“Sadie? All right?”
“Ohmygodyes,” she said, and I laughed. She opened her eyes and looked up at me with curiosity and hopefulness. “Is it over, or is there more?”
“A little more,” I said. “I don’t know how much. I haven’t been with a woman in a long time.”
It turned out there was quite a bit more. Only a few minutes in real time, but sometimes time is different-as no one knew better than I. At the end she began to gasp. “Oh dear, oh my dear, oh my dear dear God, oh sugar!”
It was the sound of greedy discovery in her voice that put me over the edge, so it wasn’t quite simultaneous, but a few seconds later she lifted her head and buried her face in the hollow of my shoulder. A small fisted hand beat on my shoulder blade once, twice… then opened like a flower and lay still. She dropped back onto the pillows. She was staring at me with a stunned, wide-eyed expression that was a little scary.
“I came,” she said.
“I noticed.”
“My mother told me it didn’t happen for women, only for men. She said orgasms for women were a myth.” She laughed shakily. “Oh my God, what she was missing.”
She got up on one elbow, then took one of my hands and put it on her breast. Beneath it, her heart was pounding and pounding. “Tell me, Mr. Amberson-how soon before we can do it again?”
As the reddening sun sank into the everlasting gas-and oil-smog to the west, Sadie and I sat in her tiny backyard under a nice old pecan tree, eating chicken salad sandwiches and drinking iced tea. No poundcake, of course. The poundcake was a total loss.
“Is it bad for you, having to wear those… you know, those drugstore things?”
“It’s fine,” I said. It really wasn’t, and never had been. There would be improvements in a great many American products between 1961 and 2011, but take it from Jake, rubbers stay pretty much the same. They may have fancier names and even a taste-component (for those with peculiar tastes), but they remain essentially a girdle you snap on over your dick.
“I used to have a diaphragm,” she said. There was no picnic table, so she had spread a blanket on the grass. Now she picked up a Tupperware container with the remains of a cucumber-and-onion salad inside it and began snapping the lid open and closed, a form of fidgeting some people would have considered Freudian. Including me.
“My mother gave it to me a week before Johnny and I were married. She even told me how to put it in, although she couldn’t look me in the eye, and if you’d flicked a drop of water on one of her cheeks, I’m sure it would’ve sizzled. ‘Don’t start a baby for the first eighteen months,’ she said. ‘Two years, if you can make him wait. That way you can live on his salary and save yours.’”
“Not the world’s worst advice.” I was being cautious. We were in a minefield. She knew it as well as I did.
“Johnny’s a science teacher. He’s tall, although not quite as tall as you are. I was tired of going places with men who were shorter than me, and I think that’s why I said yes when he first asked me out. Eventually, going out with him got to be a habit. I thought he was nice, and at the end of the night he never seemed to grow an extra pair of hands. At the time, I thought those things were love. I was very naive, wasn’t I?”
I made a seesaw gesture with my hand.
“We met at Georgia Southern and then got jobs at the same high school in Savannah. Coed, but private. I’m pretty sure his daddy pulled a wire or two to make that happen. The Claytons don’t have money-not anymore, although they did once-but they’re still high in Savannah society. Poor but genteel, you know?”
I didn’t-questions of who was in society and who wasn’t were never big issues when I was growing up-but I murmured an assent. She had been sitting on top of this for a long time, and looked almost hypnotized.
“So I had a diaphragm, yes I did. In its own little plastic lady-box with a rose on the cover. Only I never used it. Never had to. Finally threw it in the trash after one of those getting-it-outs. That’s what he called it, getting it out. ‘I have to get it out,’ he used to say. Then the broom. You see?”
I didn’t see at all.
Sadie laughed, and I was again reminded of Ivy Templeton. “Wait two years, she said! We could have waited twenty, and no diaphragm required!”
“What happened?” I gripped her upper arms lightly. “Did he beat you? Beat you with a broomhandle?” There was another way a broomhandle could be used-I’d read Last Exit to Brooklyn -but apparently he hadn’t done that. She had been a virgin, all right; the proof was on the sheets.
“No,” she said. “The broom wasn’t for beating. George, I don’t think I can talk about this anymore. Not now. I feel… I don’t know… like a bottle of soda that’s been shaken up. Do you know what I want?”
I thought so, but did the polite thing and asked.
