Lying in Bed

by J. D. Landis

  All her words were lost in the great scream of pleasure that burst from her throat and the mist of joy that lacquered her purple eyes and the thrashing of her body and rippling of her legs and the cadenzaed movement of her fingers fast upon her glistening pudendum.

  I thought she might fly from the bed and wanted nothing more than to be able to catch her and hold her in my arms and feel her shudders through my bones and let my body damp her shivering.

  But slowly, by herself, she began to come to rest, until finally she turned her hands palms-up upon her thighs and let her head fall back upon the pillows so she was staring straight up at the ceiling. She smiled contentedly and purred softly and then slowly brought her chin down until she was able to look at me again.

  I waited for her to say something. But she just lay there, looking at me. And I remembered what she had said about words failing her, words failing her after she had had sex, and I had to admit that this unusual way of having sex was certainly having sex nonetheless.

  So I let her lie there quietly and watched the rise and fall of the bifurcated muscles beneath the tight skin of her chest and waited for her to become ready to say something. It was enough for me just to sense her in all her muliebrity, the roundness of her parts, the fullness of her satisfaction, the sound of the air passing her full lips, the talcumed smell of her genitals, which I noticed was new to me in the absence of the odor of the rubber or latex or whatever it was in which I had so fastidiously invaginated myself on the one occasion I had been with a woman. The one other occasion.

  Finally, she spoke, her voice hoarse at first.

  “That was wonderful. Not an epiphany maybe, but wonderful. Thank you.”

  I must have looked at her questioningly.

  “For watching,” she explained. “It was better with you watching. I hope you didn’t mind.”

  I shook my head. “Will you tell me now why you numbed your fingers.”

  She sat up and looked at me with kind forbearance. “You still don’t know?”

  Now I was forced to shake my head in ignorance..

  “What happens when something’s numb?” she asked.

  “You stop feeling.”

  She clapped her hands gaily and said, “Exactly! You stop feeling. So when you numb your fingers, and you touch yourself, down here, I mean, when I make myself come, it’s the best of both worlds.”

  “Both what worlds? What both worlds?” I didn’t know how to say it.

  “Both worlds.” Impatiently she raised her hands and held them apart, cupped as if each contained a small globe. “The world of other people”—she shook one hand—“and the world of yourself”—and now she shook the other hand.

  As my gaze went from one hand to the other, she brought them together over her body and let the fingers of one intertwine with the fingers of the other. I felt she had explained the universe.

  “Would you like to try it?”

  I peered over the corner of the mattress at her beautiful vagina, sumptuously wet and swollen, veiled now with tiny ringlets of her pubic hair.

  She caught me staring between her legs and said, “Not me, silly. Yourself.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly …” I stood up like a man who’s been summoned from a room and doesn’t know why.

  “Take off your clothes and sit down on the floor the way I did. On your hands. And when you can’t feel anything in them, come up here on the bed. Go ahead—do it. And start with those ridiculous shoes.”

  For a moment, I wished I had been summoned from the room. I think I looked around for someone who might rescue me. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I walked to the open door to remove the stop and was about to kick it away with one of my ridiculous shoes when she said, “Leave it open. It’s more exciting when you think someone is watching.”

  My hand was on the door. “Please. I’m too private. I don’t want to pretend anyone is watching.”

  I could see her try not to laugh. I could see, and hear, her fail. But at least it was a kindly laugh at my finical youngfartness. “You won’t have to pretend. I’ll be watching. So let me pretend someone’s watching me watching you. Now leave the door open and come back here. Get undressed. Stand there where I can see you.”

  She pointed toward the edge of the beautiful old rug where she had sat before me on her hands. I followed her finger.

  “The shoes,” she said.

  To steady myself, I held onto the stern of the bed and removed one shoe, one sock, then the other shoe and the other sock.

  “Jacket … Tie … Shirt …”

  The buttons in my fingers were like huge coins with which I was clumsily trying to do tricks to impress my audience.

  “Undershirt. I didn’t know men still wore undershirts. None of the men I—”

  “They probably don’t.” I pulled the white, sleeveless shirt up over my head as I always did by grasping its hem.

  “Very sexy. You look like a Calvin Klein ad. I never thought you’d have muscles like that. Do you work out?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t believe it. Where did you get that build?”

  “Inherited.”

  “Like the money.”

  “Like the money,” I acknowledged. “I’m a paradigm of bestowal.” I chuckled at realizing how true that was.

  “I’m happy to see you loosening up. Now the pants.”

  I was glad that my belt was fastened, as always, in the last of its five holes. I had never before taken pleasure in this sign of my body’s unchanging shape. It was the first manifestation of vanity, at least in the physical realm, I had ever noticed in myself.

  The buttons of the pants came undone more smoothly than had those of my shirt.

  “The fly.”

  The fly.

  “I love that sound,” she said. “Someone should make a recording of nothing but flies being unzipped. I’ll bet it would sell better than waterfalls and thunderstorms and whale songs. Better than white noise, even.”

  “Does it bring back memories?”

  My question seemed to startle her. It certainly startled me. If this was sexual bantering—and I was not sure it was—it was my very first experience with that particular kind of verbal interchange.

  “A flood,” she answered finally.

  I pictured it, a flood of men, literally a cascade of naked male bodies tumbling in clear waves upon this beautiful small woman sitting naked in this pinkish-yellow light and she opening her legs for each of them as he flew into her and then was washed away.

  “Where do I fit in?” I asked, naïvely unaware of my play on words but then proud of it when she answered, “Who says you’re going to get in?” She pointed at my crotch and waved her finger up and down. “Underpants. Or whatever you call those things.”

  “Boxers.”

  “And I see they’re putting up a good fight.”

  It was true. An erection—mine, apparently, which I supposed I’d had so long it had come to feel natural—kept my undershorts pinned against my waist. I found that instead of pulling these pants down, as I normally did without a thought, I had to lift them by their elastic up and over the head of my penis, which stared up at me as I stared down at it.

  “Look at you.”

  It was then I realized, with some embarrassment, that that was precisely what I had been doing.

  “I’ve never imagined a cock like that. Put your hand on it.”

  It was her hand I wanted on it, but I didn’t know how to ask for that. I did notice, however, that I was bending lordotically so that my loins would be pushed toward her, like something Clara would one day give me out of James Gillray’s “Presentation of the Mahometan Credentials.” Just touch me, I wanted to say. I believe I would have given my life just to have her touch me.

  She seemed to miss nothing. “Put your hand on it.”

  I put my hand on it.

  “Around it, you idiot.”

  I moved it from my fingertips into my palm.r />
  We were like two children, I suppose, though such games had never been part of my childhood, exploring one another’s body with such innocence that we did not even permit ourselves to touch on the other what was crying out to be touched.

  I bent at the knees and sank to the floor and placed my hands beneath me and sat on them. My penis remained unabatedly erect so that I must have looked to her like the sort of ancient Mochica pitcher of which she would later bestow upon me a reproduction, whose container was the seated body of a man and the spout his upright member.

  As I sat there waiting to lose all feeling in my hands, and she sat above me on the mattress with her legs now crossed, she said, “So tell me more. Tell me why all of a sudden you started to talk to me when you hadn’t talked to anyone for a year or whatever. It couldn’t be because you knew you were going to end up naked with me here watching each other have sex with ourselves.” On the one hand, I found the notion that I might actually have anticipated this so outlandish that I smirked, and on the other hand I found her words for what we were doing here so intricately confusing and at the same time glaringly direct that I gasped.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked, though she had already joined in the levity with at least an indulgent smile.

  “It’s just that I’m not in the habit of meeting women and having them take me home with them, or having me take them home with me, or having them take me home to my home with them, which I guess is what happened here.” Then I couldn’t help asking. “Are you?”

  “I’m used to everything,” she answered, hiding nothing, which I was beginning to realize, putting aside the mystery of her diary, was the way she was and was the way she was going to be, and if I wanted to be with her, as if it were a thing already accomplished, as if it were what my future held, then I would have to get used to it, her directness, as I would have to get used to the idea that she had indeed been flooded by an endless stream of men, while I had lived, to express it epizeuxistically, as we ascetic rhetoricians would say, a dry, dry life.

  “I want to know everything” I said, convinced at that moment, as at this moment, that it was, and is, so.

  “That’s what you think,” she replied, which I found made me want to know her and her secrets all the more. And I certainly knew, though she didn’t know I knew, which was perhaps my only advantage over her, where to find them.

  “I talked to you because I found your diary,” I said.

  “Did you read it?”

  “You asked me that earlier.”

  “If you couldn’t read it, how did you know where to find me?”

  “From the quilting you put on the cover of the book. I tracked you down.”

  “So why didn’t you just hand the thing to me? Why did you talk to me?”

  “Because of your handwriting.”

  “You thought I was brain damaged after all.” She put her hand on her head and moved it into her hair. I watched as it went through her fingers like some soft, uncut grass I had seen stirring one night in the wind beyond the Festspielhaus in Salzburg and have never forgotten because of the K. 573 played there that night. “Is that how you like your women?”

  “I don’t have any women,” I confessed, unafraid of being as direct with her as she was being with me and convinced that she would find me all the more interesting for my being as artricial as a newborn soul, which of course proved me sublimely mantic. “When I saw your handwriting, I thought it was like my not talking. A form of silence. And at the same time so mangled that it shows a healthy disrespect for the word. Just like me. And nobody could hear what I was saying. We’re both imprisoned in the freedom of our privacy.”

  “So you really don’t think I’m dysgraphic.”

  “I know enough about chirography to know you’re not dysgraphic,” I announced like a surgeon.

  She shook her head. “Thank God your cock’s as long as some of the words you use.”

  As I fought the urge to cover myself and kept my pinned-and-needled hands beneath me, I said, “You write in a kind of shorthand. A private shorthand. That’s what almost all shorthand is—a private form of written speech. It goes back to the Greeks—Xenophon used shorthand to transcribe the memoirs of Socrates. And later the Romans—Tiro devised his own system so he could take down the speeches of Cicero. That’s how I learned about it, because one can’t study rhetoric without studying Cicero, without reading De Oratore. And then, there was a time, in the Middle Ages, when shorthand disappeared, because it was believed to be a code used by witches.”

  “That explains it!”

  “You admit it’s a code?”

  “Of course it’s a code. That’s why I didn’t care when I lost that book. I knew no one would be able to read it. Except of course I do want someone to be able to read it. I decided I would marry the first man who could read it. He would be the only one to know all my secrets.”

  Did she know I could read it? Was she playing with me? I remembered how, back in her shop, she had seemed disappointed that I couldn’t read it. This was beyond me, this playing with knowledge between man and woman. What are we supposed to know of one another? And what are we supposed to want our beloved to know?

  I knew I was going to marry her, or to try. I had known it even before she mentioned her little fairy-tale method of choosing her husband. But did she know she was going to marry me? Did she know I had cracked her code?

  “Cinderella,” I said.

  “My foot,” she quipped and moved one leg off the bed and brought it toward my penis and held her cyprian toes so close to the skin that I could feel their warmth.

  “How are your hands?”

  My hands were no longer mine.

  She withdrew her foot and waved me toward her. “Come up here now.”

  I obeyed and noticed how careful she was not to allow us to touch. Still seated, she moved to the other side of the bed and spread out her hands to indicate that I lie where she had herself lain.

  My hands might as well have been someone else’s, particularly when I followed her eyes and grasped my penis in one hand and then did as she motioned with her head and began to stroke myself. When I closed my own eyes I could imagine it was her hand upon me, and I did. For the first of what would become countless times, I imagined my Clara in the act of love.

  “That’s so beautiful,” she whispered. “Thank you for letting me watch.”

  “I’ve never done this before,” I managed to mutter.

  “Done what?”

  I didn’t know what to call it. “This.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve never masturbated,” I said.

  “Neither have I.”

  As the feeling returned to the hand on myself, I brought my other hand out from under my buttock.

  “Open your eyes,” she said. “Look at me.”

  I looked into her eyes looking at my hand and tried even to see the reflection of myself in them.

  “Your veins are like the veins in your hand,” she said. “And look, I see little drops of come. Wet yourself with it. Go ahead. Pretend you’re inside me. I’m still so wet. Go ahead. Do it.”

  I had never heard talk like this before. It was so simple and direct but also seemed removed from reality. I could not imagine what it would sound like in the world. But where I was now, it was angelic.

  I found the semen coating the crown of my penis and rubbed it around on my palm and brought my still senseless hand back down onto the shaft and grasped myself as I had never had occasion to before and moved my hand heavenward and hellward until just as the feeling began to return to my hand and I became aware of the swelling and even greater tightening of the organ within it, my head seemed to burst. She said, “Now, darling. Now, darling.” My life flew out of me with the dehiscence of my seed and flew into me through my eyes on her eyes. Seemingly endless white ribbons streamed out of me to adorn her lips and chin and neck and then seeped slowly down the shadow between her breasts, snaky sweet ylem on gravity’s paradisiacal co
urse.

  I could hear my cries of pleasure merge with her delighted yelps. We fell silent together, filling the room only with the sound of our breath.

  I wanted to touch her, hold her, but when I reached for her, she motioned my hand away and said, “Not yet.” Then, when she seemed confident I wouldn’t grab her, she leaned toward me and asked, “What’s your name? Aside from Chambers, I mean. I’m not going to call you Mr. Chambers, like the elevator operator, though you are a kind of mister, aren’t you? Mr. Chambers here in his chambers, his many chambers, but I can’t call you Mr. Chambers now that I’ve seen your cock and you’ve come into my face. So tell me, what’s your name?”

  She was right. How could she not know my name? Is this what comes from the habit of long silence? I speak, yet I remain a stranger. And so is she.

  But I was thrilled by her having said, “I’m not going to call you Mr. Chambers,” because that meant she was planning to call me something, that we would talk again, meet again presumably, that she had some reason to believe she would address me again. Of such small tokens, I was learning, is love sustained and fear put to rest.

  The only woman I had ever loved, or believed I could come to love if love could not be born from one such afternoon and evening as this, was not going to dump me.

  “You know my name,” I answered. “You said it earlier in your shop. That’s one of those coincidences I mentioned to you there.”

  She put her finger childishly on her wanton lower lip. “I don’t remember.”

  “Johnny, is what you said. No one’s ever called me that. I’m hardly a Johnny. But it’s close enough. My name is John.”

  She shook her head and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a laugh and bent forward and put her hand on my shoulder. It was a conciliatory rather than romantic gesture. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t being psychic. I’m not a witch, really. It’s just another code, I suppose. I call all men Johnny. As a group, I mean. Men I don’t know. The way some men call other men Jim or something, or the way men used to call all women Sister. So it was just a coincidence. Believe it or not, I’ve never actually known a man named John before. Or Johnny, even. And that’s what I’m going to call you: Johnny. My Johnny.”