Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (22 page)

Before she met Carl there had been a few experiments — some of them little more than sophomoric fumblings — with young and not very proficient men, but it hadn’t been the men, it had been her own self-awareness that wrecked the sex, a kind of “let’s get it over with” damper that got in the way of things. Or she would start thinking of something else. She had been accused of scratching her nose at the “crucial moment,” which obviously had been crucial for him, but for her simply a welcome windup of this tiresome, disappointing business. Give me your undivided attention was the watchword, and rightly so, but since all the touted sensations seemed to be taking place in someone else and not in herself, it was difficult to comply. You can lead a horse to water but you can not make him drink.

As for Carl, she had enjoyed, still did, his nearness, and during the early years of joyous felicity had met him halfway. As far as she knew she had never scratched her nose, not even when she had a pile of undies soaking in the washbasin. He was the first man who gave her love and honor and respect without infatuation: other men went overboard for the perfection of her facial features and the color of her hair — that was, when they were not eyeing her legs and her bustline. He treated her as an adult personality and as a woman to be admired for her liveliness and sense of fun and, according to him, her goodness. Suddenly she had a partner, a very decent guy who saw things in her other men hadn’t, and he didn’t keep saying, God, you’re so gorgeous, or surreptitiously put his hands here and put his hands there and pant in her ear.

They “went together” and met for dinner when Carl could manage it (he was doing his internship) and twice attended the opera: they saw
Boris Godounov
and
Forza del Destino
. She was living in the apartment at Ninety-second Street, but they didn’t go whole hog in their lovemaking, even though they had complete privacy. The first time they did it was in his room, the size of a walk-in closet, at Montefiore, where there were items like a brain pickled in a big Mayonnaise jar, anatomy casts, great medical tomes that must have weighed ten pounds each, a skeleton with a silly smirk on its wobbly skull and a cot bed so slenderly proportioned that almost any normal person would have fallen to the floor just by turning over.

It was what they coupled on, however, and they managed exceedingly well. Her wholehearted attention was with him, no diversionary thoughts, and while she failed to achieve orgasm (hell, she didn’t expect to, she half believed it was a myth) she was glad and happy and not one bit turned off, and he was so clean and fresh-smelling, nice and immaculate, and he didn’t say the way dreary drips were wont to, “Did you come? Did you?
Did you come?
”

She knew she would marry him. If she hadn’t been sure before she was that night. He couldn’t even take her home, poor thing, being on call: she cabbed back to Ninety-second Street all the way from the Bronx. She felt secure and shielded forevermore from harm. She had Carl now, and the whole rest of her life was no longer a stretch of years with a question mark, but laid out and designed, rosy and glowing, everything was okeydokey.

Then when he didn’t want to wait, but instead to be married as soon as he transferred to his third year residency at Cornell Medical, dissension raised its ugly head. That was when she got so cross and upset and everything began to get colored gray, and she didn’t see him anymore because he told her he would bide his time, but she would have to be the one to make the overtures if she changed her mind. It was money, of course, he was paid a pittance in his internship and she would have to give up the apartment on Ninety-second Street because there was insufficient closet space, insufficient walking space for two, insufficient everything. She went down with a crash, started crying at the office file cabinets at work; it was horrible.

And of course she couldn’t stand it. Neither could her mother, whose telephone calls became increasingly shrill. “Christine Elliott, you must be out of your head, a wonderful man like that, will you come to your
senses
!”

“It’s me,” she said over the phone. That was, after cooling her heels for about fifteen minutes, on hold and waiting for him to answer the beeper, also the paging system, she could hear it over the wires. “Dr. Jennings. Dr. Jennings …”

“I was wrong,” she said when his voice finally came. “We’ll do it your way, Carl.”

So it was the two of them again; he seemed to be the other part of her and there was never again any thought of division. Bemused as she was now, in these latter and bewitching days of love, laughter and enchantment, there lay beyond it a reality she very carefully put aside, as in a vaults for safekeeping. She had locked it up, nobody could steal it, and it was intact.

What she felt for Carl was firm and solid and well established. It wasn’t, never had been, anything like what she felt for Jack Allerton. This was the romance she had never had, it was exactly that, a romance, an enrapturing poem of love, with a fragility about it that haunted her. What is perfect is destructible — even diamonds, it had lately been revealed, were not forever. Was every beautiful thing doomed to fade and die? Well, of course a diamond was a coarse comparison, it had lustre and light but not the warmth and vibrancy of a human body, with its incredible intricacies, its network of veins and arteries, its ligaments, tissues, bones, glands and ganglia, all of these meshing pieces and parts sheathed, in the most masterly way, with muscle and fasciae and then layered with skin: no man-made material could approximate the skin of a man’s body or a woman’s body.

It had never been Carl’s body Christine prized, it had never threaded through her dreams or seemed a miracle of creation. He was a big, sturdy, strong and comforting man, sitting across a table from her, going places with her, making babies with her, coming home from the office with a smiling hello, darling.

With Jack it was different. Walking home when she left him, she stifled laughter at something he had said, or they had both said, and a block later after successfully controlling this untimely mirth, would see before her — as if it were actually there, right out on the street, Lexington Avenue — his naked form limned on the horizon, the way he lay after coitus and sliding off her to relieve her of his pressure, arms outstretched on the pillow, legs spread, chest heaving, ribs and flat belly and navel, loins bathed in sweat and semen. The armpit hair, the luxuriant sprout at the crotch, the penis, having done its stint, shrunken and spent, faintly rosy.

The apparition vanished, or was banished, when she went through that outside door to the lobby of the Colonnade, and the transition to the other Christine, the one who was married to Carl Jennings, took place. “Hi, Jimmy,” in the elevator, then her key in the lock. Getting out of her street clothes and into pants and a shirt, opening the door of the fridge. It was like coming home from a job. Or it was like going to a job after hours of joyous freedom. Braising the eye of round, washing the lettuce. Coming down.

Carl arriving. “How was your day?”

“Fine. Yours?”

Bruce joining them, his day at the park concession over. “Something smells good.”

“Sauerbraten.”

“It smells like pot roast.”

“Which it is, only with vinegar it’s Sauerbraten. Want to make something out of it?”

“You’re cute, Mother. Can I help?”

“Not yet, dear. You can set the table later. Nothing to do now.”

Even if you weren’t going to see him tomorrow, or the day after that as well, perhaps, there would be his voice on the phone in the morning, it meant a lot. Even just his voice. He would say something amusing and she would laugh, then his own rumbling laugh would come over the wires. The sound of his voice would stay with her all day, in her ears and mind: she hoped it was the same for him, that what she had said and the way she said it would linger for him too, through all the day’s hours.

The first thing to do when she walked into Jack’s apartment was to go to his desk, it was almost a compulsion. She had to see if the pile of typed sheets was increasing noticeably. A way to ease her conscience, she knew. If she saw a substantial rise in the stack she felt less guilty. He was spending time with her but he was also adding to his output.

“I think it’s growing, Jack.”

“It’s grown by sixty-four pages since you were here.”

“That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

“That’s damned good. What do you want, blood?”

“When are you going to let me read the books you’ve got out? You promised.”

“Not at the moment.”

“
Why
not? You said you weren’t ashamed of them. Anyway, why should you be ashamed of them? Were they pornographic?”

He laughed. “No, they were far from that. I did have offers to do a line of raunchy stuff, it’s wanted, sells well, plenty of demand. You write children’s books, hard-core and science fiction, you’re in business. I can’t do any of the aforementioned. Sci fi — nothing is more alien to me. A pertinent adjective, isn’t it, aliens from outer space? Aliens from outer space put me into a doze, they have no sense of humor in any of those yarns, Pompous and orotund or wearyingly diabolical.”

“You never read comic books when you were a kid? That’s un-American.”

“The funny papers in the newspaper, that was it. I was a little snob, didn’t you know that? I did read the Fu Manchu books, though. And my grandfather had a whole collection of books by a man named Karl May, a German author who wrote about the American West, cowboys and Indians. Old Sure Hand, old Fire Hand. I loved those. That was my mother’s father.”

“The one that was Czech.”

“Yeah.”

“You said the books you had published were suspense. Crime?”

“No. I mean, not police stuff, not procedurals. There are specialists in that genre, Wambaugh, Hunter, et al. And of course that wonder of wonders Simenon. I didn’t do anything painstaking like that. A complex character with a psychological blemish, a frailty, a moral defect. Plot based on human weakness, mainly a character study of a soul gone wrong. No supermind solving the riddle, elementary, my dear Watson, nothing like that. Very primitive stuff, but it taught me some discipline.”

“It also brings you some checks once in a while.”

“Yup, it does that.”

“You said children’s books were a fertile field. Yes, I can believe that. I’d make a guess that those, plus cookbooks, top the field in overall sales.”

“About right. Science fiction’s right up there, as I said, and then I guess girlish gothics and those period epics with crinolines and bursting bosoms.”

“And the raunchy stuff? Where does that stand?”

“Nickel and dime. It’s women who buy books, and women want make-believe. They don’t want it spelled out.”

“But you said there was a demand for it.”

“There is, but men won’t shell out much for a book, they can get their kicks from the smut magazines, why pay $4.95 for a paperback? So the list price is low, peanuts really, and they can pick up four or five at a time. Which means that the author’s advance is peanuts too. In order to make anything worthwhile out of it he has to turn them out a dozen or so a year. It’s sweat work.”

“Is that why you turned down writing for the market?”

“Hell no. Look, spelling it out is tough, it takes either a spectacularly dirty mind or a better writer than I am. Try and think up new and original ideas about the act of fornicating. Jeez, some of the stuff I read to brief myself on what they want — absolutely hilarious. I remember one that had me heehawing for days on end, I’d wake up in the middle of the night guffawing.”

He chuckled. “Fantasies, you understand. Who has fantasies like that outside of a prepubescent kid with snot in his nose I couldn’t venture to say. In this little opus a grocery boy has a high old time with some gal he delivers to. I think one day she meets him at the door in the altogether or something, and that paves the way for the didos that follow. None of your tired old banging away, no, that’s too tame. A lot of eerie goings-on, but the really imaginative stuff is concerned with the victuals he delivers. This kid has really exotic ideas, such as stuffing food up her privates, hamburger meat, calves’ liver. Like that. Yeah, and I do remember that a grapefruit was involved, I think that was an afterthought.”

He shook his head. “I felt like asking some physician. Could you do that? A pound of calves’ liver, mind you, plus another pound of ground beef. And the grapefruit besides? Also, this woman was partial to walking around with all those provisions nestled within; she got a big charge out of that. Now you tell me, Christine, wouldn’t they fall out? Or would the grapefruit act as a kind of plug?”

She was rocking with laughter. “Yeah,” he said, shrugging. “Can you picture me wracking my brains to think up things like that?”

She finally wiped her eyes. “What I’d like to know is did she feed the stuff to her family afterwards? If so, the Board of Health should get after her. And did she eat it herself? Somehow there are cannibalistic overtones there.”

“Also, was she able to get it all
out?
I just don’t see how, without an X-ray picture, she could ever be sure. Besides, there were additional items on other days. I think a few Bermuda onions featured at one time. Don’t you think she could get a bad infection that way? Possibly even gangrene.”

“Well, Jack, don’t ever get so desperate that you have to write raunchy novels. If that wouldn’t put you in the loony bin I don’t know what would. I’m not sure I’ll ever have grapefruit again.”

“It left me with a faint aversion to them myself.”

Ah, yes, there was a lot of laughter along with the lovemaking, no lack of it. Walks and talks and fondness and laughter. Just the same Christine knew that Jack must have beleaguering thoughts about the position she had placed him in, that of a man compliant with a status quo which stripped him of superiority. And he with his psyche not in the best shape.
What time do you have to leave?
He always said that casually, without any noticeable trace of irony or anger, but she had begun to inwardly cringe, to feel that he was punishing her in the only way he knew how. That he was reminding her of her deliberate and continued betrayal, and she herself had come to see that she had been incorrect in her assumption that Carl was the one who was getting the dirty end of the stick. Not true, she realized finally, or only technically true. It would have been so if her relationship with Jack Allerton was based solely on sex, a roll in the hay, a bang, laying and getting laid. When in fact it was being, in almost every sense, a wife to two men, rather than a wife to one and mistress to another.

It would be galling to any proud man, knowing that he was lavishing himself on a woman who was not separated, divorced or even disaffected with her own going concern, her marriage. She had never given Jack any reason to believe that the physical part of her life with Carl was over — or even distasteful — so it would follow as the night the day that she was in Carl’s arms when his arms wanted her, which she was. Nor did it present any real problem for her (which probably meant she
was
of low moral fiber). It came as naturally for her to satisfy her husband’s desires as it would have to give an ailing child the proper attention — a back rub, propped up pillows, soup and toast fingers.

All very well, but from Jack’s point of view it would be of little comfort and, perversely enough, she wouldn’t respect him if it did. She was sometimes, in a strange and eerily discomfiting way, like a spectator watching the progress of a play, or else as if she were cogitating a case presented to her for arbitration — an amicus curiae, a friend of the court: clearly the facts as furnished indicated malicious mischief?

“I’ll have dinner with you tonight,” she told Jack on a day that was so particularly sparkling that she knew as soon as she greeted it in the morning she was not going to leave him at the usual time this afternoon. It was a day that made you think of your childhood, with everything seeming fresh and new and almost unbearably exciting, the way things used to seem then.

“Unless, of course, you’re tied up this evening.”

“You’ll really stay?”

She said quickly, “Not overnight — ”

“I didn’t expect that. I might want it, but I don’t expect it.”

He was in the bed, waiting for her. “But you’ll be here until much later on?”

“All day. We won’t have to think of the time. Let’s be together in bed for a while, then we can take a shower, we’ve never showered together, or are you anti such familiarity?”

“A man and a woman taking a shower together? I can’t believe such a lewd invitation. Maybe, though if I steel myself — ”

“You remember those buttons. ‘Save water, shower with a friend.’

“Yeah,” he said, smiling anticipatively. “We ain’t never done that, have we? Hey, that’s nice.”

“After that, how about going for a walk, let’s go to Gracie Square, sit by the water.”

“I could go for that.”

“We’ll come back with a fresh sunburn.”

“Nice. Where shall we have lunch?”

“We can pick up some deli stuff and have it here.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Actually, it’s whatever you say. I’m only making suggestions.”

“I like you to make suggestions. Okay. Bed right now. Then a walk, sit in the sun, watch the Circle Line boats. A deli for lunch stuff. After lunch, what?”

“I sort of thought maybe bed again? Unless you’d rather sit on the sofa and discuss literature.”

“I’d naturally prefer the latter, but we must please the lady. I know how avid you always are to get my hands on your body.”

He laughed. “What I meant to say was get your hands on
my
body.”

“Just for that we’ll sit on the sofa and discuss literature.”

“The hell we will.”

“I wonder if we’re overdoing it.”

“That’s something that never crossed
my
mind.”

“Here we are, on this beautiful day, burying ourselves in bed.”

“After we bury ourselves for a while we’re going out for a walk into the beautiful day,” he reminded her. “What more do you want?”

“That recurring phrase of Faulkner’s. ‘Fornication, sin and death.’ I guess it made an impression on me all those years ago.”

“Ever notice that Faulkner used the word ‘ratiocination’ a lot?”

“Yes, a lot. I wonder why.”

“He liked it.”

“He seemed to, yes.”

“Wait,” Jack said. She was undressed, ready to join him in the bed. “Don’t move.”

She stood, arrested in motion. “What is it?”

“I just want to look at you. Just for a minute. Stand there. You’re so lovely.”

“You’re making me self-conscious.”

“Don’t you know how yummy you are?”

“If you think so I’m glad.”

“You know what I like to see you do? It’s when you’re wearing earrings, and you get undressed and then the last thing you do is take off the earrings. It’s the most graceful, feminine gesture, the way your body moves, your hands move. Reaching up and taking off an earring. Then reaching up and taking off the other one.”

“It sends you, does it?”

Grinning up at her. “Get down here, you witch.”

“That was my original intention.”

He didn’t plunge into her prematurely anymore. He was disciplined now, artful, it was like being on a surfboard with him, breasting the waves. It was like learning to dance properly, she supposed, learning with the same partner, following the will and whim of another body, so that at last you became like one skilled entity. It was wonderful.

They didn’t look for inventions, make a production of it: whatever they did was without thought or plan. They offered freely, took freely. Discussing erotic conversations, they ended up snickering. Jack said, “I guess I’m not geared to it and apparently neither are you. I guess we’re not infantile enough. I know there are people who say things like, ‘What am I doing to you? You’re fucking me. What am I fucking you with? You’re fucking me with your prick, your joystick, your big, swollen cock, fuck me, fuck me …’”

“I think it takes rather an unnecessary amount of time, if you want to know.”

“Yeah, me too. Anyway, it’s so damned manufactured.”

He said there were also people who pretended they’d just met in a bar or a cafe, something like that, made believe it was a pickup. “Maybe they’d been to bed together for about a hundred thousand times and anything to make it something other than the same old thing. Desperation time. Also the rape fantasy. She sits there in their apartment over a drink and he lunges at her. ‘How dare you,’ she says. ‘You asked me for a drink and now you-’”

“She’s shocked to the core — ”

“And scared, very scared. He pulls her dress down at the neck. Now she’s terrified. ‘Please, please — ’”

“But he’s merciless.”

“Absolutely. He’s going to take her by force. She can see it in his eyes, his teeth are drawn back …”

“She’s going to be ravished!”

He laughed. “Maybe it works for some idiots. I was assured it did by a guy in my office, he went into great detail.”

“Is that what men talk about in offices? I thought that kind of chitchat took place in locker rooms.”

“You must be kidding. It’s standard water cooler stuff.”

But it was true that she and Jack didn’t need to rely on artificial stimuli when the chemistry of their bodies and minds was so potent: it was clear that Jack enjoyed and feasted on her, that a sudden caress — idly, and in passing — sent the blood coursing through his veins and ventricles. He often erected with her hand slipped inside his shirt, she loved to do that, see him lose his preoccupation with something abruptly, feel his quick reaction.

As for herself, she was a hundred percent male-oriented, but had never felt she was phallus-worshipping, yet the fact was that the mass between his legs — or even just thinking about it — was very nearly an obsession, there was something almost embarrassing about it. She found herself, when alone, cupping her hands as if to imprison the weight of balls and penis between them. This fixation traveled into her dreams: she woke recalling night visions of male parts, like the exaggerated statuary in the Archaeological Museum at Naples, relics of libidinous Pompeii, those Priapus idolators who had tirelessly carved male genitalia in stone and marble and travertine, penis after penis in a state of upthrust tumescence, bigger and better their motto. The Neopolitans were still turning them out to this very day, on an assembly line basis, you could buy them at the souvenir stalls, take one home for a tittering conversation piece.