Slant

by Greg Bear

In those weeks before she finally allowed him to persuade her, she gave herself to other men and behaved with them in ways that she would not with Jonathan, and has not since. She has never tried to explain that to herself and in fact has seldom thought about it, but this evening, the question comes out of the murk with a disturbing rough edge.

  She remembers now that she had twenty men in all—eight of them after she began dating Jonathan, sometimes inviting a man over hours after Jonathan had left. Why twenty, she wonders; if seems so rounded and artificial a number, so meaningless, nothing to do with actual people, with arms and legs and cocks and pretty eyes and thrusting hips.

  She remembers how it seemed exciting to be a little cruel, a little bad; to turn down the quiet, good and intelligent man and then bed the loud, self-assured and brightly plumed boys.

  It was the last, the monster, that broke her and sent her straight to Jonathan. He was what she needed.

  The frame house creaks softly as the last of the wind fetches up against its eaves.

  Jonathan to her seemed honorable and decent and therefore much less of a challenge. Getting the posturing boy-men to pay attention to her was a real accomplishment. “Bitch thinking,” she murmurs. He knows little or nothing about the men who had her but were not hers, knows only about the last, and she will never tell him; he is not the sort who would react well. She would not want him to be that sort.

  Though he has tried to get her to engage in fantasizing about other relationships, she has resisted; there is something about such demands that lessens him, in her eyes. He’s changed. Sex, for this older Jonathan, seems to be some sort of adventure, some way of making up for a stiff youth; she has long since discarded that notion.

  Yet she and Jonathan get along well enough in bed, she believes. She feels his occasional dissatisfactions, his attempts to change their sexual routines; she resists with a treelike stubbornness, hoping to keep their relationship on a firm and level ground, away from the jagged mountains of her early behavior.

  She will not go back to the out-of-control passion, the pain, the loss of self through giving all and getting nothing she needs in return.

  She knows little about Jonathan’s other sexual experiences. A few things he has admitted to—unsatisfactory, half-hearted couplings with confused young women—things Chloe scrupulously dismisses as inconsequential, and indeed they are.

  The present moment is supreme. Family is what counts.

  Yet increasingly she has felt Jonathan’s entreaties turn bitter. He does not know why she resists; she doesn’t either, not really. He has asked for things, after all, that she once freely gave to others. Perhaps he senses that. He’s not stupid.

  And his requests are not extreme—no marriage counselor would call them extreme, or do more than offer mealy-mouthed placating defenses for Chloe’s reluctance to go along. It is after all a game for two, and the rules have to be agreed to by both partners.

  They have been together for twenty years and who can expect the experimenting and exploration to stretch on forever?

  It has now come to what he calls stiffness.

  She gives herself often enough, she thinks, and with sufficient response; he is not a bad lover and he knows it. But the strain is showing.

  Then the question rubs with a sandpapery grit. Does she still feel anything for Jonathan except the need for continuity, for stability and level ground, for the quality of nurture afforded her children?

  “Shit, shit, shit,” she mutters. What she did when she was eighteen is a ghostly irrelevance, numbers and bleached memories and even many of the names lost; what she gives or does not give to her husband is her own business. They have their children and their lives, their social connections and many friends… That is more than enough.

  She opens the rear glass door and stands on the porch. A few drops of rain splash on her face. She wipes them away with well-manicured fingers. Jonathan does his share. But feeling any kind of guilt angers her. She has given the children her free hours and thoughts and her passion; they are strong and they are good children. The time is coming soon when they will be adults. Penelope is dating sporadically and Hiram is hiding his interests well enough.

  Chloe hates the thought of life demanding more of her than she has already given. She has given up the tradition of her family, disappointing her father; she has not used her education.

  Suddenly, in the cooling breeze, she jerks upright and grips the railing. The tears flow freely and she hates, herself, him, all the demanding forces. What she fears is that she is coming to believe any sex at all diminishes her. She does it for Jonathan, not for herself. She has no strong needs, none at all.

  Jonathan will be home any minute and she does not want to show this side to him. He has become an adversary; she loves him but gave him so many parts of herself and her life that she feels she could have done other and better things with; and then she thinks of the children and really the obligations and losses haunt her, make her feel a little sick. What could she have been, given complete freedom from all the sandpaper demands of sex, including children?

  She goes back into the house and swings the door hard but it catches and closes with a soft snick. She would prefer to have slammed it. The lights switch on in the living room. “Lights off!” she shouts. The house is controlling her; she cannot break free from anything.

  The lights obediently dim and go out.

  She is bound on every side in the darkness.

  The front door opens. Jonathan is home. Her muscles tense and she composes herself. He must not see her this way; he does not deserve that satisfaction. She hears him in the front hall, and then he stops, and she imagines him listening to the house, like a cat trying to locate a mouse. He wants to know where she is. He wants to know if she is asleep or awake, and if she is awake perhaps he will try to hug her and touch her, arouse her. He seems to need to believe that being away for a few days or even a few hours increases her need for him. It is not so. She could go for months, years, forever.

  “Hello?” he calls softly.

  “In here,” she says. “How was the meeting?”

  Jonathan walks into the living room. He looks drained. “Weird,” he says. “Why is it dark?”

  He stands a few feet away, arms folded. For a moment she is relieved that he does not try to hug her. This gives her some time to compose herself.

  “I’ve been watching the storm,” she says.

  “Kids asleep?”

  “Yeah. The toilet says we’re sick.”

  He laughs. He sounds nervous.

  “Was the speaker interesting?”

  “I suppose. Marcus was the really interesting speaker tonight.” Then he remembers he is not supposed to tell Chloe. “Christ, I’m tired. Ready for bed?”

  “Marcus the kingmaker?”

  “The same,” he says.

  “What’s he offering now?”

  “Nothing worth the bother,” Jonathan replies, but the words sound false, or at least unsure.

  He is hiding something. Everything she has thought and felt this evening seems to double back like a cobra and she is suddenly afraid. What if she has denied too much, been too inflexible? She is vulnerable; she does not and cannot stand alone.

  “I’ve never understood the whole mentor thing,” she says.

  “Neither have I, but there it is.”

  She steps across the metabolic carpet. Her feet are bare and her toes in the warm plush feel nice, distinct. All the parts of her body feel separate and distinct. She does not like it, but her insecurity is working on her. She does not want to lose Jonathan, this situation, all she’s worked for. It’s nonsense to think anything has happened, but everything she feels seems nonsensical.

  He’s watching her in the dark. To him, she’s just an outline. Now comes the irrational response, the warming of her separate body parts. The carpet feels like animal fur. She sees herself running her hands over a horse’s flanks. If he is going to be distant and quiet and withhold something,
then she will demonstrate to him after a long while what she has, what she can do. It’s allowed, she thinks. And he wants it. This evening she will make the offer. And forget all the contradictory voices: this is a simple courtesy in a long-term relationship.

  “Too tired?” she asks.

  “What?”

  She is close enough that she can see his eyes. Without a clue. Vulnerable as a little boy. She unzips her top and lifts it free and peels it from her arms. She still has good breasts; he likes her breasts, nuzzles them frequently, but as a result of the matron conditioning, they have matured past their younger purpose to become instruments of nurture, and are not as sensitive as they once were. She can no longer have an orgasm simply by rubbing her breasts. She could have reversed this but has not.

  Now, they feel more sensitive than they have in years.

  The hair between her legs must feel rough, like the hair of a horse’s tail. She wonders if he will notice.

  Jonathan stares at her, at a loss. “Honey,” he says.

  “Now that you’re away from the power-hungry, let’s see how hungry you are,” she says.

  She steps out of her pants and underwear and stands before him in the dark. “Lights up half,” she tells the house. The lights rise to a golden dimness.

  “I want you to fuck me,” she says.

  The words stun. He does not move.

  “Forget everything else. Fuck me.”

  She wants to lie back on the carpet and feel it warm and moving beneath her like the hair on the back of a horse.

  Jonathan, with Chloe’s help, removes his clothes quickly, the sleeves catching on his wrists, the pants tangling, and he stumbles they are working so fast. Her lips and teeth and tongue are on his mouth, bruising him and stopping any words, and she is murmuring around their touching tongues. “Give it to me. Do it. I need your cock.” She has never asked him in this way before, using these ancient words, so bluntly and powerfully, like a bad Yox.

  Despite his confusion, he responds instantly. She grips with painfully strong fingers.

  She is going to show him. If he wants this, let him be dismayed and shocked to get what he wants all at once, instead of in little rationed parcels. See what he thinks. She wraps herself around him, pushes him roughly against the horse-hair matting between her legs. Her body is proving her value.

  Jonathan’s doubts die and he grabs her as if he has never had her before and there have only been days or hours together for them and no children and no other responsibilities have come between. She gracefully reclines to the carpet and pulls her knees back like one of those Celtic stones they saw on vacation in Ireland, the rude pagan statue with its knees drawn up mounted in a fence on a horse farm, a Sheila something; she is a Sheila inviting him.

  (Jonathan had stared at the Sheila with a silly boyish look of speculating embarrassment. How could such a statue still exist in Catholic Ireland?)

  He does not stop to stare but is over her and then inside her. She listens to his urgency and wonders if all men feel alike if the eyes are closed; she thinks they may. He does not feel differently from the brightly plumed boys in her bingeing time. He moves quickly and with real strength and need that he has not shown for months and she knows it is true, that he told her the truth, that he had other keys she could use if she simply willed it. It is disgraceful really that he is so easy; men are so easy this way. No challenge at all.

  Her own pleasure is not intense. The sensation of his weight and motion fluctuates between strangeness and complete familiarity and she is not sure which is going to triumph. She hopes the strangeness; no, the familiarity, the other would degrade, and finally she does not care.

  But when she pushes him back and turns over and lifts herself and pulls him back into her and thinks of the horses on the farm, of the bright-plumed boys with self-assured smiles and no brains, in this shamelessness her reaction is intense. The pleasure rankles. How dare he. She grits her teeth and humps back against him.

  Jonathan feels as if his insides have been flooded with warm wax, an overwhelming surge of joy and affirmation. His was not a useless desire; she has finally felt it too and she loves him and needs him as no other. He is the best. Suddenly the evening with Marcus seems even more ridiculous. All is right here at home; she is confirming him, she needs him desperately, she is giving him all he could ever want, all he could ask for has asked for, he can go back to Marcus and refuse the nonsense and the mystery, home is his center and always has been, all that he needs is here because Chloe is here.

  In the middle of his simple and extraordinary lust his eyes are moist with a tenderness that he wishes she could see.

  As he is nearing his limit, as large in her as she has ever felt him, even when they were making the children and that extra fillip of biological meaning increased their intensity, Chloe feels something break.

  It sounds like a lightbulb exploding.

  He is weighing her down Her head is filled with slicing blades, the cruel corroded edges whirling and blasting and reducing.

  Jonathan comes as she begins whimpering and moaning. She is limp on the floor beneath him, quivering, and he cannot tell whether she is having an orgasm or is crying. Then with an awful sense of having gone too far, he realizes she is crying. She has given too much and she is weeping like a child. Chloe reaches back with her hands sharp like claws to push him off. He rolls to one side as she jerks about on the rug. This is his wife, not some fantasy woman; he has done something horribly wrong.

  She stops writhing and lies with her breath drawn in in one horrible unrelenting sob.

  He reaches out to her, and with his other hand grabs his underpants to cover himself.

  The sob rushes out as a tearing shriek. Jonathan jumps as if stung by a wasp, then tries to quiet her; Penelope and Hiram will hear and find them naked. He tries to hug her, angling his hips away to avoid that connotation; all he wants now is for her to stop this, she is frightening him to death.

  Her thrashing stops; she is hyperventilating like a pinned rabbit.

  “Chloe,” he says. “Chloe, I’m sorry. What’s wrong?”

  “Broken,” she says.

  “What’s broken?”

  “I hurt.”

  “My God, what did I do?”

  She trembles and tries to get up, but her arm muscles fail her. Jonathan tries to lift her, but she is limp. Her limbs seem disjointed.

  “I don’t know whether I’m doing this deliberately… Am I faking? Jonathan, what’s wrong with me?”

  Jonathan shakes his head, crying. I don’t know, honey. You tell me.” He continues to hold her but leans back and almost falls over, then fumbles with one hand through his clothes for his pad. He pushes the emergency aid button and lets the pad do the rest.

  Penelope and Hiram stand in the entry, sleepy-eyed and dismayed.

  “Your mother’s sick,” he says. He stands with the pad in one hand and his pants clutched before him with the other. “I’m calling the medicals”

  Chloe shuts her eyes tight. “I can’t get away from it,” she says.

  “What is it?” Jonathan asks again, kneeling beside her. He supports her torso between his legs and her head lolls back. She is sweating profusely.

  “Me! I can’t get away from me,” she says.

  Penelope comes back from the bathroom with washcloths. Even at fifteen, she is cool and more collected for now than Jonathan or Hiram. She begins to sponge her mother, making small comforting sounds.

  “The toilet,” Chloe says. “Maybe it knows.”

  “Shhh, Mother,” Penelope says, her young voice smooth as pudding. And the neighborhood medical arbeiters are through the front door and in the living room. They clamp Chloe immediately in several diagnostic belts that writhe like tentacles. There is nothing Jonathan can do but get dressed. He pulls on his pants.

  Hiram seems stunned, as if waking to another and nastier dream.

  When the ambulance arrives, minutes later, Jonathan is dressed; Penelope has managed
to get her mother’s slacks on, somehow, working around the arbeiters and their many arms and tubes.

  The orderly, a black woman with close-cropped reddish hair, tells Jonathan the arbeiters have already put his wife on fast-acting anxiolytics. They can find nothing physically wrong with her, she explains. “She may be having a drug reaction—accelerants, maybe.”

  “She wasn’t taking drugs,” Penelope says angrily, defending her mother’s character, standing to one side now with her arms tightly crossed.

  “No drugs,” Jonathan confirms, but thinks of her seductive aggressiveness.

  “Well, we aren’t getting traces,” the woman admits as they lift Chloe and put her on a stretcher. The arbeiters dance and tag-along as they carry the stretcher outside. “Hospital is best. They’ll figure it out.”

  “Penelope, you’re in charge here,” Jonathan says over his shoulder.

  “As soon as you know, call us,” Penelope demands. Her face looks as pale and fragile as bone china.

  “You’re family,” the orderly says, handing her end of the stretcher to a uniformed male. “Here’s your mother’s emergency response number you can track her to the hospital with your personal code on the fibes.”

  Chloe opens her eyes as rain tickles her face. Jonathan is beside her; he will go in the ambulance with her.

  “My God,” Chloe says. “I’d forgotten. Now it’s back.”

  “What’s back?” Jonathan asks. He scrambles into the rear of the vehicle, bumping into a male orderly, who grins but takes no offense and makes room for him on a bench seat.

  “Black horse,” Chloe says. “Black horse with sick eyes.”

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