"The thing is," Jack goes on, hearing in Terry's silence a withdrawal from some tacdessness on his part, "while it's going on it doesn't matter that it doesn't last-Motber Nature says, 'Who cares?' It feels like it's forever. I adore your tits, have I said tbat lately?"
"They're starting to droop. You should have seen tbem when I was eighteen. Bigger, even, and stuck straight out."
"Terry, please. Don't get me excited again. I got to go." Beth's, too, he could remember, had been like inverted bowls, tbe size for breakfast cereal, witb nipples hard as a single blueberry in his mouth.
"Where to now, Jack?" Terry's voice is weary. A mistress knows the man to be a liar, where the wife only guesses.
"A tutorial. A real one, across town. I have the car; she needs it in an hour and a half to get to the library." He is uncertain, in the gap his post-orgasmic daze leaves in his head, of how much of what he says is true. Beth needs tlie car eventually, he knows.
Terry, hearing his uncertainty, complains, "Jack, you're always rushing off. Do I have body odor or something?"
This is cruel, because Beth indeed does; it fills up the bed at night, a caustic exhalation from her deep creases, and adds to his nocturnal unease and dread.
"No way," he says, having picked up this much slang from his students. "Not even-" He halts, on the edge of overstepping.
"My cunt. Say it."
"Not even tbere," he concedes. "Especially there. You're sweet. You're my sugar plum." But if truth be known he is wary of having his face too long between her legs, for fear of Beth's smelling the other woman through their good-night kiss-a mere peck, but their enduring custom for thirty-six years of marriage.
"Tell me about my cunt, Jack. I want to hear it. Loosen up."
"Please, Terry. This is grotesque."
"Why, you prim prick? You Jewish priss. What's grotesque about my cunt?"
"Nothing, nothing," he concedes, beaten down. "It's perfect, it's gorgeous, it-"
"It? What? What is all these nice things? Perfect and gorgeous."
"Your cunt."
"Good. Go on." Perhaps her point is that he uses it, as he uses her, without paying enough attention, without taking in the whole picture-the aroma, the incidentals, her ache of loneliness when he pulls out, her awareness of being used, and used squeamishly at that.
"-is wet," he goes on, "and fuzzy, and soft as a flower inside, and stretchy-"
"Oh," she says, "stretchy. This is interesting. And it likes-tell me what it likes."
"It likes being kissed, and licked, and played with, and entered-don't make me go on any more, Terry. It kills it for me. I'm crazy about you, you know that. You're the nicest-"
"Don't tell me," she says angrily, and throws back the sheet and jackknifes out of bed, her buttocks jiggling and beginning, as she said of elsewhere, to droop. Her buttocks are developing puckers. As if sensing his eyes on her backside, she turns in the bathroom doorway, flashing her little patch of cedar color; the whole doughy softness of her- white bread without the crust-is exposed, he feels, defiantly, an invitation to kindness that he has failed to accept heartily enough. The sight of her, so naked and female, so sensitive and lumpy, dries his mouth, sucking the air of his usual clothed, conscientious life quite out of him. She completes his sentence for him: "-the nicest thing since Beth before she got pig-fat. You're happy enough to fuck me, but you don't want to say 'fuck' for fear she'll somehow hear it. It used to be you'd fuck and run because you were afraid Ahmad might come back any minute, but now he's gone at his job all day you always have some other excuse not to hang around even a minute. Just enjoy me, that's all I ever asked, but, no, Jews have to have guilt, it's their way of showing how special they are, how superior to everybody else, God gets sore at just them, with their putrid precious covenant. You make me sick, Jack Levy!" She slams the bathroom door, but it catches on a woolly bathroom rug and shuts reluctantly, not before in the slice of the light being angrily flicked on he sees her Irish ass, never kissed by the desert sun, jiggle.
Jack lies there feeling mournful, wanting to get his clothes back on but knowing this would prove her point. When she finally comes out of the bathroom, having washed him away with a shower, she picks up her underwear from the floor and in measured fashion puts it on. Her breasts swing as she bends down, and these are the first pieces of her she covers, catching them up in the gossamer cups of her bra and reaching with a grimace behind to do the fasteners. Then she steps into her underpants, steadying herself with an extended arm and a shapely firm hand on the bureau top that is covered with lined-up tubes of painter's oils. She tugs with one hand and then with both the bit of nylon smartly up; the cedar-colored patch of frizzy hair puffs out, in its moment of capture, above the elastic waistband like the head on an impatiently poured beer. Her bra is black but her thong panties are lilac. Their elastic waist is low, exposing the pearly swell of her belly to the depth of the most daring hip-huggers, though what she next puts on are a pair of ordinary old high-waisted jeans, with a dab or two of paint on the front. A ribbed jersey and a pair of canvas sandals, and she will be completely armored, ready to face the street and its opportunities. Another man might steal her. Jack fears that each time he sees her naked might be the last. A desolation sweeps through him sharp enough to make him cry out, "Don't put all that crap back on! Come back to bed, Terry. Please."
"You don't have time."
"I have time. I just remembered, the tutorial isn't until three. The kid's a loser anyway, from over in Fair Lawn, his parents think I can tutor him into Princeton. I can't. Pretty please?"
"Well… maybe a second. For just a snuggle. I hate it when we quarrel. We shouldn't have anything to quarrel about."
"We quarrel," he explains to her, "because we care about each other. If we didn't care we wouldn't quarrel."
She undoes the snap on her jeans, sucking in her gut and looking comically pop-eyed for a second, and quickly slithers back beneath the wrinkled sheet in her black and lilac underthings. There is a light-hearted whorishness in the outfit, like the teeny-slut look affected by some of the bolder girls at Central High, which startles a furtive throb from his penis. He tries to ignore it, putting his arm around her shoulders-the downy hairs at the nape of her neck are still damp from her shower-and pulling her closer to him in chaste companionship. "How is Ahmad doing?" he asks.
Terry answers warily, feeling the transition abrupt from whore to mother. "He seems to be doing fine. He likes the people he works for-a Lebanese father and son, who do a kind of good-cop / bad-cop routine on him. The son is apparently something of a character. Ahmad loves the truck."
"The truck?"
"It could be any truck, but this one is his truck. You know how love is. Every morning he checks the tire pressure, the brakes, all these fluids. He tells me about them-engine oil, radiator coolant, windshield-washer fluid, battery, power steering, automatic transmission… I think that's all. He checks the fan belts for tightness and I don't know what all else. He says the mechanics at the service stations, for the scheduled check-ups, are too rushed and hungover to do it right. The truck even has a name-Excellency. Excellency Home Furnishings. They thought it meant something excellent."