I couldn't believe it the first time I touched him. I put my fingers up his sleeve. It was like feeling a rock with skin. I could hardly breath. But he never exercises! I work out hard in the health club like everybody else in New York and I still think my ass is falling. He does
nothing
. Some days he barely moves. I find him in bed right where I left him. In his suit, of course. But when he takes it off at night he is always the same. He has no fat on him. His muscles are defined. I turn the lights down just to watch the shadows crawl up through them.
I once asked him how he stays so fit.
“Am I?”'s what he answered.
Maybe if you don't live in your body, your body will never change.
But now I remember something else he once said. “Thinking about some things is harder work than anything you can imagine. And not thinking about some things is even harder.”
Maybe he's a man whose body is carved out by his brain. My Apollo. My Mr. America.
He looks eternal. If I stay with him maybe I won't ever die.
“What do you see in me?” he wants to know.
I make up some things I think he'll want to hear. They aren't lies. They just aren't true. At least not yet.
I hardly know him. But I know him well enough to know this: what I see in him is me.
And me in him.
We're both virgins in a scumy bed.
I was planning to cook tonight but when I got home Johnny said let's go out to dinner.
I thought we were going to stay in the neighborhood as usual, but when we hit the street Johnny hailed a cab and said “Carnegie Hall.”
On the way uptown he talked to me about his day and asked me about mine. He told me he'd been listening to Robert Schumann's piano music. How Schumann had crippled his hand in a device he'd built to try to stretch his hand so he could reach more notes. I told him about a woman who came in and looked around and asked how much something cost and when I told her screamed, “Are you out of your mind! It's second-hand!”
“What a marvelous story.”
I put my head on his shoulder and held his hand.
I thought how different it was riding in a cab with him than how it used to be. Other men always seemed to be talking for the benefit of the driver. Or they didn't talk at all. Johnny talks like we're the only 2 people on earth. And he listens like I'm the only person on earth. Everything we do is private, no matter where we do it.
Johnny told the driver to let us off in front of Trattoria dell
Arte. I asked Johnny if we had a reservation and he said we didn't need one because we'd come just when the Carnegie Hall crowd was leaving for the first bell. Sometimes I wonder how a man who sits at home all day can know so well how the world works.
This is where we usually eat when we leave our neighborhood. Johnny likes the body parts on the walls. The noses over the bar. Last year they gave us a solid chocolate nose for Christmas. It was so hard we couldn't cut it with our knives. What we needed was a chisel. All we had was a kind of hatchet Johnny ordered through the mail because we talked about going camping. Us! He used it to smash the nose apart. He was like a little boy eating the nostrils and making a big show of it. “Nostrils are holes,” he said. “They should be chocolateless.”
Sandra greeted us. “Hello, Mr. Chambers.” “You are so beautiful,” she said to me.
“You should work the gates of heaven,” he told her.
Sandra looked like she wanted to put her head on his shoulder. “At least no one could lie about having a reservation.”
We followed her to a table. We watched her legs. Johnny always said she was the only woman who had more beautiful calf muscles than me. I'll never get to see mine the way we get to see hers.
Sandra said, “Unless you'd prefer a booth. It's more private. It's quieter.”
This was the first time she'd offered to put us where the celebrities sit, up on the next level against the wall. I'd seen Sting there but Johnny didn't know who he was. And David Geffen. “He's richer than you,” I'd teased him. “But did he get it for nothing?” Johnny competes only with those who do nothing but ask questions of the void.
“No thank you,” he tells Sandra. “This is perfect.”
Tonight we ordered broccoli rape and the Monday blueplate duck and fish and wine. We sat and drank and ate and talked. There's never nothing to talk of. I don't know where we find the things that interest us. I don't have to plan what I'm going to say. I don't have to save up things. Anything I say becomes a part of me offered up.
People are afraid of us. We're like newlyweds on a cruise ship. My customers are always going on a cruise somewhere. Peace at any price.
At the end of the meal our waitress pours us grappa from a huge glass jar with pale berries bunched at the bottom. “Sandra wanted you to have this,” she says. She holds the jar like one of von Zichy's women with a dick in her hands.
We look around. Other couples watch us sip. My bottom lip feels swollen and oily.
This is our social life.
I think Dr. Leslie's in love with me.
I certainly hope so.
Not that I want him to suffer. But I figure that if my gynecologist's in love with me, I must have a very interesting mind.
If he's not in love with me why does he insist we have dinner after every appointment? He says it's because I make him see me in the evenings, after I close the shop, and he gets hungry when he works late. But I think he just uses that as an excuse. I think it's because he's in love with me.
I know I'm in love with him. I tell him so when he's examining me. “I love you. I love you.”
“Oh, stop it, Clara!” he says. He's got a gruff voice and a little white beard like a psychiatrist.
I just got back from seeing him. He took me out for rognons. I paid for the wine. That's our deal. He said he'd be willing to bet he was the only doctor in New York who had the courage to eat innards.
“I guess it goes with the territory,” I told him.
He groaned. But it was one of those groans where you're telling the person you're groaning at that you not only forgive them but you embrace them for their folly.
I went to him for birth control.
“What have you been using?”
“You should know.”
“But I assumed ⦔ he sputtered.
“Assume nothing.” I've been waiting for a chance to say that ever since Johnny told me about the sign on his father's desk.
“⦠that you were using condoms. I'm sure we've had this discussion.” He frowned at my chart. Then he shook his head.
“So what have you been using?”
“Nothing.”
“Good for you.” He might be in love with me, but he still likes to keep things out of women's bodies and the babies coming. “So are you worried that you're not pregnant yet?”
“No. I'm worried that I'll get pregnant.”
“What's wrong with getting pregnant? You're married now.” This is the first time I've seen him since I met Johnny. I was worried he wouldn't ask me to have dinner with him. I needn't.
“My husband wants to have a baby. I thought I did too. But now I don't.”
His stubby little fingers ⦠and let him believe they inspire me to cry out my love ⦠they start pulling on his stubby little beard. “Uh oh.”
“That's something a doctor should never say.”
“What?”
“Uh oh.”
He puts his hand back on the desk. “You're right. The only truly brilliant teacher I had in medical school lectured us on precisely that. Never say “Oh my God!” Never say “Mercy me!” or “Holy shit!” Never faint at a patient's feet. But what's the matter, Clara? The marriage is no good? You come in here and tell me you got married 3 weeks ago? 20 minutes later you tell me the marriage stinks? Of course people know a marriage stinks usually in the first day.”
Only a kind soul could be so cynical.
I told him, “It's the opposite. The marriage is so good I don't want to have a child. I'm already scared to death I'm pregnant.”
“You're not,” he said.
He gave me the prescription. What am I going to have to tell Johnny to keep him from fucking me until I'm safely on it. I was so ignorant that Dr. Leslie had to tell me at dinner that I couldn't start until after my next period.
He was still shaking his head when he asked me what I did about birth control before I got married.
I told him my husband was my first fuck.
He opened his mouth so wide a kidney rolled out.
I cut the piece for the cover of this book from a Contained Crazy quilt whose stitching had given out. Almost every little piece of fabric was coming up. You'd never know from what I put on here how the black bands made a grid over the whole thing to contain the pieces within regular squares. There must have been nearly a thousand scraps catstitched and French-knotted onto the cambric. It should have been tufted. Not
quilted. Then it might have held together and wouldn't have ended up on this book. But I'm glad I got to cut it up. Sometimes you have to destroy something to learn its secrets.
This Crazy has the common velvets from dresses and satin from ribbons and silk from neckties. But I also found small pieces of silk underpants in nearly every square. Each one of them is cut in a V and stands like a V. No other shape is so consistent in its placement. Johnny would call it a leitmotif. Triumph of the Vagina. Whoever made this knew what she was doing. I wonder where she got all the panties. They are the softest things here. I rubbed them with my finger. I thought of making a woman come across the centuries. Sometimes I wish I weren't such an innocent.
I told Johnny I might get him a Contained Crazy. Not one with underpants. Even I couldn't have dreamed that up. But I can't help wondering if he shouldn't get out of here more. We've been married almost a year and the only times he went out without me was to buy me Il Parmigianinos. The Collo Lungo for my birthday. I couldn't figure out the significance of that so he reminded me I'd mentioned it the day we met. I fall for things like that. Sentimental fool. Who'd have dreamed I'd end up with a storybook husband. Then the circumcision for Valentine's Day but late because he didn't know it was Valentine's Day until I gave him the van Meckenem. Simeon's doing the honors. He's looking at Christ's penis (thank goodness) Christ's looking at us (nobody else is) Simeon's bald. Christ's halo is a burst of white light. Their heads are together so that's what you see in this. The knife and penis are of little regard. And everywhere else you look, HAIR. Nobody's head is covered, the way they usually are, like in the Tucher Altarpiece, and there's no reverence in the styling. The Virgin's got a messy French twist. Everybody's a little on edge. Except for
the bald prophet and the radiant savior. I pointed this out to John. He said it probably represents the triumph of the mind. “Over what?” I ask. “Sex,” he says. He points to the rabbit at the bottom of the painting. “And emotion. Fear. Anxiety. Dread. Anguish. Death. Like you and me.” “So that's why I get a picture of a circumcision for Valentine's Day!” “Because you saved me,” he says.
“Wait here,” I said. I went into my closet to get something else for him. I had been saving it for another occasion, or for no occasion but I don't like to be the last one to get a present. I lived on my own too long to be able to give up control all this quickly.
I handed it to him. I deliberately hadn't put it in a box. That way when he tried to unwrap it the dick broke through the tissue paper. He gasped. I was giggling in anticipation.
“What can it be?” he said. He pulled the paper down around the huge dick. “My goodness.” He was blushing. “It's a little man. With a funny hat.”
It was an early Peruvian Mochica pitcher. Maybe 400 AD. Johnny poured some wine into it and then we both drank from it. I got excited to see Johnny with that dick in his mouth. Then he put it against my bottom lip and moved it back and forth. I could feel the wine dripping behind my lips and soaking my teeth. Some of it spilled out over my lip and dribbled down my chin and under my shirt and down the skin of my breasts. The thing didn't hold much wine anyway. When it was gone Johnny closed my lips over the penis and moved it back and forth in my mouth. It was cold and hard and small and tasted clayey. But when I couched it in my tongue and washed it with my spit I felt it was alive. Johnny took it from my mouth. He spread my legs. “May I?” “Only on the outside.” He touched that little guy to my clitoris. “Happy Valentine's
Day,” said Johnny. “But that was a present from me to you.” “Precisely.”
“So are you trying to tell me I'm a contained crazy person?” is what he said when I mentioned the quilt.
“Don't you want to go anywhere?”
“Not without you.”
“Don't you get bored?”
“Not with you.”
“Aren't you lonely here day after day all by yourself?”
“Not with the promise of you.”
“Don't you ever want to go out and chase one of those strange maidens you're always looking at?”
“Not when I have you.”
“But I thought you said I'd made you into a philogonist.” Hello, am I spelling that right.
“You have.”
“So?”
“This is the world. And you are the only woman in it.”
I realize why he's home. It isn't easy. It isn't lazy. It's not escape. There's no distraction here. The others are distracted. I see them in the shop. They know that everything they do distracts them from themselves. Their jobs. Their games. Their toys. The things they say. The lies they tell. The money they spend. They think there's magic in a quilt. Peace and quiet. History without headlines. Sleep without dreams. They buy them from me. But they don't have the courage to become one.