Fiction

I

              That night, as they did regularly on Friday evenings, James and Elizabeth made love before going to sleep.

              Their bedroom, which Elizabeth had done up, was timidly, tastefully decorated.  Next to the window that faced the bed hung a reproduction of a Van Gogh which Elizabeth had purchased after an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts.  Next to it, in silver frames, their son Adam’s grammar-school efforts were arranged vertically, and a photograph of Adam standing naked with a wiffle bat in his hand stood on James’s dresser.  There was a fire place, seldom used, and an electric heater because Elizabeth was frequently cold at night.  James kept a night table next to the bed, in which were birthday cards from Adam, old batteries, scraps of paper on which he sometimes wrote down his dreams (“Dad slips on the ice and I just let him fall”), and all of the other indicators a man accumulates which show what he has done and what he has failed to do.  

              Atop the nightstand was James’s bedside light.  He switched it off.  Now the room was quiet, dark, the bed inviting and warm.  Wordlessly he reached his arm across under the covers, where he knew her body would be waiting for his fingers, his hands, his legs and belly and cock.  For this was the baffling wing which kept their marriage aloft—the outboard motor that growled them to harbor each night when sails ripped: no matter what happened during the day, they were in one another’s arms each night with the same passion.  Of course he had desired younger women—what man his age hadn’t?—and he had, it was true, sometimes fantasized about his patients.  But not the way he desired Elizabeth.  And now, with his hot hands cupping her breasts and his lips against the soft, cool skin of her cheek, he was reminded once again of the complexity of the whole situation.  That, and how much he looked forward to the sex, complexity be damned.

              Gently, skillfully, he kissed down her neck.  Did he think about how her body used to be, these evenings when they lay together, a man of 66 and a woman of 55, and made love?  How could he avoid remembering?  And it was true: he readily made pictures in his mind of his wife’s younger body, the harder belly, firmer breasts and lighter-colored nipples, the wetness between her legs which had come sooner and more completely.  Yet he forced himself to be reasonable.  His own body no longer worked in the efficient, forceful way that it had when he was young.  That was what happened: age set in like a hard, hard frost.  You watched yourself get colder and weaker, watched your once-strong limbs wrinkle and lose their agility, were kicked and beaten like a dog, until finally, towards the end, just when you couldn’t believe it would get any worse, any less bearable, it did: and that was death.  Boom.  Just like that.

              “Lizzie,” he said.  “Have you been waiting for me to come to bed?”

              “I may have been,” she said.  “I may have gone to sleep if you hadn’t come in when you did.”  They both laughed.  All of the things that were ponderously difficult in daylight -- teasing, competing, being vulnerable -- were pure ease when they were in bed together.  Sex was easy between them.

              “Is that so?  I guess you really make the rules around here,” he said.