MAYBE AMANDA WAS GREEDY. SOMETIMES, NOT KNOWING what else to do, you had sex. Clay could make her feel better not psychically but physically. She let him carry her away from herself. In the body she was far from the mind. She opened herself to it, though maybe the vodka helped. She consented. More than. She wanted it. She pushed off her humid underwear. She lay back on the bright white duvet. The clothes she was packing up fell to the wood floor.
The shirt Clay wore remembered the sudden sweat, a fear response to that noise. She buried her nose in his armpit and closed her eyes. She traced the inside of his thigh and tasted salt. The sounds they made were close to screams. It didn’t seem to matter, nothing did. She let them rise from somewhere deep in her chest, like she imagined opera singers did. The clap of flesh against flesh. Hair lacquered to skin with spit. The opportunity to forget.
Amanda thought of the best worst things, that’s what sexual fantasy was. One dick, two dicks, three dicks, four! She thought of G. H. leering at her from the threshold, then coming into the room to offer some pointers, to encourage Clay in his fucking, to—sure why not—fuck her himself. Fuck, fuck, forget. She came once, twice. What was left on her stomach was enough to fill a shot glass, was the work of a younger man. It was enough to make a baby. You needed so little for that. They could make two, three, ten, an army of them, alternate versions of the children they already had, pink and clean and healthy and strong, a new world order because the old world was so out of order. Amanda propped herself up on her elbows. The stuff slid down her like a snail on a sedge, onto that beautiful white duvet.
Clay was out of breath. Fucking her like that was like inflating fifty pool floats. Sometimes he could picture a tumor blossoming in his lungs, black and terrible. Still, you couldn’t live without risk. He lay on his stomach, then rolled onto his back. The sweat on his skin had its intended, cooling effect. “I love you.” His voice emerged hoarse after all those exhalations and exhortations. He did not feel cowed by what they’d just done. He felt restored. He thought of Ruth and vowed that when they got back to their apartment, he would listen to Swan Lake. And he did love Amanda, he loved her, he loved. You endured as long as that was the case.
It felt insincere, to return a declaration of love. An echo was just a trick of physics. She felt free. “I’m worried about Archie.”
It was maybe the best sex they’d had, though of course pleasure, like pain, was so soon forgotten. “He’ll be okay. We’ll get home, we’ll see Dr. Wilcox.”
She prodded at the stain on the bedspread, worried.
“Who cares about that?” He dipped a finger into his semen like a quill into ink. He wrote phantom letters on her belly.
She’d strip this bed, too, leave the linens on the floor of the laundry room. “Maybe when we’re back we can do something special. It’s still our vacation. We could drive out to Hoboken and check into a hotel with a rooftop pool. I bet that would be cheap.”
“I want to stop at a diner on the way home.” Clay was hungry right then. “One of those old-fashioned places. Chrome. Jukeboxes. Corned beef hash.” The only things a person ever wanted were food and home.
“A staycation. The movies. Go to the Met. Dinner at a sit-down Chinese restaurant, with those silver pots of tea and orange slices when they bring the bill.” The life they had was perfect.
Clay imagined the end of summer city: the shimmer of heat, the drip from window units overhead, the chorus of ice cream trucks, office buildings leaking air-conditioning onto the humid sidewalks where fat tourists were wandering dumbstruck. It would be enough for him. Marble countertops and this perfect swimming pool and the touch-responsive light switches were all well and good, but be it ever so humble, etc.
“You don’t think anything’s wrong with Rose, do you?” A briefer moment of surrender than orgasm.
Clay began reflexively to say that everything was fine, but he did not believe it, and anyway, in matters of fact, belief was not salient. “She seemed okay to me. Did you notice something?”
“No.” Amanda swallowed, a hand at her throat. Was something wrong with her? “Do you feel okay?”
“I feel normal. I feel like myself.” Clay had never been the most observant of men.
Amanda stood. She wiped her stomach with a pair of his folded boxer shorts. Her arms, her legs, her waist—they showed her forty-three years. There was that sway, the gentle ripple of the excess flesh, the subtle give, though it felt nice in your hand, soft to the touch. Naturally, there were days she rounded her shoulders, wanted not to be seen. Mostly she was the kind of woman interested in blending in. The way she wore her hair, the kinds of clothes she favored. Amanda was a type. She was not ashamed of that. But there were moments—this was one—where she felt individual and perfect. Maybe it was just the barely perceptible reverberations of the orgasm. She was a thing beautiful to behold. Stained and sweaty and sagging, also smooth and ripe and desired. Humans were monsters but also perfect creations. She felt what is termed sexy but is really just an animal’s satisfaction in being an animal. Had she been a deer, she’d have leaped over a branch. Had she been a bird, she’d have lifted into the sky. Had she been a house cat, she’d have run her own tongue over herself. She was a woman, so she stretched and shifted the weight from one leg to the other like a statue from antiquity.
“Let’s go smoke.” Clay, adolescent, was proud of his performance, like he’d heaved a shot put or sunk a basketball. She’d soiled his underwear, so he stalked to the door naked. There was no grace to it; his dick disrupted symmetry, an insult to beauty.
“Put on your clothes.”
“What’s wrong with sitting naked in the night air and smoking?”
“Well . . . Ruth and G. H.”
“Who cares?”
Clay pulled open the door, but it was Amanda who noticed: interruption in the pane of glass. A crack that was more than a flaw. It was thin but deep, stretched for inches, a slash, a rent. “Look at that.”
Clay peered at the glass. He put his hand in hers.
“This wasn’t here before.” She dropped her voice, not wanting to be overheard.
“You’re sure?” A mumble, lips puckered around the cigarette.
Amanda traced the crack with her finger. It was from the noise. A noise big enough to crack glass. Noise as a tangible thing. She shivered from the cool air and the reminder too. She closed the door behind her, stood naked in the chill air, unprotected by clothes, a dare to the night and whatever else was out there.