I listened to the shower, then heard him dressing. It is interesting to watch someone who does not know he is being observed. I watched Harry get dressed, peeping carefully at him from the bed. He had a tie on and knotted before infuriatingly deciding that it was not at all the tie he wanted to wear. I wanted him to hurry-he was spending minutes tying his tie that I could be spending in Rhoda’s bed.
But at the same time, and I remember this very well, although I don’t think I’ve thought of it since that morning, at the same time I had a very strong yen for this man. I wanted him to get the hell out, I wanted him to go into New York to lay whoever it was he laid in New York, I wanted to be with Rhoda, but I also wanted to call him back to bed and suck his beautiful cock and pet his balls and have him fuck me into a coma.
(Writing dirty turns me on. I don’t suppose that’s surprising, or rare. But it certainly is nice.)
I did not call him back to bed, or do any of those fine things to him. Before he left he bent over to kiss me lightly on the cheek, and I thought, Priss, you total bitch, this is your man and you love him and what is the matter with you that you have to do this thing with Rho? Because I had never made it with anyone other than Harry since I met him. No real urge to. I would see men whom I found attractive, and I might speculate about them, throwing them a quick fuck in the province of my mind. And a couple of times-but far less often than you seem to think, Harry-I would bring one of these men mentally into our bed, and cheat in the mind while having Harry in the flesh.
But anyway I had never gone and done anything, and I was going to, and I wondered how I could do this to Harry. And I answered myself, in the same figurative breath, that I wasn’t doing anything to Harry by what I did with Rhoda. That the two things had nothing to do with one another.
Not that it made much difference what I told myself, because I was going to do the same thing anyway.
It seemed forever before I heard the Chevy coughing its way to life and taking off down the road. I was certain at one point that Harry had left without my hearing the car, and I almost got up then, but a few moments later I did hear the car and got up and went into the bathroom and showered.
And did things like putting perfume all over my breasts and thighs. Provocative Priss-puss indeed.
I wore no clothes to Rhoda’s room. I padded naked down the hallway and opened her door slowly, silently. She was asleep, the bedclothing a wicked tangle around her body. She had always been a rather hectic sleeper, I now remembered, given to thrashing about and wrestling with demonic blankets and bedsheets, even crying out in fear. I remembered nights in college when her night-terror woke me, and I held her in my arms and calmed her back to sleep.
She slept peacefully enough now. I walked softly to her bedside and knelt down beside her, and ten years went away as if they had never happened at all. We were nineteen again, and young and fresh and juicily alive, and I loved this auburn-haired, ripe-breasted angel.
I took the covers off, peeled them carefully back. She stirred but did not awaken. She was sleeping on her stomach, her legs very slightly bent at the knees, her bottom as slightly raised. I placed the palms of my hands lightly on her buttocks. I could not seem to catch my breath. There was not air enough in the world for me.
I got in bed with her. I lay down beside her and let my body touch hers. I felt afloat.
She made a small distant sound, and stirred again. I ran one hand from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine. She spoke my name.
I said, in a whisper, “Don’t say anything. Pretend to be asleep. I want to do everything.”
I petted her back and bottom and the backs of her thighs for a long time. Girls feel different from men, they’re so much softer and there’s more warmth in their skin. They are in many ways nicer to touch, I think. I lay on top of her and rubbed my breasts against her back. I squirmed around and put my cheek, which felt feverish, against her bottom, which was soft and smooth and deliciously cool.
I tickled her little asshole with my fingertip, and felt the muscle flex involuntarily. I ran the finger back across the demilitarized zone separating anus and vagina and dipped it into her. She was hot and wet, and I worked my finger inside her and she got hotter and wetter.
I took my finger out and sniffed it, and licked her taste from it.
I recognized the taste. Proust indeed, cookie crumbs indeed, but it is true, you don’t forget sensations. I recognized the scent and taste, not as a generalized taste of girl-I had, after all, had tastes of myself in the intervening years, had tasted myself on Harry’s mouth when he would kiss me after having first eaten me, for example-but the specific taste of Rhoda, recalled from ten years ago, and if anything improved, drier like old wine, riper and more pungent like aged cheese.
I rolled her gently over. She lay now on her back, legs slightly parted, pubic bush (that same red-brown shade, almost chestnut, how divine) moistened with her juices, glistening like morning dew on new-mown grass (how I carry on, but I can’t help it, I can’t help it, it truly was like that, it was poetry, it was lush imagery), her eyes lightly lidded, her lips slightly parted, her breasts full, and fully firm, their tips stiffened in excitement.
I pinched my own nipples into excitement, cupped my breasts, squeezed them. I leaned forward, my long hair flowing down in front of my face and over her face like the Modigliani statue of the woman washing her hair, that same liquidity of line, and I brushed my long hair over her face, my blonde hair over her face, and I brushed her breasts with my hair, teasing, and teasing us both, and moved to press my breasts to her breasts and kiss her mouth with mine.
I licked her all over. I sucked her breasts. I was, in turn, a baby at the breast, then Harry making love to me, then alternately Rhoda and my own self receiving these caresses. I was all of us, with space and time in disarray.
Harry and I (How the mind skips, from bed to bed, from lover to lover!) have always been exceedingly oral people, hung on loving by mouth, greedily hungry for either role. And so in eight years of marriage he has eaten me perhaps five hundred times. It is then by no means a pleasure I have had to forego. These attentions of his are usually by way of prelude, but in the sense of a full first course, not a pass-around tray of hot hors d’oeuvres. His tongue would take me to a sharp clitoral orgasm, and after coming divinely I would at once want him inside me, to complete the act.
And yet (I think there is a point to this, if I can find the yellow brick road that leads to it) there was often the tiny frustration in the course of this process, the frustration a retired ballplayer must feel while watching a game in the grandstand. (A game on the field, I mean, that he watches while he himself is sitting in the grandstand. For Christ’s sake, you all knew what I meant, didn’t you?)
The frustration, that is, in watching someone else play a game-however well-at which you used to perform admirably and enjoyably yourself. I could be eaten, and I could dig it, the way it was being done, the way it made me feel. But I also wanted to do it.
I seem here to be proving that Priss is at least as inarticulate and featherheaded as everybody thinks she is. This will never do, friends. Let me see Look. I think a penis is a beautiful thing, no argument whatsoever. But I also think a pussy is a beautiful thing, all convolutions and secret pathways a thousand times more intricate than the inside of an ear, all shades of pretty pink and red. Salt-water mussels are abundantly available here, and reassuringly cheap, and I like to steam a few dozen at a time in fish stock and apple cider until the shells open wide and the little bivalves present themselves for eating.