Heavy Water and Other Stories

“I always thought Elizabeth would have been happier with the De Bourgh girl. What’s her name?”

“Anne. It’s weird Jane Austen never had a girlfriend. I mean she had all those babies, like you had to do. But she never got laid.”

“And she understood the human heart so well.”

“I want to know something Jane Austen couldn’t tell me,” said Cleve. “I want to know what he’s like in the sack.”

“Who? Drink your coffee.”

Cleve drank his coffee. Santos and Java: cappuccino.

Cleve and Cressida had met up here at the Idle Hour—oh, a whole bunch of times. He would say quite frankly, if asked, that he enjoyed her company. Perhaps, too, he felt it was by no means unsophisticated to number among his acquaintances an intelligent straight friend. “Mr. Darcy,” he said. “I have to know what Mr. Darcy’s like in the sack.”

“Mr. Darcy. So do I. Masterful.”

“Majestic. But gracious also.”

“Tender.”

“But kind of strenuous. ‘Fitzwilliam’ Darcy. That’s so Hot.”

“Presumably he…?”

“Oh, for sure.” Cleve hesitated, and shrugged, and said, “I think we can safely assume that it’s Mr. Bingley who takes it in the ass.”

“Absolutely. That’s a lead-pipe cinch.”

He considered her. Most of the women Cleve knew tended toward the extremes of high burnish or unanxious self-neglect. Little smocked refrigerators under pudding-bowl haircuts, like Deb and Mandy in the adjacent apartment on Twenty-second Street. Or plumed icons of war paint and body sculpture, like his colleagues Trudy (in Marketing) or Danielle (in Graphics). What did the gloss and finish of Trudy and Danielle have to say? That they were interested, active, ready? What was spelled out by the dumpy torpor of Mandy and Deb? Refrigerators and pudding bowls? A nondieting pact? He had thought, at the outset, that Cressida had the typical straight look, the no-comment look, the look that just said, Don’t mind me. Composed, but dutiful, somehow. Straight. But just recently, Cleve felt, Cressida had taken on a glow, a color, a tangible charge of life. Was she… Hot? Or just hot. There she sat, loosening her raincoat and blowing the fringe off her brow. Cressida’s so-called husband, John, who held New York in disdain (straight pride, hereabouts, wasn’t proud enough for that fiery separatist), had taken his big mouth off to San Francisco, where he was a big cheese, or a big noise, on the National Straight Task Force. Being straight was his career. Still, Cleve didn’t like to ask about Cressida’s plans for the future.

Now she said, “Do you read much straight fiction? Everyone tries Proust, I guess. And E. M. Forster. And Wilde.”

“I didn’t even know Forster was straight until I read Maurice.”

“Yes, he kind of broke cover with that one. By common consent his least good book. That’s often the way with straight fiction. It’s as if they needed the secrecy. Without it the inner tension goes. They get overrelaxed.”

Cleve said shyly, “I read Breeders.”

“John hated that book. I thought it was pretty accurate. About the whole…”

“Orientation,” said Cleve, with delicacy.

“It’s not an orientation.”

“Sorry. Preference.”

“It’s definitely not a preference. Take my word for it.”

“What would you say it is?”

“It’s a destiny. Am I dying, or is it incredibly hot in here?”

“It’s incredibly hot in here,” said Cleve—to reassure her. But then, suddenly, it was incredibly hot in there. Cressida stood up and removed her raincoat. And it seemed to Cleve that he was breathing the very snarls of the coffee machines, and that the monstrous slabs of his upper body were entirely soaked and coated by their sweaty gas. More than this: he was breathing the hot flash of biology.

“You’re pregnant.”

“So I am. Not very pregnant.”

He was already thinking that Cressida looked a lot less pregnant than Mandy, the little butter-mountain in the next apartment, under her cuboid togas and tepees. Cressida’s belly, so mildly and yet so insidiously distended. One of Cleve’s therapists had told him that hypochondria was a form of solipsism. But now he looked across the table at Cressida, who was someone else, and felt the red alert of clinical fear.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she said, and briskly added: “You know, maybe you read more straight fiction than you think. I’m convinced Lawrence was straight.”

“You mean T. E. Lawrence? Sure. T. E. was straight.”

“Not T. E., D. H.”

“D. H.!”

“D. H. When I read him I keep thinking, God, what a jam this guy is. Hemingway, too.”

“Hemingway? Come on.”

She was smiling. “An obvious het. He’s like Burton Else.”

“Come on.”

“An obvious het. A howling het.”

“Hemingway,” said Cleve. “Hemingway…”

They said goodbye on Greenwich Avenue. He stood on the curb, his hardback of Pride and Prejudice almost fully concealed in the chasm of his armpit, and watched her walk toward Christopher Street.

Harv was there when Cleve got home. How about this: Harv’s birthday was seven months away, and he was talking about it already. The Antique Mart on Nineteenth Street was previewing a new glassware display, so they looked in on that, and then had a couple of white wines in the Tan Track, their neighborhood bar, followed by a simple supper of cottage pie in the Chutney Ferret, their neighborhood bistro. Back at the apartment Cleve planned the menu for the little dinner party he would be staging that Thursday. Arn was coming over, with Orv, and Fraze was coming over, with Grove; Arn and Fraze used to be together, and Grove had once had a thing with Orv, but now Grove was with Fraze and Orv was with Arn. Cleve intended to prepare marjoram ravioli and pumpkin satchels Provencale… He was doing the thing he always did after his meetings with Cressida, seeing his life as a stranger might see it: an unsympathetic stranger. Cleve kept eyeing Harv, who lay on the chesterfield, reading. Harv: his heavy dark glasses, his rectangular mustache, his fishnet tank top. He didn’t read magazines. He read chain-store romance. Chain-store romance for Christ’s sake. Whenever Cleve took a browse through one of Harv’s novels, it was always the same story, patiently repeated: stablehands getting mauled by guys with titles.

Over their cups of hot chocolate they had a vehement, repetitive, and hideously ad hominem argument about who was better: Jayne Mansfield or Mamie van Doren. They made it up while Harv unpacked the goblets that Cleve had bought him. And went back to talking about Harv’s birthday… In the middle of the night Cleve woke up and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and thought: I am in a desert, or a crystal world. Every few years I go and whack off into a tube of glass: It’s like jury duty. I was formed in vitro. I didn’t get born. I got laid. There is no biology here. There is zero biology here.

Spring came. Fashions changed. Cleve hung up his leathers and switched to painter’s pants and Pendletons. He started on the other three Jane Austens: Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. Harv learned how to cook Japanese. They took a trip to Africa: they did Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, the Congo, Nigeria, and Liberia. Cleve broke up with Harv. He two-point-sevened it until he fell for a talented young macrameist called Irv.