by Kaylie Jones
The fan blew the ninety-eight-degree air. He pulled the silk dress over my head. Then he hurriedly removed his clothes, and left them lying on the floor. Our bodies were dripping with sweat. Finally, he removed his sunglasses.
He was lean, but the muscle tone was gone. His pecs did not stand at attention, and the little hair that grew on his chest was gray. His buttocks were soft and small, and his legs long and thin. He was attentive and sensual, somewhat nervous and overly intent on making me orgasm first. He asked whether I’d like to come again, and I said of course, who wouldn’t? We kissed while he was inside me and even though it was the first time, or perhaps because it was the first time, I was overwhelmed with feelings of love. When he said he was ready, I said, “Oh yes.”
I wanted to feel his body shake and hear him groan.
“Yes,” I whispered, “do it.”
Afterward, we lay on the wet sheets lightly touching one another.
“There are some things you need to know about me,” he said. “The first is that I am a liar.”
I laughed.
“I mean it. I’m an alcoholic. I stopped drinking eight years ago, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I wouldn’t like to. I was drinking and taking drugs and saw God and made a terrible racket in the process. The outburst landed me in jail in what is my favorite place on the planet, Alabama. They arrested me with way too much cocaine on me.”
I was silent.
“Do you still want to be with me?” he asked.
“What was it like being in jail in the South?”
“I detoxed in a cell all by myself, no drugs, no help. They took away my clothes so that I wouldn’t kill myself and removed the mattress so that my dick would fall between the springs when I tried to lie on my belly. My parents didn’t bail me out, and all in all it was the absolute bottom of my life.” He took a deep breath and paused dramatically. “Oh yes. And my father committed suicide. Drank himself to death. So you see, there are reasons why I should stay away from alcohol.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I want to see you again,” he added.
It would have been so much easier to say no if we hadn’t had sex.
“Will you see me again after all the things I’ve told you?” he asked.
I wanted to say no. Go away, please. But I didn’t have the heart. “How can I possibly reject you when you are completely exposed and at your most vulnerable?”
He kissed me meaningfully. I couldn’t speak. We dressed and walked downstairs where I’d prepared lunch. The table was set with my best linen and family china. We ate salad and cold smoked salmon on blue-and-white plates edged in gold. He took my hand at the table. We were like an old married couple finally alone with the kids grown up and gone. A part of me wanted this moment to last forever, and part of me wanted to run from the house screaming. Inside my head my grandmother’s Yiddish words were going around and around: You don’t lie in a sick bed with a healthy head.
I must not be so healthy myself, I thought. Or else I wouldn’t be here, would I?
“So what did you think?” he asked.
“About what?”
“About me?”
“What about you?” I said.
“How was I?”
“You were wonderful.”
He wiped his mouth with the linen napkin, and said he had to go.
The sweltering days of July gave way to the warm and breezy days of August. Michael and I had phone sex every night when he went out to walk the dog. I wondered how he managed it standing in a phone booth. In a strange sort of way, we grew closer. I started wondering whether he needed this sort of distance and risk as part of the excitement? He told me that he loved me, that he was in love with me, that I was his oasis. I started bleeding uncontrollably. I was having a period that simply wouldn’t stop.
The gynecologist explained that I had uterine dysplasia and prescribed progesterone tablets for the next ninety days. He reported that the biopsy from the cells of my uterus were abnormal. If the progesterone worked, he said, the cells would correct themselves and the bleeding would cease. If not, it was cancer and I would have to have a hysterectomy. I wondered how they came up with the word dysplasia and contemplated the possibility that my uterus was merely articulating its displeasure at my choice of a lover.
The next day, Michael and I had an appointment for a rendezvous. In the morning I received an e-mail requesting that I not wear perfume. He arrived an hour late.
We sat on the front porch. I didn’t know which upset me more, his being late or the perfume request.
“You mean,” I said, “when your daughter asked you about the smell, you didn’t tell her you were in love?”
“How could I do that?”
“I see it as an opportunity,” I said, “to bring things into the open.”
He looked at me as if I had just stepped over the line.
“I can’t leave,” he replied in a restrained tone of voice, “it would destroy me financially.”
“And you could never take me to that club you belong to either.”
“That has nothing to do with anything.”
“Are Jewish girls among the exotics who WASPs reserve for fucking?” I wanted to fight. I wanted to scream my head off.
“What has gotten into you?”
“I’ve been bleeding heavily all week. The doctor says it’s something called uterine dysplasia. The cells are abnormal. There is a possibility that they could become cancerous. I’m taking progesterone tablets. If the tablets don’t work, I’ll need a hysterectomy.”
“I don’t want you to die,” he said.
“That’s good to know.”
“I still want you.”
“I can’t have sex for a week—the biopsy.”
“We can do other things, can’t we?”
I burst into tears. “I need to feel safe, to feel protected. Do you understand?”
“Ssshhhh,” he said as he wrapped his arms around me.
We kissed and I smelled freshly eaten garlic on his breath. We ended up in bed.
He asked me to masturbate while he watched. Then he put a pillow beneath his head while I gave him a blow job.
He growled. “No one’s ever gotten me so hard.”
When sex was over, he stood and pulled on his pants.
“Afterward,” he said, “I want to stay with you. It’s getting more and more difficult to go home.”
He threw on the rest of his clothes. When I tried to hug him, he backed away.
“I’ll call you!” he shouted on his way to his car.
And as I watched him sniff his fingers and check his mustache in the rearview mirror, I knew that he was planning to leave me.
The next day, he didn’t call the way he had in the past. No emails. No nothing. Two days later, he phoned to explain his silence. His wife—who had a drug problem, he said—took pills that she purchased over the Internet. She almost overdosed. This was not the first time this had happened.
“I married my father,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“My father drank himself to death. She’s just like him.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Nothing. I’ve trained for this job all my life.”
“Are you sleeping with her?”
“Yes,” he whispered. “Do you think I’m being selfish?”
“I can’t believe you have to ask.”
He had not told me what she looked like, but I imagined his wife to be an attractive forty-year-old brunette with shoulder-length hair and a great figure. I was desperately jealous of her. He went home to her every night. She slept next to him. She had his child. They went out to dinner together, and to the movies and to the beach.
They did all the things that he and I could not do. And on some level, I think she knew about me. I think she knew about all of us. I was willing to bet that each time he had an affair, she tried to kill herself. What a merry ride this was turning out to be.
“Do you miss me?” I asked.
“I miss your pussy.”
“My pussy is attached.”
“But right now I miss your pussy, okay?”
I was starting to feel as if I were a drug and he needed a hit.
“Okay?” he asked sweetly. “Please? Call me when you’re ready to come.”
I didn’t know how I could have allowed this to happen to me. I phoned him as requested. After I came, he ran to the company bathroom to masturbate. When he was done, he phoned me back, whispering, “I love you.”
I tried to go back to writing, but I couldn’t. The pain over my eyes was too intense. I felt nauseous, I lay down. I closed the blinds. I threw up. A friend called to see how I was doing and I asked her to take me to the emergency room. Once there, they injected me with Demerol and sent me home.
The headache went on for two days and for the first time in my life, I missed a deadline. Three days later Michael came to see me. My hair was dirty. I hadn’t washed or eaten in three days.
“I don’t like to see you this way,” he said. “Let me get you some soup.”
I just wanted to put my head on his shoulder.
“I’m so jealous of her,” I said. “I’m jealous of her, and of anyone else you may be fucking.”
“There’s nobody else.”
But it was too late. He was a self-proclaimed liar. And each time he opened his mouth that was all I could think about. What was I doing with a liar? Did I actually believe that this man would change for me? He lied to his wife. What made me think he was suddenly going to speak the truth to me?
“Soup sounds good,” I said.
He kissed me on the cheek and asked whether I wanted chicken soup or cream of tomato. While I was making up my mind, he said, “I’m sorry I’ve been such a dick lately, but I needed to keep you off balance.”
“What?”
“Can’t have you feeling too secure.”
“Your need to keep me off balance is going to kill me,” I said, “so chicken soup will be fine for my last supper.”
When Michael got into his car, I wondered whether he’d be back. But he reappeared with chicken soup for me and cream of tomato for him. We ate in silence. Every so often, he’d reach out and caress my face. I had grown to feel something for him that I called love, but I knew it was the farthest thing from it. I realized that I knew nothing about him except what he had told me. Part of me thought he was an awful man, and yet I wanted to fall asleep next to him, and wake up with him the following morning.
I wanted to go to the movies and hold his hand in the dark. I wanted to see what he was like around other people.
“I’m worried about you,” he said. “Do you need me to take care of you too?”
I wanted to say yes. Yes, no one has ever taken care of me, and I need you to be the one.
But I couldn’t.
“I can take care of myself,” I responded. “I don’t want a man to be with me because I need him. I want a man to be with me because he loves me. Do you want to be with me?”
“I don’t know how to be in a normal relationship.” He looked into his soup.
“I need to feel secure,” I said.
He stared at me and put down his spoon. He took a deep breath and sighed as if this news was a personal affront. “It’s starting to bother me,” he said, “that sooner or later it always comes to this. That I am asked to make up for all the shitty things other men have done. As a matter of fact, I’m sick of it.”
“This isn’t about you.”
“It is now,” he said.
“I think you are using me as a Band-Aid to keep your marriage together,” I blurted out. “If I had a spouse who was using, I’d grab my kid and get us the hell out of there. If you decide you want to do that, you can come here. Mi casa es tu casa. In the meantime, I need a break.”
“I understand,” he said.
I walked him to his car. I knew this was the last time I would ever see him. I put my arms around him and felt his body stiffen. He glanced up and down the street uncomfortably while he tried to undo my arms.
“Take it easy,” he said, “this isn’t the last time we’ll ever see one another.”
“Bullshit.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the wraparound sunglasses. Then he climbed into the front seat of his car. I turned around and headed for the house. I could hear the engine rev, could hear the gears shift, the grinding of the tires on the gravel, and I was determined not to turn around and wave. I would not allow him to see my tears.
* * *
Now, when I think of him, I remember not our lovemaking, but the dramas we staged for one another. And as I relive them, they transform from the once playful taunts I’d believed them to be, into war exercises, our weapons dishonesty and disrespect. I longed to turn into the selfish man-killer I’d imagined myself to be when we met.
The kind of person who could do things like phone the house to talk to his wife, or appear in his driveway.
But I kept thinking about the kid. About what her issues would be when she grew up. I didn’t want to be a part of what she went into therapy twenty years later to get over.
I really couldn’t understand how Michael could be happy with this arrangement, as a father or as a man. So eventually it seemed that the only helpful thing I might do would be to exit.
Later that winter, my health improved. I did not have a hysterectomy. Simply getting rid of Michael was enough.
One morning, long after the affair was over, I ran into a mutual acquaintance in the parking lot of a local eatery. It had been awhile and Paul seemed eager to talk. He and Michael were working together again and Paul’s need to gossip was overwhelming.
“You know,” he said, “his wife committed suicide recently. And throughout the entire ordeal, he’s such a horn-dog you know, he chased and fucked anyone he could get his hands on. I mean, do you know Marcie? Well, he was all over her the week after his wife was buried …”
“What did you say?”
“He was all over Marcie …”
“No, before that. About his wife.”
“She committed suicide.” He looked at me blankly. “You mean you didn’t know?”
“No.”
“Took pills and put a plastic bag over her head.”
I inhaled.
“What a blessing that you were well out of it by then,” he said.
“You don’t need to tell me any more.”
But he continued: “He had moved out. Then their daughter moved out to join him. They were in couple’s therapy together, and the last time she just didn’t show up.”
I needed to get away from him. He was talking and licking his lips, his big brown eyes bulging out of his head with each detail.
Sweat broke out on my upper lip. Goddamn it. The bead started rolling into my mouth. I caught it with my tongue.
I didn’t want to know how ugly it had been, and yet I did. Paul couldn’t stop talking about all the women. How many? No, don’t tell me. I knew that no woman really meant anything to him. We were pitchers of martinis; we numbed him to his existence. As soon as he was done drinking one pitcher, he simply tossed us in the trash and went on to the next. We all wanted him precisely because no one really mattered. Stupidly, I believed that I had been the one who would make the difference. It was that old cliché; if only he would open his heart, my remarkable love would redeem him, enabling him, so to speak, to transcend the crap of his life. I think Freud would have called mine a savior complex.
Paul’s lips kept moving, but I no longer heard anything he said. I was thinking of a story Michael told me at a diner one afternoon,
about a girl he had dated in college, a married woman who had left her husband for him. Once she had actually split from her husband, Michael decided he didn’t want her. Two years later she and both her children were dead in a car crash. After relaying the story, he said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” He chuckled. “You’ll be thinking all these women go around killing themselves over me.” Then he went on to add, “You know how I want to die? Shot by a jealous husband while I’m screwing his wife.”
“You’re looking a little pale,” said Paul.
“I’ve got to go.”
My hand was shaking as I tried unsuccessfully to put the key in the lock of my old Volvo. Finally slipping into the car, I slumped down in the seat and gripped the steering wheel with both hands.
My palms were sweating and my hands kept slipping. I couldn’t breathe. I imagined a woman I didn’t know, an attractive forty-year-old brunette with shoulder-length hair, lying on her living room rug, her face blue, spittle coming out of her mouth and nose, the plastic bag over her head tied in a bow at her throat. I thought of her daughter, her parents, her grandchildren, and the Christmases they would now endure.
The car was hot and airless and a swarm of enormous flies were playing tag on the windshield. I hit the open button and the windows rolled down.
ENDING IN PAUMANOK
BY RICHIE NARVAEZ
Stony Brook
Mary hated driving so close to the water. She couldn’t even see it—an incoming storm blackened the sky and the sea beneath it—but she could sense the Atlantic pulsing out there, just off the passenger side, moving like some great predator teasing its prey. “Out of the cradle endlessly stalking,” said Mary to herself.