Lying in Bed (13 page)

“That explains it!”

“You admit it's a code?”

“Of course it's a code. That's why I didn't care when I lost that book. I knew no one would be able to read it. Except of course I do want someone to be able to read it. I decided I would marry the first man who could read it. He would be the only one to know all my secrets.”

Did she know I could read it? Was she playing with me? I remembered how, back in her shop, she had seemed disappointed that I couldn't read it. This was beyond me, this playing with knowledge between man and woman. What are we supposed to know of one another? And what are we supposed to want our beloved to know?

I knew I was going to marry her, or to try. I had known it even before she mentioned her little fairy-tale method of choosing her husband. But did she know she was going to marry me? Did she know I had cracked her code?

“Cinderella,” I said.

“My foot,” she quipped and moved one leg off the bed and brought it toward my penis and held her cyprian toes so close to the skin that I could feel their warmth.

“How are your hands?”

My hands were no longer mine.

She withdrew her foot and waved me toward her. “Come up here now.”

I obeyed and noticed how careful she was not to allow us to touch. Still seated, she moved to the other side of the bed and spread out her hands to indicate that I lie where she had herself lain.

My hands might as well have been someone else's, particularly when I followed her eyes and grasped my penis in one hand and then did as she motioned with her head and began to stroke myself. When I closed my own eyes I
could imagine it was her hand upon me, and I did. For the first of what would become countless times, I imagined my Clara in the act of love.

“That's so beautiful,” she whispered. “Thank you for letting me watch.”

“I've never done this before,” I managed to mutter.

“Done what?”

I didn't know what to call it. “This.”

“What?”

“I've never masturbated,” I said.

“Neither have I.”

As the feeling returned to the hand on myself, I brought my other hand out from under my buttock.

“Open your eyes,” she said. “Look at me.”

I looked into her eyes looking at my hand and tried even to see the reflection of myself in them.

“Your veins are like the veins in your hand,” she said. “And look, I see little drops of come. Wet yourself with it. Go ahead. Pretend you're inside me. I'm still so wet. Go ahead. Do it.”

I had never heard talk like this before. It was so simple and direct but also seemed removed from reality. I could not imagine what it would sound like in the world. But where I was now, it was angelic.

I found the semen coating the crown of my penis and rubbed it around on my palm and brought my still senseless hand back down onto the shaft and grasped myself as I had never had occasion to before and moved my hand heavenward and hellward until just as the feeling began to return to my hand and I became aware of the swelling and even greater tightening of the organ within it, my head seemed to burst. She said, “Now, darling. Now, darling.” My life flew out of me with the dehiscence of my seed and
flew into me through my eyes on her eyes. Seemingly endless white ribbons streamed out of me to adorn her lips and chin and neck and then seeped slowly down the shadow between her breasts, snaky sweet ylem on gravity's paradisiacal course.

I could hear my cries of pleasure merge with her delighted yelps. We fell silent together, filling the room only with the sound of our breath.

I wanted to touch her, hold her, but when I reached for her, she motioned my hand away and said, “Not yet.” Then, when she seemed confident I wouldn't grab her, she leaned toward me and asked, “What's your name? Aside from Chambers, I mean. I'm not going to call you Mr. Chambers, like the elevator operator, though you are a kind of mister, aren't you? Mr. Chambers here in his chambers, his many chambers, but I can't call you Mr. Chambers now that I've seen your cock and you've come into my face. So tell me, what's your name?”

She was right. How could she not know my name? Is this what comes from the habit of long silence? I speak, yet I remain a stranger. And so is she.

But I was thrilled by her having said, “I'm not going to call you Mr. Chambers,” because that meant she was planning to call me something, that we would talk again, meet again presumably, that she had some reason to believe she would address me again. Of such small tokens, I was learning, is love sustained and fear put to rest.

The only woman I had ever loved, or believed I could come to love if love could not be born from one such afternoon and evening as this, was not going to dump me.

“You know my name,” I answered. “You said it earlier in your shop. That's one of those coincidences I mentioned to you there.”

She put her finger childishly on her wanton lower lip. “I don't remember.”

“Johnny, is what you said. No one's ever called me that. I'm hardly a Johnny. But it's close enough. My name is John.”

She shook her head and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a laugh and bent forward and put her hand on my shoulder. It was a conciliatory rather than romantic gesture. “I'm sorry. I wasn't being psychic. I'm not a witch, really. It's just another code, I suppose. I call all men Johnny. As a group, I mean. Men I don't know. The way some men call other men Jim or something, or the way men used to call all women Sister. So it was just a coincidence. Believe it or not, I've never actually known a man named John before. Or Johnny, even. And that's what I'm going to call you: Johnny. My Johnny.”

I was stricken. “But that's what you call everybody.”

“Not anymore, you fool.” She bent and kissed me lightly on the lips. I could feel the breath leave her nostrils so I breathed through my own to capture it.

“I hope you don't kiss like that all the time,” she said.

I didn't laugh until I saw the merriment in her eyes. If I had ever been teased before, except by my father and by boys at school who had resented my wealth and the wall of words behind which I lived, I hadn't known it. It turned out to be a peculiarly flattering kind of attention, at least coming from a woman with whom I was so treacherously smitten.

But Johnny? I was not a Johnny. No one had called me that in my life. Even my mother in lifting me from the bath and wrapping a towel around me and singing Gluck as she put me into bed (“
Chiamo il mio ben cosi, quando si mostra il di …,”
a veritable Pauline Viardot) had not
called me Johnny. I was a John. A common slug of a name, uneventful, unelongated, destined, I had thought, gratefully, to be eternally without hypocoristication. Johnny? I? I would not have believed that I could be reborn, become a child with a pet name and learn to beam and scream with the fun and pleasure of love, of marriage.

“Don't you want to know my name?” she asked.

“I've wanted to know your name ever since I met you.”

“Then why didn't you ask?”

“I was afraid.”

“To know me?”

“To lose you.”

“And you thought that if you knew my name …” She stopped not because she seemed puzzled but because she wanted me to say it.

“Then you might be real.”

“I am real.” She put the back of her hand gently on my ear. “I wouldn't have told you anyway. I don't tell anyone my name until I trust him. I'm ready to tell it to you now.”

“Let me guess.”

She shook her head. “You'll never guess. It's a funny name. It makes people laugh. I used to hate it so much that I never forgave my parents for giving it to me. I ran away—all the way from California to New York. I was sixteen years old. It was almost exactly ten years ago. I'm probably the only person who ever ran away from home because of her name.”

“I know your initials,” I said.

Playfully, she looked down at her naked body and investigated it the way one might for moles or insect bites. “I hope you don't think I'm the sort of person who wears monograms.”

“C. B.”

I'd finally said something that shocked her. My year of silence, my confession of sexual innocence, my father's condemnation—none of those seemed to push her off the axis of her beguiling upper-handedness. But she seemed genuinely surprised, almost violated yet pleased to be violated, at my having said her initials.

“How do you
know
?” She had taken me by the shoulders and was shaking me. Her breasts bobbed unnervingly near my mouth.

Though I knew it was dangerous, I couldn't resist telling her. “Your initials are right in the front of that notebook I returned to you. As words.
See. Be.
”

She released me. Tears came to her eyes, even as they wrinkled in a big smile. “You fucker! You cracked my code! Now I'm going to have to marry you. So what,” she challenged, “is my name?”

“I don't have the slightest idea,” I said, which caused both of us to burst into laughter.

“Guess,” she insisted.

“To tell you the truth, I don't like guessing games, especially onomastic guessing games.”

“I know what that means,” she said coyly. “And you should be ashamed of yourself.”

“It only sounds like masturbation,” I explained.

“It isn't masturbation when someone's watching. So what's my name?”

“Constance,” I hazarded.

“Not in a million years.” She held out her hand. I took it. “How do you do,” she said. “My name is Clara. Clara Bell. I was named”—she let go of my hand and threw herself, at long last, into my arms—“after a fucking clown!”

“Clara,” I said for the first time and felt my lips and tongue embrace her name.

W
E DID NOT
make love that night. We did not make love until our wedding night. This was at Clara's insistence. She wanted, she said, to purify herself. I told her, in my lame effort at premarital seduction, that she was a virgin to me.

What we did do that night, and have done every night since, is sleep in one another's arms.

I had come up off the floor and out of the cracks in the walls.

I was reunited, through her, with myself.

I am lying in bed, waiting for Clara.

I am positively esurient. My senses are all atumble. I taste the music and hear the quilts blazing on the walls and see Clara on my skin. So does hunger rearrange one, to say nothing of how it loosens the mind in the way it devours thoughts.

I get up from the bed and then am nearly tossed back onto it by what the Shostakovich cello sonata does to my feet. It sounds like a piece of this fractured city that's been torn out and cast up to this peaceful halidom, bullets shot at the pavement to make you dance.

Its anarchy is perfect for me now. I am free of everything but desire. And there are those who believe that this was the last piece Shostakovich himself wrote as a free artist, before his music was condemned as “fidgeting, screaming, neurasthenic, and messy” because it was created to no political purpose. And to this I say, it would have been political had he never written it down but
merely heard it in his head. The least of politics are its public manifestations; the most political acts are those most private. It's not the public hanging that's political; it's the hangman's dreams.

I dodge the music like some unbound wraith before a firing squad and prance half the length of the loft to the kitchen and pull down the box of take-out menus and decide to order from Take A Wok rather than Oriental (how un-PC) Palace or Auntie Ha Ha's, not because the food is better but because I like the name (its playfulness puts me in mind of Call It Quilts, though it lacks the underlying religious provocation of Clara like Parmenides giving God the name of It).

I shall order no dumpling or noodle or military-brass chicken despite the earlier image of my ingesting them, for that was an image born not out of hunger but out of an oily vision of the food itself. Now I want nutrition and purification and beauty, so I choose vegetables only, to obtain that perfect green of the spinach and of the broccoli that snaps in the bite and the purple of the eggplant that were it not quite so dark would match the color of my beloved's eyes and why not throw in a few black mushrooms that can be rolled on the tip of the tongue like her pinguid clitoris that in its swelling resembles more, now that I think of it, a palmaryly perfect pearl onion.

I am forced to repeat my order several times and to suffer its being repeated back to me several times, each time incorrectly, so that when I am finally told, “Okay got it, mister, okay,” it is I who must ask to have it repeated yet again and it is wrong again and I resign myself to the very real possibility that I will find a carton of sautéed string beans in place of my spinach. I dread the arrival of the delivery man, who will be even more oscitant than this
man at the take-out phone.

“Okay thirty minutes, mister, okay,” he says and hangs up as if I might question his ability to tell time as well.

How am I going to survive thirty minutes without food?

But wait.

I realize I am no longer hungry.

What is it about Chinese food, I wonder, that in the ordering of it quells the hunger for it?

On that night of the day we met, as I have said, we ate no dinner. I slept in a bed for the first time in over a year and in the arms of a woman (as a grown man, I mean) for the first time in my life.

When I awakened in the morning, I was struck by how little hungry I was, which only added to my sense of the unreality of the whole encounter. Had this really happened? And if it had, had it happened to me? But then, I wondered, what after all do people do behind all those windows out there? They do, I realized, exactly, in one variation or another, what we had done. Wake up and smell the linga, John!

When Clara finally opened her eyes, I said to her, “You were sarmassational!”