Chapter 32
In the days and weeks following this exchange, I began to look at the Navarro etchings almost compulsively, always clandestinely, the secrecy a part of their dark pleasure.
If someone came close to discovering me looking, an exquisite thrill passed through me.
A shiver of pleasure, seeing the monkey’s libidinal abandon as María reached forward to take hold of the empty teacup beside my computer.
“?Quiere más té, senora?”
“Sí, María, gracias.”
María’s face, hovering above the screen’s craven image when she handed me the tea, was as serenely beautiful as a portrait of the Virgin Mary.
There was one etching that particularly upset and allured me.
It depicted two monkeys at the foot of a huge brass bed, fucking—really, it is the only word.
A single bare bulb hung above them. Curtains were parted at either side of the image, as though they were performing the act on a crude stage.
At the bottom of the page, the title: As Apes Do.
I don’t know how many hours I spent furtively looking at that image, sensing in the foulness some vital meaning, some answer to a question from my past I couldn’t yet articulate.
But it also unnerved me. Sometimes I would grow excited and even touch myself.
Then, for days afterward, I wouldn’t look at it.
I would distance myself from Louise, even make fun of her with Tom, aligning myself with him in a way that was false, not because he didn’t deserve my allegiance but because it was motivated by a kind of self-disgust, a fear that there was some part of me that must of necessity be disavowed to be worthy of love.
One night, after I’d been staring at As Apes Do for nearly a half an hour, I went downstairs to discover Tom waiting up for me. I understood immediately that he was hoping to have sex. I picked up the novel folded open on my bedside table.
“Oh, are you going to read?” he said in a forlorn tone.
I relented. Without words, I acquiesced to him: Yes, whatever you want. As he eagerly reached to turn out the light, I caught his hand. “Can you leave the light on?”
He looked surprised. I usually preferred it be dark.
I had arranged myself against the pillows, crossing my arms over my breasts, which were ruined from nursing, though Tom still found them unaccountably pleasing—or so he told me; maybe his pleasure in such things, not in themselves attractive, was that he found himself written into them.
He began to stroke my arms, my shoulders.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart? You’re all tense. ”
“It’s nothing. Just keep the light on, okay?”
“If that’s what you want.” He gave a stiff smile, quickly stood taking off his clothes, leaving them in a pile beside the bed.
Then awkwardly climbing on top of me, like some enormous animal outside of its natural habitat, attempting something too delicate for its girth.
He took himself into his hand, nosing, searching with the tip.
I lay inert, declining to help him. There arrived that shared moment of slight resistance; his held breath, the tick of his pulse between his legs.
His eyes rolled up beneath fluttering lids.
“Don’t close your eyes,” I said.
“What?”
“Look at me.”
“Sorry.”
His meekness repelled me, his desire to avoid offense.
I had a sharp urge to scold him, Don’t be sorry, don’t say that.
Tentatively he began to move. A little faster now.
I watched him struggle to keep his eyes open, his face contorting slightly.
Mine remained composed, expressing neither happiness nor unhappiness.
In the unadornment of this protracted stare dwelled something unflattering to us both.
It was as if we had given birth to a third person, perched menacingly between us.
A blackmailer. Tom had begun to thrust in swift jabs, agitatedly working toward an end. I was repulsed, humiliated.
And then, out of nowhere, pleasure overtook me.
It lifted from my feet. I felt it like an impossible intake of breath, a dam that broke behind my eyes, releasing its store, gushing into and out of me.
He seemed frightened by it. He could no longer hold my gaze.
In the final seconds, he began to cry, big innocent tears, murmuring the name that now sounded almost foreign to me, “Sally, Sally.”
Afterward, I lay on my back, depleted. He leaned on one elbow, his face above mine, waiting for me to say something, reassure him.
“I wish I didn’t have to leave tomorrow,” he sighed out at length. “You gave yourself to me so completely tonight,” he said quietly, as though confiding a secret, a plea for it to be true, for me to agree, but all I said was:
“You won’t be gone long.”
After perhaps another minute, he reached across me turning out the light. I had curled onto my side. With almost excruciating care, he pressed the covers against me the way I liked.
“Just sleep,” he whispered.
My silence added to my deception—like that moment in a dream when you suddenly realize you have committed a crime and now must commit another to cover the first.