by Sidney Hart
“Look!” I urged as several meteors burned their way through the earth’s atmosphere, their light only a little brighter than that of the distant stars. “Isn’t that beautiful?” But she gazed at them in silence. I crushed the cigarette under foot, turned to face her and took her in my arms. “So what happened between you and Dick Hersh, did you break up with him or did he break off with you?”
“It was a mutual decision. We were looking for different things in the relationship. Dick wanted to get serious and I didn’t.” I wondered if “serious” meant too sexual but didn’t ask. Sarah put her arms around me and said, “You’re a much nicer guy and if you think I have any regrets about Dick you’re all wrong.” I looked into her eyes and saw she was telling the truth. She stared up at me, smiled, and then her eyes shifted to the sky in search of shooting stars. “If you were to make a wish right now what would it be?” At that point in my life the answer would have been “Fuck the breath out of Marilyn Monroe, Bridget Bardot, and Gina Lollobrigida,” having moved along from an earlier childhood trio of world peace, a million dollars, and a game of catch with Joe DiMaggio. The scent of soap and baby powder rose up from her body, Dial Soap and Johnson’s Baby Powder, clean and innocent aromas admonishing me to tether my lust and think of something else to wish for, but they failed.
“Being alone with you in a more private place.” Her gaze shifted back to my eyes where she seemed to search for my thoughts. Then she smiled.
“You mean it wouldn’t be for world peace or a million dollars?” she teased, assuming the ubiquity of those two wishes among the earnest children of the middle class, wishes that we knew almost as well as the pledge of allegiance.
“Okay, world peace and peace and quiet with you. The million dollars can wait.”
“And where is this ‘peace and quiet’ you’re talking about?” From the direction of the storage shed behind us came a breathy sound of something in movement as though the building itself had just exhaled in exasperation. Abruptly we both turned towards the noise and our movements so startled the raccoon that was dragging a chair cushion he dropped it and quickly dashed into the nearby bushes.
“The storage shed?” she said. She took my hand and we walked off the dock to the building where Rosie and I had groped and struggled just weeks before. I inhaled Sarah’s smell cleansing my mind of thoughts of that sorry night.
“What do we have here?” she said pushing open the unlocked door and I thought for sure some other hapless couple would be caught in flagrante by our intrusion, but the shed was unoccupied. “Broken chairs, torn umbrellas, moldy chaise lounges, raccoons, the usual,” I said. Because it had not rained very much that summer there was only a faintly musty smell in the room. Dusty cobwebs decorated the windows and spanning the gaps between the aluminum arms of the broken chaises were bridges of gossamer.
“Nobody comes here usually,” I said reassuringly.
“Nobody?” she asked with skepticism, “That’s not what Heidi Braverman tells me.”
“Well, usually nobody comes here. What else did Heidi tell you?” The memory of the flashlight’s beam full in my face raced across my mind reviving feelings of shame and repulsion.
“Things. She and Harlan stumbled in on some hanky-panky here a while ago. She was embarrassed but also a little excited by what she saw. It wasn’t quite like walking in on your parents when they’re making love but it was that kind of shock.” In the cool stillness of the shed I broke into a sweat. I waited for her to say that Heidi had seen me with Rosie; I waited for her reproach. “Anyway, is that what people come here for?” She seemed more curious than critical.
“Some.” With a gentle hand I ran my fingers lightly down the length of her arm and her body shivered. She looked up at me and even in the darkness I could see her eyes search my face in earnest for the ineffable. Her lips parted and puckered forward inside her spare smile.
“Do they,” she said, smiling more broadly and leaning forward towards me, raising her body on her toes.
“Oh yes,” I said, wrapping her in my arms and kissing her. “Oh yes.” And with that kiss, that forgiving kiss of hers, I felt a sudden restful peace envelope me. I held Sarah against me for a long time. Then, without speaking, we separated. I slapped the dust off the plastic covered cushion of a nearby chaise and dragged it onto the floor while she removed her cardigan sweater. We knelt on the cushion face to face and put our arms around each other. We had no need of words. Harlan was right; language is just the fine tuning of communication and our feelings were so in harmony at that moment that the pointy corners and sharp edges of words would have done violence to the delicate tissue of emotions that had begun to join us. Sarah pressed three fingers against my lips as if to insure the silence and I kissed them, then ran my tongue along their tips. With her other hand she stroked my face and then lifted my right hand to her mouth and enveloped my thumb with her lips. With my eyes closed the sensuousness of her mouth around my thumb felt all enclosing. It was as though all of my nerve endings were suddenly concentrated in that one place, as though all of me was safely protected behind her embracing lips. My left hand found her breast and came to rest there. She leaned into my touch rocking sideways and then all at once stiffened.
“Is that door locked? Is this safe?”
“I can secure that door with something, it just needs a rod in the door handles so they can’t be pushed open.” I found an old umbrella pole, slipped it into the semicircles of the two door handles, and rejoined Sarah on the cushion. But the mood had already been broken.
“This may be a little fast for me,” she said, her eyes averted.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling I had made a mistake and rushed ahead too quickly. I should have honored her cautioning odors.
“No. No, it’s just that my feelings ran away with me. I want to do these things with you but … I don’t know, maybe it’s just that, well, if I knew we were really private and secure in here I wouldn’t feel so nervous.”
“Tell you what, I’ll make sure there’s always a rod to jam the door handles with so that no one can come in. They’ll know soon enough this shed is off limits.”
“And I’ll have one of my kids make us a sign to post on the door, ‘OCCUPADO’ in bright red letters. Then I’ll be teaching art and language both.”
“Oy! She’s teaching my little Rosalie Puerto Rican!” I whined in a mock lamentation. “But for tonight we’ll have to settle for the old umbrella pole jammed through the handles to keep people out.” We moved the chaise cushion under the dusty and unwashed window that admitted the night’s ambient light but not the gaze of searching eyes and lay down together.
If Rosie had introduced me to the “afters” and, one might say, Diana had acquainted me with the “befores”, Sarah was my collaborator in the explorations of sexual pleasure. She was no more experienced than I in the mechanics of sex though just as interested and together we groped our way towards gratification passionately if artlessly. Sometimes my passion was too ardent and Sarah would recoil and tell me that I was hurting her. Sometimes I merely readjusted what I was doing and sometimes I felt mortified and it was I who recoiled. But we made our way in that darkened shed, on that battered and moldy chaise cushion, made our way towards one another and towards a kind of tender sexuality that often eluded us in that summer of 1956. We were too eager and too frightened by the force of our own eager appetites, too often impatient for that erotic payoff that drives the species.
“Why don’t you ever talk while we lie here touching?” she said.
“I’m concentrating. My hands are doing all the communicating.”
“Oh yeah? What do you think I am, a Braille page?”
“Shhh, don’t make me laugh.” But we did. In the good times our awkwardness, my clumsiness, were happily risible. We approached tenderness often but only to find ourselves swept away from it abruptly by the engines of lust or the comedy of ineptitude.
That first time I undressed her I was breathless with
excitement as though the pounding of my heart had beaten the air from my lungs. In the dim light seeping through the dusty window just above us I sat up and stared at her nakedness, and she, slyly smiling at me, trying to play the seductress, lay sprawled shamelessly upon the blanket covered cushion. And then, all at once, I could see the color flood her cheeks and she crossed her hands over her mount of Venus and turned her face to the side like a modest virgin in a classical painting.
“Stop staring,” she said, “and take your clothes off.” And I did, my elbow bruising her thigh as I struggled out of my sweater, my foot grazing her ear as I pulled off my pants. Cold mountain air filled the room and made us shiver as we stretched our bodies out and lay close together embracing.
“Maybe we should be under the blanket not on top of it,” Sarah said, trying to pull some of it from under the edge of the chaise to cover her self.
“But then I can’t see you,” I said.
“If I don’t get warm soon you’ll be looking at a corpse. I’m freezing!”
We stood up and pulled the blanket out from under the edges of the seat cushion before lying down again and huddling under its warmth. I must say that seeing Sarah doing that little chore in a state of nakedness was absolutely thrilling. Many were the nights I lay awake in my boyhood bed imagining the nakedness of women. During my adolescence there was no act, however mundane or banal, that didn’t seem intensely erotic when performed by a naked woman. Some women appreciate that power in their bodies and, like Cleopatra, can seize a kingdom with it. Sarah, however, was oblivious of the effect that simple act had had on me.
4.
About midway through August it occurred to me I had smoked about a dozen different brands of cigarettes that summer but still had not found the one that reunited me with the magical experience of the afternoon my aunt Ceil lit up in the family car while waiting for my father to join us. With her perfectly filed and polished blood red nails glistening, she picked a speck of tobacco from the tip of her tongue and said, “Melvin, my little darling, what ever you do, don’t become a smoker. It’s a disgusting habit.” She took a drag on her un-filtered king size cigarette, I think it was a Pall Mall, and turning her head as far to the right as it would go, she blew the smoke over her shoulder into the well below the car’s rear window where it swirled frantically as if desperate to escape. Her perfume, a richly fragrant floral scent, had dominated the space until she lit up, but the sweet tobacco smell seemed to me more pleasing by comparison, its atmosphere of sophistication, of mystery and, I have since realized, of sensuality—I felt it but couldn’t name it then— totally undercut her cautionary preachings. I could not wait to smoke. Everybody smoked cigarettes in 1956 or so it seemed and the ones who didn’t were more defensive than righteous about it. After all, smoking made a man a man and a woman seem willing. Sarah did not like my smoking, however, and I was torn between continuing my quest for the perfect smoke or uxoriously surrendering to her will. Of course she had a potent trump card to play: withholding her kiss. She never suggested withholding her body, but her kiss, the union of exterior surfaces with the interior surfaces, like a metaphor for intercourse itself and to me as preciously intimate, was what she held over my head. No matter how hard I brushed my teeth, how often I gargled with Listerene or how many peppermint Life Savers I chewed, Sarah would wrinkle her nose and turn away when I tried to kiss her. She didn’t reject every kiss, don’t misunderstand that; the “angle of the mouth press”, the quick “nibble your lower lip”, and the “lips on lips and withdraw quickly” greeting kiss were allowed; even the “opened mouth lingering kiss” was sometimes abided, but the “swallow me with your mouth and let me disappear into you” that intensely hungry, passionate and absorbing kiss was forbidden.
“The tarry smell comes right through the medicinal smell. Your breath smells like a doctor’s office where the driveway’s just been repaved.” I switched to all the mentholated brands, one at a time, Salem, Spring, Kool, it didn’t matter one bit. The menthol did not disguise my tarry breath. Quite unexpectedly, it was her greeting one day that ended the hunt.
It was one of those humid August days when the sky suddenly fills with clouds the color of charcoal and the air is so heavy and saturated with moisture you think the mere spray of your sneeze might bring down a torrent of rain. I had played some basketball and was having a Coke with Ron in the bleachers when she hailed me from the ball field. Watching her face as she approached from across the softball field, her luminous smile so warm it seemed to melt her eyebrows at their edges making them swoon over the corners of her eyes while the center of her mouth puckered itself softly inside her smile and her head reached towards me tilted slightly to the right as if poised to receive my kiss, well, what else could I do? Where her words had failed her very being triumphed and I succumbed, more to her than to her will. I loped across the field to meet her.
“Hi!” she said, reaching for my hand.
“I’m going to quit,” I announced with determination.
“You’re quitting your job?” she said with a worried look.
“Cigarettes. I’m quitting smoking. I can’t stand not kissing you the way I want to.” She beamed and hugged me.
“Got any gum?” she said with a wink, “or a mint, Listerine, 7–Up, Coke or a piece of pineapple will do.” She pushed me away and then, still holding my hand, she pulled me back reeling me in to her, as if in a dance, and kissing me into an oblivion there on the pitcher’s mound of the softball field.
After that kiss I didn’t smoke again for a time. Our nightly rendezvous at the shed became more passionate and intense. There was no need to post a sign demanding privacy; somehow word had spread quickly that the shack was off limits to all but Sarah and me, but just to be safe we secured the doors by placing the metal pole through the handles of the double doors. Then we’d spread a blanket, turn on soft music, hug each other close and begin to kiss there on the floor. In our hungry embrace we rolled around on the blanket stroking and touching, pressing hard against one another to the point of breathlessness, sometimes coming to a climax just from the friction of our bodies. Then one night quite unexpectedly, just as we began to kiss she suddenly went limp.
“Do you ever worry about the bomb?” Her question startled me. It was a question I had asked of girls in the past, my face looking earnest and serious in the hope that the thought of that nuclear Damocletian sword hanging over us might spur them to gather their rosebuds with me in the back seat of my father’s black 1953 Buick Special, but now it was as though Sarah was pointing us in the opposite direction.
“Not when I’m holding you in my arms,” I said, trying to kiss her again and recapture the mood. When she turned her face away I rolled over on my back and said, “I mean that, Sarah, really I do. I love you.” Those words came spilling out, words never before spoken by me, words I had always imagined as almost unutterable.
“I know you do. You’re such a decent guy,” she said, stroking the side of my face. I waited for her inevitable “but” the damning faint praise that had interrupted my efforts with so many other girls, only it didn’t come. She was simply expressing her feelings such as they were at that moment. We lay still, side by side, holding hands. My mouth became dry and my stomach churned. I could not hear her breathing and her body was as still as sand.
“Why did you ask me that?”
“Because I think about it all the time. Because it frightens me and I can’t see the point of thinking about the future and of love. Why bring children into a world which threatens to blow them to pieces or incinerate them to atoms?” I said nothing while time passed over and through us in a sickening crawl. Our palms grew moist. “Did you ever read “Hiroshima’ by John Hersey?”
“No, I’ve been meaning to though.”
“I didn’t eat or sleep for days after I read that book, it was so horrible. I can’t get it out of my mind.”
“Well, with that recommendation who could pass it up?” I joked, hoping to rescue h
er mood. I understood that sex was done for the night but pulling Sarah out of the depths was just as important to me, no, more important to me at that moment. I heard her laugh weakly. “Was that a chuckle? Did I hear a sense of humor stick in your throat? May I try for a belly laugh?”
“It’s not funny,” she said petulantly, but she snuggled into me her face against mine. Her cheek was wet with tears.
“So how do we do this, Sarah? How do we take any pleasure in a world that may end at any second? You know if we let it affect us like this we might as well be dead and I know that I am not dead. Let’s see if Sarah is dead,” and I slid my fingers along her ribs and began to tickle her. Her laughter came slowly, and then burst out in paroxysms. I stopped tickling her, cradled her in my arms, her small frame fitting neatly against me, and said, “You mustn’t let yourself worry about it.” Hardly a profound statement, banal in fact, but the helplessness and dread one feels at those moments can provoke one to wriggle, to try to escape the sight of the black pit that has just opened up in front of you. “Want to take a walk?” She mumbled something inaudible and twisted languidly in my embrace like a small child. “Is that a yes?”
She twisted about again and pushing me away suddenly she jumped astride me, pointed a finger in my face and said, “So what’s it gonna be, Mel or Jack? Choose one so I know which guy I’m with, Mel or Jack?”
“You choose for me.”
“Uh uhhh,” she grunted, “it’s your name, you choose,” and in her straddle she began to post as if I was her mount. “Choose!”
“Not now.”
“Now!” she said, posting more intensely and slapping my thigh with a crisp, stinging smack, “Choose!”
“Sarah, stop.” Her posting grew more and more feverish and then she changed abruptly to a more stay-in-the-saddle Western style of riding, her legs gripping me tightly and her pudenda rubbing back and forth against me with every stride.
