I got it moving. It worked. I’d been hoping for this, although not exactly this, but I felt held, I felt home. I went into her arms and peeled off my hairy defenses. Robin and I had been screwing for twelve years. We had no idea what we were doing anymore or why. Amy and I had been at it for two minutes on controlled substances and were already spiritually entwined. We were smiling and looking at each other like, Holy shit. I had trouble imagining the awful things she’d been through. Everything but this was in the past.
This was how you did it. You fell in love. You thought about her hourly. You waited for a year. You waited until she asked. I’d been screwing since high school but had had no idea what it was until that moment. Once she asks, you pass it to her. Then she passes it back to you. It’s an agreement. You have to ask for it and she has to ask for it. When the vote is unanimous, she passes it back for all women, for the business of the human race, fully aware that time started with this action, an engine lying in the cave of our furry relatives before man arrived. She was smiling. I was like, Thank you, God. The worst sex is a crime that shouldn’t define you. The best sex in life is tough to predict and hard to explain.
How weird was it that the closer I got, the lighter I felt, the drunker I felt, the weaker I felt, the more unfiltered or unmasked or honest or in love, the smaller I felt, the less I felt I had to bring, to defend myself, the more easily she could take me, devour me, allow me to disappear inside her. I started to shake, my arms were tired, and she shuddered and I shook back and we held on like two crazy poodles, shaking and trembling. I pushed only half the time, and the other half she pulled, she drew me in, and I was taken up, the cord stretched taut between us, one breath, one body, one of us. Then no one breathing, then looking at each other and madly kissing. Then the pattern again. One. One. One. If I could feel the pattern, I could stay with it indefinitely.
“Oh.”
I’ve got her now, she’s mine now.
“Ohh.” I’m holding her, I’m in her arms, I’m banging Amy, I’m coming inside a beautiful mother.
That kind of orgasm is inexplicable and impossible to duplicate. It leaves you grateful and mystified, altered and plural, selfless and boundless, winded and imprinted with her soul. She curled into my arms, resting her head on my chest, eyes closed. “Oh, bunny,” she said, and drew her knees into her chest. We stayed that way for a while. Eventually, I asked if she was okay. She’d curled into a ball like a pill bug.
“What am I doing?”
I struggled to process it analytically. Although heavily suppressed and encased in narcotic batting, even I could see where this was headed.
“I’m never reckless. I tried to leave.”
I stood and was able to put on my clothes. Other responses occurred to me: loss of control of my arms and legs, sudden convulsions, and outbursts of crying.
“I’m bad.”
“You said that last summer.”
“We’re crazy.” I found one sneaker under the bed. “I didn’t come for this. I came to see your face. I wanted company.” I had to toss her clothes around to find the other shoe. “We’re out of control.”
She fell back and cradled her arm. It wasn’t entirely the same as last year: she didn’t directly blame me or say she was going to hell, and her tears might’ve been residual and were certainly in line with recent events. It was certainly not unexpected, and a percentage of her response remained in flux, as she opened her eyes and looked searchingly and even reached out her good hand toward me, maybe moving at an asymmetrical rate to the level of normative discomfort, adjusted for the incongruence of overlapping historical, psychosocial, and physiological— There was an explosion that rattled the windows.
Maybe it had nothing to do with me. Then another explosion. When I left she was looking at her splint.
On my way across campus from Amy’s dorm there were several more explosions. Every day at five o’clock some nutjob out in the harbor fired a cannon off a sailboat to signal the beginning of happy hour. I walked to the flagpole and called home, twice, then gave up and headed to the Barn. The broken arm. The bracelet disaster. Then my wife tried to kill my kids, and I fucked a plutocrat. Things were definitely out of whack. In the parking lot, two guys were painting stage sets. Past the windmill I fell in behind some people with beach towels around their necks, barefoot, singing, “I Could Have Danced All Night.” A woman had some kind of flower in her hair. She’d been the lead in last night’s Chekhov mash-up.
As the conference wore on and gathered intensity, attendees who’d been waiting and planning for weeks or even months now burst into creative expression. The frenzy didn’t usually start until Sunday night or Monday, but here it was late Saturday afternoon and the terminal cases were hard at work. The barefoot singers harmonized. They turned left at the bottom of the hill, and it was quiet again.
Robin was alone and sleep-deprived and doing the best she could. I forgave her. My children would eventually heal and grow older, have children of their own. Their suffering was distant and unreal to me. Amy was also suffering, tolerating abuse in her marriage. Some kind of emotional blindness kept her strong, helped her negate the severity of these attacks. Around me, though, she felt safe, could feel her feelings, her fear and guilt. I wanted to run back to her dorm room to see if she was okay.
For eight months I’d maintained slavish contact, assembled a long-distance romance for the ages, returned here with low expectations, then saw her through a bone fracture and near-death country-doctoring to complete the most arduous seduction in history. But what she’d needed was a benign and practical kind of help, not another stalker from the meat department. I’d gained a new understanding of the workings of her marriage, one that concerned me. Given her history, her husband’s brutality was not surprising. Victims of certain crimes were more likely to be victimized again, were less able to enforce boundaries, disrupt patterns, read signs. I didn’t blame the victim, but I saw her as a locus of sexual aggression, a weird convergence of uncontrollable forces.