The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [107]
Such a shared habitat allowed ritual nudity to occur at home, a nudity that often heralded nothing but private fits of sleep on top of the same, vast bed.
When Esther switched from needing us to hating us—perhaps the two are not so different—Claire and I stopped being naked together. This is one of the thousands of coincidences that combine to assemble the skeleton of a marriage. After Esther switched off her feelings—after she instituted delay strategies when it came to demonstrations of love—Claire and I undressed and suited up in private instead, removing our nightwear, if the occasion called for it, only after we’d crawled under the blankets and turned out the light.
Just when there was no reason for it, when our history and intimacy made such shyness preposterous, we’d each discovered shreds of modesty with which to build out our evening endgame.
It had thus been longer than usual since we had been under the light and fully nude together. And as lovely as Claire looked, I felt sorry for her tonight, sorry for her and somewhat ashamed of myself for getting us undressed so quickly.
I took Claire’s hand and rolled over her. Beneath me her body felt cold and long. I tried to fit myself over her in a way that would trigger something. It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between the bodies of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language.
Everywhere people must have been exploring the alternatives; otherwise they’d be sentenced to solitude. But that night Claire and I showed a mutual failure of the imagination. Without speech we were unskilled mimes locked into alien vernaculars, missing every connection, growing slowly angry that the other person could not decode our thoughts.
I would like to say that without language Claire and I exchanged something. But in fact we did not. We simply looked at each other, at most with forced curiosity. The channel that was meant to dilate between us to allow our feelings and thoughts to flow back and forth, well, it didn’t. One witnessed no such channel.
Throughout our endeavors on my bed we remained dutifully mute. We wrestled in much the same way we had when we were erecting the play tent for Esther when she was four, sliding collapsible stilts through a long canvas sleeve, except this time there was no play tent between us, just deflated geometries of air, and we were two old acquaintances grimly determined to extract pleasure from each other. But when our pleasure centers met, they were cold and shielded by brittle walls of hair.
Claire arranged herself on her knees at my side while I settled back and permitted the ministrations that would ready me for our sexual encounter, since that transaction would be the only way to rescue us from our awkward wrestling. Such she did, in rote style, pressing my penis between thumb and forefinger so the top part ballooned angrily and flipped from side to side as she moved her hand.
Her activity was smart, rigorous textbook arousal technique, and she labored with her hand with such determination that her face grew misted in perspiration.
But her manipulations turned my item not toward readiness but to putty. A cold putty that did not stand, but seemed that it would melt into clammy liquid against my leg instead.
When it was clear that her work, tendered so sorrowfully, was not effective and that I would not be able to fulfill my part in the exchange of intimacy, Claire stopped touching me and stared away at the wall.
I was never very good at knowing Claire’s feelings, even, unfortunately, after she’d shared them with me. Somehow I still didn’t understand.