Slow Hand (24 page)

There really do seem to be two distinct strains that run through any group of erotic stories, that play off either the warmth of the familiar or the heat of the strange. But what happens, asks Kay Kemp, when the familiar becomes the strange? “Eros in Overtime” is a marvelous title for the portrayal of an all-too real, ail-too poignant situation, when two people make love in a time warp of their own devising.

SHE

H
e parks in front of the fire hydrant to prove he won’t stay. She waves through the window. She offered him the driveway, but when she sees the red of his eyes as he rounds the front fender, she shrugs, as you wish.

Eleven years they were together; in three cities, four houses they tamed, or tried to, two children. Roughly forty thousand nights (she counted). Countless fights. Now it’s finished. Blissfully, terrifyingly over. The lawyers are poised for their take. But first, tonight. It seems an opportunity, a rarity. A night outside of regular life; between lives, they could be strangers on a train.

The long loose arms, the rangy body cross the doorframe. It’s as if he is a transparency; the corner is visible through him, their house. His body is different now, separate. He seems so big. Once that large animal was alert to her every move, attuned to her smaller tension. Now he is bones on hinges, a puppet without strings. A husband, once removed. Her life, the visible part, the part she could cut off.

That’s what I married, she thinks, objective to the last. I just wanted to tell you, she says. I loved you.

I can’t take this up and down, he says. I can’t bounce back like this. Head in hands, he is crying. She watches in awe. That was her territory, the tears. She heaved and sobbed; he went grim, like a killer.

Maybe it’s not a bounce, she says, maybe it’s a corner. I saw what was ahead, and I don’t want to go that way. Not yet.

CHORUS

For a while they sit like that, him across the room. The pained silences of all their years gather and swell the room, threaten to crush them against opposite walls. It’s like some organ, dwelling there in the marital house, inflated, throbbing. What a clamor. The cruelties uttered, the dumb competing.

They sit and peer at each other over all this. It is where they sat before, dumb kids at thirty. They bought the house while the market was going up. It had thirteen rental rooms and a lock on every door. They worked so hard, the woodwork shines now, the floors are sanded. They dug holes in the doors to take out the locks, then mended them so you can hardly see. But something ugly got in anyway.

Oh sure, there were times. She had sat in that rocker so pregnant and he at her feet, his head on her stomach, listening. They lay on that rug in front of that fire as the wind came down the chimney, and it was the best place in the world to be. But, overall, marriage was a poison they took in. They leaned together, faint with the dread chore of it, being all in all.

Now he sits across the room a free man, made strange by
that, and alive. The line of his cheek is leaner, he’s suffered. That’s attractive. Her feet are under her; she sinks into the couch. They talk of banalities, the same old story—work, money, time, lack of it.

Then.

I’m going to try to tell you how I feel, he says. She can feel the immensity, the effort, granite cracking. He finds a new language, a new place to speak from.

He is crying, between the words, getting maudlin, he says but doesn’t stop.

She loves to see a man cry.

Now he is in her arms, the tattered male in all his glory. She grows moist, it’s so good, the great cage of his ribs, the braid of sinews in his arms. She’s pulled into a spell of his remembered scent (what is it? half-clean shirt—soap—sweat—some damp shade plant). The fine light scratch of evening whiskers on her neck.

Stay tonight, she says. I know you’re tired. We don’t have to make love, just sleep with me.

Oh we’d make love, he says in the conditional, if—he puts his hand on hers and guides it to his cock, obvious, ready, and strange. The part she knew so well, she thought she owned it.

Go out and move the car, she says. You can’t leave it there overnight.

HE

He crosses the doorframe again, lopes down the lawn to the car, and starts it up. There’s a ticket already on the windshield, forty dollars. Still smiling he hears on the radio in the ninth the Blue Jays’ Alomar hits a solo homer on a 1–2 pitch to tie it up with the White Sox 2–2. This is happening in the thirty seconds it takes to put the car in the driveway. He cheers.

He’s upstairs now in the bedroom, the one she walked out of a year ago telling him she had walked away from his bed for the very last time. He steps out of new clothes he’s bought since. She’s already under the sheets.

It’s been so long since I’ve done this, he says, stay overnight at somebody’s house.

Your house, she says.

SHE

Those clothes were different, she had nothing to do with them. But naked he is himself. They wrap together, such hunger. He’s thinner, a new hardness against his belly, and the great hands cup the globes of her buttocks, cup and separate. She’s so wet, she drips over him, and can’t wait.

You want it now, he says, so soon? His laughter against her breast.

I want to wait ‘cause it’s better, but I can’t, she says. She twists away, and for a while they touch, nose, rub against each other. The wanting is as big now as the pain before. She guides the warm missile out of its fur and over her skin, feeling the purplish velvet, sucking water from his pores. His hands become fingers, probes, and openers.

CHORUS

Everything comes back now, even this. He fills her like silence fills daydreams, like water fills a straw, flattens and lifts her like a drenching rain. All the points where they met before, nipple and neck, hip hollow and thigh, they meet again. Reclaiming him reclaiming her. He lifts his head, mouth like a bird’s, to catch her hanging nipple, and the sweet surge goes straight down her belly; he connects her poles, now the two of them make the circuit complete.

Slower now, they breathe together, steadily rocking and holding. It is new and remembered, all at once. The very best. She notes a slight change in the way he rolls, a new use of the side of his arm, a compensation, a trick, if you like. The gesture is slight but warns her. Then another. He asks her to get on her knees to crouch a new way. He’s been with someone else, she thinks. It only takes a one-minute alteration in their precise ritualized passion, and all becomes clear.

If I know it, do you know it too? If you show it, do I show it too, in my dance, my newly revitalized waltz, my jive? An inspired turn: we have each tried someone else. And no, we did not want them. The words are never said, in this instant it is forgiven, even relished.

There is that moment, halfway along, when she starts talking. It’s always like that. She bleeds words, crazy, ridiculous words, ones that don’t bear repeating: help me take me hurt me, stop, don’t stop, fuck, cunt, and more so. But that ends before long, and his animal sounds take over. Nothing but growls now, and heaves and grunting.

Here is some moment of truth. Freed from speech now another lexicon takes over her head. Fasten to me all your loving now, that once I unbuckled, in such grief and rage.

It is for this they had each other.

The rest was extra, in the way. All that depended on this one act they have shucked off. It stands by now, alert, an audience: the last dozen years, the two children, the parents, the grandparents, the house, the bank accounts. Now all that will be divided, as they will be. But not yet. Tomorrow, each will take what is fair, what he brought, and go. It’s only goods.

HE

Riches are in the meat of this nearness. He has found her now. It goes and goes, the desperate rocking, bone against bone. She becomes a vast hot channel split from the waist down, he pressing up between.

SHE

She calls out to him, every cell and pore, the old furry body, her brother, her old man, the one who seeded those children, the one who tasted her milk, who wished to nurse his children. Somewhere in all that she lost him, lost the man in him, the valued other.

CHORUS

Who’s to sing the praise of this practiced love, this rewarmed corpse, who ever did? The woman novelists always cleaved desire and duty, made the passionate heroine accept the drowsy sputters of married sex. Who will discover it, claim it, the rich depth you can charge again and again with the booty of years?

In the morning the children try the bedroom door. What are you doing here, Daddy?

HE

It was only for last night.

CHORUS

The children bounce on the bed. Alomar tried it again in the eleventh, his third homer, tying the Jays up again with the Sox at 3–3. It was a form of heroism, but he couldn’t do it alone. Sosa homered in the twelfth to make it White Sox 5, Blue Jays 3.

AU
THOR’S NO
TE

Many of the women I know, if queried about the sexual fantasies their lovers or husbands have confided in them, would answer, I think, that men frequently dream of having two women available to them for an erotic interlude. But turn the tables and suggest back to them a single woman pleasured by a male pair, and some of these guys suddenly get a little huffy. Actually, of course, since any amorous combination offers the potential for considerable pleasure, it’s going to be the one who crafts the scenario who gets to cast the supporting players. In this case: Catherine S.

I
met Caldwell first. Not that it matters. Whichever one you met first, the other soon followed. They were a set, a unit. I have tried to remember what it was like, the brief time of knowing only Caldwell, of seeing him without expecting to see Mark nearby. I have no memory of it. But then, it truly was a brief time, perhaps two hours in all.

Caldwell had moved into the apartment below mine. We met on the fire escape, where he was trying to cook an entire
chicken on a temperamental grill. He invited me to dinner when I lent him kosher salt for the rims of his margarita glasses. Mark came, too. Of course. This was how it had always been, and I quickly understood this was how it would continue to be. Caldwell and Mark. Mark and Caldwell. And me, Catherine. Sometimes. As long as I understood the rules.

They had been friends almost twenty years, since second grade. They did not remind me of other men I knew. They loved each other and were comfortable with this. If one went away for more than forty-eight hours, the other hugged him when he came back. Being with them was like being carried along by a warm breeze. I wanted to spend all my time with them. I wanted to be them.

Which one would I choose to be? Mark was tall and thin, with soft hands and the prettiest mouth. Words streamed out of that mouth, thousands of words about hundreds of things. Statistics carried out to inane conclusions. Ignominious deaths of famous people. Obscure laws and religious practices. State capitals. I called Mark when I wanted to be distracted or soothed. When I needed help with the crossword puzzle. Or when I wanted to lose control—drink too much, laugh too hard, drive too fast. I see him with a drink in his hand, his lanky height draped over a bar in some dive, making Caldwell and me laugh. I wanted to talk like Mark.

Words came easily to Caldwell, too, but so did work. He always had to be doing something. He could build a bicycle from components, tune up a car, get an eight-foot table into the trunk of a Toyota. He was broad-shouldered, with short, sturdy legs and bright eyes. I called him when things broke. I called him when I was restless. I called him to find out what had happened the night before. Caldwell was our collective memory, the one who filled in the blanks for Mark and me after a particularly hard night. Sometimes, he half carried me up the stairs to my apartment, putting me to bed. Mark trailed behind him, helpfully suggesting hangover cures.