by T. Gertler
There you are, licking my breast. How small the world is growing, to cunt-size. Come, unfold your prick. You’re pushing my thighs apart. I could do that myself, but it’s so much nicer when you do it. Take charge. Charge.
Not yet. First you will turn me over. This is the way doggies and horsies do it, boys and girls. And houseflies and camels and gnus. Dinosaurs did it this way when they were doing it. You nip at the back of my neck, you enter me, you withdraw. I’m trembling and sighing. Now you’re turning me over again. Maybe I’m being barbecued, I’m burning for sure. You grapple with my clitoris, make my cunt contract. Your tongue declares itself and, as it does, you swing your body round and offer your prick my mouth. On this exotic matter I chew without teeth, I am so happy I could die, let me die now. You take the prize away, put mouth on mouth to pour my cunt juice into me again, wrong end on purpose. Please, I’ve lost my body, I’m all cunt, come inside.
You stab at me, slick road, you’ve missed the opening, I grab your prick and show it where to go. You slide in me up to your nonexistent hips, I exhale loudly. But no, you pull away, uncork me. I’m hissing like an old radiator. One of your hands holds my wrists together on pillows above my head. Unassisted, your prick sniffs out my cunt. You’ll have it your way, on your own, and so you do. This entry makes me gasp. My dance card’s full. You’re moving in and out, I’m wrists and cunt you’ve pinned. Your fingers buff my clitoris, I ring and wring your prick with muscles I’ve acquired for that purpose. You’re riding now, I’m being ridden, my toes are pointing east and west, spread-eagle ballerina. You’re in no hurry, you detour here and there, I think I’m going crazy. We ride for miles, desert and oasis, an arching bridge, the West Side highway. I’m dreaming that I’m talking. I see your eyes see mine. We climb a hill, we’re over treetops, there’s a star or circling satellite. There’s no more place to go. One of us is moaning, I can’t tell which.
We’re lying side by side. You want to know if I believe in God.
You’re telling me your wife’s name, which isn’t Carmen or Mary Sue. I’ll have to memorize it. You want to see a picture of my husband; I show you what I’ve got, my driver’s license and a Band-Aid. You suck my teeth. You say you have to be going. You do, by the way, believe in God, even if I don’t.
*
How We Met
I was looking for someone to pay attention and you did. I reminded you of a girl from your childhood, late adolescence, or so you said. You held me closer to the light, inspected me. Your gaze was wonderful, the rest of you was odd. I didn’t know you were torturing me, bestowing your attention in order to withhold it later. You recommended coffee. Sex waited everywhere, even in your patience, but I didn’t see it. I asked, How can I ever thank you? You said, looking up seriously from a depressed chair, You can go to bed with me. I laughed and stammered something, tried to make a joke of it. Your eyes, which can sometimes seem small as the eyes of a bear, bared nothing.
Weeks later I came back to see you. I think I know what I’m doing now, I said. You mentioned you had to find someone to reverse your shirt collars. He’s strange, I thought. You said, My wife is charming but passionless, she just lies there. Exit cue for me, and I went out waving.
More time. I worked with the unreasoning endurance of an animal, which is why they’re called dumb. My husband was kind, cruel, all-encompassing. He struggled with his life, I shook my head. He bent my arm, I cried. He went to work. In the new silence of the apartment, I saw that all I had was my own destruction.
Frightened, I called you up. Frightened, I came to see you. I thought I wanted order, honor, help. You offered me a fuck.
Now you’re curled up naked on the white bed, talking, lighting a cigarette. I miss every third word because you whisper. Sometimes when I whisper to you, I can tell by your answer that you haven’t understood me, either.
*
Why You’re Sad
Because you’re spent, you’re overspent, life is seeping out of you, not from the prick, that miracle, but from your pores, your eyes, the dead cells of your fingernails. You have had and still have too many women. You long for sleep. Ghosts lie down with us in bed. Transparent naked women, some of them the same woman at different times, at different ages, observe our passion. There are too many women and you are keeping them all. The collection owns the collector. They weigh you down, they drag you down, they kill you with your children. The women are your ballast; without them, you fear, you’d drift away from earth. Wanting to stay, wanting to keep alive, you add me now, a plummet to an anchor. You’re sad because you’re getting the uncomfortable feeling that I love you.
*
Your Wife
She has dinner set out, porcelain and blood, and greets you in the kitchen with a chaste kiss. Your children have already met you at the door, crying. The youngest holds your hand as you kiss your wife. What’s wrong, you ask, what’s all this crying? They will tell you stories, they will let you be the judge. Your wife bending to open a low cabinet displays a great ass in jeans. You’d like to reach for it, but the children are explaining Occam’s razor. What tragedies they deliver you try to measure. Your wife stands up, the ass that was so pretty tucks away. You send the children off to wash their hands—With lots of soap, you call—then stealthily, a cartoon wolf, you stalk her jeans. You hug her from behind, place unwashed hands on breasts, your stirring prick against the backside groove. She says, The children. You say, They’re washing. She says, That doesn’t take forever. You let her go. Half in apology, she kisses your mouth. Can she smell me there? Not over the tobacco and the Scotch. Why don’t you take a quick shower, she suggests, and I’ll keep dinner warm. Keep me warm, you say. You don’t want to shower, you want to fuck her with your body still wearing our fuck. You want to link the women through yourself. This idea compels you to pursue her. She runs, hands full of salad, to the dinner table, where the children play with salt. Don’t do that, you say; and the children, thinking you mean them, stop playing.
You eat, you drink, you hold your children as if your love could keep them young. You kiss their foreheads when you say good night, a reed of parent over their breathing beds. You shower—I go down the drain—then stroll naked to the living room, where your wife untangles yarn for needlepoint. Or paints. Or sculpts. Or weaves hair baskets from your brush’s gleanings. You ask her, Do you love me? Yes, she says, I do. Take off your clothes, you say. Not here, she says. Then where? you want to know. Let me bathe, she says. Don’t bathe, you say. You’re angry, she says.
Naked, you sit at your desk and stare at paper. She drapes your bathrobe over you. She kisses you the way you kiss the children.
She thinks in colors: the sofa will be blue, she’ll have persimmon streaks across a pillow, the walls are beige, the walls of colors make her home. Your sex needs decorating.
I imagine this woman smaller than life. She is older than I am. So are you, so is my husband. Everybody is older than I am, though this won’t always be true. Against that day I stroke clear cream into my pained expression.
*
My Husband
Has seen me crouching, ratlike, in our room. Has told me, Don’t panic; sensing I’m about to run, and run blindly. I don’t trust him anymore, he talks so well, he does so little. Refinement’s costly. I need a winter coat. With you things are easier, I have never trusted you, not from the beginning.
My husband lives to waver, watches from the sidelines while others scramble, thinks being on the side is being up above and looking down. It’s not. His eyes are beautiful and unmatched, his soul is flawless as a baby’s. He blames me for his terrors. I’m drowning, I don’t want him on top of me, it hurts too much. One breath, another.
He understands the concepts of rent and health insurance. He understands the word please. He thinks I’m hanging him, I think he’s strangling me. The truth is not electric. Manners are better than nothing at all.
*
Fears
Your wife will take sex lessons. My husband
will read what I’m writing. You’ll die. You won’t want to see me. I’ll discover you aren’t the one thing that’s keeping me sane, you’re the one thing that’s driving me crazy.
*
Facts
I never wanted to have a baby. Bring life into despair? I knew my husband wouldn’t be the father of my child. I swallowed pills, dammed up the cervix. I spat out sperm.
The first time you entered me, I wanted to have a baby with you. My husband needs a different woman, I need a different man.
*
Solutions
Your wife will conveniently develop terminal movie-star disease and die peacefully in two days. She’ll feel no pain, only a flicker of surprise before the lights go out. My husband will die instantaneously in a plane crash, boom against a mountain, so I won’t have to hurt him with my departure. He’ll be pleasantly stoned at the time. You’ll need someone to care for your children. Interview me. I’ll learn to cook if you insist. We’ll all live happily somehow.
*
And After That
You’ll have other women. I’ll meet you for illicit fucks even though we live together. You’ll never know what I’m thinking. I’ll never believe what you’re saying. We’ll be alive, we’ll be alive.
*
But If Not
Then let’s continue as we have until we stop. Put your prick in my mouth. I have to find an apartment because I’m leaving my husband. You have one finger in my cunt, one up my ass. I’m scored, I’m skewered, I’m screwed.
—
“I worry about their future,” she hissed.
“Don’t I pay?”
“Yes, but you could stop any time and then where would I be?”
“In court, sending me to the Bastille.”
“You’ve got another kid. You don’t care about Paul and Ilene.”
“I care, Margie.”
“You’re a shit, Howie. You don’t love your kids.”
“I don’t know my kids.”
“Exactly. And whose fault is that?”
He hated her when she was right more than he hated her normally. “It’s my fault. I should be smeared in the National Enquirer. What do you want?”
“Your head on a pike,” she said and hung up.
Suzanne didn’t answer at home. He decided to call Bask and cheer him up about critics, but there was no answer there, either. Howard beat a pencil against a mug. He’d manipulated his wife and a moderately talented novelist into an affair for his own comfort, not theirs. Fine, he found young love agreeable, he hoped the two of them trembled with the exaltation of mutual irrationality, he wished sensuality to confound Suzanne as it did most people, including himself. But her affair shouldn’t interfere with any of his needs; it should enhance her observance of his needs, whether through guilt or wisdom, he didn’t care. Now she wasn’t home when he called; and when she was home, she regarded him sullenly as an enemy and not a benefactor. She hadn’t spoken to him for a week, nothing more than hello, yes, no, and then in a civil tone only in Matty’s presence. Adultery hadn’t changed Suzanne for the better. She had become a reader. Dinners tasted sour. The sensuality he wished for her hadn’t erupted, or if it had, she kept it from him.
His choice of Bask for her lover might have been the problem. He’d settled on a moderate talent because a lesser one would be too sentimental to desist at the right time—before the affair could threaten the marriage—and a greater talent would be too austere to desist. But, now that he thought about it, a moderate talent might lack the catalytic power to transform her.
Or the fault might be hers. She might be impervious to desire, passionproof: a likely explanation. Given the splendid opportunity of his marriage bed, she hadn’t ignited. And all Bask had managed to produce in her was anger. Perhaps, knowing her own coldness, she’d imagined an affair would release her; now, having failed, she was forced to face her nature, unloving. And it made her angry.
The anger piqued him. For her to reject him without apology showed a new side of her. He wanted to enter her and drive down into that solid sphere of anger, split it with a well-placed thrust, and see what emerged. Suzanne as piñata. All week, scourged by her anger, he had been unable to concentrate on any other woman, had ceased admiring lasciviously on the street expanses of tanned bosom in elegant linen dresses, had repudiated the high cheap joy of girls in slit skirts. The forever rising and forever ruptured mystery of lovemaking with a stranger now resided in the unwilling body of his wife. If in bed with a strange woman he could for a brief trajectory blast himself away and become another Howard, a stranger to himself, then who could he become in bed with a stranger who was his wife?
The mailboy’s summer replacement, a theater majorette on roller skates, zipped in with a stack of envelopes. Baby fat quivered along her bare arms. She had the misfortune to be chewing gum or he might have said hello with real interest. Unaware of her loss—and just as well, he realized, checking her departing bottom rippling in prewashed, presoftened, preworn, prepatched, presoiled, pretinged-with-vaginal-discharge Levis—she skated out, popping a bubble.
He needed Suzanne; and recoiled from the thought. It wasn’t the way he’d arranged his life, to need her. Two phone calls researched an antidote to need, a lunch-hour frolic for three at Newman’s place. The two ladies didn’t mind last-minute invitations. He’d been celibate for over a week, long enough. In a few hours he’d be too busy to worry about Suzanne.
He dialed home and, listening to the ringing, glanced at the mail. Dina Reeve’s name on a manila envelope made him mutter “Damn” with a start of what in another man would have been guilt. He hadn’t thought of her in a while. He hung up the phone. The envelope seemed thick with reproaches. He opened it carefully, quietly, as if he were reading mail at a funeral. He saw the manuscript, “An Affair, I Guess,” and gladdened. Good girl. She’d sent him fiction, not reproaches. He established a cigarette in his mouth and began to read.
—
When Gail buzzed to say that Dina Reeve was outside asking to see him, he’d typed the following on a Rosemary memo sheet:
Dear Dina,
Yes now, this is one hell of a story. A screed more than a story, but fiction nonetheless. Congratulations, sweetie, you’ve amazed me. I’d like to run it as my lead next issue. You can
He rolled it out of the typewriter as she entered his office.
She looked thinner than he’d remembered her, and more encumbered. She carried a suitcase; or the suitcase by its weight impelled her forward to counterbalance it. She dropped it in order to stop moving. An overstuffed canvas sack populated by industrial zippers, it thudded to the floor, near a pile of old galleys. She put down a portable-typewriter case.
“Well, there you are,” he said. “I’ve read your story.”
She slumped on the sofa. A tower of manuscripts beside her inclined toward her shoulder. Her expression, sullenness or exhaustion, seemed to have been penciled on and then imperfectly erased. An essay called “Borges Through the Prism of Barthes” landed in her lap. She removed the pages, swiped at her damp chin with the back of her hand. “I left Larry.”
This scene was his favorite waking nightmare, to be run through and rerun on insomniac nights. A woman would love him so much that she would ruin him. He was, he assumed, capable of inspiring such love, though the idea of ruin wore old-fashioned charm; it befell nineteenth-century unmarried girls with bodice-popping pregnancies.
Suzanne stood at their apartment door and threw him out into a snowy night. Her arm pointed, unrelenting: leave. It was July, but the scene needed snow. He took a last look at Matty weeping silently in a Kiss tee shirt. The door closed and he shivered in a moonless cold night. The hall, the elevators, and the lobby had disappeared, along with the uniformed attendants smelling of egg salad and red wine; the city had disappeared too. The place he found himself was bitterly familiar: in Mount Kisco, at the bare hedge outside the house he had lost to Margery. He couldn’t imagine any other exile than the one he
already knew, but this loss included Matty.
He prepared to audition the woman in his office, prepared to humor her, prepared to squeeze ten fingers in unkind emphasis around her neck. He would not lose Matty. “I’m sorry to hear that. You two had a fight?”
She shook her head. She had been small in bed, compact, easily moved. Now she grew larger and more fixed, a monument to folly, an obelisk aimed not at the sky but at his foul and uncertain heart.
“I need a favor,” she said. “I need a place to stay for a while.”
Disillusioned wives were supposed to go home to mothers in Winnetka, Illinois, or to recently widowed aunts in cavernous rent-controlled apartments on Central Park West. What responsibility did a casual lover owe? He said, “I hope this had nothing to do with—I don’t believe I had anything to do with your breakup. I have a family, I want to keep my family.”
“I didn’t leave him because of you.” Crying, she spoke carefully, as if he were a lip-reader. She had cried in his office before. “You had nothing to do with it.”
He marveled at her obtuseness. She didn’t understand that she was his victim. Her reddened nose and eyes, her tear-streaked face, her unresisting body stormed by sobs—these awakened in him an unwelcome desire. “That’s not what your story says.”
“It’s a story.”
“You write about leaving your husband and here you are.”
Her tears gave way to dry thoughtfulness. “What did you think of it?”
“It’s very good.”
“Flawless?”
“No, but I’d like to buy it.”
“You’re going to publish it?”
“Yes.”
“You?”
“You said it’s a story. But I don’t have a place for you.”
“The apartment we went to—”
“No, no, that was borrowed. You know that.”
“Can’t you borrow it again?”