He put his hand on her hair and waited. She looked down at her lap, but she didn’t move away, so he leaned in to kiss her neck. Very quickly, he had her flat on the bed, her skirt pushed up, her sweater pushed up, his face pressed against her midsection.
“No,” she said.
“Let me put my mouth on you.” He pulled down her tights—no underwear beneath them, oh, these young girls—and tasted her. “I just want to make you happy.”
“No. Please—no.” But she didn’t try to move from the bed and her back arched, her body responding to his touch. He was on his knees, his face buried between her legs. She could get away from him if she really wanted to. Heck, she could break his nose with her foot or her knee. She was moaning now. She was excited and her excitement was a tonic for him. She yelped when she finally came and he could tell it was a long orgasm, one that flowed and rippled. She was panting.
He went to the bathroom, swirled some mouthwash around, returned to the bed and kissed her gently, then placed her hand on his crotch. “What about me?”
She looked startled. “I—do you have a condom?”
“I don’t.” He wasn’t a cheater. He really wasn’t. But it had been months since Sarah had touched him with genuine passion and this girl had clearly wanted him.
“Maybe I do,” she said, rummaging around in her purse.
“Would you prefer that to—”
“Yes, I would like that better.”
She flipped over so she was on all fours. Oh, these younger women were so interesting. She seemed to come again, he couldn’t be sure, but the important thing was he did. After it was over, she went to the bathroom. He hoped she wouldn’t stay, and she didn’t.
In the morning he found her book, a name inscribed inside. Kim Karpas. The surname was not the one she had given in the bar, he noticed that. But it was a used book, so maybe that was the name of the previous owner. He wondered if she had known it was one of his favorite novels, an easily sussed-out fact. Maybe the whole encounter had been carefully planned to seduce him.
He didn’t care. He was flattered. He was going to go home and ask Sarah for a divorce. Tell Sarah they were getting divorced. Life was too short and he had too many opportunities, still. It was time to enjoy himself. On with the dance, let joy be unconfined. All his life, he had tried so hard to be good, and where had it gotten him?
March 25
GERRY’S PHYSICAL CONDITION is improving, day by day, and he couldn’t feel worse. The longer, prettier days mock him through his huge windows, cheery postcards from a world he cannot imagine himself ever visiting again. He longs for a particular scent in Baltimore’s early-spring air, but he can’t smell it up here on the twenty-fifth floor. Sometimes he feels as if he can’t smell anything at all.
But then there are the days when he thinks he can detect the fragrance of “real life” coming off Victoria and Claude—although not Aileen, never Aileen, Aileen smells like Lysol and iron ore. He wants to smell fresh-cut grass, sun, mulch. Then he remembers that is a detail in a short story he loved as a boy, about the people who live in a department store, pretending to be mannequins by day, coming to life when the store is closed. A writer, a poet, goes to live in the store, thinking it his singular brainstorm. He is delighted to find an entire colony of dropouts like himself. But the girl he loves is in love with the night watchman because he smells of the outside world. The story had been in one of those Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Serling collections that Gerry gobbled up as a child, collections that often had quite good stories. He had been astonished to realize in college that he had read a chapter from Waugh’s A Handful of Dust in its original incarnation as a short story, “The Man Who Liked Dickens.”
Waugh. Do people still read Waugh? Does Waugh matter? Do any writers matter anymore? Wah! There’s Shakespeare, of course. No one argues against Shakespeare. They will, one day, Gerry thinks. Some information will come to light, they’ll decide his wife wrote the plays or that he yearned to be a woman and cross-dressed in his spare time. Do people still speak of cross-dressing? He knows not to say tranny anymore and is proud of himself for that knowledge, but he’s a little confused about the difference between gender and sex.
The bottom line is that Gerry is terrified of full recovery, because then what happens? As long as he stays in this bed, it seems possible to ignore the terrible thing that occurred in this room. Once he is himself again, won’t he have to plumb his memory, determine his responsibility, and finally choose to act? Once he can stand on his own two feet, he will really have to stand on his own two feet.