God damn it, please don’t do that again. It’s like that Henny Youngman joke. That his wife is so neat that he gets up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and when he comes back, the bed’s made.
I stopped at the end of a paragraph to go fix myself a cup of coffee, and you went in and read what I wrote and wrote a cute little line of your own, and it’s funny, there’s no argument there, but I don’t like it. I really don’t. This isn’t a conversation where you can make fun of me and put me down and get laughs that way. I don’t mind being Gracie Allen some of the time, but I want to write my chapter and get it the way I want it without having my thoughts pushed out of place.
I’m really pissed off. (Which is a ridiculous expression. What does it mean? Pissed off. The opposite of pissed on, I suppose. Next question?)
I’ve lost track of what I was going to say-about Marcia, about people existing independently. Whatever it was probably wasn’t all that important. Priscilla, who is not as scatterbrained as she seems, is still the most scatterbrained of our company, isn’t she? So it’s unlikely that she would have anything truly deep to contribute. She can advance the plot line a little, she’s good enough for that, but we wouldn’t want to waste anything thought-provoking on her, would we?
Sorry. I’m being bitchy, and I don’t like it either.
I am by inclination a late sleeper, and usually do not even know when Harry gets out of bed. Somewhere along the line I’ll roll over and know that I’m alone in bed, and will roll over again and pull the blanket of sleep back over me, and emerge yawning a couple of hours later.
This particular Wednesday morning I was awake before he was, which was as frustrating as it was unheard of. He never set alarms but slept until some inner alarm woke him, and this could happen any time at all in those hours before dawn. I opened my eyes and looked at the clock, and it was a quarter to five. He might wake up at any moment, or he might sleep another hour and a half, and until he did get up and get out I had to lie there in agonizing anticipation.
(I keep overwriting. I have these purple expressions. How does one avoid that? Agonizing anticipation, for Christ’s sake. I don’t talk like that. Why do I write like that?)
After ten endless minutes of agonizing anticipation, I decided to hurry things along. I grunted in my sleep, making a variety of unpleasant noises. Hairy slept through them. I rolled over then, and bumped into him, jostling him a good one. Then I rolled back again and returned to mock-sleep while he yawned and stretched and bestirred himself.
I listened to the shower, then heard him dressing. It is interesting to watch someone who does not know he is being observed. I watched Harry get dressed, peeping carefully at him from the bed. He had a tie on and knotted before infuriatingly deciding that it was not at all the tie he wanted to wear. I wanted him to hurry-he was spending minutes tying his tie that I could be spending in Rhoda’s bed.
But at the same time, and I remember this very well, although I don’t think I’ve thought of it since that morning, at the same time I had a very strong yen for this man. I wanted him to get the hell out, I wanted him to go into New York to lay whoever it was he laid in New York, I wanted to be with Rhoda, but I also wanted to call him back to bed and suck his beautiful cock and pet his balls and have him fuck me into a coma.
(Writing dirty turns me on. I don’t suppose that’s surprising, or rare. But it certainly is nice.)
I did not call him back to bed, or do any of those fine things to him. Before he left he bent over to kiss me lightly on the cheek, and I thought, Priss, you total bitch, this is your man and you love him and what is the matter with you that you have to do this thing with Rho? Because I had never made it with anyone other than Harry since I met him. No real urge to. I would see men whom I found attractive, and I might speculate about them, throwing them a quick fuck in the province of my mind. And a couple of times-but far less often than you seem to think, Harry-I would bring one of these men mentally into our bed, and cheat in the mind while having Harry in the flesh.
But anyway I had never gone and done anything, and I was going to, and I wondered how I could do this to Harry. And I answered myself, in the same figurative breath, that I wasn’t doing anything to Harry by what I did with Rhoda. That the two things had nothing to do with one another.
Not that it made much difference what I told myself, because I was going to do the same thing anyway.
It seemed forever before I heard the Chevy coughing its way to life and taking off down the road. I was certain at one point that Harry had left without my hearing the car, and I almost got up then, but a few moments later I did hear the car and got up and went into the bathroom and showered.
And did things like putting perfume all over my breasts and thighs. Provocative Priss-puss indeed.
I wore no clothes to Rhoda’s room. I padded naked down the hallway and opened her door slowly, silently. She was asleep, the bedclothing a wicked tangle around her body. She had always been a rather hectic sleeper, I now remembered, given to thrashing about and wrestling with demonic blankets and bedsheets, even crying out in fear. I remembered nights in college when her night-terror woke me, and I held her in my arms and calmed her back to sleep.
She slept peacefully enough now. I walked softly to her bedside and knelt down beside her, and ten years went away as if they had never happened at all. We were nineteen again, and young and fresh and juicily alive, and I loved this auburn-haired, ripe-breasted angel.
I took the covers off, peeled them carefully back. She stirred but did not awaken. She was sleeping on her stomach, her legs very slightly bent at the knees, her bottom as slightly raised. I placed the palms of my hands lightly on her buttocks. I could not seem to catch my breath. There was not air enough in the world for me.
I got in bed with her. I lay down beside her and let my body touch hers. I felt afloat.
She made a small distant sound, and stirred again. I ran one hand from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine. She spoke my name.
I said, in a whisper, “Don’t say anything. Pretend to be asleep. I want to do everything.”
I petted her back and bottom and the backs of her thighs for a long time. Girls feel different from men, they’re so much softer and there’s more warmth in their skin. They are in many ways nicer to touch, I think. I lay on top of her and rubbed my breasts against her back. I squirmed around and put my cheek, which felt feverish, against her bottom, which was soft and smooth and deliciously cool.
I tickled her little asshole with my fingertip, and felt the muscle flex involuntarily. I ran the finger back across the demilitarized zone separating anus and vagina and dipped it into her. She was hot and wet, and I worked my finger inside her and she got hotter and wetter.
I took my finger out and sniffed it, and licked her taste from it.
I recognized the taste. Proust indeed, cookie crumbs indeed, but it is true, you don’t forget sensations. I recognized the scent and taste, not as a generalized taste of girl-I had, after all, had tastes of myself in the intervening years, had tasted myself on Harry’s mouth when he would kiss me after having first eaten me, for example-but the specific taste of Rhoda, recalled from ten years ago, and if anything improved, drier like old wine, riper and more pungent like aged cheese.
I rolled her gently over. She lay now on her back, legs slightly parted, pubic bush (that same red-brown shade, almost chestnut, how divine) moistened with her juices, glistening like morning dew on new-mown grass (how I carry on, but I can’t help it, I can’t help it, it truly was like that, it was poetry, it was lush imagery), her eyes lightly lidded, her lips slightly parted, her breasts full, and fully firm, their tips stiffened in excitement.
I pinched my own nipples into excitement, cupped my breasts, squeezed them. I leaned forward, my long hair flowing down in front of my face and over her face like the Modigliani statue of the woman washing her hair, that same liquidity of line, and I brushed my long hair over her face, my blonde hair over her face, and I brushed her breasts with my hair, teasing, and teasing us both, and moved to press my breasts to her breasts and kiss her mouth with mine.
I licked her all over. I sucked her breasts. I was, in turn, a baby at the breast, then Harry making love to me, then alternately Rhoda and my own self receiving these caresses. I was all of us, with space and time in disarray.
Harry and I (How the mind skips, from bed to bed, from lover to lover!) have always been exceedingly oral people, hung on loving by mouth, greedily hungry for either role. And so in eight years of marriage he has eaten me perhaps five hundred times. It is then by no means a pleasure I have had to forego. These attentions of his are usually by way of prelude, but in the sense of a full first course, not a pass-around tray of hot hors d’oeuvres. His tongue would take me to a sharp clitoral orgasm, and after coming divinely I would at once want him inside me, to complete the act.
And yet (I think there is a point to this, if I can find the yellow brick road that leads to it) there was often the tiny frustration in the course of this process, the frustration a retired ballplayer must feel while watching a game in the grandstand. (A game on the field, I mean, that he watches while he himself is sitting in the grandstand. For Christ’s sake, you all knew what I meant, didn’t you?)
The frustration, that is, in watching someone else play a game-however well-at which you used to perform admirably and enjoyably yourself. I could be eaten, and I could dig it, the way it was being done, the way it made me feel. But I also wanted to do it.
I seem here to be proving that Priss is at least as inarticulate and featherheaded as everybody thinks she is. This will never do, friends. Let me see Look. I think a penis is a beautiful thing, no argument whatsoever. But I also think a pussy is a beautiful thing, all convolutions and secret pathways a thousand times more intricate than the inside of an ear, all shades of pretty pink and red. Salt-water mussels are abundantly available here, and reassuringly cheap, and I like to steam a few dozen at a time in fish stock and apple cider until the shells open wide and the little bivalves present themselves for eating.
And not the least wonderful thing about the mussels is that they look like cunts. They really do. Inner and outer labia, and cunning little clitorises, and I always sense that each of them has a secret if you can only think of a way to make it open itself, but the secret must remain forever so. They make me horny, mussels do. Clams have a good deal more taste to them, but mussels have more charm, and are just more fun to eat.
Rhoda, you were more fun to eat than mussels.
Rhoda, I came deliciously, shivering, trembling, the instant I opened your thighs and put my mouth to you. I tasted you, I breathed you in, and without any preparation I quietly exploded and came. And yet my own orgasm, intense as it was, did not really matter much to me; it was as if it were happening to someone else who happened to share my body. (Like having dental work done on nitrous oxide-one feels what’s going on, but it has no immediate personal relevance.) Because the orgasm took place down there in my own loins, and I didn’t live there now. I lived in my head. I was a disembodied head, loving you with my mouth.
I was worried at first that perhaps you would not like it. A stupid fear. It was very important to me, though, that you like this, and I traced your secret parts like a palmist reading a hand, and caught your rhythms, and knew it was all right; it would always be all right.
College days.
It was the big game, it was homecoming week.
I can’t describe any more of it. I don’t really see the point, anyway. A couple of pages back I got myself so worked up that all I had to do was put one hand in my lap and touch myself for a few seconds and I came in my pants. Just like that.
We just didn’t leave that bed, but as far as who did what and with which and to whom is concerned, I don’t suppose it matters. Nor do I have that precise a memory for what followed. If you insist, Rhoda, I suppose I could sort of make things up to extend the scene when we put the final polish on the book. But I would rather leave it as it is.
We did at one point stop long enough to bring in cups of coffee from the kitchen and smoke a few cigarettes. And I said, “Well, I guess we still have it for each other, don’t we?”
“Does that surprise you?”
“No, it doesn’t. The only question is where we go from here.”
“Isn’t that up to you, Priss?”
“Why me?”
“Well, to be crude about it, it’s your house. Also it’s your life.”
“Why my life and not yours?”
“Because you’re the only one of us with a stable life. I could go in virtually any direction right now without disrupting anything. You’ve got a good marriage going.”
“So?”
“So you could decide that the best move all around would be for me to pack my suitcase and get the fuck out of here.”
“If you do, you’d better figure on taking me with you.”
“I’m serious, Priss.”
“I’m kind of serious myself.”
“Not really. You wouldn’t leave Harry. Christ, there’s no earthly reason for you to leave Harry.”
“I know.”
“So you could send me on my way-”
“I could never do that.”
“-or we could just see what happens.”
“You mean just keep on keeping on.”
“I haven’t heard that phrase in a while. Yes, that’s what I mean. We were never that exclusive about our love. We went on dating, we had sex with boys.”
“But what I had with you was always so special.”
“Yes, for both of us.”
“The thing is that I really love you.”
“We love each other, Priss. We always did.”
“Yes, we always did. And always will. This isn’t going to wear off, you know. I did think yesterday, it did occur to me in the car, it occurred to me that maybe this was something we were going to have to do just once in order to get it out of our systems. But that’s just not true, is it? I could have you forever and not wear out what I get from you and give to you.”
“And likewise I’m sure.”
“‘Likewise I’m sure.’ I wish I could do accents.”
“Just be glad you can’t do imitations.”
“He’s a sweet man, though, isn’t he? You like him, don’t you? And I know he likes you very much.”
“Yes, I like Harry. Of course.”
“Actually the two of you have a lot in common.”
“Now that’s the kind of line you always come up with that makes him fall on the floor laughing.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, the thing that Harry and I have in common is you.”
“Oh.”
“You nut.”
“Yeah. That’s me. There’s something I know that you don’t know, I think.”
“There are probably many such things, pudding.”
“Harry knows about us.”
“ What? ”
“Oh, wait a minute. No, not about us now. About us then.”
“You mean in school.”
“Yes, of course. You didn’t think-”
“Right, I didn’t think, I absolutely did not think at all. What I very nearly did do, though, is have cardiac arrest.”
“I’m sorry.”
“When did you tell him? That’s what happened, right? You came out and told him?”
“Uh-huh. Maybe a year or two ago.”
“You told him the whole story?”
“I didn’t tell him any story, really. Just that you and I had been lovers. I think I probably gave him the impression that we were less important to each other than we really were.”
“How did he feel about it?”
“I don’t know. You know, it was history. It was before I met him. He knows I screwed other guys before I met him and that never seemed to bother him.”
“But it might bother him having them over to the house.”
“Oh, he would never stand for that.”
“Whereas here I am-”
“Yes, that’s different. If you were a former male lover of mine he couldn’t stand it, but he’s very keen on having you here. Keen-there’s another word we don’t get to hear much from these days. Time has really turned inside out, hasn’t it? Today, I mean. I just know we’re going to get out of bed and find out that Eisenhower is President of the United States again.”
“Then let’s not get out of bed. But to get back to what you were saying.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you think he has any idea-”
“That we’ve still got it for each other?”
“And that we’re doing something about it.”
“I don’t really know. I think, this may sound weird-”
“Go on.”
“Just that I think it turns him on. The idea of us. From what I’ve read, it’s not exactly rare for men to react that way to female homosexuality.”
“You know who you just sounded exactly like? Dr. Joyce Brothers.”
“That’s been my lifelong ambition. An inarticulate Dr. Joyce Brothers, that’s me.”
“But I can’t see why this would turn a man on. I mean, if you turn it around and imagine yourself watching two guys making it together-”
“Ugh.”
“Right. I’d rather watch ice melt. I’d rather watch flies fuck.”
“Do you want to finish that coffee?”
“No, it’s cold.”
“Want another cup?”
“Not now. I want a cigarette, though. Priss?”
“What?”
“I wonder if-no, nothing. Come here, Priss.”
I wonder what I thought. About our future. Even about our present.
I suppose I thought, among other things, that this could be how we would spend Wednesdays. Once a week Harry had a day to go into New York and do whatever it was that he did there, and that could be my day to be a lesbian.
I am positive the world is full of housewives who send their kids to school and their husbands to the city and then get together and suck each other silly. I suppose this is healthier than mah-jong and less wearying than bowling and more satisfying than charity work.
But did I really think that this could go on undiscovered for any length of time?
I guess it maybe comes down to this-that I was at that time in that bed so present-oriented that I couldn’t take the future seriously. I was living in present time, and the present was time enough.