Lion's Share (15 page)

Jana felt her body tense. It seemed as if every time Ed touched her in some new way, it sparked some vague, hazy feeling of shame. She guided his hand stiffly back to her crotch. “Harder, please.”

“Not tonight, dear.” He rubbed more and more gently, easing the sensation until it vanished. “You've been through too much today,” he told her. “But I wanted you to realize your body could still yearn to be touched, even after that doctor.”

“Even after that doctor.” She repeated Ed's words to herself, gradually drawing the image into focus.
That doctor
told her he would ease her stomachache. He led her into his small, narrow room in the camp's infirmary. She closed her eyes and remembered his warmth against her, then buried her head in Ed's chest to suppress the image.

“Tomorrow,” Ed whispered. “Tomorrow.”

“I'm not a doctor,” Ed mumbled as he was about to drift off to sleep.

Jana reached out an arm and let it rest on Ed's nipple. “I know that,” she whispered. She saw herself clearly now, lying on top of the bleached white sheets and the thin green wool blanket that made her itch, while the doctor towered above her. He was telling her the counselors suspected that she was faking sick. “The kids hate me,” she was crying. “If you send me back to my bunk they'll start teasing me again.”

“Nobody hates you,” he assured her between kisses. He worked his way lower. “Besides, if things get too bad, you can always come back here. You'll always be welcome here.”
Tomorrow
, Ed had whispered,
tomorrow.

“I can't help being afraid,” she told Ed. “I still expect you to tell me I have to go back to my apartment tomorrow. You'll say the neighbors are starting to get suspicious because I'm here all the time. Like he did.”

“Like who?”

Jana sat up in bed, trembling. She'd certainly been thinking about that experience a lot lately, but she hadn't planned on telling Ed about it, not yet. The words just slipped out. She stared out the window at the blue haze coming from someone's TV set across the street. “A doctor who treated me when I went away to camp,” she said finally, and for the first time in years, she spoke his name: “Dr. Waters.”

Ed rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. He tried to press her close, but she pulled away. “I was ten years old,” she continued as if speaking from a trance. “I had no friends at home. I thought if I got around new people, some place where no one knew me, all the kids would like me. I pleaded to go to camp in the Catskills, but even there nobody wanted to be my friend. Then I started developing stomachaches. Dr. Waters kept me in the infirmary overnight, as a precautionary measure. My stomach started hurting again late that night, when there was no one around. He assured me he wasn't going to make me drink more medicine, that he knew another way to soothe the pain. Then he took me into his room and kissed me—low, around my crotch. I developed chronic stomachaches and spent a lot of nights in the infirmary that summer. Whenever no one else was around, he'd take me into his room, lay me on his bed, pull down my pajamas, and kiss my tummy.”

“So that's what it was,” Ed mumbled. “I knew there had to be something in your past to make you so afraid.” Gently he rubbed her back. “I love you,” he whispered. “I love you and if I want to hug you or kiss you it's only because I love you. I care about what happens to you. That's the difference between me and that doctor.”

Jana clung to his body as if trying to rob it of all its strength. “Sometimes it's hard to believe how much you care,” she told him. “Or when I do, it frightens me.”

“I know, dear. And I'm not going to pretend there won't be emotional consequences. It's never easy to care about another person, but as long as we love each other, I want you here with me. Sometimes it feels as if I'm going to want you here always.” He wanted to hold her tighter, kiss her all over her body, kiss her stomach, kiss her crotch, make the hurt of every doctor go away. Instead he sucked her breast.

That first night, last summer, she'd enjoyed it immensely when Ed cupped her breast in his soft, warm hand. Later she'd sat by the window at Yaddo and tried to play with her breast herself. But it was different now, he sucked like an infant, her nipples grew hard, and a sensation started in the upper half of her body that felt inappropriate,
dirty.
“Ed,” she said, cautiously, “you can kiss me, uh,
lower down
if you want.” Maybe he would just rub her there. She would love it if he'd massage her clitoris, like he'd done earlier tonight. Get the sensation back in the right place, make it strong enough, then maybe she'd be able to tolerate the rest.

Neither his hand nor his mouth moved.

“You're not some seventy-year-old doctor,” Jana continued. “I know that now, and I want to be able to prove it—to prove how much I love you.”
Don't you feel a little bit loved?
Ed would often ask as he was fondling her. Was this really what love was? Last spring she'd frozen when he'd clasped her hand. Ed could take her hand now and she didn't back away. But holding her hand was a long way from intercourse. Maybe she'd end up frigid after all.

“I'm not that doctor. And you're not that little girl.” Ed moved his hands slowly, gently down her body. He kissed along the crease her panties' waistband left, wet, warm. Then he kissed along a slightly lower line, then …

“No!” she cried. “Stop, please.” Unable to control herself, she pushed his head away from her abdomen. Pushed as she'd never dared push Dr. Waters. “I'm sorry,” she cried a moment later, drawing him back. “I thought I could, but I can't. Not yet. I'm sorry.”

“Not to worry, dear. Not to worry.” Holding her, he pictured that selfish bastard of a doctor: wife gone, kids grown, retired except for two months at a summer camp, thinks he's all alone in the world, picks on some innocent child, trying to recapture the validation he felt in honest relationships. “Pervert,” Ed called him aloud. “All that mattered was his own gratification, as if your body was his God-given right. He never stopped to consider how harmful it would be for you.”

“He didn't hurt me,” Jana halfheartedly tried to argue.

“Yes he did, dear. I have a feeling he hurt you much more than you realize.”

“It wasn't as if he raped me.”

“Of course he raped you! You don't have to be penetrated to be sexually molested. The important thing is not what he did to you, but how the experience affected you.” He thought about how confused she'd been by her wetness at first. And even before that, the way she'd stiffened that first time he'd touched her. Her warm body pressing against his that night she'd been so upset about the subway commission. The way she'd pressed against his chest earlier tonight even, pleading, as if his touch was the only thing in the world which could quiet her. That summer, Jana had been on the brink of adolescence, a time when children tend to exaggerate their emotions. For all Ed knew, that doctor might not have done anything. But there was no denying how painful the experience had been.

They lay silently, unstirring, for what seemed like hours. Jana's thoughts drifted back to the scene in Dr. Waters' narrow room—she'd been lying there, turning her attention to crickets outside the open window, a frog or two croaking from the pond down the hill. She'd known that what he was doing was wrong, yet she'd lain there pretending she didn't know.

She closed her eyes and tried to just be with Ed, the down comforter over them, flannel sheets beneath them. There's no place I'd rather be, she tried to tell herself. But there weren't any street noises, let alone crickets, to distract her from those memories. The quieter it got, the closer Dr. Waters loomed. “Maybe a drink will help me get to sleep,” she said, getting out of bed.

“Here, I'll get it for you. We could both use a drink.” Ed grabbed his robe and followed her into the kitchen. She already had a bottle of cognac on the table. Ed got two glasses and poured healthy shots.

They sat silently, drinking until the glasses were half-empty. “What you were doing
did
feel pleasurable,” Jana said, looking up at him. “I think maybe that's what frightened me.”
Cling to me
, Ed had said those first times she'd been frightened by his advances,
cling to me.

“I know.”

“No, you don't know. Not this time.” Jana set her glass heavily on the table. “It's hard to explain, but I think the pleasure I was feeling might have been familiar. Maybe I felt it with Dr. Waters, too. Maybe his kissing my stomach might not have been so terribly wrong.” He wasn't doing anything to me that you weren't trying to do, she wanted to scream. If Dr. Waters was wrong, then you were wrong, too.

“What he was doing was wrong,” Ed assured her.

She flashed on Sharma sitting at the table when they'd had dinner with Marilyn and Andy last week. The lace collar of Sharma's blouse had fallen open across her newly formed breasts. She had beautiful, firm breasts but wore them on a child's body, with no awareness of their power. And Sharma was thirteen, three years older than Jana had been that year she went away to camp. Was it any wonder she'd been so confused by Dr. Waters?

Sharma might be too young now, but by the time someone like Ed came along to fondle those breasts, you could be certain her mother would have explained the experience to her. Sharma would never feel guilty if her body responded, responded … Responded how? Jana wanted to say
normally.

Sharma wasn't here. Marilyn wasn't here. Dr. Waters would only be here if she let him in. The dim fluorescent light hummed and flickered over the counter, reminding her that Ed was the only person in the room with her. There was nothing to be afraid of. If Jana could say the words, all the fear would vanish. “The only thing that was wrong, perhaps, was that I was too insecure to trust my enjoyment. Maybe it was a form of self-punishment: mentally I was pleading with my parents, ‘Take me out of camp, even though I haven't told you what happened, and I promise never to enjoy being touched or kissed again.' Is such a thing possible?”

Ed slid his chair back. Stared at her. Suddenly her face became grained with age. Her jaw seemed to move on its own, like a Charlie McCarthy puppet. “Well, he started it, with his ‘don't ever tell anyone about what we do here.' How was I supposed to react? He frightened me. And I was even more frightened, I think, because I enjoyed the experience, while he was hinting that it was forbidden.”

Ed stood behind her now, gently massaging her shoulders. “Hey, take it easy. It's all right to realize that.” He bent over and pressed his cheek against hers. “Everything's okay now. I'm not that doctor.” Hugging her, feeling her close to him, made her real again. “You're upset today, that's all,” he continued softly. “You're still feeling the effects of Dr. Barbash's examination. I know how hard it must be for you. Honest, I know.”

Jana was on her feet, returning his hug, letting her body make itself small in the folds of her lover's. This was the comfort she had wanted from her parents, making the world right again. But she'd never even let them know what happened.

Jana massaged both temples at once with a paint-stained hand, then drew her fingers slowly and firmly along her forehead until they met in the center. She was working with oil, which meant she had to keep the windows open—ever since she started getting sinus headaches three years ago, she'd become sensitive to the fumes. She'd also fallen asleep with her head on Ed's chest last night, inhaling the stale odor of his cigarettes, which didn't help her sinuses any. It was too cold to think straight, but she kept layering colors on the painting in front of her, determined to torture herself.

A postcard of Matisse's
Odalisque with Magnolias
was tacked to the top of her easel, and Jana had spent the past two days trying to merge those lines with her mirror-image. “I'll bet a woman that large would be easy for Dr. Barbash to examine,” she thought wryly as she extended the stomach curve. Oh, screw it! She'd tacked that postcard up to remind her of Ed's grace, not to torment herself with fat-woman imagery. But there was no use kidding herself—if Ed had been fat when she'd met him, she'd probably have used his physique as an excuse to reject him.