Making Love (19 page)

He switched on the radio to an all-night FM station, something in New Jersey that played theme music from tear-jerking movies. The TV, soundless, was providing the one-o'clock news for nighthawks, and she got up to turn it off. She lit a cigarette and stood over him, dreamily happy.
 

“Jane, could I ask you a personal favor? Now you can say no, if it bugs you.”
 

“How can I refuse you?” She kissed the bridge of his nose, flat and hard as a ski slope.
 

“Jane, could I undress you? I'd really like that.”
 

“You said the magic words.”
 

“I'll leave Central America for another day.”
 

“It's my loss,” she said.
 

He was incredibly delicate for such a big man, displaying his broken-field grace with snaps, zippers, and buttons.
 

“This doesn't unbutton anything,” she explained as he explored the front of her print blouse.
 

“I don't understand why the hell they put them there if they don't work. Is it for display?”
 

“Just to fake you out. There's a zipper under the seam in the back.”
 

“Well, well, I'm really enjoying this. Like being on a treasure hunt.”
 

She lifted her arms up and he tugged the blouse off, careful of sudden rips from such a flimsy fabric. She had on a white lace bra with small swirled designs of fussy translucent mesh. He turned her around, stared down the deep gully, and wondered if he could hear his voice echo. For a moment he lost his initiative and sat there silently.
 

“Christ, Jane. I've never seen a pair like them,” he observed reverently. “No wonder you keep them under lock and key.”
 

“Rub the outside of my bra.”
 

“Anything you say.”
 

“The nipples are getting hard and I want you to see them when I'm excited.”
 

“I don't even mind when you're not excited. I wish I had two heads. That's what you rate. I take back what I said about Joy-Sue. She was like forget it compared to you. I feel like I landed on the moon. Man, I must've stepped into horse-shit, which is lucky, the day I met you.”
 

Her skirt had no deceptive buttons, simply a snap on the side. Sonny felt constrained to think of something else to prevent himself from popping off precipitately.
 

“You're the best thing that happened to me since I was a bonus baby.” He disconnected the bra catch, then peeked around the side to gauge the depth of the field. “Would you believe it? Coming right out at you.” He slipped his hand under her arm and began to nuzzle the firm belly of her breast.
 

“Easy, they're sensitive now.”
 

“I'm gonna put them in a box and keep them at Carrier's in the safe. I want you to know that I'm not a mark or easily moved, but let me tell you somethin', this year I don't need any Christmas presents.”
 

“Sonny ... I'm going to fall in love with you.”
 

He jumped up, stood in front of the mirror and beat his chest with childish delight.
 

“How did it happen,” he said addressing his image, “that you got so lucky, you mother-fucker?”
 

A belching death rattle emerged from the dusty radiator, like a Wagnerian
leitmotiv
, indicating that central heating was now available.
 

“How's that for romance?” asked a buoyant Sonny.
 

“As long as it gets warm. I'm freezing.”
 

He returned to the bed, pulled back the seventy-five percent dacron baby-blue blanket and offered her a sack as tightly made as a two-week recruit's at Parris Island, complete with hospital corners. A Fig Newton appeared from the pillow cover, and Sonny explained that Junior must've been watching TV earlier in the evening. The sheets were cold and Jane recoiled from the touch on her bare back. Sonny surveyed the situation—she had taken his favorite side—twin pyramids pointed to heaven and high purpose. In the lottery of human affairs, he had fared poorly and he embraced his new destiny with both hands, despite a dreamlike contradiction that this was not happening. He peeled her panty hose like an onion, leaving in place pale white bikini panties waywardly fringed, which called for an unusual degree of self-control. Eighteen years in training camps with Sparta-like conditions had not been in vain—he could run with the best of them, push out of his mind the half-remembered, tingling, teasing scent of conquered girls and concentrate on memorizing his playbook. Brown eleven on two drifted through his mind, a formidable trap play. He dropped his trousers and she wrapped her fingers around his hard prick.
 

A small telltale gasp when he touched the sheets revealed agreement with her earlier complaint. He slipped her head on his shoulder and kissed each ear lobe, then forehead, neck, and underneck. He moved down to her navel, skipping the breasts for the moment, which indicated a canny change of game plan. Never was flesh so sweet in his mouth. He lingered on the flat stomach. Microscopic inspection showed a small but fine growth of blond hair which fanned up into the shape of a fern. Invisible at a distance. She was now breathing with a noticeable lack of regularity. As for him, he felt punch-drunk. The hands that failed to hold the elusive pigskin for more than a few seconds were now not to be denied. He fondled the outside of her panties and Jane said: “Oh, yeah, don't stop,” and with this kind of approval his thick fingers burrowed further, deeper, locating a throbbing delta. Momentarily beached by his fear of disturbing her cycle, he left the exploration of the mouth for future probes. She pressed tightly against his chest and he moved his search to her breasts. In his mouth her nipples blossomed into flowers.
 

“I wish I knew what to do next,” the NFL's fumble king said hoarsely.
 

“Anything you want.”
 

Given this kind of license and with the end zone in sight, Sonny was not a man to tarry. He sat astride her, placed his prick securely between her breasts, then pressed them together in a heavenly bondage. She held her hands under his balls, so that the range between her mouth and him required no acrobatic skills. She touched the tip of his member with her tongue, and Sonny yielded his position between her breasts, and held both palms flat against the wall for support.
 

“Blue on twelve,” he heard the quarterback calling an audible because of a Red Dog defense.
 

It didn't help, getting his mind off Jane. Her head was down to sea level, and he was in so deep that he was concerned about damaging her vocal cords. Suddenly he felt himself hit—two linebackers and plummeted over the center and he blinked with disbelief and anguish as the white spunk seared from him. She didn't let up, and he groaned in agony of pleasure, his body hiccuping spastically.
 

She returned his member—clean, limp, still jerking involuntarily—and rested her apple-red cheek on his shoulder. It had to be for love, he thought, not simply a Baltimore malted, with something that worked like a Hamilton-Beach machine.
 

“I came with you,” she said.
 

He didn't doubt her and kissed her nose and silently counted his millions, an unexpected inheritance. He had expected at most a reluctant hand job, not this miraculous frenching session. But he turned sullen, unable to restrain sudden murderous impulses.
 

“What's wrong?” she asked.
 

“I'm not gonna ask you how you got so good at this.”
 

The sentence echoed through the air as though whispered in a record-studio sound chamber.
 

“Maybe you better not,” Jane replied. The aftermath of lovemaking was always too volatile to control when she felt something.
 

In frustration he put his hands menacingly around her windpipe, locked the thumbs, then realizing what he was doing he stopped, caught a nascent tear with his index finger and said:
 

“If I catch you with anyone ... it'll be lights out.”
 

“You've got me, Sonny,” she replied calmly.
 

“Bet your sweet ass I do. This, nobody's gonna cheat me out of. Shit, Jane, this is ridiculous, but you make me want to cry and I haven't in years. The last time was when Wesley Junior had his appendix out, now twice in one night.”
 

“You feel something, and you don't know why you should.”
 

He thought for a few minutes, then opened the side-table drawer.
 

“Jane, I got a confession to make.” He lifted a small rectangular box. “I'm the one who eats the Fig Newtons in bed.”
 

 

* * * *

 

Toward the end of the week, on a blustery day when the sky was pregnant with slate-gray snow clouds, two suitcases from Saranac arrived for Jane and a letter from Conlon.
 

 

Dearest Jane:
 

I do miss you. My life is really in New York and I'm thinking of clearing out myself, and coming down. Room for one? I can't get over how happy you sounded the other night on the phone. I'm stuck right in the middle of a crappy political-science paper and it seems awfully remote from real life. Can you give Mel a ring, and if possible do a bed check? Don't touch him, though, will you, please.
 

We've had some of the most fucking awful weather known to man. Eleven inches of snow yesterday. I was so bundled up, walking to class, that I looked like I belonged on a dog sled. All I needed was a harness. It's impossible to drive, or even go out for a sandwich. The Dingle Man is delivering right to the dorm, so pardon the grease stains on this, but it's his inimitable pastrami. My father dropped me a note the other day and told me to eat lots of raw onion to keep from getting colds. What's wrong with the Irish? Are they just plain crazy?
 

I'll say one thing for your absence—I'm studying.
 

Alan invited me to the movies. I was tempted to go—he's got snow chains on his car—just to relieve the awful tedium. I guess he's horny. Turned him down of course. Faithful to my married Hebe, who's probably banging everything that walks, not to mention his wife, who just got back from Miami and Mel is hooked on white boobs against a brown body.
 

Can I stay with you when I come down? I didn't want to say anything last time, but I'm fed up with his hotel. In the room next to ours, a bunch of men were shooting crap till five o'clock in the morning. They were hitting the dice on the wall by the headboard and I didn't even get there, although Mel tried every trick in his book. I broke out something terrible, but thank sweet christ it's cleared up. In any case my freckles provide terrific camouflage.
 

Who in God's name is Sonny Jackson? He sounds like the lead singer in a rock group. I admire your guts, truly I do.
 

I'm also back on the pill—Ovulen-21 this time. I'll worry about my blood clotting when the time comes. Meanwhile I prefer not to trust rhythm or those rings or a diaphragm which I used last time, and maybe that's why I didn't reach my climax rather than the crapshooters. Makes me feel like a goddamn plumber. I kept thinking I wouldn't be able to get it out, and I'd have to call Roto-Rooter for one of their long-wire specialists. As you can see, I'm pathetically sex-ridden ... to be continued.
 

Continued. I just got back from an interrogation with the Dean of Women who asked me a lot of sharp questions about you. She called your mother who started screaming blue murder. Lawsuits, etc., which scared the DOW shitless.
 

I've been invited up to Boston to march somewhere with some people about something. How can you move here though, with all this snow?
 

I just finished the pastrami and I feel sick as a dog. I think the Dingle Man is selling horsemeat. I'm not sure how I'll get down this weekend. Either fake an attack of mono, or say that I'm hemorrhaging internally and I want to see my family doctor. I can't wait to see you.
 

Bereftly,
 

Conlon

 

She had mixed feelings about Conlon coming to New York. Between the lines she detected the nudging implication that Conlon would be her responsibility. Struggling to her feet, she couldn't support somebody else's emotional load. She started a letter, but then gave up because her tone was sanctimonious. How could she force Conlon to face the fact that Mel was simply playing with her until a new piece came along? So easy to see the writing on someone else's wall. Her ungenerous reaction depressed her, so she went characteristically to the other extreme with a short note assuring Conlon that she'd be received with open arms, could stay as long as she wished, and shouldn't worry about money. Jane had enough for everybody.
 

On the crest of an unconsummated love affair—she and Sonny still had not gone all the way—she was incarcerated in the cell of her romantic agony, which excluded the rest of the world and all events not relating to her situation. She had watched her Invictor stock plummet to half its value, attended an NYU student demonstration, marched up Fifth Avenue on Earth Day, just missed being bombed at the New York Public Library, and moved through it all in an ethereal, mindless way. Not that she wasn't concerned or involved in the fate of the Black Panthers, the war, or the destruction of the planet, but she'd managed unconsciously to withdraw, understanding for the first time in her life that nothing took precedence over personal involvement.