Killing Time

by Thomas Berger

  She found it utterly boring to have a cop as a lover, and tolerated the situation only because by contrast it gave Arthur greater value. She and Tierney were criminals, and Arthur represented the law. He was not, however, an enforcer or even an investigator: after that single encounter with Tierney he subsided into trust, faith, or whatever you might wish to call it but cowardice. It had taken bravery for him to face up to Tierney, and Tierney’s having thrown him to the carpet (for more than a month he had displayed a blue bruise on his fat elbow, the point at which he first touched the floor) in his own home, would have crushed the spirit of a lesser man.

  But Arthur took moral nourishment from the incident. Betty remembered some old Greek legend concerning a wrestler who was easily thrown, but once he hit the ground he absorbed indomitable strength from the earth and was instantly on his feet again: a peculiarity which tended to discourage opponents. He was eventually defeated by Hercules, who lifted him into the air and squeezed him until he capitulated.

  Arthur had become physically aggressive. Astounding Betty, he had tried to pick a fight with a man at the movies. In the row ahead this man had been commenting loudly to his wife. Arthur ordered him to desist; the man made a rude reply; Arthur invited him outside, and he shut up forthwith. Another time Arthur had stuck his head out the car window and cursed a fellow driver for cutting him off.

  Arthur himself did not, consciously, interpret his change in style, in character, as a gain. He saw it rather as the necessary answer to the challenges of a world which was forsaking reason for violence.

  “I have tried to be patient, to be tolerant,” he said. “God knows. But what’s the point if at any moment a lousy maniac can grab you by the neck and choke you dead?”

  He seemed to give no credit to the struggle with Tierney, but Betty happened to know that that broke the ice, because she knew Arthur thoroughly, as a good wife should know her husband. The corollary was that Arthur did not know her at all, also as it should be. Women must be mysterious in a world in which men are physically superior. He had no suspicion of her illicit activity. Tierney’s firm denial sufficed, for either Arthur’s old character or his new. The old Arthur accepted a man’s word; the new, with its Machiavellian sense of power, believed that the man who possessed superior force had no need to lie.

  But Betty was not deeply interested in husbands or lovers at this time—she kept on with Tierney out of habit, apathy, his own wants—but an audience. The newspaper series had stimulated and not appeased her appetite for self-expression. The real story was yet to be told. The crudest disappointment of her life had been provided by the degenerate who posed as a book publisher. She still half-believed in his professional authenticity, despite Tierney. He had spoken so well. Never mind his perversions: she could survive them. She had a history of such survivals: her father’s odd ways, her sister’s exhibitionism, her mother’s relationships with the boarders, the first of whom had been an aggressive woman named Isobel. One, and only one, had Betty ever got for herself, Joe the sexless eccentric, soon to become a homicidal maniac.

  One day she called Alloway, the reporter. He sounded eager to hear her proposition and, though she offered to meet him downtown, insisted on coming out to the “wildest suburbs.”

  She sat next to him on the couch and said: “If I don’t have a book in me, no one does. I can’t understand why no publisher has got in touch. I have always heard they besiege anyone who has got into the news.”

  Alloway’s eyes roamed over the furniture and carpet. “It’s somewhat different than I expected. I expected to see more fluff and pink, dotted swiss, shellacked bronze plates and a ceramic panther on the mantel, you know.” He giggled and said: “I’m joking.”

  Betty remembered Arthur’s suspicion of Alloway. The reporter’s irrelevancy was something new, perhaps rude, but she couldn’t be bothered.

  “You must know the ropes in publishing,” she said. “What I propose is this: you and I collaborate again, only this time what I say goes. I mean a full-length book, where we can stretch our arms.”

  “Sure,” he said, “Might I ask you for a drink?”

  He already smelled of liquor, and his gaze was still irresponsibly going to the drapes, the ottoman, the tole lamp on the end table. But she complied.

  “Nothing for yourself?”

  She said: “I want to talk business.”

  “So do I.” He drank half the glass.

  “Here’s the way I see it. This time I’ll write the whole thing, first, myself. Do you call that a rough draft? Then you take it, read it, give me your critique, then together we’ll whip it into polished form. You’ll also take care of the business end, publishing contract, and so on. I know nothing of these things. We’ll split the royalties fifty-fifty. Deal?” Being hard, realistic, man-to-man, Betty thrust her hand at Alloway.

  Instead of taking it, he put his own right hand on her left breast.

  “I would never have had the nerve if you hadn’t called,” he said, still not meeting her eye. “And even then I had to get drunk. I dreamed of this so long I could not believe it would come true.”

  Betty rose calmly, and easily, for his hand merely rested against her and did not clutch, and standing staunchly before him, said:

  “Get out of here, you drunken scum.”

  The next day a poison-pen letter arrived, addressed to Arthur. Betty opened it, as she did anything that looked personal, and read:

  Dear Sir,

  This has gone on long enough. Your wife is entertaining “gentlemen callers” in your absence. That was neither here or there till now, but today one of these individuals came out of your house in a highly inebriated condition and vomited on the sidewalk in full view of my two young children who were rollerskating there at the time. I don’t intend to stand by and let this neighborhood become a slum.

  A FRIEND

  Betty destroyed the missive forthwith and told no one—not Arthur, assuredly not Tierney—of the letter, the visit, or the project. Twice she had been betrayed foully by persons privy to her dearest secret: it must not happen again. She had learned that to enunciate a special interest was to expose a weakness, to display a target for those whose ambitions are also out of the common run. Merely because she wanted to write a book, the bogus publisher assumed she would go down on him and Alloway was emboldened to assault her. Writing was apparently a kind of crime, even the threat to commit which created other malefactors from nowhere. She remembered she had shown her poetry to Joe Detweiler. There was some sinister force to language.

  Betty was pleased that both Arthur and Tierney found their pleasure in her, but with neither of them had she ever reached a climax. Nor, for that matter, with anyone else. But not all she had to tell was sensational. She had within her a great unrealized potential, brief glimpses and resonances of which could be apprehended when she stood barefooted in the surf as gulls wheeled high above, or awoke at the chattering of birds at dawn on a spring morning and saw another new sun. Little white boats on the river; a vivid geranium in a window ten stories above a gutter full of waste; a broken doll in a trashcan; a straw-hatted horse pulling a cart: contrasts, similitudes, correspondences, echoes, the gamut of qualities, the relations between things and people and animals, the living and the dead. She saw much and had related little. She, who never felt so lonely as when joined with a man in the act of love, had a lover’s passion for life in all its forms: there was as much truth in a fallen leaf as in sex and murder and their male perpetrators.

  Eventually, using the energy and courage of defiance, she found it possible to sit down before a sheet of paper and take pen in hand. The whiteness of the foolscap was oppressive; the instrument too hard, smooth, erect; the chair exerted pressure against her sacrum; she itched all over. She knew what to write; the problem was how, given an inability to use the first person. She could say “I” with abandon, but could not inscribe it upon the nullity of the blank paper. That was the first revelation: the utter lack of community between th
e written and the real, when both were personal. Life had another grammar than language, though words were alive and living had its verbal features. “When I was thirteen, my father tried to rape me.” This statement was as clear, as direct, as true as she could fashion it, impeccable in talking-turkey syntax and brass-tacks vocabulary, this being no subject for the obscenity of circumlocution—yet as a characterization in words of the event in time, it missed the mark.

  She had been awakened in the middle of the night. She smelled whiskey. A hand groped at her lower belly. Perhaps a dream-hand; or a real one fondling a dream-belly, which was preferable. She wanted it to stay in reality while she dreamed, but then it must forget so that she could remember. A dream must be private else it was actual, and the actuality of her body was disgusting. She approved of the hand, which was knowledgeable, authoritative, and enormous, and she could control it with her will: go here, go there, and it went, obedient yet prideful, seeking to please from strength and never weakness. Up it went to cherish the cones of her bosom, then back down to worship at the original shrine, a dutiful pilgrim. And she put out her own right hand to make verification, and found herself clutching her own left wrist. That was the terror against which she cried out.

  But her father was there, in the room. He said instantly: “Shh, you’ll wake Billie.”

  She whispered: “Who are you?” meaning, what are you doing, and he understood and said: “I came to close the window. It is snowing in.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can smell it.”

  He stood by her bed, breathing heavily, making fumes.

  She said: “Why don’t you go away?”

  “You called me.”

  “I had a nightmare.”

  “You better button your pajamas and pull up the covers,” he said, “or you’ll catch cold.” He sounded bitter.

  She said: “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  He answered, very bitterly: “You just leave me alone.”

  The rape was implicit in this experience, though perhaps, probably, he had not even touched her. What was true had not happened; therefore to be literal was to lie. Most of the story Betty had to tell was of a like nature: the truth that had not occurred, the history of that which had no time. But she was not dishonest. She could not represent this narrative as a personal confession, autobiographical, taking its chronology from the standard calendar, recording local names and habitations. To speak truly she must invent, construct, distort, and prevaricate.

  So Betty began a novel and found her fluency, and the more she wrote, the less was her heroine a self-portrait. The name was Margaret, and Margaret had a will of her own. Her father was handsome and had his gallant side, and she could not hate him for violating her, no matter what the pressure applied by Betty. He was often drunk on rare wines, and he brought her gifts of jewelry and lace. Ill health and financial reverses completed his ruin, which had begun in the hostility of an avaricious wife, whose sexual appetites were evident but ambiguous. One day Margaret’s father opened his wrists with a razor blade and perished in a rush of gore.

  The novel was in every way an improvement over life; fiction, unlike experience, being capable of conclusions. In the fictive household Margaret’s father was replaced by a rent-paying guest named Pauline, an old friend of Margaret’s mother and a blatant invert who lost no time in making advances to both girls. Margaret’s sister, a vain, empty-headed creature named Rosalie, perhaps succumbed: at any rate, the fur flew and Pauline soon departed.

  Whereas in life, the friend of Betty’s mother, Isobel Gauss, had been, like Betty’s father, provably guilty of nothing. Coming home from school, Betty often found Isobel with her mother. They usually sat at a great distance from each other, both smoking heavily. Betty had once counted eight cigarette-ends in Isobel’s ashtray, all burned down to the nub, unusable for her own experiments.

  Another time, Isobel came out of the bathroom and crossed the hall to peek in at Betty, who was reading a movie magazine on the bed.

  “Excuse me,” Isobel said. “I thought you were Billie.”

  Betty smiled hypocritically: Billie’s opinion of Isobel was negative. Billie was then fifteen and disapproved, for reasons of health, of persons who smoked or drank.

  “I have insulted you, I think,” Isobel said. She had a soft, fruity face though her body, while full, looked hard, as if it might, struck with a metal implement, clank. Betty had never made physical contact with Isobel. Fortunately Isobel was not a kisser or hugger. She had been married once, long ago, and in a state of alleged happiness when her husband of four months, driving home alone through the rain, executed a slide of but twelve feet, which might have been exhilarating on the apron of a deserted airfield: he was, however, adjacent to a fragile safety rail on the harelip of an embankment. Isobel henceforth lived in the absence of men and was, moreover, a critic of that sex, Betty knew from her mother, though anyone could have skidded in the rain.

  Betty was mildly interested in Isobel’s unfairness and felt a certain affinity with her because of the smoking. In the cellar of the building Betty would secretly puff on cigarettes stolen from her mother’s pack. The janitor had caught her once, beside the boiler, remonstrating in his middle-aged, heavy-set, Slavic voice. Though in appearance the classic type of molester, he turned soddenly away from her defiance and belched at the water gauge.

  Isobel said: “Are you curious to know what I mean?”

  Betty blushed, twisted back to her reading. Isobel seldom addressed her, and never before when coming directly from the bathroom.

  She said: “No.” She heard no sound, yet when she looked Isobel was gone. After a while Betty wandered into the living room, where her mother sat beside an empty coffee cup, pencil in hand, notepad on the chair arm.

  “Peas or stringbeans?” asked her mother, though not of her and neither of Isobel, who was not in evidence. Then: “Where is Isobel?”

  Betty rarely looked at her mother, whose presence she had for a year or so now found embarrassing.

  “I don’t know,” she sullenly answered.

  “Isn’t she in the bathroom?”

  “How do I know?”

  “Aren’t you friends?” Betty’s mother dyed her hair black, wore it close, with bangs. She was shortish, and at the distance of half a city block, might have been a husky schoolgirl. She was not overweight but wide-built, broad-shouldered for a woman, or perhaps not even that, really: it might have been the thrusting way she walked, she being one of those persons in whom manner takes precedence over matter. Close up, especially when seated, she was in no sense physically formidable, rather vanished into or merged with the environment as to body, establishing herself exclusively by moral means. Which, in addressing herself to Betty, took an interrogatory form. To answer one question was to receive another, in a nonsensical progression, touching nowhere on communication.

  Betty said “Yes.”

  Her mother asked: “Isobel isn’t famous for her patience, is she? She doesn’t remember how it is to be a young girl. She sometimes expects to find her own type efficiency in everybody else, her own way of striking to the mark. And she is disappointed then. She is a genius at business.”

  “Pardon?” Betty asked idly. Isobel owned and operated an agency which supplied domestics to those who could afford them; certainly nobody in the social circle of the Starrs. Her mother often mentioned Isobel’s yearly gain in precise figures, while Betty writhed at the bad taste of it. She was too old to be impressed by numbers, and too young to associate them with material realities. She had no idea of what her family paid in rent, for example, except that it was too much, like the costs of all necessities, always; and the Starrs were ever short of funds by definition. Her mother had once said, with a desperate gaiety: “If we were millionaires, we would still be broke.” Her mother was given to making statements that defied reason, thereby excluding other people, though it may have been her purpose merely to torment
them. For she was hardly a big spender. Betty often wore Billie’s hand-me-downs.

  Betty received no answer now. Her mother stared at the note-paper for a moment and then asked: “Or broccoli?”

  Betty went to look for Isobel and found her in the back bedroom, still at this time the quarters of Betty’s father—her mother even then slept in the living room. Now Betty saw a terribly ugly thing: Isobel’s rumpled, off-white girdle, lying on top of her father’s little desk. On this narrow piece of un-painted furniture he kept a table radio, an alarm clock, a few dogeared westerns and self-help books: improve your personality, learn accounting at home, collected wisdom of the sages. In the middle drawer of the single pedestal containing two shallow and one deep, was a sex manual written by an M.D., illustrated with cross-section diagrams of penis and vulva, but if he kept a store of condoms, Betty had never found them, nor any literature unconditionally dirty. Betty had a school friend named Eunice Pell whose Daddy received by mail, in plain wrappers, a dozen fish skins at a time and kept them, in a diminishing supply, in a bureau drawer beneath his clean handkerchiefs, along with a filthy comic book professing to reveal what famous cartoon characters did behind the frames of the newspaper strips. Betty was utterly indifferent to such representations, insofar as they were supposed to arouse her; but she valued their implication as to Mr. Pell and to men in general, whose sex did not distinguish between reality and appearance.

  There was Isobel’s girdle. Isobel herself lay on the bed, her shoes, with their sensible thick heels, underneath it.

  She said soberly: “Made myself comfortable. Can’t breathe in that armorplate except when standing. My advice to you: always keep your little tummy firm as it is now.”

  Betty asked: “Are you moving in?”