Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (2 page)

This is when my heart stopped thumping explosively and I knew that I wanted to watch. Whatever was happening, whatever they were doing, whatever they had on or didn't have on or were holding or touching or eating—it didn't matter because I wanted to watch. I had to watch. Sex. Someone was having sex in my bedroom and it sure as hell wasn't me and I had to watch it.

A kind of calm settled over me. Perhaps there was a name for this pre-I-Gotta-Watch version of sexual voyeurism that had captured my very being. Maybe I was treading some new water that I could share with my colleagues at the University. My mind raced as wildly now as my heart had just a breath ago. I wanted to watch and I was going to watch. This yearning propelled me forward with a rush of power and sureness unlike anything I had ever known in my life. I was brave and strong and I was going to watch no matter what happened. Nothing could stop me. Nothing.

Her foot was more than lovely. I noticed this again as I slithered to the edge of the shelf, where I had a terrific view directly into the mirror above the dresser on the far wall that I had once begged Bob to move. Hello, lovers. There was a view of the bed where I had slept not more than four hours before. They were not on my side of the bed. “How nice,” I wanted to mutter out loud. “Maybe I should go get a cold drink and an energy bar,” I thought to myself like someone who is about to go into a movie and does not want to be disturbed during the best scenes. This is where my body began separating itself from my mind. This might be what the Green Berets and Navy SEALs do. Snap of the fingers. I am invisible. My feet are a cat's paws. Swift and sure. They will never see me if I can maintain this level of high mental control. That's what I thought. Suddenly, I was invincible.

My husband was on the bottom. This was also a startling fact. The last time we had sex—could I remember when?—I am certain he was on the top and I am also certain that the sex lasted a good three minutes before he fell off, rolled over, patted my ass and fell asleep. Enough of him: back to that delicious foot.

Nails painted the color of a frosty pink geranium; a slender ankle that looked as if it could give way to a calf that had been shaped by years of exercise. I had to see this. I had to see the rest of her leg and I edged myself flat, belly to the carpet, slithering like a snake across floor covering that had seen trails of baby poop and vomit from the high school dances and the last half-decent lovemaking session that I ever expect to have in my life. I must have looked like a fool and I couldn't have cared less.

The damn mirror was not low enough. I would have to slink around to the other side of the door, where I could get a full-on view of my husband making love to the geranium woman. Should I risk it? I had to think about this, which, I was about to discover, was the reason for every screwed-up mess that touched the edges of my life. I had to stop and think if I wanted to risk getting caught so I could watch my husband making love at ten-something in the morning to a woman who was definitely not me.

The fact that I decided to go for it should count for something. Really. It was a ballsy move so unlike me that it came fast once I talked myself into it. I simply walked past the door. One huge step and there I was. I could stand at the far side of the door just at the end of the hall where the wall turned a corner before Katie's room and watch. I could watch. Of course, they might see me. But I wanted to watch so damn bad, it didn't matter. Breathing, work, my kids, food, wine, my latest research project, world peace—nothing mattered but watching.

My need to watch was an ache that moved across the small of my back and down into the tops of my legs. Sweat was running down the insides of my arms and my stomach was on fire with such a desire that a brigade of hungry near-death wild dogs could not have pulled me away.

So I started to watch. Jesus. Just Jesus. I would wonder later why the hell they didn't get a hotel room or if they had planned it and how long I had been so goddamned stupid or why he picked someone who looked so much like me or how many others there had been or when the moments of my life and marriage and world had started fraying at the edges until they met in the middle in a tangled mess of nothing, but for those moments, one and then two and then ten or fifteen, I simply stood there with my hands hanging against the seams of the denim skirt I had worn every Thursday for ten years and I watched.

The geranium woman was naked except for her blouse. It was red and looked like it was made of expensive silk. Unbuttoned, it hung against the sides of my husband like a bright tent protecting him from sun and wind and the sand I would one day want to grind into his eyeballs. Her hair was long and dark blond, kind of what mine might look like at that length. I did not have the pleasure of seeing her eyes but I imagined they were also dark and that she had high cheekbones and flawless skin. I did not hate her. I would never hate her. I would hate him for a very long time but never her, although I might never understand some things about her and what she did and how she did them. I might. I could. I would try.

She had a perfect ass. It was the ass of someone who has not had babies and who works out five days a week and could go to the spa without having to worry about picking someone up from play practice or sorting through the damn dry cleaning on the way to the grocery store for the third time in one day. She was not very tall and once when she rose up off of my husband I could see that her breasts were simply average—small rounded mounds of flesh—and not like mine. My rather glorious forty-something breasts are large and firm even though I have nursed two babies and did not wear a bra for eleven years during a very crucial period of breast growth. The geranium was riding my husband like a seasoned jockey and he was wild with sexual happiness, bucking against the red tent, with his hands pulling at the brown, terribly frayed bedspread that I had been meaning to replace for the past five years.

My friends think Bob is handsome. Some of them have warned me for years that he is ripe for an affair. Some of them have told me that they have seen him having lunch with beautiful women and getting into cars that appear to be going nowhere and that he often seemed way too happy for a man pushing fifty who has a so-so job in a community where hope of advancement means moving to a real city in a real state where there are real jobs and buildings taller than the four-story giant in our downtown. Bob was just ordinary Bob to me, which is part of the problem I realize now, but then, that day, he was the pumping machine and I was the woman in the hall who wanted to watch.

“Oh,” they both took turns moaning, and I suddenly wanted to moan with them. It would hit me later when I was woozy with vodka how absolutely insane and risky and not-like-me wanting to watch had been but I do have to admit that I was a little turned on. What a delightful feeling that was after all those months of celibacy when sex was something I might have seen after eleven
P.M.
on the old television or a vague memory from the past or a flicker of heat that passed quickly from my mind to my hips and then was gone just as fast. Sex? Making love? The mere thought, the simple word and now this real live sex act was throwing me into near ecstasy and there I stood watching this glorious woman rock the socks off of the man I had been married to for twenty-seven years.

The geranium rose up occasionally. She moved fast, like a machine that had just gotten back from a terribly expensive overhaul, and I wondered how long she could go on like this before Bob called 911. Once Bobby's little penis came out and they were frantic to get it back in there. I had all I could do but to rush in and help them. “There,” I would say. “Now, you kids behave, and you, Ms. Geranium, you stop being so damn wild. Bob has high blood pressure.”

I didn't talk or move or think of anything but what I was seeing from my perch in the hall. I stood there watching for what must have been about fifteen minutes, because Bob came fast, and then I realized they would be flopping over onto their backs and then they would have a perfect view of the bedroom door, where I stood watching them making love or having sex or just fucking around. Take your pick.

Of course, I knew when Bob would come and what he would sound like, and when he started that low groan I knew it was just about over, but I wanted to see what the geranium would do because it was hard for me to imagine that she was going to come like this too. I was certain this was a woman who needed focus and attention and direct work in just the right location. I was correct. Well, maybe I was right, but if she did come she was sure thinking, “Is that it?” because in about three seconds flat she pushed off of him and I leapt across the entrance to the doorway, a deer dancing in the headlights, and I was gone and almost certain they had not seen me.

Gone. Now what? Would they rumble in the sheets for a bit? Would they hurry up and get the hell out of there? And me? Would I race to the basement? Would I hurry up and get the hell out of there?

I have always hated the word
fuck.
Saying it was one of the few things that would make me punish my children. But now I could think of nothing else to say. I had just watched some fucking. I was certain that within a short period of time I might go fucking nuts and I had no idea what in the fuck to do or where in the fuck to go but I wisely decided that I should get the fuck out of the house and fucking vanish. And that I also needed to do this fucking fast.

When I closed the side door and bolted through backyards toward my parked car, like I used to in high school after I toilet-papered a lawn or threw eggs onto some car windows, it hit me. It hit me hard and brought me to my knees in Gloria Sorensen's yard just under the oak trees and I wanted so desperately to lie down there and roll into the garden and past all the houses on my street and into someplace where no one would ask me why I was rolling. I wanted to roll to Egypt or Cuba and out past an endless blue ocean and I wanted to grab both my children and take them with me and maybe throw the old books and the doorknob into the mix and then just roll away.

Instead, I slowed my running to a fast walk and calmly sauntered into the office at Anna Jorglinson's house and said, “I couldn't find the files and my daughter just called and needs me to pick her up from school,” and then I got into the car, put the key into the ignition, turned it on and drove fourteen blocks to the Kmart parking lot, where I pulled in between a Subaru with a canoe rack on top of it and an old black Buick that looked as if it had rusted into the space next to the light pole. I didn't cry or move or even think. I sat there looking into the backside of the Big K and counted sixteen men and women and one goofy-looking family, who had on clothes for winter and not for summer, walking into the health food store next to Kmart, which was bound to go out of business any second. I sat there for forty-eight minutes and then I reached into my black bag and pulled out my cell phone.

I held my tiny black-and-silver phone against my chest for another thirteen minutes before I could remember how to dial it. I pushed the numbers that would connect me to Elizabeth's phone and then I left her this exact message: “It's me. I just watched my husband making love to a woman who looks like a geranium on our bed. I cannot remember how to drive the car. I cannot remember who I am. When you get this message, please call me.”

Then I waited. Three planes flew past and a swarm of confused geese, who were so messed up by the ever-growing ozone layer and backwards tides and El Niño's sister-in-law that they never bothered to fly south or north anymore. I think I rolled down the window once and tried to talk to them. I sat there for a long time and then the phone rang. It was Elizabeth.

“Where in the hell are you?”

“Let me think.”

“What? You don't know where you are?”

“A parking lot.”

“Jesus, Meg, look for a sign. Look around.”

“Oh, Kmart. I'm at Kmart.”

“Can you drive?”

“I have to pee.”

“Don't leave. I will be there in five minutes.”

I forgot to hang up the phone and a soft buzz drifted through the air and then the phone went dead and I started laughing then and could not stop. When Elizabeth pulled up I was still laughing and the windows had magically rolled themselves down and she touched me on the side of my face and I looked into her eyes and I saw an ocean of light, beams of salvation from beyond the last cloud, the whisper of a sky the color of blue that I saw once off an island near Maui. Elizabeth has the most beautiful blue eyes I have ever seen and I adore every single thing about her and there she was saving me.

“Come on,” she said gently, opening the car door and walking me toward her little red Honda. We pushed aside books and clothes and a pile of hangers and then I sat down. She locked my door and took my phone and found the keys on the floor, and then she drove off and turned to me once with the biggest smile on her face and said, “So you watched, huh?”

And then I told her the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

“I wanted to watch.”