Group Sex Read online

  “I want to thank you all for electing me ship’s doctor.”

  Three pairs of eyes looked up, then went on reading.

  “It’s not an elective position,” Delma said.

  “Listen to this,” said Mary; “so disgusting. ‘I feel you deep inside me on the subway.’”

  “Shoof,” said Delma. “Try this on for size. ‘I’ve counted ten thousand minutes since you left me.’”

  “Where’s Maude?” asked Frances, referring to Allan’s helpmeet.

  “Out sick,” said Mary. “That subway one’s from her.”

  Ruthanne gave Delma a letter postmarked India. “Read Frances the part about ‘your skin on mine.’”

  “What a haul,” said Frances. “How did you get so lucky?”

  “Hammy wanted the Vietnam file,” said Mary Land.

  “Oh, ho,” said Frances, “and your eye just happened to fall …”

  “It did!” Mary twisted her bracelet. “Yours would, too.”

  Delma got up and collected the cards and letters. She scanned them for content and dealt them into separate piles. She pointed at each pile and named it, starting left to right.

  “Two suicide threats, three breakdowns, two abortions. One broken marriage and one bad auto accident.”

  “No actual deaths,” said Ruthanne. “He must be slipping.”

  “Make copies,” said Frances, “and mail them to his house.”

  “Men,” said Mary.

  “White boys,” gloated Delma.

  “Stick it in your ear,” said Mary. “They’re all the same.”

  That night Frances hurried to Paul feeling smug and guilty. She was favored above most women, though undeserving. Other men were to Paul as red glass to a ruby. Ordinary men were blurred in spirit and contour. They were not defined, like Paul, by a true vocation. Their energies were scattered, or turned to scurvy uses. Time hung heavy on their hands, so adultery was their hobby. Every impulse or notion had the weight of their fondest ambition, whereas Paul’s idlest whims served as fodder for his chosen work. Sometimes Frances was fodder, too, though more often a stable-hand. Paul’s work was a glutton with a faultless digestive system. It could process rich foods, like adultery, into scenes or stage values. Leaner portions, like nightmares or fantasies, could be used direct. In a sense, Frances had two masters, Paul and Paul’s art. Other women might never know that satisfaction. She did not have to fear Paul’s habit of stealing dinner knives, or his interest in the demographics of prostitution. She was not concerned by his horror of having his thumbs held. When he tried to raise funds from strangers, she rested easy. Any flaw in the man would be mended in the work of art.

  Frances let herself into Paul’s loft with renewed dedication. The object of her dedication stood beside the bed. He was deep in thought, so she did not run to embrace him. There was a halo of light around his head, perhaps from the lamp. Frances marveled, as she often had, at his force of mind. Paul solved problems by thinking. He could think for hours on end, uninterrupted. Frances herself could not think without moving her lips. She thought out loud, addressing herself as “darling.” Other mortals thought in fits and starts. Their thoughts bobbed like corks, then capsized under waves of distraction. Frances pictured Allan Schieffman’s mind attempting thought. His ideas would founder quickly, swamped by images from his libido: a flash of thigh, a tear-stained cheek, a razor blade, a thin white ankle.

  Frances waited like a sentry at the citadel of Paul’s reflections. What concept engaged him? Would it change the course of theatre history? Paul was turned away. She crept a little closer to him. He was pondering a pair of shoes that were sitting upright on a table. They were women’s shoes, black leather pumps, with pointed toes and sharp high heels. Paul placed his hands inside the shoes and made them walk across the table. He made them do a mincing walk. He made them do a slow half-turn. He made them do a two-step, sideways, and what looked to Frances like a dip. This was curious behavior, surely, but artists were inspired by trifles. She had seen Paul take a pocket mirror and conceive a set for Shakespeare’s Tempest.

  Paul acknowledged Frances. “Put these on.”

  “Are they part of a primal scene?” asked Frances.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Paul said. “They tilt the female pelvis forward.”

  Frances forced her feet inside the shoes. Her feet were hot. The pumps were narrow. She grabbed Paul’s arm to keep her balance.

  “Suppose I trip and fall?” asked Frances.

  Paul walked away. He picked up a wooden chair. He counted off twenty paces and then sat down. He made a slit in front of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, as if he were looking through a viewfinder, or a lens.

  “Turn around,” said Paul.

  Frances shuffled slowly in a circle.

  “No good,” said Paul. “The clothes are wrong. The clothes come off.”

  Frances bent her right leg, like a stork. Her right shoe pinched. She bent her left leg. The left shoe was rubbing her heel. Was this work? Or an exercise destined to end in bed? She wished Paul liked his pleasure, as she did, plain vanilla. She felt naked enough already. She did not want to strip. What could she strip? She was not wearing elbow-length gloves. There was no kit of feathers in the loft, stashed away for emergencies. She had only two layers to peel, or a layer and a half, since she never wore slips or brassieres and refused to wear stockings.

  “What’s your problem?” barked Paul. “Take them off! Strut your stuff! Hump the door!”

  Paul’s loft had no closet. His clothes hung on racks rolled on casters. The entrance and exit to the loft was the heavy fire door, which would slam shut and crush her before she was in position. Paul was asking too much, but he asked even more from his actors. A good actress would find a solution; she would not be so literal. In the absence of doors, a real actress would hump empty air.

  “Bump and grind!” shouted Paul. “Just don’t die on me!”

  “Leave me alone,” said Frances. “I don’t know how.”

  Paul wiped a weary palm across his forehead. His lofty brow was creased with lines of woe. He gazed at Frances, or, rather, at the wall behind her. His eyes had faded to a paler shade of blue. If Frances had walked on the ceiling or practiced birdcalls, she would not have regained one atom of his attention. Paul had plans for the shoes. His scheme had failed, thanks to Frances. He saw her, at the moment, as a snag or a hitch in his plans, like a leading man’s cold, or a loose wire somewhere in the light-board. Paul was never deterred by failure on a small or large scale. When one project bogged down, he set right to work on another. Leaving Frances to hobble to a chair and remove the shoes, he unfolded a list and began dialing telephone numbers. Until he could balance a failure with a stroke of luck, he was as lost to Frances as if he were still in Kansas. There was nothing for her to do but go home and wait. Before she went out, she performed a stealthy action. She took the black shoes and stuffed them deep in the garbage, in case Paul tried calling an actress who would come and wear them, and reveal their potential for tilting her pelvis forward.

  On Saturday morning, Frances curled up on her window seat. She never looked long before seeing some distracting incident, a pair of transvestites, or a nice arrest, if she was lucky. Across the street, at the Hellman Planetarium, a figure—male?—was leaning out the window. He was lowering a bundle attached to a length of rope. There was no one waiting below to catch the bundle. Frances watched as the package bumped its way down the wall. It disappeared out of sight behind a shrub. She waited for a furtive hand to seize the package. Perhaps she had uncovered a traffic in lunar ores. The man in the window had gone, though the rope still dangled. Perhaps it was only a method of trash disposal. She waited for a sign, but the plot did not develop. Paul would never have allowed the plot to dangle loose. Paul would call the planetarium to report it. He would call the police in a free-form Balkan accent. Holding a pair of binoculars to improve his vision, he would sit and wait for the plotlines to converge.

  Wit
hout Paul, Frances felt like a story with pages missing. She depended on Paul to make life cohere, like art. Right now Lewis, her cat, was providing entertainment. He was nudging the books off the lower bookcase shelf. Dracula toppled over, then Conrad’s Victory, followed by a copy of Little Women with a broken spine. Lewis began to work on a heavier volume, Berenson’s Italian Painters of the Renaissance. In a moment, the book fell open on the floor. Lewis bolted before he was flattened underneath it. Male animals grappled with life, as did Lewis and Paul. Frances, the female, looked on, or picked up what they dropped. As she knelt on the rug fitting books in their proper slots, she felt dull and light-headed, resourceless in body and spirit. Her body and mind mirrored woman’s historic passivity: the fatigue, the dejection, the limpness, the indecision. She sat with a book on her lap and turned over the pages. She set the book down. She opened another. She closed it. Her muscles were aching from the effort of holding a book. Her forehead was hot but her shoulders were rippling with chills. She thought she might faint. Her throat was too sore to swallow. Was her sore throat a manifestation of a slavish nature? Was she suffering from lack of a penis, or a new strain of flu? It was cheering to think that her ills were somatic, not psychic. She could go to bed guiltless, instead of attempting autonomy.

  Wearing socks, a wool bathrobe, a ski cap, and angora mittens, Frances lay under three heavy blankets and a small Turkish rug. At one point she eyed a large portrait (her great-aunt, in jodhpurs), and wondered if paint-coated canvas might supply extra warmth. She tried to lure Lewis to climb up and press in beside her; he had eaten his dinner and his body was laden with calories. Lewis offered no comfort. He snapped at her beckoning mitten. He pounced on her feet when they twitched underneath the thick covers. As always when Frances was sick and unable to eat, she felt a pure craving for lobster and mayonnaise salad.

  “They won’t let me be sick,” Frances moaned as the telephone rang. It was Edie, her friend and her scourge, who now called her twice weekly. Edie’s calls were invariably ill-timed, or perhaps they were timed to perfection, since they always caught Frances off guard and more liable to influence.

  “They Made Him A Judge,” opened Edie, in Biblical tones.

  “Who a what?” answered Frances.

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” chided Edie.

  “Hit me again,” Frances said.

  “Hill. My husband,” said Edie. “A federal judge. At his age. He’s the youngest in history.”

  “I am pleased,” Frances said. “Please congratulate Hill. What an honor.”

  “You’re depressed,” Edie stated, alert to the scent of affliction.

  “I’m sick. I’m in bed.”

  “I’ll drop by on my way to the market.”

  “There’s no need, Edie, really.”

  “Don’t try to play possum,” said Edie. “I hear how you sound. It’s your friend. He’s not good for you, Frances.”

  “What’s a nice girl like me …” Frances left the trite question unfinished.

  “We don’t visit,” said Edie. “You used to come sit in my kitchen.”

  “I don’t want to wrangle,” said Frances. “I have a high fever.”

  “I’ll stop,” Edie said, “if you’ll give me a sensible reason.”

  “Don’t expect sense,” Frances said, “from a germ-ridden person. I want to be shot from a cannon. I want to be aimed like an arrow.”

  “That’s very exalted,” said Edie. “Have you taken some aspirin?”

  “Be quiet,” said Frances, who was seeing her life in a vision. “Paul is the arrow and the bow. He’s the archer. He’s the bull’s-eye. What am I? I’m not even the feathers. Or the straw in the target.”

  Later on, Frances couldn’t remember this brief conversation, or Edie’s concern that the fever had scrambled her brain cells. After Edie hung up, Frances fell fast asleep within seconds. She slept on and off for a night and a day, by her reckoning. She saw sights that her well self was blind to, like bugs on the ceiling. These same bugs hung in swags from the bedposts or swarmed on the carpet. The reading chair changed its position, inching forward or backward. When her fever had lowered, Frances sat up and looked in a mirror. She had lost all her color, and her pale hair lay as flat as an otter’s. Sitting up was too hard, so she gave in and went back to sleep. Very soon she was dreaming strange dreams of escaping from captors. From the waist up, the captors were bears; from the waist down fork-leggèd. Dreams of flight and pursuit changed to dreams of explosions and warfare. A battering ram was pounding a fortress to rubble. The cat entered the dream. He streaked through the doorway in terror. He jumped on her pillow—her real pillow, not its dream image. Her physical ears heard a thud at her tangible front door. Whoever was kicking the door was leaning on the doorbell. They could take what they liked if only they stopped making that noise.

  The front door gave way with a bang. It slammed shut just as loudly. The vandal swore ditto: “Goddamnit, you gave me bum keys!” Paul’s footfall was weighty. The carpet resounded like marble. He barged into her room, then drew back, taking shelter in the doorway.

  “What’s this?” Paul looked frightened. “What’s the story?”

  “I have fever and chills,” answered Frances.

  “Where’s the vitamin C?” asked Paul. He pulled out a handkerchief.

  “It’s gone,” Frances said. “Please don’t go.”

  Paul covered his nose. “You look pretty when you’re weak,” he said. “Perhaps I should prey upon you.”

  “I ache,” begged Frances.

  “Bliss might unkink you,” said Paul. He sat on the edge of the bed and felt for her breasts.

  “I’m cold.” Frances squirmed away. “I have chills and fever.”

  Paul pulled back his hand. He looked at it closely and shook it, for fear it was crawling with leggy black septic microbes.

  “I better go wash,” said Paul. “Are your towels infected?”

  “Use the bathmat,” said Frances.

  “With feet on it?”

  “Use the tissues.”

  “They shred,” said Paul. He turned on the hot and cold faucets.

  Frances called out, “You’re wasting a lot of water.”

  “I don’t trust the soap.” Paul was wiping his hands on his trousers.

  Paul picked up a straight-backed chair. He parked it beside the bed. He sat down and looked at Frances with a mixture of pity and appraisal.

  “Poor brute,” he said. “How sick are you?”

  “A hundred and two,” said Frances.

  “Too sick to play Rudolf and Mary?”

  “Much too sick,” said Frances. “Who are they?”

  “I got a water pistol, just in case. You can’t buy a gun on Sunday.”

  Frances tried to remember. Rudolf. Rudolf and Mary. Mary?

  “Do you have any candles?” asked Paul. “To do it right, we need fifty.”

  “I’m not on props,” muttered Frances. She began to remember, dimly.

  “He shot her in the temple,” said Paul. “He shot himself three hours later.”

  Frances slid far beneath the covers. Only her eyes were showing. In her mind’s eye she pictured Mayerling, and the agony of Rudolf of Hapsburg. His mistress, the Baroness Mary, dressed for bed in ribbons and laces. Writers loved Rudolf and Mary, and their nasty romantic suicide. Many books probed the mystery of Mayerling. Did the Prince lose his nerve, like Hamlet? Did he fire two shots, or just one? Did assassins lurk in the azaleas? Frances wished for a bed in a hospital, guarded by nurses, where suicide games, like rich foods, were forbidden to patients.

  Paul was pacing the room in frustration. When inspired, he was apt to be testy. He viewed Frances’s virus as a hindrance; was she out of commission, or obstructive? Frances knew that he saw her as no better than a backer who has welshed on his investment. Paul prowled through the living room and kitchen, pulling out drawers but not closing them. He returned and went back to the bathroom. She could hear him ransacking the cabin
et. He emerged with a vial of brown liquid. He leaned over Frances and opened it.

  “Iodine,” said Paul. “For the wound.”

  Frances flinched as he dabbed at her temple. She was glad Paul had settled for iodine, which would come off with soap and hard scrubbing. He had not found the can of red paint, which was sticky, like blood, and dried slowly.

  “Could we do this tomorrow?” asked Frances. “I can’t act when I’m sick. I can’t help you.”

  “You’re playing a corpse.” Paul kept dabbing. “You don’t have to act. You just lie there.”

  “I don’t understand,” pleaded Frances. “How do primal scenes fit in with suicide?”

  Paul peered at the wound he had painted. He was satisfied with its dimensions. “Can’t I have two ideas at a time? I need to investigate the love death.”

  Frances groaned. Paul was not a good doctor. Death and suicide were not healing notions. She wished for an ordinary lover, who made tea and administered back rubs. When Paul appeared, she had been convalescent. She had believed there was hope for recovery. After less than an hour in his care, her germs had regained their vitality.

  “What’s the love death?” asked Frances. “Is it catching?”

  “It’s German,” said Paul, looking scornful.

  “Like the measles,” she nodded. “I never had them.”

  “Can’t you muster a little detachment?”

  “My resistance is low,” whimpered Frances.

  “It’s not a disease. It’s a feeling.”

  “Adults get them worse,” said Frances.

  Paul was reaching the end of his patience. If Frances were an actress, he would fire her.

  “Get out of your body,” ordered Paul. “It’s when dying is the same as coming.”

  “Not in my case.” Frances felt her forehead.

  “Or when coming is the same as dying.”

  Frances glanced at him with fresh suspicion. Her sickbed was a rack of nails. Paul had not disclosed his full agenda. He was planning a new set of trials.