Curtains
by Selena Jardine
I used to be fat. And I mean really fat, such a fat that people would sometimes turn their heads as I walked down the
street, wondering how I could maintain that kind of bulk. The
answer, of course, was that I loved food -not, in the end, more
than life, but it was damn close there for a few years.
I blamed it on stress. I blamed it on genetics. Really,
though, it was a haunting: food filled all my waking thoughts,
the way had when I was in high school. Instead of writing a
girl's name on scrap paper or sketching the curve of her breast,
I used to make lists of food: sometimes alphabetical (apple brioche coq au vin), sometimes by category (hot fudge caramel
marshmallow sauce whipped cream nuts cherry). If I'd had a
lover, I doubt I could have spent more time daydreaming about
screwing her than I did fantasizing about food - the food I'd
just had, and when and where I would have my next chance at some.
It got so that the accepted practice at our house was that
Marianne and the kids would put whatever they didn't want on my
plate at dinner, and I would always find room for it. Marianne
always had this look, like she couldn't believe I would really
act as the garbage disposer, but she didn't say anything
after the first few times it happened. Needless to say, our sex
life wasn't as good as it used to be. I missed it sometimes, the
frequency, the intimacy, but mostly, who cared? Stress.
Genetics. (apple cake banana nut bread cream puffs.)
It was when Marianne at last nagged me into going to the
doctor that I finally, grudgingly, began to change. I was
embarrassed to go see anyone but Mark -- he's my brother-in-law,
and I figured he wouldn't laugh, even behind my back. He talked
to me for a long time after I'd climbed on the scales and topped
out at 362. At first I thought Marianne had put him up to it,
but as he talked, I could hear in his voice that he was really
upset.
"It's like seeing someone you love with cancer, Billy," he
said, "and they won't get chemo because they're too stubborn.
What the fuck is the good of having a doctor in the if you
can't get your to listen to the doctor?" He looked pretty
wretched, poor guy. I made a lot of promises like I always did,
to get him off my back, but his unhappy face stayed with me, the
way he looked when he read my chart, my blood pressure, my
cholesterol levels. The term "morbidly obese" began to haunt me
unpleasantly.
Mark had said that I had to get some exercise, and once I'd
started thinking about it, I couldn't stop. So one Monday in
October, I went out to our back yard and started walking around
the pool. I felt like an idiot, waddling around and around the
empty space where our chlorinated water was in summer, but it was
exercise, right? And the next day, my calves were sort of sore,
which I figured was progress, so I did it again that night. And
again the next. Sometimes, after it became clear that this was
going to be a habit, one of my sons would come out and talk to me
for awhile, tossing a lacrosse ball in the air, not meeting my
eyes, but there. Marianne took longer to convince, probably
because she'd known me for longer and had the clarity marriage
can give you if you stay in it long enough. She used to stand
just outside the sliding glass door, arms folded, and watch me.
Marianne has a terrific figure that she keeps in shape by
swimming laps every day, and she has the most beautiful Irish
smile I've ever seen. I'd smile at her companionably and keep
walking. I must have walked fifty miles around that pool before
she smiled back.
It was the boredom that finally got to me, along about
spring. Shame about my body had started me walking in my own
back yard, but I'd lost fifty pounds or so over the winter,
walking in all weathers around that goddamned pool, and I never
wanted to see either the pounds or the pool again. At 310,
though, I was still too big to want to show myself in sweatpants
to the whole neighborhood, even if I was walking faster now. So
I waited until dark, laced on my shoes, and set out into the cold
spring evening. I can tell you the date, too, it was March 15,
because you don't forget a day like that, the day your whole life
twists in your grasp like an you picked up, thinking it
was dead, only to find it shockingly warm, slightly damp, and
friendlier than you expected.
But I get ahead of myself.
I started off in the chilly evening, safely in the
shadows of the trees, trying not to think about walking straight
to the nearest McDonald's for a large, salty order of fries
(cherry Big Mac sundae hot fudge oh shut the hell up, Billy.)
It was a pleasure to see something besides my own back yard,
though, and I started to look around me. After I got used to the
fresh, cold air and the occasional set of passing headlights, I
made the discovery that thousands of joggers have undoubtedly
made before me: a hell of a lot of people don't draw their
curtains at night. I walked past house after house in the deep
twilight of a March nine o'clock, their windows glowing gold,
watching frozen tableaux or scenes of rapid motion.
The first place I passed, there was a at an upright
piano and a little with frizzy black hair playing with a
Dalmatian on the floor. Next house, I could see a woman in the
kitchen doing the dishes, pushing her hair back from her face
with a damp wrist. She looked sort of like Marianne from behind,
my favorite figure, with a narrow waist but wide hips and a
perfect round ass, delightful to look at and lovely to hold. The
next house had the on and everyone was sitting in the blue
light watching a Western - I couldn't tell if it was a or
an show like Bonanza. I was enjoying myself now, and I
stepped up the pace, making my glances more like photographs than
video clips. A man, standing shirtless in the glow of the
refrigerator. A crying of maybe six, pointing into the other
room. Scared? Telling on his sister? I couldn't tell. A beige
striped sleeping, perfectly curved, on the windowsill. I
felt omniscient, as if I were the narrator of all these stories;
I didn't have any sense of myself as a voyeur.
And then, as I stepped into the rectangle of light cast by a
window about two miles from my own house on Summerhill Drive, I
saw her. I didn't know anything about her, of course, still
don't; all I knew was that I had seen an achingly beautiful of about twenty or so, studying at a kitchen table. I stopped in
my tracks, breathless from the quick walk and the cold air, and
took in some more details. She was blonde, with her hair in a
knot at the nape of her neck, and she was sort of athletic-
looking, the way of twenty so often are. Her arms were
tanned, but not like she'd been on somewhere sunny,
just as if she habitually spent time outdoors when she could.
She wore a plain white T-shirt and navy running pants, and she
was sitting with a textbook of some kind - biology?
economics? I couldn't see - on the table in front of her.
Now at this point I wasn't thinking what you're thinking:
fat middle-aged leering at nubile 20-year-old, will the real
Humbert Humbert please stand up. All I could think was how
beautiful she was, how absurdly and beautiful. I don't
know how long I stood there, but it wasn't long. I hadn't really
even caught my breath before she stood up and closed her textbook
and stretched, her eyes disappearing as she yawned like a cat.
Then she crossed her arms, the way I'd taught my sons to do it
when they were little, grasped the hem of her shirt, and pulled
it off. My heart, which had been slowing, gave a galvanic leap
in my chest, and I heard the click in my throat as I swallowed.
The took the T-shirt and dropped it in a washer that was
standing open near her. Then she reached behind her back, elbows
out in that uniquely feminine posture, and unclasped her jogging
bra. Her fell free in the golden light from the kitchen
lamp, and I swear as I watched I could see her nipples harden as
they came into contact with the cooler air. By this time the big
muscles of my thighs were reacting to the workout and the
adrenaline. "Fight!" they said, trembling. "Or flee!" And the
lizardy back part of my brain muttered, "...or fuck..." and I
noticed that an erection had tented out the front of my
sweatpants. I leaned against a tree for support, unable to take
my eyes from the window.
The bent over, her beautiful pale answering
gravity's call and turning slightly pear-shaped from the perfect
apples they had been. She skinned off her running pants and
underwear in one tangle, neatly separated them, and dropped them
in the washer with the T-shirt. I saw one flash of the
powderpuff of hair between her legs, and then she turned
her back to me and began putting detergent in the washer. I
could see the nape of her neck where the heavy knot of honey-
colored hair was, the sweep of her spine, the jut of her shoulder
blades, the heartbreakingly lovely curve of her ass, the glitter
of downy hair on the backs of her thighs (she doesn't shave all
the way up, I thought, frantically trying to distract myself, and
then, ah Christ, all the way up...).
Standing there at the washer, she was the most beautiful
thing I have ever seen, and according to my brain cortex, I
wanted her more than I'd ever wanted any other woman. My
erection was monstrous, my usually docile cock alerting me to its
iron presence (and to what it wanted, _now Billy now_) with every
beat of my heart. I found I was pressing it with the side of my
hand, as if to try to pacify it. I wanted to burst through the
kitchen window like the Incredible Hulk, fasten my lips around
that small hardened nipple, and stroke that soft powderpuff until we both melted into delicious oblivion.
Instead, I squeezed my eyes shut, still pressing ineffectually at
my raging hard-on, and counted to ten.
When I opened them, she was gone from the window, the only
sign that she hadn't been a hallucination the econ textbook still
sitting on the table. I couldn't tell if I was more disappointed
or more relieved. What I could tell was that it would be a truly
bad idea for a respectable (if hefty) member of the marketing
community to be found standing on a woman's lawn squeezing his
dick, so I turned around and walked back the way I had come. My
mind was filled with that glowing picture, her smooth skin, the
supple curve of her breasts. I'd walked almost a mile before my
erection was completely gone.
That night, I was in love. Or maybe in desire. I lay in
bed as Marianne brushed her teeth and I thought about the girl,
imagined huge changes in my life: living with her, sleeping next
to her, watching television or listening to music - Lester Young,
maybe - imagined quitting my job, cooking for her, helping her
study, going to her graduation. Then, further, imagined that
glowing skin under my fingers, her pliant warmth, imagined
teasing her clit to hardness with my tongue, feeling her guide my
head with one hand as she grasped the sheets with the other,
gasping and stiffening in pleasure. I embellished for a moment -
I'd be the first to taste her pussy! she'd be so grateful
she'd stay with me forever! - and then I took a deep breath. Get
real, I told myself. Imagine meeting her parents, the shock and
consternation on their faces. Imagine introducing her to my sons,
only eight years' difference between them and their new
stepmother. Imagine Marianne.
As if on cue, Marianne slipped into bed beside me. Instead
of setting the alarm clock and turning over to sleep as she
usually did, she propped herself on her right elbow and threw her
left arm over me.
"Billy?"
"Yeah, honey."
"I want you to know I'm really glad you're doing this
exercise thing. I - " She was flushed pink with emotion or
embarrassment, down her neck and onto the tops of her freckled
breasts that I could see at the low neck of her nightgown. My
cock began to stir. "I was so cynical all winter, I thought for
sure you'd give up. Hell, you know. You always did before. But
going out of our back yard like you did tonight? I guess that
said commitment to me somehow, like it wasn't just your private
attempt. I know you're doing it for me and Ty and Pete, and
honey, I love you for it." She leaned over and kissed me, and at
the touch of her generous mouth, my erection sprang to life as if
it had never been away. Just like riding a bike, I thought
indistinctly. My hand moved tentatively to the swell of her hip
beneath the covers, and instead of moving away, she rolled toward
me so that the point of her pelvic bone fit comfortably into my
hand. "Mmmm," she breathed, and I wasn't going to get - or need
- any more encouragement than that.
I moved my hand up to the swell of her breast, found the
nipple already hard, and made an involuntary noise in the back of
my throat. I circled it gently with my fingers, using the
slippery material of her nightgown to glide over it again and
again. Her hand was roving over my bare chest, slipping into the
waistband of my boxers and out again, avoiding my cock except for
a teasing brush now and then. I stopped her for a moment,
whispered, "Why don't you take this off," and watched as she
crossed her arms, grasped the hem of her white nightgown, and
pulled it off over her head. It was that movement that did it.
In that moment, my Marianne, with her full and wide hips,
the springing away from her forehead, the fiery patch of
pubic hair, the tip-tilted nose, utterly familiar, was also a
stranger, a slim-hipped honey-blonde athlete twenty-five years my
junior, and I was lost in love and desire.
I slipped an arm under Marianne and rolled her onto her
back, then moved on top of her, carefully propping myself on my
palms so as not to her with my weight. I looked into her
eyes, wanting her to understand something I didn't even fully
grasp. After a minute, she nodded almost imperceptibly, and I
bent and took her right nipple, the more sensitive one, into my
mouth, and licking and rolling and tugging it between my
lips. I left it for a moment, opened my mouth as wide as I
could, and enveloped her left nipple, gently pulling the wide
areola into my mouth and caressing the whole pebbled area with
the flat of my tongue. My thigh was between her legs, my cock
resting against her right thigh, and I could feel her moving her
hips so we rubbed against each other. The blood was beating in
my ears. I went back to her right nipple, circling the hard nub
with my tongue and this time nipping it slightly. "Oh!" she
said, and her eyes flew open in pleasure, "Oh, I like that, don't
stop," and as I continued, she slipped her hand down between our
bodies and began a slow expert massage of my cock, squeezing
gently at the head and the base at each sweep.
My arms were tiring rapidly, and I rolled onto my back,
bringing Marianne on top of me. As she settled, trapping my hard
penis between her and my belly, I could feel how wet she
was. Leaning forward over me, swinging tantalizingly
close to my mouth, she rocked back and forth the length of my
cock, the underside of the head rubbing against her clit at the
top of each sweep. My palms were holding that marvelous ass.
Her eyes were closed, mouth slightly open, and her whole pale
skin was flushed pink. God, she was beautiful. Her rocking
speeded up, the big muscles of her strong thighs bunching, and
now her was slipping up and down the surface of my cock
with a delicious wet noise like a long kiss. I could feel the
beginnings of my orgasm building, but Marianne was almost there;
she was shaking and I could feel the pulse of her in the
thin skin there. I fought it, but the desire of the day welled
up in me and I knew I wouldn't last long. I reached up and rubbed
my thumbs across her sensitive nipples, twice, three times. That
did it. She threw her head back in what looked like joy and pain
and triumph, and I could feel the gorgeous contractions of her
orgasm in her belly and along the whole length of my cock. As
soon as I felt that, I let go. I gave a long, low groan as I
came, watching Marianne's eyes, the first jet striking me on the
chest, the others flooding my lower belly. Marianne kept rocking
gently, squeezing me with her lips until I was drained and
limp. Then she rolled off. Her eyes glinted sleepily in the
darkness and she smiled. "Mmmm," she said again.
"Mmmm," I agreed, "pass the Kleenex, would you, hon?" We
cleaned ourselves up and went to sleep nestled together for the
first time in a long time, maybe in years.
In the days and months that followed, I couldn't stop
thinking about that girl. She attended excruciatingly
dull meetings with me, sat at dinner (where my desire for food
had substantially diminished, nudged out of the way somehow),
curled up on the couch as I watched PBS or baseball. I tried to
stay away from her house on my nightly walks. Leaving the house,
I'd tell myself firmly that I was going the opposite direction,
and I'd start boldly away from that particular glowing window.
But desire, like the lodestone, drew me without my even knowing
it, and almost every evening I found myself in front of that
house. I never saw her naked again, though she was often there.
I saw that beautiful chiseled face intent in study, or laughing
on the phone with someone; I saw her making stir-fry, crying over
a novel (it looked like it might have been _Wuthering Heights_,
but I can't be sure), stretching after a run, and once painting
her toenails in that curious doubled-over posture that only women
can seem to achieve. I don't know how many times I thought I'd
go knock on her door, imagined her reaction, different every time
- polite surprise, hostile rejection, immediate reciprocal lust -
and walked or jogged on past.
Those nightly workouts were surreal, set apart from the rest
of my life. I'd come home, sluice off the sweat in the shower,
and climb into bed. More and more often, Marianne was there
waiting for me, and as the pounds came off, our sex life
improved, and with it the intimacy that had begun to slide away.
Marianne thought I was losing weight for her sake, and I didn't
tell her anything different, any more than I explained that
occasionally, as I buried my face in her fragrant or my
prick in her mouth, I was half with her and half with a I'd
known for a year without knowing her name. Besides, like
anything you practice from the outside in, it was becoming true.
I loved Marianne, and held her, and began, hesitantly at first,
to talk to her about the things I really wanted, things I hadn't
known I wanted until recently. I didn't want to stay in
marketing, in those long dull meetings only a fantasy
could make bearable. I wanted to go back to school and be a
chef. "Put all this food experience into something useful," I
said, and laughed nervously, glancing down at what remained of my
belly. I weighed 230 then.
But Marianne didn't laugh. She nodded sharply, twice, and
said, "Go on and apply. I'll get a job wherever we move for
school. The boys'll love having that kind of a food source in
the family; they're at the age where they never stop eating." I
could feel the tears pricking the back of my eyes, and Marianne
leaned over and kissed me. I reached for her, and never thought
of the at all.
It was about six months after that that we moved to
Poughkeepsie so I could become a chef. I was down to fighting
weight, 190 pounds. The night before we left, I went for my
evening run, but instead of jogging, I walked slowly. I had a
package in my hands. In a couple of familiar miles, I stood
before the girl's house. Even now, I didn't want to knock, or
frighten her at all. I could see her in the window, shining
blonde hair falling around her face, beautiful as a summer day.
It seemed that with my desire for her, all my other desires had
unearthed themselves, too: ambition, love, hunger. I left the
package on her porch, turned, and walked away. Imagined her
opening it, curiosity turning to surprise on that lovely face as
she shook out the soft folds of material, the slow realization of
what someone had left her. Curtains. And I went home to my own
glowing window.
*****
Comments welcomed and responded to at
selenajardine@yahoo.com.
Acknowledgements to Uther Pendragon for the title to the
story. --SJ
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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