Raw Silk (9781480463318) (17 page)

“Did Daddy tell you he’s mad at me?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“Because you were late to your
own dinner party.
It’s very rude.”

“Okay. But a friend of mine is sick in the hospital, and I wanted to let her know that I was worried about her. Don’t you think it would have been rude to leave her before she waked up?”

“I guess.”

“Then you can see I had a dilemma.”

“What’s a dilemma?”

“A dilemma is when there’s no right thing to do. When whatever you choose, it’ll be wrong some way or other.”

She pondered that. “Tell Daddy you had a dilemma.”

“I will.” I kissed her and hung onto the hug for a minute, thinking what a reasonable person she was after all. “Do you want Maxine to stay?”

“Yes, please.”

I went down, sent Maxine up, made coffee and carried it back into the dining room, where Oliver was pouring finicky dollops of brandy into the oversize snifters. I noticed I was a little drunk. I noticed we were all a little drunk.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said, pointedly adding a more generous splash to my own brandy. “I embarrassed her mentioning her nightgown, if you please. I don’t know how she got on this modesty kick. She didn’t pick it up from me.”

Jeremy leaned forward, rolling his snifter. “Lemme ask you two something. D’you ever worry about her being in an all-girl school?”

“No,” said Oliver.

“I do when she can’t hear the word ‘nightgown’ without throwing a tantrum.”

“No, I don’t mean that.” Jeremy made an artistry stroke at his beard, unbuttoned his jacket and leaned back to give us a full panorama of his tartan waistcoat. “I mean, these crushes they get. We’ve heard some pretty wild stories about what goes on in boarding schools …”

“A schoolgirl crush never did anybody any harm,” I declared recklessly. “I had a dozen of them without setting foot in a girls’ school.”

“No, but I mean …”

“We all know what you mean,” Oliver broke in. Tipsy, he was clipping his words more sharply than before. Snip, snip. “But let me understand
you,
Virginia. You’re saying that if St. Margaret’s teaches her modesty, that’ll be worse than if it teaches her homosexuality? Is that what you’re saying?”

A dilemma. Which Jeremy saved me from with his own preoccupied “Look. This David Philpott up at the university. You know what he said to me? He said to me: everybody’s part queer. So. What am I supposed to answer to that?”

Mabel said, “David
Philpott
is a
psychologist
.”

Her husband turned on her. “So?”

“Well.” Mabel clenched her napkin and spread it open as if to offer visible proof of her purity. She is so breathlessly pretty at forty-five that it has never been necessary for her to alter her schoolgirl stance. “He can’t mean
everybody
,” she said, for instance, with the urgency of explaining all.

“G’dammit, he said everybody.”

“But he didn’t mean Eskimos.” I think she intended to discredit David Philpott altogether, in support of her husband’s scorn, by suggesting that his notion of “everybody” was as limited as Freud’s had proved to be. She isn’t stupid. She never understands why nobody understands her.

“He bloody well meant me.”

“Well, but, Jesus,” I said, “if the shoe doesn’t fit don’t buy it. Maybe he likes to put people on.”

“But such shit,” said Jeremy, appeased.

“And of course he’s right,” I said.

Oliver ate another piece of pie. He lifted it onto his plate with the spatula and did interesting things to the shape of it, slicing parallel lines from the two long sides of the triangle so that he ended up with a harlequin pattern. Oliver didn’t want this piece of pie. It was a new tactic in a repertoire of tactics for dissociating himself from me.

“Balderdash. Humbug,” Jeremy said.

I was feeling extremely lucid. I know this is a common claim of drunks, but it is not commonly my claim when drunk. On the contrary, when I’ve had a lot to drink I behave more like you’d expect me to behave than you might expect. I say, “I’m so drunk,” even if I’m not, and “I didn’t intend to have so much,” even if I did, and “I didn’t know the punch was so strong,” even if I knew. But tonight I felt very lucid about several things including my drunkenness. I felt very lucid about Oliver’s pie, which was a bit more dimensional than normal. I felt very lucid about what I had to do, which was to make Oliver understand a dilemma as simply as Jill understood it. Since Oliver would refuse to do this, I had to make Jeremy Jerome understand that he found homosexuality threatening in a way that it was not threatening to him. This also seemed terribly urgent. It was not my fault if the subject was one that would anger Oliver above all others, or if his own social code would prevent him from showing anger.

“I never heard such a hill of beans,” Jeremy was spluttering on. “I can tell you for certain I’ve never had a luscious thought about a male member of the species in my life. You might not think it, but I was very athletic in my younger days. Football, hockey …”

“C’mon, Jeremy,” I said, “you haven’t read your Leslie Fiedler. Don’t you know all that old-boy stuff in America is a form of gender-love? In England boys go to boarding school, in America they join the Little League. Don’t tell me you never participated in a good ol’ locker room hug.”

Now Oliver began to stir his coffee, in which there was no sugar or cream, making a perfect whirlpool into which I also stared because it seemed to me that even a very small vortex might offer stillness at its center.

“That farfetched stuff,” Jeremy said and swirled his brandy hard. “If that’s the case, why, what, is it bestiality if I pet my cat?”

“No, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” But I lost the thread of my argument for a minute while the image of Mrs. Fromkirk and her tom flashed into my head and out again. “Anything you like you want to touch, and it isn’t sexual unless it’s … sexual. But the impulse is the same, it’s toward. You back off from anything you dislike. By definition: recoil, repulse, reject. So you pet your cat and you kiss your wife and you nuzzle your daughter. I hugged horses. Look—you want people to lie all over your nudes. What’s that, a marble fetish?”

“That’s sensual, not sexual,” Jeremy said stiffly. “They’re two different things.”

Oliver stopped stirring his coffee long enough to take a vicious slit out of a cigar with a cigar clipper. “I think this is rather naïve. One also moves toward a creature one intends to strangle.”

“Yes, but we aren’t talking about that. We’re talking about whether little girls that stroke each other in a boarding school dorm are damaged by it, or whether they’re just prelapsarian by our social rules. I’d say we’re all part queer, part bestial, part cannibal if you like. We don’t have to live by it. Eventually we choose the lines we draw. The awful thing; yes, well, the awful thing is to draw the lines too soon and cut yourself off from what you really feel. I’d say it’s worse to be modest at seven and a half. Yes; I’d say that.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Mabel murmured, rolling the tablecloth from its hem. “I led a very sheltered life.”

“So did I. But—listen, why is all this so threatening to you? Listen, I played my share of doctor; it hasn’t
deformed
me. Let me tell you. When I was eleven or so there was a Mexican girl that came to the trailer court. Felicita Alvarez. Her father had started out as a migrant laborer and worked himself up to the scrap paper business. I wasn’t supposed to play with her, she was bound to have lice or Catholicism or something. But I was dazzled by her. She had masses of thick black hair to her waist, and skin like polished wood. She was fourteen, and she walked like a woman, a hand on her hip, tossing her hair. I’d have done anything in the world to impress her. I drew dozens of sketches of her. But the best thing I found, I taught her about the theater. Very high tone, yes? I called it improvisation, out of my school drama class. I’d be the boy, then she’d be the boy, we saved each other from forest fires or else we were the prince and the peasant girl that met in Liechtenstein. And we fell in love. We always fell in love; it was drama. That way we could explore each others bodies in the name of Stanislavski. Maybe it was De Mille.”

Suddenly the cone of Oliver’s swirling coffee inverted itself into the perfect dark nubile breast of Felicita Alvarez in the crabgrass under the concrete pile of the railroad bridge. Dollar crabs only a few feet below us on the channel rocks, and the SP due to thunder overhead—not to mention my parents only just out of sight over the bank, and God above the SP ready with his thunder … such a lucid sense of sin. And of course I was talking contradictory crap (the style of our times) because at eleven I had drawn my lines. I had a clear and delicious, bounded category: sin. If only I could find, now, such unequivocal commandments as I lived by at eleven. If only I knew one forbidden and delicious thing I could willfully do, instead of sitting here dully propagating these several mortal and venial revenges against my husband, against my will, while he hates me by stirring his coffee and I punish him by talking, talking importunately at random of memories of adolescent sin.

“Well, I’m sure I never did any such thing,” said Jeremy. “Nor thought about it either.”

“It did me no harm. It did me good. I remember her with great affection.”

They sat awkward for me, each in his own style, Oliver stiff and Mabel fluttery, Jeremy aloof. Finally Oliver, cocking a rigid grin at each of the Jeromes in turn, confided, “Virginia is a liberal.”

I don’t remember too much about the next half hour. Jeremy told us they were thinking of spending next Easter in Alicante and then told us everything we ever wanted to know about Catholic passion festivals but were afraid to ask. Mabel told us how she was going to tell Louise but not Janice that Polly had said that the reason she Polly didn’t think she Mable liked her was because Alison had said that Mabel had said that Polly had excluded me Virginia from the invitation list of a jumble sale benefit last December, which Mabel did not remember saying but may have said as a joke, which turned out not to be funny in so much as Polly therefore shunned Louise which annoyed Mabel at Alison and threatened to spoil next Saturday. Or something like that. And they left.

I sloughed my clothes beside the bed, pulled a nightgown over my head and fell onto the pillow. It seemed to me that morning had occurred about the middle of the eighteenth century, and I think I slept at once. I certainly slept, because I was certainly waked by the slap of Oliver’s belt being drawn out of its loops. He was standing over me at the foot of the bed, shirt unbuttoned and shirttail out, weighing the heft of his buckle in his hand. I couldn’t see his expression but I could see the shelf of his forehead in the cold light, and the sweat on it. He was swaying a little, meditative, until he cut at his calf with the belt, and all at once I was awake and sober. He lurched toward the dressing table and laid the belt across the stool with meticulous care, smoothing it lengthwise through two loose fists. It snaked off anyway and clattered against the wastebasket.

“Bitch,” he said in the direction of the belt.

I watched through my lashes, possum, while he ripped at his cuffs so one button popped and pinged against my foot. He shouldered himself out of his shirt, shoved his trousers and shorts to the floor and flung the whole bundle after the belt, all in movements of a rolling, significant sort, as if he were a very much more muscular man. He grunted at the effort and turned around saying “Bitch” again, not ambiguously this time. I had a feeling that something important might be taking place, the way I had when he shut me up in the East Anglian lounge, except that I don’t suppose a hard-on offers much in the way of revelation.

It was shocking all the same. It was against the rules. Our sex takes place under cover by mutual consent; we’ve never been voyeurs even of ourselves. Now he was standing there in the raw, a skinny-pallid tube of a man with a perpendicular handle of a cock that he handled, once; and he looked, precisely, raw. What was he playing at? He clenched his fists and flexed his belly, but at the same time the dim light burnished gooseflesh around the nipple, and his balance was a little stylized. I wanted both to giggle and to run. He stumbled toward me and I gave up the sham of sleep, saying, “Come
on,
Oliver!” but I didn’t know if I meant “Please don’t” or “Don’t be silly.” If you run into Richard Speck in a dark alley you have a right to expect the worst, but how do you hold up your head if you fall victim to Ray Bolger?

I did gasp out a giggle. At which he tore the covers down, and the cold air panicked all the surface of my skin. I reached to cover my breasts; I had no impulse to cover my face or my cunt but only, oddly, my breasts, which were as bruisable as bargain fruit.

“I
am
afraid of you,” I said, meaning it now, but the qualm in my voice came out as phony as his Tarzan lunge. He dragged at my nightgown and when I let go of one breast to resist he pinned my wrists on the pillow, my hair trapped under them so that my face was stretched back and my neck exposed. I couldn’t swallow and it wasn’t funny anymore. “Don’t,” I began saying, but he ground his teeth against my teeth and his kneecap into my pubic bone. I thrashed but he had me pinned by the hair and the groin and it hurt only me, the skin of my skull yanked back and my nipples stinging. I bit but he was offering nothing to my teeth but teeth, and now I hurt enough to know that I was going to hurt; I was afraid of being hurt and of his contemptible revenge, and above all of my sour unforgiving contempt of it: don’t, I’m afraid of you, you fool.

He shunted my knees aside with his knees and tore into me dry. It was like cloth being torn. I could feel the fibers snap and the words “blunt instrument” came into my mind with inane clarity, as words, each letter thrust by penstrokes into the cold dark: b-l-u-n-t i-n-s-t-r-u-m-e-n-t. And like blood following a dull blow, mechanically and against my will I began to lubricate for him, so that every angry slam was easier and more humiliating. I will be dry! I will not make it easy! But I did. The hot slop of involuntary submission let him deeper in, and my neck and chest began to sweat for him.