Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  We wandered down the duck trail to the creek. I trailed behind like a stray dog. Emily’s tangled blonde hair, in braids with green rubber bands, bounced like rats’ tails on her freckled neck.

  What’s wrong?

  Nothing’s wrong.

  Does it hurt?

  No.

  Is it your dad?

  He’s not my dad.

  Step-dad, then?

  I gave up and returned to my family’s bungalow on the other side of the colony.

  After lunch I went to the red house. I found Emily in the pool of dusty light below the window. She sat cross-legged in her panties on the rug squinting at me through her swollen goose egg. Her small round breasts rose neatly from white triangles beneath her tanned throat. She stood up and took off her underwear, her body wrapped in gold.

  Don’t come in me.

  I kicked off my Chucks and pulled down my swimming trunks. My prick sprang up comically. She didn’t laugh. She sat down again, opened her legs and brought them up to her waist and beckoned me to her. I clambered down between her knees. She spat on her hand and gently guided me inside her. I fell into her arms. She started to cry.

  Does it hurt?

  No, I’ve done it before.

  When?

  I moved in and out. It didn’t take long. When I was ready I pulled out and she expertly jerked my shiny tip and I burst all over her tummy. Blobs of come dripped off her body onto the floor and stuck to the frayed carpet.

  I collapsed on her, overwhelmed. I felt her rib cage rise and fall, my chin drooped over her shoulder and my lips touched the dusty floorboards at the edge of the rug. I could see down through the cracks to the laundry room below, the washing machine turned its load over and over, splish-splash, splish-splash. Emily pressed her sticky palms firmly on my back holding me in place to stop me from floating away. Stuck together, she kissed my face repeatedly as tears dripped onto the sun-baked rug. I felt completely at peace. I kissed the dome of her purple eye. She got up, ran to the big sink and drank from the twisted faucet for a long time, guzzling the cold shining stream.

  Will you get pregnant?

  No, you didn’t come in me.

  Are you sure?

  My Dad said it’s OK.

  Which of course, is a fucked-up thing for a father to tell his daughter. Though at the time I didn’t think about it.

  I was in New York for more tests. I ducked out of the cold February rain over the dirty black snow banks into the Strand Book Store on Broadway. The lonely moon of Emily’s face – older, leaner but still so very beautiful – appeared between twin towers of discount books. My memory clicked and whirred like an old VHS tape being sucked into its cradle. She looked up over round glasses, saw me, and laughed. I must have looked so funny standing there with my mouth open. We embraced. She was chatty and playful, as if we hadn’t just spent 20 years without any contact. I was stunned.

  Let’s buy the same books! Let’s go and find two copies of a book and form a book club. Right here! This one!

  She handed me a paperback.

  Graham Greene?

  I turned it over in my hands I hadn’t read The End of the Affair. I’d read Brighton Rock, that one was miserable, the film not much better. Still, a Penguin on sale, and a special anniversary edition for $10, bargain.

  Out on the street she took out her copy and pressed the book against my chest.

  We should write something in them and not say what we wrote, look at it later when we’ve finished reading. Give me yours!

  We exchanged books. I scribbled in the opening page, closed it and handed it back; my heart was pounding.

  “To Emily at the beginning, love Anthony x.”

  I waited for her to write an inscription of her own. Fine lines around clear gray eyes barely betrayed the passed time. She wrote in the back and made me pinky-swear not to look. Then we went to that fake roadhouse place on Union Square and ate mac ’n’ cheese that sucked.

  It’s like roller-rink cheese.

  You mean like at the Roll-a-Rama in Williamstown?

  Oh man, the Roll-a-Rama!

  You think it’s still there?

  It’s a gas station, now. When my mom died...

  I’m sorry, when?

  Thanks, last June... when mom died, she left me the bungalow, I still go up for the summers – it hasn’t changed.

  The red house?

  Yep. Still there.

  She smiled. She talked about her shitty job and her boss, I made wisecracks and told her about LA and the movie business and she laughed and laughed.

  It’s good to see you Anthony.

  Is it?

  We stared at each other until my vision blurred, and she smiled that big goofy teenager grin, like she’d just remembered something fun we could do by the creek.

  I want to hypnotise you.

  Fuck. I sat in shock. Emily laughed so hard, she snorted.

  Come on. Let’s go.

  What? Where?

  To the red house, silly.

  I dropped two twenties on the Formica. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Was this happening? I wanted to tell her about the Alzheimer’s and how I was losing the memories of us in the red house, how I relied on them so much and how bumping into her like this was so fortuitous. Maybe she could help me remember! But it sounded silly. It sounded creepy, talking about two teenagers with come all over them. And I didn’t want to freak her out. I didn’t want to scare her off, because the way she was looking at me, there was a very good chance she was going to let me fuck her.

  We listened to the radio in her car, holding hands. Emily sang along to the songs that played on the radio when we were kids, Culture Club, Flock of Seagulls. It was dark and snowing by the time we got to the colony. Deer crossed the trail as we rolled over the hard packed snow. Frozen in our high beams, their eyes reflected back like blank discs.

  We were barely up the stairs before Emily was on her knees pulling at my jeans. Without even taking off her long down coat she took out my cock and sucked it. She devoured it. I had to drag her off me to get my pants off. We crashed through the old boxes of board games and clothes to find our old spot on the carpet under the high window. She hit the floor face first. I fell on top of her. An empty blue spotlight of moonlight illuminated us squirming in a bright rectangle on the floor.

  I got my hands under her long wool skirt and pulled it up, yanked her panties to one side and plunged my fingers in. Emily moaned, lifting her ass to me. I had to hold her down to get her coat off. I couldn’t get her arms out of the sleeves so I pulled down her underwear, and I shoved my cock deep into her cunt.

  She stopped moving. I searched for her in the lining of her big North Face. Pulling the fur hood out of the way I found the back of her neck. I bit her ear and got a mouthful of hair. She started rocking me back and forth. Muffled by her coat she began to moan.

  What?

  I want you to come inside me.

  So I did and when I rolled off her and pulled her free from her clothes, she was crying.

  No, no! Don’t worry! It’s good, I always cry a little when I come.

  She cupped my cheek in the palm of her hand and smiled. Her eyes shone with tears and moonlight. I held her in my arms until I got hard again and we fucked, slowly this time. I looked into her eyes when she came and watched the tears well up.

  *

  After that hot summer afternoon we fucked in the red house, I had avoided her. If she were at the creek, I rode my bike to town. If I saw her near the red house I went to the creek. I never got close enough to see the light in her eyes, but I knew I was hurting her.

  That Labor Day I stood shamefaced with my BMX between my knees at the end of the track as her dad packed up the station wagon to go back to the city. Emily drifted in and out of the bungalow with her summer things packed in boxes and bags. Every time she came out, she met my gaze and every time she went back into the bungalow, she turned and looked at me over her shoulder. I followed the car to the edge of the colony and
as they pulled out I pedaled out on the forbidden main road. I tried to keep up as they coasted through the stop signs at the edge of Williamstown. When Emily’s dad gunned the Chevy towards the highway, she rolled down the window and her hair blew up in her face. I reached out to touch her, but I wasn’t fast enough. Strands of hair whipped my hand. She rolled up the window from an unheard adult command and I waved her away. She flattened her hands against the glass. She didn’t hate me and I was happy, in the way that selfish teenage boys are so easily satisfied. Later that night I biked into town and I got drunk in the 7-11 parking lot. And in bed I dreamed the film of the red house from start to finish for the first time. It was pristine and clear and amazing. I woke the next day with puke in my hair. My Mom’s temper was beating in my head and I had a sickening feeling that I’d left something out, somewhere.

  There was no heat at the red house during the winter. Emily found candles and lit a fire in the stove with old newspaper. We dragged blankets out of a box and drank hot green tea from a dented enamel mug. We rubbed our legs together like crickets to get warm under the old quilts on the now rotten Persian rug. I fell asleep looking into her eyes. In the middle of the night, I found her completely naked standing on a chair at the window, shivering. She floated in the dim, blue light, her buttocks trembling in the cold.

  Come look! The moon’s turned red!

  She jumped down, pulled me from the warmth of our nest. We balanced precariously on the chair, my arms around her waist, cupping her breasts, and looked out at the moon. Sure enough, through the raised arms of bare trees, the moon hung in the sky like a frozen drop of blood – a full lunar eclipse.

  When we got back to the city, she dropped me off at the subway and I was alone again.

  On my ride home, I looked in the book and read her scribble in my copy of the paperback. I found it on the last page: “To Anthony it’s the end XO!”

  Perhaps Emily didn’t remember the red house as I did. After all she spent every summer upstate. I was there for just one. Another holiday romance, perhaps. I didn’t tell her about the Alzheimer’s, or ask for help with my fading memories. Was her recollection complete?

  At the open car door by the subway, with the book under my arm, I touched her face.

  I’ll call you?

  She smiled. But of course I didn’t.

  A week later I walked past the roller-rink cheese place at Union Square. I was a little confused about East and West and stood for a second in the damp afternoon. I looked down into the warm, fake Americana, trying to figure out where I was. Emily sat texting at a booth. She looked up and waved.

  I turned as a man pushed up against me as he wrangled a toddler out of a stroller. A slightly older child raced down the steps in front of me. Muted by the glass, the kids exploded silently into the restaurant. They surrounded Emily with excited chatter. They piled a barricade of coats, hats and scarves up against the window and sat beside her. The man slid in beside her with a kiss. Fearing I’d be seen, I stepped back into the shadows of the snowy street.

  *

  The red house is sucked into the mush of my brain like old furniture in a sinkhole. My photographic memory is gone. The part about chasing Emily’s car on my bike? I wrote that one afternoon after a dream. I think it’s real. It seems right. Sometimes I get lucky and I see a whole scene again. But I’m not sure if they are memories or dreams.

  Sometimes when I’m really high and dozing on the couch, a close up of Emmy’s face vibrates in a triangle of window light like a hologram. The blood moon floats above me like a swollen eye. As the light changes from blue to gold and back again, I can’t tell if it’s day or night, summer or winter.

  THE LOVES OF HER LIFE

  Arlene Heyman

  Arlene Heyman is the recipient of Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright, Rockefeller and Robert Wood Johnson Fellowships. Her short stories have appeared in New American Review and she won Epoch magazine’s novella contest. She has been listed twice in the hounour rolls of Best American Short Stories. Heyman is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst practising in New York City, where she lives with her husband.

  Would you like to make love?” Stu called out to Marianne as she entered their apartment. She walked toward his office. It was mid-Saturday afternoon and Stu was still in his purple pajamas at the computer, a mug of coffee on the cluttered desk. He had a little wet mocha-colored stain under his lip on his beard, and his wiry gray hair stood up thinly around his large bald spot. He looked at her shyly for a moment, then looked back at the computer screen. His office was a small room off the entrance foyer, the glossy hardwood floor littered with unruly piles of papers and journals – she spotted Dissent, MIT Technology Review, the Hightower Lowdown. Beside these were stuffed canvas bags, a white one imprinted with SCHLEPPEN in black, a bright-blue one with multicolored flowers above the words GREENPEACE RAINBOW WARRIOR. Unframed photos of children and grandchildren lay scattered on the marble radiator cover.

  Marianne had just come back from a frenetic brunch with her son, Billy, at a bistro on Madison Avenue and hadn’t yet taken off her coat. Because his wife was divorcing him, Billy was distraught. From her point of view as an ex-social worker, Marianne had always considered her son’s wife a borderline personality – from the human point of view, an outright bitch. And Marianne would have rejoiced that they were divorcing except that Billy was distraught. She had tried to comfort him at the same time that she was urging him not to give in to his wife’s outrageous demands: Lyria wanted the apartment and the country house and half of Billy’s business. “Only half?” Marianne had asked, but Billy was deaf to her sarcasm. He put away one Grey Goose after another while the poached eggs he’d ordered turned into hard yellow eyes and he kept making throat-clearing, half-gagging sounds, sounds he’d made occasionally when he got anxious as a kid; she didn’t think she’d heard those sounds in twenty-five years. She had joined him in a Grey Goose herself, trying to smooth away her edginess, and since she rarely drank, she was still tipsy. Marianne wanted either to go to the gym to work it off or try for a drop-in appointment at her hairdresser’s where she would be cosseted. She could use some cosseting.

  But she knew how hard it was for her husband to ask for sex, even after three wives; Marianne was his fourth. Why was it so hard? The best Stu had come up with was fear of rejection. She didn’t understand – if you were out one day, you might be in the next. But he was reluctant even to ask for all dark meat from the Chirping Chicken take-out place and also he tended to buy the first item a salesperson showed him. His timidity annoyed her. He thought he was just an easygoing, nice guy. Cooperative. And many agreed with him.

  She had other resentments, some small. He never brought her flowers, although she adored flowers. “I buy you printer cartridges,” he’d said. “And flash drives.”

  Some resentments were chasm sized. He didn’t make enough money, and what he made he was always giving to obscure political groups working for “social justice” or to one of his numerous importuning adult children – the major beneficiaries of his modest will.

  And he dressed badly, and called her superficial when she complained, though lately he had let her go clothes shopping with him. Clothes delighted her. A tall, slender woman with prominent cheekbones, slanted blue eyes, and dramatic silver-white hair, Marianne attracted admiration – she did a little modeling for Eileen Fisher, one of the few fashion designers whose ads occasionally featured older women. She was proud of being, hands down, the best-looking of his wives. He loved her, she knew, in part for her looks, and so it wasn’t fair that he criticized her for caring how he looked.

  And couldn’t he be even a little seductive, instead of asking for sex as if he were asking for a game of tennis?

  In spite of it all, or perhaps because of it, she tried never to reject him when he asked: it softened her up toward him, making love. And it got him away from his computer, and connected him to another human being – namely, her. She tried to do it at least once a week.

  It did
n’t sound like much: she had made love three or four times a week with her first husband, who’d been younger than she, and who had died eleven years ago. But now that she was sixty-five and Stu seventy, spontaneity was difficult. She had acid reflux, and so had to stay upright for two or three hours after a meal or else suffer burning pains in her chest. And she had to insert Vagifem, low-level estrogen tablets, in her vagina twice a week so her tissues didn’t thin out. He used Viagra half an hour before sex, and because he tended to come too soon if they weren’t making love often, and once a week wasn’t often, he also took a dose of clomipramine, an antidepressant that had as a side effect retarded ejaculation. The Viagra made him feel flushed for the rest of the day and the clomipramine made him spacey. So they usually had sex toward evening, if not at night.

  He didn’t really come too soon; he never came until after she climaxed. But she got most of her pleasure from intercourse after she had come, an oddity, perhaps, but that was how she was. She hated remembering what sex had been like for her in her twenties, before she’d accepted herself, and when the received wisdom was that you weren’t a real woman unless you came vaginally – that is, no hands. The huffing and puffing and the squeals and screams of orgasmic pleasure she had faked! And this was in the dawning age of feminism! She had heard from a neighbor, a high school teacher, that even now freshman girls were sucking off senior boys without getting anything in return.

  While Stu wanted to last after she had come, it was difficult. If she told him, as he was thrusting after her orgasm, “God, this feels good,” he immediately came. If she said nothing, merely looked beatific, he also came. So now, ironically, she suppressed any noises she might have made and often lied to him that she hadn’t come in order to keep him at it. And if he got notice that she wanted to make love, he masturbated ten hours before, because then he definitely lasted longer. In short, for them, making love was like running a war: plans had to be drawn up, equipment in tiptop condition, troops deployed and coordinated meticulously, there was no room for maverick actions lest the country end up defeated and at each other’s throats...