Loose Ends

by Raskin, Barbara;

“Because I like fucking.”

  So Coco, smitten, propped her head up on Suede’s shoulder to attain an aerial view of their nude bodies. She surveyed the angle of her breasts, which had a tendency to disappear when she was flat on her back (a failure offset only by the fact that her stomach also withdrew), and gazed between Suede’s legs.

  “Well, I do,” Coco said. “I like to play games.”

  Then she mentally shifted her perspective into a higher, more celestial position. Over the years Coco had developed the ability to exempt herself from a scene so she could look down from a great height and watch herself in the center of her environment. This way she experienced the delight of inclusion with a margin of safety for error or repair.

  “How come you’re so serious all of a sudden?” she pouted.

  He didn’t answer. Now that he was finished he was perfectly relaxed, self-sufficient, and concluded. His interest in Coco evaporated as his penis shrank.

  “Well, you don’t have to act so arrogant,” Coco complained. “Men always get so damn arrogant after they come.”

  “What are you talking about? What do you mean, arrogant?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. As soon as a guy shoots off, he’s just done.”

  She felt his arm stiffen beneath her neck.

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” he asked angrily.

  “Nothing,” Coco said quickly, feeling hurt and embarrassed.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” His voice seemed to be filtered from a great distance. “Didn’t you come?”

  “That isn’t what I’m talking about,” Coco hissed angrily. Then she sat up and bent over to reclaim her bikini from the rug. Quickly she replaced the two pieces of fabric over the untanned areas where they belonged—like Nicky sticking adhesive geometric forms into their proper places in his Shape and Space book.

  “I really should know better by now,” Coco mumbled. “I’ve had enough conditioning to know what to expect.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?” Suede asked again, hooking his arms beneath his head. His hair was rumpled, and he looked as if he might have become available again if the mood hadn’t changed.

  Coco stared out toward the porch but remained seated on the edge of the bed. “I’m talking about the sloppiness of my human relationships.”

  “Hey. Why are you so upset now, Coco?” Suede reached out and cupped Coco’s right buttock in his hand.

  Unhappily she felt some extra flesh escape his grasp, but despite her overflow, she felt placated and soothed by his caress.

  “I’m not really sore,” she said in a conciliatory voice. “It’s just that I’m late getting started this morning.”

  “Late?” His voice squeaked in an adolescent way. “Starting what?”

  Mentally Coco began to revamp her schedule so as to reallocate some time for balling Suede. Although there was a sense of prematurity about the idea, she decided to cross out the original time chart in her notebook and draw up a new one, allocating an hour for her renewed Love Affair after Gavin left for work on Tues. and Thurs. and starting after 10:00 on M-W-F. Then she spotted Suede’s duffel bag propped up in the corner and suffered several painful minutes wondering how long he would stay in Washington and whether it was really practical to redo her schedule for what might be only a short-term fling.

  “How long do you think you’ll be here?” she asked cautiously.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Coco stood up.

  “Actually, it depends on my appointments today and tomorrow,” Suede added quickly. “By tomorrow I’ll be able to tell how many other people I have to see before I can finish.”

  “Well, try to remember to let me know,” Coco said nonchalantly.

  “Yah, sure. I’m going over to the Hill again this morning, and I’ll have a better sense of what needs doing after I talk to a couple of people.”

  Coco moved toward the door.

  “By the way,” Suede continued awkwardly, “I probably won’t be back until late tonight. I made some other arrangements for tonight a few days ago.”

  Coco unlatched the door and felt jealousy bite into her already overworked soul. She wondered where her new lover was taking her husband’s mistress for the evening. “Well, there’s a front-door key downstairs in that wicker basket on the chest in the front hall. It’s on a strip of blue leather. Just take it.”

  “Great. Thanks. Hey …” His tone was demanding enough for Coco to turn around. “I appreciate all your hospitality,” he said with his favorite variation of a roguish smile.

  But now Coco found herself incapable of looking at him any longer, so she let herself out onto the porch and splashed down on the chaise feeling physically as well as emotionally miserable. Still haunted by the hangover of adolescent loneliness and sexual frustration, Coco’s twelve-year marriage had only inflamed her appetite for a monumental passion. She firmly believed that only through a crash program of sexual excesses could she recoup her past love-losses. But she was well into her third five-year plan without any great success and it didn’t seem as if Suede was going to become her private relief program.

  After a while Suede came out on the porch dressed in a clean white shirt, laundry-pressed khaki pants, and a striped summer blazer.

  “My. Don’t you look nice,” Coco said nastily. Her sense of a sexual debt put an edginess into her voice, and she thought about Daisy Buchanan, who sounded like money rather than a horny housewife.

  “Look, I’ve got to get going now,” Suede said, “but I didn’t want to leave without saying something.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I didn’t know exactly what. I just wanted to say something.”

  “Oh, come on, Suede. A National Book Award winner like you? Can’t you come up with a clever exit line? Phil Roth or Saul Bellow or Norman-baby could come up with something just like that,” Coco said, snapped her fingers. “Can’t you say something about Jewish mamas never being satisfied? Make believe you’re Herzog. He’d say something good. And then I could make a rejoinder. Go ahead. Say something immortal. You know … one heavy charge against All Of Us. You don’t even have to limit yourself to Jewish ladies. Say something about All Of Us. You know how. Freak out like you did in that shitty story of yours in Playboy. Go on. Say something clever and successful.”

  He was laughing. He leaned against the wall and laughed very loudly, touching his chest again with happy hands that loved his own body.

  Coco clutched several pages of her manuscript against her bare midriff and stared at him. Beneath the sharp-edged papers, her breasts sagged while her anger rose.

  “I mean, if you really are one of the gang, a bright light in American Jewish fiction, sock it to me. For a guy who messes up one of my brand-new pink-striped Pepperell sheets the way you did, you should at least be able to jerk me off with a good exit line.”

  He sobered up a little, insulted.

  “You know, you do look like Moses Herzog, Suede. Tell me how it feels after you fuck a married lady and have an appointment to get to and don’t know how to weasel your way out of the house? All you need is one good put-down so you can split.”

  Now he was totally somber and looking insulted. “Okay.” He mashed his cigarette out against the brick wall and moved toward the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Pretty good. But not too original.”

  And then he was gone.

  Coco slumped back in the chaise.

  I just committed adultery with a schmuck, Coco thought.

  She sat up straight, put on sunglasses, a luxury she seldom permitted herself, and tried to read yesterday’s ten pages. But her eyes wandered over the words, spotting too many adjectives, while her mind recited a liturgy of laments.

  Gavin doesn’t love me. He loves Sylvia Brydan. Brydan. Bride. He’s going to divorce me and make her his bride. He was touching her face and her hair. He watches her mouth when she talks. He nods his head every time she says someth
ing. He must really love her.

  I mustn’t think about anything, Coco thought. I must make my mind perfectly blank and keep it empty. Otherwise I’m going to crack up.

  My book is terrible. It is obvious, amateurish and self-centered.

  Also, I neglect my children. They are growing up without sufficient maternal attention or supervision.

  Her mind was darting about, touching base with every guilt that she gilded and saved. She wondered if perhaps she should relax her work schedule a little for the day—given such trying circumstances.

  Perhaps what she needed most now was the mythical comfort derived from a female friend. Coco reached over to the coffee table and picked up the address book, which listed her Real Friends. Nervously she flipped through the pages, hoping that a perfect possibility would leap up from the K’s or the S’s, a miraculous replacement for Glenda, who wouldn’t return until August 15. Evoking past encounters as a test of compatibility, Coco slowly eliminated the names of all her second-best girlfriends one by one. The best B would certainly not be able to find a baby-sitter on such short notice, but would certainly have been indignant about Gavin’s adultery. A long-unseen G would undoubtedly overstay her visit, since she had a Latin live-in, which would necessitate Coco making messy excuses to get rid of her. L would undoubtedly be fun, but she would only be looking for things to gossip about with her other girlfriends, and besides, she never responded quickly enough. F was too thin and threatening. J was too competitive; she’d be secretly glad. D was too dumb to be any help or comfort. I want Glenda, Coco thought. No one else. Just my best girlfriend.

  Coco closed the address book, which had turned into an encyclopedia of enemies, and felt very lonely.

  Although she stayed out on the porch all afternoon, she didn’t work. Instead she napped fitfully several times and spent the rest of her hours picturing Gavin and Sylvia as lovers, with occasional splices of Suede and Sylvia going at it.

  Gavin called at 6:30 to say he couldn’t come home for dinner because he had an ACLU meeting. Coco didn’t believe him, but she didn’t berserk, since she knew that Suede was into Sylvia that night. Coco ate dinner and played Monopoly with the children before they went to bed. She fell asleep while watching the ten-o’clock news without hearing either Gavin or Suede come home.

  She woke up in the middle of the night aware that Gavin wasn’t in bed, and turned on the light. Then she got up, put on a cotton bathrobe, and dug around the closet to find her bedroom slippers. She never walked barefoot through the house when it was dark, because bugs, mice, and unexpected piles of Happy’s doo-doo which he couldn’t hold until morning. Then she went downstairs to the den. Gavin was sleeping on the couch.

  For a moment Coco felt a hard homicidal feeling sweep through her, but the thought of starting a scene with a man so lowly he could love Sylvia Brydan appalled her. Briefly she considered waking Gavin and shaking him by his lean, bony shoulders until he saw the silliness of his infatuation, the indignity he was perpetrating upon his wife the fact that he was doing the same thing to Coco as he had done to Ann. But instead she shut the door and went back upstairs, still stung by betrayal but pleased at not having to gargle with Listerine since she was sleeping alone again.

  On Tuesday she woke up firmly committed to the silent treatment, and when she and Gavin accidentally encountered each other on the staircase, he looked terrified. He cleared his throat as they passed each other, but didn’t speak. Coco adopted a mysterious expression and hurried downstairs.

  Dr. Finkelstein was right, Coco thought. After twelve years of making threats and throwing tantrums, Coco’s unearthly silence was certainly getting to Gavin.

  Wednesday was also a quiet day, although for a few hours after her therapy session Coco got into a heavy jealousy trip, and sat at the counter in the People’s Drugstore exploring her pain. The poignant memory of Gavin brushing Sylvia’s hair away from her face and kissing her good-bye ran through Coco’s cerebral theatre several times as she drank iced-coffees and watched the waitresses serving up breakfast orders. The idea of Gavin caring for someone else produced involuntary Technicolor film clips of her husband bequeathing his affection upon Sylvia in various places and situations. Gavin’s affection (a commodity of uncertain value) had suddenly—like wooden Coco-Cola cases, old church pews, and Tiffany lampshades—become quite chic.

  So that now—oh, yes, now, for the first time—Coco could understand what the first Mrs. Burman experienced when Gavin split, or how even the queen of the Western world, Jackie Onassis, had to pay her dues when she received telescopic-lens visions of Ari at a Parisian restaurant with the fantastic Maria Callas. Now Coco could relate to the plastically beautiful Joan Kennedy, summering comfortably, when news of Chappaquiddick trickled through her ears and into her bloodstream like poison running through King Hamlet’s body. And there was Eleanor Roosevelt, the Great Lady used only as a front for Lucy Rutherford et al., and Princess Margaret watching her consort consorting with ladies-in-waiting, and Mrs. Profumo seeing Christine Keeler’s picture on top of her breakfast tray every morning, and even Liz Taylor, who got hers after she did in Debbie and Sybil, when Dickie took a tumble for the slim, thin Florinda Bolkan, and Simone Signoret ducking photographers when Yves Montand was putting it to Marilyn Monroe. And Princess Saroyan bopping through airports while the new queen presented heirs to the Shah, and Dory Previn singing her heart out while Mia Farrow gave birth to twin baby boys. That was a good one—that was really putting the old knife in. Because now for the first time, Coco could really dig Medea and Clytemnestra and Marianne Faithfull and the coach’s wife in The Last Picture Show and Simone de Beauvoir and Abigail McCarthy and, oh, dear, how many more?

  fourteen

  Coco came home from Dr. Finkelstein’s office Friday morning with her heart pounding in panic because ten minutes before the end of the hour he had coolly and cold-heartedly announced that he was going on vacation for the entire month of July. Coco objected strenuously, and Dr. Finkelstein apologized for not having warned her sooner, but said he had told all his regular patients in May and had simply forgotten Coco didn’t know when she resumed therapy on the first of June. He said he was certain she would get along fine, that she would work hard on her novel and that she would not feel compelled to act out all of her emotional impulses. He said he was trusting her not to escalate her estrangement from Gavin. Then he handed her a $360 bill for June, politely opened the door, and said good-bye.

  Coco ran all the way home. Several times tears of betrayal rose to her eyes. The leadership of the D.C. Women’s Liberation Coalition was right. Psychiatry was just another put-on, another put-down for women—another commercial endeavor mining money from miserable women by plying their pain.

  The early-morning heat made her sweat as she ran, and one of her leather sandals rubbed uncomfortably against the back of her foot. For a moment she thought of removing her shoes, but the city felt unfriendly that morning, and she feared calling attention to herself. Instead of being fortified by a joust with pschological factuality, Coco felt totally demolished, demoralized and anxious she ran through the streets.

  She let herself in quietly through the front door. The house was silent, because on Fridays the park fire hydrants were turned into sprinklers for the children, and Mrs. Marshall always rescheduled her work so that the kids could play in the water during the morning.

  Coco kicked off her sandals in the front hall, ran up the carpeted stairs, and opened the door to the guest room. It was hot and stuffy inside, and Suede was still asleep, sprawled on his back across the bed. His thighs were spread apart so that the fly of his Jockey shorts spread open invitingly over the dark hair of his groin.

  Coco’s excitement was instantaneous and of embarrassing proportions.

  She slipped out of her dress and lay down carefully on top of Suede, following the outline of his body, nestling her torso against his, and letting her arms and legs follow the sleeping form of his limbs.

  He never open
ed his eyes, but immediately the unformed flesh between his legs stirred to unleash the silhouette hidden within it, while his hands moved across her back, pressing her harder and more firmly against him.

  They never spoke. Coco’s head was pressed against his chest, and she felt herself evaporate between the pressure of his hands and the firmness of his body.

  Finally he began to enter her from beneath, and Coco spun with pleasure as Suede’s X-L blundered about blindly, nearsighted and slippery, bumping into bikini crotch, clit, and thigh before partially penetrating her. Her hand, reaching downward to guide him, discovered surplus inches being wasted in space. Caught in a pitch of wild excitement. Coco maneuvered the sightless instrument into proper position, squatted slightly to swallow it and then flattened down on top of Suede again. She hitched upward and sank down in three rocking motions that released a mighty, monumental orgasm, and when the pounding inside her stopped she listened to the chorus of gasps that had quickened closely together, and then slowly diminished.

  Coco felt seared by love.

  “Now, that’s how I like to get waked up in the morning.” Suede’s voice restated the satisfaction of his body.

  Coco was drowning in romantic sensuality.

  “You’ve got a great body, babes, and I like the way you help put out your own little fire.”

  He reexamined her buttocks, kneading the flesh until rocky contractions vibrated like a dim echo through her body again.

  Coco lifted her head high enough so that she could see the handsomeness of Suede’s face.

  “And I’m still half-sleeping,” he said cozily. “You know, I never could understand how come you’re such a swinger in the sack when you’re so screwed up about everything else. But when you take off your panties you fuck just like a bunny, babes.”

  Coco received his compliment with a magnanimous smile, pleased because he was beginning to realize that her powers were of legendary proportions.

  “Oh, I’m starting to like you very much again, Suede. Like I used to in Chicago. Remember?” Coco whispered.