She laughed again. “OK,” she said.
She got there about twenty minutes later. I had a bottle of champagne ready and we talked and then I said, “Do you want to go to bed?”
She said yes.
Why is it so hard to describe something that is completely joyful? It was the most innocent sex in the world and it was great. I hadn’t felt so happy since I was a kid playing ball all day in the summer. And I realized that I could forgive Janelle everything when I was with her and forgive her nothing when I was away from her.
I had told Janelle once before that I loved her, and she had told me not to say something like that, that she knew that
I didn’t mean it. I wasn’t sure I meant it, so I said OK. I didn’t say it now. But sometime during the night we both woke up and we made love and she said very seriously in the darkness, “I love you.”
Jesus Christ. The whole business is so goddamn cornball. It’s so much bullshit that they use to make you buy a new kind of shaving cream or fly a special airline. But then why is it so effective? After that everything changed. The act of sex became special. I literally never even saw another woman. And it was enough just to see her to get sexually excited. When she met me at the plane, I’d grab her behind the cars in the parking lot to touch her breasts and legs and kiss her twenty times before we drove to the hotel
I couldn’t wait. Once, when she protested laughingly, I told her about the polar bears. About how a male polar bear could react only to the scent of one particular female polar bear and sometimes had to wander over a thousand square miles of Arctic ice before he could fuck her. And that was why there were so few polar bears. She was surprised at that, and then she caught on that I was kidding and punched me. But I told her really that was the effect she had on me. That it was not love or that she was so great-looking and smart and everything that I had ever dreamed about in a woman since I was a kid. It was not that at all. I was not vulnerable to that corny bullshit of love and soul mates and all that. It was quite simply that she had the right smell; her body gave off the right odor for me. It was simple and nothing to brag about.
The great thing was that she understood. She knew I wasn’t being cute. That I was rebelling against my surrender to her and to the cliche of romantic love. She just hugged me and said, “OK, OK.” and when I said, “Don’t take too many baths,” she just hugged me again and said, “OK.”
Because really it was the last thing in the world I wanted. I was happily married. I loved my wife more than anyone else in the world at one time, and still liked her better than any female I ever met even when I started being unfaithful. So now for the first time I felt guilty with both of them. And stories about love had always irritated me.
Well, we were more complicated than polar bears. And the catch in my fairy tale, which I didn’t point out to Janelle, was that the female polar bear did not have the same problem as the male.
And then, of course, I pulled the usual shitty things that people in love do. I slyly asked around about her. Did she date producers and stars to get parts? Did she have other affairs? Did she have another boyfriend? In other words, was she a cunt and fucking a million other guys at the drop of a hat? It’s funny the things you do when you fall for a woman. You would never do it with a guy you liked. There you always trusted your own judgment, your own gut feeling. With women you were always mistrustful. There is something really shitty about being in love.
And if I had gotten some real dirt on her, I wouldn’t have fallen in love. How is that for a shitty romanticism? No wonder so many women hate men now. My only excuse was that I had been a writing hermit so many years and not smart about women to begin with. And then I couldn’t get any scandal on her. She didn’t go out to parties. She wasn’t linked with any actors. In fact, for a girl who had appeared and worked in movies pretty often very little was known about her. She didn’t run with any of the movie crowds or go to any of the eating places where everybody went. She never appeared in the gossip columns. In short, she was the girl of a square hermit’s dream. She even liked to read. What more could I want?
Asking around, I found out to my surprise that Doran Rudd had grown up with her in some hick town in Tennessee. He told me she was the straightest girl in Hollywood. He also told me not to waste my time, that I’d never get laid. This delighted me. I asked him what he thought of her, and he said she was the best woman he had ever known. It was only later, and it was Janelle who told me, that I learned that they had been lovers, had lived together, that it was Doran who had brought her to Hollywood.
Well, she was very independent. Once I tried to pay for the gas when we were riding around in her car. She laughed and refused. She didn’t care how I dressed and she liked it when I didn’t care how she dressed. We went to movies together in jeans and sweaters and even ate in some of the fancy joints that way. We had enough status for that. Everything was perfect. The sex became great. As good as when you’re a kid, and with Innocent foreplay that was more erotic than any porno jazz.
Sometimes we’d talk about getting her fancy undergarments, but we never got around to it. A couple of times we tried to use the mirrors to catch any reflections, but she was too near sighted and she was too vain to put on her glasses. Once we even read a book on anal sex together. We got all excited and she said OK. We worked very carefully, but we didn’t have any Vaseline. So we used her cold cream. It was really funny because to me it felt lousy, as if the temperature had gone down. As for her, the cold cream didn’t work and she screamed bloody murder. And then we quit. It was not for us, we were too square. Giggling like kids, we took a bath; the book had been very stern about cleaning up after anal sex. What it came down to was that we didn’t need any help. It was just great. And so we lived happily ever after. Until we became enemies.
And during that happy time, a blond Scheherazade, she told me the story of her life. And so I lived not two but three lives. My family life in New York with my wife and children, with Janelle in Los Angeles and Janelle’s life before she met me. I used the747 planes like magic carpets. I was never so happy in my life. Working on movies was like shooting pool or gambling, relaxing. Finally I had found the crux of what life should be. And I was never more charming. My wife was happy, Janelle was happy, my kids were happy. Artie didn’t know what was going on, but one night, when we were having dinner together, he said suddenly, “You know for the first time in my life I don’t worry about you anymore.”
“When did that start?” I said, thinking it was because of my success with the book and my working in movies.
“Just now,” Artie said. “Just this second.”
I was instantly on the alert. “What does that mean exactly?” I said.
Artie thought it over. “You were never really happy,” he said. “You were always a grim son of a bitch. You never had any real friends. All you did was read books and write books. You couldn’t stand parties, or movies, or music, or anything. You couldn’t even stand it when our families had holiday dinners together. Jesus, you never even enjoyed your kids.”
I was shocked and hurt. It wasn’t true. Maybe I seemed that way, but it wasn’t really true. I felt a sick feeling in my stomach. If Artie thought of me this way, what did other people think? I had that familiar feeling of desolation.
“It’s not true,” I said.
Artie smiled at me. “Of course it’s not. I just mean that now you show things more to other people besides me. Valerie says you’re a hell of a lot easier to live with.”
Again I was stung. My wife must have complained all these years and I never knew it. She never reproached me. But at this moment I knew I had never really made her happy, not after the first few years of our marriage.
“Well, she’s happy now,” I said.
And Artie nodded. And I thought bow silly that was, that I had to be unfaithful to my wife to make her happy. And I realized suddenly that I loved Valerie more now than I ever had. That made me laugh. It was all very convenient, and it was in the textbooks I had been reading. Because as soon as I found myself in the classical unfaithful-husband position, I naturally started to read all the literature on it. “Valerie doesn’t mind my going out to California so much?” I asked.
Artie shrugged. “I think she likes it. You know I’m used to you, but you are a tough guy on the nerves.”
Again I was a little stunned, but I could never get mad at my brother.
“That’s good,” I said. “I’m leaving for California tomorrow to work on the movie again.”
Artie smiled. He understood what I was feeling. “As long as you keep coming back,” he said. “We can’t live
