“I don’t want the maid to see,” she said.
“No, we don’t want her to know what we did,” I said.
Very seriously she kept scrubbing, peering nearsightedly at the sheets to make sure that she hadn’t missed any spots. Then she dropped the wet towel on the floor and took a glass of champagne from my hand. We sat on the bed together, drinking and smiling foolishly at each other in a delighted sort of way. As if we had both made the team, passed some sort of important test. But we still weren’t in love with each other. The sex had been good but not great. We were just happy to be together, and when she had to go home, I asked her to sleep over but she said she couldn’t and I didn’t question her. I thought maybe she was living with a guy and she could stay out late on him but not stay overnight. And it didn’t bother me. That was the great thing about not being in love.
One good thing about Women’s Lib is that maybe it will make falling in love less corny. Because, of course, when we did fall in love, it was in the corniest tradition. We fell in love by having a fight.
Before that we had a little trouble. One night in bed I couldn’t quite get there. Not that I was impotent, but I couldn’t finish. And she was trying like hell for me to make it. Finally she started to yell and scream that she would never have sex again, that she hated sex and why did we ever start. She was crying with frustration and failure. I laughed her out of it. I explained to her that it was no big deal. That I was tired. That I had a lot of things on my mind like a five-million-dollar movie, plus all the usual guilts and hang-ups of a conditioned twentieth-century American male who had led a square life. I held her in my arms and we talked for a while and then after that we both came-no sweat. Still not great but good.
OK. There came a time when I had to go back to New York to take care of family business, and then, when I came back to California, we bad a date for my first night back. I was so anxious that on the way to the hotel in my rented car I went through a red light and got smashed by another car. I didn’t get hurt, but I had to get a new car and I guess I was in a mild sort of shock. Anyway, when I called Janelle, she was surprised. She had misunderstood. She thought it was for the next night. I was mad as hell. I’d nearly gotten myself killed so I could see her, and she was pulling this routine on me. But I was polite.
I told her I had some business the next night, but I would call her later on in the week when I knew I would be free. She had no idea I was angry, and we chatted for a while. I never called her. Five days later she called me. Her first words were: “You son of a bitch, I thought you really liked me. And then you pulled that old Don Juan shit of not calling me. Why the hell didn’t you just come out and say you don’t like me anymore.”
“Listen,” I said. “You’re the phony one. You knew goddamn well we had a date that night. You canceled out because you had something better to do.”
She said very quietly, very convincingly, “I misunderstood, or you made the mistake.”
“You’re a goddamn liar,” I said. I couldn’t believe the infantile rage I felt. But maybe it was more than that. I’d trusted her. I thought she was great. And she had pulled one of the oldest female tricks. I knew, because before I married, I’d been on the other end when girls broke their dates that way to be with me. And I hadn’t thought much of those girls.
That was that. It was over and I really didn’t give a shit. But two nights later she called me.
We said hello to each other, and then she said, “I thought you really liked me.”
And I found myself saying, “Honey, I'm sorry.” I don’t know why I said “honey.” I never use that word. But it loosened her all up.
“I want to see you,” she said.
“Come on over,” I said.
She laughed. “Now?” It was one in the morning.
“Sure,” I said.
She laughed again. “OK,” she said.
She got there about twenty minutes later. I had a bottle of champagne ready and we talked and then I said, “Do you want to go to bed?”
She said yes.
Why is it so hard to describe something that is completely joyful? It was the most innocent sex in the world and it was great. I hadn’t felt so happy since I was a kid playing ball all day in the summer. And I realized that I could forgive Janelle everything when I was with her and forgive her nothing when I was away from her.
I had told Janelle once before that I loved her, and she had told me not to say something like that, that she knew that
I didn’t mean it. I wasn’t sure I meant it, so I said OK. I didn’t say it now. But sometime during the night we both woke up and we made love and she said very seriously in the darkness, “I love you.”
Jesus Christ. The whole business is so goddamn cornball. It’s so much bullshit that they use to make you buy a new kind of shaving cream or fly a special airline. But then why is it so effective? After that everything changed. The act of sex became special. I literally never even saw another woman. And it was enough just to see her to get sexually excited. When she met me at the plane, I’d grab her behind the cars in the parking lot to touch her breasts and legs and kiss her twenty times before we drove to the hotel
I couldn’t wait. Once, when she protested laughingly, I told her about the polar bears. About how a male polar bear could react only to the scent of one particular female polar bear and sometimes had to wander over a thousand square miles of Arctic ice before he could fuck her. And that was why there were so few polar bears. She was surprised at that, and then she caught on that I was kidding and punched me. But I told her really that was the effect she had on me. That it was not love or that she was so great-looking and smart and everything that I had ever dreamed about in a woman since I was a kid. It was not that at all. I was not vulnerable to that corny bullshit of love and soul mates and all that. It was quite simply that she had the right smell; her body gave off the right odor for me. It was simple and nothing to brag about.
The great thing was that she understood. She knew I wasn’t being cute. That I was rebelling against my surrender to her and to the cliche of romantic love. She just hugged me and said, “OK, OK.” and when I said, “Don’t take too many baths,” she just hugged me again and said, “OK.”
Because really it was the last thing in the world I wanted. I was happily married. I loved my wife more than anyone else in the world at one time, and still liked her better than any female I ever met even when I started being unfaithful. So now for the first time I felt guilty with both of them. And stories about love had always irritated me.
Well, we were more complicated than polar bears. And the catch in my fairy tale, which I didn’t point out to Janelle, was that the female polar bear did not have the same problem as the male.
And then, of course, I pulled the usual shitty things that people in love do. I slyly asked around about her. Did she date producers and stars to get parts? Did she have other affairs? Did she have another boyfriend? In other words, was she a cunt and fucking a million other guys at the drop of a hat? It’s funny the things you do when you fall for a woman. You would never do it with a guy you liked. There you always trusted your own judgment, your own gut feeling. With women you were always mistrustful. There is something really shitty about being in love.
And if I had gotten some real dirt on her, I wouldn’t have fallen in love. How is that for a shitty romanticism? No wonder so many women hate men now. My only excuse was that I had been a writing hermit so many years and not smart about women to begin with. And then I couldn’t get any scandal on her. She didn’t go out to parties. She wasn’t linked with any actors. In fact, for a girl who had appeared and worked in movies pretty often very little was known about her. She didn’t run with any of the movie crowds or go to any of the eating places where everybody went. She never appeared in the gossip columns. In short, she was the girl of a square hermit’s dream. She even liked to read. What more could I want?