The Devil's Sperm Is Cold (24 page)

“This is going to hurt a lot later on,” she said. “When the reaction has set in and passed on, and I begin to digest everything we did and felt, I’m going to ache for you, and want you so badly I won’t be able to stand it.”

“I’ll be two thousand miles away,” he told her.

“Being consoled by Alma,” she added.

“That’s what that’s all about,” he said. And putting on his pants had added, “You don’t have to be at a loss for company.”

She had not moved.

“Aren’t you going to get dressed?” he asked.

“You leave first,” she said.

He began to protest, for no good reason he could name, but she cut him short. “Just go,” she said, “or we’ll start saying hateful things to each other.”

The memory had flooded his mind, and it took a few seconds before he felt the pressure of Alma’s hand in his. He looked down at her.

“Can we go now?” she asked.

He looked at her for a few seconds, brought himself back to the present. The woman at his side was scintillatingly attractive, dark and hard, bright and soft, all at the same time. And with her, there were no hidden traps, no ragged edges to tear him apart. She felt him ascending from his reverie, which she knew involved Joan, and returning to her. They smiled at each other, and their connection clicked again. They could feel the warmth surging back.

After his trip with Joan, he had gone to his apartment, slept for fourteen hours, cleaned up, and walked to Alma’s place. He was apprehensive about what she would say. But, at her door, she had not shown any trace of emotion.

“You disappeared,” she said.

“I had one last bit of business to clear up,” he told her.

“Are you all clear now?” she asked.

“There’s just us, now,” he said.

Alma had not asked anything more of him, and that afternoon he had moved into her apartment, and they began making plans to leave the city. Now, he squeezed her hand.

“Five minutes,” he said.

“I’ll meet you in the hallway,” she told him.

She went out into the foyer and through the door that led to the elevators. As she walked, more than one pair of eyes followed her. Most of the men were acting out of reflex, watching her ass as it moved the way a cat will idly stare at flickering shadows on a wall; and the women looked with more narrow gazes, their eyes reflecting something faintly akin to the kind of shrewdness they manifest when shopping for clothes, a feeling somewhere between critical intelligence and the fear born of suspicion that one is being cheated.

Joan watched also. But her images were more specific. She saw Manuel’s body covering hers. “She’ll be lying under him tonight,” she thought. “She will be kissing him and taking him inside her. And I wonder whether he will be thinking of me.”

Manuel walked up to her, stepping into her trance, supplanting her vision of him with his actual presence. The writer who had been talking to her fell suddenly silent, for at once her attention was riveted on Manuel.

“We are leaving,” he said.

She looked into his eyes, and for a long heartbeat they plunged into each other’s souls. They exchanged communications too compact, too deep, too complex for words. They stared at each other in silence. And then, as with all true tragedies, they experienced the real horror of their situation not in the pain of separation, but in order to separate they had to pull masks over their naked faces, over the faces that throbbed with feeling, and become once more the copy editor and the mail-room boy.

“I…hope you enjoy…Puerto Rico,” she said.

Another few seconds and she would begin to weep, and dislike herself for crying, since the rational part of her had convinced her emotions that it had decided what was best over the long haul and would punish her for any excess sentiment.

“Adios,” he whispered, and turned violently on his heel and strode from the room.

As he reached the door, he caught Lou’s eye. They nodded briefly to each other. They had an appointment for lunch the next afternoon. An odd and totally unexpected bond was springing up between them. They would have an oblique commonality once they reached the island.

Manuel sped past, past the hollow good-byes of people he had worked with for a year, and with each step, a sense of the curtain’s closing behind him sent shivers up his spine. And when he finally reached the spot where Alma stood, he put one arm around her and hugged her to him. She leaned into him, and sent her heat into his body, her breasts giving him tactile promise of the succor she would offer him later that day, and through many days and months and years to come. She slipped one hand into his.

“Let’s go now,” she said.

The young writer who had been talking to Joan, perplexed at having witnessed something he didn’t understand, stood frowning, wanting to get her attention again. But she was staring into space, unmindful of everything that went on around her. She felt as though a bandage had been rudely ripped from her heart, and while the wound was on its way to being healed, the pain of the cut and the sudden harsh exposure to the air were fierce. She was breathing rapidly and shallowly, very alert, very alive, very beautiful in her terrible desertion.

Margaret stroked her arm.

Joan turned, startled at the touch.

“Why don’t you come into my office,” she said. And then amended, “Your office, after today.”

Joan nodded and let herself be led. Margaret walked with her through the crowd, which had swelled to its noisiest and most chaotic level. She smiled and bobbed her head in purely mechanical actions that passed for social intercourse, impatient with the forced jolliness of the occasion, but knowing that nothing was to be gained by not acceding to the structure of the event. She, like everyone else there, was trapped in a social convention that none of them cared for or found meaningful in any way whatsoever.

When she shut the door behind them, the sounds diminished by half.

“Some party,” Margaret said.

Joan stood in the middle of the room looking as though she were trying to remember something both trivial and specific. Her mind had recoiled from the good-byes with Manuel, and she was finding ways of putting distance between herself and the fact that she would probably never see him again.

Margaret went to her desk, reached into a drawer, pulled out a pint of brandy, and poured two large drinks into two paper cups that had held champagne. She took one over to Joan, put it in her hand, and then led the girl to the couch. They sat down and sipped at their drinks for a while.

“It hurts,” Margaret said, voicing what she sensed Joan was feeling.

Joan shook her head. “I’m numb,” she said. “And my common sense tells me it’s for the best. I just need to assimilate it all.”

Margaret closed her eyes in silence. She had her own difficulties in accepting Joan’s feelings, and the reason for those feelings, without jealousy. She took a long deep breath and centered herself in calm.

Joan had, as Jack had predicted, just walked into the office one day. Margaret had already begun to think she might not return, and was considering calling her, when the copy editor walked up to the desk and said, “Do I still have a job here?” Margaret had thought for one wild moment that Jack had given her the line to say.

There had been no hesitation. The moment she saw Joan, Margaret’s heart melted, and in a flash she knew that without her having even been aware of the process, she had begun to love her. The doubts, the thoughts, evaporated, and Margaret had done nothing more than to take Joan in her arms and embrace her gently.

That night they went to Margaret’s apartment. Joan poured out the whole story of what had happened with Manuel. And had ended it by saying, “I belong to him. I mean, if he wants me, ever, there is a place inside me he can reach, and hold, and I will open to him. And it goes deeper than anything I can rationalize, and has nothing to do with my other feelings for him or about him. And it has nothing to do with my loving anyone else. Can you understand that?”

Margaret, who had touched the edges of that experience with Jack a few nights earlier, understood perfectly.

“I suppose on some level, a man and a woman fit together in a way that goes beyond our control. And when the right man and woman meet, the key goes into the lock and opens it. And it’s as inexorable as any other law of nature.

“And I will probably never see him again,” Joan said.

“You’re getting your first big lesson in the ways of destiny a little earlier than you may have expected, that’s all,” Margaret said. “I wish I could comfort you, but I can’t. I would be lying if I tried.”

“But what about us?” Joan asked.

“I think I love you,” Margaret told her. “And that means it doesn’t matter why you are who you are. I accept you.” And she quoted the lines from Poe’s ultimate expression of love: “I know not, I ask not, if guilt’s in that heart; I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art.”

They had gone to bed then, and Joan was frightened to try. After what she had known with Manuel, she wasn’t sure whether she could feel anything with Margaret. It would hurt the other woman if she didn’t, and she couldn’t pretend. Joan had returned for no good reason she could define. But the day after her final night with Manuel, her feet just took her to the office, and when she saw Margaret, she knew she wanted only to be taken in by the older woman. She could not call what she felt love or even desire; it was a kind of mute instinct that shaped her behavior beyond her immediate understanding.

As Joan now sat in her office, sipping the brandy, staring into space, Margaret thought of what it had been like to make love to her that night. The room was suffused with the soft light of candles and the flames in the fireplace. Everything was orange and yellow, and low winged piano music fell from the stereo speakers onto the charged air. They walked to the bed as though they were clouds, wafting through space, not aware of any hard surface or extraneous realities. They had gone to extremes, each in her own way with another and then with each other. They had inadvertently tested themselves and found that, without plan, they were deeply intertwined. Had they bothered to think about it at all, they might have considered that they each sought refuge from the failure of having formed a union with a man; but then, one might also think that their seeming inability to merge with a man was due to their more profound desire to remain free for each other.

But for them, there were no thoughts, merely the exaltation of their condition, making it sacred through a ritual of flesh.

Margaret took Joan to the bed and laid her down. The girl was suffused with a beauty so piercing that Margaret had trouble catching her breath. What she had been through with Manuel had purified her, made her lean, burned the excess from her soul, and in the wake of that, her body shone with a distinct light. Joan was trembling from head to foot, a light quivering that signaled willing helplessness before the event. She felt like a virgin. The patina of sophisticated sexuality was not present, and she now remained exposed to the sweet urgings of her most tender desires…to be held so lightly, to be stroked so softly, to be entered so delicately.

And Margaret was not only able, but enraptured, to give her all that. She peeled the clothing from Joan’s body slowly, kissing each part of her as it was exposed, licking her arms, the insides of her elbows, her shoulders. She raised Joan’s skirt and unhooked it, and for a moment feasted her eyes on the girl’s long legs, white and vulnerable against the bedspread, joining in a tangle of hair that was covered by the thinnest of fabrics. Margaret removed Joan’s panties, pulling them down her thighs, over her knees, past her calves, off her feet, and then began to look over the places she had passed, sucking the other woman’s toes, lapping the soles of her feet, gently biting her calves, running her tongue up the insides of her thighs.

Joan did not move, but let herself tingle with the mounting sense of surrender. She moaned softly and continuously, her lips pursed, and said, “Oh, oh, oh,” again and again as wave after wave of sensual realization broke over her.

Margaret continued removing clothing, unbuttoning Joan’s blouse, exposing her naked breasts. Margaret kissed the mounds unceasingly, taking the nipples between her teeth and flicking them with her tongue. She sucked the breasts into her mouth one at a time, and held each one inside her, flooding it with warmth, smothering it in sensation.

Joan did not move. Margaret was a fluttering moth on her skin. It was so different from what it had been with Manuel, utterly different. And that is how she was able to respond. For if Margaret had raised the slightest ghost of the man Joan had just been ravished by, they could not have continued. But Manuel did not even come into account, for what was happening was taking place in a totally other realm. Joan’s trembling increased until she was shaking visibly, and she raised her arms to embrace Margaret lightly.

Margaret slid up until the two women were face to face. She had her left arm under Joan’s back and with her right hand was stroking the length of her, going from her thighs, brushing her cunt, sweeping over her belly, cupping her breasts, and coming to rest on her lips, Joan kissed Margaret’s fingers with breathy, curled kisses, and when Margaret’s hand moved down again, Joan’s mouth went on kissing the air, making her face a pool of exquisite expressions in which Margaret could see reflected her own ideal beauty.

Joan opened her eyes and woman looked at woman, soul mirrored soul, and that thing took place which was beyond what happens between man and woman, so far removed from the other that no comparison is possible. And then Joan surrendered, for she saw that there was no conflict, that what she and Margaret knew together could never be touched by what either of them did with any man, that they were safe within their mutual awareness, shielded forever from all external harm. And like all who glimpse what it is to be a lover, they understood that it would always be like this if they were faithful to their highest insight into their relationship, if they continued to honor their love by not attempting to make it into something it was not.