“Ah, you’re beautiful,” he said.
In bed he held her and kissed her and she was able to lose herself in his embrace. Then his kisses, moist and sensual, trailed down over her throat and onto her breasts. This was exciting but at the same time it detached her from the excitement, as if the imposition of passivity transformed her into a spectator. It was lovely to lie like this, loose-limbed and receptive, open to his hands and mouth, oh yes, it was lovely, but one needed a sort of mental jiu-jitsu to enable the brain to turn itself off while the body was being turned on.
“Beautiful. What a fine body.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“I want to be very nice to you.”
He crouched at the foot of the bed, coaxing her legs apart with his gentle hands. She felt the soft skin of his face against her thighs, and the tickle of his moustache. He teased her a little, blowing warm breath against her, and she liked the teasing and rolled her hips in response to it. Then he put his mouth on her and his tongue moved to taste her and she sighed.
“Darling,” he said.
“Oh, do that forever.”
He was very good at this, and perhaps not the least of her enjoyment came from his own pleasure in the act. Men differed most from one another in the way they ate you. There were those, of course, who didn’t do it at all, but their numbers seemed to have decreased dramatically in recent years. And there were those who managed to convey that they were doing you an enormous favor, and others who seemed to regard the ritual as a component of seduction, a necessary technique in the arousal of a woman. For others it was clearly a quid pro quo, something not terribly distasteful one did in order to get one’s cock sucked in return. Oh, it was much nicer when the man liked to do it.
She held parts of herself back, unwilling to commit herself entirely for fear that this might be a prelude for him, that he might want to switch the channel to fucking before she could get off. But he went on and she relaxed, knowing that he would bring her off this way, that he wanted to, and now her response was quicker, deeper, and she reached the point where she knew she was going to make it, and the knowledge drew away the final veil of inhibition and reserve.
“Oh, darling, yes, oh, oh, yes, oh—” it only took her a moment to recall his name — “oh, David, oh!”
In his bathroom she used the toilet, then washed her hands and face and swished some of his toothpaste around in her mouth. She wet a washcloth and cleaned up some of the traces of intercourse, then rinsed out the washcloth and replaced it on its hook. His bathroom was tiny, like her own, but she had to admit he kept it cleaner. It still surprised her to find that some men who lived alone were almost compulsively immaculate. Others were complete slobs. There seemed to be no middle ground.
Perhaps David had someone in once a week. She wondered if Mark had kept Lucinda. He had a full time housekeeper, but he might have retained Lucinda for the heavy cleaning. Lord, how many years had Lucinda been with them, anyway? And how many words had they exchanged in all that time, beyond hello and goodbye and here’s your money and I be in nex’ week, Miz Benstock?
Had she so much as thought of Lucinda since she left Buffalo, had her name even come to mind before this moment? She didn’t think so. And what did Lucinda think of her, assuming Lucinda bothered to think of her at all?
What did any of them think of her?
Not that it mattered, not that it mattered at all.
Other things mattered. It mattered that she had been eaten superbly and fucked quite competently. That she was reasonably sober now and had no particular desire for another drink. That she wanted a cigarette desperately. This last, her desire for a cigarette, mattered a good deal more to her than the opinions of people four hundred miles away.
She returned to the bedroom and looked for her purse in the pile of her clothes. “Don’t go,” he said.
“Just getting a cigarette.”
“Good. Get two.”
“I didn’t think you smoked.”
“Once in a while. If I smoke a pack in a month it’s a lot for me. On second thought just bring one cigarette. I’ll have a couple of puffs of yours.”
“Do you think we know each other well enough for that?”
He laughed, a good hearty laugh. She joined him in bed and lit a cigarette, then passed it to him. “A pack a month,” she said.
“If that.”
“I’ve tried cutting down and it just doesn’t work for me. I get terribly tense and can’t stop looking at my watch. I’ve managed to quit entirely for a month or so at a clip but I always go back to it. Maybe living alone it would be more possible to quit. Were you ever a heavy smoker?”
“Never. Just one every once in a while to be sociable.”
“That’s very unusual.”
“I guess so, but it seems perfectly natural to me.”
The cigarette passed between them until she found an ashtray beside the bed and stubbed it out. “I ought to be getting home soon,” she said.
“Stay the night.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“There’s a good place on Broadway for brunch. Great Bloody Marys, first-rate eggs benedict.”
“You’re tempting me.”
He turned on his side to face her and ran his hand over her body. She felt a wave of very lazy sensuality pass through her. She put her face against his cheek and took his penis in her hand.
“Would you like to put it in your mouth?”
“Hmmm,” she said, thoughtfully. She had both hands on him now, stroking him, feeling him grow in her hands. “That’s an idea,” she said.
“Would you like to?”
She moved lower so that her cheek touched his stomach. “Would you like it if I did?”
“Yes, very much.”
She put her tongue in his navel. His penis was very hard now.
“Would you like it a lot?”
“Andrea—”
“Say please.”
“You’re going to drive me out of my mind.”
“Well, you teased me a little before. Sauce for the goose and all that. You’ve got a positively beautiful cock. Does everybody tell you that? Now let me know if you like this, okay?”
“Oh, God.”
It would have been very easy to fall asleep. Lying there next to him, next to his warmth, muscles limp with sexual satiation, the secret taste of his semen in her mouth, it would have been the simplest thing to let herself drift off into sleep.
Except that she made it a point to sleep alone.
This surprised her. When she first moved back to New York she’d worried that sleeping alone, after so many years at Mark’s side, might be difficult. What she found was that sleeping alone was an important part of living alone. Her sex life was rich and enjoyable, but when an episode was concluded and it was time for sleep she wanted to be alone in her own narrow bed.
She got up quietly, put on her clothes in the darkness. When she was dressed except for her shoes he said, “Andrea? Going somewhere?”
“Home.”
“Oh.”
“Can’t sleep.”
“Sure. I’ll call you.”
“I’d like that,” She approached the bed, leaned over to give him a quick kiss on the forehead. “Tonight was nice.”
Back in her own apartment she poured a juice glass full of scotch and set it on the bedside table. She got undressed and sat on the edge of the bed smoking a cigarette and taking birdlike sips from the glass of whiskey. She had sobered up completely at his place and this one glass of scotch would not get her drunk now. It would just help her get to sleep.
Tomorrow there was a party she would probably go to, and at parties she tended to drink a lot. But there was nothing wrong with getting drunk on a Saturday night. Half the world got drunk on Saturday night.