She bit into a sandwich. She could see that gleaming vision now, the big room with its pieces that had been accumulated, painstakingly and lovingly, bit by bit by bit. There had been times when, after paying rent and utilities and food and the pharmacy for cosmetics and such, she had had little more than bus fare in her pocketbook. She had never minded. Even going without had been fun then.
“Well,” she said briskly, coming back to the present. “That was a long time ago. You can see I’m a sentimental sort.”
“Nothing wrong with that. You mentioned that apartment before, Christine. The house on Ninety-second Street. It was a film, wartime, espionage.”
“Only that house was on Ninety-third Street. I guess they changed it in the title for legal reasons, something like that.”
“It’s torn down now.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I saw the film for the nth time on TV the other night. It holds up pretty well.”
“What made you think of making sandwiches like this, Jack? I must tell you they’re the ultimate luxury as far as I’m concerned. When I was a kid I used to tear the crust off my bread and hide it on my lap. I hated the crust.”
“When I was a kid I used to circle it around underneath my plate.”
“I hated milk.”
“That wasn’t one of my hangups. I drank quantities of it. Once I ate practically a whole box of soda crackers and about six glasses of milk. I blew up like a balloon. God, it was gruesome.”
“Oh, poor boy. Listen, can I take a doggy bag, Jack? You made a lot of sandwiches.”
“Getting sated?”
“Rather. I did manage to pig it, as Rodney would say. Of course I don’t mean it about a doggy bag, you’ll have leftovers for lunch tomorrow. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed anything like this. It was a splurge, did you get your quarterly check today?”
“No, that will be in August. I did get a check, yes, for a foreign sale. Italian, a Milan publisher.”
“Well, great. Congratulations, Jack.”
“I like to make Italian sales. I’m a pushover for Italy, it’s a kick to think of some Roman or Milano or Florentino reading one of my things on the bus. Maybe in an outside cafe over a cup of espresso.”
“You should have put your check toward a little trip to Italia. Instead of blowing it on me.”
“It wouldn’t have taken me very far. It was a very modest check, I hasten to assure you. What is this fuss about sandwiches and wine? It’s true I did a little thinking about making some kind of a splash, yeah. The reason being that — ”
He eyed her. “Well, you,” he said slowly. “I keep worrying you’ll say one of these days, no, I can’t come over anymore, I have better things to do.”
“Why would you think that?”
“For a very good reason. One of these days you won’t come anymore.”
It threw her a little. Well, his face, the way his face looked. She spoke quickly. She felt she had to say something quickly. She said, “There’s a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Well now, I realize she’s a little out of fashion, so please don’t look pained. Anyway this poem — apparently it’s about her husband or her lover or whomever — when he died. In the poem she says, ‘He went down the hill this morning. He didn’t come up the hill again.’ I always found it incredibly moving. He went down, as usual, but he never came back up.”
He didn’t help her out at all. She needed some help, suddenly she realized it. He should take her cue, and ease over this peculiar, silent moment. His face was still and expressionless, and she felt odd. Lost, really. She remembered films — well, period films, where a woman enters a man’s apartments and stands in front of a mirror and takes off her hat. She pulls out the hatpins and is framed in the glass and then the man comes up behind her and puts his hands on her breasts and then everything becomes hazy and the camera cuts.
“I always found that so — so moving,” she said again, and put down her glass with the strawberries floating around in it. His face swam in front of her and then he leaned back against the sofa. And he still hadn’t said anything.
Her ears sang and she was conscious of the faint whistle-hum of the refrigerator. Rodney’s did that too. He said it sounded like a peanut vendor. She said with an effort, “You washed your hair this morning, didn’t you?”
He regarded her. Then he replied, unsmiling, “Fussy, ain’t it?”
“What do you use, Head and Shoulders?” she asked inanely, and knew at once where all this had been leading, where it had been leading from the very first, when Rodney had lost out on this apartment and he had told them about the other and she heard, as if from a far and ghostly distance their footsteps echoing in the empty flat, herself, Rodney and Jack. It had led straight to this quiet, heart-stopping moment, and she must have known it almost from the beginning.
“No,” she said, when his head bent to her. It was girlish and ridiculous and stupid, and they both knew she didn’t mean it. Anyone with half a mind could see that he had been sitting there quietly, waiting for the thing to jell. It was time, today was the time, and she sat tensely as he put his hands on her shoulders, the warmth of them a quick and surging pleasure that shuddered through her and for which, she now realized, she had long awaited, patient and impatient, expectant and unsure, all the while duping herself with pious little deceptions, guileful pretensions.
His mouth. At last, and the feel of him, his big bones strong and hurting, his body making its claim on hers. So long since this had happened, this unbearable and delirious time fragment, when you knew where it would end, lusted for it with your brain and your flesh and were still powerless to start the machinery going because you were in a kind of helpless inertia, not wanting to pull apart for even a single second. Lips and tongues and wildness, this animal and that animal, the straining.
He released her finally, pulled her up. They parted in an almost formal kind of way, but staggering, unsteady, silent. Silent and intent. Then they were in the bedroom, she was undressing, she could hear him doing the same. Something was knocked off a surface, a soft thud on the floor, but she didn’t turn, she had to hurry. How did I hide this from myself, she wondered, trembling. That she wanted it so much. Not it, not just it, but from him. Jack. Even his name excited her, God knew why. John Allerton. Jack.
“Wait,” he said hoarsely, and pulled the coverlet off the bed, then sank down with her onto the sheets, pushing her head to the pillow and covering her body with his own. Covering her like a blanket: she lay sheathed and swathed in him, his arms cradled round her head. He breathed deeply, as if they had come to rest to die together, he shielding her as if from some sudden, irrevocable disaster.
Not for long, their demands were too imperative. They must now know each other, what lay beyond the conversation and the laughter, the affection and the companionship, the public faces and the arrayed figures. There was another kind of knowledge, when you were all sensation, skin, flesh, feeling and heat, an assemblage of separate parts clamoring for appeasement. Avaricious and insatiable and questing. Every man smelled different, his own distinctive emanations: she reeled with this man’s skin scent, inhaled it, memorized it, his body too, lean and triangled from chest to navel with a crisp mat of that dark, dark hair. Hair and bone and sinew. Jack …
Then his massive groan as he pulled away, towered over her again, rapid and rough, hands parting her thighs, fingers digging deep into the soft flesh, painful, elating, tears in her eyes from the hard pressure, exquisite hurt. Gasping, shuddering, he drove into her, his entry forcing a cry from her lips.
Even as her own frenzy peaked, even as she writhed and thrashed with him, a thread of tenderness, like a glimmer of light in a primeval darkness, inserted itself in her consciousness. Hair all awry, like some Paleolithic cave dweller, his eyes bloodshot, sweet, sensitive face now a tortured mask, sweat running in little rivulets. Laughter somewhere inside her, untimely and grotesque, but which she recognized as human and loving, and then she was all concupiscence
again, blind and avid and climbing with him, both striving, straining, eyes wide and wild, the cries and the puffings, the heat haze.
Sliding down now, with the mind coming back and the beginnings of gentleness and the acknowledgment that they had taken this rough and ancient road together, together all the way. Spent and sweating and exhausted, tired and sated and together. Hands roving, slow and grateful and stroking, with a faint wonder, the body in the shared bed that had so recently given such incandescent delight. Quick, shamed apologies. “Your mouth. After the dentist! Did I hurt you?”
“It’s all right. I’m fine. Hold me.”
He held her. The sun, behind the drawn cedar blind, made golden stripes. “I’m terribly in love with you,” Jack said. “You must have known that.”
“Jack. I didn’t realize I felt this way. If I did, I didn’t think about it. Or I didn’t want to think about it.”
He held her, but he was a hungry man. Well, she was hungry, too. There were no cigarettes, no interludes with quiet whisperings. It wasn’t long before she felt him hardening again. He said, forgive him for what had been, unintentionally, a quickie. He said he’d just plain lost control, he had been thinking about it too much, day and night as a matter of fact and he couldn’t hold himself back. He would do better this time. “I want to make love to you in every way known to man,” he told her. “Christine — ”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just — oh, Chris, Christine.”
He was tireless, Jack was. He had waited a long time, it seemed. She recognized need when she ran into it. Jack, for whatever reason, had been starving for love. Love or sex or just someone to lie with him, alone from the rest of the world. It didn’t matter for what reason. He had his reasons, she had hers.
No afternoon lasted forever, though, and when the sun had lost its potency and fire and the last gold gleams from the window were gone you knew it was time to get back to your senses. “Jack, it’s getting late, we must stop.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s getting late.”
“Don’t go.”
“But it’s getting late.”
“Don’t leave me.”
His hair was so soft. He had washed it that morning. “Ain’t it fussy?” She’d remember that too. And that first moment, when she realized what was going to happen. She’d like to have that first moment all over again. That first, dazzling moment, which would never come again.
She lay there, picturing herself going home, walking up to Lex and passing all the familiar shops on the way to the apartment. Checking her clothes to see they were all in place. Smoothing her hair. Legs unsteady and the indelible imprint of this afternoon fixed, unerasable. She’d go in the door and say hello to the concierge and then the elevator man. “Hi, Jimmy.” Not the same woman she had been when she left this morning. A different woman, a woman who had made love to this man beside her.
“Darling, I have to go.”
After a while he eased himself up on an elbow. “Is this going to change things? I mean, now you’ll have second thoughts?”
She was honest. “I don’t know.”
“I’m in love with you. No, I don’t mean that. I love you. I love you so much I can’t stand it. I feel you’re mine. I just feel you’re mine, that’s all.”
“I love you too, that should be plain. But I’m not sure what it means. That is, in the general scheme of things.”
“If this is the end, it’s the end of everything for me. I don’t have anything else. I don’t want anything else. I don’t want anything without you, anyway.”
“You have a whole life ahead of you, Jack.”
“That’s what you probably say to Rodney. And then go home.”
She was astonished. “Rodney? There’s nothing between me and Rodney! Why, he’s just a child!”
“He’s in love with you.”
She slid out from under him. “That’s silly,” she said, unnerved. “Everyone’s in love with me all of a sudden? Jack, what are you talking about?”
“Lots of men are probably in love with you. Why shouldn’t they be? You’re a beautiful woman, certainly the most beautiful woman I ever saw.”
“Is that it?” she demanded, upset. “I’m a dish? Men want to lay me because I have good legs and — is that what it is, tits and ass?”
“Damn you,” he said quietly. “I don’t mean a face and a body and that’s the end of the story. You know I didn’t, and don’t. So don’t make like I’m a male chauvinist pig. You’re someone a man doesn’t meet, only I did, after being convinced I never would, it wasn’t in the cards for me, and if you have any idea I’ll let you walk out of here — so long, it was fun for an afternoon, thank you very much — forget it. I don’t care what you say, you knew all along I was making love to you every time we were together. I was courting you, like some village Romeo, and you wouldn’t have gone along with it if I hadn’t meant something to you. What kills me is how programmed you are, wired for the role you’re cast in, the lady of the house, the Mom, the fixer. That really makes me want to puke. I bet your husband complains he can’t find his socks and there’s static cling in his underwear. Honey, there’s static cling in my jocks and a ring around my collar. How come, Mommy? All you have to do is keep this house in order, don’t I — ”
“Don’t say any more,” she warned, stung. Stung, astonished and shaking. “I don’t know why you’re taking this tack, but let me tell you you can put your guest towels away unused, because I’m not even going to use the bathroom. I’ll take a tub at home, a long, hot tub and soak in it — what’s the matter with you?”
She was scrambling into her clothes. He looked at her and then turned away. In her undies, she stared at his back. “Jack, Jack!”
“I don’t want you to go, and I’m saying a lot of half-assed things,” he said over his shoulder. “Put it down to my being a total shit.”
“Jack, please, I don’t want to leave this way.”
He turned again and walked up to her. His eyes filled with tears suddenly. Oh, she thought. Oh, Jack. Her own eyes misted. She looked beyond him at the bed. I left myself there, Christine thought. There’s something of myself in that mussed bed. She glanced around the room. Never to come here again?
“Look,” she said. “Maybe I understand. You must understand too. This kind of thing isn’t what I do. What I ordinarily do. I mean, I never set myself up this way. Looking back, I realize it was in my mind, I was attracted to you, I just didn’t admit how much. But in a way it was excusable, because other than physical attraction I simply liked you so enormously, I just loved being with you. Attraction — hell, I see a man on the street, or in a bus, or … and that man excites me. You know, Jack, that kind of thing happens all the time.”
“Maybe.”
“It does, and you know it! Yes, and I like it, it means you’re alive, you’re a woman, but I don’t go to bed with — ”
“Neither do I.”
“But you can. You’re not married, you have no responsibility to anyone.”
She swallowed. “I’m married, and this is the first time, in seventeen years, that I’ve done anything like this. I don’t want to think on its bearing on anyone else, I don’t want to think about my husband, I don’t want anyone else to think about him, have I asked you about Phyllis? Whether you’re still missing her, wanting her? How many times you took her to bed? One thing I’ve respected and admired about you is you’ve never spilled your guts about her, never beefed or said it was her fault that you split. Or it was your fault. You never cried in your beer about any of it, you kept it your concern. We didn’t bring other people into our friendship, that meant a lot to me.”
“There’s no way I can adequately tell you how much it means to me. But I can’t go back to just being friends. Not now. I was off base, yes, what I said, that’s because I can’t get it out of my craw that you belong to someone else.”
“I belong to myself. I do have duties and obligations to a few other people,
and well I know it, but must you remind me of it? Right after we — ”
Her eyes went to the bed again. “I never felt like that before,” she said tremulously. “Not like that. Not even half like that. Even if we never saw each other again I’d remember it, cling to it. Jack, I have to get dressed.”
“I know. Sit down for only a minute, let me try to make amends, there has to be some kind of — ”
He sat down beside her, smoothed her hair back, smiled. “Promises,” he said. “From me to you. Not ever any impertinences, no more querulous accusations, the mind is master to the tongue. I would go to my room without supper, except that I am in my room and you’re still here with me. Will you be here with me, Christine? Other days? Will you be my Valentine? Just you and me, no intruders.”
He threaded his fingers through hers. She was silent. His fingers tightened. After a while he said, his voice flat, “Have I blown the whole thing to hell, then?”
No, she thought. Nothing’s changed. Not even their making love together had altered anything. She simply adored this man, she was not going to give up being with him as often as she could manage it. “Put your arms around me just for a second,” she said. “Just so I can remember how they feel. Yes, like that, soft and — ”
Then she disengaged herself. “Don’t abuse yourself,” she said. “You didn’t say anything all that infamous, just something I didn’t want to hear. Shall we try to do something on Thursday, that is if you want to and can.”
His heartened smile. “Yes, Christine. I want to. And I can.”
“Maybe we could meet at the Met. There’s that new exhibit, the Vienna art showing. Clover told me about it, her man’s Austrian, you know.”
“What time, Christine?”
“How about noon? I’ll meet you just inside the entrance. All right?”
“Yes. Fine.”
She headed for the bathroom. “Be right back.”
Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Page 17