Free Honeydew: Stories by Edith Pearlman

listen to his labored grunts and at last his sharp intake and his final sigh and his heart thudding against her chest. His lips, so soft on hers, slid down the side of her cheek and kissed the white pillow.
    Together they went to this function and that. Jamie, usually wearing a skinny red dress he admired, hung up his coat, held on to his briefcase, hunted up a can of ginger ale if the event’s organizers had provided only water. “My Stepin Fetchit,” he’d say later, licking the underside of her chin, her labia, the backs of her knees; and whenever he licked, wherever, her inner tumblers rolled helplessly until they locked one to the other in shuddering orgasm. He could lick her earlobe in a taxi with the same quick effect. Jamie said a year later it occurred to her that her own tongue might perform that useful office, and, alone in an elevator, she pressed the inside of her wrist against her open lips and knew her skin’s salt and her stringy tendons, mm, oh.
    He could give a speech on anything. “Filth as Thou Art” was the title of his lecture on Caliban and nature and the need to protect the damaged by a kind of enslavement. “Watch Him While He Sleeps” promoted the tithe over the progressive tax. His reputation had been made by a book that likened the underclass to the population of a late medieval city during the plague. But these later days he talked about a variety of unpopular things: about the right to be rescued—this at the time that mental hospitals were pouring their inmates into the streets; about God, the living God, not a forgiving deity or a righteous one, but a God you sat wrapped up in like an overcoat. He refused to appear on television, saying that the medium itself, no matter how high-minded its content, was a scourge. He returned letters to their senders—even letters of praise—with corrections of grammar in the margins. His enemies included Action for Children’s Television and some noted psychiatrists. They allowed that he was a good man. His wives said the same. The first two marriages had ended because each wife in turn had wearied of the causes, not of the husband. As the Gabonese doctor put it in a farewell note: Your attention, dear Lev, is forever elsewhere.
    And that summer night in his apartment, Fern said, his attention was certainly elsewhere. The grooves in his face had become furrows, Jamie had noticed during the lecture he’d given earlier. His voice was raspy. His amber eyes had retreated into their lined surround. The public was demanding too much of him. In the cab afterward she asked him: “Should I go on home? You seem tired.” But she didn’t mean the offer—Schmidt would soon be back in town.
    “Perhaps that would be…” he began. Her fingers in his cold wet hand twitched. “No,” he reversed. “Come up to my place.”
    He sat in his easy chair for a long time, looking over some papers and drinking several cans of ginger ale, belching uneasily. He took forever in the bathroom. She was dozing when he finally got into bed. He turned his back in what she suspected was a common marital maneuver.
    Fern looked at Barbara. Barbara nodded at her to continue.
    But Jamie would not be denied, Fern said. She touched Lev’s shoulder, played a little tune on it, and, slowly, he turned toward her. That nimble hand of hers now entered his pajama shirt between the buttons and tweaked his nipple. With a sigh he heaved his body onto hers. He waited a few moments. She should excuse him tonight, she thought…but there it was, his erection, making its way through the fly of his pajama bottoms. He kneeled, still clothed, and entered her. A thrust, another thrust, and he fell—so quickly! And she not half begun; he had forgotten to apply his tongue. His face as usual kissed the pillow and his heart thudded against hers.
    Only it wasn’t thudding. She held her breath. Perhaps he was holding his breath too. She exhaled. He did not exhale.
    Five minutes to midnight.
    Staring