Partners, p.16
Partners, page 16
John wasn’t God, of course. She was just thinking by analogy. “Not calling John, hoping he will call me but not really expecting him to—that’s the position I want to be in, the frame of mind, the frame of soul, if there is such a thing. And I promise you, that’s not masochism but spiritual discipline.”
Barbara explained this to the space in her kitchen where the angel wasn’t, the angel who hadn’t been required to deliver the ideas that increasingly possessed her. “You probably don’t drink,” she said out loud, addressing the place the angel would have been if one had been leaning against her kitchen counter. “So I won’t either. Not tonight, at least.”
The angel said nothing, as might be expected of someone who wasn’t there. But after ten years of living alone, Barbara was quite good at that sort of conversation.
The thought presented itself that those midnight conversations with John had also been conversations with someone who wasn’t there. And the girl he was talking to wasn’t there either. She wasn’t Barbara. They’d invented each other—same as she’d invented appreciative younger sisters—out of their own desires.
The angel’s silence reminded Barbara that hoping John would call was tantamount to hoping John’s marriage would break down. “I assume I’m not supposed to hope for that,” she said. “Or perhaps I’m supposed to be honest with myself about that”—Barbara paused—“honest with your boss about it.” Pause. “We’re not having any wine, right?”
Silence.
“What was it that interesting person, Sally, said about monks in their cells? ‘Your cell will teach you everything.’ This is my cell. I suppose the life any person makes for themselves is their cell. Pretty shitty cell, even if there’s a lot about me on Google.”
Silence.
“I cannot honestly say that I do not want John’s marriage to fail. The fact that I didn’t even know his wife’s name until I googled him and found the wedding announcement from the Times, I have to admit that seems a hopeful sign. He never referred to her by name. ‘Felicity.’ Rich girl. Her father seemed to have been a partner of John’s firm.”
Silence.
Barbara went looking for her Bible, which had been given to her by an aunt who was also her godmother. The aunt was a Methodist. Barbara had been baptized as a Methodist. She’d become an Episcopalian in college. Her sisters thought that was a form of social climbing. Now that she didn’t go to church she was prepared to admit that it probably was. She flipped through the Gospels in search of insight. She figured a person could do that without turning into a creationist.
The main advice on offer was, as she put it to herself, to “lighten up on the possessions.” She started with her Cuisinart. The secondhand store took it. “It frightened me,” she explained, “the violence it was capable of, and all on show inside the plastic housing.” Also, it was emblematic of the pretense that she was a good cook. Or could be if she had the time. Barbara was hoping to lighten up on pretense. She put away the Bible.
Barbara went through her closets and found a lot of clothes to give away—clothes she’d bought a decade earlier, trying to be older, or as recently as the year before last, trying to look younger. She depleted her cornucopia of self-help books. “It’s not that I don’t need advice,” she told the angel, “but those books are so noisy.”
As an absence of things began to fill her apartment, Barbara found it natural to spend more time with her thoughts. Why had she taken John to a dominatrix? That is, in addition to her other theories? “To break through” was the thought that came immediately to mind, and the angel who wasn’t there didn’t argue with her. “We were playing with each other, dancing on a crust of eroticism that covered a lava pit of emotions. That’s what I felt like, I think. And John must have experienced our relationship the same way—as a construct, as camouflage, a way of hiding from his feelings, something that had to be cleared away. Why else, one might ask, did he let me blindfold him, and all the rest?”
Silence.
“I know what you’re going to say—except of course that I seem to do all the talking—which is that John’s reasons for allowing me to hurt him may have been entirely different from my motivation. I mustn’t assume that what happens to me, what happens inside my head, is what happens to the whole world. I don’t necessarily know anything about John, really.”
John had told her a story one night. Maybe it was a fantasy, but he’d pretended it was true. True stories were more exciting. It was about a group house he had been in one summer. Three men and three women, none romantically involved. The house had once been a small hotel or something. Big kitchen. They all had their own bedrooms—like monks. All six of them were graduate students or in law school. They all had summer jobs or academic projects with important deadlines, but devoted a lot of their free time to fitness.
The house was close to a beach. The only shower was in the backyard, so you could wash off the sand. Nudity was inevitable. They were all fit, so there was no aesthetic hesitation, just social convention. “If you’re not sleeping with a woman,” said John, “and you’re both doing thirty miles a day on a bike or ten running, plus some floor exercises and work with free weights, and one of you is under the warm water letting tired muscles relax, it seems pretty reasonable to invite the other person in, there being two shower heads.”
Then, one evening in about the third week, one of the girls starts walking around in a sarong but topless—the initial explanation being that her sports bra has rubbed her shoulder raw—and the others follow her example “out of solidarity,” so after a couple of bottles of wine at dinner the girls say, “How about it, guys?” so the three men strip off, which is hard to do without getting aroused, and the girls act all interested and admiring, as if they hadn’t been bumping into each other in the shower, as if they’d never seen a guy before, like they’re specimens in a tropical greenhouse, and then one of the girls says, “We’re none of us getting laid, right?” Nods all round. “So, let’s see how long we can go without it. I mean, were not teenagers any more. We can control ourselves, right? First pair to crack gets spanked, agreed?” They all agree. “And no masturbation.” Agreed. They’ve had a lot of wine, remember.
They do pretty well for a week in their separate bedrooms, so over lunch on Sunday one of the girls says, “Let’s make this more interesting. Let’s start sharing beds, but without touching.” And the girls agree to draw the men’s names out of a hat each night to see how they pair up. “I like this experiment,” one of the guys says. “It’s not an experiment,” says one of the girls. “It’s a contest. We know how it comes out. We just don’t know which of you guys can hold out the longest.” So John says, “Five hundred dollars says I can.” Before the other two guys can respond, one of the girls says she’ll take the bet, provided she can pair up with him every night “to be sure you’re not cheating.”
So, did he win the bet? “I lost,” said John. “Slowly, excruciatingly, explosively, the week the summer holiday ended. Best sex I’ve ever had.”
What had she done? “Nothing. I’d get in bed each night and turn on my side so I wasn’t facing her. She’d get in behind me and talk. She didn’t touch me but she was close enough that I could feel her body warmth. ‘I’m going to make this easier for you,’ she said. ‘If you last, you get the five-hundred dollars, but I won’t take anything if you lose. I just want to see how desperate you become.’ Then after a week or two she began to touch my back, very lightly, with her fingertips. ‘The rule is that you can’t touch me, but nothing says I can’t touch you—except in some obvious places.’ That I could handle.”
Then after another week she asked me to lie so we were facing. “You should always look your tormenter in the eye,” she said. So I rolled over. She just smiled. I began to tremble, literally. “It will only get worse,” she said. “And you don’t need to confess, you know. This is between the two of us. The others don’t have to know.”
“I give up,” I said finally. “So, you’ve lost?” she said. “Utterly,” I said. “Excellent,” she said. “But there’s just one thing,” she said. “Yes?” I said. “You’ll have to wait a couple of days,” she said. “You’re indisposed?” I said. “No,” she said. “Plumbing’s not an issue. I’d just like to enjoy your desperation for while longer.”
And he agreed? “For about half an hour.”
Had he kept seeing the girl when the summer ended? “No. She went back to South Africa.”
“Girls in fantasies tend to disappear,” Barbara had said. “The girl James Bond sleeps with always gets killed.”
“Why do men pay women for sex?” said John.
“So they’ll leave afterward,” said Barbara. She’d never liked that joke.
“ ‘Saskia’ was her name,” said John. “Brutal. A fantastic runner.”
Now he’d made Barbara disappear—or at least from his perspective he had, since he didn’t call. Which suggested that the telephone flirtations they had engaged in were analogous to the Saskia fantasy. Which meant . . . ?
The pessimistic interpretation was that for John, Barbara hadn’t been entirely real, that there hadn’t been a relationship, really. The optimistic conclusion was that John had intended to fail, to lose the contest with Barbara, to break down and propose real sex. Either way, he clearly liked it on the edge.
“And that,” said Barbara to her invisible visitor, “is all I know—except that he’s physically attractive and physically brave. And hasn’t called me. Which is obviously what’s called for as he tries to repair his marriage, and his relationship with his daughters.”
“Tries?” said the angel who wasn’t there. “Repair?”
“Well, I assume there was something wrong or he wouldn’t have played along with me, for a year on the phone and an hour in the dungeon.”
“Brave?”
“You’re right. Boys do foolish things just to see if they can. But there was no . . . immaturity at the end, you know. He was peaceful. He was dignified even, when I was frantic. He didn’t say anything nasty or amusing or provocative. He just let me take him to his hotel and undress him and put him in the bath. It was as if it was a ceremony. I was the high priest. He was content with his role, even if his role was to be the sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?”
“I guess he had a need to suffer that was just as intense as my need to get his attention.”
“Did you get it?”
“Seems not.”
“Perhaps he is still working something out.”
“Oh, you are a cruel angel, giving me hope.”
“I am giving you practice in accepting whatever comes. You mentioned needing to do that. And hope is a virtue, by the way, if properly deployed.”
“Is that what your boss says?”
“Perhaps you should do some more reading,” said the voice in her head.
“Wouldn’t that be a bit pretentious?” she said. “Or maybe I mean ‘preposterous.’ Reading my Bible, I assume you mean.”
“It’s been deemed helpful in the past.”
“Well, really, here’s a girl who wanted to fuck a guy so badly she arranged to have him tortured in a way that she believed might punch perverted buttons and get him to leave his wife. It would be a bit rich for her to act all holy.”
“Human beings are like that.”
Barbara had gotten pretty stuck into the Bible when her doorbell rang. She’d been at it for more than a month. It had become a sort of ritual. She came home and took a shower, changed into relaxed but attractive clothes—on the principle that John could show up on any night—ate a simple dinner, settled down in her one really comfortable chair. She didn’t pray, just studied. The angel who wasn’t there looked in on her from time to time, but generally let her get on with it. She took books out of the library that explained what she was reading, and let her skip over the “begats” without feeling guilty. Guilty, she was made to understand, was a permanent condition, but one that could be ameliorated. Not something to wallow in.
Some nights she felt like a college student working on a term paper. She was “in the zone” as athletes say, jumping between library books and scattered sections of the primary text. She mixed those nights with others when she plodded along, chapter by chapter, unfamiliar name by unfamiliar name. And then some evenings she let the silence wash over her, making her feel clean. Silence was doing that the night the doorbell rang.
Barbara’s first thought, which embarrassed her, was that she would be opening the door to God the monster. What would Moses have done? Opened the door. That seemed to have been his job.
It was John. He had a beard. He looked older. He was dressed in blue jeans and a tweed jacket, a blue shirt with a frayed collar and no necktie. “Felicity’s kicked me out,” he said. “Can I crash on your couch?”
“Why did she kick you out? Come in. Of course you can stay here. You can sleep in my bed if you want. I’d like that. You can whip me with a belt if you need to, though it’s quite all right if you don’t. There’s an angel in my head who’s been telling me you’d show up. Are you still a lawyer?”
Barbara stepped back as she said all this and John followed her into the apartment. “Yes to everything,” he said. “Except the belt.”
“I’m sorry about that . . . episode,” she said.
“No, don’t be. You broke me open. You broke the spell. Pain let me see past the guilt that prevented me from doing anything about how ghastly I felt.”
“What was there to be guilty about? We’d never done anything but flirt.”
“I wasn’t in love with my wife. And I thought that was a crime. Felicity thought it was just an inconvenience that shouldn’t get in the way of the triumphant performance our marriage was supposed to be. She threw me out when I pointed that out.” His face clouded up for a moment. “I tried to say it as gently as I could. But we have nothing in common, Felicity and me. Six weeks in Europe proved that—I used all my accumulated vacation . . .”
So, that’s where he’d been.
“ . . . six weeks spending my savings like a man trying to crash his car, putting our daughters to bed and then going downstairs in the hotel each evening to order our dinner and watch the conversation die.”
“Your daughters?”
“Lovely little people. They saw seventeen castles and learned to eat frogs’ legs. The oldest was just old enough to see that there was some sort of problem. They’ll be fine. Most of their classmates’ parents are divorced.”
“Shall we skip the part where I feel guilty about that and try to make you feel guilty too?”
“That would be good.”
“What’s with the beard?”
“I’m a new person.”
“I think I’ve been born again. Or at least I’ve been reading about God.”
“The angel in your head?”
“Our adventure had an effect on me as well. I seem to be making progress at letting go.”
John thought about that for a moment. “What’s your position on sex?”
“God invented sex,” said Barbara. “Do you have a suitcase?”
“Nope,” said John. “There’s just me and my beard and . . .”—he opened his wallet to show her that he had no cash and no credit cards—“ . . . no means of retreat. If you throw me out I will become a street person.”
“Did you honestly think I’d throw you out?”
“Couldn’t know. I haven’t called for quite a while.”
“Thank you for that. I needed space.” It hadn’t occurred to Barbara that he’d been doing her a favor, as well as wrestling with his own demons, but somehow that now seemed obvious.
“What did you learn?”
“Well, I’ve gotten mixed messages. A lot of what I’ve read is about waiting, but what my heart has told me is that talking to a person in the middle of the night, the way we did, but never so much as touching that person, is a perversion.”
“Which we should put an end to right away,” said John.
“I think we can agree on that,” said Barbara. “I hope we agree on that. But perhaps we should do a risk analysis first.”
“Fuck the risk analysis,” said John, still smiling.
“A gratifying suggestion,” said Barbara, “but before you fuck the risk analyst, she feels a professional obligation to explain a few things to you.”
“Could we undress while she does it?” said John. “I need you rather badly.”
Barbara began to unbutton the green linen shirt she had on, and as she did so began to talk. “I have an unnatural desire to put myself in situations that hurt me emotionally. I think I know why, but that’s not actually important. I know it’s stupid. If I need to spend fifty thousand dollars having a doctor explain that to me over the next two years, I suppose I can, but I seem to have worked it out for myself.”
John began to undo his belt. “And I clearly get something from being . . . frustrated.”
“Is that why you married Felicity—sorry, shouldn’t open that door.”
“It’s all right. We’re doing full disclosure.” He took off his jeans. “I do not enjoy being badly hurt physically, though I like a little bit of that, enjoy the idea of it, and it turns me on to show I can take it. It definitely turns me on to take risks. I think I should probably give up skiing. But most of all, I like . . . maybe I can’t talk about it yet.”
“So we have to be careful,” said Barbara, giving him room. She kicked off her shoes and sat down to take off her corduroy trousers. “We’re quite alike, you know. I like to train hard, but I don’t like to be hurt. And I especially don’t like being hurt emotionally, though you’d be hard pressed to prove it, given the amount of it I sign up for.”
“Would it help if I kiss you every morning and tell you I love you?”
Barbara had started to undo her bra, but stopped. She was about to show John her breasts for the first time, which made her feel vulnerable. “Only if you mean it,” she said. “Only if it is not part of a cunning though unconscious plan to break my heart.”
