I could feel my mouth smiling, and it was a great glory and a pride to bring her into it, to make her feel such a torrent of pleasure. I was a part of the great engine of the city, and I took her through all of it, through the ultimate clenching and bursting and kitten cries, and down into the softness that changed her sweaty face, back to the awareness of here and now and me, so that she looked into my eyes and whispered, “I love you so much. So much. So much.”
“Marty, honest to Christ, you are going to drive me out of my skull! Din’t you hear one word I was saying? Great! Maybe you recall the name Debbie. It means something to you? Good! Congratulations! Debbie is our daughter. I knew you’d remember her if you tried, Marty. In three days she’s fourteen. What she wants is a wiglet. A good one. From human hair, yet, hand tied. There’s a special sale. Thirty-two fifty plus tax. What I was asking when you had your ears turned off, I’ve got twelve fifty out of the house money. Can you come up with twenty more for this daughter you can hardly remember seeing around the house? Marvelous! Real generosity from practically a stranger to us all lately. Honest to God, I don’t know what’s happening to you lately. Last month you go to take off your necktie and you take off everything. Wednesday night you don’t come to bed and you don’t come to bed, and finey I come out to wake you up. But do I have to? No. There you are in your lounger chair, eyes wide open, and what are you watching? You are watching a big snowstorm and listening to a big loud hiss because the channel was off the air maybe almost an hour. Marty, you sit around here like a big lump of dead meat. If I tell you maybe the kitchen is in flames you would nod your head and smile and say ‘That’s nice, Glad.’ Can you talk to me? Do you want to talk to me? Is it trouble on the job, Marty? Is maybe that McCracken leaning on you again like two years ago over something that wasn’t your fault? Do you feel sick or anything? You should get a checkup. You eat and you don’t know what you’re eating. Do I hear you laugh anymore? Like never! Do you want to go anywhere, do anything? Excuses. Too tired. Honey, there is something wrong with your energy. We’re seventeen years married two months from tomorrow. You’re forty. I’m thirty-nine. That’s the prime of life, right? Hah! Are you still listening? Do I still have your attention, sir? Good. Thank you so much. You want to know how many times you come over into my bed in the last four months? Want to guess? Three times! I keep track. I put marks on the calendar. Such a great lover! What a big treat for me those times you do me a favor. Climb on, fall off, and the next minute a big snore. Listen, damn you, Marty, I am a normal healthy woman and I got normal healthy sex urges, and I am not about to retire from being a woman all of a sudden just because you stop being a man. Something has got to be wrong with you. All of a sudden you are a nothing, a lump. You are not even here anymore. So go to a doctor, because there are only two answers. I am not stupid, baby. I think it better turn out that you are sick, because if you’re not, then you are getting it someplace else. You turned forty years old six months ago. Seven months ago. So men get funny ideas when they’re all of a sudden forty years old. And it’s the springtime of the year. But don’t think I am going to be sweet and understanding if it comes out you’ve got yourself some cheap juicy little piece of ass maybe half your age you met servicing one of those accounts of yours. I swear before God and all the angels, Marty, if I found out you’ve been banging some young kid, I am going to show you what hell on earth is all about. And you better believe it. You hear me? You listening to me, Marty?”
Another strange and special part of being with Andrea is the feeling of being like one of those... I can’t think of what they call them. A long word. They go way off someplace and live with some native tribe and write down everything about customs and so on.
It is so magical and strange just to watch her, to watch all the woman-things she does. It is as if I’d never married Glad, never been married at all, never been with a woman at all, and had no idea of all the little things they do. Somehow, watching Andrea is like watching a little girl having a pretend party, filling little tin teacups with sand.
I got to her place at three yesterday, and she had to leave at four thirty for a get-together of a bunch of her girl friends from the place where she used to work. She said if I didn’t want her to go she wouldn’t. But I told her to go ahead. She should get out more, I think. What kind of a life is it for her, waiting around to see if I can finish up early enough to come by and make love with her before I have to turn in the day’s stuff at the office? Besides, she had already arranged to take that night off from her job where she works from six until two in the morning, cashier in an all-night cafeteria. That neighborhood is getting rougher. She has only one block to walk to the subway. Smart guys are always making a pass when they pay their tab. One of them could be sick in the head and wait outside for her. Or maybe some punks could come in and try to knock off the place, all zonkered up on speed, and she doesn’t open the cash drawer fast enough. And girls get raped on the subway. You keep reading about it. I keep thinking about those things and wish she didn’t have to work.
But I couldn’t swing it. I have enough trouble coming up with the sixty-five a month for the half of the rent that the girl she shared the apartment with used to pay. I don’t know why it seems strange to me that she should work. People work. When I was twenty-two I felt grown up. I was grown up. But she seems to be playing at being a grown-up. She’s a kid in a lot of ways. She’s got no sense of time or money. She is dumb especially about money, always running out before pay day. So she hits me for five or ten, and a few times it’s been twenty. She was trying to pay it back for a while, four dollars a week, but there was no point in taking it because she just ran out sooner.
Yesterday, I stayed there in her bed propped up on both the pillows against the headboard, with a comer of the sheet pulled across my middle. I watched her as if I was taking notes and taking pictures, getting it all down because it was something precious and rare and would never happen again.
When she came out of her shower to get ready to go and be with her friends, she was naked and all dried off. She took her hair out and gave me a little smile that said she was glad I was there and watching her. She sat on the bench in front of the dressing table, and lighted up her mirror. It is one of those mirrors with little frosted bulbs all the way around it, like actresses have. I bought it for her to celebrate two months of being in love.
Being in love started in that way nobody ever believes until it happens to them. She was new on the day shift at the cafeteria. It is one of the accounts I service. So she was just another blond girl in the city. Just there. On that account I pick up the old tapes and take a reading off the tape in the register and mark it with a check mark and my initials. You have to lift a little gate to expose the tape. I had to crowd into the little space with her and wait until she took the checks and money from a short line of people leaving, hitting the changemaker. I watched her hands on the keys. Small hands, very smooth skin, and short quick fingers. She smelled fresh and sweet. I could see the shape of her cheek, how glossy-smooth and straight her hair fell, with a kind of heaviness about it, like that thick silk that costs a lot of money.