Storm Tide by Marge Piercy, Ira Wood Page B

considered satisfactory sex before that night was if the man was not unclean or piggy and did not hurt her, and if she had an orgasm from time to time. Perhaps Gordon was simply more sensual than any man she had been with, perhaps he was simply more patient, perhaps he was simply more experienced with the bodies and needs of women. Whatever it was, she lost control as she never had. By the time he entered her, she was moaning like an animal, grabbing at him, lurching to meet him. When she came, it shook her. She lay afterwards with the feeling of having been dropped from a great height. She fell asleep almost at once.
    Natasha was up before her in the morning, waiting impatiently in the kitchen. “You stayed with Daddy. Do you like him?”
    “Yes, I like him a lot. You know too damned much for your age, Natasha.”
    “I have to. I’m the house mother, haven’t you noticed? Daddy says Fern started turning things over to me by the time I was seven! I want a stepmother, but I want some choice.”
    “It’s a little early to talk about that.”
    “It’s never too early,” Natasha said firmly. “We can’t let you get away.”
    She decided that what she saw around her was a paradise gone to weeds. Sunburned children chased puppies nobody had bothered to housebreak; students camped out on the beach among great mounds of garbage bags and green-headed flies. Gordon had begun building a tower to distance himself from the chaos. He simply could not manage the logistics any longer. He needed help, obviously, and she began slowly to make order.
    She did not leave the next day. She did not leave until the morning she was due in court. By the time she drove into the city through the hot gritty morning in rush-hour traffic, she knew she was obsessed with him. That night she called Hannah in Washington. They often spoke at ten at night, about the time they usually got home to their respective tiny apartments from their respective overheated demanding jobs.
    “Do you love him?” Hannah asked.
    “I don’t know …” Judith clutched the receiver hard. “I never thought I was capable of falling in love.”
    “When you look at him, does he make you feel weak?” Hannah asked.
    “No! He makes me feel strong.” She was going to marry him. She knew it then. Yirina would have loved him too.

D AVID
        “Let’s play home movies,” Judith said, curled up with me before the fire. “Tell me about your marriage. I was married before too. I was twenty when I got married and twenty-one when I got divorced.”
    The image that came to me as she talked was a cartoon of a pimply faced boy from New Jersey; then I added a beard to the pimply faced boy. Ridiculous. But Judith was more interested in questioning me.
    “I married the boss’s daughter. I was twenty-three, I had forty thousand dollars left of my bonus, every possibility in the world, and I couldn’t think of one. I was drifting around Florida, where I felt comfortable because everybody seemed to come from someplace else.” I lay on my side staring at the flames in the gas grate. The room was almost tropical. She had turned the heat high when we made love.
    One night in the lounge of a seafood restaurant under the bridge to Singer Island, I met a guy who’d seen me pitch. He’d played baseball himself. “But never professionally,” he said. Few people knew enough to refer to minor leaguers as professional.
    “Jewish kid, aren’t you?” Wynn Hardy was the kind of man who thought he could say anything he liked. He was taller than me, lean except for the beer belly he steered like the hood ornament of an expensive car. His lips were always set in a half smile, so everything he said could be taken as a provocation or a joke. “It’s a compliment, son. Means you’re probably smarter than the average asshole I hire, that you don’t stay out drinking till four in the morning when you have to be at work at eight.” Wynn described a forty-acre property he’d just