Bookmarker tag: inspo/imagined-desire (11 notes)

It was true that, in a different chamber of her mind, their reunion was unfolding as she’d imagined it, a trail of discarded clothes leading down a hallway, lunch forgotten in the frenzy of their coupling. From Bradley’s little glances at her figure, his touchings of her shoulder as he steered her through his plants, she guessed that he’d imagined the same thing. But now she could see, as she never had before—as if God were telling her—that the obsessive chamber of her mind would always be there; that she would never stop wanting what she’d had and lost.

The wren in the bushes erupted in full song, liquid, melodious, achingly clear. It seemed to her that God, in His mercy, was speaking through His birds. Her eyes filled.

All Margherita's chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled back to her waist, stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the boned black rig she's wearing underneath. How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here—there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses . . . singularities! Consider cathedral spires, holy minarets, the crunch of trainwheels over the points as you watch peeling away the track you didn't take . . . mountain peaks rising sharply to heaven, such as those to be noted at scenic Berchtesgaden . . . the edges of steel razors, always holding potent mystery . . . rose thorns that prick us by surprise . . . even, according to the Russian mathematician Friedmann, the infinitely dense point from which the present Universe expanded. ... In each case, the change from point to no-point carries a luminosity and enigma at which something in us must leap and sing, or withdraw in fright. Watching the A4 pointed at the sky—just before the last firing-switch closes—watching that singular point at the very top of the Rocket, where the fuze is. ... Do all these points imply, like the Rocket's, an annihilation? What is that, detonating in the sky above the cathedral? beneath the edge of the razor, under the rose?

Since I’ve been married, I find all women beautiful.

Their languid air, their purposeful movements, the turn of a bare arm as it reaches palm-up, the curve of a bare neck as the head tilts back and the blood rushes through. Any arm. Any neck. Even the old women. Oh the old ones! With the laugh lines round their eyes and the wink at the corner of their mouths, the amusement that could spill out bell-like from them at any moment. Even the chubby ones. Oh the chubby ones! Who know how to take their pleasure from this ancient world.

Since I’ve been married, I find all women beautiful.

Someone said that in a film, and my god, it’s so true. Getting married is the surest way to turn every woman who crosses your path into Helen of Troy. They were always there, all around me. I just didn’t notice.

And now it’s too late. The gong has sounded. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for my sex life.

I’m not that interested in cinema, personally; I prefer to stay home and read. But Florence loves it and she talks to me from time to time about Rohmer, Rivette, Varda. She took me to see Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and I didn’t care for it, except for the fact that the actress in it looked just like Florence, dark hair, pale oval face, watchful expression. So I go with her to the movies, to make her happy. And we saw Love in the Afternoon and I thought my heart would explode.

She hasn’t caught on. I’m not stupid enough to tell her.

I tell Max about the baby. I think he should know. I’ve been offered a teaching job in London, he says. Just for a year. I think perhaps he hasn’t heard me; I say it again. I heard you. Come to London with me. I’m not going to London. Is it mine? It could be mine. Come to London and have the baby there and it will be ours. I will take care of you and the baby. Begging, almost. I’m not going to London. And it could be Henry’s. And what about your wife? Max makes a sound. She is with someone else now.

There’s no time to think; there is too much else to consider. A new life in London, with Max, a baby, him all to myself. All to myself? Do I want all of him, all the time? Do I want to wake up with him every day? Listen to him chew his food every night? Fight with him about money? Raise this child with him? Something tells me he wouldn’t even stick around for all of that. He is too generous with himself, with his time, his thoughts, generous in the sense of being unable to restrict himself to just one person. For all his faults, Henry would assume his responsibility.

I shake my head. You don’t want me, not full-time. You only want me because I’m not entirely yours. Because I’m needed elsewhere.

That’s not true, says Max. I want you all to myself. I need you here. Or, rather, in London. But he himself sounds unconvinced.

I’m sorry. I’m not going.

And that is how I know it will come to an end, when he leaves for London. But we still have time. And when the nausea is elsewhere, my pregnant body wants him so badly that I wonder if he is indeed the father, that my body has recognised him, or if this is simply my desire leading me astray, as usual.

It didn't occur to her that Don Armour was smiling in embarrassment at the obviousness of his play for her sympathies, the staleness of his pickup lines. It didn't occur to her that his performance at the pinochle table the day before had been staged for her benefit. It didn't occur to her that he'd guessed she was eavesdropping in the bathroom and had let himself be overheard. It didn't occur to her that Don Armour's fundamental mode was self-pity and that he might, in his self-pity, have hit on many girls before her. It didn't occur to her that he was already plotting—had been plotting since he first shook hands with her—how to get into her skirt. It didn't occur to her that he averted his eyes not simply because her beauty caused him pain but because Rule # 1 in every manual advertised at the back of men's magazines ("How to Make Her WILD for You—Every Time!") was Ignore Her. It didn't occur to her that the differences of class and circumstance that were causing her discomfort might be, for Don Armour, a provocation: that she might be an object he desired for its luxury, or that a fundamentally self-pitying man whose job was in jeopardy might take a variety of satisfactions in bedding the daughter of his boss's boss's boss. None of this occurred to Denise then or after. She was still feeling responsible ten years later.

What she was aware of, that afternoon, were the problems. That Don Armour wanted to put his hands on her but couldn't was a problem. That through an accident of birth she had everything while the man who wanted her had so much less—this lack of parity—was a big problem. Since she was the one who had everything, the problem was clearly hers to solve. But any word of reassurance she could give him, any gesture of solidarity she could imagine making, felt condescending.

“I never met a girl who rides Italian motorcycles,” he said. “It’s like you aren’t real.”

He looked at my helmet, gloves, my motorcycle key, on his bureau. The room seemed to hold its breath, the motel curtain sucked against the glass by the draft of a partly opened window, a strip of sun wavering underneath the curtain’s hem, the light-blocking fabric holding back the outside world.

He said he wished he could see me do my run, but he was stuck at the motel, retiling a rotten shower.

“It’s okay,” I said. I was relieved. I felt sure that this interlude, my night in Stretch’s bed, shouldn’t overlap with my next destination.

“Do you think you might come through here?” he asked. “I mean, ever again?”

I looked at the crates of tools and the jumbled stack of the owner’s son’s bicycle collection, some of them in good condition and others rusted skeletons with fused chains, perhaps saved simply because he had ample storage space in poor Stretch’s room. I thought about Stretch having to sit in a parking lot all night instead of lie in his own bed, and I swear, I almost decided to sleep with him. I saw our life, Stretch done with a day’s work, covered with plaster dust, or clean, pulling tube socks up over his long, tapered calves. The little episodes of rudeness and grace he’d been dealt and then would replay in miniature with me.

I stood up and collected my helmet and gloves and said I probably wouldn’t be back anytime soon. And then I hugged him, said thanks.

He said he might need to go take another shower, a cold one, and somehow the comment was sweet instead of distasteful.

Later, what I remembered most was the way he’d said my name. He said it like he believed he knew me.

She looks up. I’ve caught her by surprise. Her face opens up and all of a sudden it’s like that paper mask is transparent. I’m looking right through it, and I get a flash of some kind of life we could’ve had—barbecues, dogs, kids flopping over us in bed—it rolls through me fast but strong and clear, like one of those cooking smells that blows in the window so sharp you can pick out the ingredients. And then it’s gone. It’s gone, and Holly’s holding my hand. Finally, after that long long wait, her hand is back on mine. Dry cool fingers, slim. The rings loose. I close my eyes. My hand is so hot, I feel my pulse in every finger. I’m afraid she’ll let go but she doesn’t let go. She keeps her hand around mine and it’s like she’s holding all of me in her cool sweetness, calming my fever back down.

She saw, or knew, that Angus Dance had come back into the room. Making sure about some cheese puffs, she found him close to her, talking to a black-haired, blue-eyed girl who had come with the Dalrymples.

And why on earth not? A man like that could not possibly be leading a celibate life, abstinent in tribute to her own romantic fancies.

Seeing each other was a terrible idea. We discovered that, instead of waning, desire had flared up and made a thousand demands with brazen urgency. If at a distance, on the telephone, words allowed us to fantasize, constructing glorious prospects but also imposing on us an order, containing us, frightening us, finding ourselves together, in the tiny space of the car, careless of the terrible heat, gave concreteness to our delirium, gave it the cloak of inevitability, made it a tile in the great subversive season under way, made it consistent with the forms of realism of that era, those which asked for the impossible.

I’m married, Maggie.

Whatever that means. It could mean a million things. One of those things could be, I am married so we make out all the time and of course when the ball drops I deposit my tongue deep in my chosen one’s throat even if our kids are clawing at our ankles. Or it could mean, I am married and so everything that is sexual between us is clinically dead. It’s hamburger meat at the restaurant where you work. Our passion would not be roused if you stepped on its tail in your prom heels. We pay bills together and occasionally share a late-night talk show, if the mood strikes.

Oh, she writes; then she looks around the room, though she doesn’t necessarily wish for anything to be different at all.

Like any young girl who has a crush on someone older, she doesn’t know what she wants to happen. She doesn’t know if she wants sex or no sex or to undress in her room while he watches from the sidewalk. Mostly she just wants a small suggestion of excitement. An anonymous bouquet left on a doorstep.

When I bought the house I did so in part because I had a romantic notion about the turn my life might take in such a town, so small and dead-ended. I imagined myself working at a diner, a diner frequented by truckers. I imagined one of them, kindhearted, modifying his routes so he could see me more often. Never staying longer than the time it took to drink two cups of coffee and eat a grilled cheese, but nevertheless, an understanding growing between us. I imagined myself in a long dress, in a backyard, hanging my sheets out to dry on a clothesline. Shielding my eyes from the sun. Instead I pay a woman to care for my son while I work as a legal secretary. All my skirts hit just below the knee. To clean these clothes, I use a washing machine and a dryer, both located in the basement. In the short story I read, the protagonist has a son, a son whom he leaves, with his wife, on the Eastern Seaboard. The author, the jeans-wearer, had a number of children. They are scattered about the country with the women who bore them. And though yes, it is true that the author never got sober, perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story’s protagonist, the man who runs out of road. Because he hasn’t, not really. I mean, he can drive into the ocean. He can always decide to turn around.