by Jane Smiley
“How?”
“I don’t know. But Leslie and I always agree that there are lots of things our mother doesn’t need to know. Sally led the way. She used to stop us from volunteering information, just for our own good.”
I got up and went over to the fruit basket and selected an apple; then I came back and sat cross-legged on the bed and cut it into four sections. I took the knife and shaved out the cores and set the quarters on the sheet. Felicity picked one up and bit off the end. I said, “Why is Linda Burns unhappy?”
“Well, she didn’t want to move here—or there, I mean—in the first place. None of them did except Marcus. The kids hate the school and Linda is bored. She doesn’t do anything anymore.”
“I thought she was a teacher.”
“She was, back on Long Island, but she didn’t get a job in our school district, and Marcus told her he didn’t want her to teach anyway. She feels like a slave to the house.”
“I thought she loved that house.”
“Well, she did love the grandness of it. I guess their house in New York was quite small. But she didn’t realize how much dusting it was going to take. And Marcus wants there to be big gardens and nice plantings. I’ve been helping her, but you know she doesn’t really have a flair for it.” She shrugged. “But anyway, there’s something about Marcus. He can do anything with Daddy. He can do anything with my mother. That’s the surprising thing, but when he’s with her, he’s very funny and lighthearted. He makes a lot of jokes and she just laughs and laughs. And he’s the first person ever who’s willing to go swimming with her in the pond at night. They must have done that half a dozen times last summer. We’re all late-night types, but Mom is the only athletic one, and she’s always taken these ten-o’clock swims. The rest of us can barely tolerate athletic activity at the best of times. So she’s crazy about him. And if Betty likes someone, then that person is fine with Daddy. But Norton keeps saying, ‘Oh, he’s from the IRS; oh, he’s going to bust you.’ He always sounds like he’ll be happy if Marcus does pull out his badge and say, ‘Gordon, I’m taking you in.’”
“Well, Felicity, the IRS is scary, but—”
“Norton is scarier? Yes!” She grinned. “Norton always thinks everyone else is going to do what he would like to do.” She kissed me, then picked up another apple quarter.
It came over me how satisfying it was to be with her—her beauty and her lustiness were no more appealing than her familiarity. It seemed an unfortunate (though at the moment remote) paradox that the most comforting things about Felicity were also the most forbidden—her sisterlike position in my life, her knowledge of everyone I knew, and for that matter the womanliness that grew naturally out of the fact that she was someone’s wife and someone’s mother. I said, “I think you are a treasure.”
“Do you?” She grinned again.
When we looked out the window later in the night, we saw that it was still snowing, the streets were still deserted. I had a passing fear of getting caught here and found out—what a to-do that would be—but the fear had hardly formed itself before Felicity summoned me back to bed and wrapped her warmth around me and began tickling and caressing my face and head with her fingertips. She murmured, “You look like someone whose face should be covered with tiny kisses.” She must have worked on me for half an hour or more, until it felt like all the layers of my skin had separated from one another and lit up and the rest of me had disappeared. I was dimly aware of falling asleep, and then it was morning and I could hear Felicity in the bathroom taking a shower. I lay quietly. The curtains were drawn at the window and the covers were pulled up to my chin and plumped around me. The room, I could see, had been straightened a bit—my clothes were hung up, my shoes were set together beside the door, the fruit basket was sitting in the coolness beside the window, and the tray from dinner had been cleared away. I looked at the clock. It was after ten. I picked up the phone and dialed the front desk and was told that the subways were still not running and that only emergency vehicles were allowed in the streets for the time being. Yes, the hotel had plenty of food, and no, at least for a while, the hotel did not recommend sightseeing on foot, as all municipal buildings were closed and all the shops in the neighborhood as well. Snow? On the major streets and in Central Park it was drifting to four and a half feet, but in most places it was more like two and a half. I hung up and lay back.
I picked up the television remote, but Felicity came out of the bathroom before I had a chance to use it. She was smiling and naked, a white towel wrapped around her hair and hanging down her back. Her skin was flushed from the shower. I said, realizing it was true, “I missed you.”
“You were so sound asleep. I feel wide awake today. It must be the sunshine.” She went to the window and raised her arms to rewrap her towel. The sunshine fell across her breasts and belly and thighs and cast her shadow over the beige carpet.
I said, “Can I get you back into bed?”
“Absolutely. I mean, it’s beautiful out there, but we can’t get out the car and we didn’t bring any boots, so we’ll just have to live the sybaritic life.” She rubbed her hair with the towel and gazed down at me with a smile on her face; then she bent down and pulled the covers off me. She said, “Ah. You are a hairy guy, Joey. It’s very sexy. I just have one question. In the summer when it’s really hot, does your body hair serve to wick away the moisture? That’s what they say about dogs, you know. The undercoat keeps them cool.”
I laughed.
“You know what?”
“What?” I answered.
She sat herself cross-legged on the end of the bed. She draped the towel over her shoulders and clasped her hands. She said, “There are several things I’ve been wondering about for the longest time.”
I propped myself up on my pillows.
She said, “First you have to answer about the hair.”
“Well, the hair does form a cushion between my skin and my shirt. My shirt doesn’t cling to my chest or my back.”
“That makes sense. Now, one time I had a dream that I was wearing a skirt, and I lifted it up and I had a penis, and not only that, it was erect, and I put my hand on it, and it felt wonderful and sexy and I was so glad I had it. I think that was the best dream I ever had.”
“You’re giving me a hard-on.”
“Mmmm. Anyway, I wonder if it feels great every time you touch it.”
“Yes. It does.”
“I thought so, because one thing I’ve noticed about my boys is that they’ve always got their hands in their pants. They don’t even realize it most of the time.”
I pushed the covers back farther, to reveal my hard-on. Felicity licked her lips, but said, “Why do you have that?”
“Because you’re sitting right in front of me with the sun falling on your breasts and your thighs and your bush, and you are drying your hair and talking about erections, and it’s very exciting.”
“Tell me about touching it.”
“Well, it’s right there where my hand is, which I always thought had to be for a reason. And I am right-handed, so of course I grab it with my right hand more than my left. I guess you would say that the right hand and the left hand have different functions. One is the grabbing hand and one is the supporting hand. My hand is fairly calloused, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem.” I began to stroke it, and Felicity’s nipples got hard. She was gazing at me steadily now. “Here’s what I like. I like that I can feel both sides of the engagement: I like that my hand can feel the smoothness of my hard-on, and that my hard-on can feel the—what is it? Oh, I suppose the security of my hand.” Her hand went to her crotch, her right hand. She continued to stare at me. I said, “Any more questions?”
“I think so. But I can’t remember them now. I want to have sex.”
“Then I’ll ask one. What is there about sex that you want to have?”
“I want to be penetrated. I want to feel some pressure in certain spots inside my vagina that I know you can reach.” She turne
d around and lay back on the bed beside me and opened her legs. I got up on my knees and lifted her hips, put a pillow underneath them. The sight of her labia hardened me even more; I was so hard it seemed momentarily dangerous. She was still staring at me. She said, “I wasn’t feeling sexy at all in the shower. I didn’t care if we ever made love again, but now it’s just washing over me.” I entered her and she gave a sharp “unnh” and closed her eyes and raised herself to meet me and bring me in even farther, as far as possible.
I can’t say that I had been feeling especially like making love either, but now we made love with a much grander passion than I’d expected, not as if we had spent the last twenty-four hours together, making love several times, but as if we hadn’t seen each other in weeks, as if we couldn’t get enough of each other, as if enough thrusting and enough kissing could not be had in this lifetime. Her head turned from side to side. I sucked one beautiful nipple and then the other, and then the first and then the other, and then I held her breasts in my hands and brought them together, and the whole time she was pressing her hands into my lower back and trying to get me deeper and deeper into her. Then we went back to kissing, and her mouth and lips were alive with hunger. I came with a prolonged shout, which I imagined shooting out of our window over the city, rising in a fountain of freezing drops, then shattering and raining down over the street in glittering crystals.
Felicity said, “That was the fuck of a lifetime.”
After that, there seemed no reason to leave the room. In the room, Felicity was everywhere, her affection, beauty, and good nature surrounding me and reflecting my every glance. Outside of the room, I felt, she would diminish from a three-dimensional space to a point and then disappear, so it was very important to remain in the room.
Felicity said, “What if I don’t have anything to say later today?”
“Then we’ll just be quiet. Remember? I’m a single guy. Quiet is second nature to me.”
She nodded. We were quiet for about five minutes. Felicity sat up and put her feet on the floor, then rose gracefully and went across the room to the dresser, where two glasses sealed in cellophane were sitting beside an ice bucket. She said, “Did Daddy ever tell you he won my mother in a poker game?”
“No.”
“Well, you know he didn’t go to college. The fresh start financed by the English relatives didn’t go that far. But he lived in Boston, where there were lots of colleges, and he bought himself the right kind of clothes—this was the thirties and anyway, the whole family’s main article of belief was that all you really needed was the right clothes. So, Daddy would go where the college kids gathered and he would strike up conversations and get them to gamble. It was mostly cards, but he also made book on various sporting events and horse races. I think the Harvard guys thought he went to Boston University and the BU guys thought he went to Harvard.
“Anyway, my Uncle Norton had gone to Harvard from down south, where they were from, and he felt uncomfortable in Boston, so my father was like a godsend to him—whiskey, cards, horseracing, and going to strip clubs. So one day, Uncle Norton was way down; I think he owed Daddy about a thousand bucks, and Daddy told him he wouldn’t play cards with him anymore or take any more of his bets, so Uncle Norton showed Daddy a picture of Betty, and he said he wanted to play one more game; if he won, his debt would be cleared, and if he lost, Daddy could marry his sister. You know, Daddy will take any bet, and I think he thought this was just a joke anyway, so he played and of course he won, and Uncle Norton didn’t even blink. He just started telling Daddy they would go down to visit the family for Christmas, and then he would arrange everything. That was going to be in about two weeks.
“The next thing that happened was that Daddy bought a house outside of Boston in a tax sale, and it wasn’t a bad house and it was furnished. So now he had a house and he thought he was going to sell it and make a profit. Christmas came around, and they took the train down to Virginia, and Daddy had all the right clothes, and he resumed, just a little bit, his English accent, and he let on to my grandmother, who was an incredible snob, that his family had property in Kent, which they do, but he didn’t say that the side of the family who owned the property wasn’t the old English side. They got there a day before my mother did. Well, the day my mother arrived, she told my grandmother she had just gotten engaged to her boyfriend, who was a local guy from a long line of charming drunks, and this engagement was a possibility that had been terrifying my grandmother for years, because my mother had been seeing this guy since they were thirteen. So as soon as my grandmother found this out, she sort of set Daddy on Betty. Uncle Norton promoted it too, since he didn’t want to lose his thousand dollars, so he talked up all Daddy’s connections and told about the Boston house, and the long and short of it was that Daddy swept her off her feet and she broke the engagement with the charming drunk and they got married at Easter and moved into the house and Sally was born a year later and that was that.
“But Daddy was terrified to tell her the real story, and Uncle Norton was terrified too, so they kept it dark for months, but then after the wedding Daddy couldn’t stand it anymore, and he went to her and confessed and said she could have the marriage annulled if she wanted to. But she just laughed, because it was fun and exciting and she hadn’t really loved the other guy, and I do think she really loved Daddy, and this made him seem even less stuffy and less like her relatives at home, and that was how they got married.”
After dark, we went down to the restaurant for dinner. On the way, we went out the doors of the lobby, just to see what it was like. It was cold and the sidewalks had crusted over, thoroughly unwelcoming. We turned and scurried back into the hotel.
The feel of the crowd in the restaurant was neither playful or innocently expectant—more like bored and irritable. At the next table, a waiter was telling a customer which dishes weren’t available, and the customer was exasperated. Finally, he said, “Well, if I have to have chicken béarnaise, then I have to have it, but I would have preferred the steak!”
“We are out of steak, sir.”
“You said that!”
I thought with satisfaction of the part we had played in eating up the steaks.
After we had successfully negotiated the menu—trout meunière for me and pork medallions with mushrooms for Felicity—our neighbor began moving his chair around irritably.
Felicity smiled at me. We felt so sexily superior to everyone in the room. Across from us, parents with four teenage children were sitting glumly at a circular table.
Felicity’s hand came underneath the corner of the table and took hold of mine; then she smoothed the inner seam of my pants with her fingers and squeezed my kneecap. I put my hand around hers and held it until the waiter brought our food. All around us, our fellow diners and, no doubt, hotel guests, seemed jarring and disorderly. Felicity looked at me, then hunched her shoulders. She whispered, “Let’s run.”
I motioned to the waiter, asked him to pack up the food so we could take it to our room, and a moment later, we were alone again, happy, eating naked in our temporary nest. I knew that within eighteen hours we would be on our way home, and the weight of that began to press against my sense of well-being, but only just. It was like the last hundred dollars in your bank account—enlarged by its contrast to the nothing that would follow, and so almost reassuring in its way.
We watched a late showing of an old Bette Davis movie called Dark Victory that I hadn’t seen before but Felicity had. Bogart had a bit role, which seemed odd, like a sort of joke. We chatted idly about movies and movie stars and lay comfortably against each other. Then I fell asleep, and sometime deep in the darkness, I woke up from a dream that Felicity had been rude to me—irritable or brusque; after the dream was over, I couldn’t remember exactly what she said, only the hard look on her face—and I woke up suddenly, very upset. She was breathing quietly beside me, but when I started, she woke up and said in a thoughtful tone, “Are you okay, dear? Joey?”
; “I had a nightmare.” She put her arms around me and kissed me on the temple, and I thought how odd it would be if Felicity were unkind to me, almost impossible, I thought, and surely that was the result of not being married.
CHAPTER
13
SUNDAY NIGHT I was awake all night in my bed in my condo, wondering what was going to happen between Felicity and me. There were plenty of things to worry about, perhaps especially the feeling I had that her attachment to secrecy was loosening and that at any rate a large part of her irresistible charm was that she was unpredictable. I had never spent time with any woman, any person, that was so enjoyable moment by moment as our trip to New York, but the lesson seemed automatically to be that such enjoyment was unsustainable and maybe even punishable (here was when I got up and turned on the TV for a while). Of course I wanted her to have had a good time too, as good a time as I had, and of course I knew she had, and the next thing after having such a good time would obviously be leaving the hospitable and friendly conditions of Earth as we knew it and entering the unknown vacuum of outer space, where anything could happen, and so it was best to not dwell on what a good time I knew we both had had, and so. . . .
Early Monday morning, when I finally gave up on sleeping and got up, made myself a cup of coffee, and called my answering service, I discovered I had seven messages from Gordon and four from Marcus. Gordon only said, “Call me.” And Marcus only said, “Where the hell are you?”
When I got hold of Gordon at seven, he was not the least interested in where I had been all weekend. “They dug holes all over the place,” he said. “Right where the engineer told them to dig; they dug ten holes at least. Took ’em all day. Water just sat there.”
I had forgotten in my rush to get out of town that they were going to perk the farm on Friday. “That’s not the only possible site, Gordon—”
