Slow Hand (12 page)

It was black down there. I hadn’t been glowing at all, at least not in any visible way. But when I felt a hand snake between my legs and across my buttocks, the radiance, the glow, the
beat
increased.

I gave myself to the water and its’ sensations, gave myself to what was now a cool and steady pull of current against my knees and calves and toes.

Soon something very like hair brushed against my belly and then moved away. Seconds later, it brushed yet again, my belly, hips, thighs. I reached down, my fingers floating, and I touched, though fleetingly, what seemed a human face: forehead, nose, lids and lashes, lips.

I surfaced like a shot and looked for the rock, the shore, the things that kept me earthbound. Just then, they seemed so far
away. In the same breath-stopping instant, legs pressed and even wrapped around my own.

It was at this point that my roommate interrupted me. She sat straight up and hollered“Foul,” as if this were a game. I was irritated and demanded to know why I had been stopped.“Because you said his
legs.
If this is about a mer-man, he
can’t
have legs.”

“But he did have legs. He did. He just didn’t have feet.”

“All right,” she said,“Suspension of disbelief.” She assumed her former pose.“Go ahead.”

“Thank you.”

The legs again.

“No, no! Don’t!” someone, a woman, said from shore. Did she mean me? I looked back toward the house, the lawn. At this distance, the lanterns made the water wink and gleam. The same woman was laughing now.“Well, all right,” she said.

With that, a tendril of fear began to coil within me. I thought of my parents’ friends, of the fuchsia and green people, of the men. Was this one of them? The thought of it, of someone so old, made me thrash and pull away.

I made for shore as purposefully as I could, though all the while I swam, a sinewy body kept sweeping past me—back and forth and around—in the water.

This was no one that I or my parents knew.

“Were you still glowing?” my roommate asked sarcastically.

“Yes,” I answered, beyond impatience.

As I stroked, the body in the water began to touch and play against my own, against my shoulders and my breasts and along my neck, my spine, against my buttocks, between my legs. My will to reach the shore began to fade. I let the water buoy me.

“You wouldn’t dare,” a woman shrieked from shore.

“Don’t bet on it,” a man’s voice replied. Then there was the sound of glass breaking.

“Well, last year …,” I heard my father begin. He pronounced“last” as if it were“lust.”

Meanwhile, I had the distinct feeling that I was being held and carried. I began to move through the water with a force that was not my own. I plunged and rolled and bobbed as if I were a dolphin in an open sea. And whenever I felt my lungs would explode, I would be lifted through the air for an instant or two. I was still very near my parents’ home, I noted, for I saw ribbonlike streaks of green and of fuchsia every now and again.

And then whatever gripped me arced and took me deep and deep and deep. Shells crushed against my shoulders and my back, and bits of furry weed caught in my nostrils and my hair. I caught hold of whatever it was that held me—in that moment, I did so need to—and, in answer, a sharp fin lashed out, slicing into the flesh of my hand.

And then there was nothing, no one, only the roar of my heart.

I surfaced and paddled toward an eroded part of shore. Once there I pressed my face against the earth. I was alone and hurt, the blood from my hand mingling black with the water of the creek.

Then someone softly reached from below, took my hand, licked and sucked at the edges of my cut until the bleeding stopped. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure him: his face, his jaw, his seaweed-tangled hair.

“The Mysterious Stranger motif,” my roommate offered. I was silent, angry. Then she relented.“Come
on,”
she said,“get back to the good part.” (She later went to New York and became an important editor.)

Afterward, the water lapped at me. I swayed to its lilt. The whole of my body felt its kiss, as though all of me had been wrapped in inky, liquid silk.

“Oooh, inky silk!” my roommate cooed.“That’s good.”

• • •

On shore the lanterns had been doused. I knew that it was time. I slipped beneath the water, floated with the presence somewhere near me in the night. There was no urgency now, no fervor. When we neared the pilings of our dock I let my head and shoulders break the surface.

Beyond the steep roof of my parents’ house, a car door slammed and then another. An engine fired into life.

“Is someone out here?” My mother’s voice was so close, too close.

“And then?”

“And then he swam away. He was a mer-man. I’m sure of it.”

My roommate sighed.“Good story,” she said, in a languor.“Even if it’s stupid,” she went on,“it’s good.”

“But it could be,” I told her, remembering what my father had once told me. I even used his words:“For ours is a bywater, subject to tides. It’s connected to the bay and then the sea.”

She raised her arm, laid her hand across her forehead, raised her head with great drama,“For ours is a bywater,” she intoned.

I lifted a pillow and clapped it down upon her head.

I still had the scar on my hand where the fin had cut me. I mentioned this, so wanting my roommate to believe. I reminded her of my father’s seemingly euphemistic phrase. About the mer-maids.

“Quoting Eliot,” she gibed.

But was it only that? My father, after all, had grown up on this tidal creek.

Eventually, I inherited it all: house, creek, paintings, trophies, stuffed fish. And“The Shame Girl,” which I took to staring at, long and hard.

In a certain light, after a glass or two of port, admittedly, I could see a mer-something deep within the water. Mer-man. Of course that didn’t explain why the Shame Girl clutched at herself,
but maybe she was taunting him, daring him out of the water. (Now I think that maybe our cook saw him, the merman, after all. Saw him in the painting long before I ever thought to look. There is no way to know. Cook is long years dead, buried when Jill was younger than Miranda is now. At Cook’s funeral, Father—he walked with two canes by then—summed her up, telling me,“She was fat as a goose. Her passion, all of it, went into those meals. Lord, those wonderful meals.”)

At any rate, by then there was another proof, the words of my husband, whom I had never dared to tell.“You smell just like the sea,” he would say admiringly. (Oh, but how I remember him, square face, soft lips, fierce daily stubble! Even now I know exactly how his breath felt in my ear, against my cheek, along my neck. Or at my navel or pubis or thigh.) Why the sea?

But now, today, there is the blush that crossed my daughter’s face.

“Do you like this painting?” I ask her. I am indicating“The Shame Girl,” of course.

“Frankly, mother …,” Jill begins, in a way that tells me, no, she does not see him there, not yet at any rate.

“She thinks it’s dumb,” my granddaughter says.

“I find ‘The Shame Girl’ rather interesting,” Ed puts in. We all call it by the name Cook gave it, have for decades now, and no one bats an eye.

I stand, walk to the window, look down at the creek. With the fingers of my left hand, I trace the silvery scar on my right.“In summertime, I still swim,” I announce.

I turn. Then I remember what Miranda asked me earlier about those friends of mine.“And I don’t wear pantyhose under my suit when I go out there, either.” I wag my finger and speak sternly to the little girl, making this a joke.

“Shame Girl, Shame Girl, Shame Girl!” Miranda accuses, giggling and stomping and wagging back.

We all laugh. We’re all happy. I, here at waterside, perhaps a little more than they.

AU
THOR’S NO
TE

Sometimes, especially when regarding the complex issues of sexual power/sexual pleasure, it is easy to know what to think and hard to know what to do. Or would you prefer the opposite? The fact that Carol Lazare openly and honestly confronts the rape-versus-ravishment problem (“rape is ravishment defiled”) does not mean that her answers are everyone’s. On“The Footpath of Pink Roses“she leads us down, however, one thing is certain: erotic sensation—soft, sharp, sweet, enveloping—mimics those flowers whose petals fall all around.

S
ex was always on my mind. I was fifteen and fantasized about being overcome with desire, being taken wantonly, with no holds barred, to the point of utter, complete, absolute abandon, bliss, ecstasy, and exhaustion. In a word, ravished.

A rape had been reported down by the river near a footpath where pink roses grew. Myself, I worried over the difference between ravishment and rape, and I wrote a poem about it.

If a stranger confronts me and I am attracted to him,

If he is after rape and I am after ravishment.

If the act occurs, what will it be called?

At what point does my desire to be ravished by an attractive stranger

Become rape by a horrific criminal?

    I analyzed the difference.“‘She was asking for it.” ‘She wanted it.”” If she was like me, ravishment was what she wanted. Perhaps the rapist thought that he was ravishing her, giving her what she wanted. Perhaps our natural instincts have become so perverted that ravishment is no longer possible. Perhaps, I will never be ravished. Perhaps my definition of ravishment is really this society’s definition of rape. And rape is ravishment defiled.

A year later the rape/ravishment dilemma continued, and I was on my way home from the Deluxe Theatre. There had been a Saturday double bill, and I was feeling warm and contented after having just seen two Hollywood movies full of Paul Newman. I had to walk down Carruthers Street which is like a back lane. There are no front doors facing the street. On one side are backyards, clotheslines, gardens, and garages and on the other side of the street, the bus barn. The huge, vertical, sliding door of the barn was half open, and I could see the bottoms of the orange buses and pairs of legs engaged in chores and wordless conversation. A world of thigh-to-toe legs, half-ladders, and half-mops. What response would a cry of distress from Carruthers bring? Would whole bodies come running? Or would Dalilike legs, in worker overalls, brush under the half-open barn door and dodge around and about the empty buses on the lot? One never knew what might be crouched behind an empty orange bus. I doubled my stride as I passed them and hoped that fate would once again deal me safe passage.

It was twilight too, that time of day just before dusk when you can practically see the air, when the molecules seem big enough to push aside like a veil, when time is in limbo and unusual things can happen. I moved with anticipation and S.F.s
(sinking feelings) through the molecules. In ten minutes it would be dusk, the air would be normal again, and I would be home and safe.

As I neared the intersection at the end of the block, a huge boatlike car entered Carruthers and came toward me with the driver’s window down. Through it I could hear the sweet voice of Todd Rundgren singing a familiar song. I was humming along when the driver stuck his head out at me and crowed,“Hey honey, I’m lookin’ for some tight, young slit.” I looked at him, and the molecules of his face mixed with the molecules of car that mixed with the molecules of air, like an illustory dream mixing and moving in the twilight. For an instant I tried to answer him until adrenaline kicked me into action, and I ran toward safety and the dusk.

“I’m lookin’ for some tight, young slit.” How could anyone who listens to Todd Rundgren be saying that? This was new vocabulary and it filled me with fear: fear of forced surrender, to power, rape. There was no fear in ravishment, only willful surrender to ecstasy.

My sexual adventures in the past twelve years have been uneventful. There has been, thankfully, no rape, but, unfortunately, no ravishment either. I’ve become a woman with a potentially insatiable sexual appetite. My nipples are usually visibly erect, a strong indication, so I’ve read, of an aroused woman. They can be seen pushing out a T-shirt or a dress while picking out a pound of beans or scrubbing off baked-on grease or rolling twenty dollars worth of pennies. And it’s not the cold weather. My nipples are erect in any season, day or night. Because I can’t walk around at all times flashing my aroused-woman insignia, I have often chosen to wear the“layered look.” Two or three layers over erect nipples lessens the impression that I’m a slave to carnal knowledge.

When I was nineteen or twenty, I experienced one of my more memorable uneventful sexual adventures with a young man named Marshall. He was self-assured and absolutely confident about his attractiveness to women. My mother, like many Jewish mothers, has been loving and devoted to me. I’ve
found that with the sons of Jewish mothers the care can be more extreme. Because they are so worshiped and pampered at home, they transfer this expectation to the women they meet in their private lives. Marshall, not for one millionth of a millisecond doubted his power to excite me. He knew, like no other, that the key to my arousal was my nipples. He would lightly brush them, tug them, flick them, turn them, swirl them, kiss them, lick them. I learned many things from Marshall, but my sexual education was still limited. He may have taken my breasts to university, but the rest of me remained in grade school.

One uninspired encounter after another led me to the belief that the best sex is in the mind. Free of self-consciousness, free of guilt, free to experiment, my mind had brought me to the brink of ravishment with“him,” my perfect lover. He filled all my requirements, handsome, well-built, tender, attentive, and slow, very slow. I chose my perfect lover from the Cree Nation—for his piercing black almond eyes, his long, thick, black hair, his cheekbones that could fill my palms. My engagement as a field worker for social services had brought me in contact with many native people, and I began to appreciate the traditional North American native way of life. I had many questions about the troubled state of the earth. It offered me an answer—respectful coexistence in all things including the relationship between man and woman.