Envy (16 page)

“What's that?”

“Some super-poly something. Poly-propyl-glycerin-glyco-blahblah-whatever. Lubricant, but different from that old K-Y junk. This stuff 's for real. Better than spit. A triumph of science over nature.”

What happens when she's through with him? Will she move on, according to habit? That's what he's counting on, he realizes, that's what he's decided will happen. Having collected him, she'll lose him, lose interest, refocus on the next in her series of old guys. Maybe she'll leave afterward, and tell no one, and he'll get away with it, this transgression that's been forced upon him. Hasn't it? Already he's trying to figure out just how culpable he is in this. Whether he communicated his lust to her unconsciously but still intentionally. Whether the fact that he's as turned on as he is makes him guilty, no matter who initiated the sex. Whether his fear of being exposed and accused of attempted rape makes him dishonorable. Well, of course it does. She reaches over her head to where a little bottle with a white cap is lying on her camouflage pants, almost invisible.

“Check this out,” she says. Before he can protest she has a finger in his asshole, all the way in. “Hey, relax will you? This'll be good. I know how to make this feel good.”

Will closes his eyes. The only other finger that's ever been up there is the internist's, a quick rubber-glove (and, yes, K-Y) check of his prostate, neither man looking at each other and neither, he's quite sure, with an erection. But with her space-age product she's doing some kind of inside-out hand job—finger job, he guesses he'd have to call it—and it's . . . it is good. It's really, really good.

“Oh no,” she says, “no no,” just as he's wondering shamefully (meaning he's ashamed but he's still thinking what he's thinking) how suspicious Carole would be were he to introduce her to a little bottle of—

Out goes the finger, and she pulls away on the back stroke, rolls right out from under him. “Getting a little too close to the finale.” Will doesn't answer, jerked back from the precipice so suddenly that he's dizzy with teased lust; but it doesn't matter, she goes on talking regardless of his regression into a state of mute passivity.

“Here's the deal,” she says. “First you go down on me. I want to get off at least three times. Then I'm still bottom, you're top, but this time it's from the back, hands and knees, and I want it in the ass with plenty of this.” She holds up the bottle. “Don't worry. I'm clean. I always make sure. After that, when I tell you, we do vaginal but still on all fours and you fuck me, and you go deep—you're in as far as you can possibly get, until I come, which might take a little while, or it could be fast. We'll just have to see. The good news is then you're rewarded for all your hard work. You don't have to hold back any longer.”

It's accurate to say that a lot of him feels good while somewhere on the periphery of himself he's aware of a slight, shivery sort of nausea, like the distant approach of a migraine or fever, that first warning of infection. “My God,” he hears himself say to Daniel, “do you know what I've done?”

She tastes like no other woman he's encountered. Of course, he hasn't had his tongue between anyone's legs besides Carole's for seventeen years, and it's not as if he was some junior Casanova before, but something about this girl, maybe it's the Astroglide, reminds him of a low-calorie sweetener, sucralose or aspartame, a slightly puckery, syrupy savor like those old fluoride treatments he'd get at the dentist's office when he was a kid, anticavity gel leaking from the mold into his mouth, a gaggy trickle going down the back of his throat.

Her first orgasm is demure compared with the bucking and howling he expected; the second, after an intermission of less than a minute, a carbon copy of the first. The third he has to work for, resorting to a fail-safe, tongue-punishing technique that leaves his mouth ringing with exertion. She curls up so abruptly that it's a challenge to hang on to her, to keep his tongue in the spot he's found, the right spot, the one that makes her writhe and howl, a freaky, unfeminine noise, the kind of noise, frankly, he would have thought a woman couldn't make, but so sexy: throaty and wet, a low growl that rises octave by octave into a wail. As long as it takes for her to arrive at this climax, and as long as it is that she manages to ride it, there's no denouement: one minute she's curled up, spine lifted from the floor and her face twisted in a knot of concentration; the next she pops up and flips right over, pushing the Astro stuff into his hand before she settles into position on her hands and knees.

“Slather it all over,” she says. “Enough so you're, you know, really slick, and put some on me, too. You don't have to put your finger in or anything. I mean you don't if you're squeamish. If you're not, it's okay by me.”

Will squirts the clear, colorless stuff on himself, a line of mustard on a hot dog, more than enough, it turns out. He uses his shirttail to wipe some away, otherwise he'll never achieve any friction at all. He holds his breath and pushes in. The girl gasps, very softly, a whispered gasp, if there is such a thing, and he pauses, a bit too long, evidently, because she twitches in obvious irritation.

“Hey,” she says. “How about, you know? Moving? It is supposed to be a form of, like, sex.”

Will pulls back and pushes in, feeling the rush of blood summoned by the heat of her. She's tight, tighter than anything he's ever felt before, and beyond that close grip, the rest of him is in a hot, soft place, encountering no resistance, none at all. Hands on her hips, he's got the two of them in a slow back-and-forth, guiding her along the shaft of his cock as much as thrusting himself in, afraid to hurt her.

She's sweating; tiny glittery beads form on her shoulders and spine, and she shivers; he feels the tremor under his hands. “Am I— I'm not hurting you, am I?” he asks, but all the response he gets is a huffing uh-uh. Or is it
uh-huh
?

“Keep moving,” she says, and they go on until, as before, she takes the opportunity to pull away on his back stroke, sliding off him and onto her stomach.

“Are you clean?” she asks after a minute, sitting on her heels, her back to him, breathing hard enough that he sees her ribs rise and fall. “Just look all over yourself, will you? On the underside, too. Because you have to be, like, totally clean.” She walks forward on her hands, back in position.

“All right,” he says. “I'm . . . I am.”

“Go on, then. Use more glide if you want.”

After so many and so deliberate a sequence of preludes, intercourse itself seems an afterthought if not, by definition, an anticlimax. As with all that preceded it, Will has no sense of any choice, and when she says “Deeper!” he thrusts deeper. Ditto faster, ditto slower.

He's stupid with sex, or maybe the right word is
stuporous.
When she comes, moaning, the noise startles him, as if he's forgotten what they've been doing. His own orgasm, produced dutifully, is silent, second-class, undeserving of sound effects.

They both lie on the carpeted floor, saying nothing, she on her stomach, he on his back. He closes his eyes and is instantly asleep.

7:07 by the digital clock on the desk. Will sits up. “I'm leaving,” he says. He stands to gather his clothes, and the abrupt ascension makes his head reel so that he has to sit back down on the couch. When he looks at her, she's sitting up, her left cheek bearing the impress of the ringed fingers she laid it on. She tilts her head to one side, scrubs at her eyes with her knuckles.

“I keep expecting you to guess who I am,” she says. “I don't know why. For some reason it seems so obvious. Like it should be obvious to you.”

Will is bending to retrieve a sock from under the couch. Something is about to happen, he thinks to himself, remembering that before they began, he'd had the sense, for a second he did, that he was failing to save himself, protect himself, to say nothing of his wife, his family, from getting shanghaied into a fateful—perhaps he means
fated
—voyage.

Something that will change everything is about to happen, Will realizes. But no thought follows this one, which disappears, sinks without leaving even a ripple on the smooth, reflective surface of his consciousness. He pulls on the left sock, then the right, and sits up, a hand on either knee. He makes a dizzy survey of the content of his own head, everything bent and inverted like the picture in one of those convex mirrors placed in a hairpin turn. But that kind of warning works only reflexively; allow yourself to engage with what's in the shining orb, try to think your way toward correcting the reflection's backwardness and distortion, and it's too late: you've already crashed.

The girl stares back at Will, whose thoughts tumble forward, pulled by their own momentum and the logic, or illogic, of undirected association.
Free
he'd call it, talking to a patient, as in free association, an exercise at which he's always been particularly bad because of his hyperactive intellectualizing. But for the moment something—adultery?—has incapacitated the rational part of his brain and, as if he's lost his footing on a hill, he slides from one image to another, from the round mirror in the road to the one his mother used to set on the holiday table. Meant to represent a frozen pond, on its shiny surface she arranged a set of lead figurines, tiny people dressed in furs who skated, danced, and trimmed a tiny tree. One rode behind another on a bobsled no longer than a matchstick. Each year their father made a wreath of holly to disguise the mirror's edge. “Poisonous,” he'd say. “Remember the berries are poisonous.” Invariably, their mother would add, then, that lead was poisonous, also.

“Who are you?” Will says at last. Again that distance and delay in his voice, as if he'd taken an international trunk call from himself. His head feels like a filled balloon, at once empty and under pressure.

“Jennifer.”

“Jennifer?”

The girls nods and gives him a mild, almost social smile, as if they've only just been introduced. “You know. Elizabeth's daughter?” She reaches up and pulls a strand of hair from her head, holds it out to him. “You wanted one of these?” She gets up from the floor, still naked, and takes a step toward where he sits on the couch, the single strand pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “Here,” she says. “A little present from me to you.” Will doesn't move. The single hair hangs in space, glinting, a tiny filament blowing to one side, pushed by an air current too small to feel.

“Don't you want it?” After a minute she drops her hand to her side. “The thing is,” she says, “even if you do have the DNA analyzed to compare mine with your own, and even if it does match, you still won't know.”

“I won't know.” His words are neither question nor assent, just an echo of hers.

She shakes her head, continues as if this were ordinary small talk, words exchanged in a waiting room or between bites of a sandwich. “No. Because twenty-four years ago—twenty-five, I mean—my mother was sleeping around. But that's not the point. I mean, she's not the point, her sexual mores aren't. The point is that when you were having sex with her, she was having sex with four men. You. Paul—that's my dad. A guy called Tim DeAngelo.” She counts them off on her fingers, leaving the last one up. “And Mitchell Moreland.”

“Mitchell? My . . . my brother Mitch?”

She nods, expressionless. “Your twin brother.” Her voice, too, is without affect, flat. As if what she says is so unremarkable that it summons no inflection. “Whose genetic material is the same as yours.”

She stands and rummages through her pile of clothing until she finds her underpants. Styled like boys' briefs, they're red with a fly piped in bright blue. On the butt is a silk-screened picture of a waitress with a tray. Underneath, a caption reads “Patsy's Oyster Bar.” She pulls on her socks, then her black sweater and voluminous pants, leaves her bra lying next to her boots. Will watches her dress, saying nothing. He has a hot feeling in his head, behind his eyes. Not a headache but a . . . a what? He doesn't know.

“The way I figure it, if you don't have the hair tested, the odds of my being your daughter, biologically, are one in four. If you do have it tested, you either find out, first, that we're not related at all or, second, that I'm maybe your daughter, maybe your niece. And if it's the second, since both the potential fathers have the same DNA, nobody will ever know whose I really am.” She sits on the floor to pull on her boots, crams her bra into her backpack. From the outer pocket she takes an envelope and hands it to him. “Just the way you wanted it. A hair taped to an index card.” She swings the backpack over her right shoulder. “Bye,” she says.

He's still staring at the envelope, sealed and addressed in green ink to #39, when a pair of feet come drumming up the stairs and someone knocks at the door.

“Who is it!” He stands at the door listening carefully. What else could she possibly want?

“Hey!” she says, loudly, almost yelling. “I forgot my coat.” She pushes past him to the closet, jerks the sleeve of her long suede coat so that it comes off the hanger into her hands. She drops her backpack to put the thing on, and again he finds himself staring at the grease stains around its pockets, remembers—it seems a year ago— having interpreted her slovenliness in a sexual light. She fastens a button as she walks out. The metal hangers are still chiming together as the door sighs shut behind her.

An hour later, Will is lying, fully dressed, on his couch, rubbing one thumb on the smooth black leather that matches that of his emblematic Eames chair. He's in shock, or something like it, a feeling that reminds him of coming home from the dentist's and touching the part of his face that hasn't awakened from the Novocain. The way the information from his fingertips argues against that from his brain, insisting that the warm skin and stubble of beard belong to someone else. He tries to scroll through all the surprising revelations that have been uttered in this room, crises created and/or endured by the people who have lain on this same couch. Surely some must have been as bad as this. But he can't remember them. He can't think of anything, can't address one issue—the possibility of incest—because others keep interrupting. The betrayal by his brother, by Elizabeth. His own betrayal of Carole, of himself. Even of the girl, a girl who was a patient and whom he failed to protect from herself. Elizabeth, too, in a way. He should have suspected. Known. Why didn't he?