He could disappear completely. One of those mysteries that haunt American cities. Perhaps, like a character in a Twilight Zone episode, he had found the answer to all the missing persons in the world, only to reject the answer as paranoia and then at the fadeout become one himself. A victim of some diabolical group picking off those who are vulnerable to perversion.
He got such a clear image of being chopped to bits by gruff hooded men, his money stuffed away, his clothes and identification burned. How could he be traced? Naturally they would assume he’d make every effort to get there unobserved and alone, with no record of the appointment or location left behind.
But, ultimately, it couldn’t be. She had ads on television, for God’s sake. If her clients were all being murdered, someone would put it together. Anyway, this was big money. Someone, probably the Mafia, was making a ton off the pathetic obsessions of people like himself. Why kill the golden goose? No, the truth, like always, was probably much duller than he imagined. Just a service, provided gruffly and sloppily, like all the other services to the middle class in New York.
But that was what the character in the Twilight Zone episode would tell himself, and then walk in confidently, a lamb to the slaughter.
He looked at the clock. Nine-forty. He’d have to leave in fifty minutes to be sure that he’d be at the phone booth on time. Why a phone booth? Why didn’t she give him the address right away? Probably some screening procedure. But if you were going to murder people and wanted to reduce the chance they’d write down the address somewhere, somewhere that the police … He’d have to cut this out. It was stupid. Paralyzing. An excuse to avoid what he knew, sooner or later, he would inevitably do: go and find out if these fantasies were something he wanted to be real.
He stood up. His feet almost gave out from weakness. “I can’t do it,” he said to the empty loft, a bent figure alongside the straight ridged columns, aloof with dignity. “I can’t do it,” he pleaded.
Fred walked into his apartment, his old apartment, the one he had lived in with Marion for years, but hadn’t seen for over seven months. “This is weird,” he said to her.
She laughed. Her mood was light, girlish. She seemed tipsy to him, not because they had had champagne at dinner, but generally in a state of amusement, giggles bubbling throughout her, sparkling in her eyes, lifting her shoulders, opening her heart. He kept having flashes of worry that this was some sort of practical joke. In the couples therapy everything that she said had been bitter—complaints about him, his treatment of her, and then of the world in general. More than ever Fred had realized that her gloomy existence with him, the frowns, the rushing off to bed to read alone, the sudden fits of irritation about trivialities, had all been little eruptions of a buried, boiling volcano of disgust, hatred, and resentment.
Months ago he had given up on the marriage. And even begun dating, not simply to get laid, but with a view toward the future. But the therapy had made it hard for him to see new women, he thought. Hearing the endless list of Marion’s fault-finding left with him a dim view of his own attractions. He almost felt at times that he should warn women that he was, apparently, a colossal bore to live with. Finding himself convinced that Marion’s criticisms were valid, he became enraged. Within the last few sessions he had lashed back, fighting for himself, advocating his good qualities with a passion and conviction he never guessed were in him. Then the doctor said they should see him individually and see each other socially if they wanted.
They had had two dates, quick things, going to a movie, out to dinner, chatting about their lives superficially—the therapy was always about the past, about ugly feelings, and so they had a lot to catch up on. Tonight had been the same at first, but then she began to flirt with him, getting high on the champagne (she had suggested they order it), and now, asking him back to the apartment. For Marion such behavior was wild, wanton. He liked her for this girlish happiness, remembered dimly that in college she was like that, but still he wasn’t comfortable with it either. She simply wasn’t the woman he had lived with for eight years, and that made him wary.
She settled on the couch, kicking her shoes off and putting her feet beneath her, her oval face dreamy. “Your book was accepted.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t know how to comport himself, Should he sit on the couch and begin necking (this sense that he was in a virgin sexual circumstance with Marion was really weird, silly, and embarrassing), or sit in one of the armchairs, more formal, like a meeting of superpowers?
“How come you didn’t tell me?”
He grunted. “Come on, you said over and over in the therapy that all I did was talk about my work constantly. As long as I live, I’m never telling you another thing about what I do.” He sat down in an armchair.
She pouted. She made a big show of it, but it was real. “Oh, that’s terrible. You don’t mean that.”
Fred looked down. She was trying hard. He wasn’t. He felt ashamed of himself. “No. I’m sorry. They accepted it about a month ago. Who told you?”
“I heard from somebody who knows Bob Holder that he’s wild about it. Getting everybody in the house to read it, talking to book-club people—”
“Really?” Fred said, looking up, surprised. He had assumed for so long that Holder’s talk was merely bluster that this came as a pleasant surprise.
“Yeah. Sounds like it’s gonna be a big book.”
“No,” Fred answered. “He hypes everything. You told me that yourself.”
“Did I?” she said, looking at the ceiling in wonderment.
“Oh yeah. Told me I was a fool to believe him.”
“Can’t believe I said that.”
“You did—”
“No, no,” she said, laughing at him. “I mean, what a bitch I was. I believe you. Just what an incredibly bitchy thing to say. Holder hypes books, but when he does, they sell.”
Fred smiled at her. She was great—he loved her like this. “I want to go to bed with you,” he said.
“Great,” she answered. And smiled, sitting there like a cheerful doll eager to be played with but helpless to initiate anything. “I thought maybe you’d found somebody else.”
“What?” Fred asked, puzzled.
“You never said whether you were dating anybody,” she said, shyly now, lowering her eyes, her smile fading.
“Well …” he huffed, shifting uncomfortably. He didn’t want to admit that his sex life had been at best dull, at worst dormant, but on the other hand, he didn’t want to enrage her with a portrait of promiscuity. “I have gone out.”
“With anybody serious?” she asked, suddenly hoarse.
He sighed. He shook his head. “I been doing the book. It took everything I had. It was a bitch. Marion. I went out a couple times, but …” He trailed off.
She nodded. Not triumphantly, not smugly, not with confirmation. She nodded in acceptance of how hard, how tediously grim their lives had been. He felt, too, that the stupidity of their marriage, its begrudgement of love, might have been dreary and disgusting … but it was the only real content in their lives.
Tony lay in bed. The day was bright. And loud. Nearby a brownstone was being gutted. He heard its insides landing in a dumpster. He looked at the clock. Noon. He still didn’t want to start the day and it was half over. Betty usually made coffee before leaving for work. He should get up and heat it. The Times would be in there, the business section untouched, still ironed flat by neglect. But the C section with its reviews (not of his plays) and its Broadway column, full of plans for future work (none of it his) and gossip about those now working (none of it about him), would be on the kitchen table, wrinkled, open to the last article she had read. All of them read it, even the fucking stockbrokers who read the business section. Less than ten percent of New Yorkers actually went to the theater, but by God every one of them knew who was hot and who was not on Broadway—because of the accursed, the horrible, the infuriating goddamn cultural pages of the Times. It was better to do without coffee.
A month had passed since he threw his fit at the artistic director of the Uptown Theater. He hadn’t returned Hilary’s calls. He had skipped the regular readings since then as well as the meetings of the Playwrights’ Lab. Indeed, he had done nothing other than attend a few publishing cocktail parties for Betty’s sake. He had spoken to a friend from college about seeing a shrink, frightened by his exhibition of rage in the restaurant, but hadn’t called the names suggested.
He sat up in bed and thought about Proust. He felt he understood his work habits today—the bedroom was cozy, protected. Still can’t read him, he thought, and laughed. The sound felt lonely in the empty apartment. Outside they worked on, the whole city, memorizing the New York Times, working, and not knowing his name.
Tony picked up the phone and dialed. He had to think for a moment about the number—disuse had made what was once automatic unfamiliar. It rang only once before she answered, brightly, energetically:
“Hello!”
“Hello,” he said. And there was silence, a shocked silence.
Then, tentatively, incredulously, Lois asked, “Tony?”
“Yep,” he said. “How are you?”
“Fine,” she said, sounding uneasy, as though she were constrained by the presence of someone. Could that be? “I’m fine. I’m really surprised to hear from you.”
“Why? Am I supposed to be dead or something?”
“No,” she said in good humor. “I thought you …” Again the hesitation.
“Thought I was out of your life?”
“Yeah,” she admitted, and laughed quickly. “So what’s new?”
“What’s new! What kind of question is that? I expected rage or tears of happiness or something! What’s new indeed!”
She was laughing while he spoke. “Well, I’m sorry, I can’t provide any of those things. They happened long ago.”
“What long ago? A few months.”
Her voice was gentle, solemn. “It’s been seven months at least, Tony.”
“I didn’t realize it was like a visa. What happened? I didn’t renew it in time and now it’s canceled?”
“Sort of,” she said. “Listen. I really can’t talk now. Can I call you back in an hour? Will you be home?”
“Yeah.” She’s got somebody there, he realized, shocked. It had never occurred to him that she wouldn’t remain frozen, unchanged, awaiting his defrosting presence, the warm light of her life.
“Talk to you soon.”
Who the hell was it? Who was she fucking? Some TV writer? A producer? Maybe she was fucking a TV star. Maybe she was a lesbian. He was furious. He got out of bed and turned on the shower in a rage. He stepped in without checking the temperature and scalded himself, jumping away and hurting his back against the towel rack.
“I don’t even want to take a goddamn shower!” he yelled at himself, and stood there panting, aching, his skin red, half of his head wet. After a moment the fury passed, and he washed himself quickly, shaving and dressing in a rush, as though late for an appointment.
Later he got to the kitchen. He picked up the New York Times and threw it across the room. It lay on the floor humpbacked, like a broken umbrella. He heated the coffee and sat down to drink it, staring at the kitchen phone, waiting for it to ring, waiting, as he had his whole life, for an explanation of why he had lost something he wanted.
Gelb lay between her legs, his head moving up and down while he worked his mouth over her clitoris. The warmth spread from there, radiating into her belly, down her thighs, her breasts feeling the heat wave over her like a rising tide. She felt gentle on the sea of sensation, floating there blissfully, basking in the sun of its relaxation. She could rest in the midst of its excitement forever, she felt, without the surf picking her up to crash on the shore.
She glanced down at him. His cold eyes were staring at her from under his eyebrows while he licked, checking on her progress. He was so achievement-oriented that he never seemed to relax, to let any experience simply be itself, a man forever tugging at the sleeves, straightening the tie, tucking in the shirt of life; always dressing for a job interview, desperate to make a good impression, or at least an impression. A-for-effort Gelb, she thought, and he began to move his tongue rapidly sideways, pushing her knob one way, then the other, and suddenly she was riding a wave, cresting up in the air, the sky spinning, her arms reaching for an anchor to hug. …
When she was done, he moved up to her navel and kissed it, smiling like a prankster. “Good, huh?” he asked.
“Yep,” she answered. “We’re getting better.”
“Oh, you’re so full of shit. I got you and you know it.”
“Oh, shut up.” She sighed. “What am I going to do about David?”
“Leave him,” he said, and put a hand around a breast, squeezing it, staring at the effect on her nipple.
“I just pack and say ’bye?”
“Yeah!”
“Is that how you’re going to do it with Elaine?”
Gelb looked at her angrily. “I have kids!” he claimed.
“Oh, please. You don’t give a shit about your kids.”
He sat up, staring furiously. She smiled sweetly. He frowned at his lack of effect. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes I do. You’ve got a great life. You’re the most important man in your held, your wife is beautiful and she loves you—”
“Bull—”
“—she loves you, your kids adore you, and you have a beautiful mistress who writes brilliantly. You don’t care what you feel about people, you only care what they feel about you, and you’re the center of everyone’s attention, which is the closest you can come to happiness.”
“You didn’t say you love me.”
“I don’t. I’m attracted to you. I like power-hungry greedy bastards like you. David’s just like you—only younger and not as mean.”
“You like talking tough, don’t you? But you’re whistling in the dark. You’re conventional. You want the three kids and the station wagon—”
“And a big fluffy dog to slobber on the upholstery.”
“Right,” Gelb said, smirking. This kind of exchange had become a game with them. She liked it, the saying of horribly selfish unsayable things. The abandon of it was thrilling, like their sex, heightened by the constant knowledge of the taboos they were breaking.
“So what I want to know,” Patty said, “is when you dump me? When does a mistress get too old? Forty?”
“Thirty-five,” Gelb said matter-of-factly.
“You mean it, don’t you?” Patty said aloud as it occurred to her. “You’re really not kidding.”
“Of course I’m kidding, love,” he said tenderly, but he moved off the bed toward the dresser, fumbling in a pocket for cigarettes. “You’re the one who doesn’t love me, remember? You’re going to bed with me so your book’ll do well.” Gelb puffed furiously on the cigarette once, glanced at his wristwatch stretched out on the dresser like a sun-bather, and said, reaching for his pants, “I’ve gotta get back to the office.”
She stayed in bed until long after he was gone. She stared down at her naked body. Small, white, young. There was some tiring in the skin, the beginnings of looseness—but she was beautiful. She looked too small, however, her belly button innocent and lonely, hovering quizzically above the center of all the fuss—asking her unanswerable questions about all the grief of love and men.
David looked them in their eyes, searching for a hint that they knew. He paced up and down the broad, crowded, messy street, his legs so weak from dreadful anticipation that he had to stop every twenty paces or so and lean against a building or sit on a stoop. He had arrived on the corner of Eighth and Twenty-third fifteen minutes
early, located the phone booths she mentioned, and now watched them anxiously, terrified to make the final call and equally worried that somehow, impossibly, all the phones would be busy at the appointed hour and stay so for too long. In fact, they were rarely in use so far, but he kept his eyes on them, vowing to take possession of one if he saw a rush to use them.
In between his starts and stops he looked up at the buildings, many of them lofts or brownstones, their shades drawn, wondering in which one she was located. He stared at the blank, dirty windows, the traffic groaning and roaring beside him, and thought: No one would hear the screams. They were anonymous, these buildings, all the entrances desolate, monitored by intercoms, no doormen, no happy tenants with busy comings and goings. Maybe they were all whorehouses, each room occupied by sex: Perverts Row.
He walked himself toward the phone booths, grabbing on to the parking meters for support. He had prayed that the booth next to his would be empty, but the moment after he had situated himself, quarter ready to put in, a man got into the one next to him, able to overhear. But that was silly: his end of the conversation wasn’t worth eavesdropping on. “Do it,” he said to himself, and dialed. It rang three, four times, and he began to relax. She wasn’t there, he wouldn’t have to go through—
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