The Early Stories (122 page)

He turned. Who are you? he asked her, within himself. His apprehensions ricocheted confusedly, in the room's small space, off this other, who, standing in its center, simultaneously rendered it larger and many-sided and yet more shallow, as if she were a column faced with little mirrors. He stood motionless, perhaps also a column faced with mirrors—as in ballrooms, theatre lobbies, roller-skating rinks. Absurd, of course, to place two such glittering pillars so close together in so modest a room; but, then, perhaps in just such disproportion does sex loom amid the standardized furniture of our lives.

She moved a step. Something spilling from one of the packages attracted her: a book. She pulled it forth; it was Blake's
Auguries of Innocence
, illustrated by Leonard Baskin woodcuts—a present for his wife, who in the early years of their marriage used to carve a woodcut as their annual Christmas card. Ann opened the pages, and the look of poetry on the page surprised her. “What's it about?” she asked.

“Oh,” he said. “It's about everything, in a way. About seeing a world in a grain of sand, and Heaven in a wild flower.” He heard a curious, invariable delay in the answers they made each other: tennis with sponge rackets. It might have been his thicknesses of alcohol. The brandy had been the worst mistake.

She let a page turn itself under her fingers, idle. “I used to work in a library.”

“Where?” Under cover of her apparent interest in the book, he moved two steps to be behind her, and touched the zipper at the back of her sweater. It was magenta, wool, a turtleneck, somehow collegiate in quality, perhaps borrowing this quality from their bookish conversation. He thought of pulling the zipper and gingerly didn't dare; he thought of how, with any unbought woman, in such a sealed-off midnight room, hands and lips would have rushed into the vacuum of each other's flesh, sliding through clothes, ravenous for skin.

She answered his question reluctantly, not lifting her attention from the book. “In Rhode Island.”

“What town?”

Her attention lifted. “You know Rhode Island?”

“A little. We used to have some friends we'd visit in Warwick.”

“The library was in Pawtucket.”

“What's Pawtucket like?”

She said, “Not bad. It's not all as ugly as what you see from Route One.”

He pulled down her zipper, a little pink zipper, enough to let her head slip through. Her cervical vertebrae and some down at her neck's nape were bared. “Did you like it,” he asked, “working in the library?” Under his fingertips her nape down tingled; he felt her expecting him to ask how she had got from the library into this profession. He refused to ask, discovering a second mood, after mock courtesy, of refusal. For hadn't she, silently, by some barrier in her manner, refused him a kiss?

She moved away from his touch. “Yeah, I did.” She was young and lean, he saw, a brunette, her hair crimpy and careless and long. Not only her nose but her teeth were too big, so that her lips, in fitting over them, took on an earnest, purposeful expression; she appeared to him, again, as a schoolteacher, with a teacher's power of rebuke. He laughed, rebelling—laughed at her moving away from him so pensively. As the outdoor cold melted out of his body, the alcohol blossomed into silliness, foaming out of him like popcorn from a popper. Acting the bad boy, he pulled off his overcoat, suit coat, and tie; ashamed of his silliness and the fear it confessed, he went toward her as if for an embrace but instead tugged the hem of her sweater out of her skirt and pulled it upward. Understanding, surrendering, she shook her head to loosen her hair and raised her arms; the sweater came free. Lifting it from her hands, he saw she had long oval nails, painted with clear polish. Her bra was severely white, hospital-plain. This surprised him, in an era when even the primmest of suburban women wore coquettish, lace-trimmed underwear. And he was additionally surprised that, though his whore's shoulders were bony and bore the same glazed pallor as her face, her breasts were a good size, and firm. Amid the interlock of these small revelations an element clicked apart and permitted him to place his arms around her hard shoulders and tighten them so that the winter chill and stony scent of her hair flowed from the top of her head into his nostrils. His voice leaped from the cliff of her tingling hair; he asked, “You want your thirty now or after?”

“Whichever,” she said, then—a concession, her first, possibly squeezed from her by alarm, for his extreme reasonableness did, he perceived, resemble insanity—“after.”

“So you're a librarian,” he sighed.

His relief must have been too huge, too warm; she pushed his chest away with iron fingertips. “Why don't you go into the bathroom,” she suggested, using a disciplinarian's deceptive softness of tone, “and”—she lightly tapped his fly with the back of her hand—“wash them up.”

Them!
The idea of designating his genitals a population, a little gabbling conclave of three, made his silliness soar and his complementary mood of refusal deepen, darken toward cruelty. With the deliberateness of an insult or of a routine of marriage he sat in the hotel armchair and took off his shoes and socks, tucking the socks in the shoes. Then he stood and, insolent but for the trembling of his fingers and the wave of alcohol tipping him forward, unbuttoned his shirt, pulled off his undershirt, managed the high-wire two-step of trouser removal. He was aware of her motionless by the bed, but could not look directly at her, to gauge the image she was reflecting, or to catch a glimmer of himself. She was a pillar of black facets. A wave of alcohol must then have broken over him, for he lost her entirely, and found himself standing naked before the bathroom basin, on tiptoe, soaping his genitals above the lunar radiance of its porcelain and still smiling at the idea of calling them
them
.

As he washed, the concepts her directive had planted—dirt, germs, disease, spoilage—infiltrated the lathery pleasure, underminingly. His tumescence, he observed, was slight. He rinsed, splashing cold water with a cupped hand, dried himself with a towel, tucked the towel modestly about his waist, and walked out into the other room.

Ann was naked but for her boots. Purple suede, they were laced up to her knees. Were they too tedious to unlace? Was this a conventional turn-on? A put-down? An immense obscure etiquette whose principles hulked out of the city night to crowd them into this narrow space of possible behavior blocked him from asking why she had kept them on or whether she might take them off. As if another woman in undressing had revealed a constellation of moles or a long belly scar, he was silent, and accepted the boots along with the slim waxen whiteness of the rest of her, a milk snake with one black triangular marking.

He had worn the towel as provocation, hoping she might untuck it for him. His current mistress, most graciously, unlaced his shoes, and stayed on her knees. But Ann's sole move was to tuck back her hair as if to keep it clear of the impending spatter of dirty business. He let his towel drop and held her, with no more pressure than causes a stamp to adhere to an envelope. He in bare feet, she still in boots, they came closer in height
than on the street, and his prick touched her belly just above the black triangle. She backed off sharply: “You're icy!”

“I washed like you told me to.”

“You could have used warm water.”

“I did, I thought.”

She bent down, but to pick up the towel. She handed it to him. “Dry yourself, can't you?”

“Jesus, you're fussy.” He must counterattack. “How about you?” he asked. “Don't you want to use the bathroom?”

“No.”

“Don't you need to go wee-wee or anything, standing around on the street for hours?”

“No, thank you.”

“It's a perfectly good bathroom.”

Just when he had figured her as mechanically one-track, she changed her mind. “O.K. I will.” She went into the bathroom. She closed the door! So he couldn't watch. No free pleasures, he saw, was one of the rules. Naked, he sat on the bed, picked the Blake from the bureau top, and read,

The toilet flushed; the faucets purred. She emerged still wearing those bothersome, unlovely boots, and gave his limp penis a glance he thought scornful. Only the alcohol helped him ask, “Want to lie down?”

Without voicing assent, she sat on the bed stiffly and let herself be pulled horizontal. Her skin felt too young, too firm and smooth. Passing his hands down the mathematically perfect curves of her sides and buttocks, he calculated that the journey of happiness from these hands into his head and from there down his spine to his prick was, rendered tenuous and errant by his drunkenness, too long. He stroked her breasts, so firmly and finely tipped as to feel conical. His sense of breasts had been shaped by his overflowing wife. Once when she was nursing one of their babies he had sucked a mouthful of milk from her and, not swallowing, filled her own mouth with it, so she, too, could know the taste. By comparison this kid's tits were so firm as to feel unkind. Her belly was flat, with the sheen of a tabletop beneath his fingers, and the hair of her pussy
was thick, stiff, brushlike. The first time he had slept with a woman not his wife, she had been a mutual friend, a shy and guilty woman who had undressed out of sight and come back to him wearing her slip over nothing; touched, her pussy beneath the nylon had been so startlingly soft he had exclaimed, “Oh,” and she with him—
“Oh!”
—as if together on a walk they had simultaneously sighted a rare flower, or a sun-splashed bed of moss.

Ann, stroked, took this as the signal to set her own hand, cool and unfeeling, on his prick. Too rapidly she twitched the loose skin back and forth; he huddled inside his drunkenness and giggled.

“What's so funny?” she asked.

“You're so nice,” he lied. It came to him that the part-time penmanship teacher would sometimes touch him, reaching over his shoulder to roughly grab his wrist and push and pull his hand back and forth to give him the idea of not writing with his wrist and fingers but with his forearm.

Ann sat up to continue with better leverage her attack on his prick. It tickled, twittered, and stung; his consciousness drew back, higher, as a man climbs higher into the bleachers for a more analytical view of the game. Either this girl had no aptitude for her profession, or love cannot be aped. She flicked her head haughtily, stopped her futile agitation of his penis, put her mouth to his ear, and whispered with that slithering urgency she affected, “Do you like me?”

“Sure.”

“Well,
look
at it.” She flipped it. He looked. It lay sideways, enviably asleep. She asked, “How long do you expect me to keep at it?”

“Not long,” he said pleasantly; her fingers, inert, felt pleasant. “You can go now. I'll get you your thirty dollars. Sorry I'm such a flop.”

Her face, softer in shadow, pondered. “Ed, look. I'll stay, but it'll take a little more.”

“How much more, for how long?” The prompt specificity of his question took her aback. He helped her, though he was new at this and she wasn't. “How about one hour,” he proposed, “for thirty more? In an hour the drinks should wear off enough so I can get it up. I'm sorry, I'd like to fuck you, I really would.”

Displeasingly, her whisper hoarsened, becoming theatrical, seductive. “How about being Frenched? Like that? For twenty more I'll French you. Would you like that, Ed?”

Naked and lazy, he shifted position on the bed. Impotent or not, he was the boss. In daylight transactions he hated haggling; but this was different.
She was so young she could be teased. Her youth furthermore made her an enemy. For this was the era of student revolts, of contempt for the old virtues, of energy-worship. “Twenty more!” he protested. “That makes eighty all told. You'll bankrupt me. Why would a nice girl like you want to come in off the street and bankrupt some poor john?”

She ignored his irony, asking with her closest approximation to true excitement, “How much cash you got?”

“Want me to count it?”

“Don't you
know?
”

“Like I said, I was Christmas shopping. Jesus. Hold on. Don't go away mad.”

He hoisted himself from the bed, located his pants draped on the back of the plush-covered armchair, found the wallet within them, and counted the bills. One hundred ten, one twenty, twenty-two, three. “O.K.,” he told her. “Eighty-four dollars total. I can just spare eighty. That's for one hour, starting now, not when you came in, and including you Frenching me. Agreed?”

“O.K.”

He considered asking that she remove her boots in the bargain; but he feared she would put a price on that, and, though he could inflict upon her the suspense of haggling, he would always end, he knew, by meeting her price. Also, there was a mystery about the boots that made him squeamish. To watch him count his money, Ann had lifted herself on the bed, up on her knees like a little girl playing jacks. Ed touched her cold shoulder, silently bidding her to hold the position, and then fit himself into her pose so a nipple met his mouth. He lapped, sucked, rubbed. She said, “Ow.”

He removed his mouth an inch. “What do you mean, ‘Ow'?”

“Didn't you shave today?”

“Not since this morning. Can you notice?”

“
Feel
it,” she said.

He rubbed his own chin and upper lip. “That can't hurt,” he told her.

“It does.”

He looked up, and her face and torso held a stillness that for the first time, it seemed to his sheepish sense, admitted a glimmer of erotic heat into the frozen space between them. Since he could not impress her by anger, not being angry, nor by being himself, since he had sold himself short by applying to her at all, he would act out compliance. He would overwhelm her with docility. “I'll go shave, then.”