Time Travail (26 page)

But why fourteen minutes, Beth? I would
protest, half-laughing. Why not fifteen? Just like that, she
replied, half-laughing herself.

Even though there was that locked
guestroom at the end of the corridor she always chose the
cama de
matrimonio
as the site
for tenderness. I had a hang-up about other men’s
camas de
matrimonio
but that
wasn’t one of her hang-ups as long as the action on it was
circumscribed. I suspected it was timid revenge on her
husband.

In any case, still a little sensitive to
overlapping temporal levels, I was uncomfortably aware of his
presence on the bed. The other member of her family was very often
with us there too, not just thirty times on the pastel blue walls.
Between kisses she would ask me, over and over, to repeat the good
things I’d told her about the poems in the third pile. I wished we
could have been alone on that bed a little.

Regulated physical tenderness had started as
an overflow of pure joy. She’d already told me what the trouble was
with her son that had required all that money, what he’d been
caught with and how much and what that could mean.

The day following our dead room embrace she
took off two days and went to Nebraska where it had happened. She
returned a little less worried. That evening she rang me up
joyously. She’d just got a fax. Everything was going to be all
right. I should come over and celebrate with her.

She didn’t limit her intake that day. She
hunted around a little unsteadily for the fax in the living room
and then said she must have left it upstairs, come on up. She found
it in her bedroom, showed it to me and initiated the tiptoed
embrace of thankfulness and joy. We were standing in the middle of
another room embracing as a few days before except that in this
room there were no time-sensors but a bed. Between showing me the
fax and utilization of the bed no more than thirty seconds
elapsed.

Sometimes I couldn’t help feeling it was a
little like an initial installment plan payment.

The limitations she imposed on the expression
of tenderness took me back to adolescence on sofas with good girls.
But even with good girls ultimate buttons could be slyly undone.
Certain garments could be sweet-talked off on the pretext of
preserving them from wrinkles. Beth defended her ultimate buttons
and said the wrinkles she feared weren’t those. I didn’t insist as
much as I would have in my younger days, a sure sign of waning
vigor. So I went about in a state of faint but constant excitation.
It wasn’t unpleasant, a kind of rejuvenation. Or if not, embers
beneath the ashes at least. That faint loin-fire was her great
present, maintained by a future of imagined possession and by her
refusal to let me realize it.

I thought I was on the dangerous verge once.
I’d been able to coax her into her Saturday morning Huck Finn
outfit, the tattered low-riding jeans and the big man’s shirt over
bareness and knotted between breastbone and navel. I quoted Robert
Herrick and invited her to mess up her hair which she finally did,
like submitting to any sacrifice to humor me. I prescribed the
angle of the cap. She stood there in the middle of the bedroom
surrounded by the photographs of her son, frowning, not answering
my invitation to join me on the bed. Then suddenly she left the
room and my rejuvenated heart beat hard at the imminence of total
disclosure and possession. After a while I heard the querulous
whine of the vacuum cleaner below. My present and future were still
intact.

I followed her around, even gave her a hand
with the windows.

The excitement involved in our exchange of
tenderness was more verbal than tactile. One of the unspoken rules
of our new game was that intimate things could only be whispered
into the other’s ear – hers small, pink, exquisitely sculptured and
unaging like her nose.

We confessed our jealousies. Who was that
young man a few weeks ago she’d had dinner with and maybe more than
dinner with? Oh, Johnny, from the florists’, a baby, twenty-three,
had lost his friend, needed consoling.

What kind of consoling? I whispered. Had he
been allowed to go this far? Oh no, not that, my sweetheart, she
whispered ambiguously. Hadn’t been allowed to go as far as my hand
was trying to go, did she mean? Or protesting that it shouldn’t go
so far?

She removed it and kissed it and whispered
something monstrous. She was certain I was having an affair with
Hanna. I said I felt insulted. She whispered, I know men can’t
resist big breasts. I said it depended on who was standing behind
the big breasts. In this specific case I had no trouble
resisting.

She once whispered that her love had been
from the very start when suddenly I’d appeared that day like a kind
of knight, mature but athletic, and had defied that female dragon
and switched off her lawnmower. She wanted to know when I had
started becoming interested in her. I replied, right from the start
too but there had been that time when she’d been on her knees
planting tulip-bulbs bra-less and I couldn’t help seeing her pretty
little breasts, like exquisite pink-tipped tulip-bulbs themselves,
I whispered. Only considerably larger, I added with
exaggeration.

Her breath came fast at that. My excitement
(and hers too?) came more from this evocation than from my hand’s
immediate exploration of the presumed area of her draped bosom. I
wondered if this past-orientation even in sexual matters wasn’t
another of the perverse effects of time-travail.

Sometimes she whispered pretty wild things in
response to those muffled caresses. Once she confessed she’d had
fantasies about me from the very first day, perfectly innocent
fantasies and then less so and then not at all innocent.

She told me all about it and said she would
do it again that night and gave me the exact time and said how
beautiful it would be if I did it too at the same time, each of us
in our own bedroom intensely thinking of the other, my
sweetheart.

Towards the end it all ebbs back from the
primitive area of intervention into the museum of the brain and the
best you can hope for is a woman saying things like that.

Despite the boldness of some of her
confessions in the relative heat of action she didn’t like any
allusion to our activities on that bed once we left it. I wasn’t
even supposed to take the initiative to go up to it with her. She
always initiated the tenderness sessions herself, wordlessly.
Typically, I’d be close-reading a passage for her benefit. I’d test
her comprehension with a question and get no answer. She’d be
staring at me. The sudden melting not-listening expression of her
face was pedagogically annoying but otherwise flattering.

“Wait,” she’d whisper and unlock a certain
closet and take out a photo-album. That was the signal and the
pretext for the climb upstairs, as if the photos could only be
close-read on a bed. There must have been a hundred of those
albums, largely devoted to her son doing unexceptional things at
various stages of growth. She conducted an enforced tour of his
development in the alarmed pauses between embraces. It was the
price to pay.

One evening she brought up two albums. When
the alarm clock went off she disengaged herself, sat up in bed and
opened the first of the albums and quickly shut it, saying she’d
taken the wrong one. She refused to let me see those wrong (so
Ricky-less) photos. She placed the album back on the floor
alongside the bed and groped for a bottle and a glass. “Gosh, I
forgot your whisky, Jerry. I’ll be right back. Be good.”

She was gone ten minutes, long enough for me
to leaf through that wrong album.

It was full of nude torso studies of her
fifteen or so years back. Except for the last one, they were chaste
enough to have graced late nineteenth century walls. Mushy with
soft-focus, sometimes with cute vignette effects, the studies
showed her from a variety of angles, mostly with her arms crossed
over her chest. Her pretty face had an invariable expression. Those
parted lips and eyes fixed on things beyond the margin meant to
convey dreamy spirituality.

The final photo was in sharp focus and showed
all of her entirely nude. Her arms were lifted and her head thrown
back as she brushed her long hair. She had the same expression of
dreamy spirituality as though unaware that below a spot selectively
lit up her abundant honey-colored fleece. That center of interest
was further emphasized by her awkward posture. Her husband must
have ordered her to arch her torso back to give priority to it. It
was a touchingly amateurish job on both sides of the camera.

I went on looking at her until I heard her
fifteen years later singing out from the staircase: “Gangway for
Glenfiddich.” She said it long seconds before she entered, giving
me time to close the album and place it back on the floor. When we
embraced I felt I had to pay indirect tribute to what I’d probably
been meant to see.

“Oh please no, not that, Jerry, my darling,”
she said over and over.

The alarm went off in time. She gathered up
the albums, I took the glasses and bottles and we went downstairs
to resume literary analysis.

Harvey was waiting. I kissed her cheek again
and said I’d be back as quickly as possible. As I turned away from
her I knew her face had switched to that clandestine expression of
deep concern. I could almost feel it in my back.

I took the short way down to the cellar,
through the dead room I’d begun again to think of as the living
room. I didn’t pay attention to the sensors or avoid the departed
piano. None of that bothered me anymore ever since my loins had
started glowing with urgency for a targeted future. At least that
was the connection I made.

I stopped midway down the cellar stairs. No
closer. Harvey looked up from an old TV he was gutting for parts
and stared at me grimly beneath his Harpo Marx wig.

He wanted to know what Beth Anderson had been
doing here in the house a few weeks ago.

I played it wisely. For him to have launched
such an accusation he must have had proof. Neighbors might
conceivably have seen her coming over that Monday morning. But
Harvey wasn’t on speaking terms with any of the neighbors. Had he
found a lost earring of hers in the dead room? That happened only
in books and movies.

Anyhow, I said yes, she’d been here. I’d been
trying again to convince her to let the sensors be installed in her
living room. It was his idea, after all. I’d even told her how much
he was willing to rent the space in each corner for. She’d wanted
to see them first. So I’d invited her over.

“Did you say. What they were for?”

“I spoke in the vaguest of terms of
telluric-wave research. Some day you’ll have to tell me what
telluric waves are.”

“And that’s all. You did?”

“Absolutely all.”

“You didn’t maybe. Turn on the machine?”

I looked scandalized at the very
suggestion.

“Losing my memory. But that I remember. Still
the same. Old Jerry. Still the same. Pathological liar.”

Before I could retort he switched on the
screen.

What could I say then to the infallible
bastard at the spectacle of Beth and myself locked in embrace in
the dead room? There was maybe one chance out of six trillion of
that particular image coming up and it had. I didn’t realize at the
moment that it illustrated not my habitual bad luck but a number of
Harvey’s breakthroughs.

In my discomfiture at least I was able to get
satisfaction from the sight of Beth kissing me with closed eyes,
something I hadn’t been in a position to notice at the time.
Supposedly, insincere women kiss staring into space over their
partner’s shoulder. The image was clear, unflickering and
unfragmented.

I justified myself by saying I’d had to turn
on the machine so she could see the sensors in action before she
made up her mind. It was elementary honesty to show her the sensors
operating here as they would be operating in her living room. She
hadn’t liked what she’d seen. Her answer was still no and it
sounded very definitive.

Harvey didn’t say anything more about the
matter. But I knew he would brood over it. It would germinate and
root in his mind, grow immense and black and bear bitter fruit,
like the Shadow’s tree. And I knew who would have to taste that
astringency.

To change the subject I congratulated him on
the unusually good quality of the image.

That was just one of the things. He gave me
minimal grudging information about his breakthroughs. I gathered
that the image I was looking at (looking in particular at my right
hand slipping down an inch from her waist to the birth of her left
buttock) was taped. But devising a way to videotape the images from
the past was a relatively minor accomplishment.

Vastly more important was the progress in
temporal navigation. The machine was no longer a drunken rudderless
skiff on the waves of the past. It was still far from being
perfectly obedient to the helmsman’s will, not yet able to sail for
a stipulated hour or even day, but roughly reliable to the week.
The extended maritime metaphor is mine. Harvey expressed it more
aridly. The images he was interested in weren’t literary.

Next, he’d partially overcome the problem of
temporal random selection. He’d bridled the machine’s tendency to
break out of the imposed time-corral. If it had mattered now I
would have been thankful for an end to that particular horror. But
this was my last semi-descent into the cellar.

Also, he’d made progress disciplining the
machine into staying put on the main center of interest,
restraining those exuberant zooms on what for us was trivia. There
was still room for improvement in this respect, he admitted.

Obediently, as if to illustrate his words,
the screen filled with a close-up of my hand well below the small
of her back now, in semi-possession of the left buttock. I felt
desire at the spectacle, more than at the time as an actor, I
think.