Saving St. Germ (16 page)

“Jesus,
Jesse
.”

“
Listen.
OK, so there I am, thirty-seven thousand feet above sea level, with my index finger on this young woman’s
clitoris,
and it’s
not what you think
! I mean yes, yes, it was deeply erotic, of course, but further, it was, it was ...”

“Spiritual.”

“Esme, listen. Don’t judge. Just then the pilot announced our gradual descent into Miami International and we started to bank and lose altitude. I’m massaging her, and I’m inside her, but it was not just
sexual,
it was this slow intense dreamy release. Then we descended, down, down through the cloud layers, and she started to come. Christ, it was overheated in the cabin; the sun poured through the windows as we banked, we had our heads together and she was making those
sounds.
We landed all at once, we dropped out of the clouds and I could
feel
this long long orgasm happening in my hand, coming up into my
fingers,
through my hand, my arm.”

“Sounds like you helped
her
instead of the other way around.”

“No, no. I’m telling you, it was like being
born.
Falling through the clouds, connected to the power at the
center
of this woman.”

“Then she unbuckled her seat belt, pulled up her pants, got her overhead baggage down, and split?”

He laughed. “Yeah. She walked a little funny, though.”

“God, you’re horrible, Jesse. Why do I like you?”

“Is it because I tell you the unvarnished truth? Or is it because I tell it funny?”

“It’s because you don’t have to
try
.” I paused. “Either way.”

There was another pause.

“Is it OK if I ask about
you
?”

I drank deeply of my margarita, then put it down, tasting salt.

“About me is simple. I’m not particularly happy in my life right now and I’m vulnerable to ... you know.” I looked around, flustered, shrugged. “Losing
altitude
.”

He nodded gravely.

I leaned toward him.

“I’m
drawn
to allegory, Jesse. You always did tell good stories.” Another long pause. “But if you talk about ...
blessing,
you know, that’s the whole point. I think that in this fucking state of entropy we live in, the power to bless is the only real power for good that we have. That’s what
I
think.”

He stared back at me, then covered my outstretched hand with his: warm, light.

“Let’s go somewhere, Esme. Let’s go now.”

We checked into that hotel on Sunset, famous as a celebrity getaway; this afternoon there were neither celebrities nor the people they were trying to get away from. I looked up at the Regency ceilings; the lobby of dignified shadows made me feel more sober and mature, less impulsive—as if I’d weighed this decision for years instead of minutes.

We stood side by side on the elevator, saying nothing, staring straight ahead.

“I like your shoes,” Jesse offered finally, lamely; we stared in silence at my black suede pumps.

After room service had brought a bottle of chilled chardonnay and a silver bowl of delicately perspiring grapes, pears, and plums, and after the heavy walnut door had closed with finality, Jesse poured a glass of wine for me and one for himself. I sat down in a chintz-covered chair near the window, overlooking a courtyard full of blue-blooming jacaranda trees and a bluer pool. Jesse stood awkwardly near the desk. Neither one of us looked at the bed.

“I’m not going to say ‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ nothing disingenuous,” I said after a few minutes. “I do believe that this is real, that I’m here. I
want
to be here.”

He smiled from across the room.

I sipped my wine. Suddenly he was kneeling at my feet. He lifted the wineglass out of my fingers and set it aside.

We began kissing and moving—caught up in some sort of underwater motion that beached us finally on the bed, him on top of me. I was laughing, thinking, No more good-bye in a Thai restaurant; he was laughing too. He kissed exactly the way I remembered—his whole mouth over mine, like Ollie sucking on an orange half. It was mildly disconcerting at first, then completely absorbing.

I sat up suddenly, pulling back from him.

“OK. OK, so I’m disingenuous—this
is
really happening, right?”

He’d wrenched free his tie and his shirt was half open, revealing his dark chest hair and the beautiful olive sheen of his skin. He sat up next to me, touching my half-unbuttoned blouse. He cupped my face in his hands.

“This is really happening,” he said.

I turned away from him again and he turned my head back to face him straight-on. His eyes were direct and inquiring—a bar of lamplight clarified his expression, as if he were just under the surface of an element slightly more viscous than water, a colloidal suspension, clear. His face shimmered, then stilled.

“Don’t go off in your mind, Esme,” he said. “Stay
here
.”

“I’m
here
!” I snapped.
“OK?”
Then, to my shock, I began to cry. Tears slipped out of my eyes and down my face, flowing over his hands and over my own hands, cupped over his.

“Christ.” I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed deeply, but the tears kept welling up and ran over. So I abandoned myself to it: I didn’t sob, but made a series of lengthy inaudible statements that collected themselves, finally, into sounds of grief.

Jesse held me in his arms and rocked slowly, kissing my hair. How long had it been, I thought, since someone held me like this? Exactly the way I hold Ollie?

“Shhh, shhh, Esme.”

After a long while, I got my breath, and the tears fought to the surface one last time, then ebbed.

“Well,” I said, dabbing at my eyes with a bedside tissue. “
That
was fun! Did
you
come?”

He covered my lips with a finger.

“Shh. Esme. Whatever you do right now, don’t be
funny
.”

So I wasn’t. I wasn’t funny at all, I didn’t sneer, no wisecracks, as we lay back down and slowly moved together through the ancient portals of that ludicrous, profound cliché of human passion. We touched each other with immense wonder, there was no laughter or even an abstract smile when he slid his tongue over my breasts, between my legs, as I sucked his cock. There was a hint of levity, but it was the
other
levity, meaning
lightness,
that quality or state of being light in weight, unfettered, even defiant of gravitation—we
floated
through each other like subatomic particles. ... No. I’ll say it right: We stayed exultant in our own flesh, our own blessed bodies; there were no subatomic plots, no cloud cover: Jesse and Esme fucking each other. Jesse pushing suddenly deep inside me, me shouting something as he entered, him lifting me up so that I sat on his thighs; we faced each other as he moved, both of us gasping with pleasure. Then we were turning over and over again, as if we’d been spun up from under water into a breaker line; I was adrift on my back, my stomach; he was over me, under me. We kissed frantically, our bodies soaked with sweat; he clutched my hair, pulling my head back, and groaned, moving faster inside me, then triggered a lengthening spark at the center—a long moment—slow levels of ascension, one by one—then I came, then he came, we came talking into each other’s mouths, sliding rung by rung back down the humming spiral. And only then did I make a sound—
then
I laughed, I laughed helplessly, my hand shielding my eyes from the glare, for a very long time.

I parked the car at the curb instead of pulling into the driveway. But the living room lights were on and I could see Jay inside, getting up to peer out the window. I opened the door. Behind him, the TV blared. I walked over and snapped Letterman off. There were a few, not too many, Bud cans on the floor.

He came up behind me and I turned and looked into his eyes. He was still pretty sober.

“Hi, Jay.”

“Hello, Esme. D-do you want to tell me where you’ve been?”

I glanced at the wall clock. It was almost one. I dropped my bag and briefcase on the floor and sank into a chair.

“You were with s-someone, weren’t you? You didn’t work late, did you?”

“No,” I said. “I had a drink with someone I used to know. I just forgot about the time.”

He sat down directly across from me.

“Wh-who was it?”

“It doesn’t matter, Jay. You don’t know him.”

“It m-matters to me.”

“Jay, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you.”

I was still in a daze. Jesse and I had made love a second time, more slowly and less explosively but with a languorous, vertiginous
detail
that stayed in my blood, walked in the door with me. My body felt utterly calm, but my mind struggled to understand, to make sense of what the flesh so readily absorbed—pleasure, joy, terror.

I looked at Jay, dazed, guilty.

He got up, shaking his head at me. He began to pace around the room. “I s-stayed up, Esme. I had a funny feeling where you’d gone and I wanted to be ... awake to see you when you came in, to hear what you had to say.
Now
I n-need a drink.”

He stomped off to the kitchen, then turned and came back.

“I want to know, Esme. Did you sleep with this person?”

“Jay, please. Let’s drop this now.”

“What do you expect me to do?
Ch-cheer
when you come in in the middle of the night, looking like ... l-looking goddam
happy.
What the fuck am I supposed to say?”

I stood up, angry. “You’re supposed to say, ‘What’s wrong?’ What’s wrong with my marriage if my wife goes out to have a drink and comes back looking
happier
than when she left? What’s wrong with my marriage if my wife and I can’t
talk
to each other? What’s wrong if my wife
feels free
when she leaves me?”

“You felt
free
? You
did
sleep with the guy! Am I r-right?”

“Jesus!” I cried. “So what? Yeah! I slept with him.”

Jay reached out suddenly and pushed me, hard, with the flat of his hand. I stumbled backward, holding my arm where he’d slammed it.

“Get away from me. I can’t look at you!”

“Oh? This is all about
you,
just you?”

“Tell me something!” he shouted, pointing his finger in my face. “Are you going to see this guy again?”

I swallowed. Jesse and I had had a talk, each of us shaky, absolutely stunned by the implications of what we’d done. It was simple, impossible. Anyway, I knew Jesse. He always had another plane to catch.

“No,” I said. “I am not going to see him again. We talked. I have a child who means everything to me and I don’t want to shake up her world and make life any harder for her than it already is right now.”

I stared off into space.

“Anyway,” I said, “he’s leaving tomorrow.” I smiled involuntarily. “Flying back to the East Coast.”

Relief broke across Jay’s face, became quickly distorted into an odd resolve.

“You th-think I’m going to forget this, Esme—don’t you?”

“Jay, I’m sorry. I didn’t do this to hurt you. I did it for myself. One time. I needed this one time. I needed to make something clear.”

He laughed bitterly. “Make something c-clear. You’re always
making things clear
to yourself, aren’t you? Just this one time:
y-your
theory,
y-your
universe.
Meanwhile,
you’re a goddam failure as a wife. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Jay.”

He started for the kitchen again, then turned back again. He threw the words at me like stones.

“You’re
p-pathetic
in bed,
unreachable.
I hope this guy you were with didn’t have to work as hard as I have t-to. ...”

“Jay, come
on.
Stop now.”

“See you later, Esme.
I’m
going out now for a while. Maybe I’ll make a f-few things clear to myself too.”

“Be my guest,” I said, but I muttered it under my breath and I’m sure he didn’t hear me. He was out in the kitchen then, banging things, and I was suddenly very tired. I left my briefcase on the floor and went to bed, turning in my exhaustion to the remaining broken gold fragments: Jesse’s face, lamplight, our cries, familiar and lost, coming down through the clouds.

T
HE DAY EVERYTHING
changed was the day I got a letter from my mother describing her marriage to Q: “We drove up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Kendall’s birthplace, as you know, Esme—and were married in a little chapel in Strawberry Bank, in pouring rain. A brief honeymoon in Bar Harbor, then back to Boston. How’s my precious Ollie?”

I loved the “as you know, Esme”; I laughed out loud when I read it. As a matter of fact, I had no idea where Q was born, to me it was if he’d sprung full-grown, like one of Ollie’s drawings, a homunculus from a petri dish in a sacred grove, under the gaze of a human-faced star.

I took the letter and sat down in my favorite chair and stared at the “Kittery, ME” postmark on the envelope of my mother’s letter for a while, sipping a cup of nearly cold blackberry tea. Then I glanced at the other mail. There was an official-looking communication from the Los Angeles Unified School District, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. J. Tallich. It was a report on Ollie’s progress in kindergarten. She was being recommended for a special-ed program for attention-deficient children. A personal note from her teacher at the bottom explained that some testing had been done and though it was too early to tell, it looked like Ollie needed help. It said that she was not hyperactive; it had been determined that she did not “yet” need behavior-modifying drugs like Ritalin, but she had a great deal of trouble concentrating for more than a few seconds on anything. There was a second letter from the Los Angeles Unified School District. It said that Ollie was a potential candidate for the Magnet program for gifted children and that I should fill out an application form to get her name on the list now.

I was looking at these two letters when Jay came in. He glanced at me quizzically and I flipped them in his direction. He put down his gym bag, frowning at me, and slumped against the wall to read.