“And you went parking with him afterward?”
“Hey, this is your book, not mine.”
“So while I was hot for Rosie,” he persisted, “you were fantasizing about him.”
She said, “I was struck by something you said about desire being located in the past. I tried to see if that would work with me. I looked deep into my own.”
“And found Jeff.”
She smoothed the pad on her clipboard with the flat of her hand in a cleansing motion, as if wishing to brush away the question.
Steadman considered this phantom rival and concluded that he didn’t mind. He was liberated by not figuring in Ava’s fantasy. It was better that she used him as he used her. He wanted her to feel free to fantasize as she liked, to fulfill what mattered most to her. Otherwise it was all self-deception.
“Better that we should deceive each other than deceive ourselves,” he said.
With this reflection he began dictating the episode — the prom date, groping her in the car, the sudden policeman, the fluffy dress and the straps and stitches of all her underwear, the makeup, the final flourish. Ava helped him when he hesitated, and she gave him the right words for the cosmetics.
But he said, “I don’t want too much detail. No brand names. None of those ridiculous lipstick shades.”
And when he got to the point of describing his orgasm, saying “Not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime,” she frowned and interrupted.
“Do you want to know how it felt to me?”
“Go on.”
“That I was sucking the life out of you and that you were inert while I drank you. That I was in charge, draining you of your strength and swallowing it, to be strong myself.”
Her exactness and her poise made him thoughtful. He was reminded of how much he needed her, and that she was half that life of desire he was reliving, and so half his book had to be hers.
“I’m sorry if I shocked you,” she said. She changed her posture, recrossed her legs, and said, to encourage him to continue, “So time passed.”
“No, wait.” The experience last night had uncovered an earlier memory. That was the paradox. “There was something else.”
“Another woman?”
“Another me. A younger me.”
He was staring blindly at the window, beyond it, at the lifting seafog and slender dripping oaks and grizzled needles of the pitch pines, into the past, remembering.
“I grew up in the age before everyone had an electric clothes dryer,” he said. “You probably had one.”
Ava was listening.
“Let me see,” he said. “This matters. Everywhere I looked I saw clotheslines — women’s underwear on clotheslines, lifting with the breeze and fluttering beautifully, as beautiful to me as the nakedest woman. Those secret clothes were women to me, and the way the wind filled them made me gape.”
He was gaping frankly now and lost in his gaze, consumed by his vision of silken whiteness, like the whiteness of a body. And Ava was writing swiftly as he dictated; she had no memory of her own to match his vision and was somewhat surprised by how remote this seemed from his description of yesterday’s desire, the prom date, kissing and fondling in the back seat, an adolescent episode relived.
“I see clotheslines, and secrets on them — panties and slips and bras. Why so many? Did women need more underwear then? There seemed to have been more of it, or was it more elaborate — women perhaps making up for their outward modesty by covertly wearing seductive underwear.”
“Sometimes it peeked out,” Ava said.
“Yes.”
Underwear was never totally hidden; that was the excitement and the tease. The ghost of a bra seen through a gauzy blouse, the neat curve of panty line under tight slacks, the ambiguous straps and ribbons, the imprint of lace showing through a skirt — always pretty — the notion of the beauty, the idea of tiny pink bows hidden beneath a woman’s clothes.
“And so it seemed that underwear was a distinct and evocative form of nakedness. A woman in a slip or panties was the object of desire that a naked woman is now.” Steadman pressed his temples with his fingertips. “But only the past matters to me. Underwear was an invitation, and a greater temptation than nakedness. I can see it clearly.”
As though peering from overhead, past rooftops and telephone poles, he saw himself as a hurrying boy cutting through back yards to get to Carol Lumley’s house. The boy passed clotheslines and ducked behind them, recognizing the women’s underwear from the Sears catalogue and the Sunday newspapers. The Cronins’ daughter was a nurse, but even a nurse’s white uniform seemed like a version of underwear, and so did a man’s bathing suit.
A great fluttering whiteness on this warm day in early summer. The wind lifting the underwear also lifted the forsythia and the lilacs, the irises and the two-tone leaves of the poplars that went on spinning, the sun-struck laundry, bluish white in the deep green.
Hurrying under the clotheslines, he felt the flimsy silken things fluttering against his face, the warmth of them, their fragile beauty. He was fascinated by the variety, the shapes and sizes, some of them pink or fringed in lace, their softly rubbed seams, the stitches on bras, and the way some pieces were perfectly matched — the pairs of them in silk or satin pegged up together, the revelation of the back yards of his childhood.
Needing courage, though he had nothing else to do — school had ended for the summer — he had waited until late afternoon. Carol had said, “If you want to come over and sit on my porch I’ll probably be around. My parents might have to go out.”
The casual way she had said this was a greater inducement than if she had made a formal invitation. They were tentative exploratory words, but each one suggested a promise. The danger was that the more specific you were, the greater the blame, and the worse the sin. Vagueness was the tone of innocence, and though he was attracted to Carol Lumley he had no idea what lay beyond this attraction. He wanted to kiss her, he wanted to touch her, he wanted her to let him and for her to like it. He was fourteen years old.
He moved, hunched and watchful, like an intruder, from back yard to back yard — the Cronins’, the Halls’, the Fasullos’, the Flahertys’—on this hot bright breezy day, what his mother called a good drying day. In one yard Mrs. Fasullo was clothespinning her voluminous panties, and in another Mrs. Finn was harvesting her slips, and elsewhere the underwear flapped like flags or swelled with the wind, as if with the curves of a woman’s body.
Ducking through the last back yard, he came to the Lumleys’, and what stopped him was not Carol’s underwear — though he saw lots of it on the line amid the whole family’s underwear, from her mother’s bloomers and her father’s boxers down to the tiniest bras, the smallest panties, the half-slips, and the slips — what a small body she had. He caught sight of her blue nightgown, the kind he knew as a baby doll, and he paused and looked closely.
Trimmed with lace and pink bows, wooden clothespins holding its straps, the lovely thing hung and swayed as though Carol had just slipped out of it. He touched it and held it to his face, the blue satin warmed by the summer afternoon. And beside it, just out of reach, the matching blue panties. White satin ribbons were threaded at the shoulders, and the wide strip of lace at the hem was picked out with bows. It seemed to him both a gown and underwear, but it was designed for bed, and what mattered most to him was that it was meant to be admired by someone else.
“What the heck are you supposed to be doing?”
He was too startled to speak, and even when he saw Carol laughing at the window he was not calmed. He looked away. He felt he had revealed himself. Had she seen him clutch the baby doll and press it to his face? If so, he counted on the fact that what he had done was so absurd she would not understand it.