Sign Languages Read Online Free PDF Page B

book.
    She undressed in a frenzy, upsetting herself a little. This isn’t like me at all. Hurrying is spoiling it, she thought. But she turned off the light, left her clothes in a pile, and slid between the covers. The sheets were clammy, they felt as if they’d never warm. She rolled side to side and finally lay still, turned her eyes to Mr. Warrant, who sat heavily on the opposite edge of the bed. Slowly he took off his slippers. Still sitting, he removed his pants. And in the twilight from some outside light through the half-opened blinds, she shuddered. The more he took off—old-fashioned undershirt like Madelaine Woo wore to picnics, her nipples huge rosettes, the billowing boxer shorts—the smaller he became until lying next to her, letting out a heavy sigh, he was nothing at all. She was the weight in the bed. And when she turned toward him, he rolled to meet her. And the instant they touched his whole body twitched as if he’d been electrified like those TV patients with paddles to their chests.
    â€œNancy!” he said. “What is this? My God, girl. My heavens. This isn’t…” But he didn’t finish. And neither could she, though, her hands on his thin leg, her mind snagged the sentence and tried to complete it. This isn’t. But positive as always—as they always said, she took the lemons of life and made lemonade—she ran her freshly oiled fingers up his thigh.
    Her graceful fingers found his penis and massaged it carefully. She located its thick undervein and followed it with long reassuring strokes. But there was no length to it. His scrotum was a thick still bag in her palm. And when she ducked her head under the covers, her tongue ready to moisten, coax, he held her head still. In the absolute dark her nose touched his hairless chest and she breathed in all the unusual odors. She felt his chest heave in spasms and she listened to him cry through the heavy damp quilts. For a long time she rested, his hand having released her hair, and she heard his stomach rumble from the bacon. She smelled his age like all old things that weren’t people. Her own grandparents had died young. She had never sold a nursing home. Old people never came up to her on the streets. Distant grandchildren always put their useless houses on the market.
    She came up from the covers into the twilight and listened to Mr. Warrant, on the edge of deep sleep, on the precipice of years of dreams that combined and recombined, mumble about Joyce and his wife and someone else, Bob or Rob, or maybe not that name at all. The tides at Inchon. Her own name, Nancy, called out once as if it were punctuation, an exclamation point. Or was it a question mark? Nancy? This isn’t…
    She lay stretched out next to him and didn’t strain to listen, to decipher his weightless words as airy as his body next to hers. She was substantial, lotioned, perfumed, ready for anything. But slowly she saw herself right in this room lighted by the streetlight she passed every afternoon now when she drove straight here from work. “Hey, I’ve been phoning you,” Marvin said. The newest man, too. Your machine broken? Yes, it is, she said. And brought Ms. Bojangles and put her out of sight in a far room where they were both sure of mice, the chenille balls offering unlimited entertainment.
    Then she was eager for it all to be done with—the dinners with little variation between fried foods; endless puzzles; television—so in the twilight she could listen to his weightless digressions and fill herself with his odor, the pungency of the room, the licorice smell of all the photographs, the gray underwear. The carpet full of pieces of paper; underneath the bed, the exposed springs a jungle of cobwebs and lint. There must be remnants of her in there, Nancy said to herself. For now, in the afternoons, before fried pork chops, strips of mealy steak, she would come in here and raise the blinds, her