“Careful. The paper. My drawing—”
“What?”
I moved sideways so that I could reach across, push the drawing from us. It fell from the bed. I stretched, lifted the drawing from the floor, placed it on the night table. Her head flopped backwards and she lay there, eyes closed, fists opening and closing. She pushed me sideways, rolled on top, licked my stomach, sucked on my breasts, then sat up straight suddenly—her back arched, her hands behind her on the bed, bent at the wrists for balance.
“David?”
“What?”
“Do you think we’ll ever be able to just neck anymore?”
“What do you mean? We—”
“I mean, now that we’re free and legal, do you think that in the future, every time we start to kiss we’ll feel obligated to go all the way?”
“How should I know?”
I tried to pull her down, to get my legs out from between hers, but she pressed down hard on me, leaned forward, arms extended, palms braced against my chest.
“David?”
“Jesus! What now?”
“Do you like the way I kiss? I mean, do you really like the way I kiss? Do you think I’m talented at kissing? In the eighth grade, when we passed slam-books around and everybody filled things in, I was never selected by anyone as Prettiest or Sexiest, but when we gathered in the bathroom to open the folded pages and look at the results I was surprised to learn that I was frequently selected by the guys as Best Kisser. And David?”
I sighed. “Yes?”
“Would you mind very much if we didn’t do it again? I want to—I know I started it this time—but I think I’m getting a little raw inside. I don’t know if…”
“Terrific.” I covered my eyes with my hand. “That’s really terrific.”
“I can make him come again if you want.” She slid backwards, reached down and gripped me. “What small attentions can I pay to you, sweetheart? It is different for women, you know. I’m very happy. Would you like me to turn over? They say it’s easier that way when you’re pregnant, that the muscles are more relaxed there. Just tell me what you’d like me to do, all right?”
“How the hell should I know? Jesus!”
“Shh,” she said. “Here.” She climbed off, pulled down my underpants, slipped them over my feet, tossed them to the floor, then bent over me sideways, on her knees, and began sucking, her thumb and forefinger holding me tight at the root.
I looked down, to watch her move up and down on me, but all I could see was a moon of black curls floating on my stomach. I asked her if there was something I could do for her, but she just told me to relax and enjoy myself. She said she loved to feel me swell, to feel the skin stretch. The one thing I might do for her, though, since I’d asked, was to kiss her again. Sometimes she thought she could be happy just kissing me, hour after hour. She’d worried about that at times. Was it some strange kind of perversion, to like kissing me more, at times, than having me inside her? Did I mind if she told me things like that?
She nibbled along the insides of my legs, but each time she came near my penis, she slid back down. She said she loved to see the small rushes of goose flesh move up and down my legs and thighs. She let her head rest on my chest.
“God! Your heart is beating so fast, David. Look—you can even see it—you can actually see it going thump thump. Thump thump thump…”
She licked downwards along my breastbone and across my stomach, and this time she took so much of me into her mouth that I gulped myself, afraid she would choke. I groaned, felt the shiver begin somewhere near the bottom of my spine and pulse through me, explode slowly. I pushed down on her so that she wouldn’t take her mouth away. I wanted her to squeeze and suck on me forever, to draw the long, shuddering thrill out of me and into her and never, never to stop. The spasm went on and on—I couldn’t believe it—and she pressed up now with her index finger, from below, and then she sucked more slowly, drawing the fluid from me.
I heard my own voice, strangely high-pitched, telling her how wonderful it felt, and for a brief second I also recalled the sound of Avie Gornik’s voice, pleading with Abe. But the memory drifted off. Numbness sifted through me, spreading like warm water. Her head was over my heart again, and I put my hand there, spread my fingers as wide as I could, pressed down.
“Here—where it surges—is that the part the guys call the power vein?”
“I suppose.”
“I love making you happy. I love watching your face when you come. Doesn’t it stun you, David, that we can do anything we want? I mean, isn’t it an extraordinary idea, to be able to do anything you want, and not to feel embarrassed or guilty? Tumescence. Listen: did you know that in Japan and other Eastern cultures it’s considered the height of pleasure for a man not to come, for him to have the frustration drawn out indefinitely. ‘Karazza’—that’s the word for it. Tumescence and karazza. Great words. Don’t say anything. Shh. You doze off if you want. Don’t worry about me. I like looking at you. How many times did we do it together tonight? Five? Six?”
“I wasn’t counting.”
“Neither was I, but I think it was six.”
She talked. I dozed, slept, woke, listened to her. She wondered if what people said was true, if it wouldn’t be as thrilling for us now that the act was no longer forbidden. She said that according to literary critics nobody had ever written a good novel about family happiness, about married love, not even Tolstoy. In the Western tradition, romantic love was always portrayed as existing outside marriage—as illicit or tragic or stolen or star-crossed. I felt myself slipping into dreams, into long tunnels where gleaming black tiles lined the walls, where light speckled toward me.
I heard Gail talk about Ellen and it was as if I was sliding along a smooth, enamelled tunnel into the very sound of her voice. She was talking about books and I heard myself ask her if she’d read about the things we did in books, if that was where she’d learned so much.
“When I was sweet sixteen,” she said. “I went through a period where I read all the dirty books I could find—The Story of O and the Kama Sutra and Lady Chatterly’s Lover and lots of Henry Miller’s books and some books that were, as they say, totally without redeeming social value. Ellen hadn’t read any of them, even though she was older, and she startled me by asking me to read Lady Chatterly’s Lover to her, by pressing me for details. So for once, you see, I had her where I wanted her.
“What I’d do was to read aloud to her and then stop suddenly just when we were coming to the really hot parts. She’d go nuts. She’d swear and threaten and try to whack me. But what could she do, really? Tell our parents? All I ever had to do to quiet her down was to warn her that if she told on me she’d never hear another word from the books she herself could never read. There was no smut industry in the world of Braille as yet.”
Her words came to me as if filtered through gauze. I saw steam, rising from cold water. I saw myself on a pier on Red Hook. I was with Abe and we were watching large derricks, cranes dipping down to pick up crates. There were guns and ammunition inside the crates, wrapped carefully in straw and raffia. The longshoremen joked with Abe. Guns for the Arabs, sneakers for the ]ews, they said. Not anymore, Abe replied. Never again. They laughed at him, winked at me, made jokes about Jews. Abe paid them off with enormous rolls of bills and he laughed with them. But his eyes were ice cold. The guns were going to Palestine, he told me afterwards, smuggled there to help the Jews fight against the British and the Arabs. I imagined myself on the pier without Abe. I was talking to Tony. Tony had his hands in his jacket pockets. He was inviting me to come to his house for dinner, to meet his children. Would Gail and Regina like one another? Would Tony and I watch a Knicks game on TV together? Would we pretend we were happy? Family happiness. Sure.
Gail and I lay there, holding one another, and she was so still that I wondered how I would feel were she to die in my arms. I wondered what was going to happen next, and about exactly what Abe would say to me when I returned.
Then daylight was pouring in through the window—I must have slept—and Gail lay beside me, smiling.
I heard cars, below our window, honking, and I winced slightly, pulled Gail closer. I remembered one longshoreman calling Abe a prick, a circumcised prick—and Abe answering back—it was the first time I heard the line and I used it afterwards, with my friends—That’s true, Gino, but without us pricks where would you cocksuckers be? I leaned over and picked up the drawing.
“If I had a good eraser I could have done your hair better. I couldn’t lift off some of the pencil—the shading—once I’d put it down.” I stopped. “You really like it?”
“I love it.”
“I feel kind of dizzy. Do you feel dizzy?”
“No. And the morning sickness is gone too. It only lasted two weeks.”
“Everything’s kind of hazy and spinning,” I said, my eyes closed. “Lots of tiny white dots. Circling. Remember the Lone Ranger rings you used to look into, shaped like little silver atomic bombs and when you took off the tailpiece and went into a closet and stared into it you saw thousands of tiny white specks, as if you were seeing an atomic explosion or the end of the world?”
“I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”
“I made the drawing for you.” I kissed her hair. I sensed that both of us were afraid to leave, afraid that if we went into the world all that we’d been feeling would be shattered. “It was supposed to be your wedding gift. When you woke up I was going to—”
“Oh David.” Tears ran down her cheeks, slid into my mouth. “Forgive me, but I think Gail Kogan awoke from a dream and didn’t know if she were a happy woman who had just dreamt she was Gail Kogan, or Gail Kogan dreaming she was a happy woman.”
“I didn’t know if I could still draw, though. I was frightened to try again.”
“I could take in washing,” Gail offered. “We could send you to art school. I type seventy-five words a minute. I take shorthand, Gregg-Pittman method. Or I could transcribe books into Braille—I have specialized training. I can use a Braille typewriter. I’m bright and young and efficient—”
“—and pregnant.”
“Well, just a little bit,” she laughed. “Or maybe we could make books together—stories that I’d write and you’d illustrate.” She stopped. “I know I’m pregnant, David, but that will only be for six more months, and then…” She faltered, found no words, pulled me closer to her and held me so tightly that I gasped. “I am frightened too, David. I’m very frightened sometimes.”
“I know.”
“We haven’t talked about practical things at all, about whether or not I’ll leave college or if you’ll go to college or how we’ll pay for things or where we’ll live or what hospital we’ll use. If my parents offer us money, or if your family does, should we accept? I wouldn’t mind working, really, while you went to school. I know I’m very bright, but that’s not uncommon—”
“Forget it. Okay? Let’s just forget it and change the subject, if you don’t mind. What I think is that you worship me too much. Lots of people can draw well. I’ve seen drawings in books and museums. I’ve seen the sketches real artists did long before they got to my age. I’m not so terrific.”
“You won’t know that unless you try.”
“I haven’t tried. That’s the whole point!”
“But it wasn’t easy in your home, David! It—”
“It’s never easy. So do me a favor and don’t try to cheer me up. I admit that I wonder sometimes how good I might have been if I’d stuck with it, but so what? I didn’t. Sure. We only know that we’re here, the way we are, not—”
“But you can be as good as you want! We’re young. The talent is still there. It hasn’t leaked out of you, don’t you see? It’s never too late to start, if only—”
“No,” I said, cutting her off. “Sometimes it is too late.”
Which did I want more, a girl or a boy? I said I didn’t care, that all I wanted was a healthy baby, but she insisted that I answer the question, and the answer—to my surprise—was that if I had to choose, I preferred a girl. Why? Because it would make things easier for me. Because I’d think of it more as being her child? Partly. But also because of me, because I wouldn’t worry so much about the bad influence I might have on a girl. I wouldn’t worry so much about my temper, about the way I imagined I might get frustrated with a boy if he didn’t do things the way I wanted him to. Was I afraid, Gail asked, of having a son look up to me too much?
What she thought we should do next, she said—feeding me a piece of sausage from her plate—was to send telegrams to her parents and to my mother, congratulating them on the marriage of their children. I told her she was nuts. She agreed, but claimed she was being practical, that the telegrams would serve a real purpose: by the time we got home they would have had time to get used to the idea. The best defense, she declared, was a good offense.
We were almost finished with breakfast. From where I was sitting I could see our hotel, and while Gail talked I tried to figure out which window it was that I’d been looking out. I felt restless, eager to get away, to get back to Brooklyn. I remembered a movie I’d seen not long after Abe got home—Pride of the Marines—a true story of a blind Marine, where John Garfield played the blind guy and Dane Clark played his buddy. Abe looked a lot like John Garfield, and I’d bragged about it to my friends, told them that Garfield had grown up fighting in Jewish gangs on the Lower East Side. I could hear Garfield’s rough voice, see his slanted smile.
Gail asked if I wanted to stay for another day so that we could catch up on our sleep all afternoon and play again all night. Under the table, her foot was in my lap—her shoe off—and she was wiggling her toes along the inside of my thighs. She asked why I didn’t look at her and I said I was looking at the window of our hotel room. Did I expect to see somebody looking down at us—a spy? a ghost?
A young couple entered the diner, and Gail, following my eyes, turned to watch them. The guy wore a navy-blue blazer with silver buttons, a fancy crest on the breast pocket. The girl was strikingly beautiful—small, sharp features, pale-pink lips, luminous sky-blue eyes, a dimpled chin, light-blond hair that was almost white. They passed us without looking our way, sat down in a booth.
“Oh dear,” Gail said, raising her eyebrows. “I wonder what brings them to Elkton?”
“Stop. They’ll hear.”
“Never. Their ears are too sophisticated. Did you notice how they seemed to refuse to notice us? Yet I saw the girl glance at you while pretending to look past you. She liked what she saw and even in her prissy little mind she must be wondering what the difference is, between the night she just spent with her betrothed and the pleasures I must have tasted with a man like you, with—”
“I said to cut it out—”
“They won’t hear a thing.” Gail leaned back. “They hear the way they speak. Very softly and discreetly. Notice, if you will, in a minute, how little their jaws move when they talk and eat. Wired at birth is what I’ve heard. They do that to your jaw if you’re born to an upper-class Protestant family. It’s their equivalent of circumcision, a surgical procedure ensuring that you won’t ever show much emotion should the temptation arise.”
“Listen, Gail—”
“The groom, wearing his Princeton blazer and tie, will attend the Wharton School of Business next fall. The bride, a senior at Dana Hall Academy and an Aryan from Darien, wearing matching skirt and sweater from Peck and Peck in this spring’s new heather tones, was knocked up by her flancé in the back seat of an Austin-Healy during halftime of the Princeton-Yale game, and—”
I grabbed her wrist. “I said to cut it out.” Her jaw went rigid, her eyes wide with rage. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing.” She looked down. “Okay. I’ll be quiet. Let go, though.”
I let go. “What gets into you sometimes? I mean, what did they do to you?”
“Nothing.” She picked at the skin around her thumbnail. “But you’d like a girl like that, wou
ldn’t you? You’d like some nice cool, clean young thing like that, with long ironed hair and ivory thighs and authenticated pedigree from the Junior League.”
“No.”
“Do you know why I think it is that Jewish boys like you lust after these silent shiksas so much? Do you? My brother was the same before he settled for Janet. Do you know why? I’ll tell you. So they can have it both ways.”
“Here we go again.”
“Really, David. Do you think I’m blind, that I didn’t see the way you looked at her? Her boyfriend had the lean look and you had the hungry look, right?” She leaned towards me, her hands tight around her water glass. “I’ve thought about it, though, and the answer is that it’s the challenge and the lack of challenge—that they promise a life of privacy and of peace, without nagging, an image of a woman totally unlike the women you’ve grown up with, who’ve smothered you, and yet that’s the challenge, isn’t it? To try to smash that calm, cool exterior, to see if you can get someone as beautiful and self-contained as that to do every little hot and dirty thing you want, until they’re begging for more—until they worship you more than your mothers ever did—”
I grabbed for her wrist, but she was too quick. She pulled back, and as she did she knocked her water glass over. She set the glass back up, smiled at me triumphantly. With exaggerated calm, she took paper napkins and began mopping up the water.
“But why are you so upset, Mr. Voloshin? You seem quite vexed. Would you like to talk about it?”
“Don’t pull your psychological shit on me. You’re jealous is all. You don’t fool me one bit.”
“You would like a girl like that, though,” she said quietly, tears in her eyes. “I can tell. You’d really like a nice, modest little girl who won’t make demands on you, and someday you’ll get tired of me and my mouth and my brain and go out and get one—the line forms to the left, ladies—and you’ll justify running away because you’ll say I trapped you, that I cheated you out of some other life you never lived.”
“I like the life I’m living in. I don’t think about the lives I don’t have.”
Before My Life Began Page 26