Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  Will believed what Rockwell said. Still, the memory of Matt stuck to him. Something about Matt's calm disdain, the way he'd stood, naked, with hard white light falling on him and the girl's photograph in his hands. Will saw Matt striding, suited, firm-jawed, calmly determined, into the hush of a government building, and he was filled with a dread that stung like ice water.

  1979/ It wasn't an affair. Affair was the wrong word for what Susan was having. It was—what? A mistake she permitted. An ongoing temptation she found herself, temporarily, unable or unwilling to resist. When she thought of a woman having an affair she thought of hotel rooms, tearful afternoons, a whole galaxy of longings and regrets. This was sex and something else, a modest affection that resembled, to a surprising extent, the friendships she'd had as a girl. Affairs were premeditated; they were kept alive by a tortured system of meetings. She and Joel, on the other hand, simply had sex when they felt like it and when circumstances permitted. He was a tree surgeon. She knew there was a dirty joke to be made out of that though she didn't make it to herself—she wasn't quite sure how it would go. She and Todd had been in the Connecticut house less than three months when Joel came to work on the mature elm that had somehow survived Dutch elm disease, the only one in a neighborhood once known for its trees. When Todd and Susan bought the house they learned they were considered the custodians of something precious, a monument. They were advised—ordered, really—by their neighbors to continue the previous owners' custom of having Joel out every six months to monitor the tree's inexplicable good health. The tree spoke to Darien about deliverance, a future that could not be wholly obliterated even by the bottomless appetite of disease. Susan dutifully called Joel, a short, affable man of forty or so, who smoked a pipe and carried about him a faint air of apology mixed with his scents of tobacco and wood. He was like a forest creature, watchful and ready for flight. He had an animal's mix of caution and mysterious purpose. The first time he came, she watched him climb fearlessly up his chrome extension ladder to cut away a dead branch, and she was impressed by how thoroughly he appeared to have married his simple work. He sawed the branch with quick delicate strokes, and when it fell he descended the ladder and carried the branch to his truck with a certain tenderness, as if it were a pet that had died. His black hair was cropped close to his skull; he wore yellow work boots and a green plaid jacket. Susan felt the romance of him, a sturdy competent man who had only this one ambition and who, she suspected, could take you into the woods and tell you the names of everything you saw. He whisded; he drove a truck with his name painted on the door in bright blue letters.

  It happened on his second visit. After checking the tree, he came to the house for his payment. She offered a cup of coffee, he accepted, and they stood in the kitchen talking about the miraculous deliverance of Susan's tree. There was only that one subject. “It's a strange thing,” he said in his soft monotone. “There's no pattern, no pattern at all. A tornado can level a house, level it, and leave one wall standing with a shelf full of china cups. China cups. Not one of them even cracked.”

  “I guess that's where religion comes in,” she said, and he shrugged, embarrassed by any reference to the otherworldly. He was probably a man who acknowledged only the real. As he was preparing to leave, Susan shook his hand and he looked questioningly at her with his soft, feral eyes. He was discreet. All she needed to do was drop her eyes and withdraw her hand. But she hesitated, and softly, with deliberation, he drew her close to him. He was scarcely an inch taller than she. He knew, somehow, not to kiss her lips. He kissed her cheek with a gentleness that was almost chaste. Then he kissed her forehead and hair. If he'd tried to court her, she'd have refused him. If he'd been aggressive, if he'd grabbed her or pinned her against the wall, she'd have ordered him out and called Todd at the office. His manner was what made it possible, his simple and slightly apologetic friendliness. Sex, he seemed to say, was the obvious and correct thing—it was what two people in this position would naturally do. She went along the way she'd have followed an unexpected turn in a conversation with someone older and better educated than she. They stood embracing in the foyer and he whispered, “Let's go upstairs, what do you think?” She hesitated. There was only one way to say it. “I don't use birth control, I don't have anything in the house.” “That's okay, it's okay,” he told her. “We won't need that.” She paused again, conscious of the bentwood coatrack, the striped wallpaper. She nodded. As they climbed the stairs, it seemed to her that she did not lead and did not follow. His hand rode the small of her back but didn't press her forward. He seemed only to want to maintain contact, as if the loss of it might mean the loss of all their aims. She was excited and nervous but she walked with purpose down the hall and into the guest room. She did not take him to the bed she shared with Todd. As she stood with him on the rag rug amid the odd furnishings—the guest room was a catchall for leftovers—it occurred to her that she was only twenty-nine and was the owner, half owner, of this house, a three-bedroom colonial on a full acre, probably a more substantial house than the one Joel would own. She was the mistress and the willing victim of everything that happened. She let him unbutton her blouse. Her head was clear. She knew what was happening. If she'd ever thought of anything like this she'd imagined it as an extended swoon, a turmoil of drink and passion. But now she watched with almost clinical composure as he took off her clothes and then removed his own. She felt neither proud nor ashamed of her body. Her body was a fact, it had the inevitability of the elm outside, the same unquestioned privilege. His own flesh was solid, sparsely haired, not as muscular as she'd imagined. She looked with interest at his penis—aside from Todd's, she'd seen them only in pictures. Joel's was larger than Todd's, the head blunter and redder, and she knew size was supposed to be a virtue but it didn't strike her that way at all. She loved Todd's penis, its brown-pink shaft and delicate lavender tip. Joel's was raw, thickly veined, and at the sight of it she passed through her single moment of doubt. It struck her that his penis might be an aberration, something freakish and unwholesome. Maybe she should change her mind, send him away. She almost spoke but he took her in his arms again, peppered her hair and neck with kisses, and she decided to let it happen. She would remember, afterward, that there had been a decision.

  He took her to the bed, an old double that had belonged to her parents, and drew back the covers. She was touched by his domesticity, his gentleness. She slid under the blankets and felt like a girl in a fairy tale, captured by a beast with immense paws and powerful haunches, a beast that devoured others but adored her. When she'd thought of something like this she'd thought of danger, hard predatory breaths and the tearing of fabric. She'd never imagined it kind or courtly.

  Joel lay beside her, and she put her hand on his shoulder. He smiled, shyly. His face was neither ugly nor handsome. It was simply a face, with a round nose and ordinary eyes and shaggy black brows. He ran his fingers along her arm, touched her elbow consolingly, as a friend would. This is happening, she thought. This is what it's like. He brought his hand up to her breast and, as he grazed the nipple with his fingertips, his mouth formed an 0, as if he, too, had felt the touch, found it surprising and pleasant.

  He circled her nipple with the tip of his index finger, then ran the finger under her breast and weighed it, gently, in his palm. “Mm,” he whispered. She was moved but not excited and she began to think that it would all be tender, remote, and small. It would happen outside her; she could see herself making the bed again after he'd gone. Her theory had probably been right: sex at best was a pleasant and minor experience, widely overpraised. Because it didn't matter, because this would end soon and nothing would change, she let her hand fall to his chest. She'd explore him like a nurse and then she'd know something other women knew, the heft and grain of men's bodies. It was a casual curiosity, it didn't smolder. She was satisfied with Todd. But sometimes she'd wondered how he conformed and how he differed. She'd wondered what, exactly, other women meant when they talked about their men
in bed. Joel's chest was solid under a layer of fat, like Susan's own thighs. A fountain of curly dark hair sprouted in the middle, circled his nipples (longer than Todd's, more pointed and womanly) and straggled down along the curve of his belly. He must have been a dream at twenty, and as she thought of that she pictured him as a schoolboy. Quiet, she thought. Athletic but not heroic, neither celebrated nor shunned, one of the steady boys who faithfully dated the same girl (a decent girl, semi-pretty, who sang in the school choir), and married her soon after. By now he might have been married twenty years or more, and his habits of fidelity had finally worn thin. He bent toward her, smiling, and put his mouth on her nipple, which faintly resembled his own. She felt queasy and she almost pushed his face away, but his lips were velvety and he kissed her nipple without a hint of tooth. Then he touched it with his tongue and the first true sensation ran through her, a high ticklish feeling that made her draw her breath sharply in. She hadn't expected that. He tongued her nipple and then he tongued the other, and she caromed between pleasure and squeamishness, as she had when she was a little girl and her father had held her down and tickled her. She couldn't say whether she liked this or not. The squeamish sensation rose from her belly to her throat, and without removing his lips Joel let his fingers wander down her belly to her crotch. “Oh,” she said, loudly enough to surprise herself. Joel's fingers teased her pubic hair, spider-walked among the tufts and she felt as if a wind was blowing between her legs. That settled into her, the idea of being touched by wind, and as he brushed her pubic hair she began to wish he'd touch her more deeply. What if he did nothing more than this? She pushed her pelvis out to meet his fingers, and when he withdrew them she was briefly angry. Who was he, this quiet unspectacular boy grown to middle age? Who did he think she was? She cleared her throat. He smiled up at her and began kissing his way down her belly. He was making a sound, a faint whistle and moan. She lay quietly, watching his ears and his thinning hair, unsure of what she wanted or didn't want. She watched him trace a line of kisses along her belly and then she realized what he intended to do. Todd had never done that; he'd never ventured there with his mouth. She didn't want it, she'd feel too exposed, but Joel kissed the insides of her thighs and she didn't ask him to stop. She waited. She was full of fear and a new kind of queasy excitement. She regretted having done this. She wanted to be alone in her kitchen, brewing a fresh pot of coffee, watering the plants. He worked his face between her legs. He touched her there with his tongue. The feeling was electric, slightly sickening, a hot moist sensation that shot through her. She moaned, though she hadn't meant to. He lapped at her with his tongue, spread the flesh with his thumbs and then he found it. He found the spot, and he knew. At first she thought he'd just grazed it, men didn't know about that, but he worked his tongue around it in circles and he knew, he knew, he'd found it and he knew to touch her there. She was moaning now, she didn't want to stop. She put her hands on his head, the coarse thinning bristles of his hair, and held on because she was afraid he'd quit. She was afraid he'd lose what he seemed to know. “Oh, god,” she said. This was something else moving through her blood, She'd felt the opening, the high quivering expansion, but this was going someplace different. She was used to a rise and fall, a quickness. A warm red shadow that flicked past, left the memory of heat behind. This wasn't stopping. His tongue was relentless, it kept finding her, and she writhed, half hoping she'd elude the tongue but she didn't, it found her and found her and she was crying out, “Oh oh oh, oh god, oh.” It kept opening inside her, the ragged immensity. She couldn't stand it, it couldn't open any wider, it was gushing all through her. He found her and found her and found her and she went up and over. It rushed up at her and filled her and she was tumbling, she didn't care, she was inside herself and the flood didn't stop, the hot wet pulses, they didn't stop, and then, finally, they did.

  He lifted his face, smiled at her. She watched him with a certain incomprehension, a small embarrassment that was already starting to grow. She saw that she was covered in a thin film of sweat. Tenderly, he kissed the crook of her knee. He brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.

  And then she began crying. She didn't expect it. The crying started sofly, nothing more than a stinging wetness in her eyes, but as she looked at Joel's capable face the crying continued on its own, not loud but deep, punctuated by soft ragged intakes of breath. She let herself cry. She was filled with sorrow and relief, as if she'd escaped simple happiness and entered something larger, more complex and promising. Joel stroked her hair.

  'There, there,” he whispered, and she imagined he spoke that way to the trees as he sat among their branches, sawing away their afflicted parts.

  When she was through crying they both put their clothes back on and walked down the hall together, past the closed door of the third bedroom, which was reserved as a nursery. Susan was slightly disoriented, as if she'd awoken at night in a new house that seemed strange at first and then revealed itself to be the place she in fact belonged. Here was the striped wallpaper she'd chosen, here was the antique mirror hanging at the bottom of the stairs. Joel paused at the front door. His work boots, stained with the sap of trees, were nearly the same color as the varnished pine floorboards. He took her hand.

  “That was nice,” he said.

  “Was it?” she said. Then she laughed and brushed at her eyes. “Yes. It was nice.”

  He could have killed it so easily. He could have been lewd or self-satisfied. He could have indicated, by his face or his body, that he pitied her. He could have asked her when they'd do it again.

  “Bye,” he said.

  “Goodbye.” He opened the door and she stepped out onto the porch with him. It was still a warm clear day. It was still autumn. She still lived on a street of clapboard colonials in Darien, pumpkins grinning on the doorsteps. In another few days other people's children would dress in costumes and ring her doorbell, demanding candy.

  “Oh,” she said, “did you remember your check?”

  He put his hand on the breast pocket of his jacket. They both laughed. “Got it,” he said. He walked out to his truck and drove away. He waved to her from the road.

  It surprised her that when she saw his truck a week later on her way to the supermarket, she parked her car and went boldly to speak to him. He was working on the grounds of an elementary school, pruning a haphazard arrangement of young trees that had been planted to soften the dour sprawl of blond brick buildings. He wore his boots and a navy-blue sweater, jeans that hung too low on his waist. Colored leaves cut from construction paper were taped to the windows of the single-story building that rose behind him.

  “Hi,” he said, apparently glad to see her. His eyes were brown, ordinary. His skin glowed in the cloudy light.

  “Hi.”

  A silence passed. She said, “Is it all right that I stopped to talk to you?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure, why wouldn't it be?”

  “Well. I don't know. Do you have a wife?”

  “Oh, we live way off. In Wilton. She wouldn't come over here. She wouldn't. Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “I've never done anything like that,” she said. “I guess that's probably what they all say.”

  He shrugged. “It's not like there are so many.”

  “Oh, come on.” She wasn't jealous. She wanted this to be a usual thing; she wanted to have joined a group.

  He shrugged again, and laughed. “Okay. There are a few.”

  “I should be going,” she said. “I saw you and, I don't know. It seemed like it would be strange to just drive by.”

  “It's nice to see you,” he said.

  “Maybe we'll see each other again. I mean, before it's time for the tree's checkup. Am I being too forward?”

  “No. It'd be nice to see each other again, I'd like to.”

  “I guess you can't come by in that big truck,” she said. “You know, the neighbors. God, that's such a housewife thing, isn't it strange to be saying this?”

  “Yo
u could come by my office,” he said. “You got the address, it's over in Norwalk. You could come by there.”

  “I could. What about Thursday, in the afternoon?”

  “Four o'clock? Four o'clock would be good.”

  “That's a little late,” she said. “Would three be okay?”

  “I have a job in New Canaan. I could be back by three-thirty.”

  “All right, then. Three-thirty.”

  “Okay.”

  “See you then.”

  “Yeah. See you then.”

  She got back in her car and drove to the supermarket. She couldn't believe the strangeness of it. There was no tumult, no chaos of emotion. There was only the working out of schedules and this sad but unmistakable sense of relief

  It surprised her that she could sneak away to Norwalk for Joel and yet continue to love Todd. She'd imagined devotion to be finite. She'd believed that if you focused an affectionate energy on someone new you had to deduct corresponding affection from someone you loved already. But her love for Todd held steady; at times it seemed to have grown. She retained all her tenderness toward him. She still liked reassuring him when he returned from the rigor and gravity of his days in the city. She'd learned that the mantle of work Todd had begun shouldering in college would not end. She'd been wrong in her belief that he'd emerge from his studies complete, magnified, and free. His labors at Yale had not been a trial, they'd been the first in an ascending process of labors. By now it was clear that the work led only to other work. His value would always be questioned and he would need to prove himself again and again and again. If anything, the strife became more ferocious, the stakes higher, as the lesser men fell away. Todd's firm hired only the best, and expected to dismiss fully half of them. Todd had no intention of being dismissed, and further, he had no intention of ending merely as a successful attorney. He wanted to govern. He wanted to create new systems of order. In whatever time he could shave out of his schedule he advised the city planning commission in Darien and provided counsel to the school board. He was getting his name around. He had reason to believe he could one day become a representative, a senator; he might even be able to go beyond that. There was nothing stopping him. He was smart and handsome, he had a solemn undangerous charm. He was married to a smart and handsome woman who had worked to help support him through college and law school and who now took classes at the community college. The idea that Susan would do terrible damage if discovered seemed abstract to her, like tales of the punishment inflicted on women accused of witchcraft. She did what she needed to do, lived on the edge of a forest far from what Todd meant by the world. She worked on the house, attended her classes, comforted her husband after the long struggle of his days.