You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [29]
She was not merely frigid, she was remote.
She had been amazed after they left the church that the anger she’d felt watching Clarence and the mayor turn away from the Holly Monroe memorial did not prevent her accepting a ride home with him. A month later it did not prevent her smiling on him fondly. Did not prevent a trip to Bermuda, a few blissful days of very good sex on a deserted beach screened by trees. Did not prevent her listening to his mother’s stories of Clarence’s youth as though she would treasure them forever.
And yet. From that moment in the heat at the church door, she had uncoupled herself from him, in a separation that made him, except occasionally, little more than a stranger.
And he had not felt it, had not known.
“What have I done?” he asked, all the tenderness in his voice breaking over her. She smiled a nervous smile at him, which he interpreted as derision—so far apart had they drifted.
They had discussed the episode at the church many times. Mayor Carswell—whom they never saw anymore—was now a model mayor, with wide biracial support in his campaign for the legislature. Neither could easily recall him, though television frequently brought him into the house.
“It was so important that I help the mayor!” said Clarence. “He was our first!”
Imani understood this perfectly well, but it sounded humorous to her. When she smiled, he was offended.
She had known the moment she left the marriage, the exact second. But apparently that moment had left no perceptible mark.
They argued, she smiled, they scowled, blamed and cried—as she packed.
Each of them almost recalled out loud that about this time of the year their aborted child would have been a troublesome, “terrible” two-year-old, a great burden on its mother, whose health was by now in excellent shape, each wanted to think aloud that the marriage would have deteriorated anyway, because of that.
Porn
LIKE MANY THOUGHTFUL WOMEN of the seventies, she had decided women were far more interesting than men. But, again like most thoughtful women, she rarely admitted this aloud. Besides, again like her contemporaries, she maintained a close connection with a man.
It was a sexual connection.
They had met in Tanzania when it was still Tanganyika; she was with an international group of students interested in health care in socialist African countries; he with an American group intent upon building schools. They met. Liked each other. Wrote five or six letters over the next seven years. Married other people. Had children. Lived in different cities. Divorced. Met again to discover they now shared a city and lived barely three miles apart.
A strong bond between them was that they respected their former spouses and supported their children. They had each arranged a joint custody settlement and many of their favorite outings were amid a clash of children. Still, her primary interest in him was sexual. It was not that she did not respect his mind; she did. It was a fine mind. More scientific than hers, more given to abstractions. But also a mind curious about nature and the hidden workings of things (it was probably this, she thought, that made him such a good lover) and she enjoyed following his thoughts about the distances of stars and whole galaxies from the earth, the difference between low clouds and high fog, and the complex survival mechanisms of the snail.
But sex together was incredibly good: like conversation with her women friends, who were never abstract, rarely distant enough from nature to be critical in their appraisal of it, and whose own mechanisms for survival were hauled out in discussion for all to see. The touch of his fingers—sensitive, wise, exploring the furthest reaches of sensation—were like the tongues of women,