Free The Touch of Treason by Sol Stein Page B

counsel had no comment.” Florence and Joanne both called to say they’d seen him on TV. He’d liked his anonymity as much as his privacy. His house was hidden from the street. He was ready for someone who understood even before he’d met Francine.
    *
    Inside, not a sound. On the kitchen table was the bar of blue glycerine soap, its cellophane opened like a flower, the soap its centerpiece.
    “Where are you?”
    No answer.
    Nobody in the bathroom.
    In the darkened bedroom he could make out Francine wrapped in a bath sheet. Was her face as beautiful to the rest of the world as it seemed to him? He touched her hair.
    She woke with a start. “George? Oh, I must have fallen asleep.”
    As he lay down beside her she rolled away to the other side of the bed, then pulled the bath sheet after her, and, standing up, wrapped it around her. “First things first.”
    After a moment, he got up and stood in the door of the bathroom. She had her back to him. He said, “There’s something about a naked woman brushing her teeth.” As she gargled she threw her head back. His gaze traveled the contours of her body. God’s miracle was skin; in the Met the man-made miracles were of stone. He walked up behind her and with the ends of his fingers touched the indentation on each side of her waist. He looked up. In the mirror, he saw Francine’s breasts, the areolae pinkish brown.
    “Your suit is damp,” she said.
    “I can remedy that,” he said, not wanting to take his hands away from her waist.
    She turned almost the way a ballerina turns to let her partner know her escape is merely to the other side of the stage. She turned the overhead shower on, then stepped into the tub.
    “The soap is on the kitchen table,” she said.
    “I know,” he answered, hurrying to get it.
    *
    She dozed for only a few minutes afterward because she had catnapped earlier. As he slept beside her, she remembered his saying a year ago, when it had started, Falling asleep afterward is a compliment to the experience. Nobody falls asleep in a whorehouse.
    The skin of her inside thighs still felt his lips. To George love-making was courtesy: You opened the door for another; somehow you would pass through as well. Were the other men she’d known selfish or inexperienced? She opted for inexperience, then thought how many go through their lives without understanding what a woman wants. She wanted to spoon herself against his body but thought that that would wake him. Courtesy was mutual. She abstained, and suddenly felt a rush of profound loss.
    In the early months of their involvement with each other, her days were buoyed by exquisite agony: Where was he this very moment, doing what? Her work, which used to be her primary source of excitement, suddenly became an office where time passed until she could hurry to his home and they would, in a great rush, kiss, undress, kiss, hug, glory in each other’s bodies. She lived from evening to evening, from body clasp to body clasp, as if the waterfall of tumultuous orgasms was drowning everything she had been before. The thumping insanity of the first weeks, overcome by irrationality, suffocated her brain. Her father had so drummed into her: Your mind makes you human, your power will be derived from the success of your brain.
    In time the carnival stopped. The sheer, crazy, minute-by-minute imagining and longing for the other had receded enough so that she could breathe, enjoy her work again, think of others, behave as if she were dressed and not running around the world naked. Her feeling for Thomassy now had resonance. They had a history together. Were they evolving into something longer range, or was that the trap of every woman’s hope, the cave to which food was brought and where children were born? Francine still couldn’t imagine herself in her mother’s world, being someone’s wife. Was that like being someone’s automobile? What was it she wanted? she asked of her restored sanity.
    Planning was hope-chest