We So Seldom Look on Love Read online

She thought about the sun. That it is ninety-three million miles away and that its fuel supply will last another five billion years. Instead of thinking about the man who was watching her, she tried to recall a solar chart she had memorized a couple of years ago.

  The surface temperature is six thousand degrees Fahrenheit, she told herself. Double that number and you have how many times bigger the surface of the sun is compared to the surface of the earth. Except that because the sun is a ball of hot gas, it actually has no surface.

  When she had rubbed the paint off, she went into the kitchen to wash away the turpentine with soap and water. The man’s eyes tracked her. She didn’t have to glance at the window for confirmation. She switched on the light above the sink, soaped the dishcloth and began to wipe her skin. There was no reason to clean her arms, but she lifted each one and wiped the cloth over it. She wiped her breasts. She seemed to share in his scrutiny, as if she were looking at herself through his eyes. From his perspective she was able to see her physical self very clearly—her shiny, red-highlighted hair, her small waist and heart-shaped bottom, the dreamy tilt to her head.

  She began to shiver. She wrung out the cloth and folded it over the faucet, then patted herself dry with a dish towel. Then, pretending to be examining her fingernails, she turned and walked over to the window. She looked up.

  There he was, in the window straight across but one floor higher. Her glance of a quarter of an hour ago had registered dark hair and a white shirt. Now she saw a long, older face, a man in his fifties maybe. A green tie. She had seen him before this morning—quick, disinterested (or so she had thought) sightings of a man in his kitchen, watching television, going from room to room. A bachelor living next door. She pressed the palms of her hands on the window, and he stepped back into shadow.

  The pane clouded from her breath. She leaned her body into it, flattening her breasts against the cool glass. Right at the window she was visible to his apartment and the one below, which had closed vertical blinds. “Each window like a pill’ry appears,” she thought. Vaguely appropriate lines from the poems she had read last year were always occurring to her. She felt that he was still watching, but she yearned for proof.

  When it became evident that he wasn’t going to show himself, she went into the bedroom. The bedroom windows didn’t face the apartment house, but she closed them anyway, then got into bed under the covers. Between her legs there was such a tender throbbing that she had to push a pillow into her crotch. Sex addicts must feel like this, she thought. Rapists, child molesters.

  She said to herself, “You are a certifiable exhibitionist.” She let out an amazed, almost exultant laugh, but instantly fell into a darker amazement as it dawned on her that she really was, she really was an exhibitionist. And what’s more, she had been one for years, or at least she had been working up to being one for years.

  Why, for instance, did she and Claude live here, in this vulgar low-rise? Wasn’t it because of the floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the windows of the house next door?

  And what about when she was twelve and became so obsessed with the idea of urinating on people’s lawns that one night she crept out of the house after everyone was asleep and did it? Peed on the lawn of the townhouses next door, right under a streetlight, in fact.

  What about two years ago, when she didn’t wear underpants the entire summer? She’d had a minor yeast infection and had read that it was a good idea not to wear underpants at home, if you could help it, but she had stopped wearing them in public as well, beneath skirts and dresses, at parties, on buses, and she must have known that this was taking it a bit far, because she had kept it from Claude.

  “Oh, my God,” she said wretchedly.

  She went still, alerted by how theatrical that had sounded. Her heart was beating in her throat. She touched a finger to it. So fragile, a throat. She imagined the man being excited by one of her hands circling her throat.

  What was going on? What was the matter with her? Maybe she was too aroused to be shocked at herself. She moved her hips, rubbing her crotch against the pillow. No, she didn’t want to masturbate. That would ruin it.

  Ruin what?

  She closed her eyes, and the man appeared to her. She experienced a rush of wild longing. It was as if, all her life, she had been waiting for a long-faced, middle-aged man in a white shirt and green tie. He was probably still standing in his living room, watching her window.

  She sat up, threw off the covers.

  Dropped back down on the bed.

  This was crazy. This really was crazy. What if he was a rapist? What if, right this minute, he was downstairs, finding out her name from the mailbox? Or what if he was just some lonely, normal man who took her display as an invitation to phone her up and ask her for a date? It’s not as if she wanted to go out with him. She wasn’t looking for an affair.

  For an hour or so she fretted, and then she drifted off to sleep. When she woke up, shortly after noon, she was quite calm. The state she had worked herself into earlier struck her as overwrought. So, she gave some guy a thrill, so what? She was a bit of an exhibitionist. Most women were, she bet. It was instinctive, a side effect of being the receptor in the sex act.

  She decided to have lunch and go for a walk. While she was making herself a sandwich she avoided glancing at the window, but as soon as she sat at the table she couldn’t resist looking over.

  He wasn’t there, and yet she felt that he was watching her, standing out of the light. She ran a hand through her hair. “For Christ’s sake,” she reproached herself, but she was already with him. Again it was as if her eyes were in his head, although not replacing his eyes. She knew that he wanted her to slip her hand down her sweat pants. She did this. Watching his window, she removed her hand and licked her wet fingers. At that instant she would have paid money for some sign that he was watching.

  After a few minutes she began to chew on her fingernails. She was suddenly depressed. She reached over and pulled the curtain across the window and ate her sandwich. Her mouth, biting into the bread, trembled like an old lady’s. “Tremble like a guilty thing surprised,” she quoted to herself. It wasn’t guilt, though. It wasn’t frustration, either, not sexual frustration. She was acquainted with this bleached sadness—it came upon her at the height of sensation. After orgasms, after a day of trying on clothes in stores.

  She finished her sandwich and went for a long walk in her new toreador pants and her tight black turtleneck. By the time she returned, Claude was home. He asked her if she had worked in the nude again.

  “Of course,” she said absently. “I have to.” She was looking past him at the man’s closed drapes. “Claude,” she said suddenly, “am I beautiful? I mean not just to you. Am I empirically beautiful?”

  Claude looked surprised. “Well, yeah,” he said. “Sure you are. Hell, I married you, didn’t I? Hey!” He stepped back. “Whoa!”

  She was removing her clothes. When she was naked, she said, “Don’t think of me as your wife. Just as a woman. One of your patients. Am I beautiful or not?”

  He made a show of eyeing her up and down. “Not bad,” he said. “Of course, it depends what you mean by beautiful.” He laughed. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m serious. You don’t think I’m kind of … normal? You know, plain?”

  “Of course not,” he said lovingly. He reached for her and drew her into his arms. “You want hard evidence?” he said.

  They went into the bedroom. It was dark because the curtains were still drawn. She switched on the bedside lamp, but once he was undressed he switched it off.

  “No,” she said from the bed, “leave it on.”

  “What? You want it on?”

  “For a change.”

  The next morning she got up before he did. She had hardly slept. During breakfast she kept looking over at the apartment house, but there was no sign of the man. Which didn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t there. She couldn’t wait for Claude to leave so that she could stop pretend
ing she wasn’t keyed-up. It was gnawing at her that she had overestimated or somehow misread the man’s interest. How did she know? He might be gay. He might be so devoted to a certain woman that all other women repelled him. He might be puritanical, a priest, a Born-Again. He might be out of his mind.

  The minute Claude left the apartment, she undressed and began work on the painting. She stood in the sunlight mixing colours, then sat on the chair in her stretching pose, looking at herself in the mirror, then stood up and, without paying much attention, glancing every few seconds at his window, painted ribs and uplifted breasts.

  An hour went by before she thought, He’s not going to show up. She dropped into the chair, weak with disappointment, even though she knew that, very likely, he had simply been obliged to go to work, that his being home yesterday was a fluke. Forlornly she gazed at her painting. To her surprise she had accomplished something rather interesting: breasts like Picasso eyes. It is possible, she thought dully, that I am a natural talent.

  She put her brush in the turpentine, and her face in her hands. She felt the sun on her hair. In a few minutes the sun would disappear behind his house, and after that, if she wanted him to get a good look at her, she would have to stand right at the window. She envisioned herself stationed there all day. You are ridiculous, she told herself. You are unhinged.

  She glanced up at the window again.

  He was there.

  She sat up straight. Slowly she came to her feet. Stay, she prayed. He did. She walked to the window, her fingertips brushing her thighs. She held her breath. When she was at the window, she stood perfectly still. He stood perfectly still. He had on a white shirt again, but no tie. He was close enough that she could make out the darkness around his eyes, although she couldn’t tell exactly where he was looking. But his eyes seemed to enter her head like a drug, and she felt herself aligned with his perspective. She saw herself—surprisingly slender, composed but apprehensive—through the glass and against the backdrop of the room’s white walls.

  After a minute or two she walked to the chair, picked it up and carried it to the window. She sat facing him, her knees apart. He was as still as a picture. So was she, because she had suddenly remembered that he might be gay, or crazy. She tried to give him a hard look. She observed his age and his sad, respectable appearance. And the fact that he remained at the window, revealing his interest.

  No, he was the man she had imagined. I am a gift to him, she thought, opening her legs wider. I am his dream come true. She began to rotate her hips. With the fingers of both hands she spread her labia.

  One small part of her mind, clinging to the person she had been until yesterday morning, tried to pull her back. She felt it as a presence behind the chair, a tableau of sensational, irrelevant warnings that she was obviously not about to turn around for. She kept her eyes on the man. Moving her left hand up to her breasts, she began to rub and squeeze and to circle her fingers on the nipples. The middle finger of her right hand slipped into her vagina, as the palm massaged her clitoris.

  He was motionless.

  You are kissing me, she thought. She seemed to feel his lips, cool, soft, sliding and sucking down her stomach. You are kissing me. She imagined his hands under her, lifting her like a bowl to his lips.

  She was coming.

  Her body jolted. Her legs shook. She had never experienced anything like it. Seeing what he saw, she witnessed an act of shocking vulnerability. It went on and on. She saw the charity of her display, her lavish recklessness and submission. It inspired her to the tenderest self-love. The man did not move, not until she had finally stopped moving, and then he reached up one hand—to signal, she thought, but it was to close the drapes.

  She stayed sprawled in the chair. She was astonished. She couldn’t believe herself. She couldn’t believe him. How did he know to stay so still, to simply watch her? She avoided the thought that right at this moment he was probably masturbating. She absorbed herself only with what she had seen, which was a dead-still man whose eyes she had sensed roving over her body the way that eyes in certain portraits seem to follow you around a room.

  The next three mornings everything was the same. He had on his white shirt, she masturbated in the chair, he watched without moving, she came spectacularly, he closed the drapes.

  Afterwards she went out clothes shopping or visiting people. Everyone told her how great she looked. At night she was passionate in bed, prompting Claude to ask several times, “What the hell’s come over you?” but he asked it happily, he didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. She felt very loving toward Claude, not out of guilt but out of high spirits. She knew better than to confess, of course, and yet she didn’t believe that she was betraying him with the man next door. A man who hadn’t touched her or spoken to her, who, as far as she was concerned, existed only from the waist up and who never moved except to pull his drapes, how could that man be counted as a lover?

  The fourth day, Friday, the man didn’t appear. For two hours she waited in the chair. Finally she moved to the couch and watched television, keeping one eye on his window. She told herself that he must have had an urgent appointment, or that he had to go to work early. She was worried, though. At some point, late in the afternoon when she wasn’t looking, he closed his drapes.

  Saturday and Sunday he didn’t seem to be home—the drapes were drawn and the lights off. Not that she could have done anything anyway, not with Claude there. On Monday morning she was in her chair, naked, as soon as Claude left the house. She waited until ten-thirty, then put on her toreador pants and white push-up halter-top and went for a walk. A consoling line from Romeo and Juliet played in her head: “He that is stricken blind cannot forget the precious treasure of his eyesight lost.” She was angry with the man for not being as keen as she was. If he was at his window tomorrow, she vowed she would shut her drapes on him.

  But how would she replace him, what would she do? Become a table dancer? She had to laugh. Aside from the fact that she was a respectably married woman and could not dance to save her life and was probably ten years too old, the last thing she wanted was a bunch of slack-jawed, flat-eyed drunks grabbing at her breasts. She wanted one man, and she wanted him to have a sad, intelligent demeanour and the control to watch her without moving a muscle. She wanted him to wear a white shirt.

  On the way home, passing his place, she stopped. The building was a mansion turned into luxury apartments. He must have money, she realized. An obvious conclusion, but until now she’d had no interest whatsoever in who he was.

  She climbed the stairs and tried the door. Found it open. Walked in.

  The mailboxes were numbered one to four. His would be four. She read the name in the little window: Dr. Andrew Halsey.

  Back at her apartment she looked him up under “Physicians” in the phone book and found that, like Claude, he was a surgeon. A general surgeon, though, a remover of tumours and diseased organs. Presumably on call. Presumably dedicated, as a general surgeon had to be.

  She guessed she would forgive his absences.

  The next morning and the next, Andrew (as she now thought of him) was at the window. Thursday he wasn’t. She tried not to be disappointed. She imagined him saving people’s lives, drawing his scalpel along skin in beautifully precise cuts. For something to do she worked on her painting. She painted fishlike eyes, a hooked nose, a mouth full of teeth. She worked fast.

  Andrew was there Friday morning. When Ali saw him she rose to her feet and pressed her body against the window, as she had done the first morning. Then she walked to the chair, turned it around and leaned over it, her back to him. She masturbated stroking herself from behind.

  That afternoon she bought him a pair of binoculars, an expensive, powerful pair, which she wrapped in brown paper, addressed and left on the floor in front of his mailbox. All weekend she was preoccupied with wondering whether he would understand that she had given them to him and whether he would use them. She had considered including a message—”For our
mornings” or something like that—but such direct communication seemed like a violation of a pact between them. The binoculars alone were a risk.

  Monday, before she even had her housecoat off, he walked from the rear of the room to the window, the binoculars at his eyes. Because most of his face was covered by the binoculars and his hands, she had the impression that he was masked. Her legs shook. When she opened her legs and spread her labia, his eyes crawled up her. She masturbated but didn’t come and didn’t try to, although she put on a show of coming. She was so devoted to his appreciation that her pleasure seemed like a siphoning of his, an early, childish indulgence that she would never return to.

  It was later, with Claude, that she came. After supper she pulled him onto the bed. She pretended that he was Andrew, or rather she imagined a dark, long-faced, silent man who made love with his eyes open but who smelled and felt like Claude and whom she loved and trusted as she did Claude. With this hybrid partner she was able to relax enough to encourage the kind of kissing and movement she needed but had never had the confidence to insist upon. The next morning, masturbating for Andrew, she reached the height of ecstasy, as if her orgasms with him had been the fantasy, and her pretences of orgasm were the real thing. Not coming released her completely into his dream of her. The whole show was for him—cunt, ass, mouth, throat offered to his magnified vision.

  For several weeks Andrew turned up regularly, five mornings a week, and she lived in a state of elation. In the afternoons she worked on her painting, without much concentration though, since finishing it didn’t seem to matter any more in spite of how well it was turning out. Claude insisted that it was still very much a self-portrait, a statement Ali was insulted by, given the woman’s obvious primitivism and her flat, distant eyes.

  There was no reason for her to continue working in the nude, not in the afternoon, but she did, out of habit and comfort and on the outside chance that Andrew might be home and peeking through his drapes. While she painted she wondered about her exhibitionism, what it was about her that craved to have a strange man look at her. Of course, everyone and everything liked to be looked at to a certain degree, she thought. Flowers, cats, anything that preened or shone, children crying, “Look at me!” Some mornings her episodes with Andrew seemed to have nothing at all to do with lust. They were completely display, wholehearted surrender to what felt like the most inaugural and genuine of all desires, which was not sex but which happened to be expressed through a sexual act.