Mercy (34 page)

“The last night of that semester a bunch of us went into town and did a lot of drinking, a lot of smoking, and reminiscing about the last few months, that sort of thing. Paula, that was her name, was a little subdued because it was going to be her last time with us. All the rest of us were coming back the next semester. We got back late, drunk and tired, and fell into bed.

“I went to sleep immediately so I don’t know how much time had passed before I woke up and realized Paula was in bed with me. She was completely naked and was caressing my breasts. I slept only in panties and she started taking them off. I let her. We lay together for the longest time simply holding each other. I was completely passive at first, letting her caress me, fondle my breasts, massage between my legs. Then after a while I began touching her too, very gently, every small movement an incredible tactile experience, an exploration that I found astonishingly pleasurable. I remember thinking how bizarre it felt to be touching another woman in this way. It was like touching myself, except my body had gone numb while my hands retained their feeling. I was used to a woman’s body from the inside, not the outside. I remember two special things: the weight of her breasts…the very subtle change in texture that became the nipple, and the little hollow place inside her thigh, near her vulva. I knew how being touched there affected me, and so I knew what I was doing to her and how she must be feeling. So outrageous a thing to be doing, and yet the most natural thing in the world.”

She looked down at her glass and poked at her ice a moment, shoving it around in a swirl.

“I was already sexually active with men,” she continued. “That started kind of early, as you know, so I was aware of the different ways I reacted to certain kinds of sexual stimulation. That is, I thought I was aware. Paula was a revelation. It was an extraordinary night, and I didn’t sleep a wink. After several hours Paula did go to sleep, with me holding her, but I couldn’t. I simply lay there and looked at the two of us. That in itself was exciting. I was already used to seeing my body next to one of another kind, one of different structure and texture and feel. But seeing us, two of the same, thigh to thigh, stomach to stomach, breast to breast, I couldn’t get over the unusualness of it. I liked seeing her female shape next to mine. It seemed…more appropriate.”

Broussard listened with a docile expression, managing to nod every once in a while, though he couldn’t have explained why if he had been given all the time in the world. Inside, however, he was being torn apart. It was as if every sexual encounter he had had with Bernadine in the past five years—and they had not been few—had been a deliberate mockery. He was tormented by the idea that during those encounters Bernadine had compared their lovemaking to that which she had experienced with Paula, and had found it lacking. He imagined Bernadine, nipple to nipple, navel to navel, vulva to vulva, with this girl, her lambent, bottomless eyes looking at Paula with the same candid curiosity and untethered pleasure with which she had looked at him—them—time after time after time. He could think of no movement, no caress or gesture, that he would have wanted less to share with another lover than that of Bernadine’s clear-eyed and undissembling observance of their lovemaking. To him, it always had been as primitively erotic as her nakedness, the one thing that had made her irresistible to him for more than five years.

A clacking of ice in an empty glass brought him back to the present. Bernadine had drained the last of her scotch.

“But that was it,” she said. “The next morning I took Paula to the commuter train and stood on the platform and waved her goodbye. I never saw her again.” She thought a minute. “I don’t know why that was an isolated experience…until recently, I mean. It was the best sex I’d ever had, by far. And yet I never thought of it in terms of anyone else. It was just for us, Paula and me. For years it’s been my main sexual fantasy, or I should say my main sexual remembrance, while I masturbate.” She looked at him. “I think the fact that I’ve never had another lesbian experience until now is something I’d like to explore.”

Broussard had to scramble to think of something, his mind whirling with his own mental image of the two naked women.

“Did you, at any time during this episode, remember the day you surprised your aunt and her lover?” The question had come to him almost as a reflex and saved him from exposing his disorientation.

Bernadine set her empty glass on the floor, slipped off her shoes as she got up from the armchair, and walked over and lay down on the chaise. Broussard couldn’t have been more surprised if she had flung herself through the plate-glass window. What was this?

“You know, I didn’t,” she said, surprised at the idea, raising her hips and smoothing her dress under her, getting comfortable. “But afterward I did. I mean it was even after I’d taken Paula to the train, and I was driving back to the campus when I first thought of it. I was stunned. Completely. I clearly remember how it affected me. And you know what I became obsessed with? I suddenly wanted, more than anything else, to know who that woman was with my aunt. I even thought about going to see my aunt and telling her everything, asking the woman’s name and trying to find her. It was a romantic fantasy for a number of years.”

Bernadine smiled. “Jesus, I wish I’d done that. It’s just occurred to me…if I had done that, and if I could have found her, she’d more than likely have been younger than I am now. And at that time I was nineteen. We could have had such an affair.” Her smile faded wistfully. “It would have been entirely possible. It could have happened. That’s kind of sad.”

When Bernadine paused, Broussard said nothing. He felt no compulsion to fill the silence this time. His eyes were going over his client as if they had been the curious, probing paws of a baboon. He even felt blue-snouted and cruel. It was as if he had a new client, as if he didn’t know her at all and had to start from the beginning. An entire component of her personality had been misrepresented to him and this was not, after all, the woman with whom he had consulted—and bedded—for the past five years. What the hell kind of a deal was this? Was he now going to have to deal with her bisexual identity? Her coming out? With her encounters with homophobia? Her Persephone complex? Lesbian etiology? Lesbian sexual dysfunctions? Lesbian socialization? Lesbian feminist praxis? The lesbian orgasm? The politics of lesbian sexuality? Lesbian power?

“Anyway,” she said, abruptly, interrupting Broussard’s grim preoccupation, “I’ve spent almost the rest of my life in unsatisfactory heterosexual relationships, always trying to fulfill someone else’s desires, trying to be something other than what I was for someone other than myself.”

She turned and looked at Broussard. “I’m good, sexually I mean, aren’t I?” She waited for him to respond, which he did, with a chagrined nod. “I know I am,” she said, turning her gaze back to the plate-glass window. “But do you know something? I’ve never honestly understood what it was men really wanted from sex.”

“What do you mean, Bernadine?” He was sleepwalking through the interview now, barely capable of sustaining continuity.

“I mean, it was never quite the same thing I wanted,” she tried to explain. “I’ve always been left with a feeling of: Well, not quite this time. But I never understood quite what. What was it that we were supposed to be achieving? Men seem satisfied with what they are going after once they’ve got it. But somehow, for me, an orgasm has never been quite enough, never quite the end of it. I always feel that somehow we didn’t quite achieve what we could have achieved.”

Broussard listened to this with absolute dejection. By placing herself once again in the posture of the analysand rather than the lover, but becoming the analysand-lover, she was unwittingly flaying him. If she had actually castrated him, she couldn’t have emasculated him with greater skill.

“I met this woman about a month ago,” Bernadine began. “It was not a chance encounter, although at the time it happened I thought it was. I was on my way here, in fact, and I stopped off at a service station on Woodway to get gas. While the man was servicing my car I went inside to get a package of gum. It was only afterward, when I thought back over it, that I realized that she had followed me in there. I remembered her pulling up on the other side of my car at the gasoline pumps just after I did; I remembered her following me into the station and into the aisle where I was looking for gum. I didn’t find the kind of gum I wanted right off, and she came up beside me, pretending to look for something also. I remembered that later, too, but at the time it didn’t actually catch my attention. Just as I reached for the gum, she did too, and her hand fell on top of mine and stayed there. It didn’t move. I looked at her, and she was already looking at me, her eyes holding me steadily, her hand moving slightly on mine, like an embrace. I instantly thought of Paula—for the first time in a long while. She smiled. And I did, too.”

Bernadine’s soothing contralto had grown husky as she related this, and by the time she had stopped it was thick with emotion. Broussard listened to it change with growing anxiety. He found it somehow unseemly, while at the same time it stirred something within him.

Bernadine cleared her throat and went on. “We exchanged a few words. She was obviously much younger than me, by ten years I found out later. She was dressed in a white tennis outfit that did very well by her figure. I was flustered a little, but she was very controlled, as if this open flirtation was very natural to her. Of course it was very natural to anyone observing us, two women visiting. There was nothing untoward about it at all; no one even noticed us. But I had felt the electricity between us and was flustered. Very calmly she suggested to me that I tear a deposit slip out of my checkbook so that she could have my address and telephone number. It was the easiest way, she said. She’d obviously done it before. I didn’t ask for hers, and she didn’t give it to me. After I had done this she smiled again and thanked me. As she brushed past me to leave, she very openly placed her hand on my crotch as she went by.

“I was too weak-kneed to follow her out. I simply stood in the aisle with my back to everyone—there were several other people besides us in the station—waiting to pay at the cash register. The woman left, and I had no idea who she was, or if I really would ever see her again.”

Broussard watched her begin her well-practiced routine. Bernadine Mello liked to remove her clothes as much as any woman he had ever seen, and she did it with style. Even the most experienced stripper had no advantage over Bernadine when it came to technique. The thing that made it so special was that it was clear that she did it as much for her own pleasure as for his, with a subtlety a stripper seldom conveyed.

She didn’t say anything else, but now and then her contralto purred—when her bare skin first touched the leather of the chaise, when she flung her dress, when she could look down between her legs and see her own reflection in the plate glass, washed in the green sunlight of late afternoon.

There was not a lot he could do about it. He wouldn’t be able to walk away from this no matter how repulsed he had been by her story. He would have to put it out of his mind. Bernadine was quickly wiping out every thought that might have distracted him. It was in her nature, and he let her do it.

He watched her as he slowly, mechanically, began undressing, removing his shoes first and putting the shoehorns inside them, removing his jacket and hanging it on a hanger, then his shirt and trousers, carefully folding them and placing them in the chair, doing everything by feel and habit, unhurriedly tending to the creases as he kept his eyes riveted on her. He knew that she knew what he was doing, that she had time to do what she wanted to do. He watched her hands moving over her own body as if he were guiding them with his mind, as if they were, in fact, his hands. He watched her watch herself in the green reflection of the glass with that peculiar, candid, and dreamy curiosity of the flesh that never failed her. When he was completely undressed, he moved around to the end of the chaise and crouched down with his back to the plate-glass window and looked up at her lengthways from between her legs, replacing her reflection. His eyes absorbed her every detail, slowly, slowly as they had done so many times before, each of them moving exactly as they knew they must, together turning the intricate keys of their own ritual, second nature to them in the foggy confusion of their excitement.

Then at the last moment, at the precise point at which he suddenly would put his face to hers, iris to iris, so that in the culmination of their passion he could fall into her empty, achromatic world, he was stunned to see that she had closed her eyes.

30

E
veryone was still there at seven-forty as a humid summer dusk settled over the city, and the street lamps quivered to life and the crickets picked up a steady rhythm in the damp grass and drainage ditches of this less than prosperous section of south Bellaire. Only Louise Ackley and the once handsome Lalo Montalvo had gone, in the back of the morgue van, their stinking bodies zipped up tight in plastic bags that the coroner would have to open so that he could do with them what only a few people in the world could be persuaded to do on a daily basis.

Louise Ackley, as it turned out, had been a saver of letters. This surprised Palma, and depressed her, for the letters Louise had saved had been records of tragedy, and Palma wondered how bleak her life must have been if she had wanted such things for memories. There were stacks of shoe boxes packed with letters, carefully filed in chronological order, some still in tattered and yellowed envelopes, most simply refolded to fit their space, some in pencil or ballpoint pen, some typed. Almost every one of them was from Louise’s worthless brother, or from Dorothy Samenov. The letters were a legacy of infamy dating back to adolescence, and covering a dozen states, chronicles of children cheated out of childhood, of incest in which Louise had suffered as much at the hands of her father and brother as if she had been a victim of a pogrom. Their father finally had died in a state mental hospital; their mother, for whom Louise nursed a poisonous and distilled hatred for colluding in Louise’s early incest victimization, had disappeared. But the brother and sister clung together both literally and figuratively, sometimes driven apart by their individual passions and sometimes brought together by the same. It was, at best, a relationship of dire needs in which survival, often at a very dear price, always had managed to strike a stalling bargain with despair.