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I had twenty years to go to get to be as old as he was, and then, if I got there, I'd have to go counting almost twenty years again. I was still in my thirties, but I was the one of us who was old. Anyway, he said he was nostalgic for my past.
I had a past, and my past contained a marriage and a job and friends. But I had long since dispensed with his past. I had spent the year before moving to the lake at a place where people recover from the bad things that seek them out. For the time I was there, I wrote to this man although, or because, I had met him only once, and because I felt our talk had been not an exchange of words, but of souls.
I read about a famous mystery writer who worked for one week in a department store. One day she saw a woman come and buy a doll. The mystery writer found out the woman's name, and took a bus to New Jersey to see where the woman lived. That was all. Years later, she referred to this woman as the love of her life.
It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
I lived in small rooms with heaps of bleached shells on distressed white tables and antique mantels. His place had the original brick arches between the large open areas of the loft. There were polished wood floors (slate in the kitchen and bath), and a frosted glass-and-steel screen hid the staircase to the upper bedroom. His paintings were hung in the enormous studio on the first floor, the range represented by portraits and landscapes following the early "systems" paintings. There were ordinary workday scenes supported by strict and intricate organization that a critic had commended as "art that conceals art."
Lying in bed early on: "We had rules," I reminded him. "I could fuck the wife anytime I wanted. I could fuck the husband if the wife was also present. The wife could, whenever she wanted, fuck either one of us — her choice: together or alone. The husband needed no rules, both we women felt, because, we also seemed to feel, we would have no idea where to start in the drawing up of them.
"I could fuck the wife anytime I wanted. I could fuck the husband if the wife was also present. The wife could, whenever she wanted, fuck either one of us." |
"They took me up," I told him. "I was young," I reminded him. As if he, of all we did, needed reminding!
"Which of you would make the first move?" he asked.
"The first time or any time?" I asked.
"Maybe the wife started it?" I said. "Maybe the first time she made a preemptive strike? Maybe she saw the way her husband was looking at me — I guess she made up her mind to beat him to it? You know, later on she told me that was exactly what she was doing."
"Tell me what you had on," he said, "the first time, and every time."
"The wife said any dress looks good in a heap on the floor by the bed."
He said he wanted me to tell him about myself and about the woman when the two of us were in bed before the husband came home, how we would not let him join us at first, but let him crouch beside the bed, his eyes at the level of our bodies on the mattress, first at the side of the bed, and then at the foot of the bed. And who had undressed first — had we undressed each other?
"Would you do anything — everything — they wanted?" he asked, although the real question was, Would I do everything with him?
Let him find out!
"It wasn't always like that," I said. "Sometimes we just let the cats sleep in the bed."
"Oh?" he said. "Did they come into it in some way? There was cat hair in the sheets? On the two of you? On the three of you?"
"And did you like to be watched?" he prompted. "Did you like it more when she watched you with him, or when he watched you with her?"
"Don't forget the neighbors," I said. "The couple who watched at the window where the curtains didn't close all the way. The man I didn't mind, but I thought the woman wanted to take my place, and I felt she resented me for it."
"You had never done anything like this before?" he said.
"I saw no reason not to."
"It was the great experiment," he said. "Did you wait until evening? Often you couldn't wait."
"That's true," I said. "I was supposed to be available."
"Every day," he said, "they touched you every day? Even on Sundays — you made yourself available to Saturday night's predations?"
"All the better," I said. "The better it was, the better it was."
"You mean the more, the more of them?" he said.
"Repetition fueled us," I said.
In the bed where I described the couplings years ago, he would suddenly roll me over so that I was on top. He would tell me to lean over and show him how my hair had made a tent over the face of the husband or of the wife.
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