by Jane Smiley
“In 1993, Margaret joined the Charismatic Catholic Movement, and in pretty short order, my wife was starting to talk about converting. I guess they were going to Mass together, and they got involved with a priest who was giving workshops. The kids were grown up by that time—the youngest, that would be Laurie, was in college or something—and I didn’t pay much attention for a while, because of course I had a job and was making a damn good living, but then the pressure built, and Karen was trying to get me to go to Mass with her, so I did, just to keep the peace. The first time I ever went to Mass with her was a shocker, I have to say, because here I was with a woman I had known for thirty years or thereabouts, but I didn’t recognize her. And I didn’t recognize old Margaret, either. They were kneeling and praying with their eyes closed and this ecstatic look on their faces that made me want to snap my fingers in front of their noses and wake them up. I mean, this very woman I slept up against like two spoons in a drawer the night before, and she was wearing her red-and-white nightgown with the Santa faces on it, and here she seemed to have slid back two centuries. Margaret had her hair up and a thing like a towel covering it, and I have to say that the whole experience freaked me out. I kept very quiet, and as we were leaving the church, I eavesdropped on them talking about rebirthing themselves as handmaidens for Jesus.”
“These women sound like lesbians to me.”
Charlie paused without saying anything, partly because that thought had crossed his mind more than once, too. Then he went on. “But in sickness and in health, you know, so I kept my mouth shut and tried to cooperate about going to church—or, rather, Mass—when I was asked, and I kept saying to myself that I would draw the line at some point, but I didn’t really. After we started going to Mass every Sunday, then she wanted to do another thing on Wednesday, and after that, another thing on Saturday. I was still going to the job and to company functions and working my ass off, and that included when I was playing a little golf at the club, because when you live the corporate life you have to keep up the front twenty-four/seven, as you kids say, but she wasn’t going with me. She didn’t even realize I was having trouble at the job, and you know, I didn’t bother to tell her. After my prostate thing, I just dealt with that on my own, and I’m happy I did. She was spending her whole time at the church, especially when Margaret started being in charge of the altar decorations for the weekends. And then something happened that I knew they had been plotting. You know what an intervention is?”
Monique shook her head.
“An intervention, in the strictest sense, is when you have someone in the family with a bad drug or alcohol problem, and one night you surprise him with the whole family. It’s best if the ones from far away, like the West Coast or something, fly in, because he doesn’t expect to see them. You also get an expert or two, and you confront him, though it could be a woman—the most famous intervention, at least in our circles, was the Betty Ford intervention. You know who she is?”
Monique shook her head.
“She was the wife of Gerald Ford, who was president for a while. Anyway, you confront the person with his addiction. It’s supposed to overwhelm him enough to get him into treatment, and they say it works. You don’t hear about it all that much anymore. Be that as it may, one night during the election brouhaha in 2000, I got home from work, and here were all of these people from the church that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about, and they were going to love me into being converted. They thought I was missing out. It was a kind of conversion intervention, to save my immortal soul. I could tell that it was something Margaret and the priest—Father Donald, his name was—had cooked up, and my wife was more or less going along with, so I pretended to cooperate. It lasted about an hour, and at the end there were hugs and tears all around, and I think Father Donald realized that he hadn’t really gotten me—he was no dummy—but my wife was very happy, and that lasted for a while. The proctologist, though, wasn’t having any. He and Margaret got a divorce. That just meant that Margaret was around more often, and then she began talking about becoming a lay nun.”
“What is that?”
“Well, basically, she’s a priest helper, or, in Margaret’s case, a priest enforcer, since that’s the sort of person she was. Lots of times in the U.S., there aren’t enough priests to man all the parishes, so these lay nuns would do lots of the work that the junior priests used to do back in the fifties and sixties, when the seminaries were full. Oh, she was a bossy one, that Margaret. Essentially, she came to have her own parish. I have no idea whether the church condoned this sort of thing officially or not, but, you know, organizations have to deal with their manpower issues somehow, and right around then, they were having the pedophile scandal anyway. But I didn’t want to convert, and my wife was pushing me for a yes-or-no answer. Now, I’m telling you all this, but I never told Max any of this, so you can just keep it to yourself, okay?”
Monique nodded. Of course, Charlie thought, her track record as a truthful person was very suspect.
“We were marrying off the kids one by one, and looking like a fairly normal family. I can’t say she was neglecting anything, but my impression was that she was offering it up to Jesus rather than being actually interested in our life, and after my job ended, I was working hard on my project, and one day last year I just said to myself, I don’t want this to be the only life I am going to have, because, I tell you what, it doesn’t seem like it is even my life. It seems like it is her life, and I am only a two-bit player in it. So I told her I was getting an apartment. Now we’re working on the next step, though the Catholic church doesn’t allow divorce, of course. That’s slowing us down.”
“How did your job end?”
Charlie cleared his throat. This question always made him a little uncomfortable, especially if it came up suddenly. He said, “Oh, in the usual way. Downsizing, more or less. Every company has to—”
But she interrupted him with some degree of indifference, and said, in a languorous but agreeable tone, “For me, marriage meant Russia and a Russian man. As soon as I went to France, I left marriage behind. In France, marriage is a very particular and, you might say, not-so-important thing. Many people are married, but not many act like they are married or think much about it. In America, I have noticed, being married is a full-time job.”
“That’s probably true.”
“My opinion is that you don’t want to have sex because you are not married any longer. You feel there is nothing to be gained by having sex.”
“I didn’t say that I don’t want to have sex. Do you want to have sex?”
“Why else would I come here? I got you, Marya got the boy. We were looking for something to do.”
Charlie wondered how he could have read the signs wrong. In the abstract, of course, it would be nice to have sex, but at the moment, it seemed like he was a long way from execution. He felt elderly and unsafe, his Viagra was still in its container, and that stuff took a while to work, anyway. He said, “So do you think they are having sex?”
“Sure.”
“What do you think they’re doing?”
“Let me find out.” She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and hit one of her speed-dial numbers. After a moment, she said, “How’s it going?” Then, “Oh, really?…You’re kidding.” She laughed. She said, “Just a moment.” She covered the mouthpiece of the cell phone with her thumb and said to Charlie, “Just when I called, he had been propping her up on pillows so that he could get a good approach from behind.”
“So why did she answer the phone?”
“She always answers the phone when she is having sex. If it is someone like me, then she likes to describe it, and if it is someone else—say, a stranger or someone who wants to do business—then it is fun to pretend you are sitting attentively at your desk while you are getting it and being very quiet. Don’t most people do that? I thought they did.”
“I’ve never done that.”
“See what you have missed? Here, I will put them on spe
akerphone.”
Charlie said, “They’re doing it already?” He looked at his watch. From the phone, a hollow-sounding female voice said, “This is our, unh, unh, third time.”
“You’ve done it three times in an hour? Or an hour and fifteen minutes?” said Charlie.
But there was no direct answer to this question, only various noises and cries on the speakerphone, none of which struck Charlie as arousing. It sounded like they were performing in some large, cavernous space—what he envisioned was the waiting room at the Amtrak station in Washington, D.C.—and though he had a good mental image of Simon, his head shadowed with new growth, a gold link in one of his ears, and that perpetual grin on his face, he could not quite remember Marya, except that she had blond, rather short hair and wasn’t very tall. Monique seemed to be enjoying it all, though. She was lounging on the bed, one leg bent and her foot on the covers, her head back, and her arm extended, resting on her knee. In her upraised palm sat the open silver phone, and she was staring at the ceiling again, meditative and smiling. Simon’s voice said, “How’s that? That better?” Marya’s voice said, “Oh, that’s good, right there,” and Simon’s voice said, “That’s good, that’s good, put that up there like that. Oh, yes,” and Marya’s voice said, “Just move your foot. Yeah.” There was a way in which they sounded like they were having sex, it was true, but the image that came to him was that old game people used to play, Twister. Twister in a train station. Do this, do that. Not like in the movies, where the two people always seemed to flow together in tune to some music. Still, it sounded like it was good enough for them. Even though Marya muttered a soft “ouch,” within moments there were two not quite synchronous crescendos of cries and respirations, culminating first in a yell from Simon, “Aahhhhh…Yes,” then a long moan from Marya followed by a laugh. He saw Monique put her free hand into her crotch, first outside her jeans, then, snaking it down without unzipping, inside them, so it must have been good enough for her, too. He said, “Wish you were there rather than here?” but she didn’t answer, which was surely just as well. And anyway, he couldn’t even lie down comfortably in his bed, because she was sprawled across the foot. Even though it was a good-sized bed. Well, yes, something was aroused in him, and he would have to admit that it was resentment.
He had a good idea. He said “Off.” The lights went out, first the room lights, then the one in the bathroom. He hoped she would take the hint. It was late and, really, he liked to maintain his daily regimen. Although he had crept toward California time in the course of the last six days, if he stayed up past midnight, which was three in the East, it could really throw him off. And in the morning, before going for his run, he absolutely had to sort through the pills. That could take as much as an hour right there. He felt her rise from the bed, and immediately slid farther under the covers, until he was a lot more comfortable. He arranged himself on his back, flat, balanced. The pain in his little finger had gone. That was interesting. Nor did he feel bloated any longer. No doubt the moving around had had a positive effect. And here she was, up by his ear. He felt her weight on the bed right beside him, and less than a moment later, she kissed him below the ear, twice. He said, “Are we still on speakerphone?”
“No. I disconnected. They decided to get into the spa in that room. It is big enough for two people.”
“I have to say that that was interesting to me as a novelty, but it didn’t turn me on.”
“It turned me on.” She said this in a low voice, clearly implying that the effect on her was his problem.
He said, “Actually, it’s getting quite late, and I’m trying not to get completely onto California time. So I think we should call it a day—or a night, if you will—and maybe see what happens tomorrow.”
She said, in that same low voice, “I guess I will have to accept that you don’t like me,” but it didn’t sound precisely as though she cared whether he “liked” her or not. He said, “Do you mean ‘like’ or ‘are attracted to’? I can’t say yes or no to one or the other. I guess you’re not my type. Yeah, I guess that. That seems the simplest answer.” And it did. Should he ever have to talk about this incident, he would say, Yeah, this beautiful blonde maybe thirty years younger than me just presented herself to me, in what was probably the most elegant bedroom I’ve ever seen, and we talked for a while, and she was ready, but, you know, she just wasn’t my type. And then he would say, It was as simple as that. “So I guess you should leave now, because I’m ready to go to sleep.”
Right next to him, she sighed. Under the covers, he arranged himself again, flat on his back, neck straight, head comfortably supported by the two plump wings of the pillow, knees slightly bent. Hands at his sides. Then he adjusted his genitals, not forgetting the pimple behind his balls, but not touching it, either, just freeing everything up for a good night’s sleep. He set his hand back down in the sheet, beside his hip, and closed his eyes. She was still there, of course, but in more ways than one it reminded him of having a kid in the bed. The kid would be squirming around and poking you and on the alert for the moment when you carried her back to her own bed, but if you just breathed evenly and relaxed, before you knew it the kid would be sleeping, and then you would be sleeping, too. He yawned, thinking that if she was still there in the morning, he would report her to Joe Blow; then he yawned again.
But he didn’t go to sleep. The problem was his trapezius. When he kept his head and neck straight, he could feel a painful little pull going down his upper back and then throbbing behind his shoulder blade. He had to admit that that hotel bed had killed him. And of course he had spent the whole night marshaling his arguments, too, so that tension had made his neck problem worse. When he turned his head to the right, he almost cried out. When he turned his head to the left, the pain eased a little, but it also made him want to roll over on his left side to go to sleep, since that was his habitual way of drifting off. He tried turning his head each way twice, but it didn’t work, and he must have grunted, or cursed, or something, who knew what, but she said, “Are you all right?”
“No, I have a pain in my back, neck, and shoulder. Are you still here?”
“I was thinking what a comfortable bed this is.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Charlie.
“Perhaps you would like me to leave?”
“What gives you that idea?”
“Something about the way you—”
“Of course I would like you to leave. I asked you to leave a couple of minutes ago.”
“Do you mind if I stay just a minute or two longer? I would like to find something. Of course, I will have to ask the lights to come on.”
“Just do it and get it over with.”
She said, “On, honey.” The bathroom light came up, and then the rest of the lights turned on. She knelt up, leaned, or, rather, crawled across him, opened the drawer beside his shoulder, and took out a purple tube readily recognizable as a dildo, though not terrifically large. She closed the drawer rather awkwardly and fell back onto her side of the bed, the dildo in her hand. He said, “That would be your vibrator.”
“One of them. I took the other one with me, but I forgot this one. I wouldn’t want you to find it and think ill of me.”
He glanced at her, but she wasn’t smiling. He suspected she was joking even so. He said, still resentful, “Let’s see you put it to use, then.” It was a dare, he thought, and payback for the spanking, which still annoyed him. He saw her glance at him out of the corner of her eye and then roll the vibrator back and forth between her thumb and her palm. Finally, she turned the black plastic circle at the bottom, and a low buzzing hum sounded. “What I like to do with this one,” she said, “is to touch the tip to my anus while I masturbate in the normal way with my fingers in front,” and Charlie felt the first real frisson of arousal that he had felt all night. He said, “Say that again.”
She said, “What I do is, I turn it on about medium, and I pull down my jeans and lie on my right side. Then I masturbate my clitor
is with my fingers while I touch the tip of it to the outside edge of my anus. Right when I come, I push the tip in a little way, but not far.”
“Why?”
“Oh, because it makes the orgasm go really deep, and be a little strange. More spread around my whole lower area, not so localized.”
Charlie coughed. Then he said, “Okay. Let’s see it.”
She stood up and squirmed out of her jeans, letting them drop right beside the bed, and then unbuttoned her shirt. She had on a nice bra, something shiny. The two cups were green, and they grew over her breasts in satin leaves, or not leaves, but more like the green sepals that flowers came out of. She said, “If you don’t mind, just put your fingers in here, on my nipple, and squeeze a little, rhythmically, at about, say, a one-two beat. One-two, one-two. That’s good.” He sat up to do this, and she jutted her ass out, then she did what she had said she was going to do: she introduced the fingers of her lower hand between her legs, which she spread a little bit, and put the tip of her purple vibrator between the cheeks of her ass. She closed her eyes. He said, “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”
