By Nightfall. Michael Cunningham
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of a couple with a grown daughter, a private trove of worries, and a good-natured if slightly prickly ongoing friendship that doesn’t any longer seem to involve sex on a Saturday night, after a party, semitipsy on Elena Petrova’s much-vaunted private-stock vodka, plus a bottle of wine at dinner afterward.
He’s forty-four. Only forty-four. She’s not even forty-one yet.
Your queasy stomach doesn’t help you feel sexy. What’s up with that? What are the early symptoms of an ulcer?
In bed, she wears panties, a V-necked Hanes T-shirt, and cotton socks (her feet get cold until the height of summer). He wears white briefs. They spend ten minutes with CNN (car bomb in Pakistan, thirty-seven people; church torched in Kenya with undetermined number inside; man who’s just thrown his four young children off an eighty-foot-high bridge in Alabama—nothing about the horse, but that’d be local news, if anything), then flip around, linger for a while with Vertigo, the scene in which James Stewart takes Kim Novak (Madeleine version) to the mission to convince her that she’s not the reincarnation of a dead courtesan.
“We can’t get hooked on this,” Rebecca says.
“What time is it?”
“It’s after midnight.”
“I haven’t seen this in years.”
“The horse is still there.”
“What?”
“The horse.”
A moment later, James Stewart and Kim Novak are in fact sitting in a vintage carriage behind a life-size plastic-or-something horse.
“I thought you meant the horse from earlier,” Peter says.
“Oh. No. Funny how these things crop up, isn’t it? What’s the word?”
“Synchronicity. How do you know the horse is still there?”
“I went there. To that mission. In college. It’s all exactly the way it looks in the movie.”
“Though, of course, the horse might be gone by now.”
“We can’t get hooked on this.”
“Why not?”
“I’m too tired.”
“Tomorrow’s just Sunday.”
“You know how it turns out.”
“How what turns out?”
“The movie.”
“Sure I know how it turns out. I also know that Anna Karenina gets run over by a train.”
“Watch it, if you want.”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“I’m too tired. I’ll be cranky tomorrow. You go ahead.”
“You can’t sleep with the TV on.”
“I can try.”
“No. It’s okay.”
They stay with the movie until James Stewart sees—thinks he sees—Kim Novak fall from the tower. Then they turn it off, and turn out the lights.
“We should rent it sometime,” Rebecca says.
“We should. It’s great. I’d sort of forgotten how great it is.”
“It’s even better than Rear Window.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t seen either of them in so long.”
They both hesitate. Would she be just as glad to go right to sleep, too? Maybe. One is always kissing, the other is always being kissed. Thank you, Proust. He can tell she’d be just as glad to skip the sex. Why is she cooling toward him? Okay, he’s wearing a few extra pounds around his waist, and yeah, his ass isn’t headed north. What if she is in fact falling out of love with him? Would it be tragic, or liberating? What would it be like if she set him free?
It would be unthinkable. Whom would he talk to, how would he shop for groceries or watch television?
Tonight, Peter will be the one who kisses. Once they get into it, she’ll be glad. Won’t she?
He kisses her. She willingly returns the kiss. Seems willing, anyway.
By now, he couldn’t describe the sensation of kissing her, the taste of her mouth—it’s too contiguous with the taste inside his own. He touches her hair, takes a handful of it and gently pulls. He was a little rougher with her the first few years, until he understood that she didn’t like it anymore, and possibly never had. There are still these remnant gestures, mild reenactments of old ones when they were newer together, when they fucked all the time, though Peter knew even then that his desire for her was part of a bigger picture; that he had had more intense (if less wondrous) sex with exactly three other women: one who was smitten with his roommate, one who was smitten with the Fauvists, and one who was simply ridiculous. Sex with Rebecca was extraordinary right from the start because it was sex with Rebecca; with her avid mind and her wised-up tenderness and the intimations, as they got to know each other, of what he can only call her beingness.
She runs her hand lightly down his spine, rests it on his ass. He lets go of her hair, encircles her shoulders in the crook of his arm, which he knows she likes—that sense of being strongly held (one of his fantasies about her fantasies: he’s holding her aloft, the bed has vanished). With his free hand, with her help, he pulls the T-shirt up. Her breasts are round and small (when did he press that champagne glass over one of them, to demonstrate the fit—was it in the summer cottage in Truro, or the B and B in Marin?). Her nipples may have thickened and darkened a little—they are now precisely the size of the tip of his little finger, and the color of pencil erasers. Were they once slightly smaller, a little pinker? Probably. He is actually one of the few men who doesn’t obsess about younger women, which she refuses to believe.
We always worry about the wrong things, don’t we?
He puts his lips to her left nipple, flicks it with his tongue. She murmurs. It’s become singular, his mouth on her breast and her response to it, the exhaled murmur, the miniature seizure he can feel along her body, as if she can’t quite believe that this, this, is happening again. He has a hard-on now. He can’t always tell, he doesn’t really care, when he’s excited on his own and when he’s excited because she is. She clutches his back, she can’t reach his ass anymore, he loves it that she likes his ass. He circles her stiffening nipple with his tongue-tip, taps the other one lightly with a finger. Tonight it will be mainly about getting her off. This often happens, has for years—it reveals its form, on any given night (when did they last fuck anyplace but at night, in bed?), usually decided up front, by who kisses whom. This one’s for her, then. That’s the sexiness of it.
She has a fold of flesh at her belly, a heaviness in her haunches. Okay. Peter, you’re not exactly a porn star, either.
He moves his mouth down over her stomach, still stroking, a little harder now, with his finger at her nipple. She makes a small, astonished sound. She gets it; they both get it; they both know; that’s the miracle. He stops stroking with his finger, starts circling. He bites at the elastic of her panties, then slips his tongue under the elastic, laps not hard but not gently at her pubic hair. Her hips cant forward. Her fingers browse through his hair.
Now it’s time to break formation, and take off their clothes. A pleasure of marriage—it doesn’t have to be seamless anymore. The slow strip is no longer necessary. You can just stop, remove what needs removing, and continue. He eases his briefs off over his hard-on, tosses them. Because this is Rebecca’s night he dives right back in before she’s had time to take off her socks, which makes her laugh. He goes back to where he was, tonguing her pubic hair, circling her right nipple. It’s a stop-action photo—suddenly, they’re nude (except for the socks, old white cotton slightly yellow along the soles, she should get new ones). She presses his head on both sides with her thighs as he kiss-walks down her