They had a hot dog each, sitting on a bench to eat it and then wiping mustardy hands with the postage-sized napkin provided. She started to rise, but Jack said, “No, sit. You’ll want another one, won’t you?”
“No, Jack, I couldn’t possibly.”
“Okay, then, I’ll get us some Good Humors. What flavor for you?”
“My eyes were bigger than my stomach. No, really.”
He sat down again, leaned against the bench. She gave him a quick look. He was grave and quiet, drumming his fingers in a rat tat tat on the bench. She looked away and opened her handbag for a cigarette. She couldn’t find her lighter. He put a hand on her arm. She thought he meant to offer his own lighter for her, but instead he took the cigarette out of her fingers.
“Christine?”
“Yes?”
“Can’t we go home now? That is, would you want to?”
She said, “Home?”
“To my place, Christine.”
This was what was meant when people said their bones turned to water. She felt like that, as if she were a sack of water, just all fluid, every bit of her. He was waiting for her to answer, though any fool could see it in her face. She was so overcome with gratitude and relief she could scarcely speak. She nodded, and her voice came back to her. “Yes, let’s go home,” she said almost in a whisper, but he got the message. A quick, sharp intake of his breath, and then he pulled her up. Swaying slightly, she regained balance and locomotion when he thrust an arm through hers, steered her across the avenue, and then they continued their walk downtown, to Jack’s place. Nothing to discuss now, nothing to speculate about. The test was over, there would be no more uncertainties, no further unspoken questions. This was home, he had said so, and so she felt; it was like finding something she had lost, or mislaid, a long time ago, and then given up, with sad reconcilement, for good.
• • •
As before, he was quickly propelled to climax and, as before, rueful about it. “It’s the same damned old thing, I just have this on my mind so much, with you, thinking of being with you, and then when I am I go all ape.”
“Can’t you see I was in a hurry too? Eating that damned hot dog. I thought I’d choke. All I wanted was to get my hands on you. I love your body.”
“As for yours, well you can see what it does to me. Listen to me still panting away, I sound like some animal in rut. It gives me a visceral, ass-aching pleasure to have you talk about my body. You never think of your own body, it’s just something you tote about everywhere, feed it and empty it, but when someone you’re insane about says, ‘Your body,’ you feel you have something there. Give me enough time, you telling me you like it, I’ll start flashing on the street.”
“Oh, don’t be a flasher, Jack. You’ll end up in a police station and I’ll have to come and bail you out. So shaming for me. Look at that nice lady, would you ever think she’d take up with an exhibitionist? Tsk tsk.”
“Agreed, then, I won’t flash. I’ll phone you instead, breathe heavy into the phone, drive you nuts. ‘Now I’m pulling it out,’ I’ll say. ‘Now I’m erecting.’ How about that? Yeah, maybe I’ll dial your number and you’ll be doing a crossword while waiting for the roast to cook. There you are, all calm and cozy and then this voice says — ”
“How would I know it was you?”
“I’ll say something. Some password. Something a random caller wouldn’t know about. ‘You’ve got a little beauty spot on your toches.’ Incidentally, I’ve been dreaming about it.”
“It doesn’t take much to please some people.”
“Everything about you does. Drives me crazy. It’s sick, I suppose. Thinking about you, and you’re not here, and I walk the floor, not seeing anything and bumping into furniture. You have no idea. The first time I saw you. With that boy. I didn’t know who he was, what he meant to you, and then we went out to lunch. Don’t close your legs. I don’t remember what we talked about because I was beginning to lose my mind about you. Right away, right away fast. Don’t close your legs.”
“I don’t really like that,” she protested faintly.
His voice, muffled. His dark head between her thighs. She stirred, tried to move. His hands forced her thighs farther apart. Why did she say she didn’t like his mouth there, she asked herself. Why was she still self-conscious? Let go, she instructed herself. Let go, give yourself up.
Then her body took over again, the way it had the other day, two days ago. All you had to do was forget time and everything else and let yourself go: There was no one else, there was nothing else, just this — the pain-pleasure, like a powerful stimulant zooming into her, drove thought away, she was body now, strong and passionate and driven, her legs had their own life, her arms theirs, her mouth, his mouth, they were inside each other’s skins, sweat and hair and orifices. The room whirling, now the ceiling, now the pillow, her face buried in it, rolling, tossing, then the unbearable, the colossal, agonizing, mind-blowing sequence of orgasmic contractions, never like this. Oh no, never like this …
No more talking after that. No jokes, no funnies. Do it again. Rest for a while and then do it again. You had to feel like that once more before you looked at a watch or a clock and thought about leaving. You had to have it in your mind to remember. Walk around the house and remember, eyes filmed, abstracted, it was one of the things you had between you, no one else knew about it, what you could do together. It didn’t happen all that often, it wasn’t an idle pastime, it was a necromancy, this particular man and this particular woman. “God,” Jack said, in a kind of stricken voice. “God.”
They lay quietly, spent. The only thing Christine was thinking now was that she would very much like to stay right through, make dinner for him, with candles on the table, and in the morning find him beside her, that dark head on the other pillow. Anything else seemed almost obscene. It wasn’t what she had intended at all, feeling that way. But then she supposed it wasn’t what he had intended either.
She stirred after a while, sighed. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s getting late, you have to go.”
“I’m afraid so.” She tensed, remembering the other day. Oh, please don’t let him be resentful again.
But he only stroked her hair, smiled down at her. “If you have to go you have to go. Chris, when?”
She knew he meant when would they see each other again. “I promised myself I wasn’t going to keep you from your work,” she said hesitantly. “Jack, what do you think? It will be hard to stay away from you. Just the same, we both have to be reasonable. I just don’t know what to say.”
“I do. You may not realize it, but you can only turn out good work when you’re living. Shutting yourself up all alone in a room is death. An empty mind, you can’t work that way. Since I met you I’m turning out great stuff, I’m at the top of my form, I mean that.”
He ran a finger down her nose, then traced the outline of her lips, chuckled. “Hell, I don’t mean I’m writing about us,” he assured her. “Just in case it’s crossed your mind. No, I just mean I’m alive, my work is alive, it flows.”
He raised himself on an elbow. “I want to be with you as much as possible, as much as you can manage. You’re here now, even when you’re not here in the flesh, I see you everywhere, I even talk to you. I was thinking — ”
He bent and kissed her, a long kiss. He felt her quick protest. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to arouse the sleeping lion again. Uh, I was thinking — well, could we say hello to each other in the mornings? On the phone. I call you or you call me, just hello, how are you, I love you. Like that. Then — ”
Thoughtfully: “Maybe we could be together at least two times a week? Not one of those Monday and Wednesday kind of things, but — ”
His eyes questioned her. “I know nothing about your life, I only know about mine. It doesn’t always have to be in bed, either. Maybe a couple of hours in the middle of the day — take a walk, have lunch somewhere. Be together.”
He slid down again. “I guess
I’ll have to leave a lot of it up to you. I don’t even know if this means as much to you as it does to me.”
“It does,” she said resignedly. “It does indeed. Well, Jack, yes, we’ll do that, talk to each other in the morning, say hello and then work it out. Don’t call me when your neighbor sneezes, that’s too early, promise?”
“Good thing you told me, that’s exactly when I had in mind.”
“Revise your thinking, then.” She threaded her fingers through his hair. “Who does your coiffures, honey? Kenneth? Cinandre?”
“No. A perfect little gem of a guy nobody’s discovered yet. My deep, dark secret, I decline to give out his name. Unisex, males and gays. I was wondering when you’d ask.”
“It has that untamed look, I think I’ll snip off a lock of it.”
“Good idea, I’ll give you a gold locket to put it in.”
“I love your hair.”
“Don’t give me that shit, it was a crack.”
“No crack. It’s sexy, it feels pubic.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Your hair was one of the first things to attract me. I kept thinking about it.”
“Odd you should say that. It was your hair too. I couldn’t pin down the color. Buckwheat honey, but that was a cheap, easy word, a magazine story word. Besides, it’s tawnier, but that’s all used up, it is to shudder. I can’t find anything right.”
“I can. Dishwater blonde.”
“Say that again and you get a crack on the mouth.”
“Okay, dun-colored.” She sighed again, sat up regretfully. “What are you having for dinner tonight?”
“I don’t know. Chicken divan, maybe. That’s not Swanson’s, it’s Stouffer’s. Pretty good. I might succumb to Mrs. Paul’s fried clams. I have a big special for when I’m down in the mouth. Short ribs, it costs almost five dollars, I feel like Diamond Jim Brady.”
“I’d love to make you dinner. I can’t stay to do it, but I’d love to.”
He laughed, watching her slide off the bed. “I knew someone once,” he said, “who corrected me whenever I used that phrase, make dinner. A Jewish lady who told me you ‘prepared’ dinner, you didn’t make it. She said you make a cake, yeah, or you make a bed, and when kids had to do number two they said they had to ‘make’. Did you ever hear a kid say that?”
“I think Jewish kids do, Jack. My friend Ruth’s’ children did. You don’t seem to have been around very much.”
“Aha. I’m insular.”
“Our first fight, how lovely.”
He laughed softly. “You nut …”
“Now where did I put my bra?”
“I hid it. Now you can’t leave.”
“It’s all right, here it is. This room’s a mess, our clothes are strewn all over. Please get dressed, I can’t bear to leave you wearing your bathrobe, it tears my heart out.”
“It does? Makes you sorry for the poor guy? Okay, I’ll put it on.”
But he obeyed her, got into his regular things and came to her while she was giving a brush to her hair, put his arms around her. “What’s really the right time to call in the morning, Chris?”
“Nine, nine-thirty. Okay, you call me tomorrow.”
At the door he took her in his arms. “I’m loath to let you go. But then I always will be.”
“Maybe on Monday we can take a walk somewhere. Or lunch at Anthony’s.” She pulled away from him. “It’s only you I’m worried about, Jack. Your work.”
“Don’t worry about me. Chris — ”
“What?”
“You make me incredibly happy.”
She walked home at a leisurely pace. Her mind wasn’t on this evening’s menu at all, her mind was elsewhere. She would see him, probably, next Monday. Meanwhile, she smelled him, tasted him, heard his voice, that low rumble. She permitted herself all this delightful bemusement until she walked into the lobby of the Colonnade, then she shifted gears, became that other person.
“Hi, Jimmy.”
“Beautiful day today, Mrs. Jennings.”
“Perfectly lovely.”
“Spring has sprung.”
“Actually it’s summer.”
“You’re right.”
“About time, wouldn’t you say?” Which was dumb, it had been excellent weather all along. It was the kind of thing everyone always said, that was all, like telling someone to have a good day. Carl was home almost on the heels of her own arrival, looking grim: he was greatly disturbed about the death of a thirty-nine-year-old patient who threw an embolism. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Short of raising her from the dead, I can’t think of a thing,” he said, unaccustomedly curt with her.
“I meant make you a drink, perhaps?”
“Chris, I can make my own drink.” The fact was that a predinner drink was not his usual style, but he did splash some bourbon into a glass and then tossed it off straight.
“Are you all right, Carl?”
“What else can I be? These things happen, there was nothing I could do to foresee it. It’s shit, but there you are, it comes with the territory. You just feel like a fucking jerk when you see someone seemingly in perfect health go down like that, you wonder what you’re in business for.”
He went through the swinging doors, was back almost immediately. “I didn’t mean to be cross with you,” he said.
“It’s okay, I can imagine how you must feel. Read the paper, take a nap, dinner won’t be ready for another hour. I love you, dear.”
I couldn’t be a doctor, she thought, looking out the kitchen window. I couldn’t go through that kind of thing. He would pull himself together at the dinner table, though, for the sake of the rest of them. He was a very nice man, a good man. She didn’t want to hurt him, and she wouldn’t. There were things he would never know about her, she would see to that, and what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you.
13.
There were penalties to pay when you gave yourself up to duplicity, unexpected forfeitures, like hidden expenses in an investment: you hadn’t counted on them, really, you dimly sensed that there might be some additional costs, though too titillated by the wonderful thing you had bought on a shoestring to think deeply on supplementary amercements. You had your treasure and the joy in it, so you waived fugitive doubts, relaxed and enjoyed it and told yourself you would deal with the devil when he decided to show up for further and final payment.
But you couldn’t wholly put the old Adversary out of your mind, and besides he was clever, wily, exacting recompense even before it was due, relying on conscience to do some of his dirty work for him. He gave you the golden rose (take it, it’s yours, kiddo) and then laughed up his sleeve when you pricked yourself on the thorns that lay so innocently concealed. But you didn’t give back the rose, you might bleed a little, but you held on to it, gloating. Mine, mine …
Or so you would imagine, thought Christine, trying to sell herself a bill of goods on the guilt and worry she should be feeling. She didn’t believe for a minute that an extramarital affair meant you were of low moral fiber: that was cant. Monogamy happened to be the law of the land and a fairly reasonable way of safeguarding the institution of marriage. Even if it was asking a hell of a lot. She didn’t raise her eyebrows about it, but when it came down to brass tacks if you had an itch you scratched it and, all things considered, copulation with an outside party wasn’t the whole point anyway. In fact was not really — because you were dealing with human vulnerabilities — the point at all, but was more or less beside it.
It was awful, for example, that she gave scarcely a thought to the man she was blithely betraying, i.e. Carl, who hadn’t a notion in the world that another man was in the picture — in fact, was in the forefront of the picture. She used to wonder if Carl, who must run into lovely and desirable women patients, strayed occasionally: she had heard a few bitter truths from the mouths of other doctors’ wives. It had always seemed unlikely, since his habits were so regular and ordere
d, home for dinner when he should be, draped about the house on weekends. Possibly on some trip to another city, a Medical Congress — perhaps then he met some female on the loose, who knew? It had never troubled her. She had to confess to herself that it was of no large import. Was that indifference, lovelessness on her part?
No, it was not, she decided quickly. Her husband was part of her, part of the progress of her life, a good man if not an imaginative one, a little bit like a father, though he was only two years older, but he was steady and down to earth and somehow like a person of another generation: he even used some of the stock phrases her own father did.
If there was a faint, fugitive reservation, it was about the kids. No way in the world they could ever unearth this new facet of her life and yet — well, she was weirdly shy about Bruce and Nancy’s regarding her as other than a parent. There must be something Victorian about her, but it made her squirm to think of their sensing in her a questing sexuality, that Mother had a lover, which meant stolen moments, a dark and dirty wallowing and then coming home to them brazening it out, the Mother-whore. That was the way they would view it!
And it wasn’t like that at all. If it were, it would be far less disloyal to Carl.
But it wasn’t like that.
In fact it was a gorgeous gift, a rebirth, a lustrous wonder, the knowledge of it bursting into her consciousness when morning came and sending her off to sleep at night with a thankful smile. In fact it was something to guard and cherish and protect, like some exquisite, orchidaceous bloom coarse hands could soil and sully, needing painstaking care and love. In fact Jack was not her lover, but her love, his apartment not a way station but a place she felt was home.
Even the mechanics of the situation dismayed her not at all, the careful arrangements, the delicate maneuverings, the dual roles she assumed seemed not so much double-dealing as a necessary evil she cheerfully took on. It was her tribute to Jack, a way to show her wholehearted devotion. She wasn’t only cosseting him, he must be made to see, she was cosseting herself, which anyway was the plain and honest truth, and in a way a terrible truth. If there were to be a phone call, some unfamiliar voice saying there had been a bad accident, she must be brave, it would be Jack who instantly sprang into her mind: Jack had been killed in an accident, Jack was dead. He was dead, she would never see him again, never have his arms around her, never stroll the Manhattan streets with him, never …
Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Page 19