You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [13]
Relishing her short freedom during the summer as much as she contemplated enjoyment of her longer future one, she threw herself headlong into the interim relationship with Ellis, a professional lover of mainly older women artists who came to the Colony every year to work and play.
A New York Jew of considerable charm, intellectual pettiness, and so vast and uncritical a love of all things European it struck one as an illness (and who hated Brooklyn—where he had grown up—his parents, Jewish culture, and all he had observed of black behavior in New York City), Ellis found the listening silence of “the dark woman,” as he euphemistically called her, restorative—after his endless evenings with talkative women who wrote for Esquire and the New York Times. Such women made it possible for him to be included in the proper tennis sets and swimming parties at the Colony—in which he hoped to meet contacts who would help his career along—but they were also driven to examine each and every one of their own thoughts aloud. His must be the attentive ear, since they had already “made it” and were comfortable exposing their own charming foibles to him, while he, not having made it yet, could afford to expose nothing that might discourage their assistance in his behalf.
It amused and thrilled him to almost hear the “click” when his eyes met those of the jazz poet. “Sex,” he thought. And, “rest.”
Of course he mistook her intensity.
After sitting before her piano for hours, setting one of her poems to music, she would fling open her cabin door and wave to him as he walked by on his way to or from the lake. He was writing a novella about his former wife and composed it in longhand down at the lake (“So if I get fed up with it I can toss myself in,” he joked) and then took it back to his studio with him to type. She would call to him, her hair and clothing very loose, and entice him into her cabin with promises of sympathy and half her lunch.
When they made love she was disappointed. He did not appear to believe in unhurried pleasure, and thought the things she suggested he might do to please her very awkward at the least. But it hardly mattered, since what mattered was the fact of having a lover. She liked snuggling up to him, liked kissing him along the sides of his face—his cheeks were just beginning to be a trifle flabby but would still be good for several years—and loved to write him silly letters—scorching with passion and promises of abandon—that made her seem head over heels in love. She enjoyed writing the letters because she enjoyed feeling to her full capacity and for as long as possible the excitement having a lover brought. It was the kind of excitement she’d felt years ago, in high school and perhaps twice in college (once when she’d fallen for a student and once when she was seduced—with her help and consent—by a teacher), and she recognized it as a feeling to be enjoyed for all it was worth. Her body felt on fire, her heart jumped in her breast, her pulse raced—she was aware, for the first time in years, of actually needing to make love.
He began to think he must fight her off, at least a little bit. She was too intense, he said. He did not have time for intense relationships, that’s why he had finally accepted a divorce from his wife. He was also writing a great poem which he had begun in 1950 and which—now that he was at the Colony—he hoped to finish. She should concentrate on her own work if she expected to win any more prizes. She wanted to win more, didn’t she?
She laughed at him, but would not tell him why. Instead she tried, very gently (while sitting on his lap with her bosom maternally opposite his face), to tell him he misunderstood. That she wanted nothing from him beyond the sensation of being in love itself. (His stare was at first blank, then cynical, at this.) As for her work, she did not do hers the way he apparently did his. Hers did not mean to her what he seemed