A handsome young couple is dressing in their boudoir for a black tie fund-raiser at which the woman will speak:
ANNOUNCER, VOICE-OVER: Strong enough for a man but made to help keep a woman dry.
MAN: You know, I wouldn't mind if we were the only ones there.
WOMAN: Then you better bring your checkbook.
-- TV advertisement for antiperspirant
There she was, glittering. From a table at the back of the large ballroom in the midtown hotel, he saw her upper torso and her head above all the other heads at the fund-raiser; her nervous shoulders, her smooth, lightly powdered throat, diamond necklace, the coiled potential of her long, raven hair. Her speech drifted past his head like a gentle wind. The reassuring cadences of this speech tonight were the very ones that calmed him when she lay on top of him on the living room rug during his attacks of Hooksexups. He knew the checks would come out of the pocketbooks tonight, the redundant and comforting certainty of the fundraiser.
Most of the top executives in his firm had come. There was Bosquet, one of the other young VPs, several tables in front of him, his favorite VP aside from himself, a good egg, handsome, with impeccable Nixonian hair. Ah Bosquet. Good feeling toward all fellow men, fellow persons.
But something had gone wrong. Up onstage, one of his wife's bare, white, hairless arms had been amputated, except there was still a hand at the end of it; but the hand was attached to this little stubby arm. His throat closed up. Sweat poured down his face. He needed a set of keys to grip tightly in his hand, but she had all his keys and, come to think of it, his checkbooks. Then he realized that the shortness of her arm was an optical illusion: her arm appeared foreshortened because she was pointing it directly at him. "Dan?" she asked. She had finished her speech. "Stand up," she said.
Later, in the cold Arctic motel, he would wonder what had brought on the paralysis. Everyone was looking at him and he couldn't make his legs move. He laughed and urinated freely down his trouser leg. Lacking keys, he gripped his wine glass until it broke in his hand. Blood dripped from his fingertips. He knew it was really the deep, death-bound devotion of a good marriage, and not some hostile, jealous drive to embarrass him that made her step from behind the podium, jump down off the stage in her black pumps, and rush toward him with tears in her eyes. Still, he would make her pay for it.
"Darling," she said, in the ballroom, while everybody watched. She had his face in her hands, and to the extent that he could forget where he was, which was not much, he was comforted and aroused by the touch of her fingers. He beckoned her ear toward his mouth. He found himself gently licking her ear. There appeared on her face the outward display of the most deeply felt confusion he had ever seen, followed by what looked like, in facial vocabulary, the realization that she had done something wrong. Sixty people were on their feet in a circle around Dan, who was seated in his own urine, and Tara, who was bending over him in her tight dress with her soft, fragrant shoulders. He whispered his request. Those people nearest his mouth heard only the word "ice."
* * *
After buying the wheelchair, the skins, and the thermal underwear, they journeyed to the northernmost motel in the world. On the trip, he made her haul his lame weight as often as possible, joking, "I'm pregnant," or, "I'm Roosevelt."
The first hours in the motel room, which they did not intend to leave for two weeks, were taken up with free-floating mutual panic and affectionate hostility. "I can't believe I made you do this," Dan said. "Now you're gonna leave me."
"No, don't say that. Those are not acceptable words between us even as a joke or, I don't know, a salvo." Tara scanned the room, which was big, with cheap orange furniture and small windows looking out upon harsh, bright ice and snow. "I'm cold," she said.
"Me too. Burn some money."
"Are you cold all over or just from the waist up?"
"Waist up."
She laughed. She ran across the room and leapt from the floor directly onto his shoulders, knees first. Her knees pinned his shoulders to the bed. His arms went numb. She reached behind her and unzipped his fly. "Oh no, don't do that, that's a really bad idea, I don't want to find out whether that's -- Oh. Oh my. Oh yes, do that. Wow, that is incredible."
She climbed off him and went to inspect the kitchenette. "Hey!" he said.
"I guess the invalid-swain combination is not a turn-on," she said.
"I didn't know you could be this cruel."
"You didn't know I could be this cruel?"
She walked by the bed and he tried to grab her. She dodged him easily.
* * *
In the morning, cold air trespassed upon their unhappy dreams.
"Oh my God!" Tara said.
"What?"
"Look at your feet."
"I can't find them. Describe them to me."
"They're blue."
"Are they not under the skins?"
"No."
She lifted the heavy skin they were using as a blanket and slid her body out from under it. She stood at the foot of the bed in her rainbow silk thermal attire, her dark, uncombed hair scattered about her shoulders. She shoved his cold, blue feet back under the skins. "Did you feel anything when I did that?"
"What did you do?"
"Jerked you off."
"Very funny."
She made coffee and bagels and put them on the rusty bridge table where they foresaw eating all their meals for the next two weeks. She hauled her husband's inert body out of bed, dressed it, and placed it in the wheelchair at the table. He ate the naked bagel and drank the coffee.
"This is good practice for having a baby," she said from somewhere behind him in the room. "You can't move, I satisfy all your needs, you're not grateful, you're a useless blob."
"What are you doing back there?"
"Writing a letter."
"To whom?"
"My mother."
"What does it say?"
"'Dear Mom, I'm in the Arctic with Dan. His legs are paralyzed and he told me he wishes everyone in the world except us were dead. Did you and Dad ever go through this kind of thing? Please write soon.'"
She noticed a crowbar in the half-open drawer of the motel's cheap writing desk. She thought of slamming the back of Dan's head with it. "There's a crowbar in the drawer," she said. "What are you wearing?"
"Gray cardigan sweater, black lycra ski pants, fluffy brown slippers."
"Hair?"
"Up."
"Face?"
"Set."
"Eyebrows?"
"Plucked."
"Ears?"
"Fucked."
"What's the weather like outside?"
"Are you blind now too?"
"My neck is stiff."
"I'm going to write more letters."
"What? I can't hear you. I'm deaf."
"Don't make so many jokes. I can't handle this many jokes."
* * *
Dan woke up alone thinking of Bosquet, the other VP at the fund-raiser. Had Bosquet ever been as humiliated as Dan had been? The one enchantment Dan possessed -- money -- Bosquet also had. But it was Bosquet's lack of a public degradation in his life that Dan begrudged him, not his wealth. Dan did know that if one person has a penny, another can't also have that penny, which knowledge often bred in rich people an anxious competitiveness with other rich people, but Dan had transcended that. For one thing, he did not mistake wealth for wisdom. But niether did Bosquet. The question was, How would Bosquet hold up under a ballroom urination?
Another good question: Where was Tara? He screamed her name. No answer. All alone. Exactly how he had felt at the fund-raiser. He screamed her name until he was hoarse. He sat up and tried to pull some pants over his legs, which were like two long, intractable meatloafs. He put on a full-length white fur coat and wheeled himself out the motel door. His wheelchair jammed in the ice and he fell face down. The air temperature was forty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. He dragged himself toward the motel office, twenty-five yards away across the ice. He thought he wouldn't survive, which would be his own fault for treating Tara as a servant, like the guy who is mean to his dog in Jack London's "To Build a Fire." He grappled toward the motel office and wriggled across the threshold. The office was so luxurious that he thought he either had arrived at the office or was dead. The silver carpet was so expensive! The moose on the wall. Tara shouting into the telephone, "Bosquet! I love you! Please, Bosquet!"
"No!" Dan was on his belly in the doorway.
"Dan," she said, startled. Now the knowledge ran all through him that had been stored until now in his dead legs. She dropped the phone and rushed to him. She stood above him and saw his teardrops repelled by the thick, soft, brown, waterproofed leather of her snowboots.
* * *
Tara and Dan lay beneath the skin on the bed, weeping from the cold. "I'm breaking under the strain," she said. "There's something you don't understand. Your success, you know, is immanent in you. You are your success. If you are here, it is here, even if you are a cripple. My success is the way I am in contact with other people."
Dan discovered that despite the mind-boggling, unassimilable betrayal in the motel office, he could still listen to his wife, or think he was listening. "I know," he said. "Your success depends on your keeping in touch with your community."
"No, my success is keeping in touch with my community," Tara said. "You know, Dan, I've realized something on our journey. The way you and I are together -- call it the North Pole way of being together -- I'm the cripple in that. You think if you just throw money at me I won't also need a life. I can't stay here."
"Let me just send up a flare over here in this conversation," he said. "Half an hour ago I crawled into the office as you were telling Bosquet you love him, or was I hallucinating?"
"Oh, that? I was trying to call anyone from that phone. I really did feel as if they had all died. The first person I got through to was Helena Bosquet, only Helena wasn't home, Bosquet was. So I just -- he became, don't you see, the representative of everyone out there. I poured it into his ear, my love for all of them." (This happened to be true, though it felt like a lie as she was saying it.) "It was crazy, I know. I'm going crazy up here."
Dan truly believed her. His heart was really melting. "You're right," he said. "My love has been all wrong. We have to get out of here. We must go back and apply the world to our wounded selves like a gigantic poultice."
"Oh Dan!"
They hugged each other hard and, an instinctive overture, she ran her fingers lightly across his thighs. He felt them. They were now the couple who had everything. They held each other and fell asleep. After an hour, they woke up thinking about the important relationship-time they'd logged under these skins. They wondered if they ought to hollow out an area of their house -- storage, this was usually called, the attic, the junk closet, "the crawlspace, honey" -- and develop the flotsam of a career in love, as in, "I can't believe we still have this. Imagine, the things we thought worth saving. We save everything."
"Okay now, you get out of bed first, Mr. Paralysis."
"I can't."
"Stop."
"Can't move."
"Please. It's been nice but I gotta get outta here."
"Can't move anything now. Arms."
"Danny, cut it out." She turned her head and took a big piece of his bicep and gnashed it. "You feel that?"
"Feel what?"
"All right I'm at peace with this. We'll see if this lasts. My peace, that is. I think it will. I feel different now."
"We can still try to leave if you want."
"Don't be stupid."
Dan had limited neck movement and he turned his head enough to see her face above the discolored blanket of skin. Her face had become naturally pale, resembling her soft, lightly powdered face on the night of the fund-raiser. Bright, soft, cloudy Arctic light came in through the windows. "Let me see your shoulders," he said.
She climbed out on top of the skins, naked. She had bathed just before making the call and her skin was still pale and clean and glowing from within like some pagan marble orb. Her body was full, whole, unforeshortened as she crawled around above him on the bed, as if a woman were meant to be seen by her husband only in this strictly Polar condition of light. Gradually she allowed every aspect of her breasts to be touched by his tongue, over which he retained intricate muscular control. He was able to notice with his tongue the way that her breasts emerged cleanly and roundly from the rest of her torso and the way that her nipples, distinct, round unto themselves, repeated in miniature the grand formal movement of her breasts. She presented her shoulders for the slow inspection of his tongue. He was face-up on the bed. She stood and yanked him by the ankles so that his feet and lower legs hung off the side and his wet tongue, his only mobile organ, was situated at the geographic center of the bed. She moved the surface of her belly over this remarkable small wet writhing organism barnacled to the dead mass of her husband. When it became dry she let it spread out and water in her labia, and then she gave it her inner thighs to work on, and her knees, and her calves, and her ankles, and the arches of her feet, and her toes, and back up to her thighs, and this was no easy work for her, and she was gasping with the effort. Again there was the need for watering, and she let his squirmy tongue dawdle in her crotch, and she sort of relaxed and hummed and sighed, rearranging herself now and then over his tongue, which was still soaking in the necessary liquids.
In one of these rearrangements she noticed his penis, too, was in working order, and now she was not relaxed, she was frantic, scrambling, and very soon she managed to lower herself down onto him. A few fast, easy lowerings and raisings caused an uncontrollable shaking in all her muscles and she huddled down on him for tighter, stronger movements and grabbed some part of his impassive flesh with her teeth and hands for a few last moments of deep, squalling effort and release. He knew some extraordinary expenditure had just been made by himself because he was panting, which he experienced only as hot air leaving his mouth in short gusts and cold air coming in.
* * *
For the next several days, every part of her body she could get his tongue on she did. During this major industrial exposure to flesh, his tongue lost some of its delicacy. At times it was beyond parched -- a swollen and seared meat. Tara took swigs of tapwater from the motel kitchen sink without swallowing, knelt above him all hot and bothered, carried her mouth down to his dry spot, poured her water there, and then used his tongue to paste the water once more all over her skin before climbing onto his erect cock, up and down, fast and good with low hums and high curdling little cries at the end. She had taken to springing up immediately after sex and racing to the hot motel shower while Dan remained naked and dazed on the stripped motel bed, his flesh covered with large, pointy goosebumps to which he was completely oblivious.
This had turned into a sensual vacation. For several days of their marriage, the long lick and quick fuck were the only things Dan was not impotent to do. But he was impotent not to do them, which may have been why, one cold afternoon while inadvertently working himself up into a frenzy in their snowy vaginal kingdom built for two, Dan noticed his mouth was uttering a string of words particularly masculine and foul, culminating with that bad, blunt word referring to a certain part of his wife's body.
Tara felt the whole long, sick Arctic weekend build up in her at once. She took the crowbar out of the desk drawer, raised it above her head, and then threw it on the orange nappy rug in disgust. She said she would leave the motel because she didn't want to kill him. She also said she would leave the marriage. In the motel office, with nothing more than vehement talk and seventy thousand dollars in cash, she persuaded the motelier to give her his four-wheel-drive vehicle. She drove away.
Dan managed somehow to throw himself off the bed. Dragging himself forward by means of his chin, he arrived after an hour at the crowbar on the carpet. There he burst into tears for not being able to split his own skull in two. He cried himself to sleep.
* * *
Dan woke up naked and freezing cold. He jumped to his feet and ran to the motel shower, where he let the scalding water soak into his skin. When he was dried and dressed he realized he could kill himself now. He didn't want to any more. But he did whip the crowbar into his own head in a failed effort to beat himself unconscious.
Tara motored southward in the 4WD. Her hands were shaking badly and she felt woozy, as if in sympathy with Dan, who by now had smashed his face with the crowbar so many times that the skin had folded in over his eyes. Tara pulled a U-turn on the highway. Dan, body awareness at an all-time low, had missed his head with the crowbar the last few times, and had taken instead to bending over and wailing on his shins with the hard piece of metal.
Tara walked in.
"Dan!"
"Tara!"
"Your legs!"
"You've come back!"
* * *
They sat on the bed and exchanged vows. He begged her to walk him to the car immediately. She stood up and tried to help him to his feet and he said, "My legs, they've gone dead again. Just kidding!" He sprang to his feet, his eyes covered with swollen flesh. They set off in the vehicle.
"What checkbooks do you have on you?" she asked while driving.
"Chemical, MannyHanny, Citibank."
"How much money total?"
"Whatever the FDIC limit is for each. Two hundred thousand, I guess."
"Sign me three checks for two hundred thousand each. Clean yourself out. Now."
"What? Why?"
"Because, you see, that's going to be our arrangement. You keep giving me a lot of money and I never leave you."
"What are you going to do with the money?"
"It doesn't matter. Throw big fund-raisers. Anything I want."
"What if I don't give you the money?"
"That's not part of the arrangement. You do give it: that's the point. Start writing checks."
"I can't see."
"Do your best."
And so they drove back to boring old New York.
other heads at the fund-raiser; her nervous shoulders, her smooth, lightly powdered throat, diamond necklace, the coiled potential of her long, raven hair. Her speech drifted past his head like a gentle wind. The reassuring cadences of this speech tonight were the very ones that calmed him when she lay on top of him on the living room rug during his attacks of Hooksexups. He knew the checks would come out of the pocketbooks tonight, the redundant and comforting certainty of the fundraiser.
her haul his lame weight as often as possible, joking, "I'm pregnant," or, "I'm Roosevelt."
thermal attire, her dark, uncombed hair scattered about her shoulders. She shoved his cold, blue feet back under the skins. "Did you feel anything when I did that?"
"What are you wearing?"
motel office, twenty-five yards away across the ice. He thought he wouldn't survive, which would be his own fault for treating Tara as a servant, like the guy who is mean to his dog in Jack London's "To Build a Fire." He grappled toward the motel office and wriggled across the threshold. The office was so luxurious that he thought he either had arrived at the office or was dead. The silver carpet was so expensive! The moose on the wall. Tara shouting into the telephone, "Bosquet! I love you! Please, Bosquet!"
became, don't you see, the representative of everyone out there. I poured it into his ear, my love for all of them." (This happened to be true, though it felt like a lie as she was saying it.) "It was crazy, I know. I'm going crazy up here."
that is. I think it will. I feel different now."
let his squirmy tongue dawdle in her crotch, and she sort of relaxed and hummed and sighed, rearranging herself now and then over his tongue, which was still soaking in the necessary liquids.
culminating with that bad, blunt word referring to a certain part of his wife's body.
