becoming a little too familiar. Instead of submitting to my sexual whims, she prefers to give me the benefit of her feminist rage. “Why are men so cruel?” she asks soul-fully, with a little-girl rustle of her head on my shoulder.
“Natural selection,” I tell her. “The killers survive, the killed drop out of the genetic pool. Same reason,” I go on, “women are masochistic. The submissive ones get fucked and make the babies and the scrappers don’t. The meek inherit the earth.”
I’m not sure she has been listening. “Jesus, I hate men,” she says, off in her own world of memories and strictly localized intellectual reference.
I permit myself to get angry. “You keep telling me that. Where would you be without them? A lazy ignorant cokehead like you, what are you fit for except turning tricks? And you’re damn lucky to have found an old sweetheart like me, instead of some crazy young buck who’d beat the crap out of you.”
“You’re not so uncrazy, Ben. You’re crazy about being Frenched, I notice.” Toying with my white chest hair, curling it around one index finger, while her headful of wiry oily wool tickles my shoulder and the side of my neck.
It is true, the sight of her plump lips obediently distended around my swollen member, her eyelids lowered demurely, afflicts me with a religious peace.
“And horsing around with my asshole.”
Yes, that, too. Her vagina, Deirdre’s unspoken accusation ran, was less favored by me than these two orifices designed for other purposes, for ingestion and excretion, and to this extent I was a pervert. My own sense of it is that, at age sixty-six, I am still working up to the vagina—that Medusa whose sight turned ancient men to stone, that sacred several-lipped gateway to the terrifying procreative darkness. I was not yet, at three score and six, quite mature enough to face its blood-empurpled folds, its musty exudations. I was still a boy shutting his eyes when the vaccination needle went in. My working-class doxy sensed this ant disliked me for it, even as she wearily roused herself from my side and prepared to nurse me into arousal.
“You rich leech,” she told me. “You’ve never had to get down into it, have you?”
“What do you mean, ‘into it’?”
“Into the dirt where the rest of us grub. You called me a money-grubbing cunt last week. Thanks a lot. Just because I didn’t get born a fat cat and can clip coupons all my life—”
“Nobody clips them any more. It’s all in computers. Anyway, I was born poor. Out in the west of the state. We lived in a town north of Pittsfield called Hammond Falls. There was a river downtown and a bunch of brick mills, mostly empty by the time I came along. Our house, which had belonged to my mother’s parents, was up the hill, out on the outskirts, an old farmhouse. Except it was narrow and dark, like a city rowhouse, close to the road, surrounded by these sloping fields going back to cedar and scrub maple. I went to U. Mass., when it cost almost nothing, and met my first wife, and we came to Boston, where I went to the B.U. Business School on student loans, and became a stockbroker. I changed my accent, to blend in. I suggest you change yours too, darling, if you expect to get anywhere in this very class-conscious commonwealth.”
This nearly made her spit, naked as she was, crouched on the bed. “Commonwealth, well, la-ti-da darling, yourself. What a liar! We should both wash our mouths out, me from sucking your stubby dick and you from being a liar. I can see all around this house, it’s full of inherited stuff.”
“It’s Gloria’s. My late wife’s.”
“Who says she’s late?”
“She’s not here, is she?”
“No, but she wouldn’t be, would she? With me here. Unless she was a real AC-DC.”
In a rage of annoyance—she was resisting me, in every resentful fibre—I seized her brown arm, which was propping her up over my belly like the leg of a beast poised to drink. “Who says it’s stubby? You’re the liar. If it’s so stubby why do you gag when it’s only halfway in?”
She sullenly pulled her arm away, revealing four white finger-marks. “Ow. O.K., not stubby. Stinky, though.”
“You should talk. You’re like low tide down there—low tide next to a sewer outlet.”
Deirdre brushed a mass of her curls back from one ear, contemplating thoughtfully the erect refutation of stubbiness which my surge of violence had pushed