Little Deaths, page 24
Nor was his penis erect, yet. This too was an anomaly.
In turn, Douglas was staring at her in—amazement? apprehension? dread? desire? Self-conscious as a girl, Virginia made a vague effort to hide her breasts, which were still rather full, beautifully shaped, and her belly, where a faint incision showed, curving gently upward like an unbent question mark.
‘You—you’re beautiful!’—the exclamation, passionate as if it were the truth, seemed snatched from him, like a sob.
On the television, an evangelist named Reverend Steel was shouting a sermon about Jesus Christ and alms.
Slowly, Virginia drew the bronze bedspread back, dreading what she might see; and, yes, she saw it. So humiliating! demeaning! ‘The sheets haven’t been changed since God knows when.’ Douglas, close beside her, looking, winced. Murmuring, in husbandly fashion, ‘Well. I don’t think, Ginny, we have any choice.’
Yes. She knew.
Yet, ‘If only we could draw a shade!’ The room was as bright, she couldn’t help thinking, as an operating room. But the window was raw, open, perhaps it did not even have any glass, a great gaping hole in the wall; and outside, a smoggy haze. Where was the city of Miami? Had it been forgotten, or erased? And if Miami was gone, how would she return to her life?—to where would she return?
Her lover, reading her thoughts, asked, in a low, worried voice, ‘Why are we here, Ginny, do you know?’
‘I don’t! I don’t know!’
At this, the Hispanic maid leaned out of the bathroom to call out something to them, part Spanish, part English; her tone was admonitory and jeering. Douglas winced again, urging Ginny to lie down on the bed. ‘She says, “To do it right, this time.”’
‘What?’
‘“To do it right, this time.”’
Where in the past lying in bed with Douglas had been the extinguishing of consciousness, ecstatic and voluptuous as slipping into warm dark water of sleep, or of oblivion, this afternoon the experience was one of full, hideous wakefulness. Shutting her eyes tight did no good, for the harsh sunshine was empowered to penetrate her eyelids; burying her face with erotic abandon in Douglas’ neck did no good, for his skin was so slick with sweat it felt clammy. Virginia could have wept—‘How are we to make love, in such circumstances!’ The fever blister on her lip throbbed like a bee sting.
Douglas, gamely stroking her hair, did not seem to hear. He was speaking with the eager hopefulness of a man intent upon explaining the inexplicable; as a successful corporation attorney, it was his habit to fall back upon words as a means of defence. ‘I think when we—that time—that first time, in Miami Beach? When we first became lovers, Ginny?’ pausing as if the memory in fact eluded him, so that Virginia nudged him to continue, gravely, ‘We set so much in motion we could not have anticipated. My wife, and my daughter Janey; your husband and children. We were selfish, unthinking—’
At this, before Virginia could reply, or even to collect her thoughts sufficiently to know whether she agreed, or disagreed, there came a loud rapping from the bathroom doorway: the Hispanic maid interrupted again, to shout a vehement corrective. Virginia, cringing in Douglas’ arms, the two of them pathetically naked, exposed, could comprehend only a cluster of words here and there.
Fortunately, Douglas knew a little Spanish. Humbled, he whispered in Virginia’s ear, ‘She was the maid for the room, she says. And we forgot to leave her a tip.’
Virginia’s eyes flew open, astonished. ‘What? Is that it? Is that all?’
In her fever state, she began to laugh. Douglas joined her, in a helpless spasm. Peals of laughter mingling with ecstatic shrieks and groans from the television set where Reverend Steel was exhorting the faithful in his studio audience to surrender themselves to Our Saviour.
‘Is that all? A tip?’
How hot, how prickly-hot, their skin! Their skins! In dread fascination, determined not to wince, or to cry out in pain or distaste, Virginia helped her lover lower himself upon her, and try to insert his only partly erect member into her; she wished he would not keep muttering, Sorry! sorry!—‘It isn’t romantic at all.’ Where they pressed together, the length of her spreadeagled body, her flesh felt as if it were being assailed by hundreds of tiny stinging ants.
Now too the maid was running water loudly in the bathroom, flushing the toilet repeatedly. How inconsiderate!
Virginia could have wept—‘It isn’t romantic at all.’
Yet she and Douglas gamely persevered. For, in The Paradisio, there is no turning back.
Lovemaking after so many years is inevitably awkward. Calculation has replaced blind passion. This had an air of the clinical, for Douglas had gained that weight in the torso and stomach, and Virginia, dehydrated from fever, was thinner than she’d been during the five years of their affair. She shut her eyes, trying to recall her fever in that other life. That life out of which she had stepped, into The Paradisio. Or had she died? Stricken in the Yucatán, collapsing in a seething pool of sunshine. Luscious bougainvillaea flowers reeling overhead. Or was it in the hospital? the glaring lights, and the infection that followed? But, no, for God’s sake stop—‘It isn’t romantic at all.’
And poor Douglas needed her help, he was whispering to her in desperate appeal, so, sighing, Virginia reached down to caress his poor damply-limp organ, recalling how, once, she’d been so in awe of it, and of him; of how, when The Paradisio had been a sumptuous luxury hotel overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, they’d made love passionately, blindly, unthinkingly … not once, but several times. And afterwards, dazed with love, and with the violence of their erotic experience, they had been reluctant to leave the privacy of the hotel room and return to their spouses: Douglas had gripped Virginia’s shoulders hard, declaring, ‘I will never want anything again!’ and Virginia had laughed, it was such an extravagant statement. Yet, hadn’t she felt the same way?
‘My God.’
Virginia opened her eyes, and saw what Douglas meant—several boil-sized blisters had formed on their chests! Virginia pinched one just above Douglas’ left nipple, and a watery warm liquid ran out.
‘Oh, sorry! Did it hurt?’
Douglas grimaced stoically. His face was a shimmering mask of sweat. ‘No. Not much.’
Impatient with the lovers, the Hispanic maid had begun vacuuming the room, and the roaring pelted them from all sides. ‘So rude!’ In other circumstances, Virginia would have complained angrily to the front desk; here, at least, the noise drowned out the television evangelist.
Gamely, Virginia resumed massaging Douglas, as provocatively and as sympathetically as she could; for theirs was a bonded plight. She decided not to worry about the fever blisters, but kissed him full on the mouth. ‘My love! Yes!’ Quickly, Douglas became hard, and, like a man rushing with a glass of water filled to the very brim, desperate to spill not a drop, very quickly he pushed himself into her, where she was rather dry, and parched, and feverish, but ready for him—‘Oh yes!’
How long then they laboured together, like drowning swimmers, the roaring of the vacuum cleaner pervading the room and the shabby bed nearly collapsing beneath their exertions, neither might have said. Virginia stared open-eyed past her lover’s contorted face, where droplets of sweat gathered like tears, seeing that the ceiling seemed to be lifting—floating. Set so much in motion. Could not anticipate. Selfish, unthinking. Was it so? Had their attraction for each other blinded them to others? Douglas’ unhappy wife, her drinking, dependence upon a succession of therapists; the pretty daughter who dropped out of Bennington to live in a rural commune in Baja California where the principal crop was marijuana. Virginia’s husband never knew that she’d been unfaithful to him for years with one of his most trusted friends, yet, shortly before his death (but what a triumphant death: on the golf course, having sunk a diabolically tricky putt, to the envy and admiration of three companions), he had accused her of being a ‘promiscuous’ woman—‘So unfairly!’ In fact, Virginia had had few lovers in her life and of those Douglas had been the sweetest, the kindest, even as he’d been the first; certainly he’d been the one Virginia had most cared for.
The bed was jiggling so violently, Virginia didn’t know if Douglas’ accelerating pumping was causing it; or the damned maid, inconsiderately banging the bed with the vacuum cleaner nozzle. Maybe,’ when all this was over, Virginia would complain.
To encourage her lover, she began to moan softly. In pleasure, or in the anticipation of pleasure. Or in a fever-delirium?
Seeing then, vividly as if the girl were sitting at her bedside, her own daughter, a petulant, smirky high school girl of some years ago who had astonished Virginia by asking, suddenly, with no warning, one day when Virginia was driving her to a shopping mall, ‘You and Mr Mosser—did you? When I was in grade school?’ and Virginia blushed hotly, and stammered a denial, and her daughter interrupted her carelessly, saying, ‘Oh hell, Mother! As if any of that matters now.’
Virginia wanted to protest, But doesn’t everything matter?
She opened her eyes to see her lover’s sweaty beet-red face contorted above hers, veins prominent in his forehead, eyes narrowed to slits. His breath was so wheezing and laboured, a dread thought came to Virginina: had Douglas died, too?
‘No. It isn’t possible.’
She shut her eyes quickly to dispel the thought, and saw, at once, the most unexpected, and the most beautiful, of visions: Douglas Mosser, aged thirty-five, in white T-shirt, shorts, sandals, leaning to her to extend a hand to her, Virginia, his friend’s wife, to help her climb aboard his yacht; smiling so happily at her, his eyes shining; squeezing her fingers with such emphasis, she felt the shock in the pit of her belly. And she cried aloud, now, in room 555 of The Paradisio—‘I did love you! I still do! It was worth it!’
A fiery sensation immediately welled up in her loins, that part of her body that had felt nothing for so long; and shattered, yet continued to rise; and yet continued. Virginia clutched at her lover’s sweat-slick body, weeping and helpless. As he groaned into her neck, ‘Ginny! Darling! I love you too!’
The bed jiggled, sagged, clanged in a final shuddering spasm.
How embarrassing, their pooled resources came to only $44.67—which they offered to the Hispanic maid, with trembling fingers; and which she contemplated, with suspenseful deliberation, weighing the bills and change in the palm of her hand.
Anxiously the lovers awaited her judgement. Was that bemused contempt in her face, or malice, or a wry grudging sympathy; was it pity; was it, simply, a look of finality—as if she too were eager to leave, after a long gruelling day at The Paradisio?
Until at last, to their infinite relief, she smiled, flashed a true smile, saying, shrugging, ‘Eh, gratiás!’ and closed her fist around the modest tip, and shoved it into her pocket.
THE ROCK
by
Melanie Tem
Many of Tern’s stories are about intimate family relationships. ‘The Rock’ is more metaphorical than most of her fiction, and almost has the feeling of myth about it.
THE ROCK
Like a creature in heat, the rock lay exposed on the muddy hillside above John Paul Clarke’s house. It had appeared a week ago, after exceptionally heavy spring rains had washed away the dirt around, over, and under it. That meant it had been there all along, under the surface, and John hadn’t known. He liked that.
With what John considered gratuitous attention to detail, the authorities had estimated that the rock weighed well over four thousand pounds, and that the paperwork to remove it would require at least two weeks to complete. Sleep deprivation, overlaid with the mild state of sexual excitement that was constant these days, made him fantasize, briefly, that something actually might happen to him in the next two weeks that would hold his interest.
The window in front of him was, of course, spotless. After thirty-six years of his pipe smoke, the fingerprints of children and grandchildren and Los Angeles smog, Charlotte was an expert at keeping things clean. John respected and admired that. As he sipped at the drink in his hand and looked some more at the rock, it was possible to pretend that Charlotte’s clear, clean glass wasn’t there at all.
Since the emergence of the rock above his house, John had been hopefully noting freakish natural phenomena happening everywhere: blizzards in Texas, floods in Iran and drought in the Ukraine, tidal waves and earthquakes, meteorites and hurricances and long-dormant volcanoes suddenly erupting. Maybe all this meant something, maybe the world was building up to some cataclysmic and miraculous change. In his lifetime there’d been other unsettled times like this and nothing had ever come of them, but he always hoped.
‘We live in exciting times,’ he’d said to Mara just last night. He said that to all the girls—not a line, exactly, but a way of intensifying mutual interest.
From this angle, the rock nearly filled the window. Another drop of rain, another breath of ocean breeze, some mysterious shifting of the earth and it might come tumbling down. The authorities admitted only the most infinitesimal possibility of danger to anyone.
The west side of the house, at his back now, was built out over the beach, supported only by heavy steel stilts with the sand steadily eroding under them. Observing and measuring the erosion of the foundation of his house was like standing at the edge of a cliff or just now discovering another pretty girl.
Years ago—long before Mara had started coming to him in the night, long before he’d met Susan; the name of the girl then had been Denise: lank blonde hair, grey eyes, rose perfume—John had had the entire west wall glassed, to bring the ocean right into the house. Charlotte hated it. Like him, she’d been born and raised in Ohio, where things for the most part stayed still; unlike him, she hadn’t wanted to leave. And, besides, she was the one with all that glass to clean.
She’d moved her bedroom into their sons’ old room in the northeast corner, tucked into the hill. When John woke up in her room he always felt vaguely claustrophobic and bored. He hadn’t been there now since the rock had appeared, the same day Mara had started coming to disturb his sleep.
He’d been standing in the twilight rain on the east side of his house, looking at the rock, thinking how the landscape had fundamentally changed in the last twenty-four hours and wondering how long it would be before the rock became so familiar that no one noticed it anymore. A drink in one hand and a joint in the other, he’d been just starting to get high and enormously missing Susan, when the rock moved.
Then he saw that it was a lovely young woman coming down the hill towards him. From this distance she was imposing, tall and broad-shouldered. He was directly in her path. She was running, sliding in the mud; through the slight haze of the booze and the weed, John thought for a moment that she’d fallen and was rolling down the slope, as if the rock itself had dislodged. He squinted quickly and assured himself that the rock was still there, silhouetted against the darkening sky, and the girl was standing close to him, warm, smelling of earth and musk.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘You’re John Paul Clarke.’
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
He hadn’t asked her name, but she said anyway, ‘My name is Mara.’
‘A pretty name for a pretty lady,’ he said, which was what he always said, and, to some degree, it was always true. John had never met a young woman he didn’t find attractive.
Up close, Mara was no taller than he was, and only ordinarily pretty. She was wearing some sort of coarsely-woven, diaphanous thing that seemed to dissolve when he touched her. And he touched her right away because she demanded it; she stepped up to him, put her arms around his neck and kissed him deeply. Her skin had an odd, gritty texture that John found extremely erotic. Her tongue coaxed him. She had nipples as sharp as chips of mica; he’d always been a tit man.
That first time, they made love at the foot of the hills. He’d never done that before. He’d seduced lots of girls on the beach, of course; it was so romantic. And so risky: Charlotte could look out the glass walls and see them—for that reason among many others he’d been disappointed when she moved her bedroom—and it would have been a little distressing for a man of his position to be arrested by the beach patrol for indecent exposure or contributing to the delinquency of a minor. When he thought about getting his picture in the paper because of some young girl instead of a housing development or a philanthropic project, it made him grin.
Making love with Mara among the hills had been a totally new experience. Other girls were attracted to him, because of his money or because he knew how to treat a lady, but Mara was hot for him, nearly insatiable. Afterwards he must have fallen asleep in the mud and loosening brush, because he’d awakened hours later, confused and still aroused.
The ocean was one of the things that had drawn John out of the Midwest to Southern California. Other lures were the San Andreas Fault and its less famous tributaries, the summer canyon fires and spring mudslides, the La Brea tarpits where sabre-toothed tiger fossils had been neatly landscaped into Hancock Park behind the L.A. County Museum, the imported palm trees and channelized rivers that locals now regarded as part of the natural landscape. And under it all, the lulling, deceptive, ironically pleasant climate.
John couldn’t imagine a better place to live, although he’d been tempted by the Pacific Northwest after Mount St Helens. Now, finally, this boulder had worked itself up out of the ground to threaten everything he’d worked for, and at the same time Mara had emerged in his life.
