Maybe not.
When I got tired of hearing her I put a hand on her belly and stroked her. Her sudden intake of breath showed she wasn’t expecting it. I ran my hand down, and her legs parted in anticipation, and I put my hand on her and fingered her. Just that, just lay beside her and worked her with my fingers. She’d closed her eyes, and I watched her face while my fingers did what they did.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!”
I got hard doing this, but didn’t feel the need to do anything about it. After she came I just lay where I was. I closed my eyes and got soft again and lay there listening to all the silence in the room.
My father moved away when I was still in diapers. At least, that was what I was told. I don’t remember him, and I’m not convinced he was there. Somebody got her pregnant, it wasn’t the Holy Ghost, but did he ever know it? Did she even know his last name?
So I was raised by a single mother, though I don’t recall hearing the term back then. Early on she brought men home, and then she stopped doing that. She might come home smelling of where she’d been and what she’d been doing, but she’d come home alone.
Then she stopped that, too, and spent her evenings in front of the TV.
One night we were watching some program, I forget what, and she said, “You’re old enough now. I suppose you touch yourself.”
I knew what she meant. What I didn’t know was how to respond.
She said, “Don’t be ashamed. Everybody does it, it’s part of growing up. Let me see it.” And, when confusion paralyzed me, “Take off your pajama bottoms and show me your dick.”
I didn’t want to. I did want to. I was embarrassed, I was excited, I was …
“It’s getting bigger,” she said. “You’ll be a man soon. Show me how you touch yourself. Look how it grows! This is better than television. What do you think about when you touch it?”
Did I say anything? I don’t believe I did.
“Titties?” She opened her robe. “You sucked on them when you were a baby. Do you remember?”
Wanting to look away. Wanting to stop touching myself.
“I’ll tell you a secret. Touching your dick is nice, but it’s nicer when someone else touches it for you. See? You can touch my titties while I do this for you. Doesn’t that feel good? Doesn’t it?”
I shot all over her hand. Thought she’d be angry. She put her hand to her face, licked it clean. Smiled at me.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Claudia, my blonde. I’d wondered, without much caring, just how natural that blondness might be. Still an open question, because the hair on her head was the only hair she had.
Had to wonder what my mother would have made of that. Shaving her legs was her concession to femininity, and one she accepted grudgingly.
Got so she’d have me do it. Come out of the bath, all warm from the tub, and I’d spread lather and wield the safety razor. I’d be growing whiskers in a couple of years, she told me. Might as well get in some practice for a lifetime of shaving.
I asked Claudia what she didn’t know.
“I just wanted an adventure,” she said.
“Shut the world out. Keep it on the other side of that door.”
“But you’ve got a power,” she said. “The same thing that drew me to you, pulled me right across the room to where you were standing—it scares me.”
“Why’s that?”
She closed her eyes, chose her words carefully. “What happens here stays here. Isn’t that how it works?”
“Like Las Vegas?”
She opened her eyes, looked into mine. “I’ve done this sort of thing before,” she said.
“I’m shocked.”
“Not as often as you might think, but now and then.”
“When the moon’s full?”
“And left it behind me when I drove away. Like a massage, like a spa treatment.”
“Then home to hubby.”
“How was it hurting him? He never knew. And I was a better wife to him for having an outlet.”
Taking her time getting to it. It was like watching a baseball pitcher going through an elaborate windup. Kind of interesting when you already knew what kind of curveball to expect.
“But this feels like more than that, doesn’t it?”
She gave me a long look, like she wanted to say yes but was reluctant to speak the words.
Oh, she was good.
“You’ve thought of leaving him.”
“Of course. But I have … oh, how to say this? He gives me a very comfortable life.”
“That generally means money.”
“His parents were wealthy,” she said, “and he was an only child, and they’re gone, and it’s all come to him.”
“I guess the Ford’s a rental.”
“The Ford? Oh, the car I’m driving. Yes, I picked it up at the airport. Why would you—oh, because I probably have a nicer car than that. Is that what you meant?”
“Something like that.”
“We have several cars. There’s a Lexus that I usually drive, and he bought me a vintage sports car as a present. An Aston Martin.”
“Very nice.”
“I suppose. I enjoyed driving it at first: the power, the responsiveness. Now I rarely take it out of the garage. It’s an expensive toy. As am I.”
“His toy. Does he take you out and play with you much?”
She didn’t say anything.
I put my hand where she didn’t have any hair. Not stroking her, just resting it there. Staking a claim.
I said, “If you divorced him—”
“I signed one of those things.”
“A prenup.”
“Yes.”
“You’d probably get to keep the toys.”
“Maybe.”
“But the lush life would be over.”
A nod.
“I suppose he’s a lot older than you.”
“Just a few years. He seems older, he’s one of those men who act older than their years, but he’s not that old.”
“How’s his health?”
“It’s good. He doesn’t exercise, he’s substantially overweight, but he gets excellent reports at his annual physical.”
“Still, anybody can stroke out or have a heart attack. Or a drunk driver runs a red light, hits him broadside.”
“I don’t even like to talk about something like that.”
“Because it’s almost like wishing for it.”
“Yes.”
“Still,” I said, “it’d be convenient, wouldn’t it?”
It wasn’t like that with my mother. A stroke, a heart attack, a drunk driver. There one day and gone the next.
Not like that at all.
Two, three years after she showed me how much nicer it was to have someone else touch me. Two, three years when I went to school in the morning and came straight home in the afternoon and closed the door on the whole world.
She showed me all the things she knew. Plus things she’d heard or read about but never done.
And told me how to be with girls. “Like it’s a sport and I’m your coach,” she said. What to say, how to act, and how to get them to do things, or let me do things.
Then I’d come home and tell her about it. In bed, acting it out, fooling around.
Two, three years. And she started losing weight, and lost color in her face, and I must have noticed but it was day by day, and I was never conscious of it. And then I came home one day and she wasn’t there, but there was a note, she’d be home soon. And an hour later she came in and I saw something in her face and I knew, but I didn’t know what until she told me.
Ovarian cancer, and it had spread all through her, and they couldn’t do anything. Nothing that would work.
Because of where it started, she wondered if it was punishment. For what we did.
“Except that’s crap and I know it’s crap. I was brought up believing in God, but I grew out of it, and I never raised you that way. And even if there was a God, he wouldn’t work it that way. And what’s wrong with what we did? Did it hurt anybody?”