A Case of You - continued page 3
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I could lie down,” Ben said.
And I said, “How about the hotel near the university?”
And he said, “That would be lovely.”
And it was. It was lovely. It was as lovely as anything ever gets. Even with his hand sore from the puncture and the nausea (in spite of the anti-nausea medications) rising in his throat, and his exhaustion and his pain and his despair, being with him in that room for those two hours was bliss. As he sat on the edge of the bed I undressed him, foot to head, all but his boxers, his pristine white cotton boxers. He lay back on the bed and watched me take off my clothes and his breath caught like he was a fourteen-year-old boy seeing his first woman. I was matter-of-fact rather than sultry, a little self-conscious about the C-section scars and the way my breasts no longer stood up. But then I reminded myself he was dying and I realized that the fact that I wasn’t was good enough for both of us.
I called my husband from my cell phone, told him that Ben wasn’t feeling too well and that we were stopping for coffee for awhile, the car made Ben sick at his stomach. I asked him if he would he pick the kids up from school and call Marcia and tell her not to worry, and then I lay down on the bed and I kissed Ben as though I could breath life back into him, as though he were drowning and I was performing CPR, little realizing at the time that he was rescuing me.
He couldn’t get hard but there was no need to apologize and he didn’t, didn’t even think of it, nor did I expect him to either apologize or to get hard. I just lay there naked beside him and kissed him and lay my head on his chest, which I had wanted to do, after all, which was all I had ever wanted to do from the moment I had pressed into him outside the library. I rubbed his soft flesh and I kissed every part of his body and so we spent two hours, until I helped him dress and we headed back to the car and for home.
Nothing was discussed about what we had done or what we would do next or what it all meant.
I put Joni Mitchell on the CD player and sang to him: “You’re in my blood like holy wine. You taste so bitter and so sweet. I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet,” and when we pulled into his driveway, he put his hand, his huge pinpricked hand, between my legs and I came, wet and hot, as though he had just been inside me forever.
I suppose that one could legitimately ask why, if the idea of adultery had always been so much a part of my life, at the actuality of it I was not better prepared and not better able. Why did I allow myself to get caught, what was I hoping to achieve by revealing myself so, both to Ben, and to my husband upon his discovery of my betrayal? I could not say. It was just that the notion of straying had always seemed more romantic than the reality of it. But that was later. At first, neither of us was caught out at all, at first we existed, as do all illicit lovers, in a world of our own making, a universe to which no one else was allowed entry. We managed, as lovers do, to fool ourselves and others into believing that nothing was going on, in the way people have been doing for centuries: by enacting our love affair mostly in public, as though we had nothing to hide. And so we convinced ourselves, my husband, my children, Marcia, Ben’s son Max, our friends, that I was merely a do-gooder and Ben the recipient of my ministrations.
Marcia found it easier for me to drive Ben to therapy than to think about the implications of my driving him, my husband was grateful that I was a much nicer person than he had thought me to be (or so I imagined). My friends, and Ben’s, thought me a saint. And I felt saintly, for awhile, as though I were not only doing something worthy but was actually saving Ben’s life, prolonging it, making it possible for him to stay around as husband and father far longer than he would have been able to without me.
This is all nonsense, of course. I knew exactly what I was doing and so did Ben. We were being supremely selfish, solipsistic, dangerous, mean and hurtful. He had convinced himself that he deserved this small measure of happiness before he died, and I had convinced myself that I was the only person who could give it to him, and that somehow the fact of his being a dying man made it all all right, and that everyone, eventually, would understand and forgive me.
When the doctors decided to add radiation therapy to the chemo, we rejoiced. Although that meant that Ben’s chances had grown dimmer and although he was completely enervated by the new therapy, we saw it as a way to see each other more often. Although we could never make love in any conventional way, our affair was as passionate and tempestuous, as dirty and noisy and messy, as though we had been screwing for hours like bunnies.
Mostly I would lie with him and kiss his scorched flesh, help him to the bathroom, hold his head while he vomited. I managed to buy some marijuana, not very strong, homegrown and green, but we would smoke it together and sit in its haze and pretend we were horny teenagers who couldn’t get enough of each other.
Somehow I could almost always come at the sight of him or just some gentle touch and he would look delighted and satyr-like at the flush on my cheeks and breast, at the way my breathing quickened and my limbs shook. His pleasure was mine, mine his, it was as an erotic experience as I had ever had or would ever hope to. Once in awhile he would grow hard in spite of his weakness and I would sit atop of him and kiss his face until he came. But mostly, it seemed, I would just bury my face into the warm flesh of his chest and we would lie for hours, Ben stroking my hair, and both of us drifting in and out of desultory conversation.
What did we talk about? Nothing. Everything. Books, the children, his illness, the news, how we could not go on. Lovers’ conversations, the same as lovers have had and will have forever, the kind of conversations that seem meaningful and important while one is having them, but really are as dull and transitory as any married couple’s talk at the end of the day. The only thing we did not discuss was the ordinary running of households, which takes up so much time in a married life, or the litany of errand running and to-do lists, we did not ask each other the questions that begin with Did you get? Or Did you remember to? Or Have you done the? In that way, again like lovers through the ages, we managed to convince ourselves that ours was a special relationship, above the fray, not weighted down my life’s mundane details.
