Strange Embrace, page 16
I got my cigarette going and took a long drag. It didn’t taste good and I blew the smoke out in a long thin column that held together all the way to the ceiling. I stared at the damned smoke with the fascination of a catatonic staring at a blank wall.
“I tried pretending, Jeff. I’ve known about her for . . . oh, I don’t know how long. I half-guessed it when you began being too tired to make love and knew it when you started having to work late night after night. But I can’t stand pretending. I just can’t take it any more.”
She took the cigarette between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand and stubbed it out in an ashtray. She put it out so viciously that she almost knocked the ashtray off the table. She hadn’t smoked more than a quarter of the cigarette.
“Is she that much better than I am?”
I sure as hell didn’t attempt to answer that one.
“She couldn’t be that much better,” she said. “There’s not that much to it. You just lie on your back and spread your legs and show some life. Maybe she knows something I don’t know. Maybe that’s it.”
Outside it was starting to rain. The rain fell in a steady pattern and the wind was blowing it against our window. It provided a sort of background to our conversation.
“Who is she, Jeff?”
“You wouldn’t know her.”
“I suppose that’s some consolation. I’d hate it if it was somebody we both knew. I . . . Are you in love with her, Jeff?”
“I don’t know.” It was the truth.
“Are you going to go on seeing her?”
I closed my eyes. I just sat there with my eyes closed and my heart beating much faster than it should and I didn’t know what to say.
“Jeff, can’t you stop seeing her? Don’t you see what you’re doing to me? Can’t you see?”
My cigarette had burned down to a stub about an inch long. I put it out.
Lucy was saying: “Jeff, don’t I mean enough to you so that you can give up that little bitch? Please, Jeff. I want you. I want you so much I don’t think I could go on living without you. Can’t you give her up?”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t? Or don’t want to?”
“Can’t.”
She shrugged, defeated. “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve been married eleven years and for all that time I haven’t stopped loving you. I love you right now and I hate you, too, and I just don’t understand it. Don’t you love me any more?”
“I don’t know.”
She was smiling now but it was a very sad smile. She shook her head and when she started talking it was as much to herself as it was to me. “We should have had another baby,” she said. “When Timothy died we should have had another baby right away instead of waiting. If we had a baby maybe this whole thing wouldn’t have happened.”
Timothy had been born prematurely about six years ago. He lived a grand total of four hours and then gave up the ghost. The whole thing didn’t hit me the way it struck Lucy—hell, he didn’t live long enough for me to have any real feelings about him one way or the other. It was different for her. She had carried him for over seven months, and she loved him with that instinctive mother love that they write and preach about. It broke her up so that, after the doctor said she was in danger of repeated miscarriages, we decided not to have any more kids for awhile.
“Maybe it’s better this way. If we had a child and then you ran off with another woman it would ruin things for the child. Maybe it’s better this way, Jeff.”
I kept my mouth shut.
“Do you want a divorce, Jeff?”
I let my mouth stay shut.
“If you want it you can have it. Not right away because I love you too much to let you make a mistake. But if you want it in another month or so we can get divorced.”
“Is that what you want?” I put it to her straight as she was the one who had brought it up.
“What does it matter?”
I waited for her to go on.
“What I want,” she said, finally, “is for everything to be the way it was at the beginning. What I want is for this other bitch to stop existing and for us to love each other. But I guess that’s impossible.”
Deep and all-pervading silence. I listened to the rain outside for awhile, and then I listened to the faucet in the kitchen trying to compete with the rain and made a mental note to put in a new washer as soon as I got a chance. I listened to the clock a little but it was pretty boring, and then I was listening to Lucy again.
“We can go on like this for the time being,” she said. “You sleep here on the couch because I don’t want you in the same bed with me if you don’t deserve me any more. If you give her up I’ll take you back; and if you decide you want a divorce I’ll give you a divorce. That’s all I can do, Jeff. Whatever you want you can have. I’m not much at driving a shrewd bargain. I’m not a sharp Yankee trader or anything of the sort. I’m just a woman who happens to love you—like crazy.”
She stood up then. She turned around slowly to face me and I saw that there were tears in the corners of her eyes. Her face was dead serious and she was like a little girl poised on a high-wire at a circus.
“Look at me, Jeff.”
I did. She slipped the nightgown over her shoulders and it fell to the floor. There was nothing under the nightgown—no, that’s not quite true. There was plenty under the nightgown, plenty of soft and lovely womanliness, plenty of warm flesh and soft curves.
“I’m not that bad to look at, am I?”
She wasn’t. She was very good to look at, as a matter of fact, and it didn’t require any effort for me to keep my eyes on her.
Even now.
But at the same time she was simply somebody to look at, just a naked woman who deserved a certain amount of attention because of the view she presented to the eye. She wasn’t a woman to take to bed, wasn’t a woman to want.
Just something easy to look at.
“It’s not as if I was ugly,” she said. “Or flat-chested. I’m not flat, am I?”
She was cupping her breasts with her hands, holding them from underneath as if she were presenting them to me as an offering. The gesture reminded me of the poem by Garcia Lorca on the martyrdom of Saint Eulalia, with the last line that goes something like: And as a passion of manes and swords is shaking in confusion, the Consul bears on a platter the smoky breasts of Eulalia. It was that type of scene.
She ran her hands over her body, touching herself everywhere, showing me that everything she had belonged to me and to me alone. And it didn’t do a thing to me. It didn’t move me, and all that I could do was sit there and stare at her and hate myself.
She took two small steps and then she was standing inches in front of me. She had evidently taken a bath within the past hour or so and I could smell the fresh after-bath smell of her soft skin.
She reached out a hand and touched me.
I didn’t move.
“No response,” she said, that same sad smile coming back to her face. “No reaction, no excitement, no interest, nothing doing. You just don’t feel like having some loving with your wife, do you?”
No answer from me.
“Look what I’m doing to myself,” she said. “I know you’ve just come from her, and I know you don’t want me, and I still ache for you so much that I can hardly stay on my feet. You know what it’s like, Jeff? It’s a genuine physical ache.”
With her hand she showed me where the pain was.
She shook her head, then stopped and picked up the discarded nightgown and stood up and put it on again. I sat there like a mummy while she got dressed and sat down next to me on the couch.
She was sitting closer now. She leaned toward me and slipped one arm around my neck. Her other hand rested on my thigh and she was stroking me gently, her little mouth at my ear.
“You bastard,” she was saying, but saying it gently, sexily, her voice all throaty and hot. “You dirty bastard. I love you, you bastard.”
I couldn’t move.
Her lips went up and down the side of my neck, kissing me. Her hand was doing weird and wonderful things and I felt myself responding in spite of myself. It was impossible not to. I wanted to get up and get the hell away but I couldn’t.
“You beautiful bastard,” she said. “You’re going to have me tonight. You’re going to take me if I have to do all the work myself. I won’t mind it. I just want you. Oh, and you want me too. I can tell. Isn’t that nice? It’s nice that you do.”
The room began to revolve in slow circles.
“This damned zipper,” she said. “There . . . there we go. I’m very clever with zippers. I knew I’d manage it after awhile. Oh, goodness, you want me quite a bit, don’t you? Don’t you, Jeff?”
With the hand that had been around my neck she peeled the nightgown off again. Then she leaned against me harder and a second later I was lying on my back and she was on top of me. She forced her mouth against mine and pried my lips apart with her tongue and then my arms went around her. She was soft and warm against me.
She couldn’t wait any more.
That made two of us.
It was a new kind of lovemaking, a love born of mutual desperation. I was too excited to control myself and she wanted me so much that she had less than I did. We made love but it was not love; it was brief and fast and furious, and at the very end she screamed my name at the top of her lungs and the whole big beautiful world came apart at the seams.
We didn’t lay very long in each other’s arms. We didn’t hold each other and say the sweet things that lovers are supposed to say.
It figured.
We weren’t lovers.
When it was over I was limp and weak and exhausted and entirely disgusted with myself. I was Jeff Flanders and at that particular moment Jeff Flanders was somebody I hated.
A few hours ago I had been with Candy. A few hours ago Candy and I had made the whole world turn upside-down and inside-out, had loved each other and had made love to each other.
So Jeff Flanders, bastard that he was, had promptly come home and knocked off a quickie with his wife.
Which was one hell of a note.
I was sitting on the couch getting my clothes back on and Lucy was sitting at the other end of the couch and not moving. I was sitting there thinking of the several varieties of bastard that Jeff Flanders was, when suddenly a great revelation came to me.
I damned near jumped.
Lucy read my mind and she laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh or even a vaguely humorous one. It was harsh.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know you didn’t use any protection but it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to worry, Jeff. I planned it all very carefully.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Yes,” she continued. “Yes, I planned it all. It didn’t work, did it? I don’t know—I thought if we did it spontaneously it might turn out that you wanted me after all and you only wanted her because she was something different. But that’s not how it was, is it?”
“Lucy—”
“I won’t do it again,” she said. “I’ll be a good girl, Jeff. I’ll be a good sweet loving wife and I’ll be very certain never to seduce my husband any more.
“But it was fun, Jeff. Even if it didn’t work it was fun. You’re the only man in my whole life and I still love it with you. You know that, don’t you?”
She got up from where she was sitting and scooped up her nightgown from the floor. She didn’t bother to put it on this time but held it cradled in her hands as she walked to the bedroom. She didn’t turn around, didn’t say goodnight or anything like that. She just walked, very quickly and very steadily, out of the living room and into the bedroom. The door closed behind her and I sat for ten minutes staring at the closed door.
By the time I got bored with staring at the silly door it was time to take my clothes off again. Putting them on hadn’t made much sense in the first place, but most of the things I’d been doing lately didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. I got undressed and turned off the lights and stretched out on the couch with an afghan wrapped around me and a goofy little sofa pillow under my head.
Jeff Flanders.
Thirty-four years old. White. Male. Married. No religious preference. Employed as assistant vice-president at the Murray Hill Branch of the Beverley Finance Company. The position wasn’t as important as it sounded, because the assistant vice-president was third in command in a five-man office, and the Murray Hill Branch was the only branch there was of the Beverley Finance Company. The title was there for the express purpose of impressing prospective clients, which wasn’t a difficult matter to begin with.
Jeff Flanders.
A good Joe with a decent job and a beautiful wife. An average sort of jerk who had suddenly managed to louse up everything. A certain idiot who was in the quiet and gradual process of turning his life into a reasonable facsimile of the lower depths of hell.
Jeff Flanders.
Me.
The sofa was less suited to sleeping than it had been to the previous activity. The silly little sofa pillow was about as comfortable as a sack full of dirty laundry and I was tired without being sleepy. I had a cigarette after searching around for five minutes for a fresh pack, then crawled back onto the sofa and tried to sleep.
It didn’t work.
So I lay there thinking instead. And, because there was nothing much worth thinking about except the strange and absurd mess I was in, that is precisely what I thought about.
It went something like this:
* * *
Candy is available at your favorite online retailer.
Afterthoughts
A Memoir in 47 Books
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I was in residence at Ragdale, a writers colony in Lake Forest, Illinois. I had a six-week stay booked, and upon arrival I went straight to work on what would eventually become The Burglar in the Library. I worked hard for perhaps three weeks, and got quite a bit written, but pulled up short when I realized the book had taken a serious wrong turn and I wasn’t ready to straighten it out.
Well, these things happen. I had the sense to put the book aside and work on other things. I wrote two stories about Keller that became chapters in Hit Man, and I wrote an introduction to a hardcover edition of The Canceled Czech. And then, with a week to go, I started work on a memoir.
I hadn’t been thinking of this, at least not consciously. But what I decided was that I’d write a book about my early years as a writer, and the words flew out of me. I found I would be writing about something I hadn’t thought about in years, and it would lead me to incidents I’d totally forgotten, as various doors in my memory flew open one after another. I worked all day every day, and by the end of the week I’d produced 50,000 words.
Then I went home to New York, where I spent a month surrendering to physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion of a sort I’d never felt before. I had, as best I could figure it, about forty percent of the book written, and my then-agent incorporated that book into a four-book contract with my then-publisher.
A few years later, I bought back the memoir. It was clear to me I was never going to finish it.
I don’t know why. Maybe I just wasn’t willing to risk that sort of exhaustion again.
I did write a memoir some years later. Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir began as a record of a year in the life of an aging and unskilled racewalker, and wound up including more material about my early years than I’d anticipated. When I’d finished it I found myself thinking about A Writer Prepares. (That’s what I’d been calling the earlier memoir, with a nod to Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares.) But I didn’t even go so far as to read what I’d done earlier.
Then, in 2010, I began writing afterwords to early works I was readying for new lives as ebooks. It seemed to me this would be an easy way to add value to the new editions, and also to put them into perspective for today’s reader. Looking back, I suspect there was more to it; I think I wanted to dip into the past, wanted indeed to write autobiographically about my early writing days. And, while I wasn’t prepared to resume that memoir from fifteen years earlier, I could cover the same ground incrementally, a book at a time.
And that’s what I’ve done. If I have indeed written a memoir on the installment plan, why shouldn’t I put all of those afterwords together into a single volume?
But how to organize the material? When all else fails, I tend to opt for alphabetical order, but that’s no better than other notions that occurred to me. So I’ve tried to group the books by type. But these pieces don’t have to be read in any particular sequence. You’re certainly free to skip around.
Meanwhile, why shouldn’t I add a few other introductions and afterwords written for other occasions? A few years ago I wrote introductions for new paperback editions of all eight Evan Tanner novels, so why not toss them in? The book can find room for them. Indeed, it can be readily expanded whenever circumstances warrant it. As I allow other old efforts to be made available again, and as I write new afterwords for each of them, my publishers can add the additional material to Afterthoughts. It will always be up to date, while never ceasing to be a work in progress.
Furthermore, because there’s no getting around the fact that Afterthoughts is likely to lead some readers to sample other books of mine, I’m able to think of it as a promotional vehicle for all my works. And this means that I can afford to price it very inexpensively indeed.
A lot of you have asked for a memoir about my writing career. This seems to be it. I do hope you enjoy it.
* * *
Afterthoughts is available at your favorite online retailer.
Lawrence Block, Strange Embrace
