Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [136]
“Thee deserves everything. More than everything.” Her desire to touch and be touched was so strong that she feared he might be repelled. She felt wanton and wild, she couldn’t get enough of his mouth. “I love thee,” she said. “Oh, darling, I do love thee, I do, I do!”
6
Shelly’s stay as my house guest, or perhaps the fact that I have had a look into her private life and she has had a glimpse of me being cared for like an infant by her mother, has led her to adopt a more familiar tone with me than I quite like. She acts as if she had been employed as confidential adviser, keeper, critic, teaching assistant, and lay psychiatrist. I can see her “studying” me and drawing conclusions. I suppose my routines are pretty dull, and I shouldn’t be surprised that she exercises herself interpreting her boss. Which is no reason she should feel free to talk to the boss about her half-assed interpretations. And I made the mistake of having her type up all the tapes that I was sure contained no personal matter. I would have been better advised to keep her from seeing any of the book.
This afternoon, after she got through typing some of the Leadville chapters, she asked me if I didn’t think I was being a little inhibited about my grandparents’ sex life. “Because it’s a novel,” she says. “It isn’t history–you’re making half of it up, and if you’re going to make up some of it, why not go the whole way? I mean, it’s tantalizing. You get close to dealing with their sex life, and blip, you turn off the light. Two or three times. Once on the honeymoon, once at Santa Cruz, now once in Leadville.”
“I may look to you like a novelist, but I’m still a historian under the crust,” I said. “I stick with the actual. That’s what they would have done, turned off the light.”
“I know, all that business about never seeing your wife naked. They were so puritan about their bodies in those days, it was bound to have screwed up their minds. Can you leave out anything that basic and still have a valid book? Modern readers might find a study of the Victorian sex life interesting and funny.”
I felt like asking her, if contemporary sexual attitudes are so much healthier than Grandmother’s, how Grandmother managed to get through a marriage that lasted more than sixty years, while Shelly Rasmussen hides out in her parents’ house at the age of twenty or so to escape the attentions of her liberated and natural lover. But I only said, “Interesting in what way? Funny how?”
I suppose because she has worn pants much of her student life, she feels free to sprawl on the back of her neck, with her worn loafers stretched halfway across the room. From where I sat in the dormer I could see her studying me through her hair, getting all ready for one of those open-hearted open-ended rap sessions that the young have adapted from the David Susskind show and learned to call education. They can go on for hours, and reveal all. Combined with encounter techniques they can empty the well and cleanse the soul and bore the hell out of anybody over twenty-five. The afternoon light was in her squarish face. She squinted shrewdly, she burbled with her hoarse laughter. “Well, it couldn’t have been all that decorous, could it? They had sex with their eyes shut so they could pretend everything was on a high plane. Aren’t hypocritical people sort of funny?”
It happens that I despise that locution “having sex,” which describes something a good deal more mechanical than making love and a good deal less fun than fucking. Also I don’t think anybody’s sex life, Grandmother’s included, very funny, unless you mean funny-peculiar, and Shelly didn’t mean that. She meant funny-ha-ha, funny-hypocritical, funny-absurd. I had imagined that Leadville love scene, exceeding my license as a historian, because I felt that just then she was fighting against her ingrown gentility and snobbery, ashamed of herself for having been ashamed of her husband, and making contrite and affectionate amends. I had meant that scene to be tender. I meant it to clear away,