Free Sleeping Beauties by Susanna Moore

coming, no matter how hard she listened for him each morning, because the blue wall-to-wall carpeting that Tommy had put on every floor surface of the house, including the garage, muffled the sound of the bouncing basketball and Yuseef’s expensive sneakers. She missed Yuseef those mornings when he didn’t come to her bedroom.
    Clio was not treated much differently than the crew except that she was allowed to stay through the night. She tried very hard to do her part. She was willing to give Tommy whatever he needed. She was fond of him. The irony was that although he did what he was supposed to do—pull her into the current—he didn’t seem to want very much in return. He seemed relieved just to have her around. She was no trouble, as he had known she would not be.
    She sometimes wondered if Tommy, like her stepmother, Burta, mistook her stillness for a lack of will. Some women, she knew, would have been grateful to be left alone, and she wondered why she minded. It was not as if she were used to adoration, or even attention. She had assumed that when two hearts really did become one, a certain alteration, a rearranging and even forfeiting, was demanded—out of fondness as well as necessity. She was surprised to have her hours and her days, and even herself, returned to her so quickly.
    Clio had entered a period in her sexual life in which caresses, kisses, and embraces, all the delights and torments of a preliminary nature, were dispensed with in favor of immediate resolution. Puna Silva had liked to make love every day, snapping off his black rubber wet suit to fall happily on top of her. There had not been much erotic contemplation with Puna Silva. Although he had been graceful and passionate, he had not been very curious. Clio was not too surprised by Tommy Haywood’s lack of exploratory interest, but he was neither passionate nor curious.
    Although Tommy believed that sexual intercourse was good for one’s mental and physical regimen, he was not a sensualist. Clio realized that he would not be able to make love to a woman who he didn’t think was physically perfect. He said “Good muscle tone” when he looked at Clio’s legs, and “You must be a great swimmer” when she lifted her arms to braid her hair for sleep. It would have been a reflection of himself that would have made him very uncomfortable, and even anxious, had he discovered too late that a woman to whom he was making love was ten pounds overweight.
    He was quick at his lovemaking, his head buried in herneck, his small hands gripping her shoulders. He jumped up as soon as he regained his breath, and went to the mirror. He tilted his head boyishly so that he looked up at himself, and ran his hands through his thick black hair. He smiled at himself. Then he took a long shower.
    He sometimes bathed three times a day. He would not take a bath if she had used the bathtub unless the tub was scrubbed down with cleansing powder. She had made the mistake of admitting, reluctantly, that she sometimes urinated in the bath water. It was very like Clio to tell the truth, and he made her feel guilty about it. She had read of a prime minister in India who drank a glass of his own urine every day as a tonic and she told him this. He was shocked.
    “I just feel better if the tub is clean, that’s all,” he said. “It makes me feel good. I’m the Number Four Box-Office Star in America. I like to feel clean. I don’t give a shit what some Arab does.”
    In the rare instance when she was alone with him, when he sent away his friends and bodyguards and trainers, and rarer still, when there was a kind of tenderness and intimacy between them, she asked him questions. She could see that he became interesting to himself in a new way during those unaccustomed moments when she prodded him and pulled from him a spontaneous truth. Those occasional hours were, she realized, the only times he ever interested her. He, too, but in an unclear way, because he wouldn’t have