by Linda Wolfe
“Isn’t there even a chair to put that on?” he said crossly to Naomi, who had begun to unpack her suitcase on the bed.
“No. So much for your nurse’s taste in accommodations.”
He heard her with annoyance and wanted to suggest they leave and drive farther. Drive anywhere. But before he could speak, Naomi had begun to remove her skirt and sweater. Next she removed her underwear and sat down on the edge of the bed, her legs dangling.
He stood still. But it might as well be now or never, he thought. Moving slowly toward her, he pulled her to her feet and pressed his lips to her curly hair. There was no point in delaying their encounter any longer. His body would either fail him or rally to his support. Whatever happened, afterward he would know once and for all whether or not it was going to be possible for him, now that he had the will for it, to establish a binding relationship.
“Aren’t you going to undress?” Naomi asked, shivering slightly.
“Later,” he murmured, pushing her to arm’s length and regarding her breasts. “Later. I want to look at you.”
“Please,” Naomi repeated. “I feel funny with me undressed and you dressed. As if I were one of your patients.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. It didn’t occur to me.” He stood and began wrestling with his jacket and shirt.
“Hold me,” she said, as soon as he was naked. “Hold me, I’m freezing.” He embraced her again and they slid under the bed quilts.
In bed he tried everything that had ever worked for him in the past when he had had successful sex. He caressed her belly, ran his fingers down the insides of her thighs, turned them to brushing against her nipples. But he felt as he always did in bed. As if he was turning pages. Was acting by rote. Was outside himself and looking on. He didn’t want her to know and he increased his activity, rubbing at her clitoris first lightly then strenuously. She grew excited, and put her hand out toward his penis, stroking him. But he remained soft. He decided to try licking her, hoping that setting off an alarm of passion in her would produce an echo in himself, and he slid down along her body, his tongue tentative at first, then insistent, tapping, a tool. But his mind was elsewhere, dryly reviewing the day, the long drive, the disappointment over the room.
Naomi, shifting her body, suggested he let her mouth him for a while, and he did, but it was all to no avail.
“Let’s stop for a while,” she said at last, raising her head and moving away from him. “Maybe you’ll be more in the mood later. You’re tired from the drive, I imagine.” She sat up, moved to the head of the bed, and pushed a pillow behind her back. But her willingness to give up after all the planning and effort he had expended infuriated him. He pulled her back down, so that she was lying flat on the bed, and then twisted his body so that he could lie over her with his mouth once again on her clitoris and his penis up against her lips.
“Please, let’s stop,” Naomi pleaded, her voice muffled. “Maybe you’ll be less tired in the morning.”
But he was feeling a compelling, driving desperation. “It will work. I know it will.” Lying over her, he held her so tightly that she began to try to squirm free. “Don’t give up now,” he ordered, and sucked at her even harder than he had before.
But she was pulling away. “We’re not machines,” she said, her voice more mournful than angry. “And I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted right now. It must be nearly one.”
“I’m not tired,” he said bitterly.
“Sure you are,” she insisted. Then she yawned elaborately. “Let’s try again in the morning.”
Disappointed and angered, he got out of the bed and walked to the window under the eaves, his thin body taut, the shoulders tightly hunched.
“Okay?” Naomi asked cajolingly. But he stared out the window and didn’t answer her. The sky was dark, moonless.
“I hate high drama in the middle of the night,” Naomi pronounced. “I can face anything, so long as it’s after the sun comes up.” She fluffed up another pillow and took it in her arms, and then lay down alongside it. “You sulk if you want. I’m going to sleep.”
He felt enraged at her and furious with himself for having imagined she could help him. She was too ordinary, too lacking in glamour, to excite him. He would wait until she was asleep and then head back to New York. He would leave her in Vermont, stranded. It would serve her right. Or, better still, he wouldn’t sneak from the room. He would tell her how she had disappointed him. How her awkwardness put him off, her uncultivated accent grated on his ears, and her very style, her flamboyant costumes and elaborate jewelry, made him wince.
He turned, ready to injure her in any way that he could, and began walking toward the bed. And then he saw that she was already asleep. Her breath was coming in long, drawn-out sighs and her arms were curled forlornly around the pillow. Shaking with anger, he looked down at her, only to realize that whatever else he was feeling, and had been feeling all evening, it wasn’t loneliness. He was bitterly disappointed, furiously despairing, but he wasn’t isolated, cut off, bored, estranged from emotion.
Stooping, he sat on the edge of the bed. Perhaps he should rest for a while. Perhaps he should wait and tell her in the morning how angry she had made him. Perhaps, and his hand stole gently to her curls, he might, after all, feel aroused in the morning. It had been years since he had spent an entire night with a woman, years since he had awoken from his sleep beside one, years since he hadn’t failed to leave at once or to send the woman home in a taxi after his impotence had been displayed.
Disentangling the quilt from Naomi’s shoulders, he lifted it a little and climbed underneath it. She mumbled something in her sleep, clutching at the pillow in her arms, and he looked at her with amusement. Then, pulling the quilt so that it covered both of them, he wrapped his arms about Naomi and the pillow both.
Of course, he was wide awake for hours, saw white, then stone-gray clouds drift past the window, heard pattering on the attic roof and, later, torrents of pounding rain. He hated being awake, resented the night noises in the old building. Below him, a bed squeaked. Across the hall someone was snoring, someone less deserving of rest than he. But he lay next to Naomi and eventually fell asleep with his arm caught under her breasts.
Toward dawn he imagined he heard a bell ringing insistently, and he awakened with a throbbing need to urinate. His penis was enormous, engorged. He slipped out of bed, shivered his way into the icy bathroom, then flung himself back under the quilt. His penis had withered but when he pressed against Naomi’s side for warmth it began to grow again.
She rolled onto her back with a startled groan of awakening and he climbed on top of her. He felt himself shrinking but then she was reaching for him and pushing him inside her and, her eyes closed, was grabbing at his shoulders as during the night she had clutched the pillow. He began to move up and down on top of her and underneath him she was arching toward him. And suddenly his penis was throbbing, lurching, arrowing into her, and he had come, too soon for her but hardly soon enough for him.
“I figured it might happen this way,” she said, her voice bland, matter-of-fact.
“Did you?” He himself was astonished, shaken.
“Sure,” she smiled. “I know as much about sex therapy as you. Morning erections.”
He chuckled, beginning to feel quite pleased with himself, and put his head down into the crook of her neck. “You might have indicated last night that that’s what you had in mind, instead of just acting so bored,” he murmured.
“No. If I had, you’d have found a way of making it not work.”
“You think I make trouble for myself?”
“God, do you ever.” Her arms, still encircling him, were hoops, binding him to her.
“But you like me, don’t you?”
“When you’re not being so compulsive.” She shifted and slid out from under him. “You know why I put up with you last night? I knew it wasn’t going to work and yet I kept thinking of an article I once read about infants who wouldn’t cry, or
even eat, unless someone handled them, touched them, fondled them.”
“Nurse Naomi,” he joked, and reaching out put a hand between her legs. “The further adventures of.”
“You even have a sense of humor,” she laughed. “At least I think there’s one hidden in there.” She touched his forehead, then took her fingers and moved his hand away. “But I don’t like to come in the morning.”
“Well, you just might have to, if I’m no good at night.”
“You might get better.”
“But then again, I might not.” He began to fondle her again and this time she didn’t resist him. Soon she was moaning under his fingers. But although his penis failed him once again, refusing to erect in response to her pleasure, he was far less worried than he had been the night before. Even though he had no choice but to play observer as she began to quiver into orgasm, he didn’t feel detached. He was a spectator, but not a removed one. Flaccid, he could nevertheless feel in himself a tension and breathlessness that echoed her own.
They missed breakfast. They heard the knocking on the door, grasped the innkeeper’s assertive, “It’s now or never,” but Ben looked out the window and saw pelting rain and gathered the quilt around their heads again and they went back to sleep. That afternoon he took Naomi to an antique shop and when she admired a particular pair of dangling gold earrings, decided to buy them for her. While she dawdled at the back of the shop, he approached the cash register counter, set the earrings down on it and hurriedly counted out bills from his wallet, signaling to the shopkeeper to get up from his stool at the door and take his money. Just then Naomi ambled up to the counter and, seeing him with the bills in his fist, looked at him inquisitively. Then her eyes wandered to the thick wallet he still held in his other hand.
For a moment, he stood motionless.
“Yes?” the shopkeeper, an elderly, wizened man, said.
Ben stared over his head, remembering with a start what Sidney had said about Naomi’s being interested in him only for his money. Certainly all weekend she had been making jokes or casual remarks about money. Certainly, too, she had very little of it, while he had a great deal. Between his savings and his investments, he was worth close to a quarter of a million dollars. It wasn’t a remarkable amount. No more than any unmarried, child-untrammeled Park Avenue doctor might be worth after ten years of practice. But to Naomi, on her Newspaper Guild salary, he must seem rich indeed.
“You want those?” the shopkeeper was saying in a nasal drawl.
“I—I’m not sure the lady really likes them,” Ben said, turning suspiciously to Naomi.
“These?” Naomi had noticed the earrings on the counter now and her dark eyes were glistening. “They’re wonderful!”
Suddenly he laid the money on the counter and handed the earrings to her. What difference did it make why she wanted him? What difference did it make how he got her, as long as he got her. She was his chance to change, to come awake and stay awake.
She had slipped one of the earrings onto an earlobe.
“You look beautiful,” he whispered, and put an arm around her shoulders, his finger teasing the gleaming pendant.
It rained on Sunday too and they ended up spending the afternoon antiquing again. In a dusty garage Naomi came across a worn carton filled with African wood sculpture and she began pensively to sort through the pieces. “Why not buy one of these for your office?” she said, holding up an ebony animal with long, curved horns. “These are very good, and very old, I think, and the prices are ridiculously low.”
“What’s wrong with my office the way it is?” he asked.
“It’s too bare,” she said bluntly. “Devoid of personality.”
Insulted, he took the wooden antelope from her hand and set it back in the box. And then he softened, admitting to himself that she was right. He had never thought he had the taste or imagination to decorate his office, and so he had left it barren of ornamentation. Besides, he wanted to please her. They had tried to make love twice again, and although he had been potent only one of the two times, that success, and the one of the morning before, had made him feel exquisitely encouraged about himself and enormously grateful to Naomi. Even her taste for exotica seemed to him charming and singular today. Reaching back into the box, he pulled out a different carving, the figure of a woman with elongated neck, great, rounded breasts and a large, smooth stomach.
Naomi nodded. “It’s lovely. And it would even make some sort of a statement.”
He bought both carvings and, on the way back to New York, kept the newspaper-wrapped packages on the seat beside him, brushing against them from time to time. All the while he drove south, he kept wishing they were going north again and kept dreaming of what it would be like never to have to return to New York, never to have, again, to work, to see patients, to see Sidney. In his mind’s eye he imagined driving with Naomi up into Canada, of reaching snows that would never melt and mountains that would take their breath away, and it was with the greatest of reluctance that he approached the bridge that led to the looming city beyond. “We got here so fast,” he said sadly to Naomi.
“And a lucky thing too,” she commented. “I’ve still got to go and pick up Petey at his friend’s.”
Still, he drove more slowly as he crossed the bridge, afraid that his tenuous attachment to Naomi would not survive the strains of the city.
But it did. Although, sexually, their relationship continued to be stressful, he and Naomi saw a great deal of each other in the next few weeks. They went to the theater, dined grandly at Lutèce and informally at La Petite Ferme, and sometimes just ate hamburgers and watched television in Ben’s apartment.
He liked that best, liked walking into the kitchen to fix drinks and returning to see her cross-legged on his couch or sprawled on the floor, her chin in her hands. It was as if each time he left her side, he expected to find her gone when he returned, and it was with a jolt of absurd delight that he would realize that indeed she was there, really there, just where he had left her.
CHAPTER FOUR
APRIL
“Listen, old buddy,” Sidney said, barging into Ben’s office one evening late in April. “Can you come over for dinner tonight? I need to talk with you.” He was meticulously dressed in a blue knit blazer and white shirt and on his cuffs gleamed gold links in the shape of Asclepius’s staff. But his face looked drawn, as if he had been losing weight.
“What’s up?” Ben hedged, rising from his chair and busying himself by searching for his raincoat in the closet. He was meeting Naomi for dinner in half an hour, but was reluctant to say so. Knowing that Sidney had a way of making him doubt himself and waver from whatever goals he set, he had for several weeks now been maintaining a new emotional distance from him, avoiding confidences and limiting their conversations to discussions of patients and peers.
He had thought at first that such a distance would be difficult for him to accomplish, if only because Sidney might consider it a kind of defection and insist on an accounting. But to his surprise, Sidney had hardly seemed to notice any change in their relationship. Always self-absorbed, he had been unusually preoccupied all month and even now, looming in the doorway, he seemed unaware that Ben hadn’t accepted his invitation to dinner. Walking to the desk, he reached for the telephone, and announced, “I’ll tell Claudia to set an extra place.”
“I can’t make it tonight,” Ben said softly.
Sidney let the phone receiver careen noisily into its cradle and stared at him. Above his eyes, deep creases appeared, so precise they seemed carved with a knife.
“I’ve got an appointment,” Ben went on cautiously and, finding his raincoat, draped it over his arm.
“Can’t you break it? There’s something very important I’ve got to discuss with you.”
“What is it?”
“I need you to do something for me. To go down to the Caribbean and check something out for me.” Preempting Ben’s empty chair, Sidney swung his legs up on the desk. “I’ve
got a guy heading up one of my clinics down there who keeps insisting that before we start testing the pill in the States this summer, we ought to do another major study down in the islands. He claims there’s been an increase in birth defects in his area and that the defects could be related to the Zauber pill.”
Puzzled, Ben sat down opposite Sidney, taking the patients’ chair. “Birth defects? But the pill is one hundred percent effective in preventing conception.”
Sidney nodded, his fingertips massaging the lines above his eyes. “Yes. We haven’t had a single case of pregnancy in any of the women who’ve stayed on the pill. It’s the ones who’ve gone off it this guy wants to study. Apparently some of their babies have shown defects and he claims my pill is involved.”
“Do you believe it?” Ben frowned.
“Not really. There are plenty of other more likely factors. But this guy’s been making noise for some time now and I’d like him checked out. How legitimate is he? How good are his records?”
“Don’t you think you should go down yourself?”
Sidney shook his head slowly. “No. My going down would suggest I was taking the guy more seriously than I’m prepared to do just yet. Besides, I’ve got to be at the hormone meeting in Chicago on Saturday.”
“Really? I didn’t think you were going. I’d thought I might—”
“Yes?”
“Oh, nothing.” He had been hoping to have a long, work-free weekend with Naomi, but he could see that, one way or another, he was going to have to serve Sidney this weekend. “Okay,” he acquiesced. “I’ll check this guy out for you. What exactly is it you want me to do?”
“Just talk with him. And look over his research. His name’s Keith Neville. Is he sound? Or is he just one of those black ideologues who thinks all birth control is racial genocide?” Rising, Sidney began walking to the door and added, “Come on. I’ll tell you the rest over dinner.”