Goethe’s
Resting on the final shelf were a signed baseball, a beer stein, several shot glasses, a paperweight of a black- and-orange enamel shield, and a chartreuse rubber snake.
I noticed all of this, I took it in quickly, and I didn’t really care. So he was a bachelor—of course he was, otherwise he wouldn’t be dating me. The space actually was clean, not dusty or cluttered. The bedroom was empty except for a mattress on top of box springs with no frame. The sheets were blue-and-white striped, pulled tidily up to the pillows, and a ceiling fan was already running. In the doorway of the bedroom, Charlie kissed me again, and then he walked me backward, maneuvering me onto the bed. When I was lying on my back, he stood above me grinning. “That’s much better.”
I was wearing my denim skirt and a maroon tunic with orange and pink flowers. He leaned over and used both hands to lift the tunic from around my waist and push it above my bra and over my shoulders. Being undressed like this made me feel, in a strangely nice way, like a child: watched over and taken care of. My bra was next to go, and when he’d tossed it somewhere behind my head, he gazed down at me, lying in the light of his bedroom—attached to the ceiling fan, sticking out from its center, was a bare bulb—and he said, “I can’t believe how beautiful you are.” He leaned forward and kissed one nipple and then the other, slowly and methodically, first with his lips closed, then opening his mouth to suck in a manner that seemed respectful, almost reverent.
Next he unbuttoned my denim skirt, unzipped the zipper, and I arched my back to help him slide it off; this, too, he tossed aside. I was wearing pink cotton underpants, and he stuck his thumb inside the elastic waistband, snapping it lightly against my hipbone and grinning. “Hi, pink,” he said.
“Hi,” I said back, and as we looked at each other, I felt what I’d felt the times I’d laid beneath him at my apartment: sprawling, enormous happiness. What I most wanted was exactly the same as what was about to happen. Which forces had conspired to make me so unreasonably lucky?
He ran his forefinger from my navel straight down over the front of my underwear, slowing above my pubic bone, and when he got to the cleft, the cotton fabric beneath his finger was damp, and he said, “Looks like someone’s enjoying herself.”
I reached up; he had so little fat on his stomach that I could slip my hand into his boxer shorts without unfastening his pants. His erection was hot and stiff, and when I brushed my fingers over the tip, he inhaled, but then he drew back, shaking his head. “This is about you. We’ll get to me later.”
“It can be about both of us.” I was touching him from outside his pants now, and he shook his head and nudged my hand away.
This was when he pulled down my underwear—they got caught for a second around my ankles before I kicked them off—and then I was naked on his blue-and-white-striped sheets and he was crouching over me, tanned and masculine in a yellow oxford shirt, his flared nostrils, his slight hint of stubble, his light brown hair, and his smile, his perfect smile, and I felt a total, unfettered attraction to him. He bent his head to kiss my sternum, my navel and belly, my pubic bone, the tops of my thighs, and then he dropped to his knees on the floor and used his elbows to spread my legs, to open me up, and he brought his face in and was licking me, he was licking me firmly and repeatedly, and it seemed both difficult to believe (Charlie Blackwell’s face burrowed between my legs?) and also entirely inevitable: beyond logic and language and decorum. Possibly, I thought, I had lived my life up to now in order to be licked by this man. I could hear myself cooing—I was leaning on my elbows with my feet near the floor, and he was kneeling, with his arms beneath my thighs—and he began to flick his tongue rapidly, almost thrashing it, in a focused spot. His cheeks between my thighs, his bobbing head, and his earnest assiduous lapping—very quickly, it was too much to bear, and I gasped and cried out. It was like tremors, and I felt my thighs clenching around his head, and when he came up a few seconds later and kissed my forehead, I said, “I hope I didn’t suffocate you,” and he said, “I can’t think of a better way to go.” Then he whispered, his mouth against my ear, “I really want to be inside you right now,” and as soon as he’d rolled on the condom, I encircled him with my legs, and he slid into me. He didn’t make much noise when he came, his breathing just thickened and slowed a little, and we both were still. Lying there, I felt a peaceful kind of sleepiness come over me. I could have gone to bed right then, without brushing my teeth or washing my face, without changing positions. Not that I would; instead, I’d leave within the hour and return alone to my own apartment. To have sex with a man was one thing, but to spend the night with him was another—even if my personal sense of etiquette had become outdated, I had difficulty disregarding it.
Against my neck, Charlie said, “We should do this every day for the rest of our lives.” Then he said, “I can feel you smiling.”
ALL AT ONCE
we were spending vast amounts of time together. In my apartment, I moved the papier-mache characters into the living room so he and I could lie on my bed, and though I didn’t let him stay over, he ended up leaving at a later hour each night—one or two, sometimes three. Because we often fell asleep after making love, I started setting my alarm clock for two, and when it beeped, Charlie would groan and say, “For the love of God, woman, make that thing stop,” and then we’d curl in to each other and fall back asleep, and after twenty or thirty minutes, I’d wake with a start and push at his torso, saying, “You really have to go now,” and he’d pretend to cower, covering his head and groaning, “I’m being exiled! The queen is banishing me from the castle!”
Several times he said, “Don’t you think it’d be nice to wake up together? And we can make some morning mischief that no one but us needs to know about?” But the fact that I felt it was improper for us to stay over at each other’s apartments was really our only point of dissent. He was very easy to be around, very comfortable, in a way that surprised me. With Simon, if we had gone to kiss each other and our mouths missed, he’d pretend it hadn’t happened; he wouldn’t acknowledge if one of our stomachs rumbled. With Charlie, everything was out in the open. Once, after dinner, when we were watching television in his living room, he stuck his hand beneath my shirt to rub my belly, and when I shook my head and said, “I have a stomachache,” he said, “Go ahead and let one rip if you need to. I’ll still think you’re the prettiest girl in all of Madison.” I didn’t do it—I couldn’t have, I’d sooner have tap-danced in Calvary Lutheran Church—but he apparently felt no such inhibition. A few days later, I walked into the kitchen after him, smelled an earthily unpleasant odor, and said, “Did you just—?”
“I can’t remember, but probably.” He grinned. “In my family, we call that tooting your own horn.”
He was so appealing to me, and so confident of his own appeal in a way that was boyishly endearing rather than arrogant. He always wanted to snuggle, he even used the word
which I’d never heard a man do. The night I made us halibut in aspic for dinner, he did the dishes afterward, and when he finished, he came into the living room, where I was lying on the couch reading. Wordlessly, he lifted away my book and lay flat on top of me, then said, “Aren’t you going to put your arms around your man?”
At his apartment, we always grilled out, making either hamburgers or steaks (I had not realized the evening
