by Sonia Taitz
Collum and Jude need privacy, so they begin to patronize the Teeter-Totter Inn. It’s a horrible motel, near Teterboro Airport, but it will do. Slam stayed there once when his plane had been grounded due to the weather. It was the only place with vacancies that night, and he’d complained about the seediness of it. That’s fine for Jude, who wants only to be anonymous with her long-lost boy.
Something in her wants Collum to know that nothing matters but their love. Collum doesn’t care where they are, as long as he has her, and Jude doesn’t care either. She’s not a suburban wife; she’s a lover. So she doesn’t need fancy sheets and a huge soaking tub. The toilet paper does not have to be folded in a special way, and the shower doesn’t have to thunder like a South American waterfall. Love, she now knows, is the final luxury—and more than equal to all the others.
In theory, then, nothing in the world matters to her but the absolute rightness of this moment with her man. In practice, Jude recoils a bit the first time they open the door to their chamber. But she hides it; she’s doing penance—to show Collum how far she’s come from the days of her bourgeois childhood. She’ll starve for him, freeze for him. She’ll sit in an ugly room with a blinking overhead light, where you can hear airplanes taking off nearby.
“Shall I carry you inside?” says Collum. “Like my long-lost bride?”
“OK,” she says, with a touch of sadness. Looking at the dreary curtains, she knows that this is not her husband or her bridegroom. Life is cruel in exactly this way. The décor is a stern reminder of limits and losses. She is already married, to someone who no longer needs her. This is only the long-lost lover of her compromised life. She had lost him long ago, and is now trying to grasp a molecule of happiness, somehow. And this is the room for it: a soiled cubicle near a second-rate airport.
Nonetheless, they enter the room as one.
The bed is sunken. It’s covered with a stained comforter, which Collum tosses away onto the linoleum floor. The sheets underneath are purple and shiny in a sickly kind of way, like rotted meat. There’s a large, square plaque near the headboard; it has a coin slot in it. The sign says, “Magic Fingers.”
“Shall we?” says Collum.
“Shall we what?”
“Make some magic?”
Jude thinks he must be kidding, talking like that in a place like this. She hardly knows him and his tastes; she isn’t sure. Odd that you can kiss like that when you hardly know anything about someone. When all you know is how much he needs you and how much you need him.
But then she realizes that he’s being ironic about the “Magic Fingers.” That makes it fun. They’ll need two quarters to make it go. Jude fishes in her purse, finds one. Collum gives her the other. Just like that—they’re a couple.
Once the second coin drops, the bed vibrates. It’s palsied, raucous, incompetent, arrhythmic. It’s silly. They sit together on the hectic bed. Its shaking makes Collum’s cheeks shake; it’s ridiculous.
She laughs.
“What?” he says, laughing too. Even his voice shakes, “whaaaaaaa”—like a billy goat’s. “At least the sheets are soft, right?”
He rubs them a bit too hard and an orange spark shoots out.
“Ouch!”
She bursts out laughing again as he sucks his finger. Jude tries to get a shock, too, and she does it, and he roars. From then on, Collum and Jude feel the weight of the world vanish. They make magic sparks together ’til the bed lies still. It’s a crater, and they fall into the center, limbs tumbling over limbs.
Collum drags the mattress off the bed and flings it on the floor. He lies down on it; he pulls her down to him. Nowhere to fall, and no more surprises.
“We’re old,” he says, kissing her. All joking, disguises, and shocks have stopped, and his kisses feel different than they did at the beginning. There’s something besides desire in them, a bit of rue. Unless he’s being playful, Collum defaults to sad, Jude sees. And when he’s sad, there’s something wary in it.
She remembers the boy he was, broken and hurt by a ferocious father. Broken and hurt, and she hadn’t been able to help. But she can help now, and she kisses him with all her love, with pity even, making promises she can’t expect to keep—promises no one could keep. Her kisses say, “I’ll never leave you.” And, “there’s no one else.” And, “nothing will ever change.”
Most of all, they try to say, “You’ll never feel pain again. You’ve had enough pain.” When she puts that thought into her kisses, she feels that kindness itself is what hurts him most.
“I dye my hair now,” he says, pulling away, as though to stop this love stream. He’s a restless boy now, sharing in show-and-tell.
“Have a look!” He leans up on his elbows, chuckling ruefully. “I don’t mean this tar paint. The blond’s fake, too. The Nordic blond I’m loved for, the one you see in all the pictures. Either way, I’m gray as a granny. Go on, have a look at the old mop.”
She grabs a hank of his hair and peers at the roots. Yes, she could see the white. There was no black and there was no blond. No color at all. Gone. She was sad to see it, touched that he let her.
It wasn’t only that it was white; it was thinning, too. Here and there, she finds spray on his scalp. Painted pores. She doesn’t want to know this.
“I dye mine, too, Collum,” she says reassuringly. It’s a voice she’s used with her sons. “Who doesn’t, at our age?”
“OK, not sure about you, but I happen to be an Aussie male, and it’s creepy. But I have to. I also wear a girdle,” he advances. “On camera at least. Got a little tummy now, see? A little jam roll?”
He unzips his pants, and she is relieved that he’s not wearing any spandex below. She does see a bit of whitened stomach, a soft roll of flesh. Collum pinches his fat so hard it turns white.
“It’s lipo for me in the end, I suppose.”
“Oh, come on,” she says again, with a mother’s kind voice. “We all gain a few pounds over the years. Everyone I know wears Squeezys,” she adds, mentioning a popular brand among her generation. “They’re not really girdles, they’re foundation garments.”
“Oh yes, luv, they are girdles!”
“No, they’re black and sexy—”
“I’ve come as I am,” he admonishes, playful. “But if YOU are smuggling a girdle into this room under the guise of Squeezys I will know of it, young lady—” he grabs her skirt and lifts it.
Jude is, in fact, wearing a “foundation garment.” What an idiot she is—she’d thought she’d pull it off in the bathroom. She’s forgotten the game.
Both laugh as Collum wrestles her girdle down, falling silent when he succeeds, leaving her naked from the waist down. Jude lies very still, fully clothed on top (a cashmere V-neck, a pretty bra below). Her skirt is up, and Collum can see everything she tends to hide away. Light streams in from the motel window. Her lover can see her stomach, loosened from childbirth. He can see her legs, where they meet at her . . .
“What do you call this?” she said, drawing her knees up, tightening her thighs.
“What do you mean?”
“You know,” she says, wishing more than anything to let him at it.
“I call it a cunt, of course. Now put your legs down for me.”
Now he can see her cunt. And down he goes, so tenderly, so brilliantly, nuzzling her so that she disappears into a loving, spiral glory. And that is just the beginning of a day that disappears and never ends.
Collum and Jude had found a sanctuary in time, like the evening when God rested from his toil. There was nothing between or outside them, no secrecy, no rushing and no shame. No one would burst in and ask them questions, such as “who the hell” this man was. Collum was hers and she was his, before Joey or Davey, Slam and Gingerean.
In those primordial moments—so rare—Jude found a deep, collected sense of life; it washed over and warmed her. She was more than safe. Life held no danger, no misunderstanding. She was loved as she had always needed to be loved, and held as she had never been held
. Collum was with her, and he seemed happy. Now, finally, he gave his Jude everything he had, all that he had saved for all those years. And now she knew how much he had to give.
They began meeting every day from two to five o’clock.
It was amazing that sex could be so heavenly even after the sixth, seventh, twentieth, thirtieth time. They were hungry, making up for lost years. They were vengeful, greedy, lusty, rude. Twice, three times in a row, and nothing but the same thing, over and over, as much as was needed to calm them down.
They were finally calm. They weren’t so lonely anymore. They’d had their fill, they knew it and were stilled. Slowly, workaday thoughts crept in again. Jude wondered what kind of things Collum liked to do—besides this. She loved books (after all, she taught writing to high schoolers). Did he like books? Despite the small paunch, he seemed to have spent a lot of time in the gym. But she hated gyms. Did he like to take walks? Should they drive somewhere and take one? Did they both like strolling in the city, or would a nature hike be better?
Collum slept beside Jude as she began to puzzle their differences. They’d moved up to a better hotel, and then a really good one. But something was getting lost, even as the packaging of the toiletries was more and more gorgeous and the bathrobes more fluffy.
Even when everything smelled like sandalwood and felt like the emperor’s own silk, Jude was falling away. Between bouts of increasingly tiring lovemaking, he snored the way Slam did. Maybe even louder, with sudden snorts that seemed almost rude, almost flatulently abrupt.
The air outside their lovers’ nests was cooling. Collum was not a boy anymore; he was a man, and she knew very little about him. He muttered when he dozed, but Jude could neither understand his words nor guess what he was talking about. If he was practicing yet another dead language, she couldn’t have cared less. When he awoke and reached for her, he hugged her in place, so she could not sleep comfortably. Judy was aware of the bones in his arm, his hard chest not a pillow but a stone.
Paradise was always temporary. In the end, man and woman were going to be evicted. He had to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and she would bear children in labor and pain.
She and her husband had played those roles. He had been her first actual lover, the one to whom she’d lost her virginity. She had never thought of their lives as roles, never realized their passion would end. Slam was not like Collum, not tender and enclosing, but self-absorbed, virile, and mechanical. He knew exactly what to do, and did it powerfully well. It was he who had turned her into an eager lover, female to his male. First, they had done it many times a day.
Then every day.
Then several times a week.
Then once a week.
Then once a month.
Then on special occasions.
Then almost never. That was when the corset and heels had come into play. The cheerleader outfit. Viagra and the role of bonne francaise.
Then never, no matter what. Not birthdays or anniversaries. Nor when Slam came home from Italy after a long time away, and she had tried every last trick and lure she had. They were done in that department.
“Do you think that will happen to us, Collum?” she’d been bold enough to ask only a week before. “Do you think you’ll ever want me to wear the proverbial corset and black stockings?”
“Take longer to get to you? Nah!”
But just after Columbus Day, Collum awakened from a snoreful doze. He smacked his lips, rubbed his eyes and said:
“You know, luv, I’ve been thinking about that merry widow—”
“Merry what?”
She was brushing her hair in the bathroom. Restoring it to the look she had when they entered the motel. Tied back in the barrette. The mother of teens, respectable and tame. That person was Jude, too. She was real and true, and Jude knew her.
“Merry widow. You know, you mentioned the sexy gear, the corsets and that sort of thing.”
“Mm hmm?”
“You know how you complained that, ah, your husband didn’t care? Well, I would care, a lot, ah, if you don’t mind putting it on for me . . . sometime. D’ya still have it, baby? And the stilleto heels, you know?”
“Stilletos?” said Jude glumly, also noting the generic word “baby.”
“Won’t say no to that, me Sheila!”
“Then I won’t say no, either,” she said, too brightly, dejected to be hauling out her kit again. These items were no longer “proverbial.” They were sadly all too real.
So she hauled them out and heaved them up. She rummaged through her closet to find the discarded ensemble. Jude was very sad as she donned her costume, tucking each breast into its confining cup, and hitching her garters. Was this both the first and last man whose breath she’d take away? For how long could she morph into a courtesan or pinup? How many tricks must she play to get the desired result? And did she still desire it?
Here it was. She felt the blasphemy in the very question—had she tired of him, too?
Stilettoes in the air, Jude began to notice—to fixate on—the broken red veins around Collum’s nose, from that sun in Australia. She might be a middle-aged woman trying to be sexy in that phony, pinup way, but he was a middle-aged man who decided if and when she was. And she resented him.
Who is he? Why does he want her to play this role? Why on earth are they humping like this, as though it matters?
She is suddenly tired not just of him, but of thinking about any of this “love stuff.” It confines her so that she wants to scream.
A growth spurt. Her boys often have them. They tend to hurt.
Escape from Paradise
Jude isn’t being entirely fair. Ever since Collum asked her to tart up a bit, she’s been bitchy about whether he really loves her. Of course he loves her! What else is he doing, dropping out of the world (no movies, an angry producer) begging her over and over again to be with him?
Does she have any idea how many people in the world adore him? How many would change places with her? But he doesn’t want any of them. She is the only woman for him; she always will be. Life doesn’t give people too many retakes—yet here she is, balking as she’d always done.
She’d betrayed him before, excuses or not. And here she is, dillydallying. A man can only take so much. Even a man in love.
All Collum wants is for Judy to leave Plum Grove and “start over” with him. But he is starting to suspect that Judy is never going to run away from the comfy life she has, any more than the first time. Not even to Tahiti, where he keeps a large house running with the help of ten servants. His wife, Gingerean, had known nothing about it; it was always his private refuge, his dreaming place.
Collum had bought it when he’d made his first killing in the movie business. And even back then, decades ago, he had bought it with Judy in mind. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He could make this happen. She was being a mule, and this part of her drove him mad.
“Let me call for my plane,” he says, dragging on a cigarette as they lie together, spent again. “We could make our first lap anytime. To LA, maybe, then overseas. Bit by bit we’ll leave ’em all behind.”
“But I—I want to. I will, but I’m not ready to leave—just yet.”
“Not ready? Where have I heard that one before? We’re middle-aged now! How much bloody longer can we wait, Judy?”
“I can’t just cut off all ties, Collum!”
Jude is thinking of her sons. How on earth could she take care of them all the way from Tahiti? Not that she has to tend to them daily, but they aren’t fully fledged, and she cannot simply abandon them. And she does love teaching her writing course.
“Well, I’ve cut all ties, as I did the last time, as you might recall.”
“I do recall,” she says, remembering how he’d run to her home from that battle with his father.
“You don’t believe I’m serious?”
“Of course I do,” she says, appeasingly.
“Don’t you condescend, snotty! This is my bleedin’ life
I’ve cut off.”
“Did you just call me ‘snotty’?” Name-calling was new.
“I did, and I’ll do it again,” he says, thrusting his jaw like the pugnacious kid he is. She actually never liked that part of him, especially now that she is getting a taste of it. He could be crude, and not in a way that was titillating. Quite the opposite, in fact. Crude and reductive in a way that ruined any spell.
“Well,” she answers coolly. “From what I read, you were having a nervous breakdown anyway.”
“I was having a what?”
“Nervous breakdown. I mean, you were losing it, Collum. Call it a mid-life crisis, the price of fame, I don’t know. But you were fine for a very long time without me. So you can’t blame me for everything bad that happens in your life. And the things that go on in your head.”
“What things?”
“Collum, I’m just saying that I can’t fix everything! I can’t make all your pain go away!”
“You said you would.”
“Did I? I was about fifteen years old at the time.”
Collum feels his temper rise and knows things will go bad. Over the years, he has turned more and more into his father. He knows he has, but there is nothing he can do about it. The beatings and abuse have come back in his mind, and like Neil himself, Collum now fights unconquerable demons. They madden him. They want everything that is good in him to die. He is fighting and fighting for that good, but where does that fight ever get him?
With a threateningly calm voice, Collum asks Judy to repeat what she has said. About his supposed “breakdown.”
“About your going nutso?” she says lightly.
He decides to laugh it off.
“Yeah, all right, I do go bonkers now and again. And who wouldn’t?”
“I’m not the poster girl for normal myself,” says Jude, suddenly seeing herself as she is, naked with a near-stranger, discussing Tahiti with a guy she hasn’t seen for more than thirty years. And counting the ways they’re both crazy.
“Nah,” he says, collecting himself. “No, right. I know I’m abnormal. So are you. Love you for it.” He takes a deep breath: “But—but just to clarify—you don’t believe I’ve cut things off for your sake?”
