Little Deaths, page 44
‘we started talking, then. I can’t remember about what, but the words sounded vulgar to me, all except ‘I love you’, and even they barely passed muster. Love must take place mostly in the silences, I think, because everything we said seemed to diminish what I felt. But I suspected you were worried that I was feeling guilty, that I was thinking about Darryl, and you were trying to soothe me. Which was ridiculous, because I hadn’t thought about him since we began planning the weekend. But at any rate, we were talking, and the noise of the wheels suddenly intensified, and white light came crashing through the window, and I could see our hung-up clothes, the mirror on the door, my purse. The smallness of the compartment startled me. It seemed I’d been living in this infinite place, a place without walls, and even though the notion was totally unreal, it made me uneasy to imagine that I’d been suspended in all that black turmoil with only your arms to support me. Your hand was on my breast, and my heart was throbbing against it. It was as if I’d had a mild fright, an anxiety attack or something. But then your erection came back, and all I could think was to get you inside me again. That was when I rolled over and got up on my hands and knees for you. Do you remember? Once again, that was something I’d never enjoyed, that position, but I wanted to do it like that with you. I wanted to do everything with you.
‘I can’t tell you how strange it was to feel that way, to act that way. It wasn’t like me at all, or rather it was an entirely different me from the one I was used to, and I didn’t quite know what to make of it. I’m still not sure I do. Anyway, there I was with my butt up in the air, just begging for it, and instead of fucking me, you began running your hand along my flank, and then you put two fingers in me. You worked them inside me so slowly and carefully, it put me in mind of a surgeon inserting his hand into a rubber glove. I asked what you were doing, and you said, ‘Just playing.’ In retrospect it seemed so clinical, I should have found it off-putting, but I didn’t, because I was completely in league with you, with the requisites of your desire. I loved what you were doing. Your fingers felt so good! And when you did start to fuck me, I know I came unglued. You were so deep inside me, all through me. I couldn’t believe how quickly I came, I couldn’t believe I came at all in that position. I guess orgasms really are 90 per cent mental. But the hardest thing for me to believe was how much pleasure I took from your pleasure. I loved how you handled me, not roughly, not too gently, as if I was breakable, but like you were handling a strong, young animal, gripping me firmly and battering into me from behind, and I just rested there, staring out at the rattling dark and the stars, and every once in a while I’d reach back and touch the sticky, complicated place where you entered me and feel how hard you were.
‘The train began slowing down, pulling into a station. I saw the station walls and the roofpoles of the waiting area passing by, but I didn’t try to stop you or pull the curtain. You were so close, and I wanted you to come in me. Even when I saw people standing outside, I didn’t interrupt you. I didn’t care if they saw us. In fact I wanted them to see you come in me, I wanted them to know how thoroughly possessed by love I was, and I rolled my hips more quickly, trying to bring you off. And after you had finished, after you’d collapsed beside me and the train had stopped, I lay there for what must have been almost a minute, just staring out at the people staring in, not because I had an urge toward exhibitionism … I don’t know why exactly. Maybe simply because it didn’t matter if they saw, because what had happened between us made ordinary concerns irrelevant. And when I finally did pull the curtain, it wasn’t out of embarrassment or prudishness. I only wanted to be alone with you …’
The intense sexuality that informs this letter was a mirror image of my own, and my memories of that night were no less commanding than Kathleen’s. Before we became lovers we had discussed how things might go for us, and we had agreed that everything depended on chemistry. We need not have been concerned. In fact, there were often times when I thought that the powerful chemistry between us actually harmed our chance to win at love, causing us to neglect other facets of the relationship—the friendship, our mutual interests, all those things that were our foundation. But what struck me as curious about Kathleen’s letter, about all of her letters, is that there was never a single mention of tenderness, of sweetness, of any of the qualities that served as the setting for our passion, qualities that women generally prize above the basics of sex. We were in love, she with me and I with her, completely, all-consumingly in love, and when we were together we lived in a world of whispers and caresses, of small, delicate behaviours and quiet joys. Yet in her correspondence. Kathleen was absorbed by the flamboyant aspects of sex, by the number of times we made it and the duration of each encounter, and by the exotic deployment our bodies. This is not to say that such an absorption was unnatural, but it puzzled me that she was absorbed by these things to the exclusion of everything else. Then I remembered Evelyn Cobb’s alarm at her awakened sexuality, and I had the thought that Kathleen might be similarly alarmed, and that her fascination with our sex life was concentrated on her lack of control. She had spent her entire adult life in cities, mostly alone, involved in the paranoid wars of the corporate world, and she had never been in love before; her previous relationships with men, including that with her father, had been problematic at best, abusive at worst, and thus she required a certain measure of control in order to feel secure. Now, though she exulted in her newfound liberation, she was also frightened by it, distrustful of it. All this is there in her letter, but at the time I could not see its importance.
Kathleen moved out of her husband’s apartment three days after our return from Montreal, and for nearly a year thereafter, though we kept separate apartments, we were essentially living together. I suppose that for the most part we were happy. Certainly we were excited, alive, bright with who we were and what we might achieve. We were both successful, we had love and enough money so that we did not have to think about it, and we were living in the most thrilling of cities, at the confluence of sewage and great art, of politics and business, of bloody murder and sublime grace. We talked about marriage, children. We made plans to make plans. Yet I never felt that anything in the relationship was a fait accompli. Indeed, there were signs that gave me cause for doubt and inspired me from the very beginning, as I have already mentioned, to exercise my superstitious nature, to buy charms, to consult psychics, and so forth. For one thing, she had not told her husband about me, claiming that she didn’t want him to think she had left him for someone else, but rather because the marriage had failed. It’s kinder this way, she said. Yet it appeared that nearly everyone else in New York had heard about us. I found it annoying that so many people to whom Kathleen introduced me wore knowing smiles, it seemed that her penchant for confessional gossip signalled a shallowness that I had not noticed before, to reflect her desire to be a luminary among her friends, to have her brilliant life outshine their drab ones. But perhaps, I told myself, all this was merely a product of her excitement, her enthusiasm.
In the end I could never understand how we had gone so wrong, how everything that in the beginning seemed so clean and strong had been twisted and defiled. But perhaps my perceptions of the beginning are faulty; perhaps those early signals of wrongness were not mere harbingers, but symptoms of an already terminal decay. Whatever the case, I analysed our failures incessantly. I knew I had made my share of mistakes with Kathleen. I had pressured her too much at times, I had not been the neatest of housekeepers, and I had drawn her into a wilder orbit of people and drugs and music, something that initially pleased her but that she came to use as evidence we were not suited to each other. Yet I had done so many things right, and my mistakes were not the crucial sort her husband had made and continued to make, particularly the irreparable mistake of being someone whom she did not love or respect. Even more significant was the recognition that my sloppiness, my aggressiveness, my lifestyle, these were all qualities she had originally treasured because they were in opposition to Darryl’s compulsiveness, temerity, and conservatism. It appeared that she was rejecting me now for the very same reasons she had embraced me, and this made me realize that my flaws were not driving her away so much as were her lack of trust in her feelings and her failure to come to terms with her loss of control.
Of course it was not that simple. I did not, for instance, incorporate into my analyses the fact that Kathleen was a liar of almost pathological proportions; I was unaware of it then, and so was unaware that much of the information she relayed to me was useless. Because of her lies, I will never be able to understand it, but this was how I understood the situation on the night she told me she was going back to her husband.
‘Just on a trial basis,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some feelings about him I need to resolve. The only way I can be sure they’re just reflex, just habit—and that’s what they are, I’m sure of it—is to move back in.’
We were sitting in a rear booth at the Lion’s Head on Christopher, surrounded by tables packed with chattering, wine-sipping yuppies, and when she told me this, a terrible flush came to my face, hot as a fever, and the babble and the colours of the place seemed to dim and waver like things in a dream.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, putting a hand on mine. ‘I’m not going to sleep with him. I’m not going to do anything with him except coexist for a while. I know I won’t be able to take it for more than a month … if that.’
‘Then why do it at all?’ I asked her, still so shocked I could barely get the words out. ‘What’s your therapist have to say about this?’
‘She’s disappointed in me, but she thinks this’ll prove her point.’
I pulled my hand back from hers, had a swallow of vodka. I thought about giving ol’ Darryl—who was still and would always remain in the dark—a call and clueing him in that little Miss Demeanor here had spent the better part of the past year with her feet waggling in the air. But all that would achieve would be to cause an explosion. ‘Fuck it,’ I said. ‘I can’t go through this again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. I’ve been through this before, I know what’s going to happen. I’m not going to sit back and watch my life unravel again. You move back in with him, and that’s it. I’m leaving you to it.’
‘You waited for her.’ She looked glumly down at her wine glass. ‘You must not love me as much.’
‘How much I love you’s got nothing to do with it. I just know what’s going to happen. I’m not going to hang around and take a beating for no good reason.’
‘You can’t do this!’ she said angrily. ‘You can’t make assumptions about me based on what happened to you with another woman. It’s not fair. I’m not her!’
It had been raining when we entered the Lion’s Head, and I could smell the rain in her hair, along with the smells of wine and perfume. The mixture of scents made me dizzy. She looked radiant, all the fineness of her face, the high cheekbones and parted lips, unusually articulated, polished to a rare splendour. I felt sick at heart.
‘No,’ I said weakly. ‘You’re not her.’
She took up my hand again, playing with my fingers; then she leaned forward and slipped my index finger into her mouth almost to the knuckle, caressed it with her tongue. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said, leaning back again. ‘I love you, Michael. Keep that in mind. Even though I’m back there, I’m still going to see you.’
‘See me? You mean we’ll have lunch, shit like that?’
‘No! I don’t want anything to change between us while I’m there. My commitment is to you. This is just something I have to do so I can be with you all the time.’
One of the yuppies at the adjoining table was staring at us. I scowled, made my hand into a fist and let him see it. I wanted him to say something, but he turned back to his friends.
We continued arguing for a while longer, but although I believed it was the beginning of the end, in truth it was not an argument I wanted to win. I was too much in love with her to walk away. I did, however, insist upon one thing, a codicil to our agreement. ‘If you decide to stay with him,’ I said, ‘I want to have one last time with you. A weekend. We’ll go up to Connecticut. A country inn, maybe. Just to say goodbye. Just to make an ending. That’s important.’
‘It won’t be like that. I’m going to leave him.’
‘Maybe so,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s all going to work out. But the worst thing I can think of is to have something like this end without really ending. To have it just fade away. I won’t do that again. It’s too much pain. If I have to wait out here in the cold while you get your head straight, I need you to promise that if you stay’—she tried to offer another protest, but I cut her off—‘in the unlikely event that you stay, you’ll come away with me one last time.’
I felt a strange confidence then, not one grounded in the belief that she would leave-Darryl, because I no longer believed that … or rather, if I did believe her, it was in the prayerful, clinging way that a sick man turns to God. Perhaps my confidence was simply delusional. Or perhaps I had an intimation of the future, perhaps I knew in my secret heart the strength of my obsession, the lengths to which I was prepared to go in order to achieve my ends.
‘It’s not unlikely, it’s impossible.’ Kathleen leaned close again and kissed me with her mouth open, her tongue flirting with mine; she put my hand on her breast. ‘But I promise.’
That night was the only time I ever had difficulty in achieving an erection with Kathleen. I was still shocked, still poisoned with anxiety, and lying on her bed, watching the slices of light that fell through the blinds jiggle atop the blankets, listening to car horns making a hot, brassy, incoherent music, to sirens and shrieks and curses, to all the traumatised animals of the New York night, I felt distant from everything, helpless and adrift, as if the bed were a shoal in the midst of a black and troubled sea. But Kathleen would not let me maintain a distance. She lay down beside me and began stroking my cock, gently at first, but with increasing vigour, whispering as she did. ‘I want you to come in my mouth,’ she said, brushing her lips against my neck, my chest. She pitched her voice softer, lower, so it was scarcely more than a sibilant breath. ‘On my face,’ she said. ‘I want some on my face. All over my face … and my breasts.’ Her tongue traced a line of wetness down past my navel, and her warm mouth engulfed me for a moment. ‘And in my pussy. I want some in my pussy, too.’ This whispered to the head of my cock, held a fraction of inch away from her lips. Then she moved back up beside me, continuing to work me with her hand and to list all the things she wanted me to do, the cadences of her voice as steady and hypnotic as those of a snake charmer.
This was new for her, this kind of seductive intensity, and I wondered how much the evolution of her sexual aggressiveness had to do with what she had asked of me back at the Lion’s Head. Then the thought occurred that maybe fucking me over was a turn-on for her, maybe the power she was beginning to use on me was directly related to the new condition of our relationship, to the fact that she had put herself in a position to control two men. I doubted that she was aware of this, but I was convinced that the recognition of the circumstance and opportunity was operating in her on an unconscious level and was at least partially responsible for her behaviour. I could not see her in the darkness, and I imagined that her face had been replaced by that of a witch, a woman with human eyes and a cruel, curved beak flecked with shreds of flesh, whose whispers were an evil incantation. But I was hard now, hard as a spike driven through her fist, inflamed by her hand and her voice, and it really didn’t matter which sort of magic her words were, whether a lover’s enticement or the wicked spell of my imagination, because they had done their work, neutralized all my bitterness and transformed anger into lust.
I rolled Kathleen onto her back and spread her legs and tasted the damp, musky place between them. Her breath caught, and she caressed my hair, encouraging me. I slipped my hands under her ass, lifted her to a better angle, and probed with my tongue until I found the little nub of flesh that cued her gasps. She bridged up from the mattress, her thighs clamped to the sides of my head. She was already so close to coming that when I breathed in I breathed her spend. Like water thickened with pungent oils. Her belly spasmed, her hand tangled in my hair. I felt wild, lapping at her, an animal driven mad by some vile nourishment. Her hips churned, and my own hips pumped in reflex, my cock butting at the sheets. I heard her cry out, a single, sharp cry cut short, like the cry of someone who had taken a heart wound, and she began to thrash about so fiercely, I was nearly tossed aside. Then the tension that had flooded her abdomen ebbed, flowed into her thighs, and she held me so tightly I couldn’t move, couldn’t use my tongue, my mouth pressed to her in a still kiss.
‘God, Michael,’ she said feebly. ‘Oh, God.’
The city sounds had receded, as if all the homblowers and shriekers and profaners had stopped to watch us. I came to my knees and lifted my head, feeling solitary and vaguely triumphant, vaguely predatory, rather like a wolf standing over his kill and scenting the air. The only smell was the smell of her sex. The wetness on my face was cooling, drying.
‘Come here,’ Kathleen said, pulling at me.
My eyes had adjusted to the weak light, and I could see her. With her narrow hips and smallish breasts, the merest convexities when she lay on her back, like overturned saucers, and the pink candy of her aureolae, the sparse red tuft between her legs, her body had an almost childlike aspect, as if not quite finished, and it was that unfinished quality, that simple pale softness, that I found so desirable, so precious in its apparent vulnerability, so surprising in its passionate strength, in its wonderfully adult capacity for giving and receiving pleasure.
