“I had a home once—with Val. And I muffed it. I couldn’t have her and a meaningful job, her and a decent income. But I couldn’t hold on to her in the long run without job and income.”
“You came back from her shining. Something turned on in you that you haven’t managed to smother yet. I keep wanting to touch you. Maybe I think it will rub off … or I don’t want you to squash it again.”
“I have to.” For a moment her eyes burned. She was caught by surprise. How close her emotions seemed to the surface today. In a sense she was still on vacation—beyond discipline, away from control, from all the armor that sustained and protected her against the hundred casual and calculated onslaughts and insults of every day.
“No. You don’t. We don’t have to go on being caught in our own traps always. I don’t even have to spend my life caught in an old parchesi game.” His hand slid up very gently over her breast, exploring it with fingertips only.
She tensed under the hand. “Don’t.”
“What’s the difference between your rib cage and your breast? Because society draws funny lines on the body?”
“I was born in this society. My breasts are personal.… I suppose the touchy-feely scenes make me uncomfortable because where do you draw the line? But there’s a real difference between taking my hand and touching my breast.”
Yet he continued his soft tentative caress. “It feels different to me too. If I touch you on the rib cage, on the back, it’s like touching myself. Bones, lean meat. If I touch your arm, it’s like being with a man who’s more athletic than I am. So it’s as if I had breasts.… The couple of other women I ever touched were all soft and strange, spongy. Except for Ann-Marie. She felt lean and sinewy like you, except for her small breasts that were just starting.”
She gathered herself together, tensed to move. “Don’t though. I’m not comfortable. Stop.”
“Am I not being gentle enough?”
“Bernie, to me it is erotic.” She was embarrassed, but she could feel her nipple harden and her breast grow warmer with blood.
“To me too. Isn’t that a surprise? I think it’s fabulous.”
She started to roll away from him but he anticipated her. The other hand that was behind her pulled her to him. He rubbed his lips against hers as if curiously back and forth. Then he was kissing her mouth not gently but hard.
She was shaken totally awake now and she thought, Oh shit, and cursed herself for stupidity, yet she was scalded with surprise. She could not quite believe what was happening. It was like suddenly arriving in a puddle of hot oil. Why hadn’t Honor come? This would never have happened. She lay passive in his arms hoping he would just as suddenly stop. He was kissing her so that she could not speak, and she tensed with astonishment. Almost she expected him to stop momentarily.
But he was not stopping. She bucked quickly for space and tried to wriggle from his grasp. He let her fall onto her back away from him and then he moved over her. She felt a kind of hot shock at the weight of his body on her. He was naked, his body heated by the sun, and she felt his erection against her thigh. She turned her head away from his mouth and spoke into his sharp collarbone. “Bernie, don’t! You must stop.”
“I want to, Les, I have to. Hold me, please. It can work this time, I know it. It can work.”
“I don’t want it to work. Get off me. If I have to stop you, I’ll hurt you, Bernie!”
“We could be together, I know it. Hold me. Don’t fight. Let it happen. Please, Les, I’ll make it all come out. It’ll work.” He tried to cover her mouth with his again. His hand was fumbling now with her pants. He got the zipper open and his hand moved down her belly that felt cool against the heat of his touch. She felt at once an aching twinge of desire as his hand covered her mons, and a stronger bolt of anger, the confident cock shoving like a club against her thigh, him and his hand trying to breach her. She fought free with her left elbow till she had enough space to drive her right fist into his solar plexus. He groaned and went limp and she thrust free of his weight, rolling off to the side and coming up on her feet.
Grabbing her shirt, she ran from him over the broken concrete to the trees, zipping her pants. When she turned at the wood’s edge, looking for the path and staring back over her shoulder to see if she was pursued, he lay curled up on the pavement where she had left him. She paused to pull her shirt over her head. Then she ran up the slight rise and down the other side. She followed the dim path past the duck blind humming with wasps and then back through the bushes and willows to the sedge where the boat was moored. There she stopped.
How could she get in the boat, row off and leave him on the island? How would he get back? Even if he had gone out of his mind and attacked her, he was still Bernie. She simply could not go off without consideration of how he was going to get home. Reluctantly, making faces at herself, she trudged slowly back.
When she emerged on the apron again, he was still lying where she had left him; for a moment she was afraid she had killed him. But in that constricted space she could not have hit him hard. He lay with his eyes closed, clutching his stomach with both hands. As she watched him on the ground, he was too familiar for her to stay back. Tentatively she took a few steps. “Bernie?” He opened his eyes and looked at her without expression she could discern. “Are you all right?”
“Not noticeably.”
She came closer until she stood over him. “Are you hurt?”
“Entirely! Les, I’m sorry.” He sat up. “I kind of wish I was dead.”
She reached down then to help him up.
“You don’t mind touching me?” He raised an eyebrow. “You’re not afraid?”
“I’m not afraid of you. How could I be?” She clutched her arms around herself as if she was cold. “How do things get so messy?”
“Yes, you can handle me. Alas. I wasn’t cut out for a rapist.”
“Bernie, don’t misuse words. It wasn’t rape.”
“Well, attempted.” Moving gingerly, he stepped into his pants.
“You knew I could stop you.”
“But you’re not angry with me now. I can tell.” He looked at her closely and shrewdly.
“I’m confused.” She did not move off from him.
“You couldn’t pretend it never happened?”
She shook her head. “No. In a hundred small ways. Like now when you put on your pants, I’m aware there’s nothing under them.”
“Except me.” He laughed thinly. “Am I nothing?”
She shook her hair roughly, pulling it into the familiar club on her nape. “I’m aware now you aren’t. I mean … that it’s all sticky, as if we and every word and everything for miles has been covered with a film of hot taffy. I’m aware of you physically now. I’m confused, I mean it. Do you think that just sort of happened by accident?”
“I wish it had. No. I think somewhere in my spine—I must think with my spine like an extinct dinosaur because I certainly don’t seem to use what brain I have upstairs—I knew I was bringing you here to try to … be with you. To try. I was so caught up in the fact that I could, I overlooked whether you could or would.”
“You startled me.”
“Maybe deep down I’m convinced you’re really Ann-Marie. Now she could never refuse me, she could never say no to me when it came to the crunch. Maybe I was convinced I could have you too because I think you’re really Ann-Marie and therefore you’re really mine anyhow. So I have some ancient right, you see.”
“The only brother I feel related to lives in Seattle and I never get to see him any more. But a peck on the cheek is a big display.” She picked up their jackets and handed him his shirt.
“Well, I’m perverted in all sorts of ways, we know that,” he said sourly. “Actually I didn’t think you’d leave me here. I had a cold moment and then I felt sure you would, responsibly, trot back to fetch me. You’ll have to row us home.”
“My pleasure.” She led the way over the ridge. “Don’t limp so. I didn’t do a thing to y
our leg.”
“The idiotic things you get pleasure from. A rowboat rather than me.” He stopped limping. He kept quiet until they had pushed the boat off. Then he sat facing her as she rowed, giving her directions through the maze of reeds. “Are you sorry you hit me?”
“No. You made me angry. You shouldn’t jump on people.”
“I did begin very gently, as I recall, then I got too enthusiastic.” He stared at her. “You aren’t going to run away from me like you did right afterward. Or are you?”
She shook her head no. “I’m confused by what happened.”
“Euphemisms. What I did.”
“Besides what you did, things happened. We have to talk. I feel a little … unraveled. I have to sense my way back toward you again. I want to feel open, I want to feel like your friend. I don’t want to withdraw. It’d be easy to. It’s terribly hard not to. But I’m trying. You have to try too.”
“In spite of such emphatic rejection. What am I to do?”
“Just talk to me, Bernie. Till we understand each other again.”
“Oh, talk!” He threw up his hands. “I’m wonderful at that. I should have stuck to talking this afternoon.”
twelve
Leslie brought George’s Cordoba home to its attached garage. She had promised to feed the tropical fish in Davey’s room, the hamster in its cage in Louise’s, and to water the houseplants. But basically Bernie and she came back to the house because it was other space, less constricted than trying to talk in her room or presumably his, less awkward than talking in a bar or coffee shop. A gay bar on a Saturday night did not seem the right ambience.
“I could make supper,” Bernie said. “I’m a good cook. One of my survival skills: How can you throw me out on the cruel hard streets when I can bring you a prefect omelette for breakfast? I bet there’s goodies in their freezer. This strikes me as a well-stocked house.”
“They didn’t exactly invite me to move in while they’re in Puerto Rico.”
“Any chance they’ll come back early? Suddenly appear?”
“No. George has to call, so I can pick them up at the airport.”
“So you really think they counted every last steak in the freezer?”
“I’m sure not. Sue never knows what she has on hand. Every Thursday night we have to run out for things she’s forgotten. He has little parties for staff and students on Thursday nights.”
“How cozy.” Bernie looked in the freezer. “Roast beef. Pork loin roast. All those take too long. Wait, what about Cornish game hen? I could defrost it in kind of a hurry under running water in its little plastic bag. What do you say?”
“Why not? Do I have to help?”
“You have to clean up.”
“Fair enough.” She did her George chores and then sat in his chrome and leather swivel armchair and took his copy of Time on the Cross which he was using for the methodology seminar and started reading where she had left off in her own copy. She took particular pleasure in observing and in some cases copying George’s notes. Bernie was busy in the kitchen for a long time and then she heard him running the water for a bath.
In another half hour he emerged flushed and almost steaming, wrapped in a dark blue velour bathrobe she supposed was George’s. “I figure we can wash the towels in that busy laundry apparatus downstairs before we clear out. Cover all traces.” He leaned against the walnut desk combing back his hair with his fingers. It was flattened to his scalp in ringlets. “So much lovely hot wtaer. The heart of luxury. I live in a dreadful roominghouse. My landlady’s okay. She’s a fat middle-aged Black who grew up in Detroit and she’s lived in that house for twenty years. But there’s never enough hot water, nothing works right, it’s noisy and drafty. When the furnace is turned on, the hot air blows right up into my room through a register in the floor like a desert wind. When the furnace is off, a cold wind blows through the cracks around the windows. I almost never get a bath because there’s not enough hot water. And most of the guys are pigs. They never clean the tub. So I have to take lukewarm showers.”
She put down George’s book, realizing the truce, the recovery time, was past. “Is it too late for me to take a bath before we eat?” That would put off confrontation. As she ran the bathwater she thought, There is a real connection. We both live in ratty cheap lodgings without enough heat or hot water, and a bath like a good meal is a real treat. Lush towels. Sharing small pleasures like booty stolen from the comfort we’re both struggling toward: that’s the real part and the confusion this afternoon only passing static.
Still, her naked body wavering in the baby blue tub discomforted her. She had only a shower, like Bernie, and no full-length mirror; she hardly ever saw herself naked. Image: Valerie and herself standing nude side by side with arm around shoulders, leaning together in front of a big mirror with a carved mohogany frame. Somewhere they had spent the night. Unmade bed behind them, a big fourposter rumpled with their lovemaking. It was the house Lena had before she bought the Victorian mansion in town, a farmhouse near Lake Michigan she had filled with antiques and semi-antiques bought at the auctions she attended weekly, although she always implied that the finest pieces had been handed down in her family. Yes, Lena had given a party for the summer solstice with a live women’s band brought in from Chicago. Not only had she and Valerie been invited, which wasn’t unusual for an enormous party, but invited also to stay over for the night and share a special outdoor breakfast Sunday. That was odd because they were not in Lena’s crowd of lesbian couples with university and professional jobs. She sighed, realizing Lena had already been interested in Val, but Leslie had been too lost in herself to notice—her assistantship, George, her degree, stacking plans on plans.
Skeptically, she squinted at her body looking vast and pink underwater. Why had he wanted to do that, to try to have sex with her? Yet she had partially responded. If it had not happened so quickly, what would she have done? He had made it easy for her to grow angry and reject him violently. She was relieved but confused, and she felt open to him still.
She did not want to lose him. He was the only person she talked to openly and honestly about her life. Honor had to have more independence, more sense of options and choices before they could communicate fully. With Tasha she had often hung back, sheltering herself from judgment. Not really wanting to describe the work she did with George, the Simpson papers, the history of capital development, sure that Tasha would be critical. Would find political objections. Would manage to threaten her position, her security.
She tried to imagine Bernie as a woman, but she failed. He only came out in drag. She could hang the paraphernalia of conversational womanhood on him, but that made him more gay. She was glad he was not a transvestite, because they made her uncomfortable; she disliked men taking on the attributes of the enslaved woman as an aesthetic ego trip. She felt awkward enough around Honor sometimes. Bernie was not a woman but not a straight man either. In no way did he remind her of the boys she had been involved with so many years before.
Somehow it would sort itself out. She grimaced at her body and rose dripping to wrap it in a thick towel twice the size of the much laundered three towels she had at home. Carefully she cleaned the bathroom after herself. Then she discovered why Bernie had put on George’s bathrobe. She was hot and damp from bathing and she seemed to have swollen. She could not fit into her pants.
Stubbornly she went and sat on the floor with her legs crossed until she had cooled enough to force her clothes on. She had washed her hair and now she toweled it part dry, leaving it loose to dry itself while she ate. She hoped supper would be ready.
Bernie too had his pants and shirt back on. She felt relieved. It was going to be easy after all. They would talk and everything would simplify. He was dashing around the kitchen from stove to chopping board to refrigerator. “Good. You can set the table.”
She did. “Do we have wine?”
“The best I could find is a Paul Masson chablis. I’ve got it in a pan with ice wat
er. Tell George to purchase a proper ice bucket.”
He had used orange juice on the skin and filled the hen with pine nuts and kumquats. It was succulent. It was delicious. They sat at right angles eating fervently with their fingers. He had also made a rice pilaf and broccoli with lemon butter. “It’s all wonderful,” she said, but not until twenty minutes later when she had eaten all she could.
“It is awfully good, isn’t it? Did Valerie cook for you?”
“When we bothered. A lot of times we just ate on the run, a can of tuna fish. Or we’d make a big spaghetti or rice and beans and eat it for days.”
“I just have a hotplate. Doesn’t make for gourmet splendor. I try to eat enough at the restaurant to carry me the rest of the week on eggs.… I do love to cook. It’s a way of flattering someone. Are you flattered?”
“I’m satisfied.”
“Now make me a fire. It’s turned cool.”
When she had lit the fire, they sat on the soft couch facing it with their feet on the coffee table, where he had set out coffee and Metaxa he had found in the liquor cabinet. He said, “How quickly we get used to being George. You have a surprising taste for luxury.”
“But I couldn’t be George. Even for a good meal and all the comforts of this house.”
“How come? I thought that’s what you were working for. I thought you simply admired him to the stars above.”
“I couldn’t take the kind of … arrangement he has—the roles, the distance, the maneuverings. I mean, there are things I like about him and things I don’t. In some ways he is ruthless. Not to me. But toward others It’s not my business.”
“Burt lived this well. Not a big house. He had an apartment. But superior in the line of the food and the drink and the tailoring. Do you appreciate what I gave up in the name of some obscure principle of honesty or free choice or whatever you want to call it—if you want to call it anything. Fido, perhaps?”
“Are you sorry you left him?”