by Joan Wolf
Chapter Six
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Susan wrote in her journal one evening two weeks after the dinner in New York, “but I can’t seem to organize my life and get down to writing anything. There’s no excuse, really. Maria does the housework and a great deal of the cooking. I only have the baby to deal with. But somehow there never seems to be any time.”
She sighed and looked out the window. The main problem, she thought, was Ricardo. He had spent the last few weeks building shelves in the baby’s room and he had had the foundation poured for an addition to the garage. He had come home a week ago with a new Volvo station wagon for her, which needed garage space as the present two-car garage housed Ricardo’s Mercedes and the new sports car he had won as MVP of the World Series. When they got back from Bogota he was going to have the new garage addition framed out and then he would finish it himself.
All of these were Ricardo’s projects but they seemed to eat incessantly into Susan’s time. He needed someone to hold his hammer, to hold a board straight, to run to the store for sandpaper. She had to drive the new Volvo over half of Connecticut before he was satisfied she was competent to handle it alone. She wondered sometimes if it wasn’t his strategy to keep her so occupied that there wasn’t room in her life for anything else.
“The problem is,” she wrote reflectively, “that I don’t feel confident enough to demand time for myself. Who am I to say I’m a writer? Who am I to say I need time away from my husband, my child? Who am I—a mediocre scholar, a shotgun wife—to make any kind of demand of Ricardo? And yet—I feel I must make it, that if I don’t, I’ll suffocate.”
She was sitting at the desk in her bedroom and now the lights of a car caught her attention as they swung into the drive. Ricardo was home.
Ricardo was home and she would go downstairs to greet him, to ask him about his dinner, about his speech, about the people he had seen. He would smile at her good-naturedly, that famous ingratiating grin that had charmed millions, and shortly afterward she would go to bed in her own private room.
Next week, of course, she would see the doctor and all of that would change.
It frightened her, the prospect of sleeping with him again. He had seemed so confident these last two weeks, so toughly competent in all his undertakings, so calmly dominant where she was concerned. And yet he scarcely touched her, never kissed her. She didn’t like to admit it, but she was afraid of him. She was afraid, inexplicably, of his maleness, his capability, his way of “dealing” with her. When the time came he would take her to bed with the same casual expertise with which he did everything else. He would impose his own implacable reality upon the hazy memory of that night in New Hampshire, and she was afraid he would destroy it. For some peculiar reason she was unable to associate the Ricardo she knew with the Ricardo of that night. They seemed two separate and distinct people. She felt as if she would be going to bed with a stranger.
* * * *
“You’re just fine, Mrs. Montoya,” the doctor told her reassuringly. “You can resume sex without any problem. Would you like me to give you a prescription for birth-control pills?”
Susan said yes and then had the prescription filled before she drove home. She also stopped at Lord and Taylor and did a little shopping. Ricardo was speaking at a Little League sports dinner that evening and Susan wanted him to be gone before she arrived home, so she delayed for as long as she could.
She was successful; the sports car was gone when she peeked into the garage before going into the house. Maria was waiting, ready to go home, and Ricky was indignant because his dinner had been delayed.
It was a very long night. Susan fed Ricky and put him to bed, then, knowing it would be impossible for her to write, she switched on the TV. At eleven she fed Ricky once again, took a shower and got into bed. Her room seemed very large and very strange. They had moved the baby’s crib into the nursery a few days ago and she was alone. She closed her eyes and tried to go to sleep, but all her muscles were tense with waiting. At twelve-thirty she heard the sound of Ricardo’s car on the drive.
It seemed forever before his feet sounded on the stairs. Then the door to her room opened and closed and Ricardo was standing there, his shoulders against it, motionless in the dim glow from the night-light Susan kept burning so she could see if she had to get up with the baby. His face was shadowed and he did not speak—or maybe it was that she could not hear him above the thudding of her heart. Then he came across the room and stood, towering, next to the bed. He said her name.
“Yes?” She hoped, desperately, that she sounded sleepy. “What do you want, Ricardo?”
“Really, Susan, what a question.” He sounded amused.
She was aware of him standing there with every pore of her body. “How was your dinner?” she asked, and sat up, pushing her hair out of her face.
“I don’t want to talk about my dinner,” he said softly, and sat down on the bed next to her. “How did your checkup go?”
“All right.” Her voice sounded squeaky in her own ears. “He said I’m okay.”
“Now that is very good news.” He raised a hand and lifted the hair from her neck. “It’s been a very long wait,” he said, and let the pale silky strands slide through his fingers.
“Ricardo.” She moistened her lips with her tongue. “It’s been a long day and I’m tired. Perhaps we could wait. . . .”
Her voice trailed off. He was taking off his suit jacket and undoing his tie. “No, querida,” he said. “We can’t wait.” He dropped the jacket and tie on the floor and started in on the buttons of his blue dress shirt. In a minute the shirt had followed the rest of his clothes to the floor.
“They’ll get all wrinkled,” Susan croaked out of a dry throat. His bare chest and shoulders looked enormous in the dim light of her bedroom.
“It doesn’t matter,” he answered impatiently, and began to unbuckle his belt. Susan shivered and dragged her eyes away from him. She was breathing very quickly.
I’m being stupid, she told herself. It will be wonderful, just as it was the first time. The bed creaked as it took the brunt of his weight and her eyes flew up to his face. For the first time he seemed to apprehend that something was wrong.
“Susan,” he said. “Querida.” His voice was deep, caressing. “You aren’t afraid of me?”
It was the voice of the blizzard. “Ricardo,” she said uncertainly, and he answered, “Shh, little one. It will be all right.” And he bent his head and kissed her.
It was an infinitely gentle kiss, infinitely sweet. After a moment he eased her back against the mattress and stretched out beside her, gathering her close against him. She remembered instantly the feel of his body and slowly her arms curved up to hold him. “Susan,” he said in her ear. His mouth brushed her cheek, her temple. “Dios, but it has been a long wait.”
She arched her head back to look up at him. “Did you mind?” she asked wonderingly.
He made a sound deep down in his throat. “I am a man,” he said. “Of course I minded.”
“Oh,” breathed Susan, and then he kissed her again. Her lips softened under his and immediately the kiss became more forceful, his mouth opening hungrily on hers in an erotic demand she recognized and involuntarily surrendered to.
It was like nothing else in the world, the feel of Ricardo’s rough callused hands, so incredibly sure and delicate on her body. She melted before the magic of it, opening for him as a flower opens to the warmth of the sun. He seemed to sense the magnitude of her surrender, for his gentle caresses became something more. She had the dizzy feeling of being violently overthrown and mastered, and then, astonishing, her own passion came beating up, answering strongly to his, overwhelming and all-encompassing. When it was over they lay still, locked together, not ready yet to return to their separate identities.
It was he who spoke first. “Do you know why I never tried to see you after that night in New Hampshire?”
His breath lightly stirred the silky h
air on her temple. His voice was so soft, so deep, it penetrated her nerves. “No,” she answered on a bare breath of sound.
“It was because I didn’t want to spoil the memory of that night, and I was afraid that if we met again it would never seem the same.” He chuckled. “It was rather like something out of a medieval romance, you must admit: the night, the storm, the beautiful young virgin.”
She had never suspected him capable of such profound romanticism. “I know,” she whispered. “It was—you said it was magic.”
“It was.” He rubbed his cheek against her hair. “I expected you to turn into a unicorn the next morning and gallop off into the mountains.”
She sighed. “And instead I turned into a very pregnant lady whom you had to marry.”
“Well, let us say rather you turned into a very pregnant unicorn,” he suggested, and she giggled. “But I’m not sorry we got married,” he was going on. “Are you?”
She was acutely conscious of his nearness, his maleness, his power and strength. He was the biggest thing that had ever happened to her. She knew that and she knew, too, in a sudden flash of intuition, that he always would be. Nothing else in her life would ever measure up to the importance of Ricardo. “No,” she said, low and steady, “no, I’m not sorry.”
“Good.” He burrowed comfortably deeper into the bed and in two minutes he was asleep. Susan lay awake for much much longer before she finally drifted into a dreamless slumber.
* * * *
The next few weeks slipped by for Susan, heavy with the haze of sensual fulfillment. All the minor discontents and irritations of the past weeks seemed simply to vanish. Her world both expanded and contracted and that world consisted of just one thing: Ricardo. Even the baby became somehow an extension of her husband. All of Susan’s intellectuality and feminism died, drowned in the absorbing, purely physical life she was leading. For the first time in her life she was profoundly conscious of the pleasures of being female. She wrote absolutely nothing.
“I got our tickets for Bogota today,” Ricardo said to her one evening in early December. They were sitting in the family room in front of the fire, Susan curled up on the sofa next to Ricardo, her head pillowed against the hardness of his shoulder. She stirred a little and looked up at him.
“What?”
“I got our tickets for Bogota. We leave in four days.”
She sat up and stared at him. The glow from the fire cast golden shadows on his warm olive skin and high cheekbones. “Four days?” she repeated.
“Um.” He looked at her and quite suddenly frowned. “You did update your passport, as I asked?”
She had done that months ago. “Yes. But, Ricardo, four days! I have to pack and get Ricky ready . . . Ricky! He doesn’t have a passport!”
“Oh yes, he does. I got him one a month ago.”
“You got him one. . . . But when?”
He looked a little impatient. “I had the photographer come to the house. Don’t you remember?”
“No.” She was quite definite. “I do not remember.”
He looked even more impatient. “Well, perhaps you weren’t home. As a matter of fact, now that I think of it, you were out getting your hair cut.”
She stared at him, utterly flabbergasted. “And you didn’t even think to tell me?”
He shrugged. “I forgot.” He raised an eyebrow. “But what is all this fuss, querida? Ricky has a passport. You have a passport. I am so important that I have two passports. You throw some clothes into a suitcase, and we go. Why are you upsetting yourself?”
She expelled her breath in a sound of mingled exasperation and defeat. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s utterly weird of me, but I would like to be kept a little more apprised of your plans for us, Ricardo.”
He looked surprised. “Don’t you want to go?”
“Of course I want to go.” She looked up at his splendidly masculine face and surrendered. “Why do you have two passports?” she asked.
He smiled, irresistible and charming now that she had given way to him. “I have both a Colombian passport and an American passport. When I am traveling to Colombia I use one and when I am returning to the States I use the other.”
“How convenient.”
“Isn’t it?” He looked down at her. “But then, I have always liked convenience. I find having a wife is very convenient. If I had known how much I would like it, I might have married years ago. Aren’t you lucky I waited?” He picked up her hand, turned it slightly and kissed first her wrist and then her palm.
“You mightn’t have found another wife quite as convenient as I am,” she said very softly. The touch of his mouth was causing her heartbeat to accelerate.
“That is true.” He shifted his grasp to her wrist and pulled her closer to him. “Let’s make love right here, in front of the fire,” he murmured.
Susan’s eyes widened with surprise. “Here?”
“Here.” He bent his head and began to kiss her, slowly, seekingly, erotically. He pressed her back against the cushions of the sofa and her hands came up to hold him. The muscles of his back and shoulders were hard under her palms. He kissed her throat, her collarbone, and his hand moved up under her sweater toward her breast.
“Ricardo,” she whispered. She kissed his cheekbone, his ear. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“No,” he said. “Here.” His fingers found her breast and his other hand began to move caressingly along her hip, her thigh. Susan’s body responded even as her mind hesitated, her New England conservatism slightly scandalized by his behavior. This wasn’t a ski chalet in New Hampshire; this was her home.
He sensed her indecision and pulled back a little to look into her face. He was so close he could clearly see the baby-fine texture of her skin. Her wide gray eyes were both unsure and voluptuous, her mouth was so soft, so inviting. . . . “Little puritan,” he said, and then his weight bore her back against the wide cushions of the sofa.
“Ricardo . . .” Susan said protestingly, but her hands closed on his shoulders and held him close.
“Carina,” he said. “Angelita.” Susan’s eyelids felt heavy as her body ripened under his touch. She helped him take off her clothes, conscious at last only of the rushing of her blood, the sweet melting desire that longed for him to take her and make her his. The fire was hot on her bare skin and he was deep within her. Her whole body shuddered with the intensity of the pleasure he gave her and she buried her face, her mouth, in the sweaty hollow of his shoulder. She said his name, and then she said it again. He rolled over onto his side, still keeping his arms around her, and they lay still. After a long while Susan raised her head and, bending, rained a line of tender kisses along his face, from temple to chin. Her hair swung forward, enclosing both their faces in a silken tent. She raised her head a little and he smiled at her, warm and peaceful in the glow of the fire. Later he carried her upstairs to bed.
* * * *
Susan spent the next three days doing laundry and packing. On the day before they were to leave she put Ricky in his car seat and drove up to Fairfield to visit her mother.
“Why don’t you come to Bogota for your Christmas vacation, Mother?” she asked as they sat over a cup of coffee in the kitchen. Ricky was sleeping next to them in the port-a-crib Susan had brought along with her.
“I’d love to, dear, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to,” Mrs. Morgan said. “There’s a whole calendar full of dinners and parties I’ve promised to attend.”
“But what will you do on Christmas?”
“The Slatterlys have asked me for the day.” Anne Slatterly was an old college friend of her mother’s and the two had always remained very close.
“Oh,” said Susan. She smiled and said lightly, “I can see I don’t have to worry about your being alone.”
“Of course not.” Mrs. Morgan smiled down at her sleeping grandson. “I’ll miss this little guy, though.”
“Yes. Well, we’ll be back sometime after the first of the year.”
&n
bsp; “When exactly are you coming home, Susan? I forgot to ask you the other day.”
“I don’t know.” Susan sipped her coffee. “Ricardo hasn’t said. But I’ll call you when we get in.”
Amusement lit Mrs. Morgan’s face. “Ricardo doesn’t know how lucky he was to marry you, Susan. There are very few American girls today who would be as accommodating to his ‘lord of the manor’ style as you.”
Susan kept her eyes on her coffee. She tried very hard not to feel hurt, but she was. “That’s just the way he is,” she managed to say.
“I know. And you are—and always have been—a sweet, gentle and affectionate child. You’ll suit him perfectly.” Mrs. Morgan got up to take a coffee cake out of the oven. “What is Ricardo doing these days to keep himself busy?” she asked as she served her daughter a slice.
“He’s been going into New York these last few days, to film a camera commercial for television.”
“Oh? Good for him. There’s a great deal of money to be made in that sort of thing. Does he do it often?”
“Once in a while. For products he really uses and likes.”
“And what have you been up to, dear?”
“Well,” Susan said feebly, “the baby keeps me busy.” She looked down at her sleeping son. He didn’t look as if he kept anyone busy.
“But you have Maria to help?” Her mother was prodding gently.
“That’s true.”
“You ought to join a few local organizations,” Mrs. Morgan advised. “Stamford has some excellent civic groups.” Mrs. Morgan herself was a member of various professional, political and civic organizations.
All her life Susan could recall her mother going out to meetings.
“I’ll think about it,” Susan said with noticeable lack of enthusiasm. Her mother gave her a slightly baffled look and then, obligingly, changed the subject.
Driving herself home an hour later, Susan felt the old familiar sense of worthlessness sweep across her. She was bitterly hurt by her mother’s assessment of her and yet she didn’t know how to dispute it. All her life she had felt weaker, less vital, less interesting than the rest of her family. She had always seemed to be swept along in the bustle of their lives, trying desperately to reach out and touch them and never quite succeeding. She had touched people—a few high school and college friends, one or two of her teachers—but with her family, and in particular with her mother, she always seemed to fail. She had never doubted that the failure was her fault. And if she was so unsuccessful with her own mother, how on earth was she going to manage with Ricardo’s. She would never admit it to him, but she was really dreading this trip to Colombia.