Maggie was surprised to find herself thinking about sex. For so many months her fantasies had involved supermarkets and shopping malls—public, inappropriate spaces devoid of possible intimacy. Earlier on this very night, anticipating Mark’s probable desires, she’d recoiled at the prospect of being asked to engage. But something about Tina and Pete—about their musky tenderness toward one another—had flipped a switch, and, as Mark fiddled with the window cranks, Maggie gradually became aware of that sublimely simple craving. She wanted to be touched. She longed to be caressed, squeezed, jostled into various and necessary positions.
The only problem was that she didn’t want to ask or explain. She wanted Mark to read her, understand her the way beast understands beast. Forget words, forget language altogether. She wanted them to be wolves and let their bodies do the speaking.
She pulled off her shorts, took off her T-shirt, and unhooked her bra. Then she lay down on the bed and waited. The breeze prickled her skin.
It took Mark maybe five minutes to notice she was topless. After that, it took very little time or energy before they were having sex.
In the bathroom, after, Maggie ran her hands tentatively along the sink’s counter, looking for the unopened pack of glow sticks. She didn’t find them but knocked over what felt like a short stack of washcloths. They made a soft thump against the tile floor. Perhaps they’d already opened the last pack. She couldn’t now recall.
One hand after the other, she fumbled her way to the toilet. The pattern of the tile felt foreign against the tips of her fingers. The toilet was a full foot left of where she remembered it being when Pete had quickly shone the flashlight around the bathroom’s corners. She thought of Audrey Hepburn alone and blind, groping, unaware of the burglar so close at hand. She thought of Jodie Foster in that basement, the murderer mere inches from her outstretched hand. She thought again of the coed. Eventually she made contact with the toilet’s tank.
She lifted the lid and then sat. The porcelain was cold. She wiped away the sex and peed.
She was aware of the knock of her heartbeat; aware of the splash of her urine hitting the water in the bowl beneath her. She wondered if anyone else in the hotel could hear. She was sure Mark could. She’d left the door open when she walked in, not wanting to be alone. But now she felt vulnerable.
She wiped again, felt until she found the handle, then flushed. The water gurgled beneath her. She stood, pulled up her underwear, but then sat immediately back down. She was overtaken by loneliness.
She knew better than to associate it with Mark specifically or even with her current and unpredictable state of mind more generally. There is a sadness after sex, always: the philosophers say so; the poets say so. And this, right now, was Maggie’s own bleak little minute of irrational sadness, which was how Augustine had put it some sixteen hundred years ago. Some things never changed.
Maybe—god—maybe it wasn’t loneliness or sadness at all. Maybe it was simply the quiet. She missed the buzz, the low steady prrr of electricity. This momentary excursion into the forlorn could be that simple. It could.
She put her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.
The long and short of it, the plain and simple fact: Mark was afraid of technology and Maggie was afraid of people.
Her question: Could they move forward—together or alone —in a world filled with technology and people?
Were they already doomed? Or was tragedy behind them now for good? Maggie felt unsure of everything at that moment. Nice tits or nice day? She didn’t know earlier and she didn’t know now.
She leaned back against the toilet’s tank. It felt cool and clean against her skin. She closed her eyes, opened them, closed them again. There was no difference. Black, black, black. It was a metaphor for something—for life maybe: it was the same whether you looked or didn’t, the same whether you acknowledged the evil lurking in the corner or ignored it. If the plane’s going down, the plane’s going down. It doesn’t matter how aggressively you grit your teeth, how hard you grip the armrests. The end is the end is the end, plain and simple. Maybe Mark was right about everything. Maybe he always had been.
She moved her hands from her thighs to her breasts, and now she held them—her right breast in her left hand and her left in her right. Their weight felt pleasant, if a little sweaty. Four-plus decades and they were still pretty good. The nipples, never having breastfed, were still capable of expanding and contracting. Just now they were hard, responding to her own touch. But later, asleep for a few hours next to her husband, they would expand, flatten, turn round and light in color.
She stood up, a flutter of lightness in her chest.
Something else Augustine had said? That a woman’s caress served only to bring down a man’s mind. It wasn’t verbatim, of course. But the point was, screw Augustine! Screw bleakness, irrational or otherwise!
Maggie didn’t need to be sad if she didn’t want to be. This weight she’d been carrying around hadn’t paid any real homage to the coed; it had only served to suck the life out of her marriage. That man out there—my man!—was her husband, and Maggie’s love, physical or otherwise, didn’t lower him; it elevated him. Just as his did her.
The point?
The point?
The point?
To hell with the poets. To hell with the coed. This was her life, not theirs.