“Hi, it’s me. What’s your room?” he blurted at the sound of Lois’ voice.
“Twenty-one forty-two,” she answered in a startled tone.
He dashed across the narrow lobby to the elevator banks and told the uniformed boy the floor number, praying the doors would close quickly before anyone else had a chance to enter. Even in the relative security of the twenty-first floor’s hallway, Tony moved quickly, glancing at the brass-plated oval room numbers in search of Lois. He found her waiting, the door open, at the end of the hall. He trotted to her, sweeping her in his arms and kicking the door closed behind him, his fearful actions making a good imitation of passionate desperation.
She hugged him hard, as if to say, “I’m here, darling, you have me” to his wild run of longing. His misunderstood performance now began to work its magic on him. He buried his head in her shoulder and nuzzled like a devoted pet greeting a long-lost master. Clasped in her thin, muscled arms, pressed against her tense bony body, he felt welcomed. At home. Celebrated. Cheered. She loves me, he thought, swelling with pride, and loving her back not out of mere politeness but out of gratitude.
There was desperation in their lovemaking. Impatient, they didn’t even strip before coupling. Both her jeans and his pants were around their ankles, her blouse was unbuttoned and open but still on her arms, and though her breasts were exposed, the empty bra was on her, lewdly covering ribs and stomach.
He entered her with almost no preliminaries. She urged him to, unzipping his pants and pulling desperately at them in an awkward attempt to lower them. When he did, she took hold of his penis and guided it into an already warm welcome and then put her long fingers on each buttock and pulled him toward her, her back arching, her eyes closing, with a quiet moan of relief and satisfaction.
Tony withdrew a little and then pushed hard, not stopping when he was fully inside and felt her hard pelvic bone press on his, but shoving angrily against the impasse. Lois opened her eyes, like someone coming blissfully to consciousness in heaven, free at last from the world’s cares and evils, to look in his eyes. “I missed you,” she said. It was the first words they exchanged.
A part of his mind, yearning to answer her truthfully, searched for a summary to the complicated feelings he had about coming here to this physical consummation of the emotional adultery begun in LA ten months before. He had fantasized this illicit sex so vividly for so long that to leave it unfulfilled at the altar of his dreams, unwed to reality, had seemed cowardly and stingy. In LA she had seemed fascinated by him; he wanted more of her intense interest. He wanted that distillation of what an audience provides en masse: uncritical silence and admiration for the playwright’s soul, ideas, and feelings. He had become fond, through months of phone calls and letters, of her outer hardness, so different from Betty’s genteel manners: and Lois’ inner yielding to him was just as different from Betty’s secret aloofness. Lois transformed him into a new person, less cocky and sure of himself about the world, but utterly in command of the emotional war. She had broken her sword and surrendered to him in a way Betty never would or could.
Betty would die fighting to maintain her dignity, a pretense of negotiated equality: Do you love me? Then I love you. Will you help me? Then I will help you. And so on. in the dull negotiations respectable people conduct, believing that emotions can run on schedules, picking up anger here and depositing understanding there, arriving at a terminus of happy unity. For Tony, the train never seemed to go anywhere. Instead, with Betty he often felt alone, a lawyer seated across an oak table from another skilled logician, nitpicking over contractual details. I want to have a baby. I’m not ready. Let’s not go to their party. I want to. They don’t like me. Yes, they do — you don’t like them. That’s right, I don’t like them and neither do you. I can’t think of an idea for a new play. You will, sweetie. How do you know? You always do — I need a book for the spring list. Why don’t you publish my collected plays? Ha, ha.
“I missed you,” Tony answered Lois in a whisper and resumed his movements in and out, avoiding her eyes, because they looked at him with sad longing, as though their image of eventual separation loomed behind his loving body, so that each movement seemed to contain both comfort and sorrow. She pushed him in harder and harder each time, impressing him on her, as though she could stamp herself with his devotion permanently. Soon she sighed and groaned with satisfaction, her chest heaving, her feet trying to untangle themselves from her pants so she could wrap her legs around him for the final moments of orgasm.
He was amazed at her easy climax. With it, he felt abstracted. His penis felt at home, comfortable with its occupation of her. This was unusual. Normally he felt the pleasures of the vagina too awesome to control; a little boy, he lost control and peed his passion away too soon. He would repeat the act a little while after ejaculation, less out of desire to prove virility (he told himself) than a wish to screw calmly. But seconds always felt like second best. There was a loss of intensity. Now, with Lois satisfied and concentrating on him, her hands playing up and down his backside, her hips working, even the walls of her cunt contracting and loosening, her mouth teasing his neck, his mouth, soothing his eyes, there was both: the miraculous joy of surrounding warmth, an unbearable overload of pleasure, but also the calm sense of ease, unhurried passion, controlled, building, pulling him out, out of himself, widening from his groin, vibrating through his legs, washing up his belly, breaking down his observing mind, blinding his sight …
He slept. For an instant the narrator was silenced and he floated unconscious in her. Someone sang. No! Moaned. It’s me! It’s me! Oh God! I love, I love, I …
He absolutely lost controclass="underline" he bucked against her like a wild stallion, making sounds of joy and triumph to the hotel walls, an animal seeding its mate with blind, agonized joy.
When he fell against her again, utterly drained, and noticed the sweat, the color of the carpet, he felt himself again. He understood he was in the Sherry Netherland, lying on the floor of a room with his pants cuffing his ankles. He could picture what the sight would look like to an audience: an automatic laugh, the sight gag to be revealed to a cuckolded husband or a shrewish wife: or the automatic reveal in a drama, the scales falling from the eyes of a betrayed husband, or the ultimate humiliation of a neglected wife. He felt stupid. Small. An easily dismissed category of human. The arrogant, self-serving bourgeois artist, without scruples or shame. He felt shame at his lack of it; he felt belittled by his own condescension to himself. Appalled that he felt appalled. Guilty that he was guilty. And, finally, remembering how completely he had lost himself, howling like an animal while his prick jerked its liquid into her, as though she were merely a vessel, he felt embarrassed.
He glanced at her shyly. Lois was smirking proudly. There was love in her eyes, but there was also pride, the look of someone who had secret knowledge. The confident look of a person in power.
Tony laughed. “I guess I enjoyed that.”
“It was great,” she said, her proud smile widening even more.
He realized she thought of it as her achievement, a tribute he had paid to her. He had been shamed by the revelation that he loved sex so much, that it could so overpower him. He didn’t think of it as having much to do with Lois.
“Do you always come so loudly?” she asked playfully.
Tony wondered at this strange moment. There was almost nothing in his memory (at least at that moment) of life with Betty that could compare to the nakedness of this. Lois was asking if she possessed him, owned a greater percentage than his wife’s holdings. He had spent only a few days with Lois, and this was his first sexual experience with her, and yet she could ask him that. And he felt perfectly at ease answering: “No.”