So he moved down her and she said we can’t do this, he could be right outside—but she opened for him and she slid her fingers into the piles of his sweaty hair. This hair of yours, she said.
That hair of yours, he said from between her white thighs. He slid one hand up her body and took some of her hair and he put the fingers of his other hand just a little bit inside her and his tongue lightly on the hood of her clit and started slowly, circling with the fingers there in the wetness and circling with the tongue above. He felt her body give in to it. He built speed. He could feel his semen in her, smell it, taste it when his tongue ventured downward, so much it started to lather like soap as he went harder and faster with his two fingers and she let out a short sound more like a bark than a scream, a gruff shout, and put the pillow in her mouth biting it and growling, her hair, her hair, her hair on the pillow, and so much pubic hair it spilled from her vulva onto each leg uninterrupted. She was bucking and pulling him around on the bed and turning on her side and then she was done and she pulled away from him and pushed him off as hard as if he were an overbearing house pet. She let go of the pillow which retained its bite mark and wet stain and she lay panting and he too was sweating and panting. But—he needed to get away before they were caught: so he rose quickly and began to dress. He wiped his hand on the back of his shirt. He knew he would remember that. Funny, how you know. She put on her nightgown.
He looked down at the mess of sheets and pillows and straightened them a little and flipped the pillow with the bite mark, to hide it. He went over to look in her mirror. He had his back to her, and he ran his fingers through his wet hair.
Jesus, she said.
I am not he, George said. I am but a voice crying out in the wilderness.
She rose up and tried to hit him, not hard, but he pulled back. Then he returned and put his arms around her and he said, That was beautiful, and you are beautiful.
Beautiful and wrong, she said. She was not resisting the hug but not yielding to it either; more like she was nullifying it. George didn’t mind that, he was feeling elated and full of affection—love, it was, really, this was how easily he could fall in love—and he could see the darkness start to close in on her, angle across her face as if a cloud had passed before the sun.
Maybe so, he said, but, you know, compared to bombing Cambodia, it’s not that bad.
You’re not a Catholic, she said. She was getting angry, he could tell.
No. Thank god.
This darkened her face further. Oh man, Jon was in for it, a scalding. A raking. A raking and a scalding.
You’d better go, she said. He looked at her to say goodbye and she was sitting on the opposite side of the bed, back to him. She meant it.
Open the windows, he said.
She was fortunate, on a corner.
Air the place out.
She didn’t answer or move. He went and opened them for her. Then he left her, closed her door behind him and went down the hall of the suite in his long coat and used the collective bathroom and washed his groin and dried it with his girlfriend’s towel, as he’d done before except before it had been her body that he’d been washing off himself; washed his face twice, it had been slick with her. He sprayed around himself some powdery deodorant he found beside the tub, and took up a comb one of the girls in the suite didn’t bother to keep clean, little gatherings of darkish gunk between each tooth; long light brown hair trailing from it. He used it anyway. He looked at himself: such an adventure that was, looking into one’s own eyes, knowing he existed but not being able to decipher the fact. Then he went to Marianne’s room and knocked, and she opened the door, sleepy-looking, and smiled to see him. In the bathroom, and now here, he should have felt guilty, he should have felt awful and panicked at his sins, which is how he’d usually felt before about his sins, his terrible sins, but he didn’t, there was none of that: it was as if he’d lost a thousand pounds, he was buoyant, he was bouncing on the surface of the moon. And he was horny again: he would fuck his girlfriend now, and god, with the speed he was already getting hard again. Amazing stuff. But oh, how he wanted back into Eliza’s room. Outside Marianne’s large window the sky was a pale winter blue, the sunlight glittered on the bare tips of the silver-brown trees, and he felt better than he’d ever felt in his life, with the day full of gleam and promise and the future floating near him, touchable, graspable, light and easy as a child’s balloon.
That night, Eliza canceled Jon, who was going to a movie with some other guys and a girlfriend or two—she made some shit up and went to the apartment on Claremont Avenue that George shared with Jon and another friend. George was there alone.
She said, I felt you all day. I felt you inside me all day, an ache up into my spine.
I bet it made you mad, he said.
Oh my god, she said. I was so fucking mad at you. Why did you do that? Why did you have to go and do that?
He looked at her.
It was there, he said. Sitting right between us. It has been for a long time. It was like a big red—
If you say apple I will scream, she said. That’s a certainty. Count on it.
Like a big piece of cake, he said.
You brought the fork. The cake could have gone in the fridge.
Too much goes in the fridge.
You know what, we’ve taken the cake metaphor as far as it needs to go. You could have left it alone and you didn’t. What was there, yes. It was there.
Is it absolutely necessary that sex be attended always by this army of shoulds and shouldn’ts?
Yes, she said.
Why? he said.
Aside from the religious and moral considerations? Which universally discourage rampant indiscriminate fucking? Biological survival—rules of attachment and commitment? Because otherwise who would take care of the children? Provide? Because otherwise the men would just eat them is what would happen. Like guinea pigs and grizzly bears do. You should have left it alone.
My memory is that you could have left it alone too. My memory is that you turned away and I was about to get up—
You should have gotten up! That’s, that’s what a—She stopped.
What? he said. Go ahead, say it.
A gentleman would have done, she said.
A gentleman wouldn’t have been there in the first place and in any case it’s 1979 and there are no more gentlemen.
You are so full of shit, she said.
He was holding her by her hip bones, swinging her slightly, twisting her, so that his cock, growing prominent in his jeans, would be dragging across her front.
What’s this called, he said, this slightly convex piece of territory down here? The pelvic yoke?
You’re misinformed, she said. That’s actually ridiculous.
He’d heard it somewhere.
He thought of it later when he was sitting on the bed and she stood on the mattress above him looming and inviting him to pull each of her legs over his shoulders, which he did; she balanced herself with her hands on the top of his head, and he put his arms and hands up her back either side of her spine and with her feet planted against his back she leaned back on his arms and pulled his head to her, and he used his lips and tongue on her and let her grind on his mouth and chin and there it was: he was yoked. The affair lasted less than two months. She was a harrowing, angry woman and it was the most powerful erotic experience of his life thus far, subduing her, feeling her come. The air ionized with hostility. A month before graduation, the affair already over, she nevertheless told Jon, as George had figured she eventually would—she was mean that way, nothing held back if it can be a lash; Jon had broken up with her immediately and he would not speak to George, who meanwhile was breaking up with Marianne since she was going for the summer to India, then doing a year at San Diego. Some marine biology thing. Graduation ended it all. Jon he eventually made up with but he never saw or heard from Eliza again. He did not miss her but he missed the sexual potency, the power he’d felt when he was with her. It
had been as if he’d discovered the perfect prosthesis for the limb he had never admitted had been severed from him earlier in his life. He would figure out that this power came from the absence of fear; he knew she had no real interest in him. He thought she found him cavalier, glib. Shallow. And a moral danger. So she didn’t like him—not all that much. Which was all right. It meant she couldn’t destroy him.
13
Come two weeks after graduation in 1979, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, Anna needed help moving into her new apartment. She remembered a scene in a Joan Didion novel, a woman’s electric unease at a cocktail party, being in the same room with two different men she’s slept with. Anna now was with three—she had solicited in the absence of other muscular alternatives three exes to assist. It was indeed peculiar, as Didion had written it. More so that each of them knew quite well about the other two. A certain amount of posturing was inevitable. Razzing over issues of dexterity and strength.
Three former boyfriends to help her move. Testament, she said, to the loyalty and affection she inspired… There was Gregory, the actor and aspiring playwright of the gritty American kind, an Ivy League Sam Shepard, a straight Edward Albee: he wrote grueling scenes of injurious intimacy. He was the most handsome of them, really striking, one of those men you could tell would be handsome his whole life; he was, too, a sweet man. He spoke in a half whisper and the rest of his personality was as vague and slightly unreliable as his voice. With an impishness, an arched eyebrow at the world.
There was David, parents with a lot of money, the kind of newish money that showed on his face and in the way he walked and what he wore. From Miami. He kept saying how his mother looked just like Janet Leigh in some later iteration of Janet Leigh with a frosted helmet of hair that Anna had trouble perceiving as desirable. These boys and their mothers. Younger, he’d been an awkward guy and had a bad temper, easily aggrieved, a nurser of perceived injuries, but with a certain thing he had, a gleam, a sense of manners, a constant hum of desire: he was one of those guys who, you could tell, loved women, loved pussy. Which he did. To a distracting degree, so that by the time he was finished enjoying it with fingers and mouth and even once, stoned, whispering to it in Spanish—yes, he did—she’d felt so isolated to her cunt that it was as if the rest of her didn’t exist. So they’d stayed friends. That thing. He’d take her out twice a year to very good restaurants downtown and give her an excuse to dress up a little. She’d kiss him on the lips as reward. No—she shouldn’t say that. She would be genuinely grateful on such evenings, affectionate, he was always pleasant, even a little funny, he treated her so well… she wanted to give him that, acknowledge that in him and that between them. But still. It was a reward.
And George. The important one.
She was important to George as well, she could tell he felt this and had regularly displayed a kind of devotion to her as a body on the planet. It did not make him enjoy bumping the two big bureaus up the stairs one after the other with the annoying David, heading off to law school at NYU in his pressed jeans. At one point George said to him point-blank: You iron your jeans.
I send them to the cleaners, he said. They do it.
You dry-clean your jeans?
Yeah. I don’t want to have to deal with them.
You realize before Paco Rabanne and whatever, Calvin, these items were manufactured as suitable pants for men who, like, drove mules and waded in manure?
The culture has transformed them. Now they’re for people like me, who know all the doormen’s names at Studio.
He meant Studio 54. The regulars were on a first-name basis not only with the staff but with the institution itself.
Her apartment: run-down but with ancient exposed wood. George liked it. It reminded him of certain boats he’d worked on. The wood looked like mahogany, hints of luminous gold and pink under the finish, which was stained and dried out in many places and here and there ruined entirely. He wanted to get his hands on it. The bathroom was down the hall and shared with other tenants; the building had once been a mansion, ended up a boardinghouse and then SRO and now was lying in wait for reclamation by a rich person. It was enormous, the bathroom, and spectacularly tiled—jade color background with some scene of chinoiserie with flowers and a lord of some kind. It was part of four floors of cheap ill-kept flats, most of them badly divided, but not hers, which was at the rear, three intact rooms in what had been a beautiful brownstone. No lease. The apartments were month-to-month and, a few older ones, week-to-week. There was a nail in the bedroom which they had painted over, the landlord’s crew, okay, a cheap rush job, painting over a nail, that’s par, no big deal, except here was a paint-over none of them had ever seen or heard of before: a hanger had hung on the nail and did still, a wire hanger like for a shirt. It was hanging on the nail when the painters arrived and they had just painted over that too.
She told them this on the sidewalk as they were pulling things out of the U-Haul. George walked in and took a look and there it was, a hanger form in bas-relief against the wall, high up and a little right of center, nearer the door than the window.
That’s amazing, he said. There was a small can of red floor paint in one of the closets and a stiff old brush and later he outlined the hanger in deep red, making it a hat, and painted a clown face below it. With the clown’s usual creepy smile and unreadable eyes made up to appear sad. It’s your personal homunculus slash circus entertainer, he told her.
She said, Your choice of the word slash is unfortunate, but thanks. Very helpful.
She left it there for the year and a half she was in the apartment. She looked at it in many different moods. There was something in the way George smiled at her that day: something actually in it. And she could see it in that clown’s face. Something intimate and true that went through her. And of course those shoulders of his, laying into the sides of her larger pieces of furniture. And the sweat. But they all had bodies, these boys, these young men, bodies that were not unappealing, and they all sweated: so… it had to be faced in the end, that two of the sweaty bodies she would shy from now, and one she would want. She had to conclude later that what had compelled her was all that sat between them, unfinished. Unspoken. Some acknowledgment that had to be made—that they loved each other, yes, why was this so hard to come to? To say, even silently? She didn’t allow the word to pass through her mind until well after. But it was okay, they could love each other and go their separate ways, knowing at least that each knew what the other felt, even though they didn’t say it in this dispensation, this period of attenuated relations. That night after the move, when the others had finally been shaken off, when he’d stood ready to go but looked at her and she stepped into him and put her arms around him and he’d kissed her. They’d looked it at each other—and looked it again while they were having sex and then later, yet again, talking. They’d acknowledged it and needed to do so because both sensed—both knew—that they would fall out of touch—now that school was behind them, now that they were embarking, moving to a new stage of creating themselves, changing neighborhoods—now that they wouldn’t just run into each other on the known paths. The known paths—every neighborhood in this city that she would ever live in—Upper West Side, Harlem, Lower East Side, Prospect Heights for a while, Fort Greene briefly, and then back to the Upper West Side—would have its known paths, where she would or would not be likely to see or run into or be able to enjoy or have to endure someone or something. The doorway where the men pissed at night. The bad-smelling burger place with its exhaust fan out over the street. The flower shop. A certain boy or a certain man, whom she would run into or wish to run into or then, later, not wish to run into.
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