Cheat and Charmer (55 page)

“A garter belt?”

“Yeah. And put some makeup on—you know, eye stuff, lip rouge.”

“What for?” He had never asked her to do anything like this before, and she was bewildered.

“Because I’d like it. Because it’s sexy.”

“You just told me how s-s-s-sexy I am.”

“Of course you are, baby. This is just to do something a little different.”

“Well, I don’t
have
a garter belt—I only have girdles. And if you think they’re sexy, you’re in real tr-tr-tr-trouble.”

“Don’t you have something black? What’s that kind of a lacy thing that pushes your knockers up?”

“A merry widow?”

“Yeah. Don’t you have one of those?”

Her own desire was rapidly fading and his erection was shrinking, but, feeling she was to blame, she got out of bed and disappeared into her dressing room. Trying not to think too hard about why he wanted her to put on this weird getup, and why she didn’t, she opened a drawer and began sorting through her underthings. She found a black lace merry widow with a tiny red satin bow. She sucked in her belly and, one by one, methodically worked from waist to breast the long row of hooks and eyes, although what she really wanted to do was tear off the tight, scratchy “garment,” as, she suddenly remembered, her mother-in-law would have called it. She found a pair of stockings, the kind with seams, pulled them on, and hitched them to the garters. Then she slipped into a pair of black suede high heels.

Sitting at her dressing table, she could feel the upholstered raw silk of the stool against her bare behind, and she felt ridiculous. Nevertheless, she applied red lipstick to her mouth, and green eye shadow to her eyes, adding black mascara, which she dried with the eyelash curler. Everything was taking so long that she wondered whether Jake had fallen asleep. What if she walked into the bedroom in this getup and he was no longer interested? She would feel like an idiot, she told herself. She daubed some perfume on her neck and in her artificially pushed-together cleavage and her pubic hair, which exposed the scar from her hysterectomy and struck her as grotesquely ugly under the edges of the merry widow. Feeling unfamiliar to herself, and hurt by Jake’s sudden whim, she went out to him as if he were a stranger.

He lay dozing on top of the sheets. His pajama top was unbuttoned; his penis small and limp. She lay down beside him and fondled it again, and he blinked but didn’t open his eyes. He began to grow hard again in little leaps and stretches. Resenting him, she thought, I’ve gone and done myself up like he asked and now it’s going to be one of those half-dead ones where he never opens his eyes. “Jake,” she said. He opened one eye.

“Let me look at you,” he said drowsily, as if chronic somnolence were his natural state and the bursts of energy required for daily life only a brief respite from permanent exhaustion. “Stand up,” he murmured.

She got up from the bed and stood in front of him. His eyes swept over her.

“You look great. Come here. Dance a little.”

She approached him the way she thought he wanted her to, with a bump-and-grind—something that she, with her dancer’s body, knew how
to do. She had done it long ago, before they were married, and since then, too—in her nightgown or her underwear or with a towel around her or naked. And it had been she herself who had done the sexy, slinky dance, and not some gotten-up imitation of a five-dollar whore.

He smiled at her with half-closed eyes, reaching out to grab her. For a moment, she stood over him and he kneaded her ass. Then, not wanting him to sense what she felt, and knowing what he loved, she leaned over and put her mouth around him. “Oh, boy,” he said.

Oh, boy
, she thought. That’s what he says when he’s about to eat a hot dog at a baseball game.

After a few moments, he stopped her and motioned to her with both hands. “Climb aboard,” he said. “And watch my knee!”

It wasn’t what she wanted, and she couldn’t let go. So often, in the past, her love for Jake and her faith in the rightness of their marriage had been wordlessly renewed when they made love, and every little familiar routine—his hands sliding underneath her buttocks when he lay on top of her, her rooting in his chest hair and his neck—had spoken of their knowledge of each other’s body, of their soldered selves. She yearned now for the old connection, but it wasn’t there. And again she blamed herself and did what she had never done before: she moaned and groaned and clutched and bucked, faking it all. He came quickly—too quickly—but powerfully, explosively, with a hoarse cry and a sudden shrinkage within her. Lengthening herself on top of him, carefully avoiding his knee, she brought her head to his chest. His heartbeat was subsiding, and she reached up and felt the sweat on his forehead.

She felt sure that it wasn’t she who had caused that explosion of lust, but whatever character she had become for him in this “costume drama,” as she silently called it. Perhaps it was a memory of themselves, when they weren’t yet married, hadn’t had children, and were still in the throes of their stormy on-again, off-again three-year affair, with its quarrels and passionate reconciliations? She did not know and could not ask. There were certain things they had always been able to say to each other. Organs could be named, dirty words used, jokes made. But some kinds of talking were beyond her, because she was shy and proud and embarrassed, and, glib as he was, with his ready store of answers to everything, there were things—tender,
loving things—he could not bring himself to say, although she yearned to hear them.

She rolled off him and sat up. “Sorry, but this thing is driving me n-n-n-nuts,” she said. She unhooked the stockings and rolled them down, letting them fall to the carpet; then she unhooked the merry widow and tossed it to the floor. Naked, she was herself again, and even felt the return of desire. She snuggled up against Jake, placing his hand inside her spread legs.

“Didn’t you come?” he said, his voice muzzy. “It sounded like you’d landed on the moon.”

“Well, of course I did,” she said. “But I want more. ’Cause you were so great.”

“Uh-huh,” he said drowsily. He dispassionately began to play with her, using a series of practiced moves that had been worked out between them many years ago.

A couple of times, she put her hand on his to make him pause, because his fingers were working stolidly, mechanically. Oh God, he’s on the assembly line tonight, she thought; this was the expression she used when she felt that his heart just wasn’t in it. It was obvious that he wanted more than anything else to drift off to sleep.

But now, as if to erase what she had just recognized, she felt that she had to come, had to find pleasure, had to obliterate the vision of herself in the merry widow and high heels. She wanted everything to be the way it used to be. Oh, give up, she said to herself—just let him go to sleep. But she continued to labor away in the solitary confinement of unfulfilled desire, while sensing acutely her husband’s satiation and indifference. She told him to touch her nipples, to suck them. Why, after all this time, do I have to ask? she wondered. Why doesn’t he just
do
these things? Doesn’t he
know
by now? I know what
he
likes, I do what
he
wants without having to be asked; why doesn’t it work the other way?

She could tell that he wanted to sleep—that the automatic moves learned long ago were, for him, a chore. So she got him to stop and start, fighting her own resistance to pleasure with small escapes from it that she used to force-feed desire. I am being
serviced
, she told herself. Finally, she realized that the climbing and the retreating were futile. Her body gave up, and she said to herself, indignant at her own recalcitrance and nearly exploding with anger at herself and at him,
I want this
. Through slightly opened eyes she guided his hand, instructing him to put two or three fingers inside her and then to press hard with his thumb on the outside. In
this way, with these precise movements and unromantically detailed instructions, the pleasure mounted, like a donkey climbing a mountain in Peru, and she came, but in a searing explosion of loneliness and despair, without joy or connection.

It seemed to Dinah that she should say something to Veevi. But what? And how? She brooded, and waited for the right moment, and had imaginary confrontations in her head. “Now, listen,” she said, her speech clear as January in California, “I don’t care how down and out and pathetic you are; keep your goddamn hands off my husband.” Every time she rehearsed this scene she felt exhilarated, and she decided, about a week later, that she would actually speak her piece. It was a hot Sunday afternoon. Jake was away playing golf, and the Lasker kids, along with Veevi’s little Coco, were splashing and shrieking in the pool. Claire was stretched out on a towel along the hot terra-cotta tiles, roasting herself through a glaze of coconut oil. Any moment now, Dinah expected Veevi to come out to the pool after a long lunch date with Saul. She decided that she would say what she had to say quietly and firmly, though she shuddered at the prospect. After all, she couldn’t remember when she had ever spoken with true harshness to her sister.

She took a drag on her cigarette and continued knitting, determined not to cave in.

Veevi did at last appear, wearing a two-piece bathing suit and a terry-cloth jacket, and carrying a large paper bag in which, Dinah assumed, she had some crocheting, books, cigarettes, and the Sunday papers. Dinah was counting stitches herself and barely glanced up as her sister settled in a comfortable pool chair. Both women wore straw hats and sunglasses. Veevi smiled at Dinah and began to apply suntan lotion to her arms, shoulders, and midriff. Dinah immediately began to relent. Then her resolve doubled. “Vee …” she began.

“Mmm,” Veevi murmured, not looking up.

“There’s something I have to say to you.”

“Mmm?”

“Vee. Look at me.”

Veevi looked up, blank-faced. Dinah couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark glasses.

“I saw you and J-J-J-Jake. Last week. In the den.”

“Oh, my God,” Veevi said, speaking rapidly. “So embarrassing … entirely my fault. Made an absolute ass of myself. Christ, I’m sorry.”

“F-F-F-Forget it,” Dinah said. “It never happened.”

She looked up. Veevi was making a “Can-you-forgive-me?” bubby face, to which Dinah nodded and made her own: “Of course I forgive you.”

Desperate to change the subject, she took a closer look at the large paper bag Veevi had brought with her. “What’re all those clothes in there?” she asked.

Veevi explained that they were clothes Saul had collected for old friends and their families who had been blacklisted and were now living in Mexico; he was terribly busy with work and had asked her as a favor to pack them up and send them for him. Some of them were very nice, actually—donated by people like Evelyn Morocco, who made annual trips to Bergdorf’s and believed fervently in cashmere. Saul had said that Veevi was to let Claire take a look and pick some of them out for herself before she sent them off.

As she spoke, she pulled one item of clothing after another out of the bag, and soon there was a large pile at her feet, out of which she selected individual pieces to show Dinah. Calling softly to Claire, she told her to go through them, and the girl, who had her mother’s good proportions, held up one piece after another, deciding which ones to take. It was at this point that Lorna, who adored her older cousin and was fascinated by everything she did, came out of the pool to see what was going on. She stood with water dripping down her legs and a large towel around her shoulders, listening as Veevi repeated to Claire that the clothes were being sent to poor friends in Mexico but that Saul had distinctly told her that Claire was to have as many of them as she liked.

“Oh, can I have some, too?” said Lorna.

“Why, no, dear,” Veevi answered at once. “Claire’s thin, and you’re fat, and Claire’s poor, and you’re rich.”

Stung to the quick by these words, Lorna looked from Veevi to her mother, her face reddening and her eyes filling with tears.

Dinah did not lift her eyes from her knitting, and said nothing.