“That’s OK, lady. I have a real life too.”
She looked at me. She took one hand from behind her head and reached over to me, stroking my shoulder. “Don’t do this,” she said.
“Don’t you do this,” I replied. She was the one who started it. I realized now that she had come today to say this — that she wouldn’t be here next week. I rolled over and wrapped myself around her, she was lying straight and still, with me curling around her — something like the photo of John Lennon with Yoko on Rolling Stone, if you remember that cover. She began to put her fingers through my hair, in a soothing kind of way, but I twisted my head away, I didn’t want it. I kissed her eyes and her neck. Then I lowered my head and fastened onto her breast. I felt her settle patiently, as she must have for her children, waiting for the tension in the jaw to slacken with a small shudder and the greedy mouth to let go. Gradually she began to realize that I would not let go; nothing would make me let go. I felt her stomach contract, her nipple cautiously trying to remove itself, trying to slide through my teeth. “Nicholai!” she whispered. “Let me go.” I lay like a deadweight. I was covering her everywhere, I could feel the tension everywhere, if she were on her feet she would be running. But her breast didn’t move. The muscles in her shoulders bunched, but the breast held still. Was she thinking about me now at last? Me, Nicholai, son of aristocratic Russian émigrés? Me, Peter, spoiled son of a Greek shopkeeper? Or the me that Douglas Miller picked up at a SoHo party and who can’t find quite the right bribe... “Nick, please,” she said. “Let me go. I’ll see. About the weekend. I’ll see what I can do. Let me go.” And then, of course, I did. I put my hands on her hips and turned her so that she lay facing me. I pressed my thumbs into the hollows in front of the hipbone. Then I pulled myself over her and began to fuck. A bed adds a lot of resiliency to fucking. A bed sinks, bounces. Goes along with the flesh. On the floor, everything is harder. Everything resists more. Sometimes the floor is exactly hard enough. It is exactly what you want
I thought about the way Screwbosky defused sex by letting people call him by his nickname. When you’d hear the crowd yelling it, cheering it, it became more a name than a word. “Screw! You!” people would shout at concerts. I’d think about that sometimes when I was in bed with someone. Think about him, or think his name, Screw! Screw! in the rhythm of what I was doing.
I relaxed my grip and she got to her knees and then to her feet and took a couple of steps across the room. She just made it to the wall, where she leaned against it, her forehead and palms and one hip resting against it as if it was softer than the floor; I really loved her then, looking at her back, but I realized it was a kind of pity. I had to feel pity for her before I could feel the love. Against the wall, she was full of grace and desperation; I could have watched her forever. She ground against the wall, turning slowly to look at me, and her fingers caught the edge of the poster. She tore a long strip from the lower half. Actually it improved the poster, improved its relationship to the wall. It looked better now.
I jerked my hips in her direction. “You don’t like it?” I asked.
“Not like that.”
“Look, if you only like the things about me that give you pleasure, you’re in trouble.”
Later I realized that I was taking a chance, saying something like that to her, something that was absolutely true. But I find it works out OK to tell the absolute truth some of the time. It adds something to the whole project. For both people. I thought I’d explain that to Storey when I went out to Connecticut to talk to her about our relationship.
The relationship I had with Douglas Miller was based on his assumption that he was under obligation to me. He wasn’t actually. What happened was that the first time we met was at a big loft party downtown on a Friday night, where there were a lot of fantastic people and even a few who were famous. Doug was out of his element, not having a very good time, but content to be there staring at everybody.
He had seated himself in a chair of regal proportions in the middle of the room, which was not helping him any. I watched him for a while, then went over and sat on the floor, my back straight against one carved leg of the chair as if I was chained there, the back of my head almost touching his hand, which rested on the chair’s ornate arm. Now he looked interesting. All through the evening, people came over and talked to us and then walked away. It was like holding court. People approached, exchanged a few words, and gave place to the next courtier. It was a little trick that just happened to work, but Doug went on thinking I could do that anytime I wanted to. He thought that anytime I chose, I could turn anything into an occasion. That if I didn’t, it was because I was mad or bored or stubborn.
So when I turned up at Perth Island, in the middle of his renovations, with piles of sand and gravel spoiling his lawn, he was not inhospitable. He was more discomfited by the fact that I had driven out in the cab. Nobody ever saw a taxi on Perth Island, except for the occasional Darien town taxi that ferried guests over from the train station. But mine was yellow, a real taxi. I obligingly stashed it in his garage, out of sight.
I would have to make up the mileage to Mike out of my own pocket. He was going to be mad when I didn’t bring it back to the barn tonight. I’ll be surprised if he ever lets me take it out again. He’s tired of putting himself out for me, I can tell.
After I parked the cab, I looked around the main floor of Doug’s house and told him it was coming along fine. It was. Most of the older houses there were bungalows and fishing camps built along the shore around the turn of the century. They are still unassuming to look at, with their odd shapes and shingled upper stories, but on the inside many of them have been elaborately remodeled. Doug was putting in a glass wall on the west, facing over the marsh and catching a sail’s worth of the Sound to the south. I told Douglas that he’d be getting a great view.
“I’m going to go for a walk on the beach,” I said. “Just needed to get out of town, unwind for a couple of hours.”
“Suit yourself, Nick. Come back up for a beer later.”
“Sure,” I said.
I walked over to East Beach and took off my shoes and rolled up my jeans and walked back and forth at the waterline for a while, looking for shells or whatever the tide had brought in. Then I went over to the sea wall and sat there, leaning against a stone pillar, perfectly content to watch the small boats offshore, swinging on their anchors like weather vanes.
It wasn’t long before I saw them. I figured she and the little girls — she had two — would walk along the beach one more time before the kids went away to camp. Sure enough, I heard a door bang along the edge of the low cliff that rose from the beach, and two skinny little girls, blond and suntanned, came scuffing along in their flip-flops, with Storey right behind them. When they reached the beach, they turned down the other way, where there’s a long walk before the beach ends at Rocky Point. I jumped off the sea wall and walked in their footprints, but faster.
When I came up behind her, I said hello, in the warmest way I could. I didn’t want to alarm her, or announce my presence in some awkward way. She cut her eyes around at me and they almost rolled in her head — for a moment I could see only the whites of her eyes.
She took a few fast steps and her hands shot out and grabbed her kids’ necks, not hard, but one hand on each. I could see the strength in her hands, and I knew how they felt on the backs of those little flower-stalk necks.