Sylvia was visibly excited by the situation although oblivious of its subtleties. She had started out seated on the couch, but after several drinks, heady from the rarefied atmosphere produced by a nationally known novelist exchanging antiestablishment pronouncements with her very own lawyer, she slipped down onto the floor and deposited hunks of her body across the rug as well as up the side of the couch. The skirt of her dress was stretched so tight that when she bent her knees the dark foliage of her crotch appeared, and each time she turned to flick her cigarette toward the ashtray on her left, her enormous breasts swung, independent of each other, from side to side. Occasionally she stuck two or three fingers into her glass to fish out a lime slice to suck while asking Gavin Meet the Press type questions about The Law, smiling promiscuously toward Suede, and ignoring anything Coco said.
“Would you like another drink?” Gavin asked when he passed near Coco’s chair.
And because the puzzling phenomenon of Sylvia—apparently hiding some great sexual magnet beneath the pillowy pads of her hips and some intellectual bonanza behind the muslin-colored drapes of her hair—affected Coco adversely, she nodded her head. The giggling sound of gin rushing out of the bottle into her glass pleased her so much that when Gavin left the ice tray etching its shape into the coffee table, she didn’t complain. As soon as he recommenced his odyssey around the room, she put the ice cubes in the bucket, and then, after Suede made a round-trip visit to the toilet, she sat down on the rug beside his chair and commenced a flashy flirtation with him to reestablish her own sexual and domestic territory. Her fatigue was frosted with a thick layer of alcohol and jealousy.
“So what’s up with you and Ms. Brydan,” she asked in an accusative, suggestive, stagy whisper.
“My dick,” Suede answered, squinting through the smoke of his cigarette.
“Terrific,” Coco countered, feeling that her foreign policy was in total disarray. “You know, I’m counting on you to put me in touch with a good publisher in the fall.” She smiled, and as an accompaniment to her request, expanded her chest isometrically by blowing out imaginary candles on an invisible birthday cake.
Suede seemed to appreciate Coco’s physical gesture more than her assumption of his literary assistance. He stamped out the butt of his cigarette, pushed a fresh one out of the package, struck a match, crunched up his blue eyes to avoid the first blast of smoke, and slashed a very white smile across his tanned face. “What are you thinking about?” he asked. “A hardback or paperback?”
“Well, actually”—Coco smiled—“I’d like it printed on those little folders they sell for cleaning eyeglasses and distributed by the company that hangs up those little tissue tablets in department-store fitting rooms.”
Suede looked at her quizzically.
“You know … they have those little tablets of papers that ladies are supposed to put over their mouths so they won’t make lipstick smears when they try on dresses.”
Suede chuckled in tribute to her whimsy but then straightened his mouth into a line of impatience. “Well, it better not be anymore of that clit-lit stuff. One more prom-queen book, and I’m going to barf.”
Coco considered Suede’s attack on the women writers she worshiped sacrilegious, but her need for an ally made her traitorous, and so she decided to mobilize Suede with an attack on Sylvia’s feminist fanaticism. “Yes, that’s gotten a little out of hand, hasn’t it?” she agreed, selling out her sisterhood.
But Suede looked at her suspiciously. “Didn’t Gavin say that you were into all that shit too?” He blew a fascinating stream of smoke out from between clenched lips that held his cigarette like an erotic erection. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some of your … other troubles”—he blinked euphemistically—“were a result of all that crap too.” He looked over toward Sylvia, who was talking softly to Gavin across the room. “It brings out the worst in women. Not to mention books.”
That was a bit heavy for Coco. Suede going gaga over Sylvia, while putting down the women’s-liberation movement seemed inequitable to Coco. But since, at the moment, her personal peril was paramount, she caught her hair at the nape of her neck, twisted it around into a Mary McCarthy-type bun. And said solemnly, “Well, let’s just say my novel deals with realities.”
Generously Suede decided to let that pass. He inspected Coco’s body admiringly several times, taking a third tour of her legs as a show of forgiveness, bent over, lowered his voice, and said, “You know, nobody else ever got it up for me as fast as you did.” Then he grinned and raised his voice. “Hey … I’ve got a whole lid of grass in my room. How about turning on?”
Sylvia rose to her knees. “Wow! Why did you hold out so long? I thought none of you smoked or something.” Her voice moved like a caress across the room.
“Well, you can’t smoke pot in here,” Gavin said. “It gives me hay fever.”
Sylvia laughed disbelievingly.
“No. It’s true,” Coco said. “He gets hay fever and asthma from both kinds of grass. But we can go sit outside on the back porch.”
She looked toward Gavin anxiously, but he seemed relieved as he picked up a book before sprawling out on the living-room couch. So Coco led Sylvia and Suede out to her porch, which looked very different and strange at night. She flicked on the yellow anti-bug bulb on the brick house wall, watched Sylvia confiscate the chaise, and then sat down on the floor. The sky was very dark, and the moon kept swimming in and out of the clouds. Suede rolled several joints and soon the strong sweet smell of marijuana lilted through the porch. They all took long burning gulps of smoke into their lungs. When the cigarettes finally grew pinched and empty, Suede gathered the butts together, flicked off the light, and stretched out flat near Coco, with his head propped against the wall close to hers.
Right away Sylvia began to move around restlessly on the chaise, and finally she too got down on the floor on the other side of Suede. Coco saw a flash of Sylvia’s fleshy buttocks and then watched one of Suede’s hands reach out to casually collect a little of the stray fat in his fingers. He seemed totally engrossed by the bright promise of burying himself in the rolling prairies of her flesh.
Why doesn’t anyone want me like that? Coco thought, beginning to feel gusts of suspension engulf her.
“How you doing, babes?” Suede asked, trying to include Coco in their honeymoon trip. But his good intentions seemed scorched by the hot night and the sexual transactions and negotiations going on between him and Sylvia. Crammed against the wall with the lower half of Sylvia’s inert body imprisoning his legs, he was helpless.
A filmed preview of Suede and Sylvia making love filtered through Coco’s mind. Their physical desire—the uninvited friend of her uninvited guests—was a reminder and reproach to Coco. She closed her eyes and felt her legs become weightless appendages to her body, immutably there, but somehow severed and disconnected.
“I’m getting high,” she said aloud, tortured by the nearness of a passion that excluded and eluded her.
“Wow. It’s nice out here,” Sylvia said. She was lounging even more impudently beside Suede now, with her legs spread apart, like fat arrows pointing at the target, and Suede’s large presumptuous hand was slipping toward the bull’s-eye. “That’s good dope.”
“Aren’t you thirsty?” Coco exhaled the funny, non-meaning words and felt a warm liquid sensation flood through the lower part of her body. She wondered if her post-lib libido was geared toward orgiastic orgasms, and involuntarily she shuddered as several pleasant waves of desire rippled through her. She felt fanciful and turned on because she lay near a man who had once rummaged around inside her.
“What did you say?” Coco mumbled in response to no one, her mouth dry and her head heavy.
“Huh?”
From a great billowy distance, through blankets and pillows of space, noisy memories were clamoring. Then the sound came closer, until it seemed to have occurred much earlier. Coco stretched out flatter on the floor and suddenly realized Suede had tucked his fr
ee hand into the soft pocket between her thighs and was scratching against the silk crotch of her panties. Reason and disbelief stirred within her. It was impossible that he was fingering both Coco and Sylvia at the same time, digging in both of them, under the cover of darkness. Still, Coco’s lower body began to feel damp and loose, as if all her insides were listing downward. A block of real time intruded upon her confusion. Flooded with uncertainty as to what was happening, Coco moved, straightened the long skirt that had somehow crawled up her body, and rose to her feet.
“Hey, where you going?” Suede asked hoarsely.
Coco gripped the screen-door knob, feeling sad and separate.
“Coco.” Gavin was calling to her from the third floor.
She ran through the guest room and down the hallway to the stairs. “What?” she called weakly.
“I think the baby wants a bottle.”
“Just put in his pacifier.” She could hardly speak. She started slowly up the stairs, and after a long while reached her bedroom. Then she lay down on the bed, closed her eyes, and waited for another billow of time to enfold her.
“I think the baby’s getting sick,” Gavin said, coming into the bedroom. He planted himself near Coco, looming upward like a palm tree with his little coconut head waving up on top.
Coco tried to anchor her runaway thoughts to Gavin’s voice. His practicality offered to reestablish reality for her, and since he wasn’t a part of the sexual flurries and storms that had raged through the porch, he was uncontaminated and safe.
“I hope not,” Coco said after a long silence.
“I think he’s got a stomachache.”
Flat on her back, she looked up high at her husband. “I’ve got a stomachache in my heart,” she whispered.
Gavin looked down at her quizzically from the isolating height of his own preoccupations. Coco watched his small, neat features reshape themselves into a speculative expression.
She struggled for self-control. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she said, brinking on tears. “Everything seems wrong.”
Gavin’s narrow forehead corrugated into a frown.
“Oh, I know you’re tired of hearing me complain all the time.” Coco felt swollen with discontent.
Gavin bent the length of his body in half and sat down beside her. He leaned over and placed an outstretched arm on each side of her body. “Look, honey, I know you’re upset. Things have been rough for a while.”
Coco raised herself a little so that she could nestle her head into the hollow between Gavin’s neck and shoulder, trying to extract a percentage of him.
“But you think all my problems and troubles are inconsequential—next to what you think about,” Coco said, feeling spatially dislocated.
“That’s not true,” Gavin answered. But his words came out too quickly, like “that’s all right” when the kids broke a glass—impatience and insincerity humming behind the disclaimer.
“You just don’t understand what it’s like for me,” Coco continued. “I’m not like you. I’m different. Men and women are different. I can’t think about the world when I’m hurting inside. It’s not that I don’t care about Vietnam. Jesus. I do. But when I feel so miserable, I can’t think about faraway things. It’s like blotting out a building by holding up just one finger in front of your eyes. My problems are blocking out the rest of the world for me. No wonder Jane Austen never mentioned the French Revolution.”
Gavin’s steadfast kindness consisted of silence. He began stroking the top of her head with soft, thoughtless fingers.
Coco felt weak with bewilderment. “I know what you think. You think that I’m silly and selfish. But all you ever do is evaporate before I can get to use any of you. And it was that way even before you fell in love with your girlfriend. Don’t you think I feel bad enough without Suede seeing how things are around here and without that freaky feminist watching us fall apart?”
“Who cares about that?” Gavin shrugged.
Coco’s high was falling. “Well, if you don’t care about anything that matters to me, you should get the hell out of my life.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Gavin began.
“Fuck you,” Coco groaned.
He moved away with a wrenching motion that shattered her.
“Why don’t you go to sleep?” he said angrily. “I’m going downstairs.”
Coco watched him turn his back on her, retreating into his own urgent agenda of responsibilities and purpose.
“Please don’t go,” Coco said suddenly, pathetically. She rolled across the tangled sheets of the messy bed—a poetic graphic symbol for her own disorganization—watched her husband stop, flick off the overhead light, and return to lie down beside her. Complacently he pulled her toward him, placed his hand inside the top of her dress, and captured one of her breasts.
Disgust flooded through Coco’s body while her flesh tightened involuntarily under Gavin’s probing fingers. He made the curve of his palm a proper size to fit her breast into the cup of his fingers. Then he examined the nipple until it grew hard and springy. Coco thought she might survive the encounter if she activated one of her pre-fab pre-lib fantasies, but she was too upset.
“Gavin,” she said determinedly, “I want to talk.” Her body was rigid with rejection, and a familiar objectless rage had begun to assert itself within her.
“What do you want to talk for?” He rolled closer to kiss her, and the pressure of his lips made her feel seasick and queasy.
“What do you think of that girl? Sylvia. Suede really seems to like her, doesn’t he?”
“Ssssh.”
She felt the moist warmth of his sound upon her skin and her throat felt prickly. “Please, Gavin, answer me.”
“What do you want to know?” he mumbled.
“Shit.” She turned her head so that the side of her face touched a rough exposure of uncovered mattress. Her arm was stretched out along the wall. At the end her hand held a cup of darkness.
“I have to talk,” she said finally. “I feel sort of nervous.”
“What are you nervous about?”
She felt his body flatten against her own. “I don’t know. It’s probably because they came over.”
“Relax, Coco. Quit thinking for a little while and take a vacation.”
“Listen,” she said wildly, desperate to divert him, without knowing what to say or how to say it.
Gavin didn’t answer. He began to caress her stomach, mechanically extending each stroke downward. His breathing became louder as his rummagings quickened. He began to roll her skirt upward and push her panties down the length of her legs.
“Please just tell me what you think of her? Isn’t she a nut? Far-out?”
“Oh, she’s all right,” Gavin mumbled.
“Oh, it’s one of those days, huh?” Coco asked flatly. “It’s one of those days when everybody’s okay by you. Even Hitler.”
“Look, I don’t want to fight,” Gavin said.
“Well, how do you think I feel,” Coco asked, “with them screwing around on my porch right now, right here in my own house?”
“Look. What do you care? Don’t pay attention.”
Coco escaped from Gavin’s arm. Gratitude for his chatting with her faded with his lack of agreement about Sylvia. “You know, there’s certainly not much point in talking to each other anymore if you’re in one of your Christian moods of understanding. No matter what anybody says or does, you’ll find a good reason to understand their motives. But I’ll tell you one thing. I think that Sylvia is crazy.”
“Ssssh. Don’t talk so loud.”
“I can assure you that they’re not listening to us.”
Gavin took Coco’s hand and placed it upon himself, silently reproaching her for lack of interest.
Coco’s body felt nearsighted, unable to focus upon the instructions implicit in Gavin’s movements. She remembered how thin and hunched he had looked walking toward the door and she sensed a private brand of aesthetic
rebellion move through her. Then she felt him crawl upon her, covering her limbs with his own. Internally she collapsed in exasperation. Now his touch felt like the assaults of a relentless mosquito that she couldn’t evade or escape in the darkness. Her body became only an extension of her anger.
And then suddenly Gavin rolled away from her toward his own side of the bed.
Totally discredited, Coco’s eyes filled with tears at the unexpected demise of his desire and she began to cry.
He put his arm beneath her neck. “Now, what the hell’s the matter?” he asked, but disinterest was printed upon each word. “You know, fighting all the time gets to be one hell of a bore.”
“Oh, it’s not that you don’t like fighting, Gavin, it’s that you don’t like the idea of you fighting.”
Gavin locked his arms around her again. “Can you tell me when the hell I ever said I was a better son-of-a-bitch than anyone else? What’s started you off on that kick?”
“Oh, God. You think you’re Jesus Christ, that’s all.” Coco pulled away and rolled over to stuff her face in the pillow. Her words were muffled messages sent out into the darkness. “You spend every minute of your life acting good, defending good, thinking good, talking good—except when you’re fucking around with your little girlfriend.”
“You know something, Coco, I’m beginning to think you’re not really jealous.”
Coco groaned.
Gavin remained silent, demonstrating his equanimity and appropriating great virtue unto himself.
Coco looked toward the window, and for a moment the city outside beckoned to her with noises that mixed escape with decision. But inside her body a riot of conflicting feelings—hurt, revenge, jealousy, bereavement—were plummeting through her, and she still couldn’t translate the dialect of her own emotions.
Suddenly Gavin switched tactics and crouched above her again, emanating his own anticipation.
Coco felt detached and distant as he worked, solitarily, through his own excitement. She measured progress only by the tempo of his movements, letting the thudding rhythm of his passion wash over her. Finally, her numbed body received his lurching conclusion, and she lay silently beneath him until he moved away.
Loose Ends Page 12
