Ghosts and Other Lovers (24 page)

In the kitchen, amid the smells of coffee and charred toast, Fred looked ordinary again, ordinary and a little shy, and I knew that must be how I looked, too. He didn't seem to mind, though. He seemed to like looking at me, and he didn't avoid my eye, rather he caught it, and smiled.

An accidental bump led to a fervent clutch and a kiss and very soon, clutching and groping at each other, we made our way back down the hall to the bedroom. He seemed different in daylight, the whole thing was different, clumsier and sweatier, no less urgent yet somehow scarier, a new first-time. And then he paused and drew back a little. "Shall we . . . uh, do you want to . . . ?"

"Of course." I rolled away from him just enough to reach the box of condoms on the table, but when I looked back I could see that wasn't what he meant. "No?"

"Oh, yes, that too, but I meant -- like last night. In the skins."

It shocked me to hear him say it. How could I have thought it was my secret when it was his house I'd found it in? Yet, since it had fallen off, the memory of the womanskin had moved into the part of my mind where dreams and sexual fantasies lived, and to have Fred refer to it gave me the creepiest feeling, as if he'd somehow got inside my head.

He misinterpreted the look on my face. "Of course we don't have to, if you didn't like it. I thought it was rather special, that's all . . ."

"Yes, yes, I did too," belatedly I twigged. "
You
were wearing one, too!"

"Yes, of course."

"Fred, what are they?" I rolled onto my side, propping myself up on an elbow, and he mirrored me.

"I don't know. A manskin and a womanskin, just what they seem to be. No, honestly, I don't know any more than you do."

"You must. Where did they come from?"

"I don't know. I found them in the garden."

"In your garden?" I looked at the bedroom window, still curtained in net, at the greenish blur beyond. I hadn't seen his garden yet, but I was familiar enough with the pocket handkerchief gardens of this neighborhood of London to imagine the narrow, fenced-in rectangle of grass bounded on at least two sides by flower beds or shrubberies, all most unmagical. "You found them in your garden? How? When? Tell me, Fred!"

"Well, did you think I'd bought them in a shop?" He grinned at me. "The garden's nothing special; I'll show you later. There's a little shed down at the bottom, and a compost heap; the skins were lying on the grass in between. It was about a month ago -- well, it must have been exactly a month ago because the moon was full, like it was last night. It was about a week before we met -- you see, I haven't had them very long. I was feeling a little lonely and a little restless and I wasn't quite ready to go to bed, although it was late enough. It wasn't raining and I could see the moon shining away when I went to draw the curtains, so I thought I'd go out into the garden for a breath of air. That was when I saw something shining like moonlight on the grass. It looked like -- you know, quicksilver? That's what I thought of, quicksilver flowing in the shape of a person. Like a shadow on the grass, but light instead of dark, almost like a concentrated essence of light, shining up from the dark grass. I went over to it and bent down to touch it, and it was as I was hanging it up that it fell apart into two, and I realized I was holding -- well, you know."

"So you just kept them?"

"What would you have done?"

"Did you try them on?"

"Just the manskin," he said swiftly, so swiftly that the qualification made me wonder. "Once I had it on I knew that it was no good by itself, that they were meant to be a couple, were for a couple."

"So a few days later you asked me out."

"I would have asked you out anyway. It might have taken me a little longer, that's all. The skin gave me an extra -- it gave me courage."

"And then yesterday you left the womanskin hanging on the back of the bathroom door hoping -- what? That I'd just see it and happen to try it on?"

He nodded.

"What if I hadn't?"

"But you did." He smiled his sweet, shy smile. "Shall we put them on again?"

I wasn't feeling the slightest bit sexy, the mood had gone to something else entirely, and I wanted to go on exploring it, exploring him by talking, but I was so moved by his strange story, and by him, that I did what he said, got up and went to the bathroom and slipped into the womanskin. I knew as soon as I returned that he was wearing his -- there was nothing to see, but I sensed it, like an aura. As soon as the two skins came into contact they began making love. Of course it was we who did all those things, our two bodies fitting together as if we'd been lovers for years, and of course we experienced the arousal, the growing excitement, the climax, and yet all the while there was some small part of me which remained remote, aware that Fred and I were two strangers, separated by the skins, and that all the passion they generated had nothing really to do with us.

At first, in the beginning days and weeks of our deepening relationship, I didn't like to say anything about it. Sex in the skins was so reliably wonderful that it seemed sheer perversity to ask to try it without them. And besides, I thought naked sex was bound to happen naturally before long -- we'd just get carried away and do it without thinking of the skins.

But it didn't. If we were caught in the throes of passion on the couch in the middle of watching the late-night movie, we had to pause for contraception, and given a pause, the skins would insert themselves. I could have protested, of course, made a joking or a serious request to leave them out of it. But I guess I wanted it to come from Fred. I was afraid of finding out that the skins meant more to him than I did.

Every night Fred would slip into his skin at bedtime, the way that I might have inserted my diaphragm, just in case. But there was no "just in case" about it, because once he'd put the manskin on, I seemed to feel a yearning from the womanskin which would have been cruel to ignore. I couldn't just be myself when Fred had on the manskin; I had to be her.

They were no good on their own, the skins. It was as Fred had told me, they were a couple, made for a couple. One morning I had the notion of wearing the womanskin out into the world, of going to work in it and seeing how other people would react. But I couldn't do it. The skin which clasped me so close whenever I was alone with Fred simply refused to stay on; it would not be worn under clothes or without sexual intent.

I don't mean to imply that the skins dominated our lives. The skins were only for sex, and when we weren't wearing them, or about to, even the memory of them seemed to slip away, at least from me. There's always more to life than sex, even in the most passionate relationship. Fred and I began to spend all our spare time together. Although I still, cautiously, continued to pay rent on my single room, and left my out-of-season clothes hanging in the wardrobe there, I was effectively living with him. I met his friends and he met mine, we cooked for each other and went shopping together, joked and argued and shared a life. It should have been perfect -- the sex could not have been better -- yet I felt there was something missing. I wanted a greater closeness. Fred didn't know what I meant. How could we be closer? We did everything together and the sex, every night, was great. I thought maybe we should talk more about ourselves. Fred didn't, but he did his best to oblige, answering my questions about his past, or what he felt about something, even when I could tell he found them annoying or unimportant or intrusive.

I couldn't explain what was wrong, what was missing, but something was. After a while I became obsessed with the notion that the skins were coming between us, and that the intimacy I craved would be ours only if we made love without them.

Of course, I should have said something about how I was feeling, but our love was still too new: I didn't want him to think I was dissatisfied, or to make him unhappy. So, in time-honored female fashion, I resorted to trickery.

We were on our way to the cinema, a route which took us right past the house where I rented a room, when I suddenly expressed a need for a particular sweater I'd left there. Obligingly he went along with me, and as soon as we were together behind the closed door of my room I faked an overwhelming passion to get us onto my single bed. But even before all our clothes were off he'd revealed that, alongside the emergency condom I already knew he carried in his wallet, he also carried both the skins.

"They fold down to nothing at all, you must have noticed," he said. "I don't always carry them with me, but this morning I just thought I'd see if they'd fit . . . lucky chance, huh?"

I burst into tears and confessed. He was astonished. Why hadn't I said?

Now, too late, I tried to make light of my desire. I hadn't asked because I hadn't wanted to make it seem important. It wasn't important. Our relationship, most particularly the sexual side of it, was wonderful. Only, now and then I wondered if we might not be even closer if we made love without the skins. Hadn't he ever wondered about that, about how it would feel?

He said he had not. He said he couldn't imagine being any closer to anyone than he already was to me. He said that sex with me, in the skins, was the best he'd ever known and, that being so, why should he want anything different? But now that he knew what I wanted . . .

Now that he knew what I wanted, we had to do it there and then, the skins folded back into his wallet. Was it their presence, like uninvited ghosts, which made what followed so unsatisfactory? Or was it my guilt at having tried to deceive him? How could I complain we weren't close enough when I kept my own feelings hidden? It was a pretty wretched coupling, all told. I'd seldom felt less like having sex, and it was easy to imagine the pressures on Fred struggling to satisfy me unaided. No wonder that we ended up farther apart, more alone than ever. No wonder it was such a relief to put the skins on again later that night and feel ourselves drawn back together. In my imagination the skins had been coming between us, blocking a more perfect understanding, but now I could see it was the skins which saved us from our differences. Without the skins we were only ordinary. With them we were special.

We soon took great sex for granted, as our right. We were spoiled by the skins which made sex instant and easy and completely detached from the rest of life. It still made me uneasy because it was so unnatural. We were in the unlikely situation of being in a sexual relationship in which the sexual part was completely unaffected by the relationship.

The sex was magic, but the sex belonged to the skins. It didn't matter if we'd just been arguing about whose turn it was to clean the bathroom; or whether someone who voted Conservative could be, in any sense of the word, a
good
person; it didn't matter if he was tired or I had a hangover -- whatever our moods, whatever our differences, if we put on the skins we were instantly ready for love. The skins took us into another world, their world, where only one thing mattered. Tiredness, anger, irritation, menstrual cramps either vanished or stopped mattering for a little while. Yet it was the same if I was feeling particularly loving toward Fred for some reason, or if I was already aroused by some fantasy I'd been having -- none of it mattered, nothing made any difference, positive or negative, in the realm of the skins. Fred and I were involved in a sexual relationship, but it was not our own.

Our relationship did not influence the sex, but the sex definitely influenced our relationship. It's hard to share several hours of physical bliss with someone and not feel, at the very least,
warm
toward them the next day. Kitchen and bathroom foibles, odd and even disgusting personal habits are easily forgiven in the afterglow, differences forgotten because unimportant. I don't know what sort of lovers we would have been without the skins; neither of us was eager to find out, unwilling to spoil what we did have. And yet there were times when I was with Fred when I felt lonelier than I'd ever felt on my own. I put it down to hormones.

I still don't know why I put on the manskin one night. Opportunity, I suppose, and curiosity. I had never examined it; I don't think I'd ever even touched it except when Fred was wearing it. We'd just been getting ready for bed when the telephone rang and he went out of the room to answer it, leaving his skin lying on the bed.

Wondering how different it was to mine, I picked it up, and, because I was naked already, put it on.

I didn't expect it to fit. My skin fit me, as his fit him, as if they'd been specially tailored to our proportions, and Fred was nearly six inches taller than I was, with broader shoulders and longer arms. Yet the manskin settled onto my nakedness like my own skin. Looking down at myself, I thought there'd been some mix-up: his skin couldn't possibly fit me so tightly and comfortably. This must be a woman's skin.

But I knew it wasn't mine. Fred had been wearing this skin; it was unmistakably his. Something of his essence still clung to it the way that a smell, perfume, or body odor will cling to much-worn, unwashed clothes. This wasn't a smell, though; it was emotion, it was personality, it was cast of mind, a sort of echo of Fred himself, which I recognized as surely as I recognized his voice on an answering machine, his arms around me in a dark room.

It was almost like being Fred, knowing what he knew, feeling what he felt. It was intimacy beyond anything I'd ever experienced, a way of knowing what I'd only struggled to imagine, before, and the knowledge overwhelmed me with love.

Fred came back into the room and I tossed him my skin. "Put it on," I said. "Quickly!"

I don't think he understood what I had done until he had put it on. I saw the astonishment on his face, the melting into love, in the minute or so before we came together to make love.

It was the best ever. In the past I'd sometimes felt more like a passenger than a participant, aware that it could be someone else, anyone else, inside without making any difference to what was happening between manskin and womanskin. Great sex, yet somehow anonymous.

This could not have been less anonymous. I was engulfed by Fred himself, by the sensual, sensory memories of the man. I was in
his
skin, and yet I was myself, making love to him, the man I felt with every part of me, in
my
skin. Words can't explain or do it justice. I'm not even sure I can really remember it now, not the way it really was, but one thing is certain: it was the high point of our love affair.