Loose Ends

by Raskin, Barbara;

  Suddenly she wanted to explain very slowly and logically how life had not allowed her to do everything she intended. She wanted to explain that she was all the things that had happened to her as well as certain things which had not occurred. Together she and Suede might share the total vision of everything she meant to be and do.

  But instead he removed one hand from her back to snare his wristwatch from the floor beside the bed.

  “Jesus.” His breath was musty with sleep. “I’m going to have to get my shit together. I’ve got an appointment at twelve.”

  Coco winced. After dispensing with his sexual business and making an allowance for recovery time, Suede was rebounding back into his work routine with all the enthusiasm of a man who jogged several miles every morning to put himself in shape for a strenuous day.

  “Do you have to get up right now?” Coco whispered against his shoulder. Lying on her side, she threw one evenly tanned leg between his thighs and then half-rolled her body across him.

  “Yup. One of the editors at Esquire arranged for this luncheon meeting a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t interview anyone from the Justice Department until I had gotten enough background material.”

  Coco twisted slightly so that all her protuberances bit into Suede’s body. She pressed her pelvic bone like a sweet reminder against his thigh and slipped one hand over his chest, enveloping the mound of muscle beneath one handsome brown nipple. Then she closed her eyes and swam through a second great tidal wave of desire.

  “Okay, babes.” Suede swung himself off the bed. He retrieved his shorts from the floor, charmingly looked into the crotch for skid marks, and then put them on again.

  Coco felt instantly embarrassed at not having offered Suede laundry service, but she felt too shy now to say anything about it. Instead she reached down to untangle the sheet so she could pull it up over her body.

  “What’s on for tonight?” he asked casually. He was rummaging around on the top of the bureau, shuffling through coins and keys he had unloaded from his pockets the night before.

  Coco pressed her head into the pillow, unwilling to hear the sound of such practical activity. She let her thoughts float away and wondered if her children were cool, running through the sprinklers, splashing in the spray. She couldn’t understand why Suede was striding around the room taking care of business rather than taking care of her, discarding the possibility of making passionate love all day. She wondered if hard work helped to sublimate sex drives.

  “Nothing special,” Coco said after a long while. “You must have gotten home pretty late last night. I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Yah.” He heard the implicit accusation of infidelity but didn’t bother to respond. “Hey, is there any coffee downstairs?”

  “Probably. There’s an electric pot right next to the sink.”

  “Jesus,” Suede groaned. “Don’t you think you can get your butt out of bed and fix me something for breakfast? You must of fed your old man bacon this morning, because I smelled it all the way up here.”

  “That was for the children,” Coco said defensively. She was beginning to feel persecuted, but her estrangement from Gavin made it risky to display any discontent toward Suede—when there was trouble in the family it was best not to quarrel with friends.

  Bastard, she thought, selfish bastard. She felt sticky and could smell the unfamiliar but still fishy, odor of Suede’s sperm.

  “So where did you go last night?” she asked, finally, forced into making a formal inquiry since her jealousies subsided if she didn’t refuel them with new information.

  “I saw Sylvia,” he answered offhandedly. “We had a date.”

  Suede was too rushed to be either hypocritically silent or a trifle apologetic. He was rustling around in his duffel bag searching for something and sending out earnest directives for Coco to get up and assist in his departure.

  Coco shriveled up in silence and wished she could retreat one hour in time and simply twitch her bottom at Suede while cutting through his bedroom to the porch. She wished she could have ignored him with the chill indifference of a happily married woman or at least held out against his advances long enough so that his needs would have accumulated and taken longer to satisfy. She also wished she’d never have to see him again.

  “Come on, babes. Speed it up a little, can you?”

  Coco extended one hand from beneath the sheet to grab her bikini bottom, pulled it under the covers, and then hoisted it up her legs. But the bra was so far out in the middle of the rug that she had to get up to recover it. Keeping her back toward Suede, she quickly shook her breasts into the wired cups. Then she brushed the hair away from her face and turned to confront him for the first time since meeting his eyes amidst the hard rocking of their lovemaking.

  “Hey. You look good.” Suede smiled. He was still bare-chested, wearing only trousers. “I put some roses in your cheeks this morning.” He chalked up several invisible points and then collected his shaving equipment off the bureau. “Give me ten minutes for a shower, will you? Maybe you can throw some eggs in a pan while I get cleaned up.”

  Coco stared at him. “Sure. Okay. I’ll make you breakfast.”

  And then she heard the front door open and the sounds of her children spilling into the house.

  Coco hurried into the hallway and ran downstairs.

  They grabbed at her from all levels, around the calves of her legs, her hips, her waist. The baby stretched upward to pull her hand down toward him, and Coco tried to gather them all together inside her arms, refreshing herself against their cool skin and still-damp hair.

  “I’m going to start up on the third floor today,” Mrs. Marshall said authoritatively. “Whereabouts is the house guest?”

  “He’s on the second floor,” Coco said. Jessica had gotten on top of the hall chest, thrown her arms around the back of Coco’s neck, and boosted herself into piggyback position. “I think he’s taking a shower.”

  “They should go out back,” Mrs. Marshall advised, and then started up the stairs.

  Coco began to move toward the kitchen, towing and carrying her children.

  “I’ll make you a picnic,” Coco said. “Crackers with peanut butter and pink Hawaiian punch with ice cubes. Okay? You didn’t eat at the park, did you?”

  “No,” they shouted again and again. Energized from love and attention, they hurtled through the kitchen and out the back door. Coco carried the baby down to his playpen in the patio. Then she came back inside.

  “Mom, I’m going to call up and see if Stevie’s home,” Mike announced.

  “Okay, honey.”

  Through the windows she could hear the hum of Mrs. Marshall vacuuming and the children fighting as they reclaimed their toys and reestablished territorial rights in the yard, gleeful after their sprinkle time and excited about the promised picnic. Quickly Coco brushed a variety of crumbs off the kitchen table into her cupped hand, scattered them in the sink, and set a place mat for Suede. Then she cracked three eggs into a mixing bowl, ransacked the spice shelf, and blessed her omelet with a touch of curry. At the same time, she softened the butter for English muffins and filled a small jar with marmalade.

  Finally Suede ambled into the kitchen with a puckish stride that sent a whimper through Coco’s body. Fully dressed, he looked more seductive then he did in his self-composed nakedness.

  Coco lowered her head, turned off the burner, and slid the omelet onto a dish.

  “Sit there,” she said, nodding as she poured two cups of coffee.

  Suede paused to look through the back door at the jumble of children around the swing set. “Jesus. Can you believe all of those are really yours?” he asked.

  Coco flushed. “Well, they’re running around,” she explained apologetically. “When they run around, it looks like there’s more of them than there actually are.”

  Suede shrugged and sat down at the table.

  “You know, this is something else—this establishment you run here—plus all the f
ucking around on the side. You and Gavin can do your own things—go through your own changes—and all the while you’re raising these great kids.”

  He began to eat his eggs very seriously.

  Coco sat down across from him and poured cream into her coffee as a special treat. “That’s nice of you to say,” she smiled. “But there’s the possibility that the shit we’re laying on them doesn’t do them too much good.” She studied the various bruises on the familiar wooden tabletop and held back tears.

  Suede looked sympathetic for a few seconds, ate several forkfuls of eggs, and reached over to touch Coco’s hand softly with his own. “You’re a good chick … whoops”—he laughed in compliance with his own self-correction “—lady … woman.”

  Mentally Coco readjusted her page quota for the day up to fourteen, looked at the clock, and then got up to bring the Ritz-cracker box and peanut-butter jar to the table. She began spreading sandwiches. “So what are you doing tonight? Are you going to be back for dinner?”

  “Well, I don’t know how long my interviews will last. I’ll call you this afternoon, though, and let you know. I’m not too hip on eating dinner with Gavin … you know.… Except that he’s gotten to be such a swinger himself, he probably wouldn’t mind, even if he knew. Or would he?”

  “Who cares?” Coco wondered what Suede meant by “swinger,” and if he had secretly found out a lot of gossip over the last few days from Sylvia. He surely must have pumped her for information.

  “Those were good eggs.” He lit a cigarette and squinted seductively through the smoke. “I’m kind of sorry I’ve got this appointment now,” he said, his voice thick with suggestiveness.

  Coco looked at him with a Masters-and-Johnson challenge in her eyes.

  He stared back at her, somewhat unnerved. “You’ve still got some more complaints, babes?”

  Coco smiled again, this time beautifully. “No. Not at all.”

  “Okay.”

  He stood up, unhooked his striped summer sport jacket from the back of the chair, and slipped it on. Then he brushed a kiss on the top of Coco’s head and hurried out of the kitchen.

  Coco listened to his footsteps and smiled when she deduced from the lapse of time between the kitchen and front door that he had stopped to inspect himself in the hall mirror.

  When she finished making the picnic she carried it outside and served it to the children. But even after they had eaten, she loitered on the patio, collecting their lost Jell-O molds and cooky cutters so they could bake sand pastries. Coco’s sense of moral jeopardy was so extreme that the innocence of her children seemed to offer a spiritual sanctuary. Coco ran her hands through the sand (careful not to connect with any feline feces deposited by neighborhood alley cats who used the Burman sandbox as a public outdoor kitty-litter container) scooping out small buried toys, until some hot water splashed on her arm.

  “Nicky! What are you doing?” Coco asked indignantly. Although Jessica wet her bed, Nicky persisted on peeing in such improbable places as the fishbowl (three goldfish died within ten minutes) and wall sockets (which short-circuited four houses on the block).

  “He always pees in there to make the sand wetter,” Jessica said, running over to rat on her brother. “That’s why it stinks.”

  “Go in the house, Nicky, and use the toilet.”

  “I don’t want to walk all the way upthairs. And it thtinkth from cats.”

  “Go ahead,” Coco said firmly, picking up Joshua to move him away from the urine-damp section of sand.

  “Anyway, I’m done,” Nicky said with finality, edging the leg of his sunsuit back into place.

  Coco frowned, covered the wet spot with dirty but dry handfuls of sand, and then hurried back inside the kitchen to score some downers. High on the window ledge above the sink behind the curtains where the children could neither reach nor see were her medicines. She took down the dark green bottle into which she had transferred Dr. Finkelstein’s twelve Stelazines, peered through the smoky glass, shook the jar to see how many remained, and then thumbed off the cover to pop two powder-blue capsules into her mouth.

  But it took an hour before she felt composed enough to go upstairs to work. Once on the porch she lay down on the chaise, opened a new pack of Marlboros, and took out her calendar notebook. It had been exactly thirty days since she had commenced her daily exile to the porch, but subtracting weekends, only twenty-four full working days. According to her plan—10 pages × 24 days—she should now have 240 pages or eighty percent of her manuscript completed. But despite the fact she had faithfully written ten pages each day, in the unavoidable and wrenching process of editing, she invariably lost half of her daily output, so that now she was left with only 122 finished pages. And it was the end of the month—a Friday, the 30th of June.

  Coco studied her calendar intently. If she didn’t finish a first full draft by the end of July it would be impossible to sustain her self-confidence or continue paying Mrs. Marshall’s salary. That left only thirty-one days, minus four weekends, and tomorrow was the beginning of the Fourth of July holiday. Mrs. Marshall would be gone for the next four days and Coco would have trouble salvaging the week.

  She put out her cigarette and shivered in the hot sunshine, regretting June and dreading July. Indeed, the damage done to June 30th was already irreparable. Just because Dr. Finkelstein had FORGOTTEN to warn her of his trip to Europe, Coco had spent the morning channeling her separation anxieties into sexual activities so that now more than half her work day was lost and she was suffering a paralyzing sense of defeat. Once again she had let the men in her life—husbands, psychiatrists, friends and lovers—wipe her out emotionally and impede her productive, creative activities. Take Heaven By Storm lay neglected while Coco wasted her time worrying about a bunch of pricks.

  A little spaced from the tranquilizers, Coco’s mind began to wander. In a rather scientific manner she wondered if the curly little Y genes which turned boys into girls had a special trait (inscribed in invisible ink) which caused congenital female self-destruction. Doris Lessing said that every woman would give up her work for a man, and that no man would forsake his art for a woman. That made Coco wonder if she could somehow translate her affair with Suede into something a trifle less casual, into something more adolescently immature and … compulsive. If balling Suede was going to interfere with her work, she should at least get a real thing going, so that it made good sense politically and served as proper reparations for Gavin’s infidelity. She wanted to be certain that screwing Suede, right in the house, was equal to Gavin making it with Sylvia or Catherine from Baltimore—if there was such a person.

  GET TO WORK, post-libby shouted.

  Coco straightened up guiltily. She would not lie down. It didn’t matter that this was the time of day when she usually turned over to add to the amount of tan on her back so that her frontside wouldn’t be browner than the rest of her. She had to GET TO WORK.

  But perhaps she should use this last day of June to look through old manuscripts, packed away with the winter clothes in the trunk down the basement, to find some ideas or excerpts she could incorporate into her novel. That would clearly save some writing time. But poking through old fiction, looking for usable phrases or paragraphs or passages from other rough drafts, could become distracting and time-consuming. Although cutting out ready-made scenes and stapling them onto a new manuscript produced a good consolidating high—like dropping off dirty shirts at the laundry right when the clean ones were ready, or cutting up leftover hotdogs into the next day’s baked beans, or the hard end of a Cheddar cheese into a pot of macaroni—it always took more time than expected and usually made more of a mess than an improvement—like defrosting the Frigidaire.

  Coco wished she had an almond Hershey bar. She tried to imagine how she would look if she cut off her hair and wore it short and curly like a boy. She wondered if the kids were being so quiet because they were playing with the garden hose under the back porch. For a moment she thought that she heard the soun
d of Dr. Finkelstein’s voice calling to her, but she didn’t answer. She wondered, quite rationally, if she might be going insane, while a small transistor in her brain repeated.… tomorrow is the first of July.

  She began to envision the weekend, seeing how the children would try to consume her. Railing inwardly for their inevitable misbehavior she decided to check out the Post’s Amusement Page to see if there would be any Walt Disney movies in town. Detesting the approaching, encroaching trivia that would devour her time and mind, she felt an enormous desire to devote herself to a new, great work of art which was waiting to spring, perfectly constructed, out of the typewriter. Emotionally she began to pant with a commitment to work every waking moment until the book was finished, to remain impervious to anyone or anything which might attempt to detour her.

  But a rush of despair gushed through her as she looked toward the neatly stacked manuscript on the coffee table which fell so short of her dream. Recklessly she wondered if she should start over again. With thirty more days—if she did some moonlighting on weekends—she could start anew—fresh from the beginning—banishing forever all equivocal disguises. She would only record truths from now on, instead of simply gossiping about herself under the guise of an unruly heroine, tainted and poisoned by Coco’s own self-contempt. She closed her eyes and experienced several passionate moments of firm determination to outline a truly great, and objective, book.

  Take Heaven By Storm wasn’t nearly heavy enough. It wasn’t even dirty enough to become controversial or notorious. If Clifford Irving had risked all, why couldn’t Coco? She needed something totally different, dramatic, dynamic. New versions and visions of her novel came spinning through her head and suddenly the self-hating character of Gwensandra Rappaport began to take on new proportions.

  Coco pulled the chaise into stern upright position. Now she knew what she should do.

  She would write the story about what was happening to her now—right this minute. Her book would be THE novel about the Women’s Liberation Movement. Gwensandra Rappaport would be a young married woman struggling toward her own consciousness, fighting chauvinistic oppression, identifying with the new women’s movement. Then there would be a character like Sylvia Brydan who would crawl out of the woodwork and run around organizing and making little statistical speeches about how thirty-one percent of all working women are secretaries or filing clerks, fifteen percent waitresses or domestics, fifteen percent factory workers. By packaging the problem and marketing the Movement, the Sylvia Brydan-type character would gain Gwensandra’s confidence and infiltrate the Rappaport home. Then, under the guise of sisterhood, she would rip off Gwensandra’s husband. And why? Because that Sylvia Brydan-type could not survive one single day or night without a man! She could not tolerate her own independence. She was driven to share her liberated body with legions of dirty male chauvinist pigs.