Charlotte’s haste, her need, and her mood of anonymity were a pleasure to him — perhaps the only one — for she was more a stranger in bed than anywhere else. “Bed” was a euphemism for the various places they made love: the back seat of the car, the bathroom, the hidden pocket beach below West Chop lighthouse. He did not want sex as a gift; he wanted it as a command — and to take turns giving orders. Charlotte taught him that, or at least helped him realize what he wanted. As a stranger she had no inhibitions; she could demand anything of him, he could say anything to her, they could be irresponsible and reckless. She used him, he used her — those were their happiest days. He loved the fact that sexually she was hard to satisfy, always behaving badly, like a selfish person taking advantage of someone unsuspecting.
Early on, she had dropped hints. “Look at that,” she said of a lacy low-cut dress, “it’s real slutty.” And of a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes, “I want a pair of those hump-me pumps.”
Ordinarily she had little conversation, but when she was in the mood for sex she was like a cat, demanding, rubbing against him — or not like a cat at all, but like a predatory woman, a coke whore on a back street pleading for sex. Steadman liked her snatching him and insisting, “Go down on me — yes — more,” while she held his head with both her hands. “Use your finger, too. Yes, like that, harder, deeper, don’t stop, make me come.”
And after she came, convulsed, gagging and squealing, her body bucking, she could be even hungrier, more demanding, but in a pleading and submissive way, on his behalf. “Be rough with me. Call me a cocksucker. Go ahead, make me blow you.” When Steadman was tentative — Where do I begin? — she said, “Rougher, spank me, force me,” and then, as she kicked and he slapped her small hard buttocks, she growled against his cock and became noisily ecstatic, whinnying as she drank him.
Otherwise, most of the time, and always in public, she was a rather prim and passive woman.
She bought clothes, she had her nails done once a week, she read the Wall Street Journal. She was absorbed by her work. “I’ve got a marketing meeting in Cambridge with the salespeople, and I haven’t edited the pitches or read the spreadsheets.” What? Her work was a mystery to him.
But this strangeness, this unexpectedness, made her combative, too, and he often wondered, Who are you? At last Steadman was indifferent. He worked on his book and was so absorbed in it he ended up not knowing her. Fighting with her was meaningless. Their house seemed emptier when they were both inside. He wanted her to go, but he was so exhausted that when he suggested that she go, his voice sounded lazy and detached — so hopeless and speculative he hardly cared.
“I think it’s over, Charlie.”
A year before, during their courtship, when she had become flustered by his excessive questioning, she had said to him, “What you see is what you get,” as though emphasizing her simplicity, almost boasting of her shallowness, primary colors in one dimension, a paper cutout, a little doll. Her facetious warning not to look deeper became her mantra: she had no subtleties, nor any inner meaning. “I’m in sales and marketing! Doesn’t that say it all?”
When he said he doubted that—“You’re not being fair to yourself. There’s always more”—she complained in a rueful wronged tone that she was not hiding anything and that he was the most complicated man she had ever met in her life. He was impractical, he had no savings, no real income, no investments. He had spent his money on a two-year trip around the world. How could you be both a writer and a traveler? Writers stayed home and drove people crazy; travelers didn’t sit long enough to write. But he did both, a profound mystery to her.
“I’ve got to read one of your books,” she had said soon after they met.
He did not tell her that there was only one, that it was not done yet, that he had no money left of his advance.
All this in the last months of his finishing Trespassing, when the manuscript was sitting on his desk. He was so tired from the physical effort of typing the book and imagining it at the same time that he could not look further ahead to its publication. He had never imagined the overwhelming success, the transforming miracle of it: the fame, the wealth, and then the celebrated seclusion that made him notorious and sought after.
But that was afterward, after his tentativeness with Charlotte, his believing that she would understand him only if she had read what he had written.
“I really want to read it,” she said.
The stack of paper, the Trespassing manuscript, was almost eight inches high. He had typed it himself on a manual machine, banging the keyboard with the claws of his hands, watching stiffened insect legs fly up from the oily basket and kick letters onto the page as the bruised ribbon fluttered. The book proceeded letter by jumping letter. He had sickened himself smoking cigarettes while doing it, his pores oozed with tar, his throat ached, he felt poisoned; and that was the end of his cigarette smoking.
She was not daunted by the size of the manuscript. She repeated that she was eager to read it. “Your book, look at it,” she said, in an overly patient, uncritical way, with a slightly affected smile, as though she were describing a puppy.
“There’s a lot of geography in it,” he said. “But I’ve got a set of maps — you won’t get lost.”
How often he remembered his innocence and self-deception in those days, seeing two people quietly talking, the stack of manuscript between them in ream-sized boxes, hopeful and happy, in a kind of paradise, before the whole world knew and began to intrude.
She was the book’s first reader. She buried herself in it. But she had a disconcerting habit of reading the manuscript with the TV on, glancing up from the pages to follow a sitcom, smiling at the show, frowning at his pages. At last she said, “I like it.” He wanted more from her — more praise, more detail, an extended rave, alluding to all the passages she particularly liked. Even though he was starved for praise after all those years of indifference, he managed to say this in a tactful whisper, or at least not seeming to be pleading.
“I liked all of it,” she said, protesting, surprised that he should want more than that.
“The typescript is almost seven hundred pages. Did you finish it?”
“I read practically all of it. What do you want me to say?”
He shrugged. He realized he was asking too much of her. After all, he was unable to evaluate the twenty or so pages of a marketing plan she sometimes showed him, though he was able to correct her spelling and grammar.
Following her simple verdict on the book, she had said, defending herself — and she never looked prettier, more bright-eyed, lovely lips, full breasts, delicate hands—“What you see is what you get.”
Don’t look for more or you’ll be disappointed, she was saying. I am only surfaces.
That was a complete lie, it turned out. Perhaps deliberate, perhaps an honest misunderstanding, but a lie he could no longer accept. “Crap,” Steadman raged. “Dog shit!” For later, as his wife, every day some new annoying aspect of Charlotte was revealed, always a shock to him because of her insistence in advance that there was nothing more to know. Wrong — there was everything!
She cried easily, she was hurt by the slightest word, she was insecure. She reacted hysterically to a chance remark or the wrong question — she saw questioning as a form of assault. “I don’t know the answer! I guess I’m just stupid!” She told defiant lies. Mention a book, any book, and she always said casually, “I read it so long ago I can’t remember much about it.” He stopped talking about books so as not to put her on the spot. She had not read anything except books about sales and marketing.