by T. Gertler
He undid her blouse, bra, belt. He didn’t touch her breasts. She started to unzip her jeans, but he whispered, “No,” shaking his head, black hair falling across his forehead. She let her hands drop. He unbuckled her sandals, pulled her jeans down as if he were opening a package and didn’t want to tear the wrapping. She wished he would kiss her again or touch her breasts. Slowly he pulled down her underpants and slid them over her feet.
“There,” he said.
Where? she thought.
He stepped back and looked at her before bringing her close. She waited for the blue government seal of quality to be stamped on her rump. His tongue quizzed her teeth. His hand skimmed along her stomach. Fingers approached between her legs. She parted them in a kind of first position for ballet.
“You’re wet,” he said.
Hooked on his finger, she danced and wondered at his surprise. “Please,” she whispered.
His finger withdrew. He kicked off his shoes, took off his socks, jeans, and underpants. He was all polished wood. His cock nested in black hair. She knelt and kissed it, trying to coax it out. What was his name? Her fingers circled it at the base and squeezed gently. It lifted briefly but didn’t grow. She rested a hand against his thigh and continued coaxing.
He guided the top of her head back and forth. She tugged and caressed him.
“Come up here to me,” he said.
She stayed fixed to him, working, until he insisted, “No, come up here.”
He hugged her tight, his chest pressed hard against her cheek. “It’s been like this, you see, for a while now,” he said. The ceiling lowered. He was carrying her.
His blue sheets weren’t orange. She’d managed to get back to this bed, anyway. On blue he spread and fingered her. She strained for pleasure.
“Let me inside you.”
In a spirit of scientific cooperation, she wet him with her tongue. He managed, after some maneuvering, to enter her. They moved in a stately minuet. He semiprobed and semiplumbed her. She felt a distant neighborly interest in his efforts, which didn’t affect her, until she realized they might affect her after all.
She said, “I have to get something.”
“Birth control?”
“Yes. Suppository.”
“No, no, I can’t stand that stuff. No, I’ve never made a mistake.”
“I think I should.”
He pulled out suddenly and easily. “No.”
His leaving made a small new emptiness inside her. “But then you can come inside me.”
“It’s all right. It felt good being there for a while.”
She closed her mouth around a huddled pulsing hummingbird. Soon with a sigh he came. That urge to fulfillment, no matter what the difficulties, amazed her, like the sight of green leaves sprouted through cracks in the sidewalk, or tree roots having broken through concrete to expand.
He kissed her nose. His black hair or her own covered her eyes. “Well,” he said. He blew on her nose as if it were a kazoo.
“Ugh.” She scratched her nose.
“Let’s lie together.” He rolled her to his side. “I’m going to hold you very tight.”
She glimpsed his Buddha smile before her ear fitted against his chest.
“You looked quite angry at the Karatasi bookstore.” His speech resonated from his chest to her ear. “I’m glad you were happier at Howard’s office today, or how would I have been able to ask you to dinner?”
An ironic tone drove his voice and made what he said sound important. On his voice went, and on, talking about his youth, his women, the books he had made his by ferocious admiration. She listened carefully, taking each disclosure for a gift.
—
She couldn’t hear what he was saying to his wife because he was in the bathroom for privacy. “She’s been through a bad time and she needs my support,” he’d explained, trailing the phone cord. Low reassuring murmurs issued from behind the almost-closed door. She got out of bed and turned off the lights. At the window, she peered between the curtains. Two stories down, nobody was on the sidewalk or across the street or, as far as she could see, on the street in either direction. She put the lights on and went back to bed, arranging the sheet up to her neck. The bathroom door opened. “Butter almond?” he asked.
He brought two filled bowls with spoons and sat on the bed, a naked doctor examining a covered patient. His carved body resisted her. “Can you stay tonight? I’d like you to.”
She sat up, the sheet around her, and nodded. The bowl was cold. She was never going to go away.
“I have to finish writing a review in the morning, a half-hour or so, and then we’ll go for breakfast. Is that all right with you?”
It was. It also was all right when he took away the ice cream and drew her from the sheet to his lap. Now it was her turn. The room sprang upside down. Her mouth arrived at his knee, his calf, his ankle. A hard finger bumped her cervix. Something unpleasant continued there. She concentrated on his high-arched instep. At last she produced a yelp.
“Did I hurt you?” the voice came from above.
“Yes,” she called.
He gathered her up in his arms. “You have to tell me. I don’t want to hurt you.”
Safe in his arms, safe in his unchallenging lap, she whispered, “Okay.”
—
The page had more crossouts than text. In light from the lamp set on one of his two remaining cartons, the yellow typing paper looked jaundiced. He punched a c by mistake. From the next room came a hiccuping of voices as Jonathan changed channels. “Well, let me say this—” a campaigner said. The e was so filthy its eye was closed. The simple, the reasonable thing would have been to get drunk. Or stoned. He had to rethink his purity.
He would have gone to sleep, but he didn’t want to dream about her, not as she’d been in his bed and not as she’d looked later in the restaurant. “It doesn’t matter,” she said when he showed up outside the restaurant after paying the bill and guaranteeing himself future excoriating reviews from Putz Sykes. “What doesn’t?” he asked, but she’d already hailed a predatory Checker. “You’re not the only one, you’re just the first,” she said before the cab removed her, and he thought she might have been addressing the driver.
He filled two lines by typing SuzanneSuzanneSuzanne over and over. Maybe the publisher would buy that. On the third line he typed,
The first time he saw her, she was peeling carrots.
Surprised, he went on:
He immediately explained to her that carrots must be washed, not peeled. She seemed worried by the information.
Curious to find out what was happening, he kept typing.
“There are at least fifty thousand of them in readiness right now,” the beautiful woman said. Howard admired her fluency with facts.
“And the policy is, let’s have more. We could characterize this as a state of global insanity,” she went on. She had the kind of beauty useful for a crusade: strong, classic, riveting enough to gain attention, but not so demanding that it detracted from her subject. He approved of her high-necked white blouse. Passionate natures often covered up. He tried to think of an example.
“I’m not disagreeing with you, Lorraine,” a man said, “but I don’t think you’re going to get an organization going here.” With his forefinger and thumb he fondled a nonexistent beard; it had been there on the jacket of his last book.
“Doctors did. Look at Physicians for Social Responsibility.”
“Yes, fine, but how many writers do you know who are social and responsible?”
This provoked laughter around the large, crowded living room, even at the back, where several plotless novelists had knotted symbolically behind a Mission chair. A Sullivanian and frequent contributor to the New York Review occupied the chair in obvious discomfort, perhaps because among those sitting on the Navajo rug at his sneakered feet was a former movie actress and recent memoirist whose newspaper picture he’d taken into the bathroom for masturbating sessions when he was elev
en.
The beautiful crusader laughed too, to show she was human, then began describing what Manhattan would be like one minute after the air explosion of a one-megaton bomb. “The equivalent of about eighty Hiroshima bombs,” she said pleasantly.
“Let’s get out of here,” Howard muttered to Newman.
“I have to stay to sign the petition.”
They were on a red leather sofa in the middle of the room. A needlepoint pillow scratched Howard’s back. The apartment’s owner, the son of a publisher of erotic art books, sat on Newman’s other side. Howard’s other neighbor was a woman who’d written a novel in which the heroine had a mastectomy. He scrutinized her chest for a clue.
“…immediately for more than one million people,” the crusader was saying.
“Mail them your signature. Let’s get a drink.”
“She’s interesting, isn’t she?”
“She’s blowing up my apartment building and melting my family.”
“I hear she got two hundred thousand for the film rights to her book—what was it called?—and the first thing she did was have her teeth capped.”
They’d looked natural enough when she laughed. Newman proceeded to analyze her overuse of the passive voice. “Other than that, her prose is oddly muscular, as if she’d been lifting weights.”
The man who’d spoken before said to the crusader, “If you dropped a bomb in this room now, there’d be a lot of deadly literary fallout.” He grinned, expecting laughter. When none came, he rubbed his minimal nose, the result, it was rumored, of a Pinocchio complex. Howard had started the rumor in ′78 in a station wagon going downtown to a fund raiser for what he’d dubbed the Kurds and Ways Committee.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Newman whispered. “A man can be so meticulous in his work and so boorish in person. It’s enough to make you believe in divine evenhandedness.”
“Speaking of which, how’s Dina?”
“Fine.”
“You’ve been seeing her?”
“Yes.”
Howard lapsed into silence until a description of burn victims. He refused to think of Matty that way. Suzanne might already be lost to him, but not Matty. “Our Dina likes to bite, have you noticed? She used to chew my shoulder.” He caught the flash of disappointment on Newman’s face and wished emotions could be bronzed like baby shoes; he would keep that one on his desk for a paperweight. The next minute he regretted his meanness, and the minute after that he was wondering if he should sign the upcoming petition as Captain Marvel or Barbara Cartland.
Aug. 13, 1980
Dear Mother & Dad,
Hope you’re both well. I’m okay. There’s still no place you can reach me. I’m moving around a lot. I’ve sold a story, and it’s going to be published. I don’t know if I want you to read it. It’s not as hot here as it could be. The evenings are pretty cool if you don’t move too fast.
Love,
Dina
The man’s eyes were close-set and a wolflike yellow-brown. His several chins hadn’t been shaved, but the hair was too sparse to constitute a beard. It looked like a map of areas of population density in Utah. He breathed a cloud of herring and onions when he requested timidly, in a southern accent, a life of Einstein.
She found several books for him. “No, no, no,” he whined, “Einstein.”
“I don’t think he knows what he wants,” she whispered to Dan. Two aisles away, the man, a squat hulk in a short-sleeved plaid shirt, with green suspenders holding up baggy gray pants, wrestled a three-page foldout of the human skeleton back into a medical dictionary.
“Don’t you know who that is?” Dan asked.
“No.”
He shook his head and spoke a name she’d never heard before. “Probably one of the greatest writers alive.”
“He wants stuff on Einstein, but when I bring it, he doesn’t want it.”
“Not Einstein—Eisenstein.”
“He says Einstein.”
“He means Eisenstein.”
“How am I supposed to know that?”
“The references are in his last book.”
“I haven’t read it.”
“Excuses, excuses. There’s more to life than Paul Newman.” A sweet, expectant smile overcame Dan. “I’ll help him. There’s mail for you.”
“I like Paul Newman,” she called after him.
Near the register, a thick manila envelope addressed to D. Leitman produced two copies of Rosemary with her story. Her name in type on the contents page seemed to be somebody else’s. There was a listing for contributors on page 242. Howard hadn’t mentioned that. On page 242 she found herself between Blaine Jason and Sandra Olivieri. For all she knew, they were the second and third greatest writers alive.
This is D. LEITMAN’s first published story.
Blaine and Sandra each had a paragraph detailing their recent books and grants and awards and degrees and hobbies and marriages and children. Between them, the brief sentence about her seemed miserly and inflexible. It bristled like somebody being pressed in a crowded subway. She could hear her father saying, “As long as they spell your name right, kiddo.”
It was spelled right in the byline for the story. She couldn’t read any more than that. What if there was a mistake in it? What if her writing embarrassed her? She felt carsick.
“Watch out,” a man said. Two cartons slammed down beside her on the counter.
Queasy, she glanced up at Vincent Bask.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
She shook her head.
He picked up the second copy of Rosemary.
“That’s mine,” she said. She closed the copy she was holding.
“Can I look at it for a minute?”
“Why?” If he flipped through the magazine, he might notice her story or he might not notice it.
“Did I do something to upset you? Is it because I said something to your friend last week at that restaurant? Or is that your father?”
“He’s not my father.”
Bask put the magazine back on the counter and opened the cartons.
Dan had a special formula for buying books; he gave people he liked more money than others. She didn’t know if he liked Vincent Bask. “Dan’s busy right now.” She pointed out the plaid hulk. “Do you know who that is?”
“I think he used to be on TV.” Bask went to a table to search through coverless paperbacks.
She reopened Rosemary to the contributors’ page. Bask’s name was there, in a four-line paragraph.
With his third story for Rosemary in two years, VINCENT BASK extends…
She said to his broad back, “Excuse me.”
“What’d I do now?” he asked, large and undangerous.
“Your story’s inside.” She gave him a copy of Rosemary.
“Oh. Yeah. Right.” He scratched his head, and a pink ear poked out from russet curls.
“I guess you’ll get copies in the mail too.” There was no way to ask him not to look at it too hard and wear it out.
“You have something in here?” he asked.
“I read your story ‘Eating Peaches’ in the Maupassant Prize book. I liked it—”
“Thanks. What’s your name?”
“I have a copy of Bandaged Moments and I’m going to read it.”
“What’ll your friend Mr. Sykes say about that?”
“He’s a very nice man.”
“What’s your name?”
“Dina.”
“You have a story in here?”
She didn’t nod, but she didn’t shake her head, either.
“Can I read it?”
He succeeded in making her smile. “How could I stop you from reading it?” she asked.
“If you don’t want me to, I won’t. Not even at home with my own copy.”
“I didn’t ask your permission to read ‘Eating Peaches.’ ”
“You didn’t know me then.”
“Can I read Bandaged Moments?”
“Sure. The que
stion is, should you? Can I read your story?”
“Yes.” She would have preferred to say no, but no would have taken too long; Dan and one of the greatest writers alive were heading toward the register and she wanted to grab her other Rosemary before they got there.
—
The blue leather album was half-price. It had overlapping plastic sleeves, one for each snapshot. The saleswoman shot the sleeves up and down with long, curved nails. “It makes it easy to locate the one you want.” Light bounced from frosted polish on her nails, from plastic sleeves, from chrome-trimmed mirrored display cases, from windowless mirrored walls, from silver belt buckles and hammered silver bracelets, from glass stoppers in perfume bottles. An atomizer released a cloud of jasmine. The saleswoman looked across the aisle, past Suzanne. At the next counter a silver compact, shaped like a rose, winked.
The first picture would be of Matty in a white cotton dress with blue smocking. There wasn’t much smocking done anymore. And Matty preferred wearing pants or shorts. She tolerated a red gauze tent dress with tie straps. “As long as I don’t have to wear tights with it,” she said.
Suzanne flipped up an album sleeve. The second picture would be of Howard and her laughing, arms around each other. It would be a little out of focus because Matty would have been giggling when she took it. She needs me, Suzanne thought.
Over brandy after a dinner of paella with saffron rice and ecstatic murmurs from the guests (“How do you do it?”), she would set down on the coffee table a white bowl of perfect strawberries and a red bowl of unsweetened fresh whipped cream. She would see Howard’s crossed beige trouser legs. “Howard,” one of the men would say, “you lucky man.”
“And what’s this?” the man’s wife would ask, opening the blue leather album to divert attention from Suzanne. “Oh, marvelous.”
“Please, don’t bore yourself with family pictures,” Suzanne would say. Then: “Yes, that’s in Connecticut. Howard insisted we get away for a weekend and relax. Yes, that’s Washington. The National Gallery. Howard took it. That’s the Pont Neuf. We had a long weekend there. Howard surprised me.” Lovingly, eyes adoring the crossed beige trouser legs: “He always surprises me.”