“But all I want to know is how I failed you, Gavin.” Coco smiled with sincerity and love. “I just want to know when it all started, so that I’ll know where I was coming from then! Even Dr. Finkelstein says its healthy for me to want to know,” she lied sweetly. “Just tell me the times. I don’t mean the number. Just the dates … approximately.”
“Look,” Gavin said in a hard voice, “I’m not going to talk about it anymore. Now knock it off, because I want to watch this movie. I never saw it before.”
“Listen, you son-of-a-bitch,” Coco hissed. “You’re going to tell me tonight, or I’m going to call David Kaplan tomorrow morning and start the filthiest divorce this city has ever seen. I’ll ruin you, and I’ll ruin your precious little law firm, and I’ll tear your fucking world down on your head.”
There was silence. For a while both of them watched Natalie Wood suffering the persecutions of a small, bigoted town. Then Coco began to consider the public implications of Gavin’s extra-marital lovelife.
“You know, Gavin, the more I think about it, the more I’m positive that everyone in Washington must know about you and her. I must be the laughingstock of the city. Me. The big women’s-lib lady. I’ve got a husband who’s fucking some hippie all over town.”
“Oh, Coco. Nobody knows. I can assure you of that.” In the mystical blue light of the television, Gavin looked a little desperate.
“How do you know nobody knows? How do you know who’s seen you? How do you know she’s not going around town telling everybody?”
“I can assure you that’s not the case.”
Coco’s blood ran hot like fuel heated for a missile launch. “But how can you defend her?” she asked pitifully, walking around the room now, wild with rage and self-pity. “Why should you think she has any integrity? Why shouldn’t she talk? She’s got nothing to lose. She’s in love with you, isn’t she?”
Silence.
“Well? Is she in love with you, or isn’t she?”
Gavin shrugged his bony shoulders in a particularly provocative way that made Coco advance toward the sofa threateningly. “Well, you must be very happy now that you’ve ruined my life.” She decided against throwing her drink in his face, because she was too upset to make a fresh one. “I just know that all my friends know,” she said in a weepy voice. “I’ll bet you made me lose all my friends.”
“Well, what if somebody else does know?” Gavin asked very rationally, “We know plenty of things about other people.”
“That’s not the point, Gavin. It’s awful knowing other people know something about me that they don’t think I know. It makes me feel pathetic. I mean, if they think I don’t know, they must all feel sorry for me. But if I know that they know that I know, then I won’t feel so bad.”
Coco paused thoughtfully as she surveyed her public image. Then she decided that the only way to re-establish equal social power was to tell everyone that she too knew about Gavin’s affair. She lifted her heavily weighted purse off the floor, took out the calendar notebook and opened it to the address/telephone numbers section which was her Dictionary of Permanent Friends.
Just last year Coco had relegated all temporary relationships, medical personnel, Movement offices, neighbors, business establishments, friends of the children, small appliance repair shops and babysitters to the beatup old tablet in the kitchen so she could keep the addresses/telephone numbers section of her calendar notebook uncontaminated. Now it was exclusively used only for those people who remained eternally important to her—either as friends or enemies. These eighty-six names (and constantly changing addresses) constituted the select audience for whom she played out her life and, unspeakably weak as it was, everything which she did was to please, provoke, annoy or challenge this small group of people whose opinions mattered desperately to her and with whom she lived in constant league or competition.
“My reputation is ruined,” she said flatly. “You know second wives are terribly vulnerable just because they’re second choices to start with—that they’re just fucking second-class citizens. If you have a mistress, how do you think I look? Well I’ll tell you how I look, like a fat Jewish mother. Why should I even try to stay thin if you can make me look fat just by screwing somebody else?”
Gavin smiled. “You’re endsville, Coco. You know you’ve never been skinnier.”
“Really, Gavin, being fat is not just physical. What other people think doesn’t matter if a person thinks she’s fat if she feels fat.” Coco tore a sheet out of her clean-paper section, fumbled blindly through her purse until she captured a pen, and began to work on a list of FRIENDS WHO SHOULD HEAR IT FROM ME. “Right here in the middle of Washington, so everybody I know can laugh at me.”
Suddenly it occurred to Coco that Gavin—just like Richard Messinger in Such Good Friends—might very well have been sleeping with a Pre-Lib Friend of Permanent Interest or a Post-Lib Sister rather than a passing fancy type person whose name would only appear in the kitchen tablet. Coco’s hand shook as she deposited that horror in her bank of suspicions.
“Why did you do this to me, Gavin?” she asked solemnly.
“Because you don’t love me.”
A shock of surprise shot upward through her body. She looked over at Gavin, and for the first time felt sorry about the campaign she was waging. She sometimes suspected that her instinct for malice was somewhat overdeveloped and that she was perhaps too hard on her husband, but she could hardly say that she loved him at a time such as this. She was much too hurt to talk of love. And besides, he was Her Enemy. Quietly she sunk back into the green chair to watch the movie.
An hour later, just as Natalie Wood waved goodbye to Warren Beatty, Coco started to feel a little romantic and decided that it was best for Gavin to deposit his sperm in her bank at home rather than carry it around all over town like so much loose change in the bottom of his pocket. Resolutely she unraveled herself from the chair once again and walked over to the couch.
Gavin raised his eyes from the television, visibly startled by Coco leaning over him, and involuntarily lifted one arm above his face in a gesture of self-protection.
“Oh, Gavin,” Coco said achingly, “I wasn’t going to hit you.”
And at that moment, stricken by his defensive motion, Coco silently conceded that her husband was, after all, probably her best friend, even better than Glenda. And though he failed her frequently, it would be nice to ball him right there on the couch in their gently air-cooled TV room, with the test pattern blinking on the telly, because practice had made him perfect in all the secondary sex skills. Ever since they met, Gavin had been supercooperative about sex and did everything he possibly could to please Coco, including never kissing her on the mouth in the morning because she believed her after-sleep breath was a major source of pollution and had decided long ago that the politest thing she could do, if she consented to a pre-breakfast quickie, was press her lips tightly together so no bad smell could get out.
Gavin was also very cooperative about Coco’s breasts. He helped make them seem larger than they were by scooping up all the excess flesh that dripped under her arms when she lay down (Coco was never sure whether what Gavin politely grasped was mammillary tissue or fat, since both felt exactly the same to her), and massaged whatever he grabbed very satisfactorily. And so Coco never forgot to push her finger up Gavin’s rectum when he came, because he had always been so thoughtful about her breasts, and never once—not once in twelve years—mentioned her increasing deficiencies in that area. Indeed, one of the major conspiratorial secrets they shared was the fact that Coco had a large rib cage that thrust her chest far out beyond her waist and her flat (when it wasn’t protruding or constipated or pregnant) stomach. And when men alluded to her big breasts, Gavin never let on, and usually smiled with cooperative pride about the optical illusion produced by her barrel chest.
But besides his cooperativeness about bad breath and boobs, Gavin was a great and artistic crotch man. And here again he was in secret league w
ith Coco, because, embarrassingly enough (indeed, she never admitted it even during the most passionately intimate Columbia Road Local Consciousness Raising Club sessions), Coco was and always would be a vaginal-orgasm person. Now that the entire American Left had swallowed the there-is-no-vaginal-orgasm propaganda and diplomatically refused to recognize any but the clitoral kind, Coco felt politically discredited and sexually counterrevolutionary. Because there was no doubt that she got her orgasms deep within the hallowed halls of her vagina—wonderful multiple vaginal orgasms, optimally six in a row. And though Coco underwent vigorous, rigorous self-criticism, there was no arguing her way out of those thunderous contractions deep within her, no matter how unfashionable they had become.
Indeed, next to having Jessica throw temper tantrums, nothing irritated Coco more than someone fingering her clitoris, which she considered totally superfluous and as unnecessary as the shadowy moustache above her upper lip. Actually her clitoris gave Coco the same impatient feeling as acne did, and made her want to ask God: Did you have to add a clit to confuse the tissue? Did you have to make adolescents have their acne on their faces? Why couldn’t they break out privately—on the upper-left thigh or around the ankles—instead of getting those huge sad splotches and blotches on the face?
So Gavin had politely and sweetly bypassed that well-acclaimed clit, and was digging marvelously away with several (she had, after all, had four kicking, squalling babies) fingers inside of her. Coco had once read a remarkable article in the Washington Post about a man standing trial for pulling out a woman’s womb, doing just what Gavin was doing right now, although if Coco remembered correctly, the newspaper had called it mutual masturbation. The man, luckily got a suspended sentence because the judge said it was in the heat of passion. And right now, Coco could clearly understand such a Gaelic ruling, because right then Gavin was beating time and batting away at the marvelous walls of the Hollow Tunnel that ran right up the center of her. And it really felt terrific.
And that was how Coco came, or at least one of the two possible ways. Because while those fingers were thumping madly, she simply began tripping to some upbeat feeling that moved ponderously along until the pleasure burst out into rather glorious contractions. 1-2-3-4-5-6-getting-weaker-7-oh-8-ah-yes.
And next it was Gavin’s turn, and though sometimes he went in for some grotesque gymnastics—junior-high-school positions that made Coco feel positively ridiculous with one ankle hooked over the top of the dresser while she concentrated (hurry up, please) on not falling (hurry up, please, it must be time)—tonight Gavin went missionary instead of native and simply plunked down flat on top of her, probably because the couch was rather narrow.
And that was when Coco got bored. Because even though Gavin was as good a screw as anyone else she knew, married intercourse was terribly repetitious once you got the swing of it—which, of course, helped to explain the Great Clit Hit of the 1970’s. Because what every woman knew was that balling guys with sizes Sm., Med., Med. L., or even L., when you were married to it, was quite dull, regardless of the position. And since the celestial manufacturer offered no warranty, no little postcard to mail back, postage guaranteed, when the crazy, mixed-up initial passion was over and routine domestic screwing could no longer trigger the contraction mechanism inside the vagina that worked like the delicate timer in the dishwasher that caused the soap dispenser to open and release the Cascade automatic detergent—a wife was stuck. But at least with a dishwasher—if you had a Sears Roebuck repair-insurance contract—you had a chance, while once you were legally married, the family penis was yours to keep whether or not it satisfied you.
So Gavin began thrashing around, and Coco assumed that it felt good to him, since he got a happy look on his face. But she couldn’t feel worked up about what was going on, and that was what originally caused the birth of her Perfect Lover, who, of course, had an X-L. that just grew and grew so that it could hardly get in, and Coco could just lie flat on her back and explode internally without any physical effort; because the combination of illegitimacy and an X-L. was endsville.…
six
On the third Sunday of June Coco woke up unusually early, while the house was still silent, and lay in bed flooded with a sense of aimlessness. Sundays always made Coco feel the same as when she put a carbon paper in backward, typed a clean page of copy, and then discovered that the duplicate was blank. Lately, all her Sundays had felt like the shakingly empty second sheet of a weekend. Inevitably her first thought was that somewhere, soon, Mrs. Marshall in her pink-and-rose-print silk dress would be lifting her voice in praise of the glory of God in the Baptist storefront church where she sang in the choir. That vision triggered both metaphysical and domestic anxieties.
Invariably, Coco spoiled Sundays by trying to overachieve because she had consolidated all her maternal guilt into weekends and had become obsessive about producing happy adventures for the entire family all day long. Instead of simply deciding to be patient and interested, she would arrange complicated excursions to the zoo, the Phillips Art Gallery, or the lobby exhibit at the National Geographic Building, followed by ice cream at Griffith’s out in Silver Spring or hamburgers at the junior Hot Shoppe in Georgetown, where the balloon man also sold nickel packs of marijuana.
These tedious Sunday odysseys were always such emotional or physical disasters that this morning Coco didn’t know if she had enough strength to travel at all. Feeling depressed, she put on her bathrobe and walked into the boys’ bedroom. It was almost eight o’clock but they were still sleeping. Coco tucked Josh’s blanket back on top of him, recovered the wandering mate of one blue tennis shoe, gently lifted Mike’s soiled undershorts off the floor, unhitched Nicky’s sunsuit from the railing of his top-deck bedpost to throw in the hamper, retrieved Josh’s pacifier from its jail between the mattress and the bars of his crib, and then stepped down, barefoot, on a metal Hot Wheels car near the door to Jessica’s room. Too wounded to muffle her cry of pain, Coco looked up expectantly, only to discover that her scream hadn’t disturbed the boys and that they were so spiteful they simply wouldn’t wake up when she needed to love them.
So Coco ran downstairs for the morning papers and carried them back up to her bed. Quickly she skimmed off the cream of the news and then fished out the prize. For twelve years Coco had been studying the Post’s book review section as if it were a racing form to check out long shots, dark horses, fast starters and late arrivals. But the reviews (good or bad) of any new woman novelist sent Coco into a frenzy because, with growing frequency, the lead sentence—used simply as a self-starter by some semi-articulate male assistant professor of American Lit. at George Washington University—would contain one of Coco Burman’s favorite insights.
Sooner or later all of Coco’s best ideas jumped out at her from the book review page, showing the growing popularity of her own privately copyrighted experiences. Her personal past was being plagarized and published (as major plots, or even worse, minor episodes) in other women’s novels. By now almost all the meaningful events of Coco’s life had been used up by much younger women in well-edited novels neatly welded together by the insertion of an interuterine coil, an abortion in Mexico, a nasty divorce or a Tom Wolfish title—copping the corner of the market Coco coveted. All across America beautiful young blondes, like Cynthia Buchanan, were stealing Coco’s unique perceptions plus her prospective symbols, settings and even NAMES OF CHARS. And when, late at night, she saw her rival sisters doing guest spots on the Dick Cavett show—despite her commitment to the women’s movement—she would feel sibling, rather than sisterly, feelings in her isometrically-exercised breasts.
But today, luckily, the book review dealt with an ecology study, so Coco politely reconstructed the Post for Gavin. Now the Sunday feeling of the morning was lodged in her throat like an irretrievable bit of apple peel or peanut skin. She turned over so her weight shifted the mattress; Gavin moaned slightly, and Coco, seizing the opportunity to pretend she thought he was awake, began talking loudly.
“You know, Gavin, it’s really your fault that I never wrote my novel. You always sabotaged it.”
“Oh, sure,” Gavin grumbled, too groggy to know how early it was. “And it’s my fault if it snows in the winter.”
“You never think you do anything wrong, do you, Gavin?” Coco asked. Now she felt vindicated for waking him up, because she realized he had never once looked out into the porch where she had been spending her days trying to track down a major theme.
“How the hell is it my fault if you don’t do something?” Gavin asked, opening his eyes wider. “I mean, you have to try to do something. Things don’t just happen by themselves.” And suddenly, without making any romantic overtures, Gavin sat up, dropped the long anchors of his legs overboard, and began eyeing the piles of discarded clothes on the floor near his side of the bed. Since Coco was quite compulsive about keeping used clothing in His and Hers piles, Gavin quickly spotted a prospect, projected the top length of his body upward, sprang into a pair of blue jeans, and prepared to run downstairs to hide.
Coco felt the hammer of anger. “You know, Ann was really the smart one,” she began slowly. “I felt like such a hot shit getting you away from her, but she was really the winner. She took off like a bat out of hell and made a name for herself the minute you sprang her loose.”
“Shut up, Coco.”
“So tell me, Gavin. Does your new girlfriend have a nice body? Better than mine?”
“I told you that I’m not going to talk about that anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to, and I don’t have to.” He was edging toward the door.
“Dr. Finkelstein says if you provoke me by continuing not to be honest, I might go off my rocker. I’m probably going crazy bit by bit every day anyway, but if you keep on baiting me, I’m really going to crack.”
Loose Ends Page 7
