by Kim Wright
“And he didn’t stop,” she says. “He could tell I was crying and he didn’t stop.”
“Let’s list all the things you’re good at,” says Kelly. Her voice is a little desperate. She doesn’t like it when Belinda’s unhappy.
Belinda wipes her face on her sleeve like a child. “Maybe Lynn had the right idea.”
“At least try,” Kelly says. “You’re great with children and dogs. And don’t you know some Spanish?”
Nancy and I have dropped a few steps behind. “This little party’s turning sour,” she says.
I shake my head. “She’s not going anywhere.” And she’s not. When a woman’s ready to leave she’s not talking about crying during sex. She’s not talking about feelings at all. Suddenly it’s all about getting passports out of safety deposit boxes, buying new lamps, making sure the apartment you’re looking at is located within the kids’ school district. When a woman is ready to leave there’s no anger in her voice, no hurt. Belinda is still rising and falling in the rhythms of a wife—she’ll probably go home and make up with Michael tonight.
But there’s no way to explain all this to a woman like Nancy. There’s no way to make her understand that Belinda’s anger means there’s still hope for her marriage or that my calmness means I’ve completely given up on mine. If you’re screaming at the man at least you still see the man. But once your voice goes flat, picks up speed, and turns matter-of-fact, then your husband, for all practical purposes, has already begun to dematerialize. He’s fading out of the picture, vaporizing like raindrops on a hot highway. He’s nothing but a town you’ve got to drive through on your way to somewhere else.
“What’s a man thinking,” Belinda says, “when he looks down at a woman and she’s crying and he just keeps doing it?”
“They don’t think,” says Kelly.
“Maybe you should try counseling,” Nancy says. “Look how much it’s helping Elyse.”
Belinda suddenly stops, stops so abruptly that Nancy runs right into the back of her. “Is it just me,” she says, “or does it seem like we’re always walking in circles?”
Later that afternoon Pascal comes into the studio with a live bird in his mouth. I scream and he runs. He likes to do this, to show off what a great hunter he is, and in the past I’ve sometimes been able to catch him and pry his mouth open with my index finger. But the release of the wounded is a gray area. It’s hard to tell how badly they’re hurt—sometimes the animal is able to get away, sometimes not, and if they aren’t strong and fast enough he is soon back on them, more businesslike this time. I’ve never been able to decide if it’s kinder to let Pascal finish them off in the first attack or if I should take them outside, leaving them alone in the grass to die their small deaths.
Just as Pascal enters with the bird, Garcia lunges out of nowhere, causing Pascal to snarl. The bird escapes. It makes an unsteady arc toward the ceiling and I realize one of its wings is broken. I manage to use a drop cloth to herd it out of the studio and get the cats shut into the laundry room, but it’s hard to say if my decision is the right one. The bird flaps frantically around the house for more than an hour, repeatedly striking walls and leaving behind small explosions of blood and shit. I open every door and window and it finally flies out to God knows what kind of fate. When Phil comes home I’m walking around the house trying to clean the walls with a sponge and a bottle of Fantastik.
“They’ve gone completely wild,” I say.
“That’s what cats do,” he says, reasonable in that way that only people who’ve been gone all day can be reasonable. “They kill birds. If it bothers you that much, keep them inside.”
“Damn you two,” I say to Pascal and Garcia, who are curled on the ottoman, as innocent as a calendar picture, looking just like the sweet kittens I adopted three years ago from the Humane Society. “I feed you all the time. Why are you always hungry?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with being hungry,” Phil says. “It’s just their nature.”
Chapter Nineteen
Miami is hot, even in December. I am dozing out on the hotel room balcony in the afternoon sunlight with a newspaper spread over my lap. Gerry comes out and sits down beside me on the chaise lounge. He presses his hip against my thigh and I move over a little.
“It’s hot,” I say.
He fishes an ice cube from a clear highball glass and rubs it over my wrists, as if he is a medieval doctor trying to cool the humours in my blood. I love this. There is no greater pleasure than to be hot all over except for one small place, and he uses the ice cube as a brush, stroking coolness across my palm, painting over the heat. I stretch my hands above my head to remind him, but it’s not necessary. A pair of neckties has already been threaded between the slats of my lounge chair and this startles me. I didn’t see him do it—I must have actually slept. It takes only a second for him to bind my wrists and he does it very loosely. He slips down to his knees beside me, knocking the paper aside with one flat swipe of his arm, and I startle with the movement, as if he’s hit me. He takes a second ice cube and places it in his mouth so that it extends between his lips like a small transparent tongue.
This is the moment I find the most unbearably erotic, the intensity with which he stares at me, the lowering of the head. He circles my navel, traverses my belly. He is slow. He knows that it’s important that I feel we have all day. He slips the ice cube lower, running it along the waistband of my shorts, and I mumble something.
His mouth is strong. I noticed this the first time we kissed, that his tongue was muscular and he has no trouble forcing it beneath the elastic leg of my shorts. No trouble forcing the remains of the ice cube, thinner and more pliable now, between the folds of my skin. I make a noise to let him know that this is right, he’s right, that this is what I want, this slow winding approach, this focus.
As the ice cube grows smaller his tongue grows larger. It’s just as cold but the texture is different, flatter and broader with more nuance, a few bumps, the ability to curl or flutter. Even though he has not yet centered his attention, even though he is deliberately stalling the moment when the high tight climb to my orgasm begins, even though he is not doing what we both know he will eventually do, even so my fingertips begin tingling and my face is hot. The ice is gone and I am surprised by the sudden feeling of hands upon my breasts.
I sit up. Or rather I try to sit up because as I struggle to rise, my hands do not come with me. They remember that they are fastened behind my head, trussed with a pair of eighty-dollar Gucci neckties. I am in this strange position, neither sitting nor lying, but somehow suspended, with my back awkwardly arched, and I am suddenly awash with panic.
“Stop,” I say. He pushes his tongue into me and begins to lick slowly, systematically, as if he is sweeping.
“No, stop,” I say, “really stop. I have to sit up. My back hurts.”
He can’t seem to hear me. He’s focused now. It’s good in spite of itself, good and bad, good-bad. He is rough with my breasts. He pulls on the nipples and then twists them as they’re being pulled and no one has ever done this, both the pulling and the twisting at the same time. I hear myself make a noise halfway between a moan and a scream, even though we are outside, possibly within earshot of the other balconies, even though part of me likes it.
“I lied,” I say. “I lied to you, I lied, I’m lying.”
I can’t take this. I don’t know why I told him I could. I pull on the neckties and dig my heels into the lounge, trying to push myself back to a sitting position. But he follows me, butting his forehead into my pubic bone and the orgasm and the panic are running beside each other now, like horses neck and neck, and my face is so hot that when I lick my lips my tongue feels cool.
And then suddenly I see it coming toward me and there’s absolutely no doubt. He’s carrying me toward the field in St. Kitts. I know this field. I’ve been there before. Out from Basseterre about forty minutes with a sweating Coke in your hand, the Crayola-blue ocean on one side an
d on the other there’s yellow wheat blowing in the breeze, turning back into itself, folding into gold. A narrow road, a bumpy road, a rental car with mushy brakes. It’s like being dropped into the middle of a Van Gogh painting, like being dropped into heaven, and I remembered it the first time I saw it. It’s the orgasm field, the one I sometimes glimpse, just for a moment, before I come. Not every time, just sometimes. But when I see the orgasm field, I know it’s inevitable and it’s going to be a good one.
I say help and I say no but it’s all rising, that blue water, that yellow wheat, coming toward me in a wave. You can’t ride it, it’s going to engulf you and I try to scream and just at that moment when it hits I say, “Apple.” Apple finally comes to me, apple. The next thing I see is Gerry holding his arms out to me. I reach for him, my hands trailing neckties. I don’t know when he untied me or if I was ever tied at all.
“It was too much,” I tell him.
“Why didn’t you say ‘apple’? Earlier, I mean.”
“I didn’t think of it.”
“I wasn’t sure what to do.”
“You did right,” I say. “It was my fault. I didn’t think of it.”
“You seemed to come hard.”
Well… yeah.
He slips the ties off my wrists. He lies down beside me on the narrow chaise lounge, pulls my head to his chest. I catch the scent of his bay rum soap. His breathing begins to regulate and mine does too, rising and falling with his pattern as if we were mated, as if we have known each other for years. I am unaccustomed to this, to being held in a man’s arms after sex. For the first minute I feel confined, and then it starts to feel good, and then I almost tell him that I love him, and then his arm feels too heavy against my ribs and I feel confined again. This is a mysterious land. A mysterious shore I’ve crashed into, and I am like the explorers who, centuries ago, started for India and hit the Caribbean instead.
He says something. I think he calls me sweetheart, and there are birds, he says, something about birds in the distance. I don’t see any birds. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” he asks, and I say yes, because they probably are.
“The game’s on any minute,” he says.
“I know. We need to bet something on it.”
Neither of us move.
When I read about the explorers as a child I had been infuriated by their white man arrogance. How dare they call people Indians when they weren’t in India? I wrote a paper titled “The Big Mistake” and my teacher pinned it to the bulletin board with a bright red A. Maybe that’s where I first got the idea that being angry was the same as being smart. But I am older now and I feel some compassion for the explorers, crammed all those weeks into their airless little ships, half crazed with scurvy and thirst, so disoriented by their long journey that of course they would think they were in India. Of course they would call things whatever they wanted them to be. Gerry and I set sail intending to find Friendship with Sex, so I guess that is what we’ll name this new continent, no matter what it really is.
There are trees all around us, hiding our balcony from the others, making this a safe and somewhat private place to lie naked on a warm winter afternoon. I suppose that’s what he’s paying for—this luxury, this spaciousness, this illusion that we are in a high room with green walls, walls that have leaves and, apparently, birds. I could sit up and reach for my glasses but I’m not sure that would help. My vision is changing and the last time I went to my eye doctor she said I should consider bifocals. When I told her absolutely not, not yet, she just laughed and said okay then, I had a decision to make: Would I rather be able to see what’s close to me or what’s far away?
Chapter Twenty
When I get back from Miami there’s a call waiting on my machine from the gallery owner in Charleston. A couple of weeks ago, I’d sent her a picture of a pot with a new type of glazing I’d been working on and she says she liked it. The gallery owner is old, with a voice so thin that she is hard to understand on the phone. She always sounds as if she is breaking apart. But she has been my lucky angel on more occasions than one. She is the person who told Gerry how to find me.
I call her back and she says they’ll be resuming their gallery crawls in the new year and she wants several pots. Maybe thirty, she says, in her quivery voice, and for a moment I think I haven’t heard her correctly. It is an astounding order for someone who works out of her garage and an astounding amount of work. We decide I’ll have the first ten to her by January 18. Ten more in February and the final ones in March. Once-a-month delivery seems like a good rhythm, she says, and I agree.
And then, just as we are about to hang up, she warbles to me, “Haven’t you forgotten something, my dear?”
“Oh,” I say, ashamed of myself. “Thank you. Thank you so much, Mrs. Chapman.”
“No, dear,” she says. “The price.”
“I can do them for a hundred per.” I don’t know why I say it. It just blurts out. I’ve never sold a pot for a hundred dollars in my life. She hesitates for probably no more than a few seconds and I think I’ve been greedy, that I’m getting ready to be scolded and reminded of what a favor she’s doing me. Then she says, “I believe that will be just fine.”
I spend the afternoon in a frenzy. I place the pot that I photographed on my kneading table and look at it from every angle. The shape and color are good but the one thing I’m not sure about is the texture. It’s a little too rough, not rough enough to show up in a picture, but perhaps unpleasant to the touch, and we can’t have that when Mrs. Chapman is paying a hundred per. She’ll probably mark them in the gallery for twice that. Maybe I should cut down on the grout. I call Kelly and ask her to pick up Tory after school. I get on the phone and order more clay and then I haul what I do have—maybe twenty pounds—out of the bin and over to the table.
There is something mindless about the kneading and the cutting process and usually this is where I lose myself. Usually there is something in the swollen malleable mass that rises between my fingers that cuts off my mind and sends me back into a sort of God. But today is different. I work the clay but it does not work me. My mind is spinning with logistics. To get ten good ones I’ll have to make fifteen, and it takes at least ten hours of work on each pot, and it’s December, the busiest month of the year. Not to mention that I told Lynn I’d help her paint the Sunday school rooms. Maybe I should try and get out of that.
At some point the door from the kitchen opens and Phil says, mildly, “You’re working late.”
“You’re not going to believe this. I got a commission. Mrs. Chapman in Charleston wants thirty pots.” And then, God knows why, but I can’t seem to stop myself from saying this next part. “She’s paying me a hundred dollars apiece.”
“Wow,” says Phil. “That’s thirty thousand dollars.”
“No. No, it’s three thousand dollars.”
“Well, that’s still good. I’m guessing we’re picking up supper.”
“That’s a funny mistake.”
“You know I’ve never been good with zeroes. You want Thai?”
“Thai’s okay.” I stand up. My back is hurting and I realize I have been in this same position, hunched over, for hours. “Can you swing by and get Tory while you’re out? She’s at Kelly’s.”
He nods and heads toward his parked car. “One green curry and one yellow?”
“Fine.” I cut through the clay, looking for airholes. They’re small but treacherous. This mound seems well kneaded, but you can never be sure. I cut through it from another angle, and then another. “Phil?”
He turns back. “Yeah?”
“I need you to say you’re proud of me.”
He hesitates, just long enough that I know he’s getting ready to ask me if I’m proud of him whenever he finishes a root canal. He could point out that I don’t burst into applause every time he drags home $3,000, or $30,000 for that matter. It would be a fair point to make.
But instead he just opens the car door.
“Of course
I’m proud of you,” he says.
I’m proud of myself. I’ve let something go and Phil and I have reached a state of equilibrium.”
Lynn is throwing toys into a black Hefty bag. “What did you let go of?”
“I don’t know. But whatever I lost, evidently it wasn’t necessary. We do better when there’s less of me there.”
“Do you think it would work to run everything through the dishwasher?”
“Yeah. Most of them are plastic. I wonder how long it’s been since anyone sterilized this stuff.”
“My guess would be… never.” Lynn pulls the drawstring on one bag and gets out another. “And you’re okay with all this?”
“Jeff says that you can’t expect one man to give you everything you need.”
“Jeff said that?”
“Well, I mean everybody says that. It’s standard marriage counseling advice. You accept a man for what he is and then you find ways to fill in the gaps. Like you used to run.”
“And you saw how well that worked out.” Lynn pauses, takes the headband out of her hair and shakes it. I have brought her a Christmas gift and it lies unopened on the small table that’s here in the toddler room. There’s a pair of stretchy gloves inside—navy and gray herringbone, a pattern that struck me as sophisticated and subtle, right for Lynn. “You know,” she says, “when I was first voted onto the church council, Phil and I got there early one night… it was just us and he started talking about you. I can’t remember what story he was telling, but at the end he said, ‘Elyse is a pistol.’ And he sounded proud.”
I can’t picture Phil saying that, but okay. Lynn has cleaned off the shelves and is beginning to wipe them down with disinfectant. She’s frowning, or maybe it’s just the fumes.
“Do you know what Andy told me the day he left? He said part of me was missing.”
