She craned her mouth toward his, rubbing the penis dutifully, losing her rhythm occasionally. “Say more,” she murmured.
“About the grass?”
“No, no. . the other. .”
“Yeah, baby? You like the talking? Alright then. . Listen, it’s all a wash. The rules they’ve been setting up this whole time. The rules will never paper over the abyss, never get it out of our heads, and now the holes are showing up. The fraying. But the holes are deep, unfathomable. The expectations are tumbling down. People don’t know which way to go. The crybabies yell about ending the war, and they don’t see that it doesn’t even matter, the whole charade will end in war and famine and misery. Keats said it — nature and youth and suck at the beauty before it rots. The kids get high, wait for the parents to die. Ha!” He laughed at his own rhyme.
It struck B. even in her drunkenness that his disquisition about non-believing might be just another form of believing, another attempt at “papering over.” But the scotch swallowed the validity of this thought. Anyhow, she preferred the sureness of his authoritative voice. She wanted it to keep talking.
“What does your wife think of the war?” she asked.
“This wife obsession is a serious bummer, as our friends would say.” He reached for his empty glass on the coffee table and licked the inside rim. “Never enough,” he sighed. “To answer your question, my wife does not think about the war. She may give you an opinion but she does not spend any qualitative part of her days pondering it.”
“How do you know?”
“Do you think of the war?”
“No.”
“Exactly.”
“But I might if I wanted to. . I could.” Anger rose up weakly through the alcohol. She wondered momentarily if he’d slipped her something stronger; but this thought departed. She struggled to her elbows and he pushed her back down.
“Look, she’s not here, baby, don’t worry. She has what she wants. She has her Ivy Leaguer, her little slice of bohemia. She reads Kant and sketches her nudes and irons my shirts and cooks up spaghetti. She likes it all just fine. She doesn’t concern herself with every part of the arrangement.” He placed B.’s hand, which in her distraction had stopped massaging, back on his shaft and led it up and down more forcefully. “Now where was I? Hmmmm, yes, our children of the flowers and peace and dropping out. Maybe they’re trying to live Keats, I’ll give them that—”
She sat upright suddenly, pulling her hand out of his crotch. “—it really shouldn’t be such a difficult thing, you know, to walk around the city. To daydream. I realize that.” Blurred thoughts had been gathering as he spoke. “I want to be like the others. I don’t want to be different. I don’t know why the carsickness comes. I hate it. It’s horrible. And I realize the things I’ve wanted to do lately are strange, could be seen as strange. . but they don’t seem strange to me. I don’t know what else to do.
“And that’s the problem, you see. Nothing feels safe. The banks do, but nothing else. I don’t know why.” He was jerking himself off now as she spoke, grabbing at her breasts. But she was not aware of him. “I need to get to a new place. I thought maybe it was the valley, or a kind of house. If I could only get to this new place, it would all make sense.”
She was so lost in thought she didn’t notice him coming until he spurted his semen onto her lap. She sat a bit stunned, hazy. He hung his head, shuddering for several moments. Then he got up wordlessly and came back with a kitchen towel and tossed it to her.
“In the end it’ll all be shot,” he said, picking up where he had left off, as if he’d spilled some milk on her. “All the old rules won’t matter. Transcendence and pleasure and unboundedness, that’ll be the new society.”
“But that can’t be it.”
“. . making love and rapping. . ” He hiked up her dress and pulled down her underpants.
“No, that’s not right either. I don’t want that.” She felt an urgent desire to get back to something. They had been on the verge of answering all the questions. Of uncovering a transformative truth. But after wiping off the semen, the room overtook her again, the alien objects and the assault of words and nudity. As his fingers worked between her legs, she had no energy to fight, against the questions, the incongruities. “Yes, maybe you’re right, maybe. .”
“You’re lovely,” he whispered.
“No, not that. Everyone says that. Talk about the fear again. . the grinding.”
Later she could not remember when they had switched to wine or moved to the bedroom. She could not recall any more of what they said, except that she’d kept wanting to get back to the earlier thing, the real conversation. She seemed to remember having his penis in her mouth. She seemed to remember his waking up in the middle of the night and whispering in her ear, “Take me with you,” as he held her. But she was not sure this wasn’t a dream.
Her first awareness the next morning was the searing hangover, then the throbbing foot. The wound now pulpy and sore. It took a moment of staring at the door and the white-and-black-checkered rug to piece together where she was. The university man slept with his mouth open. She listened to his breath sputter like a boy’s. After several minutes of lying there, she brought her hand to his cheek. His eyes opened. He blinked at B., clearly attempting to place her, then launched into a hacking cough. Eventually he settled red-faced into the pillow.
“Well, hello,” he said. His voice was tired, neutral.
He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. “Well. We got a little sidetracked from your medical care. We need to put that gauze on your foot. We’ll fix you up and get you back on the road.”
“I’m not in any hurry. I can stay awhile.” She thought she might tell him about the checks. Maybe he could help her be done with them.
“Well, no, you can’t stay.” He spoke to the ceiling, his voice still neutral. “I’m married.”
“I realize that,” she replied. A distant sinking sensation went through her. “I thought maybe we could talk more. I like talking with you.”
He did not move his eyes from the ceiling. “I have some things I need to get to. My wife is coming back soon and there are some things around the house I promised I’d work on. . ”
He went on about the house, its gutters or hot water heater or some other domestic concern. She lay rigid, understanding she would need to move quickly, to locate her dress, slip it on without zipping. But for the moment she did not want to move. A Johnny Mercer song came into her head. She waited inside “I’m Old Fashioned” for some clarity or consolation; there was only her aching body in the bed.
“Good luck on your trip,” the professor said abruptly, apparently at the end of his monologue. Then she knew she must go.
The house in the morning no longer looked quaint and comforting but disordered and stained, unwashed plates and cups on bookshelves, crumpled boxer shorts on the floor, discolorations in the rug. The charcoal nudes unmistakably thrusting, hostile. She found her heels near the couch. The African mask mocking her with its foreign, turned-up mouth and slitted eyes.
She ran through the campus, her foot a violent sting. The Mustang was not where she thought it was. She limped down the first street and then the next, identical in its dumpiness, and began to panic — had the car been stolen, towed? Why did it all look the same? — until she found the car dirty and untouched on the first street and wondered how she had missed it. She sat hunched at the wheel. The carsickness was a single crushing shot through the hangover and wounded foot.
She waited in the Mustang for the bank to open. A white banner draped across the top of the doors offering free toasters to new students. There was a foul smell in the car from the uneaten tacos but she did not want to handle them before going in, so she sat in the heat with the odor. She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror, catching the glint of the diamond brooch in the narrow rectangle, the mussed hair and dried makeup.