Lying in Bed (22 page)

At your quilting, maids, don't dally,
Quilt quick if you would marry.
A maid who is quiltless at 21
Never shall greet her bridal sun!

I'm always in heat. Or almost always. Or I can be warmed up. Easily.

My sex is all over me. In my hair. On my ears. Toes. A finger in my nostril. (Not my own finger!) My spine. My ass parted to the air. Fingertips on my teeth. And my lips. My lips are impossible. They burn my mouth. My waist. At the sides. Like I've got nylon zippers there and when they're down I open up. There are times when one man's not enough. I swear I think I could fit them all inside me. Then they'd have nothing to talk about but me. Sing my silly praises to the guys. The skies. Disguise. The insides of my thighs. The skin there must be what God is covered with all over. And Its final creation was cheerleaders in their little skirts. The backs of my knees. If I don't let it tickle, I bliss. And when I'm on my knees, I pray. Even the pain is plush. My throat's a waterfall. My eyes are bigger than my mouth. And my eyelids. How could I ever tell anyone what it means to have them touched.

This is the first time I've ever been faithful to anybody. I like that I didn't choose it. I didn't decide to be faithful. I didn't swear off other men. I just found I didn't need them. I can get from 1 man what it used to take 10 to fail to give me.

We're together all the time. We're obsessed with ourselves. The sex is spectacular. And I'm finally at peace with myself. I can't imagine ever wanting anyone else. Even my fantasies are less intense. I'm no longer interested in getting fucked by phantoms.

I told him: “I've stopped seeing other men.”

“So have I, Clara,” he said.

Johnny told me Julia Duckworth used to lie for hours on her dead husband's grave.

After she married again and had Vanessa and Virginia her son by Mr. Duckworth used to explore Virginia's private parts.

“How did she say it?” I asked.

“Just like that. “He explored my private parts.” Vanessa's too, I gather. But Vanessa didn't write about it.”

“Read it to me.”

Johnny went into his closet and came out with a book. He didn't come back on the bed with me. (I made him give me the book afterward so I can copy down what he read to me) “I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes, going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too.”

I could see Virginia with his hand down her clothes. A girl like me, posing for pictures while my hand explored some boyfriend's private parts. The Bell girls who aren't real Bell
girls get violated. Why does it arouse me all the time?

Johnny knew me too well. That's why he stood at the end of the bed. He shook his head at me.

“She was only 6 years old,” he said.

And I was only 15! I want to scream at him.

Ike told me he wanted me to make a studio visit with him so we closed the gallery and he called a car to take us downtown and asked for a limo because he said that's what artists like to see. I have never been in a limo before and from the way Ike was looking at me and I found myself looking at him I could understand how dangerous they are. You feel everybody's looking at you but at the same time you feel you have a separate existence. You can do anything. Not that we did. But I spent the whole time on the opposite seat looking at Ike with my hand halfway up my skirt. He had to drape his raincoat over his arm when we got out.

“Let me do the talking Clara,” Ike said as we climbed the metal stairs to the studio at the top of the building.

Fuck you I would have said if I had been permitted to speak.

The artist was brilliant. Fortunately so was some of his work. His name is Franco Rothberg, or at least that's what he calls himself to take advantage of this year's ethnic sales pitch. He's kind of Marquez meets Chagall in the suburbs. Nothing is grounded in his huge canvases. People such as they are bungee by. All human movement is vertical. Which to me means you can be buried in the ground or in the sky. You can believe in the earth or in heaven. But not in both. Industry encroaches from the periphery. Grass and flowers grow, Franco says, “excrementally.”

“What do you call this one?” Ike asked.

“The Jewish Community Center Cannot Hold,” Franco answered.

“Yeats,” said Ike.

“Oh please,” I said to stop him from making a fool of himself.

Ike shot me a dirty look. But it was too late.

“I'm joking,” said Franco. “I'm from Newton Mass. So everything I do is called Newton. With Roman numerals. Who cares? Fig Newton. Isaac Newton. Titling makes me self-conscious. It's like having to give names to your fingers.”

On the way back uptown Ike said he wasn't going to represent him.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

I didn't but Ike did. Franco called me late this afternoon.

“Come back by yourself,” he said.

I went in to Ike's office. “Reconsider,” I told him.

“Was that he on the phone?”

“How did you know?”

“I'm not going to take him on just to keep you away from him, Clara.”

“I won't see him if you do.”

“Just which one of us are you bribing, me or him?”

“Myself.”

“Go,” he said. “I'm not interested in his work.”

“What about me?”

“I'm not interested in you either.”

“I meant what about my interest in his work.”

“Go and indulge it.”

Ike picked up his phone.

“Don't you dare call him.”

“I'm not.” Ike smiled. “I'm just getting the limo back for you.”

So I went. Franco made love to me. From the periphery.

I don't know if Ike's jealous. But I know I am.

I just got around to reading Lancelot by Walker Percy, which I can't remember where I got it and I found in a stack of old books in the back of my closet. It's about a very strange marriage and has “hard-ons” and “cunts” in it, which are words I'd rather think than read, and the hero, whose name is John, puts hidden cameras around to catch his wife fucking. I would like to see me and Johnny doing it. But there's no way we're going to get a camcorder. We don't even have a TV or a VCR to play it on. We don't even have the kind of still camera my father used! Johnny reminds me of the John in the book, who says all you need is a room with a tiny window and one other person. As soon as you add the world, he says, like other people and TV and the news, you go crazy. While I was reading it I asked Johnny because this comes up in the book, “Would you say you're John the Baptist or John the Evangalist?” He shook his head at my book and said “Neither.” But later when I told him how the hero of the book stops talking just the way he did, Johnny said, “Oh, well then, you tell your Mr. Percy that he should have used Juan de la Cruz—toda sciencia transcendiendo. There was the John who understood what Steiner calls the abandonments of speech as ancient as those of the Stylites and Desert Fathers. Anything else I can be pretentious about?” I told him that this man said that when his wife wasn't with him it was like being without oxygen. “And when you're not with me,” Johnny said, “it is like being without …” He stopped. “What?” I asked. “There is no way to describe the emptiness,” he said. I closed my book.

Truro. Johnny watches me from the bed the way he does at home. The room's so small, I can feel his breath between my shoulder blades. I love to write in here with his eyes on me. I love to feel him try to see right through me.

The ocean sounds like traffic. When you live at the top of the city, it feels like the whole world rushing by between your legs.

We left New York early this morning. Johnny had not been out of the loft for a couple of weeks. That's how strong he is. He wouldn't go pick up the rental car without me. He won't go anywhere without me. Except when he buys me a present I guess. He loves me so much he'll do things he never does to do them for me.

We took 95. You have to get past New Haven around Guilford before you feel New York let go of you. Everything until then's a suburb. You think you might die at any moment. Then around Guilford you smell the sea. Or you hear it. Even over the music. At least in your mind. This morning we played Mozart flute quartets and George Thorogood. Traveling music we call it. We never listen to it at home. Johnny likes Bad To The Bone. Everybody who hears it ends up singing it. They probably don't even know what they're singing. But Johnny does. That's what he does. He takes things apart. He always says, “But don't call me a deconstructionist.” “I wouldn't dream of it. You're a diaskeuast.” He makes me laugh. He makes me laugh at him. When a man does that, he kills my fear. I've never for a second been afraid of Johnny.

We hit traffic going over the Cape Cod canal. For a while we just sat there on the swell of the bridge. I looked down and thought about dying. Actually, I looked down and thought about our car falling off into the water. When you're on it it
looks like the highest bridge in the world. But I don't die. Johnny makes his way to me through the water and claws open the window and presses me against him and we swim up into the sunlight.

I look at him while I'm seeing this. He's in the driver's seat. I won't drive over these bridges. One of them has a sign about calling the Samaritans if you're thinking of killing yourself. It's on the side of the bridge leading back toward the city naturally. Johnny knows. He's just staring straight ahead with his hands on the wheel. But he knows he rescued me.

6 was crowded all the way. When we hit the single lanes past Hyannis with all the white crosses bunched together it got even slower. If I died in an accident on that road, and somebody insisted on sticking up a cross to make an example of me, I'd want it on the spot where I went.

We still got to the flea market before it closed. Homer was there. “Clara,” he said. “John.” He remembers everything. “How's that Hole in the Barn Door you bought 5 years ago?” he asks me. “And that shirred rug with the flowers?”

“Sold them,” I tell him.

Johnny gets interested because we're talking about a time before he knew me. I could feel his heat come out of the heat of this huge drive-in. No shade. But he was hotter. He wants to possess me possessed. He creates me for himself. Other people just erase you. They want to make all the difference to you. They don't. This guy would watch me getting nudged around by my father's dick in my mother's womb if he could.

“How do you remember these things, Homer?”

“I can picture her buying them.”

Johnny wants to be Homer now. He wants to be standing there 5 years ago looking at me.

I was just happy to be standing there with him today.

He was in awe of Homer. Just like of me. We see things. Johnny can't. He has nothing in his mind but words and sounds. He taught me how to hear. I'm teaching him how to see. But he won't. You can learn to see things outside but you can't learn to see things that aren't there.

He has other gifts.

Don't you Johnny?

I went through Homer's old van and found some pieces. I knew I would. Homer goes back to the midwest every winter and scours the farms. Quilts rise from the earth as people are buried in it. He likes to get them before they make it into the inventory of the estate. He won't wholesale them, but New York prices are so high it would shame me for Homer to see them. So I never haggle. People in New York will pay anything for something “authentic.” Anything.

He's got a Circular Album buried near the floor of the van. The van's so hot I sweat on the quilt.

“You found it,” he said.

“Where did you
get
this?”

I could tell he'd been saving it for me. I told that later to Johnny.

“You adore it when men save things for you.”

Of course I do.

“See you next year. Or whenever.”

I like Homer. He's a vagabond. Once a year's enough for most people. My husband's the only one I want to see repeatedly.

When we got to this motel I spread the quilts out on the bed. Johnny knew I would. He was patient.

“They're beautiful,” he said.

“I hope I can find the right people to sell them to.”

I barely got them folded when he gathered me up.