Mourning Glory (25 page)

She straddled limply over him for a long moment as they
calmed. Slowly, her mind found its reason again and she was able to reflect on
her actions.

She had never done anything with such compulsion in her
life. It worried her that somehow she might have crossed the line, destroyed
her credibility, blown any chance of a permanent relationship. Had she acted
too soon, gone too far? And more to the point, did he believe that her pleasure
was real?

They stayed together in a tight embrace until she lifted
herself off him. He held her for a moment, then edged her forward so that he
could kiss her again on the lips.

"Back in a minute," she said, going to the
dressing room.

She looked at herself in the mirror, hardly recognizing her
face, blotchy and flushed, the obvious result of excitement and passion. Then
she washed and came back into the bedroom. He had drawn the blinds in such a
way that the light in the room was muted, but not dark. He was lying in the big
bed, obviously waiting for her return. When she came into the room, he lifted
the thin coverlet and beckoned her to join him.

She hesitated briefly, unsure, but knowing that there could
be no turning back. Besides, she wanted to be in his embrace.

"I'm not Anne," she whispered as his arms folded
around her.

"I know," he whispered.

He sat in the chair of the bedroom patio, watching the
rising sun spangle the water. She had left sometime in the night, probably just
after he dozed off. They had made love repeatedly and he had reveled in it. He
felt more charged with erotic lust and sexual endurance than he had ever felt
before, even with those others he had coupled with. It made him doubt the
ravages of age. Perhaps aging was a state of mind, he thought, knowing it was a
fool's wish.

It was as if he had come to an oasis after a long journey
in the desert. Never had this bed, this room, seen such passion. He felt
transformed, renewed, and his sexual acrobatics apparently came as a surprise
to Grace as well.

"You're like a man of twenty, Sam," Grace told
him.

"You've inspired me," he had replied, but he was
thinking beyond the sex, believing that this attraction was more than that,
something mystical. Or was he romanticizing a perfectly natural event? He had,
after all, emerged from months of physical deprivation and years of psychic
hunger.

"Am I as good as Anne?" she had asked.

"I've told you. Different."

At that moment he knew that he must bring himself to offer
the full truth of himself, that he could not go forward with Grace without her
hearing his full confession, the complete revelation of his stunted life, the
final reckoning of his endless chain of lies. His marriage, he knew, had been a
compromise, however he had rationalized it. With death closing in, he had
determined that he could not, would not, go through such a gauntlet again. It
was too late for lies.

Such had been his silent vow as he sat beside Anne in her
final moments. His regret had been too painful and profound. Never could he be
less than scrupulously honest, less than forthright. No more lies, white or
black. Only truth, pure, pristine, unblemished truth. The soul must be purged.

Nor did he dare believe that he had had the blind luck to
find in Grace the whole woman he had looked for all his life. It was, of
course, still too early to tell. He was mystified by his powerful attraction to
her, especially coming so close on the heels of Anne's death, and when she was
away from him, like now, he longed for her, craved her. Was it his vanity
talking, his apparent rediscovery of his youthful libido, a kind of last
hurrah? The boys in the locker room would call it pussy fever. Surely it was
more than that.

To the structured world of accepted standards of propriety
in which he lived, such an event as this so soon after Anne's death would be
looked upon by his peers and certainly his children as a betrayal, a callous
and disrespectful act, an insult to her memory.

It was too complex to understand, no less unravel. He had
betrayed Anne years ago, had continued to betray her. Their marriage, if one
dwelled on the sexual component, was one long betrayal, and yet he had adored
and respected her as a friend, a companion and, in all aspects but one, a wife.
He missed her and grieved for her. He had silently vowed at her deathbed that,
in the future, there would be no more lies, no more dissimulation, whatever the
circumstances there would be truth, only truth. He needed to believe that her
death would have some meaning, some impact on his future. His vow had been his
gesture of repentance.

"What you see is what you get," he had told Grace
as they lay in the afterglow of their lovemaking, knowing she would be confused
by the assertion. "What I say is the truth as I conceive and believe it.
No more sham. No more lies. No more manipulation. No more play-acting. These
are the conditions."

He observed her puzzled look.

"The conditions of what?" Grace had asked. By
then, in just a few short hours, their intimacy, at least in his mind, had
accelerated to another dimension. She had lain crosswise, her head resting on
his upper thighs.

"Of us," Sam said, stroking her hair. "If
we're going to continue to be ... lovers." He had difficulty expelling the
word, fearful that it would signal a note of possession for which neither of
them was quite prepared and, as yet, were unwilling to accept.

"Lovers?"

"It's my line in the sand," he emphasized,
remembering all the years he had held back the truth of himself from Anne.

"Who can argue with that?" Grace said.

"Truth validates everything," he said, his
fingers caressing her. "Nothing is complete without that."

She had nodded but remained silent.

"You must think I'm paranoid about this. Grace, it's a
terrible thing, living with secrets. Believe me, I know."

He wasn't sure that she was getting the whole import of
what he was telling her, but he was certain he was conveying what was most
important to him. He had the sense that she was giving him breathing room,
letting him dig deep down into himself.

"My life with Anne..." he began, pausing, feeling
some psychic dike inside of him begin to give way.

"Yes," she said. He felt her stiffen, poised to
listen.

"All in all, my life with Anne was a good life,"
he said, but did not go further. She waited. He continued to explore the tunnel
inside of him. "But the truth of it was that we did not live as man and
wife."

"You can't be serious," she said, raising herself
on her elbow and looking into his eyes.

"I am," he replied.

"Then I was wrong about..."

"About that part, yes."

"I thought I was doing what Anne did," Grace
said. "I thought that maybe I was imitating her."

"No," he said. "We were totally estranged in
that way."

His hand moved over the nipple of her breast, which he
caressed briefly, then dropped his hand to her genitals.

"She refused you?"

"Not exactly. She ceased and I desisted."

In the semidarkness, he saw her eyelids flutter. Then she
stared upward at the ceiling, frowning.

"Was she ill in any way?"

"Not in a physical sense."

"You mean she was frigid."

"I assumed so."

"You never went to, you know, psychologists,
professional people?"

"No. In fact we never discussed it. That part of our
life simply disappeared."

"But how could it? For how long?"

"From the beginning. Almost."

"How did you live with it?"

"I ... I found other women. Many other women."

Grace was stunned.

"And she never knew?"

"Never."

"Not even suspected?"

"I can't be sure of that. It simply was not part of
our lives. It was a subject never discussed between us. I suppose you might say
we lived like brother and sister."

"Did she think you couldn't do it, that you were
impotent?"

As if to emphasize the point she kissed his penis briefly,
then caressed him until he was hard again.

"You wouldn't know it from this angle," Grace
said.

"She never explored the possibility. She just wasn't
interested."

"Do you think she masturbated?"

"I doubt it. I certainly never saw her at it."

"And you?"

"Considering the frequency, I should be blind. That's
what they used to tell young boys. Masturbation could make you blind."

She giggled at the explanation.

"You poor man," Grace said.

"I never allowed the deprivation to get in the way of
our marriage."

"I always thought it was part of it."

"You never refused your husband?"

"Never. Not that he was exactly an athlete in that
respect. I did what a married woman was supposed to do."

After this remark Grace fell into a long silence, while he
reflected on his life with Anne. Never had he shared this revelation with
anyone.

"I guess Anne didn't see it that way." Sam
shrugged. He had long ago made peace with this part of her nature. At first, he
remembered, he had been angry, disappointed, self-pitying. Didn't she know what
it meant to be a man, to have this compelling biological need for sexual
satisfaction? It tortured him, forced him into unnatural repression. He was not
a priest, had not made a vow of chastity to some imagined God, who, if He did
exist, would be revolted by the penance of distorting his creation. In the end,
following the old adage that necessity was the mother of invention, he had
concluded that his only choice was to seek satisfaction elsewhere.

But the burden of keeping Anne from the truth of himself,
his real feelings, his sensual nature, his searching need for sexual
experience, had been almost too great to bear. In the end he had accepted her
frigidity as a kind of genetic fault. Hell, he had his fun outside the house,
like eating out from time to time.

All his married life he was tortured with the possibility
that this lack in Anne was really his fault, something in his aura or persona,
some mysterious force that could not light the spark of her sexuality. Perhaps
it was his own cowardice, his fear of confrontation that prevented a resolution
of what might have been simply a physical or psychological problem of sexual
dysfunction.

Or he might have backed away deliberately from any further
exploration of this phenomenon for his own subconsciously nefarious reasons.
Under his facade of respectability, his real agenda might be that of a satyr, a
voluptuary, a sex addict who needed a varied menu of such activity.

Quite often in his life, he considered that he might be
using Anne's indifference toward him sexually as an excuse for his own secret
excess. He had even fantasized what it might be like if his secret life was
exposed, if Anne knew he had betrayed her, was betraying her. He feared that
the most, not only the embarrassment of discovery, not only the humiliation and
acknowledgment of his own failure, but the devastation she would have felt
about her inability to function as a complete wife, and how that would affect
the good things between them.

But it meant living forever with a missing link, because he
loved everything else about Anne, loved her surety and confidence and social
skills, loved her good taste and the life she had made for him.

Suddenly it seemed necessary to, once and for all, let it
out of himself, as if he needed the comfort of confession and he had discovered
just the right moment and a willing ear. Even as he spoke, he wondered if he
could ever fully explain or ever understand the complexity of his relationship
with Anne. Indeed, his characterization of Anne and her attitude was filtered
through his own perception. Her perceptions lay locked in her dead
consciousness. Nevertheless, he felt it suddenly tremendously important that
Grace hear his side of it.

Grace had remained silent until he had emptied himself.
Then she sucked in a deep breath and shook her head.

"I don't know what to say," she said.

"I suppose I've taken you by surprise."

"You're right about that, Sam. It's a little
scary."

"Scary? I hadn't realized I was frightening you."

"Not frightening exactly. It's the idea that what you
just told me about your relationship with Anne is so different than I had
imagined. I'd never have guessed."

"Nor would anyone else," he agreed. "She was
a fabulous wife in every other respect."

"Except where it counted most."

"She just wasn't aware of how important it was to
me."

"Why didn't you explain it to her?"

"I decided that it would only have made it worse,
heightened the trauma. Maybe I didn't want to see it as an obligation on her
part, or, as you suggested, a kind of duty. Did you enjoy your so-called duty,
Grace?"

He watched her grow thoughtful for a long moment.

"I didn't think about it. I just did it. I figured it
was part of the game. Was it fun? Sometimes."

Sam nodded.

"Well, it wasn't part of the game as far as Anne was
concerned. That's why the other way, me catting around, was a lot easier. I
gambled that I could get away with it."

"And you did."

"I wish I could understand why she was like that. She
apparently didn't seem to want to know or care. Maybe the sparks went out of it
or the chemistry spoiled or the mysterious reactors that turn on sexual energy
went blank. I don't know the answer. I wish I did. All I'm saying is that it
changed the entire pattern of my life. I married to be true, honest and faithful.
Till death do us part. That may sound like a naive concept, but I believed it
at the time and I swore allegiance to it. No need for that now."

"I'd say you kept your word, Sam," Grace said.
"Sounds like one big guilt trip to me."

"You think so?"

"I mean this need to tell your story now. It's so
Catholic." She chuckled. "And this." She kissed the head of his
penis. "It salutes your confession." She giggled for a moment, then
continued her ministrations. Stopping, she looked up at him. "Poor Anne.
Look at this wonder. Look what she missed."

"And what I missed," he said, feeling the full
pleasure of it.

She started again, then stopped and inspected him.

"It's like a pillar of ivory. And a perfect fit."

He smiled at the reference.

"So I've noticed."

Gently, he moved her upward and kissed her deeply. He was
silent for a long moment.

"What was your marriage like?"

"You mean sexually?"

"Yes."

She grew thoughtful.

"Not like yours," she said. "He was not
deprived. I was available. I let him use me until it sort of petered out."

She giggled.

"And you were faithful?"

"Damned right," she said. He sensed her pride in
that. "I was hit on by strange men more than once, but I felt
uncomfortable about ... affairs. Oh, I thought about it. I might have even
imagined it. But I didn't do it."

"Because you were afraid to be discovered?"

"Yes, that, too. But the truth is ... I didn't want to
feel ... well, disloyal."