“Tough but oh so gentle,” I said.
“But it isn’t going to happen, and it’s probably just as well. I don’t usually feel so good about myself after I’ve made it with someone but Harvey.” She laughed again, but this time harshly. “Come to think about it, I didn’t feel all that good the last few times I made it with Harvey.”
“Was that recently?”
She looked away from me. “Two years ago.”
“That embarrass you?”
She looked back. “Yes,” she said. “Very much. Don’t you think it should?”
“Yeah, maybe. On the other hand you’re not a sex vendomatic. He drops in two quarters and you come across. I guess you didn’t want to sleep with him.”
“I couldn’t stand it.”
“And you both figured you were frigid. So you hustled out evenings to prove you weren’t.”
“I guess so. Not very pretty, is it?”
“Nope. Unhappiness never is. How about Harv, what was he doing to dissipate tension?”
“Dissipate tension. My God, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk the way you do. I don’t know what he was doing. Masturbation perhaps. I don’t think he was with other women.”
“Why not?”
“Loyalty, masochism, maybe love, who knows.”
“Maybe a way to grind the guilt in deeper too.”
“Maybe, maybe all that.”
“It’s almost always all that. It seems the longer I’m in business, the more it’s always everything working at the same time.” I took two cans of Utica Club from the refrigerator and popped the tops and handed one to her.
“The thing is,” she said, “I never found out.”
“If you were frigid?”
“Yes. I’d get drunk and I’d thrash around and bite and moan and do anything anyone wanted done, but part of it all was faking and the next day I was always disgusted. I think one reason I wanted to ball you was so I could ask you afterwards if you thought I was frigid.” Her voice had a harsh sound to it, and when she said “ball you” it sounded wrong in her mouth. I knew the harsh sound. Disgust, I’d heard it before.
“For one thing, you’re asking the wrong question. Frigid isn’t a very useful word. You pointed that out to me a while ago. It doesn’t have a meaning. It simply means you don’t want to do something that someone else wants you to do. If you don’t enjoy screwing old Harv then why not say that. Why generalize. Say I don’t enjoy screwing Harvey, or, even better, I didn’t enjoy it last evening. Why turn it into an immutable law.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I think everything is that simple. But you’re probably right. Sex is as natural as breathing except it takes a partner and what one can do with ease, two mangle.”
“Does Susan… I’m sorry, I have no right to ask that.”
“Does Susan like to have sexual intercourse? Sometimes she does and sometimes she doesn’t. Occasionally, just occasionally now, that’s true of me. The occasions are more frequent than they were when I was nineteen.”
She smiled.
I took the lettuce out of the refrigerator, unwrapped it and tossed it in the bowl with the rest of the vegetables. My sauce was starting to bubble gently and I took enough spaghetti for two and tossed it into my boiling pot. “Plenty of water,” I said, “makes it less sticky, and it comes right back to a boil so it starts cooking right away. See that. I am a spaghetti superstar.”
“Why do you want Harvey and me back together? I’m not sure that’s your business. Or is it just American and apple pie. Marriages are made in heaven, they should never break up?”
“I just don’t think you’ve given it a real shot.”
“A real shot. Twenty-two years? That’s not a real shot?”
“That’s a long shot, but not a real one. You’ve been trying to be what you aren’t until you can’t swallow it anymore and now you think you’re frigid. He’s been panting after greatness all his life and he can’t catch it because he thinks it’s success.”
“If I’m not what I’ve been trying to be, what am I?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you could find out if you no longer decided that what you ought to be was what your husband expected you to be.”
“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
“You too, huh? Well, look, if he’s disappointed in you it doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It could mean he’s wrong.”
She shook her head. “Of course, I mean that’s no news flash. That’s every woman’s problem. I know that.”
“Don’t generalize on me. I don’t know if it’s every woman’s problem, or if it’s only a woman’s problem. What I do know is that it might be one of your problems. If so, it can be solved. It’s one thing to know something. It’s another to feel it, to act as if it were so, in short, to believe it.”
