Afterburn (29 page)

Essential, too, is the woman's awareness of the man's passion; he must be similarly delirious with pleasure yet supremely conscious of the woman's feelings. It is not that he is subordinating his own pleasure to hers; rather, that her pleasure is his pleasure.

What happens if all these conditions are right? The woman begins having orgasms without any effort at all; her body convulses ecstatically beneath, in front of, or above the man's—perhaps she is licking his neck or one of his fingers, perhaps he is sucking her breasts, and even as she completes one orgasm she is aware of the possibility of another, for the man has not stopped his motion, and the woman, though having just achieved orgasm, is desirous of another, of more; aroused by her own capacity and, with no anxiety about her lover's generosity or ability to continue, she begins to feel the same urgency as a moment before, the same flooding ripple of pleasure. In this state, she will continue to have orgasms every few minutes, the muscles of her torso clenching in contraction. She may wish to pause and catch her breath before starting again, or she may have one orgasm begin as soon as another ends, even rapid clusters of them that render her almost psychically destabilized. She is silent, she is loud, she is fierce, she is sweet, she is peaceful, she is frenzied; she cycles through these moods, then back again in no particular order. Strange things pass through her head: music and faces and sounds, she forgets herself, she remembers everything, she sees death and babies and her father; she smells a forest or an ocean. Her lover changes from one man to other men to any man to the devil to a god to an animal to a heavy, hot-breathing ghost. She loves him, now and forever, yet hates him with finality. She fears his superior strength yet knows she is stronger. She moves from waking to dream to nightmare and back. He is her master, he subjugates her, he wrecks her vagina with his great pounding force. He is her plaything that she may suck in and push out, his penis merely her toy that she controls with her wish. She is tight inside but aware of great spaces. The room is dark but full of light. She desires that he destroy her, but himself as well. Finally they have had more than they imagined, they are not just sore and exhausted but losing themselves, their consciousness. She will cry out for his climax, urge him, even wiggle her hips and squeeze him. She prefers that he exhibit his pleasure—in shivering breathlessness, perhaps, or with a straining, roaring spasm that leaves him collapsed in her arms or she in his, the two of them washed up on the shore of complete release, in emptiness that is full.

Such an all-obliterating copulation, though enormously pleasurable, later becomes problematic for her, because it is unforgettable. The woman knows herself well enough to know that she is not like this with most men, few in fact. There's no good explanation for it; this man is neither this nor that, exactly; rather, it's quite complicated. This is disturbing to her and she resists knowing it, because she knows that when she leaves him or he leaves her, she may encounter disappointment in subsequent encounters with new sexual partners. She knows how she has hidden anger and disappointment in the past, and she suspects she may have to hide these feelings in the future.

The woman knows something else, too: Her capacity for such immense sexual pleasure is so threatening to most men and to some women that she needs to be careful talking about it; men will anxiously resent the woman's awareness (as well as experience) of such pleasure, while, paradoxically, some women will deny that such pleasure is possible, calling it fantasy or erotica, since it requires a kind of subjugation to the man's force that is emotionally too risky or politically incorrect; other women will resent the woman if she provides an intimate description of her pleasure because they, the other women, suspect they are incapable of such enjoyment, or that, if they are capable of it, the men available to them can't provide it. She is, therefore, a kind of outlaw. The woman knows, too, that in reality only a small percentage of men and women are capable of such pleasure; when she considers that such capacity will not correlate with other areas of compatibility (interests, intelligence, education, age, etc.) as well as the difficulty that men and women generally have in achieving even reasonable sexual pleasure, she sees how truly rare is such an interaction.

But she has a consolation. She is in possession of a secret. She is pleased to remember her pleasure, for it means that she may find it again. When she finds a man who she thinks can fulfill her, she is loving and patient.

I would like to be that way for you. I would like to make a baby with you in a great moment of passion.

Lady, he thought, you got the wrong guy. She might actually kill him with such excitement, even if he were capable of it, what with his back and everything else. And would she be a good mother? The letter had nothing to do with being a mother, in fact. He put it into the no pile.

Martha opened the door to the conference room. She looked like what she was—a tired lawyer, overweight, overburdened, used to hearing her own voice.

"You met Towers?"

"I did."

"And?" she asked.

"Inspires confidence."

Martha sighed. "Don't do it, Charlie."

"Come on." He handed her the maybe folder. "Some of these are pretty impressive."

"What's this?" She opened the folder.

"I want you to contact these women and set up interviews, here, as soon as you can. Next few days if possible. The rest are not right. Please tell them they've been rejected."

Martha's eyebrows lifted. "Rejected."

"Yes. Write them a nice letter. Don't put my name on it, of course."

She glared at him. "You're serious."

"Yes. Also, did you set up my appointment at the fertility clinic?"

"For tomorrow morning," she answered. "If you stop now, I won't bill you for what we've done so far."

"Martha," Charlie said, "either help me to the best of your ability and shut up about it, or tell me to find someone else. You're pushing me and I don't like it." He pulled himself to his feet. "What's it going to be?" Martha's fleshy neck reddened as she stared at him, the room silent, an air-conditioning vent rattling, telephones softly trilling in other offices. "Martha?"

He waited for an answer, and when it didn't come, he showed himself out.

I DON'T WANT TO GO HOME,
Charlie thought, carrying the Shanghai bowl as he got out of the cab. I don't want to go home, but I will. Kelly, a uniformed figure of sweaty obedience, held the taxi door.

"Just saw Mrs. Ravich," Kelly observed.

"How was she?"

"She had a lot of packages, considering this heat."

"She was doing her duty for the American economy."

"Sir?"

"If nobody buys unnecessary junk, we'll plunge into a depression."

He crabbed past the mahogany paneling into the elevator, and Lionel, just starting the night shift, blinked his slo-mo recognition, an ancient mystic in an elevator man's uniform, all vitality in his being concentrated between the elbow and fingertips of his spectral left hand, which incessantly fondled the brass throttle. Where Lionel's right hand hung down against his pants leg, the material was worn shiny from the incidental graze of his unkempt fingertips.

Charlie stepped out into the foyer of his apartment. "Good evening, Lionel."

"Evening, Mr. Ravich."

He opened the front door. "Ellie?" He pushed the bowl back behind the coats and boots in the hall closet. He'd surprise her later. "Ellie?" Jolly her up, he thought, make her feel good, even though never in a million years would he be buried alive in a retirement community where men dribbled cereal onto their three-hundred-dollar sweaters and farted disconsolately through the day. Napping in their golf carts. Not me, he told himself, not the man who yanked eight million after-tax dollars from a dead man's mouth. "I'm here!" he called. "Your first husband is back. He has absolutely nothing interesting to tell you—no announcement from afar, no volatile shift in stock prices, including his beloved Teknetrix, no bulletins of world events, no private revelations, no confessional outbursts." He listened. "Ellie?" Nothing. Silence—the great roar of marriage. "What did you buy that needed the efforts of our man Kelly?"

Ellie came out of the bathroom off the kitchen, turning out the light. She kissed him quickly. "You sound like you had a drink at the office."

Bit excited here, he thought. "I didn't but I wouldn't mind one."

"Gin and tonic?"

He followed her to the bar in the dining room. "What did you get?"

"Get?"

"Shopping. Packages. Supporting the American economy."

"Nothing."

"Kelly said you came in with a bunch of packages."

She frowned. "No. I don't think I did."

He took his briefcase through their bedroom into his office. On the bed sat two large bags from Bloomingdale's, another from Saks. Don't mention it, he thought, there's no point. Her mind is just on other things. "You expect," he asked when he returned to the dining room, "that Julia and Brian will try to use another woman's egg? A surrogate?"

"I think it's an idea." Ellie handed him his glass. "They do that now frequently."

"But the child will never know who his real mother is."

"His real mother will be whoever changed his diaper and read books to him."

He tasted his drink. Terrible. Too strong by half. He poured an inch out and added tonic. "You know what I mean, Ellie, I mean the biological. Wouldn't the kid always ask himself the rest of his life?"

"It depends on how secure he is."

"But aren't you bringing a child into the world who is going to be damaged by what he or she can never know?"

Ellie took the ice back into the kitchen and he followed her. "I don't look at it that way," she said. "The child would have his biological father and an adoptive mother. Julia will be a beautiful mother."

"I know. Maybe I'm not putting it the right way." He needed to bend the question around for himself, since tomorrow he was due to whack off in a glass beaker or jar or Coke bottle or whatever they used in high-tech medical whack-off joints. "Here's what I mean. You have these women having children by themselves, and some are just going and getting sperm from any old place. I mean, how do you feel about this? Those children don't know who their fathers are."

"That's fine," Ellie said distractedly.

"Why?"

"Because if the woman went to all this trouble she wants to have a baby very much."

"But what—"

"Men
never
understand what it is to have a baby. Of course it is harder to raise a child by yourself. But for some women that is
actually
better, you know. They can love the baby and not have the distraction of the man, the competition for their time." She looked out the kitchen window toward Central Park. "I raised both kids while you were away. I was perfectly happy. I had everything I needed at the base. My only worry was if you were safe."

"You were a good mother."

Ellie shrugged. "The kids were okay. The kids knew you could be killed in the plane, and that's much worse than wondering about some father you never met."

"I thought you didn't talk to them about the plane."

"I didn't, but, Charlie, it was the base! All the kids had dads in planes. Remember Janny McNamara? And Susan Howard? They both lost their husbands, and they weren't even in Vietnam."

"That was an in-flight refueling thing." The frontseater, Howard, had misjudged his speed and flown into the jet-fuel boom sticking out of a KC-130 tanker, impaling the cockpit.

"I don't remember," Ellie went on. "What I'm saying is, I was okay and so were the kids, even though we missed you and—All I'm
saying
is that I don't blame these young mothers. To nurse your own child is just—well, you remember how I was. These young women want that. Why can't they have that?"

Now he was going to use Martha Wainwright's argument. "But shouldn't they adopt some other child who needs a mother?"

"Maybe, in a perfect world."

"What about the men who donate their sperm to the sperm banks? Isn't that just vanity?"

"No."

"Why?"

"They want to go on. I understand that."

They want to go on. She understood that.

AFTER DINNER
, Ellie put down her spoon and looked at him. "I really want you to come visit the retirement place."

"Why?"

"Because you might like it, you know. You might actually think to yourself, Ellie has a good idea here."

"I'll visit it soon as I can."

"When?"

"Let me just get by this factory stuff and I'll drive down."

"With me or by yourself?"

"We'll see." What he wanted to do, that very moment, was to slide out of the apartment and ease down the street two blocks and sit up at the bar in the Pierre, where the bartender made a damn good gin and tonic using some kind of sweetener and you sometimes saw Henry Kissinger. You sometimes saw a lot of other people, too, and most of them wore very nice dresses. He just liked to sit and watch the action. You ended up talking to a German television producer or a British real-estate man or anyone else with an hour's worth of breath. You forgot that your back had ached for ten thousand straight nights or that your wife was driving on three wheels or that you owed the Bank of Asia fifty-two million dollars in U.S. currency, the interest rate floating at three points above the prime, a sum equal to one tenth of the total capitalization of the company. You forgot that to repay that sum you would have to exploit the labor of eleven thousand semiliterate peasants in four countries, eleven thousand souls who assumed your exploitation of them and craved for it to continue, because it was the best thing going. Well, the company had tried to design humane living conditions in the dormitory next to the new factory. He needed to check on its progress, he reminded himself, he needed to sit quietly and think about the company. He could take a couple of months' worth of sales reports and raw-materials cost projections and sit at the Pierre's bar and pick through the data. You had to keep on top of the flickering indicators that the market was pressured by demand or the lack of it, rising costs or falling margins. The company's sales reps were reporting that customers were saying that Manila Telecom's salespeople were promising new products, faster manufacturing times. Maybe you forgot that, too.