Читать книгу Promiscuous Unbound - Bex Brian - Страница 11

My not calling Ralph is becoming a problem. In fact, my stubborn refusal to contact anyone since the accident is becoming a problem. Hospitals like to think you are cared for. Hospitals like to think that somewhere there is someone out there willing to pay for what they are doing to you. Two weeks ago they sent in a shrink, Madame deBuchard. Ramrod deBuchard has done nothing but talk about herself. My head is full now of what it means to be a French woman, to love, to not mind the summer heat, or winter skies, to have a good shoemaker—how she blushed when she realized how inappropriate that topic was—and a good midwife, to know how to cook, especially a roux, and how to use wine in sauce sparingly. We have yet to discuss my lack of visitors. I have wondered if this is a particularly French approach to a delicate subject: present a world of observations, truths, personal remembrances and see if any of them trigger in the listener a flood of confessions and revelations. So far all the revelations have been hers, but I don’t mind because in amongst her discourses on three-inch heels and béchamel is the refugee, her life, pearls worth keeping.

“Tell me,” I say, “what do you know so far?”

“She didn’t marry because he was clean.”

“Sonia told you that?”

“Oh, yes.”

“It was just an idea, a seventeen-year-old’s idea.”

“Why did you marry your husband?”

“At the time, it felt impossible not to.”

“Like it is impossible to call him now.”

“Maybe. What’s the husband like?”

“I can’t say. I only met him for a few minutes.”

“He doesn’t want anything more to do with her?”

“Well . . .”

“I bet he couldn’t cope. I imagine expectations were betrayed. Perhaps she did love him because he was clean and then she found his house was dirty. Or it could have been the lovemaking. Hard to be married so quickly, then make yourself believe that you know the man on top of you. But that’s impossible too, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“To really know the man on top of you. Anyway, she ran away, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” she said, getting up to leave.

“Flight or escape,” I wondered aloud, but the doctor seemed not to hear.

Why don’t I call Ralph? I don’t know. I love him still. I believe I told him that I loved him even before I knew him. He assumed the wrong thing, of course, saw me seeing him on the flicking screen: Ralph McCrimmon, the renowned zoologist seen most Sunday nights on the Discovery Channel. I meant something a little more a priori, cosmic, meant-to-be-ish. Who knows, maybe I was purposely forcing the issue. One can’t help but think it would be harder for a husband to leave if he believed Fate had a hand in the coupling.

But love came hard for me and was too strange. Must have slept with twenty different men in the first few months of our marriage just to calm myself down. Because the truth now, if it’s possible: Ralph became for me a universe. Infinite, unfathomable. I am a little more elemental. The perpetual couplings behind my marriage’s back, the brevity and illicitness, offered me an anchor against such frightening depths, or heights: the universe, so far, never beneath our feet. For an hour or two there was none of the assumption of understanding. The problem, mine at least, was that I could never conceive of Ralph even when he was right on top me. Not sex. That’s a whole other ball game. Rather, when he sidled up to me unexpectedly, gently pulled my hips toward him and rested his lips between my shoulder blades, or, if we were out, as I sat at the bar and he would crowd in behind me to create a closed space, his long arms encircling me until his hands could grip the bar, these signs of affection always left me facing outward, and when I turned back and looked up at him, I couldn’t see him clearly, as if a dewy condensation blurred the handsome lines of his face. Without a face you really can’t have true knowledge. You can’t even have sex.

Perhaps I should offer this up to Madame deBuchard as my reason for not calling Ralph. Tell her that even in this battered state with all these drugs making me at once drowsy, puffy, sweaty, and hopped up, the one cogent part of my brain now conjures only a rollicking dick parade. In my dreams too. And when I wake—that word is entirely wrong for the muted roll into consciousness that is the lot of the heavily sedated—I’m often still in the throes of a dream-inspired orgasm. Rolling over, reaching out to recall, to recapture perhaps another second of my mind-mate’s feathery touch, I can’t help but to give him a face, and it’s never Ralph’s.