“This is it,” he said watching my face when he unlocked the door at the top of the stairs.
“It’s nice.”
Actually it was plain and sort of poor-looking. It looked like the home of a guy who’d been living alone a long, long time. I can recognize that look now. Almost four years later, I should be able to do at least that much.
There was a large aquarium near the kitchen, so I walked over and watched some fish swimming around. One of them looked at me and kind of wagged his tail, so I smiled back.
“Where you at now?” Jeff asked next.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’m still sort of grieving for my marriage or something.”
“Don’t you work?”
“I’m a free-lance writer. I write fluff for women’s magazines.”
“And what’s your position on smoking dope?”
“Well, it’s not kosher at AA, but my doctor doesn’t mind if it helps me not to drink. I was … drinking a lot.”
“So how about we have a joint and listen to some music?”
“Don’t you have to work? Drive your cab?”
“Not if I don’t want to. That’s why I do it.”
He has a real slow smile that sort of develops like a photo print, getting lighter as it comes into focus. His eyes are as smoky as the air around us.
He likes me.
“You got any kids?”
“Two. Seventeen and twenty.”
“Well, at least you’re lucky there.”
Suddenly it felt as if we were old colleagues in a lousy world.
I hadn’t been with a man for more than three years.
I asked him some questions about Vietnam, but instead he told me this story:
Once he and his younger brother, Arthur, were walking home from grade school in Missoula, Montana. Some bigger boys were out to get Arthur and five of them jumped out of nowhere. They pummeled Arthur until his face and head were bleeding. By the time they ran off, Arthur was in pretty bad shape—crying and wheezing from asthma. Jeff took him home, calling their father while they were still walking up the front stairs. Their dad ran out and listened to Jeff’s story about what had happened.
“From now on,” their father said, looking at Jeff, “if one of you gets beat up, you’d both better come home crying.”
“So I took good care of Arthur after that,” Jeff says seriously. “Even though he got most of the sweet pussy when we were in high school, I didn’t really care. I loved that kid. Then I went to Vietnam and my Dad died and Arthur became a junkie and moved out to San Francisco. He OD’d while I was in Saigon. So I didn’t do what my dad asked me to do, after all.”
Jeff walks over to his bookcase and removes a shoe box filled with rolling papers and pipes and a big cellophane bag full of grass. Then he sits down on the sofa beside me and rolls three big joints in a little red rolling machine.
“I used to have a hard drug problem,” he says easily. “I was in a program for three and a half years. Now I only smoke a joint once in a while.”
Then he puts on a tape and heats some water for tea.
We got stoned real slow. For a while I felt an uncomfortable craving for a drink—for the controlled action of alcohol—but then it passed. Vaguely I wondered if this man would make love as nice as he made tea. About half an hour later we went to bed. We had been sitting on it anyhow.
Whoever said you can’t recover your virginity hadn’t gone through menopause yet. You hang around long enough, history repeats itself.
His foreplay was fabulous and, after my long famine, perfectly sufficient. But finally he shifted and lifted himself on top of me. I pressed my hands against his chest in an insincere gesture of shyness. I was not afraid as much as nervous. The warm object pressing between my legs seemed enormous, its blunt head butting me like a billy goat. But I remained closed and tight and dry. It had been a very long time since I melted for a man.
Patiently he continued prodding me.
For the first time in my life—since the very first time of my life—I was unable to receive a man.
He stops and returns to caressing me, but this seems false to both of us and clearly beside the point. I feel almost innocent again. Fleetingly I remember some blah-blah about postmenopausal vaginal atrophy I’d read in a ladies’ magazine.
This was a problem? This was a consolation prize.
Jeff too seems appreciative of the delicious drama of his forced entry, his armed—ha ha—assault. Though not savage, he’s persistent about pressing onward and upward like the good soldier he must have been.
Ah. The ache of such arch rejection, the drama of such halting penetration! The unrequited constancy of it all! Decades of sex are deleted with quick strokes. Passion impedes our breathing. I become intoxicated by the sweet pain of his persistence and my own ambivalent resistance. I am unable to surrender to the monstrous machine seeking entry into my secret. I can do nothing to make myself welcome him. I cannot admit him and thus everything is severely dramatized and intensified. This is no scene from a newish-Jewish novel; we are definitely in a Regency romance now.
And what else could be the value of virginity if not the joy of deferred gratification? Deferred gratification is clearly another sweet experience wasted on youth. My deflowering makes Jeff and me delirious. Even our dialogue is delicious.
“That must hurt.”
“Not too bad.”
“Seems it would.”
“Well, a little.”
He resumes his labors.
“You … doing okay?”
“Ummmm.”
“Oh, sorry. Am I hurting you?”
“Uh-huh. Now you are.”
“This is too much.”
“I know.”
“IS THIS GOOD OR WHAT?” he shouts.
I have to laugh.
We begin falling in love from making love. By definition some things are sweetly circular. Other than a baby, what else can lovemaking produce but love? Where does breadmaking lead?
“Oh! Wait a minute!”
“Sorry. Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay.”
“This feels like high school.”
“That I wouldn’t know.”
“You’re really out of shape. I mean practice.”
“I know.”
Rest time. Then a sweet, softening internal massage.
“I think you’re loosening up.”
“Really. I think you’re getting my Change Cherry.”
We laugh so hard we have to wait a while, lying side by side on his pullout sofabed, holding hands. I look around the studio again. From here, I can see a small patch of live sky and his ailing avocado plant. It seems like a sufficient amount of nature for me. After a while I hear him stifle a moan of discomfort.
“I know you’re sore, but we could … try something different,” he offers.
“Why would we change?”
“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. We’re definitely on a roll here. We’ll just take it real slow.’
Ah. Then some progress. There is a partial entry but no maneuverability. A shiver of expectancy rattles me, but Round Two ends in a draw again before another recess.
“You’re going to be sore as hell,” he predicts.
“I am already.”
“That’s what I thought. How about … some more tea?”
He stands up. I am shocked he is detachable.
“I’ll never eat another piece of pecan pie or rice pudding ever again without remembering this. That vanilla …”
He shakes his handsome head with appreciation. He is standing nude, clearly still on-call, beside the bed. He is a little winded. His smoky eyes study me intently. Then he flashes a white, white smile. He has a wonderful bedside manner.
“I wonder if you could use it for suntan lotion, too?”
“I don’t know. Why not? It is a little sticky, though.”
“What did you drink?”
“What do you mean?”
Now he is back in bed, tea forgotten. “What was your drink of choice, as they say?”
“Oh, vodka. Vodka with grapefruit juice.”
“Uhuh. Salty Dogs. I’ve played a few sets with those too in my day. Down in the islands.”
Down in the islands.
He’s nuzzling me, licking vanilla off my neck.
“Did you see Atlantic City?”
“Yes.”
“Remember Susan Sarandon rubbing lemons all over herself to get rid of the shellfish smell?”
“Uh-huh.”
He’s still licking me, a proud cat grooming his kitten, learning as he goes along.
“We’re going to have to get you moving a little,” he says gently after further examination. “You’re not really in too bad shape. We’ll just get some of those Salty Dogs out of your system. We’ll go jogging on the towpath.”
“Ummm.”
He misses my lips and kisses my chin, smiling, friendly.
And then, quite unexpectedly, my body remembers the music.
I turn to look into his already dear face.
Of course, I do not have to speak.
He knows.
And this embrace is as slow and as lovely and as perfect as any in my long career and he knows that too and we are very close for a long time after it has ended. Lying in bed, listening to his tapes and talking and drinking tea, we touch each other to remember and wait for the future to happen again.
It is already getting dark when his voice changes and he grips my arm too tight.
“I really want to … reach you, Sukie,” he says, turning my face toward him. “I want to find out who you really are. I don’t have the foggiest …”
He begins again. He is panting. He is straining upward and inward to find me.
He does.
But then he starts to lose it.
He loses it.
After a sweet while I do too.
Later, tenderly and lovingly, he touches the laugh lines around my eyes and the smile brackets around my mouth. Then he gathers me up into a giant hug that warms me like a great overcoat.
We screw again. And again. And again. We cannot stop. We screw until midnight. Then he puts me in a taxi, his—ha ha!—and takes me home.
The next afternoon I go back as I’d promised, and he opens the door, real excited:
“You like chicken? I barbecued us some wings. A whole big slew of them. About thirty.”
“Sure,” I say.
So we ate a lot of chicken wings, got high again, got back in the pullout bed that he’d left pulled out and started ***** like bunnies.
Sweet sex.
That first afternoon in Jeff’s apartment, I felt as if he were pumping life-restoring glucose intravenously into my system. The fact that he used the vaginal canal route was almost irrelevant.
Sex as consolation goes a long way.
Other Sexchanges:
He likes fiction a lot. We talk about who’s writing what. Since we don’t know any of the same people, we talk about characters we like or don’t like in books. I tell him I really loved Ray Hicks in Dog Soldiers, so he says, “Oh, yeah?” and gives me this big white grin and then forces me down on his bed to do something to me that Ray Hicks did to Marge.
Hmmmmm.
He wants to know about my books. He pesters me and pesters me, so after a couple of weeks I bring him a copy of each.
He responds differently from anyone else who ever read anything of mine. He takes them seriously. He assumes I am serious, that I am consciously working within a tradition, trying to do certain specific things.
What hurts me most is that he wants a baby. Oh God. No more babies. I hadn’t really thought about that before. Before now, who cared? Who cared about life and love? I only loved loss and losing. Now I remember the sexiness of pregnancy—the body as a testimonial to the dark, secret stirrings of nightly love.
Once I caught Max looking at me when I was pregnant with Carol. We were out somewhere and suddenly he looked at me like a high school boy seeing a hickey peeking out from the neckline of his girlfriend’s, sweater and then looking around to see who else had noticed. I think Max was shocked that he’d left such a public mark upon my body.
The last time I visited Mama, I accidentally got off the elevator on the maternity floor and saw a young couple—no, a boy and a girl—holding on to each other. They had clearly become parents and he looked as shy as she did, standing there by the elevator, burning with pride and shyness because now the world knew what they had done. He was only a boy—like Max had been when we had Carol.
Jeff is so sweet. He coaches me sexually. He is like one of those flamboyant, hands-on, TV-star pro basketball coaches. He’s always urging me to go for it, to dance all the way downcourt to score. His voice hums in my ear.
“Was that a nice one for you?”
“Hmmm.”
“Can’t you say yes? Say yes so I’ll know.”
“Yes.”
“It was a biggie, wasn’t it? Would you trade ten little guys for one biggie? Oh-oh. You getting shy again?”
Hardly. This is shy?
We move with economy. We don’t need or like too much motion. We like staying locked together for as long as we can bear it. (How can you tell if a JAP has an orgasm? She moves.) Stoned, we savor the small, shivery sensations. Small is beautiful.
“This is going to be a very big one, “he announces to me in advance. “Now just stay still, be quiet for a minute. Ssshhh. You are really going to love this one.”
Waves of breathing.
“Oh, good for you, sweetie.”
He is always happy to make me happy.
I am happy.
He can hold back for hours. In fact, he holds back far too long and too often. I don’t know how or why he does that. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something physically or psychologically wrong with him.
Ha ha.
In the beginning I was too shy to ask. Finally I found the nerve to say, “This is all about me. It shouldn’t be all about me. What about you?”
“Don’t worry about that. I like what we’re doing. Tomorrow’s soon enough for me.”
“Tomorrow? Are you kidding?”
“Hey. Don’t be a Jewish mother about that too, okay?”
“But—”
“You don’t get to control the action around here. This is my pad.” Flash of white. “I can come and go as I please. Now hush, “he whispers. “Just let me love you a little. Come on. How’s this right here? Nice, huh? Is that nice for you?”
“The sixties were never lonely,” he says one night, breaking my heart. “There were so many things to do.”
A friend he knew in Vietnam is coming to Washington. Jeff is pretty excited. I ask about the man and Jeff says his name is Roger and he’s bringing “the lady he lays with.” I’d never heard anyone say that. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It spoke of ultimate choices.
We’ve had some bad times. Some real bad ones already. Once I got to his place at the agreed time and he wasn’t home. All I could do was stand there kicking his door, angry as hell. He didn’t call for a couple of days, either. When he finally did, he said, “There’s no excuse for what I did, but there was a reason.” He would say nothing more, so I kept pondering the tense tautology of his words for days and days afterward.
Once he called me at midnight.
“Did you know that Andrea’s coming?” he began.
I had been asleep. “What’s an Andrea?” I asked, thinking of a hurricane.
In fact, it was his girlfriend from New York. She stayed with him a week. I thought I might die. During that week I felt like the soft white filling of an Oreo pressed between my grief over Max and my yearning for Jeff. I was simply the center of a pain cookie, the frosting between a layer of agony on top and another on the bottom. Actually, though, the diversification of pain, like a financial portfolio, was somewhat liberating. It showed me that my original grief over Max was not absolute—only
relative. It was also a good lesson about sexual jealousy. No longer in a position to claim any exclusivity, I was glad just to be included in Jeff’s stable.
When Andrea finally went back to New York, Jeff invited me over. I pouted around his apartment for a long time, looking for signs of her, signs of their togetherness.
Finally I asked “So how was Andrea?”
“She has very weak gums,” he answered seriously. “Very weak gums. They bleed. She has bleating glums.”
That was all. That was it. That was all he would ever say.
But he did make very, very sweet love to me that night and he kept smoothing back my hair whenever it got damp from sweat and stuck to my forehead. He kept smoothing my hair all night long.
Once we were over at my house. I was trying to shorten a pair of jeans for David. I couldn’t find a thimble and I was going crazy trying to push the damn needle through that heavy denim and getting nowhere. Finally I threw the jeans across the room.
“Damn it,” I said. “I can’t do anything with my hands.”
“That’s not true,” he said immediately, with his delicious smile. “You do nice things to me with your hands all the time. You just don’t know it.”
He loves his fish. They are really his pets, like a dog or a cat. Their names are Sacco, Vanzetti, Pol Pot and Kissinger. Every week he buys them fresh shrimp to eat from Cannon’s Fish Market. He says taking care of those fish reminds him of positive values. He says taking care of his piranhas, his ficus and his tape collection keeps him off heavy drugs.
On the day the time changed from daylight saving to standard—or whatever—I took down his kitchen clock and moved the hands back one hour while he was sleeping. On the way home I felt rich, as if I had given him a gift of an extra hour of rest.
The next time I was there I smoked a big joint by myself because he didn’t want to. He was sort of in a bad mood and he poured himself some vodka, which he doesn’t do often in front of me, and then sat there sipping it. So I said, “It’s lonesome getting high without you.”
And he told me that he loved me.
That was the very first time.
One night when I was already encased in the blankets of his pull-out bed, he reached up to the top shelf of his closet and pulled down a sweater. After pausing to think for a minute, he threw it onto a rattan chair in the corner. Then he began pulling down all his sweaters, one after another, beige and gray, navy, brown. They flew past the bed and fell like leaves on the woven straw chair. I watched the colored sweaters winging above me and remembered Jay Gatsby showing Daisy his silk shirts.
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