Yet the fruity silk of her thighs, warm against warm. Belly’s dull gloss. At times her body would answer him, follow.
“I’ve wanted objects. Certain drawings downtown. An Egyptian cat. A Japanese monkey screen.” In the slack flutter of her eyelids the sheen in the plumage of grackles. Color of very dark tulips. One hand rested on his back.
“I began making my clothes when I realized they didn’t like me trying on clothes in Ransom’s. I understood why my mother ordered from Sears. I learned to sew then. A woman from the church gave me lessons.”
“Do you blame me for wanting you?”
“Of course.”
The wall of masks watched, among them his own lewd face. With her he felt conscious of his bulk, his hair, the buried clubs of bones. Her small hand floated on him without pressure or urgency. She said, “I never know how much I should be watching out for you. You seem so clumsy with your guts dragging and your pockets full of yourself. But you want, you want.”
“Well, you wanted that monkey screen.”
“I have a cold faith in myself.” Her eyes mirrored him in obsidian. He was dug in for a long siege, prepared and patient. “If I really want that screen, I can reproduce it. It may take a year to learn brushstroke technique and longer to master it, but then. Suppose I make a screen? Is that what I wanted? If not, what did I want?”
“We have different problems.”
Her fresh laugh. “Friend, you noticed that?”
She never completely shut her eyes. Sometimes she filtered him through long lashes. Sometimes she fixed on middle distance, above the ceiling. Sometimes she challenged his eyes. He laid his hand on her flat midriff. In her free floating a bubble world: two dark skinny minnows in clear cold water, in a hard early morning light with the colors sharp as scallions but few. In his arms, her: in her, that water world. She spoke of her brother.
“We kept each other’s secrets. We were always acting stories. We like the Bible best but we’d do King Arthur and Robin Hood and Tarzan and lots of martyrs. He’d be Moses and I’d be the children of Israel—all of them. That’s how the masks started.”
She sat up against him suddenly, groping. “What’s that? On your leg there?”
He winced. Rough scab. “Accident.”
“You cut yourself shaving? What kind of accident?”
“It’s getting tough in the neighborhood. Ran into some kids the other night.”
She lay back still touching it. Line of lamp on her cheek. Her nails teased his back indolently. She moved her head slowly to and fro on the pillow. Hollows came and fled in her arched vulnerable throat. The breaking curve of her breasts interminably against the wall. In a slow teasing voice she told a story. “Once upon a time in a cold country lived a king who had two hundred daughters. Finally a son got born named Peter Moses Joseph George Washington Frederick Douglass—”
“A heavy name for a kid.”
“You don’t know the half of it. Of all his two hundred sisters, now, he liked Joan best, just older. The kids found out that much was expected of them at home—only perfection—and that out in the world people had expectations too but the opposite. Once they got off the farm the world seemed pretty mean and badly run. Even the folks who depended on their father thought the family stiff and proud. Their sisters became giddy and boycrazy or household drudges under the strain. The boy Peter was spoiled, yet beaten by his daddy so he’d improve. And he tried and she tried all through their childhoods to be good. Their daddy was superintendent of the little Sunday school, where every week in trepidation and glory and cold, cold sweat they performed like tortured parrots.
“Now in everything Peter led and Joan came running after, cause she was trained always to give her brother the bigger piece—which meant in practice she let him do the cutting. Their relations with the town whites were sometimes tense, sometimes muddy. But they were never afraid of their white teachers the way some colored kids were, because their daddy was much scarier. And they could trust each other. Old Joan had had it so dunned into her that her duty was to her brother that she would even lie to her daddy to protect him and then wait for God to cause her wicked mouth to be sewn shut.
“Things went along like that till Peter was in highschool and Joan was in teachers college. A mean pablum-minded school where she paid tuition and the cost of a dreadful room five nights a week by doing domestic work—but that’s another fairy tale. Now through wide reading, Peter lost his faith. He started pointing out flaws in their religion.”
“Did Joan lose her faith then?”
“At first she argued, but then she couldn’t stand to be outside, so she joined him. In fact each time she came home for the weekend she would bring new contradictions she had worked out. She’d always been thorough in her lessons. Peter was sick and tired of the whole project long before Joan had finished busting up their tight little world. It was busted good, too.
“Summer came, and Joan came home. But Peter, who’d always had his charm, was discovering what to do with it. Life was nature, he said, to replace the broken world, and sex was natural. He picked out the daughter of a man who did odd jobs. Not one of her father’s churchgoing families but those bad niggers on the outskirts of town they’d been raised to scorn. One hot Saturday Peter went off to town nervous like before an exam and selfimportant—oh! Joan lay on her bed and read and reread a short story of Hemingway’s called Up in Michigan which seemed horridly appropriate and her zoology book’s vague chapter on reproduction. Of course she’s seen animals together though told nice girls didn’t watch, but thinking of chickens and cows and dogs made it worse until she cried. This grubbiness was clearly not the sort of thing that could replace that tight world in which they’d tried to be saints, together.”
Experimentally she touched him, her hands for a moment less weightless. He was fighting now. To quiet that voice of cold water running he kissed her and kept her mouth. He let her slip from him only momentarily, then fastened on her again. Slowly her breasts heaved; her breath quickened. Fringe of lashes screening her sliver of gaze, wary still. Plumage tones in the flesh that slightly gave to him and answered. She was with him now, obedient, following though the eyes scanned him and would not go under. He did not dare let go of her mouth for fear that voice would start up like an airconditioner, so with his hand only he worked on her parting her thighs. She was small, firm as her breasts, yet he could not be sure she was a virgin. He had expected a tangible hymen. Perhaps some poor bastard before, laboring on her black marble belly veined with his sweat, died leaving no trace.
Finally, slowly he slid in using a condom. She had said, “You do something. You do it.” She was tight on him as slowly he worked in. He could no longer keep her mouth but it pressed into his shoulder. He tried bearing against her, but a wince crossed her face and her eyes opened wide. She felt good, she felt good, but he had to hold on. Her face was borne on the pillow, the lips slightly swollen, the eyes watchful and bright. He brought his mouth over against her lids and got them shut. Let go, come on, let go. If only he could get her to cast loose.
Her tightness brought him to the edge. He stared at the floor, counting boards beyond the little rug, counting them back again. He could feel a pulse in her beating against him, a slick pressure growing. Could feel her coming up to him. He clenched his teeth and worked. That pulse answered. He was so sure. But after a while she turned her face free of him. “I’m beginning to get sore,” she said in clear gentle tones.
He shifted, slowed. “Better?”
She shrugged, still looking away. The resilient pulse had died. Her flesh shrunk away. He came, working up grimly, and got out. Sitting on the bed’s edge he felt heavylimbed, as if he had just climbed out of a lake after a long swim. She hopped to her feet, plucked her underwear from the floor and went to wash.
She called from the bathroom, “Anyhow, if you still want me to go to that party with you, I will.”
Second sudden surrender. He dangled the loose sloppy pendulum of con
dom. They should get out of here or they’d get depressed. He told himself as he got up to flush the condom away that many virgins could not make it for a while. Next time.
She shut the bathroom door with a slam. “Wait till I come out!” He had to kill time on the bed, the clamminess of the condom making him sit with his thighs far spread. He kneaded his belly folds. Well, he had lost weight recently. Was skinnier than he’d been in four, five years. He felt no satisfaction. Thirty-one. Anna’s face as she leaned into the mirror sometimes: he had called it masochism. This was such a dryshod moment when he thought, what am I doing here? Why did I want that? What am I trying to do?
Out of the bathroom she strolled coolfaced, coppery highlights in the forest of her skin. Her walk was lightlimbed and relaxed. Her eyes were wide, the soft pushbacked curve of her nose was raised, inquiring. No fingerprints. But a brief cat’spaw of smile touched her face as she met his gaze.
When he came out he caught her at the mirror, examining. At once she swished away, brushing imaginary lint. He laughed, getting her coat. “No, you don’t look different.”
She stuck out her tongue. But let him take her arm. His depression had blown off. To have got her to bed was only a step. In the car her head on its long neck inclined toward him. Slowly she bent. He drove through the icy streets enjoying the extra effort. He felt good in his body.
“Afterward, come to my place tonight.”
She shook her head no.
“Why not?”
“You mean, why not now. Because I went to bed with you.”
“Don’t nit-pick. Why not anyhow?”
“Because of your friend.”
“Harlan?”
“Yes. It’s his house.”
“But you’ll have to meet him sometime. He’s going to learn about you anyhow.”
“I have to live in my world.”
“One you keep shrinking.”
“I’m going to your party, aren’t I? Like a proper trophy.”
He parked down the block from Marcia’s, the narrow house lit and uttering pulsations of shout and bang and crash and twang and ha ha. Her head lay lightly on his shoulder. “Should I tell you a thing that pleased me?” she asked.
“My modesty would survive it.”
“That you didn’t say you loved me.”
“Why?” Because if she’d asked for words, he would have.
“Because people do that, presenting a bill. I love you. As if you’d asked them to. Sticking their need at you.”
“Have you been billed that often?”
“The other thing I liked was that you didn’t ask indecent questions. You didn’t behave as if you had a right to know.”
Setting her ground rules. Far from minding he felt the surer of her the more she was careful to set up new barriers. On the stairs she shrugged off her coat and he took it. Who knew what would happen and for how long? For the first time he noticed the dress she had put on in the bathroom, worn with boots. He looked at her clothes because he was aware she made them. Soft folds of white wool. Bridal nightgown. Whatever happened she was going out of his hands into the world, not back into that damn little room. He would make her see and smell and taste and hear a hundred new things. He would drag her around the city until its streets buzzed in her head.
She moved into Marcia’s livingroom ahead of him with a hint of swagger in her walk—partly the boots, partly her good mood, partly her nausea at appearing in public with him that usually caused her to go sullen and stiffspined.
The room boiled at them. “Rowley, marvelous! Yes, I’m really leaving.” Marcia embraced him gustily. From kelly green shadows her soft eyes inspected Vera. After introductions as they were turning away, Marcia pinched his arm. “Not bad. By the way, Anna’s—let me see, where did she go?”
Across the room. Dark yellow Mexican sheath he had given her. In sensual repose against a doorway, the bow of her hip was taut for a tall guy who filled her ears, leaning close. Deeply she laughed. She never wore a girdle. He felt like touching her. Not gently. Like coming up behind and giving that shelving ass a pinch. As if his eyes hurt she twitched then and looked over her shoulder directly at him, without apparent surprise. Waved and turned back with that heavy flowing ease in her movements. He looked for Leon but could not find him. Maybe that was over. He felt no satisfaction. The guy in a tweedy sportsjacket, big build, peered at her bust. Suppose he was what she’d call handsome in a sort of openfaced rube way.
Some kids and some not danced by the phonograph. A girl with an ecstatic freckled revival-meeting face and long straight hair flying out, sharp pointy hips in orange pants, spun her ass like a propeller. Opposite a lean bored boy flopped. Two pretty brownhaired girls did a sedate roadrunner alongside. The talkers, his age or older, were nose to nose in every room. Permanent graduate students, lower to middle faculty, research types from the institutes, actors, personnel from FM stations and museums, proprietors of book shops or galleries, a smattering of editors and union staff, a psychiatrist, a poet, some social workers. No one on top. All partly defeated and partly on the make and partly arriviste. All interested in who were sleeping together, but more interested in who got the grant and who the ax. On sofas wives talked babies and appliances and the neighborhood association. Twenty percent black, thirty-five percent Jewish, more men than women, a good slice of the gay life.
“Well, Well!” Sally stood at his elbow: Marcia’s roommate and once his. Curly darkbrown hair, blue eyes in a face of olive. She stood there squareshouldered with feet planted as if in oxfords, and shot off her eyes. Short, deepening lines dragged the corners of her mouth. “Your newest discovery is up to the mark. But young. Eighteen? So young, so dark, so fair—just what the hip folksinger brings to a party.”
“With a little luck, sure. What are you doing these days?”
“Editing a reader on urban problems.” Sally worked for a textbook house. She had been a poet. He had set one of her antibomb pieces and sang it, until? Until the bomb itself stopped being the focus.
“You writing anything?” he asked her.
The mouth dipped. “Some of us give up our youthful pretensions.”
Sally herself had rather gained focus, in selfpity not to be explained by any event in particular: bitterness she had leaped into pulling the cover down. He felt sad seeing a woman he’d had rusting. She said to the world with her bitter mouth and squared off stance, You don’t love me! Said the world, No kidding. Patiently he waited for her to release him. Vera let herself be talked at by a glib fairskinned Negro kid, well tailored—what she would marry? Displaying before her an inflated smirking male pride as no doubt he himself. Her provoking air of resignation and mockery.
“I asked you if you’d talked to Anna lately?” Sally’s voice croaked with annoyance. “Anna Levinowitz. Remember her? Or is that too ancient history?”
“I haven’t seen her for a week or so. She’s over there,” he pointed, then saw that she wasn’t.
“Oh, she just walked out with whoever that was.” Her large blue eyes blinked at him from that face of olive. “We were all surprised that dragged on so long. Anna is such a self-defeating person. Leaving graduate school to get married. Leaving her marriage for a quick affair.”
“She’s tougher than you think. And she would have walked out of that marriage if she’d never met me.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?” In blue-eyed wonder. “Heard she’d been fired from her teaching job. Wonder what she did?”
“Are you sure?”
“Some man hired her at the University. I thought you said you’d spoken to her last week?”
Jesus, a couple of months sharing a bed five, six years ago? and she thought she had a license for kicking him in the shins every time they met up. Had it in for Annie, no known reason. What would have got her fired from that sweatshop?
He joined Vera and they began making their slow way toward some station people when Vera said, “Oh, there’s Caroline.” Still wearing a coat she stoo
d near the door talking to Marcia while her eyes combed the room. “She told me she was coming tonight. She asked me special if we’d be here.”
“Yeah? Where’s her boyfriend?”
“She said he couldn’t come. She only has time to drop by for a while.”
He felt a vague uneasy boredom as Caroline steered toward them. She stopped to squeeze an arm or exchange a hug, but she kept glancing in their direction to check that they were waiting. By the time she came up to them she looked hot and fussed but kept on her coat.
“Hi, Vera doll, is that a mad dress. I love it! I’d give anything to have you make my clothes. Listen, come to the john with me for a moment, okay? We’ll be right back. I have a personal favor to ask.”
Now what? She had always been making sly suggestions that he push her as a folksinger. Yeah, out the window. He frowned after them, sucking on his cheeks. Caroline led the way with her hand on Vera’s arm like a bracelet of flesh. Vera stepped along neatly just behind. Once she glanced back at him as they were going into the hall, a quick pout of what now? with a trace of smile and a tiny wave of her free hand.
He continued the interrupted journey to the group from the station. There were friends he never saw because they worked a different shift. Everybody was arguing about a new series they’d bought from the BBC. He kept his mouth shut and hoped nobody would find out he hadn’t bothered to listen. A few minutes later he saw the girls already making their way back toward him. Vera was leading now, and when he saw her face, he excused himself brusquely and went to meet her.
She was walking stifflegged, her back tense and her face smoothed into that childish mask of no-one-home. Her eyes as he approached narrowed and spat at him a look of pure acid. I hate you, said the eyes, I hurt, I hate you.
He took her arm. “What’s wrong?”
“What could be?” She stared at his hand on her arm. She made that arm stiff as fish skin under his palm. “Caroline has a few words for you.”
“All right. Say them.” He frowned.
Vera jerked her arm from him. “No. Get our coats.”