Martin and she had quickly formed a tighter bond, one based on incredulity at the fact of their daily tasks—disbelief that they were meant to merely man computers, waiting for data, feeling as suffocated as those at battle stations in wartime submarines but nowhere near as necessary (Martin had said this; he’d been a history major). The two were nearly stunned by the idea of doing this all day, unnerved enough that they couldn’t even laugh about it, until, one night on the way home, after they’d each had two beers apiece at a nearby bar, they couldn’t stop laughing.
Even here, the torpor of the job had taken its toll, sapped their spirits; they hadn’t actively chosen the bar, Martin had just caravanned behind her car until Isabel shrugged, put on her turn signal, and he had followed. In the same sleepwalking way, they had gone to her place afterwards, since he still lived with roommates, one of whom slept out in the open, on the living room couch.
They had watched an animated movie for a while, one that both had seen several times without even liking. Then, neither being the aggressor, they simply moved closer on the couch like commuters making room for others on a crowded subway car, freeze-framed the film, and got close enough to touch.
Martin’s hands had skittered over her like bats, and she had darted her tongue into his mouth as if trying to reach something under a couch where it had not been vacuumed for years. While each had made the least amount of effort possible, both became aroused—it had been ages for Isabel, after all, and she heard Martin moan in what sounded like agreement when she rubbed his half-erection, her wrist pressed somewhat painfully against the clump of keys in the right front pocket beside it.
Yet by the time she’d returned hopefully from the bathroom—carrying a condom, which she’d taken discreetly from a bowl of free ones in a progressive bookstore downtown—wearing only her panties but still holding against her the T-shirt she’d taken off, self-conscious as ever about her size, she found that Martin was already pulling back on the pants he’d partially yanked down and was reaching again for the remote.
He gave no explanation (later, she understood he’d been too embarrassed, or at least too unhappy with himself to speak), and at the moment she blamed herself, and then him, and then herself again, and sat there feeling strange, still gripping the unwrapped condom with her right hand and the T-shirt with her left as he began the movie again from the place where they’d stopped it.
While they watched—or while he did, and she stared into a middle distance, wondering if she was blushing (it seemed like it) and, if so, whether if it was from anger or embarrassment or both—without a word or muting the movie, Martin turned and began touching her again, fingering her through the side of her underwear and occasionally moving her T-shirt away to inexpertly but intently suck her nipple. He did it, she thought later, out of guilt and obligation, or as a kind of good form and fair play (he was a WASP after all; he had said so over drinks, though he had gone to school on a scholarship), or from an excitement that (and here she began to feel compassion for him and not contempt) he was unable to fully feel but only witness and acknowledge, the way one smells food that one doesn’t actually crave but understands others eating. Why ever he was doing it, he made Isabel come, a bit more intensely than she usually made herself in the evenings, her experience diminished somewhat by the accompanying sound of a song sung by cartoon flounders in the movie, along with which she suspected Martin was quietly humming, though it might have been more of the agreeing-with moaning he had done before.
Afterward, he pulled away, leaving her to readjust her underwear and fully pull on her shirt. The fact that he had even done it after appearing impotent (because he lacked strong enough blood circulation or didn’t desire her in that way or didn’t eat enough—he had only nibbled at the nachos in the bar, while she ate almost all of them—or was, well, ill) somewhat endeared him to her, and she placed an elbow upon his shoulder, as if they were players on a high school soccer team or something, as they watched to the end the movie they still thought mediocre.
As the credits rolled—and Martin finally pressed mute—Isabel thought she should say something to comfort him, in case he felt at fault.
“I bet you’ve had more exciting evenings,” she said to take the rap, though she knew—or at least suspected—she was unworthy of such punishment, a tiny residual doubt notwithstanding.
“Oh, hey,” Martin said, after a long and tortured pause, direct expression clearly—along with other kinds of human interactions—an ongoing and excruciating trial for him. “It’s you who had to . . . I mean, I hadn’t been. . . .” and that was the best he could do to grab back the ball of blame.
Then there was an even longer pause before, not able to look at her, he asked, “When was the first time you—you did it?”
Isabel was surprised, even taken aback, by his inquiry. For a second, she didn’t answer. He took her silence as a rebuke and said, “Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have. . . .”
But that he had had the energy to ask her anything, had taken an initiative that wasn’t to make up for a failing (as when he’d touched her) or express a negative emotion (as, at work, when he had once “mistakenly” deleted incoming data), so impressed her that she felt obligated to reply, if only to encourage him to continue.
“It was, well, in high school,” she said, “at a boy I knew’s house.”
Slowly, he asked her another question about the encounter (which had been with Bailey Glynn, arts editor of the high school lit mag, The Long Island Epiphany), and then another, and each time she answered, because as she did so, she sensed a commitment from and curiosity in him that she had never seen and did not want to quash, uncomfortable as she was revealing details which up till now had been known only to Bailey and herself.
“He undid my bra, and then we thought we heard his parents pull into the driveway, but it wasn’t the case; strangely, that seemed to make him harder, and—”
“What did you do then?”
She told him about her first fumbling yet erotic experience with fellatio, distancing herself from the event by pretending to describe a movie she had seen and, accordingly, embellishing it here and there, which both allowed her less unease and increased his avidity. The almost entranced quality of his arousal (his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open) grew more and more marked as she kept talking.
“And were you excited?”
“So excited.”
As she reached the peak of her story, Martin began to undo his pants with great haste, as if he simply could not wait a moment longer. She was surprised by the strength and size of his erection now, as if he were another person, had a whole other body, when she talked to him like this. Before he could touch his penis she did, and before she could touch it more than once he came, so loudly and powerfully that he sounded as if he was in pain and had to place a hand on her arm to steady himself, as if he was afraid of what was happening, though this only made her excited and not concerned for him.
Afterward, Martin looked down and saw that his semen had shot the entire length of his bare leg and onto her couch, some of it even hitting the TV remote inches away. He said nothing, just rose to pull one, two, then three tissues from a nearby box and start to fastidiously clean up. Before he had finished, Isabel had tugged his hand toward her, pried the tissues loose from it, and placed it between her legs: he pushed three fingers inside her, and she held his hand there and came again, this time much more deeply and electrically than she had before—than she ever had, she later admitted only to herself.
Each briefly looked in the other’s eyes, aware that both were alive in ways that were unknown to other people in the office, and that neither would have known if neither had exposed—sacrificed—something (he pride, she privacy); that both had done things that night and been rewarded, in other words, the opposite of how they spent their time at work. Then they looked away, each secretly knowing what would happen next.
Isabel and Martin didn’t d
iscuss or arrange it: speaking to each other was not their strong suit (especially not his). Yet the next day, after staring immobile at information on a screen before pressing a button to distribute it, when no one was passing their door, she quietly asked him what else he wanted to know about her, and he answered her question with another question—“What was the next time you, etc.”—and she answered his question with an actual answer, and that made him ask another question with an urgency he showed about nothing else (had maybe never shown about anything else), and she answered again, his excitement exciting her (her power to excite him exciting her), until he nonchalantly placed the base of his palm quickly against the large lump that had grown below his belt, and she naughtily brushed it once or twice with her elbow and ended the exchange, Martin gasping and seeming almost lifted up in the air by the wild rush it afforded him. Then Isabel excused herself and went into the ladies’ room where she locked herself in a stall and made herself come, too, which happened almost instantly and left her so sweaty and aromatic that she realized her “natural” deodorant didn’t work and probably never had, she just never had known for she had never tested it with enough effort.
As weeks went on, they got the routine down to a science, knew when to stop if they heard sounds in the hall, when to swivel away from each other, when to start up again. One day, Martin stayed out sick with a cold and called her from home. This was physically easier for her—Isabel only had to eyeball the hall and not physically disengage from him if the coast wasn’t clear—yet it took some getting used to, it being more impersonal.
“What did he say about your tits?” he asked after she had quietly described an event.
“That he liked them.”
“That’s all?”
“That they were big. That I had nice ones.”
“Then what did he do?”
“He kissed around, then licked around and bit around my nipples. He wouldn’t suck them. He was tormenting me.”
“Did your nipples get hard?”
“So hard.”
“What did you do?”
“I begged him to suck them. And he said I’d have to wait.”
“Were you wet?”
“So wet.”
“What happened then?”
“He made me promise that I would swallow his come if he sucked my nipples.”
“And what did you do?”
“I promised that I would.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. Later.”
“I really want to hear about that.”
There was a brief pause on the other end of the line as she heard only Martin’s slow, slightly cold-congested breathing. Then, “I’ll call you back,” he said and hung up.
She made up the stories, of course, having long since exhausted her actual experiences, which she had fictionalized in the first place as to make them virtually unrecognizable. She saw herself as a kind of Scheherazade, though only vaguely aware of whom that was. When Isabel looked up the name online, she saw that the analogy wasn’t perfect but close enough to make her feel connected to an oral tradition, in a line of great raconteurs.
Yet after more weeks, this remained the only connection she could feel. Martin never stopped wanting to hear her “memories” (which she assumed he knew were padded with details picked up from porn films she saw online, actually had researched at home in her idle hours, the sites not being “safe for work,” and then made less mechanical and cold when she offered them up as her own), but this remained the extent of their physical relationship. Soon he was not requesting to do it after work anymore but only in the office, and didn’t reciprocate by touching her (for she, being shyer, refused to have that done in public and still insisted on going to the ladies’ room by herself, and then even stopped doing that). Isabel began to feel their actions were fading into another form of passivity—more work, in other words, a new and modern job, the pressing of a penis the same as that of a “send” button, etc.
It was around this time that their boss, Owen, requested her appearance in his office after five.
Isabel had spoken to Owen just two or three times—once when he assured her she hadn’t caused Rita’s heart attack; once when she rode the elevator with him after only he and not she had carried an umbrella in that morning’s thunderstorm, and she had tried to laugh off the water literally dripping from her hair and clothes and pooling on the marble floor of the car, and he had smiled, politely, seeming she thought repelled, and another time she couldn’t remember. He hadn’t even hired her; it had been an obese woman named Cybil in Human Resources.
So she had been startled when Owen poked his head in her and Martin’s office only a few minutes after Martin had excused himself to clean up in the men’s room. Owen had an open and expectant look, as if about to ask if she wanted anything at the store, he was making a run (“I’ll fly if you buy,” they used to say in college), but that couldn’t be it, of course.
When she walked to his office later, it was with trepidation—an instinctive reaction to being summoned by someone in authority, she thought—but she also had a flickering hope that she was about to be fired, though if the cause was her office adventures with Martin, that might turn out to be embarrassing, maybe even featured on the evening news, then splashed all over the Internet where her parents could see it.
When she sat opposite him, though, Owen didn’t mention Martin and only wanted her to do some special project on a freelance basis; he would understand if she were too busy.
“Busy?” She was unable to keep a tone of comic disbelief from her voice and was immediately sorry about it. “I mean, no, I don’t think so. All right. Thank you.”
Isabel needed the money, after all—and she tuned out when Owen explained about the mild tax complications that “freelance” would mean, “estimated” or whatever. She concentrated instead on looking at Owen, who was forty-two but whom she thought was either thirty-five or fifty. He had a boyish, snub-nosed face surrounded by greying hair, reminding her of a modern painting in a gilded frame from another century. He didn’t meet her eyes as he spoke, yet what he said couldn’t have been more simple, innocent, and non-incriminating. Was he avoiding something else of which he was ashamed? She didn’t know. She had walked in wondering why he’d chosen her and left convinced it could have been her or someone else; maybe he’d just stopped by her office after counting to ten.
When Isabel got home, there was a message on her machine from Martin. In it, he implied an interest in hearing her talk over the phone that night, having apparently enjoyed it when he’d been ill, unlike Isabel who’d had mixed feelings. Isabel meant to call him back, yet by the time she’d finished the assignment for Owen, it was midnight and too late. She’d completed the task in just one night, despite the several Owen had assumed it would take. Since it had been no more interesting than what she did at work—seemed more boring, actually, like spending a vacation in her home—Isabel was surprised by her diligence and went to sleep without comprehending it.
The next day, she politely demurred when Martin nodded suggestively at the empty hall during lunch hour. They had sometimes missed other opportunities—for instance, when they had had to attend day-long, company-wide meetings after which both confessed they had fantasized about doing it in front of the entire workforce, which had fuelled and made more exciting their next encounter. This was the first time Isabel had actually said or at least shaken her head no, and she could see the disappointment—which was deep—on Martin’s face. At day’s end, he waited for her to accompany him out, but Isabel simply said she would see him tomorrow.
“I’ll call you?” he said, or asked, as if unsure whether he would, or would be allowed to by her, it wasn’t clear which.
As soon as he was gone, Isabel walked quickly to Owen’s office, hoping he hadn’t left for the night. She carried the work she had done, which she had printed out and placed neatly in a folder. She could h
ave emailed it to him but wanted to deliver it in person, she didn’t know why.
“Well, well,” Owen said, impressed, using a way of talking that was older than his youngish face, as if his greying hair were talking or something—Isabel couldn’t express it coherently to herself. “Thank you. I had no idea you’d do it so. . . .”
Suddenly Owen couldn’t finish the sentence—and the final word was almost certainly “fast” or “quickly;” he appeared too appreciative and that made him too emotional. Or was it something else? For whatever reason, his eyes filled with tears.
Standing before his desk, Isabel didn’t know what to do. Had she somehow sensed this aspect of Owen—an instability—and complied with the job so quickly out of compassion? She was suddenly unaware of so much, though many things were presenting themselves. She only knew that something had been building in her, begun by her losing interest in—growing to resent really—Martin. Unintentionally, the older man had stepped into the spill of a searchlight Isabel had been shining around, and now she had stopped it; he had her full attention.
“May I close the door?” he asked, still choking up, and Isabel nodded, as if to say please do.
When he retook his seat, Owen again spoke without looking at her, but occasionally met her eyes and glanced away, testing new waters of trust.
“My wife,” he said, “I don’t—I don’t mean to put her down. She can’t help it. I know depression is a disease, that’s what the doctors say. I understand that. But she sleeps hours and hours a day—sometimes all day. I bring her books and newspapers—I brought her an easel with an expensive palette, for she used to paint. They all go unused. She’s taken every pill invented and none has worked for more than a week. What am I supposed to do? Nothing? That’s what it feels like she wants for me to do, not to leave her but to leave her be. How can I? She stays behind a closed door that seems as big as that space monolith in that movie where—oh, of course, you wouldn’t know it, you’re too young.”
The Family Unit and Other Fantasies Page 21
