want you. I want you so much I don’t think I could go on living without you. Can’t you give her up?”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t? Or don’t want to?”
“Can’t.”
She shrugged, defeated. “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve been married eleven years and for all that time I haven’t stopped loving you. I love you right now and I hate you, too, and I just don’t understand it. Don’t you love me any more?”
“I don’t know.”
She was smiling now but it was a very sad smile. She shook her head and when she started talking it was as much to herself as it was to me. “We should have had another baby,” she said. “When Timothy died we should have had another baby right away instead of waiting. If we had a baby maybe this whole thing wouldn’t have happened.”
Timothy had been born prematurely about six years ago. He lived a grand total of four hours and then gave up the ghost. The whole thing didn’t hit me the way it struck Lucy—hell, he didn’t live long enough for me to have any real feelings about him one way or the other. It was different for her. She had carried him for over seven months, and she loved him with that instinctive mother love that they write and preach about. It broke her up so that, after the doctor said she was in danger of repeated miscarriages, we decided not to have any more kids for awhile.
“Maybe it’s better this way. If we had a child and then you ran off with another woman it would ruin things for the child. Maybe it’s better this way, Jeff.”
I kept my mouth shut.
“Do you want a divorce, Jeff?”
I let my mouth stay shut.
“If you want it you can have it. Not right away because I love you too much to let you make a mistake. But if you want it in another month or so we can get divorced.”
“Is that what you want?” I put it to her straight as she was the one who had brought it up.
“What does it matter?”
I waited for her to go on.
“What I want,” she said, finally, “is for everything to be the way it was at the beginning. What I want is for this other bitch to stop existing and for us to love each other. But I guess that’s impossible.”
Deep and all-pervading silence. I listened to the rain outside for awhile, and then I listened to the faucet in the kitchen trying to compete with the rain and made a mental note to put in a new washer as soon as I got a chance. I listened to the clock a little but it was pretty boring, and then I was listening to Lucy again.
“We can go on like this for the time being,” she said. “You sleep here on the couch because I don’t want you in the same bed with me if you don’t deserve me any more. If you give her up I’ll take you back; and if you decide you want a divorce I’ll give you a divorce. That’s all I can do, Jeff. Whatever you want you can have. I’m not much at driving a shrewd bargain. I’m not a sharp Yankee trader or anything of the sort. I’m just a woman who happens to love you—like crazy.”
She stood up then. She turned around slowly to face me and I saw that there were tears in the corners of her eyes. Her face was dead serious and she was like a little girl poised on a high-wire at a circus.
“Look at me, Jeff.”
I did. She slipped the nightgown over her shoulders and it fell to the floor. There was nothing under the nightgown—no, that’s not quite true. There was plenty under the nightgown, plenty of soft and lovely womanliness, plenty of warm flesh and soft curves.
“I’m not
She wasn’t. She was very good to look at, as a matter of fact, and it didn’t require any effort for me to keep my eyes on her.
Even now.
But at the same time she was simply somebody to look at, just a naked woman who deserved a certain amount of attention because of the view she presented to the eye. She wasn’t a woman to take to bed, wasn’t a woman to want.
Just something easy to look at.
“It’s not as if I was ugly,” she said. “Or flat-chested. I’m not flat, am I?”
She was cupping her breasts with her hands, holding them from underneath as if she were presenting them to me as an offering. The gesture reminded me of the poem by Garcia Lorca on the martyrdom of Saint Eulalia, with the last line that goes something like:
She ran her hands over her body, touching herself everywhere, showing me that everything she had belonged to me and to me alone. And it didn’t do a thing to me. It didn’t move me, and all that I could do was sit there and stare at her and hate myself.
She took two small steps and then she was standing inches in front of me. She had evidently taken a bath within the past hour or so and I could smell the fresh after-bath smell of her soft skin.
She reached out a hand and touched me.
I didn’t move.
“No response,” she said, that same sad smile coming back to her face. “No reaction, no excitement, no interest, nothing doing. You just don’t feel like having some loving with your wife, do you?”
No answer from me.
“Look what I’m doing to myself,” she said. “I know you’ve just come from her, and I know you don’t want me, and I still ache for you so much that I can hardly stay on my feet. You know what it’s like, Jeff? It’s a genuine physical ache.”
With her hand she showed me where the pain was.
She shook her head, then stopped and picked up the discarded nightgown and stood up and put it on again. I sat there like a mummy while she got dressed and sat down next to me on the couch.
She was sitting closer now. She leaned toward me and slipped one arm around my neck. Her other hand rested on my thigh and she was stroking me gently, her little mouth at my ear.
“You bastard,” she was saying, but saying it gently, sexily, her voice all throaty and hot. “You dirty bastard. I love you, you bastard.”
I couldn’t move.
Her lips went up and down the side of my neck, kissing me. Her hand was doing weird and wonderful things and I felt myself responding in spite of myself. It was impossible not to. I wanted to get up and get the hell away but I couldn’t.
“You beautiful bastard,” she said. “You’re going to have me tonight. You’re going to take me if I have to do all the work myself. I won’t mind it. I just want you. Oh, and you want me too. I can tell. Isn’t that nice? It’s nice that you do.”
The room began to revolve in slow circles.
“This damned zipper,” she said. “There … there we go. I’m very clever with zippers. I knew I’d manage it after awhile. Oh, goodness, you want me quite a bit, don’t you? Don’t you, Jeff?”
With the hand that had been around my neck she peeled the nightgown off again. Then she leaned against me harder and a second later I was lying on my back and she was on top of me. She forced her mouth against mine and pried my lips apart with her tongue and then my arms went around her. She was soft and warm against me.
She couldn’t wait any more.
That made two of us.
It was a new kind of lovemaking, a love born of mutual desperation. I was too excited to control myself and she wanted me so much that she had less than I did. We made love but it was not love; it was brief and fast and furious, and at the very end she screamed my name at the top of her lungs and the whole big beautiful world came apart at the seams.
We didn’t lay very long in each other’s arms. We didn’t hold each other and say the sweet things that lovers are supposed to say.
