She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me

by Herbert Gold

  Then she was laughing, laughing, and asking, “Hope there wasn’t any poison oak, don’t you?”

  A toadstool grew in the shade nearby, a giant prick with a shiny carapace, and Priscilla blew a kiss toward it, saying, “I’ll be right there.” Her nostrils moved with a little fishlike oscillation as the deep after-pleasure breath went in and out, in and out, easing down and continuing oh please God forever. It was the full catastrophe.

  The afternoon shadows were lengthening. We stretched and stared at each other. Then we straightened this hollow on Mount Tamalpais where we had lived for a time. I hooked the lightened picnic basket under one arm; she took the other. I felt her long fingers on my elbow; her hand sliding up to find a place; hand holding and resting. She took my arm as if she loved me. This is the most beautiful sentence of my life. She took my arm as if she loved me. This was the happiest sentence of my life.

  “When we get back,” she said, “I want to get the twigs out of my hair, I want a good bath.”

  “Not a bad idea for me, too.”

  “And then,” she said, “I want to do all that again.”

  She touched me as if she loved me. She looked at me as if she loved me. She took my arm. I surrendered to the full catastrophe.

  * * *

  How her eyes faded blue to black and then to pale blue again when we made love, the dreamy distance of her gaze. The headband around her forehead when her hair was sunlit and we were pedaling our bicycles in Golden Gate Park. At Ocean Beach, she stared out at the sea, leaning on her bike, and I thought she had forgotten I was there until she suddenly touched my arm. “Save water, take a bath with a friend,” she said. “Let’s go now, it’s time to start saving water. We’ll be an example to future generations.”

  She was like one of those shiny new several-plex movie operations—different shows going at different times, but the facilities shared by folks whose dreams could only be guessed at. We stretched out; water lapped against the edges of people and sometimes over the edge of an antique deep-bellied tub with clawed feet. I hoped, as we bathed together, we were scheduling ourselves for the same program.

  Priscilla’s legs were a long and very interesting evolutionary event, slim at the ankles, widening, bunches of smooth musculature up to the complex juncture at the knee, sockets, and joints (try sorting these things out through the medium of kisses at the surprisingly warm backs of knees); and then after a brief reprise of slimness the event turned full and muscled again on the way up to oceanic mysteries. The better to grip you with, dearest; the better to hold you, my love; the better to walk speedily away, if necessary.

  The message up at Brain Central, a galaxy removed from the moist warmth of the oasis at the joining of her legs, the estuary, the slow warm heading out to sea—the message up there in the control panel seemed to be: Not only do I want you to want me but also I personally, on my own, choose to want you. I select you from the hazards and accidents of millions.

  How rare and wondrous this conjunction of ideas. I’ll take this happiness above all others.

  Just, please God, don’t let me lose the memory of good luck. We saved water together. She put on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde to dance to. She didn’t mean dance. Whoever would think of dancing to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”? Well, folks can, lovers can, moving with that lazy beat under the nasal thrumming of a voice that seemed to drift over the walls of the madhouse of the sixties. But she didn’t really mean dance. Dance was only in the heart and soul. She meant climb into each other, sing into each other, keep humming and keep it on forever.

  Chapter 6

  It’s a well-known fact that aging persons, even persons with a pronounced tendency to grow older, are sometimes allowed to fall in love. God winked. I was such a person.

  General metabolic luck helps when God looks the other way, slyly averting His eye. I was lucky enough to meet Priscilla before I sprouted hairs in irregular patterns all over my nose, or perhaps unlucky, because those hairs might have protected me, armored me into peaceful recreations with Alfonso and Lillian or Lillian’s successors, especially if the nose hairs betrayed a coarse tangled rug growth on the back and chest—kept Priscilla from liking, teasing, loving me in the blithe, abandoned style of a gifted young woman whose metabolism, so far as she can tell, is only going one way, upward, toward more beauty, more sweet smells and emanations, more liveliness and yearning appetite.

  Of course, even nose hairs might not have saved us, especially since they are rigorously plucked in most cases, men aiming for that bald-nose look so much in demand these days in the higher social circles. My vanity: probably I would have stood spraddle-legged and squinting at a mirror, plucking away, so that even in the sunlight of that picnic on Mount Tamalpais, silver gleaming out of her straw basket, wine chilled, her eyes blue as heaven and her hair the brightest thing on the mountain, no telltale specks could have been discovered on my nose as cartilage invisibly thickened. And the rocks churned upward through the mountain in the continual tectonic shifts of California geology. By this time boulders are exposed that were buried in soil then, and the descendants of the bees and other humming insects that attended our picnic have evolved in ways some researching genius might care about … the humming confusion and harmony of the air that day.

  Priscilla might even have enjoyed the maturity and sage majesty of a wise hairy nose, busily sniffing samples of life in her crevices. She said my nose tickled her. We were so busy falling in love that even the bee-humming world distracted us only a sigh’s worth, then our mouths distracted us with wine and toy food, and then our bodies continued their business. Joy. What a business.

  Fate. Dire destiny. Nothing to be done for it or against it. Happened. She, I, we loved making love, more every time it seemed, though now I can’t be sure. I praised her, she praised me, we praised each other. I guess the thing I didn’t know was how much I would love her forever and how she might have been a victim of the concept “forever.” Only the day was endless, it seemed.

  And then we went home. She said she liked the darkness and smells of my bedroom. She asked if I kept memories of other women there and I said none that I could recall and she said, Hello, Hello, you’re not making any sense, and I said, Why bother?

  “Right. Right. Okay. Now,” she said.

  * * *

  “Are you thinking something?” I asked one day after we made love and I was watching the dim ghostly motes spinning in the afternoon air. Brown burlap curtains were stirring. The summer evening fog was sweeping through the Golden Gate.

  “If someone else walked in,” she said, “they’d find it stuffy. Why don’t you open the window wide.”

  No one was going to walk in. We didn’t have to consider the fresh-air needs of late-afternoon burglars preparing for their nightly drug intake.

  “So why don’t you? Or should I?”

  I opened the window. I did so. She stirred, moving her hips delicately.

  “Anything else?” I asked, but it wasn’t sarcastic, just inquiring.

  “No, that’s good. Good.”

  “Do you love me?”

  There was no answer. This wasn’t rudeness on her part. She was asleep. A breeze from the window unfurled the burlap like a sail, cooled my thighs and my thoughts, washed over any burglars who entered while we slept.

  * * *

  She tried to tell me she was an ordinary person, but she didn’t succeed in convincing me. She was once just a child with childish ways, she said. I didn’t believe her. She looked exasperated. She told me she started spelling her name with a y, with two ys, when she was a silly little girl … Pryscylla? … and even that couldn’t change my mind. I was hopelessly in love, and she noted fairly: “Hopeless, Dan, hopeless. But nice. That’s n-y-c-e.”

  I understood her perfectly, but not the way you or others understand her and not how she understood herself. That is, I understood her how I needed her to be. That is, I didn’t understand her at all.

  Beauty is generally distress
ing; in particular, both scary and inciting. The genes are jumping and the hormones are hopping. Men and women, wary of the unknown, can also be tempted to seek the adventure of … We’re Made for Each Other! We Are! The distressing beauty chooses to confuse the confusion by organizing a picnic and taking the suitor for a stroll in her garden. Priscilla leans against him. These are my flowers, these are my tomatoes. This is you and me. She takes his arm. She offers to mend the favorite red flannel shirt from L. L. Bean; come on, strip it off, it’s warm out here, I’ll have it back for you later. Then she refuses to return the shirt. “I want to keep it in my bed when you’re not here. It has your smell in it.”

  Priscilla took my arm, sewed my sleeve. She does light sewing and charm; she does laughter; she does kindness. He will change everything in his life, including his faulty character. He is captivated. The world is a miracle on the plus side; it’s a marvel. The universe belongs exactly where it is. He is captured.

  Men like me, which means all men, almost all men—well, the foolish ones—welcome this funny idea where we think a woman’s pleasure is something we should credit ourselves for. Mark one up for me, please, on the lighted billboard, the way burgers might be counted by a monster universal franchise operation from God. Priscilla did fine when we made love. I felt like a hero striding triumphantly at the head of her parade. It didn’t come to mind that she could do fine whenever she wanted such a result. If she chose to have one joyous convulsion and then sleep, one it was. Or two. Or three. Or a caffé latté afterward, plus philosophical conversation and then to bed. Depending on how deeply burrowing into the body, how loftily flying from it, the spirit chose. Whatever. It was Priscilla’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

  The event didn’t have too much to do with the chosen man’s exertions, although I was certain she felt a special indulgence for my chatter and enthusiasms. I worked on the puzzles of life, I rambled about the private eye’s career … “When a fellow sees me circling his house with a flashlight at three in the morning, digging in his trash, he begins to wonder.”

  She laughed, although I’d said this before.

  She got off on laughing, therefore chose to laugh.

  What turned into a bewilderment and confusion to her was that the solitary middle-aged private investigator with one good friend, a black cop, ended up enchanted by a person who seemed to fall out of the sky. To herself, she hadn’t fallen out of the sky. She was there all the time, present in her world, and didn’t require miracles or meteor showers.

  “You ever have any awful unsolvable problems?” I asked her.

  “What’s that? You mean like ‘God is dead’ or alcoholism, that type of thing? Twelve-step kinds of problems? No. No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’d know if you did,” I said.

  Her laughter pealed forth. “If I remembered,” she said. “Generally I don’t dwell on the bad stuff. No, I don’t think there’s been much. At least not yet.” With a slight shrug of modesty, she added, “Probably yet to come, don’t you think? I’m not impatient. I can wait.”

  I lay there with my head cradled between her thighs, gazing at her legs, wondrous immense structures close up like this, filling the known universe, although from other angles they were just a handsome woman’s long legs; and like someone hiking in a forest, fresh from the city, in awe of what he sees—redwoods! butterflies! look at the vines!—I found myself compelled to name the present miracle aloud, saying, “Your legs.”

  She moved slightly. This naming habit might be irritating to some people. My head slid off and I slid it back. “Your smells. Good.”

  Drowsily she reached her hand down and put it over my mouth, but otherwise she scarcely moved. Through her body, transported by vibration to her legs, to the damp forest place where I rested, I could feel the regular breathing; and pretty soon my own; and both of us were sleeping. I dreamed I was falling through a mirror, Kasdan in Wonderland. I’m not sure about Priscilla’s REM or non-REM dreams. I think she just slept. In the middle of the journey of our lives, in the dark wood where we dwelled.

  We also liked the out-of-doors. We made our own weather in a meadow, scrambling about on a hillside slant, scraping our knees; and then another day under arching and bending eucalyptus trees, in air made pungent by damp and sun on the leaves; and then—a habit of picnicking—in the cathedral shade of a giant pine in Muir Woods. She needed to stay out of the sun; I didn’t mind. Afterward we sat up to pluck out of the picnic basket the good surprises she had concocted; I brought fresh fruit salad and cakes from a shop called Best Karma run by a young woman in a granny dress. It was that time of the Aquarian Age when businesses used the word “Karma” and Priscilla and I surprised each other, our legs waving hello to the California sky like heliotropic filaments.

  Once we spent Saturday afternoon listening to the impromptu bongo orchestras that gathered at Aquatic Park on San Francisco Bay, joined by guitars and stoned groupies shaking tambourines or cans filled with pebbles. Alfonso joined us, shaking his head, saying, “You guys. Next time, man, I got to bring some company for me.” Later we walked back up Russian Hill in the dark and watched the winking lights of Marin and the searchlight that still turned in the bay. We held hands up Hyde Street. Someone waved from a cable car. We waved back in case it was a tourist who deserved a friendly wave.

  We turned ourselves inside out; we were children again. I showed her mine and she showed me hers. It was all good news to us. We marched with picketers at the Federal Building because this was the time of the Vietnam War; we visited the Free Store in the Haight with our leftover clothes, on our way to dance in Golden Gate Park because that was how San Francisco stopped the freeways, tore down the high-rises, brought racial justice to America; how selfish we were. I did pro bono work for CORE, tracking possible Tac Squad infiltrators. She served breakfast to Tenderloin teenagers at Glide Memorial Church. We passed a dreamy year of turmoil.

  The wet-ashes smell of my contented middle age was gone. I told myself in wonderment, in disbelieving, incredulous total conviction: Forever! This is forever! After a long history of floating on the sweet surfaces of San Francisco, working enough to get by, killing time, occasionally killing some brews with Alfonso—now I thought, Forever with this lady, just because little songs come out of her eyes when she smiles? I answered the question: Yes.

  We kept talking to each other as if we had found endless marvels to tell. I brought her the stones I had collected in a longer life than hers. She wrapped in ribbons the delights and pains of her growing up. We sat laughing and breathing into each other. We ate all the time and grew thin. We were in a state. We were too happy. Our friends hated us. I noticed her secret pre-pregnancy sleepy smile. Probably I walked with a strut. I knew we would have children. Envy is as legitimate and human as any other enjoyment. Alfonso was right to dislike so much happiness. He also forgave us. That’s the job assignment for friends who have to deal with lovers.

  * * *

  About that time, probably due to the confidence shed down upon my life, the swagger of a happy lover, I finally had the chance to get rich. An offer came my way. Karim Abdullah was a friendly person of enterprise, hefty across the chest and in the thighs, wearing semitropical clothes that emphasized his heft. He kind of liked heft; he also kind of appreciated a skinny, different sort of person like me. Despite his body’s tendency to weight, his spirit was delicate and precise. He kept his eyebrows carefully sculpted into widely separated bunches of dense hair, clean outlines, with antlike dots of plucked growth between the clumps. He liked a lot of things about doing business in San Francisco, including his own eyes, and reminded himself and others of his pleasure by wearing a touch of eyeliner.

  The sex shows he ran in a former movie theater in the Tenderloin were the legal, tax-paying part of his enterprise.

  I used to notice Karim looking at me, nodding, nodding, smiling, building up our acquaintance on the sidewalk terrace of Enrico’s, where we both took lunch. When he saw me there with Priscilla, he ma
de the beer-ad approval sign with his hand, circle of thumb and forefinger, three thick fingers upraised, meaning, Hey! She’s okay!

  “That man likes me,” Priscilla said. “Funny eyes.”

  “I think he likes me.” I said. “He’s a local business guy who thinks … Here he comes.”

  There came Karim, smiling, snug, warm, advancing his ample vibes, carrying a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket; explaining that he could have sent it over with a waiter, which would be the normal way to do it, he fully understood the etiquette of such gestures, but this was far more than a mere gesture; rather, it was a tribute to a remarkable couple whom he admired from afar but with whom he now sought to build a personal association; explaining that he desired to save the time that is lost in the practice of ordinary courtesy; explaining that he admired the lady and also deeply, deeply respected my reputation in my chosen field of endeavor and why hadn’t I returned his calls?

  “Pretty busy these days,” I said. “No sort of office staff. I’m a solo practitioner.”

  “Like that, like that. Solo practitioner,” he repeated, rolling the words juicily. “You sing alone, Mr. Kasdan.”

  Perhaps I smiled. Priscilla kicked me in the universal language of stand up and be polite. I stood. “Look, I promise to return your call,” I said. “Just now I’m having a day off with … This is Priscilla.”

  “I know, I know, I know.” He beamed. “Today is not the first time I have seen you two together, deserving so many good things in your life. And so now I leave you, please drink in your own honor, celebrate your good fortune.”

  He bowed—he wore his wide, inappropriate, white linen suit with pride—he backed away, he knew I would call. I had made an oral contract. From his table he smiled and bowed again, and then turned away, meaning that I could talk freely. He knew I would be talking about him. His own companion was a young woman wearing a black-and-white cowl and nun’s habit although Halloween was still a few weeks away.