Other people

Twenty-five Francine

I suggested that we might stay in a motel near Oswego and not head straight home.

"I don't like motels," said Thomassy.

"I don't think anyone likes motels. I thought, just on the spur of the moment, for the night, it might be fun."

He looked at me as if the word "fun" were repulsive to him.

On the flight back I asked him why we had gone to Oswego. To visit his father, he said. I meant why did we go to visit his father. Why do you think? he said. I said I didn't know. He said he didn't know either.

The flight took under fifty minutes. We got a clear view of the city as we came in to LaGuardia over the sound. In his car, I asked if he had planned to whip up a dinner for us. He hadn't. I volunteered to cook one with whatever I could find in his place.

"There isn't much."

"I'll try."

While he was slouched on the sofa, his legs sticking straight out, coddling Jack Daniels on ice, I asked, "What would you normally be doing on a Saturday evening?"

"Recovering from flying," he said.

"You don't usually fly around on Saturdays, do you?"

"I fly all week."

You couldn't call it a conversation. I did the best I could with eggs and cheese. I found a bottle of Chateau Giscours '66, but there wasn't time to air it.

After dinner, I sat three feet away from him on the couch. "What are you thinking?" I finally dared.

"Nothing."

"Are you in a bad mood?" I asked.

"No."

"I was thinking of Beckett. Those two people in ash cans on opposite sides of the stage."

"Nothing compared to Heloise and Abelard," he said. He wasn't smiling. Wasn't it better getting lost with Bill on a date, anything, than this sitting around with nothing happening? Except that I felt something was happening.

Of course she took it for granted you'd spend the night together, idiot. You don't take other women to Oswego. You take her to Oswego. Where do you take her next? The head bone's connected to the neck bone. You take an option on a woman. The thigh bone's connected to the ham bone. The binder connects to the contract. Joint tenancy. Great. Either or the survivor. Terrific. Stop thinking like a lawyer, Thomassy. A lover doesn't think.

I have to acquaint this woman with who I am. Look here, Francine, I have to say, I was brought up in a certain period. I am a period piece. Any fellow brought up in my period had to know the rules of four games: baseball, basketball, football, and mating. Francine, here's how mating was played, not just by me and my crowd but by everybody. You were supposed to go around the broad as if she was some kind of Monopoly game. Player One, male, is supposed to move from lips to tits to you-know-where and get as much as he could without making the big commitment. Player Number Two, female, has to lead him on, step by step, toward the contract, the steps consisting of One: fraternity pin or reasonable facsimile; Two: engagement ring; Three: you're out, game called permanently on account of marriage.

Moreover, I ought to tell her in those days you had to play or pretend to play or Player Number Two, female, and all her friends would say you were not a man. I don't want to was not a male election. Francine, in my hung-up generation, that was the highest form of social coercion, just a hairline away from rape without a weapon: you play or you forfeit. You can fuck bad girls all you want to. But if you go steady with a good girl and fuck, you better be prepared to visit a jeweler.

You kids live in cloud-cuckoo land, no past, no worries about the future, just have a piece of now, pass it around, have a drag, use my body it doesn't wear out. Save it for a rainy day? Suppose it never rains, you say. Think of the future. What future — oxygen, plutonium, hydrogen? I never knew whether it was Armenian or Thomassian but my father used to say What would you do six years from now? Apply that idea to almost anything and it changes what you're thinking of doing. Six years from now I'd be bumping the half-century mark. What if you got pregnant now — oh yes, pregnancy was always around the comer — you'd end up with a kid that in six years would have a fifty-year-old father, and what kid wants that?

I have got to sit ye down, Francine, and give you a lecture on a minor, temporary affliction of mankind more prevalent than the common cold. It's called loin-tingle. It doesn't require a relationship, it requires scratching and it goes away. You need a man of thirty. I know all that garbage, mommas' boys, deep-freeze neurotics, or if not, two youngsters fumbling around for experience, it doesn't have to be permanent, first marriages are for experience-gathering.

Let me throw cold water on it. Just turn the sexes around. Young man, older woman, and what do you get? Fag hags? Young woman, older man, you're just catering to the society-for-the-admiration-of-tight-bellies. The experienced lover with the child needing guidance, care, money, a parental substitute?

Oh yes, I can hear your answer all right, you are the magnificent age of twenty-seven, you've skipped the first marriage, and so have I. You have an answer for everything. Maybe that's why I'm having this conversation with you safely inside my head. I don't like back talk from opposing counsel. My court is my court and your court is my court.

All of this noodling is probably just a cover-up for my own disinclination to hook up with another person. It's hard enough living with yourself. You learn your own likes and dislikes, you take shortcuts, you convince yourself. And there's no one to blame. How often can you fight with yourself over something trivial? Married people fight all the time over trivial things.

Look at her, she's fallen asleep with her clothes on.

Oh yes it's sinful to pretend I'm still asleep while he turns me over gently and unhooks the one link at the top of the dress, then slides the zipper open. There's no way he can get this off me without cooperation. I am a stone. Catatonic.

He's managed it. I ought to wake up and applaud. Don't spoil it. He's managing. Aren't you glad there's no bra to fuss with, counselor? He is kissing my back between the shoulder blades, not exactly kissing, I can feel the rough surface of his tongue as he moves down each vertebra, to the left side, then the right, he knows I'm awake, he knows I'm feeling it.

His mouth is now at the indentation of my waist, on the right, and if I didn't have an erogenous area there before I do now, God do I feel it, and his hands are cueing me to turn over, and I turn slowly, and he is at my belly, one side, his tongue moving teasingly down, I was glad he turned me over, I thought he was going to kiss my butt, now his tongue is on the other side of my belly sort of sliding down, saying something to me like a promise, but stopping and moving up again, the anticipation is exquisite. No one ever did anything like this, I guess it's experience I'm experiencing. He moved up to kiss my lips softly, gently, and I admit I felt alarm he wasn't going down any farther any more! His hand went down there, just a touch past the mound, and I could feel, barely, a finger circling, not touching it, just on the hood and then to the side and the other side, just as a woman would do it, I mean a person who'd felt it herself. Men, boys really, sometimes just go with the finger like it was a hacksaw till you could scream idiot that hurts, but George was doing it so right I thought the top of my head was coming off, he was down there and I could feel it in my nipples, and he knew it, I don't know how he knew it, but his hands were up to my breasts, just teasing around the nipples, then flicking fingers over them, over them, over them, and suddenly his mouth was moving down again, fast this time, to where his finger'd been and I felt the first flickers of his tongue on my centerpiece, my breath was choking me, my own breath from my chest heaving, and everything just pointing beautiful arrows down there, the epicenter of everything getting ready, I could feel it, my hips were rising to meet his tongue, and then my hips were into a rhythm, and he was cupping his hands under me, helping, and I was thrusting as if everything, my whole body, was coming together in one place, meeting where his tongue was now circling it, and for a second I thought he was going to stop but he was only moving his mouth down where I felt so excruciatingly sensitive, and he moved just a bit, circling the epicenter again, and I heard myself saying, "George, come up here," and in an instant he was kissing me and entering me and then plunging again and again, and it was if every beautiful nerve ending was singing, and I said, "Don't stop, oh God, don't" and I let go in unbearable waves of joy, and he said, "Hey," because I was moaning so loud, and I never felt so good as when I pulled his head to mine so I could kiss him again, and hold him, and love him. without end into eternity amen.