The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  “No,” she said. “Let’s go in the bedroom. It’s nicer.”

  “Are we going to do it? Will you?”

  She did not answer but only led him by the hand into the bedroom and shut the door. “Take your clothes off,” she said. “All of them.”

  He obeyed her, blushing. He blushed dark red. It was wonderful. He could barely get his shorts off over his erection.

  “Your socks too.”

  He had forgotten about them. Then he stood there looking embarrassed and foolish and gorgeous. “Lie down on the bed,” she said.

  He obeyed her, staring at her body. She loved the way he obeyed her. It made her feel high, the way people talked about drugs. She peeled the negligee off and stood there in front of him. “Do you like the way I look?”

  “You’re beautiful! Let me kiss you.”

  “Look at me. Keep looking.” Slowly she reached around and undid the bustier. Then she slowly rolled the bikini down. “Keep still. Don’t move.”

  He obeyed, but he was trembling. His erection stood up almost purple against his skin. Now she was naked and she climbed on the bed and knelt over him. She ran her hands over his chest and his nipples. She touched his flanks and his hips. She ran her hands up his thighs. He was visibly shaking but he obeyed her. She loved that. Finally she closed her hand around his prick and his control broke. He grabbed her, pushed her down on the bed and began to kiss her. She did not struggle. She was ready for him.

  “Put your hand between my legs and touch me,” she said into his ear. “Don’t hurt me. Be gentle.”

  He touched her carefully. Obviously he was none too sure what he was doing, but he was groping his way. Finally his finger slid into her and he groaned, as if he could have an orgasm with his finger. She could. Very quickly she did. She did not cry out, but let it wash through her. Then she took his prick, spread her legs wide and brought him to her and into her. He gave a short deep cry muffled by her throat and began to drive into her. He came very quickly, as she had expected him to.

  “My god, my god,” he kept saying.

  “You liked that.”

  He nodded dumbly. “You’re so beautiful. This is what I dreamed about, again and again.”

  “We’ll do it again and again, I promise you. If you’re good to me.”

  “I love you, Becky, I love you so much. Can I look at you?”

  “You can do anything you want to me, do you understand? As long as you’re good to me and you do what I say.”

  “Anything I want to?”

  She knelt over him, looking into his eyes. “Anything.” She didn’t think he’d come up with exercises that were too inventive, but she had ideas.

  “Can I kiss your tits? Can I put them in my mouth?”

  They began to explore each other, stroking, caressing, tasting. She seemed to be in a state of permanent desire. Ted Topper had been a far more skillful and experienced lover than Sam, but Sam pleased her. She felt she had never before really given herself over to sex, never really felt desire the way she did this afternoon. She taught him to eat her, and she took him in her mouth. He was pleasant to hold. He was cute, adorable. His skin was smooth and resilient. He was compact and tight-muscled. He wanted to please. He would turn himself inside out to please her.

  Around two they got out of bed and sat at the kitchen table eating leftovers and what they could scrounge from the cabinets and the refrigerator. Then they showered together and went back to the ravaged bed. This was the way it had been supposed to be and never had been. Sam looked at her as the most important object in the world. He kept telling her she was beautiful, and he meant it. He made love to her without thinking about anything else. He was not worrying about other things. He was not fantasizing about some model he had seen in the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated or the last issue of Penthouse. He wanted her. He wanted her fiercely, the way a man was supposed to. He was always ready. This was how she had imagined sex with a man to be before she had gone to bed with the first one. It filled her up entirely, the way things ought to, so that she was never, for once, wishing to be somewhere else, to be someone else, to be part of the golden place in the TV where things really happened.

  After they had sex again, they were both drowsy. She set the alarm, so that there would be time to eat before she took him to the performance. They fell asleep wrapped in each other’s arms.

  She awoke before him and gently disentangled herself, raising her body slightly on her bent elbow to look at him. He was hers. No man had been hers before in that absolute way. His mother did not know it, but she had taken him. He was no use at all for the sort of things she had looked to men for in the past. He would be going to college next fall. He did not even have a job. He could not bring her money or security or resources. Ted Topper had the most bountiful lifestyle and the most abundant resources of any of the men she had been with, but he had not been prepared to share with her. She was a rented motel room outside the house of his life. From Terry she had expected much, and she was getting nothing. He wanted to steal from her what she had worked years to create. What had he ever put into this condo besides his parents’ money? She had picked out the furniture, she had made the curtains, she had cleaned the walls and decorated. At least Sam wanted more than anything in the world to make love to her. He looked at her with a wild hunger. He wanted her more than he wanted to eat pizza or hang with the guys watching a basketball game. He wanted her more then he wanted to go off golfing with some twit named Heather.

  When he woke up, he asked her, “Can I stay over tonight? I told my mom I would probably stay with my friend Gene.”

  “Won’t she check up on you?”

  “My mom doesn’t do things like that. I could tell right away she was thinking that her boyfriend could sleep over. She doesn’t let him stay ever. She thinks it would be bad for my morals.” He grinned. “Maybe I don’t have any to lose.”

  “The important thing is loving each other, not your morals. Sometimes I wonder if you really love me. I’m risking a lot for you.” She put her hand on his chest, tracing circles among the scant hair.

  He seized her shoulders. “You have to believe how much I love you. I can’t sleep at night thinking about you. I break into a sweat.”

  That was sex, but who cared? “You can stay. I think we’re safe. But you have to understand, he’s dangerous. He has a terrible temper.” She almost found herself giggling when she said that. Terry was irritable and sulky but hardly dangerous. Without thinking too much about it, she was setting up Terry as a villain. She needed a way they could blackmail Terry into giving up the condo and just moving out. Scaring him. Forcing him. But how? His parents would still demand their money back.

  It turned out that Sam could cook some. She had thawed some chopped meat and he made hamburgers for them, while she put together a salad. It was sweet. Terry and she never seemed to do anything like that. He didn’t really want to keep house with her, that was the problem. He had left home reluctantly, married her in a rebellious mood. What he really wanted was just to live at home, be cooked for and taken care of, his clothes mysteriously vanishing from the floor where he tossed them, only to reappear clean and pressed. He liked dating. He liked going out with his brother and his old friends from college and prep school and his new friends from golfing. Being married and having his own life and his own home were just not priorities. He didn’t want to grow up. Sam at the stove turning burgers seemed to her far more of an adult than Terry.

  “Now at the play,” she said sternly, “you are not to be making eyes at me. We are not sneaking into a room to make out. We are coming back here to bed, and you know that, so you’ll behave yourself and act as if nothing is going on between us. This is vitally important. You have to listen to me. One of the people in the play lives just under us in this building, Helen.”

  “The old lady?” He looked at the kitchen floor. “She’s right down there?”

  “You got it. So we have to be careful. As long as I’m stuck wit
h my husband Terry, we have to be awfully, awfully careful. Do you understand?”

  He did his best at the play. She caught his eyes gloating on her at times, but mostly he tried to be good. He was always trying to do what she told him, and she liked that enormously. It was delightful to have him wanting so badly to please her. It was heady, it was stimulating, it was heavenly. She noticed Helen watching them both, but nobody else. They were all involved in their own scenes. She would have a little chat with Helen. Maybe Helen had caught a glimpse of Sam at the condo. If so, Becky would have to invent some cover story. What could he be doing there? Fixing something? Unbelievable. She was helping him with some assignment? She would come up with something. The best lies were believable and dull. The funniest thing is that she hardly had to lie to Terry. He just wasn’t interested enough. Himself, he tended to stonewall her rather than lie.

  She liked sleeping with the kid, waking with him. He even smelled good. His mother had trained him to be scrupulously clean about himself. She could nibble every part of his body with pleasure. In the morning, some inner door blew open in Sam. Suddenly be began to talk to her.

  “You don’t mind that I’m Jewish? There’s so few Jews where I live, I always wondered how it would be when I really started to get involved with girls. I mean, I’ve gone out with girls, but it never meant anything. It was just, you’re supposed to and so I did.”

  She was startled. “You’re Jewish?”

  “You didn’t know? Everybody always does. I think only Jews are named Sam these days.”

  “I never knew any Jews. Why should I care? I mean, I’ve heard people say ugly things about Jews, but people say awful things about Blacks and Italians, and my best girlfriend is Italian. And I know what people say about the Portuguese. Did you know I’m Portuguese?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s true, people say the Portuguese are dirty and stupid. People like to feel better than somebody.”

  She learned more about Sam in a few hours Sunday morning than she had the previous six weeks. He loved his mother; Becky thought that was good. He did not seem to expect much from Cathy. It was like Becky’s attitude toward her own mother. He thought of himself as more capable, more together than Cathy, and rather than expecting much from her, longed to be able to help her out.

  He had an uncle he was close to, a vet who probably did well. That must be how come he could go away to college. In the tenth grade, he had a girlfriend, Rachel, he really cared about and they had gone as far as touching each other through their clothes, sitting on the sofa in her house. Her father’s gourmet store had failed, and they moved to Arizona. Until Sam met Becky, his big fantasy was getting Rachel back. They wrote, but less often than they had. Now he probably would stop writing Rachel, because it would be deception, since he loved only Becky. Before Becky, he had not known what love was.

  Becky listened to his protestations of passionate love with silent skepticism but great enjoyment. That was how men ought to talk to women, even if they hardly ever did.

  Suddenly the doorbell rang. She froze. It could not be Terry; he would just use his key. Helen? His parents, spying on her. She grabbed Sam by the arm and shoved him into the bedroom and shut the door. “Don’t make a sound!” She ran to the door in her bathrobe. “Who is it?”

  “Tommy, Becca. Let me in. Now!”

  She opened the door. “Hey, Tommy. I’m not even dressed. What’s up?”

  He shut the door, locked it. “Listen, I need you to hold something for me until the middle of next week. Then I’ll take it back. Don’t ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” He gave her a book. “It’s hollow, but don’t open it, on your life. Just put it in your drawer and Wednesday I’ll come by at fivethirty and pick it up.”

  Then he looked at the closed bedroom door. “Who’s in there, Becca?”

  “Nobody, Tommy. Terry’s off in New Hampshire with his brother.”

  “What do you think, I’d come charging over here if he was sitting on his ass watching the TV like always? Who’s in there, Becca?” He pushed past her.

  Clutching her robe shut, she thrust herself in between him and the door. “This is none of your damned business, Tommy. If you want me to do you a favor, you do me one. Leave right now.”

  “I have to know who it is. You think I’m looking out for the interests of Mr. Couch Potato, the Happy Golfer? I come by here one day to see if he wants to make some money on the boats, I’m doing him a favor because he’s hooked up with my favorite sister. He acts like I offered him a fat fresh dog turd. Now who’s in there?” Tommy pushed her out of the way and flung the door open.

  Sam was pressed against the far wall. He drew himself up and tried to look impressive. He had pulled his pants on and was fumbling with his shirt. “Jeez.” Tommy backpedaled. “Who’s the kid?”

  “Tommy, mind your own business. His name is Sam and he’s in the play I’m in. I was balling him, and so what? I never cheated on Terry or anybody else in my life, but I’ve had it. I need some love too.”

  “Are you Terry?” Sam asked, trying to lower his voice menacingly.

  “If I was, you’d be in some trouble, huh? I’m her brother, Tommy Souza.” He stuck out his hand and Sam hesitantly gave him a hand to shake. “Well, I hope you know what a good woman you got here. I don’t know what the two of you think you’re doing, but her husband is worth shit.”

  Tommy took Becky by the elbow out of the bedroom and shut the door behind them. He hissed, “You hide this and don’t tell that kid anything.”

  “Of course,” she murmured. “But you won’t mention this to anybody, right?”

  “Just take it easy with him, Becca. He’s just a kid. Have a little fun, but don’t take it too seriously. It’s nothing you can lean on.”

  “He’s crazy about me, Tommy. He’d do anything for me.”

  “At his age, he’ll do anything to get laid. Promise me you won’t fuck up your life just to spend some time in the sack with a high school kid. You better send him home soon anyhow. Terry could get back anytime.”

  She leaned close to Tommy to whisper, “Terry’s with a woman. He has a girlfriend with some bucks. Name of Heather.”

  Tommy grimaced, one side of his mouth turned way down. “We got to get rid of him, Becca. He’s no damned good for you.”

  “But I want to keep the condo.”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes you cut your losses and walk out.”

  “No.” She planted her feet and shook her head. “Not this time. I’m not the one going to lose.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Leila

  Leila was disappointed by David’s visit home. He spent a great deal of time on the phone to Ikuko, long conversations behind closed doors. Afterward he was moody and distracted. While there had been girls in his life since he was thirteen, this was the first time one had taken up a central position. She supposed that she should be pleased that his emotions were finally engaged, but she wanted a little more attention from him than she could command. Coming home was a duty he was discharging. His mind was fixed on Ikuko.

  Nonetheless, he had been displeased when he returned the night before and Leila was not yet home. It was good that she had not spent the night with Zak, very good. “Who is this guy?”

  They were at breakfast. “He’s a veterinarian. The uncle of one of the alleged murderers. Sam. A kid two years younger than you.”

  “He killed because he was crazy about this older woman. That’s fascinating. Ikuko is a year older than I am.”

  “I hope you don’t plan to murder any of your professors for her.”

  “It’s so off the wall and extreme. What did he think when he was doing it? Did he suppose he’d never be caught? I can’t imagine not realizing that if you can figure how to do it, somebody can figure out how you did it.”

  She pushed her bowl aside, propping her elbow on the table. “What’s strange is that they’re both likable, Sam and Becky. Both plausible and personable and interesting. And in contradictio
n. One of them is lying.”

  “Which of them is better at lying?”

  “I think Becky’s had more practice.” Becky after all had carried on an affair with Sam while married to Terry. Sam had only to confuse Cathy, a task no ten-year-old would find taxing. “The strange thing is how little sense I have of Terry. He’s the missing man. Often in murder cases, the victim looms over the scene. But Terry is like somebody who got hit with a falling tree. He was just a guy who was in the wrong marriage at the wrong time.”

  “But it wasn’t a drive-by shooting, Mother. He must have been pretty obnoxious. Maybe he secretly beat her or shot up.”

  “She drops hints he beat her. But I’ve known a lot of battered women, and she doesn’t fit any of the profiles.”

  “Maybe they just all had a screaming fight and it got out of hand. For instance, would you like to hurt Father if you could?” He was looking at her from under his lashes, a sly glance.

  She felt a slight chill. “What did he say?”

  “That you attacked him.”

  “I threw a vase of flowers at him.”

  “Oh. Is that all? He made it sound so dramatic.”

  “Drama is your father’s business.”

  “I knew he was exaggerating. Listen, I want us all to have supper together tonight. I promised Father and I want us to sit down like a family at least once.” He leaned forward, as if to persuade her from a shorter distance.

  “Your father and I are not seeing each other.”

  “You can’t pretend Sheryl doesn’t exist. Aren’t you curious?”

  “I vaguely remember her when she was Nick’s student.” She couldn’t openly explain to David that she felt she had met Sheryl before and before and before. They were always thin; they were always in their twenties. They were not the ones going to shoot into sudden or long-term success. They were the ingenues who would fade, if lucky into character roles; otherwise, into whatever they would do with the rest of their lives. They were a little desperate, frantic to please. They saw in Nick a chance to clamber up, to become visible, to move on to other roles and regular work. Sheryl differed from the other ingenues in one striking regard. She had not aimed to improve her lot as an actress, not by becoming pregnant, certainly, not by deciding to have the baby; her desire had been not to use Nick but to possess him. Therefore the play had ended, but the affair had not. Why would Leila ever want to meet her?