“Jamie,” Barbara repeated. “That Jamie is the most scrupulous-looking woman I have ever seen. Pulled-back hair. Round glasses. Pale lips. Every day a clean white blouse…You’re related, aren’t you?”
“We’re cousins. She’s my Cousin of Perpetual Penitence.”
Barbara sipped. She sipped and sipped. “Does she have cause for penitence?” she asked at last.
Fern said, “Oh, I couldn’t.” And then she did.
Decades ago, Fern began.
Remember the fizz of those times? The era, they call it now. Women and blacks, upward and outward, not exactly hand in hand except for certain instances. Well, this was an instance. Jamie was just out of college, doing an assistantship in Lev Thompson’s think tank. Fern had been in New York too, she said, student-teaching children who might as well have been orphans — whose parents noticed them only to knock them around. She and Jamie shared an apartment.
Lev Thompson. A figure. He’d passed his sixtieth year; he’d packed those six decades with admirable activity. He’d been a doctor, a civil rights leader, the head of one national organization and adviser to others. Now he spent most of his time on the lecture circuit. His voice wasn’t one of those fudge-rich bassos, no; it was soft and grainy. His skin was the color of shortbread. His mother was a teacher, Fern said, like us.
Jamie’s face was too thin and her shoulders too narrow. But her blue eyes were shot with golden glints; and then there was that head of hair: lots of it, mahogany. He liked to hold a thick strand of her hair between his fingers, she told me. She told me everything. He held her hair as if his fingers were tongs, and he slid the tongs down to the end, and then he started again from the scalp.
A flat chest; and her two front teeth overlapped. Some men were wild for such defects, who knew why. She and Jamie came from a certain sort of family, Fern said. You know, Connecticut — money so old that it’s gone. Anyway, Jamie, no boobs, too aristocratic for orthodontia — she appealed to him. He was populist, he had more than a streak of the preacher; but there was nothing coarse about his tastes. The first woman, the one he’d married when he was a young doctor — she was a person of refinement. Their three kids were a credit to them both. The second wife was a Gabonese surgeon — they had a daughter he doted on. The third was a German tennis player — he was still married to her when he and Jamie got together. Class acts, the lot of them. Sure, he’d played around some, he told Jamie, who told Fern. But just a little: Jamie was only his second affair this marriage. Schmidt, the tennis player, was on the road a lot, and at his age he didn’t like to be alone.
Fern stopped, ordered another drink. Barbara did too.
He needed company, Fern went on. He probably could have done without the sex. But Jamie was in love, just like her predecessors — in love with his voice, his skin, the way he had of shrugging and waiting in argument, palms turned outward, as if he had all of God’s eternity to spend until the other person came around to his way of thinking. The kindly smile — you saw it across the room, stretching his tawny face, and you ached to see it hanging over you, and you on your back…The hair on his chest was silver, Jamie reported. Sometimes, before they happened upon licking, she was slow to come. “So what?” he whispered into her ear. “I’m a patient darky.” Well, you know, only a man like that can say a thing like that.
His apartment was books and leather and wood, and there were pictures of his wives and children, including a life-size photograph of Schmidt returning a backhand. Jamie stayed there infrequently, and of course only when Schmidt was on tour. Schmidt liked other women, Lev told Jamie in that tolerant voice — liked men too, liked riding him as if she were a circus performer, her knees up around her ears, her arms stretched diagonally toward the heavens. “Want to try it that way — me the tired old horse, you the young rider?”
Sure: anything for him. But what she liked best was to lie beneath him, to let him envelop her, to raise her own knees only slightly, to listen to his labored grunts and at last his sharp intake and his final sigh and his heart thudding against her chest. His lips, so soft on hers, slid down the side of her cheek and kissed the white pillow.
Together they went to this function and that. Jamie, usually wearing a skinny red dress he admired, hung up his coat, held on to his briefcase, hunted up a can of ginger ale if the event’s organizers had provided only water. “My Stepin Fetchit,” he’d say later, licking the underside of her chin, her labia, the backs of her knees; and whenever he licked, wherever, her inner tumblers rolled helplessly until they locked one to the other in shuddering orgasm. He could lick her earlobe in a taxi with the same quick effect. Jamie said a year later it occurred to her that her own tongue might perform that useful office, and, alone in an elevator, she pressed the inside of her wrist against her open lips and knew her skin’s salt and her stringy tendons, mm, oh.
He could give a speech on anything. “Filth as Thou Art” was the title of his lecture on Caliban and nature and the need to protect the damaged by a kind of enslavement. “Watch Him While He Sleeps” promoted the tithe over the progressive tax. His reputation had been made by a book that likened the underclass to the population of a late medieval city during the plague. But these later days he talked about a variety of unpopular things: about the right to be rescued — this at the time that mental hospitals were pouring their inmates into the streets; about God, the living God, not a forgiving deity or a righteous one, but a God you sat wrapped up in like an overcoat. He refused to appear on television, saying that the medium itself, no matter how high-minded its content, was a scourge. He returned letters to their senders — even letters of praise — with corrections of grammar in the margins. His enemies included Action for Children’s Television and some noted psychiatrists. They allowed that he was a good man. His wives said the same. The first two marriages had ended because each wife in turn had wearied of the causes, not of the husband. As the Gabonese doctor put it in a farewell note: Your attention, dear Lev, is forever elsewhere.
And that summer night in his apartment, Fern said, his attention was certainly elsewhere. The grooves in his face had become furrows, Jamie had noticed during the lecture he’d given earlier. His voice was raspy. His amber eyes had retreated into their lined surround. The public was demanding too much of him. In the cab afterward she asked him: “Should I go on home? You seem tired.” But she didn’t mean the offer — Schmidt would soon be back in town.
“Perhaps that would be…” he began. Her fingers in his cold wet hand twitched. “No,” he reversed. “Come up to my place.”
He sat in his easy chair for a long time, looking over some papers and drinking several cans of ginger ale, belching uneasily. He took forever in the bathroom. She was dozing when he finally got into bed. He turned his back in what she suspected was a common marital maneuver.
Fern looked at Barbara. Barbara nodded at her to continue.
But Jamie would not be denied, Fern said. She touched Lev’s shoulder, played a little tune on it, and, slowly, he turned toward her. That nimble hand of hers now entered his pajama shirt between the buttons and tweaked his nipple. With a sigh he heaved his body onto hers. He waited a few moments. She should excuse him tonight, she thought…but there it was, his erection, making its way through the fly of his pajama bottoms. He kneeled, still clothed, and entered her. A thrust, another thrust, and he fell — so quickly! And she not half begun; he had forgotten to apply his tongue. His face as usual kissed the pillow and his heart thudded against hers.
Only it wasn’t thudding. She held her breath. Perhaps he was holding his breath too. She exhaled. He did not exhale.