Fred sat up in the bed, feeling foolish. He had finally moved toward Marion on the couch and started to kiss her. He had tried to put a lot of movement and passion into it, but it felt fake, and Marion saved the moment by smiling. “I think we’d better just get into bed,” she said. “We’re not strangers.”
He had undressed in the bedroom, their old bedroom, unchanged from when he had last slept there, while Marion disappeared into the bathroom. He wondered whether she was planning something, going to come out in some sort of sexy nightgown. He hoped not. It would seem pathetic, just like his maneuver on the couch. Whatever their situation, they certainly weren’t courting.
She didn’t. She came out in her robe, naked underneath, walking to the bed and shedding it before quickly crawling under the covers and snuggling into his arms. “What were you doing in there?”
“Putting in my diaphragm,” she said. “I didn’t want to stop to do it later.”
He had always complained about the effects of breaking off foreplay for the sake of contraception, so this too was another sweet attempt on her part to make things between them amicable. To improve on the past. It was their enemy. All the things they had done and the way they had done them were to be avoided. He felt the weight of her head on his chest heavily. The task semed too great.
He shook off this feeling, moved her head away, and again began kissing with mock passion. She went along this time, brushing a leg against his penis while he pressed his upper thigh against her groin. After a while the self-consciousness passed, he felt aroused, and she seemed to be also. He began to hope again that it might work.
He threw the covers off them. The lights were still on— she had usually insisted they be turned off and he realized that the fact they weren’t was another concession to him. He looked at her body. She kept her eyes closed, her hands urging him to return. He looked at her belly, her flabby maternal stomach, her thick bush of hair. It was the body of a real woman, not the models of magazines, but the real comfortable female form of nature. He loved it. Staring at it in the bright light, leaning down to kiss it, moving his hands under her soft substantial buttock, feeling the warmth and give and pliancy of her fat felt good.
She was tensing against his investigations, embarrassed (he realized for the first time) by her body, assuming he didn’t want it. But he did! He kissed and moved back to look, seeing things he had never noticed, feeling her sex, utterly different. Soft and warm. Home. He wanted to be inside her. Kept safe inside. No longer fighting the hard ungiving world.
She seemed relieved when he entered her. She hugged him to her gratefully. The ease of her body seemed designed for him, from the glove of her wet vagina to the soft pillows of her breasts. To be inside her forever in this blissful peace was all he wanted, all he wanted from life and the world; acceptance and comfort; a place to be, nothing more, just be, without effort or pain.
Marion urged him with her hips. He began to move. He felt reproved by her movement, assumed she had been displeased by his stillness, his willingness to remain parked inside. He moved. Withdrew and pressed back in hard. She liked that. For all her gentleness, she liked him to move hard and fast. Had said so in therapy in fact, complained (to his astonishment) that he liked foreplay too much, that she liked to screw vigorously.
She had tried so hard — shouldn’t he? He pushed himself, pulling out and then slamming back in, each time harder, surprised that she liked the force, and never reacted with pain, even though it felt to him that their pelvic bones must be bruised and battered by now.
And the itch had begun. The restless tickling yearning of his penis, desperate for more and more sensation while he felt its liquids gather and hope for escape. He tried somehow to restrain it despite the powerful tease of moving out and then quickly into the softest, most desirable home in the world. When he felt the cool air on his balls and most of the length of his penis, only the head peeking inside at the warm fires, the longing to return was overwhelming. And then the relief, after the collision of their privates, the sweet relief of complete docking in the harbor was so quickly taken away by her desire for more and more and more …
He started to come without warning. He tried to cut it off, freezing his movements, but she pulled at him, and the liquid dribbled out of him guiltily, guests skulking out early from a party, hiding their escape from the host.
The fuel was gone but she wanted to continue. He pushed in and out, praying he would stay hard. Suddenly everything felt uncomfortable. Her substantial thighs pressing against him were hot and irritating. Her big belly and wide hips seemed too crowded to penetrate. Each time he tried to press farther in, they seemed to frustrate him, the goal of her pelvic bone receding. I’m losing it, he thought, listening to her breathing to judge if she was near climax. He reached down with a hand to infiltrate it in the traffic jam below and speed things up, but she angrily grabbed his hand and moved it away, putting her hands on his ass and pushing him in at her, irritably.
He pushed. He pushed. There was no goddamn way past all the flesh and hair. Everything was awkward. No place to rest his head: having to hold the upper part of his body up, as though he were exercising, not making love.
She began to moan. They were choked sounds — coughs repressed at a concert. Quick, short sounds increasing in frequency. He gathered himself for a final effort and pushed in hard — feeling nothing, the bottom half of his body numb — but she did let out one long last satisfied moan. The tension in her body evaporated and it was over. Thank God.
By the time Lois called back, he knew. After her hello, * he made the accusation immediately: “You’re in love with somebody else,” he said coldly.
“Uh … yeah,” she agreed,
“All right,” he said. “Good-bye.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, and laughed. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“I’m not hanging up. But I’m not kidding.”
“You can’t blame me!”
“I’m not blaming you.”
“You dumped me. You didn’t even call to say you were dumping me!”
“I didn’t dump you. Jesus Christ, what a phrase! I needed time to think. I told you that.”
“Oh, I see,” she answered sarcastically, challenging him. “And now you’ve figured it out?”
Well, she had him there. He was dead wrong, as wrong as a human being could be: his position was illogical, arrogant, deceitful, probably insincere, certainly selfish. “Who is he?” Tony asked. “How serious is this?”
“Uh … what do you mean? What do you — I’m not gonna report to you. What’s the matter with you? I really expected you to have …” She stopped.
“What? Have more class?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Guess again, honey. I’m just as stupid and mean as everybody else.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” she answered.
This was a mistake. Probably she had just begun a romance. It could fall apart, fail to move beyond dating, he might even be able to break it up — there were lots of possibilities. The nicer he acted about it, the more points he would have racked up for the day, the inevitable day, when she would seek more adventure, and he would be back in the game. It happened to everybody, to every relationship, to every marriage, it would happen to her and this guy. How could he be a major writer and be so inept at dealing with people? He knew them inside and out. “I’m jealous,” he said quietly, convinced this was a lie, a manipulation. The silence on the other end told him he had finally come up with the right approach. “I’m still in love with you.”