My Education (12 page)

“Another time.” I refused him firmly, for Martha's eyes on me seemed to lend me her superior composure.

“But you've never been there! It's humanity's greatest creation! I want to be the first person who shows you the city. I want your Big Apple cherry.”

“You'll get it,” I made the error of promising. “Just not today.”

Watching him go, waving his left arm wildly and sadly out the window, it occurred to me I might have botched my performance for Martha. Until now I'd shown no sign of weakness, but declining to go to New York could suggest I was pining for her. Equally it could suggest I was wholly content, in no need of distraction. I stood a long time on the porch after Dutra had gone. The term was over. I had done all my work, unnecessarily well. By every available measure I'd succeeded in not falling short, and no available measures remained. Her magical eye rested on me, goose-pimpling my arms, and I exhorted myself to appear unperturbed and even considered lying down in the hammock and inviting its taut knotted cords to bite into my limbs. When the phone rang, despite the fact that her days were still ruled by the same school calendar as Dutra's and mine, it seemed possible I had conjured the call with the sheer abject force of my longing. “He's gone,” I heard Martha confess. “Nicholas has gone out of town. On his annual trip. Canoe trip. Georgian Bay. He'll be gone for three weeks.” And then amid our breathless overlapping exclamations, I somehow managed to direct her to my house, for in our impatience she was going to come pick me up in her car.

“. . . the north side of Pin Creek,” I was babbling. “It doesn't go through, you have to jog down to Elmwood and take the bridge there. The pizza guys never find it. They go to the south end of town—”

“I can find it,” she promised. “Ten minutes.” And with the spring on the timer thus wound a moan wrenched free of me, so unwilled I could have thought it had come from the couch cushions.

Only aircraft could have traveled from her house to mine in ten minutes. It took her more than twice as long, long enough that I mastered myself. Urgency and solemnity banished emotionalism. I could scarcely let go of the phone but once I did every separate grain of my condition, both inner and outer, seemed to present itself to my unsparing gaze. I showered again, and soaped the grooves between my legs with thoughtful fingers until they might have squeaked. The same scouring finger slipped into my anus as into the teardrop-shape gaps between each of my toes. My body seemed as neutered as a child's, as if it had never been used, at least never for pleasure. Toweled dry I had no odor at all. All warmth seemed to have left me. I pulled the comb through my hair and the deathly white furrows of scalp lay exposed to the light. The clothes I pulled on could have been for a latter-day monk; I was already dressing as she did without my realizing. Loose man's jeans that just clung to my hip bones over white cotton panties; a white cotton T-shirt; no bra; hoary Birkenstock sandals. Before you, everything is revealed, I seemed to concede in this sexless and dowdy attire. Any effort to consciously flatter myself, to be beautiful for her, seemed pointless. But she wouldn't set foot in my house, with its glacial formations of cassette tapes and bong parts and empty beer bottles; to await her I stood on the porch. If we'd been alone on the planet I would have waited there naked, not as provocation but as an admission. When she pulled up, in a black Saab wagon as glossy as a patent leather shoe, I descended the three wooden steps from the porch as if mounting a gangway, to a ship of the seas or the skies, and did not care if I ever again saw my house, or Dutra, or anyone else I had known this past year, or the halls along which I had learned, or the books I had read or the papers I'd written or any of the items of which I'd assumed that my life to that point must consist, and from then I would go on not caring for a very long time.

In the car she took hold of my hand, and turned toward me her stunned, windblown face, and we gazed at each other as if from the opposite sides of a chasm. Then she relinquished her hold to return to driving. The car might not have even halted before we were moving again, quickly, through the downtown streets with their shabby frame houses on handkerchief plots, and then, nose up, onto the hill. To all sides heaps of end-of-term moving detritus, disjointed floor lamps and dog-eared, dry-mounted Warhols and blackened, crumb-glutted toaster ovens and the doughy folds of exhausted futons obstructed the curbs, abandoned by the graduating seniors in the course of their ascension to postgraduate life. Goodbye, goodbye, tolled in my mind, not because I sympathized with the annual rite, the completion of toil and attainment of credentialed enlightenment; nor because I saw myself commencing, in the terms of the familiar metaphor, a new course of education. No conceit requiring my separate existence was tenable now. I yearningly bid it goodbye because I longed to be grappled against her and thoroughly used and subsumed; I couldn't start to imagine just what we would do, whether we would fuck with our mouths or our fists or an improvised suitcase of devilish tools, but I somehow felt very precisely the final result, and couldn't have gained it too quickly. I was singed in advance; though I sat very still in the car, my gaze fixed on her face I'd already so carefully mastered, on the slight bluish dent on one side of her nose, and the almost invisible down of her cheek, and the incipient spidery wear at the crease of her eye, when the car stopped, and I made to get out, my right knee popped with pain, for I'd been pressing so hard on an imagined gas pedal I'd ground up the delicate joint.

“Lucia's at the park with Joachim,” she was saying as we fell out the doors of her car, but amid all the other exigencies passing between us that moment, these particular words were illegible.

We sliced through the rind of the house like two knives. Nothing now was of interest to me except her; that house I'd first come to because of Brodeur, my abruptly imploded polestar, was just so much waste to be shouldered behind. In a more circumspect frame of mind I might have admired the quality of the house's construction, as the door to her bedroom did not fly off its hinges when we came crashing through. Her bed, a fragrant welter of matelassé and ecru and other characteristics I was yet to be taught, was as she had recently left it, also perhaps as her husband had recently left it, as I might have assumed in a more circumspect frame of mind, but in a more circumspect frame of mind I might have allowed her to tell me that she and Nicholas hadn't shared the same bed since before Joachim had been born. This was too much to allow her to tell me, when her mouth at that moment was so crucial to my survival that I fell onto it as if drowning, and determined to drain her last breath, even if this consigned her to drowning as well—she might not have been able to handle me if my aggression had not been as frantic and disorganized as hers was efficient. Once again I was wringing the front of her shirt—my hands were abruptly afraid of her skin, so that I wanted to crush her to me without having to touch her; I would have liked a single rope to bind us together, with tightly stacked coils, so that we formed a sort of Siamese mummy within which our two bodies got mashed into one—and having fought me to half an arm's length so she could undo my jeans, and peel them off with a hard downward step of her deft pointed foot, she simply seized me by the armpits and heaved me away from her onto the bed, and as I struggled to regain her kiss pinned me flat with the heel of her hand so that she could, when I gave up the struggle, with a leisurely sigh sink her face in my cunt. I seemed to come right away, with a hard, popping effervescence, as if her mouth had raised blisters, or an uppermost froth; but beneath, magma still heaved and groaned and was yearning to fling itself into the air. Until now, my orgasms had been deep and ponderous things; slow to yield to excavation; self-annihilating when they finally did, so that in their wake I felt voided and calm, every yen neutralized, and gazed on whoever had managed the work with benign noninterest. Never had there been this tormenting, self-heightening pleasure, like a hail of hot stones, and yet she seemed to recognize just what had happened, so that before I had even stopped keening she bore down again. She made me come so many times that afternoon that had I been somewhat older, I might have dropped dead. Had I been a doll, she might have twisted off each of my limbs, and sucked the knobs until they glistened, and drilled her tongue into each of the holes. Certainly had the windows been open, as would have made sense on that sunny June day, my thundering cries, in the end, would have summoned the neighbors; for Martha, in dismantling me, dredged a voice out of me I did not know I owned; the devastation of my pleasure surged outward and outward again, like an ocean-floor tremor, while that voice I had never imagined was bellowing harshly Oh GOD, Oh GOD, OHGODOHGOD!—and it was then that Martha finally flung herself onto my shore, and through violent sobs kissed me, as if drenched in my juices as she had become, eyes glued shut, stringy-haired, fever-cheeked, parched and gasping for water and air, she'd been born out of
me
in those hours, bodied forth by titanic orgasm, and now she was helplessly, utterly mine for the rest of all time. Love is tutelage, after all; and ardor, such as we had laid hold of, that same tutelage greatly compressed—so that, knowing nothing but what she'd just taught me, I was somehow no longer afraid, and rearing up on the heels of my hands I threw open her spent, helpless body, already softened as if by a mallet from the hours of toil she'd expended on me, and plunged into her headlong with fingers and tongue not unlike, the thought burst in my mind, having leaped without forethought or parachute out of a plane. Yet, all the while I was plummeting down, I still wafted and roved, and was drawn along ropy cross-currents, and seemed at my leisure to swim in a lush element . . . until with a fearsome huge groan like the earth cracking open I found Martha suddenly near, rushing upward toward me.
“Oh,”
she wailed, with strange desolation, as if the nearer she came, the more receded her voice,
“Ahh . . . OH . . .
,
”
and then came the sodden implosion of impact, and her bed elephantinely bounced up and down, and her cries filled my ears and we burst into tears from the shock.

Weeping we knotted our bodies together, caressing and hushing each other, until we both must have slept, to awake it seemed many hours later, and gaze at each other in mute wonderment.

“Fuck,” she said, sitting up. “What the fuck time is it?”

Outside the closed windows the horizon-bound sunlight was guttering now through the limbs of the big handsome trees. With the labored strokes of a swimmer pulling dead weight to land Martha got within arm's reach of a tiny bedside alarm clock while I did everything to impede her, while I nuzzled her neck and her armpits and with fresh resolve nosed toward her crotch—“Oh, God,” she realized. “It's already six-thirty. Okay,” she said, more to herself than to me, as with adrenaline visibly coursing she leaped out of bed. “Okay. Okay. You'll have to stay here. Just stay here in my room.” From some far-off realm of the house, I now realized, an irregular noise drifted steadily toward us, part percussive, part exhalative—as of water or wind—part obscurely verbal, and part high-pitched, parrotlike shriek. “I've got to take a quick shower. You'd better take one as well, look at you! Your hair looks like a nest—come on, hurry—”

I couldn't help but behave as if drugged in the shower. The sight of her body agleam with the coursing hot water seemed to muzzle the rational part of my brain. All the minor imperfections of her superior age made me insane with adoration as I one by one rooted them out of her smooth opalescence: the minute dark-purple varicose squiggle midway down her right thigh, as if a single gaudy thread had dropped there from an unraveling garment. The thin rippled furrows streaking out from each side of her pale flat belly, where snagging needles perhaps had been dragged down the silk of her skin—or where her pregnancy had stretched her, I realized only much later, for I was so young then that I had never seen those marks that become so mundane, like the first kinky, colorless hairs on one's head, just one decade later in life. Either I was poring over her skin with my tongue—“Stop.
Stop!
” she admonished—or slumped swooning against the wet tile as she soaped me with businesslike hands, but regardless I was no use to her and yet she had us in and out of the shower quickly, as she'd stated she would. Back in her bedroom I lurched and stumbled and fell over in my hapless effort to put on my jeans while she disappeared into a closet and reappeared a moment later in khaki shorts and a pale green tank top, her breasts shifting under the jersey fabric in a way that made me shudder with recognition—and pulling a tortoiseshell comb through her hair. “I've got to go down now,” she said. “I have to nurse. Do the dinner thing. Stay here. Just stay here—” In her panic she rushed from the room.

The irregular noises from downstairs continued, very distant and hard to interpret. I swayed on my feet, the walls pitching around me as if I'd developed an inner-ear balance condition, but there was nowhere to sit in her room but the bed, and I disliked the bed without her. I felt the peculiar gratification of having been made a taxidermy of myself, disassembled and rebuilt with some sort of narcotic-soaked gauze densely stuffed in my cavities—I was that deeply satisfied, down to my marrow; all the bones in my pelvis seemed loosened and bobbling around. That tawdry skeletal dishevelment made me grin with remembrance. Martha's agitated precaution that I stay in the room never could have sunk in, I was so inundated with pleasure, and perhaps, looking back, there was also reluctance on her part to fully avow the requirement of secrecy, to embrace the adulterer's furtive procedures by declaring outright that my choices were hiding for hours in her bedroom, or inching my way down the outside drainpipe. Such behavior as is natural to criminals could not have been less natural to my feelings, which were most like uncontainable pride, so stratospherically levitating I hardly felt myself in that room in the first place, though for the moment I floated on the outermost fibers of her round bedroom carpet. I did notice, but very remotely, because such things as furniture seemed now so misguided, so many props for distracting the body from what it did best, how impersonal the room was, as was that downstairs powder room. No photos or knickknacks, not even a bookcase. Just a short pile of paperbacks set on the floor, a Penguin Classic of
The Last of the Mohicans
on top looking wholly untouched. The clothes she'd been wearing before we made love lay strewn about the floor in arrested positions of ecstasy, and descending from the altitude of giants I scooped them up and pressed them onto my face, and devoured her pungent aroma. I was ravenous; sexual satiation flipped over neatly and showed its reverse, which was wolfish hunger. And so it was that without any pang at ignoring her orders, without in fact remembering her orders at all, I left that room in which we'd remade each other, which now looked so diminished, and danced down the carpeted hallway and stairs to the part of the house that I already knew.