But there was a worse possibility. Suppose she left a note and he met her and she went up to him and at the moment of meeting realized, heard her body saying that she was repelled by him, that she could not bear saying that she was repelled by him, that she could not bear to have him touch her. Oh, she could cover that over with social forms—“I’d like us to remember each other as friends”—but he’d know and she’d know that she had hurt him even more. And that seemed unforgivable.
But it didn’t matter, she had to do it Had to risk hurt and guilt, remorse.
Late in the afternoon, on her bike, riding towards the hotel, she composed notes in her head. “Saw you this AM by chance; would like to see you some PM by intention. D.”
No. Too peremptory.
“Would you like to get together some evening? Call me. D.”
No. Promised too much.
“I would like to see you. Dolores.”
Yes.
Parked her bike and walked into the hotel head down, thinking about what she would write, pushed through the hotel door and bumped into Victor.
And it was the same as it had been that day on the train. They did not touch. They did not speak. But their bodies cried out, sent out and received messages on the same line. Chemical, electrical, or romantic; delusion, illusion, or penetration to the basic truth: whatever it was, it was so strong that when Dolores moved to allow a couple who were leaving to pass between her and Victor, she could physically feel herself breaking a field of force. There was a snap, she heard it and looked around to see if others had heard it too.
They stood facing each other, bodies clamorous, faces speaking. She knew her face looked like his, soft with longing and pain and desire, hard with anger and knowledge and the past.
“Excuse me, sir but would you allow me to pick you up? I’d like to buy you a drink.”
“Madam, I’d be honored.”
“I don’t, of course, ordinarily pick up strange men.”
“Of course. I realize that I am extraordinarily attractive.”
They walked into the lounge and he ordered drinks. “Will you excuse me for a minute, Dolores? I have to make a phone call.”
“Was it hard to explain?” she asked when he returned.
He looked at her startled for a second, then expanding, his face moving into a broad smile. So there you are, he was saying. I’ve missed you, you old sharpie. “A little,” he laughed.
They sipped drinks.
“How have you been?”
“Miserable. And you?”
“Numb, mostly.”
“Work going well?”
“Very. And yours?”
“Fine, fine.”
“Have you been traveling?”
“A little. Brussels. And I flew back to New York for ten clays.”
Silent pause. Caught breath, expelled. “Oh, how nice. And how are things there?”
“Fine. The same.”
They will always be the same.
“That’s good. How’s Vickie?”
“Fine. Good. We had a long talk, it was really good. She’s applying for graduate school.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“And your children?”
“Fine, fine.” Like to tell him the news, but then I’d have to tell him the truth of them, show him my barefoot children, my babies.
“You never called,” she began.
He stared at the table. “No.”
Silence.
He turned a wrenched face to her. “I felt … well, I know how you think, your … politics, I guess. And I felt … well, I didn’t want to pressure you, to embarrass you. I knew if you wanted me, you’d call me.”
“Yes,” she sighed.
“Well,” he lifted his glass to her, “and here we are!”
“Here we are,” she smiled.
They finished their drinks.
“Would you like another?”
“Umm. What I’d really like is to see your room.”
“My room?”
“Yes. Don’t you have a bottle up there?”
He grinned then and reached out his hand and pulled her up and they walked as swiftly as they could, careful not to run, to the elevator, and she bumped her knee on a chair in the lobby, but paid no attention, although it made her limp a little, and she followed him to the elevator and they went up up up up up.
And down the hall and he unlocked a door and she saw a blur of pink around a lamp, dusk at the windows, a bedspread pinky-red, salmon. And him, his body, his face, and that was all there was then, him holding her, her holding him. Holding, standing still, just holding for a long time. Then there was rubbing and feeling and their bodies spoke. They did not tell
about
, they
told
, like counting coins. They held, they felt the fine rough wool and the silky cotton and tissues of silk and cotton smooth and cool as water, buttons cold as pearl. They held, they felt, they rubbed and smoothed and caressed.
Oh, so good, so good to lie down, to lie down together, warm and solid and fitting. And, oh, so good that golden shining place just beneath the opened collar, smooth as cotton or silk but rippling with intrusions, mountains of bone around a valley as vulnerable as a wound. Around it the throbbing landscape of body, ear against it, hear the throbbing, like hearing the earth’s heartbeat when you lie against it, the other side of silence, absorbing its rhythms into your own, harmonizing them.
Smells: of melon and strawberries, fresh sweet cream, cheese of the goat, cool lemon, salt everywhere to give it savor. Softness of lips, bodies like ripe fruit hanging with only curled leaves caressing it, fruit aching to be picked, held, turned over in the soft firm palm, rubbed against the cheek. Arms tired of hugging themselves hugged other bodies, cherished them, lavish in pleasure, treasuring the soft places, the hard places, places that were soft and hard at once. A strange hand, a strange mouth, sighs of a strange throat that seem to come from your own. Deep breath, from the soft-hard place far back in the cave of the mouth, warm and wet.
Moving, so good to move, to bend, to twist, to encompass, to be encompassed, knees, arms, thighs, calves, hips, moving, clasping, pressed together, interwound. Which are whose? Lying together, around, over, under, rubbing softly, bending, flexible, warm. Alive. Feet cool and damp and smelling of the earth they walk on. Hands, masters of arts, doing, feeling, being, all at once. Giving, taking, in one instant; strong and delicate, hard and weak. Fingertips stroking lightly, being stroked, shivering satin flesh, silken flesh, flesh like the finest sheer cotton shimmering in the sun.
Heat builds up in the engine of the body. Hot channels pump it all the way to the fingertips, while the feverish damp source aches with longing, hot and wet and silently crying, agape or athwart. Picasso mouth and tongue wanting each other, bodies almost violent trying to absorb, assimilate, meld together, wanting to become fluid and melt together, wanting to possess and control, wanting to be possessed and controlled, both at once, wanting it all, having it all, both swooning under hands, powerless, both making to swoon, powerful.
Power meets power with both engines running, two eagles fornicating in midair, wings flapping lest they fall, head-on collision, joy in the power and the motion, joy in the powerlessness and the surrender. And all at once it is both, taking and giving in the one instant, and then it floods, the release, the relief, tension flooding out, away, giving in. Everything resolved.
Contraries exist simultaneously. Paradoxes are simple truths. Pain and pleasure equally mixed impossible to differentiate. Solids turn liquid, filledness is emptiness, you are the fruit that is plucked and held and caressed and bitten into tantalizingly. You are the plucker who picks the fruit from the branch, holds it, caresses it, takes a tantalizing bite, then bites deep, the juice squirts and runs down your chin, you eat it all, hungrily.
Smell of lemon, smell of salt, salt fish swimming upstream in eager encouraging waters. Hands holding, smoothing the fine damp silken flesh, holding firmly the firm soft bodies, lost and found, familiar and strange, filled and insatiable.
I
T WAS SATURDAY NIGHT
and they had decided to eat in for a change. Dolores cooked, made a
blanquette de veau.
Victor peeled onions and carrots and mushrooms, but mostly he sat at the kitchen table watching her and drinking wine.
She told him everything, told him she had been confused and still was, but she couldn’t think anymore, couldn’t work it out so that it made sense. And that she couldn’t help feeling what she felt, and that she was sorry. All those lost weeks’. But she couldn’t help it.
Yes, he said. Yes.
Knight on white horse, perhaps.
Yes, he said, I understand.
Political differences, she said.
Yes, he said, I understand.
Poor Edith, she whispered, and he lowered his eyes and whispered too: Yes.
And then: I don’t want you to live with her because it is killing you. But I don’t want you to leave her because that will kill her.
He put his hand on his forehead: Yes.
And Mach, she said. You work with him.
Mach. Yes, he said. “But you know, darling, Mach is only an ant. You know, the soldier ants, who are hierarchical, like humans. The avant-garde goes out early in the morning and does the spying, then comes back and tells the rest it’s okay. And then they march. And the forward group marches out with banners flying, the rest plod behind. And they come to a river, and the forward group charges bravely in. And drowns. All the ants plow in behind them. And drown. By the millions they drown, until their minute bodies form a bridge, a human bridge, no, I mean an ant bridge; they drown, Dolores, one on top of the other until there’s a solid line and the millions who are left can walk across it, can get to the other side where there is food, where the race will continue.
“What I’m trying to say is that Mach isn’t a person, he’s a vehicle of the culture, he carries on the ideas of the culture, he’s its DNA. He has no ideas of his own. He plods along, he and his kind, creating napalm and penicillin, employment and deployment, food and starvation. He hasn’t any moral standards; to him napalm and penicillin are equally valuable because they make money. He’s an automaton, a machine.”
She stared at him, her knife in air. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, exactly. And that’s the problem.”
“But,” he said hesitantly, “don’t you think we’re better off with a Mach, simply because he has no moral priorities, than we would be with a man like … Hitler, say, who had clear plans for the human race?”
“Better off? I don’t know. I suspect if Mach had Hitler’s power, he’d be as bad. It’s true that one man’s moral priorities are another man’s oppression. But I believe we have to get beyond that, have to find a more humane set of priorities. Oh, god, Victor, why is it so easy to be a monster and so hard to be human? When the very word human, as I use it, as others use it, means superhuman.”
He stared at his glass, he fiddled with it. “Yeah. I can remember the moment when I realized I’d become inhuman. It wasn’t that night with Edith, wasn’t even when I sat there in the hospital waiting for her to come out of the OR. But it was that same day, it was the late afternoon of that day.
“I went home, having seen Edith, knowing she was unconscious and would remain so for some time. I knew I had to tell something to the kids. I thought that maybe I’d even have to tell them the truth. And I had no idea how to do that. I’d been thinking about it for hours, sitting there in the hospital waiting room. Not knowing then if she’d come out of the operation alive. Wanting to tell them the truth, sick of deceptions, but not wanting to shock them into horror, to hurt them beyond recall.
“I got home a little before dinner. Mrs. Ross was in the kitchen, there were warm food smells in the house. She came running to the door as I came in, she put her hands on my arms, she cried, ‘Oh, Mr. Morrissey, how is poor Mrs. Morrissey?’ So genuine, so concerned that I couldn’t answer her, couldn’t even swallow.”
He swallowed, remembering. “I told her I didn’t know, that we’d have to wait and see, but she was in bad shape. And Mrs. Ross began to cry, softly, gently, like a light spring rain. ‘Ah, the poor lass!’ she said.”
She told me the children were in the den, and I went in there. The children were all sprawled around. It was a big room, paneled, with a fireplace and a TV and couches and tables and a set of French doors leading out to the garden. The children never sat all together in the den. They stayed in their rooms, or a couple of them might have been in there watching TV, but they didn’t usually hang around together. But they were together that day, and that’s how I knew how scared they were.
Vickie was sitting curled up in a chair reading a magazine. Leslie was watching the TV, filing her nails. Mark was making paper airplanes and sailing them across the room. There were tens of them lying around on the floor. And Jonathan was lying on the floor on his stomach, watching TV with Leslie. They looked up when I came in, they were silent. Leslie got up and turned off the TV set “How’s Mom?” Vickie said.
There was a paltry little fire going in the fireplace. They must have built it themselves. I was getting more and more stuffed up, my throat felt as if it were going to burst. I walked over to the fireplace and began to roll and twist newspaper and put it into the fire.
“We don’t know yet how she is,” I said.
I began to pile kindling on top of the newspaper.
“Is she going to die?” Mark said in a thin high voice.
I poked the fire into life and sat down in an armchair. “I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody knows, yet.”
Mrs. Ross came in with a tray bearing a bottle of Scotch, a glass, and a bucket of ice cubes. She almost curtseyed, she was so anxious to please me, so anxious to make me feel better. She caressed Vickie’s cheek on her way out. “Oh, ye poor lassies and lads,” she said.
And Jonathan stood up, he began to wail. He was eight then, and he just wailed, he had no control. He started out of the room and I leaped up and tried to catch him, to hold him, but he wriggled out of my grasp, he fought me, he hit my arms, pounding them, and then he ran out of the room. I was dazed, I had tears on my face, the fury of him, the rage, the fear!
I looked around at the other children. They were lying or sitting as they had been. Their faces were blank. I sat down again.