Loving Women (45 page)

Now, she said, sliding out from under me, holding a silver butter knife with a vaselined handle in her hand, standing above me as I tried to get myself back into the world.

Now you better eat me, honey.

One evening I met her down at Sears. We always met there when we planned to go to a drive-in or to the beach. This night she came out of the store chewing the inside of her mouth.

Let’s hurry, she said, sliding behind the wheel.

What’s the problem? I asked.

Roberta, she said.

Roberta was her blond friend from Sears, the woman I’d seen months ago leaving the San Carlos one morning with Mercado. Eden talked about her from time to time, relating episodes of the woman’s life. Usually it sounded like a soap opera. The thing with Mercado hadn’t worked out, of course; Mercado wanted sex and Roberta wanted marriage. So Mercado smiled, kissed her, said good night and went away. After Mercado she’d met an ensign named Larry. Since Larry was an officer and a gentlemen, and I was an enlisted man, the four of us never went out together. It was forbidden by the rules of the democratic Navy. Sometimes we would see them in a drive-in or at the shrimp place, and wave hello. I was introduced just once to Larry. We were both in civvies. He was tall and thin and looked at me as if I were a shoeshine boy. I never said another word to him. And I never really got to see Roberta, although Eden talked to her every day at Sears.

She says she’s gonna kill herself tonight, Eden said, as she drove through the back streets.

Why, for God’s sake?

Larry jilted her. But not for another woman. Turns out he already
had
another woman. Little wifey back home in Ohio. Turns out
Roberta
is the other woman. And she can’t
stand
it.

Aw, hell.

I tried to
tell
her; I said, Roberta, no man is worth
killin
yourself for. Not one of them. No matter
how
much you think you love him.

I thought:
What about me? Would you kill yourself over me?
But I said nothing.

Gotta get her thinkin’ right, Eden said. Gotta save her life.

She drove fast until we came into a middle-class white section just beyond Mainside. Roberta lived in a small complex of new apartments, two stories high with stucco walls and tile roofs and cars parked in the driveways. The stairways were on the outside of the buildings. Eden led the way to Roberta’s apartment and rang the bell. No answer. Eden listened at the door.

God, I don’t hear a sound, she said.

She rang the bell more urgently, and this time we heard shuffling footsteps coming to the door.

Roberta’s voice asked us who we were.

Eden and Michael, ’Berta, honey. Better let us in.

Go away.

Eden said, If you don’t let us in, honey, we gonna knock the damn door down.

There was a pause, then the lock turned and the door opened and Roberta was standing there. She was wearing a white flannel bathrobe and she looked terrible. Her hair was wild and matted. There were splotches of makeup on her face and dirt under her fingernails. Her eyes were sore from crying and her face was swollen.

I don’t want to hear your damned sad story, girl, Eden said, taking Roberta’s arm and leading her into the apartment. I closed the door behind us and locked it.

Ain’t nothin to tell, Roberta said.

Sure
there is, Eden said. All about a low-life lying conniving son of a bitch flyboy. Lots to tell about
him
. But we just don’t wanna hear it tonight, girl. We gotta get you lookin
human
.

She led Roberta to the bedroom. I wasn’t sure what to do. This was something that happened in the country of women and I didn’t know how they acted there. I looked around. There were gin bottles everywhere, overflowing ashtrays, dirty plates and glasses, mounds of clothes on the floor. Eden saw them too. She turned to me at the door of the bedroom.

Maybe you can clear up this mess, she said, while I clean up Roberta.

I nodded and she closed the bedroom door. I moved quickly around the small apartment, putting the gin bottles in garbage bags, emptying the ashtrays, folding the clothes and setting them on an armchair. I opened the windows to let the sour hangover smell drift into the damp night air.

All the while I heard the shower running and wondered if Eden had been forced to climb in with Roberta just to hold her up. And as I straightened the chairs and the couch, the apartment changed its character. The dirt and disorder had made it Roberta’s place; now it seemed to belong to nobody. There were no photographs of friends or relatives or lovers anywhere in sight. Like the place where Bobby Bolden stayed with Catty Wolverton, there were no books on the shelves and no pictures on the walls. It was an empty space. Maybe, I thought, Roberta made it her own with chaos. I’d made it look like a hotel room.

The water had stopped running in the shower, but I heard nothing from the bedroom. Navy jets raced through the sky.
Their sound must drive Roberta mad
, I thought. One of them could be Larry. I heard a radio playing a Tommy Edwards song:

Many a tear has to fall, but it’s all
…

The door opened. Eden was standing there with a towel wrapped around her and nothing under the towel.

Come on in, she said.

Roberta was still wearing the bathrobe, but her hair was brushed straight back now, and her skin was shiny and her fingernails clean. She smiled at me like a kid arriving at a surprise party. Then she went to the large bed and, still wearing the robe, slipped under the covers. All the while, she was looking at me.

I turned to Eden.

She nodded at the bed, and then went past me, turning off lights.

I undressed and got into the bed beside Roberta, engulfed by the odor of soap and fresh perfume. Roberta looked directly at me and touched my face. Her skin shimmered whitely in the dim light.

Hello, Roberta, I whispered.

Take my robe off, she said, in a small frightened voice. If
you
take it off, then it’s all right.

I turned and saw Eden suddenly naked, getting into the bed on the other side of Roberta. She nodded at me. I untied the belt of the robe. Roberta sat up and I slipped the robe off her shoulders and saw her pink nipples and lush breasts and she shifted her weight
and I slid the robe out from under her and dropped it on the floor.

I been so unhappy, she said, and suddenly began to cry.

I held her close to me, one of my hands reaching past her for Eden, for her arms and breasts and face. Roberta turned her face up to me and I kissed her and tasted salt. Eden sucked one of my fingers.

And so Eden and I began to make love to Roberta, trying to console and heal her, taking her out of Pensacola, far from flyboys and liars, away from her loneliness, into some place where things would happen that she might remember after everything else had faded. We kissed her mouth together, lips and tongues moving against each other, twirling in a single movement. Then I kissed and sucked one of Roberta’s breasts, while Eden kissed and sucked the other and then I put my cock in her and Roberta groaned and Eden kissed her mouth and played with her nipples.

Roberta whispered, Don’t come in me, Michael. Please don’t come in me.… That’s just for Eden. Don’t come in me and it’ll be okay.

I eased out of Roberta and entered Eden, trying not to come, not to end this until Roberta was consoled, and while I was in Eden, Roberta covered Eden’s face with kisses and sucked her breasts and dark-brown nipples and said, Oh, honey, you are my own true friend. You and Michael. My only friends …

Then Roberta was behind me, pushing hard against my ass as I drove into Eden, our double weight flattening Eden against the bed, Roberta’s breasts against my back, her hands under me kneading Eden’s breasts until I could hold back no longer and exploded. I rose like a horse bucking and Roberta pulled on my hair and Eden moaned until we all fell back on the bed.

That wasn’t the end. We dozed together, Roberta holding my limp cock, my hand on her pussy. Eden brought in large cold glasses full of Coke and ice. We listened to the night sounds. We hugged Roberta between us. We dozed again. When I came fully awake, Roberta was sucking my cock. Over on a chair, facing the bed, watching us, a hand between her legs, Eden was transported. I couldn’t come right away. Eden could. She groaned loudly. Roberta came off my cock and turned to Eden.

She said, Come here.

Half bent over, still coming, Eden rolled off the chair to the bed and then Roberta plunged her blonde head between those dark
thighs, offering her own pink ass to me, her cunt a thick gorged red, the blonde hairs almost invisible, the lips slippery and her asshole tiny and tight, with dozens of little lines vanishing into the hole. I wet myself in the cunt and then eased into the other hole and her body shuddered and rose and trembled and pulled away and then pushed back at me to take me into her while Eden’s dark hands gripped her blonde head.

We slept for a few hours and when I woke up, Roberta was gazing at me.

Thank you, she said.

Eden woke at the sound of Roberta’s voice and saw the look on her face and smiled.

I guess we better go, Eden said.

We started to dress, with Roberta watching us, the covers pulled tight to her chin. I felt strange, as if this all had happened to somebody else. Certainly nobody would believe me if I told them about it at Ellyson Field. But here I was, pulling on my shorts over a cock that was not soft and not quite hard. The room smelled of perfume and pussy. Eden went over and kissed Roberta gently on the brow.

No more crazy phone calls, okay? she said.

Okay.

You promise?

I promise.

We’ll see you soon.

I hope, Roberta said softly.

We drove away. I was late, and would have to go through the fence. It didn’t matter. I held Eden’s hand, but neither of us spoke for a long time. Then I started to think about the things we’d done with Roberta and my cock got hard again. What we’d done was supposed to be wrong, was supposed to tell me that Eden was some kind of strange and perverted woman: a woman who goes with
women?
But I knew that I felt better and it wasn’t just the sex: we’d helped a woman live who might have died. And Eden was here, with me, not with anyone else, man or woman. Flashes of Roberta’s bedroom played in my mind. And they must have filled Eden’s too, because after a while, she reached over and gripped my thigh.

I can’t stand it, she said. We’ve got to pull over. Before you go back. Right up there. In the parking lot. Behind that church.

Chapter

51

T
hat was the way it was with us, in the time of The Games, as spring moved into summer. If we could imagine something, we’d try to do it. In a way, she was more like someone my own age, or younger, than a woman fourteen years older than I, a mother with two children. Sometimes she would lead the way; sometimes I did; and soon we were doing things without plan, instantly joining in some new unscripted play. There was a strange innocence to it too; neither of us had done these things before, so we were discovering them as we did them. The past, her history, the chilly sermons of priests: all receded as we lived in the fierce present tense. The Games were ours, inventions of the imagination; and I remember even then thinking that in the distant future I would remember this as the season when I did most things for the first time. And I also knew that this fresh wildness might never happen to me again, with any other woman. And about that I was right.

But our time together wasn’t always games, costumes, scenes. Sometimes Eden just wanted to be still, to lie beside me in the silent trailer, listening to the night sounds of the lake and the River Styx. Other times, she wanted to make love quickly and brutally, explaining later that she had thought about it all day and had exhausted all the preliminaries in her mind. In a choked voice, she would blurt out the hardest words she knew and make me say them to her: words as hard as my prick. And on some strange nights, usually on the weekend when time was no consideration, we engaged in a kind of dance, an erotic version of the Mass, with a familiar sense of slowness and ritual; I would hear Latin phrases like
ad Deum qui laetificat juventutum meum
, and hum them in that dead language whose coded words were ground into me, echoing around in my skull like a dream that always comes back. In those moments I felt engulfed by sin. I wasn’t violating Eden; I was negating my own past, my Catholicism, my enforced subservience to a tyrannical code that was not of my own invention. Embracing sin, I ceased being a Catholic. Sweet sin. Sin, dark and unflowering and delicious.

Neither of us asked if what we were doing was right or wrong. We just did it. Music always seemed to be playing somewhere, even when the radio was off, even deep into the night when no sounds drifted across the lake; the music of sin, of crossing frontiers, of changing ourselves by what we imagined and what we did. We listened to that music and moved to it, invented to it, made love to it. I asked her to sit at the table, looking prim and reading a newspaper, a proper housewife, my little sweet Doris Day Blondie wifey, with Bing Crosby singing nice wholesome songs on the radio, and then I would get under the table and slide my head between her thighs until she lost all control. But music wasn’t always there. We made love once in the trunk of the car, in the parking lot of the Federal courthouse, with her panties keeping the trunk from locking. Once we found a small Catholic church out in the Alabama wilds, a building seemingly abandoned in the Protestant sea; we whispered in the emptiness of the nave and then went behind the rotting velvet drapes of a confessional, where she took me in her mouth. That was sin. And yet it didn’t seem wrong. Sin was made up of violation, license, the breaking of the rules; but with Eden it never felt wrong. It just
felt
.