Sleep, page 7
She could wait. She could wait until they told her they were ready.
10
She had been relieved, the first time she saw it, that Duncan’s house was a shitshow; if it had been clean, she would have been in danger of wanting to marry him. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t want to live alone forever, but she had no interest in picking a man’s clothes off the floor. She could never live with another man who didn’t clear off his kitchen counters to clean them, who just pushed the accumulated piles back and wiped in front of them. She could never live with a man who let a sink scum over with the spat-out foam of so many days of toothpaste or left underwear on the floor that she would have to inspect to know if they were clean or dirty. Even now, on her knees on the carpet, a part of her was aware of how badly it needed vacuuming.
But then again: his cock. She was surprised by how much she thought about it. Not just about sleeping with him but, specifically, about his cock; specifically, inside her mouth. She had never minded giving blow jobs. She was generally a person who liked to be proficient and who liked to please. She had given plenty when she was still a virgin and the occasional one during her marriage, especially after the babies were born, when the breastfeeding hormones had left her too dry and depleted to want anything inside her. But this was different.
Maybe it was the combination of submitting to him while also being in control. She would have hated to have him pull at her head and gag her, and she knew he never would. Or maybe it was science, some pheromonal magnetism based on his particular smell. Or maybe she just liked it, the delicacy of the skin, his hard pulse, the length of it all against her tongue. It was called giving a blow job, but she wasn’t trying to give him something; she wanted something from him. In fact, she would probably like it if he made her beg, if she had to say please.
She couldn’t tell other women this because they wouldn’t believe it. And she couldn’t tell men because they would. There was nothing unusual about wanting to be dominated in bed. But liking to be told to do something wasn’t the same as liking, simply, to do it, to fill her mouth with him, her mouth that was normally so full of all the things she didn’t say.
* * *
—
Early on, she had been afraid that something might be wrong with her, that she might be damaged. She was grateful that it hadn’t turned out that way, that ever since she’d had her first real boyfriend, she’d liked sex, it had made her happy, mostly. Wanting something, and getting it, and wanting more—that was sex. The fulfillment of desire never depleted the desire; it only intensified it. She gathered that this was normal, though it sounded crazy. Duncan’s cock inside her made her want his cock inside her.
Once, in her very early twenties, she’d been invited to join a book club full of glamorous older editors. She’d worn corduroys and felt like a child, and they’d read On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, about British virgins who love each other but can’t consummate their wedding night because the boy is proud and clueless and the girl is traumatized. Her father raped or molested her in some way—the book doesn’t say exactly. Margaret wondered how McEwan had done it, described with such precision the girl’s horror at the prospect of being touched again. The new husband ejaculates, prematurely. The girl frantically tries to wipe the cum away but it’s too sticky; it congeals, another layer of skin; she can’t get it off herself; she has never been able to get it off herself.
“Nobody could recover from something like that,” a woman in the book group said.
Oh, Margaret had hated that. That wasn’t what the story meant at all. “There was hope for her.” It literally said that; a line in the book said that. She remembered, cross-legged on the floor in the position of maximum deference, flipping through pages. “But he writes, ‘There was hope for her,’ ” she interjected. The woman—she had a sweater with a hole in it and a job at The Paris Review—looked down at her and said, again, “No way. Nobody gets over that.”
Fiction wasn’t about what happened, she thought. What happened only happened to show you what could have happened differently. That was why there was hope. Ian McEwan put those people on that beach and they couldn’t cope. But change one thing, anything—oh, if the boy had only called her name—and it would all have turned out differently.
She would have been interested in talking about this, if only she could express the idea properly. Even now, so many years later: the problem of expression. “How was the book club?” Ezra had asked when she’d gotten home to their apartment, that first gloomy railroad. “I dunno, they were kinda snobby,” she’d said. She had never gone back; in fact (it was silly…), she’d never gone to any book club ever again. Duncan would talk to her about On Chesil Beach, about the hope in the plot, if she could remember what she’d been thinking about when she was finished.
Duncan lived in the Rockaways in a house full of books like a literary sea captain. He surfed, even in winter, and taught in the architecture school at CUNY. He’d lent her his copy of The Waves, and she realized only at the very end that she’d forgotten about Woolf having drowned. Of course she had. And yet Margaret somehow didn’t believe that her life had ended that way, with stones in her pockets. Or she believed it on the internet but not in the books. She would talk to Duncan about that too; he would be interested in that feeling.
She’d been to the Rockaways before, of course, to go to the beach. She liked it; it was full of all kinds of people, as if someone had tipped a subway car sideways and tumbled New York out onto the sand. But she’d never seen Duncan’s part of town until she started dating him. It was wild and desolate there on the bayside—old people living in the same houses they’d grown up in, silver junk in the front yards and shacks in the back. Rats in the salt grass. Abundant street parking. She did something new with her tongue.
That afternoon they’d paddled across the bay in his canoe. He owned a canoe with a crack in it that he stored under the bushes in a neighbor’s backyard. Rain had threatened all day, and as soon as they pushed the boat into the water the wind picked up, great humid gusts of it.
“What do you think?” Duncan had asked, knee deep, assessing the sky, holding the canoe and her in it.
“I think we paddle fast,” she said, and so that’s what they did.
They had wanted to go out to a little island before the storm hit. But when she looked back in the direction of the city she could see it already—the bad weather plopped down in the sky like a fat black island itself. The wind snatched at her, and she laughed. She liked a storm. It was just the right amount of emergency.
She put her hand into the water and the fingers disappeared; she couldn’t see three inches down into it. That gave her a buoyant, upside-down feeling, like the sky was deep and dangerous while the bay was pure surface. It was blue, then gray, then blue, then gray, then suddenly green as a field. If she’d gone overboard, she wouldn’t have sunk—she’d have lain there beside the boat while the wavelets rustled around her.
Duncan had been talking about his kids, Willis and Louie. They were a few years older than Helen and Jo, and surfed with their father, and built bonfires on the beach. A fantasy clambered into the canoe, and it dipped and shimmied from side to side. She and Duncan would blend the kids into one raucous and bohemian family, and instead of the Catholic classroom, her girls would spend their summers here, with the bonfires and the bay. Her marriage would fade into a sweet but misguided phase she’d gone through, and Ezra would be an old friend and not an angry man whose home she’d destroyed. She would have, once again, the coherence of a single life, instead of this division in which she was either mother or woman but never both at once. She would have a future again, instead of just a past.
But then Duncan’s ex-wife, whose feelings he still talked about with a proprietary intensity, reached a hand out of the bay. Ezra followed, enumerating his many concerns. Then, last of all, the boys, the brothers, the terrible risk. She plunged her paddle down through the murk, down among the unseeable crabs and turtles and whatever dank reeds had managed to cling to the shifting silt. The paddle resisted; she rowed against the real beneath.
The rain had started, and they’d had to turn around.
Her hair was still wet, which was helpful now—it stayed in a rope down her back and she didn’t have to tie it up. She wondered what the kids were doing; they would be out at the playground (she hoped—not watching television). Would they have eaten any vegetables? She would need to get groceries.
But then Duncan put a hand on the back of her neck, a point of contact so gentle there was no weight to it. “Oh,” he said softly, and once again the current of her desire was rising and sweeping the thoughts away until all that was left was her own building rhythm. His hand trembled, and he made another sound, a sound of wondering pleasure. It was good that she was on her knees. She swallowed.
11
I had said no so many times, to so many things—the massages, the oral sex. That scene made no sense. But the movie would never have been made if I hadn’t agreed to go topless.”
She turned off the radio. “Disgusting,” Ezra said, and his fingertips rose off the steering wheel of their friend’s borrowed minivan, as if even the upholstery had somehow been corrupted by the crimes of Harvey Weinstein.
She was glad the girls were napping in the back; she didn’t want them listening to this. What Weinstein had done to the actresses had nothing to do with her, it was not sex—it was a different category altogether—and yet the word oral still made her twitchy. She could feel Ezra glancing sideways, sensing it on her—what she had done and liked. Before she’d left, Duncan had asked her, “Will you be okay?” meaning during the day ahead with Ezra, during the weekend with her family. His worrying about her was a kind of lingering possession. He’d forced her legs apart with his knee and she really shouldn’t be thinking about that right now.
Ezra was turning in to the museum and then down, underneath it. A guard stopped them at the entrance of the parking lot, gesturing through the closed window. He opened the back, and hot air blasted in while he poked around under the collapsed stroller. Then he crouched down out of view. What was he doing? She craned her head to see. He was shining a flashlight under the car.
“Are they really looking for bombs?” she asked quietly, but Ezra didn’t answer. Of course they were looking for bombs. The girls were stirring crankily in the back seat, suffering through the onset of consciousness. “Are we there yet?” one of them asked, and for once she got to say, “Yes!” Though it took about twenty-five more minutes to find a spot and resurrect the stroller and steer them all into the elevator and up to the lobby.
She hoped they would never modernize this museum. She loved the swashbuckling antiquatedness of it all, as if Teddy Roosevelt himself might stomp in at any moment with a dead cat over his shoulder. It was a bit horrible to think of all the animals as corpses with the meat scooped out, but it was horrible in an honest way. Everything was mimesis, but this was as close as you could get—not just resembling but reassembling. There they all were with their own precious claws and teeth.
Margaret and Ezra had been coming since Helen was an infant, before she could even focus her eyes. It had felt like something parents did, though now Margaret would hardly consider carrying twelve hot pounds in a sling parenting. Since the divorce, they’d come, if anything, more often. They agreed that continuity was important. The museum distracted the girls from any parental tension, and the fear of losing sight of the girls in the crowds distracted the parents from each other. At least, that was the theory. And so they carted out the old hide of the nuclear family, stuffed the slack bits with cotton, reinforced it with pins, asked the children, “Where to first?”
“Space,” said Helen.
“The whale,” said Jo.
Would Ezra make a divorce joke? Did he remember watching that Noah Baumbach movie together? The whale and the meteorites were in completely opposite directions, but it didn’t matter. “Okay,” she said, and they just kept going the way they were already going.
* * *
—
“I read somewhere that the biggest threat to the museum now is moth infestations,” she told Ezra. “Remember we got moths that time, and we had to seal all the sweaters in bags? It’s the same moth; they eat the taxidermy.”
Ezra gave her a look like, Don’t remind me of our happy past, though she hadn’t remembered the moths as a particularly happy episode.
What really interested Margaret was the idea that even the dead animals weren’t safe, that even in the simulacrum the decay was real. But that wasn’t the kind of comment Ezra would appreciate either. Ezra mostly liked the museum because he could demonstrate that he knew which antelope was a waterbuck and which was a springbok without looking at the plaques. She thought this and felt bad about it.
Ezra hated the idea of her having ideas about him, of her making any assumptions about what he thought, or felt, or what interested him. They had agreed for a dozen years that they knew each other better than anyone else in the world, and they had loved to say to each other things like: You’ll hate this; that is so you; I could tell from your face; I knew you were going to say that. Then they broke up and agreed that they didn’t know each other at all. Now they were supposed to treat the other’s private, interior life as if it was too dignified and mysterious to presume to encroach upon, and to pay each other the respect of having no idea what the other thought, or felt, or might do next.
Her phone buzzed, and she took it out of her back pocket. Duncan. She would tell him about the moths in the simulacrum; it was exactly the kind of thing that would interest him. Reflexively she opened her email for five seconds, got overwhelmed by the scroll of bold unreads, and stuffed the phone away again. What had she been about to say? Oh shit, where was Helen?
How could she let this happen? A blur of backpacks and T-shirt slogans and other people’s children. What was Helen wearing? The dress with the strawberries? No, Jo was wearing that. Face after face presented itself: that one was old, that one bearded, that one a waxen Inuit figure in bobsledding furs. She discarded each face, looked for another. Body after body and all of them too big to be Helen’s until— There she was.
She had her hands clasped behind her back, professorially, and her head was tilted up so her ponytail swung loose. She was looking at a grizzly bear. It was posed on its hind legs, but it wasn’t rearing to strike so much as gazing around dopily. Margaret wheeled the stroller, smothered the panic, took her daughter’s hand.
This was Margaret’s favorite part of the museum. Being provincial, she liked the North American mammals best, the bears and beavers and wolves, all that fake snow dusted on real fur. She liked the mountains in the background and how the painted stalks of grass became real stalks of grass rooted to the floor. She liked to flick her eyes back and forth between the real grass and the fake, back and forth over that line where the illusion began.
Then Jo said she was bored and Helen said she was tired. At eight, Helen was far too big for the stroller, but she demanded a turn in it anyway. “My legs hurt so much they feel wounded,” she said. Good word, wounded. It was time for the Hall of Ocean Life.
* * *
—
Everyone loved the Hall of Ocean Life. The diving, the splashing, the dolphins: so playful. All that movement suspended on wires under blue lights, and the impossibly fleshy sea lions with their proud rolls of neck fat. The girls could dart around without her worrying that she would lose sight of them. The blue light really did make you feel like you were underwater, or at least under something. She and Ezra leaned against a glass sea and watched their daughters. The phrase companionable silence entered her mind. They were watching their children in companionable silence.
Margaret had told Ezra that she wanted a divorce in dead winter. It had been barely 5:00 but already somehow night, the air so cold and dry it felt contentless. Words, breath, heat, the day—the second they left a living surface they were gone, voided. Outside the cab, everyone was doing the same thing they were doing, what they were always doing: going home with their shopping, their groceries, their kids who’d been expensively stimulated by their afternoon extracurriculars. Margaret had thought about the sheer physical effort expended to do the tiniest fucking thing. The circuits to the fibers, the muscles tugging at the bones.
They got home, and she sat the girls in front of the TV in the living room. (Their shared apartment had been big enough to have a proper living room and kitchen.) She started unpacking the groceries. He asked her if something was wrong. It wasn’t typical of him to ask, or it wasn’t typical of her to convey that she needed to be asked. But that day he did, and/or she did, and after only an agonized hour or two—poof. The whole framework of their life was gone.
It didn’t shatter or fall to pieces. The marriage was simply there, solid, a real-life fact, and then it was gone, and in its place the four of them were just out there on some two-by-fours, dangling their legs in the void.
She sometimes thought that if Ezra hadn’t asked if something was wrong, maybe it would never have happened. Maybe she’d be in that kitchen still, stacking a can on the highest shelf. Why had she done it? He might never stop asking. If he asked again now, she could say it was like she had been behind a sheet of glass, suspended on wires, making, forever, some suspended representative gesture. But then something had gotten inside, something had set her swinging.
He wanted an answer, though, not a simile. It was the least she could do—explain why. And he said she couldn’t or wouldn’t. And she said, I tried, and I am.
They hadn’t seen much of each other lately, beyond the regular handoffs. With Jo’s birthday weekend coming, Ezra thought it would be good to spend some time together before spending more time together. This outing was a practice run. To make sure it didn’t end in whisper-fights or worse. Margaret and the girls planned to take the train to New Jersey on Friday, and Ezra would follow on Saturday. It was probably going to be terrible. But at least the girls would be happy. At least Elizabeth’s house was big enough for them to sleep as far apart as possible. At least Elizabeth and Ezra had always been close. They could talk, if not to her, then to each other.
