She had invited him over for some sort of meal, but she hadn’t cooked anything, and she couldn’t even remember whether there was anything much to eat in the kitchen. She hadn’t been hungry in several days. She felt a nauseated elation that prevented her from eating. She had lain awake the past several nights, too excited to sleep. When she looked in the mirror, she was amazed by how young and flushed she looked, how alive. Talking to Lila on the phone earlier, they had laughed together about how they were both in the same state. It reminded them of Vassar, freshman year, when they’d both fallen in love over the same weekend with a pair of Brooklyn boys they’d met on the Staten Island ferry during a daring overnight jaunt — Teddy’s idea — to New York City.
Teddy had insisted that they buy a bag of pears and apples and ride the Staten Island ferry all night in honor of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Recuerdo,” which went, “We were very tired, we were very merry—/We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.” But the notion of buying Millay’s apples and pears had fallen by the wayside and turned into a bottle of scotch instead. Teddy and Lila had sipped it from the bottle in a brown paper bag, feeling very daring, wrapped in their merino wool coats, sitting on a bench looking out at Manhattan.
Tom and Albert were inside the ferry, where the rows of benches were, playing jazz with an upturned hat at their feet. Tom played trumpet, Albert trombone. Teddy and Lila had wandered tipsily in to watch them play and had, of course, caught their eyes. During a break, the boys approached the girls and began chatting them up. They were not much older than Teddy and Lila, but they seemed decades older in terms of worldliness and experience. They were from Bay Ridge, but they shared an apartment now in Greenwich Village and played in a jazz combo. Teddy had staked a claim right away on Tom, the rougher, older, more profane and aggressive of the two, so Lila had gotten Albert, his younger and milder brother. The foursome had sat outside on the deck all night long, drinking, talking, and, finally, necking in their Teddy-ordained pairs, till the sun came up “dripping, a bucketful of gold.” Then the boys escorted the girls by subway up to Grand Central Station, treated them to breakfast at an Automat, and then Teddy and Lila had caught an early train back to Poughkeepsie and sat cuddled together, staring dreamily out the window at the gentle pink-and-blue morning river, the trees flashing by.
For a week or two afterward, Teddy and Lila had been in this same state of jittery, euphoric exhaustion, waiting for the dormitory telephone to ring. It never did, but by the time they realized it wouldn’t, they’d moved on to other youthful obsessions.
Teddy opened the door before Lewis could ring the doorbell. “Welcome to Oz,” she said, laughing at him. She pulled him into her house. In the living room, he set his briefcase on the coffee table and took a deep breath.
“Want a tour?” she asked.
“All I can see right now is you,” he said. “Sorry.” They exchanged dazed, elated looks; then she melted against him.
“I am so excited,” she said into his mouth, her voice rippling with laughter.
“I have been on fire since you left my house,” he said.
“So have I.”
“Can this happen to people as old as we are?”
“I had no idea.”
“I had a slight idea.”
She pulled back to look him right in the eye. “What’s in the briefcase, Lewis? Surely you’re not planning to work while you’re here.”
He released her reluctantly and opened the briefcase. “Do you have a record player?”
He handed her a few albums in their original battered cardboard covers. “I brought music.”
She took them, chuckling, and looked through them. “The Lovin’ Spoonful!” she said. “Oh! The Stones. That skinny little English boy sounds just like an old black man in the Delta.”
She took Beggars’ Banquet out of its sleeve and set it on the turntable. This she did with some difficulty; she hadn’t operated a record player for years, since Oscar was alive, but more importantly, she was dying to touch Lewis again. The music started: “Please allow me to introduce myself…” Teddy was swamped by a memory of how hot and raw and alive everything had seemed back then.
“I must have been in my mid-thirties when this came out,” she said.
“Remember when I took you to that Stones show at the Academy of Music? I got those tickets from a musician client who thought I would pass them along to someone younger…” Lewis laughed. “We were the oldest people there.”
“By far,” said Teddy. “Back then, being in your thirties was middle-aged, remember?”
Lewis moved toward her as if through heavy warm water, slid one arm around her waist, and took her hand in his.
“Why don’t we just go to bed,” she said. “And fuck.”
“I want to torture you first,” he said.
She burrowed her face into the crook of his neck and they moved around her living room, their thighs and groins pressed together, moving with raunchy intent, breathing in unison. They had both stopped laughing. Teddy was swooning against him, liquid. They were like two wax figures joining together in the heat.
She had felt so different with Oscar. His body had been bulkier and more solid. Sex with him had been like wrestling with a big, hungry bear; she had always felt very small and fragile with him. Oscar had been blunt and carnal and boyish in bed. Lewis was built exactly like Teddy, aerodynamically sinewy; being with him felt incestuously kinky. He was inventive, ardent, almost feminine in the dexterous subtlety of his hands on her flesh, but the way he moved inside her was not feminine at all.
Remembering that now, craving it again, she stumbled a little in their dance. “To bed,” she said, her words half plead, half command.
“What’s wrong with right here?” he asked her. He let her go and, bending down, took off his shoes and socks, stepped out of his trousers, unbuttoned his shirt and took that off, too. Then he stripped Teddy’s dress off. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. She was barefoot. They were just about the same height; he was possibly an inch taller than she was. His hard-on pressed against her pelvic bone. She reached down and felt it and her eyes closed; her hand tightened around it.
“Even better than last time,” she said, breathless, trying to joke, strangely embarrassed by her own lust. “Have you been taking those pills?”
“No,” he said, “just the result of years of anticipation.”
He put his hands on her hips and held them still while he entered her, bending his knees slightly until he was inside her, then straightening up to his full height. She felt herself expand to take him in, then enfold him tightly.
“We fit perfectly,” he said, his eyes blazing blue, inches from her own.
She was speechless. They swayed to the music, rocking, arms around each other.
“I have no food,” she said.
“But you invited me for lunch.” He lifted her with a small grunt, her thighs in his hands, her feet crossed behind his back, and carried her over to the green velvet couch. Still holding her, he slowly sat and lay back on the couch so she was straddling him. “I may never eat again,” he said with his mouth on hers.
She was suddenly nervous about this new position, the shift he’d made so impetuously in their connection, suddenly protective of him in case it didn’t work. “Let’s just stay like this till we starve and they find us skeletons overgrown with cobwebs,” she chattered. “Actually, Benny might knock on the door sometime tonight if you don’t go out and send him home.”