She lay back again as he pressed against her, and he caressed her breasts. She felt that her body was floating out to sea on a warm gentle wave that had orders not to drown her, but she didn’t even care if she drowned. Then, rather suddenly, he put his mouth to her breasts and nursed at them, and quickly entered her and quickly came, silently, with only an expelled breath, and a pang of self-pity hit her, her eyes filled with tears. No, no, not again, it couldn’t be the same, it wasn’t fair, was there really something wrong with her? He lay on top of her, holding her closely for a long time afterward, and she had time to swallow the tears and paste a smile back on her face. She patted his back gently and reminded herself that she had at least had pleasure from it this time, and maybe that was a good sign. He had given her, if nothing else, more pleasure than she had ever had from her body before.
After a time, he leaned back and lay on his side close to her. They lighted cigarettes and sipped their drinks. He asked her about her girlhood: what kind of child had she been? She was surprised. Women ask such things, sometimes, but not men. She was delighted. She lay back and threw herself into it, talking as if it were happening there and then. Her voice changed and curled around its subject: she was five, she was twelve, she was fourteen. She hardly noticed at first that he had begun to caress her body again. It seemed simply natural that they would touch each other. He was gently rubbing her belly and sides, her shoulders. She put her cigarette out and caressed his shoulders. Then he was leaning over her, kissing her belly, rubbing his hands on her thighs, on the insides of her thighs. Desire rose up in her more fiercely than before. She caressed his hair, then his head moved down, and she tightened up, her eyes widened, he was kissing her genitals, licking them, she was horrified, but he kept stroking her belly, her leg, he kept doing it and when she tried to tighten her legs, he held them gently apart, and she lay back again and felt the warm wet pressure and her innards felt fluid and giving, all the way to her stomach. She tried to pull him up, but he would not permit it, he turned her over, he kissed her back, her buttocks, he put his finger on her anus and rubbed it gently, and she was moaning and trying to turn over, and finally, she succeeded, and then he had her breast in his mouth and the hot shoots were climbing all the way to her throat. She wrapped her body around him, clutching him, no longer kissing or caressing, but only clinging now, trying to get him to come inside her, but he wouldn’t. She surrendered her body to him, let him take control of it, and in an ecstasy of passivity let her body float out to the deepest part of the ocean. There was only body, only sensation: even the room had ceased to exist. He was rubbing her clitoris, gently, slowly, ritually, and she was making little gasps that she could hear from a distance. Then he took her breast in his mouth again and wrapped his body around her and entered her. She came almost immediately and gave a sharp cry, but he kept going, and she came over and over again in a series of sharp pleasures that were the same as pain. Her face and body were wet, so were his, she felt, and still the pangs came, less now, and she clutched him to her, holding him as if she really might drown. The orgasms subsided, but still he thrust himself into her. Her legs were aching, and the thrust no longer felt like pleasure. Her muscles were weary, and she was unable to keep the motion going. He pulled out and turned her over and propped her on a pillow so that her ass was propped up, and entered her vagina from behind. His hand stroked her breast gently, he was humped over her like a dog. It was a totally different feeling, and as he thrust more and more sharply, she gave out little cries. Her clitoris was being triggered again, and it felt sharp and fierce and hot and as full of pain as pleasure and suddenly he came and thrust fiercely and gave off a series of loud cries that were nearly sobs, and stayed drooped over her like a flower, heaving, his wet face against her back.
When he pulled out, she turned over and reached up to him and pulled him down and held him. He put his arms around her and they lay together for a long time. His wet penis was against her leg, and she could feel semen trickling out of her onto the sheets. It began to feel cold, but neither of them moved. Then they moved a few inches and looked into each other’s faces. They stroked each other’s faces, then began to laugh. They hugged each other hard, like friends rather than lovers, and sat up. Ben went into the bathroom and got some tissues and they dried themselves and the sheets. He went back and started water running in the tub. Mira was lying back against the pillow, smoking.
‘Come on, woman, get up!’ he ordered, and she looked at him startled, and he reached across and put his arms around her and lifted her from the bed, kissing her at the same time, and helped her to her feet, and they went together to the bathroom and both peed. The water was at bath level by then. Ben had put Mira’s bath lotion in the water, and it was bubbly and smelled fresh, and they got in together and sat with bent knees intertwined, and gently threw water at each other and lay back enjoying the warmth and caressed each other beneath and above the water.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said.
‘I’m famished,’ he said.
Together, they pulled everything out of the refrigerator, and produced a feast ofJewish salami and feta cheese and hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes and black bread and sweet butter and half-sour pickles and big black Greek olives and raw Spanish onions and beer, and trotted all of it back to bed with them and sat there gorging themselves and talking and drinking and laughing and touching each other with tender fingertips. And finally they set the platters and plates and beer cans on the floor and Ben nuzzled his face in her breast, but this time she pushed him down and got on top of him and, refusing to let him move, she kissed and caressed his body and slid her hands down his sides and along the insides of his thighs, held his balls gently, then slid down and took his penis in her mouth and he gasped with pleasure and she moved her hands and head slowly up and down with it, feeling the vein throb, feeling it harden and melt little drops of semen, and wouldn’t let him move until suddenly she raised her head and he looked startled and she got on top of him and set her own rhythms, rubbing her clitoris against him as she moved and she came, she felt like a goddess, triumphant, riding the winds, and she kept coming and he came too then, and she bent down her chest and clutched him, both of them moaning together, and ended, finally, exhausted.
They fell back on the rumpled sheets for a while, then Mira lighted a cigarette. Ben got up and smoothed the bedclothes out, and fluffed up the pillows, and got in beside her and pulled up the sheets and blankets and took a drag of her cigarette and put his arms behind his head and just lay there smiling.
It was five o’clock, and the sky above the houses was light, lightening, a pale streak of light blue. They were not tired, they said. They turned their heads toward each other, and just smiled, kept smiling. Ben took another drag of her cigarette, then she put it out. She reached out and switched off the lamp, and together they snuggled down in the sheets. They were still turned to each other, and they twisted their bodies together. They fell immediately asleep. When they awakened in the morning, they were still intertwined.
CHAPTER FIVE
1
Strange. I can see now, writing this all out, what I never saw before. Everything that characterized Mira’s and Ben’s relation was there from the very beginning. It was formed in a mold. But even seeing that, I don’t know what to say about it. Is there any relation that is not formed in a mold? I remember Clarissa saying – after she and Duke had been divorced for over a year, and Duke badly wanted a reconciliation and was pleading with her to believe that he had changed, had become more sensitive, more able to see other people – ‘He says he’s changed, and maybe he has. But in my head and feelings, he has the same shape he always had. I think I’ll always see him that way. So even if I could bear to go back to him – which I can’t – and even if he has changed – which is unlikely – I’d turn him right back into what he was, because that would be what I expected from him. It’s hopeless.’
I find it a desperate thought that people can’t change, can’t grow togethe
r. If that’s true, people should be required to re-enact marriage every five years or so, like signing a lease. Oh, shit! No rules: we have enough as it is. But if it is true that relationships are formed in molds, then how do people live together when time brings change, and change inside a mold either breaks the vessel or agonizes the bound foot?
But people do live together: men and women, women and women, ancient ladies with lace curtains at the windows who dress up in rayon print dresses and high heels to go to the market for a half-dozen of eggs and a quart of milk and two rib lamb chops. Do those women, like some elderly married couples I know, sit in silence at dusk, chewing the insides of their lips with irritation at Mabel or Minnie?
‘Scratch a woman, find a rage.’ Val said that so often that her voice still says it in my ear. Does Mabel’s habit of using so much talcum powder after her bath that she leaves the bathroom floor dusty, which bothers Minnie’s nostrils, does that lead inevitably to explosions, during which all of Mabel’s other annoying habits – peering at the name of the sender of all Minnie’s letters, never vacuuming behind the sofa, and missing the eyes when she peels the potatoes – are thrown at her like a set of knives, sending her into tears and counter-accusations? Because of course (Mabel announces the terrible truth tearfully), Minnie herself is not perfect. She always asks who is calling when the telephone rings (ah, so rarely!) for Mabel, and that is pure nosiness. Minnie pulls out her smelling salts at the slightest provocation, as if she were frail, when the truth is she’s healthy as a horse. She even did it that day the neighbor’s dog, in heat, met a stray on their front lawn. Yet surely, Minnie, at seventy-four, had seen such things before! And Minnie, never, never, puts the newspaper back together again the way it was after she reads it: it is enough to drive one mad.
It is true they both cluck and tut at any news story about children being mistreated; that they both tighten their lips and look away when there is a sex scene on television; that they both live uncomplainingly on canned soup and eggs and a lamb chop or hamburger every third night, which is all they can afford on Social Security and their tiny pensions; that they both disapprove of smoking, drinking, gambling, and any woman who engages in them; that they both love the scent of lavender and lemon oil and freshly laundered sheets. Neither of them would think of going out with curlers in her hair, the way some of the young women do, and each spends a chunk of her little allowance to have her hair set and blued every week. And neither of them would ever go outdoors, or even walk about the house, for that matter, in disarray. Their ancient knobbed arthritic fingers struggle every morning with the iron-tight girdle, the delicate hose. And both of them remember, as if it were yesterday, the Baum family that used to live next door.
But I ask you: is that enough?
Across the street are Grace and Charlie, also in their seventies, married over fifty years, who are the same way. Except Grace gets angry at Charlie for every day consuming three cans of beer and constantly belching, and Charlie gets angry with Grace because she doesn’t let him watch all the TV programs he likes, insisting on watching those stupid game shows. Both are proud and smug about the neatness of their front lawn – not like some people’s, they tellingly remark to Mabel and Minnie, who of course feel the same way, and all four of them look downstreet at the Mulligan house. Yes, but is it enough?
What holds people together? And why do we have to hate each other so much? I ask this not to have you shake your head piously and pronounce that we must certainly not hate, not hate our fellow-man. We do. What I want to know is, why? It seems necessary, you see, like breathing out after you’ve breathed in. Okay. I can accept that. The true mysteries of the true church, if there ever were one, would be those: Why do we love and hate? How in hell do we manage to live together? I don’t know. I already told you: I live alone.
It’s easy enough to blame men for the rotten things they do to women, but it makes me a little uncomfortable. It’s too close to the stuff I read in the fifties and sixties when everything that went wrong in a person’s life was Mother’s fault. All of it. Mothers were the new devil. Poor mothers, if only they realized how much power they had! Castraters and smotherers, they were unpaid servants of The Evil One. It is true that men are responsible for much of the pain in women’s lives – one way or another, whether personally or as part of a structure that refuses to let women in at all, or keeps them in subordinate positions. But is that all of it?
If anyone ever had a chance for a good mutual life, it was Mira and Ben. They had enough intelligence, experience, goodwill, and enough room in the world – whether you call that opportunity or privilege – to figure out what they wanted and to achieve it. So what happened in their relationship ought to be paradigmatic somehow. It seemed so at the time. It seemed to glow with the divinity of the ideal. They had the secret, keeping both intimacy and spontaneity, security and freedom. And they were able, somehow, to keep it up.
It was April when Mira and Ben became lovers. Mira’s first Cambridge April, and her mood was perfectly attuned to the little green balls that appeared on the trees, the thin feathering of forsythia, and the lilacs in the Yard, hanging over the brick wall around the president’s house. As the sun grew warmer, the tiny green balls expanded, then opened, and cast green light on the warm uneven red brick. The days smelled warm; light perfume of dogwood and lilac drifted down from Brattle Street, from Garden and Concord, and penetrated even the crowded, fumy Square. People thronged on the streets, jackets open, smiling, unselfconscious, carrying a bunch of daffodils from the Brattle Street Florist, a rolled-up poster from the Coop, a polished apple from Nini’s.
Mira was studying for generals and finishing up papers; Ben was trying to organize the ten crates of notes he’d brought back from Lianu. They met almost every day, for lunch or coffee at the Patisserie or Piroschka or Grendel’s, where they could get a table outdoors. When everybody was broke, a group of them would meet for a drink at the Faculty Club, where Ben or another teaching assistant could charge things. They always spent the most money when they were broke.
Mira was working very well: the sense of home she had in her relation with Ben freed her mind. She could focus intensely for hours without feeling restless or getting up to pace her apartment or the top floor of Widener. She could be as organized and efficient as she had always been without having to feel she was substituting order for life.
The lovers spent Saturday night and Sunday together, in an extended honeymoon. They ate dinner out on Saturday night, trying every interesting restaurant in Cambridge. They had guacamole, the Szechuan shrimp, and vegetable curries, and Greek lamb with artichokes and egg lemon sauce; they tried a variety of pastas, baba ganoush, hot and sour soup, sauerbraten, quiche, rabbit stew, and one special night, suprêmes de volaille avec champignons. They tried buffalo stew at the Faculty Club. They tried for variety and goodness of food and surroundings. They found everything good, and some wonderful things.
On Sundays, when most restaurants in Cambridge are closed, they cooked in. Sometimes this became quite a production, as when Ben insisted on cooking a Beef Wellington that took him all day and left the kitchen a shambles. More often it was simple: soufflés and gratins, stuffed crêpes, or pasta, and salad. They had friends in or ate alone with chamber music on the stereo Mira had bought.
And off and on all weekend, they made love. They did it for hours, and sought for constant variation. They tried it standing up, hanging over the edge of the bed, sitting down, or with Ben holding Mira onto his standing body. Many of their experiments ended in giggling failure. They played games, pretending to be characters out of old movies, varying the power roles. She would be Catherine the Great and he, a serf; he would be a sheik and she, a slave girl. They acted the parts with verve. She played the woman of her masochistic fantasies, he played the man of his masochistic fantasies. It was like being a child again and playing house or cowboys and Indians. It liberated their imaginations and freed them to live out all the mythic lives they had rejected,
like playing dress-up in all the costumes they had stored in the attics of their brains.
They went for long walks, down along the Charles, up to Fresh Pond, all the way along the Freedom Trail, ending in the North End with an Italian coffee or ice. And they talked, and they argued about everything conceivable, about poetry and politics and psychological theory, about the best way to make an omelet and the best way to rear a child. They shared enough of the same values and assumptions to make their arguments rich and exhilarating, and both were old enough to know that small differences of opinion kept things interesting.
In May, there was a student protest against the war led by a group more militant than the peace group Val and Ben belonged to. The Yard thronged with students; the protesters surrounded University Hall and spoke to the crowds through loudspeakers that distorted their voices. Sounds wavered across the Yard: it was moral to use forcible means to try to stop the war because the war was immoral. That was the crux of the argument. They urged the students to strike. Mira, listening, watched the crowd. People stood, considered, wandered. Some argued with the speakers, who tried to argue fairly in response. But the arguments were over logic and legality: it was against the law for them to take over University Hall; it was immoral to act against the law; but it was more immoral not to act against the law when the law supports an immoral war.
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