The Hotel Eden(43)
“How’s your nightcap?” I asked Lynn. We hadn’t really talked much in the car or parking it in the basement or riding the elevator to her floor or waiting for her to find her keys and I didn’t know how we were doing anymore. Isn’t that funny? You see a friend playing the organ in the dark, and you fall asleep at the wheel. I sipped the beer and I had no idea of what to say or do next.
“I love baseball,” she breathed at me. She smelled nice, something of brandy and a new little scent, something with a European city in the name of it, and her hand on my shoulder felt good, and I realized, as anyone realizes when he hears a woman tell him a lie when she knows it is a lie and that he is going to know it is a lie and that the rules have been changed or removed and that frankly, he should now do anything he wants to, it’s going to be all right. He’s not going to get slapped or told, “You fool, what are you doing!” It’s a realization that sets the adrenaline on you, your heart, your knees, and I sat there unable to move for a moment as the blood beat my corpuscles open.
When I did move, it was to reach for her, slowly, because that’s the best moment, the reach, and I pulled her over toward me to kiss her, but she came with the gesture a little too fully and rolled over on top of me, setting her brandy skillfully on the floor as her mouth closed on mine.
It had been a while for this cowboy, but even so, she didn’t quite feel right in my arms. Her body was not the body that I was used to, that I associated with such pleasures, and her movements too had an alien rhythm which I didn’t at first fully appreciate. I was still being dizzied by these special effects when she started in earnest. It wasn’t a moment until we were in a genuine thumping sofa rodeo, she on top of me, riding for the prize. My head had been crooked into the corner, stuffed into a spine-threatening pressure seal, and Lynn was bent (right word here) on tamping me further into the furniture. She did pause in her frenzy at one point, arch up, and pull her skirt free, bunching it at her waist. It was so frankly a practical matter, and her rosy face shone with such businesslike determination, that it gave me a new feeling: fear. Supine on that couch device, I suddenly felt like I was at the dentist. How do these things turn on us? How does something we seem to want, something we lean toward, instantly grow fangs and offer to bite our heads off?
I remember Midgely at the plate during a college game, going after what he thought was the fattest fastball he’d ever seen. It was a slow screwball, and when it broke midway through his swing and took him in the throat, he looked betrayed. He was out for a week. He couldn’t talk above a whisper until after graduation. And right now I was midswing with Lynn, and I could tell something ugly was going to happen.
Meanwhile, with one halfhearted hand on her ass and the other massaging the sidewall of her breast, I was also thinking: You don’t want to be rude. You don’t want to stand, if you could, and heave her off and run for the door. With her panties tangled to her knees like that she’d likely take a tumble and put the corner of something into her brain. There you are visiting her in the hospital, coma day 183, the room stuffed with bushels of the flowers you’ve brought over the last six months, and you’re saying to her sister Phyllis, the most ardent wrongful-death attorney in the history of the world, “Nightcap. We’d had a nightcap.”
No, you can’t leave. It’s a night-cap, and you’ve got to do your part. You may know you’re in trouble, but you’ve got to stay.
A moment later, Lynn peaked. Her writhing quadrupled suddenly and she went into an extended knee-squeeze seizure, a move I think I had first witnessed on Big Time Wrestling, and then she softened with a sigh, and said to me in her new voice, breathy and smiling, a whisper really, “What do you want?”
It’s a great question, right? Even when it is misintended as it was here. It was meant here as the perfect overture to sexual compliance, but my answers marched right on by that and lined up. What do I want? I want my life back. I want to see a chiropractor. I want baseball to be what it used to be.
But I said, “How about another beer? I should be going soon, but I could use another beer.”
When she left the room, shaking her skirt down and then stepping insouciantly out of her underpants, I had a chance to gather my assertiveness. I would tell her I was sorry, but not to call me again. I would tell her I wasn’t ready for this mentally or physically. I would tell her simply, Don’t be mad, but we’re not right for each other in any way.
When Lynn reappeared with my beer, I sucked it down quietly and kissing her, took my ambivalent leave. The most assertive thing I said was that I would walk home, that I needed the air. Oh, it was sad out there in the air, walking along the dark streets. Why is it so hard to do things on purpose? I felt I had some principles, why wouldn’t they apply? Why couldn’t I use one like the right instrument and fix something? Don’t answer.