by John Updike
She has felt him pull back, and tightens her grip, silently. On the beach, he sees, a group has brought down a hurricane lamp, with their drinks; the lamp and their cigarettes glow red in the shadows, while the sea beyond stretches pale as milk beyond the black silhouette of a big sailboat anchored in the bay, under the half-moon tilted onto its back. Thelma lets go of his arm to fish in her sequinned purse for the bungalow key. “You can have Cindy tomorrow night,” she whispers. “We discussed it.”
“O.K., great,” he says lamely, he hopes not insultingly. He is figuring, this means that Cindy wanted that pig Harrison, and Janice got Webb. He had been figuring Janice would have to take Ronnie, and felt song for her, except from the look of him he’d fall asleep soon, and Webb and Thelma would go together, both of them yellowy stringy types. Thelma closes the bungalow door behind them and switches on a straw globe light above the bed. He asks her, “Well, are tonight’s men the first choice for you ladies or’re you just getting the second choice out of the way?”
“Don’t be so competitive, Harry. This is meant to be a loving sharing sort of thing, you heard Webb. One thing we absolutely agreed on, we’re not going to carry any of it back to Brewer. This is all the monkey business there’s going to be, even if it kills us.” She stands there in the center of her straw rug rather defiantly, a thin-faced sallow woman he scarcely knows. Not only her nose is pink in the wake of her sunburn but patches below her eyes as well: a kind of butterfly is on her face. Harry supposes he should kiss her, but his forward step is balked by her continuing firmly, “l’ll tell you one thing though, Harry Angstrom. You’re my first choice.”
“I am?”
“Of course. I adore you. Adore you.”
“Me?”
“Haven’t you ever sensed it?”
Rather than admit he hasn’t, he hangs there foolishly.
“Shit,” Thelma says. “Janice did. Why else do you think we weren’t invited to Nelson’s wedding?” She turns her back, and starts undoing her earring before the mirror, that just like the one in his and Janice’s bungalow is framed in woven strips of bamboo. The batik hanging in here is of a tropical sunset with a palm in the foreground instead of the black-mammy fruit-seller he and Janice have, but the batik manufacturer is the same. The suitcases are the Harrisons’, and the clothes hanging on the painted pipe that does for a closet. Thelma asks, “You mind using Ronnie’s toothbrush? I’ll be a while in there, you better take the bathroom first.”
In the bathroom Harry sees that Ronnie uses shaving cream, Gillette Foamy, out of a pressure can, the kind that’s eating up the ozone so our children will fry. And that new kind of razor with the narrow single-edge blade that snaps in and out with a click on the television commercials. Harry can’t see the point, it’s just more waste, he still uses a rusty old two-edge safety razor he bought for $1.99 about seven years ago, and lathers himself with an old imitation badger-bristle on whatever bar of soap is handy. He shaved before dinner after his nap so no need now. Also the Harrisons use chlorophyll Crest in one of those giant tubes that always buckles and springs a leak when he and Janice try to save a couple pennies and buy one. He wonders whatever happened to Ipana and what was it Consumer Reports had to say about toothpastes a few issues back, probably came out in favor of baking soda, that’s what he and Mim used to have to use, some theory Mom had about the artificial flavoring in toothpaste contributing to tartar. The trouble with consumerism is, the guy next door always seems to be doing better at it than you are. Just the Harrisons’ bathroom supplies make him envious. Plain as she is, Thelma carries a hefty medicine kit, and beauty aids, plus a sun block called Eclipse, and Solarcaine. Vaseline, too, for some reason. Tampax, in a bigger box than Janice ever buys. And a lot of painkiller, aspirin in several shapes and Darvon and more pills in little prescription bottles than he would have expected. People are always a little sicker than you know. Harry debates whether he should take his leak sitting down to spare Thelma the sound of its gross splashing and rejects the idea, since she’s the one wants to fuck him. It streams noisily into the bowl it seems forever, embarrassingly, all those drinks at dinner. Then he sits down on the seat anyway, to let out a little air. Too much shellfish. He imagines he can smell yesterday’s crabmeat and when he stands he tests with a finger down there to see if he stinks. He decides he does. Better use a washcloth. He debates which washcloth is Ronnie’s, the blue or the brown. He settles on the brown and scrubs all his undercarriage, everything that counts. Getting ready for the ball. He erases his scent by giving the cloth a good rinsing no matter whose it is.
When he steps back into the room Thehna is down to her underwear, cocoa bra and black panties. He didn’t expect this, nor to be so stirred by it. Breasts are strange: some look bigger in clothes than they are and some look smaller. Thehna’s are the second kind; her bra is smartly filled. Her whole body, into her forties, has kept that trim neutral serviceability nurses and gradeschool teachers surprise you with, beneath their straight faces. She laughs, and holds out her arms like a fan dancer. “Here I am. You look shocked. You’re such a sweet prude, Harry - that’s one of the things I adore. I’ll be out in five minutes. Try not to fall asleep.”
Clever of her. What with the sleep debt they’re all running down here and the constant booze and the trauma in the water today - his head went under and a bottomless bile-green volume sucked at his legs - he was weary. He begins to undress and doesn’t know where to stop. There are a lot of details a husband and wife work out over the years that with a strange woman pop up all over again. Would Thelma like to find him naked in the bed? Or on it? For him to be less naked than she when she comes out of the bathroom would be rude. At the same time, with this strawshaded light swaying above the bed on so bright, he doesn’t want her to think seeing him lying there on display that he thinks he’s a Playgirl centerfold. He knows he could lose thirty pounds and still have a gut. In his underpants he crosses to the bambootrimmed bureau in the room and switches on the lamp there whose cheap wooden base is encrusted with baby seashells glued on. He takes off his underpants. The elastic waistband has lost its snap, the only brand of this type to buy is jockey, but those cutrate stores in Brewer don’t like to carry it, quality is being driven out everywhere. He switches off the light over the bed and in shadow stretches himself out, all of him, on top of the bedspread, as he is, as he was, as he will be before the undertakers dress him for the last time, not even a wedding ring to relieve his nakedness; when he and Janice got married men weren’t expected to wear wedding rings. He closes his eyes to rest them for a second in the red blankness there, beneath his lids. He has to get through this, maybe all she wants to do is talk, and then somehow be really rested for tomorrow night. Getting there … . That slither underwater ….
Thelma with what breaks upon him like the clatter of an earthquake has come out of the bathroom. She is holding her underclothes in front of her, and with her back to him she sorts the underpants into the dirty pile the Harrisons keep beside the bureau, behind the straw wastebasket, and the bra, clean enough, back into the drawer, folded. This is the second time in this trip, he thinks drowsily, that he has seen her ass. Her body as she turns eclipses the bureau lamp and the front of her gathers shadow to itself, she advances timidly, as if wading into water. Her breasts sway forward as she bends to turn the light he switched off back on. She sits down on the edge of the bed.
His prick is still sleepy. She takes it into her hand. “You’re not circumcised.”
“No, they somehow weren’t doing it at the hospital that day. Or maybe my mother had a theory, I don’t know. I never asked. Sorry.”
“It’s lovely. Like a little bonnet.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, more supple naked than he remembers her seeming with clothes on, Thelma bends and takes his prick in her mouth. Her body in the lamplight is a pale patchwork of faint tan and peeling pink and the natural yellowy tint of her skin. Her belly puckers into flat folds like stacked newspapers and the back of her hand as it ho
lds the base of his prick with two fingers shows a dim lightning of blue veins. But her breath is warm and wet and the way that in lamplight individual white hairs snake as if singed through the mass of dull brown makes him want to reach out and stroke her head, or touch the rhythmic hollow in her jaw. He fears, though, interrupting the sensations she is giving him. She lifts a hand quickly to tuck back a piece of her hair, as if to let him better see.
He murmurs, “Beautiful.” He is growing thick and long but still she forces her lips each time down to her fingers as they encircle him at his base. To give herself ease she spreads her legs; between her legs, one of them lying aslant across the bed edge, he sees emerging from a pubic bush more delicate and reddish than he would have dreamed a short white string. Unlike Janice’s or Cindy’s as he imagined it, Thelma’s pussy is not opaque; it is a fuzz transparent upon the bruise-colored labia that with their tongue of white string look so lacking and defenseless Harry could cry. She too is near tears, perhaps from the effort of not gagging. She backs off and stares at the staring eye of his glans, swollen free of his foreskin. She pulls up the bonnet again and says crooningly, teasingly, “Such a serious little face.” She kisses it lightly, once, twice, flicking her tongue, then bobs again, until it seems she must come up for air. “God,” she sighs. “I’ve wanted to do that for so long. Come. Come, Harry. Come in my mouth. Come in my mouth and all over my face.” Her voice sounds husky and mad saying this and all through her words Thelma does not stop gazing at the little slit of his where a single cloudy tear has now appeared. She licks it off.
“Have you really,” he asks timidly, “liked me for a while?”
“Years,” she says. “Years. And you never noticed. You shit. Always under Janice’s thumb and mooning after silly Cindy. Well you know where Cindy is now. She’s being screwed by my husband. He didn’t want to, he said he’d rather go to bed with me.” She snorts, in some grief of self-disgust, and plunges her mouth down again, and in the pinchy rush of sensation as he feels forced against the opening of her throat he wonders if he should accept her invitation.
“Wait,” Harry says. “Shouldn’t I do something for you first? If I come, it’s all over.”
“If you come, then you come again.”
“Not at my age. I don’t think.”
“Your age. Always talking about your age.” Thelma rests her face on his belly and gazes up at him, for the first time playful, her eyes at right angles to his disconcertingly. He has never noticed their color before: that indeterminate color called hazel but in the strong light overhead, and brightened by all her deep-throating, given a tawny pallor, an unthinking animal translucence. “I’m too excited to come,” she tells him. “Anyway, Harry, I’m having my period and they’re really bloody, every other month. I’m scared to find out why. In the months in between, these terrible cramps and hardly any show.”
“See a doctor,” he suggests.
“I see doctors all the time, they’re useless. I’m dying, you know that, don’t you?”
“Dying?”
“Well, maybe that’s too dramatic a way of putting it. Nobody knows how long it’ll take, and a lot of it depends upon me. The one thing I’m absolutely supposed not to do is go out in the sun. I was crazy to come down here, Ronnie tried to talk me out of it.”
“Why did you?”
“Guess. I tell you, I’m crazy, Harry. I got to get you out of my system.” And it seems she might make that sob of disgusted grief again, but she has reared up her head to look at his prick. All this talk of death has put it half to sleep again.
“This is this lupus?” he asks.
“Mmm,” Thelma says. “Look. See the rash?” She pulls back her hair on both sides. “Isn’t it pretty? That’s from being so stupid in the sun Friday. I just wanted so badly to be like the rest of you, not to be an invalid. It was terrible Saturday. Your joints ache, your insides don’t work. Ronnie offered to take me home for a shot of cortisone.”
“He’s very nice to you.”
“He loves me.”
His prick has stiffened again and she bends to it. “Thelma.” He has not used her name before, this night. “Let me do something to you. I mean, equal rights and all that.”
“You’re not going down into all that blood.”
“Let me suck these sweet things then.” Her nipples are not bumply like Janice’s but perfect as a baby’s thumb-tips. Since it is his treat now he feels free to reach up and switch off the light over the bed. In the dark her rashes disappear and he can see her smile as she arranges herself to be served. She sits cross-legged, like Cindy did on the boat, women the flexible sex, and puts a pillow in her lap for his head. She puts a finger in his mouth and plays with her nipple and his tongue together. There is a tremble running through her like a radio not quite turned off. His hand finds her ass, its warm dents; there is a kind of glassy texture to Thelma’s skin where Janice’s has a touch of fine, fine sandpaper. His prick, lightly teased by her fingernails, has come back nicely. “Harry.” Her voice presses into his ear. “I want to do something for you so you won’t forget me, something you’ve never had with anybody else. I suppose other women have sucked you off?”
He shakes his head yes, which tugs the flesh of her breast.
“How many have you fucked up the ass?”
He lets her nipple slip from his mouth. “None. Never.”
“You and Janice?”
“Oh God no. It never occurred to us.”
“Harry. You’re not fooling me?”
How dear that was, her old-fashioned “fooling.” From talking to all those third-graders. “No, honestly. I thought only queers … Do you and Ronnie?”
“All the time. Well, a lot of the time. He loves it.”
“And you?”
“It has its charms.”
“Doesn’t it hurt? I mean, he’s big.”
“At first. You use Vaseline. I’ll get ours.”
“Thelma, wait. Am I up to this?”
She laughs a syllable. “You’re up.” She slides away into the bathroom and while she is gone he stays enormous. She returns and anoints him thoroughly, with an icy expert touch. Harry shudders. Thelma lies down beside him with her back turned, curls forward as if to be shot from a cannon, and reaches behind to guide him. “Gently.”
It seems it won’t go, but suddenly it does. The medicinal odor of displaced Vaseline reaches his nostrils. The grip is tight at the base but beyond, where a cunt is all velvety suction and caress, there is no sensation: a void, a pure black box, a casket of perfect nothingness. He is in that void, past her tight ring of muscle. He asks, “May I come?”
“Please do.” Her voice sounds faint and broken. Her spine and shoulder blades are taut.
It takes only a few thrusts, while he rubs her scalp with one hand and clamps her hip steady with the other. Where will his come go? Nowhere but mix with her shit. With sweet Thelma’s sweet shit. They lie wordless and still together until his prick’s slow shrivelling withdraws it. “O.K.,” he says. “Thank you. That I won’t forget.”
“Promise?”
“I feel embarrassed. What does it do for you?”
“Makes me feel full of you. Makes me feel fucked up the ass. By lovely Harry Angstrom.”
“Thelma,” he admits, “I can’t believe you’re so fond of me. What have I done to deserve it?”
“Just existed. Just shed your light. Haven’t you ever noticed, at parties or at the club, how I’m always at your side?”
“Well, not really. There aren’t that many sides. I mean, we see you and Ronnie -“
“Janice and Cindy noticed. They knew you were who I’d want.”
“Uh - not to, you know, milk this, but what is it about me that turns you on?”
“Oh darling. Everything. Your height and the way you move, as if you’re still a skinny twenty-five. The way you never sit down anywhere without making sure there’s a way out. Your little provisional smile, like a little boy at some party where the b
ullies might get him the next minute. Your good humor. You believe in people so - Webb, you hang on his words where nobody else pays ‘any attention, and Janice, you’re so proud of her it’s pathetic. It’s not as if she can do anything. Even her tennis, Doris Kaufmann was telling us, really -‘
“Well it’s nice to see her have fun at something, she’s had a kind of dreary life.”
“See? You’re just terribly generous. You’re so grateful to be anywhere, you think that tacky club and that hideous house of Cindy’s are heaven. It’s wonderful. You’re so glad to be alive.”
“Well, I mean, considering the alternative
“It kills me. I love you so much for it. And your hands. I’ve always loved your hands.” Having sat up on the edge of the bed, she takes his left hand, lying idle, and kisses the big white moons of each fingernail. “And now your prick, with its little bonnet. Oh Harry I don’t care if this kills me, coming down here, tonight is worth it.”
That void, inside her. He can’t take his mind from what he’s discovered, that nothingness seen by his single eye. In the shadows, while humid blue moonlight and the rustle of palms seep through the louvers by the bed, he trusts himself to her as if speaking in prayer, talks to her about himself as he has talked to none other: about Nelson and the grudge he bears the kid and the grudge the boy bears him, and about his daughter, the daughter he thinks he has, grown and ignorant of him. He dares confide to Thelma, because she has let him fuck her up the ass in proof of love, his sense of miracle at being himself, himself instead of somebody else, and his old inkling, now fading in the energy crunch, that there was something that wanted him to find it, that he was here on earth on a kind of assignment.
