Joyce raised her hands. “Okay, I got it, I got the general idea.”
“I’m not saying that it’s a guaranteed sure thing, but I do think it’s worth a try,” I said excitedly. “Are you with me?”
“When would this happen?” She had the same sideways smile she’d had when I first asked her out.
“We could set a date, if you like. Five minutes from now?”
“That seems soon,” she said.
“I’ve lost all conception of what ‘soon’ means. Don’t you want to lose all conception of what ‘soon’ means, too?”
“I do, kind of.” She lowered her eyes.
Suddenly I remembered birth control. “Shoot, that’s right. A condom is out, because there has to be total contact.” I made popping sounds with my lips, thinking. “You’re not on the pill, are you?”
“There’s a man I see sometimes. So I still am technically, yes.”
“You are? Oh—great! Perfect.” I waved my hands. “Forget we talked about that. Let’s talk about something else for a while.” I asked her to tell me more about her botanical drawing class. She described the difficulties of rendering bark. She talked about her teacher. There was a nice moment when she finished saying something, and took a bite of bread, and noticed that I was looking at her with an odd, gleeful expression, and her face filled with friendly curiosity. It was time. “May I?” I said.
“May you what?”
“Snap my fingers?”
She drank the rest of her wine. “Okay.”
I snapped my fingers.
I carried her down the stopped escalator to a sofa in the lobby and found a rolling cart that the bellhops used for suitcases. I went into the back rooms and found several blankets and pillows and padded the cart with them. I put her down on the cart, on her side, with her legs bent. It took me less than an hour to push her to her apartment. I stayed mostly in the middle of the street. It had begun to rain, but we didn’t get very wet because we were only dampened by the drops that were suspended in our path, not by the ones above us, and even in a heavy rain, the number of drops per cubic foot is far fewer than it appears when the rain is in motion. I left the cart by the mailboxes and carried her upstairs and used her key. I laid her down in the sunporch, on her bed. I kept my eyes closed while I pulled off her clothes and my own. (I wanted to be able to tell her that I hadn’t looked at her.) I arranged the covers of the bed over her and then got in next to her. She was very warm. I lay there for a while with my eyes closed, letting my heart calm down. Her mattress pad felt terrific. I was tired and sleepy. I had a nap of maybe half an Arno-hour. When I woke up I thought to myself, I’m lying in bed with the woman whom, above all others, I want to be in bed with. I snapped my fingers.
Joyce began to say something that began with “Although.” She stopped abruptly. “What happened here?”
“See how easy it is?” I said.
She turned her head on the pillow to look at me. “What did you do?”
“I brought you to your apartment and got in bed with you.”
Her arm moved under the covers. “I don’t have any clothes on.”
“That’s true,” I said. “But I assure you, I kept my eyes closed while I was taking them off. I haven’t done anything seedily voyeuristic. They’re over there. I just wanted to be totally naked in bed with you.” We were both lying on our backs. Our arms touched a little. The room was dim.
Joyce put her hands on her forehead and thought. “How did you get me here? Did you drive?”
I explained how difficult it was to drive during an estoppel, what with all the immobile cars. I described the luggage cart and the borrowed bedding. Then I said, “There’s one serious problem, though, having to do with time, which is that as we lie here talking, our entrees may be being served, and the waiter may wonder where we’ve gone. I left my jacket there to show that we haven’t skipped out, but I think we should find a way into the Fermata together as quickly as possible, before anyone notices that we’ve disappeared at the restaurant, and then once we’ve done that we’ll have loads of time to talk, and we can stroll back in a leisurely way and finish dessert.”
“You mean—?”
“Yes, I think we have to make love right now, and we have to put off any foreplay until after we’ve Snapped out — assuming, that is, that we do successfully enter the Fermata together. But let’s try.”
“Couldn’t we at least kiss?”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “We have to kiss. It’s a necessity. We have to have a total mental and physical union for this to work. Try to feel as much love for me as you can.”
So we put our arms around each other and started kissing. I think we were both somewhat surprised by how good it felt. Her mouth was the best thing my mouth had felt in quite a while. I guess I had simply forgotten that there is no satisfactory autoerotic substitute for a kiss. Our lips cooperated; they understood each other. In fourth grade I had a rubber stamp that said ARNOLD STRINE. I didn’t like stamping it hard. I liked placing the fully inked stamp gently on the paper and rocking it back and forth as I pressed down, so that my name came out very dark, and the tops and bottoms of the letters flared. While Joyce and I made out, I closed my eyes and saw for an instant an image of my old rubber stamp being held in the air and brought together with a second well-inked stamp saying JOYCE COLLIER, so that our two names met face to face and rocked together, printing themselves on each other.
I’d also forgotten, I guess, that there is no substitute for the joy of first putting your arms around a woman’s nudity — when time is unfrozen and when she answers your embrace by actually embracing you back and you can’t believe how well naked seamless bodies can coincide, how accommodating they can be, even before erections have been manually confirmed and clitorises tested or tasted. And it isn’t often that you begin making out with someone, for the very first time, in a state of total nudity, as Joyce and I did. As if it was all part of our kiss, as if our bodies were kissing, Joyce moved underneath me and opened her legs and as I let more of my weight press on her she brought me inside, past her lush black fur and into her hot Fermata.
I whispered to her how good she felt. “Ready?” I said.
“Yes.” I felt her breath on my neck.
“Hold me really tight. Snap your fingers when I do.” I counted off, “One, two, three.” Then we kissed again and we snapped our fingers in unison.
It was difficult to tell for a moment if anything had happened. We looked at each other inquiringly, our eyebrows raised. Our slightest movement made my cock squeak with pleasure.
“Did it work?” Joyce asked.
I listened. “Hear that? It’s totally quiet. That’s the way the Fermata always sounds. It worked.”
She sighed with relief and started lifting her hips up against me. “Good news,” she murmured. “Good news. Can we do this for a while, though?”
“We can take as long as we want now,” I said.
Several Arno-and-Joyce-hours later, we walked back to the Meridien, wheeling the luggage cart with us. I showed her the negative black paths our bodies left behind in the constellations of hanging, glinting raindrops. “So — while you’re out on walks like this,” Joyce said, “you just take off a woman’s clothes, if she attracts you?”
I said I sometimes did.
Joyce tried it. She undid the black jeans of a motionless man in a leather jacket and pulled on his underpants and peered inside. She also unbuttoned a businessman’s raincoat and reached her hand into his jacket and felt his chest. “Hey, I could learn to like this,” she said. We took our seats at the restaurant and counted to three and snapped our fingers. The waiter appeared shortly after with our entrees. “The plates are very hot,” he said importantly, holding them with a cloth. We had been gone for no more than five minutes; nobody had missed us. Joyce and I talked for another hour, and we drank some more and then had some coffee, and then I walked her home and kissed her good-night at her door.