by Al Riske
Afterwards, they stroll through town, check out some of the shops. They separate, as they usually do, and Casey spends most of his time shuffling through a rack full of postcards outside one of the stores, but the real attraction is a brunette in a red thong. She’s just across the way and Casey can hardly believe his eyes. He’s waiting for her to turn so he can get another look. She’s with a friend, a pretty blonde in a lime-colored two-piece, who looks at Casey and doesn’t look away.
It’s like a game of chicken, and Casey is the first to look away. What’s he supposed to do? He’s married. Twenty-six years. Today.
WHEN HE WAS a junior in high school, there was a senior, Bridget Nelson, who used to sit on his lap and ask him questions. This had never happened to him before, and he couldn’t think how to respond. He couldn’t really look at her, or anyone else for that matter, but he did put his arm around her lightly the second time it happened. (Thinking about it now, the cool feel of her thin polyester dress still comes back to him.) When he finally got up the nerve to ask her out, she said no.
CASEY HAS A thing about lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. He orders so often—for Elaine’s birthday, their wedding anniversary, Valentine’s Day—that the catalogs show up every few days.
He has the packages delivered to work, as if he can still surprise Elaine if he continues to be very secretive. At least it gives him a chance to wrap his selections and attach a card. The trouble is that coworkers tend to notice the return address on the packages and ask him what’s inside.
Once, a few years ago, he left a catalog on his desk. A colleague picked it up and casually thumbed through it.
“Which would you order for Elaine,” she said, “these PJs or this bra-and-panty set?”
She pointed to a pair of cotton pajamas in an ecru rose print, then a demi bra and bikini in peacock satin with an overlay of black lace.
“She already has both of those,” he said.
The woman let out a scream of mock anguish.
Casey said, “What?” But then he realized that he couldn’t ask her to explain. He could only assume it was the right answer from the wrong guy, a married guy.
They let it drop.
TO THIS DAY, Casey still has that catalog. He finds it difficult to throw any of them away, in fact. He still has favorite editions dating back to the summer of 1986. (He realizes it’s sort of childish, but Elaine doesn’t seem to mind. The models aren’t a threat to her.)
To Casey, a woman with tiny breasts pushed up and in by a padded bra can be far sexier than a full-breasted woman. Why? Because she’s asking him to look at her, inviting him to admire her form, even if it’s not entirely hers. It’s how she wants to be seen.
He’s willing to go along with the fantasy—it’s not real, and yet it is. A woman’s imagination may not be tangible, not like her lips or hair, but does that make it any less real?
Would Elaine be Elaine without her imagination? He knows she gets hot watching Mel Gibson in The Bounty and Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans, but that’s all right with him. Sometimes he likes to imagine himself as a sailor torn between love and duty or a rugged frontiersman attracted to a spirited Englishwoman.
MOST OF THE time he still thinks like a schoolboy, but he realizes he’s not when he’s with his nephew Jake, putting together a jigsaw puzzle that will form a map of the United States. A piece falls off the coffee table, he bends over to pick it up, and his back goes out.
This has never happened before.
He rolls onto his brother-in-law’s brand new Berber carpet and tries to straighten out; Jake calls for Aunt Elaine to come fix him.
CASEY CAN THINK of just a handful of cases over the past twenty-six years where a woman’s willingness was unmistakable, even to him. And he has been thinking of them lately. Part of his oddly persistent nostalgia, they pop into his head whenever they feel like it.
Maybe it’s the weather today that makes him remember that, on a hot summer day not so long ago, he happened to be sitting outside a coffee shop, sipping an iced latte and staring into the middle distance, deep in thought. He doesn’t remember now what he was thinking about, but he remembers the slender young woman who stepped into his line of sight. She stood still and seemed to shiver for an instant, despite the heat.
“Yes,” she said.
Casey, charming as ever, said, “What?”
She looked him straight in the eye and said it again: “Yes.” Just that. Nothing more. Then she tossed her silky hair and walked away.
IN HIS OFFICE on a Monday morning, Casey is trying to figure out how to adjust a newly-delivered ergonomic desk chair, without reading the tiny three-language manual, when he gets a call from Kara.
“I would love it if you wrote for me,” she says.
He protests, still distracted by the chair, but she’s not having it.
“You don’t know how rare you are because you are living it,” she says. “No one our age has done what you have done. No one.”
“I’m sure there are couples in the Bible Belt who … “ Casey pulls a lever and his chair’s immovable backrest suddenly tilts so far back he nearly tips over.
Undeterred, Kara says, “I mean, you and I are the only two people our age who never did drugs, and now you do this.”
Casey regains his balance and says, finally, “What exactly would I be writing about?”
“You’re so cute … ‘Why I still want to fuck my wife, and only my wife, after a quarter century of marriage.’”
“Ah, that clarifies things considerably,” he says.
CAITLIN HAS PURCHASED a narrow, two-story Victorian in the Sunset district. Casey is impressed that she can afford to buy at her age; she says she got a good deal because the owners were going through a divorce they wanted to put behind them quickly.
She takes him to see it in the middle of a slow work day.
The garage is so narrow he can barely get out of her Mazda Protégé, but the upstairs is surprisingly roomy with lots of natural light. It helps that she doesn’t have a lot of furniture. What she does have, though, is new and stylish in a retro way.
As Caitlin takes him on the tour, she says things like, “This room used to be blue, but I think the yellow really brightens it up.” In the kitchen, she talks about refacing the cabinets some day and wanting different tiles for the counters.
The bedroom is a bit dark, even when she turns the lamp on. There’s a big bed with a wrought-iron frame, a tiny nightstand piled with magazines, and a massive armoire with a portable TV inside. Cait-lin closes the armoire and gathers up a few stray clothes, including a skirt, top, lace panties, and padded bra, which she quickly stows in a wicker hamper.
“Very nice,” Casey says.
Caitlin smiles and maybe blushes; it’s hard to tell in the dim light. She may think he was commenting on her undergarments, which were certainly designed to be provocative, or maybe he was just talking about the room. After all, he had said much the same thing about the living room, dining room, and kitchen. For his part, Casey is wondering if she left her things out on purpose. She could hardly have chosen sexier lingerie for him to see. Or maybe she is just a bit slovenly and all her underwear is like that. Mild embarrassment would seem natural in either case.
So which was it?
He looks at her and tries to tell.
She looks at him, too, and then at the one window with its white curtains. “The sun wakes me up in the morning,” she says.
Casey looks at the window, sees the late summer sun filtering through the curtains even now, and knows what she means. He steps forward, thinking at first that he’ll just go see the view from the window.
Caitlin smiles ever so slightly and steps back, her shoulder blades bumping the wall behind her. She’s wearing a thin cashmere sweater with tiny pearl-like buttons down the front and a long thin skirt that hugs her hips and tickles the tops of her feet. As usual, her hair is a tangle of red-brown curls, always looking to escape from whatever way she tries to
tie them back.
They look at each other for a moment, and Casey moves closer without thinking—refusing to think, actually.
She puts her hand on his chest. “What are you doing?” she says.
They are only inches apart. “This,” he says, and stretches his neck to cover the distance between them.
Now two hands are on his chest. They hold firm and push back steadily.
Casey opens his eyes. “What?”
“You’re married,” she says.
THAT’S THE WAY Casey imagines it, anyway.
He also imagines a tender kiss on strange lips, a tight embrace with an unfamiliar body, torn clothes, and a rumpled bed.
Then would come the slow, inexorable dissolution of his marriage—the heartbreak and the sadness that would linger forever.
He has a good imagination.
Caitlin says, “I don’t feel like going back to work, do you?”
“No,” he says. “Didn’t I see a Starbucks on the corner when we drove up?”
What She Said
I’LL TELL YOU what she said. She said, “If you’re really drunk, how come you don’t make a pass at me when I turn off the flashlight?”
I was seventeen then, and it was the first time I had tasted beer, but I wasn’t drunk.
She said, “Do you remember where you left your sleeping bag?”
IN THE MORNING, she got up first and I waited ten minutes. People were already starting to pack their gear and gather the empties scattered about the cabin. I put my things in the trunk of the car.
“I think I left my hat upstairs,” she said. “Wanna help me look for it?”
We looked nowhere.
Finally I said, “We’d better get down there before people start to wonder.”
“You mean, before they lose their patience,” she said.
HER NAME WAS Rachel. She was in college; I was still in high school. I started driving out to the campus to see her on weekends.
She said, “If you’re thinking it’s all your fault and your responsibility, you’re wrong. I’m as much to blame as you are, if not more. It’s just that you’re a guy and I’m a girl—and we can’t do much about that.”
MY PARENTS BROUGHT me up in the church, and I believed in the Bible then (which is not the same as believing in God, which I still do) and in what the pastor said to make it all relevant to the modern world.
Rachel said, “You aren’t going to feel guilty about this, are you?”
It was Sunday night, evening service time, and we were sitting on the bed in her dorm room.
YOU PROBABLY THINK we were doing it by then. I know I’ve made it sound like that—but we weren’t. That first night, when we shared a sleeping bag, I had reached up under her sweater but I hadn’t even removed her bra. Later, what I had felt was my fault and my responsibility, was when I slipped her sundress off her shoulder and took her breast in my mouth for the first time.
HER REACTION: “I’VE been leaning back on my bed, thinking about you and smiling to myself. I can’t help it. You just do that to me. You distract me,” she wrote. “I’ve been smiling all evening for no reason at all—except that I saw you today.”
MY REACTION: GUILT. I hadn’t gone that far with my previous girlfriend, and I was in love with her. Plus, I was a Christian and that’s not the way Christians are supposed to act, are they?
“I DON’T THINK you’re a hypocrite,” she said.
BY THE NEXT week she had gone from a sundress to a turtleneck sweater.
“You want me to take it off?” she said.
I nodded.
“This too?”
THERE WAS ANOTHER girl in the loft that night, a friend of Rachel’s who I thought was asleep. A few weeks later, I overheard her telling someone, “And then I hear Rachel saying, ‘I can’t get it out. I can’t get it out!’”
She was talking about a contact lens.
Everyone had a good laugh, though, imagining what else she might have meant. Everyone except me.
I SHOWED UP in her doorway one time, unannounced. The door was open and there were half a dozen coeds sitting around talking. When Rachel saw me, she ran into my arms and nearly knocked me over. It took about twenty seconds for the room to empty.
Rachel said, “With other guys I’ve always felt I had to be on my guard. I never felt the kind of trust I feel with you.”
THE NEXT TIME I tried to surprise her, she wasn’t there. Neither was her roommate. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I went home. “I wish you would call first,” she said.
“YOU LIKE THAT?” she said.
“It feels good.”
“Yeah?”
I closed my eyes.
“Hmm, I’ll have to remember that,” she said.
EVERYTHING WAS NEW to me then. Her tongue and her breath in my ear would make me shiver.
“I like experimenting with you,” she said.
I REMEMBER ALMOST everything she said to me in that room. Which wasn’t very much for all the time I spent there. I especially remember this:
“What is it, Gene?”
“I think I love you.”
“You do, huh?”
I nodded.
“Sounds serious,” she said. “I don’t think I’m ready to be serious. About anyone. But I can say: Gene, I love you.” She said it in a very lighthearted voice, not serious at all. “Does that make sense?”
I nodded again.
“Is that what your love means?”
I said it was.
SHE SAID, “I wish I weren’t a virgin and that I was on the pill. Then there’d be nothing to stop me from taking you right now.”
We were on her bed, as usual. I was on my back and she was propped on one elbow, running her hand over my chest. It was raining hard and the wind rattled the window pane.
“Nothing?” I said.
And then there was this:
“You don’t think I could seduce you?”
I shook my head.
“Want me to try?”
I shrugged—as if it didn’t matter, I couldn’t be moved.
She put her hand on my crotch; I took hold of her wrist.
“Maybe you’d better not,” I said.
THERE WAS A little spot right in the hollow of her back where Rachel was very ticklish. I used to run my fingers lightly down her spine, and when I hit the spot her hips would thrust forward and press against mine.
We were lying on our sides, in her bed, in the dorm, and she said, “If you know what that does to me, why do you keep doing it?”
RACHEL’S ROOMMATE WALKED in on us once when we were in bed together. Later, Rachel told me she had a hard time convincing her that we still had our jeans on under the covers. That was true. She didn’t mention—at least I hope she didn’t—that I left there with my shirttails out to cover the wet spot on the front of my pants.
MY MOTHER LIKED Rachel more than any girl I had ever dated.
RACHEL WAS GOING to be home for Thanksgiving, so she invited me to come over for dinner. I called at the last minute and told her I wasn’t feeling well. She believed me. Why wouldn’t she?
TWO WEEKS LATER I got a letter from her. It said: “You could at least tell me what’s going on. And why? Couldn’t you?”
OVER THE HOLIDAYS I ran into one of the girls from Rachel’s dorm. I could see her through the double glass doors of the post office as I was coming out. I said hello and held the door for her. She pointedly opened the other one herself and went inside.
I FELT TERRIBLE, but I was so conflicted about Rachel that I decided to start seeing someone else—a pretty blonde who let me kiss her but wouldn’t open her mouth. Or didn’t know she was supposed to.
I wanted to say something to Rachel, but what?
ANOTHER FRIEND OF Rachel, a classmate of mine, said to me: “I wouldn’t worry about it. She was seeing other guys the whole time you were seeing her.”
My face always gave me away in those days.
“You didn’t kn
ow that, did you?” she said.
THE NEXT TIME I saw Rachel—the first time since I stopped calling her—was at a party that summer. She arrived late, when the hard drinkers had already had enough to start showing the effects. We saw each other but didn’t speak.
She looked the same: Her hair, a tangle of brown curls that fell down past her shoulders, was parted off center and tended to cover half her face. She was always brushing it back with her right hand.
I was in the living room talking to a redhead named Cindy, who I had never met. She was somebody’s girlfriend, that’s all I knew. Somehow I wound up on the floor with her straddling me and trying to pin my hands down. I was aware of Rachel sitting nearby in an overstuffed armchair. The redhead flirted with kissing me but stopped when her boyfriend came back into the room.
Later, I was going into the kitchen as Rachel was coming out. As we squeezed past each other, she looked me in the eye.
“If you only knew what I was thinking,” she said.
I THOUGHT ABOUT calling her. Then I tried not to think about it.
The thing was, despite what I said earlier, I never thought that I was in love with her. When I said, “I think I love you,” it was because I thought I should.
“You think too much,” she used to say.
I DID EVENTUALLY call and ask her if she’d like to join me for dinner and a movie.
She said she would.
Afterwards, we parked in her driveway for over an hour—talking, she would tell her parents.
She had on a pair of pants that hugged her waist and hung loosely over her hips. I don’t remember the color, but they were made of a slick material and I kept running my hands over her buns and down between her legs. She seemed to like that, so I didn’t stop. She started squirming around in my arms and pressing herself against me.
After a while the shudders subsided.