He didn’t know what she meant. He spoke quickly, without thinking.
“How did you know it was the first time?” he said.
“I meant for us,” she said.
Then she was suddenly quiet as though someone had struck her hard. He felt the silence vibrating with something new and pent up as his heart beat loudly and savagely. He thought surely she’d hear it. Fool! He thought.
“Erick,” she said quietly.
“Yes.”
“Are you trying to tell me that … this is your first time?”
He licked his lips and shivered.
“That’s right,” he said and though he tried to make it sound unconcerned, his voice was husky and it shook a little. He had the horrible fear that he might start to cry. It made him want to jump up and run away lest it happen.
Now she was looking at him. He felt her eyes on him in the darkness. He twitched a trifle as she touched his arm.
“Oh, my God, Erick,” she said, “I never even dreamed.”
“Well,” he said, fighting to keep his voice on an even pitch, “Now you see how important you are. This isn’t just another affair.” You’re lying, he thought, she doesn’t mean a thing and you know it.
Her coldness disappeared.
She pushed close to him and kissed him. “Come here,” she said in motherly tone and pressed the warm length of her body against him. She was soft and warm and he wanted to believe it was the real her. She kissed him again, very gently. And he fought back tears.
“You big dope,” she said.
He swallowed before he could speak. “Is that affection?”
“Yes,” she said, “It is” She held onto him. “I can’t believe it,” she said.
“It’s true.”
“But …”
“I don’t know whether to feel proud or ashamed,” he said, “Whether to blush or take credit.”
“Take credit,” she said, “It makes … makes me feel almost unclean.”
He kissed her damp neck, her shoulder.
“I thought that when you were in the army …” she said.
“No, I was a dear little boy in the army,” he said, “I wouldn’t dream of it.” He thought of the times John and he used to go to the movies and how he used to walk quickly past the obvious sluts who used to give him bedroom smiles in the streets of the sleepy Southern towns.
She sighed in bewilderment.
“I’m your first woman,” she said, “You’re incredible.”
He was thinking—Does she mean that? Or did she mean that he was stupid, that he really was a dope?
Then she put her hands on him again and it started all over. The violent breathing, the locked bodies, the sweating, the half articulated words.
When it was over she asked, “Did you come?”
“No,” he said. Miserably, in exhaustion and fright and pain.
“Oh, darling,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
They lay there quietly a while. She smoked a cigarette. In the glow of its tip he saw the contours and dark places of her body.
“Do you think it’s love,” he asked.
“Of course not,” she said, “It’s sex.”
But later when they had done it twice more, she kissed him and said, “I think you love me a little.”
And it made his heart jump. For there was suddenly a wistfulness in her voice. As though he suddenly mattered to her very much. And for a brief moment, he saw her, self-isolated, self-castigated, reaching out one frightened and trembling hand and asking him, despite all, to love her.
They kept on talking, exchanging thoughts in the darkness. It was anew thing in itself, almost the most enjoyable part of it for Erick, this lying there naked body to naked body and talking quietly of many things. There was no pain in it.
Mostly she told him about a man she’d lived with for two years after college because she thought he was going to marry her and he never got around to it. It gave Erick a strange, restless feeling to hear her talk about the man when she was lying beside him.
“I’m impotent,” he said in the middle of the conversation.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You’re not impotent,” she said. And she went back then to her story.
Later she said, “I don’t know why you should attract me. Your type never does.”
“What’s my type?” he asked.
“Oh, the tall, young, clean-out boy type.”
“That’s me,” he said, “Clean cut.”
“Oh, stop it.”
“You’re after my money.”
“Huh.”
He lay there thinking of how impossible it was for anything to happen between them. Because he was poor and she was outspoken in her desires for material things; for a house and a car and furniture and clothes and all the things that he couldn’t give her. He didn’t know why he even thought about marrying her just because he’d slept with her. It was probably because of the way he was, the way he’d been raised. This was his first sex experience and he thought it should mean something. It should culminate in a clean fresh feeling, not a degraded one.
But he could see nothing between them and, even though he wasn’t sure he cared for her, it made him unhappy. At least that much of the writer was in him, the ability to envision the future and the concomitant inability to appreciate the present on its own terms. He could do nothing about it. He had always been that way. A prophet looking into a future he had only repugnance for. A seer repelled by his own hideous talents.
Later in the morning they did it again. He was almost relieved. He felt a wild thrill coursing his body. But it didn’t happen. The darkness lost its sparkle and the stars and it was just plodding blanket of night again. And he became him and she became her and together they found nothing. They were both too exhausted.
She smoked again. She had smoked about six cigarettes since they had got into bed. She smoked them nervously with deep inhalations and a quick blowing out of smoke as though she wanted to quickly get rid of the thing she had just drawn in with all her power and might.
Later they went to sleep.
In the early morning his stomach began to ache. He woke up five times and had to go to the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror. It surprised him to see that he looked the same. The great romance had done nothing to his appearance. He resented it. He’d expected that something would be different. But it wasn’t. It was just the same. And he comforted himself in the way of his boyhood. Went back to the bed bitterly.
As it began to grow light Leo threw off the heavy comforter. She flung up her arms over her head. He looked at her shaved armpits, her slight breasts and her stomach, her face.
She was sound asleep. Her legs against his were burning hot. She kept putting them over him as she lay diagonally on the bed. The legs kept wrapping over his body and the weight hurt his stomach. He tried to take them off. They kept coming back. It made him angry. He wanted to be alone in the bed so he could lie in between cool sheets and stretch out and be sick in peace. She kept putting her legs over him. He visualized himself as married to her, suffering this every night. If he ever married, he thought, there would be single beds. This damn business of legs all over him …
She began to snore a little.
He looked at her hair. It looked dingy.
He felt his stomach ache and burn. He kept thinking that daylight and soberness could be a terrible thing to romance. She wasn’t pretty. The sharp angles of her features seemed exaggerated now. She looked almost shrewish. She would be ugly when she got older, he thought. The hard look was on her face again. As she slept.
He shut his eyes quickly as the door opened. He heard Lynn’s bare feet on the floor, heard him taking clothes from his dresser and closet. He knew that Lynn was looking at Leo. The thought made him shiver. The door shut again and he looked up. There was a note tacked to the door. He got up to look at it.
I have gone to commune with the bees, it read, Back shortly.
Erick went back to bed. Bu
t after a while it hurt too much to lie down. His stomach kept hurting. He got up and took a shower and dressed slowly. Then he went and made himself a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee. He made the same for Leo. He went in and put it on the bedside table feeling like an obedient husband and not sure whether he liked the feeling or not. He sat down on the bed and nudged her.
She opened her eyes sleepily, without comprehension in them. He had the momentary feeling that she wasn’t looking at him. Who was she looking at? he wondered. In that first moment of wakefulness, was his the shadowy amorphous face of every lover she had ever looked at in the early mornings?
“Coffee?” he said timidly.
She smiled sleepily. He almost resented how pleased and relaxed she seemed. And thought—I’m sorry I told her I was never a lover before. He wished desperately to convince her now that she was only one in a long line. He wanted to hurt her.
She glanced at the coffee and the orange juice.
“Hi,” she said and she pulled down his head and kissed him as he bent over. He felt the cramps in his stomach making him wince. She didn’t notice.
“I have to brush my teeth first,” she said cheerfully.
He handed her the terrycloth robe and went into the livingroom without watching her get up. He turned on the radio and started to listen to the Masterwork Hour on WNYC. People were singing Lament For Beowulf.
He heard a sound and turned around. She was standing there in the doorway, her robe held wide open, her body held tautly in the harsh morning light.
“Look at me,” she said, teeth clenched.
* * * *
Later she came out of the bathroom and they sat on the couch. He watched her drink the coffee he’d had to heat up again. She drank it and smoked cigarettes chain fashion. She laughed at the note. He kept his arm around her. He felt repelled by her flat-colored hair, her small, wide-hipped body, the sharpness of her face.
She told him that the man she lived with was ten years her senior and that when she was in Paris she always went out with older men.
“I never felt young until I met you,” she said.
* * * *
He was in his room, thinking about it.
He could see its power now. Gradually it had come on him. It had started slowly. Now it was a great thing.
It had brought him out of the pit. It enmeshed him in the world where, as a writer, he rightfully belonged. It was a little thing while it occurred because it did occur. He felt it with all his senses and it was and, because it was, it was easy to accept. He was living it. That night with Leonora. It was actual. It worked itself into the pattern of his life effortlessly. It was completion, all effect, the sum of every moment.
But now he was back.
He had returned to his small crouching room and now had to make a bridge to cross from recent past to present. It was a tie that had to be made and that in a matter of hours. He could no longer go on as he did before. There and then he had to adjust. He didn’t wish to return. Having Leo had changed everything for him. Whether or not she was worthy of that feeling, he didn’t know. Whether it was sickness and not strength he didn’t know. All he knew was that sex had been added to his life, the rich and baffling mystery of it. And he was not afraid of it. He was not drawn small eyed and crazy to it. It was a part of his life. It had to hold its own relative position. It was no longer the stuff of dreams, wet or not wet.
He told himself.
And, because of the new element which he did not fear but only craved and appreciated, because the soreness in his muscles and the weariness in mind and body heralded a new advance in his life and thus, his writing, the old things had necessarily to modify. No longer could he see with the eyes of before.
It appeared.
But perhaps it was too much. Maybe he was just in a cloud. God knew he ached and hurt and at times when he thought about it and the pain was severe, he resented sex and felt he wanted no part of it. Perhaps, he thought, a reaction will set in. Maybe the conglomerate magic of pain and dazed wonder would pass and his own higher selfishness would take over once more. Perhaps he would sweat over the possibility of her becoming pregnant. And hate himself and consider himself stupid for doing what he did.
And Lynn would triumph.
Perhaps.
But for some reason, lying there with the music in his ears, he gloried in the sense of new wonder, of added richness. It was all magnificent. Almost certain that he held it beyond proportion, he could not stop it. It was there and, oddly enough, it did not frighten him. He wanted to have it again and again. He wanted to be with her. He wanted to hold fast in his arms that sweet wild flesh that so incredibly linked what he was to what he had become in those short hours.
Leo was, in a way, his passport to newer things.
* * * *
Monday afternoon he called her at her office.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” he said.
And felt disappointed.
He didn’t know what he’d expected. It was just that he’d slept with her, the first woman he’d ever slept with in his entire life. And he thought something more should be said than just hello.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Fine.”
Pause.
“I’m still sick,” he said.
“That’s too bad, Erick,” she said.
Another pause. He swallowed. “Say, I’m going to be over at Lynn’s tonight. We’re going to try out a television script together. Like to come and kibbitz?”
“Well,” she said, “all right.”
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he said.
“Won’t I be in the way?”
His mouth turned down. “No,” he said.
Pause.
“Well, all right.”
“She’ll be in the way,” Lynn said before she got there.
“For Christ’s sake,” Erick said, “Just because your pretty plan backfired, don’t take it out on Leo.”
Lynn looked bland. “Oh,” he said, “Did it backfire?”
Then his face hardened again.
“Listen boy,” he said as though he were Erick’s father, “We were supposed to do some work on a t-v script tonight. We’re not going to get anything done with her sitting around.”
“Why not?” Erick said stubbornly, “For Christ’s sake, is writing a t-v script such a big thing?”
“You don’t keep sluts around when you’re working.”
“Trying to get a rise?”
“Not at all. She’s a slut. I’m simply stating a fact.”
It was mostly vanity that made him flare up, Erick realized.
“Why don’t you give up, you big frustrated jerk!”
Lynn smiled, holding tightly.
“I was here. Remember?”
“Oh, you’re a great little bastard,” Erick snarled, “A great little bastard.”
“Let’s face it,” Lynn said, “She likes to give it.”
They didn’t get any script done. They just sat around and talked distractedly and everybody was bored. Then Lynn went into his bedroom with wine and a book. Leo and Erick sat on the couch.
“What’s the matter with him?” Leo asked, a little edgy.
“He’s still mad because he set us up and it worked.”
“What!”
She looked at him with shocked rage. “I’m just kidding,” he said quickly, afraid of the look on her face.
They sat there a long time. He still felt sick. His stomach muscles were tight and aching. He put his head in her lap and didn’t know what to say. She kept her hands off him.
“You have your girdle on,” he said.
She didn’t answer. Her mouth was a thin line.
To lie there on her lap in deadly silence. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t relax. It seemed that something must be said. They had given their bodies to each other. There had to be some explanation, some resumé, some recapitulation. It was too much to just end. Ther
e were too many strands that had to be drawn tight and woven into a credible pattern. But how?
“I have to get up early,” she said.
As they walked silently through the streets he turned to her and looked at her profile. Finally he said, awkwardly,
“Well, what do you think of our relationship?”
She looked at him curiously. “What do I think of it?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, swallowing, “Where does it end?”
“I don’t know,” she said and it sounded utterly callous to him as if the entire subject were a matter she didn’t care to waste any time on. It made him feel sick to his stomach.
“I don’t know either,” he said weakly, “I’ve been thinking about it and … and I’m still confused. I …”
He stopped. He was angry for letting her know everything all the time, giving her the advantage. All the things he meant to hide were coming out. His need to love her. Because he couldn’t just sleep with her and let it go at that. For him there had to be more. He felt a severe need for it.
She was silent.
“I’m sick and exhausted,” he found himself complaining, “And I don’t know what to make of it.”
She still didn’t talk. He kept going. He couldn’t stop.
“It’s that we don’t know each other,” he said, “It’s that it’s a pity we didn’t know each other mentally before we knew each other physically.”
He didn’t see her wince as though someone had slapped her across the face, violently. When he looked at her, she had the same dead expression, the same staring eyes.
“Oh,” she said.
“I mean,” he thought he was explaining, “Like the way Sally and I knew each other mentally. Going around a lot together, talking about everything, and … well, just getting to know the way … you think.”
She didn’t say a word. She walked a little faster.
“I just don’t like it,” he said, “You seem to be drifting through this thing without the slightest concern. It hasn’t affected you at all.”
Still she said nothing. They turned up the street her hotel was on. Her eyes stayed straight ahead. Her arms hung at her sides and the fingers on her right hand curled limply around her handbag. Her eyes were lusterless.
“I don’t want this to end,” he insisted, “But it’s up to you. I … I just say it’s too hard to have physical love without mental love to go with it. Maybe you can do it but I can’t. Oh,” he threw up his hands in arch despair, “I don’t know!”