Good in Bed

But his kisses were horrible, slobbery things, all bludgeoning tongue and lips that felt as if they were somehow collapsing when they met mine, so that I was left with a choice between teeth and mustache. His hands were stiff and clumsy. “Lie still,” I whispered.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered back unhappily. “I’m all wrong, aren’t I?”

“Shh,” I breathed, my lips against his neck once more, the tender skin right where his beard ended. I slid one hand down his chest, lightly feathered it over his crotch. Nothing doing. I pressed my breasts into his side, kissed his forehead, his eyelids, the tip of his nose, and tried again. Still nothing. Well, this was curious. I decided to show him a trick, to teach him how to make me happy whether he could get hard or not. He moved me enormously, this six-foot-tall guy with a ponytail and a look on his face like I might electrocute him instead of… this. I wrapped both of my legs around one of his, took his hand, and slid it into my panties. His eyes met mine and he smiled when he felt how wet I was. I put his fingers where I needed them, with my hand over his, pressing his fingers against myself, showing him what to do, and I moved against him, letting him feel me sweat and breathe hard and moan when I came. And then I pressed my face into his neck again, and moved my lips up to his ear. “Thank you,” I whispered. I tasted salt. Sweat? Tears, maybe? But it was dark, and I didn’t look.

We fell asleep in that position: me, wearing just a T-shirt and panties, wrapped around him; him, with only his shirt unbuttoned, only halfway, still in underwear, sweatpants, socks. And when the light crept through my windows, when we opened our eyes and looked at each other, it felt like we had known each other much longer than just one night. As if we could never have been strangers. “Good morning,” I whispered.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

I decided that I could get used to hearing that in the mornings. Bruce decided that he was in love. We were together for the next three years, and we learned things with each other. Eventually, he told me the whole story, about his limited experience, about always being either drunk or stoned and always very shy, about how he’d been turned down a few times his first year in college and just decided to be patient. “I knew I’d meet the right girl someday,” he said, smiling at me, cradling me close. We figured it out – the things he liked, the things I liked, the things we both liked. Some of it was straightforward. Some of it would have been raunchy enough to raise eyebrows even in Moxie, where they ran regular features on new “sizzling sexy secrets!”

But the thing that galled me, that chewed at my heart as I tossed and turned, feeling clammy and cotton-mouthed from the previous night’s tequila binge, was the column’s title. “Good in Bed.” It was a lie. It wasn’t that he’d been some kind of sexual savant, a boy wonder under the sheets… it was that we had loved each other, once. We’d been good in bed together.

TWO

I woke up on Saturday morning to the sound of the telephone. Three rings, th en silence. A ten-second pause, then three more rings, followed by more silence. My mother was not a fan of answering machines, so if she either knew or believed that I was home, she’d just keep calling until I picked up. Resistance was futile.

“This is so obnoxious,” I said, in lieu of “hello.”

“This would be your mom,” said my mother.

“I’m shocked. Could you call me back later? Please? It’s very early. I’m very tired.”

“Oh, quit whining,” she said briskly. “You’re just hung over. Pick me up in an hour. We’ll go to the cooking demonstration at Reading Terminal.”

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.” Knowing, even as I said it, that I could protest and complain and come up with seventeen different excuses, and, come noon, I’d still be in the Reading Terminal, cringing as my mother offered a high-volume play-by-play critique of the hapless chef’s menu selection and cooking skills.

“Drink some water. Take some aspirin,” she said. “I’ll see you in an hour.”

“Ma, please…”

“I’m assuming you read Bruce’s article,” she said. My mother is not big on elaborate transitions.

“Yeah,” I said, knowing, without having to ask, that she had, too. My sister Lucy, a charter subscriber to Moxie and eager reader of any and all things related to femininity, still had her copy delivered to our house. After last night’s door-pounding debacle, I could only assume that she’d pointed it out to my mother… or that Bruce had. The very thought of that conversation – “I’m just calling to let you know that I had an article published this month and I think Ca

“Well, I know you’re upset”

“I’m not upset,” I snapped. “I’m fine.”

“Oh,” she said. This, obviously, was not the response she was expecting. “I thought it was kind of crummy of him.”

“He’s a crummy guy,” I said.

“He wasn’t a crummy guy. That’s why it was so surprising.” I slumped against my pillows. My head hurt. “Are we going to debate his crumminess now?”

“Maybe later,” said my mother. “I’ll see you soon.”

There are two kinds of houses in the neighborhood where I grew up – the ones where the parents stayed married, and the ones where they didn’t.

Given only a cursory glance, both kinds of houses look the same – big, rambling, four- and five-bedroom colonials set well back from the sidewalk-less streets, each on an acre of land. Most are painted conservative colors, with contrasting shutters and trim – a slate-gray house with blue shutters, for example, or a pale beige house with a red door. Most have long driveways, done in gravel, and many have in-ground pools out back.

But look closer – or, better yet, stay a while – and you’ll start to see the difference.

The divorce houses are the ones where the Chem-Lawn truck doesn’t stop anymore, the ones the plowing guy drives past on the mornings after winter storms. Watch, and you’ll see either a procession of sullen-faced teenagers, or sometimes even the lady of the house, emerge to do the raking, mowing, shoveling, trimming, themselves. They’re the houses where Mom’s Camry or Accord or minivan doesn’t get replaced every year, but just keeps getting older and older, and where the second car, if there is one, is more likely some fourth-hand piece of automotive detritus purchased from the Examiner’s classified ads than the time-honored stripped-down but brand-new Honda Civic or, if the kid’s really lucky, Dad’s cast-off midlife crisis sports car.

There’s no fancy landscaping, no big pool parties in the summer, no construction crews making a racket at seven A.M. adding on that new home office or master bedroom suite. The paint job lasts for four or five years instead of two or three, and is more than a little bit flaky by the time it gets redone.

But mostly, you could tell on Saturday mornings, when what my friends and I dubbed the Daddy Parade began. At about ten or eleven o’clock every other Saturday, the driveways up and down our street, and the neighboring streets, would fill with the cars of the men who used to live in these big four- and five-bedroom houses. One by one, they’d exit their cars, trudge up the walkways, ring the bells of the homes where they used to sleep, and collect their kids for the weekends. The days, my friends would tell me, would be full of every kind of extravagance – shopping excursions, trips to the mall, the zoo, the circus, lunch out, di