A MONTH OR TWO later Raimundo and Jane were about to run into each other on a thronged sidewalk below Union Square. Each had spotted the other when they were still almost a full block apart. As they got closer, though their eyes locked, and curious, involuntary smiles appeared on their faces, it seemed they were actually strangers. What could they possibly have to do with each other? It was disconcerting to surface from public solitude like this. Their intriguing unalikeness didn’t pop and hiss when they came together like acid-plus-base, but they cautiously avoided kissing or even touching.
Raimundo was carrying a brown paper bag too tiny for any purchase Jane could imagine. She got the upward half of a nod and gave him an indecipherable wave with her right hand down by her hip. They laughed. Jane indicated the subway entrance. “I have to go in two seconds.” Still, she strolled a ways in Raimundo’s direction before coming to a stop.
Raimundo held up the tiny bag. “I’m putting a new carpet in my mom’s apartment.” When he shook the bag, carpet tacks jingled like jewelry. “My mom wanted this gray industrial style. It’s fairly cool.”
Their glances kept catching on passersby. Both felt a touch proud, because each was happy to see the other’s desirability stand up in a crowd. Partly for this audience of strangers, Jane seized on wild confession, exclaiming, “I was starting my life of crime this morning, but it seems like I’m having problems with my accomplice. Or rather he’s having some issues that need to be smoothed over.” She narrowed her eyes. “What? No, not you! Rai! Ha! Never you. I’m talking about that semi-friend of mine, David. You’ve met. I think he was there the day I met you.”
Raimundo formed a sly limp wrist as a question.
“Rai,” she scolded. “That’s never been decided. And actually I think he’s not gay. Just one of those newt-like low testosterone types.” She laughed in surprise at this slashing caricature. Where had she gotten it? “You’d have a problem with that, incidentally?”
“No, no. They’re everywhere. Me, I don’t care.”
“You must get harassed all the time. You have such a great ass. And you’re awfully pretty with those pink lips.”
His cheeks darkened. His embarrassment seemed to delight him. “Hey, watch that!” He laughed and mimed punching her shoulder with a meaty fist. “What makes him a criminal? What makes you a criminal?”
“Ah!”
“What crime you planning?”
“Oh, just your average forgery/fraud. No. I’m kidding. He said he was depressed. Some huge psychodrama is brewing with the woman he lives with and her kid. I’m his only regular friend, sad to say.” She shuddered. Out of the blue, she begged Raimundo, “Why don’t you come? Please?”
“To him? No. I got to—” He held up the bag of tacks.
“Please, Rai. I never ask anything. I don’t want to see him alone. What if he goes crazy and tries to assault me? He did ask me to marry him one time. He’s unstable.”
Raimundo resembled a bull, considering. “You serious? That little guy scares you?”
“Disturbs. You know how some depressed people feel like they’re drowning and they might drag you down, too? It’s harsh, I guess.”
“That’s supposed to make me want to go?”
“Please.”
“Can we work?”
“Work on what?”
“Wark. Can we wark?”
“What—?” Furiously he raised his foot and pointed at it. She cried, “Oh, walk! Walk. No, he lives at Tudor City. But we can take the express. What? No, I swear. I just couldn’t understand what you were saying. That was all.”
The stiff flat of his palm caressed her cheek, a pantomime of a slap. People glanced over. Jane didn’t love the joke violence but felt she should hate it even more than she did. He was clearly well-brought up, but playacting violence was a constant tic of his. She was grateful he was coming, though, so she didn’t feel obliged to challenge him this time. Her annoyance may have showed. He laughed at her expression and pantomimed cringing from her attack. “Yeah, watch it,” she said. “I’ve been known to slap little children.”
The décor of the tiny Tudor City studio where David Caperini was living combined disarray and obsessed storage. Steel shelves ran floor to ceiling against three walls. These were densely packed with boxes, stools, scuba masks, winter clothes, broken lamps, Tonka toys. What gaps remained were tightly stuffed with empty fast-food cups and clamshells, crumpled Kleenex, painted river stones, rubber-banded bank statements. The whole had a jumbled neatness about it like an outcropping of fossiliferous rock. Identical clear plastic boxes lined the floors at the foot of the shelves. They were stuffed with baby things, hats, board games, cheap plastic earrings (hoops and triangles) a rubble of crumpled acrylic paint tubes, empty prescription bottles. Atop the boxes rose stacks of books and magazines. A bed and furniture were just emergent from throws and comforters, shawls and pillows. The padded play cage was empty.
David was obviously displeased to see Raimundo. He made an effort to withhold an ingratiating greeting and almost succeeded. He apologized for his rudeness before being rude, but he did finally manage it. He avoided meeting their eyes and crossed his legs tightly in the apartment’s only undraped piece of furniture, a tan corduroy wing chair. A castoff from his father’s Princeton office, it was ink-stained and the left wing flapped when touched.
David answered Jane’s nervous, chatty questions with monosyllables. Stubbornly he looked out the window at a dismal view of tar-papered rooves under an ashen sky. He was pretending Raimundo didn’t exist. A red filigree of capillaries showed at the glinting corners of his eyes.
Jane’s not-so-secret shrugs of incomprehension and eyerolls did nothing to put Raimundo more at ease. He’d broken a sweat. The atmosphere felt asthmatic, lukewarm despite an air conditioner. Jane had been exactly right. This was like drowning. He would be dragged under. He could almost feel the manic order and disorder of the apartment tighten around his shoulders and belly like Lilliputian cables.
“Where’s the baby?” Jane asked.
“He’s with my wife,” David harrumphed, looking at her for the first time, a flat stare.
“What? Wife?”
“Oh, didn’t I mention it? You haven’t called for a while. Yeah we got married, and it lasted—” He looked at his wrist where he didn’t wear a watch. “Three days, it would be, as of last night. So three and a half.”
David’s angry gravity couldn’t keep Jane from one obvious cough of laughter. The whole thing was too strange. “You got married? And it’s already over? What about—?”
“You had your chance. I wanted to marry her.” David produced a gruesome smile and addressed Raimundo, or the shelves behind him. “But it looks like she was lucky she didn’t. It seems—it seems I’m not very—not very easy to live with.”
“What!?” Jane demanded. “You weren’t serious, David. He was never serious!”
Raimundo’s heart started racing.
Jane barked, “Are you saying she just left or something? With the baby?”
“Not just. Last night. It’s been building up, I guess.”
Raimundo and Jane glared at each other. He couldn’t have looked more put-upon or she more abject. David caught the stare and turned, chin up, to the window again. “Sorry—sorry to inflict this on you,” he told Raimundo with the politesse of the damned.
Raimundo uttered a soft, animalistic syllable and tipped his head toward the bathroom door. “You mind?”
“Please. Just jiggle the—the flush thing until it catches.”
“My God! David, I had no idea,” Jane breathed. “What happened?”
“She says I attacked her. She claims I hit her, and she says she absolutely refuses to stand for any violence. Because of her father or something.” Bitterly he explained, “She claims he hit her too. And her father’s best friend used to feel her up or something.” Jane couldn’t think of a word to say. David hissed, “But nobody ever believes her, supposedly. Of course. Actually, I’m not sure I do.”
“David,” Jane said gravely.
“Oh, shut up! I didn’t hit her. I mean, maybe—I was just—I got so frustrated, I grabbed her by the arm. That was it.”
“Oh, David. No, of course you didn’t. I mean, I know you.” She couldn’t help doubting him, though usually she was as quick to doubt the victim’s tales of abuse as he was. So, for the moment Jane doubted everything. She could hear the torrent of Raimundo’s urine, seemingly inches away. She had to close her eyes to concentrate on judging David, who’d tried to blackmail her, after all, and was generally a dodgy person. But violent? If Raimundo had meant to efface himself by vanishing into the slightly less storage-packed bathroom, it wasn’t working. His basso burbling out-puttered the wan air conditioner. It filled the room with noise and prompted a hysterically magnified thought-picture of his penis.
David smiled wryly at the sound. “Small apartment.”
“I don’t know what to say. Your family? Do they know about this?”
“She’s probably there now. For all I know. They feel sorry for her getting stuck with me.”
“What?”
They heard a boulder being moved in the bathroom.
David looked annoyed. “Hey!” he called. “Just—just jiggle the thing, and it’ll—it’ll work!”
“I’m fixing it,” Raimundo muttered through the wall.
David’s eyes closed in a ladylike pique. His words quietly goose-stepped, “It needs this plastic piece.”
“He’s a contractor,” Jane explained. “He knows this stuff. He really knows what he’s doing.”
“I thought he washed dishes,” David muttered insultingly, the first indication that he recognized Raimundo.
After a moment, they heard a perky-sounding flush. Unruffled as a surgeon, Raimundo emerged and announced in a quadruply strong accent, “Now I work. Bye, Jane. Now I’m going to do my mama’s carpet.” He didn’t sound like he was losing his English, so much as recoiling from it.
“Thanks for the toilet. I think.” David wore an ungrateful frown. He stuttered less the bitchier he got.
Raimundo ignored him and motioned Jane into the hall. Not for a hug goodbye. He was stony, unforgiving. “I don’t ever wanna meet any more of your friends.”
“That’s mean,” Jane whispered, pounding his chest once, light as a feather. Raimundo gave no quarter. His hands ran over her body lasciviously when they kissed. This caused Jane to shiver out of his arms. She stamped her foot in girlish frustration. Raimundo tipped her a cocky wave from the elevator. He was deliberately playing the jerk.
Jane was a hair less compassionate with David after Raimundo had gone. “We’re going to have to go someplace I can smoke.”
“You can smoke here. As long as the baby’s not around,” he trumped her. “I don’t—feel like going out.”
She sighed, unwilling to commit to the draped bed or the ottoman, if that’s what it was. She jerked open a window in a brown aluminum frame. With a few pulls and shoves it rose fully, and she rested her hip on the sill. She used a dry Popeye’s cup as an ashtray.
After rising to punch off the air conditioner with frugal resentment, David shrank into his chair again. “I’m glad he left.”
Jane mumbled, “I just bumped into him. I couldn’t not bring him. Sorry.”
David’s eyebrows rose. “Am I right, he worked at that Mexican place? And now you’re in a relationship—or something with him? I didn’t know that’s who you meant when you said Raimundo.”
“Does that matter?”
“I find it interesting you would bring him. It’s revealing. A glabrous cheek, I noticed, which should probably be a danger signal for you.”
Jane didn’t get how snarky this jibe was at first. She misremembered what glabrous meant and thought David was talking about the color of Raimundo’s skin. “I think the question is about you and your bizarre marriage. Is it for real or is this some freaky performance piece?”
“You bring a young, handsome—young guy to meet somebody who asked you to—who wanted you to marry him. Seriously? You do that even after you called this morning and that person made it perfectly clear that he was feeling—I don’t know—depressed? But I’m the one putting on a performance piece?”
“You said you were depressed. I admit it. But I had no idea what had happened. And don’t pretend you were ever serious about marrying me, David. I don’t even know how serious all of this really is with—”
“My wife?”
“Stop! Do you think this is recoverable?”
“I don’t think so. And no. The problem isn’t just her and me. It’s bigger. I probably said OK to getting married because I’m sick of being such a side issue in everybody’s lives. You know, my father—my father told me—as if he’s being nice—he said he was considering putting aside some money for the baby. It’s not even my fucking baby! Thanks, Dad! How prudent! How dynastic! I feel like my fate is in the hands of incompetents. My dad is like a baby himself. Money is his toy. He would never trust me with a penny!”
“David.”
“I swear they have more respect for that drooling shit-tube! Can you believe it? I’m sure she went out there. She took the baby to Princeton to be with my family!”
“You’re really angry,” Jane noted gently.
“Of course I am. I have no money, no prospect of any money, except for those fucking drawings. And I guess—I guess I’m a wife-beater. What do I do?” He shook his hand at a paisley-covered surface on which lay a very pale manuscript. It was twenty pages or so—printed until the ink ran out. “Everyone thinks my stuff is shit. And he says—my dad—he’s putting aside money for a kid he’s met maybe two times. And I’m supposed to be grateful? Thanks for keeping the money from irresponsible me, Dad. Because—because he thinks I’ll drink through it. Or I’m sneaky. That was always their word. Don’t be sneaky, David!”
Jane raised her eyebrows. She followed a flight of pigeons spooked when a cable guy a few buildings over dropped a tarpapered roof hatch behind him. “Listen, David. With families. We’ve just got to lead our own lives.”
“Right. That’s easy for you to say. You rely on yourself. You’re like a man—the way you run through your bimbo boyfriends. I’ve got—I’ve got my whole family conspiring—against me—and you can go, Oh, maybe I fucked up some underage kid? Well, I’ll pop a Prozac. That’s what you—you’re the one who told me. Go on Prozac. See a shrink.” He blanched. “I’m sorry! I’m mad about—about the drawings, still. I guess.”
Jane sighed, too hurt to be angry, unsure how to tackle this. “First of all—I mean, what’s the problem right now? If you’re right that she went out to Princeton, what would she be talking about with your parents?”
“Who?” David’s gaze flashed keenly. His expression made it plain. He’d suddenly realized that Jane couldn’t remember the name of his head of Fulfillment, his wife. Jane tensed aggressively and looked him even harder in the eyes. But David looked down, deciding he couldn’t afford to blow up at the last person willing to endure him. He answered softly, “She’ll tell them I’m a wife-beater!”
“No. Come on, David. That’s the whole story? There’s something you’ve wanted to talk to me about for a long time. I just haven’t been picking up on it.”
“I doubt you could understand. I can’t understand. She—she thinks I’m overbearing.”
“Really? I always assumed—you made it sounded like she’s much more—”
“I know. Ha-ha! She’s the one wearing the pants, really. Everything gets done her way. Then it’s me—sissy boy parasite—I’m the one who’s violent and uncontrollable. Probably because I really need to—want to be some—he-man’s bitch. Deep down,” he snorted contemptuously. “I’m supposed to be gay, remember?”
“Look at your situation, though. You’re living in this tiny room. The pressure of dealing with a baby. It’s inevitable people are going to fight, isn’t it? Isn’t that part of marriage under the circumstances?”
“But what can I do now?” he whimpered. “She—she—won’t talk to me. Like my parents—she has this way of—she just cuts you off.”
“She won’t discuss it?”
“No. That’s the whole point. That’s why she left. Because she says I always twist discussions my way. So there was no point in talking anymore.”
“Well, you can’t do anything. You have to take care of yourself and wait for her to make a move.”
“But that’s unfair. I’m left in the position of—in everybody’s eyes—it looks like I’m the wife-beater. And I can’t say anything about it. I’m not allowed to respond. It would be different if I could appear suddenly with a huge pot of money from the Vail drawings.” He sniffled.
“Does she know you have those?”
“Why did you call this morning? You never call me anymore.”
“No reason. I admit I’ve been a little worried. But it had nothing to do with changing my mind about your drawings. What I meant was, if she knows about the drawings, she might tell your parents. Then—”
“She doesn’t know I have them. Or what they are.” Emotion draining, he eyed her. Then a wave of frustration crashed over him. “See, this all so unfair! Everybody else decides who I am. You can’t handle money, little boy. I’m a fag. I’m a fuck-up drunk. And this is going to be the worst. You’re a woman, so you don’t understand. I have no say. Now I’m the wife-beater. I’m beginning to doubt it myself. Am I violent?”
“Nobody ever hit anybody in your family, did they? It’s an inherited thing. You’re under pressure is all.”
“Have you ever hit anybody?”
“No,” she lied. Her finger brushed at a tickling on her cheek. Funny, she’d just been thinking about the time she slapped Darius Van Nest.
“But maybe there was some secret violence in the past, and it’s coming out in me because I’ve sunk so low—socially. My dad is insanely systematic. Isn’t that a kind of violence? Kind of—ingrown?”
“That’s crazy, David.”
“No one talks.” He hopped in his seat. The corduroy wing fluttered. “So—so—I start thinking things like that! Jesus! Even—look at your expression, will you!” he demanded with a hint of a sob. “You look like you’re scared of me! I can tell you’re thinking, Who knows what he’s capable of?”
One stormy afternoon a couple of weeks later, Jane’s apartment seemed to be rising—rising straight up in the air—so much water was sheeting down the windowpanes. The wind spit rain through gaps in the frames, and the droplets caused a spider plant’s leaves to nod on their stems. The old futon had been unfolded. Jane and Raimundo lay naked on the dirty canvas.
Raimundo was peaceably describing the décor of his mother’s apartment, on which he worked when other contractor jobs were lacking. They’d turned the volume down on a trash talk show but still occasionally heard the mob-like audience jeer or applaud over the thrumming rain.
Jane was listening to this awful human noise and may have sounded uninterested when Raimundo described shelf brackets designed to look like little outcroppings of crystal. So, he inquired calmly, “You think my taste is not so great.”
“That’s not true.”
Without taking offense, he pressed her. “Yeah. When you say I like that song or I like that shirt you’re wearing, it’s not really true.”
“Of course, it is, Rai. And even if it wasn’t, or if I didn’t like that stuff, what would it matter? It’s just taste. There are more important things.”
“Maybe. Or it could be that you’re intimidated by the world, and it makes you go for everything low. What you think is low.”
The way he looked at her was something of a challenge. As if his brown eyes dared her to call him a wetback or worse.
“I’m friends with you because I want to be,” Jane said levelly. She turned away and leaned back against his terra cotta shins, nicked pink in quite a few places. She felt his broad feet wriggle under her buttocks. When she didn’t say any more, she sensed that he shrugged. “You know more about me than anyone,” she argued disingenuously.
He was silent.
“You know, a guy tried picking me up—not bad-looking or a creep. I told him I was in love with someone else. Maybe not that word, but I told him about you. I think it was clear.”
His silence may have been a tease. Or proof that she truly was, in the final analysis, alone with him. She turned her head and caught his mischievous smile, reassuring in a way.
He sighed—for himself, from the sound of it. His knees parted, and he tried to pull her back between his legs. His great fingers looked monstrous to her, ugly, for an instant. “Ai,” he grunted when he found her immoveable. “Getting a little fat?”
She brayed in delight. “Nice try. One-twenty-three! Saggy maybe. Crepey-skinned, a little.”
“One-twenty-three? You sure about that? You know, it’s not bad for the woman to get a little voluptuous.”
“You’re the big elephant.” She reached around the small of her back and tweaked his trunk.
“Ai!”
With a playful scream, she jumped up. “No, Rai!” She was marvelously, helplessly happy—almost as if she’d never experienced happiness before. She tottered on the futon, put her arms out for balance. The happiness only lasted a second or two. “Here. Let me read you something weird. This is a case where I really need to know what you think.”
Lifting a messy stack of bills from a dresser, she smiled when Raimundo remarked, “Mm. Nice ass, but I’m telling you, it’s starting to jiggle.”
From a thick envelope under the bills, she slid several carefully folded pages. She jumped back on the futon. Standing over him, she touched his cheek with her finger and said admiringly, “Glabrous-cheeked boy!”
He knew what she meant. “I’ve always had lots of hair down here, but nothing up here. You mind if I can never grow a beard?”
She fell to her knees and pushed Raimundo’s legs together, shutting a casual erection behind his muscular thighs, which, unlike his cheek, had a dense pelisse of black hair. She settled against his shins again. Unfolding the pages, she felt a flicker of nervousness for some reason. “Letter from David Caperini. See, it’s all decorated.” She wagged the first sheet over her shoulder for him to see.
“No. Come on. Let me see.” He grabbed her wrist. He examined the letter for a long time.
“I feel like I’m drowning,” Jane said idly about the rain. Still, Raimundo held her wrist and studied the letter. She was as nervous, almost, as David himself would have been. “Or like a deep-sea diver coming up. I’ll get the bends.”
Each of the letter’s paragraphs was framed by colored pencil foliage from which peeped mournful faces and humping putti.
“Shit,” Raimundo said. “This is amazing. Really excellent, I think.”
“Really? I don’t know. I’m not crazy about that cartoony style,” Jane groused, still nervous. “It’s good, I suppose.”
“No, it’s definitely good,” Raimundo said. “Come on.”
“I guess so, but listen. Blah, blah, blah. He begins with some irrelevant stuff. Then he says, ‘But now I don’t mind the marriage and everything flying to pieces. Maybe everything else will fly apart too, including the vicious and humiliating resentment I feel toward dad, and even toward that unhappy mouse/phantom, mom. Her for not having any strength. Him for being an asshole. Both of them for not being rich like the Van Nests. That, honestly, feels to me like pure stupidity on their part, which is totally unfair, but there it is. I hate them both for damaging me beyond repair. But I’ve decided there’s no point in suppressing the constant burning envy I feel toward anyone who knows how to function in the world, even you, sometimes. Let me be calcined to dust! Knowing the way I am, you’ll laugh, but this raging, shifting, unstable condition in which I no longer have the power to think makes me feel naïve, defenseless and morally brutal. All in a good sense, if you can imagine.’”
Raimundo whistled. “This is crazy. I don’t get any of this. He says he can’t think, but it’s all thinking. Thinking that doesn’t make sense.”
Jane raised her eyebrows. She didn’t turn to look at Raimundo. She seemed to agree but was trying to keep from influencing her consultant. He started cuddling her wearily. His hands crept up and weighed her breasts. She said, “Wait. End of page one. It gets better. ‘I’m so tired of being steamrollered by the ideas other people have about me. When you bring one of your ‘hunks’ by, I—’ That’s you, Rai. He puts hunks in ironic quotes and underlines it.” Raimundo’s forehead landed in his palm. “‘—I know I’m meant to admit to being just an asexual clown, not a real man. (Even if you don’t think you intend it, you do.) But all that stops if I’m nothing but ashes. This is nothing new, you and I have often discussed it: who are we when all our delusions and rote habits are destroyed? I hope you understand the note of pride I feel that, even while I may be burning and fragmenting and flying apart, certain things remain constant, namely the deep nothingness that precedes being. This sense of atomized peace and alienation from myself, from my friends and my so-called family tells me something breathtakingly deep and true about myself—’”
“Jane, please. Come on,” Raimundo begged.
“No, this is the part I really wanted to read. Last page. Buck up. ‘—about myself. I’m not pompous enough to make outsized claims, and I have nothing but pity for childish and spasmodic arrogance (e.g. Darius V. N.), but this is more than colossal presumption on my part. I’m coming to recognize that if anyone gets the dust version of me, the worthless me, it’s you. Not just in the clichéd sense of now you know I’m a sneaky little pilferer, because we exchanged confessions. But also in the sense that, as dust, you and I necessarily disbelieve in affective links between people or anywhere in Nature at all, except as human narrative constructs to give the purely aesthetic clockwork of life a moral air. In connection with gli disegni di Vail which we discussed, I understand your knee-jerk reaction was that it would be wrong to profit. Entitlement is currently a swear word, but my true feeling is that Vail’s memory and gli disegni are, in every important sense, yours. This certainty trumps career, rights, economics, law, even the cold emotion that links us. Your ‘baby clock’ indifference has always fascinated me, and I wonder if that’s how you choose to burn, if that self-imposed sterility is your way of reducing yourself to dust. I think you realize you’re also a deceiver, like me, and that, unless recognized by someone, you will inevitably be alone. Like me. My proposal, not just about selling gli disegni but the original proposal, i.e. marriage, was, is, and always will be serious. David.’”
The rain had slowed some. After Jane fell silent, its pelting sounded weary and cross. “See, he asked me to marry him,” she explained. “That’s what I wanted you to hear. There was a lot in there you wouldn’t get—gli disegni are these drawings, a long story—but the main thing was he asked me to marry him. Married with a kid, and he’s asking to marry me!” This big punch line came out flat. Reading the letter had been more painful, less funny, than she’d expected. Raimundo was running his beardless cheek along her shoulder with distracting tenderness. She stood it as long as she could, even pretending to rub back a little. Then she pushed him away.
She stood up and crossed her arms, throwing the letter to the floor in irritation. She stood at the window which was trembling in the frame whenever the wind gusted. “We know this isn’t for the long term.”
“What do you want me to say about it? What am I supposed to say about that thing?” he complained.
“Not the fucking letter. I’m sorry, Rai. Not the letter. I hate the way he thinks, though. Just having those thoughts run around inside me—” She shuddered.
“Don’t let them get in there.”
“I’m not talking about that, Rai. I’m not talking about the letter when I say this isn’t going to work for very long. I just suddenly know. This isn’t going to work. We should probably start getting ready to break up. You and me.” She found it hard to believe that ten minutes ago she’d been, for a moment, as happy as she ever remembered.
Raimundo stood up, nearly stumbling on the thick futon as if on a quaking bog. His expression was scared.
Jane couldn’t help smiling wryly at his nodding satyr-like tumescence. “What’s that about?”
“What do you think?” he demanded with perfect gravity. In truth, he was almost as surprised as she was. Here he was, shocked, or quite possibly even crushed by her words, and the thing raged on. He seemed to be lugging it around the room with a strange, ecstatic resignation that couldn’t have been entirely sexual. Maybe it wasn’t sexual at all.
“Now I’ve said it,” Jane said regretfully. “And I guess I meant it. But I’m just sorry and regretful and feeling miserable. I suppose I am a deceiver. That’s what you said at first.”
“You’re completely messed up,” he said affectionately. “I’m much more together than you. I think you’re the one who gets nightmares. Not me.”
“I meant it, Rai. I’m sorry. If I were a teenager, I’d tell you—well, I’m sorry to tell you even what I would tell you—it’s just as scummy—but if I were a teen-ager, I’d say, I do love you. I only hate the way I am. And—I guess, I wish I were dead.” At that, his mouth hung open a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said in a slightly different tone, looking down at his body. Abruptly she asked, sounding matter of fact and not at all humorous, “Isn’t that distracting for you?”
He shrugged. He plodded across the bed to embrace her, penis bobbing. It was sandwiched between their bellies like a leaf spring. Though he was exceedingly gentle, he could feel her displeasure.
“Something’s getting between us,” Jane said. Now she was joking, but in an exhausted, unfunny way. She’d gone limp in his arms. He looked down at her with a childish, fostering frown. She answered him almost sharply, “Yes, Rai, I do. I do want to fuck. The only problem is, I also mean what I say.”
He didn’t want to be put off. Passively, she let herself be lowered to her knees, then to her back on the futon. Sex in this condition felt ceremonial, a communicant’s visit to the whore of Babylon’s temple-top boudoir, awkward, passionate, static. In the faintest voice, she whispered a theoretical protest, “No contraception.” Her head fell to the side.
He continued in the most tentative way, perversely slow almost.
“Rai, I think you think because we’re upset, you have to be gentle. You don’t. Just the opposite.”
“What?” he murmured.
“Here.” She took his hand and forced a pantomime slap across her cheek. There was something off about it. For him, anyway. He slowed and stopped and broke it off.
Raimundo thought about pretending to go for contraception. That was too involved. He just wanted to stop now. Jane reacted to his breaking off as if it were exactly what she expected. She gave his back a brisk, teacherly rub when he stood up. With lilting steps, he padded across the floor to the bathroom, his penis, stiff as ever, bobbing with the rhythm of a blind man’s cane. His arousal felt as perfunctory as isometrics. Really, he was on the verge of tears. The whole thing was so confusing and sad for him that he forced himself not to look back at her from the bathroom door.
Her hands were laced behind her head. Her feet yawned, toes outward. A hint of inflamed color split the shadow between her legs, where the hair was slicked apart. She reached down. The heel of her palm rubbed at an itch in her tangled mons, a casual
thump. She stretched her arms. She sighed. She slapped the canvas on either side of her in a silly rhythm. Her breasts jiggled and swirled flat like eggs.