“Do you have food? Are you all right here?”
“Yes, run along. I feel better already, being back. That doctor and I were mutually embarrassed by my health. Apparently, child, I’m quite without white blood cells. The man was shaking with fear. He was convinced that I was going to die right there in his office. Lambert, I felt so sorry for him!” A dark hole of mirth opened in the sick man’s face. “I tried to explain to him that my white-blood-cell needs are entirely nugatory. But he seemed intent on regarding me as a medical curiosity. I had lunch with Mother and took a taxi to the airport.”
“You’re sure you’re OK.”
“Yes. Go, with my blessing. Be foolish. But not in my house. Go.”
It was unwise to be seen with Don Armour at her house before dark, with observant Roots and curious Dribletts coming and going on the street, so she directed him to the elementary school and led him into the field of grass behind it. They sat amid the electronic menagerie of bug sounds, the genital intensity of certain fragrant shrubs, the fading heat of a nice July day. Don Armour put his arms around her belly, his chin on her shoulder. They listened to the dull pops of small-bore fireworks.
In her house after dark, in the frost of its air-conditioning, she tried to move him quickly toward the stairs, but he tarried in the kitchen, he lingered in the dining room. She was pierced by the unfairness of the impression that the house was obviously making. Although her parents weren’t wealthy, her mother so yearned for a certain kind of elegance and had worked so hard to achieve it that to Don Armour the house looked like the house of rich people. He seemed reluctant to tread on the carpeting. He stopped and took proper note, as possibly no one else ever had, of the Waterford goblets and candy dishes that Enid kept on display in the breakfront. His eyes fell on each object, the music boxes, the Parisian street scenes, the matching and beautifully upholstered furniture, as they’d fallen on Denise’s body — was it just today? Today at lunch?
She put her large hand in his larger hand, knitted her fingers into his, and pulled him toward the stairs.
In her bedroom, on his knees, he planted his thumbs on her hipbones and pressed his mouth to her thighs and then to her whatever; she felt returned to a childhood world of Grimm and C. S. Lewis where a touch could be transformative. His hands made her hips into a woman’s hips, his mouth made her thighs into a woman’s thighs, her whatever into a cunt. These were the advantages of being wanted by someone older — to feel less like an ungendered marionette, to be given a guided tour of the state of her morphology, to have its usefulness elucidated by a person for whom it was just the ticket.
Boys her own age wanted something, but they didn’t seem to know exactly what. Boys her own age wanted approximately. Her function — the role she’d played on more than one lousy date — was to help them learn more specifically what they wanted, to unbutton her shirt and give them suggestions, to (as it were) flesh out their rather rudimentary ideas.
Don Armour wanted her minutely, inch by inch. She appeared to make brilliant sense to him. Simply possessing a body had never much helped her, but seeing it as a thing that she herself might want — imagining herself as Don Armour on her knees, desiring the various parts of herself — made her possession of it more forgivable. She had what the man expected to find. There was no anxiety to his location and appreciation of each feature.
When she unhooked her bra, Don bowed his head and shut his eyes.
“What is it?”
“A person could die of how beautiful you are.”
This she liked, yes.
Her feeling when she took him in her hands was a preview of her feeling a few years later, as a young cook, when she handled her first truffles, her first foie gras, her first sacs of roe.
On her eighteenth birthday her theater friends had given her a hollowed-out Bible containing a nip of Seagram’s and three candy-colored condoms, which came in handy now.
Don Armour’s head, looming above her, was a lion’s head, a jack-o’-lantern. When he came, he roared. His subsiding sighs overtook one another, overlapped almost. Oh, oh, oh, oh. She’d never heard anything like it.
There was blood in proportion to her pain, which had been fairly bad, and in reverse proportion to her pleasure, which had been mainly in her head.
In the dark, after she’d grabbed a dirty towel from the laundry basket in the hall closet, she pumped her fist at having achieved non-virginity before she left for college.
Less wonderful was the presence of a large and somewhat bloody man in her bed. It was a single bed, the only bed she’d ever slept in, and she was very tired. This perhaps explained why she made a fool of herself by standing in the middle of her room, with a towel wrapped around her, and unexpectedly weeping.
She loved Don Armour for getting up and wrapping his arms around her and not minding that she was a child. He put her to bed, found a pajama top for her, helped her into it. Kneeling by the bed, he drew the sheet up over her shoulder and stroked her head as she had to assume he often stroked his daughters’ heads. He did this until she was nearly asleep. Then the theater of his stroking expanded into regions that she had to assume were off-limits with his daughters. She tried to stay half-asleep, but he came at her more insistently, more scratchily. Everything he did either tickled or hurt, and when she made so bold as to whimper, she had her first experience of a man’s hands pressing on her head, pushing her southward.
Thankfully, when he was done, he didn’t try to spend the night. He left her room and she lay utterly still, straining to hear what he was doing and whether he was coming back. Finally — she may have dozed — she heard the click of the front door’s latch and the whinny of his big car’s starter.
She slept until noon and was showering in the downstairs bathroom shower stall, trying to comprehend what she’d done, when she heard the front door again. Heard voices.
She madly rinsed her hair, madly toweled off, and burst out of the bathroom. Her father was lying down in the den. Her mother was rinsing out the insulated picnic hamper in the kitchen sink.
“Denise, you didn’t eat any of the dinner I left you!” Enid cried. “It doesn’t look like you’ve touched a single thing.”
“I thought you guys were coming back tomorrow.”
“Lake Fond du Lac was not what we expected,” Enid said. “I don’t know what Dale and Honey were thinking. It was a big nothing.”
At the bottom of the stairs were two overnight bags. Denise ran past them and up to her bedroom, where condom wrappers and bloody linens were visible from the doorway. She closed the door behind her.
The rest of her summer was ruined. She was absolutely lonely both at work and at home. She hid the bloody sheet and the bloody towel in her closet and despaired of dealing with them. Enid was naturally surveillant and had myriad idle synapses to devote to such tasks as noticing when her daughter had her period. Denise hoped to come forward apologetically with the ruined towel and sheet at the appropriate time, two weeks hence. But Enid had brainpower to spare for the counting of linens.
“I’m missing one of my good monogrammed bath towels.”
“Oh, shoot, I left it at the pool.”
“Denise, why you took a good monogrammed bath towel, when we have so many other towels … And then, of all the towels to lose! Did you call the pool?”
“I went back and looked.”
“Those are very expensive towels.”
Denise never made mistakes like the one she was claiming to have made. The injustice would have rankled less if it had served a greater pleasure — if she could have gone to Don Armour and laughed about it and sought his consolation. But she didn’t love him and he didn’t love her.