Lying in Bed (12 page)

I laughed. I thought she might laugh too. But she didn't, and I wasn't even sure she had heard a word I'd said. Her eyes were locked into mine, and mine were locked onto her fingers, first of one hand and then, when she would put that first hand back under her bottom, of the other hand, moving back and forth, and then quickly, fleetingly, up and down, upon herself.

When I stopped talking, I became aware of her breathing, which intensified and then subsided according to how she moved her fingers, and as I listened more intently I could hear the liquid click of the juice she was drawing out of her body and the small, almost breathless words she was saying.

“There. There. Right there. Pardon
my
French. There. Do it. Oh.”

I stood up. Was she making fun of me? I didn't care. My penis had grown hard and caused the front of my trousers to stand out.

“Sit down!” she whispered. “Just watch me. Watch me. I'm going to come. Watch me come. Sit down. Watch me.”

I obeyed. With both hands now working almost frenziedly she raised her buttocks from the mattress and her head too and stuck her tongue out and seemed desperately to be trying to lick her breasts, though no matter how supple she might be, and how gracefully long, I noticed, her neck might be, and how much she might be able to push her breasts together and raise them by moving her shoulders toward one another with her arms pushed against her sides, her tongue could reach no farther than the tops of her breasts and the beginning of her cleavage, where drops of her saliva collected and glowed faintly in the soft peach light.

But she didn't seem to mind. She was smiling now beatifically as she said, “Oh there, oh there, oh there. I'm there. Oh please. Help me. Help me. Help me.”

I didn't get up this time. I knew enough to know she wasn't talking to me.

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.

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.”