“Is that why you turned down writing for the market?”
“Hell no. Look, spelling it out is tough, it takes either a spectacularly dirty mind or a better writer than I am. Try and think up new and original ideas about the act of fornicating. Jeez, some of the stuff I read to brief myself on what they want — absolutely hilarious. I remember one that had me heehawing for days on end, I’d wake up in the middle of the night guffawing.”
He chuckled. “Fantasies, you understand. Who has fantasies like that outside of a prepubescent kid with snot in his nose I couldn’t venture to say. In this little opus a grocery boy has a high old time with some gal he delivers to. I think one day she meets him at the door in the altogether or something, and that paves the way for the didos that follow. None of your tired old banging away, no, that’s too tame. A lot of eerie goings-on, but the really imaginative stuff is concerned with the victuals he delivers. This kid has really exotic ideas, such as stuffing food up her privates, hamburger meat, calves’ liver. Like that. Yeah, and I do remember that a grapefruit was involved, I think that was an afterthought.”
He shook his head. “I felt like asking some physician. Could you do that? A pound of calves’ liver, mind you, plus another pound of ground beef. And the grapefruit besides? Also, this woman was partial to walking around with all those provisions nestled within; she got a big charge out of that. Now you tell me, Christine, wouldn’t they fall out? Or would the grapefruit act as a kind of plug?”
She was rocking with laughter. “Yeah,” he said, shrugging. “Can you picture me wracking my brains to think up things like that?”
She finally wiped her eyes. “What I’d like to know is did she feed the stuff to her family afterwards? If so, the Board of Health should get after her. And did she eat it herself? Somehow there are cannibalistic overtones there.”
“Also, was she able to get it all out? I just don’t see how, without an X-ray picture, she could ever be sure. Besides, there were additional items on other days. I think a few Bermuda onions featured at one time. Don’t you think she could get a bad infection that way? Possibly even gangrene.”
“Well, Jack, don’t ever get so desperate that you have to write raunchy novels. If that wouldn’t put you in the loony bin I don’t know what would. I’m not sure I’ll ever have grapefruit again.”
“It left me with a faint aversion to them myself.”
Ah, yes, there was a lot of laughter along with the lovemaking, no lack of it. Walks and talks and fondness and laughter. Just the same Christine knew that Jack must have beleaguering thoughts about the position she had placed him in, that of a man compliant with a status quo which stripped him of superiority. And he with his psyche not in the best shape. What time do you have to leave? He always said that casually, without any noticeable trace of irony or anger, but she had begun to inwardly cringe, to feel that he was punishing her in the only way he knew how. That he was reminding her of her deliberate and continued betrayal, and she herself had come to see that she had been incorrect in her assumption that Carl was the one who was getting the dirty end of the stick. Not true, she realized finally, or only technically true. It would have been so if her relationship with Jack Allerton was based solely on sex, a roll in the hay, a bang, laying and getting laid. When in fact it was being, in almost every sense, a wife to two men, rather than a wife to one and mistress to another.
It would be galling to any proud man, knowing that he was lavishing himself on a woman who was not separated, divorced or even disaffected with her own going concern, her marriage. She had never given Jack any reason to believe that the physical part of her life with Carl was over — or even distasteful — so it would follow as the night the day that she was in Carl’s arms when his arms wanted her, which she was. Nor did it present any real problem for her (which probably meant she was of low moral fiber). It came as naturally for her to satisfy her husband’s desires as it would have to give an ailing child the proper attention — a back rub, propped up pillows, soup and toast fingers.
All very well, but from Jack’s point of view it would be of little comfort and, perversely enough, she wouldn’t respect him if it did. She was sometimes, in a strange and eerily discomfiting way, like a spectator watching the progress of a play, or else as if she were cogitating a case presented to her for arbitration — an amicus curiae, a friend of the court: clearly the facts as furnished indicated malicious mischief?
“I’ll have dinner with you tonight,” she told Jack on a day that was so particularly sparkling that she knew as soon as she greeted it in the morning she was not going to leave him at the usual time this afternoon. It was a day that made you think of your childhood, with everything seeming fresh and new and almost unbearably exciting, the way things used to seem then.
“Unless, of course, you’re tied up this evening.”
“You’ll really stay?”
She said quickly, “Not overnight — ”
“I didn’t expect that. I might want it, but I don’t expect it.”
He was in the bed, waiting for her. “But you’ll be here until much later on?”
“All day. We won’t have to think of the time. Let’s be together in bed for a while, then we can take a shower, we’ve never showered together, or are you anti such familiarity?”
“A man and a woman taking a shower together? I can’t believe such a lewd invitation. Maybe, though if I steel myself — ”
“You remember those buttons. ‘Save water, shower with a friend.’
“Yeah,” he said, smiling anticipatively. “We ain’t never done that, have we? Hey, that’s nice.”
“After that, how about going for a walk, let’s go to Gracie Square, sit by the water.”
“I could go for that.”
“We’ll come back with a fresh sunburn.”
“Nice. Where shall we have lunch?”
“We can pick up some deli stuff and have it here.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Actually, it’s whatever you say. I’m only making suggestions.”
“I like you to make suggestions. Okay. Bed right now. Then a walk, sit in the sun, watch the Circle Line boats. A deli for lunch stuff. After lunch, what?”
“I sort of thought maybe bed again? Unless you’d rather sit on the sofa and discuss literature.”
“I’d naturally prefer the latter, but we must please the lady. I know how avid you always are to get my hands on your body.”
He laughed. “What I meant to say was get your hands on my body.”
“Just for that we’ll sit on the sofa and discuss literature.”
“The hell we will.”
“I wonder if we’re overdoing it.”
“That’s something that never crossed my mind.”
“Here we are, on this beautiful day, burying ourselves in bed.”
“After we bury ourselves for a while we’re going out for a walk into the beautiful day,” he reminded her. “What more do you want?”
“That recurring phrase of Faulkner’s. ‘Fornication, sin and death.’ I guess it made an impression on me all those years ago.”
“Ever notice that Faulkner used the word ‘ratiocination’ a lot?”
“Yes, a lot. I wonder why.”
“He liked it.”
“He seemed to, yes.”
“Wait,” Jack said. She was undressed, ready to join him in the bed. “Don’t move.”
She stood, arrested in motion. “What is it?”
“I just want to look at you. Just for a minute. Stand there. You’re so lovely.”
“You’re making me self-conscious.”
“Don’t you know how yummy you are?”
“If you think so I’m glad.”
“You know what I like to see you do? It’s when you’re wearing earrings, and you get undressed and then the last thing you do is take off the earrings. It’s the most graceful, feminine gesture, the way your body moves, your hands move. Reaching up and taking off an earring. T
hen reaching up and taking off the other one.”
“It sends you, does it?”
Grinning up at her. “Get down here, you witch.”
“That was my original intention.”
He didn’t plunge into her prematurely anymore. He was disciplined now, artful, it was like being on a surfboard with him, breasting the waves. It was like learning to dance properly, she supposed, learning with the same partner, following the will and whim of another body, so that at last you became like one skilled entity. It was wonderful.
They didn’t look for inventions, make a production of it: whatever they did was without thought or plan. They offered freely, took freely. Discussing erotic conversations, they ended up snickering. Jack said, “I guess I’m not geared to it and apparently neither are you. I guess we’re not infantile enough. I know there are people who say things like, ‘What am I doing to you? You’re fucking me. What am I fucking you with? You’re fucking me with your prick, your joystick, your big, swollen cock, fuck me, fuck me …’”
“I think it takes rather an unnecessary amount of time, if you want to know.”
“Yeah, me too. Anyway, it’s so damned manufactured.”
He said there were also people who pretended they’d just met in a bar or a cafe, something like that, made believe it was a pickup. “Maybe they’d been to bed together for about a hundred thousand times and anything to make it something other than the same old thing. Desperation time. Also the rape fantasy. She sits there in their apartment over a drink and he lunges at her. ‘How dare you,’ she says. ‘You asked me for a drink and now you-’”
“She’s shocked to the core — ”
“And scared, very scared. He pulls her dress down at the neck. Now she’s terrified. ‘Please, please — ’”
“But he’s merciless.”
“Absolutely. He’s going to take her by force. She can see it in his eyes, his teeth are drawn back …”
“She’s going to be ravished!”
He laughed. “Maybe it works for some idiots. I was assured it did by a guy in my office, he went into great detail.”
“Is that what men talk about in offices? I thought that kind of chitchat took place in locker rooms.”
“You must be kidding. It’s standard water cooler stuff.”
But it was true that she and Jack didn’t need to rely on artificial stimuli when the chemistry of their bodies and minds was so potent: it was clear that Jack enjoyed and feasted on her, that a sudden caress — idly, and in passing — sent the blood coursing through his veins and ventricles. He often erected with her hand slipped inside his shirt, she loved to do that, see him lose his preoccupation with something abruptly, feel his quick reaction.
As for herself, she was a hundred percent male-oriented, but had never felt she was phallus-worshipping, yet the fact was that the mass between his legs — or even just thinking about it — was very nearly an obsession, there was something almost embarrassing about it. She found herself, when alone, cupping her hands as if to imprison the weight of balls and penis between them. This fixation traveled into her dreams: she woke recalling night visions of male parts, like the exaggerated statuary in the Archaeological Museum at Naples, relics of libidinous Pompeii, those Priapus idolators who had tirelessly carved male genitalia in stone and marble and travertine, penis after penis in a state of upthrust tumescence, bigger and better their motto. The Neopolitans were still turning them out to this very day, on an assembly line basis, you could buy them at the souvenir stalls, take one home for a tittering conversation piece.
“I don’t like the soap,” she complained, when they got into the shower. “And the spray’s too forceful. Hey! I don’t want to get my hair wet! You should have a shower cap.”
“How can you take a shower without getting your hair wet?”
“I told you. Just hold my head away. Like this. The rest of me will get the water. Only turn down the spray a bit.”
“How are we going to have exotic little adventures in here if there are all these prohibitions?”
“We’ll just be like two dear little children.”
His laugh echoed against the tiles. “You’re the weirdest woman in the world, I could eat you up. Oh, and say, what’s the matter with the soap?”
“It’s drying,” she said tersely. “Bad for the skin. You should use Keri or Lubriderm, I’ll bring you some.”
“Let me tell you, no gal I ever showered with objected to the quality of my soap.”
“I’ll wash your mouth out with this if you start talking about other women.”
“Jealous, huh? Ah, the beautiful women I’ve showered with, m’dear. Fifty beautiful girls, fifty. A cast of thousands. The wolf of Sixty-first Street.”
“Open your mouth!”
“You shove that cake of soap in my mouth, I’ll stick your head under the water.”
“Okay, uncle. Enough! My lovely curls — ”
“This is fun,” he said. “It’s not ball-aching, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun, being a dear little child with you.”
“See? There are other ways to entertain oneself.”
Drying off afterward, toweling. One of Jack’s oversized bath towels, which today were a deep royal blue. “You need towels?” she asked him. “You need bed linen? I like to buy you things, you know. Please tell me what you need, Jack.”
“A mink coat,” he said. “Full-length.”
“I’ll have it sent over in the morning. Seriously. What are you in short supply on?”
“Why don’t you shut your yap? Save your pennies for Christmas.”
“Okay, what do you want for Christmas?”
He regarded her. “Oddly enough, I was thinking about that the other day,” he said. “What I’m going to give you for Christmas. In a way I can hardly wait for it. It’s been many a year since it meant something to me.”
“Really, Jack?”
“Ah, yes. Well, there are a lot of shopping days until then, gives me time to think up something Christineish. By the way, let’s not forget to get you a shower cap on our walk.”
“And some decent soap.”
“Nag, nag, nag. Get dressed, babe, it’s Gracie Square time.”
Walking over, the sun high in the sky, it was early, they had hours ahead of them. Passing Henderson Place, those magnificent old houses, ivy-trimmed, austere. Then the little park that led to the boardwalk, which was trimmed up with strollers and baby carriages and kids on roller skates, toddlers pedaling away on scooters. The sun on the water, small craft gliding along, the bridges that spanned the rippling blue expanse.
“I used to come here on Sunday mornings with my Times,” Christine said when they sat down on one of the benches. “Deepen my summer tan at the same time. It’s a nice place to have handy.”
“I came here when the tall ships passed. Bicentennial year. Great show, that was something to take your mind off your troubles.”
“Were you having troubles then, Jack?”
“Yes, quite a few.”
Maybe, she thought, it pinpointed when the breakup came, Jack’s breakup, his marriage pfft. It sounded rather like that. He didn’t say. He never said anything, or at least hadn’t to date. “There’s that park on Sutton Place too,” she said. “Very small, very pretty, do you know that one?”
“No, I guess not. There’s John Jay, but farther down. I guess I haven’t come across it.”
“We’ll go there sometime.”
“Cigarette?”
“No, I’m too comfy to bother. Thanks.”
“What a day.”
“I love the sun. I love it. I know people who couldn’t care less about the weather. So it’s raining, they say. What’s wrong with rain? So it’s overcast. You wouldn’t want it to be sunny all the time? But I would!”
“I’m not keen on cloudbursts myself,” Jack said. “I even decided against basing myself in London because I wasn’t sure I could stick the gray of it. The pea soupers and the drizzles.”
“You did consider living in England, then?”
“I considered a lot of things. Get away seemed to be a solution. Most of us have periods when we want to run. So I guess at one time I wanted to run. I didn’t get very far, I’m still in the place I started in.”
“So am I.”
“We could be in a worse place. New York seems like home, I guess it always will.”
“Oh, by the way, Jack. I’ve been to London three times, I never ran into a pea soup fog. Believe that if you will.”
“Oh, I don’t think they’re all they’re cracked up to be. I think they’re mostly in Hitchcock thrillers. At least I’ve never been totally fogbound whenever I was there, not thè kind where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Plenty of pouring rain, though. I find it rather daunting, and it would definitely add to your cleaning bills if you lived there.”
“Suppose you made a big haul with some book of yours. Maybe the one you’re writing now. More money than you ever dreamed of. I assume you’d have your pièd a terre here, in New York, and then what else besides? A lovely little chalet in Switzerland? A villa in Nice?”
He thought it over. “Both,” he decided. “Let’s see, now. Oh yeah, Fiesole. A villa in Fiesole, naturally. With that view. That view …”
“I remember that view well,” she said. “Yes, I can picture you up there, in one of those crumbly-stuccoed houses with the red-tiled roofs, sitting in the garden typing, with a bottle of Punt é Mes on a table. You’ve grown a beard, and your face is now a famous face and you, too, have grown fond of the word ‘ratiocination’ and — ”
“Can you tell me when all this is going to happen, I’d just as soon have a little advance notice. And how do I look with a beard display, adorable?”
“Most impressive. There goes one of your Circle Line boats. People on the deck waving as if it were the QE. II. Bless them, they seem to be having a fine time.”
“I don’t suppose you’re hungry?”
“Which means you are. Am I a selfish slob to take up a whole day of yours like this? How can you become famous sitting by the water in Gracie Square?”
Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Page 22