You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [31]
But the flow stops.
Once he said to her: “I could be turned on by bondage.” No, he said “by ‘a little light bondage.’” She had told him of a fantasy in which she lay helpless, bound, waiting for the pleasure worse than death.
There is no plot this time. No story of an improbable friendship down South, no goldilocks from the Midwestern plains. Just page after page of women: yellow, red, white, brown, black [she had let him tie her up very loosely once; it was not like her fantasy at all. She had wanted to hold him, caress him, snuggle and cuddle] bound, often gagged. Their legs open. Forced to their knees.
He is massaging the back of her neck, her shoulders. Her buttocks. The backs of her thighs. She has bent over a hot typewriter all day and is tired. She sinks into the feeling of being desired and pampered. Valued. Loved. Soon she is completely restored. Alert. She decides to make love to him. She turns over. She cradles his head in her arms. Kisses his forehead. His eyes. Massages his scalp with her fingers. Buries her nose in his neck. Kisses his neck. Caresses his chest. Flicks his nipples, back and forth, with her tongue. Slowly she moves down his body. His penis (which he thinks should not be called “penis”—“a white boy’s word”; he prefers “cock”) is standing. She takes it—she is on her knees—into her mouth. She gags.
The long-term accommodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is, she knows, forgetfulness. She will forget what turns him on.
“No, no,” he says, very sorry he has shown her his collection; in fact, vowing passionately to throw it away. “The point is for you to be turned on by it too!”
She thinks of the lovely black girl—whom she actually thinks of as her friend Fannie—and is horrified. What is Fannie doing in such company? she wonders. She panics as he is entering her. Wait! she says, and races to the phone.
The phone rings and rings.
Her friend Fannie is an out-of-work saleswoman. She is also a lesbian. She proceeds to write in her head a real story about Fannie based on what she knows. Her lover at work on her body the whole time.
Fannie and Laura share a tiny loft apartment. They almost never make love. Not because they are not loving—they do a lot of caressing and soothing—but they are so guilty about what they feel that sexuality has more or less dried up. [She feels her own juices drying up at this thought.]
They have both been out of work for a long time. Laura’s mother is sick. Fannie’s young brother has entered Howard University. There is only Fannie to send him money for books, clothes and entertainment. Fannie is very pretty but basically unskilled in anything but selling, and salespersons by the thousands have been laid off in the recession. Unemployment is not enough.
But Fannie is really very beautiful. Men stop her on the street all the time to tell her so. It is the way they chose to tell her so, when she was barely pubescent, that makes her return curses for “compliments” even today.
But these men would still stop her on the street, offer her money “for a few hours’ work.”…
By now she has faked all kinds of things, and exhausted her lover. He is sound asleep. She races to Fannie and Laura’s apartment. Sits waiting for them on the stoop. Finally they come home from seeing a Woody Allen movie. They are in high spirits, and besides, because she shares part of her life with a man, care much less for her than she does for them. They yawn loudly, kiss her matronizingly on both cheeks, and send her home again.
Now, when he makes love to her, she tries to fit herself into the white-woman, two-black-men story. But who will she be? The men look like her brothers, Bobo and Charlie. She is disgusted, and worse, bored, by Bobo and Charlie. The white woman is like the young girl who, according to the Times, was seduced off a farm in Minnesota by a black pimp and turned out on 42nd Street. She cannot stop herself from thinking: Poor: Ignorant: Sleazy: Depressing, This does not excite or stimulate.
He watches her face as he makes expert love to her. He knows his