Fear of Heights Page 11

  Robert stands and walks toward me.

  “Are you saying you don’t want me to go?” I ask.

  Robert pulls me into a hug and I hug him back tentatively.

  “Stay with me,” he says.

  He slowly rubs my back, and his arm slips around my waist. He pulls me closer. I smell the brandy on his breath. He might be drunk. He also seems strangely unaffected by what I’ve just told him. Maybe he no longer cares what I do.

  “Instead of a stranger, what about having sex with me?”

  His hand slips under my shirt and his fingertips slide across my back. How is it that Robert’s touch feels even stranger than an actual stranger’s hands roaming my flesh? The night in the hospital when he kept watch over me felt intimate, a precious reconnection that we desperately needed. It disappeared so quickly. I’m afraid our love is depleted, all melted away. All that’s left is the empty echo of the last note when the symphony comes to an end.

  “Tell me what you did with him,” Robert whispers into my neck, his hand trembling ever so slightly against my shoulder blade.

  This is what I’ve suspected but have been too afraid to ask. Robert has always seemed too casual about my relationship with Jaylee. He acted as if the romance was a nuisance but the sex was expected: it turns him on to imagine me with another man. Worse, he finds some pleasure in the idea of his wife’s debasement.

  You can go fuck other guys, but then fuck me while you tell me about it.

  We are husband and wife. I have birthed Robert’s babies. There should be no boundaries between us, no limits to what we reveal to one another.

  But I feel used. I’d rather Robert lie to me about this. I’ve got no desire to include him into my already complicated equation.

  “His name is Ideal,” I whisper, pronouncing the name slowly in Spanish. “What do you want to know?”

  Maybe all Robert ever wanted from this was to be included.

  “What’s he like?” Robert murmurs, treading lightly on virgin territory. He kisses the side of my mouth and runs a hesitant hand across my breast.

  “He’s handsome,” I say cautiously, “and he’s young.”

  He lifts my white blouse up over my head and swiftly undoes the clasp of my bra.

  “Tell me?” Robert’s lips graze my ear, his hands halting under my ass.

  “He’s beautiful but also harsh-looking, dangerous. His eyebrows are dark and arched, with two little lines shaved in the downward slope. I wanted to touch them. I ran my finger over them.”

  I suck in air as Robert undoes the fly of my jeans. He walks me backward and lowers me onto the couch. He remains standing, and begins removing his clothes.

  “What else?” This time his voice has found authority.

  “He looks mean, but he’s actually very kind. His hair is long; he wears it in braids. He’s tall, taller than Jaylee . . .” I stumble here, not knowing if this particular border crossing is allowed. “Should I be telling you these details?”

  “Touch yourself, Katie, if it turns you on.” Robert says quietly, shedding his slacks and his boxers to grab the base of his shaft. “Where did he take you?”

  “To his apartment, or his family’s. He took me to his room, carried me over his shoulder. It happened on the bed.”

  “Were you frightened?”

  “Yes. And ashamed, and terribly excited too. Then humiliated by my own excitement.”

  “Is that why you like these guys? Because they scare you?”

  “No. I like that they want me.”

  Robert moves closer and masturbates directly above my face. He takes my hand and invites me to join in stroking his cock. I do, hypnotized by this display.

  Robert is objectifying me, through the eyes of another man. He wants to do it, because he no longer can. It takes another man’s vision for him to see me this way. I lie still on the couch, waiting for his next move, revolted by the idea that maybe he felt this way when he thought of me with Jaylee. I have no idea what we’ve started and even less of an idea where we’ll arrive.

  “Did he hurt you?” he asks, his voice near the breaking point from arousal.

  “No. He was gentle, mostly, but I hit him. I tried to hurt him and throw him off. My brain was in full out battle with my body. I’ve almost never been so turned on. He told me to lie on my stomach and stick my ass in the air.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do it for me.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  So I oblige him and he grabs my hips as if to enter me.

  “Robert, you should use a condom. I didn’t, with him.”

  I hear Jaylee’s prediction again and see it coming to fruition. He’ll fuck me even if he hates me. That part was true, but I didn’t expect him to like it even better.

  Robert goes to his briefcase and extracts a condom. With assurance, he rolls it down his shaft and enters me from behind. The impromptu condom produced out of thin-air rolls my stomach, boggles my mind. We may be partners in life, but look at how much we lie to one another and hide.

  “Did you come with him?” he asks as he pumps into me.

  “No….”

  Robert and I have shared everything, but I’ve been married to this man for more than a decade and I know nothing about his innermost desires.

  Why? Because, it’s loaded with complications, and our life together has always been about pretending we have none.

  Now I’m wet from just the residual memories of Ideal, from the ricochets of Robert’s own hyper-charged lust.

  “Can you come now?” he asks me breathlessly.

  “Yes!” and I do in a rush, with a gasp of pleasure and wonder. I can’t tell if I’m coming for Robert or if this orgasm belongs to Ideal.

  Sexuality suddenly appears before me as a never-ending journey. An unraveling that reveals brand new dawns, even when you thought you’d reached the end.

  In the morning, Robert leaves me a note. I’m surprised he didn’t draw up a legal contract for me to sign. I think last night was the most honest Robert has been with me in months. Maybe ever.

  The note is all remorse and recrimination. He writes that what happened between us last night does not give me permission to be unfaithful. He still considers me sleeping with other men to be infidelity. He had too much to drink and isn’t sure what got into him. We should, he concludes, make time to discuss it further in the future.

  I grab the phone and angrily dial his office. His secretary says he’s in an appellate argument, and that she’ll let him know I called. I dial his cell phone. He answers on the first ring.

  “Robert Champion.”

  “I’m your wife, not a client,” I yell. “Just tell me how you feel, Robert! You can tell me anything!”

  “Kate, I’m at work.”

  “I’m not going to judge you for what happened last night, for how you felt. You’ve seen me through all this, and accepted everything from me. You can be who you are. I want you to be who you are.”

  “Listen, last night was a mistake. I had a lot to drink after work with a client. I got carried away. I have to go into an argument right now. Can we talk about this later?”

  “Okay. But look, I want to know everything that you are, and I’m not afraid of any of it. I’m not afraid of anything anymore. If we’re going to stay together, I want to have a real relationship.”

  “Kate, I’ve got to go. Forget last night.”

  “Robert… you keep condoms in your briefcase.”

  “I have to go.”

  I hang up feeling disappointed. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last year, it’s that life doesn’t wait for you to figure everything out. If you don’t test your own limits, you’ll never know what you’re capable of. You’ll never know who you could have been, or more importantly, who you could become.

  Chapter 10

  I find Ideal on the corner in front of the barbershop. He’s laughing and speaking loudly, gesturing with both his hands an
d his head.

  “¡Sabrosura!” he yells as soon as he sees me approaching. He does some little dance move and then laughs again. He’s got headphones on and curls his fingertips in to touch his palms in a sweet come-hither gesture.

  I like Ideal. This is not a desperate feeling. There is no temporary insanity or breath-robbing agony. I just like him, and his smile, and his casual corner dance. I have to quickly remind myself that I’m here for an envelope.

  “Sabrosura, que hermosa,” he purrs as he pulls me into a hug.

  Then his hands are all over me, proprietary in their knowledge of my body. His obvious familiarity is on display for everyone to see, one block from Jaylee’s, the home of not only a member of a rival gang but even a personal enemy.

  “Can we go inside?” I stammer.

  “Lo que tú quiera’,“ he says, one hand snaking down to my butt, the other rising quickly to capture the back of my neck. He moves his face in as if to kiss me, but he doesn’t. He holds my head still and whistles, shrill next to my ear. He’s communicating with people right behind me but has me positioned so that I can’t see them. I hate this neighborhood. The gangs. The secrets. Everyone knows everything. Everyone except for me.

  “What’s that? Who are you talking to?”

  “Nothing, amorcita. To’ ‘ta bien. I gotta get somebody to take the corner, tú sabe’?”

  In Dominican Spanish, these men especially completely swallow their s’s.

  He whistles again, gestures, says something entirely indiscernible in Spanish slang, all the while bracing my head so that I can’t turn my neck to see who they are. Then he grabs my hand and pulls me toward his building. I crane to see who he’s communicated with, but I recognize no one in the small group of men, with their jackets and baseball caps. I might as well be blind or deaf when it comes to deciphering these street interactions.

  It’s the same dirty foyer, the same tiny, claustrophobic elevator, but this time my adrenal glands are kind enough not to go into overdrive. This time, Ideal feels like an old friend. Yet he touches me so freely, as if my body belonged to him, almost as if my body were an extension of his own. This, I start to gather, is partly his personality, not just his feelings toward me.

  “You couldn’t get out last night, huh?” he says, softly grabbing my nose between his two knuckles like a preschool magician.

  “I just came for the envelope, Ideal. I’m not your girlfriend.”

  “That’s what you think,” Ideal says with a coy smile. “I can make you change your mind.” He pulls me flush against him, but his hug is warm and generous. He’s teasing me, not trying to seduce me.

  “My life is complicated enough. I could use a friend, though,” I say, lowering my forehead to rest against his breastbone. Ideal sweeps my hair up off my neck and wraps it around his fist, pulling it over my shoulder and baring my cheek to him simultaneously. My skin prickles with his touch. He kisses my cheek and nuzzles my neck. His exhale on my flesh is hot and inebriating.

  I start to feel the deep hunger again. The one that threatens to engulf me. The one that’s now insatiable. It just keeps going, opening and dividing, revealing new spaces, new voids I can’t seem to fill. I am full only of hunger.

  The elderly man sits in the same spot on the plastic-covered sofa, this time wearing a button-up shirt and boxer shorts, and slippers with socks pulled up to the middle of his skinny calf.

  He opens his mouth at me, and moves his jaw; his eyes are watery, gone grey with cataracts, and they look right past me. He must be Ideal’s grandfather. Ideal sings along with the bachata from his headphones as he sets up a TV tray in front of him, shakes out a cloth napkin, and tucks it into the neck of the old man’s shirt. I remove my shoes.

  “Tú quiere’ algo de comer?”Ideal shouts at me from the kitchen.

  I follow him and watch while he ladles a soupy mix of rice and beans onto a floral plate. He sticks a large piece of meat in the center of it, then cuts it to bits with a fork and knife.

  “He don’t got a lot a’ teeth anymore,” he says, snapping his own together with a disturbing clacking sound.

  I nod and smile at his homemaking.

  He sets the plate in the microwave, puts the leftovers away and gathers me into another hug until the timer dings. Ideal pulls it out and yelps at the heat of the plate. He drops it on the counter, licks the mixture off of his thumb, and then as if plating for a fine-dining establishment, grabs a paper towel and sweeps off the drips of food around the rim of the plate. He leaves the kitchen to carry lunch to his grandfather, and I brace myself against the molding of the doorframe.

  These little gestures that he creates, no doubt part of what is his quotidian, unravel me to my very core. I experience his compassion as a physical ache. Is it because my life is empty? Is it because his love is honest, laid bare for all to see?

  Ideal makes me acutely aware of a silent beauty in life, one that seeps into everything, that overflows into the cracks of the doorway I’m holding with white-knuckled fingers. A beauty that slips into every tiny corner of this tiny kitchen. A beauty that, though hard to extract, I know is ever-present. I want to touch it, taste it, roll in it. I long for Jaylee, for the baby. I crave affection from Ideal.

  When he comes back around the corner, he doesn’t speak, but he senses the change in me. He knows better than I do that I’m no longer just here for an envelope. I am connected to everything. I am connected to Ideal.

  I melt into his arms and he carries me again, lifts me like a sack of bones over his shoulder, my hip digging into his collarbone. Yet he places me on the bed gently, with great affection. I surrender to him completely.

  His hands are cool as he opens the buttons of my blouse. I close my eyes and imagine him buttoning, with the same sweet agility, his grandfather’s threadbare shirt.

  “Is it just the two of you?” I ask, curious to know more about the man who has become an unexpected source of light in my darkest days.

  “Dunno, you still with your husband too? That would make three.”

  My eyes flick open in surprise. He’s referring to the men in my life. But Ideal is smiling. He makes light of my torment. He doesn’t really believe I’m conflicted. He has no reason to. I’ve been putty in his hands from the very first instant.

  I reach up to his brow and run my finger over the tiny shaved lines.

  “You like that, don’t you?”

  “I really do.”

  “Called a catscratch. You could get yourself one, you know?”

  Ideal thinks everything is easy. He believes you should always have fun.

  He pulls his T-shirt over his head, stretching the fabric across his chest as he goes. I noticed that he had multiple tattoos the first time but I didn’t really look at them, preferring denial to any admission of my own sexual deviance. I was much more invested in denial than in discovering a lover. Ideal is exquisite, every inch of him is beautiful. His bicep reads, “DDP,” and again on his defined stomach, the same letters arch boldly above his navel. He’s labeled himself; I’ve got no excuse for my ignorance. My lovers were rivals long before me. They’re engaged in a war, one that rages far from my experience, but is on display right under my feet.

  I close my eyes again and he lifts me up the length of the bed, his arm underneath me, across the span of my back, then brings the other hand to grasp my chin. He takes my mouth hard and furiously, and I respond to his kiss.

  How quickly sex becomes sophism. I don’t even know if he’s on my side or if he’s out for revenge against Jaylee for something I know nothing about.

  But there is sweetness as well as violence in this man, and despite my uncertainty; it’s birthing a fledgling friendship across the cataclysmic divide between us. It startles me and draws me in. Maybe he’s seeking to lose himself too. Maybe we’re both clawing for the same chance at escape. Sex is a drug, a self-inflicted blindness for those who have no desire to see.

  He takes my shirt off and tears my bra straps from my shoulders,
cupping my breasts and sucking my nipples hard enough to make me cry out and arch my back. I’ll take any pain he’s willing to inflict because it helps absolve the guilt. I don’t want to listen to anything that pulls me away from this house, from this man, from this corner, from this succubus I’ve become.

  “I like it when you’re rough with me.” It reminds me of Jaylee.

  Ideal’s roughness has no malice; it’s pain for pleasure.

  Ideal has me naked, fingers inside me, in his mouth, in my mouth, tasting me, tasting both of us. His ferociousness doesn’t stop. He wants to fuck dirty; and I’ll follow him wherever he takes me, because with him is far better than empty. With him is far better than alone. I’ve never been with a man who can have his hands in so many places at once, who can split me nearly in two with his penetration. He has no inhibition. Ideal does not know the meaning of restraint. I’m here to forget and that makes us perfect for one another.

  He’s fucking me from behind, but I’m flat on the bed, face down, my legs spread in a shameless V. He reaches his hand underneath me, palm up, his long fingers grasping to stimulate me. I roll my hips in response. I don’t want to come. The last thing I want to do is to come.

  Because an orgasm signals my compliance. An orgasm to me means defeat.

  Ideal is fast and strong and insistent. He flips us over so that he’s now beneath me, my back on his chest and my breasts bared to the water-damaged ceiling. He wraps one leg around mine, coming up from underneath and swinging it over my own, pinning me to keep my legs spread should I fight him. He does the same with my left arm. Then he cups my sex and inserts three fingers, dragging the wetness out and up and lubricating everything from behind. I tense in fear and frustration.