There’s a secret about this table — two secrets. But first I have to tell you about tough girls and golden girls.
Just sit. Pull out a chair.
In high school I was never aware of any special unhappiness. You look surprised. But no, really. Oh, I had my bad days, my rotten days, but they were basically exceptions. The truth is, adolescent angst bored the hell out of me. At fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I was never a morbid type, never broody or gloomy or crazy-restless. All that was like some dumb style of hat I wouldn’t be caught dead in. There were girls in my school — I could tell you stories. Girls who wore long black dresses with lots of rattly beads, stared at you with big sorrowful eyes, and looked like they started each day bright and early by slitting their wrists in the bathtub. Who needed it? Really, who needed it? I had a few good friends, I got on all right with my classmates. I fit in well enough, without fitting in completely — which was fine with me. But right from the start I was aware of two kinds of girls whose very existence made me uneasy. I would see girls walking down the halls in pairs, wearing tight skirts and sweaters, swinging their hips — girls who laughed loud, brassy laughs, wore too much lipstick, talked dirty at the lockers, and had sudden fits of anger. These were the tough girls, who’d give you a hard look if you met their eyes. What was it about them that seemed to make me doubt myself? And then there were the golden girls. . Ah, those golden high-school girls! Beautiful — really gifted with beauty — slightly languorous, clean-smelling, friendly but somehow untouchable. There they were, the golden girls, sashaying down the halls with their long hair swaying, giving off a kind of light, as if whenever you saw them they’d just spent the entire day at the beach. . oh, they were as far as possible from the tough girls with their black leather jackets and cheap pocketbooks. But I saw that they shared a secret, the tough girls and the golden girls, a secret I wasn’t allowed to know. It was the way they walked. Yes, they were at ease in their bodies, they inhabited their bodies — while I, don’t you see, I stood a little outside my own body, I didn’t fit myself. I was like one of those color comics where the color doesn’t fit the outlines but leaves a space on one side and spills out the other. Don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t ashamed of my body. It was a pretty good body, as bodies went. No, I wasn’t morbidly self-conscious— that came much later. That was your gift. But I was estranged from my body — in a not unpleasant way.
The grand thing about Robert is that he made the color fit the outline. In college I’d had two lovers — to call them that— strange name for the loveless — who taught me something about pleasure — and anger. But it was as if my body had its own life, and I myself another. But with Robert — well, he liked to tell me I was good in the sack, and all that jazz, but what thrilled me was how I no longer. . I mean. . it’s difficult to say. But the color fit the outline. I somehow got into my own skin. Do you see what I mean?
But I was telling you about the table. Here was this heavy, serious, deeply solemn piece of furniture, sitting right there where we had to eat our dinner. Robert said we ought to paint it yellow, or maybe put up a Ping-Pong net. Or else we ought to eat on the floor, he said, underneath the table. One night after dinner we both stood looking at it, the grandmother table — gleaming, solid, unmovable — all too depressingly there. We looked at each other. And we knew; we knew how to break the spell. And so we made love on the table. After clearing away the dishes, of course. Right over there, near that end. “That’ll give her something to think about,” Robert said later. I never knew whether he meant the table, or his grandmother, or Queen Victoria.
It was our little joke — our secret — our little protest against gravity. We ate in the dining room without trouble, after that.
We were lighthearted, Robert and I. Can you understand that?
I don’t know exactly what I hoped for, after the night of my visit to you. If it was peace I was looking for, an end to night madness, I found none of it. Instead of imagining all women, I confined myself to just you — but you grew to be a giantess, you were all women, you were more than all women. You were my obsession, my. . demon. I imagined Robert making love to you, over and over again, until my head felt battered. I wondered what you did in bed exactly, what you did to draw him to you. I’d seen your plain nightgown, but I imagined you had fancy things, just for him: black lace underpants, for example. Robert had once pointed to a pair of black lace underpants on a mannequin and said, “Do you think she’s trying to tell me something?” And speaking of a colleague’s wife he said, “She’s a white cotton underwear sort of woman”—curled lip, little dismissive wave of the fingers. “Like me,” I said. “Oh, you’re different,” Robert said with a laugh. And it’s true that I like yellow, and blue, as well as white. But I thought of that mannequin, when I imagined Robert in your room. Black lace underpants. Was that your secret? I imagined him tearing them off with his teeth. It wasn’t — you realize — simply a matter of black lace underwear. It was that I thought I might have misunderstood something about Robert, that my whole life might have been wrong.
So: black lace underpants. But that was only the beginning. I imagined you owned more specialized things, things you ordered from expensive catalogs — maybe a sheer pink bra embroidered with flowers, or one of those male-fantasy things that hook up the back and come with garters to go with your lace-top thigh-highs and your spike heels. Or say a nice black nylon spandex slip with lace hem over your pale-peach bikini panties. Oh, I imagined you could teach Victoria a secret or two! Unless the trick was simpler than that. Under a tight skirt that showed off your legs — look, Robert! — no underpants.
There was no stopping you now. You’d do anything— anything. I saw you in a little-girl Sunday frock — ironed and pink — sitting with your knees pressed together — your long-lashed eyes blinking innocently — a nice pink bow in your hair — your legs in black fishnet stockings. And of course there was your classic chambermaid routine: short black dress, white apron, little white cap, lowered eyes — oh yes, sir, oh no, sir, very well, sir — reaching higher, higher, higher with that cute feather duster as your skirt hiked up.
I imagined Robert standing behind you, burying his teeth in your shoulder.
Or you as calendar pinup in six-inch heels and black top hat — your back to Robert and me — black-gloved hand on hip — white dress shirt not quite covering your perfect behind— as you glance over your shoulder at us — well, hello there — with bee-stung lips — in a darling little sulky pout.
But maybe that wasn’t it at all, maybe there was some other trick you used, to get him into that room of yours. One summer Robert and I traveled to Paris. Our hotel room was small, but we faced a courtyard, which seemed to me exotic. On the first night I was startled by a loud cry, a terrible anguished groan that made me think someone was being murdered. I ran to the window, but Robert pulled me away, laughing. I realized that what I was hearing was the sound of a woman screaming in orgasm. I was uneasy, thinking of my own much quieter sounds. “I imagine he’s completely deaf by now,” Robert said, in that way of his. But now I wondered: Is that what men liked? Were you a screamer? I imagined you letting everything go, filling the room with murderous cries, with shouts of ecstasy bordering on pain.
I watched the two of you making love—is that what you called it? — in your moonlit love nest on the other side of town — while I lay alone in my big big bed and Robert creaked in his study. Sometimes I felt myself turning into you, a high-class whore in fancy lingerie, seducing my husband away from his boring wife. And he would make love to us fanatically— insanely — in the cheap motel room of my mind — till we hurt between the legs.