I spilled a cup of coffee on the table. I mopped it up with a dish towel, which was slightly brainless. I stopped myself on the way to the window.
I felt — I don’t know how to describe it. Drunk? Maybe. It was a little like being drunk, like occasional states of drunkenness in which you can almost feel another mind taking control of your head. I was still me, but somehow it was a different kind of me, and the everyday me was still in there, watching, taking it all in, but not able to do much about anything.
Is that schizophrenic? I don’t know, I’ve never been out with one.
(This coffee is terrible.)
I went to the bathroom and stood under the shower for a while, letting the hot spray hit me on the back of the neck. This is usually better than a tranquilizer, and it sort of worked; I could feel the tension literally draining from my flesh. I got out, I dried off. I shaved my legs and armpits (I love that word, it’s so wonderfully crude), and fantasied shaving my pubic area. I have never done this but have often wanted to. To recapture youth? I don’t think so. I think it conjures up visions of Oriental cathouses or something. If I did it, I wonder how long it would be before Howie noticed.
I didn’t shave it. But I did put a little cologne on it, and some more between the breasts and under the arms and behind the ears. And did all this still thinking in at least one part of my mind that I wasn’t actually going to do anything, that this was just playacting, a costume for a role I would not perform.
I put on a terrycloth robe. Nothing under it. Except, she said vampishly, me. Then I went to the bedroom and put on my diaphragm. I had stopped taking the pill when Howie and I decided that we had to have children to go with the house and the station wagon. I didn’t want to have children, but if I was going to have them it seemed only fair to let Howie father them.
I watched him finish shoveling the path. The walk and driveway were already done. I checked myself in the mirror, looking to see if there was a gleam in my eye, a telltale gleam in my eye. I checked both eyes and saw no gleam, but I did seem to look younger and fresher than I had lately. Imagination? Wish father to the thought?
He came to the door. So did I, from its other side, and opened it. If he noticed that I had changed from sweater and slacks to bathrobe he chose to ignore it.
“All done,” he said.
“You did a good job.”
“Be no trouble getting the car out now.”
“You must be tired.”
“Well, it’s pretty hard work, but I don’t mind.”
“Why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee?”
“Well, uh, thanks, but I don’t really care for coffee.”
I think groaned inwardly is what I did then. It seemed vital to get him inside. What could I offer him? Milk and cookies? Did we even have any in the house?
“How about a beer?”
“Well—” A tough decision for him. He didn’t want to come in but he really wanted the beer. The beer won.
We sat at the kitchen table. There was just one goddamned bottle of beer left in the refrigerator. Howie drinks it when he watches ball games, never otherwise. I guess it fits his self-image then. He also is apt to take his shoes off and pick his feet. One trouble with marriage is that when people are truly relaxed in one another’s company they let down their defenses and become genuinely disgusting.
I gave him the beer and made another cup of coffee for myself. We talked. The conversation went something like this:
ME: Do you go to school?
HIM: Over at East Central.
ME: I suppose they closed the schools today.
HIM: No, I cut when there’s a lot of snow. See, I can make thirty or forty bucks in a day. My old man gives me a note that I was sick.
ME: And you just go door to door looking for work?
HIM: That’s right.
ME: You must meet a lot of interesting people that way.
HIM: Well, just people, you know.
ME: A lot of lonely women.
HIM: Well, see, all I do is I shovel their snow, see, so I don’t really get to know too much about them.
ME: Oh, I’m sure a lot of them make a play for you.
HIM: I wouldn’t say that. And you know, most of them are pretty old, see, and there’s usually kids around the house or something.
ME: As old as me, for instance?
HIM: You’re not old.
ME: How old do you think I am?
HIM: Oh, I don’t know. I’m terrible at guessing ages. But to me a person is old or they’re not, see, and I would say that you’re not.
ME: Do you think I’m attractive?
HIM: You know, I’m getting funny feelings from this conversation. Like a little lost, if you know what I mean.
ME: Aren’t you going to answer my question?
HIM: I think you’re very attractive.
ME: (opening her robe): Do you really think so?
HIM: Jesus Christ.
If there seem to be parallels between this and The Graduate rest assured that I was painfully aware of them at the time. But if I was less adept at this than Mrs. Robinson, he was neither as sensitive nor as reluctant as Benjamin, which made things somewhat easier. We went to the bedroom (I almost wrote upstairs) after a couple of urgent kisses in the kitchen and another in the hallway. He was in a fantastic hurry and seemed hard put to decide whether to undress or to have me as soon as possible. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes and socks, then his pants, then his shirt. He had his underpants on still. I got out of the robe and kicked off my slippers. He was staring at my breasts almost as intently as I was staring at the bulge in his underpants.
I said, “You’re wearing too many clothes.”
He looked down at his underpants and blushed.
And took them off.
His penis was good sized and oddly shaped. At least it looked unusual to me. I haven’t seen that many cocks. Howie’s, three boys in college, and a few pictures and statues, but the pictures and statues were never of erect ones. I suppose they must show erect ones in the little pornography shops around Times Square. I suppose there are some women who are ballsy enough to go into one of those shops and buy a magazine with pictures of men’s cocks. I am not one of those women.
This particular cock was sort of cone-shaped, much thicker at the base than at the tip, sort of like an inverted ice-cream cone.
I got on my knees in front of him and kissed the tip of it and then took its head in my mouth.
“Oh, Jesus! Oh my God!”
He was enormously excited, and worried I guess that he wouldn’t be able to make it last. He reached for me. I climbed on top of him. His hands went immediately to my breasts. I hardly noticed them. I didn’t want to be handled, I didn’t want him to touch me at all. In fact I didn’t want him to do anything. I wanted to do, I wanted to fuck him and not the other way around, I wanted to do it.
I got on my knees and I straddled him and I took his cone-shaped cock in my hand and rubbed it across myself (say the word! rubbed it across my cunt) and lowered myself on it and it sank in, sank all the way in and this feeling went through me, all through my body, and it was like losing my virginity it was exactly like that and I came instantly the instant he was inside me I came and came through my entire body, a total orgasm that hit me without any real prior excitement, there was no getting hot first, there was just this quick rush of orgasm. I came in a flash, that is what it was, that is exactly what it was, I came in a flash.
He was starting to move his hips.
I said, “No, lie still, please, lie still, let me do.”
He did and I did. He lay still, and I lifted and lowered, up and down, up and down, and at first it was mechanical, which is not to say that my heart was not in it because it most definitely was, but that I was getting nothing out of this but the aesthetic pleasure of fucking him well. But I had every desire to do just that. And somewhere along the way there was more than a spirit of amateur professionalism on my part, more than the delight in craftsmanship, and I knew that I was going to come again. I felt excitement mounting up again and knew I was going to make it, and I ground faster and faster against him, leaning way forward so that the top of his shaft rubbed against my clitoris (what a sweet word, except I don’t honestly know how to pronounce it, whether you accent the clit or say it so that it rhymes with Horace and Boris and Morris, it being a word you read more often than you speak it aloud) and I kept doing that so that I was using his cock to masturbate with, that is what I truly was doing, and I knew it at the time, and that somehow added to the excitement of the act. He was a tool, his tool was a tool. I was using him. Which was probably why I wanted to be on top and why I wanted to do everything and not be touched by him. The dominant female.