Into the Valley by Ruth Galm Page B

would be like.”
    â€œThey were just paper, darling.” Now he nuzzled her neck. “Just dolls.”
    â€œBut I should have considered . . . ” The scotch had gone all through her body and the kisses tingled on her skin, rippling inside her. Her thoughts splintered. The jazz was swirling in a low moaning wail.
    â€œIs your wife ever nauseous?” she asked abruptly.
    â€œNauseated,” he corrected, licking her collarbone. “I wouldn’t know, we don’t talk about female things.” He unzipped the back of her dress. Her back spasmed when his fingers brushed it. He took down her bra straps and cupped her breasts. “No more about her,” he whispered.
    He moved her to the couch. He emptied the last bit of scotch into their glasses and finished his in a single go. He pressed her back on the couch and began kissing his way down her breasts and onto her stomach. Somewhere again she thought she must stop; he was married. But the sensation of the kissing and the scotch and having confessed about the dolls made her malleable, new. At her navel he stopped as if struck by something. “People don’t really talk, you know. The hippies think we’re so rotten and bourgeois, and they don’t talk any more than we do—communicate, I mean. I mean, what are they really saying to each other with all this ‘turn on and groove’? It’s all another way to obfuscate. Cover over the void. Just a different language of avoidance.”
    He seemed to be speaking to an entire room, not B. in particular, but she did not mind. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, her own voice in her head disappearing. She felt he might have sensed this.
    â€œI see the fear in my students’ eyes,” he went on. “Those guys outside the window just now. They oughtta be scared. There’s no way to know they have it right anymore. They may be totally wrong, useless. I have nothing to tell them.” He laid his cheek on her breasts. “They see the others living in the parks, getting high and sticking it to the Man, so what are they supposed to think about themselves? What can I tell them? Subconsciously it grinds them. Subconsciously . . . ”
    B. was soft and serene in her drunkenness now; no spinning anywhere. She stroked his hair. He inched up next to her until their faces touched. It seemed she had left the city and traveled to the valley precisely to find this man.
    He took her hand and pushed it down his pants, guiding it back and forth over his penis. “I wish I had some grass for us,” he said.
    She craned her mouth toward his, rubbing the penis dutifully, losing her rhythm occasionally. “Say more,” she murmured.
    â€œAbout the grass?”
    â€œNo, no . . . the other . . . ”
    â€œYeah, baby? You like the talking? Alright then . . . Listen, it’s all a wash. The rules they’ve been setting up this whole time. The rules will never paper over the abyss, never get it out of our heads, and now the holes are showing up. The fraying. But the holes are deep, unfathomable. The expectations are tumbling down. People don’t know which way to go. The crybabies yell about ending the war, and they don’t see that it doesn’t even matter, the whole charade will end in war and famine and misery. Keats said it—nature and youth and suck at the beauty before it rots. The kids get high, wait for the parents to die. Ha!” He laughed at his own rhyme.
    It struck B. even in her drunkenness that his disquisition about non-believing might be just another form of believing, another attempt at “papering over.” But the scotch swallowed the validity of this thought. Anyhow, she preferred the sureness of his authoritative voice. She wanted it to keep talking.
    â€œWhat does your wife think of the war?” she asked.
    â€œThis wife obsession is a serious bummer, as our friends would say.” He reached for his empty