by Sue Miller
As for me, it was his wildness, his openness which intrigued me, which I wanted. But it was that very quality which scared me at the start, and the security of his being like me in some way—professional, educated—that had let me move over the edge into his world. As for what kept me there, it was, of course, still his wildness, but it was also things like the whiteness of his skin, the way it filmed over during sex and seemed to grow paler from within; the way his hair curled over his neck when he bent once to tie my shoes after helping me get dressed. It was the fact that during sex I lost track of the boundaries between us, thought of his cock as a feeling inside me, thought of my cunt as a part of his body, his mouth. And because I became with him, finally, a passionate person.
We fought a lot about work, about what it meant to each of us. And sometimes in the heat of those fights, I’d feel a claustrophobic sense of the familiarity of the kind of standard he set for himself, for me. I’d feel I’d come full circle, back to the expectations of my childhood. I can remember raising my voice over a screaming train to yell at him that those issues were completely extrinsic to a relationship, were things individuals worked out for themselves. That people loved each other for other reasons than that.
As the train’s noise faded from under it, my voice suddenly sounded harsh, strained. We sat staring at each other across the startling silence in the dining room, and he shook his head slowly.
“It ain’t like that in my experience, Anna,” he said softly. “People love each other for things, at least in part. Not after you leave your mom’s house do you get unconditional love, love without all those things you think are so fucking extrinsic.”
My sudden teariness took me back to the time before I’d left my mother’s house, to a yearning for a kind of love I felt I hadn’t had even then. But it was even with some sense of release that I felt the wash of self-pity—or more precisely, pity for the little girl who also had been so exacting of herself. In sorrow for her then, I started to cry; and Leo, somehow able to sense that my sorrow reached beyond what was happening between us, held me until I’d stopped.
No fight was worse than the first one, in part because I was still in the euphoria of getting to know him, which denied even the possibility of such a thing. It was one of our earliest weekends alone together—Brian was with Molly—and we’d gone to a restaurant in Harvard Square to celebrate. Leo had given me a pink silk blouse, loose, low-cut and draped across the bosom (he thought I dressed too suburban and had given me a number of presents designed to transform me: rhinestone earrings, suede pants). I was wearing it, and feeling very beautiful. We parked the car on Acacia Street and walked through a fine spring rain to the restaurant.
We’d been making love all day and hadn’t eaten anything. The wine with dinner affected us both almost immediately. We were loud and silly through the meal. Over coffee, I was talking about my piano students. I was amused with myself, very conscious of how pretty I looked in the blouse, and was, I thought, amusing him too; but slowly I noticed that he’d fallen silent. I stopped talking and there was a blank moment between us.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Was I talking too much?”
He pretended to be startled. “No,” he said. “Not at all. I was enjoying it.”
“I thought I’d noticed that you stopped, though. Enjoying it.”
He shrugged. “I guess.” I looked across at him. In the dim light I couldn’t see where his pupils ended and the near-black of his iris began. He looked away. “I guess I just get tired of kind of the way you talk about your work.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged again, and turned slightly in his chair, as though trying to end the conversation. “It just seems so . . . limited. Like it’s just background noise in your life.”
I sensed a great danger, an oddly familiar pit I could fall into. I tried to push it away with an attempt at objectivity. “Well, I suppose there’s some sense in which that’s true. But I like my work.”
“But it’s all pretty interchangeable isn’t it? I mean, the rats, the piano students, you know.”
I shrugged now. “Well, maybe almost. Not quite. I think I feel more utilized in the piano lessons.”
Slowly, as though suppressing more violent motion, he leaned back in his chair, tossed his napkin onto the table. “Jesus,” he said softly. “Utilized.”
The contempt in his voice stung me into a silence that lasted for perhaps a minute. Then I started to feel angry. “Are you objecting to my choice of words?” I asked.
He looked across the restaurant for a moment, as though he hadn’t heard me. Then abruptly, he turned to face me. Quietly he said, “It’s just that I can’t stand the way you think about your work, your life. You don’t care about it. I mean, you don’t even have work in the sense that I’m talking about.”
“What sense is that?” I could hear the polite contempt in my voice too.
He leaned forward and spoke intensely. “And don’t talk to me in that fucking ladylike tone,” he said. “I’m talking about passion. About some kind of commitment to something else besides a way to put food on the table. I mean, when I first met you, I thought you were a musician, that you cared about music.”
“I do.”
“But you don’t. I mean, I look for some kind of parallel to the way I feel about my work and there just isn’t one.”
“Why should there be?”
“Because that’s what I want, dammit. I want a woman who has that powerful a commitment to something outside herself.”
“I have a commitment like that.”
“To music?”
“To Molly. And to doing carefully and well what I do.”
He looked at me for a moment. I thought of how he’d looked when we made love that afternoon in his light-flooded studio. “We can’t even talk about it,” he said. He picked up the bill and began rifling through his wallet.
I leaned forward and put my hands on his. He looked up. “Listen to me,” I said. I moved my hands but stayed hunched across the table. “It used to be that men would say, ‘I want a woman who’ and the list would be a little different. ‘Who cooks, who sews, who can entertain my friends.’ But it’s the same impulse. The same impulse. It’s still your judgment, your list, your game. Just all the rules have changed.” I was suddenly aware of my breasts, pushed together and nearly fully revealed in the low-cut blouse. I leaned back. “You’re still saying I’m just an extension of you, that I’d better look good to the world so I make you look good. That’s all it is.”
He shook his head. “You’re missing it, Anna. That’s not it.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s really that having those parallel interests, those parallel passions, makes life more interesting.”
“So I bore you.”
“I just don’t get the way you talk about your work.”
“Because it’s different from the way you talk about yours.”
“Right.”
“And if I were a real musician, a . . . what? A performer? A composer? What would do the trick?”
“Don’t make fun of me, Anna.”
“No, I’m wondering. Really. Because I might have been, you know. I’ve told you that. That was the plan for me. And I just wasn’t that good. That’s all.” I had begun to cry, but strangely, it didn’t, at least for the moment, seem connected to me. I could feel tears springing from my eyes and running down my cheeks, but it was as though they were glycerin, movie tears. “And so I’ve made another kind of life for myself. But I hate, I really hate to be told there’s no honor in it. Especially by someone as lucky as you are, with the good luck to be as good as you are at what you do.”
I pushed my chair back quickly, stood up and crossed the restaurant. A few people looked up at me and then quickly away as I passed their tables. I wiped at my face with my hands.
It was still raining outside, the streetlight’s garish aureole making Mt. Auburn Street ugly. I turned off into Hilliard Street,
and the sudden absence of that purple softened and darkened the world. Yellowish light seeped mistily from the houses. In one of them, a woman bent over a table to turn off a lamp. For a moment she appeared all grace in the orange glow. Then she was gone, the windows black, glistening with raindrops.
I heard footsteps behind me. Leo caught up with me, put a coat over my shoulders.
“You left your raincoat behind.”
I turned to him, and let him hold me against his chest. I felt a wild grief, a pain in my throat like a deep cut, but no sound came out and my tears had stopped.
“Anna, I’m sorry,” Leo said. His hand ran over my hair again and again.
“Please don’t say that,” I said. “It’s what you meant. You’re only sorry it hurt me, not that you feel it.”
“I’m not sure what I feel,” he said. After a moment, we began walking, half-stumbling, half-embracing on the rain-slicked, bumpy bricks.
When we got to the truck, he unlocked my side and let me in, then walked around. I slid across the seat to unlock his door, and when he got in, I clambered over him, sat across his lap, ground against him, kissing him. The rain drummed steadily on the truck, and the sound of our breathing, the wet, light clicking of our mouths sliding over each other’s was intensified in our tiny world. The windows began to fog lightly, and Leo reached up to find my underpants, to pull them down.
“It’s a body-stocking,” I whispered. “It’s all one piece.”
I lifted my skirt to show him. He arched up, unsnapped his pants. I raised myself slightly, let him unzip himself and pull his stiff penis out. I bent over and reached between my legs, pulled the body stocking to one side. I moved towards him, onto him, and he came in me a little way, guiding himself with his hands. I rose off him, then down again, each time a little deeper, until he was all the way inside me. I let my weight go and felt him almost like pain, deep in me. I touched his face, moved freely on him. The windows silvered with our breathing, and when he came he cried out my name over and over. In the panting silence that followed, we could hear doubled footsteps, voices passing by closely on the street outside. “Richard,” a man’s voice said. We didn’t move, didn’t speak until they’d gone.
Molly liked him too, though it wasn’t until I realized that this was the case that I also realized how much it meant to me that she did. Initially with her he was much less impetuous, much less active. Around her he was even, instinctively it seemed, less active with me. He let her occupy the center of my life, as she always did, and modeled his behavior on mine.
But as he grew to know her, he got more comfortable and seemed more himself. The third time he came over when she was awake, he brought me flowers, and a box of Band-Aids, three hundred of them, for her, because he’d noticed her affection for one on her knee. For days she was covered in them. At the slimmest excuse she’d slap on one, and I didn’t interfere. They were hers, I told her. She could make her own rules for when she needed them. She put Band-Aids on her toys, on me, and finally, one night, on Leo. It was a turning point, her first spontaneous gesture towards him. He had a cold, was honking and sneezing into a Kleenex and complaining about his nose being about to fall off his face. She taped it on, soberly, with four or five big ones.
“God, I can’t tell you how grateful I am, Moll,” he said. “If your nose is ever about to drop off, I hope you’ll tell me, so I can return the favor.”
Slowly she let him touch her, started to be affectionate to him. They began to have routines they’d go through, just as she’d had with Brian. He’d stop her on her way through the kitchen. “Just a second, Molly,” he’d say, frowning. “You’ve got something in your ear, here.” And then he’d pull a nickel or a dime out. “My God, Molly,” he’d say. “Look at this, that I found in your ear. Can you believe it? It must be . . . magic!” And she would grin at him, charmed, but dubious.
“Now, Moll,” he’d say. “Who would you say a nickel like that belonged to? Does it belong to the person who found it? Like me? or does it belong to the person whose ear it was in? For example, like you?”
And she’d have to claim the nickel, claim the magical ear, which she always did, but with a little edge of honest worry.
Three weeks after I’d slept with Leo for the first time, I bought a queen-size mattress and box spring and folded up the rollaway bed, and he began to sleep with me at our apartment. At first he would leave late at night. Then more and more, he’d set the alarm and leave at dawn. We almost always made love in that clean half-light, and it was then, in the mornings in my room, that I began to come predictably with Leo. Often I’d wake with his caressing me, entering me, and begin to get there before I was even conscious of desire. Perhaps it was the absence of all those layers of conscious judgment; perhaps it was the utter hopelessness of worrying about all the things I’d always worried about with sex—how things looked, smelled, tasted. In those early mornings it all tasted of sex after a few moments. The sheets would get tangled and sweaty. The whole room seemed full of our commingled, complicated smells. And over and over again I’d come, sometimes still nearly asleep.
Then once or twice when we were very rushed, he asked me to bring him off with my hands or mouth. I did, quickly at first, and a little fastidiously. But then I discovered that I wanted him that way too. All my initial passivity, all his energy, I realized, had made our lovemaking seem in a sense like masturbation. He was so like a fantasy, like someone I might have conjured in my solitary mornings of coming alone. I could simply lie back, as though dreaming a sexual dream, and be made happy.
But now I discovered a different kind of appetite, a kind of active hunger for his body. I loved watching him come in my hands, or feeling him, tasting him, in my mouth, the even more intense connection with him sexually that came from understanding exactly how he came the moment that he did, from helping him get there. All of that made my love for his body more intense, more absolute. I felt there was nothing I didn’t want to do for him, wouldn’t want him to do to me. We got wilder and wilder, even when we were simply doing it straight. It felt like some shift in dimension, not just the addition of new techniques. Once he kissed the back of my neck softly in the kitchen, and with a little gasping upheaval, I came. Sometimes just looking at his hands circling a coffee cup could stir me nearly to moan aloud.
Still we were trying to keep it from Molly. We didn’t discuss it much, and by now Leo was spending three or four nights a week in my bed, but he got up faithfully each morning he slept over and was out of the house before she emerged from her room. Once or twice it was the noise of her beginning to putter in her room which woke us, but then Leo would kiss me, rise swiftly from the bed and pull on his clothes, and be gone barefoot down the long hall nearly as quickly as the half-formed memory of my dreams faded from me.
I’m not sure why we didn’t tell her. She seemed irrevocably to like Leo, so it wasn’t the fear that it would threaten their friendship. Perhaps part of it was simply that I didn’t understand what significance it might have to her to know that he and I were sleeping together, and so wasn’t sure how to explain it. As for Leo, he was again following my lead. It was a fatal part of his sweetness to follow me, even in my confusion, to assume always that I knew what I was doing with her, around her. I fostered it. I never articulated to him my anxiety, the sudden rush of feeling I sometimes had with her that I was doing everything wrong. He saw my mothering her, her relationship with me, as implacably monolithic, a given, what was meant to be, and took all his cues from that. Even the grace of his uncomplaining rising in the morning—the quick tilt back of his hips to zip his fly, the wings of his half-buttoned shirt flying out as he turned to enter the hallway—seemed emblematic to me of his assumption of rightness in whatever I was doing with Molly.
But the truth also was that I felt less confusion with her then, that I asked myself fewer questions. When I think about the whole period of time I spent with Leo, I try to rewrite it in a sense, to bring Molly more into the foreground. Surel
y she nibbled at my conscience, my unconscious, as she had before, as she certainly has since. Surely I always thought of her, I never took her growth, her happiness, for granted.
I don’t know, really, but I think there is some sense in which during my passion for Leo, I forgot Molly. Maybe in no worse a way than mothers of three or four children sometimes forget one of them for a while, or women living in a time which didn’t make them concentrate such energy on the issue of their children’s emotional life could and perhaps did sometimes forget them. But the sense of blankness about Molly that thinking of Leo conjures for me now is as horrifying, as accusatory as the memory of her scratched and screaming in the back seat of the car at Sammy Brower’s house.
At any rate, one cool night in May, long after Leo and I were asleep, something woke Molly and she came and got into bed with us. I was too soundly asleep to realize the implications of this, or perhaps some part of me was glad for the resolution it would offer and pushed consciousness away. I made room for her and fell deeply asleep again, my arm around her, Leo’s body warm and smooth against my back.
When she woke in the morning, she seemed to think it was perfectly natural to find him there too. Her excitement was almost entirely transferred to the idea of having him join us for breakfast. He played along with her by insisting that that’s what he was there for: to make breakfast for all of us.
And he did. Shirtless, barefoot, in jeans, his hair wild around his head, he made Molly’s favorite, French toast. After that it became, as things did under Molly’s stern aegis, a ritual. When Leo spent the night, he got up first, leaving me sleepy, love-satisfied, in our bed. Then he woke Molly, and it was only after I heard their voices, smelled coffee and the sweet vanilla odor of French toast cooking, that I’d rise and pull on clothes to join them.
I felt I’d never been so happy, and perhaps I never was. Our lives seemed magically interpenetrated, commingled, even as we each separated into all the day’s complicated activities. I had never expected it to seem so graceful and easy, but Molly’s seemingly complete comfort with Leo was like a benediction on all aspects of the relationship, even the sexual.