B
ELINDA AND
I
MET AT A MUTUALLY
agreed upon place a couple of towns away from Monarch, a restaurant, dark and lamplit, a snuggery out of the cold, perfect for adulterers. Arriving first, I sat down in one of the plush booths, and in the few minutes before she got there, I did my very best to remain on the guilt-free train of logic that I’d boarded that morning upon waking up: that it was somehow circumstance, not me, that was bringing this to pass; that there was a way in which life itself had assumed control of things with a heavy, blue-balled inevitability; that for the sake of decency, if nothing else, I should step aside, and let the world—so apparently interested in unzipping my fly—have its way. I loved my wife. But I was also (recalling my anthropology classes from college) a hominid, and a descendant of clubbing, tearing, hacking creatures, who fanged meat and broke open skulls. As such, perhaps the crimped daintiness of monogamy
was simply against my nature, and maybe, for that, even a crime against the state.
I ordered a Bloody Mary out of solidarity with my inner ape, and drank it quickly. It went straight to my head, of course, because I normally don’t drink vodka at lunch. Feeling faintly defiant and exhilarated, I was just finishing the drink when Belinda entered at the far side of the restaurant and proceeded toward me at a casual saunter. She was wearing heels, which flexed her diamond-shaped calves, and black stockings laddering into a short tight skirt that in turn debouched upward into a black top, fitted to underscore the heft of her breasts. It was an emphatic entrance, declaratory like a shout, and my head, already weighted with alcohol, fell slightly forward in disbelief.
“Well, wow,” I said, getting to my feet and bending to kiss her. She displaced any doubts I had about the purpose of our encounter by ignoring my inclined, politely pursed lips and pulling me toward her into a three-point stance of breasts, lips and cocked pelvis. Lucy was delicately made, but Belinda was built like a beautiful nose tackle, with all her physical features outsized, as if for the anatomically hard of hearing.
“Hi there,” she said casually.
“You look absolutely fantastic,” I said.
“Do I?” Her voice was low, and standing inches away from me, she let her arms linger around my neck. “I just threw on whatever I could find.”
“Somehow,” I said, smiling back at her, “I don’t think so.”
With a wink, she detached her arms from me and seated herself on the other side of the table. I heard the
lisp of fabric as she crossed her stockinged legs, and in that split second felt my previously guiltless locomotive derailed on the spot. Who was I kidding? Belinda radiated sex. There was no way to look at her and think that what would ensue when a few drinks were added to the mix would be casual, or a surprise. I had configured the lunch in my mind as a series of glancing impacts, which even if they landed us in the sack would do so as a result of something plausibly approaching coincidence, but the sexual clarity of her intent and voice worked against that. I grew slightly uneasy as I realized there would be no shirking responsibility for whatever happened. I had held to that shred of moral high ground and now it was removed.
“I see you couldn’t wait,” she said, and smiled as she nodded at the empty glass in front of me. She seemed to take it as a tribute of sorts.
“I’ve got a lot on my mind,” I said.
“Really, such as?”
“Can I get you a drink?”
“Yes, white wine.”
“Excuse me?” I snagged a passing waiter and placed the order as she put her bag on the table, and did the back-flexing thing, her breasts rearing.
“So,” she said, falling forward again. “How we doing, friend?”
“
We
are doing fine,” I said, emphasizing the pronoun. “It’s the
I
I’m worrried about.”
I laughed nervously in the silence.
“Really?” she asked. “What’s up?”
I hadn’t wanted to lead with my difficulties. This kind
of conversational tack was against my nature. Maybe it was the vodka. I said, “No, nothing, just the usual stress of life, I guess.”
She looked at me, her head canted off slightly to one side in doubt, studying me. “God, I really do know you, Nick,” she said. “I know and know and know.”
“Really?” I asked, relishing the sensual innuendo of her phrasing. “Whattya know?”
“I know that you were a perfect, polite little child and you’ve become an unnaturally controlled guy.” Her hand began to crawl toward mine over the tablecloth. “I know you’ve got ‘stewardess-face,’ and you always have. You can’t stop looking composed even as your life is catching fire and burning to death at thirty-five thousand feet.” Her hand now reached mine with a small electric touch, and I started.
“Whyn’t you let a little air out of those tires, honey?” she asked in her low voice as we both laughed, and her hand, lying on mine, suddenly tightened.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said.
“Why am I suddenly nervous?”
“Let’s play twenty questions.”
“Oh, c’mon.”
“Twenty questions, Nick. It’ll be a great way to catch up.”
“Okay.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Whatever, sure.”
“Great, I’ll start. Swing set in the backyard?”
“Uh,” I said, catching on after a second, “do you mean do we have one? Yeah, we have a—”
“Wooden fruit bowl on kitchen table?”
“In fact, yes.”
“Ethan Allen in the living room?”
“Philippe Starck from Target, actually.”
“When’s the last time you were happy to feel your wife’s hand on your arm?”
“No comment.”
“Xbox for the kids?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Do you dream of sex with old girlfriends?”
“It’s been known to happen.”
“Basement workshop?”
“A small one.”
“Riding mower?”
“Jesus, self-propelled.”
“Netflix?”
“Blockbuster.”
“Have you ever,” she asked, leaning back in such a way as to subtly cantilever her breasts into my line of sight, “had a screamin’ hot dream about me?”
“Good evening,” interrupted the resonantly self-conscious voice of the waiter, “might I inform you of tonight’s specials?”
Both of us turned to look, each struggling in a different way not to burst out laughing, and listened as he recited the entrées with the special overemphatic pronunciation of servers in pretentious restaurants. I ordered the steak and
pommes frites.
She got
pasta puttanesca
. Together, we ordered the wine.
“To answer your question,” I said, after the waiter had left, “yes.”
“Yes what?”
“About you. Yes, I have.”
“Dreamed?”
“That’s right, I admit it.”
“Well, you’re not the only one,” she said in her low voice, and squeezed my hand again and winked.
Over the next few minutes, gliding on our previously established mood, we effortlessly deepened the terms of our understanding. We would be partners of a sort, complicit in the larger enterprise of pretending we weren’t deeply attracted to each other, and as part of that pretense, we would talk our heads off. We would court each other, in other words, as if the outcome wasn’t preordained. It had been a long time since I’d actually unburdened myself like this, chattering away in widening circles of affinity about the things that moved me, the things that disgusted me, the things that made me want to take risks in life and jump off a cliff into unknown worlds. The food came. We ate—I discovered I had a huge appetite—and we drank, the mood unwinding further, and for many minutes at a time, I was able to forget the issues that had lately been pushing into me and clamoring for attention. For whole stretches I was simply aloft on the buoyancy between us. She was chatty, affectionate, girlish, flirty. Then she was blustering, hard charging, outlandish and foul mouthed. At a certain point toward the end of the lunch, with the great windblown feeling of hilarity still moving through the room, she suddenly said, “And forgive me for asking, but how’s the sex with Lucy?”
The wind, abruptly, slackened.
“C’mon, Belinda,” I said, dispirited even to hear my wife’s name mentioned.
“No, really, is it make-up sex, or real sex?”
I lowered my eyes to the table.
“Is it sex out of wanting her, Nick?” she persisted. “Or as compensation for having hurt her feelings?”
Sometimes, when Belinda was like this, what I mainly felt was stalled and thick. It was a shutdown that arrived, unreconstructed, from all the way back in adolescence, and the conversion of my failure at being charismatic with girls into the labor-intensive option of “becoming friends.” I could hear the familiar chain-dragging hesitancies of that time in my mind now as I raised my eyes and stared at her, uncertain how to respond. Why couldn’t I ever simply lift myself up and rush straight at what I wanted to say, like Rob always did—or Belinda too for that matter?
As if sensing my loss of momentum, she leaned over her plate, holding her bottom lip in her teeth, and then she smiled a special smile. It was a smile that forgave all; that promised me a complete and total pardon in advance of anything I might say. I was dazzled by the implications of that smile. “Have you ever fucked a woman against a wall in the back of a restaurant, Nick?” she asked softly.
Staring at me for a long moment, she gently put down her knife and fork, placed her napkin on the table and got slowly to her feet. As she did so a wave of bridling air seemed to pass upward over her like a hoop that rose from the ground and finished, glistening, at her hair.
“Nick,” she said, smiling, “I’m heading to the bathroom here. I know this bathroom. It’s dark and it’s got scented candles. I’m going to be there for at least five minutes. And if there should be a knock on that locked bathroom door, I’m going to open it.”
I watched her walking away, the cheeks of her ass kneading the shiny material of her skirt, and I felt, as I
have for at least twenty years, the human shadow that falls between the disembodied function of admiration and the carnal fact of the man who stands up and drops his pants. I could have spent all day relishing her good looks. I could have even gotten aroused doing that relishing. But I couldn’t—not yet anyway—have simply pulled the trigger and acted on what I saw.
Fittingly, instead, I slowly shut my eyes, and for a moment, hiding in the darkness, I paged backward in time through my own encyclopedia of sex. I remembered the orthopedic contortions in the backs of cars, the incredible quiet wars of attrition with young girls, the sticky joys and feverish pounding heats of the high school years, and the long, slow-motion erotic decline of my marriage. In that moment I saw how much of my life had been drawn up around somehow minimizing the knowledge of that marital disappointment. I’d deployed the numbing pleasures of routine. I’d circled the wagons of children, house, the job and the hollow joys of consumption. I’d lulled myself to sleep with stories of the success of my “maturity” and its attendant dull buzz of early middle age. And it had almost worked. Almost, that is, I’d forgotten there were alternatives to sensual shutdown, and steadily decreasing erotic returns. Almost, I had gotten away with it. Yet a loophole had remained, leading back into that original fever dream. And Belinda Castor had just slithered through that loophole in a rush of silky fabric, high heels and innuendo. Eyes closed, I remained sitting very still, trying unsuccessfully to think my way through to a decision on what to do next. This sense of willful inertia was depressingly familiar. When I heard a noise and opened my eyes, she
was coming out of the bathroom. I steeled myself for an angry or at least disappointed woman. And yet when I saw that rather than being angry with me, she was smiling and at ease—it was then (characteristically!), in the wake of being absolved, that I grew hard in my pants.
“My cautious pal,” she said, sitting herself back down and sipping her wine.
“A pleasure deferred,” I said, and then heard myself to my surprise say, “but not for long, I hope.”
She looked at me, her smile widening. “I can work with that,” she said, and under the table took my knee between her two knees, and began rubbing on both sides with the stockinged insides of her leg in such a way that a delicious shiver, beginning seemingly at the soles of my feet, rippled all the way up my spine.
An hour later, in her hotel room, when I was finally inside her, and blotted out by the whiteness of sex, I managed for a while to forget everything. White the room, white the neural roar inside my body as I fell repeatedly into her, and thought
this
is what I wanted, and
this
is what I needed. Then the bigger engines of sex themselves began to turn over, and the “I” faded, and suddenly, as happens occasionally, the sex began having
us
; the machine of sex with its nozzles and sprockets and flailing levers carrying us both forward, as if we were crossing a literal distance, rowing hard.
When it was over, for a few seconds, everything was sparkling, saline, rinsed clean by the solvent action of what had happened.
“Oh, Belinda,” I said.
“You see”—she laughed a little laugh—“I told you.”
“You did.”
“And you didn’t believe me.”
“I didn’t.”
“That it could be this good and easy and hot.”
“And loving.”
She turned toward me in bed, her face rubbed clean of makeup by our greedy kissing, her eyes filled with a strangely candid light.
“And loving,” she said.
It was that word. It was that silly word. It rattled around inside me like a stick banging a radiator. It went straight from my brain down to my heart, which grew literally fat with feeling. I got hard again.
“Oh, my,” she said, looking down. “I do love a hungry man.”
I
AM NOT AND HAVE NEVER BEEN ESPECIALLY
religious. When very young, Christianity to me was a vast, remote armamentarium of punishments so extravagantly drastic as to need only be hinted at to be effective. Hell was a useful concept for many years, but was eventually discarded at adolescence, with Rob’s help, in favor of infinity. How could there be superheated regions of the damned when all but a tiny fraction of the universe was empty space, and amid those trillions of void miles, only the occasional mineral lump of a planet or the fizzing furnace of a star to break the monotony of it all? Emptiness, not content, was the true message of life, and “good works” and “Christian charity,” it was clear, were piffling human constructions when faced with the facts of deep time and interstellar space.
Yet, as scattershot as it was, my religious training had evidently left its mark, because in the days after my tryst
with Belinda, I spent a lot of time confidently awaiting retribution in the most time-honored Christian fashion. Would it arrive as a tragic report from the pediatrician, or the surprise surfacing of some ruinous forgotten debt? Would Lucy, recently grown a touch warmer with me out of compassion for my father, turn on me in a sudden homicidal fury and stab me in the eye, or my colleagues on the job solemnly open my office door and explain to me that my ser vices, after all, were no longer required?
Instead of any of that, as it turned out, nothing happened. My car didn’t spring a sudden flat and send me cartwheeling into oblivion. My house wasn’t struck by a meteorite, nor was I, like the famous farmer in France, brained in the middle of a field by a compacted mass of frozen airliner effluent, and killed. My sleep wasn’t any worse. If anything, it was better.
And yet as time went on the happy sated feeling in my nerves gradually gave way to a strange, helpless openness, in which I felt myself increasingly becalmed in life. It was as if I were on the receiving end of some mysterious large process, and singled out for special attention.
The world knew
, I told myself. The world knew what I’d done and the world was taking action. And part of that action was to make sure that it—the world—perforated me so violently with its sights and sounds that I was paralyzed out of sheer nervous saturation. I grew weirdly sensitive to human suffering in this period, and strangely, easily moved to tears by stories of mine collapse, of the death of horses by wildfire, of persistent coma victims waking up suddenly and embracing loved ones. I walked around looking for stories of violent redemption, of eleventh hour
pardons and charismatic reconciliations. And my guilty gift to Lucy was to gaze at her across the gulf of our estrangement with eyes that saw only her benevolence. Regret is a dazzling cosmetic. As was the case previously when I’d kissed Belinda but now even more powerfully, I was blinded by the light of her calmness, her patience, the untroubled simplicities of her heart.
I fought back against my remorse by citing to myself the fact that nearly 40 percent of men commit adultery. I told myself, changing tack, that my home life was a wounded animal and I’d given it a merciful pistol shot to the skull. I pled the case that I was simply self-soothing, getting my own needs met and blowing off some steam, the better to return to my loved ones refreshed in spirit. These speeches were eloquent; they were persuasive. For a while, they worked to stave off the inevitable. But one morning the sun rose on the edifice of my marriage and showed me a lovely church now desecrated with adolescent rage, and the union upon which I’d gazed indifferently for so many months somehow mystically transfigured into a model of intelligent coexistence, and I knew then that it was over, and that I had lost.
I’d surrendered to the stupidest, most shallow, most idiotic slavery of them all: sex.
All of these conclusions were entirely internal, of course. No one knew my feelings. I’d been living with secrets for long enough that I’d actually gotten the knack of it. And relations at home with Lucy were so withered that she wouldn’t have noticed my subtle changes in mood and feeling unless I’d shouted them out loud. My heart might have ached, but my face reflected the same potted
geniality as ever. When one morning around this time, a cracked, vaguely familiar female voice called at work, I said nothing at all in response to its hello. Even though I couldn’t place the voice, I associated it intuitively with trouble, and I had more than enough trouble in my life at the moment. I hoped the voice would go away. But it didn’t go away. “Don’t you recognize me?” the voice asked. “This is Shirley Castor and it’s urgent that I see you today.”
I’d almost forgotten about Shirley Castor. After my last visit to her months earlier, I’d been so disgusted by her drunken cruelty that I’d done my very best, even while lying on top of her daughter, to forget she’d ever drawn breath. But now she was croaking excitedly in my ear that she had “important information” to impart to me, and that it was “top secret” to boot. Deeply suspicious, I nonetheless told her yes, I’d be there, begged off the usual deli lunch with colleagues, and drove over that day. I feared the worst. I hadn’t talked to Belinda in the interim aside from a brief, warm, exclamation-filled e-mail exchange, but I was certain that Shirley knew about the liaison. In the absence of knowledge, I revolved imagined Belinda scenarios of blackmail, pregnancy, suicide attempt or worse.
I arrived, parked and approached the house, pushing through deep snow while noting that the only visible tracks in the otherwise inviolate slab of white on her lawn were those of the mailman—probably delivering circulars—which led out to the place he parked his truck. Clearly, no car had been there, which led me to wonder if she’d been living on cat food since the snowfall had hit, several days earlier.
This time, ringing the front bell, there were no teenage
memories of erections under a sunny attic roof. Clearly, something far more serious was in the offing, and as if in confirmation, she met me at the door deliberately toned down, wearing only a drab housecoat, her hair in dry snarls and her face, unsprung by the upward tug of makeup, hanging creased and slack. A cigarette was fixed in her hand. Even though it was only noon, her eyes were unfocused. “Brrr,” she said, opening the door. “Hurry in!”
I leaned forward in an uncertain gesture of amiably general greeting, but she turned her body sharply away from me and shunted me to one side, where I kept moving forward into the dark, stale air of the home. She pirouetted to follow.
“Cold enough for you?” she said.
“Sure is, but I’m bundled up pretty good.”
“Isn’t that nice.”
She motioned irritably with her chin toward the living room and I slid past her, seating myself on the creaking slipcovered sofa. She sat in a chair across from me, and looked me slowly up and down.
“Well, well, well,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette and leaning back and folding her arms on her skinny chest, “if it isn’t Mr. Nicholas Framingham.”
I nodded stiffly.
“An old English name, Framingham,” she went on.
Again I nodded.
“An illustrious name,” she added.
This time my nod was barely perceptible.
“But then again, what’s in a name, right?”
As I watched, she lit another cigarette with a series of tired fluent gestures.
“Mrs. Castor,” I said, but she held up a hand to stop me.
“I know,” she said. “Be patient.”
She reached down alongside the chair and raised up the familiar yellow canister, from which she took a long drink.
“I’m gonna tell you the truth about something that has been with me for over thirty years. I’m gonna do it because, well, I can, and because I’m tired. On top of that, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m old. I wasn’t supposed to be old, but it happened anyway. It’s time to clear my debts. And one of my debts is to you, Mr. Nicholas Framingham.”
I felt my brow furrow.
“It was a bad thing that happened all those years ago, and I was always certain that it was nearly a victimless crime, but it wasn’t. Of course people do adapt,” she said. “In the Indian town of Ahmedabad I once saw a dozen cripples with stick legs and withered arms—not moping, but dancing! It’s not what you’re given in life, it’s what you do with it that counts, eh?”
I was by now totally bewildered.
“It hurt me, it hurt her, it hurt just about everybody, but they adapted, oh yes they did.”
I could no longer keep silent.
“Who adapted, Mrs. Castor?”
“Your parents,” she said.
I felt a sudden constriction in my throat.
“And to what did they adapt?” I asked with a certain effort.
She took another swallow from her canister and ate another puff of cigarette smoke.
“How are you, Nick?” she asked.
“I thought I was fine until about ten seconds ago. Is there something I should know?”
“Thirty-some years ago,” she said, “I was called back to San Francisco on urgent business. It was an incredibly hot summer and people were outside on their lawns constantly, wearing as few clothes as possible. The sun is a hot, lecherous and even disgusting thing. In controlled doses, I believe it can make people quite crazy. Do you agree?”
“Uh, actually, I’m not sure.”
“Really? That’s too bad. Trust me, it can.”
“Okay,” I said, “so it can.”
“And it did, in this case.”
“In which case, Mrs. Castor?”
“Friend,” she sighed, sat back in her chair, and took another drink, “here’s the way I see it. I’m going to die soon. Die. And I’d like to have a clean slate before I go. Do you understand?”
Slowly, doing my best to encourage her, I nodded.
“That’s why I invited you here. I want to travel to that afterlife as lightly as possible, even if”—her eyes rose to meet mine—“they say it’s a long trip.”
She smiled, horribly.
“What is it you wanted to tell me?” I asked.
“A secret,” she said, “a nice fat juicy one. Not that I mind keeping secrets, understand. Secrets,” she pronounced, “are the salt and pepper of life. Did you know that’s one of my lines? I wanted to be a writer. No, strike that”—she grinned—“it was expected that I
be
a writer—by my father of course. A terrible man, my daddy, in the line of some kind of Romanoff merchant prince in his own mind. Do you know of the Romanoffs, you poor dim boy?”
Despite the hour of the day, it was clear she was dead drunk.
“What is it you wanted to tell me?” I repeated.
“Oh, lots,” she said gaily, and lit another cigarette with the burning end of the first. She was still inhaling when the heater suddenly kicked in with a distant whooshing sound, and the rush of warm dry air brought with it that special yeasty, bone-deep funk of metabolized booze and cigarettes that attaches only to a special class of miserably cross-addicted people. I felt a faint twinge of nausea, and coughed into a hand.
“Why do you think it was my son met that awful girl?” she asked. “He was so utterly unprepared for that kind of woman.”
It took a few seconds of swallowing before the nausea passed.
“Which woman was that?”
“That horrible Kate Pierce. A wolf is what she was, a wolf dressed like a lamb.” She shook her head in disgusted recollection. “I’ll never forget the first time I met her. Her fangs were just little stubs then. You could barely see them. But I could feel the corruption coming off her. That Little Bo Peep act didn’t fool me for one minute.”
“Mrs. Castor,” I said.
“A woman,” she ignored me, “can corrupt a tenderhearted man in a flash, Nick. She can put a hex on him as easily as pouring herself a glass of water, and ruin his virility. Soon, she overturns his heart, and she fogs his brain too. You think it’s so hard? Men,” she said scornfully, “are all full of bragging wind when seen from the front, but just reach around”—her long knobbed hand paddled the
air, and snapped shut—“and open them up from behind and you’ll find a little on/off switch, wired directly to their little egos. The funny thing is”—she gave a phlegmy cough into her folded fingers—“it’s undefended! Oh yes, buried behind the career and the drive is that little-boy switch, that little red button, and you just give it a little flip, and the lion becomes a cooing, silly dove in about one hot minute.”
She leaned forward, and toggled an invisible switch in the air. The bitterness in her voice was deep, ancient.
“Flip-flop,” she said, and drank deeply from her canister. “Rub-a-dub-dub, away in your tub, Mr. Accountant, Mr. Executive, Mr. Millionaire Athlete. Go play with your ducky, Mr. Politician, Mr. Race Car Driver. You men,” she sniffed, mainly to herself, as if in commiseration with some inner voice, “are all such hot air and little-boy bullshit.”
She stopped, and lifted her eyes over my head. “I hated Marc so much,” she said quietly, mainly to herself, “that it’s a wonder he lasted as long as he did. It’s a wonder he didn’t die earlier from my simply wanting him that way, dead.”
She lowered her eyes to mine, and repeated the word with heavy emphasis.
“Dead.”
“Mrs. Castor,” I said again.
“At least he was handsome,” she went on. “Oh, yes, with that cleft chin and the oiled Valentino hair—who was handsomer than he was? I saw him on the tennis court, and his legs, and those shorts—well, I was a goner on the spot.”
She laughed merrily to herself a second. “What crazy kids we were! My father was against the marriage, of course. But when your whole life has been business, you want something better for your children than another number cruncher, sure. A musician, maybe, or an actor or a scientist. Also, Marc wasn’t Jewish, and that was no small thing in my family. Oh no, to become a member of the Solchik tribe, you had to show what you were made of. These were tough folks! People often think of Jews as people with their heads down, muttering over old books. But these were the calloused-hand Jews. These were the salt-of-the-earth Jews. They cared about culture and they cared about work. Did you know my uncle was the first Jewish tugboat captain of New York Harbor?”
I looked at her and shook my head.
“What, you think that’s odd?”
I shook my head again, this time pityingly, and stood up to go. Her expression darkened.