Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (3 page)

“Yes, I absolutely see the force of what you say,” I responded agreeably, since, except for whatever immediate fun you may get out of it, it is always a waste of time to argue with anyone about politics — or about anything else, when you come right down to it. You rarely ever learn anything and you absolutely never convince the other person. “You’re probably right,” I went on. “Of course, the real question is whether they can get the cost of any of these things down to a competitive level. It’s really just a matter of supply and demand—”

“The
real
question is whether we intend to leave ourselves at the mercy of the marketplace or whether we will take our fate in our own hands like rational, moral beings.”

I was concerned that she might be getting not only deplorably rhetorical but genuinely angry. The mood, like the weather, seemed uncertain. “By the way,” I said, “I meant to ask you about something in the
Journal
today. Evidently, a band of
Times
reporters has been captured with a Cuban adviser. Apparently, the
Times
has these training camps in Ethiopia, and I thought you might be able to tell me—”

“Fuck you.” She said this in a matter-of-fact tone and with a pleasant smile. I have noticed—although it is important not to let them get too wound up in it—that people often actually feel better when they can rant on about politics a bit. Perhaps this is the real value of politics. “Actually,” she went on, “I
do
want to know about the cost of alternate energy sources. That would be really useful to me. It really is amazing, the numbers you have.” She paused momentarily as another thought struck her. “No. Show me the thing about supply and demand curves again. That’s what I want.”

I was delighted at the opportunity to explain anything whatever to Anne. And then it is always good to feel that one is serving humanity and one’s own selfish interests at the same time: perhaps I would be responsible for giving someone at the
Times
a rudimentary notion of the concepts of supply and demand. I took a pad of unlined paper from my briefcase and moved over to the seat beside her. Resting the pad first on my thigh and then on hers, I drew the familiar coordinates.

“Now, this axis represents the price of some good, and this represents the quantity of the good produced. Now for each—”

“Is what you’re drawing here for all goods or for some particular good?”

“Well, it’s an example… that is, it’s some particular good. For any particular good, at any particular time, there would be a particular supply curve and a particular demand curve — if that’s what you’re asking.”

“What sort of good? What exactly
is
a good, anyway? It would be better if you could be concrete.”

“It could be any good. Or any service. It could be anything at all, anything that at least one person wants. And that someone can provide, I suppose. Automobiles, wheat, newspapers. Ballet lessons. Handguns. Sonnets. The point is that at any given price there will be some associated level of supply — the amount of the product or service that people are motivated to provide at that price.”

“What happens at the ends?”

What does happen at the ends? I tried to reason it out quickly. “Different things, none of them important.” I ran my hand along the upper surface of her thigh, feeling it move under the blue linen skirt. She ignored my hand and peered intently at the drawing lying next to it on her lap.

“Try to pay attention and not ask difficult questions,” I went on. I drew a pair of coordinates and another curve under the first. “The demand curve — I’m drawing it separately to begin with — is the same idea, but it slopes the other way.”

“Always?”

I seemed to recall that you could contrive cases where it sloped the wrong way, but I couldn’t remember whether you could always explain them away or whether you just ignored them. I should, I thought, quickly read through some elementary economics text and review some of these things.

“For all practical purposes, always. I don’t want to make this explanation unnecessarily complicated.”

I slid my left hand under her skirt, and ran my fingers several inches along the inside of her thigh. Her legs spread apart a fraction of an inch to welcome my hand. Then she reached out with her hand and held it firmly to keep it from straying further.

“Actually,” I said, “with the demand curve this axis represents the amount that will be purchased at a given price.”

Still holding the pencil, I reached up with my right hand and brushed the hair away from her neck. I leaned over and kissed her behind her ear. She continued to study the paper on her lap, but she shuddered.

“What I want to understand,” she said — a little absently, I thought, “is how you combine the curves. And why.”

I reached over and redrew the second curve, superimposing it on the first. I kissed her again on the back of her neck. Her shoulder pulled up and her head twisted back in a slow little writhing movement. Her grip on my hand relaxed. I leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. She opened her mouth, and our tongues twisted over each other. She took my head in her hands, pulling it toward her. We both twisted sideways on the seat so that we faced each other, our knees jammed together. With my fingers spread, I ran my hands up and down her sides. My thumbs pressed into her breasts. I held her rib cage and felt it swell and contract heavily with her breathing, her heart banging against my hand. I drew my left hand over her breast. As I kissed her mouth, her neck, and her eyes, I slid my hand into her blouse, pulling open a button. I could feel the swollen nipple under my fingers and then my palm. I flattened her breast under my hand. I undid the rest of the buttons on her blouse and ran both hands all over her torso. I leaned forward and kissed the hard nipples. She arched her back, pushing her breasts forward to me.

The space in which we were trying to maneuver was impossibly awkward, the seats too short, and the gap between them too narrow. I twisted around further until I was half standing with one leg on the floor and with the other kneeling on the seat next to Anne. I kissed her on the mouth again, while I ran my hands down her smooth back. I can remember perfectly how beautiful her naked breasts were in that railway car. She started to pull at the knot of my necktie and then, impatiently changing her mind, left it and began pulling open each button down the front of my shirt except the top, collar button. She slipped her hands under my shirt and pulled the shirttails free of my trousers. Her fingers were traveling over my chest and sides and around the small of my back. She leaned over and kissed me on the chest and on the side. I ran one hand across the smooth flesh of her belly and then slid it under the waistband. She sucked in her breath to let it pass. My fingertips ran onto the delicate pubic hairs. I pushed my fingers gently down and felt her hips tilt forward. She slid down a little in the seat, turning further sideways so that her head rested against the window, thereby twisting my hand backwards under her waistband. We were not having an easy time arranging ourselves on the seat. With some difficulty I extracted my hand and pulled her up until we were both more or less standing in the narrow space between the facing seats. As I pulled her toward me, she spread my shirt open to expose my chest and wrapped her arms around my torso and I felt her naked breasts against my skin. We kissed. I pushed my thigh hard between her legs and twisted my pelvis against hers.

Half releasing her, I reached down under the hem of her skirt and slid my hand slowly up the inside of her thighs. She was leaning against the window now. I pushed the palm and fingers of my open hand back and forth between her legs, feeling her perfectly through the thin, moist material of her pants. Her legs opened and her pelvis twisted slowly under my hand. Reaching down with the other hand, I hooked both thumbs over the waist of her pants and pulled them down to her knees. She lifted one long naked leg out of the pants and, snagging them with her toes, pulled them down into a little heap on the other foot. I gently slid my fingers over the soft pubic hair and into the crevice. She began yanking open my trousers, and when she encountered the expected boxer shorts, she yanked them open too and, seizing me with both hands, pulled me erect out into the open.

Writing this now, I see that I owe you, the reader, an apology — or rather a warning — since, knowing that every pornographic novel has a scene in a railway car, you may be misled by my adventures in that railway car about what is to follow. What does not follow — and I confess to some regrets in the matter — is a succession of sexual encounters of ever increasing frequency and acrobatic complexity between ever increasing numbers of participants. In fact, one of the rather melancholy aspects of my present situation — and far more melancholy for me as protagonist than for you as reader — is the relative difficulty of encounters of any kind. Nor do I want to mislead you about the quality of my life prior to that day. This was not a typical scene from my daily routine. I did not often— did not ever, except on this one day — find myself in a sexual frenzy, half-naked, with a beautiful half-naked woman in a public place. If nothing else out of the ordinary had happened that day, it would still have been one of the most extraordinary days of my life.

Or, on the other hand, you may feel that I owe an explanation or even an apology — although I am not sure to whom — for relating this incident at all. Or for the incident itself. And, to be honest, I am not altogether comfortable as I write these things down, since although on most days and in most moods I do not have particularly strong moral feelings about the behavior of eagerly consenting adults like Anne and myself, I understand that there are a great many other points of view on the subject, and I generally disapprove of offending any of them unnecessarily with public displays of sexuality or emotion. I am not at all an exhibitionist — although this may seem a rather empty boast given my present condition. I have no idea what possessed us that day. Rather, I know exactly what possessed us, but not what happened to the usual inhibitions and moral scruples. I am not sure why, that day, we were standing half-undressed in that railway car, in a sexual delirium, gripping each other’s private parts and shoving our tongues into each other’s mouths. But we were quite alone in the railway car: we had not seen anyone since New York but the conductor, and him only once. And the various feelings we had for each other were probably quite strong. There was the fact that we had been up most of the night. And we were still, I think, quite drunk.

I pushed Anne back down onto the seat. It was not wide enough for her to stretch out, and she was slouched down in a semisitting position with her shoulders and head leaning back against the window. Her skirt was up around her waist, and her legs were spread open, one of them extended along and over the edge of the seat onto the floor and the other drawn up, with her foot braced against the armrest by the aisle. I stood poised over her. She had her hands on my hips. I thought briefly of getting her to the washroom, where we would have enjoyed a greater sense of privacy — at some cost, however, in comfort and convenience. Anne probably made the same half-hearted calculation. The thing was, there was no one in the car and no one likely to enter it. And if someone did, how important would it be in the larger scheme of things? The main thing — the only thing in that agonizingly delicious moment — was to push ahead to certain bliss.
Carpe diem.

But as I began to lower myself onto Anne, the train abruptly began to brake, and I paused uncertainly to look out the window. My first thought was that we had arrived at Princeton Junction. Damn. But it was not Princeton Junction. It was not really anywhere — or not anywhere this train should be stopping. This was not in itself particularly disturbing: if you have ever ridden on one of these trains you will know that, although they operate on the most important and most traveled rail route in the country, their movements are as random as the physical limitations of steel rails will permit. That is, they are always mysteriously speeding up, slowing down, or stopping altogether at unpredictable intervals bearing no relation to published schedules or the location of stations. And when they come to a full stop, they will pause for entirely random periods of time — sometimes a few seconds, sometimes many hours. The employees of the railroad, if they have any idea themselves what is happening or why, never ever communicate it to the passengers. Then, mysteriously, forward progress resumes.

Under the circumstances, I might have welcomed an unscheduled stop. The difficulty on this occasion was that we were slowing abruptly to a full halt right in the middle of some unfamiliar station. We were on the outside track right next to the platform, and there were people — thankfully only a few — waiting on the platform for the next local. Perhaps they were to be allowed to board our train instead. I certainly hoped not. But at the very least they would be wonderfully positioned to look in through the windows; and as it happened, our particular window of our particular car came to a violent and full halt directly opposite three well-to-do ladies of late middle age. This afforded them a commanding view of Anne sprawled bare-breasted and spread-eagled across the seat and of me poised erect and quivering above her. Were it not for the pane of glass separating us, they could have reached out and touched us. Not, I suppose, that they would have wanted to.

Of course, I had an excellent view of them too, although that was not proving to be of much comfort to me. They possessed portly dimensions and staid clothing befitting their age and station. Their demeanor was forbidding. From the fact that they were standing on the southbound platform, we can conclude that, living midway between the two cities, they had decided to spend their day in Philadelphia rather than New York. They stood side by side facing us. The one in the middle had some sort of needlework in her hands, and from their position it appeared that the three of them had been leaning over it and discussing it earnestly. However, when our little
tableau vivant
was hauled so abruptly before them and deposited there, their eyes turned to us and widened; each of their mouths formed instantly into a little, voiceless O of astonishment and censure. I felt extremely uncomfortable. I suppose they did too, although their discomfort had presumably a very different quality. I suppose my mouth must have formed into its own little O of astonishment, or into some other equally ridiculous expression, because Anne looked up at me and then, letting go of my hips, pushed herself up into a sitting position and turned her head to look out the window and see what was going on. She stared at those three stern countenances for a moment and then tilted her head and shook it so that her hair fell across the side of her face, partly obscuring it. Then she turned back towards me.