She closed her eyes now and kissed Stu with her tongue and opened her legs wide and, rubbing herself with one hand and caressing his neck with the other, imagined herself a stupid little girl, maybe twelve years old, who came to clean at a house of old men, one of whom explained to her that she’d get much smarter in school if she sucked semen out of them, that semen was the source of intelligence, and the more orifices of hers she could get their semen into, the smarter she’d be. And one man took her clothes off and began rubbing her little clitoris, and another put his old gray penis in her mouth and she sucked and sucked eagerly until she got some semen out of it and then she begged for more and sucked off another old man. Her job was to clean the house and they set her doing it in a servant’s frock with no underpants on, so any old man who wanted could begin massaging her clitoris, and she would beg to suck him off. She didn’t notice any improvement in her grades at school, but felt she had only just started with this sucking business and there were all her other openings and she wondered about her ears.

  Stu continued moving in and out of her. Marianne nibbled at his neck and at his ears. She put more K-Y Jelly on her finger and imagined herself a woman in her twenties, with a shaved head and pussy, lying naked in a doorway while one woman rubbed her clitoris, another pulled at her nipples. There was a party going on inside and any man who was entering the party had to step over her. He was allowed to do anything he wanted to her, so long as he didn’t hurt her. The women kept her in a constant state of excitement. A stranger might enter her casually while chatting with one of the women. Or he might chat with his friend who was accompanying him; the two might together enter Marianne, one in her mouth, one in her ass. One or the other might come on Marianne’s belly and rub his semen all over her breasts.

  Marianne kept rubbing herself, her husband kept thrusting, she felt she was almost there, almost there. She put more jelly on her finger and imagined herself a thirty-year-old woman on a stage making love with a younger man while an audience of Japanese businessmen took photos of her, one or another running up onstage to get a better shot. Occasionally the man who was banging her asked if anyone in the audience wanted to take over. Several rushed onto the stage. Soon there was a line snaking out the door.

  In bed Marianne opened her legs as wide as she could, as if someone were forcing her open, and whispered urgently to Stu, “Stop moving! Stop!” She was starting to come, little waves of contractions passed through her, and if he kept moving, she would miss feeling them. She kept rubbing herself through the contractions, which intensified them, and finally when they stopped, she put her arms around Stu’s back and kissed him deeply. After a moment, she said “Now.” And he began to move gently, quietly, then forcefully in and out. And she tried very hard not to look pleased—she kept a frown on her face. She wanted to say, “Pull out if you feel you’re going to come,” but she was afraid to say anything.

  She kept her eyes closed and he said, “Can I come now?”

  “No!” she nearly hollered. He stopped moving, and they waited. Then he started again. “Tell me when I can come.”

  “Not yet.”

  Then his breathing got heavy, heavier. “I’m going to come,” he said desperately, and then he was breathing heavily into her ear and made a few quick thrusts and fell onto her.

  She had wanted more, and she felt disappointed, a little empty. Still, she kissed his face and he came out of her, put tissues on his penis and between her legs, and she got out of bed and hobbled to the bathroom holding the tissues in place, then dropped them into the toilet and peed. She washed her hands and breasts and washed between her legs and got back into bed. He was lying naked with tissues on his limp penis. She kissed him and spooned up against him. She thought to ask him, “Why couldn’t you have held on just a little bit longer?” But he was already snoring, which was just as well. She’d complained to him a few times about his failure to last longer, but she never said why didn’t he last as long as David had or why didn’t he make even half the money David made. She did ask why couldn’t he go with her to see an occasional avant-garde film, and wear a suit and tie on the rare occasions they went together to her arts club—she was chairperson of the film committee. And he’d yelled at her, “I give talks all over, and I’m treated with respect, like a valued person. Only at home am I sniped at.”

  He had slept on the living room couch that time—it was not the first time—and in the middle of the night, she’d gone in and apologized, and dragged his offended hulking self back into bed with her. She tried to get him to make love to her, but he wouldn’t. “I’m not in a loving mood.”

  “It’ll put you in a loving mood.”

  But he wouldn’t.

  Cleaning out their storage cages in the basement of the apartment building, she came upon boxes of documentation David had saved for income taxes. Stu said they could all be thrown out, they were more than ten years old, but she couldn’t bear to throw away anything to do with her dead husband without at least looking over each item, including canceled checks (they reminded her of where they’d been and what they’d done). So she laid a tarp over the Oriental rug in the foyer, and Stu helped drag up the dusty boxes, some of which had dried bits of plaster in them; she vacuumed the boxes.

  There were income tax returns that showed her husband had made half a million dollars some years, a million others, and that was when money was worth more. There were airline tickets and stamped documents proving that he had attended surgical conventions, which made their family trips tax-deductible. There were journals in which he’d published papers—he was an expert on repairing the labrum, a membrane in the hip joint, which often tore in athletes. In fact, he had invented the procedure. Other surgeons simply removed the damaged labrum, but sewing it up seemed to make for less arthritis in later life—at least that was the case in animal studies. The data were only now, decades later, starting to come in on humans, and a colleague of his told her everything seemed to bear her husband out. David would have been thrilled.

  There were receipts from different restaurants where they’d eaten in Venice: Locanda Cipriani, Crepizza, il Cenacolo, da Bepi. She remembered the family watching a glassblower in Murano. From one of the thunderous red furnaces, the skinny, pockmarked fellow had pulled out a long pipe with reddish-yellow molten glass at the end of it. He’d blown into the pipe and the blob of glass expanded and elongated, and Billy, age seven, watched fiercely, swaying a little in the hot, noisy room, clasping and unclasping his hands. Marianne asked did he need to go to the bathroom, but the boy shook his head without taking his eyes off the changing glass. David hoisted Billy up onto his shoulders, where he sat rapt as the worker rolled the glass in dark-green powder and thrust it back into the furnace, blew it up again, and tweezed it, astonishingly, into the shape of a man playing the piano—all very small, but you could see the pianist’s fingers and the piano keys. Billy bounced with delight on David’s shoulders and begged to stay for another demonstration. Afterwards they ordered a whole orchestra of the small green-glass figurines for Billy, who was learning to play the trumpet at school. Billy now owned a bookstore, and he had those figurines out on a table in the books-on-music section. It was amazing that the orchestra had survived his childhood, so many years ago, intact. But Billy had been a careful, thoughtful boy. How had he married such a flailing, chaotic woman?

  She remembered a shop on the Rio Terrà Canal, off Campo Santa Margherita, a shop that made masks; they’d bought the plague doctor for David, a papier-mâché face in black and white with small round glasses and a huge curved beak of a nose. (Anti-Semitic? No. In the Middle Ages a plague doctor wore a cone-shaped beak stuffed with herbs and straw to ward off “plague air.”) She shook the dust off the mask onto the tarp.

  Hadn’t warded off anything.

  Ever.

  She remembered going to empty out David’s office at the hospital, after he had died so suddenly. She had cried in the street and put the mask on momentarily to cover her tears. A l
ittle white boy holding an older black woman’s hand had pointed at Marianne, reached up, and tried to touch the mask; he’d called out “trick or treat,” though it was April.

  She wanted to touch David, not the decayed David who was in that box; probably the bacteria had eaten away everything but the bones. Maybe the bones, those slim bones, were gone, too, by now.

  She touched a receipt from a hotel in Spain, in Toledo. It was dated almost seven years earlier than the Venice receipts—she’d been pregnant with Billy. On a clear afternoon during the Easter season, they’d driven a rented car to Toledo. From a distance they could see most of the hilly, terraced town with its stone gray wall and the blue Tagus River winding round; Toledo looked so much like an El Greco painting that she half expected to see elongated figures in glowing robes walking the streets. She’d learned that the artist had lost commissions because of his hauteur and pomposity. Not to compare herself, but she’d been turned away by donors for understating what she could do as a filmmaker. She’d always had self-doubts.

  Church bells rang throughout the day in different pitches and timbres. On the ancient walls, paper pictures of saints were taped, and red-and-white streamers flew overhead. Half the town seemed to consist of tourist shops. At dusk, the couple joined a solemn parade that was moving ponderously up to the Catedral, the great church of Toledo. Incense suffused the air. At the front of the line, in a gray robe, a monk carried a big wooden cross with a life-sized carved Jesus hanging from it. Marianne and David left before the procession reached its destination—they had seen so many churches that they felt weighted down by them—and made their way at first gravely, then giggling, two escapees, to their hotel. They ate—she remembered a rabbit-and-vegetable paella—in their penthouse suite, from which they could see the city lights glimmering in the night. Two big bottles of sparkling water, which tasted like champagne to them, accompanied the meal. David had joined her in abstinence; he claimed that not drinking and doing Lamaze with her brought him as close as he could get to the experience of being pregnant himself. Not drinking was actually easier for him than for her: she liked her glass of wine with dinner, but alcohol put him to sleep. They kept nonalcoholic beer in the refrigerator at home.

  After dinner they undressed, Marianne keeping on only a heavy string of black pearls David had bought her on a trip to China. She’d had a head of thick blond hair back then; “my lioness,” he’d teased her. He took a photo of her standing against the bay of windows, her hair and the pearls and her belly luminous. She still had that photo around somewhere; it was a favorite of hers. She took a photo of him naked, too. He was five feet ten, a very slim man with a raised appendectomy scar (“made by a butcher,” he’d say) from when he was nine and a sharp, jutting elbow where he’d broken his arm and it had been set badly when he was ten. She thought he’d become a surgeon in order not to repeat with others the botched jobs done on him. David had curly black hair that he kept very bushy because she liked it that way—an Isro, they’d called it in those days. Afterwards, when he saw the photo of himself naked, he was delighted with how well hung he looked. They had made love slowly, gently, she on her side, her back to him because of her belly, still wearing her pearls, which they took off and hung from his erection for a moment, and she remembered feeling, in that city of churches, Jew that she was, beatified.

  She occasionally recognized that she had an eternally summery image of her marriage to David. À la Fragonard, if that wasn’t too fancy. It was not so much that the dead sprouted wings, as some said, for she genuinely believed David had been a good man—as was Stu. In fact, she was a fortunate woman. It had something to do, she’d had the thought very recently—why only very recently?—with glorifying the inaccessible, while denigrating what was available to her. She recognized in some inchoate way that doing this darkened her life, and the lives of others.

  Afterwards, in that Toledo hotel room, she had asked him if he wanted to have anal intercourse, and he said if she wanted. Neither of them had ever done it before. She lay on her side and they lubricated him to the hilt and he came into her slowly, carefully, and it felt strange, like she had to go to the toilet. Throughout, she worried she’d crap all over the place. And she got angry at him later. And he said, rightly, “It was your idea!” And they both spent a long time in the shower.

  Sometimes he would come almost as soon as he entered her. They would have screaming fights about it—why had she screamed at him? She had impoverished their love life—even though he’d get a second erection and could last so long she’d limp afterwards.

  In a box from the basement she saw her shrink bills that he’d paid. She’d gone to Dr. Levinson with the complaint that she was in the wrong profession and that she’d married the wrong man. She’d had it with social work—sitting on the phone at the hospital trying to find dispositions for chronic psychiatric patients, getting them out of the hospital and into group homes, or into the homes of relatives. It often took days if the patient was poor. Finally, when she found a place, the patient would stay there at most a few months—after which he would stop taking his meds and end up hallucinating on the streets again. And then, back to the hospital. She wanted to do something less Sisyphean.

  David made enough money so that she could afford to quit. She’d gone to film school at NYU, which she really enjoyed. But she wanted to be a star, to excel at something, and she never really had. Except that she’d been loved immoderately. But that wasn’t exactly her excelling.

  She complained that her husband wasn’t creative. She should be married to a filmmaker. Not someone who put in long hours at a hospital, although he managed to drive Billy to school several mornings a week, and he ran a boys’ basketball league. He spoke at different medical schools and hospitals, and not only about that procedure he had invented but about different materials he was experimenting with for pinning bones. She went to hear him a few times and was vaguely proud of him, but found the talks stupefying.

  There was a receipt from a hotel in Lucca, in Tuscany. It had been pouring so hard that dark night that he had to pull the car to a stop on a cobblestone street before they could get near the hotel. Billy was asleep, seat-belted in, in the back of the rented car. She and David somehow got into a discussion of money. He was very proud of being a good breadwinner. She was maintaining that money didn’t matter. Art mattered. She yelled at him, “All you think about is money.”

  “I’m what keeps this family afloat,” he said. The rain beat against the windshield and the top of the car. “It’s because of me you can do whatever you damn please.”

  “Don’t throw that up to me.”

  “I’m not. I was happy to pay for school for you.”

  “You don’t respect me. I mean, as an artist.”

  “For God’s sake, where do you get that claptrap from? Talk about respect! If I had to depend on you for my self-esteem, my head would be in the toilet.”

  She was in the bookstore with her son. Billy was his present age, thirty-seven, but with his formerly curly blond hair (a putto, they’d called him, until he was school age), indeed a big bush of curly blond hair, although his hair had never been bushy. Certainly he didn’t have his current bright-brown wavy hair, graying a little, thinning out and receding at the temples. Instead of being distraught, he was happy. Happy to see her. In fact, he shone. He was well muscled, in a black T-shirt and red shorts. He showed her first editions of books she had read to him in childhood (he handled them with pleasure now, but also carefully): Charlotte’s Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, Norman the Doorman. She remembered he would lie under the covers and she would lie above the covers beside him and read to him. They would look at the pictures. They would fall asleep together.

  One night Billy, age four, had said to her, “Marry me.”

  “What about Dad?” She smiled.

  “He can sew.”

  Now Billy took her by the hand and led her to his book-lined office. There was no photo of Lyria here, not even one with the glass cr
acked. And no computer. What there was, was a riot of flowers, cream-colored roses on the desk, a tall black vase of burning orange gladioli standing in front of the fireplace, fat pink peonies and deep-red poppies in a bowl on a side table beside an easy chair. A soft light shone against the white walls. The mingled odors, the sweetness of the flowers and the woody acridness of the books, moved her. She and Billy slowly, languidly undressed, and he had a glistening erection. Her body was taut as a young girl’s or as a pregnant abdomen. He entered into her and she came at once, explosively, yet gently, and they went on and on.

  IN LOVE WITH MURRAY

  In memory of Bernard Malamud

  Leda, a budding artist, met Murray Blumgarten in the late 1960s, when she was an undergraduate at NYU. It was summer, she was working half-time as a salesperson at an outré women’s boutique, and in her free time, trying to paint and attend as many art shows as she could. This afternoon she was going to see what was happening at the Whitney Annual. Tall, her pale blond hair piled high on her head against the heat, she wore big carved wooden hoop earrings and beads, and a (secondhand) orange miniskirt and matching peasant blouse, without a bra. When she showed her art student pass to the suddenly awake ticket taker, he waved her in and nearly followed her into the elevator.

  Somewhere around the middle of the show, which interested her mildly—there were the usual pieces, the usual styles: op, pop, hard-edge, color field—she spotted a man she immediately recognized as Murray Blumgarten. He was standing alone near one of his works, eavesdropping on visitors. It was a huge, mysterious diptych of what looked like a sketchy, ramshackle motel (was it the Lorraine?), a body on the balcony, on the ground black men with agonized arms pointing in different directions: a few pointed at a torn, blown-up black-and-white-photo-like silkscreen of a dead white man on a hotel kitchen floor, a Mexican busboy in white uniform and chef’s hat bent over him; others pointed at somber realistic colored portrayals of police beating dying young men and women and children outdoors at night. They were dying in Central Park, for God’s sake! Leda recognized the merry-go-round—poles twisted, horses halved, quartered, shattered. Was that Tavern on the Green, tables belly up, full of great shards of glass? Blood was oozing, bombs were bursting off the edges of his canvases onto the Whitney’s walls. Leda hugged herself in order not to be blown away.