The Plexiglas partition between Fred and the driver was frosty with dust and scratches, the side windows covered with stickers that warned or cajoled the customer with New York City Taxi Commission regulations. The seat seemed to be sliding down through the bottom of the car. There was nothing to look at but the shrinking form of his wife. His anger welled in his chest. But he couldn’t begin, frightened that once out, the flood of his rage would never subside and would end only by drowning them both.
No. no, he told himself. I won’t show fury. She’d like that. Prove to her how she got to me. I’ll give it to her cold. Aloof. Marion, as far as I’m concerned, our marriage is over. I don’t want you to accompany me on any social occasions, I can no longer promise to be faithful. I don’t give a shit about shopping for dinner. We can continue to live together but—
It made no sense.
If I hate her. I should leave her.
The taxi dropped into a pothole hard.
“Jesus.” Marion exclaimed.
The driver mumbled something.
“Watch where you’re going.” Marion called out.
Fred forgot his problem and felt dread that the taxi driver would get angry and start fighting. This driver looked insane. He had hair growing all over his body, he looked sooty, and his eyes were bloodshot. Fred had noticed all that when the cab stopped for them in front of Elaine’s, and had even considered waving him on, but didn’t, only because he was frightened that the driver, cheated of a fare, would get out and punch him.
The driver shouted something back, Fred couldn’t hear what, and now his heart beat rapidly again, this time with terror. “Shhh,” he said to Marion.
“He nearly broke my spine!” she said loudly.
“I know, I know,” he whispered back. “He’s crazy. We’ll be there soon.”
They relapsed into silence. I’m soothing her. I wanna blow her head off and I’m soothing her. It was like being a teenager living with his mother. He’d want to scream at his mother, tell her she was a whining, unattractive, bitter woman, ungrateful to his father (always tired, exhausted from work) for providing her with a life of ease. A maid to clean daily, caterers for parties, expensive trips, all the clothes she wanted (though she continued to look drab, no matter what her hairdo or the style of her dress), and all the power in making family decisions. And yet, like Marion, there was no end to her complaints that she was neglected, ignored; no action or comment his father could make that she failed to deride or despise. How his father had had the will and courage to build his business in the fog of complaints and meanness his mother exhaled at home … No more remarkable, he imagined, than his own ability to persevere in his ambition to be a novelist despite Marion’s poorly concealed skepticism.
They arrived home. Fred gave the driver a big tip, knowing that would guarantee he wouldn’t say anything. To his surprise, the driver said, “Thanks. Sorry about the bump. They oughta fix the fuckin’ streets.”
“Yeah,” Fred said cheerfully, ecstatic that the guy was reasonable and decent. Marion had gotten out and gone ahead.
“It’s that fuckin’ fag we got for a mayor,” the driver said out his window while Fred closed the door.
“Yeah,” Fred said, not so cheerfully. He’s probably an anti-Semite, he thought to himself, convinced that anyone who disliked Mayor Koch had to be. An anti-Semite and stoned, he decided after another glance at the driver’s angry red eyes. Fred hurried to catch up with Marion.
She greeted him with: “What the hell did you give him a big tip for?”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” he answered with thorough bitterness. He almost covered his mouth, embarrassed by the release, but he forced that feeling away and strode into the elevator. Then he felt good. Not happy, but vigorous. No longer constipated by a little boy’s timidity.
Marion stood outside the elevator and stared at him. For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to get in. “You’re such a baby.” she said, and then finally entered, moving to the other side of the elevator as though they were strangers riding to different floors, different lives. He wished they were. He kept his glance downward until they got to their floor, looking up when Marion moved to get out. He watched her behind move while he followed her to the door. Although there was nothing exciting about either its shape or its motion, he felt horny for her. If only he could get her to bed without all the bullshit—if only he knew for sure what made her want to fuck. Other than his pressing her for so many days in a row that she eventually ran out of excuses, he couldn’t say what did make her want to have sex. Years ago, when they were kids in college, he didn’t remember that either of them had to initiate making love. They were both so thrilled to be doing it, it was automatic as soon as they were alone together. They would kiss immediately and soon …
There was an empty feeling to the apartment. The place was jammed with their things, eight years of living together, but their footsteps seemed to echo as though it were bare. Fred turned on the television to rid the place of the silence. Marion disappeared into the hallways. Probably gonna take a bath, Fred thought to himself bitterly. Well, I’m not going in there to apologize and whine just because I want some nooky. I’ll find someone else. She doesn’t think I’d ever do that, doesn’t think I’d have the nerve to have an affair. Maybe she doesn’t think anyone would have an affair with me, Fred thought, furious. She doesn’t want to fuck me, so she probably thinks no one else does.
There was a moment, a moment of nameless dread and despair, when he feared she was right.
Patty would! Fred thought, blessed by the aburpt recall of their kiss at that dinner party, the party that had firmed up his relationship with Bart and led to his book contract. Yes, that was another time Marion had whined. Just because he needed her help to throw a party, one little party in eight years to advance his career. She had made him feel like a piece of shit that night. He remembered his erection, surging madly when he met Patty’s gaping wet mouth. He had felt firm breasts against his chest. He knew her ass would also be a shape, a definite shape, not floating in a sea of blobby formless flesh like Marion’s. Yes. Patty would have fucked him and Marion was a joke compared to Patty, hardly part of the same gender. Patty would do it. Or she would have before she had a boyfriend.
If only he had the nerve to march into the bathroom (since Marion no doubt expected him to come in like a penitent dog wagging his tail, head down, eyes up balefully, hoping to be forgiven) and say, “Patty wanted to fuck me.”
What? He burst out laughing. Marion wouldn’t have the faintest idea that was meant as an answer to her behavior. He laughed again.
“What’s so funny?” Marion asked.
He gasped, turned to find her, as though he were a potential victim in a horror movie, his enemy having sprung from the grave. “You startled me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She was trying to be pleasant. “What’s so funny? I heard you laughing. I thought it was something on TV.”
Fred glanced at the set. He hadn’t been paying attention to it. “No,” he said, and offered no explanation.
“Why did you get so angry?” she asked. She squinted at him as if he were a distant object.
He made a sound, a disgusted laugh.
“I was just teasing at Elaine’s,” she said.
“Bullshit.” He stared at the television, afraid to meet her glance. It would be amused and tolerant, contemptuously forgiving. When she treated him like a child, he always became one: more interested in winning back her love than winning the fight. Even now part of him wanted to make up, knowing that to continue the hostility meant weeks of sexual deprivation.
“You’re right,” she said.
Her tone was firm, settled. He looked at her out of curiosity.
“You were being an asshole,” she said, again in a definite way, a telephone operator repeating a number. “You didn’t want me to come, and then everything I did, everything I said, you acted like it embarrassed you. You acted like I was a slob who doesn’t
know how to behave. I have news for you. You were the one who behaved like a fool. Tom Lear thought you were the asshole, not me.” She put her hands on her hips, an outraged landlady, a middle-aged shrew. Fred felt ancient, cowed. He imagined he had communed with his father’s life: he understood, as he never had before, what that man felt while he sat in his Barca lounger, staring ahead at Monday Night Football, silently absorbing his wife’s verbal abuse. Had Dad also kept quiet, fearing he would never get laid again if he fought back?
No, impossible. His father would have gone out and fucked someone else. He must have stayed for the sake of the kids.
Then why the hell am I still here? he asked himself. “You’re pathetic,” he said at last in a weak voice, almost paralyzed by despair. He meant her delusion that he was the one who had been embarrassing. She was incapable of seeing herself truthfully.
“Get out!” Her chin quivered.
“What?” he said, almost with a laugh.
“Get out of my house!” she screamed, her face red, her shoulders shaking.
Fred got out of the chair, his legs trembling. She seemed insane, terrifying.
“I don’t want you here! Understand?” She moved at him, her hands clenched as though she meant to physically get rid of him.
“I live here,” he said inanely, pleading.
“I can’t stand looking at you! You make me sick! Get out of here!” She was screaming, her voice tearing her throat, the last words rasping from the exertion. She took a breath, put out a hand on the couch to steady herself, and then said in an exhausted whisper, “If you don’t get out of here now, I’ll have to leave. I don’t know what I’m gonna do …” She closed her eyes and shuddered.
He moved toward the door, taking a wide route around her. At the closet he stopped. “Where am I gonna go?” he said plaintively.
“Oh, God.” she moaned, as though stabbed, her knees buckling so that she was not totally supported by the couch. “Please go,” she said in a whine, sounding so weak, so desperate, that her life seemed to be at stake.
He stood there indecisively. He could soften her if he went back, pleading an apology. He wanted to—walking out into the night with nowhere to go felt forlorn. He took a step toward her. “Marion … ” he began.
“Go!” she said, and then, after a breath. “Please. Just go.”
“Well, when do I …”
“Call me at the office tomorrow. We’ll talk then.”
She’s gonna divorce me, he realized with disbelief. Tomorrow she’ll tell me she thinks we should spend some time apart, but really she knows now she means to be rid of me. He was appalled. Divorce had seemed to be his option, his threat. He wanted to call foul, summon the umpire and have the rules read. He was sure this wasn’t allowed. It infuriated him to contemplate her high-handedness: throwing him out, “we’ll talk tomorrow,” the whole uppity fake sophistication of it.
“Fuck you,” he said with relish, opened the door, stepped into the hall, and turned back to make sure that when he gripped the door handle and slammed it shut, he did a good job of it. “Fuck you,” he said again from the hallway and then pulled the door closed with every ounce of strength he could muster.
In the silence that followed, he waited, expecting to hear something from inside the apartment. What, he didn’t know. Tears? Cries of apology? Derisive laughter?
He heard nothing. The hall hummed with lights, the starts and stops of the elevators, faint sounds of televisions and stereos, but nothing from Marion.
He walked away, rang for the elevator, and considered his choices. Whom could he call? His oldest friend lived in Long Island. His parents were out of the question. His brother was in California, his sister in Vermont. To go to Karl or one of the other of his writing friends meant spreading the story among all their friends. And what was the story? Were they breaking up?
Yes, I’m never going back.
Then why avoid their New York friends? They would have to know eventually.
He rode in the elevator, walked out into the street. It was too late to go to a movie, except at Times Square, where he wouldn’t dare go at that hour. He could walk around for a while and then sneak back in and sleep in his office or on the living-room couch. Unless she bolted the chain. He hadn’t heard her do that. She might later. He could telephone and insist on returning …
My God. Tom Lear is probably gonna call tomorrow morning to talk about the manuscript, he remembered. Humiliation at his situation washed over him. Then he realized he could call Tom first and eliminate that danger of discovery. But where would he sleep? Her behavior was a fucking outrage. And his acceptance of it! Incredible. He just left. He could have planted himself in that chair. What the hell could she have done about it?
An image of her screaming at him answered. She had looked so furious, so insane and out of control, that maybe she would have attacked him, poured gasoline on him while he watched late-night television and burned him to a crisp. And on top of everything, the really fucking outrageous thing, was that if she did incinerate him, she’d probably become a hero, celebrated in a novel by a feminist writer, played on the big screen by Meryl Streep or Jane Fonda. His part would probably go to Dabney Coleman or Richard Benjamin. The villain as jerk, or the jerk as villain.
He couldn’t cheer himself up with this line of thought. It was humiliating. It was painful. It was stupid. And above all, baffling.
He stood out on Third Avenue, looking across its broad length, hating the fucking city. Huge and empty. Small and crowded. Too cold or too hot. Too lonely and without privacy.
When Norman Mailer got a new wife or stabbed an old one, it sounded romantic. People spoke with breathless excitement about famous writers getting bounced by their wives. Fuck it, he thought, heading for a phone, I’ll tell all of them. I’ll get them out of their fucking beds and tell all of them.
David Bergman listened to Patty typing. There were long periods of silence in between her bursts, unlike the steady flow when she had worked on the romance novels. With this writing, she was either quiet or frantic.
He punched another button on the cable-television box and got a scroll that told him the time, the weather, closing stock prices. He punched another, the sports channel, where they were showing a billiards championship.
She didn’t seem to know, but she had made him a character in her book. Sure, he was disguised. Indeed, she had romanticized him physically (just another insult), making him taller, his features handsome. But the heroine’s attitude, the male’s responses—they were portraits of the inner truth of their relationship. In a court of law you could never establish a similarity, but she had captured the real nature of their feelings. It was impressive.
He punched a button for a movie channel and groaned that Gandhi was being shown again.
And insulting. She was a good writer. Oh, she needed to learn some grammar, to be sure, her craft could stand more work, but the essential, the absolutely necessary ingredient of being a good novelist she possessed—her characters lived, they inhabited the reader’s skin, benign parasites mingling with the reader’s own feelings and prejudices until they seemed inseparable. She was much more honest as a writer than she was in real life. The heroine stayed with her lover out of inertia, fear of being loose in a big city, mollifying his ego, stroking his personality as effectively as she pleased his cock.
He punched another button and a tall red-haired woman was on screen saying, “Kneel, slave!” The camera, obviously a hand-held video one, awkwardly pulled back, revealing that she was dressed in a skintight leather outfit that exaggerated the curves of her ample body. At her feet was a pathetic-looking middle-aged man—fat, bald, his skin pasty, his ass hairy.
“Yes,” he said.
She struck him sharply on the back with a riding crop. It left a faint red stripe. “Yes, what?” she said, her tone also sharp, like a whip.
“Yes, mistress,” he said in an abject whisper.
“Good,” she said, tapping him lightly
on the back with the whip. “Lick,” she said in a bored tone.
The camera bounced and jerked as it moved to show the man put his face near her black leather boot and tentatively touch the tip of his tongue to it.
David had an erection. He looked down at his pants, outraged. He had an astonishing hard-on. He guiltily looked across the loft at Patty’s back to make sure she hadn’t noticed. She couldn’t, of course, but his physical response to the screen implied things that horrified him and he dreaded her knowing. He could never convince her it couldn’t mean anything.
The redhead brought the crop down on his back, lower this time, striking part of his buttock. “Faster,” she said.
“Yes, mistress,” he answered.
The sexual excitement David felt amazed him. He knew of course what he was watching. He had never seen anything like it, had only seen such scenes done in brief burlesques in movies, a joke shot to make fun of a macho character. He had read the Marquis de Sade in college. He didn’t remember …
The image jumped. The tall woman was now standing next to a long black leather table. The man was strapped down, facedown. She raised the riding crop. “You want to be fucked up the ass, don’t you, slave?”
“No,” he cried in horror.
She whipped him on the ass twice. She was really hitting him. David realized, flabbergasted, noting the red marks the blows left.
“Yes you do. Tell your mistress you want to be fucked up the ass.”
The image jumped again. The man was now standing, his wrists and ankles bound so that he was spread-eagled. She stood in front of him, her riding crop slowly stroking one side of him. With her other hand she brushed a nipple. He moaned. “Sensitive, aren’t you?” she said, mocking. She took the nipple between her index finger and thumb and squeezed.
“Oh!” he yelped, his body trying to arch away from her.
She flicked her crop against his flank. “Don’t move! How dare you move while I punish you!”
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