Breakable You (13 page)

So as soon as he had come, as he lay there with his head turned away from her, so that he could be hidden, so that he could deny, in a way, what had just happened, she unbuttoned her dress and made herself naked and crawled up the length of him and said, "Smell this," and then, "Taste this," and he complied, putting his mouth on her, and she could tell instantly that he was inexperienced at this and furthermore that he didn't have much of an instinct for it. "Most men don't know how to do this," she said, "but I'm going to teach you." And she told him what to do, showed him, as best she could, leading him on a guided tour, until he got a sense of what he should be after, and she talked him through it, trying to keep the element of humor out of her mind (trying not to compare this to
Airplane
!, with the doughty air-traffic controller talking the hapless pilot through the landing).

She landed successfully, with a climax that was pleasurable and long. It had been a kind of do-it-yourself experience, but she felt good. The key to having satisfying sex with a man, she thought, is that you have to masturbate.

He was hard again. She liked this: she was glad to see that giving her pleasure made him hard. She lay beside him and put one hand over his face, so he could be only half here if that was what he wanted, and with her other hand she stroked him slowly until he had come again.

After a moment she returned to the idea of leaving early. At this point, she thought, it would be a good move. Now that he's spent.

She kissed him on the mouth, gathered up her things, and left without saying a word.

She needed to pee, but she didn't want to dilute the drama of her exit by using his bathroom. She regretted it once she reached the street, because she
really
needed to pee. Luckily, there was a coffee shop about a block from his apartment, and she used the women's room there. When she got out, a slight but aggressive waitress demanded that she order something, so she got an egg cream to go, and drank it on the subway while reading Kant.

He kept wanting each time to be the last time. But she kept coming back.

The truth was, he kept asking her back.

It was like living within a dream of sex. She would come to his apartment in the evening, close the door, and unbuckle his pants. Sometimes they reached his bedroom, sometimes they ended up on the couch or the rug or, once, on the kitchen table, as if they were a meal. Sometimes they would talk a little before they fell asleep, and sometimes they wouldn't: there were times when she stayed through the night without either of them speaking a word.

During the first few weeks of their acquaintance, when she kept making those awkward attempts at conversation with him at George and Celia's place, he didn't have the slightest interest in getting to know her, but he constantly daydreamed about getting to know her body: kissing her, smelling her, biting her, swarming all over her with his hands. And now he couldn't believe that she had turned out to be exactly the sexmate he'd dreamed about. He couldn't believe he'd found a woman who wanted the same thing he did: sex without commitment, sex without conversation.

This kind of faceless sex had never been his fantasy in his former life. He would have considered it adolescent and uninteresting. But now the thought of getting to know anyone repulsed him.

During his time alone, his sexual hunger had never died, but he hadn't been able to satisfy it, because he hadn't found a woman who wanted nothing but sex, and he'd come to believe that such a woman probably didn't exist. He had no interest in the commercial varieties of sexual experience—prostitutes or lap dancers or phone sex. He wanted a real, non-fee-charging woman. But he didn't want to
talk
to anyone; he didn't want to hear anyone's life story or tell his own. He'd come to think that he'd never have sex again, and he'd grown almost resigned to the need to starve his sexual impulse to death.

But now there was this. Here was Maud, and here was fucking. It was sex without affection, sex without connection, sex without conscience, sex without soul. It was just what he needed.

There were many things about her that would have reached him deeply if he'd met her years ago—her reflectiveness, her curiosity, her humor—but he didn't care about any of these things now.

They were seeing each other several nights a week. She would show up at his door with a satchelful of books that she was reading for her dissertation—Kant and Hegel and all the small fry in between—but none of the books ever made it out of the satchel.

When he was around her he somehow felt both more alert and more sluggish. He felt alive to every flicker of her mood, but at the same time all he ever wanted was to lie down with her and be animals together.

Her height transfixed him. He had never felt this before, never suspected it, but there was something erotically stimulating about standing on level ground with a woman and looking up at her. It was as if she could contain him—so it was as if the sexual act was implicit in every moment, even when they were just standing next to each other, fully clothed.

Maud wasn't overweight, but she had meat on her bones. All the other women he'd been with had been recovering anorexics. "I'm not sure I have a body," Leila had once said. Maud most definitely had a body. As she moved around his kitchen wearing one of his button-down shirts, wearing only that, she seemed to be too much for the room: she seemed to carry too much aliveness in her
to
be contained in such a small space.

It wasn't as if their sex was some delicious delirium in which everything simply flowed. He went down on her all the time, but he sometimes felt that he didn't know what the hell he was doing down there. He used to feel like he knew what he was doing with Leila, but it turned out that giving a woman pleasure was not like riding a bicycle. Uncovering the mysteries of one woman's responses had nothing to do with uncovering the mysteries of another's.

He was ashamed of how little he understood her sexually, when she seemed to understand everything there was to know about him.

Sometimes when she touched him he felt panicked, because it felt
too
good. She had hands that made him think she should have been a sculptor. He felt as if he were being created by her touch. It wasn't that she was finding out what he liked; it was that she was teaching him what he liked.

With her large beautiful body, which she operated with the delighted abandon of a shy woman who had decided to let her shyness go, she would maneuver herself on top of him, lower her face to kiss him, and her hair would fall over his face and he would feel as if he were losing himself, losing himself within her. There was something weirdly compelling about this, about the feeling of simply letting go.

After three weeks of getting together at his place, they decided to have an evening at hers. When he showed up, she had a cup of tea ready for him, and as she brought out a tray with both sugar and honey on it he experienced a wild desire to punch her in the mouth.

"How are you?" she said.

"I'm fine," he said. "How about you?"

"I'm well," she said.

I'm well
, he thought. What pretentious bullshit. Can't you just say, "I'm good," like everybody else in the world?

He hadn't hit anyone since sixth grade, and he hadn't
wanted
to hit anyone since then, but now, with Maud, the urge to do violence was starting to overwhelm him.

Why
did he want to attack her? He wanted to attack her because she was Jewish. He wanted to attack her because she was so persistent, had been so persistent from the first. He wanted to attack her because he was so drawn to her.

He would leave her apartment and walk home and fall into a rage-demented silence. He wanted to kill her. She was a Jew and she was doing this to humiliate him.

Doing what? Making herself irresistible to him. Making herself indispensable to him.

He would walk home quickly, gritting his teeth with the desire never to see her again, but before he had passed out of the island of Manhattan his rage would burn itself out and he would begin to think about her longingly: her full mouth, her long, strong legs, her genius hands; and after he thought about her longingly he would think about her tenderly. He would think about her mind, about the way she somehow combined intellect with innocence. She was strong and she was soft, and the combination moved him. And every time he caught himself thinking about her tenderly, he had to wrench himself back into indifference.

He didn't want to grow with her. He didn't want them to evolve into a condition where they were renting videos together and telling each other the names of their childhood pets. He wanted to keep fucking her, and he didn't want anything to change.

Except something
was
changing. Something began to change after the time he stayed over at her apartment. When they were getting together at his place, she seemed to be taking her cue from their surroundings: he had eliminated every ornament, everything that wasn't functional, and they had fucked with a zeal that in its silence and its one-dimensional intentness was almost grim. But in her apartment, which was filled with books and papers and paintings and photographs and plants and flowers and souvenirs and figurines and tiny treasured toys and little knickknacks, something about their sexual encounters began to change.

The first thing that changed was that she began whispering. She would put her mouth close to his ear and talk to him, and the things she said made him crazy. Or maybe it wasn't the things she said; maybe it was just her voice. She would talk, and keep talking, and he had the feeling that he was being led downward into a place where their sex was even more private, even more unlike anyone else's. She was guiding him into some other region, guiding him there with her talk, dark wet slippery slithering bed talk, unsayable in the light. The things she said to him made no real sense, didn't mean anything when he thought about them later, but in bed they seemed to be the things he'd always wanted to hear someone say, and her voice was the voice in which he'd always wanted to hear them said, her low and confident voice, sliding around him in the darkness. Binding him. One night lying in bed in her apartment he woke up in the dark and thought of leaving, just getting out of there and getting home, because they had been waking up too much together lately, waking up and having breakfast, and he didn't want what they were doing to evolve into a normal life, and as he lay in bed resting for one last minute before getting up, she stirred and put her hand on his stomach—she was still sleeping but it was as if she had intuited his thought—and then, without opening her eyes, she began to touch him, slowly, and after she was done he fell asleep again, and when he woke again it was morning and he had his arms around her and their fingers were intertwined. They had been holding hands in their sleep.

Maud liked to have dessert with every meal, and, for some reason, she liked to have the dessert at the beginning. When they went out to breakfast, she usually started off with a cupcake. This habit charmed him, even though he didn't want to be charmed.

During one of their breakfasts—the only time they really talked about anything—she told him a little bit about her dissertation. She was working on the problem of recognition.

"Kant's categorical imperative," she told him, "says that we have to treat other human beings as ends in themselves, not as means to our own ends. I'm trying to trace the development of that idea in some of the thinkers who have held it since Kant."

"Like who?"

"Martin Buber. Jürgen Habermas. Emmanuel Levinas."

"Do you look at the political implications of the idea?"

"No. I mean, they're implied. But I don't write about them."

"So you don't point to the contradiction between the fact that these last three are distinguished Jewish thinkers but the Jewish state has done its best to render its neighbors, the Palestinians, into nonpeople."

He wanted to pick a fight with her, but she wouldn't fight.

"That won't be in the dissertation," she said. "Maybe when they turn it into a movie."

There was a plate of eggs and toast in front of him, but he didn't touch it. If she wouldn't give him the satisfaction of fighting with him, then he wouldn't give her the satisfaction of eating.

He felt like an eleven-year-old.

He hated being drawn back into life.

Even when they were making love, he hated it. At the same time as he was hungrily putting his mouth on her and smelling the powerful weird smell of her sex, he was hating it, because with every moment in which he was drawn more fully into life, Zahra was being delivered more fully into death. Running his hands over Maud's body as they lay on his small bed, he felt as if the two of them were conspiring to murder his daughter all over again.

He didn't want to admit anything new into his life, anything that Zahra wouldn't recognize. He wanted his life to be a hollowed-out place of worship, a house of memory, and he was afraid that any new experience he had would make his memories of her grow faint. He didn't want to forget anything. The memory of her learning to crawl, face lit up with a remarkably sophisticated mixture of determination and pride, as she fought her way across the floor, gurgling and drooling, in an attempt to reach a ball Leila had laid down for her. The memory of her learning to talk—of the first time he heard her put two words together. One afternoon when she was one and a half, she sat on Samir's lap for a while as he read the paper, then climbed down and said, "Bye," and then, after taking another few steps, she turned around and said, "Bye, Daddy," the first time she had ever put two words together, and she smiled a little slyly, as if she knew she had accomplished something special, and then she continued on her way to the living room.

When she first learned to talk, "horse" for some reason was "wahwah." The first time they took her to Prospect Park to ride a pony, Leila and the young attendant had put a helmet on Zahra's head and strapped her to the saddle, and then Leila stepped away and joined Samir on the other side of the fence, and the attendant led the pony slowly around the little ring and Zahra looked at them and in an exultant voice cried out, "I riding! I riding a wahwah!"