“Well, what do the gypsy moths do,” she began, “bad?”
He smiled.
Three gins-and-tonic plus the morning’s tranquilizers had obviously blown Coco’s mind.
But then the waitress reappeared, accidentally mixed their glasses, and caused enough confusion to afford Coco a slight reprieve.
It would be too much—too ironic—to have the day end with this kind of failure. Here was Coco, the smartest woman she knew, and at a moment of crisis, she was coming on like a little Capitol Hill secretary who couldn’t remember the number of her boss’s congressional district. Recklessly Coco sent a give-me-another-chance smile at the man, and quickly transmitted a complicated message explaining the reasons for her current flustered condition. I do know all about psychology and ecology, she said through expressive changes around her eyes, but the trouble is that I’ve been under a tremendous strain lately. She let flashes of troubled intelligence play across her face. My husband and my lover have left me. So did my best girlfriend and my shrink. I happen to have four little children, one of whom may be a latent homosexual, another one who has enuresis, one who lisps, and another who won’t talk. Apparently I have few or no friends. I have oodles of talent (but no discipline), enormous rats out in the patio, great sexual passion, and a broken lock on my back door. Please give me another chance.
But with a shock Coco saw that her companion was already shifting around in his chair, chafing from disappointment, and casing the bar for a means of escape.
Coco felt panic panting behind her.
“Washington’s certainly a lot dirtier than the last time I was here,” the man said, clearly trying to disengage now. Any body-language expert would have no trouble translating his motions into an exit urge.
“Well,” Coco flailed out desperately, “actually Washington has a higher pollution …” (rate? standard? quota? level?) “Worse smog than L.A.,” Coco blurted.
Sure. Great. Come on competitive with the psychologist-ecologist you’re trying to make. Terrific.
“That’s weird,” he said, “since there’s no industry here.”
Blank. A total blank. Even the pain of her failure was erased for a moment.
“It’s the cars,” Coco said slowly. “The commuters.” But instinctively she knew that wasn’t right. What was it? She had read about it endless numbers of times, accidentally, inadvertently. But what headline had tricked her into reading a story about smog? Traffic? Parking? Automotive-repair courses for women? What? It couldn’t be that Washington was in a valley, since she never saw any hills around. Coco began punching at her mental Morse Code machine, anxious to get her SOS across the Atlantic. Dear Dr. Finkelstein: I am beaten. For me now everything is over. I cannot remember one fucking thing about anything. I can’t come up with anything under the title of Ecology Pollution, or Psychology Today. All I can think about is Arlo Guthrie singing “Alice’s Restaurant” because he got arrested for littering. Is littering a subdivision of Pollution?
A vision of her backyard floated before her eyes. Did disorder qualify as a pollutant? And what about the drawers in the desk in the TV room where they had once found maggots? And what about her rats? Maybe I am drunk, Coco thought. Maybe the insufficient amount of oxygen reaching my brain has caused actual damage to the cells, plus deterioration of the central nervous system.
“What kind of clinic do you have?” Coco asked, squeezing her legs together under the table in an effort to assert bodily authority over her mind through a strong sensation.
“Actually, it’s quite experimental,” the man answered, averting his marvelous eyes to survey, probably to case the room for other opportunities and women.
Coco felt totally reckless now. “Clinically experimental?”
He turned back toward her again with a speculative expression. “Well, we’re devoting ourselves almost exclusively to the psychological problems of women of all ages.”
Thank you, dear Lord, Coco whispered. Thank you, Dr. Finkelstein. I’m home free now. I’ve paid my dues, and now I’ve hit pay dirt, and I’m home free. Women. Women. Hurray.
“Well, it’s about time some mental-health people decided to pay exclusive attention to a specific problem area,” Coco said briskly.
“What do you mean by that?” Instantly he was back in Coco’s orbit, studying her, leaning forward, gravitationally held in time and space by the force of her will.
Coco smiled, remembering how Jessica had run into the house after her first day of kindergarten and yelling, “I’m here now.” Flushed with success, Coco suddenly understood what her daughter had meant. The personal surprise of survival necessitated a public announcement of the fact.
“Well, it’s been perfectly clear to everyone that there are specific problems females face that orthodox therapists simply disregard—an oversight, which, to say the least, has a rather catastrophic effect upon American women.”
“Be more specific.” Now he was lighting another cigarette for her, bringing the flare of the match high enough so that they both watched his large tanned hand move seductively close to her face.
A whimper of pleasure squirted through Coco’s body.
“I certainly wouldn’t quarrel with the fact that women have hangups, but most of them are cultural rather than personal. For instance, if a woman can’t get a decent job,” Coco continued, “it’s not because she has work hangups or because she’s paranoid or because she’s ambivalent or afraid of employment, but simply because men don’t like to hire women. So at least if the therapists were clued into some of those little verities, it would save women a lot of pain, time, talk, and money.”
Now he was smiling excitedly and beginning to explain in detail the design plans for his female-therapy programs.
Suddenly Coco felt tired. How much could she possibly put out on so little sleep, food, or confidence? How much strength could she possibly have left after so many pills and so much alcohol, after pulling the stroller, the trike, and the bike up and down the stairs twice? Where was her energy supposed to come from? But luckily, male chauvinists liked to hear themselves talk, so now that she had proven herself a worthy audience, she was off the hook. Her adrenaline, triggered by desperation and determination, began to slacken.
After a while the man interrupted his narrative to announce that his name was Charlie O’Connor, that he thought Coco was beautiful, that he had left his family and was living with one of his formerly schizy patients in a marvelous house out in Pasadena with three avocado trees in the backyard, that he had tripped with Tim O’Leary (“O’Really?”), that he had been to Esalen eleven times, that he believed the world could be saved only through the new Divine Light Mission and a coalition of ecology groups, that he was working with the L.A. Amnesty for Draft Resisters, and that he belonged to a nudist club where he and his mistress spent one weekend each month. Eventually He pressed his thigh against Coco’s leg and moved in closer to whisper that he was also raising money to make a movie early next year about a drug rehabilitation center and that—confidentially—Peter Fonda was interested in playing a small bit part.
By now Coco was floating through the Straits of Nausea. The outer rims of her lips felt frostbitten; her ears were playing a light buzz into her head; her eyes were dilating and contracting, making the world drift in and out of focus, while the tips of her fingers turned numb, so that twice she almost lost a grip on her glass. Internally her programming director was providing equal air time for various public-service announcements such as a missing-persons lookout report for Gavin Burman (last seen wearing a determined expression on his face) and an encouraging spiel about how student nurses could provide first-aid treatment for cuts, chipped bones, concussions, and convulsions.
Meanwhile Coco was slowly realizing that the man next to her was a foppish fool but still a perfect person to know on the West Coast if she really decided to resettle near the Pacific. Silly as it seemed, it would be through just such a schmuck as Charlie O’Connor that she might very likely me
et a suitable second husband, since other hip people would also know him in the same casual way she did. So while not responding to his thigh, she also didn’t avoid it, and instead concentrated on trying to counteract the tranquilizer-plus-alcohol sick sensation swimming through her system. She had already discovered that if she remained completely silent and motionless she could maintain life with the residue of air already in her lungs.
“Would you excuse me for a moment, please?” she asked suddenly, taking herself so much by surprise that she didn’t even have her purse strap firmly clenched in hand before she rose from the chair. The table seemed to shrink as she grew teller and the handsome head of her companion was clearly sitting just to the left of his neck. At the end of the tunnel of blackness she could see a pinpoint of light identifiable as the Shoreham Hotel lobby. But her journey to the powder room took a long time, and when she finally stood in front of a full-length mirror, the environment began to play games with her senses, and she had to fight to restore authority over her rebellious body.
“Maybe I should vomit,” she said out loud to the mirror, since there was no one else in the rest room.
Why did you do this to yourself? the disgusted face of her post-lib prosecutor inquired from behind the glass.
Where is Gavin? Coco asked her accuser. Please tell me.
Gavin, she called silently. Gavin. I’m sick. I’m really sick. I want you now. I need you.
She went into a toilet stall, clutched the crotch of her panties to one side, squatted over the bowl, and listened to the comfortable splash of urine spilling from a great height straight down into the water. Perhaps if she sat down for a while she might move her bowels, but instead she turned around, bent over and tried unsuccessfully to vomit. Finally Coco walked back out to the sinks, splashed some water on her wrists, wiped her face on a roll of toweling coming out of a machine, and began to reapply mascara with a hand that seemed totally disconnected from her arm.
“It doesn’t matter if the eye-liner is a little crooked,” she said to one unanchored eye rolling around in the mirror. “Vogue doesn’t really expect us to paste silver sequins on our lids. That’s only their way of suggesting an approach—a reminder not to forget your Maybelline.” She smiled at her reflection and began making plans for her return trip to the cocktail lounge.
Why don’t you just split? the dazed-looking post-lib prosecutor peering out over the sink, suggested. Go home. You look awful. You can keep the nurse there for an extra hour—for just another dollar twenty-five—and take a nap.
No way, Ms. Burman, Chairwoman of the Department of Economics, replied promptly. Pay to take a nap? Are you crazy? Anyway, when you’re planning to open a branch office in California, you can’t afford to throw away any fresh contacts on the West Coast.
But in exactly three minutes he’s going to ask you to go up to his room.
So I’ll go, Coco shrugged.
But you Haven’t shaved your legs, pre-libby piped up.
So what? Charlie O’Connor’s hip, Coco countered.
But, Coco—Ms. Post-libby said—you don’t want to go to bed with him. You don’t have to. He’s not going to make you feel any better.
Well, he can’t make me feel any worse, Coco groaned; replacing her cosmetic bag in her purse and pushing open the rest-room door. She skimmed across the royal scarlet carpet until she saw Charlie O’Connor standing in the doorway of the cocktail lounge.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Sure.” Coco smiled. A single woman could obviously never confess to feeling sick. Illness was the exclusive privilege of children and married people. There was no one in the world who cared if an unwed mother developed a cold.
“Actually,” Coco amended bravely, “I think I’d like some, coffee.”
“How about ordering dinner up in my room?” Charlie O’Connor suggested, prompting her a little with one broad shoulder. He took her elbow in a department-store-detective clutch and moved her toward the central elevators. “Let’s order up some steaks. I’m starving.”
So Coco allowed herself to be maneuvered along the corridor, wondering how she looked from the rear, trying to pull in her ass so sho wouldn’t look like a hooker or, even worse, an easy screw to any vice-squad plant or Congolese linoleum salesmen conventioning at the Shoreham. She walked along dutifully, hating the hangups which prevented her from insisting on eating dinner in the dining room. Once on the elevator she had to fight back an unexpected swell of nausea that rose in her throat. She gulped down the bile and noticed that she was panting instead of breathing. Why do my chest and shoulders and under-the-arms ache? Coco wondered. What’s the matter with me? And why doesn’t this schlep who knows all about women see I’m sick? Really sick.
They reached his room after traveling vertically and horizontally for a long time. Once inside the door Coco moved automatically toward her reflection on the far wall, placed her purse on the dresser top, and looked back through the mirror at the green bedspread and the green carpet and the floral draperies and the boxy TV and the green squarish chair. Then she looked at herself again. Silently she requested the blurry reflection not to disappear in a dead faint.
“Comeere a minute,” Charlie O’Connor, the West Coast psychologist, suggested.
Coco parted from her shoulder-bag purse with reluctance and turned around.
“If you’re feeling queasy, lie down here for a minute.”
The word “queasy” brought another rush of salty liquid into Coco’s mouth. She floated toward the bed, sat down, and then slowly flattened her body into prone position. No sooner had her head touched the pillow than the dark bulky shadow of Charlie O’Connor’s head closed over her, blotting out reality, daylight, and oxygen. She raised her hands against his chest to push him away so she could grab a mouthful of air, but he was involved in some grunty sexual advance that was so inexplicably noisy that he paid no heed to her lifesaving efforts.
“Please,” Coco whispered against his face. “Stop.” The pimply visage of a rabbi’s son at a Chicago-Winnepeg AZA convention floated before her eyes. I’m drowning, she thought, trying to get some air down her throat and trying to stop the vomit from coming up. He started to kiss her as she went under for the second time. By the time he forced her lips apart to insert a fat bumpy tongue inside her mouth, she began to emit the sick helpless moans of a street-crime victim. But just like the ghostly rabbi’s son who had suddenly appeared to haunt her, Charlie O’Connor misinterpreted Coco’s moans of panic as pleasure. A moment later, traveling by his own private itinerary, he removed his gulped blubbery tongue from her mouth and began muzzling his way into the top of her dress.
Coco opened her lips and gulped some stale, artificially cooled air, squeezing some of it down into her throat. With one hand she unbuttoned her dress before Charlie O’Connor could rip it open, and then lay motionless, still concentrating on forcing the oxygen down into her chest, past Charlie O’Connor’s head, which was making untranslatable sucking, rutting sounds, and down to the bottom of her lungs. Breathe in, she instructed her diaphragm. Now let a little air come out.
But her chest was too tight. She wondered if a clinical psychologist had to study anatomy in college. If she fainted right now would Charlie O’Connor realize she was getting insufficient oxygen, or should she tap him on the shoulder, right now, and say “Excuse me for bothering you, but I’m having a little trouble breathing”? In fact, she should probably tap him on his shoulder right now and warn him she was dying, so that he could split before the police and press arrived and found him in such mysterious circumstances. Indeed, Coco was just drunk and drugged enough now to be able to die voluntarily if she chose to do so. If Charlie O’Connor would just stop jumping and lunging around, she could very simply close her eyes, and like some arctic explorer, lie back, in the snowy drifts of insufficient air, curl up, and fall into a warm cozy sleep, never to awaken again in her frozen white universe.
“Listen, honey,” Coco heard the sound of his voic
e hissing in her ears. “Lately I’ve been having a little trouble making it when I’m with strange women. I mean, women who are still strange to me. Women I never made it with before.”
Charlie O’Connor’s voice sounded distant and tinny—like a poor transatlantic connection.
“Give me a little help, huh?”
Coco’s lungs were getting tighter. Soon they would be involuntarily inoperative and she would be dead. Apparently lungs were not the kind of organs which, if threatened with annihilation, fought for their own survival.
“What …?” Coco murmured vaguely. “What did you say? What do you want?”
“I need a hand-job,” Charlie O’Connor said apologetically.
Your receiver is off the hook. Your receiver is off the hook.
“Come on. If it works, I’ll stop you in time to give you a good fuck.”
And then, through the bitter desert of desolation and a new surge of dizziness, Coco felt her hands maneuvered into position around Charlie O’Connor’s butter-soft size-S penis.
“Move them up and down slowly,” he said. “Not so hard. Not so fast.”
Please, dear Lord, Coco began to pray, let me die right now, right here in the Shoreham Hotel jacking off some guy who can’t get a hard-on, because it is only poetically perfect that this be the last scene of my third act. Her tingling appendages seemed to be drifting away from her body while her heart palpitated in sick little jerks. Just let me die, God. Right now. Please, Sir.
“Not so hard, honey. Not so fast,” Charlie instructed a bit impatiently.
Coco stared at the face next to her on the pillow as she rhythmically and mechanically rubbed the loose skin of Charlie’s penis up and down with the same motion she used to stretch leather gloves when they got mixed up with the dirty laundry and run through several cycles in the washing machine. Meanwhile Charlie O’Connor lay flat on the bed with his eyes closed, apparently trying to send blood donations from other parts of his body down to the disaster area between his legs. His mouth was hanging open like someone receiving first aid at a rescue operation and he seemed to be in a trance of impotence.
Loose Ends Page 27
