Sourland

sweetie. I mean, forever. Smoking dope, and drinking vodka, and masturbating. After you.”

Woody blinked and stared. Woody decided to laugh, this was meant to be funny was it? “You’re kidding, right? You aren’t serious.”

“I am! I am serious.”

For it was true. Dope, vodka, masturbating. All that was tied up with Woody Clark for no one else in Mount Olive had smoked dope with her except Woody, no one else in Mount Olive had offered her dope except Woody, and the vodka had been some kind of flashy fad, Dostoyevskian-dangerous to one like Yvonne with dipsomaniac genes and in fact she’d had a little problem with that, with the drinking, after moving across the state from Mount Olive, but she didn’t intend to tell Woody Clark that. And the masturbating: not exactly something she was proud of but why not tell Woody, spill her guts to Woody as she hadn’t been able to spill her guts to any therapist, ever. The masturbation was something she’d done compulsively, fierce and insatiable and (maybe) slightly deranged, after afternoons with Woody when she’d had to fantasize the man back with her and so vividly she could not cease thinking of him, seeing him, smelling his sweet-funky sexy-sweaty odor, feeling him inside her, and out; and to call such frantic sexual need pleasure, pleasurable let alone self- pleasuring was some kind of crude joke. Seeming to see from a distance of about ten feet a woman screaming and tearing at a pillow cover with her teeth, moaning, sobbing as if her heart was being broken, her desperate fingers inadequate trying to contain the muscular convulsions between her chafed legs, and there was a mad wish to pry up inside herself with, what? — a knife-blade, a pair of scissors. Those months she’d been in a fever, this had been sickness, and trying then to sleepwalk through her life as a man’s wife and a (needy) girl’s mother with dilated eyes, swollen mouth and thoroughly fucked-up head — she had no idea how she’d managed, it was a wonder to her like sending a man to Mars, or wherever. No possible way you could comprehend it except to assume it had happened, somehow.

Flush-faced Woody was saying, “Ohhhh fuck. Just fuck, Yvonne.

Why’d you tell me this shit?” and Yvonne was saying, wiping at her eyes, speaking eagerly now, “Because, well — I thought we told each other everything.” And Woody was saying, “Everything? We told each other nothing” and Yvonne was saying, “We did? I mean — we didn’t? I mean, I did — ” and Woody was saying, in the voice of an aggrieved twelve-year-old, “Here I thought we were so terrific together. We were fantastic, I thought. You were so classy-cool and ice-blond not what anybody’d think from seeing you which was a terrific turn-on, for me I mean, you were always, like, ‘I’ll try anything,’ like I was some kind of native safari guide, leading the white lady into the jungle. And now you’re telling me, you’re actually telling me that all that time you — ” Woody shook his head as if to dislodge something inside it. He could not bring himself to enunciate just what it was, Yvonne had been doing.

She protested, “But that’s why, Woody. I was crazy for you. I couldn’t get enough of the actual you. It’s the way women are, I think. I mean, when it’s like a sickness. When love is, well — like a sickness. The fantasy.”

“What fantasy? I was there, wasn’t I real? I thought I was plenty real.”

How to make Woody, or any man, know, the more real he is in actual life, the more real in fantasy? Yvonne began to stammer, “But you, you must have fantasies, too? Don’t men? I mean, sometimes? Come on, Woody, you must have masturbated, too — ”

Woody said, appalled, “No! Why’d I do that! I wasn’t thirteen for Christ’s sake. This is really sick, Yvonne. This is so you. Telling me now, eight years later like a delayed kick in the groin.”

Yvonne laughed. Woody was so hot-eyed and excited, the blond fuzz covering his flushed scalp looked radioactive. You’d have thought she had insulted his lineage, his dignity. “Oh, Woody. Come on. I’m only just telling you how it was with me, it’s a compliment to you. How many female residents of Mount Olive, all ages, are fantasizing about Woody Clark any given time of the day, or night? Live with it.”

Woody was sulky-mouthed, skeptical. “I suppose now you’re going to tell me, jacking-off was better.” Better than what, Woody left unsaid.

Yvonne said, hurt, “‘Jacking-off’ isn’t what women do. With women it isn’t so crude, it’s more fantasy, romantic. I mean, it isn’t all that physical.” Yvonne paused, not knowing what she meant. For certainly it had been physical. And yes, often it had been better than the seemingly real thing, with the man. She began to laugh, a little short of breath. The courthouse was nominally air-conditioned, but you’d hardly have known it in this submerged corridor that smelled like the interior of an old refrigerator.

Woody said, frowning, “Baby, cut the bullshit. You’re breaking my heart. My balls, you’re breaking. Was it better? ‘Mas-tur-bating’ some secret place where Neil wouldn’t be likely to find you?”

Yvonne laughed. Ohhh no she wouldn’t say one word more on the subject. Almost, she’d think that she and Woody had been smoking dope in the basement of the old courthouse, he’d been passing her one of his “fantastic” joints (he’d acquired, he said, from the same high school dropout kid who supplied the local teenagers) and laughing at the dazed-silly expression on her face, hilarious when she coughed, choked, wheezed and couldn’t seem to keep her mouth closed.

There were footsteps at the farther end of the corridor, on the stairs. Someone else was coming to the county clerk’s office? A man in what appeared to be a rumpled seersucker suit, looking like a courthouse lawyer. Thank God, no one Yvonne recognized. He bypassed the clerk’s door to unlock another door, and disappeared inside.

During this exchange, Woody had been looming over Yvonne. She remembered with a thrill his air of menace, the way sometimes he’d use his big body aggressively, in the guise of seeming-playful so you’d think He’s kidding, but this is the real thing. In their circle, Woody Clark’s reputation was up- from-blue-collar, therefore frank-talking, cut-through-bullshit, straight-Democratic ticket, though in fact (not that Woody would talk about this, much) his father ran a family-owned business, Woody had gone to one of the small, good colleges in New York State (maybe Colgate? Hamilton?), had a business degree from Cornell and was a partner in Mount Olive’s preeminent accounting firm. “Let’s get some fresh air, Yvonne. It’s badly needed.” He’d been herding her in the direction of a rear door marked EXIT.

Unexpected bright air! After the dim-lit corridor, it felt like TV exposure.

The asphalt lot was shimmering with heat. A surprising number of vehicles were parked there. Woody inquired which car was Yvonne’s and she explained she’d parked on the street, her car was a metallic-green Acura; Woody pointed out his massive black Land Rover, parked close by in a way to take up two spaces. Yvonne said, “Why am I not surprised, Woody? The Land Rover was invented for guys like you.”

Woody took this as a compliment. He offered her a cigarette, some low-tar filter brand Yvonne didn’t even recognize, and she declined, though with regret. (Yes she’d stopped smoking. Was trying to. Like the personal trainer, the Atkins diet. Other things that made the navigation of a single day like a voyage in a kayak in white- water rapids.) Woody was talking about cars, or maybe he was talking about the economy, looking over her head now restless-eyed, smoking his cigarette with zest. It was sharp as pain, how badly Yvonne wanted to ask about Caroline, or anyway who’d just recently died in Woody’s family, for surely it had to be family, to upset Woody the way it had seemed to upset him, unless she was misreading him but no: she was sure she’d read Woody just right, a few minutes ago. But she couldn’t ask, and he wasn’t going to volunteer, though Woody was asking, circumspectly, politely, about Neil, Neil’s work, for he’d heard Neil was “doing really well” and, you could see that Woody sincerely meant it, he was “happy” for them both.

He said, sucking in smoke, “Everybody always said, Neil wouldn’t stay in Mount Olive long. That seemed evident.”

Yvonne took this as a compliment, and not a backhanded one. She’d been wiping at her smudged mascara with a tissue, trying not to be too obvious. In the acid-bright air her eyes ached but she didn’t want to retrieve her sunglasses from her handbag, the lenses were so dark-tinted as to seem opaque. She wanted to see Woody Clark clearly, and she wanted him to see her clearly. She heard herself say, in a casual, seemingly retrospective voice, not at all an accusing voice but soft-sounding as she could manage, “I really did want you to know, Woody: I think of you often. You were the love of my life.” She paused. Her mouth twitched. Each was waiting for some further remark, a comic oneliner perhaps. But Yvonne couldn’t think of anything funny enough to risk.

(Oh, they’d joked so much together! Yvonne was remembering that now. Every assignation was a conversation and every conversation was packed with laughs. Her laughter with Woody Clark had been like hyperventilating: once you start, it’s hard to stop.)