You've Got to Read This (20 page)

She was exhausted now. Maybe she could cry so much that her body would force itself to sleep and when she woke up it would be normal, because that was the way things had worked till now; why shouldn't it solve itself so simply? But how could it when the situation had changed so drasti-cally? She had not chosen this. Everything was different; he wasn't the same he; she herself—oh, was she also different, not just in the sense of having learned something, but substantially altered? Could she not go home again even to the home of her being? Was it going to prove that large a crime she'd committed, to herself, or invited if not committed: some psychic leaving of the keys in the car, or the house unlocked? Take from me; violate me?

But no, how could she have known that the locks would not only be changed by the time she got home, but in her impotent presence the lock, the whole house changed, the door, the windows, the stairs (how long ago
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it seemed she'd stood at the top of her stairway) all turned inside out and impossible to put back in order.

That's when he stopped. Vision was the only sense that informed her, because feeling had long since been used up. The point was that nothing was different after he stopped, the same way on a long trip you feel like you're driving even after you get out of the car. She wanted to know what it was that made that particular point the one he'd selected as enough. Maybe he'd climaxed. But she suspected he had a completely different kind of sexuality, not based on that system. Even if it was the same system it was different, because no man ever took that long to get to the point conventionally regarded as completion; no ordinary man. Or had she drawn it out in her mind because she was so uncomfortable? No, there couldn't be that much disparity.

He was leaving. He had dismounted and left the bed. It seemed that he didn't need any time to recover from his own experience. He was walking away and she was free, no longer oppressed by that weight, that invasion; she'd been granted just what she pleaded for. But what would she do, if he left her all alone in the room again, with no one and no way out and no way of knowing where? She was more afraid than ever.

"Oh please don't go," she said. "Don't leave me alone. I'm afraid to be alone here."

Her request wasn't on the order of begging the lover to linger a little longer, wanting to draw out his sweet company, not Juliet bemoaning the lark song; it was simply preferring any risk to the risk of solitude, the way someone you're suspicious of suddenly seems harmless when you see the real villain. But she was only half involved with this anxiety about his departure, probably more than half, that is, not entirely consumed by the fear, because she was partly caught up in watching him begin to dress, seeing his body for the first time from a distance, with perspective. And she was also ashamed at feeling renewed attraction for this man whom she'd minutes ago felt utterly victimized by. But she couldn't get over his beauty; at this moment she wasn't so much aroused by the sight of him naked as interested in his body aesthetically.

She dwelled upon the refined features: cheekbones, throat, his beautiful hands. Her own hands had felt the softness of his dark hair, from that of his head to the field that pooled below his navel. He was fuzzy and nice down there; she remembered the feeling of that against her. Before she had only seen him hard, now she found it just as appealing soft; she supposed he wouldn't appreciate that sentiment, he would surely not deviate from the norm in that respect. She also wondered if it was abnormal of her to feel as she did, not to prefer it hard.

They had been united by that organ; now it was just a part of him again; perhaps it had its own little memory, its own will, and was choosing now to disassociate itself from the warm surround she had provided. And how she had soared in the first stages of that providing. She'd never had such a
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strong sense of being with a man: that she was the feminine to his masculine. He elicited from her a quality of her own femaleness that she'd never before experienced on that physical plane—a response she realized might be hopelessly bound up in the conditioning of role, but was nonetheless immensely powerful. It was getting clear again, with the distance, with his going, the power of the sensation that had made her respond in a way she never had: totally. She'd come outside herself to meet him through the medium of body, through the act of letting him inside her, and yet never felt so fully in her body, in her self, as when she had.

He was working now toward his clothes: a neat pile contrasting with her own things, scattered around it. She didn't remember him taking off what he was now putting on; she thought they were the same clothes he'd been wearing when they first met and talked. It was a button-down shirt, that much she remembered, but the color looked a little different than it had in the candlelight: pale pink oxford cloth; it might look effeminate on most men but on him it was just right, perfect for his blend of beauty and masculinity, his refined masculinity.

As she was observing him in the act of dressing, deep in her own reflections, she felt quite spontaneously in her genitals the muscular contractions of orgasm. She'd been concentrating on the pinkness of the shirt, and watching him put his firm, muscular—first right, then left—legs into his gray flannel trousers in a business-like manner, when out of nowhere her body had produced this gratuitous release to no accumulated tension, in an instant of incredible intensity that left her completely drained, as if she'd been building up to it for some time. She'd often wished she could speed up that process but this was a most undesirable other extreme, this joyless, arbitrary orgasm; it was in no way satisfying. If anything, scary. This very strange ventriloquism made her furious. For the first time toward him she felt her emotions focus as unmitigated, almost violent anger. She felt used, much more so even than when he had been doing to her what technically could be considered rape. But to do this intimate thing from across the room! How cowardly of him; that's what it was, truly unmanly, that he wouldn't even face her with his body to manipulate her, though in a way it was honest, to be so blatant.

A marvelous thing indeed it would be if she could think her way to orgasm, or come just by watching him, but this was quite different, as removed a process as artificial insemination, this artificial climax for which she had been just the vehicle. She wanted to hit him but she was practically incapacitated as a result of her climax. She wanted to hit him because she felt stunned as if she had been struck; she had fallen back from an upright position, and as she'd fallen back, her peripheral vision had received the mirror's version of that moment. It contained two genders; a man's reflection had been for that instant there: a single thrust by all the reflected men in all the mirrors: multiple petals around her lonely, central, actual pistil, from
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which no bee sucked nectar. Why was she surprised, that they would contradict no matter what, turn appearances around as a matter of course? She should have the pattern down by now.

A few minutes later she had her strength back, but since immediacy would have been the point, there was no use in striking him now. It would probably only end up hurting her anyway. Alternatively she decided to maintain utter dignity, which was difficult because she needed to go to the bathroom and there wasn't a chance she'd be able to divine the whereabouts of the ladies' room. She got off the bed in as stately a manner as she could accomplish and walked slowly but deliberately to where he stood. She tried not to feel vulnerable despite the fact that she was naked and he now completely clothed.

"There's a matter of some urgency," she said.

He looked up at her. "If you want to leave," he said, "all you have to do is figure it out. No one will stop you. I certainly won't."

After she had held her breath a minute, determined not to start crying, she tried again: "That's not the matter I had in mind—something much more mundane. You see, I have to, I need to [he was no help] find a bathroom."

"There aren't any." He wasn't very gracious.

"Oh," she said, at a loss. Then she found courage.

"Look, you have to help me."

She was afraid he wouldn't answer, and was thankful when he finally said, as if he'd been thinking about it all the while rather than ignoring her as she'd thought, "In fact, there is something," and hastened to add, "but it's only meant to be decoration. It was part of the architect's design."

Since her urgency was not decreasing she couldn't afford to be choosy.

Responding to her expectant look, he led her to an alcove she could have sworn had not existed, but then it was hard to tell because of all the reflection. In any case she hadn't noticed this place before. Somehow the mirrors masked the contours. It was hard to tell how far the room extended, hard to distinguish what was reflection from what was actual space.

"This is all I have," he said (what a funny salesman he'd make, she thought), gesturing toward two gleaming urinals, affixed to the wall at waist height, totally out of place though in another way consistent with the atmosphere.

"Are you going to watch?" she asked in an injured tone, and he accom-modatingly turned to walk away, but then she called him back and asked him to give her a hand, being pragmatic rather than proud.

"Help me," she said, but it was a question rather than a statement because she didn't know exactly what she wanted him to do for her, or whether he would even know how to help her. She had in mind a position that would somehow enable her to put feminine function into masculine form. She stood on tiptoe and stepped backward, facing him—she did not want to have her back to him—until she straddled the fixture. It was difficult to do this, but not impossible because she, although not tall, had fairly long
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legs, and the thing itself was not all that high. The insides of her thighs made contact with the porcelain rim; it was cold, but she couldn't raise herself high enough to avoid it.

She was still looking at him for some kind of assistance, and he, regarding her now as if she were truly demented, approached her, reaching his hand out hesitantly, as if he felt obliged to offer it but didn't know quite where to touch her, how to hold or support her. Finally he squatted in front of her and the urinal, and grasped her legs just above the knee, as one might hold a ladder someone else is standing on, to make it secure. This was no help. It was so strange to have him touching her in this functional way; she realized she didn't want him to touch her at all. Certainly she didn't want him to witness her in the actual act of urinating, especially in this awkward posture, and she couldn't wait much longer. Perhaps realizing that he was making no contribution, he rose, but kept standing there, out of malice or ignorance she wasn't sure: his face was blank.

"Thanks for the help," she said, hoping he would take that as dismissal.

He looked mesmerized by her sustained acrobatic—an expression foreign to his face as she knew it: being in the power of something rather than being in power over something, someone. Then he snapped out of it, looked normal again, and said, "The needs of his guest are a host's first pri-ority." Was he sneering, or was it her own distortion of his smile? Then he turned quickly away. They seemed far from anything sexual now, poles apart from each other's sexuality. It was as if her nakedness were the most ordinary thing in the world to him now. At least he was gone and she could urinate in peace, if not exactly comfort, since relief was thwarted by the awkwardness of posture. There was so little space between her and the fixture that she got splashed by little droplets. Well, it's sterile anyway, she thought. Of course there was nothing to wipe herself with; there were no accessories to this monstrosity. It vaguely resembled a baptismal font.

She eased herself off, gripping the sides for support; this time she didn't have to worry about looking dignified. Once on land again, dry, flat land, she spread her legs, planting her feet far apart, and waved her hand rapidly between her thighs to speed up the air-drying process, as she leaned against the cold porcelain, too cold to keep contact with for any longer than necessary. She was tired of being in discomfort. Hadn't she suffered enough? She stopped leaning and tried fanning with no support but found her legs still too unstable, so she compromised by kneeling, though that didn't leave much space in which to wave her hand. All her muscles ached now; she wanted to find the bed again and lie down, but she couldn't summon the energy. Fatigue overcame any squeamishness she had about lying on the floor near the urinals: he had said they were only used as decoration. She lay on her back, at first with her legs up, positioned like an open scissor, as in one of the exercises she did, to facilitate fanning, which her left hand had taken over. The absurdity of the whole endeavor suddenly struck her; she
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dropped her legs to the floor, exhaled, and closed her eyes, vowing she would allow herself the luxury for only a minute. It might have been several minutes, before she was seized by panic. Where had he gone when she'd sent him away? She forgot about her fatigue and ran into the main part of the room, trying not to bump into glass. He was nowhere. As she was about to call him she realized she had no name for him. Oh, what a fool she was, alone just as she'd feared, and all her own fault. How useless everything was.

But she wouldn't let herself cry—no more despair. It was time to be practical, at least to go through the motions of being practical, for her own sake, to try to create some sense, even a contrived one, of order, in this most peculiar, relentless universe. So she began to dress, even though there was no rational reason to do so, except to feel dignified, and what else was there to do? She looked fondly at her scattered clothes. She regarded them as a soldier might some article that had been with him through numerous battles. And who knew what battles were yet to come, she thought, almost saying it out loud to her faithful skirt and blouse, the ones she'd been in the process of removing when she left her bedroom to investigate, the thing that got her into this nightmare: her fear of the sound, followed by her—feeling—for the cafe owner.