30 Pieces of a Novel (65 page)

was
important—maybe she forgot to give me the check for the reading, though to be honest I expected it to come by mail in a couple of weeks, as she'd said earlier, or even that someone in the hotel was after her—I opened the door. I wasn't going to let her in—I thought I could deal with whatever it was at the door—but she walked right past me. I said something like, ‘Hey, what're you doing?' because by now I knew it wasn't about the check or anyone stalking her in the hotel. She was tenacious and aggressive and undiscouraged by anything I said to her, but still, as I told you, I could have resisted and I know that, so don't think I'm trying to get out of this by saying I don't. I could have said, ‘Are you insane? Get the hell out of here, beat it, or I'll throw you out, and I mean it: get out now!' I actually did say something like that, though not as forcefully, like, ‘Listen, this is all wrong and you have to leave here. I'm married, happily married'—that's what I told her, the exact words, foolish and inept as they must have sounded—‘and I don't want to do anything with you, period. Besides, I'm very tired and I want to set off early tomorrow, so will you please leave this room?' I think I even showed her the door—went over to it and put my hand on the doorknob but didn't open it, because I was concerned people in the corridor would see her in my room. In other words, I wasn't sure what to do about her persistence but I knew I didn't want to have sex with her—if I wasn't married or going with anybody, maybe I would have wanted to or at least wouldn't have been so adamant in wanting her to leave. But I eventually caved in. I'm still trying to figure out why, and I'm not trying to be funny there. I'm being apologetic. I feel miserable about it. She started undressing then, and I said, ‘What in the world are you doing?' Then she threw herself on me—put her arms around me, I mean, and her shirt's off and so's her bra—and then started pulling off my shirt and I swear to you I tried putting it back on. But then it was off, and I think she tore part of it, and next thing I know she's grabbing me through my pants and I push her hand away and she grabs me again and starts stroking me down there and I think, Oh, I give up; I don't know why, but I knew by this time I was finished. As dopey and fake as this must sound, she was unstoppable and I ended up being conquerable. I was also, and I know this plus my tiredness contributed to some of it, a little drunk but not soused from the wine at dinner and the martini before and then that one brandy or cognac after in the bar. In fact I'm beginning to think—I'm almost convinced, though again this isn't to worm out of it—that that's what contributed to it the most. All the alcohol made me lethargic, stupid, and maybe even amorous, the way it can. But that's what happened and how. I did it with her just once, I doubt I got half my clothes off, and I don't remember a lot of it or if I even completed it: that's how tipsy and sleepy I was. And the whole time she was there—from the knock on the door till when she left—was maybe thirty minutes in all. Believe me, I'm so sorry; I can't tell you how much, and it'll never happen again, never. I didn't want to do it and I'll know how to resist it next time. For one, to stay away from that much alcohol when I'm on the road, if I ever go again, even for a night, and I don't think I will. It could be I drink more when I'm away from you and alone, but also eat less, thereby getting high quicker through two ways, but that's still no excuse for it, and this whole thing took me by surprise. She was much younger than I—more than twenty years. I'm practically an ugly guy by now, and to her an old man, and that's how I thought she saw me—completely uninterested in me physically—till she came into the room, so I don't understand it. But she was capricious and a bit odd and wild in her way and obviously turned on by something, not necessarily me, and I was just about drunk and she had a few glasses of wine in her too and also that brandy or cognac, and that's all I can say to explain it. Not even that I was flattered and went for her finally because she was so much younger and pretty and showed me this kind of attention. But you know me: I couldn't care less and even react against it, when someone says nice things about me or my work, which she didn't, by the way, except for the dutifully complimentary things reading coordinators always say to you after a reading. And it also isn't that just because I never did this in almost nineteen years, made love to anyone but you, I was curious if not eager to try it, especially when it was practically thrown at me—given on a silver platter, that sort of thing—because the truth is I haven't had any urge to do something like that since we got married or even since we first met. Of course not when we first met or anytime around that, because I was crushingly in love and attracted to you, as I am now, and I'm not just saying that, and sex with you then was new and we were just starting something, so why would I want to be with anyone else, and ruin things with you, or even think of another woman that way? Anyway, for our entire relationship, I haven't wanted to. You were always enough for me and out of consideration or something else, when you weren't feeling much like it, always made your body available to me except when you were sick or it was the beginning of your period or during our worst moments together, which I was usually responsible for, just as I've always been available to you that way, except during those kinds of times too. Oh, I've had my fantasies about other women a lot, but that's as far as I ever took it—all in my head and fleeting, where I knew they were strictly fantasies and would never be carried out. But when she—” Oh, enough of it. “But when she” what? When she put her hand in his fly and started pulling on him, but he wouldn't tell her that. He wouldn't tell her half of what he just thought of, and she'd probably by now be crying to whatever he did say, possibly from when he first said he made love to a woman last night, which would be one of the first things he said, so who knows how much he'd be able to tell her? Much of what he doesn't say today, if he does decide to tell her about it, he can save for another day when she'll be more willing to listen. But if she was crying he'd try to comfort her, maybe try to hold her, hold and comfort her and say comforting and loving and apologetic and remorseful and self-damning and -hateful things, but she'd have none of it and would push him away, if he was holding her, he's almost sure of it, and maybe say things like “You fucking bastard, you stinking shit,” and not say but scream them at him, and get dressed and leave the room or take her clothes with her and dress somewhere else, if he did start telling her this while they were in bed with no to few clothes on and preparing to make love. But he's often impulsive and might just blurt it out sooner—to get it over with, he might give as a reason to himself—in another room or outside where he saw her when he got home but before there was any chance they'd go to bed, because of all places and occurrences he wouldn't want to tell her there and then, and not blurt it out but say calmly and solemnly—and the solemnness would be real—that he has something important, disturbing, and grave to tell her and even frightening to him because of the effect it might have on her, and nothing to do with his health, he'd quickly add, since he wouldn't want her getting alarmed at that possibility and then finding out what it really was. Maybe just say immediately that he's done something he's terribly ashamed of … deeply… anyway, he'd find the words. And after he told her he slept with a woman last night he's almost sure she wouldn't, after she told him what she thought, say much to him for a week. He can picture her—she's done it before over less serious things between them: when he called her a cunt once. “There it is,” she said, “it's finally out, what you truly think of women: they're all just cunts to you, right? Well, I won't listen anymore to your jackass insults”; another time, near the beginning of her illness when she was only limping a little and sometimes felt weak, when he said how sick can she be that she can't even straighten a room out or wash a dish: “You're completely without understanding and compassion and talk like the dimmest lowbrow I know. From now on think of me as deaf”—cupping her ears—and before that probably saying something curt like, “Shut up, I've heard enough, there is no word for you, get out of my sight.” Or she might not say anything, what he'd tell her would be so bad, and would only look stricken for a while and maybe even crazed, before getting herself away from whatever place he told her this at. After that, he thinks, the only things she'd say to him for a week would be for the kids' benefit, so they wouldn't think something irreconcilable had happened between their parents. She hates when he starts an argument when they're around and usually says something like, “Save it for later when they can't hear us, and I'm not saying this to defuse you but to spare them.” Or she might hear him out soberly like that and then say she doesn't understand: if he didn't want to do it with this woman as much as he said, at what point did he give in? and it might be then he'd have to say—if he didn't say, “Forget it, let's drop the subject for now”—“When she put her hand in my pants. Something just happened to change things,” and she could say, “Drop it? No, I want to hear all of it,” and then, “So that's it? She grabs your dick and massages it half a minute and you totally capitulate? Worse comes to worst and it was overcoming you when your conscience or governing intelligence or whatever that higher part in you that screens and is supposed to thwart these kinds of actions didn't want it to, as you said, and you knew it would jeopardize our marriage and hurt me and indirectly inflict similar distress on the kids, why didn't you push her hand away and, if that didn't work, wrench it free without injuring her or your penis and bark in her ear that this isn't what you want to do, exciting as it's obvious you find it, and if that didn't sink in and she kept grabbing at it, then excuse yourself to go to the bathroom, even say you have to defecate—she couldn't refuse you that, and I doubt she'd accompany you there—and lock the door and masturbate?” He actually should have done that, the last part, and there at least would have been some pleasure in the act rather than not having completed anything—maybe a great deal of pleasure, considering all the hot stuff that preceded it—and then come out of the bathroom and tell her what he did and he's sorry but it was the only way he could stop from making love with her and now he won't be good for anything involving sex for an hour and probably two—that's been the pattern the last ten years—so she better just go since he really won't want to do it in two hours or even an hour from now any more than he wanted to do it before, and it would also be much later than he wants to stay up. But who knows how his wife would take it, if he did tell her, though he's almost sure she'd be cold and sharp and sullen to him for a lot longer than a week, no matter how often he apologized for what he did, and she wouldn't let him make love to her—even let him embrace or kiss her or hold her from behind while they slept in bed—for a month, maybe more. She probably wouldn't sleep in the same bed with him for a couple of weeks, though he thinks she'd insist on taking over the guest bed in her studio, since he does most of his work on his desk in their bedroom. But after that—after many discussions between them and verbal soul-searchings on his part that in a way, and he'd tell her this, he feels she let him off lightly—he thinks most of it would be worked out. He'd periodically say how bad he felt about it and still does, just so she wouldn't think he was trying to forget it, and that he knows it could never happen again, not only because it was wrong and morally indefensible and a breaking of her trust in him and things like that—not “morally indefensible”; that's too much like a cliché—but because the consequences to them both and the children were so great, till in a few months she might tell him to stop bringing it up: it's for the most part over and done with, she could say, and a certain healing's taken place, significant as the event was to them then and the one that caused the greatest rupture in their marriage and nearly blew it apart. But she's satisfied it won't be repeated, so less said about it now the better, since there doesn't seem to be anything pertaining to it she hasn't heard from him a dozen times, doesn't he agree? He'd say, “Without question, and I'm glad to hear that's how you feel.” Maybe in a year things would be completely normal between them again. “Like the Jewish mourning period,” he could say. “It's possible that's the tradition in other religions, but concerning mourning and bereavement I only know the Jewish ones, and not well.” In two years they might even banter about it if one of them alluded to the incident in some way—he doubts it'd be he. “You know what anniversary today is?” she could say. Would this be something she'd do? He's only using it as an example. And he'd answer with something like, “You know me and memory. I'm very bad with birthdays and wedding anniversaries and those kinds of personal dates. World history I'm better at. August sixth, the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima—or was it Nagasaki? August ninth—this is 1945—the second A-blast on the city that wasn't hit first. No, definitely Nagasaki for the second one, and I'm not trying to be flippant about it. August eighth—notice the opportunistic timing—the Soviet Union declares war on Japan or just invades some of the more vulnerable Japanese-occupied territories on the Soviet Union's Asian borders. August fourteenth, V-J Day, and September second, I believe, Japan signs the surrender papers on the
Missouri
, so the official end to the entire war, as the one in Europe ended on May eighth the same year.” “It's two years to the day you told me about Sylvia, or whatever her name was, and when I thought, Am I going to use this transgression to start immediate divorce proceedings against you? Because I had never felt so let down by anyone. I remember the date exactly because it was the last day of the month and was my childhood friend Rejelika's birthday,” and he could say, “It was that bad for you? I knew I'd hurt you, but you never told me how much. Me too, but on the opposite receiving end. I hoped, though, you'd forgotten it to the point where you didn't even know—no, I was going to say—oh, what's the difference what I was going to say, but it was ‘it had happened.'” “God,” she could say, “you were so guilty and penitent that day, I thought you'd never stop apologizing, and that went on for weeks, perhaps, where your guilt and contrition hardly receded. The only plus side of it was that you were also much sweeter and more indulgent to me and the girls than you had ever been to me, or since the first few weeks after I gave birth to each of them. And you kept using phrases in your apologies that I hadn't heard from you before, such as ‘higher sense' and ‘breach of faith' and ‘moral duty' and words like ‘perfidious,' ‘unscrupulous,' and ‘corrupt,' which had always been part of your vocabulary though mainly confined to governmental and academic politics, never in relation to yourself,” and he could say, “I felt miserable over it—what can I tell you?—and afraid for weeks I'd lose you and, by losing you, lose the love and respect of the kids and seeing them every day. Now I know you lose that respect no matter what undeviating good you do for them and how straight a line you toe, I think they say—people who say such things—and then get the respect back at some point, if your undeviating toe is good, though we haven't come to that end of it yet. But I thought we'd agreed, some three months after the thing happened, not to go into it at length anymore—that we'd said just about everything we could on the subject and it had become so irksome for you to hear me refer to it again that you didn't know what was worse, you said, what I'd done or that I was about to reproach myself and beg forgiveness for it once more,” and she could say, “You could be putting words in my mouth there—after all, it was almost two years ago, and if your memory's not so sharp about nonhistorical things, as you said, why should I believe you'd remember that?” and he could say, “Dates, I didn't say ‘things.'” “Anyway,” she could say, “that one romp with Madam S, I'll call her, doesn't upset me any longer and hasn't for a year, and I feel we can even banter about it, it's such ancient stuff and where there's little chance of it being repeated, wouldn't you say?” and he could say … what? “Yes,” he could say, “I could say that,” and she could say, “There is one aspect of it … do you mind my continuing with it a bit further? There was something in your past explanation that never sat well with me,” and he could say, “Why I went ahead and had sex with S—even I've forgotten her name, though I know it's not Sylvia—when I had so many reasons not to? But you do believe she sort of forced herself on me after she finagled her way into my hotel room and that I didn't initiate or encourage the action though I eventually did participate in it, right?” and she could say, “Yes and no, though I won't at this moment, maybe just to be mischievous, say which expression goes where,” and he could say, “Okay, get it out, you're entitled, I guess, and I never want to stifle conversation between us except when I'm too sleepy to speak or hear, though I hope this is the last time we talk about it for a while. I think”—what could he think? he thinks in the car—“I think, in spite of the long break in our even referring to it, that I'm kind of fed up with the subject now too. Because you did say you were fed up with it, true? Or was that almost two years ago?” and she could say, “One, you were only going to be away from home a day, and by the time the romp took place you'd been gone a mere twelve hours. Two—” and he could cut in and say, “First let me go over your figures to see if they're correct and also if they're of any importance in the matter,” and she could say,