Other people

Thirty-nine Francine

At the office I received the funniest sort of phone call from my father. He asked me if I was still seeing George. The way he pronounced "seeing" had a private connotation. With the case still pending, I told him, of course I'd been seeing George. He sounded as if he were pleading a case that had gone askew. Weird!

I certainly wasn't going to pick up on whatever he was hinting about. In fact, I felt in an unstoppable rush to see George every possible minute. The day after the Holiday Inn episode, George and I met for lunch halfway between his office and my office and would you guess where that halfway turned out to be? The same Holiday Inn, same desk clerk, same expressions, only this time when my clothes were off I skewed my hand around to my back and showed George the Band-Aid right above my butt.

"No carpet," I said.

"Hop onto the bed," George said, but one step ahead of him, I plunked myself into the overstuffed chair near the window. Straight ahead was the mirrored bathroom door, and I have to admit I looked pretty good in it. I moved my right arm snakelike as if in a dance, watching my reflection. Then my left.

"Narcissus," said George. "Will you have a room service lunch before or after?"

"Instead," I said, as he dropped to his knees in front of the chair. It was odd, watching in the mirror, then oddly exciting, then very nearly unbearable.

We didn't muss the bed this time either. We did order a couple of sandwiches afterwards because all that appetite gave me an appetite.

That evening we went to the movies. How do I know what was playing, it was a movie, we weren't watching the movie, we were too busy with each other. That night we slept at George's, the jigsaw pieces of our limbs learning to find the perfect fit with each other. The next morning, I had my driver's license at risk as I zoomed to work, getting there late, and was greeted by X saying, "Can you make lunch?" and me answering, "You mean cook?" and he saying, "In a restaurant, idiot," and me saying, "I took a very long lunch yesterday, I should eat in," and him saying, "I'm the boss, it's okay."

Over lunch I kept thinking of yesterday's nonlunch lunch with George, and I guess I wasn't paying too much attention because X finally said, "Are you in love?"

"Yes."

"Who's the lucky man?"

"A man."

"As distinguished from a boy?"

"Yes."

X professed mock jealousy — I hope to Christ it was mock jealousy — and then invited me to sub for him on a radio panel because he had a conflicting appointment.

"I know all about your conflicting appointment," I said. "You don't want to do it."

"Right."

"Why?"

"Fair enough," said X. "Butterball is the other guest. I'd be tempted to let him have it. If I do, it's serious."

"And if I go on in your place, it's not serious because I'm just a young woman of low station and it doesn't count."

"Oh it'll count all right. Just sending an underling like you will be received by His Highness as an insult. It's beautiful."

"Thanks a lot." I wasn't really angry. Butterball, or His Highness as we sometimes called him, was the crown princeling of a new West African country with a population smaller than Harlem's, but who saw his Harvard-educated self as the most glamorous of the spokesmen for the new bureaucracies that had dumped all their white colonial riffraff and were learning to master postage meters and typewriters.

"The subject," said X, "is the shrinking world."

"Lovely."

"You could have a good time at it. It'd be good experience."

"When?"

"Next Tuesday evening."

"Will you listen?"

"Wouldn't miss it."

"If I'm terrific do I get a raise?"

"You know the system."

"I do indeed."

In the meantime, there was the weekend. Friday night George took me on the longest drive through Brooklyn to some terrific Italian restaurant in Coney Island and it was two in the morning before we got back to his place. When I came out of the shower he was in bed asleep, the son of a bitch, but I crawled in alongside of him, kissed the back of his neck, and the back of his back, and he muttered sounds in his sleep. I slept too, till sometime toward morning when I felt the scepter stiffen. We made languorous middle-of-the-night love till daylight, then slept till noon. Still in our nightdress, we ate a marvelous breakfast of grits and bacon and eggs and English muffins and orange juice and back to bed.

"Not bad for an old man," I said, flaked out from postcoital exhaustion, absolute, terminal, and slept again. I woke, refreshed, glanced at the clock. Impossible! It was after three in the afternoon! Where had the day gone?

"Get up," I said to George.

"After you," he answered.

"Simultaneously," I compromised, and we pulled each other up, and then, like kids, made a game of dressing each other.

"This is a very erotic exercise," said George.

"Oh no," I said. "If you're not worn out, I'm worn out, let's go for a walk," and we did, until the daylight faded. Having missed lunch, we stopped for dinner early at a small Italian place. We finished half the chianti before the spaghetti arrived. We laughed at each other mixing the meat sauce, forks twirling the pasta in dinner spoons, shoveling it into waiting mouths. Halfway through, George made a thing of taking a single strand in his lips and sucking it in.

"People are looking," I whispered.

"Voyeurs," said George, "may they enjoy it."

"Crazy," I said.

"Crazy," he echoed.

Suddenly George said, "Let's go!" He motioned for the waiter, who came scurrying over.

"No good?" he questioned, as if to say how can spaghetti not be good.

"Marvelous," said George. "Check, please."

George overtipped, and we both skipped out of the place, and once in the street, hand in hand, ran back to the house and to bed. I didn't think I could have another orgasm, but I did, I did.

Sunday morning we were awake at dawn. It felt as if the rest of the world had disappeared. I pulled down the covers and addressed George's organ. "This," I said, "is a day of rest." All I did was tap it on the head to make my point, but I could see it stirring. "Lie still," I told it, patting it down. It wouldn't listen, thickening. "It's Sunday," I said, touching the rim of the corona, circling it as one does the rim of a martini glass. And there it was, instant yeast, the veined mast twanging up to its full height.

"A day of rest," I said to the unmoving George, as I got up to lower myself unto him, then raised myself, then lowered again, riding him first in fun and then in fury as the shudders came and I collapsed on top of him.

I was still lying half over him when we later woke.

"They shoot horses, don't they?" said George, and I had to laugh, even though I hadn't seen the movie.

I told him about the Tuesday radio show and invited him to hold my hand. "Not literally," I said, "they'll probably make you sit somewhere behind the glass, but you can watch me show off with Butterball."

"Have you ever been on the radio?" he asked.

"Nope."

"Aren't you nervous?"

"Only about us."

"What about us?"

"Continuing."

His kiss caught me by surprise.

"Sated?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I had an idea."

"No more."

"No, a different idea. How would you like to get out of being the star witness at Koslak's trial?"

"I said I would do it."

"What if you didn't need to?"

"I'm not going to let that bastard off."

"Suppose I was able to guarantee a jail sentence for him without a trial?"

"You planning a dictatorship?"

"I want to try something."

"Who's stopping you?"

To me, after all those days and nights of lovemaking, he seemed unstoppable.