by Sue Miller
It took me nearly an hour to get to Ursula’s. By then the sky was white, and I was no longer drunk. I peed for an absurdly long, ecstatic interval and ran a hot bath. I fell asleep for a while in the tub. When the water got cold, I waked, dried off, and went to bed. It was eleven before I woke again.
I had had two other lovers since leaving Brian, since Brian left me. One of them was someone I’d brought home with me from a Christmas party while Molly was staying with Brian in Washington. It had been a difficult week for me, the first time Molly had been away, my first Christmas as a single person, Brenda and Brian’s wedding scheduled for New Year’s; but I had turned down an invitation from my parents to come to Chicago, determined to make it alone. The party had seemed full of other desperately gay people. The man I picked up had chatted with me only briefly about his work—he was a reporter for the Globe—before he began telling me how much he’d like to spend the night with me. In an almost cold-blooded way I decided it would be better than spending another night alone—the lover-as-electric-blanket theory—and some time before midnight, we’d left together. We made love for a long time, and initially he was passionate and excited. But I didn’t come, and there seemed, in the end, a kind of hostility and coldness in his climax. In the morning he said he had a squash game to get to and left without breakfast or even coffee.
The other man was a lawyer, a friend of Charlene and John’s. I’d gone out with him four or five times, and made love with him twice, before I realized how much he reminded me of Brian.
I hadn’t come with him either, in spite of his solicitude. Nor did I come the first night with Leo. It was too quick. I was too drunk. But I had felt a charge, almost like fear, around him that made me think I could, just as I’d felt I could dance if he’d teach me. When we had danced and I lost myself—in him, in the music, in the shapes on the wall—I was also intensely aware of myself physically. I felt as though my pelvic bones got heavier, shifted somehow. And when he had pushed into me on the mattress, I was wet, though I hadn’t known I would be. His warm slide in and out felt not like the intrusion it had always been with Brian, but like something that was already part of me. I hadn’t had any sense of wanting him to finish: I’d reached and pushed against him to feel more. Leo cried out something when he came, and I wanted to cry out too, so bitterly was I disappointed at being left behind.
When I got home Sunday afternoon, Brian said someone had called the day before. “A guy. He wanted to know when you’d be home. I told him around seven tonight.” He was sitting at the dining room table playing lotto with Molly. His tone of voice was carefully neutral, but there was a question stamped on his face, and I could feel myself flush.
That evening, a few minutes after seven, a few minutes after Molly and I got back from taking Brian to the airport, the telephone rang. Leo didn’t sound particularly friendly or warm. He asked if we were going to see each other again. I said it hadn’t occurred to me that we might not. He asked when. I told him I ought to be able to get a sitter for a couple of nights from then, Wednesday maybe. He said fine, and we agreed on seven-thirty. I said I’d rather meet him somewhere than have him pick me up, and he suggested the Newtowne Bar and Grille.
When I arrived on Wednesday evening, he was there ahead of me again, again drinking beer. I slid into the booth opposite him, but I felt almost unable to look at him. He was unsmiling and, I thought, beautiful. When my eyes met his, it felt like the beginning of a slide down a steep hill, like the physical sense of falling that sometimes comes with the onset of sleep.
“I’ve already eaten,” I said. It was true. I’d known that I’d have trouble swallowing if I tried to have dinner with Leo, that I’d drink too much instead. I’d fixed dinner for Molly at six and she and I had eaten together. Spaghetti. When the sitter came, Molly wanted to know where I was going. I had a date, I told her. She watched me while I found my purse and keys, while I gave the sitter instructions. When I’d kissed her good night, she said, “I hate when you have a date.”
“I’ll be back before you know it,” I said, trying not to pay attention to her fury. “I’ll come and kiss you again when you’re sleeping, and then in the morning I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Stupid Mom,” she said, uncharmed; and clomped down the hall.
“Do you mind watching me?” Leo asked me.
I said I didn’t, and when the waitress came back with wine for me, he ordered. He seemed to know her. They joked together about the food. Then she was gone and he sat back and looked at me. I tried smiling at him, but just felt idiotic.
“Well, Anna,” he said. “How come you left?”
I sat for a long moment looking at my hands. It seemed to me, suddenly, that I’d spent all week not thinking about this. “I was scared, I think.”
“Of what?”
I drank some wine and carefully set the glass down. I shrugged. “Of waking up by you. Of making love again, in the light. Or not.”
He was silent a minute, frowning at me. “Let me get this straight. You thought we might not make love? That I might not want to?”
“I don’t know,” I said loudly. It came out sounding as desperate as I felt, and I looked around to see if anyone had noticed. “I don’t know,” I said again. “I was afraid you would want to, too. And I was afraid of how married it all seemed. That we’d wake up together and have breakfast or something. It was just too close for me. Like pretending to be married.”
“But we made love. Isn’t that close, too? Closer, really?”
“Not as much to me, I guess.”
He stared at me for a moment.
“That’s just sex,” I said, feeling even as I did so that I was digging myself a hole to fall in. “I mean everyone does that.” His eyebrows went up. “I mean, don’t they?”
He shook his head. “I’m not the expert, Anna. Don’t set this up with me as Casanova.”
“They do,” I asserted. “That’s what the whole sexual revolution was about.” Bravura. I’d sat the whole thing out with Brian, practicing the piano and making curtains. “But to get up with someone.” I took another quick swallow of wine. “To go through all those intimacies of rising, being your ugliest, most vulnerable, least presentable self . . . it seems as though you really need to care about someone to do that.”
“And you don’t care about me?”
“I don’t know you,” I said.
He looked hard at me with his raisin-dark eyes. I thought of how he had risen above me on his hands the night we made love, and looked at me as though he were seeing straight through to some part of me I had only guessed at the existence of.
“How will you get to know me?”
I shook my head. I felt I was being accused of something. The waitress came, set down a paper place mat, a napkin, Leo’s silverware. Through the flurry of her arms in the air between us, I could feel Leo’s eyes steady on me. When she left, he leaned forward slightly and said, “I want to make love to you again tonight. Is that going to happen?”
My heart seemed to stop for a minute, to change position in my chest. I nodded. “Yes,” I said, and licked my dry lips. “I want to.”
He exhaled and his breath touched my face lightly. “Yes,” he said. He leaned back in the booth. “Well, you know, Anna, I discover that that’s all I wanted to hear.” He grinned. “That’s it, just an ego problem I guess.”
“Except,” I said, and then raised my hand as if to push away the question that quickly rose in his face. “No, it’s just that I’ve got a sitter. I have to go back. It’s a school night. Kind of early.”
“What time?” he asked.
“Well, maybe eleven-thirty at the latest.”
He looked at his watch. “What am I eating for?”
I laughed. “And that’s what I wanted to hear.”
But we waited for his dinner, and I was glad. It gave me time to have some more wine, and I felt I needed it. By the time we walked back to his apartment, I was nowhere near as drunk as I’d been on
Saturday, but I was relaxed.
We had barely got inside when Leo began caressing me, easing me towards the bed. I felt once again the sense of dropping, of heaviness in my lower body and legs, that I’d felt Saturday. We were awkward, unbuttoning, unzipping each other, and our loud breathing was the only noise above the faraway rumble of traffic on Mass. Ave. There was still a faint light diffused through the room, and Leo’s body emerged white, nearly incandescent as he removed his clothes. His skin was smooth except for the shock of dark hair around his penis. After he’d pulled my jeans and underpants down, he moved between my legs on his knees, pushing my legs apart, looking down at me. I felt unlovely, awkward. I was suddenly aware of my knee socks, the harsh sound of our breathing, of a comical aspect to all of this. I tightened my legs slightly, pushed them in against him. He looked up at my face. His face was in shadow, but I could see his puzzlement. “Don’t you want me to look at you?” he asked.
I shook my head, and slid my hands up his arms, pulled him towards me. As he moved forward over me, he pushed into me and we lay still a minute. I thought of our merged shadows on the wall the night we danced, and was grateful for that same sense of obliteration.
“I like to look at you,” he said into my ear. I shook my head again. He nodded his up and down, making of those two movements a joke and a caress. His hands began to move on my body, his body to shift slightly up and down over mine. Without moving his head, without looking at me, he began to talk about me, whispering with warm breath against the side of my face and neck.
“I like your colors, Anna. Here, where you’re white and pink, and these blue lines.” His fingers traced the veins on my breasts, lightly touched my nipples. “I like all your freckles, and how different they are. Such dark dots, like periods all by themselves, and here, where they’re pale and so many.” His hand moved down to my belly. I closed my eyes and he pulled away from me slightly to touch my pubic hair. His wet penis slid out of me and lay heavy and warm against the inside of my leg. “And this wonderful gold stuff. And inside.” His fingers touched me, slid a little inside me, then up and down. I felt lost in his whispery voice, as though I were being given shape and color by him. Somewhere I heard my irregular breath click in my throat. He swung his body over me again, his cock pushed into me easily. For a while he kept talking, kept whispering to me about my body, what it looked like, how it felt. His voice deepened when he whispered, and its deepness was like a musical vibration I felt as well as heard. I moved with him, against him, and looked up at him when he rose above me again. When he came he cried out, “Oh sweet, sweet, sweet. Oh my sweet, sweet.” For a moment I felt lost in his lostness; then abruptly another part of me, the part that insisted on my not giving myself up, took over again. I couldn’t help it, holding his limp body next to, on me, I smiled. I thought of the thrush’s sweet sweet call, his “bonsoir song,” my birdwatching grandfather had called it. My birdlike lover, I thought. And even though I knew that he had made love to me as quickly as he did because he thought I didn’t want him to look at me, to pull away from me, I felt a little wash of irritation at his speed, at his limp satisfaction.
After a long interval, during which I thought he might have fallen asleep, he rose abruptly on his elbow next to me. “Hi,” he said tenderly. Then, “Want wine? beer?”
I stretched. “Wine would be nice.”
He swung away from me and in one fluid motion jackknifed up to a standing position. The room was heavily shadowed, nearly dark now, but even so, as he bent away from me to rise, I could see exactly how Leo was put together from his asshole to the swinging weight of his balls before they tucked front again. It startled me, pleased me somehow.
He bent over the kitchen table and turned on a little lamp. Colors leapt back into the room. He got a bottle of wine out of the refrigerator and picked up two glasses from the table. Carefully he sat back down, cross-legged, uncorked the wine and poured. As he handed me my glass he said, “You’re the silent type tonight.”
I sipped the wine, set the circled base on my breast. “Hmm,” I said. “And you’re the noisy.”
After a moment, he grinned. “Just ’cause I came.”
“Just ’cause I didn’t,” I said.
“We could fix that,” he said.
“Could we?” I asked, and absurdly, I felt again some answering yes in me. Yes, I can dance, I can come, you can make me do those things, have those things.
“Sure. Then would you talk to me?”
I nodded, and we kissed gingerly for a little while, carefully balancing our glasses here and there.
I drank a little more. “Really, I’m just silent because I’m obsessed about what I’m going to do when I need to pee.”
“I see no problem,” he said.
“I do. I’m of the shut-the-door persuasion, and you haven’t even got a door.”
He lay back and laughed. “I think you’ve got the basic differences between us down.”
“More importantly, though, I drank a lot at the Newtowne Grille.”
“I’ll shut my eyes.”
Leo set his glass on the floor and began to touch my breasts, gently circling each nipple. I watched him looking at me. Then I shifted my body away.
“I need to pee,” I said. “It’s no longer hypothetical.”
“Go ahead,” he said. He grinned at me. It was like a dare.
“Am I the only person in the world this is a problem for?” I asked him. “What do you do when you have a party, for instance?”
“Well, there are some people who actually trek down to the Newtowne Bar and Grille rather than go here. But I set up a screen, that screen.” He pointed to a burlap-covered frame leaned against the wall next to the sink. “Even so, those of us who get off on it can listen, can imagine.” He grinned lasciviously.
I wasn’t entirely sure he was joking, but I smiled back. “Set it up for me,” I said.
As I sat down behind the burlap screen, Leo ostentatiously whistling and rattling dishes in the space behind it, it occurred to me that there was a sense in which this might be the most flamboyant thing, physically, I’d ever done. And so, when perhaps an hour later I came, having lost track of whether it was his fingers or his mouth that was touching me, having lost any sense, exactly, of where the touch was registering, opening my eyes in that space that glowed like the inside of a cloud to see his white face rising over me, still glistening from his work between my legs, I had no sense of surprise.
We talked almost ceaselessly the first few weeks we knew each other—all the time, when we weren’t making love. I fell behind on the rat work, kept postponing the runs, and only petted them. They grew fatter and more affectionate in my hands, as though responding to events in my life. I spent whole afternoons bought with day-care time in Leo’s white studio, eating, making love, watching him work, talking.
The talk was really just searching for a way to claim love for someone I felt absolutely in need of anyway. Just as I’d found a way to telephone him after I’d felt the impulse to, so now I found a way to care for him, to legitimate and broaden the feeling I had for him nearly from the start. He seemed to sense this too—that we were really just filling in gaps in a framework we’d already intuitively set in place. “Let’s tell each other all the good stuff,” he’d say. Or: “Well, Anna, when you get around to hurting me, how are you going to do it?”
Eventually we told each other the complete histories, with appendices, with revisions. It was the same history each might have told anyone else, with little or no effect, but it charmed each of us absolutely because each had the desire, the will to be charmed by the other.
Leo was everything my family, Brian, I, were not. A little of it was posture—he was also very aware of what he wasn’t, and of its currency in my staid world—but most of it was a genuine sort of recklessness of the heart.
He’d grown up in Arizona. His father was a cotton broker, a loser, he said; a man who’d buy a round of drinks for the house with his last thirty do
llars and think later how he’d feed his family. Leo had supported himself since he was a teenager, trying whatever seemed interesting at the moment. He’d done construction work, managed a drive-in theater, been a short-order cook, an ambulance driver. It had taken him seven years to finish college at the University of Arizona, and then he’d won a fellowship at Yale.
His real name was Leonard, Len. He’d changed it when he came East. “Len,” he said. “A turd of a name. Who wants it? I mean, a name that ends in a nasalization, for Christ’s sake. Leo, now. It’s like Anna. They go on forever. You can live with a name like that.”
Life seemed to reach in and touch Leo in a way it never did me. Maybe because he welcomed that exciting, random touch. The phone would ring at eleven at night, and it would be friends in from Tanzania or Provincetown or Tucson. Could they stay for a week? Did he want to go camping with them? Meet them in New York? Always the answer was yes. People spoke to him on the subway, in bars, waiting in line at the movies, and he always answered. People gave him their advice, invited him to parties, sold him things. Once he even bought a gun, not because he wanted or needed it, but because he’d never owned a gun before. We were in the same bar in Central Square we’d gone to the first night, when a black guy sat down next to him and offered to sell him one. Leo wasn’t sure he could take it, thought it might be too big. “Will it fit in a bureau drawer?” he’d asked the black guy.
“What you talkin about, man?” the black man had said irritably. “I’m talking about a gun here, not no lingerie.”
There was a certain tension between us about our differences. He liked my reserve, my coolness; but on the other hand, it was the way I had gotten angry with him in the middle of being what he called “ladylike” that had piqued his interest. And beyond that, he said, what really interested him was that even then I had only suggested, “in the most hostile tone possible,” that he stuff his clothes into a machine. Nothing personal. “That was truly elegant,” he said.