The Varieties of Erotic Experience

The politically minded person always knew who and where the well-to-do were and what they were likely to be looking for in the officials they helped elect.

  The unidentified lady appeared to be alone, without a companion to help identify her. The study door was ajar but mostly closed. Philip had the simultaneous sense that he'd never seen the woman before and had known her all his life. Maybe she was a neighbor whose name he'd forgotten, someone who’d moved away. She might be an old family friend, or another, forgotten baby-sitter from long ago. Maybe she’d snuck in.

  She didn’t look old enough to have been a babysitter of his, although it was hard to say how old she might be. Her face was of no particular age and her shortish dark hair of no particular color, yet in looking at her, Philip found himself to be completely captured. Her eyes and expression were keen. She looked at the two men intently without staring. Then she pushed open the door to the study and stepped inside.

  As if pulled by a will not his own, Philip moved toward the study door, nearly tripping over the kitchen trash can as he went. He felt summoned, though he neither saw nor heard the summoning. He simply perceived and obeyed it.

  The door clicked shut behind him. Had he closed it? He knew the door had no lock, and at the same time he knew it would not and could not be opened. He was alone with the strange woman, whose back was to him, but he was not worried. It was a familiar room in a familiar house, and crowds of friends and family were swirling just beyond the door. If she turned out to be some kind of nut, all he would have to do was shout for help. So, no, he wasn't nervous.

  His stomach was churning slightly, but this was probably because of something he'd eaten, a bit of potato salad made with spoiled mayonnaise, or from having drunk too much plonk. He had been inattentively nibbling for some time, and inattentively sipping cheap white wine too. Cheap wine was indigestion in a bottle. The body grew less forgiving of such insults as it grew older. It complained more loudly at smaller provocations and could, at times -- almost always inconvenient times -- become outright petulant. Alcohol was definitely poisonous. This was one of those brute facts that life presented to you sometime after your thirtieth birthday, at a surprise party for one thrown at 3 in the morning.

  Philip felt a dampness on his palms and his heart beating in his throat. He wondered if the heartbeat was visible. It couldn't be visible to her, since she continued to stand turned away from him, as if she did not know he was there. But she must know. She must have heard the door click shut, unless she was deaf. This was unlikely but possible. He tried to remember whether he knew any deaf people. He knew very little sign language: just how to ask for a restaurant check and how to say someone was cute.

  "Excuse me," Philip said. "I hope I'm not interrupting."

  "Not at all," the woman said. Her voice was a rich, smooth, contralto, like a fresh mocha. She turned to face him. "Let's sit down," she said, as if they were standing in her study, her private fief, her house. He noted the paradox of being treated as a visitor in a house that had belonged to his mother and now belonged to him, though it didn’t yet feel like his. Even as he thought these thoughts, the paradox floated away like a leaf on a bubbling brook, visible but receding and beyond recapture.

  Instead of commenting, he accepted her invitation, or instruction, and sat at the end of the love seat. She settled into the chair behind the desk. They were more or less looking in each other's direction without directly facing each other. Was this a face-off? A cheek-off? He felt expectant and defensive. She commanded the situation, he did not know how.

  "Better," she said. "This is quite a party."

  "I hope you found something to eat," Philip said. "There's plenty of wine and beer down in the garden. I’m not sure about some of the potato salad. I’d be careful there."

  The woman smiled. He found it awkward to be making this kind of small talk. He wasn’t good at it. On the other hand, he felt he had to say something. He had to make some effort to set her at ease. He couldn’t just sit there waiting for her to slip him a check or an envelope stuffed with cash, as though he were a dog expecting to be handed a treat. She would have expectations from him in return for the money. There must be a lot of money and high expectations for her to have engineered this little meeting.

  "I haven't made it that far," she said. "Actually it was you I came to see anyway. I admired your eulogy. It was serious but not heavy."

  "I'm sorry, it's embarrassing, I don't remember your name," Philip blurted. "But I do know I know you! It's just been, you know, one of those days, and I have a lot on my mind."

  "I think you're doing brilliantly," the woman said. “I thought you did brilliantly in the church. You talked about her, mostly, not about yourself. That can be difficult to do. It was her funeral, after all, even if you were the one speaking. And when you did talk about yourself, you did it with humor and a light touch. I think people appreciated that. They’re so used to politicians talking at them, talking about themselves. They’re grateful for some genuine modesty. They get enough of the fake kind.”

  “You were there.”

  “I was there.”

  "It was good of you to come," Philip said, aware of his banality. Banality could be a useful instrument of subordination; he would be so banal that she would be forced to declare herself and her business. He would throttle her with banality until she cried out the truth. He did perceive a headwind blowing from her direction, a shapeless but insistent resistance. She was resolute in her caginess. He would have to be careful, even in banality. He was the host, and hosts did not hector their guests, even the uninvited, presumptuous and elusive ones.

  "I never miss a party," she said. She was now returning banal fire. Her gaze pierced him. He wondered if she were a mother and what her children were like. She looked motherly. Her children might have come to the party with her and might even now be eating lamb kebabs and chicken-apple sausages in hot-dog buns. They would have to be quite a bit younger than he was, because she wasn't much older than he was -- five years, he guessed, seven at most. It was hard to be sure in an era when people no longer reliably fell apart after forty.

  To his surprise, he felt a twinge of attraction for this older woman, this mysterious mother in expensive clothes who so politely declined to give her name. Philip had never been into women at all, and he had never been into older people -- far, far from it -- but now here he was, thinking certain thoughts about a woman who was older than he was, although not that much older. She wasn’t old enough to be his mother, thank goodness. The Oedipal crisis was averted.

  "I loved my mother," he heard himself saying. Certain random themes in his mind had fused, as in a dream, and those themes left him in the form of a spoken sentence, an unwilled expulsion, like a burp. Was he defending her or himself?

  "Of course you did," she said. "And if you didn't, would it really be your fault? Does it even make any sense to use the word fault when we're talking about feelings? No. Feelings are feelings. They come and go as they please, like clouds. I'm on the side of children, you know, in parent-child matters. Children take the world as they find it, and the world they find is almost entirely the creation of their parents, at least for the first few years. So parents are responsible. On the other hand, parents learn how to be parents from their own parents. It's not as if they have anything like free will. You see where I'm going with this. You see why forgiveness is so important. It’s awkward, but important. Free will is quite a can of worms! I’ve struggled with that one for a long time."

  "Who are you?" Philip asked again. She sounded either like a child psychiatrist or a theologian. He couldn’t recall knowing any child psychiatrists or theologians.

  "I think we need some Sancerre," she said.

  "Sancerre?" Philip said. “The wine?"

  "The white wine," she said. "There are red ones, but I don’t think much of those. But the white ones are the world's best white wines. I'v
e never had a bad bottle! But I don’t think anybody brought any."

  "No," Philip said. “Just pinot grigio, which gives me a headache now.”

  “In cheap vino, calamitas,” she said. “But, as luck would have it, I came prepared.”

  From somewhere she produced a bottle of wine and a pair of goblets, along with one of those little corkscrews restaurant waiters carried and wielded so adroitly, like gang members with their switchblades. She was adroit, although he didn’t picture her as having ever been a waitress or packed a switchblade. But you never knew. In a moment the bottle was uncorked and the wine poured. They clinked their glasses. It felt strangely celebratory, as if he’d just been hired, or elected.

  “I’d propose a toast,” he said, “but I don’t know what we’re toasting.”

  “Well, we’re toasting the future, your future,” she said, “your future in this house. Your future generally. And we’re giving thanks for your mother’s life. How’s that?”

  “Not bad,” Philip said. He took a sip of the wine, which was indeed excellent. He glanced at the bottle but didn’t recognize the label. The wine had a lemon flintiness he wasn’t used to. It was quite different from the flabby bonhomie of American chardonnay. The first taste shocked