She found something interesting in Camus. A combatant in fascist Europe, Camus abhorred abstraction. In his Notebooks, airplanes are infernal Olympian machines. Your view of the world from an airplane abstracts and dehumanizes it. Pure thought aloft chews up the earth. Gertrude Stein, though, remembered how, when she was first on an airplane, she looked out the window and grasped at that moment the truth of cubism. From up there you see that things really are square. Things really are cylindrical. They do indeed intersect and bend around each other. And Picasso the abstractionist was as impassioned an anti-fascist as Camus. Yet both Picasso and Camus abstracted women to a point where they used them like doormats. Maybe she was a fascist too.
Taylor Jones asked her why she seemed down, and she told him it was nothing in particular.
“How does dinner sound to you?” He extended his hand toward hers in a gesture that seemed all the more gallant from such a tall, hirsute man. Once again he was bending slightly in a charming eighteenth century sort of way.
“What does your husband do?” he asked.
“He’s a stockbroker,” said Alice.
“So New Jersey’s convenient for him.”
“We’re thinking of moving soon.”
“I imagine he does very well.”
“Yes, very well . . . You know I never called him to say I’d be late. He’s still at the office. If you’ll excuse me a minute, I’ll ring him there.”
It was raining outside and a day-long fog was still settled. Alice was eager for some formless beast to burst out of the fog. Lure it with a lovely web. Catch the beast and give it form. “Everything all right?” he asked when she returned.
“Oh yes,” she said.
“You have such a lovely sadness about you,” he said.
“Do I?” she asked. She knew how to conjure vague thoughts that put vulnerability in her eyes. Men loved that. Her eyes were special. They truly distinguished her. They made men like Taylor at once lustful and tenderhearted. Alice’s face made men like Taylor want to ravish and revere it.
Any man could have been hers had she wanted a man in the conventional way. “I hope your husband appreciates you,” he said, lightheartedly.
“Oh he does!” she said, affecting a chipper, self-satisfied tone. Taylor hated Alice’s husband for the man he imagined him to be: wealthy, getting wealthier, turning this subtle woman into a trophy. Proving to the world that beauty is a rare commodity but a commodity nonetheless.
Taylor smelt a strange perfume, an exotic odor incongruously brazen. “I don’t usually feel so attracted to unattainable women,” he said.
She gave a little start as if to show that any such hint of sexual advance was jarring to her in her observant life. “Oh no?” she asked nervously.
“Are you unattainable?”
“This is a very strange situation for me,” she said, still tremulous. She felt him growing stronger across the table.
“Are you? Are you?”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” she said, almost mournfully.
“Spend some time with me. I live on Third and 17th. Forgive me if I . . . It’s raining pretty hard. I’ll get a cab.”
“No, no cab.”
“We’ll get soaked.”
“I don’t care,” she said, almost angrily. “I need to walk. I don’t care.”
He bought two umbrellas from a street vendor but the rain was coming down too hard to stay dry. They were sopped when they reached his place. The outline of her nipples was sharp under the pink-red paisley blouse she had on. A smell of city rain mingled powerfully with her perfume. His beard and the hair on his arm were glistening like grass, like jet-black grass.
They kissed passionately. “My God,” she said, “I don’t believe this is happening.”
“It’s wonderful,” he said.
“Strip me naked,” she whispered, and he peeled off the wet blouse and undid her skirt. He caressed Alice’s breast and tugged on the band of her panties so he could peek down at the few strands of her colorless pubic hair.
“You’re trembling,” he said.
“I can’t help it,” she said. He stripped too. Taylor’s raw masculine body was streaked with thick strips of black hair. His penis was very large and hairy. His balls were too. But he didn’t look like an ape. He looked like a man. She stared wide-eyed between his legs and whimpered girlishly.
They embraced. He was holding her up in the air with his large flat hands astride her rump. “You smell so good,” he said, with a sudden edgy, guttural tone.
“I need it,” she said. “I need it bad.”
“I’m fucking you, baby.”
“I need it. Oh God, poke me!”
“Open, baby,” he said. He was losing control.
“I need it! Do you understand?”
“Open! Open!”
“I need it,” she said. “You don’t know, you don’t know . . .”
“I know.”
“Ahhh,” she went as his cock pierced into her. She started to gasp, almost to convulse, a weird hot sound half lust and half sheer physical torment.
“Baby?” he called. A slight alarm cautioned his instincts. “Are you okay?”
“Oh your fuck, your big fuck,” Alice cried aloud.
“Sweet thing,” he growled.
Then her eyes widened as if in shock, and she exclaimed, “My husband’s teeny-weeny!”
With that, her lover let out a feral growl and went into her as far as a man can go.
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