And Go Like This

by John Crowley

  These last years they’d mostly given up on sex; it had too often ended in nothing but her discomfort and his discouragement, and they’d rarely felt the compulsion to set the whole float in motion. Stan thought that she’d mostly risen to it out of a willingness to meet his need, but if that were chiefly Stan’s reason too—to meet what he thought was her need—then it didn’t have much of a basis. That was sad, but in a way seemed less dreadful than a younger Stan would have felt it should be. It was a lack. Sometimes Stan felt guilty that he didn’t feel as bad about it as he should have; felt guilty when he found himself believing that there were more important things in a marriage, in their marriage. He wondered if Terry felt the same way. It was hard to bring up.

  It was also true, and seemed sweet but strange, that since this unspoken truce or abatement, they had come to lie more often in one another’s arms: front to back, as now; or her head on his breast, leg over his, warm breath on him. More kisses too. He slept sometimes wrapped around her; in former days he’d never believed he could sleep in such a way, like some god and nymph in a painting, but it turned out he could. As now he did, dreaming.

  “Pheromones,” Harry Watroba told him the next day.

  Stan had been trying to remember the name for those chemicals that aren’t smells but come in through your nose, or your sense of smell, that cause emotional reactions. Aggression. Arousal. Harry knew the word: words were, as he said, his business.

  “That’s it,” said Stan. “Pheromones.”

  Stan was selling Harry’s house lot, which was not far from Stan’s house in the hills. Harry’s house had recently burned beyond salvation, a sudden fire that was due (the fire chief told Stan, for his information, since he might in his business have occasion to warn homeowners) to old paint cans and thinner collected in the basement. The land should be worth quite a bit, but even after the remains of the house were removed there hung over it a sad and maybe repellent air of ruination and loss that kept even cool-hearted bargain-hunters from making an offer that Harry and his wife—now ex-wife, Stan was given to know—could accept. Now and then Stan ran into Harry in town, as he had this afternoon at the ice-cream shop, and caught him up on progress, if any, or just talked. Harry knew a lot of odd things, not just words, and Stan enjoyed listening.

  “In India,” Harry said, “there’s a kind of firefly that fills the trees at a certain season. Of course you know that fireflies flash in order to attract females.”

  “Glow little glow-worm,” Stan said.

  “These fireflies all flashing on and off. Then as the pheromones connect, this is hard to believe, they begin to synchronize. More and more, until all the fireflies in one tree, in two trees, a line of trees, all flash at once, like caution lights. On. Off. On. Off.”

  “Insects,” Stan said. The hairy antennae of moths are for picking up pheromones: he remembered that.

  “Well how about this. Did you know—it’s a well-attested fact—that women in a girl’s dormitory, say at college, crowded in together, will gradually synchronize their periods?”

  “Really.”

  “What could it be but pheromones, chemical triggers?”

  Harry dabbed his moustache with a paper napkin. He’d ordered a root-beer float and was addressing it with a kind of complex interaction that took into account its impressive size and his own slight one, wielding spoon, straw, and napkin in turn like a matador with cape and sword. Around them the kids from the local high school swarmed from table to table, in a pattern like the dancing of bees, expressive probably of impulses and hierarchies Stan would never know. Even when he’d been one himself he hadn’t been aware much of such things, and these anyway were beings of a different order than those he’d known then. This one, young breasts hiked up by a bra that maybe was like one from his youth but quite clearly on show, straps visible on her brown shoulders; her tummy already brown too, and the bones of her hips rising out of her low-slung pants. Life’s a beach, the bumper stickers said; he guessed they were dressing for it. He looked away. Harry hadn’t.

  “Harry,” said Stan. “Don’t do that. They’ll catch you.”

  “Right,” said Harry, and returned to his float. He appeared not to feel reprimanded. “But really. She’s chosen to dress that way. What’s she expect?”

  “Well, they’re not dressing that way for you,” Stan said laughing. “Not for some dirty old man.”

  “You’re right,” said Harry mildly. “Somehow I can’t help it. I feel compelled. I feel a sense of loss if I turn to look at one passing me in the street and find she’s gone, got away, turned a corner or whatever. One gone forever.”

  “One? One what?”

  “Oh, you know. A missed opportunity to mount.”

  Stan laughed.

  “Just doing my job,” Harry said.

  “Your job?”

  “As a male. Listen, if we male mammals didn’t think about sex almost all the time, and if our senses weren’t preternaturally attuned to the nubiles, well, think about it. We wouldn’t be here at all. We humans.”

  “But Harry, you’re not mounting them,” Stan said. Harry was a man of Stan’s own age, or older. “Are you?”

  “Of course not. I don’t even dream of trying. Still.” He drank, the straw rattling the last of the creamy liquid at the bottom of the glass. “I feel compelled to assess. Add them up. I don’t know—I think it’s like counting coup.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Plains Indians,” said Harry, adopting the manner of a kindly teacher, “thought the height of bravery was to encounter an enemy, and instead of killing him to ride up close enough to give him a little tap with this special stick. The other guy was out then, out like in a game, humiliated, defeated. But no harm done. He was counted. See?”

  Stan sort of didn’t. He didn’t think as Harry did, though Harry wasn’t the only man among his acquaintance whose eyes tracked the passing scene that way. Yet just now, today, here in this shop, he felt moved: moved not in the sense of touched or affected but in the sense of being transported or carried. Carried along. He remembered what it had felt like when he was a boy, chivvied and pushed around by ardent feeling—“remembered” it in the somatic way of feeling it newly here and now. Maybe it was the pheromones, the massed pheromones of all these nubiles. Harry’d told him that “nubile”only meant “of marriageable age,” but wouldn’t that mean “putting out pheromones” too?

  Why today so strongly? Just spring, he guessed.

  That night Terry wanted to have the bedroom window open, though Stan thought it would be too cold by the wee hours; she insisted. When he woke later on in the usual way, he lay a long time and felt and listened: all those night noises, birds and animals and cars passing and the little river rushing through the town, that hadn’t been heard in here for a long time.

  Terry moved beside him in wakefulness too. He took her hand, turned his head toward hers on her pillow; she turned to him, her face too dark to read.

  “The isle is full of noises,” she said. “Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”

  Stan at first heard “the aisle is full of noises,” and ruminated a while to make it come out right. “What’s that? Shakespeare?”

  She didn’t answer, only swept aside the blankets and rolled herself against his cool flesh. She kissed him, he her. Then in sudden wondrous certainty he enfolded her, and she opened her legs to admit him. It was so easy and unimpeded that he might have thought of it as dreamlike, like his dream of the night before, except that it was entirely actual, and Stan wasn’t thinking; within minutes they were both crying aloud, barking almost, clinging to each other as to a life-preserver, or two drowners each mistaking the other for a life-saver. It didn’t last long.

  For a time they lay damp and embracing, panting a little. Stan laughed. He hadn’t laughed after sex in years.

  “God,” Terry brea
thed. “God, I thought you’d never.”

  “What. What.”

  “I just thought you’d never, never get.” She swallowed, overwhelmed, full of liquid—he could hear it. Never get it? Never get over it? Around to it? Never get it up? How long had she been waiting, knowing that she was waiting and knowing he didn’t know? For a long while she wouldn’t release him. Outside the bugs and beasts seemed to have fallen silent, shocked, but Stan could hear—returning him to the world—the far-off rattle and wail, far down in the valley, of the only night train.

  When morning came they awoke and almost without a word started again, as though it was a thing they did, night and day, morning and evening.

  “Is it these medications?” Stan asked her afterward.

  “Well,” she said. She looked . . . he wouldn’t have said “radiant” because that was just too, too what. But still. “It’s what she said, the doctor, that it would help with, you know, the lubrication.”

  “A well-oiled machine,” Stan ventured.

  “Well, not just that though,” she said. “More than that.”

  “You mean, they’re doing more than that?”

  “I guess.”

  “Pheromones,” Stan said. “I think you’re putting out like clouds of pheromones.”

  “What,” she said, raising herself on an elbow. “You mean you wouldn’t want to just on your own?”

  “Well, it’s part of wanting to. Isn’t it? Putting out the signals. Why people do and don’t. If you want to, I want to, and vice versa at the same time.” That, Stan thought, if true, was what Harry Watroba had left out: how men too put out the signals, and how theirs work or don’t work on the women. If true. “A feedback loop,” he said.

  Terry laughed a little, indulgently, seeming to be of a mind to dispute all that but not caring to make the effort, not important, and lay back on the pillow. “Stan, if pheromones could do it, I’m awash in them all day at school. Ninth graders. Industrial strength. You can actually smell them.”

  “You can’t, really.” Stan had looked them up on Ask Jeeves. “They come in through your nose, but you can’t really smell them as a smell.”

  “You go into my lunchroom,” Terry said. “The gym when there’s a dance. Or a game. It’s like a wall.” She put her hands behind her head. “I have to get up,” she said, and fell asleep.

  That night, again. And though he warned her laughing not to expect much, they managed, three in a row she said, gleeful, triumphant even, something he hadn’t done for thirty years: lying loose-limbed grinning and feeling that hot strain of fine exertion as in days gone by, maybe he ought to watch it though at his age. His father had once told him that every orgasm shortened your life. He’d died at ninety.

  That triple play was never repeated, but the medical miracle, if that’s what it was, ran on unabated, May into June. If they bustled out of bed in the morning without locking gazes, embarrassed or confused at the new abundance, they’d find themselves at cocktail hour grappling on the couch and talking dirty. His dreams were filled with lush gardens where dewy infants played, glamorous hotels full of sophisticates who swapped teasing jokes with him in grand salons. After some more tests Terry was switched by the doctor to a patch-and-creme combo, lessening the dose, and they waited to see what effect this would have, but it seemed to have none, to subtract nothing. They laughed about her youthful re-blooming, like a nature film run backward. She cried a lot too, “tears, idle tears,” she didn’t know why, she smiled while she cried, as though leaking more than weeping.

  It was exciting and challenging, all he could say clearly about it, reaching for words he might have used at his old job to describe the prospects of a position to a new hire. Hilarious even, to be thrust again into the ninth-grade can’t-wait mode, holding hands at the supermarket and making out in the car parked in front of a house awaiting them as dinner guests. But while Terry re-bloomed, Stan remained what he was. It began to happen that they’d begin all right, but then get somehow out of synch, moving at odds like two cars in a thriller trying to shunt each other off the nighttime road; or he’d find himself at a loss, straining and tense, a tug struggling to turn a barge. Surely he had once known how to please her, he thought she’d liked what he did, what they did, was grateful even he seemed to remember, as grateful as he was to her. He could remember that she’d liked it, but maybe he couldn’t remember now what it was. Certain nights or mornings he was made to re-experience another part of the old days: the engine failing, the movie stuttering to a stop and going dark, the silence in the balled-up sheets.

  “I guess I just can’t do it that often,” he said to her. He remembered the rule for these moments, you never said I’m sorry. He was breathing a bit hard, was that okay? He put his hand to his heart. She was smiling, not altogether kindly. Hot and humid today, it looked like.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked. Another thing you weren’t supposed to say.

  “It’s my age, Terry. It’s nothing about you. Nothing about wanting to or not wanting to.”

  “You should just relax. You get upright, I mean uptight.” She yawned.

  “I’m not uptight. I’m an antique.”

  “Oh, you’re not an antique yet, Stan,” Terry said. “You’re still just a Collectible.”

  “Anyway I don’t have the whatever,” Stan said. “Or anyway not as much of it.”

  “Well,” she said. “Come here a minute.” And patted the place beside her on the messy bed.

  Since so much of his work had to be done on Sundays, Stan had elected to give himself Wednesdays, or at least Wednesday afternoons, off. By Wednesday most people have stopped their Sunday-paper dreaming about houses, and not yet started on the new weekend’s possibilities. It didn’t always work out for him, but on this Wednesday nobody called that he wasn’t able to put off. By three he was able to toss his old and rather disreputable canvas bag of clubs in the truck and go out to the country club, as free as a retiree or a dentist to hit the fairways on a weekday afternoon.

  Though he had gone away for some years in the long search to find or build a life that would please his first wife, Stan had been born and grown up in the Hills and along the rivers that ran among them. At the little country club, not so much club now as public amenity open to all, Stan had learned to play by caddying for his father, watching and learning, and the game of golf had retained from those days a kind of educational quality, involving the passing on of skills and the continuance of rituals; even now Stan, when reaching the bubbler on the eighth tee and swallowing water gratefully, couldn’t help wiping his chin with the back of his hand and saying Ah! Adam’s ale!—as his father always had done just there.

  He’d just as soon have played nine holes by himself, but as he was teeing up at the first, his doctor appeared beside him, having finished nine and lost his partner, and he joined Stan for a second nine. Stan liked doing well at games but was profoundly uncompetitive; he usually went for Personal Best, which in practice meant not paying a lot of attention to the score. Today, though, an unusual intensity of feeling about the game grew up in him by the third hole, a flame of need to win. Gripping his driver, his chin out, he eyed the girt doctor, bald dome already tanned (Florida, no doubt) at the tee, impatient for his own turn to dig fiercely into the ball. Freshly angry at his irremediable slice. Dr. Beha won handily. The day stayed glorious.

  “So can you explain something to me?” Stan asked with a little laugh as they sat in the empty clubhouse bar.

  “Sure. Unless it’s a medical question. For that you’d have to see a doctor.”

  Stan ignored that. “My wife, you know, Terry, has started this hormone-replacement therapy. She’s sort of early menopause, and it seemed like, well anyway the gynecologist recommended it for her, and it seems to do her a lot of good.”

  “Uh-huh.” The doctor seemed to be aware of what was coming next.

  “It�
�s improved her, well, her hot flashes and whatnot.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dr. Beha sipped his drink, unwilling to be helpful, Stan thought. “And your question is?”

  “Well. It’s certainly changed the. Well, the family dynamic.” He laughed, swallowed beer for cover, wiped the foam from his lip with a cocktail napkin.

  “It does do that,” Dr. Beha said. “Surprises people. Spring awakening sort of thing. Is that what you mean?”

  “I guess.”

  “Young again in all respects.”

  “Well, that’s I guess the problem.”

  “Aha.”

  “I mean she’s young again, but I’ve stayed the same.”

  “How old are you, Stan?”

  “I’m sixty-three,” Stan said; as usual it felt like a lie. He looked around the bar and not at the doctor. “This has all taken me a little by surprise, to tell the truth, and at some times I haven’t risen to the occasion.”

  “It happens,” said the doctor. “Just advancing age, I’m afraid. But you get concerned, naturally. Which doesn’t help. It gets so you can’t think about it even for a second or it fails. Everything okay down there? And woop.” He illustrated with a drooping forefinger.

  “Not that you can’t get it up,” Stan said. “You just can’t count on it.”

  “It’s common. Would you like me to refer you for counseling? Sometimes a change in attitude.”

  “Hm.” In the tiles of the bar floor a comic stick-figure golfer was inlaid, his legs tangled, wild swing gone wrong, club bent, divot flying. It had been there for decades.

  “Are you interested in trying an erectile-dysfunction therapy?”

  “Well I hadn’t. I mean.”

  “You know about Viagra.”

  “Well, of course. It’s unavoidable. Bob Dole on TV. Jokes everywhere.”

  “It is,” the doc said, folding his hands together somewhat medically or professionally, “a really quite remarkable breakthrough. Actually does what it claims to do, safely, few or no side effects even, for most men. It’s like an elixir of life, the thing the Chinese sought for centuries, drinking gold or eating mummified tiger’s hearts. Old men are taking young wives off to Niagara Falls, knowing they can perform. Stan, I’ve prescribed it for paraplegics, and it’s worked for them.”