The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,64
and prepare his dinner. “And he can be violent,” she added. “Oh, no one believes it, because in public he’ always the perfect gentleman, not a hair out of place. He would never dream of making a scene in public. But then when we’re alone, the smallest thing sets him off. This morning, for instance—I’d gotten dressed, and was getting ready to go play the piano with your mother, when suddenly he started . . . Well, just staring at me in this awful way that made my heart race. ‘What’ the matter?’ I asked. ‘I can’t believe what a frump you’ve turned into,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘You mean you haven’t noticed?’ he said. And then he laughed in this horrible way and said, ‘If you can’t see it for yourself, I’m not going to tell you.’ I went into the bathroom and peered into the mirror, trying to figure out what was wrong. But I couldn’t. So I went back into the bedroom and said, ‘Please, Jonah, for God’ sake, tell me what’ wrong.’ Then he made this noise of disgust, grabbed me really quite roughly by the arm, and dragged me back to the bathroom. And then he showed me, in the mirror, that there was this stain on my blouse. This really quite tiny little stain. And he explained very calmly that unless I changed my blouse, he wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. No one else would notice, he would do it so subtly; still, I’d feel it.
“I changed my blouse, and the whole time he lectured me about how fat I was, how I’d let myself go. He hated the first blouse I put on because it was wrinkled. He hated the second blouse because it didn’t match my skirt. And on and on, until I didn’t have any blouses left. ‘Well, that last one will have to do,’ he said, ‘but really, Anne, this is absurd. You’re an embarrassment.’ And in the meantime my arm is aching, my right arm, because he’ wrenched it so badly, practically pulled it out of the socket.”
That same arm was now hovering over my diaphragm. Very casually—much as her husband had put his arm around my shoulder down in the barbecue pit—Anne started to touch me. She was talking and talking, and in the meantime her fingers were drumming my chest, darting now and then into the gaps between the buttons on my pajama top, brushing bare skin, once even tweaking a nipple. Of course, as you can imagine, I had a huge hard-on. How couldn’t I, what with all the anticipatory tension of that long day, and now the prospect of Anne finally making the massage fantasy real? And so she went on touching me, and went on about how cruel he was, and how unhappy she was, and how could he have the unmitigated gall to claim that he cared about that novel more than anything in the world—even more than her—and yet be so cavalier as to leave the only copy in the world at a Chinese restaurant? So that on top of everything else, his abuse and his coldness, now she had this anxiety to contend with, feeling that she had to watch out for him every second. And all the while her hand circling, circling, getting closer to my groin. I was so hard my balls had nearly disappeared; I wondered what would happen if—when—she touched my dick, if I’d come right away, and in that case, whether she’d be pleased, or annoyed and frustrated. Once again, it was rules and systems, codes that I assumed everyone else understood perfectly, the outlines of which I could barely make out in the shadows . . . I wanted it all to be over, and at the same time I wanted it to last for hours, this sweetly awful hovering on the edge of an abyss that was somehow also a bridge over an abyss . . . and what was on the other side of the bridge? Part of my not wanting it to end was fear of what was on the other side.
She was careful. She knew what she was doing. She got close, then moved away. Prolonging the pleasure—the first hand other than my own. And in the meantime the monologue never let up. “But tonight decided me,” she said. “What happened at the restaurant decided me. I’ve had it up to