We waited until Theresa had walked up the stairway to the train and disappeared, and then I drove off.
“Poor dumb cluck,” Martha said.
“Martha, I’m going to take you home. I’m going home myself—” She wasn’t listening, however, and I didn’t feel I had the strength to repeat myself.
“The poor jerk got herself pregnant.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m going to collapse of exhaustion myself. I’m taking you home, then I’m going back to my place.”
“Oh yes?”
“I’m a dying man, sweetheart. Honestly, I’m dead.” She didn’t answer. “You come tomorrow,” I said, “to my place. Doesn’t Annie LaSmith come tomorrow?”
“I promised Markie I’d take him to buy a Christmas tree tomorrow.”
“Let Annie stay with him — you can come—”
“I promised him.”
“Okay. I’m just too dead tonight.”
In front of her building I did not even turn off the motor.
“All day I’ve been saying to myself: tonight I am going to have illicit relations with Gabriel Wallach.”
“That makes me very proud,” I said, “but my throat feels as though it’s been ripped open.”
“I had Abercrombie’s deliver a new set of whips and thumbscrews.”
“Martha, every night you roll over and go to sleep. Every night I have to go out into this weather and drive home and try to get a few hours sleep—”
She was whistling; nothing like eight hours of work to pep her up.
“I’ve got two classes to teach in the morning,” I said. “I just haven’t the strength.”
“I’m not asking you to lift weights, poor baby.”
I kissed her, and she said, “Come up for just an hour.”
“But my body fails me …”
She took my hand and touched it to her cheek. “Why don’t you just leave everything to me,” she said.
“Oh sweet Martha—”
“Why don’t you just come with me, all right?”
“You sound like a tart, baby.”
“See? Already you’re stimulating your imagination. Come.”
So I followed her up the stairs; before she placed the key in the lock, she turned and put her hand on me.
“Oh,” she said, “that’s so nice and sweet.”
“Martha, I’ve got to tell you that it’s got no more wind in it than a choir boy’s. It’s spiritless, it’s humbled and limp—”
“It’s sweet humbled and limp.”
I went into her bedroom and she continued down the hall to the children’s room, where she turned off the night lamp. I heard her close the door leading to Sissy’s room. Sitting on the blanket in the dark, the feel of the quilt and the sheets and the mattress under my hands filled me with awe. I waited, and then I was sinking, and then, I suppose, I was out.
When my eyes opened, it took me several minutes to see who was moving in the dark. Beneath me and above me I felt the clean white sheets I had so desired; someone had even been kind enough to remove my clothes. I raised my head a little and saw Martha by the window; she had one foot on a stool, and was bending forward, pulling down her stockings; the way in which her breasts hung from her body sent through my mind thoughts of flowers, mermaids, cows, things female. But I did not want to possess Martha or a nasturtium or a Guernsey; I wanted only sleep.
Martha’s hands were on the flesh of her hips; they ran down over her stomach and were touching her thighs. She was looking toward me in the bed, and it was as though I were waiting for some decision of hers. Even the furniture in the bedroom seemed altered, because between us something seemed to be being altered. Since Thanksgiving I had done the wooing, I had done the undressing, the caressing, and on the hard and serious work we had both pitched in. We had been dogged and conventional, we had proceeded step by step, until we had both clutched, and hung on, and then fallen away into sleep. To please one another we had had to do nothing at the expense of our own separate pleasures; we had been uncompromising and we had been lucky.
But now Martha stood by the window looking toward me for what seemed a very long time, pronouncing words I could not make out, and I was overcome with exhaustion; though I reached up to her, saying I would have to go, I don’t think my head ever left the bed. I dropped away, beyond hallucination or dream, and when I did rise up, it was never to regain power or lucidity; I was simply there, and Martha’s hair was down across my legs. I raised my head — such a feather, such a weight — and I saw her hands, saw her face, possessing me miles and miles away.
“Oh Gabe,” she said, “my Gabe—”
I left her there alone, just lips, just hands, and was consumed not in sensation, but in a limpness so total and blinding, that I was no more than a wire of consciousness stretched across a void. Martha’s hair came raking up over me; she moved over my chest, my face, and I saw her now, her jaw set, her eyes demanding, and beneath my numb exterior, I was tickled by something slatternly, some slovenliness in the heavy form that pinned me down. I reached out for it, to touch the slovenliness—
“Just lie still,” I heard her say, “don’t touch, just still—”
She showed neither mercy then, nor tenderness, nor softness, nothing she had ever shown before; and yet, dull as I was, cut off in my tent of fever and fatigue, I felt a strange and separate pleasure. I felt cared for, labored over; I felt used. Above, she was me now, and below I was her, and however I fell away from consciousness, or floated up toward light, always, beating on me, was Martha. Beating, beating, and then rising up and away, and wordlessly calling back of her delight.
Everything is right.
What I remember of that night are those three words. Out of proportion sometimes, sometimes not in sequence, but those three words bubbling through me; what I remember is my sense that a rhythm in my life was being realized, and a rhythm in Martha’s too. I remember — as night went on and morning came — a greed of hers that went beyond pleasure, and on my part what I remember is the abdication of all will. For a while perhaps she was me and I her, but at some point that morning all distinctions belonged to another world. We were sexless as any tree or rock, liquid and unencumbered as a stream or a spring — and yet so connected one to the other that when I pumped within her, plunging into a final dizzying exhaustion, I might have been some inner organ of her own. Man woman mother child — all distinction melted away.
Later a bell rang. When I opened my eyes, Martha was at the side of the bed, wrapping herself in a robe. Outside the darkness was just beginning to lift. I knew I had to leave, that it was time again; but it was Martha who left the room, and I let myself float backwards.
Martha was pushing at me. “Gabe, Gabe—”
But I couldn’t, I simply couldn’t pull myself up. Martha moved into bed beside me. “Gabe,” she said softly.
And then there was a knock at the bedroom door. Martha jumped up in bed, and the door opened. Limp as I was, I went even limper.
But the face in the doorway was not a child’s. It was the battered face of an old Negro woman, and she was moving into the room with a cup and a saucer. “Here’s your coffee, darlin’—” she began.
Then she saw me. “Oh,” she said. I had been edging the sheet up around my chin, and now I lowered it an inch and, infirmly, smiled. The woman took three big strides forward and placed the cup down on the night table. When she turned and left, I tried to push out of bed, but it was as though I’d been worked on by a carpenter during the night; hammers, chisels, planes, and screwdrivers all seemed to have had a go at my body.
“I’m sick as a dog,” I said.