For Daniel, being in his own house would have become not a torment but a form of non-time, a time not fully engaged or lived, like the page of a book that when you got to the end of it, you asked, “What the hell have I just read?” Downtime. Daniel would be conscious now of the spaces of the rooms in his house, of the air they contained, the spaces they measured out to such precision—and for what? This could go on indefinitely, and in the beginning he thought it would, the house and Annie and his marriage to her providing a framework for the time he called his life, within which he could get away, escape that framework or introject a totally different structure into the interstices of this one, a secret room in which he began now more and more to have his true life, the life in which he was truly excited, truly generous, truly passionate, truly alive. Being in the house was getting more and more to be like what his sister-in-law said about someone stupid: “Lights on, no one home.”
And then there was the delicious guilt of the alibis and of the transgressions themselves, the challenge of the detail. He spent half an hour banging the frame of his squash racket against the floor and balustrade of Connie’s terrace. He had scuffed up his gym shoes the same way. He would put on his squash outfit and then run in the Presidio with Connie, getting the clothes good and sweaty before bringing them home and throwing them, casually, into the wash. This, he thought, made a lot more sense than the evening courses he had “taken.” Then he had actually had to read some of the crap on the reading lists, books on Basic and Pascal, or R. Charles Mortimer’s Gens and Justice: The Law in Early Roman Civilization. What a horrible, constipated style the man wrote in!
But part of the pleasure was just in this breaking of the law, seeming to operate within it while actually saying “Fuck you” to it, so that everything he did was charged with this doubleness, knowing something nobody else did, having the being they thought was him at the same time that he had this other self, this secret being asserting itself, unseen, right under their noses. The sweetness came in part from saying “No” to the very system that seemed to provide the framework for his life, what everyone simply assumed he had accepted too, just like them.
Daniel regretted only that all this acting, this performance, was going unacknowledged. He was his only audience, and that annoyed him. A job of acting presumed an audience aware that the actor is playing a role: it was validated in that audience’s knowledge of its doubleness, its approximation of an identity. When the actor’s self fused with the character’s, there could not be any consciousness of similitude and no appreciation of the details chosen to create that illusion, whose success, he now realized, depended on its being unsuccessful, on its being acknowledged as an illusion. Imperfect. Walking back the two and a half blocks from Connie’s to where he’d parked his car one night after one of his “squash games,” with the feeling of her still clinging to his skin like the briskness of a shower on a cold morning, he realized the studied casualness with which he was walking, as if he lived on this street, in this neighborhood, taking it for granted, not looking around while he walked along, “lost in thought,” conversing with himself, even. The worst was one morning at breakfast when Annie showed him a newspaper ad for an extraordinarily sexy “teddy.” “Would you like me in something like that?” she asked. He looked at the ad and swallowed hard. It was Connie.
“Sure,” Daniel said.
As he soaped his genitals, David thought that because the self behind Daniel’s role-playing went unperceived there must have been times when Daniel began to feel the reality of his being leaking into that role. He was saying “No” to the system, the structure of middle-class middle-aged couples, but the negation was so all-encompassing it negated eventually even the self that made it. At first, when this doubt about the reality or fullness of his own being began to trouble him, he could find comfort in his affair with Connie. Sitting at breakfast with Annie, the litter of dishes and crumbs and sections of the Chronicle insisting on the messiness of the real, buttering a slice of toast and making sure the butter went all the way to the edges, he would feel himself begin to dissolve, to be aware of the room as if he himself were not there, the walls and the windows, the floor and the ceiling shaping and containing this space and these smells so completely that he faded into a kind of irrelevance, like the crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. If he smoked, he thought, he would right now crush the butt of his cigarette brutally into what was left of the cube of butter as it sat in its glass dish there in front of him.
He would think then of his previous night with Connie and the perfection of their being together, her breast just there in his hand, its nipple just manifesting itself through the lace, his cock being sucked just to the point of spasmodic surges of pleasure and then allowed to ebb back, as he had brought her, repeatedly, to the edge of coming, both of them asserting their desire and their control. That had been real, he thought, that had been full.
And then he realized that he had made those very motions, he had spoken the same words, to his wife. And Connie did not know that she too, the person he had chosen or been given to share this most secret room of his life, stood outside it, unaware of any illusion and so unable to appreciate the reality of his performance as a performance. Toward the end of the second year, lying on Connie’s bed or sitting with her at breakfast—one morning she did cook breakfast and served it and ate it with him while wearing nothing but a little lace apron that frankly failed to conceal her breasts and her pubic hair—he would think of this apartment as a place measured out, as the rooms of his house were, to accommodate a life, and that this life only happened to include him, and only during the time he was actually here. Twice—no, three times—he took things from her apartment, nothing that had any value—a ceramic matchstick holder from Paris with CASSIS QUENOT printed in big red block letters around the base, a little toy metal seal, a glass ashtray with something printed on it in Arabic. But outside her apartment they seemed to lose whatever charge they’d had. He left things of his own there, too—clothes and keys, a small spike from a narrow-gauge railroad in Colorado that he’d had brass-plated. But none of these things made his being in this place any more necessary, and he felt a strange ghostliness as he moved through the plushes and glass and chrome of this apartment. The ghostliness was similar to what he felt as he drove away from his own house to “play squash” or “go fishing.” The elaborateness of the cover story made him feel like a criminal. This is what criminals must feel like as they prepare to do a job, he thought, constructing a world based on the fullness (and falseness) of the cover story. And yet he was not going to commit a murder or rob a bank or even burglarize a house. He was only going to do something so normal the wonder was that it did require such an elaborate preparation. But it was just that combination of secretness and commonness that made it so sweet. It was what everyone wanted and almost nobody did, to slip out of or through the structure that gave your life a shape into a room where your life took the shape you wanted it to have, to love and be loved by someone perfectly beautiful. The dream of millions. He could never have predicted either that he would achieve it or that, having it, he would find it so fucking complicated.
“Hey,” Jane said, poking her head in the door of the bathroom, “you must be the cleanest man in Iowa by now! Should we just go on down to dinner without you?”
In the Lone Pine Inn in North Platte, Nebraska, David thought how Daniel must have wondered how these two women had their being while he was not there. He imagined Annie making dinner by herself, or stacking the dirty dishes in the machine, or repotting plants out in the garden, humming to herself as she worked, feeling the cool redness of the flowerpot as she held it in her left hand, tamping the soil down around the stem with the trowel in her right. She would talk on the phone with Andrea. She would talk on the phone with Hendricks from the California Foundation. She would walk through the quiet house turning off lights on her way to the bedroom, taking the whole house for granted, like a second skin and not the occasion for doubts or a
nxieties about her own being. She would watch the late news, and then she would read for a while, her mind quiet, her life comfortably full. Even Daniel’s absence was part of that comfortable fullness. And Connie? Connie would work out at the gym, and then she would drive home because she preferred to shower in her own apartment, where she could reach out through the plastic curtain and have a hit or two off the joint in the ashtray on the windowsill. She would turn on the TV but she would not watch it, except when the commercials came on. Instead she would sort through the latest batch of glossies to see if she wanted to update her portfolio. There were some nudes in this batch, and even though she knew she could command a higher fee doing fashions, she toyed with the idea of including one or two, just to put a sort of edge on the portfolio, to make it a little more exciting to the men who would be checking it out. The phone would ring and she would talk to her mother for a while, thinking that she would ask Daniel about the nude shots. She would not be aware of the color of the walls or the texture of their stucco, or of the starburst chandelier over the table in the dining room. Whenever they had dinner at home, Daniel always wanted to eat in the dining room. Why was that? she wondered. It was so much less of a hassle to eat in the kitchen.
In the Maybell Lodge in Maybell, Colorado, David took the little square plastic bucket from the room and walked down the sidewalk past the other doors and windows to the ice machine. The metal scoop had been left in the ice bin and its handle was uncomfortably cold. This was the first motel of the trip home that actually had a separate little bedroom for Danny instead of just a single bed on the far side of the room, and he was savoring already the lovemaking he and Jane would do—for the first time since starting home—later tonight. He put the ice into the glasses and poured the whiskey. Danny had turned on the TV and was busy watching the latest installment of the rerun of Roots.
“This is the first time,” Jane said as she took the drink, “that I feel we’ve really gotten back to our own territory. As soon as I saw the Rockies, it felt like we had finally gotten out of the—the gravitational field of the East and the Midwest. Know what I mean?”
Behind the boy’s back, David reached over and caressed her breast, while she gave him a big smile and stroked his thigh once, a little uncomfortably, and then pulled his hand away, murmuring, “Plus tard.”
He thought of Daniel and Connie as they browsed through her portfolio, or through a new batch of glossies or tear sheets, trying to decide what to include and what to cut. They came across two lingerie shots in a row. In the first she was wearing a sleek, floor-length gown in some dark, satiny material. It was completely opaque, but cut so that it showed perfectly the swelling roundness of her bosom and the shape of her nipples. The background was dark, with three tall white candles looming up mysteriously behind her. She was holding a wineglass and looking at somebody who was just outside the frame of the picture. The skin of her shoulders and arms and her swelling bosom was luminous, and there was no mistaking the knowledgeable sexiness in that look. The man this nightgowned woman was looking at was about to get the fucking of his life. This woman would show him that he only thought he knew what it was all about. Her look and her carriage, even the way the wineglass gave itself to be cupped in the warm flesh of her hand—all spoke of velvet-lined chambers in châteaux outside Paris, of satin sheets over the chaise on the terrace of the palazzo at Fiesole, looking down on the Arno as it wound its way, lovingly, through the body of Florence.
In the other picture, she was standing in a field of flowers wearing some sort of gauzy, flowered shift or baby-doll nightgown whose almost perfect transparency wrapped her—incompletely—in a cloud or halo of light. It draped down from her bosom and opened in front, exposing part of her upper thighs, but what was covered could still be seen through the sheerness of the cloth. The soft focus of the picture blurred her nipples somewhat, which seemed now so clearly visible but the next moment looked as if they were actually part of the floral design of this chiffonlike stuff. The pale sunlight that picked out the flowers amid which she stood was also caught in her tousled hair. This was a world of morning sunlight and morning flowers, of the first awakening to love or the first awakening from the discovery of love and its sweetness—the look in her eyes that ambiguous.
“Do you like that?” she asked, her eyes bright with desire.
“Un-hunh!”
When she came back, she stopped in the doorway, leaning a forearm against the jamb, which framed her. She had tousled her hair and put on a gauzy, shift-like gown in the same style as the ad, a flower-printed “dress” he could see through that was loose and clingy, and widely slit up the front, that made a sort of zone or field of semi-transparency within which her long, lithe body moved subtly. She was giving him the same look of hungry innocence as in the photograph. She was incredible!
“Oh, honey,” he said.
It started out as simply as that. At first she asked him, “Would you like me to wear something special?” Then later it was “What would you like me to wear?” Still later she would alternate between asking him and surprising him, either putting on an old favorite or wearing something completely new, an outfit he had never seen before. At first it was a particular nightgown: the long pink one with the demure bodice and the tiny little sleeves that he liked to slide off her shoulders; the floaty black chiffon in several layers; the bride-like gown-and-peignoir with an Empire waist that wrapped her in an obscuring white cloud of innocence, and that, when he’d peeled it off her body and her arms and pulled up the sheer white of the gown above her thighs, revealed a wicked white G-string bikini that cupped her blonde little pubic mound; the dark blue outfit that started with a slip slit up to here, which she eventually pulled over her head to stand before him in a matching bra and panties that led up to those moments of truth when she stood or knelt, her hands coming together at her sternum as if to pray, and unfastened the bra and pulled it open to expose her perfect breasts and then hooked her thumbs with deliberate casualness in the elastic of her panties and pulled them down slowly—revealing more and more of her flat abdomen, and then her most secret hair. Sometimes she would wear nothing but a garter belt and stockings, but she was carrying a wine-colored peignoir. By maneuvering the robe and her arms and legs, and by turning her body this way and that, she could be with him like this for a long time without ever actually revealing herself to him except in momentary glimpses. His part was to sit back and “enjoy the show,” but after a half hour or so of this he was pulling the cloth out of her hands and burying his face in her bosom. Once she pushed this routine just a little further, standing beside the couch with her nude backside to him and spreading the robe over the sofa. When she did this, he could see her naked front in the mirror on the far wall, and he took her from behind, her rear end draped over the armrest while he stood between her spread haunches, his pants spilled around his shoes on the red kilim, fucking her in the ass while she hugged the cushion to herself and whimpered like a dog with pleasure. Once he stood in the doorway of the bedroom and watched her bring herself off with a penis-shaped hash pipe.
Then they progressed to street clothes. He loved to watch her undress, so she became a Montgomery Street secretary getting home from work and slowly pulling off her raincoat and scarf and sweater, and then, prolonging each step while he stood watching her from the doorway to the bedroom, she would slowly, with excruciating casualness, unfasten the silk bow of her blouse and begin to unbutton it, pausing to gaze out the window as if preoccupied with something, or to talk on the phone, all this time her unbuttoned blouse open to the waist, revealing her perfect, lace-covered breasts. She would go on with this, pausing to look at herself in the full-length mirror. Or she would wear a cocktail dress with nothing at all under it, and in that elegance, in jewels and makeup, she would slowly sink to her knees in front of him as he leaned back against the back of the couch, and suck him off. In another version he had her buy a nurse’s starchy white, semi-transparent uniform, under which she wore enough
underwear to keep her busy undressing for half an hour—a camisole and half slip, a full slip, a body stocking, two bras and three pairs of panties. “Daniel,” she said as she came out into the living room for him, “I can hardly move.”
She would do a cowboy shirt and blue jeans or a tight satin sheath with spike heels. They fucked in the kitchen and the bathtub, starting out in everything from jogging or tennis outfits to an incredible floor-length knit something she had gotten at Helga Howie for an evening at the opera. Sometimes she would start out naked and stalk him throughout the apartment, stripping the clothes from his passive limbs after she caught him, and then she would stroke him and suck him till he begged her to let him fuck her.
Later on he got involved in the costuming too, and in one of their favorites she would greet him at the door wearing a simple cotton shift, like a farmer’s daughter, and he would do a “coke dealer”—a black silk shirt, an Australian outback hat and Frye boots. He would spend all evening seducing this innocent young thing, eventually talking her into snorting some cocaine. At that point she became a drug-crazed, sex-crazed hellion and began ripping his clothes off. In addition to the nurse’s uniform she had a short-skirted, candy-striped thing with a pinafore-type bib like a waitress, a nun’s habit and an olive-drab WAC outfit complete with the little cap and some campaign ribbons pinned over her left breast. The best one was when he played Uncle Daniel, who had come to visit her mother, who was out right now. Connie was a fourteen-year-old virgin who had just come home from the convent. For that one she started out wearing a version of a Catholic school uniform: white blouse with a navy cardigan, a plaid skirt that barely came to her knees, white knee socks and black patent-leather shoes.
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