Estrin retracted on her side. “Being by yourself beats bad company. Most company. It’s underrated.”
Farrell uncurled her. “It’s easier.”
He rose to slide out of his shoes and strip off the red tie. Farrell had his shirts commercially laundered, so when he raised his collar it stood stiffly starched to his chin. He paused and, on some whim for which Estrin would always be grateful, leaned down and kissed her, with that gravity so particular to the man. Why the picture of Farrell with the white collar raised would burn so lustrous in her memory she would never know, or why it was nice that he was in his socks. Maybe the raised collar gave him a touch of the priestly or pastoral, to remind Estrin of her father. Maybe a little synapse in her brain illuminated the moment like a flashbulb for no better reason than that his shirt was so startlingly clean. Maybe it was just a mental accident, like taking a picture of your thumb, but Estrin didn’t think so. There was a purity to the image, even as he stood back up and wrangled briefly with the top button, in one of those quintessentially masculine gestures, like slipping a checkbook from an inside pocket. The light in the room was warm but bright; his cuff links gleamed; the shirt was radiant. He did not seem much older; Ireland and the United States did not seem far apart.
Surely she should have remembered making love to him with this same clarity, but in Estrin’s experience it was hard to recall particular couplings. They seemed so distinctive at the time, but maybe they were pretty much the same after all; or possibly recollection blurred from interior shyness, censorship even, and her memories were pasted with bits of black tape, porn rags for sale in a decent neighborhood.
That said, tonight’s episode would impress itself more than most. Before, like the Technicolors of his tales, Farrell had laid it on too thick. In fact, she found his most drastic moments his most pathetic. Both his thrashing at her hips and the extravagance of his bedtime stories were rooted in a sad little fear: that he could not feel. Farrell’s compulsion to magnify implied the meager; and it was when he cried most loudly inside her that she was certain he felt numb.
However, this evening they measured out their pleasure in tiny, cautious doses. Private, Farrell pulled the spread to her neck. While only frenetic bounding had brought him to climax before, it was readily apparent he was in danger of coming too fast. Then he had whipped to such a rapid frenzy that he’d been gasping less from rapture than from exertion; now he moved more gradually as they progressed. The first time, too, he’d been half drunk and a little slack; this time, hours without a drink, he was fully hard and so a larger man than she’d realized—a pleasant surprise.
From the outside the couple must have looked boring: a lump under chenille, a rustle, a murmur. But no one was watching; that was the point. For in their weaker moments, Estrin performed for men, Farrell performed for himself. Relieved of audience, they did not try athletic positions but remained on their sides; it felt good that way, there was no reason to try something new. Farrell, rather than caterwaul, only sighed. Estrin kept two fingers on his shoulder, and these absorbed the majority of her expression—a light pressing, or a lifting until the whorls barely skimmed the summits of his gooseflesh.
For Farrell, too, the less they experimented, the more each sensation distinguished itself from every other, like that astounding variation among three white pebbles when you looked at them hard. Just as the grind of his shoes and the clunk of the panic bar had segmented as he approached the Brown Thomas bag, so the sough of Estrin’s breath broke down, and he followed each inhalation’s shutter from larynx to trachea to bronchia and back again. He breathed with her; as air branched to both their lungs, his head went light. Listening, he found she drew each breath a different pitch, with a characteristic flutter all its own. Sometimes she sucked in suddenly, then leaked back out, her mouth a patient puncture in a tube. Others she said, “Sh-sh,” though neither had spoken, or whistled lightly through her tongue. On occasion she held a lungful so long that Farrell, too, stopped breathing to hear better, in irrational fear she would suffocate.
They didn’t kiss, they’d not have been able to bear it. This was already far too much, until they slowed so completely an observer would have claimed they were sleeping. Farrell was caught in a single stroke, inchmeal; each fraction he pushed toward her, the pressure of those two fingers increased. He could not remember when it had been like this or whether it had ever been like this, though admittedly he wasn’t remembering very hard—he didn’t want the distraction. He would fuck this exquisite, tiny creature as long and as gently as he could and save memory for more disappointing nights—this memory.
Estrin’s forehead rippled down over her eyebrows, and she turned her head a few degrees away. She could no longer withstand seeing his face straight on. She shifted her thighs so he no longer touched her so directly. Even as she organized Farrell’s presence as more glancing, it grew only more unendurable, like days so bright that not only could you not look toward the sun, you couldn’t stand its glare on the wall. Her tongue rose to form “No,” but did not. Her back arched, but not very much. She touched her forehead to Farrell’s arm. She didn’t want to come yet, but it was hopeless. In return, quiet, low, doleful, a felt mallet pounded on her kettledrum. While Estrin thought she came again, she wasn’t sure, for though she could now distinguish one hair from another on his shoulder, the pinkish brown around the edges of his nipples from the bluer brown of their tips, sighs of pure pleasure from their identical twins tinged with regret, she could no longer distinguish between Farrell’s sensations and her own. Estrin saw water—wide pale-blue water, still. Farrell drew her closer and stayed inside, his erection dying as slowly as it had come.
Before he lapsed out, there was a second explosion, quite nearby. It resembled their own, for bombs detonate within the body. They blossom in the lower intestine and open to the ear, where the pressure changes as the air in your very brain tries to escape, like a sudden inspiration. Just as Bach had enlarged her in Chartres, deep C minor from down the street expanded Estrin’s slight figure until she filled the room, inhaled Whitewells, and grew enormous with the city, round. All her pictures were dark and furred. The windows rattled. One pane splintered and pinged; a shard spat against the drapes and dropped to the carpet. The sound lay down slowly. A cold whistle trailed through the broken window, like breath on Estrin’s tongue.
Farrell’s renewed erection embarrassed him. Though too late to hide his revival from Estrin, he sucked from her anyway, to tuck away the evidence ineffectually between their hipbones. She didn’t mention it. But it’s physiological, he wanted to explain. Buses, you know. Buses do the same thing. That was no bus, he heard back. He was relieved to skip the conversation.
“Just down the road,” he whispered, stroking her head as if she needed comforting. “Probably the courts. Didn’t sound so massive. I’ll get the window replaced in the morning. Bloody hell, if I’d known in ’68, I’d have thrown every shilling into pane glass and flowers—orange, green, and white carnations, red, white, and blue. I’d be a rich man.”
She didn’t need comforting, or jokes. When the bomb went off, she had only seemed alert. If she was disturbed, it was not by the explosion. Her eyes were open, vacantly wondrous. “Flowers?” she asked.
“Funerals.”
Her head limp on her neck, it rolled away from him, her hand now dead on his shoulder, where two tiny bruises were just beginning to bloom.
Farrell was constantly having the experience of realizing he hadn’t noticed people before. In fact, he rarely paid enough attention to most people to realize he was ignoring them. Waking that morning to find Estrin Lancaster rising from his bed for the loo, he found that though he’d spent two long nights with her, he had yet to notice her, really notice-notice.
Och, he’d listened to her, more or less, and filed away her vital statistics, though with much the same caginess of any politician who will remember the name of your baby for his next campaign. And sure he wanted her; just watching her gr
ope from the sheets he was already rising to the occasion. So what did he mean, not notice?
Well, for example, he’d never even looked at her, look-looked. (Farrell kept two meanings for every word; with himself he identified the emphatic from the facile by using it twice. These amounted to two different languages, the second of which he never used, for if he were ever to speak in total sincerity—imagine—he would have to stutter, I-I am-am sorry-sorry, like awkward tribal languages whose plurals are formed by repetition. However, to speak this language would instantly devalue it, and then to himself, he supposed, he would have to say everything three times.) Now, Farrell had slept with a fair number of lovelies, each with her charms. What selected this one had something to do with light. The groggy winter gray sifting through the drapes did not fall evenly over her shoulders or paint a simple highlight down her spine; rather, each ray suppled in fluctuating shades, as if poppling the surface of water more than flesh—was he awake? No, really, that light was not normal, it was not lapping a smooth surface, and as she stood and stretched and walked around the bed, the grays churned and eddied over her back, swirled in her buttocks, and streamed in parallel shafts down her thighs: why, her entire backside silvered like a school of fish. He sat up a little and rubbed his eyes. Because this was not the ordinary sleek of a small young woman in decent trim. Either she was diseased, he was still sleeping, or that was muscle.
Which explained the other difference, the eerie spring of her skin. Estrin’s shoulders were small round melons, underripe; they would not take the press of his thumb. Her thighs had the taut shine of aubergines, that same resonance, her forearms the wood and stalk of overgrown leeks—in all a body more vegetable than fruit, hard and green and indigestible, with a smack to her skin that inspired him to spank her.
On return she glared down at his erection as if it were butting into her business. “You know, for all this liberated lip service, most men are still oblivious to contraception.”
“And most women still make broad, slanderous statements about half the population of the world. I’d think you were better traveled than that, my dear.”
Seven a.m. on three hours’ sleep and the my dears were already hackling. Traditionally they would wake fucking or fighting—or both.
“Don’t you care if I get pregnant?”
“I expect you’ll take care of yourself.”
“Everyone expects that.” She glowered. “And I always do.”
“My relationship to sex is apocalyptic.”
“Most people don’t think of children as the end of the world.”
“My, my. We are thirty-two.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Tick, tick, tick.”
Estrin flung the blankets on Farrell’s flagging enthusiasm and sat half off the bed. “Fuck you.”
“Soft spot.”
She reeled toward him. “Yes, but not the way you think.”
“You want children?”
“No, I do not. Nor have I ever. And I’m sick to death of this secretly, secretly you do, wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Every year I get older it gets worse. Come on, admit it, all you really want is to be a mommy, right? And this gadding about on airplanes, you’re looking for a man! Confess, that whole time in Jerusalem you were pining for a split-level outside Philly with 2.2, a cocker spaniel, and a remote-control garage.” Estrin rose to gaze through the broken window, assuming a stance that would have entailed thrusting her hands in her pockets had she been wearing any clothes. “You have kids?”
“No,” he said. “Though I had one child, shall we say, canceled.”
“Catholic girl?”
“It wasn’t easy.”
“No, for her I imagine it wasn’t.”
Though unsure how he’d kindled her fury, he found this an interesting performance. “I meant for me.”
“But you brought yourself to it. Didn’t marry the buttercup, now, did you?”
“Not Germaine. I married another time, however. She wasn’t pregnant. It was a mistake. I’m not likely to marry again. You should be forewarned.”
The turret swiveled. “Right. Two nights of fucking and she’ll be out this morning looking at rings.” She advanced on the bed. “You don’t want to marry again because you’re so exceptional, isn’t that right? Everyone else needs a hand to hold but Farrell O’Phelan?”
“I cannot lead an ordinary life. But I do find the odd hand to hold—even yours, my swallow.”
“And the no kids, the abortee, you don’t want, same reason? That you’re better than the average bear?”
“With my work I cannot have children.”
“You can, you’ve proved that once, maybe twice, for all the precautions you insisted on last night. Okay, but I could have predicted you didn’t want a family ten minutes after we met. My point is this: when I say I don’t want to marry, do you believe me?”
“No.”
“And when I say I don’t want kids?”
“Not for a moment.”
It dismantled her a little that he was so direct. “Right,” she faltered. “Spinsters have missed the boat; bachelors have jumped ship. Farrell remains dashingly unattached; Estrin protesteth too much.”
She ranged the room, picking up splinters of glass and tossing them in the bin, moving with unnerving ease for a naked woman. Farrell had never met a female who wasn’t dissatisfied with some part of her body, which she would go to extraordinary lengths to hide. But barring a flag to her small breasts, Estrin’s frame was impeccable—and that she seemed to know this was not altogether attractive. He missed the crossed arms, the clutched thighs, the panicked robing and dive for towels, the humanizing shelter of shame.
She unfolded the chamois from the shoeshine kit on the portmanteau, smoothing and refolding it like a baby blanket. “Why am I so proud of not wanting kids, though? God, what’s wrong with us?”
She turned and studied Farrell and caught him looking at his watch. “I can see you, though. Sixty-five or seventy. With a much younger woman; suddenly fervid to have an heir. Going to doctors, taking her temperature. Then children wouldn’t seem ordinary anymore, would they? So you’d wildly overdo it, and croak in bed.” She laughed.
Farrell reached for her hand. “Kill me.”
She bounced amicably back beside him, her mood swings quick and queer. “I could, you know.”
“With just that broken window and hyperventilation. I have weak lungs.” Even joking, he couldn’t bring himself to say asthma.
“No, really. We should be so lucky in 1988 to get plain old pregnant. But I am astounded you didn’t ask this foreign flotsam about disease.”
“I have assumed if you weren’t forthcoming about your health in the first place, if I did inquire, you would lie. So why be unpleasant?”
She paused. “Why is it when you talk like that I get the creeps?”
“Haven’t a clue. Just solving an equation.”
“Would you”—she curled on his chest—“lie about that?”
“If I hadn’t told you at the start? Of course. Brilliantly, and to the bitter end. Seventy pounds and bedpanned in rubber gloves, I’d still be gasping the diagnosis was a grotesque mistake. Never back down. Because as long as I stuck to my story, blood test or no, there’s a very good chance you would believe me.”
She turned over and mused. “Ten years ago, know how hard it was to get a guy to slip on a rubber? When it was only to protect the girl? Now it’s to protect their pricks, the sons of bitches arrive in bed swathed from head to toe in cling film.”
“Are you staging this whole scene to get me to wear a prophylactic?”
“God, no, that’s like indulging yourself in a Tootsie Roll and forgetting to take off the wrapper. Me, what with Dieter shooting up again, I got tested last month.” She slowed, deferent, unraveling a pill of chenille. “Which was hard,” she admitted. “I’d waited three months, celibate, for the untoward to show itself. At the Royal, they were nice, but suspicious. An American. W
hose last boyfriend was a heroin addict. That went over terrif. I was scared. And I went through the test all by myself, like everything else. Waiting two weeks for the results. Confiding to nobody. That is lonely. But I was clean. Boring, but diseases are afraid of me.”
“Are you of me?”
“Better believe it.”
“So you want me to wear—?”
“No, I doubt you’ve copped enough international ass to be dangerous. And as for Junior, I lift weights.”
Only when they’d finished did he ask her to explain.
“I exercise like a lunatic and eat fish. I don’t have enough fat to ovulate. I’m infertile, long as I lay off the cream buns.”
“How convenient.”
“And extreme. I thought you’d find it appealing.”
Farrell phoned while she showered. He could have waited, less risky all around; he worried the water was audible through the receiver. But a naked weightlifting motorcyclist in his bath made the call much more fun.
As a result, at breakfast downstairs he was still feeling self-satisfied, so he wasn’t prepared. The moment was infinitely small, but the bombs that go off in an emotional life are so often this tiny interior poof no outsider can hear, a dog whistle of an experience—sun on brick, a raised collar. He happened to turn back around on his way from the dining room to get his papers, to tell Estrin to order steamed milk. She was sitting. She did absolutely nothing. Except her face changed. It—sank to itself. It cohered. He would hate to have to explain this to anyone else, except that the subtle settling altered the way he saw her forever more. He had witnessed the miracle of self-return, and from now on he would treasure most in her that she existed when he left the room.
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