Do you, she breathes lest the phone might find the bed, do you think of anyone else when you fuck me?
What is she made of inside? I don’t answer her but begin circling, I have not much of a self only the change through which I drop and afterward don’t recall except in that other time zone parallel. Her question grips me and is answered as if later in that other time but maybe it is right now as my hardness is felt in these circles I describe.
Someone else? Sure. With one person, have others; wife, think of friend; friend, think wife. Enemies? heavy.
Tom cat, she says. She dabs with her tongue a point in my left hand where if the fingers were spread the thumb and index finger extended downward on two imaginary lines would meet. This touch for some beatific technical reason the Chinese have doubtless understood for centuries seems to trace a light fingernail up the longitudinal dividing line of my scrotum.
Now, if you are thus between, then that accounts for your weightlessness, extended between bodies. But are you in fact weightless because she says you taste like custard.
(I taste like custard.) She says or will say inside her you split her right up and she is real again. Hurt? Inner structure be damned; here’s a soft slot only.
I am about to do something different, I feel it in my chest hairs, but as if again she is ahead and waiting she cries out or laughs or something, and is coming with a force like sound but as submerged as the words I didn’t speak answering her a moment but what a moment before, and I am not circling, I have come into her and time has come and gone by, into her and out her nose’s nostrils each now to be kissed. And her smooth knee.
The phone is ringing once and once and once. A child is somewhere perhaps.
Neither of us feels at home; we are thousands of miles from home.
Phone is ringing. We are listening together. A person somewhere is concentrating on something.
I can almost smell who that is, I say aloud.
Tom cat, she says.
I remember from a moment or a minute before that our hands came together for the first time when hers came up to clamp mine down, I think ah what if she were a doctor, think what those eyes and hands would know.
There’s a Mexican restaurant a few blocks south. Not worth thinking about but it is there. Maybe the phone with its cartridges will feel like having a Mexican repast a bit later.
She says, We’re going to Mexico in January.
Enjoy it, I say.
Plunging ahead, she says, you have to plunge ahead without thought.
If you’re going to get what you didn’t know you wanted, I say.
I rise over her and swing my beard down to the three lines of hair, look deep, close my eyes and think what if she were a lawyer, what would that be like? I remember when my daughter was born and when the doctor raised her by the feet her back to me and her genitals were puffed and I thought it’s a boy, and when he said, A beautiful girl, water broke over my eyes, I had wanted a girl maybe, and a nurse said cheerily, Every man should have a daughter.
She was a young nurse, sexy but not beautiful I can attest to that, and I can’t remember if there was one of her or two.
9
This was not a return, except to my true whereabouts. And yet not wishing to go at once to Sub’s I did not for a while know where to go. I had no suitcase.
It was a long time before I got to New York even though the time difference being what it is you could leave at ten and if the wind was right arrive at eleven, which would not have forced my own clock because Monday night I was still in that respect virtually in New York though in London. But my charter associate, who at 10 P.M. found himself grumpily discussing our future when all I wanted was a cheap seat on a New York plane, did get me on a Sydney-London-New York flight out of Heathrow, but it didn’t get off the ground of course until five in the morning — which is the trouble with these less popular lines that keep charter agencies in business — and by the time I buckled my seat belt to take off for New York my body was almost in London, which was why seven hours later I sat in an early morning cab riding the Van Wyck Expressway through South Ozone Park and with the very early commuter traffic (onto the Long Island Expressway) unable to tell the bearded driver with his Afro-pik stuck in the side of his head where I was going.
Should I have been guilty about Lorna — regretted only what I’d missed? I’d seen us together, night, morning, my body clock going off every hour on the hour, heard in my daydream a phone ring, the second tenor calling a blind baritone’s wife smelling curry on the hob — earlier hearing Jenny come in with her new key, run upstairs, stop and call Lorna — and call me — or earlier still, Will come out and wash and discreetly go down and get himself bacon and egg and fried bread and leave for school — earlier still touch a pearly scar on Lorna’s shoulder in the first light of Highgate dawn but as my cab bends down to the Midtown Tunnel toll booth (which for anyone east or west who does not know New York is on the Queens side) I can’t decide if I’m looking at Lorna’s scar from front or behind, and I know the only thing my daydream would certainly have heard: namely Will my son, and now as my driver tossed money into the toll bin and waited for the green light and I became aware of his radio just before the tunnel snuffed it out playing what used to be called in the fifties modern jazz, Will on the floor of his room waiting for his father raised my memory to a new power of decision and I gave the driver an address.
Made up your mind sooner, I’d taken the Williamsburg Bridge. Six half dozen.
I envisioned Sub’s apartment room by room by my remote closed-circuit telly till I reached his own set right near my suitcase, the window open, sounds entering Sub’s high apartment like the sounds my cab was driving through. But we were on Second, Broadway, Bleecker, through Washington Square Village with its giant Pablo (guarding NYU faculty families), Little Italy to the south, the Washington Square statue of Garibaldi to the north, then down Downing into Varick with the early morning trucks shaking over the cobbles, and my spirit for an instant shot ahead to the bail bond places way downtown off Varick where I and a lawyer I’d dug up on my own because I didn’t want to involve my father had gone to raise bail for Reb Needle, whom I’d not seen since we graduated from college and who’d given of all people my name sitting in jail in shock from having punched a fellow drinker half to death in an East Side bar — but my driver was finished with the Varick Street cobbles in a moment and was in King Street stopped in front of a fine brick house, four-story with a high stoop like the brownstones in Brooklyn Heights where I grew up.
Well, Monty Graf was not exactly out on the stoop waiting. He’d been in bed, but everything about him when he opened the door was awake, his deliberate smile above the stubble veiled a mole at the fork of his chin cleft and below the middle line in his forehead that stops halfway across leading your eye still to the hair, and awake in some communicated sense of what he thought I might think of his stubble lip and uncombed hair, whatever I thought of him, and I didn’t know for sure, which was why I was zooming at all these surfaces. Awake enough to lead me past a half-open door to what was the dark living room and back to the white-tiled kitchen before he asked how I’d had the address, his phone was unlisted.
Claire, I said.
Well, he said, you’ve certainly been giving me the silent treatment.
He wasn’t rushing things; he seemed to sense I’d come from far away; I did not know why I thought that, for I had no suitcase, only a raincoat and a toilet kit too big for my tailored pockets and I hadn’t given any indication that I’d come from Sub’s down here to Monty’s by way of London and Highgate; he said he was glad I’d come, I said I’d been up all night and was tired, he said we’d speak later, he pulled out of the fridge some pale grapes plastic-sealed and a half-gallon carton of homogenized milk, and said, Anything else you want, and swept his hand out gently so a hairy forearm slid out of his jet silk kimono sleeve.