He stood up suddenly and came over to her, drawing her to her feet. He began unbuttoning her blouse. “Get undressed, Elena, and lie on the bed.”
Chad remained in his chair. “Hey. What’s going on?”
“Watch,” was all Evan said. He waited till she had stripped and lay on the bed, feeling exposed but also high from the way that Chad was staring at her. She knew that she looked good and that he couldn’t turn his eyes away. In the meantime, Evan quickly undressed and put on a condom. Then he lay down on top of her. He could tell she was excited already and simply pushed in and began to fuck her. She glanced over at Chad. He was staring at them, but he hadn’t moved. She loved the feeling of him watching them, as if he was in their power and couldn’t break away. She came quickly. So did Evan.
He stood up, not covering himself, and came to stand in front of Chad. He motioned for Elena to come over. Slowly, loose and wet after coming, she obeyed. She almost felt sorry for Chad. Instead of looking cool and in command the way he always did, he looked lost, almost scared, but he stood his ground. She had no idea what Evan was about to do, and in a way she was scared too, but she trusted him. It would be something wild. She thought Evan was enjoying the upper hand and the power to shock Chad.
“Do you want us?”
Chad was so startled he couldn’t reply for a moment. Then he repeated, “Us?”
“We come as a set. We don’t separate. Or are you scared?”
“I never did it with a guy.”
She knew Evan hadn’t either, but he wasn’t going to say so, and she wouldn’t betray him. “Have you ever done it with a girl?”
“Once…” Chad said reluctantly. His gaze returned to her body. His eyes excited her. Evan never looked at her that way. They were so used to each other’s bodies, they took their nakedness as a matter of course. Anyhow in the year they had been fucking, her body had changed. She had real breasts now, and her behind was curvier. She liked Chad staring at her. Chad raised his gaze to look into her eyes. “Don’t you have a will of your own?”
“We’re together,” Elena said indignantly. “He doesn’t make me do what I don’t want to. We’re honest with each other.”
“Do you love Evan?”
Elena took a step backward away from Chad, shaking back her hair. “I don’t know what that means.”
Chad grinned narrowly, as if she had given him back a measure of initiative. “But I do.”
“If you don’t want to, nobody’s making you.” Elena made as if to reach for her T-shirt from a Twisted Sister concert.
He caught her wrist. He gave her a push so she sat down hard on the edge of the bed. Then slowly and deliberately he undid his belt buckle and then his shirt and then his jeans. Evan watched him with his head cocked, smiling slightly. Chad was erect, so he couldn’t be that put off. She stared at his cock, because it was only the second one she had ever seen. He looked different from Evan, sort of bigger and looser around the top. “I’m not circumcised,” he said. “My father doesn’t believe in it.”
Evan straddled his desk chair, keeping out of the way. Elena waited until Chad had undressed completely and sat on the bed’s edge next to her. Then without waiting for him to make a move, she slid toward him and, taking his face in her hands, gave him a sensuous tongue kiss. She moved her thigh against his. She wanted him so bad she ached. She did not think she had ever wanted Evan this strongly, but she would never let him know that. It would hurt his feelings, and he was her own. Her flesh. Her more than brother.
Chad’s hand was on her breast now, a little awkwardly, squeezing hard. With Evan she would have instructed him, but she could not take a chance on discouraging Chad. They had wanted him and now they were going to have him, both of them. Now he was lying on top of her, kissing her almost frantically. She put her hand on his prick and guided him in. Normally she would have liked fooling around with him longer, but she did not want anything to go wrong. He thrust hard and came almost at once, long before she could. Then he lay spent on the bed, while she eased out from under him.
Evan let him lie like that for several minutes. Then he motioned for her to get up. She took the desk chair, which Evan had dragged to just beside the bed to watch more closely. Evan lay down beside Chad. At first he just caressed him from the back, making spoons. Evan’s chest and pubic hair were dark, almost black, and Chad’s body hair was the palest brown. Chad was tanned over his arms and chest. Evan was milky pale. Evan patiently caressed Chad, reaching around to his cock. Then he rolled Chad onto his stomach, used the surgical jelly and slowly, caressing his way, put himself into Chad’s ass. Chad winced and bit at the pillow, but once Evan was in, he seemed to mind it far less. She liked watching. She loved watching. She was possessing Chad through Evan’s cock. She was fucking him through Evan. She wanted Evan to thrust harder, but he was careful, gentle. She could almost feel his come. Then he rested for a moment, turned Chad over and began to suck his cock. She came just watching them.
Afterward Chad lay as if dazed. “Do you do this a lot?” he asked finally, trying to recover himself.
“We fuck all the time,” Evan said. “We study and we fuck. But it’s the first time we’ve ever taken anybody else with us. You should consider it an honor.” He was grinning widely.
“Did you like being with us?” Elena asked almost shyly. He was so beautiful, Chad with the blue blue eyes and the carved face.
“I’ve spent worse afternoons.” He reached out and pulled her down on the bed with him. He was staring into her eyes. “I don’t understand you.”
“Sometimes I don’t understand myself.”
With a light caress now his hand moved over her breast. “You’re like something I made up lying in bed at night.”
She jerked away. “I’m no fantasy.”
Evan said, “You know, we could all have a lot of fun.”
Chad looked at him, his hand coming to rest on Elena’s bare thigh. “I think you’re right.”
5
Suzanne
Rachel was silent for an entire week. Suzanne tried to call her twice at the apartment she shared with two other rabbinical students. Suzanne left pleas on the answering machine, but Rachel did not return her calls. Finally a reply came in her E-mail.
Mother:
I really can’t imagine what you were thinking of, to give my room to Elena. I just can’t believe you did that to me. I think it was incredibly selfish of you not to give up your gym or your office, but to make me the sacrificial lamb. I am certainly not coming home until I have my room back. You are always expecting me to put up with anything to satisfy Elena, who can never be satisfied anyhow!
It seemed to Suzanne that Elena somehow occupied seventy percent of the apartment. Her jacket lay on the back of the couch. Her CDs were scattered about as if flung. She left the television on and wandered away. Her flame red brassieres and bikini panties hung on the rod in the bathroom. She was on the telephone as much as in high school, when Suzanne had gotten Elena her own phone in self-defense. Furthermore Suzanne had to deal with Sam, who dropped in on his adopted daughter a little too frequently for Suzanne’s comfort.
Sam was ensconced on her couch at the moment. “I pulled Judge Fogarty. That man must be a hundred years old. Why don’t they have mandatory retirement for judges? It would help if they had to leave the bench before senility overcomes them.”
Sam was big—broad shoulders, big bones, and curly sandy hair. He had been a good-looking man when she had married him, twenty-three years ago, but he had spread out considerably since then. She had never been madly in love with him the way she had with Elena’s father, Victor. She had not wanted to be. She had seen herself going down the same road as her mother, rendered idiotic by blind passion for a series of ill-chosen men. Sam had been a rational choice. She had made that choice as much for Elena as for herself. She had loved him, certainly, but with clarity, with her mind as well as her body.
Their careers had got in the way, so that in an average week,
most of the time they spent together was in bed and almost all of that, asleep. They were both young political lawyers very much on the make and far more passionate about their cases than about each other. Their marriage had disintegrated under the pressure. But Sam had always been a good father, to his three children with his current wife (who did not work); to his own daughter Rachel and to Elena, whom he had adopted shortly after the marriage. She had chosen well in that regard, and as much trouble as Elena had got into, it might have gone far worse if Sam had not been there for her. Elena’s own father had disappeared before she was born. Suzanne heard about him very occasionally. He was in the mountains in Nicaragua. He had been shot down on the streets of Guatemala City. He turned up again in Chile. He was in jail in Panama. She wondered. His family had money, and she would not be surprised if he were running one of their corporations instead. He did Elena no good, except to excite her imagination. Suzanne still remembered seeing a composition Elena had written in her second college: “I am a bastard out of Brookline, Massachusetts. I am a bastard, the daughter of a bastard. My father was a hero and a guerrilla leader.” Suzanne sighed. Sam was looking at his watch.
“Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t have been more truthful with Elena about her father. Then maybe she wouldn’t romanticize him so ridiculously.”
Sam shrugged. “Compared to us, he was a romantic figure. You were crazy about him.”
“For a while. For a while. Until he took to abusing me. I did not find that romantic.”
“I bet you didn’t.” Sam grinned. “Besides, what harm does it do to give her a sense of a colorful background? It isn’t as if she’s about to go off to the jungle to look for him. Or as if she’s ever taken a serious interest in anything political.” Sam looked at his watch for the third time.
Sam was waiting for Elena. Doing anything with Elena usually involved a great deal of waiting. Elena had only begun to dress when Sam arrived. They were going to a concert by a Chilean group. If Elena did not appear soon, they would be late. But Suzanne was determined not to hurry Elena. She was constantly telling herself to treat her daughter as if she were a houseguest rather than a child of hers. Of course, she rarely entertained houseguests. She was too busy. Aunt Karla came to see her and the girls every year, yes, sometimes with Rosella and the twins, and Beverly visited maybe once every five years. That was about it. But what she tried to keep in mind was that a hostess was far more polite to a guest than a mother to her daughter, and she needed to muster all her tact and resources to handle having Elena back home. She felt an intense usually subliminal fear for Elena, always, that she would get into some desperate trouble, that something violent would happen to her. For Rachel, her fears had always been more mundane. Don’t catch cold. Don’t strain your eyes. Are you sure you can handle six classes? But there was no limit to her anxiety for Elena.
The redwood protest case has been postponed again, this time by the prosecution, so I am free to fly out. I have appointments with the people I have to see Monday and Tuesday. It sounds as if having an office there might happen, but I won’t know till I talk to supporters face-to-face and see if I can be effective in the Northeast. I’ll be flying in Friday night, hoping that we can spend Sunday together. Let me know if that’s possible. How are your schedule and other commitments?
Suzanne hit “return” on her E-mail program and sat there, trying to figure out what to say. Panic told her to type that she was going to be out of town, out of state, out of the country. She was planning to drop dead on Friday night. The memorial service had already been arranged. Jake was not invited.
What does it matter, she told herself, if he’s disappointed in me. So what? So we will or will not continue corresponding. Maybe I’ll be disappointed in him. Of course I’ll be disappointed in him; how could I not be? What good can come of this? She could not think what to say and she ended up getting off the computer altogether, as if even being on a potential link with Jake was too dangerous to handle.
Elena was still in bed. Suzanne ran upstairs to Marta. “He does want to see me! He wants to spend Sunday with me. What am I going to do?”
“I guess you’re going to spend at least part of Sunday with him.” Marta smirked. “So what could be so bad? Even if it’s a disaster, you can eat out for a month on the story. It’s romantic, Suzanne. Meeting a man on the Internet is so trendy and fin de siècle. I’m rotten with envy.”
“If you truly are, dearest one, you can meet him in my place. He doesn’t know what I look like.”
“Hmm.” Marta pretended to consider, head cocked. “But Jim and I have to go to New York this weekend.” Her son, Adam, was at NYU. “He’s showing the film he made. I have to go see it. I was thinking of asking Beverly if we could sleep on her couch. I don’t want to drop a thousand for a stupid weekend. If we have a free place to stay, we can fly instead of driving and worrying myself sick about the car.” Marta had a new Jeep Cherokee she did not look forward to parking in Manhattan.
“Ask her. Beverly likes you. In fact I think she likes you better than me.”
“Well, my mother always liked you better than me. We should have traded mothers twenty-five years ago and made everybody happy.”
“What a wonderful idea.” Suzanne sat up. “Elena could get into that. Suppose when you went away to college, you exchanged parents. Everybody by lot draws somebody else’s. Or a computer could make matches. So much less angst. I think I’m onto a great piece of social engineering.”
“You’ve changed the subject from Jake. Jacob Kallen, eco-terrorist.”
“He is not, counsel. He is an eco-activist.”
“Jacob, who wrestled an angel, or god, or whatever.” Marta played with her long braid the color of weathered shingles. “Think he might want to wrestle you?”
“Don’t be obscene, Marta. This is an absurd tête-á-tête I backed into. The truth is, I never thought of him as a real man. He was a figment of my computer. And I liked it that way.”
Suzanne did nothing about Jake that day. The next morning she did not even turn on the computer but spent an extra fifteen minutes on the treadmill, then took a long hot shower. By the time she had breakfast and dried her hair, it was time to rush off to the university.
The gender equity committee of the law school met every Thursday at seven-thirty, so she had supper with Alexa, a friend from women’s studies, and then went to her committee meeting. When she got home just after ten, Elena was watching a gangster movie on TV. At the next commercial she strolled into the kitchen, where Suzanne was setting up her coffee for the next morning. “Oh, some guy called. From California. He wanted the address and directions.”
“Is he going to call back?”
“He goes, ‘Well, is she going to be around?’ Anyhow, I looked at your schedule and I told him that Sunday looked clear all day. Is he some kind of friend of yours?”
“You told him I’m going to be around? On Sunday?” She spilled ground coffee all over the counter. “You said I was going to be here?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“I hadn’t decided.”
“Whatever,” Elena said, losing interest. She strolled back into the living room, where her movie had resumed.
6
Suzanne
Suzanne spent an hour dressing for lunch. Jake had called her from the Inn at Harvard Square. She felt like a bloated adolescent about to go on a date: ridiculous and pitiful. To spend all this time worrying about her appearance was humiliating. No matter what she did to herself, she would still look forty-nine and she had never been beautiful. She was simply pleasant-looking and small, and that summed up the best she had to offer to the gaze of any man.
The truth was, most of her clothing that could be called dressy was selected for class or for court. She had a bunch of suits in gray or navy and some silk dresses, conservative and careful. She had two party dresses she wore at holiday time. She had a couple of caftans, comfortable and interesting-looking, in which she entertained, on th
e occasions she had time and energy to do that. She had exercise gear. Almost everything was ordered out of catalogs, because she found shopping tedious. It was always too hot in department stores. It took hours to find anything, and then they would be out of size eight. Finally she dressed as if for class (rather than court): nice pants, a chenille top, and a silk blazer. Earrings and pendant. She avoided looking in the mirror and marched out of her bedroom.
“Where are you going?” Elena asked suspiciously.
“I might be back for supper, I might not.” She paused. “I almost certainly will be back. But I’m not sure.”
“I’m going out with this guy, Roy, so I won’t be here for supper anyhow. But where are you going?”
“To meet a friend.”
“What kind of a friend? This is that guy who called from California, isn’t it, and you’re dressed up for him. Who is he?”
Suzanne shrugged, a little flustered. “I hardly know him.” She yanked on her coat and ran for the door.
“So who is he,” Elena called after her, stimulated into curiosity by Suzanne’s reticence. “How do you know him?”
All right, all right, she would meet Jake and blow their silly thing out of the water and she would save ten minutes every morning. Get it over with.
The two elevators in the atrium of the Inn were side by side. She was sitting, as she told him on the house phone, on a couch facing them. Two men got out, arguing. A woman and a child. Then the doors opened and a small man emerged, looking around. Of course he was not small compared to her, but still he struck her as small. She realized that both the fathers of her children had been a foot taller than she was. She had never thought about that. Did she have a preference for tall men? Had she had a preference for tall men when she was younger? In years, she had not exercised a preference for men of any sort. He was perhaps five feet seven and wiry, small boned. He had piercing brown eyes in a sharp face. His brows were arched in surprise (what had he expected?) and he was smiling tentatively. He stuck out his hand. “Suzanne, I presume?”