Bodies and Souls (12 page)

“Good morning,” he said.

God, he was a gentleman. He said, “Would you like to use the bathroom first?” And he closed his eyes while I got up and put on my robe.

I’ve made love with enough men to fill this church. What fun it would be to have them sitting here, all lined up in pews. I could stand at the pulpit and judge them: the schoolboys, the professors, the pilot, the banker, the sailor, the dentist, the carpenter, the Boy Scout leader, the tennis coaches, the congressman, the scientist, the businessmen. My good parents provided me with almost more money and good looks than I can use in one lifetime, so I’ve never needed to use sex to pay my mortgage or to buy me the company of men. And the company of men has been the greatest pleasure in my life. Many times I’ve sat here in this very church, trying not to topple off the pew with boredom, entertaining myself with the age-old question: which is most enjoyable, the courtship or the act? I love those early moments, when both people are breathless with lust and anxiety and indecision, when a man gently helps me into my coat and lets his hands linger just a few seconds too long on my shoulders, so that his fingers seem to touch accidentally the rise of my breasts. I love the dance of it all. I love seeing a man’s face when I walk into the room for the evening, and it dawns on him that under my silky dress my breasts are free. On the other hand, that sort of pleasure, while perhaps the more exquisite, is also the more delicate and subtle—and rather precious. I suppose I do prefer the actual act. In spite of the number of lovers I’ve had, I find each penetration a great physical surprise: my mind and the rest of my body goes numb and quiet, and all my senses become focused on that one sweet intrusion, as if my nerves were a crowd who rushed to gather around a dramatic scene. I love all the vulgar thrashing, the groaning
barnyard sounds. I love the focused, tense, desperate climb to orgasm, and then the helpless arch of release, when the fork of the body pumps like a machine. I love it when I come, and when a man comes, pulsing. After making love, the feeling flows back again from my crotch into my limbs and extremities, and I feel like a tree must feel when in the spring the sap forces itself up and out through tight veinlike channels so that each twig pushes out a leaf.

Am I depraved? Perhaps. Or perhaps only honest. There was a time when I thought it would be best to give all that up. I decided that I should settle down, get married, be monogamous, have children, and run charities—that’s what people do with their lives. I had a friend named Grady whose father owned a local insurance company. Grady was as pretty a man as I am a woman, and he was bored, too, and we thought what fun it would be to have a big lovely wedding. Sexually we were beautifully matched; we’d both had our share of experiences, and knew what we liked. Our making love was a form of eating on the order of starved rats with Swiss cheese: we bit and burrowed. And as the months went by, after the wedding, we constructed ourselves the most lovely maze: a large sun-filled modern house with blond parquet floors and dhurrie rugs and silver cigarette cases on the glass-topped table. For four months we played this game called marriage: Grady went off to work at his father’s business, and I stayed in that lovely house that curled about me as aromatically and luxuriously as a fresh wood shaving. I unpacked wedding presents and tried to decide in just which perfect spot to place them. I hollowed out cherry tomatoes and stuffed them with crabmeat and mayonnaise and capers. I left the house each Monday to swim at the country club, or just drink, so that I wouldn’t inhibit the maid while she cleaned the house. Some nights we entertained envious friends; other nights, Grady and I took our wineglasses to bed and screwed our minds out, then watched television, like any other normal American couple.

But one morning, four months after our wedding, Grady came down to breakfast looking strange. I thought perhaps he was sick to his stomach. His expression was that of a man who has food poisoning but hasn’t figured that out yet. He sat down across from me at our blond butcher-block kitchen table, which I had set with quilted place mats and Wedgwood china, and at first he just drank his coffee. I waited.

Finally he said, “Liza, I think I’m going mad.”

“Grady. What’s wrong?” I asked, only slightly alarmed. Grady liked his theatrics as much as I.

“All this—
stuff
—makes me feel—
trapped
,” he said. “I can’t explain it. But every day when I come home from work, and every morning when I wake up in this house, I feel scared. I feel like I’m walking into some kind of cage.”

“My God, Grady,” I said, “that’s just the way I feel. I mean, you at least get to
leave
. I’m here all alone to dust and rearrange these things. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me how demanding appliances are? Just look at that kitchen counter! There they stand, all in a line, and they inspire in me the most awful sense of
duty
. Sometimes I think I hear tiny metallic voices, whining, ‘Use us, use us! Blend something, toast something, fry something, open a can, sharpen a knife, crush some ice, slice an onion, grate some cheese! What do you think we’re here for?’ It’s like having a stable of electric avocado-colored dwarves! Do you realize that it’s possible to fill a house with appliances and furniture and objects, and then to think
that’s what life is about
? Most people feel protected, assisted, by the objects in their homes, but I feel imprisoned.”

I realized then that I had shoved my chair back from the breakfast table and was clutching my knife and fork in my hands. I dropped them on the table and leaned back in my chair.

“Oh, Grady,” I said.

“Oh, Liza,” he said. “No wonder we love each other so much.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

Grady grinned. Then he reached out one long arm and snatched the toaster cord from its socket, then sent the toaster flying across the room. It slammed into the refrigerator and crashed to the floor.

“Grady!” I said.

“Where’s the blender?” Grady asked.

I got up and got it from its shelf, and meant to hand it to him, but instead I threw it past him, and it thudded into the window seat.

“Let’s get ’em,” Grady said, and he laughed, and his laugh was full of lust.

We rampaged through the kitchen then, ripping electric cords out of sockets, smashing the ice crusher into the Cuisinart. The room filled with metallic shrieks and snaps. We could feel the angry energy from those dying machines come oscillating out of their plastic shells into the air around us. Many of the instruments we had to throw several times, because they had been so sturdily built, those insidious jailer-robots. Grady finally took a porcelain-handled ladle and banged savagely at the can opener, but though
the plastic can opener body split open, it was the porcelain ladle that broke first—it cracked in half. And that was too bad, because the ladle was pretty and delicate and had asked nothing of us but admiration.

“I think we killed them,” Grady said at last. By then we were standing together in the kitchen, panting from exertion, surrounded by shattered appliances. They lay all about us on the Eternal Shine vinyl kitchen floor, their plastic cases cracked open, exposing their metallic innards, wheels, and chunks and shards, and their cords trailed away from them like broken tails. The room was silent, except for the self-defrosting freezer, which let a trickle of water slip down its back, with a sound like a sigh of relief.

I looked at Grady and he looked at me, and we hugged. I don’t know when we were ever more delighted with each other. We went back to bed and made love, growling and rolling about and biting, still full of that eerie triumphant energy that had been released down in the kitchen. Afterward, we lay in bed, sweating and holding hands.

“Do you want me to destroy the dresser?” Grady asked.

I looked at the dresser. It was an old mahogany thing that had been in my grandparents’ house, and the burled boards looked more like fabric than wood. It just sat there, not doing anything.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Actually, it’s not the furniture that bothers me. It’s just those appliances. And the houseplants. When you’re gone and I’m alone in the house, they rub their leaves together and whisper, ‘Water us, water us. Get me out of the sun, I can’t take this heat. Feed me, feed me, pluck me!’ ”

“We’ll kill them tonight,” Grady said. “I’d better get to work. I’m late.”

So Grady showered and put on his gray pin-striped three-piece suit, and I showered and put on slacks and a shirt and got out of the house as fast as I could. I wasn’t going to sit in there all day with a kitchen full of dead appliances and a bunch of pleading plants. I went to the country club that has the good golf course and played a few holes of golf with a friend who was hanging around there waiting for someone to drink with. The kid who caddied for us was so cute I regretted being married. Whatever else marriage means to me, it means monogamy. I ate lunch and had a few drinks with my friend, and watched TV in the club lounge all afternoon, thinking: This is no way to live a life.

I went home around six, when I expected Grady to arrive, and he was already there, in the kitchen, wading around through jagged plastic and metal, trying to fix drinks.

“Don’t come in,” he said. “It’s dangerous in here. You might cut your ankles.”

He brought the drinks into the living room, and we sat there, sipping them slowly. They were unattractive drinks, because with the demise of the ice crusher, Grady had had to resort to dropping in plain cubes of ice.

“Shall we kill the plants now?” he said after a while.

I looked around the room. “No,” I said, “I don’t think so. They don’t seem as threatening—as militant—as those appliances. Besides, no matter how you pull off their little green fingers and arms and pinch their little pink heads, they’ve still got those creepy roots sneaking around down under the soil. I can just hear them
growing
. No, you can’t kill plants by ripping them apart.”

“Well,” Grady said, “then let’s just not water them. If we stop watering them, they’ll die eventually, won’t they?”

“That’s brilliant, Grady,” I said. “God, you’re smart. And sexy. I love you.”

Grady and I went out to dinner that night, and for the next week we managed to struggle along without ever going into the kitchen. It was hard getting out the door in the morning without coffee, but we had smashed the coffeepot, and kicked the stomach out of the teakettle, so we couldn’t even boil water. Every night for a week we went out to dinner. It was just too depressing living in that house with those dead metal things and those dying plants. I tried not to look at them, but they seemed to stretch their limp brown arms out to me in supplication. I had to call the housecleaning lady to tell her not to come, because I couldn’t think of a reasonable explanation for the way the house looked. Housecleaning ladies impose their own sense of duty, and I just wasn’t up to it.

One morning about ten days after we’d destroyed the kitchen, just as I was going out the door a friend of my mother’s came up the walk with a coffee cake in her hand.

“What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?” I asked in alarm.

“Liza, have you forgotten?” the woman asked. “I was afraid that you had. I’ve been calling you all week, but there’s been no answer. The Ladies’ Hospital Auxiliary is meeting at your house this month. Don’t you remember? We arranged it last month. I told you I’d be here early to help you set up the coffee. You newlyweds, I can’t imagine what’s on your mind!” She laughed, pleased with her wit, and tried to elbow past me into the house.

“You can’t go in there,” I said.

“Whyever not?” she asked.

It was that very Thursday morning, standing on the slate sidewalk of my luscious
well-groomed front lawn in a suburb of a wealthy city in the middle of the United States, that I realized that I could never be what I had intended. I could never be a housewife. No matter how much you guard against it, people will come into your house. The thought of having to live out the rest of my life explaining myself to people like this dear charitable lady was enough to make something in me snap.

“Everything’s in a dreadful mess in there,” I said. “Grady and I got in a fight and threw things at each other. I’m just on my way to a lawyer now to start divorce proceedings. You’ll have to have your meeting elsewhere.”

I burst into tears and ran down the walk and got into my car. But as I looked up at that poor bewildered woman, I felt no sense of guilt. I might have inconvenienced her by refusing to let her have the meeting in my house, but I had given her the most marvelous new piece of gossip! And she was the first to have it. An exclusive. “Imagine,” she would say to all the Hospital Auxiliary ladies, “Grady and Liza are getting divorced, and they’ve been married only four months. I wonder what’s happened.” Oh, how happy all those women would be!

I drove down to Grady’s office and asked if we could talk privately. We went out to a little bar and sat in a padded booth and talked. We felt we had given it a good try. But neither of us was cut out for marriage. We could still be friends and lovers, of course. We felt so tender toward each other that we went to a hotel and made love. We ended up living there for three weeks, while we went to a lawyer and started the divorce. We shared a lawyer—we each kept our own money, and agreed to split down the middle the proceeds from the sale of the house. Grady packed his clothes and silver cigarette box and moved into a men’s club; I packed my clothes and silver cigarette box and went to France. My only regret, as I slipped out the door of that house for the last time, was that I hadn’t thought to take a knife to the sagging belly of the vacuum cleaner.

In France, after a time, I realized I was pregnant. It’s funny how babies are made: I don’t think the system is very sensible. I can understand the nine months of growing the baby, because that’s necessary to make a whole child, and to help the mother come to terms with the fact of this new life. It’s the bit about conception that’s so ridiculous, because there seems to be no connection between the act and its consequence. No woman ever gets a choice at the actual time; it’s always a sort of ambush. I often think of the Virgin Mary—how it must have happened, if it really happened. If Mary was a flesh-and-blood person, not a religious fiction, and if that angel was real and not a hallucination,
well,
poor
Mary. I don’t think she knelt before that angel and said, “Well, tell God thanks.” I think she got up and stomped around the room and cried. I think she said, “Look, I don’t even know if you are
real
, fluttering around up on my ceiling like some kind of science-fiction moth, but if you are, and if what you are saying is true, well, I don’t like it. Listen I just got engaged to this real nice man, and if you’re an angel, you know how this society is, it’s a righteous, vengeful place we’re living in these days. Women are supposed to be pure and chaste. Well, hell, I
am
pure and chaste. Now you come along and tell me I’m pregnant? That’s not fair! Why can’t you wait till after I get married? I like kids, I’ll be glad to have children, but I need to be married first, or I’ll be ostracized. Do you think anyone’s going to believe me when I say, ‘God put a baby in my stomach but I’m still a virgin’? I’ll sound like a fool and no one will believe me. Joseph will probably leave me, and I’ll be disgraced. It’s just not fair that I don’t get any choice in this matter.”