A Part of the World

He arrived at her apartment that evening. She opened the door and he stepped into the foyer. They were alone, and he was surprised to find that he was unsure of himself. There was a brief moment, a few seconds at most, when they looked at each other, each seeking to confirm that their mutual understanding was still in place; that the state of affairs between them when they last parted from here was unchanged. That took only a moment, and then they were at each other. There was an urgency not present two nights before. Sunday night had been a gradual unfolding of the joy that was to be had; now there was no time to lose. He tried to go down on her again, but she wasn't having any of it, and again there was the sandpaper tightness inside until she lubricated.

The realization that it was really her he was with, not some imaginary stranger but this real person he had known briefly and then dreamed of for two days, came to him once they started, and then suddenly there she was, revealed in all of her quivering feral perfection, now clothed only in her gleaming silky coat and that not being nearly enough, she being eaten up from nose to tail; and he wanted to see the shock of it in her eyes, frolicking only moments ago without the slightest notion of what was to become of her. And then, just like that, they were done and holding each other and she was smiling at him, oblivious to his dream.

They made love again before they could relax and lie with each other. Late that night she bled a little and they stopped. She didn't complain, but they didn't have sex in the morning, and they agreed that when he came the next day to spend the night they would not make love. On Thursday, this resolution survived a period of time best measured in seconds. He didn't force himself on her, he would have been happy to go along. But it was her vagina, and she was no more inclined to stop than he. Anyway, she had begun to stretch out by then, and there wasn't any more bleeding.

They had their first argument. She'd been alone for six months since her marriage had broken up. They obviously had similar appetites, and he assumed she had pleased herself since her husband had left. He asked her about it. She said she never did that, and then reflected the question back at him. Her phrasing made it clear that there was to be only one acceptable answer, but this hint was ignored. Oblivious as usual, he blurted out that he did, but only a couple of times a day now that he was seeing her. By the time the words were out of his mouth, he knew he'd made a mistake. He started to explain that it only happened on their days off and it didn't affect anything that went on between them and were they really not fucking enough as it was, but the words wouldn't come out fast enough to calm her down. She was simply furious. She seemed to take it as a personal affront.

He was tempted to say, fine, come on over and take care of me if you don't want me to, but in fact that would not at all have been what he wanted. He loved wandering in his pornographic garden, sifting through the scores of luxurious, sleek women who were to be found there, imagining scenarios he would never dare or even want to act out with her. He'd grown accustomed to the efficiency and convenience of it; if he had to get that from her every day, he thought, he'd never make it out of the house. And he liked being alone with his dreams, unrestrained by the confines of opportunity or morality, enjoying the complete absence of any distraction external to his own pleasure, not having another person there to complicate matters by adding a social layer to the experience.

He hadn't fantasized yet while they were making love, she had filled his thoughts. But if he couldn't dream of other women at all, ever, even when he was away from her, it would only be a matter of time before it affected their lovemaking. This was the first time in his life that he'd had sexual thoughts about the same woman for more than two days in a row. He tried to imagine what it would be like to think of other women while he was having sex with her. The thought horrified him. When they made love he was promising her that she consumed him, and up until then the promise had been true. If he dreamed of other women he'd be breaking faith with her. It would be a betrayal, like Jane Fonda glancing at her watch. So he remained silent. There was obviously no point in talking to her. Of course he wasn't going to stop; he just wouldn't tell her. And so now there were secrets.

* * *

Her ideas about his equipment were fanciful. She swore it was the biggest one ever, and measured it with a ruler. He hit her diaphragm one night, and when they were done she put him in a headlock, her arms like a vise around his neck as she whispered lasciviously into his ear: You've been places nobody's been before. She told him one night during their second week that her ex-husband had come by the night before to see their child, and she'd had sex with him. She described his reaction to the roomier new her with obvious relish. He could tell, she said. He could tell the moment we started. She was quite pleased with herself at this triumph over her former spouse.

Years of watching porn had made clear to him how ordinary he was. But this knowledge couldn't possibly stand up against the onslaught of her flattery. Soon, by the operation of some mysterious psychological phenomenon consisting mainly of human vanity, he was overcome with self-satisfaction. Her admiration was so childlike and unabashed that he actually came close to being jealous of his own penis. And the effrontery of it! He would never have dared get a seamstress's tape and try to measure a girl's boobs, and yet here she was, thinking she had the right. He was both amused and mortified to find out how susceptible he was to her admiration. Like everyone else, he'd always looked down on flattery as a crass art, unworthy of his refined sensibilities. He now realized that this was only because nobody had ever gone to the trouble of flattering him before.

He was astonished at the obvious pleasure she took in pleasing him, and how that pleasure was magnified as it was reflected back and forth between them. This had to have been deliberate behavior. She must have been aware of the effect her admiration was having upon him, but even this knowledge of her motives couldn't undermine his instinctive reaction to her attention. It was overpowering. So this was what it was like to be pretty; to be well-thought-of and to receive such attention, simply because of the way nature formed you; to have a girl look at you and like what she saw. She must have seen how wonderful it was for him to think of himself in this way, but she never let on.

It wasn't long before his thoughts took a darker turn. It occurred to him how unfair this was. He finally had some physical attribute that favored him, but the one person who knew about it had only made the discovery after having already decided to sleep with him. This nullified the whole advantage. Women had breasts, which didn't shrink away to nothing when their owners weren't excited. It really bothered him that this wonderful instrument of his was hidden away. He thought about asking her to sign some kind of statement testifying to what she'd said, and have the thing notarized. But how to word it without it seeming weird? And then he'd have to figure out some way to show the statement to a girl, and that could be awkward. He tried to think of ways he could steer a normal conversation to the point at which it would be appropriate to whip out the statement. Nothing came to mind.

Eventually there was proof of her sincerity, and this was his downfall. She went and purchased some condoms for him to use, and of course she came back with the largest size they had. He tried one on. It was enormous. He could have unrolled it, held it by the tip, and lowered it onto his penis without it touching the sides. This should have been the end of it, but she was not so easily disillusioned. She seemed like an obsessed 4-H club member, grimly determined to believe that her prize pig was the best one, notwithstanding any extrinsic evidence to the contrary.

They almost never got out of bed. She must have fed him at some point, but afterwards he couldn't remember ever eating there. Except for bathroom breaks, and a bath they took together, as far as he could remember they spent the whole time sleeping, making love, or lying on their sides with their limbs intertwined, talking and kissing. Their lovemaking was distinguished only by its frequency. As new as they were, the added stimulus of novelty was just not necessary. In its place was an intensity that was almost grim, as if they were trying to make up for lost time. Once, when they had two days off in a row, he rode down to a building in the Haight where she was working alone and they made love on the floor of her office. This was to be the extent of their invention.

Now that they had gotten down to business, there weren't any more non-sexual activities being planned. One night, he insisted they go out on a date. She was perfectly indifferent, but agreed. They went to a Chinese restaurant on Geary Street and sat across from each other, holding their menus. He started to speak, but then realized that the subjects they'd been talking about would feel strange being said out loud in a public place. She was miles away. Her facial expressions were different from when they were in bed. For the first time, he felt pressured to say something that would make her smile. This was a waste of time. They could have been at home. He thought perhaps she had already known this. They finished their dinner and went back to her apartment.

He slowly came to the realization that, all the time they'd spent together beforehand, she'd just been waiting on him. This, what they were doing now, was what she'd wanted all along. The irony of it was that he'd wanted the same thing. All of his efforts had been directed towards the same end, to no effect whatsoever; the only thing he'd done to advance their relationship was to ask what a black body was. He crawled towards women. He was incapable of putting himself forward in a direct way, and this just confused her. The reason things took so long was her assuming that he would eventually make his feelings plain. Once she realized that he was never going to try, she simply took matters into her own hands; even his pathological shyness hadn't put her off.

There was a singular economy of purpose to her. He'd noticed from the first how self-possessed she was, but only now recognized its object. There was no chrome on her, no extraneous motion, nothing not purposeful to her objective. Intimacy was, to her, life's greatest joy, and she directed all of her energies to that end. She was not to be distracted. Every word she spoke was in marked contrast to the forms of speech he'd previously heard from women. He thought at first that this was just another aspect of intimacy, and partly it was; but mainly it was the fact that he had been chosen by a woman completely free of guile. Up until then, his whole life with women had consisted of thoroughly engineered conversations, safe and censored, stripped of any real content of the minds from which the words sprang. But now, finally relaxed, he was able to say what he thought, or nothing at all.

This new-found candor was a mixed blessing. One night, he'd arrived and they'd made love. To get to her apartment, he would ride across the Golden Gate Bridge, turn right just past the toll plaza, then down along the coast to 25th, and out Geary towards the beach. His sense of anticipation, building as he rode along this route, was palpable, and he wanted to convey this to her. The image of Ferdinand the Bull sprang into his head. Without further thought, he said: Sometimes I want to fuck you so much, I can't even see you. She didn't say anything, but rotated her body on the bed until she was perpendicular to him, and then kicked him as hard as she could. He flew off the bed and bounced onto the hardwood floor. He spent the next half hour on his knees, rubbing his hip and trying to undo the damage he'd done. She let him dangle for a while, accusing him, among other things, of regarding her as a "sordid little sex toy." He meditated briefly before saying, no, he never thought that. By this time he knew better than to answer spontaneously; he was gradually discovering the limits on telling women how he actually felt.

* * *

He was playing baseball with some friends in the lower yard at his old elementary school during their second week. This was an exercise in nostalgia, since the playing surface was asphalt, with 60-foot baselines, and they were all years past the age when they would have played on such a small field.

Standing at home plate, he noticed the shade tree that stood in foul territory in right field, one sprawling branch overhanging the field and interfering with play on balls hit down the first base line. The ground rule was that anything fair hit into the tree was a double, and even back when they were kids this was a travesty, since the tree was only about thirty feet past first base.

When he had attended the school, trees had ringed both the upper and lower yards, shading the wooden benches which had been placed along their perimeters. Once there had even been a spring in the lower yard, but this had long since been covered over, and several of the trees in the upper yard that he could remember were now gone. Some day this tree would be removed as well, as the school's character evolved over time from that of a building hastily built in a field near an old sawmill, to a boring proper school in an affluent neighborhood. He felt sad for the tree, and lucky to have seen it. He thought how fortunate he was to have attended school here. He remembered the coolness of the room underneath the auditorium stage where they stored their bicycles, and the hurt look on the school secretary's face when he was sent to the office.

His thoughts turned to the question of why he was even entertaining such idle reflections; this had never been his habit. Before, moments like these would have been a distraction, providing only a temporary refuge from the normal course of his thoughts. Now they were an enhancement, adding to joy rather than thwarting misery. And this was all because of her, even though he wasn't thinking of her and hadn't for several hours.

His friends couldn't tell any difference in him. Of all his acquaintances, only a friend of his sister had noticed anything, when he had stopped by her shop to say hello. And almost the whole of his external life was unchanged from before. But now he was happy over nothing at all; and the ordinary annoyances he experienced, while still the same, formed only the tiniest offset to the general sense of contentment that he now took for granted. The last week had stilled the incessant drumbeat in his head that he was alone and unworthy of companionship because there was something wrong with him. It was not so much that some calming knowledge had been added, as that the relentless self-disapprobation that he had labored under had been subtracted. He wasn't constantly being attacked by his own mind. He no longer felt that he was looking at the world through a pane of glass, as if peering into a restaurant window on a rainy night. He was, for the first time as an adult, a part of the world, as deserving of his place in it as anyone.

He did not want to reveal this happiness to others. He wanted to keep it as a secret, suspecting that if it were to be made public, it would lose its special character and become only common pleasure. But he didn't know this. And as private as he was, she was even more so. He had noticed that her public behavior was largely unchanged from what it had been before they became intimate. She still would not look around, or smile, or speak loudly, or communicate with him in any way that would betray to a stranger that things between them had changed. She would whisper to him in class; that was all. He knew she had changed, but only because he had witnessed her private behavior before their first night. She had never smiled before, not like after the first time, and now it was always there when they were alone. But she would never flirt, nor be coquettish, in public or in private, neither before nor after. To her, intimacy was not a fit subject for humor or satire.

He wondered how much joy had been hidden from him in this way. All of the things he was enjoying now, he had experienced before without particularly noticing them; whereas now, only with this new knowledge added, all of life's other pleasures flowered before him, so that even standing stupidly at home plate looking at a tree was a source of contentment. He was frightened to think that perhaps some day he would take happiness for granted; that, now having obtained what he had before felt jealous of in others, he would become as complacent as they had once seemed to him.

* * *

That night, as they made love, she closed her eyes and turned her head to the side, laying her cheek against the bed, as she would sometimes do. She seemed to be hiding from him, trying to block out what they were doing. Maybe it was modesty, or some weird desire for privacy. He thought this wasn't right. Her face was the part of her body that mattered most to him when they were being intimate. It was the part she used to look at him, to smile at him, to speak to him, to kiss him. Her face reflected the remarkable changes she went through when they made love. She must have known this, and been somehow ashamed or embarrassed by it, or else she wouldn't have hidden herself. He had thought he was shy, but now he believed that it was she. He went inexorably towards her with his eyes open, even as she veiled herself. He knew exactly what he was doing to her and was glad of it, while she could not face the fact of her own exposure to him, and averted her eyes, as if somehow to withhold the frightful knowledge that was being had of her.

He sometimes held her head in his hands as they made love, but he couldn't forcibly move her head that way. So, when she turned away from him, he was reduced to using his face to harass her, not much different from what a puppy would do. He used his open mouth and the front of his face to rub the half of her face that was exposed to him, and then tried to work his nose and his jaw underneath her cheek, to force her head up. Eventually she turned her head to the other side. He left her alone for a few minutes, and then started in again until finally she turned to face him, and he put his tongue into her mouth. He wanted her to know that there was no point in trying to hide from him. He wanted her to see that he could see all of her beauty; and when it was all displayed before him, when she had given up trying to hide, he groaned and came inside of her. Coming was just nature's way of recording the fact that, for a fleeting moment, he'd seen her. And in that moment, he felt as if they were together inside of her, the two of them riding the beating wave of her heart, finally joined and safe with each other after being somehow lost and apart. And there she bathed him in the unbearable light of herself, as if she were the sun; and the world and all of its mean distractions ceased to matter, because they were with each other and entirely self-sufficient, not dependent upon anything outside of themselves to complete their happiness.

He wondered whether she was really hiding from him, intending not to be found, and his finding her was thwarting her will; or whether she was, in hiding from him, only inviting him to look for her. He never asked her. He felt uncomfortable discussing their lovemaking, and in any case the answer didn't matter; he would have dug her out of her hole either way. Other than groaning at the end, he didn't talk to her while they were making love. He was new at this, and it felt strange; he didn't know what to say. It was as if speaking would somehow be a defilement of what they were doing, that it would disrupt the strange, sacred irrational space they were inhabiting when they made love. And it made no difference anyway; he thought it would be impossible for them to do these things and her not know how beautiful she was to him. Much later, he realized his mistake, and thought of things he would have liked to say to her; and the things he had not said were among his many regrets.