AT CINDY’S HOUSE, WHILE WE WERE CHANGING FOR THE embassy party, some fooling around occurred. I started it. It’s seldom a bad idea to fool around with women who’ve recently been mad at you. It may not lead to the heights of passion, but it will often suspend their memories and keep them from getting mad at you again over the same thing.
Besides, Cindy had very sexy shoulders—they were both strong and soft, rounded and dimpled, tanned and lightly freckled. In effect her shoulders were a kind of microcosm of the body that lay below them. I liked them a lot.
She was not loath to be fooled around with, either. I believe she felt I owed her something for having caused her to miss an important cocktail party. The dress she had chosen for the evening was a beautiful white one that covered one shoulder and left one shoulder bare—it was while she was considering it that the fooling around started.
It ended with Cindy having secured herself two orgasms, the second strong enough to send her into a form of repose. She didn’t close her eyes, but she was in repose. Her eyes were bright, her body utterly still, and her face blank and smooth, like the face of a child who has just awakened from a nap.
My own exertions had been sufficient to induce a nap, though it turned out to be a very short nap. Cindy awoke me with her favorite tactic—an elbow. I felt very sleepy. Cindy had apparently just come out of the shower. She looked very awake. Like Boss Miller, she evidently had excellent cells. She looked ready for about three sets of tennis.
“You look pretty sluggish,” she said. “I think you should watch your diet.”
It was an absurd thing for her to say. I was sluggish but it was because she had just let me sleep about eight minutes. People who think everything is a function of diet give me a pain. In her preoccupation with waking me, she had forgotten to dry her legs and little streams of water were running down them onto her rug.
“Dry your legs,” I said, “unless you want to drip.”
She thought that was amusing and went over and got the white dress. Her closet contained more dresses than her dress store, which only contained maybe fifty dresses. They were costly dresses, but their numbers were not large.
An eight-minute nap disorients me. Instead of postcoital sadness I woke to postcoital surrealism. It seemed surreal to me that I was about to go to a party with a girl whose dress shop only contained fifty dresses. I don’t know why that fact struck me, but it did.
I took a cold shower to try and reduce my disorientation and only succeeded in making myself feel sexy, which in itself was surreal. A cold shower is supposed to reduce one’s ardor, and I had no reason even to have any ardor just at that time, but nevertheless I got an erection.
For some reason this made me reluctant to come out of the shower. I turned off the water, to see if that would have any effect on the erection, but it didn’t. About that time Cindy came into the bathroom to look for a comb and noticed that the shower wasn’t running and that I wasn’t out. These facts struck her as novel.
“Hey,” she said. “What’s with you?”
I hardly knew what to say. I didn’t really know. So I said nothing.
Cindy had no patience with mysteries. Also, it was her shower. She opened the door and saw me and my erection. At the time she was brushing her dark blond hair and she kept brushing it. A man in her shower with an erection was no big deal in itself. For all I knew it could have been an everyday sight.
“What was Harris doing standing by that parking meter?” I asked. I had meant to ask earlier but had forgotten to.
“He was trying to decide if it was raining enough for him to open his umbrella,” Cindy said.
“Do you mind if I just stand here for a minute?” I asked, since she was still brushing her hair. I was beginning to be aware that I was probably only a temporary indulgence on Cindy’s part. I wasn’t exactly her chosen mate. I could feel my own temporariness, dripping like the shower. After a week or two of dripping I would be gone, probably.
At least her good humor extended to my erection.
“Why have you got a hard-on?” she asked pleasantly.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Actually, I felt a little blue. All at once I had the sense that I understood the workings of life. It worked through irony and paradox, like a metaphysical poem. The chief paradox seemed to be that what you most wanted was what you were least likely to get.
Cindy evidently sensed something plaintive in my attitude. The orgasms had eliminated her memory of my recent failings, as well as much of her natural combativeness. A faint sexual afterglow in her smooth cheeks was nicely set off by the white dress. She seemed willing to overlook the fact that I was standing in her shower with a hard-on just as she was almost ready to leave. She look girlish, friendly, and a little absent.
“If I told Oblivia about you she wouldn’t believe it,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked.
Cindy let her head hang to one side and brushed her hair that way for a while. The head hanging kind of kept the afterglow from fading.
“Oblivia doesn’t understand people who don’t do things at the right time,” she said. “She was brought up among successful people.”
“Come on.” I said. “Nobody does everything at the right time.”
“Oh yeah, around here they do,” Cindy said. “Somebody like the Secretary of State isn’t going to get a hard-on just before a party.”
It was plain that my aberrant behavior intrigued Cindy a little. It might make me unfit for a Cabinet post, but I had a feeling that it kept me in the running with Harris, for at least one more day.
“I just don’t know what she’ll think of you,” she said, laying down her brush. The uncertainty seemed to excite her. I was an ambiguous factor, socially and otherwise. On that provocative note, we left for the party.