David Malouf - The Complete Stories

To lie in until midday while the sun shone in on the bedcovers, then go off to the beach or an afternoon movie, then come back and fuck— but in a leisurely way, with no need to hurry, and with the luxury sometimes, which is another sort of pleasure, of not having to fuck at all — was the ordinary bliss they had set their sights on, a rehearsal for the settled life to come, when, their term of duty over, they would have no other obligation than to get pleasurably and without effort from one day to the next.

Sally Prentiss was an actress. That is, she was preparing to audition for NIDA. She had taken up this work because it paid better than anything else she had been offered. At just nineteen she was very aware that she had no real experience of life and she thought this might supply it. She was a down-to-earth person who knew how to stick up for herself; she did not think it would be damaging. She would only be doing it for a few months, and the men who wanted this sort of arrangement— or so she thought — would be nicer than the average, and since they would be pretending while they played house that everything was normal, would make fewer demands. They were nice for the most part, but she was wrong about the damage, and she was wrong about the demands as well.

They came in every variety, these boys, these men.

Some of them were barely house-trained. They licked the flat of their knives when they were eating — she pretended not to notice; they did not know how to wash properly or when they should change their socks. “Oh Delilah,” she said to herself in a voice of commiseration, "not another one!” She had a whole cast of voices that she used for bucking herself up or giving herself a good talking-to, or for commenting, in a half-mocking way, on the irony of things and the rebounds and reversals that made up her world.

As for the demands — of course, all some of them wanted, or thought they wanted, was sex, laid on and guaranteed at any hour of the day or night. A wife out of the porno magazines. But even these boys wanted sometimes to just hang in the doorway and, in a proprietorial way, watch her do something as simple as make her face up in the bedroom mirror or wriggle into her jeans.

They would come up behind her while she was washing dishes at the sink, shoes off, hair damp with sweat, and, slipping their arms around her waist, rock her gently against them to an unheard tune — a moment, sweetly evocative, out of an old movie they had seen on TV. Or, with an ease that suggested an intimacy so long established that it no longer vibrated with even a hint of the provocative, walk in while she was in the bath, lower the toilet seat, and have a good old-fashioned talk.

What many of them wanted was to have reinforced the illusion of mastery. To a point sometimes just short of brutality. But there were times when even these fellows wanted to be relieved of all that and just lie back and be petted.

Then there were the ones — she got to recognise them after a bit— who just sat around all day in their undershorts and never left the flat. They were uncomfortable with air and sunlight, or had seen too much of it. One big foot up on the edge of the coffee-table, eyes glued to the TV, downing can after can of beer, they ignored her; but at every moment, whatever she was doing, kept her in view. However far off she might move, she was never quite out of reach. Idly, almost abstractedly, without taking their eyes off the game they were watching, they would put a hand out, and with the same easy affection for the body's demands with which they might shift themselves more comfortably in their undershorts or scratch their heel, take possession of her neck and push her down.

They were almost completely cut off from speech, these fellows. Their denial of words, like their body smell, was something they imposed, on the room, on her, with a satisfaction they were barely aware of since it had to do entirely with themselves.

She put up with it but was filled with rage. This pleased some of them, though they might also use it later as an excuse for complaint, then violence. The blows were real enough, but the words they found to spit out at her, the routine obscenities, were half-hearted, a formula for keeping them excited, for reminding themselves that she was there.

God, she thought, what a nightmare! Imagining years of marriage on such terms.

Then there were the ones who felt an obligation to teach her things. Very solemn and little-mannish, their freshly scrubbed faces intent on the task of relieving her of some aspect, suddenly revealed, of female ignorance, they would deliver long, sometimes incomprehensible lectures on politics or the Market or the workings of some bit of equipment they had fallen in love with, while she, barely attending, sipped at a Coke or did her nails.

Usually this sort of boy did not care to be interrupted. All she had to do was keep nodding. But one or two of them wanted her to repeat what she had learned, and there were others who liked her to argue, but when she did would get mad and shout at her. This aroused some of them. To the point where they would all of a sudden forget that they were engaged in the business of instruction and want to fuck — right there on the living-room rug.

There was no way of guessing beforehand the quite ordinary things that would turn them on.

One moment they would be as still as a pond, everything would be relaxed and easy between them. The next they would have dived into themselves and be staring. Some gesture she had made, something she had said or done, had made her suddenly alive to their senses, provoked in them a rush of blood. What alarmed her was that for her there was no connection; she had felt nothing herself and almost never knew what it was.

There were times, faced with this impersonal power she possessed, when she wanted, quite simply, to run. But mostly what she felt was a kind of pity. They were so utterly at the mercy, these boys, of their needs; and they hated it, some of them, and could convince themselves, even while they were fiercely pushing into her, that she was the source of this fever they were afflicted with, this animal dependency without which they might have been hard and pure and self-sufficient.

They were just boys, she knew that, but they made her mad. She often quarrelled with them and said things that were mocking and cruel, but only in her head. Laying the responsibility for their failings on her, making her responsible for their weakness, was unfair. They did not play fair.

But the quality in them that she found hardest to live with was their restlessness. They were always looking at their watches and could not settle. Something was always missing. And this was just what they had feared. That having survived and come so far, the thing they had come for might still be out of reach, or be happening elsewhere, and at every moment time was passing. “Peter, Paul, and Mary,” she whispered, "save our souls!”

But she saw at last that this was only part of a larger fear, and she learned after a time never to look, never to really look, into their eyes. What she saw there when she did was scary and might be catching. She wanted to keep clear. But there was no way of touching them and keeping clear.

She had thought, since they had been through so much and were boys, were men, that they would by now have learned to deal with it; or that being here in the quietness of the city, with a glint of sunlit water at the end of the street, they might forget. But they did not. It wasn't a mental thing. So long as their body was there, big and pulsing with heat, so was the fear. They brought it to bed with them, in dreams from which they woke shouting, and the only thing then that might drive it off was sex. Terrifyingly possessed, they thrashed and sweated in the effort to push their body through to the other side, gasping at the limit of their breath, crying out into her mouth. And when they subsided and lapsed immediately into unconsciousness, it was a dead man's weight that was on her, a dead man's sweat she was drenched with.