Typing out fifteen pages of C-level work in sixty hours didn’t seem like such a feat to Clem. “Champagne, Urbana,” he said.
“Exactly.”
Drinking anything alcoholic, at nine in the morning, in his condition, was ill-advised, but Sharon had definite ideas about how things should be done, and he didn’t want to disappoint her. He peeled the foil off the bottle and popped the cork.
“To us,” she said when he’d filled two jelly glasses. “To Scipio Africanus!”
“Don’t even say that name. I spent all night typing Scipoi and having to erase it.”
“Just to us, then.”
She stood on tiptoe for a kiss that he bent down to give her. He caught an exciting, catfoody whiff of degraded semen from his several deposits of it in her on Monday. She took her glass and the bottle into her bedroom, and he followed her like a dog. She sat propped against the pillows on her bed while he pawed her feet, massaging her bare soles with his thumbs. The champagne was making her exceedingly lovely. Far from easing his announcement to her, it was inviting him to calculate when he would have to leave her house to intercept the postal worker emptying the mailbox and get his letter back. On the theory that his brain cells needed readily absorbable glucose to regain higher function, he drained his glass.
She immediately refilled it. “You said you had something to tell me?”
He fell back onto the bed and looked up at the canted ceiling, his vision spinning. The light coming in through her dormer seemed detached from any specific hour, by its grayness and by his body clock’s confusion, the feeling that today was still yesterday and morning had followed afternoon without an intervening night.
“I have something to tell you, too,” she said.
It occurred to him that he’d never kissed her feet. They were tiny and high-arched, their soles soft and cool, a balm to his fevered cheeks. She laughed and pulled them away.
“Sorry,” she said. “That tickles.”
He had no basis for comparison, but it was possible to worry that not all girls—perhaps very few girls—were as sweetly direct as Sharon about what they liked and didn’t like. Possible to worry that few girls could have been more generous, more forgiving of his blunders, more tolerant of his incessant wish for intercourse, more interested in having it herself, less given to tears or pouting, less emotionally demanding, than Sharon had been. Possible, indeed, to worry that the three months now ending had amounted to a little Eden, an earthly paradise that he’d been stupid-lucky to land in and was a fool to be destroying. He thought of the November morning when he’d watched her hobble to the bathroom, like an old woman, and had understood how miserably sore he’d made her in his pursuit of one last, negligible orgasm. He remembered how she’d hobbled back to bed, how he’d castigated himself and begged her forgiveness, and how she’d simply laughed it off, C’est l’amour. He’d been living in an inverse Eden, whose Eve had eaten the apple and shared her delicious knowledge with him. Why, oh why, did he have to destroy it?
He reckoned that he could leave her room as late as 10:45 and still be back at the mailbox before a postal worker got there. For that matter, he could spend the whole morning with her and write a second letter to say he’d changed his mind and was keeping his deferment.
“Are you falling asleep?” she said.
“Not at all.”
“Let me make you some toast.”
“No, I’m okay. Champagne is like a glucose bomb.”
He pressed his palm between her legs, testing the spring of the curls beneath the flannel. He moved up for a closer view while he pulled down her pajama bottoms. Oh, the beauty of what he uncovered! The inexhaustibleness of its invitation! It was true that, if he’d been as forthright in his preferences as she was in hers, he might have asked her to leave her pajama top on. He was on friendly enough terms with her breasts, but he’d gained access to them so early on that he hadn’t had time to become properly fascinated with them, as a treasure to dream of uncovering, and they’d seemed a bit irrelevant ever since. He liked them better in a bra. Best of all would be to have her top-clad and bottomless, like a collegiate female faun, Honors student above the waist, creature of his wettest dreams below. But he’d never found a way to express this preference uninsultingly, and she seemed to prefer being fully naked.
She shed her pajama top and tugged on the shoulders of his shirt. She liked him naked, too—considered it especially bad form to leave one’s socks on—but this morning he didn’t feel like undressing. He’d had a taste of aggression and felt like doing what he wanted, even if he couldn’t tell her what to do. He had an image of a soldier fucking in his boots, defended by his clothes. When she tugged again on his shirt, he resisted.