by Robert Clark
None of this need have precipitated a crisis. Certainly there are many storms in life that couples weather best by sheltering in the company of others (be they friends, spiritual or psychological counselors, or even unattached members of the opposite sex); and Edward was not such a fool as not to know that under the circumstances it would be easier to like almost anyone better than his wife. But he had not counted on liking Jane so well, or, in what initially seemed to be only an afterthought, on finding her beautiful.
By conventional estimates, Jane is not beautiful: She is what is called handsome, just as Emily is thought “cute” rather than pretty. In fact, in the opinion of most persons, she is not as beautiful as Virginia. It must be said that this thought has occurred to Edward more than once, and he has taken comfort in it, believing that this among other factors will prevent their relation from moving where it should not go. But beauty, as Dr. Fields has tried to tell him, is but one aspect of being, and love is another; and the apprehension of being is much the same thing as the apprehension of beauty, and in either case love almost inevitably must follow from it.
Certainly not all of this has been lost on Edward. As he sits with her, as the music plays, he is aware of what he might call her darkness. Where Virginia is chestnut or auburn, Jane is umber; where Virginia is blue (as in her eyes), Jane is brown; where Virginia is evenly sunlit, Jane is chiaroscuro. Like the music she favors, she is a little stormy and mercurial, whereas Virginia is placid: Even her anger trickles in and out like a shallow tide. At the time he married Virginia, Edward would have described Jane as “trouble.” But how much we change, or are changed, by the beautiful. Jane’s problems are not Edward’s problems—or rather they are the same problems, but independently borne—so why should she be “trouble” for him? He is not going to marry her. He is not, up until the moment he does so, even going to kiss her.
When he does, on the Wednesday of the first week of October, as they sit on the little couch, listening to music, perhaps midway through their second drink, he cannot even say how it has happened. It is like a manhole in the sidewalk upon which he is walking, whistling, hands in pockets, which opens where no manhole should be. He simply falls in feet first. It was not headlong. They were perhaps two feet apart, and what must have happened was that both of them happened to be leaning back, resting their heads on the back of the couch, and one or the other of them turned his or her head to the side and found the face of the other, waiting.
If a decision was made, it must have been along the lines of “Oh, well, what could be the harm?” But once the kiss was accomplished, it seemed more the result of a decision taken long ago; or of some inevitability they had quietly accepted months before. There was, as it were, a crack, a chasm in the ground they had been sharing all this while, and at some point they were going to tumble into it.
They pulled apart slowly after the kiss. Jane smiled at Edward and arched her eyebrows, which might be read as saying “Well?” or “What did you think of that?” or “Shall we continue?” Edward understood all of these possibilities and his answer to each of them was “Yes indeed.” He had not a moment of compunction about kissing her again, about beginning to touch her with his hands, and when that kiss was done, he wanted her as he had wanted no one since his wedding night. Curiously, it was Jane who hesitated, and did so on his behalf, if only in her mind. She wondered if he understood what he was getting into, but decided she could not be the one to weigh his obligations against her needs. She is, after all, the beggar maid. She is already ruined. Edward’s ruination must remain Edward’s business.
It is hard to believe that Edward at no point halted, at least for a moment, and considered what he was doing. This is not like him, almost anyone would agree, but his hands are already upon Jane’s breasts, his mouth set upon hers as if he were going to swallow her whole. Jane’s own hands have plowed down his back and now her thumbs are in his waistband, and it is easy enough, given the fashions of the day, for the thumbs and then the fingers too to find their way around to the front of Edward’s trousers to where his erection already stands high and taut. One hand is grasping the shaft of his penis, and then the other is pulling at his waistband, tugging at him to rise from the couch and toward Jane’s bedroom.
The transit from the couch to the bedroom might have afforded another interval to reconsider. But Jane is long past that. It has been four years since she has been with a man, and much, much longer since she has wanted a man as she wants this man, since she has felt the two tremendous weights bearing upon her as they do now, the one pressing the breath from her chest, the other pressing up and into her below, florid, heated, and thrumming.
As Edward follows Jane down the hall, one of her hands still in his waistband, he knows where he is going, but insofar as he thinks anything at all, believes he is already pretty much there. The lovemaking of the married (or once married) does not proceed like that of the adolescent, through gates and doors that may or may not progressively open to higher intimacies. Edward figures rightly that once their kissing became deep kissing and certainly once they were touching each other, their mutual intention was to take matters to their conclusion. That is not to say that Edward has no capacity for self-restraint at this point—that he is, by his own definition of the species, himself no more than an adolescent—but now he is in the hands of destiny, of a chain reaction launched on the little couch scarcely four minutes ago. If you could get him to listen, if you could get him to stop for an instant, and asked him, “Would you give up everything to penetrate this woman and ejaculate inside her?” he would say, “Yes.” He truly would, just then.
Once in Jane’s bedroom, they do not undress each other. There is no time for that. Jane is naked in fifteen seconds, her shift and bra and underpants fallen to the floor. Edward takes longer. He has shoes and socks to negotiate. They regard each other for a moment. Jane’s breasts are freckled and dark-nippled, as Edward thought—hoped—they would be; Edward’s shoulders are broad, his penis heavy and arced as she wanted them to be. She lies down on the bed and Edward maneuvers himself inside her and begins to thrust. They call out to each other. At the final moment, which comes in hardly more than a minute and a half, Edward hears himself say, “I love you.”
After they were done, after Jane had pulled herself a little toward the head of the bed with her fingers still in Edward’s hair, with him collapsed on his side, his body curled up and facing away from her, she thought, What was that? That we did? And she felt blissfully, girlishly happy, and she thought, I never want this to end. She wanted to put Edward in her bed and sleep with him there and then, in a little while, rouse him and have him fuck her again.
Edward was trying to collect, if not his thoughts, then himself. He saw he was indeed naked, lying on a made bed in a strange and shadowy bedroom. He saw his bare leg—cratered and flecked with pores, freckles, moles, and spots, pierced by coils and threads of hair—and that it ended with his foot, whose sock he had indeed removed, even in his haste. Beyond that, looking into the gulf past the end of the bed, there was a closet, half open, and on the door was a mirror. In it, at last he saw himself entire, and a little way behind him, the woman. She was looking down, perhaps at her hand, her face somewhat abstracted, sitting, one knee bent upward, and upon this she set her chin, and her dark hair swaddled her cheeks. He—the man—looked like he had crumbled here, as though he had been struck by a vehicle or simply shot. Together in the mirror, foreground and background, he in the shadow, she in the light, objects fallen together on this spot, in this composition, Edward saw they looked like a painting. He saw then that, from that angle, it might have been a scene of great devastation.
Edward regarded his watch. It was ten after five. He had ten minutes to dress, to say goodbye, and ten more to drive home, during which he might consider or construe what it was that had taken place and what he needed to do about it. He was not after the meaning of it. He had the feeling that this was a great event, a miracle or a catastrophe, whose o
ccurrence subsumed all other meaning, that made everything else around it mean differently.
He turned on his side and looked up at Jane.
“Hi,” she said, smiling. “How’s tricks?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She slid down to him, made her body parallel to his, and pressed against him. He could feel her breasts and the mat of her pubic hair, the first soft and yielding, the second coarse.
“I’m fine,” Edward said. “Just fine.”
“You ought to be. You’re not just fine. You’re magnificent.” She slid her hand over his buttock. “I’d like to keep you here all to myself. Fatten you up and just . . . eat you.”
“That’d be nice. But I’m fat enough and . . .”
“You have to go.”
“I do.” He put his own arm over her and held her a moment, smelled her, smelled them, and wondered whether this scent (for between Jane’s wetness and his own flood of semen, they were nothing if not lubricious) would persist, all the way home. Then he realized that, against all reason, he was becoming aroused again.
Jane pressed her hips a little tighter against him, against his hips. “Seems like somebody else has a different opinion.” She pressed again. “A strongly held opinion, I’d say.”
“And well-informed, too,” Edward said at last. “But I still have to go.” He sat up. “I wish I didn’t have to. But I do.”
“Of course you do,” Jane nodded.
Edward stood. He put his hands out in a gesture of inquiry. “I wonder if I could use . . . ”
“Of course. On the hall, just to the right.” Jane watched him walk away, naked, his fine body treading barefoot, delicately, across the wooden floor and into the hall. She heard him urinate and then water ran for a time. She thought she should not be naked when he returned; that although she would happily be naked with him all day and night, she did not want to be exposed, to be—she supposed—vulnerable, when he dressed, when he bent to tie his wing tips, in order to leave.
She had just pulled the shift over her head when he returned, gathering his clothes from the floor as he went to the foot of the bed. As he pulled on his socks, as he wriggled into his underwear and threaded his arms into his shirt and began to button it, she sat behind him, and as he did up his cuffs, she kissed him softly on the neck. He stood and pulled on his trousers, fastened his belt, and sat again to put on his shoes. She kissed him again, and asked, “You’ll come again soon, won’t you?”
“As soon as I can,” Edward said.
They walked together to the door, and before she opened it, she hugged him and he kissed her in return, not on the mouth but on the cheek. He rested his cheek pressed to hers for a while, and, Jane thought, very sweetly for all that.
After he was gone, she went into the living room to collect their glasses. The record player had shut itself off, and she slid the record into its paper envelope and then into its sleeve. She carried the glasses and her ashtray toward the kitchen, and thought of what he had said as she was having her orgasm, as he was having his, no doubt, and wondered whether she had imagined it.
Edward might have skulked into his house, having carefully checked himself in the rearview mirror of the car for telltale signs, lipstick on his neck perhaps from Jane’s nuzzling; then swaggered unnaturally, with forced and strained normalcy, into the kitchen, where with his dry lips he might have given Virginia the faintest of swipes across the cheek and then backed away, his hands in his pockets, his eyes missing no chance to avert themselves from hers. And because Virginia’s whole consciousness was perpetually tuned to the frequency of their relation, to the weather inside the Byrne household (and also because she was nobody’s fool), she might have sensed something amiss.
But that was not how it went, for Edward had a good talk with himself in the car, in the ten minutes it took him to drive home, and came to one conclusion: that he had claimed something, found something for himself, with Jane, and he might give it up or he might not. But as against Emily, as against Virginia, as against the career which he had never even bothered to assay for any point beyond a paycheck, this was his, and he was not about to set it aside without careful consideration. Even if, on closer inspection, it, too, turned out be nothing rather than something.
So Edward entered the kitchen with nearly a bounce in his step, as though he were the preordained victor in an unanswerable argument, full of righteous, almost jovial anger. He did indeed kiss Virginia lightly, but not for fear of giving something away, but because that was the sort of kiss he felt like offering. He dealt with her usual queries in offhand style, as though they were of no consequence, but he was perfectly happy to oblige her nonetheless. As she worked at the kitchen counter, turning this way and that in a light cotton dress, he regarded the contour of her breast, the concavity just above her hipbone. He thought of coming up behind her and resting his hand there; and then of lowering his zipper, extracting his stiff cock, lifting her dress, sliding down her panties, and taking her right there, from behind, as she slowly begins to bend, as she calls out to him, her palms and fingers splaying out on the edge of the counter.
Virginia turned again, and he saw her face and realized it was not Jane and that it was Jane that he wanted. He saw Virginia’s face had fine and delicate features, that after all these years his wife was still pretty, but her prettiness bored him, as white linen and porcelain and Parker House rolls bored him. He wanted Jane’s beauty, her dark and arcane beauty.
Sometime between then and dinner—pork chops with spinach and applesauce—it begins to dawn on him that the conclusion he arrived at in the car is mistaken; mistaken because it rests on an inoperable premise. He has pictured his life as a void he is going to fill with his own desires and devices—Jane chiefly among them—when it is in fact already full; he has a history, a hand dealt to him long before Jane, and it is both substantial and substantive. It will not exist easily alongside this new thing, nor will it permit him—assuming he could bear to do so—to simply choose between them.
This comes to him when, midway through dinner, he realizes that the meal Virginia has prepared occupies a special position in their history: It is his “favorite,” and she serves it at least every ten days. It calls for some acknowledgment: It calls for him to like it, and to say so. But now it does nothing for him. Yet there it is. It is not nothing after all. It is not so easily displaced, even by beauty.
What an aching and weary thing is beauty, really, save in the instant of its perfect apprehension (at the moment, say, when Edward called out, “I love you”). The rest of the time it is tired to the bone, just like memory, dutifully enacting its rituals and quotidian chores, which are never quite caught up on. For there is altogether too much of it—too much past and not enough present to give it its due, too much loveliness and not enough love to lavish on it—and so we are always a little short; and that is the pity of so much of our lives.
Edward pushes away his plate an inch or two, and that is also part of what he does after a meal. Then he says, “Thanks for making that, honey. I always like that. It always hits the spot.”
8
IF VIRGINIA SUSPECTED NOTHING, WE MIGHT SAY that Jane suspected everything: every ring from the telephone, every suggestion of a foot tread at her doorstep, every thing present or absent under the sun that might be a sign—and what, in love, is not?
Surely that is going too far: to say, scarcely sixteen hours after they first parted as lovers, that Jane and Edward love one another, are in love. If Jane were to seek the guidance of a professional (such as herself, in fact) the therapist/counselor would likely attempt to help her see that what she feels today is at best infatuation (albeit without exactly using that word), perhaps even pure sexual desire—lust (without, needless to say, using that word either)—which, mind you, under the circumstances is a perfectly normal, natural, and healthy response to her recent experience.
But Jane would not be having any of that. Assuming she had told anyone. Which she has not and will not (not even Frances) for th
e foreseeable future. Because this is hers, and she is damned if she is going to share it, parcel it out, pass it around like a bowl of Triscuits. And that is why she is going to call it love if she calls it anything at all; which she is not going to do at this point, for just now she is keeping it even from herself. She is not saying anything about it to herself, not in words. She is keeping it entirely in her heart, and there it sits, spinning.
Edward, too, is thinking along these lines, when he is not thinking the other thing: the one that struck him over his pork chop; that he is trying to make two different objects occupy the same space, and will come to grief for it.
Edward has stopped work early—he could not sell an ice cube to an Arab in his present state of mind—and is driving up the hill at three-thirty to tell Jane this very thing. Or some other thing he has yet to determine. It will amount to “This is wrong and we have to stop,” but first he is going to make love to her, one last time. He is hard already, in the car.
“You came,” Jane says as she opens the door.
“I said I would. As soon as I could.” Edward elbows the door shut and seizes Jane by the hips, pulling them together at the waist. He lowers his face into her hair, just above her neck by her ear, as though he is taking shelter there; as though bullies or demons have been chasing him, and he has evaded them only by slipping quickly through her door and bolting it fast.