The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

  To his surprise, at the key moment, she turned herself over and presented him with her ass. He positioned himself against her and felt the terror of a skydiver, that gravity-defying leap, but he steadied himself and went in, slowly in, all the way in, to the delicious accompaniment of her animal groan.

  Disgusting triumphalist feelings surged up in his chest as he began to move, letting his hips and the very top part of his thighs bang gently against her ass and relishing the juxtaposition of the motion: it was gentle; it was a bang; it was bangishly gentle; it was taunting, rapacious, malevolent, tender; afterwards, he thought, maybe she would show him her paintings; he had a medieval vision of himself marauding into the enemy’s castle, a thick animal hide covering his shoulders, and raping the queen; when he was done he’d eat some mutton off the bone. He didn’t know what mutton was, but seemed to recall reading about it in some Arthurian fable. England was all about mutton. England, he thought—what a wonderful place to fuck!

  Then something went wrong. What was the matter? He was not, he told himself, having a suddenly prudish and judgmental reaction to fucking on the second date. He had wanted this! It was something else. Now things were going wrong very quickly. He felt the despair of a young boy who, having had the training wheels removed from his bicycle, pedals off furiously and realizes after just a few seconds that the machine is beyond his comprehension, and he will fall.

  With razor-sharp reflexes, he blamed her.

  She had maddeningly unfamiliar tendencies, he rationalized. Her mouth, for example. The expression on her mouth had excited him from the moment he first saw her, and he had looked forward to how it would look when he was inside her. At first he couldn’t see her mouth at all, as it was buried in the pillow. Then he glimpsed her in profile and her expression was that of mild disappointment, the expression of someone who has ordered the endive salad only to be given the mixed green.

  Or maybe it was the expression of the dieter who has snuck into the kitchen at midnight and, in the middle of stuffing her mouth, glimpses herself in the mirror.

  She lay on her stomach, hands protectively near her face, very still.

  She was barely tolerating him, he thought. She had brought him back here; she had agreed to let him kiss her and pull her clothes off and get behind her. But her heart was not in it. He had looked forward to what she might be like, to some resistance, to a giving in, but he wanted her to enjoy giving in.

  Then, when it appeared things could not get worse, when he had pretty much lost all hope, and the surging pride in his chest had turned to a puddle of shame, and he was slipping out of her, she started to cry.

  He rolled onto his back next to her and lay very still, listening in silence to her tears.

  He wanted to say: “Honey, what’s the matter?”

  But he didn’t. He suspected, and feared, that her reply would be something like: “A man I don’t know well or like very much, but decided to sleep with just for fun, on a whim, because I decided that there was a shortage of whimsy in my life, can’t even keep an erection inside of me. What do you think is the matter?”

  Or: “Don’t call me honey.”

  So he said nothing and listened.

  She became quiet. They lay next to each other, not getting close, but not getting far, either.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t know what the matter is. I’m sorry.” Her voice had a softness to it that he hadn’t heard before.

  “You know, we’ve been playing this game in which hostility is sort of a turn-on,” he said. “But there is something incredibly heartbreaking about you that I really like. I don’t mean heartbreaking as in sad. I mean it as in human.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “But you don’t know me.”

  The blanket was bunched up at the bottom of the bed, and her whole body was exposed and naked in the dim warm light of the lamp. Her back moved up and down with each breath. He could see the outline of her ribs, and the soft, round bulge of her breasts pressing out from her side. He tried to think of what to say. In the dim light he was reminded that she had a very nice ass. It was exposed and facing upward, and moving ever so slightly because of her quiet breathing. It was round and full and provocative and taunting. It was like a separate entity altogether. It seemed to be saying, “This ridiculous woman up there is weeping, but I’m game. I’m ready. Here I am.”

  He ran his hand over it, northward. He ran his hand over it, southward. He went on like this for a long time, every now and then letting his hand roam flamboyantly up between her shoulder blades. Eventually something in her relaxed as he caressed her like this. She lay on her stomach, facing away from him, and he sat propped up on one elbow, observing the whole thing, and after a while they both became hypnotized by the motion, and the whole world became reduced to the small area of her ass and lower back over which his hand moved. And then she began to push her ass up in the air, ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly, like a cat arching its back in response to being petted. He struggled to his knees behind her. The bicycle worked!

  As a courtesy, he came on her ass. He was unclear if it was pregnancy that he was being practical about, or if it was just some strange sense of politeness, or some instinctive wish to mess up that smooth surface he had caressed for so long, but it was aesthetically pleasing as hell. The only problem was that, because he not only felt it but saw it, the pleasure of the moment was complicated and a little corrupted by pornography.

  When he pulled out and observed the helpless-looking bit of white stuff squirt on Katrina’s ass he had a confusing sense of déjà vu, as though he had seen this exact moment before, which in a sense he had, because pulling out and coming on a woman’s ass after fucking her from behind is one of the great stock shots of porn movies (plus, he had done it before, but somehow it was the pornography that seemed familiar). Suddenly he was outside the scene completely, watching it with a director’s eye, making judgments about what he saw: the size and shape and general character of the penis, the ass, particularly the way the ass moved and shook while it was being fucked, and the glistening white stuff. He didn’t even see it with the eyes of a director; it was more like an editor trying to figure out how best to use the available footage.

  SHE FELL FORWARD slowly. She felt him wipe her ass with something. Then he wiped himself. Then she saw a crumpled black sock go flying off to the side of the bed.

  The fact that he had just wiped his come off her ass with a black cotton sock confirmed her sense that this was an extremely sordid interlude. That she had just been fucked by a man while he was wearing his socks was too revolting and depressing to think about at the moment. She would lie very still and hope that the whole thing would, with the passing of time, improve and become tolerable. She closed her eyes. He lowered himself next to her, and at the last moment she opened her eyes a tiny bit, if only to make sure that she didn’t get bashed in the face by his broad shoulders, and accidentally caught a glimpse of the bereft balled-up black sock sitting stickily on the floor.

  They lay in silence. She could feel his chest going up and down. She began to pay attention to him, still with her eyes closed. She was looking out for smugness, or for contrition at not having made her come, or at the least for some awareness that women come at all and this was something to be taken into account. She couldn’t detect any of this. Instead she felt a deep physical somnolence overtake the man next to her. His breathing steadied. His body, which had been giving off heat, began to cool. Like a meat-drunk animal, he fell asleep quickly.

  There was only one sock on the floor. The other was on his foot. If there is anything worse than having just been fucked by a man wearing two socks, she thought, it is a having just been fucked by a man who is falling asleep while wearing only one.

  Now, she thought, now. Make this the exact moment you decide never to see him again. Here is a piece of evidence: heed it.

  Yet there was something about this man—the intensity of his
gaze upon her; his oblivion to the delicate intricacies of her life, her world—which made him seem ordained somehow, an opportunity to be herself without the oppressive weight of her own context.

  There was nothing to do except sleep. Later on she would figure out if this was a regrettable one-night stand. Or maybe it wasn’t a one-night stand. Maybe it was a two-night stand.

  AT THE NETWORK, in New York, Alex had enjoyed a brief but ecstatic honeymoon when he was first hired. He bought rounds of drinks for a bar’s worth of people on his expense account and treated his friends to lavish dinners. For a flickering moment he was—to use the word his senior producer favored—“hot.”

  He had been hired to produce quirky, off-beat news stories, “essays on film,” and had come up with a good one right off the bat: the Rainbow Man. He of the rainbow-colored wig and floppy mustache who seemed to have the best seat in the house for every major sporting event of the seventies. The Rainbow Man had gone from a groovy, disco-loving stoner making thumbs-up A-OK! signs at the camera in the seventies, to being a religious fanatic in the eighties, to being a convict in the nineties. He was now in jail, serving a life sentence for having held a hotel maid hostage in an attempt to “create a major worldwide media event and get God’s word out.”

  It made for a great segment. There was something deeply satisfying and exciting about seeing video clips of those old sporting events, glimpses of the Red Sox’s Luis Tiant doing his bizarre windup and then throwing a fastball at home plate (behind which sat the wacky Rainbow Man). Or Tom Landry pacing stoically up and down the Dallas Cowboys’ sideline (and the Rainbow Man leaping around like a freak in the front row behind him, giving everyone in the vicinity high fives). An old Budweiser commercial in which the Rainbow Man had a bit part was dredged up, and it was amazing to perceive how strange and funny the commercial now seemed, with its earnest “This Bud’s for you!” chorus; the theme of the commercial was “This Bud’s for all the fans.” Hence the Rainbow Man’s brief cameo in it, the ultimate fan.

  All this old footage was juxtaposed with a long-faced man in prison garments, telling his story, as well as footage culled from Hard Copy and other real-life crime shows showing his final standoff with the police—after hours of negotiations, they threw a percussive grenade through the window and led him out shirtless and in handcuffs. He was just another of those peculiarly American creatures: the conspiracy-minded loner, caught in his own paranoid fantasy world, who finally explodes with violence.

  The Rainbow Man, it turned out, was a shy son of an alcoholic father. His dad had died when he was young. He married young, and when his marriage fell apart he went on a year-long television binge that ended in the strange bit of inspiration that he should devote his life to attending sporting events in a rainbow-colored wig and making what he referred to, with touching stiffness, as “positive hand signals.”

  He was a sad piece of meaningless junk, made by television, for television, around which all sorts of effluvial junk had collected, and Alex’s piece was yet another ring in the concentric rings of television junk being broadcast into the world twenty-four hours a day, no doubt spawning absurd visions in some television-obsessed loner who would, in a year or a decade, pop up behind home plate and declare himself Rainbow Man II. It was depressing, on some deeper level than Alex even understood at first.

  After a few weeks of Alex’s doing nothing, his senior producer, a tight-lipped English woman with short blond hair who spoke in the clipped, businesslike manner of someone whose time is very scarce, called him into her office. “Rainbow Man was great,” she told him. “Can’t you do more stuff like that? You could do the Where Is That Weirdo Now? stories.”

  He returned to his desk and sat there like a zombie.

  KATRINA WAS IN her kitchen making dinner. Alex had come over late. Patrick was staying with Sam. Three nights a week she was alone, her son at her husband’s new apartment ten minutes away.

  She had made some pasta with a little garlic and olive oil, and thrown some coriander on at the end. Alex had brought a bottle of white wine. There was something improvised and relaxed about having him at the table; she was at ease with him, and he delighted in the scene because, he told her, it made his awful fluorescent-lit hell at the network seem like a bad dream that was now over and could be forgotten. The large set of straight black antelope antlers hung on the wall above the sink like a giant quotation mark.

  “Is it weird being here without your husband and Patrick?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Extremely. But there has been so much strangeness in these last months, it’s hard to focus on any one part.”

  “Is it hard to focus on me?”

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “Now we get down to it. It’s about you.”

  “Not true!” he said. “I’m asking about you. I’m trying to figure you out.”

  “Don’t try,” she said.

  “All right. It was just an experiment,” he said.

  “Am I an experiment? Your English experiment?”

  For a moment she looked a little rueful, as though someone had once whispered to her everything that would ever happen to her, and now she had no choice but to be a one-woman receiving line for the events of her whole life, greeting them as they came through the door. It was an expression that already, days into their acquaintance, evoked in him a mixture of sadness and exasperation and sexual excitation. It suggested she had found a way to keep everything at arm’s length so as to neutralize it, but was sad that so much of her life was at arm’s length.

  He pulled her chair over to him with her still on it.

  “Come here,” he said.

  “I already am here,” she said.

  A strangely vacant room was adjacent to the kitchen. There was an expanse of empty wood floor; a television and some chairs in one corner; a hamper of toys in another; and a red leather couch with brass studs gleaming against the far wall. In a less grand house the couch might have dominated a room, but here it sat unobtrusively.

  “What’s the couch for?” he asked.

  “It’s a sofa,” she said. “What are sofas usually for?”

  “It looks sort of lonely over there. Like no one ever sits in it. It’s too far away from the television to watch from there. There are no other chairs. It’s incongruous.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “It was a wedding present from a distant relative of Sam’s. We used to change Patrick on it. I don’t know. It’s just there.”

  “A couch for a baby. Interesting.”

  He stood and walked over to it. His shoes clacked on the wood floor. He noticed that the general spaciousness of her house had the peculiar effect of making everything theatrical. He looked back into the kitchen where Katrina sat, in different light.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He pulled the couch to the center of the playroom. It slid easily on the smooth wood floor. The dark red leather was cool and smooth and knowing. Then he went and took her by the hand, brought her over to it, sat her in the middle, and took a few steps away, as though to get some perspective on this new arrangement. She sat with her knees close together, her hands folded in her lap, and looked at him with a certain expression that seemed to say, “All right, I’ll play.”

  Eventually he walked over to her, sat beside her, and started stroking her hair tenderly. He planted soft kisses on her temple, her cheek, her ear. He whispered, “Baby, it’s all right. It’s all right, sweetie. Baby…” It was as though he were consoling her.

  A kind of melting look came over her face, barely scrutable, as though she had lost her will; it was at once emotional and a form of numbness, as though she had been wondering if he would express this particular mixture of malevolence and love, and now that he had she was helpless to do anything but let it take its course.

  He undressed her, stroking her and kissing her in this slightly perverse, paternal way. A couple of times he stood up and walked a few steps away to examine with perspective this
work in progress. Her vulnerability, this trancelike state she seemed to be entering, had sent him into a stratosphere of excitement that made him feel as though his head and chest and limbs were all filling with helium and preparing to float away. The entire density of his body was concentrated into one part that strained violently against his pants.

  She let him get very close to her, not just physically, but in another way, too. It was almost too much to bear. At times he circled her like a lion tamer walking around his star lion, who sat perched, utterly still, at once docile and dangerous. When it was over they lay entangled and fell asleep.

  SHE WOKE UP first. She tried to rouse him gently. Then she just tried to rouse him. He refused to wake up.

  “You cannot sleep here naked on the couch!” she said, irritated.

  “I’m sleeping,” he murmured, still sleeping.

  “You have to get up. Come on!” The sheer impatience, the comfortableness of it (because there are certain kinds of impatience that are a form of intimacy), and her imperious English accent all conspired to open an eye.

  “Please just let me sleep a little longer,” he said, one eyed.

  “No. Anyway, I can’t leave you on the couch.”

  “My bed where I’m staying is a rag on the floor with an awful wooden bar that goes across it. Just let me lie here for another hour.”

  She said no, but saw that the eye had already closed.

  “Oh God,” she said.

  She put him upstairs. She took him to a spare room with a mattress on the floor. The ceiling slanted down to a dormer window. She threw a sheet and a blanket on the bed. He held her by the waist, tightly, and tried to kiss her, but she turned her head.