Slow Hand (3 page)

She and Carole sat next to each other in the dark, while a wavy shaft of light cast pictures on the screen. The big, bare room smelled of chalk and wet socks, and above the faint hum of the projector you could hear the constant rustle of children forced to sit still. The darkness, the muffled noise, the shadows of people you no longer knew turned the barren room into a private place.

For the first half of the film, Mary would trace a delicate line up and down the soft skin on Carole’s arm. When they changed to the second reel, it would be Mary’s turn. She would stare entranced at the screen while Carole’s fingertips returned the delicate, feathery stroking.

That wasn’t really erotic, Mary admitted. Not like Herbert. But Mary decided that sensual also had a place on her list. She left Carole’s name on it.

“Mr. Maxwell.”

Mr. Maxwell was an older man in his twenties. When Mary was sixteen, he had hired her older sister, Helen, as a file clerk. Whenever she went to pick up Helen, Mr. Maxwell would call Mary into his office and flirt with her. One day he had leaned over and run his finger up her leg.

Mary pretended not to notice, but after that, whenever Mary came to get Helen, Mr. Maxwell invited her to come into his office. Sometimes he asked Helen to work overtime, and while she busied herself outside, trotting back and forth down the hallway with full file folders, Mr. Maxwell asked Mary about her boyfriends and tipped himself forward in his chair so that, as he talked, he could run his fingers lightly up and down, up and down her leg.

“Wesley Sutcliffe.”

She still thought of him occasionally when she saw the moon lying low, pouring light onto water as it had at that beach party the year she was thirteen. She had barely known Wesley, but when everyone had gone for a final swim, he had waded through the water and picked her up. Holding her wet body against his chest, he had carried her up the moon’s line of light, walking into the darkness of the sea. The silky, clinging wetness of her bathing suit was all that was between her breasts and his chest, and her nipples had hardened at the touch of his skin. He had carried her farther and farther into the silver light until at last they vanished in the moon.

The phone again. A neighbor was calling to give warning. The raspberries were going by. If Mary wanted any, she must pick them now.

There was enough of a breeze to keep the bugs away, but also enough to send her notes skating off the kitchen table and across the floor. And out the window. And into the hands of a neighbor child who would later ask, “Mommy, what does ‘fuck’ mean?” She picked up a brass candlestick and placed it firmly on the papers before taking a basket and heading for the raspberry patch.

She picked for an hour. Someone was practicing the piano—“In the Good Old Summertime”—and the ponderous notes came to her over the buzz of bees. It was all the summers that ever were, and Mary began to miss the moment even as it was happening. Next January, pulling up close to the wood-stove, she would be able to close her eyes and remember the clean feel of sun and the pleasure of licking a finger smeared
red with raspberry juice. A mosquito danced across her back, and she straightened up to swat it. Drops of sweat slid down between her breasts.

How nice it would be to strip off her blouse, to unhook her bra and let the breeze lick the sweat from her skin.

She reached absentmindedly toward a dark red raspberry, but stopped at the sight of a small white worm humping and sliding its way down the cane. Mary brushed it off, decided she had picked enough, then saw one more ripe berry, then two just a few steps farther on.

“Picking raspberries is like orgasms,” she said to Paul later that evening as they lay in bed together.

“You think everything is like orgasms,” said Paul, who had only been half listening to her account of the raspberry patch. He had been smooching around her body, planting sweet, silly kisses on her elbow, her wrist, licking the place where her waist lowered itself onto her hips.

“I always think if I wait a minute there’ll be a better one. Sometimes I don’t want to come.”

“We all think that,” said Paul complacently. “Prolonging the pleasure. It’s why eighteen-year-old boys aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

Paul was fifty-two. Much better than an eighteen-year-old, Mary agreed. Although now that she thought about it …

“I’ve never been to bed with an eighteen-year-old,” she said. “By the time I lost my virginity I was too old for someone eighteen. What were you like then?”

“Fast,” said Paul. “It didn’t occur to me to try to please a woman. It was me who was pleased just to have one; I didn’t dare take any time for fear she might get away. Hop on, vrooom, hop off. Poor woman.”

“Poor woman,” Mary agreed, feeling the pleasure of his weight as he slid on top of her, rubbing himself against her inner thigh before pressing inside of her and beginning to move slowly back and forth, finishing at last what had started their day.

• • •

Obsessed was too strong a word, but Mary admitted she had spent a lot of time the last few days adding names to her erotic memoir. Partly it was because Paul had fastened on it. Whenever he saw her writing, he tried to look over her shoulder, pretending to believe it was a shopping list. All his insecurities had snugged down into her past. She rather liked the past he gave her, all glamor and carelessness. The real one had been much more painful.

She, in her turn, had no fear of his past. She shied at his future. She kept herself ready for the day he would announce that being together had become more difficult than being apart.

She knew that for both of them, these were protection myths, like the Indian legends of creation. You were ready with a cover, a story which would explain how strange and terrible things that could not happen sometimes did.

“Tim.”

Her first lover. She had been devastated at his loss. It had never occurred to her that one would go to bed with a man and
not
marry him and live happily ever after. She had. They had not. It had been sex, but had it been erotic? She was too full of trying to please him, her mind poking itself into everything, wondering if it was all right to do this. And what he would think of her if she did that. Never in the few years they were together had she relaxed in bed and listened to him with her skin. But the first man you ever fucked, surely he had to be in your erotic memoir.

Erotic was not just a hand on your body, or she would have been swept away by the strange man who came up to her at a dinner party, gave an enchanting smile, and reached out and cupped his hands around her breasts. The Masons’ secret handshake, or was he Mr. Magoo? It had been as erotic as watching a nurse plump up a pillow. Erotic wasn’t the motion, or the mechanics, it was what had gone before, even if before was only a brief connection. It was the connection that counted. The mind knew not to be wary and allowed the flesh to have its say.

• • •

The phone. It was Paul.

“Are you busy, or would you like to go on a picnic?” he asked.

She met him at the town wharf, passing him the picnic basket and taking his hand. She rocked for a moment on the edge of the dock, so that she could say before she stepped into the boat, “If you were the kind of man who looked up a woman’s skirt, you’d notice I don’t have on underpants.”

She jumped lightly into the boat, dropping safely down amid the piles of slickers, sweaters, boots, and lines.

“Aha!” he gave her a quick grin, but he was coiling the painter as he talked and she knew better than to pursue the conversation. He drifted off when they were on the water, his mind going ahead in search of rock or wind.

They ate on the shore and then walked the edge of the island. In the distance they could hear the bleating of an island ewe, anxiously calling back a wandering lamb. They walked to the top of the hill, past low bushes of sheep laurel, whose brilliant pink flowers looked innocent and enticing. “It’s also called lambkill,” Paul said, poking at a bush with his toe. “It doesn’t seem to have hurt this batch.” Another mother with her two lambs scampered off in front of them.

“They probably don’t eat it unless there’s nothing else,” Mary said, her eyes straining ahead to pick out the gray sheep from the gray rocks that jutted out of the meadow. At the top of the hill they stood for a minute, looking down on the ocean below. Then Paul lay on his back, and she leaned on one elbow above him. His shirt was open, and she walked her fingers across his chest, lightly like a spider. She kissed the place where his neck hollowed into his shoulder and then ran her fingers around the edge of his mouth.

“You are erotic,” she said. “You are the last entry on my list.”

“Sure I am,” he said, lost again in his vision of her past. “Number 27.”

“227,” she corrected him. “Do you take me for a slacker?”

He smiled and unbuttoned her blouse. He pulled the sleeves
carefully down off her shoulders, and then, impatient, he gave a yank so that the whole thing dangled around her waist. He unfastened her bra and pulled her breasts free.

“I think I’ll just take you.”

His own pants were off, and he put his hands under her skirt. She raised her hips, and he pulled the skirt up, a clutter of clothing wrapped around her waist, her top and bottom bare. He put his fingers in his mouth, moistening them with his tongue as she watched him, then he leaned over and kissed her, putting his wet fingers between her legs.

His lips touched hers, his tongue sliding softly into her mouth so that as she inhaled she breathed him deep down inside her. His tongue in her mouth, the hardness of him pushing in between her legs, the spirit of him sliding deeper and deeper into her life.

AU
THOR’S NO
TE

In contrast to the sensuous case of the familiar, presented with such spirited warmth by Susan Dooley, other stories in this book, of which “Leaper” is one, take a look at chance encounters. It is quite clear to me from the many submissions I read, though in itself hardly a new idea, that the element of “unknowingness”—of unfamiliarity with another body or its history—can strongly enhance the erotic quotient of a sexual episode, whether real or imagined. But Jenny Diski and every other writer selected for this collection who has taken the sexy-stranger theme has made it her own.

Known for her daring, Diski here examines the coming together of two people whose needs and vulnerabilities match up for only a very brief moment.

H
e phoned at completely the wrong time, my lover. “Write me a story. A man and a woman, fucking. Keep it short and dirty.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “If you want a story, speak to my agent. The going rate is five hundred pounds a thousand words. If
you want a fuck, speak to me. The going rate is … what is the going rate?”

“Do as you’re told,” he said, just the tiniest bit menacing.

“Fuck you,” I said and put the phone down.

I’d spent the morning struggling with a never-to-be-published story and was sunk in a kind of slime of incapacity. What I lack is confidence. Much good it does to know what’s lacking. I’ve written quite a lot: short stories and articles for magazines, most of them published. Looked at from the outside, the writing’s going quite well. I’ve made a small but significant reputation with a number of editors, and it’s only a matter of time now, before I attempt The Novel that will, I hope, fulfill the promise I’ve shown.

If that sounds like an efficient piece of PR, it is, because I know, in that place where you really
know
things, that I can’t write at all. That fact, that I have produced decent stuff to murmurs of quiet appreciation, doesn’t affect this knowledge I have about myself. Something to do with my childhood, I suppose. Anyway, although things turn out more or less all right in the end, it doesn’t change anything, and I face every blank piece of paper in a state of panic. This time, I know for sure, they’ll find me out.

Things could be worse. That bone-deep knowledge of my own inability doesn’t, as it might, pervade my entire life. Not any more. At least it’s contained in the writing department, realizing, I suppose, that there is where I’ve decided I can live. I see this now as part of my internal structure; just as there is a language center in the brain, so I have a worry center which fills with anxiety and has to find something to worry about. It used to attach itself to anything available: money, sex, shopping, the daily news, the condition of my flat. For no reason connected with anything that was happening, anxiety would erupt. Suddenly, it would occur to me that there was dry rot under the floorboards, or perhaps, since I didn’t know one from the other, it was damp rot; and the gnawing worry would infest the day. No matter what sensible things I told myself, that it probably wasn’t true, or, if it was, so what, or I could do
something about it, the ache would thrum away, coloring the day with anxiety.

The damp/dry rot was
desperate
all of a sudden, festering and rotting the fabric of my flat. I would go about my business, efficiently enough, but accompanied always in some small space inside me by my fears. By the following morning, the certain knowledge of rotting floorboards beneath my feet would have faded, but something else would take its place, filling up the worry gap before I had a chance to be relieved. A bank statement would arrive, and now the money situation, no different from the situation a day or a week before, would be terrifying, and I’d spend every free moment listing and relisting my income and outgoings, coming up each time with the same answer, forgetting almost what the problem was, but knowing there was some solution it was essential to arrive at. Sometimes, it made life very difficult to live.