The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  He motioned for me to straddle him, daddy-long-legs style, on the swivel chair. I leaned forward, and he bit me lightly on my chin. I bit him back, lightly too, and felt the stubbly growth he gets in the late afternoon if he doesn't shave again. When I ran my tongue along his bottom lip, the tenderness of the flesh just inside his mouth brought to mind the feel of his daughter's forearm, and I wanted to speak about the weight of her neediness, but I did not know how to begin.

  "Is it Ginger you've been wanting or me?"

  "I would have to say I was at the mercy of a rather elaborate fantasy. She liked it when there was another woman."

  "So you've said." Pillow talk; antique Ginger stories. By now we had swapped large chunks of our past. "But how will I know you'll be happy with only one of us?"

  "I promise you'll know."

  "I think I just became convinced."

  His eyes closed, his tongue lightly against my lips, my front teeth, the edge of my gums. He was capable of delicacy. I wanted the delicacy of those sensations at the front of my mouth to obliterate the sour taste of this exchange. I wanted it to erase the words of another Englishman that often came to mind when Daniel touched me: Try to love me a little more and want me a little less, said Ursula to Rupert Birkin in Women in Love.

  My eyes swerved from his shut lids to the clock on the microwave. I didn't want to time us; I wanted to know how long we had before we had to leave for his house, for the children's anniversary celebration. An hour. Next to the time, today's date flickered bright blue, and I was surprised it had taken until this late in the day for me to realize that it was also another anniversary: three months since we first slept together. I doubt he knew the specific date, and I'm sure he had no desire to call attention to the sentimental possibilities. Despite what I had told Henderson, I held a good bit more than ten percent of his attention, but he could not bear to be reminded of our attachment or of what it could mean. He was a deer caught in the headlights of my affection, until he bounded across the highway and disappeared into the woods. I sometimes wondered whether those days and hours and ecstasies would ever accumulate, acquire a history, a specific weight and gravity, or whether they would remain flashy ornaments on our erotic Christmas tree.

  When he grabbed my thigh, I felt a spike of anger toward him for his parsimony. And at myself, for accepting it, for craving it, when I knew how slender his offering was. But what I got in exchange was this: a degree of heat and hunger that still astonished me, and concentration—submission to the act, not to each other—both focused and preoccupied. We were arm-wrestlers; we were junkies on our way to a nod.

  We were still dressed, and there was about this exchange, as about all of them, what I can only describe as a mutual bluffness. I slipped my forefinger between his teeth and let it roam across his tongue and around it. Then I took the finger into my mouth and sucked off his spit. It was metonymy, and it was my finger and his spit. I did it again, this gesture that acted on both of us like a narcotic injected into the bloodstream. "Kneel on the couch," he said, and his voice made me remember what I had to tell him about his children, about caring for them, but that would have to wait. This was not the moment for that; it was the moment for this.

  Crossing the living room shedding our clothes, watches, socks, as if we were clowns in an X-rated circus act crossing the ring to climb into an Austin Mini. And for our next trick. There was even, I saw as I bent my knee on the edge of the couch, an audience: ourselves. A mirror, a large rectangle with a purple plastic frame, another Third World Pier One bargain, hung in the corner, above a glass-topped end table and a kelly-green glass vase of eucalyptus cuttings, and if we turned our heads to the right, we would be able to watch ourselves.

  I watched. I was not as afraid as Daniel was of looking. Not afraid to see him slip inside me, my back bent forward, like an ironing board coming down from the wall, or a Murphy bed, at a sharp right angle to his. Not afraid to study us, to steady myself, my hands gripping the back of the couch. He held my hips and drew me toward him, his head tipped back, eyes closed, and I was disappointed that he was not admiring the woman I had become. Since returning to New York, I had shrunk one and a half sizes, firmed up my thighs and buttocks at the twenty-four-hour Crunch on Lafayette Street, and found Federico of Broome Street, who can make my hair the same shade of brown it was ten years ago. I am a typical Unitarian, with grandparents from four countries between Latvia and Ireland, and from each of them I inherited a trait or a feature that makes me an ethnic patchwork quilt: a buxom, naturally curly-haired brunette, a green-eyed kibbutznik with a Waspy surname—Chase—courtesy of my Scottish grandfather. I straighten my Medusa curls, wax my eyebrows, pay a woman from Croatia whose father was taken away one morning to a Serb concentration camp and has not been heard from since to paint my toenails cherry red, but I could not see them that afternoon in the mirror. What I saw was a scene from a porn flick, the mans head thrown back in some anonymous ecstasy, his slim hips thrown forward, pumping fast. I was the female lead in this flick, certain that what I was doing, the unequivocal nature and specificity of it, the way it resembled nothing other than itself, would short-circuit my capacity to hold a thought. But it didn't; it doesn't. It simply concentrates the mind, as Dr. Johnson said of a hanging. By then he was moving faster than he had any right to. I swear he did not know what it meant to slow down; I feared I might never again myself. But I knew that even if I could train him to be slower, gentler, I could never teach him grace. Never teach him to kiss my neck or stroke my back and stay there. There were moments of tenderness when he touched me that way, but they were so rare and brief, and left me hungry for so much more, that they felt like punishment.

  "Be slow," I told him, "be slow."

  "Come to the bed and turn over on your back," he said, and I thought he must not have heard me. In the life I invented for Lili before Hollywood, she has an Algerian lover who calls her darling and holds her face when they make love and issues no commands. But after we moved to the bed in the alcove and I did what he said and he lowered his full weight onto me and held my hands gently above my head, he surprised me and did what I said, moving on top of me in gestures so small it was as if he was not moving at all, and then something happened, like a switch being tripped between my legs, and I forgot to breathe. The current surged through me and flooded my brain, and I thought, What would I give up for this? My first edition of To the Lighthouse? My twelve Billie Holiday CDs? A husband who used to tell me how sweet it was to see my sheepskin slippers next to his on the floor of the closet? A husband who used to say my name and my pet name and honey and baby and lover when he made love to me? All of the above, every single one of them—though I missed, I cannot tell you how much I missed, the sound of my name in my ear.

  We were locked into a rhythm we had never found before and it could go on and on and on, an infinite loop of pleasure—those were the words I was thinking when I felt my eyeballs roll up in a jerky motion and a drop of his sweat fall into my open eye and sting—

  The voice erupted into the room, a man at the door, interrupting the soundtrack of swallows. What we heard was him asking for me, some version of me, and I realized it was the answering machine. I'd remembered to turn off the ringer on the phone, and I'd muted my outgoing message but not the caller's voice.

  "I need to leave a message for, uh, Sophy O'Rourke."

  "Oh, fuck," I whisper-moaned, and Daniel and I began to laugh between gasps, but we kept going. We would not stop for a call from someone who knew me so little—so not at all—that he thought I went by my husband's last name.

  Then Daniel's panting grew lower and everything else sped up, and there was a concatenation of hard human sounds, my own rhyming with his, that made it impossible to hear every word except that this was Sergeant Burns with the Massachusetts State Police. Daniel's noises ended, and I heard a phone number, the Swansea area code, and the prefix almost everyone on the island shares. I wriggled out from under Daniel, or maybe he let go of my han
ds and flopped to my side, maybe we moved apart together, because he told me later he had heard the man say "State Police" and thought the call was for him, about his family, and he was about to leap to his feet when he saw me leap to mine.

  I stood by the side of the bed with the phone in my hand, dazed and breathless with the effort. "This is Sophy, don't hang up," as if I had run up ten flights of stairs, and I knew in the time it took me to push the wet strands of hair from my wet forehead that there was no other reason the police would call me from there, it must be the highway patrol, though how did they get my name and number? A computer, an old insurance policy? A bolt of fear struck my knees, but for a few seconds I had my wits about me, or maybe it was that my body needed those extra seconds to prepare itself to absorb what I knew was coming.

  "Do you have bad news to tell me?" was what I said, and I pictured the motorcycle he had just bought, all of him smashed to pieces. I looked down at Daniel at the edge of the bed, looking up at me, a slice of alertness, or maybe I mean terror, on top of his breathlessness, his hair blown sideways and backward, beads of sweat like quicksilver gathering at his temples. I touched his shoulder to steady myself and felt the prickly hair on the side of his thigh against my knee. On the quilted bedspread was the ghostly indentation of my body.

  "I'm afraid I do," Sergeant Burns said, but I didn't wait for him to say more. I began to whimper and shake, a shuddering noisier and more feral than I can describe. Then I did all of them at once or so close together it felt like a seizure. "Is there someone there with you?" the man said, "I hope there's someone with you—"

  Daniel must have taken the phone from my hand, or I must have dropped it. He was patting the night table for a pencil, and I heard myself howl, as if I were falling down a well, or someone else was.

  "Officer," I heard Daniel say, "can you give me the information, tell me if there's anything we need to do immediately?"

  I don't remember walking across the room and walking back to the bed, but somehow I was wearing Daniel's long-sleeved starched ice-blue shirt, which hung on me like a nightshirt, and I curled up on the bed while my entire body chattered, fueled by images of the motorcycle skidding, Will's body flung, mangled, crushed, verbs twisted into adjectives that no longer breathe. I pulled the bedsheets to me and the pillows, but I could not make myself still.

  Minutes passed. I heard him say, "Uh-huh, uh-huh," and "Thank you, yes, yes, quite, of course," and then I felt him lie down at my back, curl his chest against my spine, and wrap his arms tenderly around me. I forgot after a moment how surprised I was that he knew, he actually knew, what to do. An embrace that comforted was in his repertoire, but buried so deep that you were sure it would never turn up, like the remains of the Titanic. "A neighbor found him in his house, a chap named Ben," he said quietly. "It seems he died in his sleep," and that was a great relief, that was nearly good news. That he did not suffer. Did not know. I bunched the pillows in a gesture I knew even at that moment had something to do with wanting to conceal my grief and shame and rage. Daniel had never seen me weep. He had been making me moan and tremble and cry out in this bed for three months, eight days a week, but if I had cried over something smaller than this, he would have fled. If I had shown half this much feeling, he would have abandoned me, and I knew even then, as deep as I was inside that wave of grief, that I despised him for that.

  I was not thinking clearly, but it surprised me that I was thinking at all. I was thinking that Will could not be dead, because I'd spoken to him—when was it?—last week or the week before, about the money he owed me, but when my friend Geoff died last year, there were people who said, "He can't be dead, I just had breakfast with him"; "He cant be dead, we were supposed to go to the movies tonight"; "He can't be dead, his wife is about to have a baby." I was thinking that this state of consciousness, which must be shock, is analogous to making love, which you imagine will lead to ecstasy, and ecstasy will be so true to its meaning that you will not be capable of a clear, reliable thought, and in that too you are wrong.

  I was thinking that I had to call Will's daughters and tell them. They were twenty-five-year-old twins, and their older brother was dead, and I had not had the nerve to call either of them since I left Will. Now I had to tell them this. If I could find them.

  "What are you doing?" Daniel said.

  "Looking for my address book. Did the police say anything to you about the medical examiner?"

  "Sophy, may I give you a bit of advice? There's nothing you need to do right this moment. You're scrambling around as if there's an urgency here, whereas—" I was across the room at my desk, looking through stacks of papers and files for the address book I often misplaced. "Darling, he's dead."

  I froze for an instant, uncertain whether I was more shocked by the darling or the dead. I turned to say something to him; I didn't know what it would be, but then I didn't have to, because another voice shot into the room, like a stone through the window.

  "This is Joe Flanagan, Flanagan's Funeral Home, on Swansea. I'd like to leave a message for—"

  I picked up the phone before he said my name and flipped the ringer switch on at the same time.

  "I know this is a difficult time for you, Mrs. O'Rourke. Myself and the members of our family and staff—"

  "How did you get my name?"

  "The police, ma'am."

  "Are they soliciting business for you? Do you intend to talk me into a five-thousand-dollar funeral? Because my husband has absolutely no interest—and no one in our family has the slightest inclination to be exploited at a time of—"

  "Pardon my interrupting, Mrs. O'Rourke. I believe there must be some confusion. Your husband's body is here right now. The police instructed us to pick it up from the house. It's going to the mainland tomorrow on the first ferry, to the coroner, at no charge to you or your family. I wanted to pass on my condolences. If there's anything we can do for you, please let us know."

  I was speechless, as mortified by my outburst as I was Stunned by this barrage of news about Will, who was now an "it," not a "he." A piece of luggage, something attached to a bill of lading. I started to say, "Thank you, I'm sorry," but I began too late, just as he hung up the phone.

  "What did he say?" Daniel asked.

  "Why don't we get dressed? It seems a bit tawdry, lounging around as if we're in a Turkish bath."

  "Did you find your address book?"

  "Here's your shirt back."

  "What did that chap say that's got you so undone?"

  "His body is there. Spending the night. Off to the coroner's tomorrow. Do you suppose it's in a coffin or a refrigerator?" I found my bra in the middle of the living room floor, and as I reached down for it, remembering how it had landed there, I remembered how keenly I had wanted to tell Daniel that his children needed more from him. I still wanted to, but I knew I could find no clever way to work it into the conversation. It was a bra that hooked in the front, and as I peered down, snapping a tiny plastic rod into its plastic slot, I felt Daniel's eyes on me, the way your eyes are drawn to someone in pain, and at that instant, I understood it might not be my pain he was focused on, but its eerie resemblance to his own.

  "A refrigerator, I imagine," he said, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that I might be wrong in every one of my conjectures about what passed between us, mistaken about everything but the reality of the sparks our bodies threw off when we rubbed them together. "Particularly in this heat," he added, and for an instant I did not know to what he was referring.

  "Did I already ask whether the police said anything to you about the medical examiner?"

  "They didn't mention him."

  "Her. She was Will's doctor on the island."

  "Is she the one you're ringing?" Daniel said.

  "No, his best friend, Diane. From grade school. Lives in Cambridge."

  When Diane answered and I told her I was calling about Will, there was barely a pause before she said, "He's dead, isn't he?"

  "You don't sou
nd surprised."

  "I'm not. The last time I spoke to him he was distraught."

  "But they said he died in his sleep."

  "Of what?"

  "Well, I—I don't know. A heart attack, I guess. Isn't that—What else is enough to—"

  "Will there be an autopsy?"

  "Tomorrow. What did he say when you last spoke to him?"

  "What didn't he say? He was beside himself. Kept talking about how alone he was, how terribly alone. I was afraid he might kill himself. I suppose I thought he had. I've been leaving messages for him for weeks."

  "Weeks? Why didn't you call me?"

  "Call you? What for?"

  "We're still married. The divorce hasn't—but even if it had—"

  "Sophy, this is hardly the time to—"

  "If you thought he was dead, why didn't you call the police?"

  I could feel Daniel's eyes on me, and I turned to see him, fully dressed, clothes freshly wrinkled from lying in heaps on the floor, his gaze as startled as my own. I could feel the stew of melodrama thickening, but I was in no way prepared for what Diane said next: "Will saw you with a man. That's why I didn't call you."

  "Saw me where? When?"

  "He drove his motorcycle to New York a few weeks ago, hoping to talk to you. You were on the street with a man Will said looked like Tom Wolfe, or maybe he said Thomas Wolfe; I wasn't paying the closest attention. He left the city immediately and drove here on his motorcycle."

  "Tom," I said grimly. "Definitely Tom." Daniel even had a dandyish off-white, raw silk suit I'd seen him wearing not long before. Had Will seen us with the children? Seen us leaving my building, as rumpled as we were right now? "What was the date?" I asked, because I remembered Will calling me in the middle of the night a few weeks ago to say he was coming to New York so that we could talk. I'd told him not to; I said it was too soon for us to be friends. He shouldn't make the trip. But he must have, after all. He may have come the very next day.

  "Let's see," Diane said, and I heard some papers rustling. "Three weeks ago this past Tuesday. It was such a dramatic event, I wrote it on my calendar."