He tugged his wife’s hand. His eyes began to water, and at first he thought it was the wind, but then he realized it was the words. He told her everything.
*
Make love to me. Of all the unlikely responses… and with all the sisterly obligations due up in the next hour or so, with dinner and the boys’ bedtime due up…. Yet as soon as she and Kit got back in the house, her face pinched tight and his spongy as a baby’s, Bette lead the way to their room. Once they were up by the salted windows again she hooked him into a hug, close enough to have him retasting the low tide in the smell of their woolens. Then: Make love to me. Please Kit, now. The asking alone sounded a bit off — she almost never asked, in so many words. Kit glanced around the room, at once noting three or four good reasons why they shouldn’t, the unlocked door and the men grumbling downstairs and the still-unmade bed. The mattress was horsehair, at least half a century old.
She had her coat off, her jeans open, one hand at his belt while the other drew his fingers up under her sweater. Her nipple was warm but stiff, and hands and flesh and eyes she had him. The Monster-Net.
The room’s key had been lost long ago, but with a quick jostle Kit heaved the bureau against the door. The mahogany piece thumped into place, elephantine, gashing the doorjamb’s multiple paint jobs. Christ, were they going to knock the place apart? Still Bette had him netted. She had him hooked by a belt loop, a zipper pull, the mushrooming head of his cock. It was a game and not a game at all, a mess of psychology you got free of by diving in still deeper. Bette folded up, making herself an easier reach in undone clothes. Kneeling on the edge of the bed, she started to suck on Kit while his feet were still on the floor. The springs and bed frame screeched and jangled while she hunkered down into a mouth-first bundle. Knock the place apart.
“I don’t have Trojans,” he gasped. “I didn’t think—”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t care.”
Her sucking, his diving was all they needed of foreplay. His unrubbered cock was too serious for that, his confession too recent.
They couldn’t lose their awareness of the Cottage, the mattress, the cackling wood, and in Kit this triggered images from the ranch where he’d been raised. He flashed on freshly dug potatoes in burlap sacks, on the Jello-and-hay odor of a foaling. Bette moaned, he whispered—darling, the best—yet these guttural breathings seemed to belong with Kit’s memories, as if she’d been back in Minnesota with him. The notion played just perceptibly through his windings against her cunt, through the throb in his injured temple. Because why couldn’t she have been there, at his uncles’ ranch? The time a husband and wife spent at sex stretched way past the norms, didn’t it? Packed with a thousand adjustments, replayed both out loud and in dreams, the time a husband and wife spent at sex expanded out and away according to rules all its own. And he and Bette had put in a lot of time, by now. A whole childhood and adolescence of foreplay and afterwards. Marriage, as Kit knew it, could include the cackling of this seaside manse, the old money showing off, while at the same time it shared his memory of feeling his way up into a mare’s birth canal in order to yank out a stuck foal. Why not? He and Bette were doing it even now, cackling and reaching. Upright on their knees, they clung hip to hip.
Kit rocked with long tremors, kiss to cock. Bette’s look was all tatterdemalion. Here were handfuls of buttock, there a dissolving down-the-throat moan.
They went through spasms for a while, jamming after the best angle. Such a shape they made, upright, the lovers’ capital Y. Y for Yes, Yeah, You. She’d been right to insist.
Afterwards Kit lay fingering his stitches with one hand, the other on the thigh she’d thrown across him. The stretch-fabric of their life as a couple felt as if it were drifting down over them, a vast parachute material, tangible in a thousand gentle rumples. He began making sentences, fumbling, not quite thinking. The talk came out as the marriage-feeling was reeled back in, a compensatory mechanism. Occasionally his sweeter nothings made Bette fish tenderly along his hip, her crotch nudging his bone line.
“Second time,” he found himself saying. “No Trojan, no precautions. The second time.”
She raised her eyes, but it was dark by now.
“Think about it.”
The only noise was a squeak against his breastbone: her wet face, moving. Wet, yes, and he should have known what was happening the moment it started. His wife was crying, he should have known. Her shoulders quivered and she buried her face in his chest.
“Aw Betts.” He locked his arms around her. “Darling.”
Was this his deficient social skills again? Another dumb farm boy move?
“I love you. I love you.”
No answer except the squeaks between them, skin on skin.
*
1/14, 50 minutes:
Subject anxious. Reports dream activity. Rises from couch
At street window—“Life, life, one mess after another.”
Dream of paper sack. Bus station, everybody reading paper, he has sack on lap. Can’t let go of sack. Sack seams coming apart, leaking blood.
Visibly anxious. Neck massage.
MEMO: KV Story, 2nd rewrite
I see a property, guys. I see a majordocudrama. I see Emmy.
Guys, you got me wicked psyched. Wicked psyched. The trailers for KV Story, they’ll be like sixty seconds on the hot button. And the beauty is, we can play the integrity number. Hard-hitting real-life drama fresh off the streets.
Kit had thought he’d spend Saturday in the library. In winter, the room was the most livable in the house. Walls of packed shelves provided a leathery coziness, and the fireplace still worked. Ceci had even vacuumed the carpet. The boys needed a clean palace to play, the sister explained. You didn’t want anybody coming home sick.
But before lunch, Saturday, she’d left the boys with Kit. She and Bette had gone into town to talk. Bette’s idea.
“I think I’d like, oh, a glass of wine with my sister,” his wife had said. “Overlooking the sea, you know.”
“A glass of wine?” Ceci said. “An actual adult setting?”
Bette didn’t laugh. She avoided Kit’s look. Instead it was the sister who caught his eye, taking his measure.
And once Cecilia’s wagon pulled out of the drive, the library no longer worked for him. Not with the boys there, playing Star Wars before the fire. They had figurines, Luke, the Princess and the Wookie, and they kept pestering him to join. Aw, wasn’t he going to get a break? A moment to think? What was Bette doing, abandoning him? Kit found a few fingers of gin in dusty half-gallons left over from summer. He withdrew into the now-familiar wooze of alcohol and Percodan, browsing the spines along the farther bookshelves. He pretended an interest in the family Bible. Inked onto the opening pages was a century and a half of marriage, birth, death. The entries ended with the previous generation, a death in ‘51. His wedding — Bette’s, rather — wasn’t there.