by Lisa Zeidner
The selfsame breast had just seen service, in the Wilkes-Barre hotel room, and I realized that, like the dark-haired man there, I was not registering the target of my seduction. My lust was impersonal in the purest sense. As I talked, I focused on the double-image of his shoulders. They were clearly a man’s shoulders, but underexposed, still bearing a ghost of the way he would have carried himself as a child. The shoulders, the back, the back of the neck: it’s the sweetest place on a little boy. Despite the muscles, the irony, and the zits, the smooth vulnerability of the boy was still there. Sex with him, I felt, would be like a long exposure, mounting slow and steady as a time-lapse. How absurd! I also thought, not being a moron. For that kind of sex—selfless sex, like Buddhist meditation—I’d do better with my husband, or with some other middle-aged male who knew my terrain. Not an eighteen-year-old boy who would hump like a monkey. Yet that felt like part of the experience, part of the double-exposure: tenderness, joy, and wonder hidden behind the haste and thrust of the butterfly. As opposed to the boor in Wilkes-Barre, who was only crude.
But like that man, I didn’t want to have to ask. I should be able to do what all mating people everywhere have always done, and many species of birds as well: a quick, shy glance away, followed by a frontal gaze that says come with me. Your room or mine.
Amazingly, it worked. After the obligatory discussion of the rigors of medical school, it became clear that unlike his, my room had a view toward the park. As well as being a swimmer, Zachary had been a high-school track talent, and the idea of a jog around the park, with company, appealed to him. We only needed to stop at my room, to get my running shoes. That I didn’t have running shoes was something I figured we’d deal with later.
The room had not yet been cleaned. As he headed to my windows, and my view, I slipped the DO NOT DISTURB sign into position. By the time he turned around, I was in position to be in his arms. We were in bathing suits, so the journey to bed shouldn’t take long. I was aware of trying to be perfectly clear about the invitation, while at the same time hanging back enough so that I didn’t scare him, or repulse him—I feared that with Let me be perfectly clear I could seem, coming at him for the kiss, like Richard Nixon through a fish-eye lens, old and hairy, tremulous. Though he was probably too young to have any picture whatsoever of Richard Nixon: the fabled problem of communicating with a younger mate, over the long haul. Though the long haul, I reminded myself, was not what I had in mind.
“Oh, man,” he said.
In the split second before he zoomed in for the kiss, my lust drained away completely.
It was amazing. The mere thought of Richard Nixon had apparently done it in.
But why was I thinking about anything, I asked myself, no less Nixon, in this situation?
Now he was kissing me. The kiss was exactly the combination of aggression and tentativeness that I had anticipated. The smell, however, was a surprise: some childish combination of July dusk and broken-in sneakers.
This was my idea, after all. If I backed out now, I’d be sending a message that grown women were addled and two-faced, no different from the teenage girls he’d tried to seduce in cars and parental rec rooms. Though it was possible that the girls in his high school had been pretty willing, for he was an expert kisser, modulating the activity of his hands in my hair to the pressure of his lips and managing to be intense without getting my lips too wet—coloring in the lines, I thought, my body the outline he was following, as a diligent child would, with a fat crayon. Though maybe an attentive boy could learn all this from the movies.
Though, though, though, I thought. Chill!
Despite the flurry of brain activity, meaningless as static, the rest of me was responding on cue. I heard my own moan as he guided me toward the bed and maneuvered me backward while still locked into the kiss, a move right off the cover of a romance paperback. He pushed down the damp bathing suit, swooped. My eyes jerked open to see him watching the breast he was licking, completely alert, his nose so close it was immense. I got another nursing flashback then, as powerful as the one in Wilkes-Barre: Evan looking up, glassy-eyed, his fist relaxing in my palm.
Once more I gasped. But my lover took it as pleasure, increased the pressure.
What was this? It wasn’t as if I hadn’t had sex for three years. Granted, not much—and too much of it in a campaign at ovulation—but from now on was I going to have to raise my son from the dead each time I made love?
I was trying to calm myself. But then my milk came in.
It happened as it always had. That solid click, substantial and precise as a lock correctly dialed. You don’t really perceive the flow of the milk once it gets going so much as the release, not like a river undammed—nothing that pastoral—but more like a safe door swung open. Oddly metallic.
As I felt the rush, Zachary screamed something like ack! Reared back in slow motion, arms flailing, action-adventure style, as if he’d just fallen off the wing of the plane he’d been clinging to. Then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grimacing. “What the fuck was that.”
My nipple appeared to have excreted something. I pinched, got a drop more. It was clearer than the milk I remembered. Last time I’d seen my OB-GYN, he’d given my nipples a squeeze that would have struck the easily offended as sexual harassment, but he was checking, he’d explained, for galactorrhea. I remembered the term now because he and I had discussed it, laughing—sounds, I’d said, like a Star Trek sequel.
“Hormonal misfiring,” I explained to Zach. “It happens, when you get older. I assume it’s all perfectly normal.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” He kneeled now, his expression still horrified. “Your tits leak? Like sperm before you come?”
I smiled.
“Tastes like shit,” he said. “Tastes like yak milk.”
“It’s yellow and it’s thin,” I said. “But babies like it. I hear it’s pretty sweet. Try again,” I suggested, thumbing the glistening nipple with its ragged opening.
“No way. I wasn’t breast-fed,” he added, as if that explained something, and maybe it did.
“None of us were,” I agreed. “It was taken to be unsanitary and savage for a while there, back in—when were you born? Seventy-seven? Seventy-eight?” I nodded in disbelief and shock as people always did, at the idea of someone being born while they themselves were in college.
“Maybe that explains everything. All these grown men with their family values, desperate to have their cocks sucked. Maybe they want to just curl up at the altar of devoted moms, of the type they missed. Suck or be sucked, what’s the difference, so long as the woman is harnessed into service? As if sperm tastes so divine.”
He was inching off the bed, I noticed, while I talked. Still on his knees but trying to escape, unblinking, as if from a madwoman on the street, in his tight, shiny little bathing suit like a codpiece. I felt in a rush how I must seem to him, and I was sorry, because I had brought him here, and I would seem crazy with my incontinent breasts, blathering away, whereas before I had been desirable, and what kind of lesson was that to teach a boy who had never drunk from his mother’s breasts, who was already doing the butterfly, already calcifying into the wrong kind of man? So I sat, reached, slowly pulled down his bathing suit, made soothing noises as he cringed, then steadied the now-limp penis, brought my head to the edge of the bed, took the penis in my mouth, aware even as I did so that the better thing to do was let him go. And I swear there was a comfort in the steadiness of the sucking and the simplicity—no tricks; nothing fancy or older-womanish was required; and as long as he didn’t look at me, as long as he was focused on the sensation, we were fine. And it wouldn’t be long.
By this point my head was clear. I pulled him up and inside. Sensing that too much sound would unnerve him, I turned my head sideways, buried my mouth in the bedspread with its paisley pattern, so that sensation began to follow paisley paths, curling into tails, then opening again to roundness. By the time he came I had no thoughts. I was wonderfull
y empty of thought, except for the pattern of the pleasure, those baroque paisley curlicues.
As I came, I thought: birth control.
I thought: none.
Delighted: I am pregnant.
Except that I suspect I’m supplying these words in retrospect, because at the time the knowledge was as wordless, as almost graphic, as the paisleys. A conception of conception.
It was as if my body, all on its own, in its waning days of (uneven) procreative functioning, had chosen its moment, then produced this specimen of manhood to further the master race. Deemed that my personal problems were no impediment. Goaded me into action, and I’d complied, single-minded as a ghoul or Stepford wife.
What to do, though, with the knowledge that flooded me? It was a joke. Though I’d gotten pregnant relatively easily with Evan, there had hardly been a ringing bell or pinball bing when sperm met egg. It’s true that before the grind of fertility problems, trying to conceive had lent a pleasing gravity to the proceedings, a ceremonial quality. But that was hardly the case here.
Zachary, in fact, was smiling, pleased with himself. An expression for semifinal team triumph. Whatever sex education he’d been offered had failed: AIDS had not even yet occurred to him. I almost said, indignant, “For all you know I could be a hooker,” but then realized that he assumed I’d taken care of things, because I was a trustworthy adult. I was as certain to be clean, and without risk of pregnancy, as his parents were certain not to let him drive the Honda without insurance.
“Now how about that run,” he said.
“Confession,” I said. “No running shoes, in point of fact.”
“You got me up here on false pretenses, you evil wench?”
I tried to strike an expression somewhere between proud and sheepish.
“What size do you wear?” he asked.
“Eight. Why?”
“Put on some thick socks, and borrow my mother’s.”
His mother! She had not occurred to me, until that moment. Nor had it occurred to me to wonder why he was at a hotel, with whom he was staying. As he gloated I did some math, somewhat desperately.
“She’s eight and a half,” he said, “and she won’t be back for hours. Throw on some shorts and we’ll—”
“Nothing to jog in. Just work clothes,” I said. “Power suits,” though he would know this for a lie: I came and left the pool in a T-shirt and shorts. But I felt a need to be rid of him, to contemplate my feelings about my first-ever infidelity on the possible scale from deep shame to bemusement. I had sat up. Zachary stood above me, smiling and bobbing, hyped-up as a kid on Halloween candy. “Too tired anyhow,” I added, collapsing backward on the bed. Aware of myself collapsing, and aware of my awareness; aware, too, that I seemed to have developed a habit of telegraphing all of my comments to this child with a gesture, as if he were a waiter in a foreign country. Gracias! Ciao! But once I was backward, my toes left the floor, where they’d been rather skittishly working the carpet’s pile, and I lifted my legs, knees to my stomach in the classic jogger’s stretch.
To hold the sperm in. Instinctively, that’s what I was doing. Two or three minutes you’re supposed to give the buggers. Hard not to think of them as cartoons crouched on their starting blocks, me watching from the bleachers.
Zach, however, misread my posture as another semaphore. Wide-eyed, idiotically grinning, and hard again, he dove on top of me.
Teenage boys. No surprises there. But it is astonishing, really, the curve of the adult male’s performance, the very narrow ledge when they’re at the peak of the curve, between instant ejaculation and sex so slow that they can slog semihard in you for hours, so you feel like a talk show they’re not quite committed to. Women, meanwhile, coming ever faster, more efficiently. That makes sense: once the children are on the scene, no time to waste; pack those lunches, wipe those asses; diminished expectations as we work around our mates’ herniated disks and cosmic fatigue. Of course, we would do better to fuck the young bucks, and let our husbands take their gentle time with the fillies. And so they do, if they’re inclined, whereas we rarely tempt the younger fellas. The human race is fixed to give maximum options to the men, who are lucky to be having sex at all; in most of the animal kingdom they would have long ago slunk off, having acceded to the biggest baboon, the horniest and hugest-horned.
I’d always been a sucker for the nature shows that explain why the zebra has its stripes, why the flounder’s eyes migrate, and found myself, as I often do, thinking of them then. Thinking what a remarkable luxury human sexuality is, how emblematic of our aspirations, our need to be a self in the world. Animals, presumably, don’t have identity crises. Most animals can’t even compute a mirror image and yet there human babies are, from almost the very beginning, cooing at their own reflections.
In the time it took Zach to finish, I had time to think those vague thoughts, and feel a spasm of nostalgia for Kenneth. In bed in pajamas, the Learning Channel on, both of us shaking our heads as the lions tore apart their fast-food prey or the Chinese acupuncturist performed the C-section, the woman awake and chatting away to the nurses as the doctors sliced her open. Ken has ideas about evolution. He has ideas about the body’s mind—he’s shockingly New Age, for a surgeon. When Evan was a baby and colicky, had a hard time falling asleep, Kenneth examined the problem. Developed a method for turning him three times in the bassinet with his head like a compass butted against one bumper one way for three minutes, then another thirty-degree adjustment, then in three minutes another adjustment. Three was the charm. Evan was always asleep within ten minutes, head at north-northeast, where Ken had discovered his progeny enjoyed the strongest trace of womb memory.
As usual, the thought of Evan as an infant made my eyes burn. And the heartbeat-blip of grief headed off any possibility of my own orgasm. And then Zach groaned, rolled off.
If I were with Ken, I could finish the job myself, with a little help if he was inclined, or he could just watch, or not.
I could push Zach’s head down, continue his education. Leg around his back, toes pointed. Taste yourself oh yes, all corny and porny, but as I looked at him carefully studying my reaction, I thought no, I felt actually bashful, exposed. I crawled toward the head of the bed so I could reach for the sheets, pulled them over me, gave him what would have to pass for a sated smile.
But for some reason—a mind reader?—he dove under and there was the tongue, and I didn’t have a single thought for however long until I breathed, “Christ, Zachary, your mother really lets you watch too much cable TV,” and he laughed, giving me that break (for his style here was, like his breaststroke, overzealous) to mash myself back into his still-bared teeth.
Thereafter, guilt. Immediately I felt dizzy and sick, as from MSG in Chinese food. What a childish thing to do to my husband. On cue I’d fulfilled worse than his worst-case scenario of penny-ante retribution.
“It’s true,” Zach said cheerfully. He rolled over on one elbow to study me. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then sniffed the hand, did a skit with pinkie out, an oenophile rejecting a vintage. I couldn’t look anymore. I turned my face toward the pillow.
“My father has quite the collection,” he continued. “Couple hundred of ’em right out there in the open on the custom bookshelves. He jacks off I guess after he finishes with depositions.”
“And your mother allows that?” I asked, surprised. “Do you have any younger siblings in the house?”
“Divorced. This would be in Counselor’s bachelor pad. Pretty close to here, actually, if you want to sneak over and check ’em out.”
“No thanks,” I said. “My husband says I’m a prude, but I just hate how stuff’s always done in exactly the same order. The gardener comes to the door. Drinks are poured. He kisses her, kisses each tit. Kiss, kiss, kiss, a little mouth-tit trinity. Rubs ’em together, boing boing boing. Then he goes down on her. Close-up of her with her bad shag haircut, whimpering. When he unleashes the banana, the camera does a reverent low-
angle shot like it’s the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, she oohs and aahs, then the camera records his blow job at considerably more length and with considerably more interest to the tune of music from an airport bar. Orgasm always from intercourse, orgasm always mutual. As far as I’m concerned, cooking shows are more erotic, though I suppose they do get one going. If that’s all one needs. But sexy? About as sexy as a Water Pik fighting plaque. Might as well stick your finger in a light socket.”
He just stared at me.
“Just making conversation,” I said.
“What’s 2010 a space odyssey?”
I laughed.
“Actually, my father likes the kind with a couple of girls. So they’re a tad more, shall we say, atmospheric.”
“Yeah, until the guy comes in at the end to bestow ecstasy like Santa Claus with his big banana.”
“So you’re married?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Have a girlfriend?”
“Sure.”
“What’s her name?”
“Guess.”
“Kimberly,” I said. “Heather.”
“Wrong. Wrong.”
“Jennifer.”
“Nuh-uh. Petra and I—weird, huh? Sounds like diesel fuel—are attending different universities in the fall, and have mutually agreed to ‘see other people’ for the nonce.”
“Are you from Philadelphia?”
“Burbs, but my mother and I jumped ship after the divorce.”
“Was that hard on you?”
“Piece o’ cake. Loved every minute of it, actually. So what about that run? You ready, or you still wanna get to know me better first?”
He must have learned this particular style of sarcasm from the loathed, revered father. It didn’t quite fit. Odd that it should be his fake-urbane speech, and not the sex, that made him seem most painfully young. That and the short attention span: he was now gazing longingly toward the window, anticipating the workout in the park, I guessed, but really it was my open laptop, set up on the desk.