by Jane Smiley
“Who promised?”
“Well, my mother and her sister, but they promised on behalf of all the intermediate contacts.”
“Everyone has been very quiet, so you’ll have to tell me yourself.”
The waiter came and Susan ordered, not forgetting the wine, which was some sort of Italian white. When he was gone, she said, “Well, I am in a spot now.”
“I think you can handle it.”
“Maybe. Let me see. I said you were cute.”
“Everyone thinks I’m cute.”
“Oh. Well, I said you had a very melodious deep voice and that I enjoyed talking to you before bedtime.”
“That’s rather suspicious.”
“Yes, isn’t it? And I said you have very appealing hands.” She reached across the table and took one of my hands. She looked at it for a long moment, then said, “Yes, I was right about that. And grace. You are graceful.”
“You are graceful.”
She smiled again. I was enjoying myself very much. There was something about the way she said things that made replies easy. I didn’t have the sense I had often had with Felicity that there was no answer possible because what she said was unexpected and a little challenging. I thought I knew Felicity, but she perplexed me. I didn’t think I knew Susan, but she was comfortable. She took my uneasiness upon herself and made it go away. My mother would have called that manners. My mother was going to like her very much, I thought, but for the time being Susan Webster was mine alone.
We talked and then we didn’t talk. The food came, and it was delicious, especially the bruschetta, which for some reason was far more tasty than I expected chopped tomatoes on toast could be. The tortelloni, which were large envelopes of pasta shaped like hats, had a light, delicate filling, and the spinach rolls were a bit more pedestrian but still good. I said, “The only thing is that I’m still hungry.” She looked up and signaled the waiter. When he came over, very eager to serve us—her—she ordered again, this time thin slices of veal in a lemon-artichoke sauce, and we shared that. It was a perfect meal, and as soon as I had finished the last of the bread and the sauce, I moved around the table until I was next to her on the banquette, and I put my hand behind her neck and leaned toward her and kissed her. When her lips softened and she bent into me, I put my arm around her and deepened my kiss and our embrace. She put both her arms around me. We kissed for a long time, and when we opened our eyes, the waiter was standing there with a bottle of champagne. He said, “We have this excellent Chandon. It’s really very very good.”
I said, “Let’s have it.”
Susan said, “Oh, let’s do!”
After the champagne, which the waiter poured with a great flourish and a conspiratorial look at me, we went into the next room and danced. Then we went back to our table and drank more champagne and ate crème brûlée with pears, and then we danced some more. Of course she was a good dancer, and of course I was a good dancer, because that was her great talent, to bring out the talents of those around her. She made requests of the band. The band members said, “Oh! That’s a good one. We know that one,” and then played the numbers perfectly. The waiter set dishes in front of us with pleasure and in anticipation of our pleasure, and after watching us dance, other couples got up and danced, too, and laughed and joked with us. At midnight, we were still dancing, and the band was still playing, and I said, “I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun.”
She said, “Let’s go back to my place,” and kissed me. I paid the check and we went out to the car. The valet had gone home. The car was far away. I held her tightly under my arm, almost smothering her, but she hung on to me and turned her nose into the wool of my coat, and the air was full of tiny bright prickles of snow that swirled and fluttered in the veranda lights and the lights of the parking lot, and I felt as if Susan Webster had designed this night for this purpose, for my enjoyment, like the meal and the conversation and the dancing.
All of this was joyously expected. I had prolonged our courtship, retarded my wishes and expectations, and now, driving toward her little house, the moments were especially sweet and smooth. I didn’t know how she would be making love, but I did know how she was, and so it was a perfect combination of familiar and exotic, known and new. She seemed to understand this and feel the same way, because she welcomed me into her house with a kind of decorum. She took my coat and hung it in the closet. She offered me something hot to drink. She showed me where to set my shoes and gave me a towel to wipe them off. The place was familiar to me, but I appreciated the way she had left certain lights on and turned off others, to make the progress to the bedroom inviting and easy.
In her bedroom, where one lamp was lit, she sat on the bed. One by one, I undid the forty buttons. Then she went into her closet and, as naturally as you please, took out a pale silk nightgown that looked more like a slip and put it on. I undressed down to my shorts and laid my clothes over the back of a chair. She came over to me and rested her head against my chest. We were quite sober in spite of the champagne, what with the food and the exercise. She sighed, then said, “I’ll be right back,” and went into the bathroom.
I stood at the foot of her bed, looking at a large picture of a tree branch hung with oranges and orange blossoms and shiny green leaves, all very realistic and lacquered-looking but much larger than life. When she came out of the bathroom, I said, “You can almost smell these.”
“Aren’t they great? My friend in Spain painted that. Her name is Lupe. That’s her signature. She doesn’t use her last name. Have you ever tried cocaine?”
I turned to look at her. She was holding a thick greenish piece of glass, about the size of a small windowpane, and on it was a razor blade and a little white hill of what I recognized as cocaine but had never actually seen before. I said, “No.”
“Do you mind?”
“In what sense?”
“Do you mind if we snort some? Or if I snort some? It’s fun.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s compelling. It’s not dangerous. We aren’t going to go anywhere. It’s not like LSD or mescaline or that sort of thing, where something can go wrong unexpectedly.”
“Except a drug bust.”
“Except a drug bust, but there isn’t going to be a drug bust. I don’t sell cocaine. I am not a suspicious character. Am I?”
She smiled winningly, and I said, “Not in that sense, no.”
She sat down on the bed with the pane of glass on her knees and arranged the white powder with her customary grace and ease. In a moment or two, she had set up two lines and pushed the rest off to the side. I had seen it all in the movies, but in the movies there was a charged air about it: danger, anticipation. Here it was very cozy. The room was warmly lit. The bed looked inviting. I had a little buzz from the champagne still. Above our heads, the beautiful branch of orange blossom threw off a glow. She reached into a bedside drawer and took out a short straw. She said, “In the movies they do it with money, like a hundred-dollar bill, but it always seems to me that some of it is going to get caught. Money isn’t smooth, and money has a lot of germs on it, doesn’t it? It’s very show-offy to do it with a hundred-dollar bill.”
“Somehow I think that a hundred has fewer germs on it than a one. Or maybe they are just a better class of germs.”
She leaned forward and drew the line of white powder into her nose, snorted a couple of times, and smiled at me. I said, “Do you do this often?”
“Are we good enough friends for me to answer that question?”
“That would be for you to decide.”
“There we go,” she said, and grinned. She looked at me for a long moment, very friendly and intent, and then she kissed me. There was a faint acrid odor that was more than an odor on her lips. It was almost an electrical sensation. I could not help but notice that her kiss was softer and more intense than her earlier kisses had been. My desire, which had vanished as soon as I said the words drug bust, flooded back, and I gently stretched he
r backward against the pillows. She continued to kiss me. There was something odd about it, as if she was so involved in kissing me that a part of me, the part that wasn’t kissing her but was noticing the bed and the room and her body, was alone. She kissed me and kissed me, and I went in and out of the kiss, alternately absorbed in what my lips and tongue were feeling and what I was thinking, which was that the evening had taken an unexpected turn and I wasn’t sure what I thought about it. She broke away and murmured, “Oh, that was good. You should try it. It can’t hurt to try a line. It’s not like heroin. One line doesn’t make you an addict. I promise.”
I looked at her. She didn’t look odd or overexcited or drugged. She looked like she was having a good time kissing me. So I sat up. She sat up and put the glass on my knees and handed me the straw. I remembered what I had seen in the movies and snorted up the line. It burned and I rubbed my nose; then I looked at Susan’s face. While I was looking at it, it got brighter and bigger, not as if it had changed shape, but as if everything else around her face had dropped away. The only way to describe it is to say that her face got remarkably important. After a moment, she laughed; then she started kissing me again.
Of course I noticed a difference between after the snort and before, but it wasn’t like any difference I had ever noticed in the past. It wasn’t like getting drunk; it wasn’t like smoking marijuana; I don’t think it was like taking a psychedelic drug, but I had never done that, so I didn’t know. It was just like having more. It was like having reached the limits of your capacity for enjoying something or eating something or engaging in any good thing, and suddenly finding your appetite expand. We kissed and kissed. If she hadn’t said “Breathe” from time to time, I might have forgotten to. And then it wore off, and she did another line, and then it wore off for me, and I did another line, and after that line we had sex. In the course of that, I noticed that my cock was huge and hard, and then I became somehow tremendously absorbed in my cock. It astonished and delighted me. Just as, when I was looking at her face or kissing her or stroking her body, that got to be the only thing in the world I was thinking about or doing, so when I saw my cock and put my hand around it, that got to be the only thing in the world, just the perfection of my own member, rigid and silky, beautiful and enormous. I started to laugh; it was so wonderful that it was mine. I saw that Susan was looking at it, too, and I watched her stare at it, then I looked back at it and forgot that she was looking at it, too. It did not seem to be possible that my hard-on would go away.
Susan whispered in my ear, “Let’s do it.”
“Do what?”
“Make love.”
“Oh, yes. Let’s.” And then we did. I had to consciously close my eyes, though, so that I could stop looking at my cock. It was a good thing I did, because the inner life was at least as involving as the outer life. I became lost in the sensations of penetration, accompanied by the secondary feeling in the palms of my hands where I was gripping Susan around the hips. I could feel her skin against my palms and her vagina around my dick and I could feel my own thrusts and it went on and on, no shifting of position or change of any kind. Change seemed irrelevant and impossible until our balance shifted and the old way was completely gone and a new way was installed. It was entirely strange and involving and then the sensations began to fade and I opened my eyes. She said, “You’re coming down from the high.”
“I suppose.”
“There’s more.”
“Can I ask a stupid question?”
“There are no stupid questions. There are only stupid assumptions.”
“Oh. Well, am I going to come?”
“Nothing is going to stop you from doing that, though it could be awhile.”
“Well, judging by this, am I going to live through it?”
“Maybe not in this form.” She laughed.
“I can believe that.”
“This is nice, isn’t it?” She removed herself from me. I was still hard, as hard as I had been however long ago that was. It was wonderful but it wasn’t quite as riveting as it had been. I was noticing that, as she lay down beside me on the bed and snuggled against me. She said, “Let’s have a little rest. What is it? Oh, about three. Three-o-nine. That’s not all that late.”
“What time did we get here?”
“Twelve-fifteen, maybe. Coke kind of makes the hours disappear. It is nice. Very nice. Sherlock Holmes was a coke addict.”
“I thought Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character.”
“Well, Sigmund Freud, then. He was too. My boyfriend used to say it was the drug of intellectuals and artists.”
“Really?”
“I would think, Then why are you taking it, Billy?”
“He was not an intellectual or an artist?”
“He was a coke dealer. That was as close as he came. A purveyor to the stars, as it were. I met him on the plane home from Spain. He lives in New York. They prayed that we would break up.”
“They?”
“Mother and the aunts.”
“Oh, them.”
“Their prayers are often answered, I have to say.” She snuggled closer. I felt the texture of the room slowly return to something I recognized. “The danger is that you’ll just get worn out, but if you are organized and careful, it’s not at all like the addictive drugs.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. I’ve had lots of experience, no problems.” She hoisted herself on her elbows and looked at me. She went on, “It’s just a thing, you know. It’s nice but it’s not great. It’s fun, but it’s not art or religion or a baby.”
I looked at her. She smiled prettily and self-confidently. It was all the same thing, I thought, the pictures and the tiles and the décor and the neatness and the hair and the clothes and the general savoir faire and grace. It was all the same thing as the cocaine. She was the first woman I had ever met who was universally competent. I saw that my hard-on was subsiding. I pulled a sheet, a very delightful sheet, smooth and cool, up over us. She said, “I don’t think I’ve known anyone quite like you, Joe.” The fact was that sometime later we fell asleep, and in the end, I didn’t come. But afterward, I was kind of glad of it, because it seemed like that would have been almost too much, almost too dramatic. It was a pleasure to be saved for later.
CHAPTER
25
AND SO GOTTFRIED FINISHED the two houses he was building and I put them on the market, and the money I used for the advertising was my own, because I didn’t want to involve Marcus and Gordon. The day the ads came out in the paper, I was actually a little nervous, as if I had done something and now I was going to be found out, especially since they were good-sized display ads with several views of each house. HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS was the title of the ad, and both properties looked terrific. I planned to run the ads through Christmas, which was expensive, but they were perfect houses to show during the holidays, and I managed to get Dale and Gottfried’s wife to trim them out a bit with some wreaths and some lights. One early snow and they would look like Hallmark cards, I thought.
Marcus stayed mum.
Gottfried moved his trucks and tools and crew (two other guys named Jim and Jack) out to the farm, and Marcus went out there at least every other day. When he told me he was going out the first time, I stopped him before he walked out the door. I said, “You know Gottfried can’t stand you, right?”
“I knew he was miffed about the fence, but—”
“And the color of your new roof. Don’t try to win him over. Don’t make suggestions. He’s got the plans. He’s gone over the plans three times with all of us. Let him follow the plans.”
“What if we want to make a change, or there’s something that doesn’t look quite—”
“My first choice would be that you not make any changes at all. But if there’s really something, let me suggest it. You keep your mouth shut. Just stand around and admire, if you have to be there, which I don’t really buy.”
“It’s our project.”
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“Don’t think of it that way for the next four or five months. Think of it as his project.”
“But what if—”
“I’m telling you. If he walks away, he won’t come back, and there isn’t a single other builder we can get in the area or at the price. The houses will be different. Now we’re talking about the clubhouse.”
“I don’t think money is the real object here. We want it to be exactly right.”
“He will do it exactly right, but he’s very touchy. Imagine the touchiest person you’ve ever met.”
“Linda?”
“Whoever. Now, imagine someone ten times touchier.”
“Gottfried?”
“Yeah. Now, if you make one inadvertent mistake, or maybe two, I can work through the wife, but that’s all the rope you’ve got, so don’t waste it and don’t use it up.”
Marcus laughed, which I didn’t think was a good sign, but at the end of the first week I still hadn’t heard from Gottfried, so I began to relax a little, though I did say to Jane, “Give him as much work to do as possible to keep him away from there.” Jane understood. I was coming to like Jane.
One day not long after this, I was pulling into the parking lot at about the same time as Marcus, and when he saw me he jumped out of his car and sprinted over to my spot. As soon as I had gotten out, he said, “Come with me. I’ve got something to show you.”
“Don’t tell me that.”
“No, really. You’ll love this.” He slapped me on the back. He was in a better mood than I had seen him in weeks. He stepped behind me and hustled me toward the door. He didn’t even turn his head to look at Mary King, sitting behind her desk, though I saw her eyes follow us. Good, I thought.
When we got into the building, he turned me right instead of pushing me straight ahead, and in a moment we were standing outside of the South African Gold Trading Exchange. Marcus reached around me and opened the door. I had never been in here before.