The Summer Without Men

with a few tricks either up his sleeves or in the pockets of his white coat. I had to ask myself if my circumstances, my own unwanted pause from “real” life, my own postpsychotic state had affected me in ways I wasn’t aware of and couldn’t predict.
    *   *   *
     
    The two further amusements Abigail revealed to me that Thursday were as follows:
    One floral, hand-knit tea cozy, which, when turned inside out, exposed a tapestry lining of female monsters with oozing eyes, flaming breath, breasts with spears, and long swordlike talons.
    One long green table runner embroidered with white Christmas trees. When reversed and unzipped, it displayed (moving from left to right) five finely rendered female onanists on a black background. (Onan, the disgraced Biblical character, got into trouble for spilling his seed on the ground. As I examined the row of voluptuaries, I wondered if the term could apply to those of us who are seedless but egg-full. We waste those eggs like crazy, of course, flushing them out every month in days of bleeding, but then most sperm are wholly useless as well, a thought to be considered elsewhere at greater length.)
    Slender sylph reclines in easy chair, strategically dandling a feather between her open legs.
    Dark lady lies at edge of bed, legs in the air, two hands hidden beneath disordered petticoats.
    Chunky redhead straddles the bar of a trapeze, head thrown back, mouth open in orgasmic extremity.
    Grinning blonde with shower nozzle—spray stitched in neat fanning lines of blue thread.
    And, finally, a white-haired woman lying in bed clad in a long nightgown, her hands pressed over the cloth against her genitals. This last character changed the work entirely. The jocularity of the four younger revelers turned suddenly poignant, and I thought about the loneliness of masturbatory consolations, of my own lonely consolations.
    When I looked up from the tapestry of self-pleasuring women, Abigail’s expression was both shrewd and sad. She told me she had not shown the masturbators to anyone but me. I asked her why. “Too risky” was her curt response.
    It was strange how quickly I had become accustomed to the woman’s jackknife posture and how little I thought about it as we talked. I noticed, however, that her hands were shaking more than when we were last together. She told me three times that no one had seen “the runner” but me, as if to be sure of my confidence. I said I would never speak of it without her permission. Abigail’s sharp eyes gave me the strong impression that choosing me as a repository for her artistic secrets was not caprice. She had a reason, and she knew it. Nevertheless, she explained little and conducted a roving, shapeless conversation with me that afternoon over lemon cookies and tea, moving from her visit to New York in 1938 and her love for the Frick Collection to the fact that she was six years old when women got the vote to the poor supplies that were offered to art teachers in her day and how she had had to buy her own or deprive her pupils. I listened patiently to her, aware that despite the insignificance of what she was telling me, an urgency in her tone held me in my seat. After an hour of this, I felt she was tiring and suggested we make another date.
    When we parted, Abigail grasped both my hands in hers. The squeeze she gave them was weak and tremulous. Then, lifting my hands to her lips, she kissed them, turned her head to one side, and pressed her cheek hard against the skin of my knuckles. Outside her door, I leaned against the wall in the corridor and felt tears come into my eyes, but whether they were for Abigail or for me, I had no idea.
    *   *   *
     
    I knew Pete was back because I heard him. Now that I had befriended Lola, I felt worse about the noise. I was sitting in the backyard on my chair after a long talk with Daisy on the telephone, my up-and-coming comedienne with the kind but overly possessive boyfriend “who wants to be with me every minute when he’s not at work.” She had called because she needed to discuss diplomacy. Daisy wanted to find the perfect way to tell him, “I need my space.” When I suggested that the phrase she had just used seemed inoffensive, she moaned, “He’ll hate that.” Pete was hating something, too, but fortunately after only minutes his bellowing stopped, and the house next door went quiet. Perhaps the combatants had taken to the wordless thrusts and parries of copulation. My father