Lost in His Eyes

by Andrew Neiderman

‘What you want and what I want is so clear. Do you mind if we just go to a motel?’ he asked.

  I had to rake the deepest places in my memory to think of another girl or woman I knew or had known who wouldn’t simply ask him to get out, but those I did recall surely felt this same surge of exhilaration. All the danger, all the risk made it more so. When had I last thrown caution out the window this quickly? I felt as if I was ripping off chains. I longed to be naked.

  But a motel? Why not his apartment or his hotel? Motels were painted in anonymity, even the ones that weren’t national franchises. Unlike hotels that people might frequent with some regularity (many had a favorite hotel in New York or some other city), motels were more like hubs, some unassuming, unremarkable stop between the start and the finish of a journey. They had the essence of temporariness. You left nothing of yourself there. You didn’t take time to make friends with the employees, unless you were some sort of regular like a truck driver or salesman, and you didn’t have a favorite room. Maybe you would ask for the quietest and one type of bed or the other, but nothing more. Of course, a motel.

  Recently, I had stayed at a motel, considering it a stop on my way from a normal life to insanity, a welcome pause during which I might be able to find my way back. I needed nothing but a different bedroom where I could fall asleep to the glow of the television set and enjoy the sense of being free. I paid in cash. From my days with Sebastian, I knew how credit card bills could convict you of some indiscretion or reveal some secret. I lied about going to see an old girlfriend of mine in Palos Verdes, Patty Cutter. I let her know I was using her name occasionally so she could cover for me. Patty thought I was having an affair back then and was titillated that I had used her as my alibi. So many of us live vicariously through others.

  ‘I never believed you could last with one man, Clea,’ she said. ‘This is probably not your first time.’

  ‘Probably not,’ I said. The vagueness reinforced her theory and her pledge to cover for me. The truth was I didn’t need to concoct elaborate alibis. Ronnie enjoyed these ‘free’ nights as well, not that he spent more time with Kelly. I wondered if they even knew I wasn’t there for most of the evening. It was odd, I know, to think of a motel as an escape, a refuge, but it was.

  However, when he suggested a motel, it took on an entirely new image. Go with a man to a motel? I hadn’t gone to a motel for a romantic tryst since my senior year in high school. Ronnie and I skipped all that and went right to his apartment on the second date. I recalled how nervous I was when I did it while still in high school – so nervous, in fact, that I nearly backed out after Sonny Reuben had paid for the room and we had parked in front of the motel room door. I still remembered the number – twenty-one. I was not quite seventeen.

  ‘Do you know that if we’re caught, you could get into legal trouble?’ I asked Sonny. ‘I think this qualifies as statutory rape. It could even be a federal crime since we’ve gone over the state line.’

  Sonny was nearly nineteen, a late entry into kindergarten and actually the oldest boy in the senior class. The idea that he could be held accountable seemed ludicrous to me as well as to him, but I mentioned it anyway. Even then I was thinking like a paralegal.

  ‘It’s worth the risk,’ he had said and had given me that smile that could melt ice-cube hearts. He had kissed me, too, and stroked my hair lovingly, far more lovingly than anyone would expect a senior high school boy capable of doing. I felt as if in me he had found exquisite beauty, and any boy who can give a girl that feeling is worth his weight in future aggravation. ‘Ready?’ Sonny had asked.

  Heart pumping as fast as the engine Sonny had just shut off, I nodded and we got out.

  How sexually sophisticated I had felt then. I knew he had been here with other girls. He didn’t have to say it, and I didn’t have to hear it from any of my girlfriends. He simply had the experience written into his walk, his cool way of turning his head just slightly with that licentious smile to look at me coming into the classroom or approaching him in the hallway, and, of course, the confidence in his words and his no-hesitation embrace.

  I wasn’t a virgin, but I hadn’t lost it in a motel room. It was done clumsily in the rear of a Chrysler Town Car, one of the vehicles in Jeffrey Morton’s father’s limousine service. It was clumsy because Jeffrey was six feet three and I was no slouch at five feet ten. A few times we nearly fell off the seat, and when he came, bursting like a water balloon, he did fall off, laughing. I laughed, too, which wasn’t the way I had envisioned this life-changing event to establish itself. Like any young girl full of fantasy, with tons of romantic movie and novel love scenes stuffed in her backpack, I was anticipating soft, poetic words of love and a beautiful melody in the background. I wanted to hear him swear that he would never take me for granted and I was nobody’s trophy. This was to be real, something to cherish for a lifetime. When he dropped me off afterward, I felt as dazed as anyone who had stumbled into womanhood unsure how she had gotten there and whether or not it was worth the effort and the journey. The disappointment was enough to make me want to swear off sex, become a nun and spend my life stifling my hormones.

  But there was nothing specific to only me back then that reinforced all this disappointment. I wasn’t ‘out there’, ‘weird’, ‘different’. I was an A-student, on the cheerleading squad and up with the latest teen fashions. No, for all my contemporaries, sex had become just something else we did. Even though I thought it and believed it, it infuriated me whenever I saw that or heard it said. Tell that to William Holden in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, or Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, or Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard, I would rant. Where were the men who felt something as strong, if not stronger than the women, and where were those women now? They were difficult to find in my high school at the time and, I suspected, just about every other one in the country. Well, maybe not in the Bible Belt, but they had other obstacles blocking their feelings which were too often viewed as signs of sin to come.

  However, I was determined this would be different from any love affair I had, even when I began with Ronnie. This would be what it was meant to be. I would soar into clouds of ecstasy and it would be more than just another sexual experience to bury in a closet of my memories so deeply that it would take an oil rig to bring them up.

  I guess I drove about thirty-five miles east of where we were to the motel I knew. Coincidentally, he knew it too, but I didn’t ask him why. I had passed it by many times since I last had been there, each time tempted to stop and check in, if only for a few hours. I’m not even going to pretend I knew how many miles were on the odometer of my car. I’m not that exact or precise about all this. I just knew how long it would be to get there. It helped to harness the anticipation and control the trembling in my body and in my voice.

  I wanted at least to match how sophisticated and how confident he was.

  Talk about confidence … he already had the room booked, and it wasn’t because that was where he was staying, either. He didn’t tell me that; he just said he wasn’t keeping it as any sort of temporary residence.

  ‘That’s an oxymoron anyway,’ he said. ‘You don’t think of a residence as temporary.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘Just like an experience can’t be temporary. It becomes a part of you, of who you are, don’t you think?’

  ‘I try not to think,’ I said. I knew I took that line from some movie and hated using it. That was something Ronnie would do. I don’t know if I hated anything more than I hated sounding trite.

  He laughed.

  ‘You’re a terrible failure, then,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I doubt very much that you hate to think. You probably think about things more than most people you know.’

  Why was it a stranger could look at me and immediately see me, but my husband of nearly twenty years could barely see me standing in front of him most of the time? Do we eventually wear each other, put on each other like a pair of old gloves, hardly noticing what we’re doing because we’ve done it so often? I often wo
ndered if soldiers off on some Middle Eastern tour of duty are loved more because they’re so far away and seen so infrequently, despite Skype or FaceTime or whatever Internet magic puts husband and wife on a computer screen. Until they find a way to convey touch, it doesn’t do more than increase your longing. And passionate love does need longing and anticipation; otherwise, it’s too mechanical. You don’t want to come home from a date feeling like a prostitute, and I certainly had no intention of feeling that way now.

  When he directed me to the parking spot, he got out of the car before I did and came around to open my door and help me out, not like he would an elderly woman, but how he would if he were escorting a debutante to her ball or some other formal gala where eyes were like microscopes looking for imperfections in your dress and behavior. He paused to see if I would hesitate, if I would shake my head and say, ‘Sorry, I can’t do this. You see, I’m married with a teenage daughter, and although I’ve fantasized about being with other men, I’ve never so much as returned a flirting glance or in any other way encouraged any man to pursue me. I’m in my second virginity, you see, the virginity that comes with matrimony.’

  I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t hesitate either. I walked with determination toward the door. He opened it. Apparently, he had unlocked it earlier, maybe thinking that fiddling with a motel key in a door lock would look too low-class or something. This was more like opening the door to his private bedroom. I thought that was a nice touch. It made it all just a little more special, and although I might be writing too much into the gesture, it showed more respect for me. By their very nature, motel assignations could seem cheap. There was hardly an investment, whether it was time or money.

  The curtains were tightly closed, barely permitting a thin sliver of daylight, yet there was nothing cheap or gloomy about the room. The covers of the bed had been neatly folded back and there was a single rose on the pillow on the left side. I remember thinking, that’s the side I sleep on at home. Once you get married and you establish which side belongs to whom, that’s the way it stays forever, even when you travel or go to a resort on vacation. This is considerate, I thought. He has taken into consideration where I’m comfortable in bed. I didn’t even wonder how he might have known that. Maybe I just looked like someone who would sleep on the left. I like leaving theaters through the exit on the left.

  Ronnie used to put a rose on my pillow occasionally during our early years. Somehow, he would sneak it past me so that I wouldn’t discover it until we were ready for bed. He told me he had seen it done in some movie. I suppose I felt as if I had stepped into a movie now. My lover pretended he didn’t know how the rose was there.

  ‘Maybe it grows out of pillows,’ he suggested. ‘Magic pillows.’

  ‘I put away my fairytales years ago,’ I said.

  ‘Pity.’

  He didn’t say anything else and neither did I.

  We both simply started to undress. He was very neat with his clothes, going to the closet to get hangers for his jacket, shirt and trousers. He waited for me to hand him my dress and then he hung that up, too. He sat on a chair by the small desk and took off his socks while I sat on the bed, unfastened my bra and slipped off my panties. I put them on the chair in the corner and then I slipped under the blanket and looked up at the pinkish white ceiling which had embossed circles, smaller ones within the ones, giving the illusion of looking down a tunnel. I was so fascinated with it that I didn’t look at him until I felt him get into the bed.

  The sheets felt cool on my skin which was already hot with anticipation. I pressed my feet against the bottom of the cover sheet which had been tucked in by someone who made beds in the military. It was like a straightjacket. In its own way, it had captured and was holding me, not that I was making any effort to break free, change my mind, dress and rush out.

  I turned to him, and he smiled and leaned over to kiss me softly on the lips, a kiss that felt as if it was made out of sweet mist and yet left the warm, salty taste of a sea breeze. I kept my eyes closed the way a little girl might just before she was to get a surprise. I waited for him to touch me, but he didn’t, so I opened my eyes. He just lay there looking into my eyes. All that while, my heart beat faster as the anticipation began somewhere between my neck and shoulders and slipped down like a thin layer of warm water over my breasts, the small of my stomach and down the inside of my thighs to my ankles.

  ‘Just for a while,’ he said, ‘let’s not move. Let’s just anticipate.’

  It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t torture either. It was an exquisite longing that nudged the erotic part of me that had been sleeping too long inside my very soul. I could feel its eyes open and the happiness that was beginning to rage. It was the Rip Van Winkle of my feminine longing finally awoken. I was a teenage girl again, relaxing the inside of my thighs to welcome the tip of that hardened, usually very limp penis that now would be like a key opening all the feelings and behavior we were both warned to avoid by one set of rules and encouraged to get into by another.

  After a while, he smiled, as if to say, ‘Well done. We can move on now.’

  We kissed again, my mouth opening like soft petals, my tongue touching his, warm and wet like I was increasingly becoming between my legs. His hands began to play my body, gently lifting my breasts so he could bring his mouth to my nipples. Every muscle in my body, some seemingly tense forever, relaxed. My softness hardened him faster. I could feel his muscles tightening, his body pause to drive itself into me, almost absorbing me into it, taking charge of every cell, every strand of hair, every bone, all of me welcoming and demanding more. The small of my stomach resonated in a symphony of pleasure that echoed up and down the passages from my head to my feet, turning and twisting through every part of me until I felt lit up, my eyes glowing, my breath salty, my lips wet, my hips moving to fit him carefully and completely inside me. It was trite to say it, so I just thought it: it was as if we were made for each other, as if the spiritual power that mixed and stirred our genes did so with the intention of making us for each other, eventually.

  We were part of some celestial plan, which was why everything that had happened and was happening now happened so quickly, with neither of us offering the slightest resistance. We were under divine orders to make Him proud of inventing sex as the ultimate statement of love. He would use us as an example, cite us in footnotes in celestial papers.

  I have heard my girlfriends say that making love with their husbands had become as ritualistic and as ordinary as brushing their teeth. Some were clever enough to realize that their husbands made love out of fear. With all the talk about erectile dysfunction, the commercials about the loss of testosterone, men were haunted by the images of limp penises. Every successful act of sexual intercourse reaffirmed their manhood. For many, it could have been with any vagina. The important thing was to reach that climax and, oh, by the way, trigger at least one climax in his wife, if possible. But hey, if she didn’t have it, that was her fault. Maybe she was the one who needed hormones and not me.

  ‘Do married people make love or make sex?’ Kelly once asked me. She was only fourteen at the time, but one of her girlfriends, Elise Shelly, whose parents were divorced, told her that Elise’s mother said people fall in love for ten minutes, get married and follow the dots. She finally figured out that Elise’s mother meant they do everything together afterward because that’s the way it was supposed to be and not because they wanted to, passionately.

  Because children are so honest, Elise told her all this without hesitation, and then Kelly came to me, hoping to get an equally honest response. Should I tell her that’s true, at least for me, I wondered, and then have her become cynical about love and marriage? She was too young for that, I thought, and, besides, everyone needed to develop his or her own cynicism. Cynicism was something that had to be born of personal experience. Otherwise, especially in relation to your child, he or she could hate you forever for spoiling tomorrow.

  But I couldn’t say no, that’s
not true, and say it with the sort of enthusiasm she was hoping to see. That would be false and she would see it, I thought. Rather, I used the easy escape.

  ‘What’s true for Elise’s mother is not necessarily true for everyone else,’ I said. ‘There are things you should learn for yourself. Sometimes the journey is more important than the destination, Kelly. Don’t look for shortcuts.’

  She knew what I meant. She is a very perceptive girl when she wants to be. She had to open her eyes. For the moment, that answer seemed to suffice. I knew she knew she had gotten a more sophisticated response than Elise had gotten or ever would get. She didn’t ask me if it was as true for me as it was for Elise’s mother, but I wasn’t in a divorce, so maybe it never occurred to her.

  Our time making love in the motel seemed to evaporate once it had ended. My orgasms were more like gongs on a grandfather clock, sounding the ecstasy, until, finally, he withdrew and slipped away as gently and carefully as a surgeon closing a wound. I closed my eyes and fell into a warm repose, drifting on the memory of the moments that had just passed.

  I awoke at the sound of him dressing.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, as if I had missed a cue. I sat up.

  ‘I have to be somewhere,’ he said. ‘No worries. I have someone picking me up.’ Then he smiled. ‘Don’t even think it. This is not slam bam thank you ma’am.’

  ‘You didn’t give me a chance to think it.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Take your time. Relax. I’ll see you again.’

  He came to the bed and kissed me. Then he picked up the rose and put it in my hands.

  ‘That’s how I want to remember you when I think of you later,’ he said.

  I watched him leave and fell back against the pillow. I closed my eyes, feeling happy and complete, and fell asleep again.

  When I awoke this time, I felt alone and the room seemed colder. My dress, still hanging in the closet, was a lonely-looking garment that resembled something forgotten by the previous visitor. I sat up and ran my hands through my hair. The curtains were still tightly drawn. I got up and, still naked, parted them to look out at the motel parking lot. My car was practically the only one there. Another car, an SUV, was down toward the far end.