“You,” Henry went on to say, “are the best kisser I have ever kissed.”
Joanna said, “How do other women kiss?”
Henry said, “Differently.”
This told Joanna nothing.
The women she knew, she realized, also told each other nothing. They did not say, How do you kiss? Where do you put your arms, your legs? How far do you take his cock into your mouth? Even if they did ask this last question, they would not say “cock.” They would say “penis” because they were polite well-brought-up women who prided themselves on being anatomically, if not sartorially, correct and they would not say the c-word even if they had one in their mouths.
Joanna and her friends were only joking when they asked each other, “Do you spit or swallow?” It was a rhetorical question. They did not really want to know. They did not want to picture their dear gentle friends clutching some man’s bare back, moaning, maybe drooling, eyes glazed over with unbridled passion. They could not picture their dear gentle friends’ faces contorted with ecstasy.
When they talked about sex, they compared results. They did not compare technique.
Results meant: Did he pay your cab fare home? Did he call you the next day? Did he fall forever in love with you? Did he ask you to the dance next Saturday night?
Technique would have meant: Did he groan when he first put it in? Did he call your name (or God’s or somebody else’s) when he came? Did he come? Did you? How long did it take? How many times? Who was counting?
Joanna never did get up the nerve to tell anyone that Henry said she was an exquisite fuck. What if he was wrong? What if he was right? How could she ever know?
secret adj. 1. a) kept from general knowledge, b) abstruse; concerning occult or mystical matters. 2. remote; secluded; private. 3. keeping one’s affairs to oneself. 4. mysterious or esoteric. 5. in a clandestine manner; concealed from notice; hidden.
A Saturday morning, 8:45. Lewis was rubbing his penis between Joanna’s legs and her back was arched. Wanda was away for the weekend. Joanna was moaning and looking straight into his eyes when the phone rang.
It was Esther. “Finally,” she said triumphantly, “finally I got the truth out of Agnes.”
Who the hell was Agnes, Joanna thought, naked, aching. Oh yes, Agnes, her mother’s friend, Agnes from the bridge club.
“Finally,” Esther gloated. “She’s kept it a secret all these years. But now I’ve got it.”
What she had was Agnes’s secret special family recipe for a dessert called Yum Yum Good. Agnes brought this concoction to everything: to bridge club, to funerals, bake sales, and afternoon teas. Everybody loved it but Agnes just smiled like a magician who will not reveal the tricks of the trade to anyone under any circumstances. Finally, Esther had wormed it out of her. She insisted now on reading the recipe into the telephone. She insisted now that Joanna immediately copy it down. For the sakeof keeping peace in the family, Joanna, still naked, found pencil and paper and listened.
YUM YUM GOOD
Crust:
24 graham wafers crushed (or 1 3/4 cups crumbs)
1/2 cup melted butter
1/3 cup white sugar
Dissolve sugar and butter by creaming. Add to crumbs and pat into 8- or 9-inch pan, saving enough for topping.
Filling:
16 marshmallows
1 1/2 4-oz. Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bars
1/2 cup milk
1 cup whipping cream
Melt marshmallows, chocolate, and milk together in double boiler. Cool. Whip whipping cream very stiff. Combine with chocolate mixture. Spoon over crust and sprinkle on topping. Refrigerate overnight.
Afterwards Joanna wondered what had possessed her to answer the phone in the first place. Who was she expecting anyway? A stranger giving away a million dollars if only she could correctly answer the skill-testing question: 467 + 289 - 14 x 999 =? The Nobel Prize nominating committee telling her she was in the running? Wanda accusing and crying and cursing so that finally the truth would out, the secret would explode into all of their startled ghastly faces, and they could at long last get on with their lives, whatever they were going to be? Who was she expecting anyway? Who on earth could she have thought would have something more important to say than Lewis at that moment looking straight into her eyes and telling her that he loved her to death?
Afterwards Joanna bought an answering machine, and whenever Lewis came over she turned it on the minute she saw him coming up her driveway. They would lie there in her bed listening to the voices speaking into the machine in the kitchen, listening to the unsuspecting voices of business associates, bill collectors, or friends. Joannaand Lewis would lie there in her big bed in her blue bedroom like spies, listening and giggling and safe, so they thought, from the unsuspecting rest of the world.
One such snuggly afternoon, Lewis told Joanna a secret about Wanda. He told her that Wanda still sucked her thumb when she went to bed.
“No wonder we never make love any more,” Lewis said mournfully. “Can you imagine having sex with somebody sucking their thumb?”
Joanna did not laugh nearly as hard as she wanted to. She also did not tell Lewis that she too still sucked her thumb, her left thumb, had sucked it so long, in fact, that it was now smaller than her right.
It was an innocent-enough secret, Wanda’s thumb-sucking, and yet Joanna managed to throw this knowledge back at Lewis later, turning it on him in an argument just the way she swore she never would. They were naked in Joanna’s bed. They were arguing because Lewis had told Joanna he’d already made love to Wanda, not once but twice, that morning, so maybe now he couldn’t or maybe now they shouldn’t because it just didn’t seem right.
Joanna said, “What happened? Did she stop sucking her thumb?”
When Lewis said, “I never should have told you that. I feel like I’ve betrayed her,” Joanna laughed in his face and then cried on his naked chest.
Then Lewis went home for supper with Wanda. Joanna went downtown for groceries. Waiting in the checkout line at the A&P, she overheard the woman in front of her hissing at her husband, “Of course she’s got trouble, she’s always got trouble. But don’t you go feeling sorry for her! It’s no secret. She brought it all on herself.” Joanna wondered if it might not be the people who bring their trouble on themselves who need and deserve the most sympathy in the end.
After the affair was over, Joanna never did get up the nerve to tell anyone how the loss of Lewis had ruined her whole world. How she could not even masturbate any more without crying. Who would she tell?
After the affair was over, Joanna thought about how time is supposed to heal all wounds. How time, like some antibiotic ointment faithfully and regularly applied to the affected area four times a day,is supposed to be the magic anodyne which will eventually render one’s scar tissue down to innocuous layers thin as rice paper. But what if it doesn’t? What if it only makes it worse? Ah yes, the exquisite torment of time and the truth.
exquisite adj. 1. carefully done or elaborately made [an exquisite design]. 2. of great beauty and delicacy [exquisite lace]. 3. consummate; extreme; of highest quality [exquisite technique], 4. keenly sensitive; fastidious; discriminating [an exquisite ear for music]. 5. acutely susceptible to; sharply intense; keenly felt [exquisite pain].
On the delivery table for eleven hours trying to give birth to Samuel with Gordon there as her coach, Joanna says all the things she was told in prenatal class that she would say and that she swore she never would.
She says, “I hate you! This is all your fault! I‘ll never sleep with you again! I hate you! Why did you do this to me? I hate you! Why can’t you help me? I hate you! Go away! Please don’t leave me! I love you!”
When Samuel is barely one month old, Joanna realizes there were a lot of things they didn’t tell her in prenatal class. They didn’t tell her how some days it would be too much trouble to even comb her hair, let alone change her smelly milk-stained blouse, let alone even consider making love to a ma
n, any man. They didn’t tell her how some nights, awake with him again at 4:00 A.M., she would think of how easy it would be to accidentally put the pillow over his face and hold it there, and no one would ever know what had really happened. They didn’t tell her how after she’d imagined suffocating him, then she would sit the rest of the night beside his bassinet watching him breathe, weeping with guilt. They didn’t tell her how a little tiny baby would change every single detail (past, present, and future) of her entire life.
46. SOLDIER
DESPITE ALL PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE to the contrary, Joanna can never quite believe that her father fought in the war. There are dozens of war pictures which were never pasted into the album withthe rest. In fact, the album does not begin until 1954, the year Joanna was born. All the earlier prints and negatives were stored in a shoe box in the original developers’ envelopes in no apparent order. Because Esther kept threatening to throw the box away (she was tired of moving it around, she never looked at those old pictures any more anyway, who would want to?) Joanna took them with her when she left home.
Being an artist, now she has ulterior motives beyond her instinctive needs for archival order and memory. She still believes that if these needs are eventually satisfied, from them will issue clarity, meaning, and a coherent sense of reality. She might use the war pictures in a series of collages.
They are in an orange envelope with Esther’s name on the top. Joanna sorts through them, selects the best ones, and then arranges them page by page in a new photo album, sticking them down with those black paper corners so she can still lift them out to read Clarence’s handwritten notes on the back.
PAGE ONE:
A shadowy man riding in a wagon drawn by a white horse down a wet cobblestone street. An old car disappearing in the opposite direction. Tall vine-covered buildings on either side, sunlight on stone, the shadow of a tree. The village is not named. Perhaps this is where Clarence and his soldier buddies were so hungry they ate olives right off the tree and made themselves sick.
An empty city street, modern, with large brick buildings and part of a viaduct on the right. In the center beneath a leafless tree, a round metal structure sits on the sidewalk, open on one side, with lattice work and iron leaves ringing its domed top. No matter how many times Joanna looks at this picture she thinks of it as an elaborate European phone booth, despite the fact that Clarence has written Italian Urinal on the back. She cannot imagine her shy father peeing in this place, let alone taking a snapshot of it to send back to Esther in Canada waiting at home.
Harbour in Naples: Smooth grey water, placid but crowded with intricately rigged ships puffing black smoke. On the left a freighter, docks, and large piles of something that looks like salt. A fluffy white cloud coasting in the center of the sky.
PAGE TWO:
A statue of two naked people kissing on a marble pedestal. The woman is draped from the waist down. She has her arms around the man’s waist. He has one hand up to her face as if he were kissing her and putting his fingers in her mouth at the same time. His blurry genitals look like grapes.
Another statue of a naked woman also on a pedestal looking to the right, her left hand spread across her crotch, her right hand hovering protectively below her full breasts.
A third statue, a fountain. A cherubic little boy with dimpled arms and legs peeing proudly in a steady stream. On the back it says: The Little Boy of Brussels.
The interior of an enormous unidentified basilica with soaring vaulted carved and painted ceilings, Corinthian columns, shining stone floor. Two diminutive priests strolling in black, two soldiers in uniform, another man in the middle in a white hat. Joanna can make out letters carved into the stone near the dome: NI CAELORVM TV ES PETRVS. She does not read Latin but she likes the sound of it.
When did Clarence do all this sightseeing and picture taking, all this art appreciation between battles? It is as difficult to picture her father in this church as it is to imagine him in his tank, in the trenches, in mud or smoking rubble up to his knees. It is as difficult to picture him down on his knees praying as it is to imagine him killing Germans.
PAGE THREE:
The Colosseum in Rome, the wide boulevard in front nearly empty of vehicular traffic save two army jeeps on the right. There are several bicycles, one motor scooter, and many pedestrians: six men in white uniforms, a soldier in shorts, a woman with long dark hair and a newspaper, another woman balancing a large package on her head. The ruined ancient structure looms over the street as if it too had been damaged in this long war.
A bombed-out building, rubble piled all around it, timbers, rocks, and wires heaped upon its collapsed roof. Joanna recalls (and cannot completely cast off) her childhood confusion, her sense that everything must have happened at once, as if it were all the same war.
Clarence and another soldier both in uniform leaning against an undamaged building. Between them is a small scruffy dog and a short plump woman in a striped belted dress. Her breasts are very round and large, the left one hanging lower than the right so she looks lopsided. They are all smiling. Clarence has his arm around the woman, who has neat dark hair and an open peasant face. The back of this picture is blank. It gets mixed up in Joanna’s mind with the one of the bombed-out building. Bombs. Shells. Bombshells. Is this woman a bombshell? War, women, sex, death, and other surprises. She never does ask Clarence about the woman in this photograph.
PAGE FOUR:
A picturesque shot of a rolling valley, misty mountains fading into an overexposed sky. Joanna can make out sun-struck buildings, undulating fields, roads like ribbons or veins. On the back it says: Bertchesgaden, Germany, 1945, taken from Hitler’s balcony.
Another soldier, not Clarence, posed in front of a bombed-out building. Beside him a sign: GOERING’S HOME. This time it is the ground which has been overexposed, faded to white, so the soldier seems to be standing on air.
Esther posing on the front step of their white house in a white suit, padded shoulders, black blouse, big shiny earrings, legs crossed at the knee, arms crossed at the wrist, waiting, while Clarence takes pictures from Hitler’s balcony and gives his heart over maybe to unknown bombshells.
PAGE FIVE:
Holland, 1945: Clarence’s head sticking out of a Sherman tank, its top open like the lid of a tin can, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, radio headphones like earmuffs.
Our crew, October 6, 1945: Clarence and four other out-of-focus young men kneeling, squatting, standing in front of the tank.
My tank, Cecil III: the enormous muddy machine lined up with four identical others in a field of dirt. The gun of her father’s tank sticking straight up. Now it looks like an erect penis but when she was younger, it only looked like a big scary gun.
PAGE SIX:
Two vertical shots of the same brick building, undamaged, manywindows, white curtains, striped awnings. Apartments, a hospital, an orphanage, what? In the first picture, three buxom serious women on the sidewalk in front with a baby in a white bonnet in a black carriage and a little boy on a tricycle. In the second picture, seven little boys out front, all in shorts and argyle knee-socks. On the back of both of these it is written: In remembrance of the ending of the war on the 5th of May 1945.
Inexplicably (or naturally) enough, Gordon has been reading a book called Decisive Battles of World War II. There are many maps and pictures, chapters on the Blitzkrieg, the Battles of Britain, Midway, El Alamein, Stalingrad, Monte Cassino. Joanna knows for sure that Clarence was in this last one. She studies the photographs looking for her father’s face. Could that be him inside a rolling Sherman tank? Could that be him running through the ruins of Cassino Town? She is overwhelmed by the growing knowledge of what he went through, what he never talks about, what he must have done to survive.
It is Sunday morning. Samuel is looking at the book with her, full of questions. “Is that Grandpa’s war? Why isn’t Grandpa in the pictures? We don’t like guns, do we, Mommy?”
Currently there is a w
ar documentary series running on TV on Saturday afternoons. Joanna will not let Samuel watch it, its horrific impact on the mind of a five-year-old outweighing, she figures, its educational value. Samuel says, “We don’t like war, do we, Mommy? We just hate that show.” Either it gives him nightmares or he thinks it’s just another program like “Superman,” “Batman,” or “G. I. Joe.”
When the phone rings, it is Clarence making his weekly call. He says, “I went to K-Mart yesterday and got Samuel some school clothes.” He says, “The tomatoes are great this year, just great.” He says, “I cooked pork chops for supper last night and were they ever good! I’m really getting the hang of this cooking thing. Your mother sure would be surprised.”
Her father is not the man at Monte Cassino, the man smoking calmly in the tin-can tank, the man peeing cavalierly in an Italian urinal. Her father is the man who buys school clothes for his only grandson, the man who grows tomatoes in the garden, cooks pork chops and is proud of them.
No. Her father is the man at Monte Cassino, the man who put his arms around unknown bombshells, the man who took pictures of churches and statuary in the middle of a war, the man who appreciated the panoramic view from Adolph Hitler’s balcony. Her father is not the man who cooks pork chops to surprise a woman who has been dead for eight years.
The questions she asks him are: Did you get my last letter? Did Mrs. Nystrom have her operation yet? Are you going to watch the baseball game this afternoon? Why don’t you get those bunions looked at? Do you want to talk to Samuel?
The questions she does not ask are: Who was that woman you were hugging in Italy? What happened to the other men in your tank? What were you doing on Hitler’s balcony? What was the name of that church?
And why, when he finally hangs up after discussing the weather, the rising price of gasoline and a murder/suicide in Toronto (that evil city), does she feel so stupid, so frightened, so angry?
In the Language of Love Page 21