Pete Hamill - Loving Women

I been so unhappy, she said, and suddenly began to cry.

I held her close to me, one of my hands reaching past her for Eden, for her arms and breasts and face. Roberta turned her face up to me and I kissed her and tasted salt. Eden sucked one of my fingers.

And so Eden and I began to make love to Roberta, trying to console and heal her, taking her out of Pensacola, far from flyboys and liars, away from her loneliness, into some place where things would happen that she might remember after everything else had faded. We kissed her mouth together, lips and tongues moving against each other, twirling in a single movement. Then I kissed and sucked one of Roberta’s breasts, while Eden kissed and sucked the other and then I put my cock in her and Roberta groaned and Eden kissed her mouth and played with her nipples.

Roberta whispered, Don’t come in me, Michael. Please don’t come in me.… That’s just for Eden. Don’t come in me and it’ll be okay.

I eased out of Roberta and entered Eden, trying not to come, not to end this until Roberta was consoled, and while I was in Eden, Roberta covered Eden’s face with kisses and sucked her breasts and dark-brown nipples and said, Oh, honey, you are my own true friend. You and Michael. My only friends …

Then Roberta was behind me, pushing hard against my ass as I drove into Eden, our double weight flattening Eden against the bed, Roberta’s breasts against my back, her hands under me kneading Eden’s breasts until I could hold back no longer and exploded. I rose like a horse bucking and Roberta pulled on my hair and Eden moaned until we all fell back on the bed.

That wasn’t the end. We dozed together, Roberta holding my limp cock, my hand on her pussy. Eden brought in large cold glasses full of Coke and ice. We listened to the night sounds. We hugged Roberta between us. We dozed again. When I came fully awake, Roberta was sucking my cock. Over on a chair, facing the bed, watching us, a hand between her legs, Eden was transported. I couldn’t come right away. Eden could. She groaned loudly. Roberta came off my cock and turned to Eden.

She said, Come here.

Half bent over, still coming, Eden rolled off the chair to the bed and then Roberta plunged her blonde head between those dark thighs, offering her own pink ass to me, her cunt a thick gorged red, the blonde hairs almost invisible, the lips slippery and her asshole tiny and tight, with dozens of little lines vanishing into the hole. I wet myself in the cunt and then eased into the other hole and her body shuddered and rose and trembled and pulled away and then pushed back at me to take me into her while Eden’s dark hands gripped her blonde head.

We slept for a few hours and when I woke up, Roberta was gazing at me.

Thank you, she said.

Eden woke at the sound of Roberta’s voice and saw the look on her face and smiled.

I guess we better go, Eden said.

We started to dress, with Roberta watching us, the covers pulled tight to her chin. I felt strange, as if this all had happened to somebody else. Certainly nobody would believe me if I told them about it at Ellyson Field. But here I was, pulling on my shorts over a cock that was not soft and not quite hard. The room smelled of perfume and pussy. Eden went over and kissed Roberta gently on the brow.

No more crazy phone calls, okay? she said.

Okay.

You promise?

I promise.

We’ll see you soon.

I hope, Roberta said softly.

We drove away. I was late, and would have to go through the fence. It didn’t matter. I held Eden’s hand, but neither of us spoke for a long time. Then I started to think about the things we’d done with Roberta and my cock got hard again. What we’d done was supposed to be wrong, was supposed to tell me that Eden was some kind of strange and perverted woman: a woman who goes with women? But I knew that I felt better and it wasn’t just the sex: we’d helped a woman live who might have died. And Eden was here, with me, not with anyone else, man or woman. Flashes of Roberta’s bedroom played in my mind. And they must have filled Eden’s too, because after a while, she reached over and gripped my thigh.

I can’t stand it, she said. We’ve got to pull over. Before you go back. Right up there. In the parking lot. Behind that church.

That was the way it was with us, in the time of The Games, as spring moved into summer. If we could imagine something, we’d try to do it. In a way, she was more like someone my own age, or younger, than a woman fourteen years older than I, a mother with two children. Sometimes she would lead the way; sometimes I did; and soon we were doing things without plan, instantly joining in some new unscripted play. There was a strange innocence to it too; neither of us had done these things before, so we were discovering them as we did them. The past, her history, the chilly sermons of priests: all receded as we lived in the fierce present tense. The Games were ours, inventions of the imagination; and I remember even then thinking that in the distant future I would remember this as the season when I did most things for the first time. And I also knew that this fresh wildness might never happen to me again, with any other woman. And about that I was right.

But our time together wasn’t always games, costumes, scenes. Sometimes Eden just wanted to be still, to lie beside me in the silent trailer, listening to the night sounds of the lake and the River Styx. Other times, she wanted to make love quickly and brutally, explaining later that she had thought about it all day and had exhausted all the preliminaries in her mind. In a choked voice, she would blurt out the hardest words she knew and make me say them to her: words as hard as my prick. And on some strange nights, usually on the weekend when time was no consideration, we engaged in a kind of dance, an erotic version of the Mass, with a familiar sense of slowness and ritual; I would hear Latin phrases like ad Deum qui laetificat juventutum meum , and hum them in that dead language whose coded words were ground into me, echoing around in my skull like a dream that always comes back. In those moments I felt engulfed by sin. I wasn’t violating Eden; I was negating my own past, my Catholicism, my enforced subservience to a tyrannical code that was not of my own invention. Embracing sin, I ceased being a Catholic. Sweet sin. Sin, dark and unflowering and delicious.

Neither of us asked if what we were doing was right or wrong. We just did it. Music always seemed to be playing somewhere, even when the radio was off, even deep into the night when no sounds drifted across the lake; the music of sin, of crossing frontiers, of changing ourselves by what we imagined and what we did. We listened to that music and moved to it, invented to it, made love to it. I asked her to sit at the table, looking prim and reading a newspaper, a proper housewife, my little sweet Doris Day Blondie wifey, with Bing Crosby singing nice wholesome songs on the radio, and then I would get under the table and slide my head between her thighs until she lost all control. But music wasn’t always there. We made love once in the trunk of the car, in the parking lot of the Federal courthouse, with her panties keeping the trunk from locking. Once we found a small Catholic church out in the Alabama wilds, a building seemingly abandoned in the Protestant sea; we whispered in the emptiness of the nave and then went behind the rotting velvet drapes of a confessional, where she took me in her mouth. That was sin. And yet it didn’t seem wrong. Sin was made up of violation, license, the breaking of the rules; but with Eden it never felt wrong. It just felt .

Sometimes, of course, sin wasn’t easy for me. I would glimpse my mother’s face and her austere Sunday morning Catholic piety and I would pause. A small fight would break out in my head; the child accused the man: would you do this in front of your mother ? Invariably the man would win, arguing with vehemence: she had her life and she’s dead and gone and this is my life and I’ll do with it what I want. But sometimes the child was the temporary winner. The first few times we made love to Roberta, I was more upset than I let on. I thought (or the child did): Would I be doing this if Roberta was a man named Robert and we were both fucking Eden Santana? Suppose Mercado and I had Eden between us on this bed and came in her together? And what really was going on in Eden’s mind? Why did she seem to enjoy it so much? Going to Roberta’s house was one of the few things we did more than once. She truly did make our visits seem like corporal works of mercy, the healing of the sick, where flesh, tongue, cock and come closed all psychic sores in a churning of flesh. But back in the barracks, surrounded by men to whom I could confide nothing, I would think: Suppose Eden was some sort of a lesbian? How would I feel if she and Roberta made love when I wasn’t there?