“God am I hungry,” she replied.
So was I.
We ordered breakfast to be delivered, for I had no food in the apartment.
She hated the place. I put it on the market the same day.
I confessed I didn't know anything about the clown after whom she claimed to have been named.
“You've never heard of Howdy Doody?”
“I'm sorry,” I said, “but I fail to see the humor in someone greeting a bowel movement.”
Perhaps I was being too literal. Once she had stopped
laughing, she told me all about Howdy and Clarabell.
I told her about the Bloomsbury Bells.
I showed her my violin.
She showed me each and every quilt in her shop and began to educate me about them.
Clara is visual, visual and tactile, the ideal combination for someone in her business. She seems to believe with Wittgensteinian instinct that there are things that cannot be put into words, that make themselves manifest, and this belief renders her mystical.
See Be
âthe perfect motto for her, coded initialing aside. She is positively eidetic, able to see something forever in her mind if she has seen it once, whereas I cannot see even her, though I am unable to take my eyes off her when she is with me and I see myself so much more clearly through her seeing me (I tell her that I call this Clarafication and that I cannot imagine her with any other name).
She told me about Madonna.
I asked her birth date.
“November 22, 1963. Why?”
I was taken aback. “That's the dayâ”
“Kennedy was shot,” she said impatiently.
“I wasn't going to say that,” I said, for John Kennedy's death had hardly been an occasion for mourning in my family, which I remembered though I had been but three years old at the time. “I was going to say that it was the day Aldous Huxley died.”
She told me about the Doors.
From then on, for each of her birthdays and on inconsequential occasions as well, I have bought her as fine a print as I could find of a Madonna. I started, naturally, with Il Parmigianino's Madonna dal Collo Lungo and followed that with Botticelli's and Cimabue's Madonna with St.
Francis and the seductive van Hemmessen and Lochner's Madonna in the Rose Garden and da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks and Raphael's Virgin of the Fish. For her thirtieth birthday in two months I shall give her another Raphael, his Madonna del Cardellino (as well as a 1929 first edition of the Hogarth Press
A Room of One's Own
), unless by then we know we have a child on the way, in which case I will give her a Madonna with Child, probably Fra Filippo Lippi's, which I've decided, under the tutelage of my all-seeing wife, is the most magnificent of all.
She played popular music for me.
I played classical music for her.
We learned about jazz with each other.
The only thing we didn't do was make love.
True to her word, she wanted to wait.
I might have thought this was a ploy to get me to marry her sooner, but I didn't think that, because I could not make myself believe she might want to marry me in the first place.
“What do you see in me?” I finally worked up the courage to ask her.
“Someone who can read me,” she said.
“Innocence,” she said.
“The father of my children,” she said.
“The love of my life.”
At our wedding, which was the simplest possible thing at City Hall, I got the clerk to let me turn on Clara's boombox to play Yo Yo Ma's recording of the sarabande from the fourth cello suite, and with that as our hymeneal, I told the assorted throng of strangers awaiting their turn to do what we were doing that when I met Clara Bell I felt what Henry James Senior had felt when first he met the woman, Mary Walsh, whom he was to marry. He reported,
to Emerson: “The flesh said It is for me, and the spirit said It is for me.”
No one there seemed to know what I was talking about.
W
E CAME HOME
to this loft of ours, which we'd bought and designed together and had furnished in anticipation of that day, that night, and we drank champagne and talked for a while until finally Clara said, “Fuck me, Johnny,” and we consummated our marriage upon this bed.
I sit on its edge and recover from the desperation of hunger only to have it replaced, blessedly, by the desperation of lust. At last, I am approaching that pinnacle of desire that I have suffered so much, in being separated from Clara, to attain. Nietzsche called us the bravest of animals and those most accustomed to suffering and knew that we not only don't repudiate suffering, we
desire
(his italics) it, so long as we're shown the meaning of this suffering.
I try to picture her now, not in my usual hopeless attempt to see her but to see what she is doing. I cast her out from my mind in order to bring her into my flesh. I create of her a stranger.
Where can she be? With whom?
She is not with another man, which is to say she is not
with
another man, though the chances are good that she's with a man, for most of her dates and meetings in the evening are with men: her hairdresser is a man; her internist is a man; her gynecologist is a man; her accountant is a man; her aerobics instructor is a man; those people who truck in with quilts from America are men (and not one of them homosexual, according to Clara); her masseur is, obviously, a man.
I have in the past enjoyed the image of Clara having a
massage. Then I can see her, not her face, really, which is half-obscured by the table on which she lies, but the rest of her, naked, only a small towel over her buttocks, while a man moves his hands across her skin and presses them down upon her, hard enough so that the outside edges of her breasts become visible upon the surface of the table. When his hands have reached that marvelous little concave small of her back, where the solid strength of her supple spine meets with charming incongruity her two darling dimples, his little finger slips under the white towel. Her buttocks flutter beneath the towel. As he moves that finger and then the next and next and next down the crack between them, her whole ass rises, magnetized. The towel slips off and falls slowly from the table to the floor. I am so happy to see my wife's beautiful ass I could weep. My cock quops with delight.
It is not that I want my wife to be with another man. I merely want to see her with another man. It is she who has taught me to see thingsâpaintings, quilts, my crescive cock in her mouth that she eats like a croissant, delicately and edaciously at the same time.
It is Clara who has opened my eyes. She has shown me that the only way to see her is to see her not merely as someone apart from myself but someone apart from herself.
To have her, truly, I must give her up.
So I do. I give her up to my imagination and in that way get to keep her, real and for real.
What is more exciting, after all, for a man: to imagine having sex with another woman or to imagine his wife having sex with another man?
The former erases her, casts her out; the latter recreates her.
I have never dreamed I was making love to another woman when I was making love to Clara.
But sometimes I dream that I am someone else making love to Clara.
Someone from her diaries, her past, a forgotten lover from among the multitude of her lovers, given life anew by me and in turn giving life to me and through me to Clara, for I've found that I can bring myself to an absolute frenzy of desire by using a succedaneous cock on her and watching her use it. My frenzy is contagious. Clara is delivered to bliss. “Sometimes I don't even know who you are,” she says. She looks at me through lust-puffed eyes as if she has never seen me before.
I say nothing but her name: “Clara.” I say it again and again. How powerful a sound it is, this name of hers, fresh off the lips of a stranger. No other word quite so arouses her, no vulgar sex word, no description of what's happening between us, no tease or praise or demand. I say her name as if I had just come upon her, as if I were saying it for the first time, as if it were flesh itself. She pulls my head down to hers, my lips to her ear, and hears the whisper of her name until she cries out mine in her climax.
And thus I have her, truly, by having given up myself.
To imagine your beloved is someone else insults her, diminishes her, and removes her from you and you from her. Even that old hypocrite St. Jerome was wise enough to recognize that the husband who is lost in immoderate love is exalted in sin when he screws his wife so passionately that he would have done it with like abandon even were she a stranger. (It is he who also said, “The wise man should love his wife with judgment, not with passion.” So how, then, is a man to love his wife?)
Is it not the greatest of all relationships, this accidental bond, this lifelong pledge, this pleasure, this plicate gathering of limbs and breath in the hasp of sex and the trust of sleep? We come together as strangers, aliens, and are folded, crushed, into a single, resurrected blood. Out of thin air, with someone who did not exist until we met, we make family. This is the will to life. This is the death of death.
Is it any wonder that I wonder where she can be? With whom?
I am right where I want to be. At home. Waiting for her. Beginning to ache.
I leave the bed and go to her handbag, from which she'd taken money and keys. It is lying just where she had left it on the floor by a small bird-cage tea table we'd bought on a quilt-hunting trip to western New York. The inside of the bag is comfortably cluttered, but I have no trouble finding what I am looking for. It is her Week-at-a-Glance datebook, which, I must confess, I do not consider sacrosanct like her diary, though into which, I must further confess, I have not peeked before except on those occasions when she's shouted to me from bathroom or closet to check her schedule.
She has torn off the corners at the bottom of the pages so that, when the thumb encounters the first untorn page, the book opens exactly to this week. This evidence of Clara's precision makes me miss her all the more. Has there ever been someone so wanton and unrestrained who is also so punctilious? It is my duty to know her and my desire that she remain, finally, unknowable. It is like wanting to get to the bottom of something that has no bottom.
I'm amused to find myself thinking of Clara's bottom.
There is probably no happier sign of her influence upon me than that my mind should concoct a play on words to lead me from my admittedly endless, frequently metaphoric, rumination on her meaning in my life to visions of her tight yet bouncy ass. I, who have seen so few asses in my time, and most of those in advertisements in her magazines, cannot imagine there is any that compares to hers. How, I wonder, could anyone be so captivated by those perky globules of fat that, putting aside their cushional and excremental functions, would seem to serve no purpose except, perhaps, to amuse? But what a world they are, unto themselves, soft and hard, big and small, manifest and inscrutable. And what they do with light! Simply by lying prone there on the bed, still and naked on a late-summer day like this one, as day fades to night, she teaches me to see how shadow is God's paint and the picture never done. The golden fuzz is brushed aside, the texture rendered eggshell pure but for a moment, when the consequence of darkness proves the subtlety of lust. I am drawn to touch, a sculptor, even I with these crude hands, but while she yields, she also bounces back. There is nothing I, or anyone far more divine, could do to fashion something more comfortably enticing. But it is wholly for admiration, not penetration. I shall not have to perform the ten days' bread-and-water penance decreed a thousand years ago by Bishop Burchard of Worms for having one's wife “
retro canino
.” She will reach around to finger me like a flute along the narrow of her ass. Yet once she arches up and aims me, it's toward the moister, softer, more modestly cucullated hole. Thus we get to do the dance while wearing looser shoes. And what a sight it is, to hold her bottom in my hands and gaze up along the river of her spine and see her shoulders twitch and neck slither and
head grind the pillows. Her hair's her face and thus expressionless, though still it says so much. Its very anonymity arouses me, and so primitive too it seems, fucoid in its swing and even in its reddish-olive coloring. Also different are the sounds she makes, more guttural, deeper, fundamental, mimicking this assward view of life and urgent in their calling to this unseen man behind her, whoever she might imagine him to be. I box her behind in my hands and push and pull her up and down, or is it back and forth, upon myself, and the view I have is unparalleled, panoptic, all of her and all of me until I disappear and she groans, “More.”
But instead of her before me it's her Week-at-a-Glance. I still can't bear to look. And so I think instead of the absurdity of this, week-at-a-glance, and remember how on the day we met she pronounced my otiant life refreshing in contrast to all those others for whom time is best compressed and her beloved quilts some talismans of contemplation. I could probably get rich, I thinkâor richer, for the small need I have of money even in this most lucripetous of citiesâby issuing Life-at-a-Glance, the perfect little datebook for the active man and woman to remind them how fugacious are their unreflective lives. How strange, I realize, that I then should have ended up a sensualist, knee-deep, and deeper still, ball-deep at least, brain-deep, yes, in what only the uninitiated think is fleeting. Marriage is eternal, and so must be its pleasures, all.
I start at the beginning of the week and see, in her mangled handwriting, which only I can read, some things I know and some I don't: she's eaten lunch out twice; she's reminded herself to have her teeth cleaned; she's leg-pressed some fifty times-plus more than what I weigh,
which makes me smile; her period is late; her estimated tax is due today; she means to buy some lobster, perhaps to celebrate the end of summer, some six days from now, and I think I must then chill an old Climens, the full 750 ml, thereby to guarantee enough to take with us to bed, for nothing sweetens up a kiss like that unless it is vin santo; she's had to have, unseasonably, her air conditioning serviced; she's sold four quilts and bought two more; and now, tonight, right now, she's â¦