The Pillow Friend (26 page)

Although on their first night together he had insisted on darkness, he had no objection now to being looked at for as long as it was light. When night fell, taking them by surprise, they coupled in darkness, half-asleep, and when dawn awakened them the grainy, gradual brightening of the room brought new discoveries.

They slept again and woke again to full daylight, and Agnes realized she was starving. She fended off his embrace, resisting her own desire with a great effort. “Come on, we've got to go get breakfast. If we don't, I'll end up eating you—and
don't
say you wouldn't mind!”

He laughed, kissed her, and let her go. She wrinkled her nose at the smell in the room—sex and mildew and dust—and went off to the bathroom for a cold water wash before dressing in the clothes she'd scattered about the bedroom the day before.

Breakfast was in the first roadside cafe they came to on the way to Houston. It was too soon to go to Houston, they agreed, but it was the simplest and most obvious route; she didn't feel up to tackling maps and back roads again so soon. Over their stacks of pancakes, with bacon and hash browns, grits and biscuits, they decided to drive straight through Houston and on down to Galveston. She'd gone to Galveston every summer as a child, but hadn't been back in years, and it seemed to her an appropriate place to take a visitor as well as being something they would both enjoy.

“There's lots of historical old buildings,” she explained.

“My dear, I come from a land of old historical buildings—that's not what I look for in America.”

“Well, it's pretty, anyway. And there's the beach, and lots of good seafood.” She met his eyes and had a
frisson
of sexual memory. “But it doesn't really matter where we go, does it?”

“Just what I've been telling you.” He reached across the table to cover her hand with his.

“We could have stayed at Aunt Marjorie's.” With her renewed desire for him she was on the verge of suggesting they turn around and drive back, but, with an unconvincing laugh, he wrinkled his nose and shook his head. His eyes were uneasy. “Hardly,” he said. “It wasn't the most welcoming habitation.”

She felt let down by his response. It was honest, if you thought of the smell of mildew, the spiders in the corners, the lack of civilized comforts, but it was ungracious, considering what had happened to them there. She looked away, so he wouldn't see the hurt in her eyes, but he noticed, and gave her hand a squeeze.

“Come on,” he said. “I know it was special to you—but it was
your
special place, not mine. I feel more comfortable—and much sexier—in a room with clean sheets and no insects.”

She met his smile, and was going to remark that she didn't think her heart would stand any increased sexiness, but the waitress was there to refill their coffee cups, and the moment passed.

But that night in a Galveston motel room, although she embraced him with enthusiasm, he had become a stranger again, or she had, and they were clumsy and uncertain with each other. Her body still remembered the passionate intensity with which he'd explored and claimed her the previous night; she didn't know how to cope with his diffidence now. Had he, during that one long night of intimacy, exhausted all of his interest in her, or his tolerance? Did she smell bad, despite her shower? Did she have bad breath?

“It's not you, honestly. It's me. I've never really liked kissing; that's all.”

“But—” She remembered the long, searching, knee-melting kisses of the day before. “So . . . you only do it to please me? Because you think I expect it? Or—”

“It generally is expected. Look, I'm not saying I hate it or we can never kiss. I'm only telling you, I'm not that comfortable with it unless I'm already aroused enough not to feel self-conscious.”

Then what, she wanted to ask, had aroused him to such a pitch before she ever touched him at Aunt Marjorie's house? But before she could ask, he said, “Now, do you want to talk, or to make love?”

“Can't we do both?”

His sigh was answer enough; she shut up and began to touch and stroke him, trying to stir up an urgency she did not feel.

It was no good. The magical electricity which had sparked between them with every touch had gone, and she no longer found the texture and smell of his naked skin uniquely intoxicating—it was just skin. Ordinary skin against skin when they embraced; awkward, uncomfortable sex. She faked an orgasm—for the first time in her life—just to get it over with.

Never again, she thought. It doesn't work. What had happened between them in Aunt Marjorie's house should not have happened. Somehow, she had made it happen—unconscious wishcraft, witchcraft—she didn't know how, but it was beyond her conscious control, and it was dangerous. She had done it once before, in her teens, with Alex—and Alex had no memory of it. She wondered what Gray thought had happened, what he remembered, if he remembered anything. What had been a happy, glowing memory all day now frightened her. She didn't want to think about it. She closed her eyes and tried to wish herself to sleep.

There was a connection between them which was real, which she knew she was not imagining. They both felt it: the hot, itchy spark of sexual attraction, the warmer emotional pull of something that might be love. Intellectually, they were well-matched, and they spent hours, as they traveled together through Texas, talking about books, ideas, art and films.

She decided, after their first night in Galveston, that she would not have sex with him again. She had imagined having to refuse him, to resist his advances, and then to argue with him, but that did not happen. During the day, in public, he often embraced her, held her hand, stroked her hair or her back, and kissed her, chastely, but at night, lying naked beside her in their motel room bed, he didn't try to touch her.

Although they talked about so much else, they did not talk about sex. They didn't discuss their relationship, or try to define it.

Anyone seeing them sitting together in a restaurant, or walking hand-in-hand along the beach at any time during their travels from Galveston to Port Lavaca to Victoria to San Antonio and then back east to Houston, would have assumed they were lovers, perhaps a couple on their honeymoon. There was an electricity between them which made a simple friendship impossible. There could be no going backward. She had fallen in love with him in Aunt Marjorie's old house in the woods, but the man she had made love with there did not seem to exist outside, in the real world. Or, if he did, she could not seem to find her way back to him.

It had been her own decision not to make love with Graham again, but she was not happy about it. She enjoyed his company during the day, and their closeness built up a tension which was never released. She longed for something she could not have, for something which she knew to be impossible. She kept recalling her silly, childish desire to eat the dollhouse food, and one night, trying to laugh, she told him about it. She was grateful for the darkness which meant he could not see the tears in her eyes.

“
Tale of Two Bad Mice
,” he said.

“What?”

“Beatrix Potter. Don't you know it? About the mice who break into a doll's house and try to eat the food. When they discover they can't, they try to destroy it—and then get even madder to discover that the fire in the grate won't burn!”

“I never tried to destroy it—I wouldn't do that,” she said anxiously. “I just wanted to taste it—and knowing that I couldn't, that it wasn't what it looked like, didn't make me stop wanting. I couldn't stop wanting the impossible.”

“That's why you write.”

“Is it?” The comment startled her. In the darkness his voice was like an oracle; everything it said had the ring of inescapable truth. “So if I had everything I wanted I wouldn't write anymore?”

“No one ever has everything they want. Not while they're alive.”

It was a confusing, emotionally draining week, and she was glad to arrive in Houston with the end in sight. But she realized as she was driving into the city that she didn't know where she was going.

She said so to Graham. “I don't know anything about the local hotels, I'm afraid. I always stay at my mother's.”

“Don't you want me to meet your mother?”

His question took her completely by surprise. Before she could respond, he'd sensed something wrong. “Forget it. I'm sorry. I'd forgotten about him.”

He meant her stepfather, Eddie Shawcross. But the idea of having a stepfather no longer outraged her as it had when she was nineteen. He wasn't the faceless stranger he'd been when her mother had informed her she was getting married—he was a pretty nice guy, actually.

“It's all right. You've just had my whole history dumped on you, but I don't dislike him at all. Really, there's no problem. We'll go there. I'll just get off this freeway and find a phone first, to warn her we're coming.”

As she had expected, her mother sounded pleased to hear from her, was not startled to learn she had a boyfriend in tow, and invited them to come for dinner and spend the night. She didn't know why she should feel so dissatisfied as she put down the phone, why her stomach began to twist and turn with anxiety as she walked back to the car and Graham.

There was something wrong, something missing from her relationship with her mother and she didn't know what it was. Nothing she'd read in any book or heard from any other woman seemed similar to her own experience. She'd tried to explain it once, when she was part of a women's Consciousness Raising Group in college, but even in that small room vibrating with sympathy, even in the company of seven other women all willing themselves to understand, she had failed. She didn't have the vocabulary or the concepts, only the dim yet certain perception that something was wrong, something was missing, in her relationship with her mother. After her failed attempt to verbalize it, she had decided that the thing that was missing must be something in herself. It was her problem, not her mother's: her own failure.

That evening was like many others she'd spent with her mother and Eddie, perfectly pleasant, yet not what she hoped for.

“She's lovely, your mother,” Graham murmured to her at one point. At another moment, when the two women were together in the kitchen, her mother said, “He seems very nice, this Graham Storey. You've always had a thing for poets, haven't you?”

Agnes stiffened at something unexpectedly knowing in her mother's voice. She was certain she'd never confided to her mother her fantasies about Graham Storey.

“Well, is this serious? Is he the one?”

“I only met him a week ago. How should I know?”

Her mother looked at her as if they'd never met and said, “If you don't know, I can't tell you.”

Agnes didn't know what was missing in her relationship with her mother, but with Graham, she was sure sex was the missing element. They got along well on so many levels, and they connected, intellectually and emotionally. But they just weren't sexually compatible. She remembered something from a story by D. H. Lawrence, his description of an unhappy marriage as “a nervous attachment, rather than a sexual love,” and for some reason the words, which had been written by another of Aunt Marjorie's idols, made her feel better. It wasn't the end of the world, and it had happened to other people before. There was no sense crying about it; the romance she had wished for simply hadn't come true.

As she lay in the guest room's double bed waiting for him to come out of the bathroom and join her, she remembered the flimsy, typewritten sheets she had read in the air-conditioned isolation of the Humanities Research Center, and wondered if his letters to her would look the same. Or would he write to her by hand, page after page in his tiny, neat script?

He came out of the bathroom naked and she felt embarrassed and turned her head away, thinking that she'd been silly to insist on this last night with him when she could have stayed in one of the other bedrooms just as easily. He turned out the light, got into bed, and began to caress her.

Startled, she drew away. She had not expected this in her mother's house, and she didn't want it. But although he was always so quick to sense her moods in daylight, now he seemed not to notice her unwillingness. Or, if he noticed, he took it as a challenge, for he became more ardent. Yet, while demanding, he was not crude. His hands upon her body were gentle. He was not the lover he had been in the house in the woods, his merest touch did not spark an immediate response in her, but he was patient, tender, slow and determined, and gradually she became aroused and began to respond. She realized then that his penis was flaccid; his persistence with her seemed prompted by something other than his own desire.

He stopped her from going down on him. “No, I don't want that. I'll bring you off with my hand.”

He'd already started, and although she felt she would regret it later, she was too close to the edge to want to stop him. Her orgasm was the quick, rough untying of a knot; afterward she felt dirty and absurdly grateful. It was all too much; she'd been aroused and frustrated for so long, hopelessly wanting him, and it was all one-sided. He didn't want her. Embarrassed by herself, she began to cry.

“Shh, shh,” he soothed her. “It's all right. It doesn't matter. Really, it's all right.”

“But we have to talk—we've never even talked about it!”

“It's not something to talk about.”