ABSTRACT
During their first year together, Gunnar and Alva weathered crises that would have destroyed a less honest relationship. Their first experience of sexual intimacy had been so brief and hurried that neither of them could savor the emotions it awakened. Then Gunnar plunged into a depression and Alva suffered a debilitating illness. When they next met, he disclosed that he had picked up a prostitute on the street and found it simpler and more satisfying to have sex as a purely financial and physical transaction than as part of an emotionally close relationship. He then proffered a supposedly scientific account of his “experiment,” admitting that his desire to impose his will on another was as strong a motive as his sexual need for a woman. After recovering from the hurt he had inflicted, Alva focused on the moments of astonishing candor that remained. A level of self-criticism of which most men were incapable made Gunnar appealing. He flattered himself by anointing Alva as an exception, a “woman with a soul.” But to Alva, his honesty and willingness to engage in psychological analysis seemed to make up for Gunnar’s shortcomings.
