Private Practices (11 page)

His was another matter. Locking his desk and preparing to call Naomi to tell her he was on his way, he realized that she had faded in significance, had become vague and unreal to him. It made him angry with himself. He had done precisely what he oughtn't to do if he was to carve out a life for himself that was independent of Sidney. He had allowed himself to get so wrapped up in Sidney's affairs that his own had grown shadowy, trivial. Dismayed, he tried to remember Naomi's face, and failed. When he dialed her, he felt he was calling a stranger. But then she was on the phone, her disembodied voice ebullient. “Will you be here soon?” she was asking. “Shall I meet you at the front or the side?”

“Talk to me a minute,” he said.

“About what?”

“About anything. What you're doing. What you're wearing.”

“I'm reading next week's issue in galleys and wondering when you're going to get here. And I'm wearing a turtleneck and a llama-hair skirt. Why?”

“No reason. I just wanted to know.”

“Is that okay? Do you want to know what's underneath? Do you only weekend with women who wear garter belts?”

He laughed. Her bantering had made her real to him again. She was clumsy, but she was amusing, approachable. “I'll be at the side entrance,” he said. “In half an hour.”

Repeatedly, he kept losing his sense of her and having to find her again. When he pulled up across the street from her building, there was a crowd of people emerging through revolving doors beneath a cantilevered roof and at first he couldn't tell if Naomi was among them. Then he thought he saw her, her face partially concealed by the hood of an embroidered sheepskin coat. Then he thought that no, Naomi was the more heavyset woman walking just to the left of the one in the sheepskin and wearing a purple fun fur. It was only when the woman in the sheepskin hood spotted him and waved that he recognized Naomi completely.

She came hurriedly across the street, her eyes busily judging the traffic and peering at the Buick he had rented. Then she climbed inside and kissed him on the cheek, lighthearted, pleased to be getting out of the city. “I didn't figure you for the Buick type,” she commented, reaching for the seat belt.

“I'm not. It's not mine. I rented it.”

“You mean you don't own a car?” She sounded incredulous.

He took her remark as criticism rather than a mere question and answered stiffly, “I rarely have need of one.”

“Oh? I thought all doctors owned at least two, whether they needed them or not. A Porsche and a Cadillac.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Actually, it's three,” Naomi went on, elaborating her notion. “The third one's a Mercedes. And they trade them in every year.”

“Not all doctors.”

“No, not all. Some of them are too busy making money to get down to the car dealer's.”

It was a while before he recalled that it was Naomi's style to be playful and that she had been teasing him. Then he chided himself for having forgotten so much about her and to bring himself into emotional touch with her, tried touching her literally, putting his hand on her skirted thigh. She placed one of her own over his, and little by little he became more comfortable.

“Are you a good skier?” he ventured, turning and studying her face in an effort to memorize it. “I never asked you.”

“I'm good but not great.”

“Do you think we'll have snow?”

“Sure I do. But then, I'm an optimist.”

He squeezed her thigh and then, having to extricate himself from a tangle of cars trying to enter the highway, let go of her. But he was no longer feeling quite so estranged. She amused him, he thought, as they drove bumper to bumper through the northern suburbs. And, with her dark skin and eyes, she was attractive enough, if not a beauty like Claudia.

She did most of the talking. “What do you think of Bergman? Truffaut? V. S. Naipaul?” Most of the names she mentioned meant nothing to him. “Doris Lessing? Have you noticed that nowadays women writers only write about women, and men writers only write about men? We don't have fiction anymore. We have purdah.”

“Tell me about yourself,” he countered. “I—I'm not a man of wide interests.”

“You could be,” she said softly. “I'm sure you could be.”

Pleased, he nevertheless tried to keep the conversation directed toward personal rather than intellectual subjects. “Who left whom?” he asked. “Did you leave your husband or did he leave you?”

“I left him. But he had it coming.” She frowned. “Of course, now he has an excuse to be mad at me, and so most of the time he doesn't send the child support.”

“It must be terribly hard for you to make ends meet.”

“Terribly. But as I told you, I'm an optimist. I always figure there'll be good luck just around the corner. I'll write a book that will sell. Or some rich relative I never met will die and name me as his heir. Or I'll learn to have less expensive tastes.”

He patted her hand. “You're so different from me. I'm so cautious. So worried. So negative. I hope I don't drag your spirits down.”

“No,” she said generously. “And who knows? Maybe I'll lift yours up.”

He really did enjoy her, he decided, and speeding ahead through gold-domed Connecticut towns he put his arm around her and kept it there except when fog drifted across the road.

Still, it was difficult to translate enjoyment into passion. Alone with Naomi in a tiny attic room in the inn Cora had recommended, he grew nervous and argumentative. The room itself irritated him. It was lit by dim, yellowish lightbulbs and there was nothing in it but a lumpy double bed and a scarred dresser, as if guests who came to the inn had few needs beyond those that could be met in bed.

“Isn't there even a chair to put that on?” he said crossly to Naomi, who had begun to unpack her suitcase on the bed.

“No. So much for your nurse's taste in accommodations.”

He heard her with annoyance and wanted to suggest they leave and drive farther. Drive anywhere. But before he could speak, Naomi had begun to remove her skirt and sweater. Next she removed her underwear and sat down on the edge of the bed, her legs dangling.

He stood still. But it might as well be now or never, he thought. Moving slowly toward her, he pulled her to her feet and pressed his lips to her curly hair. There was no point in delaying their encounter any longer. His body would either fail him or rally to his support. Whatever happened, afterward he would know once and for all whether or not it was going to be possible for him, now that he had the will for it, to establish a binding relationship.

“Aren't you going to undress?” Naomi asked, shivering slightly.

“Later,” he murmured, pushing her to arm's length and regarding her breasts. “Later. I want to look at you.”

“Please,” Naomi repeated. “I feel funny with me undressed and you dressed. As if I were one of your patients.”

“Oh. I'm sorry. It didn't occur to me.” He stood and began wrestling with his jacket and shirt.

“Hold me,” she said, as soon as he was naked. “Hold me, I'm freezing.” He embraced her again and they slid under the bed quilts.

In bed he tried everything that had ever worked for him in the past when he had had successful sex. He caressed her belly, ran his fingers down the insides of her thighs, turned them to brushing against her nipples. But he felt as he always did in bed. As if he was turning pages. Was acting by rote. Was outside himself and looking on. He didn't want her to know and he increased his activity, rubbing at her clitoris first lightly then strenuously. She grew excited, and put her hand out toward his penis, stroking him. But he remained soft. He decided to try licking her, hoping that setting off an alarm of passion in her would produce an echo in himself, and he slid down along her body, his tongue tentative at first, then insistent, tapping, a tool. But his mind was elsewhere, dryly reviewing the day, the long drive, the disappointment over the room.

Naomi, shifting her body, suggested he let her mouth him for a while, and he did, but it was all to no avail.

“Let's stop for a while,” she said at last, raising her head and moving away from him. “Maybe you'll be more in the mood later. You're tired from the drive, I imagine.” She sat up, moved to the head of the bed, and pushed a pillow behind her back. But her willingness to give up after all the planning and effort he had expended infuriated him. He pulled her back down, so that she was lying flat on the bed, and then twisted his body so that he could lie over her with his mouth once again on her clitoris and his penis up against her lips.

“Please, let's stop,” Naomi pleaded, her voice muffled. “Maybe you'll be less tired in the morning.”

But he was feeling a compelling, driving desperation. “It will work. I know it will.” Lying over her, he held her so tightly that she began to try to squirm free. “Don't give up now,” he ordered, and sucked at her even harder than he had before.

But she was pulling away. “We're not machines,” she said, her voice more mournful than angry. “And I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted right now. It must be nearly one.”

“I'm not tired,” he said bitterly.

“Sure you are,” she insisted. Then she yawned elaborately. “Let's try again in the morning.”

Disappointed and angered, he got out of the bed and walked to the window under the eaves, his thin body taut, the shoulders tightly hunched.

“Okay?” Naomi asked cajolingly. But he stared out the window and didn't answer her. The sky was dark, moonless.

“I hate high drama in the middle of the night,” Naomi pronounced. “I can face anything, so long as it's after the sun comes up.” She fluffed up another pillow and took it in her arms, and then lay down alongside it. “You sulk if you want. I'm going to sleep.”

He felt enraged at her and furious with himself for having imagined she could help him. She was too ordinary, too lacking in glamour, to excite him. He would wait until she was asleep and then head back to New York. He would leave her in Vermont, stranded. It would serve her right. Or, better still, he wouldn't sneak from the room. He would tell her how she had disappointed him. How her awkwardness put him off, her uncultivated accent grated on his ears, and her very style, her flamboyant costumes and elaborate jewelry, made him wince.

He turned, ready to injure her in any way that he could, and began walking toward the bed. And then he saw that she was already asleep. Her breath was coming in long, drawn-out sighs and her arms were curled forlornly around the pillow. Shaking with anger, he looked down at her, only to realize that whatever else he was feeling, and had been feeling all evening, it wasn't loneliness. He was bitterly disappointed, furiously despairing, but he wasn't isolated, cut off, bored, estranged from emotion.

Stooping, he sat on the edge of the bed. Perhaps he
should
rest for a while. Perhaps he should wait and tell her in the morning how angry she had made him. Perhaps, and his hand stole gently to her curls, he might, after all, feel aroused in the morning. It had been years since he had spent an entire night with a woman, years since he had awoken from his sleep beside one, years since he hadn't failed to leave at once or to send the woman home in a taxi after his impotence had been displayed.

Disentangling the quilt from Naomi's shoulders, he lifted it a little and climbed underneath it. She mumbled something in her sleep, clutching at the pillow in her arms, and he looked at her with amusement. Then, pulling the quilt so that it covered both of them, he wrapped his arms about Naomi and the pillow both.

Of course, he was wide awake for hours, saw white, then stone-gray clouds drift past the window, heard pattering on the attic roof and, later, torrents of pounding rain. He hated being awake, resented the night noises in the old building. Below him, a bed squeaked. Across the hall someone was snoring, someone less deserving of rest than he. But he lay next to Naomi and eventually fell asleep with his arm caught under her breasts.

Toward dawn he imagined he heard a bell ringing insistently, and he awakened with a throbbing need to urinate. His penis was enormous, engorged. He slipped out of bed, shivered his way into the icy bathroom, then flung himself back under the quilt. His penis had withered but when he pressed against Naomi's side for warmth it began to grow again.

She rolled onto her back with a startled groan of awakening and he climbed on top of her. He felt himself shrinking but then she was reaching for him and pushing him inside her and, her eyes closed, was grabbing at his shoulders as during the night she had clutched the pillow. He began to move up and down on top of her and underneath him she was arching toward him. And suddenly his penis was throbbing, lurching, arrowing into her, and he had come, too soon for her but hardly soon enough for him.

“I figured it might happen this way,” she said, her voice bland, matter-of-fact.

“Did you?” He himself was astonished, shaken.

“Sure,” she smiled. “I know as much about sex therapy as you. Morning erections.”

He chuckled, beginning to feel quite pleased with himself, and put his head down into the crook of her neck. “You might have indicated last night that that's what you had in mind, instead of just acting so bored,” he murmured.

“No. If I had, you'd have found a way of making it not work.”

“You think I make trouble for myself?”

“God, do you ever.” Her arms, still encircling him, were hoops, binding him to her.

“But you like me, don't you?”

“When you're not being so compulsive.” She shifted and slid out from under him. “You know why I put up with you last night? I knew it wasn't going to work and yet I kept thinking of an article I once read about infants who wouldn't cry, or even eat, unless someone handled them, touched them, fondled them.”