by Lisa Tuttle
There was a connection between them which was real, which she knew she was not imagining. They both felt it: the hot, itchy spark of sexual attraction, the warmer emotional pull of something that might be love. Intellectually, they were well-matched, and they spent hours, as they traveled together through Texas, talking about books, ideas, art and films.
She decided, after their first night in Galveston, that she would not have sex with him again. She had imagined having to refuse him, to resist his advances, and then to argue with him, but that did not happen. During the day, in public, he often embraced her, held her hand, stroked her hair or her back, and kissed her, chastely, but at night, lying naked beside her in their motel room bed, he didn't try to touch her.
Although they talked about so much else, they did not talk about sex. They didn't discuss their relationship, or try to define it.
Anyone seeing them sitting together in a restaurant, or walking hand-in-hand along the beach at any time during their travels from Galveston to Port Lavaca to Victoria to San Antonio and then back east to Houston, would have assumed they were lovers, perhaps a couple on their honeymoon. There was an electricity between them which made a simple friendship impossible. There could be no going backward. She had fallen in love with him in Aunt Marjorie's old house in the woods, but the man she had made love with there did not seem to exist outside, in the real world. Or, if he did, she could not seem to find her way back to him.
It had been her own decision not to make love with Graham again, but she was not happy about it. She enjoyed his company during the day, and their closeness built up a tension which was never released. She longed for something she could not have, for something which she knew to be impossible. She kept recalling her silly, childish desire to eat the dollhouse food, and one night, trying to laugh, she told him about it. She was grateful for the darkness which meant he could not see the tears in her eyes.
“Tale of Two Bad Mice,” he said.
“What?”
“Beatrix Potter. Don't you know it? About the mice who break into a doll's house and try to eat the food. When they discover they can't, they try to destroy it—and then get even madder to discover that the fire in the grate won't burn!”
“I never tried to destroy it—I wouldn't do that,” she said anxiously. “I just wanted to taste it—and knowing that I couldn't, that it wasn't what it looked like, didn't make me stop wanting. I couldn't stop wanting the impossible.”
“That's why you write.”
“Is it?” The comment startled her. In the darkness his voice was like an oracle; everything it said had the ring of inescapable truth. “So if I had everything I wanted I wouldn't write anymore?”
“No one ever has everything they want. Not while they're alive.”
It was a confusing, emotionally draining week, and she was glad to arrive in Houston with the end in sight. But she realized as she was driving into the city that she didn't know where she was going.
She said so to Graham. “I don't know anything about the local hotels, I'm afraid. I always stay at my mother's.”
“Don't you want me to meet your mother?”
His question took her completely by surprise. Before she could respond, he'd sensed something wrong. “Forget it. I'm sorry. I'd forgotten about him.”
He meant her stepfather, Eddie Shawcross. But the idea of having a stepfather no longer outraged her as it had when she was nineteen. He wasn't the faceless stranger he'd been when her mother had informed her she was getting married—he was a pretty nice guy, actually.
“It's all right. You've just had my whole history dumped on you, but I don't dislike him at all. Really, there's no problem. We'll go there. I'll just get off this freeway and find a phone first, to warn her we're coming.”
As she had expected, her mother sounded pleased to hear from her, was not startled to learn she had a boyfriend in tow, and invited them to come for dinner and spend the night. She didn't know why she should feel so dissatisfied as she put down the phone, why her stomach began to twist and turn with anxiety as she walked back to the car and Graham.
There was something wrong, something missing from her relationship with her mother and she didn't know what it was. Nothing she'd read in any book or heard from any other woman seemed similar to her own experience. She'd tried to explain it once, when she was part of a women's Consciousness Raising Group in college, but even in that small room vibrating with sympathy, even in the company of seven other women all willing themselves to understand, she had failed. She didn't have the vocabulary or the concepts, only the dim yet certain perception that something was wrong, something was missing, in her relationship with her mother. After her failed attempt to verbalize it, she had decided that the thing that was missing must be something in herself. It was her problem, not her mother's: her own failure.
That evening was like many others she'd spent with her mother and Eddie, perfectly pleasant, yet not what she hoped for.
“She's lovely, your mother,” Graham murmured to her at one point. At another moment, when the two women were together in the kitchen, her mother said, “He seems very nice, this Graham Storey. You've always had a thing for poets, haven't you?”
Agnes stiffened at something unexpectedly knowing in her mother's voice. She was certain she'd never confided to her mother her fantasies about Graham Storey.
“Well, is this serious? Is he the one?”
“I only met him a week ago. How should I know?”
Her mother looked at her as if they'd never met and said, “If you don't know, I can't tell you.”
Agnes didn't know what was missing in her relationship with her mother, but with Graham, she was sure sex was the missing element. They got along well on so many levels, and they connected, intellectually and emotionally. But they just weren't sexually compatible. She remembered something from a story by D. H. Lawrence, his description of an unhappy marriage as “a nervous attachment, rather than a sexual love,” and for some reason the words, which had been written by another of Aunt Marjorie's idols, made her feel better. It wasn't the end of the world, and it had happened to other people before. There was no sense crying about it; the romance she had wished for simply hadn't come true.
As she lay in the guest room's double bed waiting for him to come out of the bathroom and join her, she remembered the flimsy, typewritten sheets she had read in the air-conditioned isolation of the Humanities Research Center, and wondered if his letters to her would look the same. Or would he write to her by hand, page after page in his tiny, neat script?
He came out of the bathroom naked and she felt embarrassed and turned her head away, thinking that she'd been silly to insist on this last night with him when she could have stayed in one of the other bedrooms just as easily. He turned out the light, got into bed, and began to caress her.
Startled, she drew away. She had not expected this in her mother's house, and she didn't want it. But although he was always so quick to sense her moods in daylight, now he seemed not to notice her unwillingness. Or, if he noticed, he took it as a challenge, for he became more ardent. Yet, while demanding, he was not crude. His hands upon her body were gentle. He was not the lover he had been in the house in the woods, his merest touch did not spark an immediate response in her, but he was patient, tender, slow and determined, and gradually she became aroused and began to respond. She realized then that his penis was flaccid; his persistence with her seemed prompted by something other than his own desire.
He stopped her from going down on him. “No, I don't want that. I'll bring you off with my hand.”
He'd already started, and although she felt she would regret it later, she was too close to the edge to want to stop him. Her orgasm was the quick, rough untying of a knot; afterward she felt dirty and absurdly grateful. It was all too much; she'd been aroused and frustrated for so long, hopelessly wanting him, and it was all one-sided. He didn't want her. Embarrassed by herself, she began to cry.
“Shh, shh,”
he soothed her. “It's all right. It doesn't matter. Really, it's all right.”
“But we have to talk—we've never even talked about it!”
“It's not something to talk about.”
“I mean sex.”
“So do I. It's better to let these things take their natural course. You mustn't take a little, er, hydraulic failure on my part as a slur on you. You're lovely. It's not your fault if I can't rise to the occasion.”
Her face was burning hot, but at least her tears had dried up. She had never imagined that talking about sex with someone who was her lover could be so excruciatingly embarrassing. “I don't mean tonight. I meant sex in general, between us, how it's been . . . or not.”
“Please don't let's get started on something that . . . you're tired and emotional. We both are.”
“We haven't made love very often. . . .”
“Did you think I hadn't noticed?” His voice, although low, was a howl of pain which caught in her throat. Tears flooded her eyes again, and she clutched at him. “Did you think I couldn't feel you willing me not to touch you whenever we were in bed?”
“Oh, Gray, oh, oh, darling, I did want you, I did, and I still do, only—” Sobs strangled her words.
“Hush, hush.” He sounded weary. “Don't upset yourself. Don't try to say any more.”
But there was one thing she was determined to ask him in the darkness, while they were still this close, one thing she had to know. She struggled to stop crying, to control her breathing. “The first time we made love wasn't the greatest—I thought it was a mistake, really, and that I'd kind of pushed you into it. That's why I left.”
“Silly girl.” He kissed the top of her head.
“But after that, the next time, when I took you to—when we made love, there, it was totally different. At least it was for me. Was it for you? Do you remember? Was it as good for you, that time?”
“Let's not dwell on the past.”
“But I want to know. I need to know.”
“Yes. Yes, it was good for me. And it will be again, even better. I promise you, it can be. I'm just sorry I couldn't prove it to you sooner.” He sighed rather shakily, and then said firmly, “No more talk. We'll talk in the morning. Go to sleep now.”
Relief flooded her. So he wasn't the same as Alex; he did remember, and he wasn't afraid of her. She realized how weary she was, and stopped fighting against sleep. Just as she was dropping off she thought she heard him say, “I love you.”
Things were strange and strained between them the next day and it was hard to know how to fill the morning. They left the house after breakfast and she took him to the Galleria. It was either that or art galleries, and he hadn't been to a mall yet.
“Not that the Galleria is really typical of American malls. It's kind of more . . . well, ritzy and expensive. There's a Neiman-Marcus and a Saks.”
“Hmmm, I don't know that my budget will run to souvenirs from Neiman-Marcus. I have scarcely any money left. Although there are a few people I really ought to bring presents back for, like the neighbor who's been watering my plants, and, um . . .”
“Caroline?” She heard the sharpness in her own voice.
“What are you implying?”
“Just that she might expect a present.”
“Then if I don't bring her one that's another mark against me. And if I do, I'm trying to curry favor and we'll carry on—is that what you'd like? For me to continue with Caroline?”
He had told her too much about his problems with Caroline, although he probably thought he hadn't. She had been careful never to express anything but sympathy for him and had almost convinced herself that she was not jealous, yet knowing that he could be with the other woman tomorrow, she felt bitter. “I'm not telling you what to do. That's up to you.”
“How about you? Will you be going back to your bloke once I'm gone?”
She shrugged uneasily. She'd had some painful moments of missing Jack, regrets about what she had done, but that was that. “We'll probably break up.”
“Only probably?”
“I'll have to tell him the truth. He's an easygoing guy, but he's not a doormat. We'll break up.”
“Will you be sorry? Have I just ruined your life?”
She was suddenly tired of all this emotion. She longed to be alone in her car, on the highway going home, three hours spent driving toward Austin without the sound of another voice except for that of the radio DJ calling out the hits. She thought she might wait a few days before seeing Jack. It would be good to have some time to herself. “Of course not. We were bound to break up eventually. Let's shop.”
On the way to the airport, their final journey together, there were long stretches of silence. Anything said now had to be trivial or it took on an almost unbearable significance. Only a few more hours left to say everything there was to say. Agnes wished it over with.
She parked in the long-term parking lot and took him inside to check his suitcase and get his boarding pass. Then, with nearly two hours to kill before his flight was called, they looked for somewhere to sit down. She spotted an empty table in a cafeteria-style coffee shop and told Graham to claim it while she stood in line. “I'll get coffee and . . . do you want anything else? A sandwich? No? Sure? I'll get us both coffee, then.”
She'd only been standing in line about a minute when she heard him behind her. “This is crazy,” he said. “Come away from that queue. I was looking at you across the room and wondering what I was doing, letting you walk away from me. I don't care about coffee. I just want to be with you.” She was shocked to see that he was crying.
“Oh, Gray!” She reached up to wipe the wetness from his cheeks. “Don't, please don't cry.” Her own eyes filled sympathetically.
“I don't want to lose you. I can't bear it. I never expected this to happen, I never planned to fall in love with you, but I have. Oh, Nancy, please, please come with me. Come and live with me in England.”
She stared at him in astonishment. It was like something she might have imagined long ago, but not now, not after what had not happened between them.
“I'm serious. I know I'm no great prize, I know I'm difficult to live with, I know my past history with women is—but I'm serious about you, I want something different with you, I want to change my life. Oh, God, I wasn't going to say it now, here, like this, but—I want to marry you. I want you to be my wife.
“No, don't answer me now, think about it, we can live together first and then decide if it really makes sense. I know life in England will be different for you, you might not like it, but please, won't you try it, for my sake? Give me a chance?”
She bit her lip. “I don't know what to say. I—this is a horrible place to talk about it, but . . . there is a problem, isn't there?”
“You mean the sex,” he said readily. “I'm a disappointment to you.”
“No! I didn't mean it like that!” She felt herself going red.
“This isn't the place to talk about it.”
“I know, but—”
“But I'm pushing you. It's so unfair. Nancy, we hardly know each other, and that's the truth. But I do know I love you, and I want to know you. We can work things out. There's often trouble at the beginning, adjustments to be made. The sex will get better, I'm sure of it. All we have to do is want it to.”
The sex could get better—it had been better, once. It had been the best ever. That memory would be with her always, the memory of their time in the little house in the woods, when he had been her perfect lover, better than she'd ever dreamed. If they'd had it once, why shouldn't they have it again?
“Yes,” she said. No other decision was possible, this story had been written long ago. This was the life she'd been waiting to find, and he was offering it to her. To live with a poet—her poet—in England. It was the great wish of her life, and she had to accept it, whatever the consequences. She smiled, seeing he hadn't understood. “I do want to. I will try. I'll come to England.”
“Oh, Na
ncy!” He threw his arms around her, squashed her to him. A button on his jacket pressed painfully into her breastbone. Just as quickly he let her go. “Come on, I'll buy you a ticket. I don't care what it costs if only there's a seat left on my flight!”
“Gray, I can't, not like that. I can't fly back with you now.”
“Why not? You want to talk to your boyfriend first, decide if I'm really a better deal?”
“No, of course not, it's nothing to do with him.”
“Get your roommate to pack your things and ship them to you, COD. You can write to your employers and your bank. What else . . . oh, your car. Surely you can leave your key here and call your mother, tell her to come and get it. She could keep it for you or sell it if you decide to stay. Come on, Nancy, if you love me, come with me now.”
She was torn. Part of her resisted his urgency while another part responded to his desire with a reckless excitement of her own. How wonderful, to live life like an adventure, like a fairy tale, to run away with the handsome prince the moment he asked, to let the god in animal form bear her across the sea to Europe. He wasn't perfect, but he was the man of her dreams. Of course she could manage to work out all the boring details of quitting her job and selling her car through friends and the mail.
“Say yes,” he urged.
She opened her mouth and winced as she remembered. “I can't. My passport's in Austin.”
THE POET'S WIFE
As dead-clammy meat turns to edible meat. As revulsion turns to appetite.
