Very quickly, ignoring the hand he placed on her wet armpits, she put her bag on the dressing table, eased off her shoes, and undid and rolled down her trousers and pants together and, still with her blouse on, lay on the middle of the bed and turned her face to the wall, as though he were not in the room. Her speed alarmed him; he feared he was losing the moment again. He felt isolated by her indifference and began to fear that he might be losing her as well. He saw the white of her belly and the tan on her legs. She had very little hair on her groin; perhaps she shaved; and the cleft was like a dumb, stupid mouth.
Without undressing he lay down beside her and again he was swallowed up by her hard big kiss, her mouth opened wide. He put his hand on her groin, felt the thin hair and moved his fingers lower. She took her mouth from his, slapped his hand away, and said, with the irritation that now accompanied all her words, “Don’t tease me.” He sat up and undid his shoes. And already she was withdrawn; and again he felt alarm. He took off his trousers and pants. Then the telephone began to ring. He sat still. He heard it ring and ring.
Jane said, “Answer it, for God’s sake.”
He got up and she saw him black and barely tumescent, little springs of hair scattered down his legs; his hair was more Negroid down there. And now, only in his Mao shirt, and looking absurdly like one of the children of the shanty towns, who wore vests alone, their exposed little penises like little spigots, he walked to the chest of drawers and took up the telephone.
From somewhere in the house, in the sudden stillness after the ringing stopped, could be heard footsteps, the sound of rubber soles on concrete.
Jimmy shouted through the door, “It’s all right. All right.”
As soon as Jane heard the voice at the other end of the telephone she recognized it.
Jimmy said, “Yes, massa.”
Jane turned over on her belly and shouted, whether with laughter or rage it was hard to tell, “Put that in your next classified communiqué.”
She sprawled face down on the bed, her blouse tight over her shoulders, her legs apart and graceless, her hips very wide, her pale buttocks flat and spreading, smoother than her tanned legs.
“I haven’t seen him, massa,” Jimmy said into the telephone.
Jane tucked her arms below her chest.
“I know, massa. I know. Massa, I’ll telephone you back.”
He put the telephone down and came back across the scatter of clothes to the bed. Jane, still face down and with her arms below her, was as if asleep. He put his hand on her hip. She didn’t respond. He lay down beside her and she didn’t move. He lay on top of her, and again had only the feeling of flesh below him, again missed the sense of knowing the shape of her body. She remained still. Sudden anger swept over him. He seized her shoulders, lifted himself off her, and sought to enter her where she was smaller. She shouted: “No!” and turned over so violently that she threw him off, her elbow hitting him on the chin. He raised his hand to strike her; but then, with closed eyes, she said strange words. She said: “Love, love.” He lay upon her clumsily; he was swallowed by her wide kiss; he entered her and said, “I’m not good, I’m not good, you know.”
“All men say that.”
And then, just like that, without convulsions, his little strained strength leaked out of him, and it was all over. And he raged inside.
He rested his head on her shoulder, on her blouse, smelling, too late now, her sweat.
She said, “Love, love.”
He shrank, and unwillingly he slipped out of her. He shifted off her and lay face down on her arm.
She said, “Do you always make love in your Mao shirt?”
There wasn’t even mockery in her voice. She was already quite remote. And when he opened his eyes to look at her, he saw that her right leg was drawn up, that the part of herself she had forbidden him to touch with his hand was displayed, as though she were alone. That drawn-up leg, so slender above the knee, and held slightly to one side: there was something masculine about the posture, something masculine about the hand that stroked that leg now. And she was looking at leg and hand. But how carefully she had tanned herself! With what care she had rendered that leg hairless! The skin looked abraded; but already there were the beginnings of new hairs.
She said, “What did Peter want?”
“Something about Stephens. That boy who used to be at the Grange.”
She said, twitching her arm below his head, “I’m getting up.”
He was close to the edge of the bed. He got up and stood beside the bed in his Mao shirt.
She got off the bed on her side, moving with quickness now, swinging both legs to the floor at the same time. And then, with one large gesture, she pulled the yellow candlewick bedspread off the bed, knocking the bedside lamp over; and, before he had time to consider her nakedness, she with her instinct to conceal herself after an act of casual sex, to reduce the man to a stranger again, she wrapped the spread about herself; and then, nimbly, in spite of the big bedspread, she moved about the room picking up everything that was hers, everything she had seemingly so casually discarded, almost as items that might be abandoned, her shoes, her bag, her trousers and her pants within the trousers; and, with everything that was hers, having cleared the room of her presence, she went into the adjoining bathroom, as though she had been there many times before, and slammed the door shut.
Half naked, Jimmy considered the room. He had lost the moment; he began to know again that emptiness he had lived with for so long; he began to feel that great pain in two places above his groin. He heard her using the lavatory, heard her flush the toilet. Later she tried to flush it again, but there was no water. He began to dress; and it was only then that he noticed, where Jane had lain on, the bed below him, a great damp patch on the white sheet, a great circular patch that had soaked through the candlewick spread. So that her body seemed independent of her manner, her words, her attitudes; and yet he had lost the moment.
And when, presently, she opened the bathroom door, she was dressed, her hair rearranged; and she was cool, almost a stranger again, someone who would have to be wooed all over again, someone who had surrendered nothing. Through the open bathroom door Jimmy saw the yellow candlewick spread hanging over the low tiled wall of the shower area, untidily tossed, wet. The starved woman had had many lovers, nevertheless; she was as inexperienced as a girl, yet she was spoiled; and, without knowing it, she had developed the bad temper, and the manners, of a prostitute, one of those prostitutes who after defeat and degradation celebrate a triumph, revenging themselves on the maid of a brothel hotel, creating work for that creature, the low punishing the lower. So cool she looked now; so triumphant. He was full of hate for her.
He said, “The car’s still here.”
She said nothing.
But he walked out with her. In the car port at the side of the house she saw the driver in the blue shirt and the boy with pigtails. She opened the door for herself, got into the car, and waited for the driver.
She said, “I hope you get what you wanted from the executives.” Almost without looking at him.
The pain in the two places above his groin grew and grew after she left. He longed for the feel of Bryant, for Bryant’s warm firm flesh and his relieving mouth and tongue.
6
THE LITTLE delirium had gone; it had begun to die even before she had reached Jimmy’s house. Now, in the car, sitting again behind the driver, and studying the little roll of hairy flesh above the bigger roll of almost hairless flesh, hardly aware of the desolation through which she drove, aware only of the heat, she knew something like distress. Distress as a settled mood, bearable, not a pain. She had memories of sensations; but images of the house and the bedroom broke into those. Words began to go through her head, words addressed to no one in particular, yet words that she fancied herself speaking with tears, like a child: “I’ve looked everywhere. I’ve looked and looked.”