I drove Susan to the airport and checked her baggage through. In the boarding area I held her close to me, savoring her sweet, clean fragrance and the softness of her yielding fully against me. Her lips, as ever, warm in my ear, whispered, "Remember, if the plane goes down or anything, remember how much I loved you."
I stood on the observation platform and watched until she became a dot, distant and fading in the sky.
Three days later, what we thought might have been something serious turned out to be just a wild form of flu. All of my mother's tests and X rays were negative, so I prepared for my flight to New York. I was thinking that Susan was in Tel Aviv now. She was at the hotel, walking the avenues, maybe having an orange juice at a sidewalk cafe. I tried to picture where she would be at any given moment, tried, to figure out the time difference on my watch, but grew confused with the arithmetic. What difference did it make? I myself would be leaving the following night.
The jangling telephone jolted me out of sleep at five-thirty in the morning. It was Susan's mother. She was laughing about something. Why would she phone me just for a joke at this hour of the morning? Was she drunk? I tried to remember if Susan had told me whether her mother drank too much. Wait, she wasn't laughing. She was crying. She was hysterical. My head began to clear. I couldn't understand her.
Then there was silence.
Then Susan's father.
"Richard," he said, the word came slowly, "it's Susan. Susan's dead, my daughter is dead."
I tried to catch the significance of what he-was saying. I understood the words but they didn't seem to mean anything. I couldn't think of anything to say.
"Are you still there?"
"Yes," I said.
"We got a call from the consulate in New York. It was an accident. She was hit by some Israeli truck as she was crossing the street, near her hotel."
"Yes," I said.
"I'm leaving for Israel tomorrow to bring her back."
Words. Only words. What were they supposed to mean?
"Are you still there?"
"Yes."
"Well, things are pretty hectic around here right now. I'll call you when I get back and let you know about the funeral and everything."
"Funeral?"
"Yes, for Susan."
And then I knew.
A feeling of nameless dread.
Cold all over.
Vomit into phone receiver.
Go to window and look out.
Past Jackson Street.
Past Bay.
Past Oakland.
Sun is rising.
Past sun.
Past Atlantic.
Past Mediterranean.
Tel Aviv.
Susan is dead in Tel Aviv.
Nobody to hate but a stupid truck driver.
All that way, just to get killed.
Not even some stern, uncompromising, forsaking God to blame.
If I had kept her with me, as she had wanted, that truck might have been in some other part of the country on the day of our arrival.
Remember vaguely talking about everything in life being probability, even death. The meaning of life is that life has no meaning.
Feel so, so empty.
It wasn't possible. Seven years before, I had been playing war in vacant sandlots, Joey, fall down, damnit. You're supposed to be killed. Death, only another of life's games.
Five years before, I had awkwardly had my first woman.
Only three years since Mora had taught me the art of love.
How many women?
How many?
Hundreds?
To be sure. Maybe even a thousand, counting all of them.
Who knew?
Or cared?
And now, just as I was learning what it could be like, the joy of real love, Susan was dead.
I felt cheated, robbed of my most prized possession. In my selfishness. How many women would I have to go through next time, always comparing?
Another thousand?
Ten thousand?
Images of things past.
In class.
Driving.
Talking.
Mozart.
Beethoven.
Laughing.
First name.
TLR.
Beach.
Cliff House.
First night.
Warm, soft body.
Coming against me.
Living with her.
Taking care of her.
Why?
My sweet, beautiful girl.
My love.
"… remember how much I loved you."
Her last words, fleeting whispers in my ear.
I learn grief.
The abyss with no bottom.
The black plateau with no end.
But I am only eighteen.
And in time,
I will search again.
EPILOG
It took us a few million years, but we have finally reached the Age of the Almighty Orgasm.
Most women in times past, blissfully unaware that females were even capable of this physiological response to proper stimulation, loved their husbands, raised their families, and went about their lives with an orderly minimum of fuss and bother. In their ignorance they were happy. If men were careless clods and jackrabbits in bed it didn't really matter, because their wives didn't know there was any more to it. If sex was naughty, even for married people, if it was performed under heavy blankets and with the lights out, it was all right.' The man got what he wanted, and the woman, having performed her wifely duty, could busy herself with important things like laundry, raising children, and cooking. Most wives loved their husbands dearly and existed with them in a close-knit family environment. But those were the good old days.
Then came the sexual revolution. Some idiot, somewhere, had discovered (or rediscovered) the fact that women could have orgasms, probably while browsing through an ancient copy of The Memoirs of Casanova. Worse still, he let word of his discovery leak out. It wasn't long before romantic novels began alluding to the earth shaking, the sky falling, bells ringing, and lightning bolting. Women who read these novels began to wonder what it all meant, because the sky never fell when their brutish husbands made love to them. The discontent was vague, rambling in the distance like a far-off thunderstorm, but it was there.
Things might have eventually reverted to normal, had it not been for the movies. They took the ball from the novelists and started showing shots of puffy clouds floating through azure skies just at the crucial moments of their love scenes. Again the women wondered, perplexed because they had never seen any clouds wafting over their four-posters.
Then came the final and most telling blow; doctors, smelling money in sex the way a whore can smell a John with a bankroll, began writing books. "The Climax!" they screamed. "The climax is the be-all and end-all of marital bliss." And not just a climax, but mutual climax. They were still afraid to use the word orgasm because puritanical censors might confuse pontification with pornography. However, they described the sensations in terms so glowing that the earthquakes of the novels and the clouds of the movies paled by comparison.
Women by the millions began to read these books, and the more they read, the more they felt cheated by never having had a climax, much less a mutual climax. So, for the first time in modern history, the female began to make sexual demands upon the male. There was only one small problem: the male, used to pleasing himself alone, was not up to meeting these demands. Women who had always thought of themselves as happily married began to see their husbands in a new light of glaring sexual truth, as ineffectual climax givers. Ladies who had been completely happy never having had an orgasm began to develop the "frustrations" of which the books spoke. Formerly contented housewives began to see psychiatrists, the marriage-counselor business started booming, and divorces for "incompatibility" mushroomed. As time went on the authors became braver and started discussing orgasms instead of climaxes. Medico sexual fad developed. The idea of the vaginal versus the clitoral orgasm, which reigned for some years, was finally blown out of the saddle by Masters and Johnson. Mutual orgasm as an ideal fell into disrepute.