A Round-Heeled Woman (24 page)

Except I can't, for in this most beautiful of months in the finest of all cities, Robert found me; he phoned my niece, she told him where I was. Was I happy? I don't know, a little, maybe more. He tells me that he and Sylvia had a fierce and final fight, and that he is free at last. For what? Robert is a very good kisser, but in the six weeks since our last meeting, he writes me, he has gone impotent, yet another system down for the count. Viagra still makes him nauseated; even Sylvia, with whom he confessed to being in love way back in March, had not been able to restore function, he tells me. Worse, for me at any rate, he has no desire. And yet—Would I like to do the
Times
crossword puzzle with him at his apartment? Yes. Would I like to have breakfast in our favorite restaurant? Yes. Would I like to go to the ballet at Lincoln Center? Uh-huh. I am so weak. At his invitation, I traipse up to his apartment. From the chair on the other side of the room from where he sits with the Sunday puzzle, I ask him very shyly, “Does impotence preclude your giving pleasure?” He is offended: “I have always considered sex to be a mutual affair.” As usual with Robert, I feel confused. I want more than anything in the world for him to take me to bed. He has no intention of doing that; he has not lied about why. I feel ashamed and embarrassed and needy. I feel like a beggar. Which I would become in a minute if I thought he would be generous. But I know he won't. I am glad to have a reason to leave him behind. He makes me cry.

SPRING IN New England has been unusually rainy, so everything is beautifully green. Behind the fences are cows and horses and, particularly refreshing after New York, space—lots of meadow and empty fields just sitting there. I open the window and breathe deeply. John has given me directions to a small shopping center in the small village outside of which he lives in the woods in a house whose location, he says, is too complicated for me to find on my own. Ted Kaczynski had a house in the woods. John promises he will meet me in the parking lot. That's safe. Back when I was running for exercise, whenever nasty dogs ran out to greet me, I screamed, bringing the owners to attention. I perfected this scream. It's better than mace, which you have to remind yourself to tuck into your shorts. My scream is built in; so far, it has been infallible. This is what I tell myself as I leave the livestock behind for this village right off a picture postcard. Listen, I say to myself, anybody who lives in this lovely, lovely place can't be a murderer or even a plain, ordinary degenerate. I am ready. Bring him on.

A car pulls up next to mine. A man looking nothing like his photograph gets out, comes 'round to my door, and says, “Jane?” I get out, and he is tall and he is great-looking, and he is smiling truly, and then he puts his arms around me and kisses me. Right in public. “Follow me home,” he says. You betcha.

John's house sits on the edge of a stream that runs through a meadow. It is a little house, a very old house, 1832, with an upstairs and a downstairs and a basement. It is a very nice house, nothing fancy unless you count as fancy (and I do) books lining every wall. John writes. He writes very slowly on that manual typewriter of his, so slowly that he has had nothing ready for publication in five years, though he works daily.

He sits in a chair across from me in his living room and crosses one graceful leg over the other. Wait till you see him with his trousers off. His legs ought to be stuffed (not yet) and put in a museum for everybody to enjoy. “I hope you passed on your legs to your daughter,” I will say, upstairs in his bedroom. “I did and she appreciates them,” he will say.

Honest to god, I am stunned. I try not to look at him below the belt, my favorite part of men, just below the belt buckle, that pelvic plain, flat and broad. Above the belt tells how much and how long the man has eaten and drunk the wrong stuff; below, where I carry a lot of my extra pounds, in most men remains enviably firm and flat. John is lean above and below. I put a finger to the corner of my mouth to check for spittle.

John says, handing me a glass of wine, “I haven't had a drink in thirty years, though I know you appreciate good wine.” God, he's a mind reader, too. “I play tennis,” he says in answer to my gaze fixed on his nonexistent gut. He smiles at me fidgeting in the chair, whose edge I sit on so my feet can reach the floor. How can I be expected to be graceful or sophisticated or cool when sitting in almost every chair in the world necessitates a certain amount of scooting so that my feet won't stick straight out like Lily Tomlin's creation, that devilish kid Edith Ann, sitting in the huge rocking chair? “And that's the truth,” Edith Ann sputters. I feel like her. John is still smiling. “You seem so buoyant,” he says.

Buoyant.
I could never have thought of that word in my whole life. But isn't it nice to be called “buoyant.” “I am,” I manage, once again struck by my own linguistic inventiveness.

John continues, “I would have expected this odyssey of yours to have worn you down a bit. In my experience, women want affection, after the act, for a time beyond. Aren't you letting yourself in for a lot of pain?” He is honest to god interested in what I think. “Tell me, what have you learned about us, about men?” He is irresistible. I find my voice.

“I haven't drawn any conclusions about men,” I tell him, “and yes, I have made myself vulnerable, and yes, I have suffered some.” I choose
some
over
a lot,
the latter being closer to the truth. “But a great deal of pleasure has come my way, not just physical but intellectual, absolutely unexpected but as wonderful as any of the flesh, maybe more.” He does not look at all doubtful. He looks as if he is liking me, as if he finds me interesting. Even I am beginning to find me interesting. I continue, “I have decided to appreciate men for who they are, not trouble myself with who they aren't.” John looks skeptical. I explain, “I have decided to appreciate men for what they can do, not fuss about what they can't.” John ought to know, given my late-night phone calls, how hard-won this new philosophy of mine is. But he is incredulous: “You're running for goddamn sainthood!” I've got him on the edge of his seat.

“No,” I say, “I'm being practical. Too much energy, too much time, gets lost in frustration.” How I wish I were telling the truth. I am, in a way; I really have decided all this as it applies to Sidney; he doesn't kiss, why make it a big deal; he's wonderful, he likes me, he tells me wonderful things, calls me “darling” in that sexy New York accent, so what if he doesn't kiss. But Robert? I don't know if I can be in the same room with him without wanting him to undress me and take me to bed. I don't know if I can watch him move his long fingers, blunt at the end, over his beard, slowly and deliberately, the way they moved along my body, without wanting him to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. Robert wants me to be his friend, just his friend. I don't know if I can.

John smiles at me. “It's good to have a conversation with someone who doesn't turn everything into an argument.” I like this man. “How do you feel about cemeteries?” he asks.

“They're great to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.”

John's smile is indulgent. “I thought we would visit one or two this afternoon, come home so I can feed you, and then, if you like, explore the upstairs.”

“Okay.”

WE STANDUNDER gray skies before grave markers, our shoes damp from the wet grass, and make up stories about the people whose names are engraved on the stones: “Hepzibah Fulsome Bullard, b. 1612, d. 1644.” Hepzibah, we decide, died in childbirth; sure enough, nearby are three very small stones, like little lozenges lying on their backs: “Clara,” “Thomas,” then “Anna.” Oh my, she had lost all three, two in an epidemic and the last at birth. Or so we imagine. John is a historian. He knows that the epidemic might have been influenza or diphtheria. Our stories about birth and death become very real.

“Elizabeth Holmes, Wife of Albion,” reads a stone. “Truth-full Holmes, Consort of Albion,” reads the stone nearby. “Reliance Holmes, Relict of Albion,” reads a third. And finally, “Albion Holmes, b. 1613, d. 1689.” We decide the women had died in childbirth and Albion had gone right along to the next one. We stand together, our heads bent toward the stone, imagining aloud the lives of each successive wife, the number of children in her charge increasing until she, too, died giving birth to yet another whose care would be provided by Albion's next wife. “Those were hard days,” I say.

“Those were simpler days,” says John.

“No days were simple.”

“I prefer them to today.”

“Tell me one thing about today that is an improvement.”

“Medicine,” John says. “Great strides there.” His tone is abrupt.

BACK HOME he feeds me curry, which he has made himself, and sauvignon blanc. Then he kisses me a long time and I follow him upstairs, which is like his downstairs: plain and comfortable and books all around. This will be the first of three lovely nights.

I have never had sex with someone who sucked on hard candies as he labored in my vineyards. John explains. He gave up tobacco only three days earlier; only three to go, the doctor said, until the physical addiction would abate. He doesn't believe it will ever abate. “I predict I will be sucking on candy until I die or until my teeth fall out, whichever comes first.”

“Uh-huh,” I say and continue my efforts toward orgasm. Finally, I fake one and John doesn't, and we lie side by side. “You're remarkable,” he says. “You're at least ten years younger than your age.”

“If you say so.” I am pleased, of course, but at that moment I am more concerned with my orgasm, or, rather, its absence: my failure. All that plunging he did; surely, I should have come. What is wrong with me? Good lord, after meeting all these men and sleeping with quite a few, I am as troubled about vaginal orgasms as I was at the very beginning, six months earlier. Performance anxiety, as you probably already know and I should have long before this, is not restricted to the male sex. In our fertile years, according to evolution, sex results in pregnancy and the continuation of the species, pleasure not figuring into this equation. In our postmenopausal years, according to
Cosmopolitan,
sex leads to orgasm, which is supposed to result in pleasure, which we are supposed to get a lot of and not feel guilty about. So if I don't have an orgasm, what does that mean? I had no pleasure? Come now, I had a lot of pleasure. John is nice. He is fun. He is warm and feels good on the outside and on the inside. So who do I think I needed to fool when I pretended? Me, I guess, stupid after all this time. Here is a man who will listen to me. He is a man with a mountain of experience who likes me, who thinks I am smart, who even admires me—“I admire you for what you are doing,” he said in the first moments of our meeting. I lean over and kiss him, and, appreciating him for what he can do, say, “Tell me a story.”

“Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, carried on a long and torrid affair with a very married Mabel Loomis Todd, usually at noon, in front of the fireplace in Emily's house.”

I am happy.

THE NEXT D AY we walk around little villages whose inhabitants of the cemetery outnumber the living, whose libraries are monuments to stone masonry, where the latest of five generations dips ice cream out of freezers in the grocery store that dates back two hundred years, where the children go to school in the same building as their parents and grandparents before them, where the floors, old wood oiled ebony, sag from children's feet and rise again beneath the desks bolted to the floor and, back to back, to each other.

“The James brothers,” says John. Oh, good, he will tell me a story about Frank and Jesse. “Henry and William,” says John, “you remember them.” I laugh and explain my disjointedness. He smiles down at me and tells me a story about Frank James and Cole Younger. “They decided, after their retirement from lawlessness, they ought not ever to be seen in a bank together. No matter their lack of criminal intent, one or both of them, they agreed, would get shot.” This is a wonderful man. When he smiles, which is often, the creases in his cheeks deepen. Sometimes, I reach up and run my fingers along them. He does not seem to mind.

THAT NIGHT, I hurt. The pain had begun seconds before I yelled, though it was not unbearable, and at first I considered not saying anything, hoping John would drive past whatever obstacle my body was presenting. The name of my disease—the wasting disease John had mentioned in his very first letter—is creeping martyrdom. My mother had it and tried to pass it on to me. I hate myself when I see signs and symptoms, silent suffering heading the list. Not this time. I yelled. “Oh! I think you hit something in me!”

John paused. “I'm sorry, I think I hit your cervix. I'll be more careful.” And he was, slower and gentler, but I was drying up; pain is not a lubricant.

“Maybe we can rest a bit; otherwise, you're going to get stuck in me.”

“Would you mind if I did?”

“No,” and this time I didn't lie. I liked him in me. I liked his liking to be in me. I liked his full attention. I liked that he didn't talk during sex. I liked that he talked after.

“When did you lose your viriginity?” he wants to know. I tell him about blooming late, about the sadness of Jack. “Why did you marry your husband?” he wants to know. “I was pregnant,” I tell him. “Those were hard days,” he says. And then, “I have some K-Y jelly right here should the need arise. In the twenties, this kind of lubricant was called Johnson's Joy Juice.”

Someone once told me I was a fool for learning. What a nice classroom John has provided and what a terrific teacher he is. Then, I tell him a story. I take hold of his penis, which is now outside me, and hold it gently in my hand. “I once had a lover.”