Loose Ends

by Raskin, Barbara;

  But then, somehow, although Coco’s hands moving up and down in a pumping motion on Charlie O’Connor’s penis had no visible effect cm him, the project began to produce some positive results for Coco. Each time she bent to knead his little organ, a small quantity of air pressed between her lips and slid down her throat into her lungs. Crazy, Coco thought, I’m doing artificial respiration on myself. I’m making my lungs expand and inflate because I’m hunched over like this, pumping this guy’s prick, and my arms are moving up and down and pressing air into my diaphragm.

  I’m going to be able to breathe again in a minute, sang her heart. I’m about to catch my breath. Coco opened her eyes, rejecting the sick darkness, and gulped one deep mouthful of oxygen that went splashing down to the bottom of her chest, spilling through her lungs.

  Oh, yes, Coco said silently, reverently. Oh, yes, how fresh, how religious, how great was God’s air. I’m all right, she thought joyously. I’m all right. I’m breathing regularly, normally. I’m breathing again.

  So Coco stopped her manual labor and sat up straight in the bed. Quickly she fumbled around until she extracted her sheer little mini-dress from the wrinkled clump of sheets bunched up at the bottom of the bed and jumped to her feet. In a slithering motion she yanked on the dress, crumpled her bra in her fist, slid her feet into her sandals, keeping them on with curled toes so she didn’t have to buckle them, darted to the bureau to retrieve her shoulder-bag purse, and started moving toward the door.

  “For Christ’s sake, you little bitch,” Charlie O’Connor groaned, sitting straight up on the bed. His tanned hairy legs were spread apart, revealing a sexual organ that might actually belong in the Boy’s Sizes 6–10 Department, and his face was contorted with amazement and fury. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  “Oh, Charlie, I’m sorry. But I’ve got to get home, and it was taking too long. I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to finish up yourself.” Coco smiled and waved good-bye.

  Then she darted through the doorway into the liberated zone of the hotel corridor. It was in the elevator that she realized she had lost the belt to her dress, was missing one of her favorite Mexican silver hoop earrings, and that one of her eyelids felt suspiciously light. (Had her Revlon Double-Thickness Daytime Midnight-Blue Real-Hair Lashes fallen off and stuck to Charlie O’Connor’s pillowcase like a dead scorpion, so that in the morning he would see it and shriek with horror?)

  When Coco bent over to fasten her sandals, she felt bile rise in her mouth again. But walking home slowly, she enjoyed the regularity of her breathing matching the easy motion of her strides and she felt momentarily suffused with physical well-being.

  She was halfway to her house before she remembered she had left her car in the Shoreham garage.

  twenty-three

  It was almost eight o’clock when Coco reached home. Nancy Grant, the short little student nurse, looked somewhat harassed, having just put the children to bed. Coco paid her six dollars, mostly in coins from the bottom of her purse which were sticky from melted Clorets and sprinkled with tobacco jimmies. But when she picked up the car keys to drive Nancy back to Georgetown Hospital, the enormity of her plight struck again with renewed force. Obviously one of the unanticipated and most horrid consequences of divorce was that there was no one to watch the children when baby-sitters had to be taken home. Stunned and disoriented, Coco considered leaving the children alone—even if Mike was away—and risking a quick round trip to Georgetown. But then she remembered an old baby-sitters’ tale that the danger to unwatched children was not the untimely arrival of a child-molesting killer-rapist but the possibility that the parent might never return. Coco paused to picture herself dead on Wisconsin Avenue beneath a burning car and her three little children, ever mindful of instructions not to go outside alone, finally dying and their little bodies decomposing for months—since it was clear that no one ever dropped in to visit divorced women and their families.

  So Coco went to the telephone, ordered a taxi, and rushed around looking through the children’s various banks, drawers, and hiding places to find another dollar and a half for the cab fare.

  After the nurse was gone, Coco ran up to the third floor, checked on the children, and then went into her room to stretch out on the bed. The preview of Life as a Parent Without a Partner, the whole how-are-you-supposed-to-drive-the-baby-sitter-home? syndrome, multiplied by a still unknown X, left Coco feeling weak. It was apparent that her nightmare was only just beginning. After all, the children didn’t even know the truth yet, and their reaction to Coco’s announcement was happily unimaginable. Indeed, Coco herself was nowhere near ready to believe Gavin’s unyielding, unwavering, unilateral decision to cut out on all of them.

  Worries rose to her head in little bubbles that erupted like burps from the mouths of comic-strip characters: How did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this? What am I going to do now? Why did I drive away the father of my children? How will my children survive? Will they ever forgive me? Occasionally the dialogue was cast in declaratory sentences like: I am afraid to be alone. I will have a life full of Charlie O’Connors and Suede Bellocks. I will turn into a Sylvia Brydan. I am a failure. I am in a great panic. I am a Victim. Terrible things always happen to me.

  Tsk, tsk, tsk, Dr. Finkelstein cabled from Europe.

  Fuck you, doctor, Coco wired back. What do you know about anything anyway? What do you know about being a woman or how that can screw up a person’s life? What do you know about me or the Silverman family or corrupt Chicago Jewish culture or the real effect of dirty male-chauvinist-pig husbands or how four little kids can do in a woman with all their diapers to change, pins to snap, bows to make, buttons to sew, toys to fix, belts to buckle, ears to Q-tip, laces to tie, shoes to find, socks to match, Pop Tarts to toast, milk to pour, mouths to kiss, or tookies to wipe? What do you know about crummy jobs working for crummy men, or any of the other sociological, economic, political, or psychological facets of the women’s-lib movement which you always thought was my own private neurotic stock until it went public? What do you know?

  Nervously Coco rose from the bed. She walked over to the dressing table and looked down at the two earrings, one silver, one gold, lying abandoned near her cosmetics. She had seldom lost earrings before, but today she had dropped one in the park and one in Charlie O’Connor’s bed at the Shoreham. Two in one day. Coco felt a sweet sense of sadness possess her as she stared at the gold and silver hoops—lone survivors—useless, nonfunctional items that could never be rehabilitated. No occupational therapy could ever provide them with alternative careers. Their only value now was as symbolic-objective correlatives for Coco’s condition.

  She reached over, picked up the telephone, and dialed Sylvia’s number again. The unanswered rings produced a quick skin flick that flashed across the screen of Coco’s mind. The stage set was sparsely furnished bedroom with a mattress on the floor. The camera zoomed in on Sylvia sitting squarely in the middle—totally unselfconscious, with her thighs spread apart, revealing light brown pubic hair that matched a few ringlets around her nipples—eating a juicy Sunkist orange. The unflattering camera angle revealed not only her gross vulgarity but also her political opportunism, intellectual underdevelopment, emotional duplicity, and pathological need for someone else’s husband. In the next frame Gavin could be seen lying naked be side Sylvia and giggling nervously as the telephone jangled, occasionally reaching out to hug her when the tension produced by the ringing became unendurable. Coco considered leaving her receiver off the hook all night so that Sylvia’s phone would never stop buzzing and the lovers would be driven either to answer it (sufficient cause for Coco to drive right over and storm the building) or else flee the apartment, rendered sexually impotent by aggravation, to rent a motel room.

  But judiciously Coco replaced her receiver just in case Suede might be trying to call from New York.

  Highly agitated by her home movie, Coco ran downstairs to the kitchen. Since the chocolate-covere
d doughnuts—which by now were obviously defused by twelve hours of abstinence—Coco had not eaten anything. She opened the Frigidaire, decided to start Dr. Stillman’s water diet first thing in the morning, and then ate a container of creamed cottage cheese and a half-pound of raw hamburger. I will eat only protein from now on, she swore passionately. Protein and water make you thin and also produce great creative energy. She sat down next to the telephone, tried Sylvia’s number again and then Gavin’s switchboard. Tomorrow she would organize her telephone canvassing so that it would be more systematic and provide better coverage throughout the day and night.

  Pouring herself a cup of murky coffee, she returned to the big brave sketchpad on the kitchen table. No. She would never move it. The kids could eat in the dining room from now on, since they always wanted to anyway, but she wasn’t going to move that sketch-pad. And every night after dinner she would transfer notes from the little notebook in her purse onto the huge tablet, using that process to get a handle on her reality. The monumental sheets of the paper would finally produce epic clarification.

  Coco sat quietly, sipping her coffee and letting a strong sense of The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit Syndrome come to her mind. If Mary McCarthy had done it, masterfully knocked over a sitting duck, why couldn’t Coco? Why not simply record the disastrous afternoon at the Shoreham and the deadly life-giving clinical climax she had achieved in Charlie O’Connor’s bed. Oh, Charlie O’Connor was perfect, a perfectly magnificent symbol of the impotence that was running rampant across the country and all the sick dicks attached to silly, insincere, and insignificant men.

  “Wow,” Coco said out loud.

  That was it. A natural. For not only was Charlie O’Connor fucked up, but he fucked up plenty of women.

  Oh, move over, darling, Coco hummed to herself, thinking of Bellow and Roth and Malamud and Updike and Mailer and Styron and Jones—all as a single male entity. Move on over, darling, because the revolution started at 9:27 P.M., July 1, 1972, and it’s our turn now. We’ve waited a long time. We’ve spent our lives going down on you and having live-bacterial sore throats for hours or walking around with sticky-stinky sperm dripping out of us all day, pasting the flabby skin on our thighs together like adhesive Band-Aids and hoping that all that guck wouldn’t stain the crotch of our panties yellow so at night we’d have to hide them under the bed because whether they’re endemic or imported spots, every woman thinks she’s the only one in the whole world who gets them … just one more thing to make her feel like a cunt.

  Coco wrote the word “cunt” on the sketchpad. It was the first time she had ever written it out. It almost seemed like an important key word to something. THE CUNT’S HUNT, she printed. Then she scratched it out so Mike wouldn’t see it. She wrote The Sex Life of Gwensandra Rappaport and underlined it like a proper freshman English teacher. What she really should do was write a sexual autobiography. But then she would have to include her early years, wrestling with the devil alone in bed, seeking an end she wasn’t convinced existed. No. That was too much. Let Roth jack off in public. The female thing was obviously much more private and complicated, too hard to confront with all the hairbrush handles, the empty Coke bottles, the carrots, the fingers, the hands, the pillows, the violent rockings, the shaking beds and quaking hearts.

  She began to doodle, drawing small boxes fitted into other boxes joined by parallel lines, and tried again to think of a friend to call who would produce the right responses and provide insights, indignation, and make travel plans. Then she picked up her red Flair and wrote: “Wanted: A father for three boys and one girl. Regular part-time position. No experience required. Evenings after 6:00 and weekends. Live in or out. Close to bus line. Call 202-765-8431.” But where could she place such a personal Personal? The New York Review of Books? The Berkeley Barb? The Texas Observer? Playboy?

  Then jealousy beset Coco again and she began to quiver with pain. What she really should do was list all of the great women who had made the Big Jealousy trip. Instead of famous ladies publicly announcing their past abortions, what about an International Jealousy List? Now, that was a real trip, a gut issue, a put-up-or-shut-up kind of list. What if Simone de Beauvoir published a legally notarized statement that she had written The Mandarins because she was ravished by jealousy over Jean-Paul Sartre’s indecent indiscretions, and what if dear Shirley Jackson acknowledged she wrote “The Lottery” because she had to put up, and put up with, girl graduate students, and Doris Lessing confessed she wrote The Golden Notebooks because she was hurting over Clancy’s fancies? Was it true that the finest women artists were whipped into creativity only by lashes of jealousy? Were Sylvia Plath’s last poems, scribbled in that cold London flat, only the ultimate moans of a woman betrayed? Was jealousy perhaps the only catalyst for great female writing?

  Because whether or not a woman loved her man, the result of conjugal betrayal was extreme, possibly fatal, jealousy. The pain Coco felt now on the beachhead of her heart—a potent combination of rage, competition, love, revenge, and rejection—was obviously a universal reaction. It apparently stemmed from some strange contractual state of mind that married women developed to explain to themselves their own puzzling situations. Whatever the cause, women certainly couldn’t tolerate husbands having extamarital love lives. Jealousy instantly canceled out all history and truth and immediately activated the classical how-dare-you-do-this-to-me-when-I-really-should-have-done-it-to-you-first-except-that-ifs-harder-for-a-woman-because-she-has-to-pick-up-the-kids-at-three-etc.-etc.-etc. response.

  Coco began to draw triangles. She covered half a page with symmetrical triangles. Then she drew one upside down, superimposing it on another, and watched a Jewish star appear to taunt her. Then she methodically began assigning triangle points to people. She did a Liz-Dick-Sybil Burton triangle. She did a Mia-Andre-Dory Previn triangle. She did a Mrs. Rockefeller-Gov. Rockefeller-Happy triangle.

  Good Lord, why am I sitting here doing this? she thought hysterically. Why am I just hanging out in the kitchen like I’m sitting Shiva? Am I sitting Shiva for the death of my marriage? Should I run right out to the Safeway and buy a Yarhzeit candle? Should I use the candle to masturbate and the glass for the kids to drink milk? Maybe it’s normal to mourn, she thought maturely, but then she remembered her Freud and decided to be wary of melancholia.

  Then a scene from Coco’s past resurrected itself. Once, perhaps twelve or thirteen years ago, she had been visiting Helen’s apartment in New York, a seventh-floor walk-up, and was standing near the window when she caught a glimpse of some commotion down below in the street that drew her closer to the dirty paint-spotted window, and she had watched a miniature horror show that brought the sick taste of fear into her mouth.

  A woman had gone berserk in the street in front of a huge apartment building, and her shrieks were cascading upward like an inverted waterfall, splashing in a translucent spray against Helen’s window. The woman ran, wailing along the sidewalk, back and forth in front of the building, caged in by her own delirium while children stood watching, fascinated rather than frightened, and someone must have called the police, because finally a Black Maria appeared, and somehow, despite the cosmic disintegration the woman was suffering, once the cops had grabbed her, once they began to shove and push her toward the double doors at the back of the van, she must have realized that she was safe, that she was no longer responsible for herself, that some force stronger than her own madness had now seized her, claiming her for its own. Because once hands had been laid upon her, she ceased to bellow, ceased to scream, and cooperatively climbed up to disappear inside the paddy wagon, and Coco, years later now, suddenly understood the peace of submission, and thought, as she rose from her chair, that even city hospitals have sheets and that private institutions probably have their linens pressed as well as laundered.

  She went upstairs to bed.

  The next morning the baby slept late, and unexpectedly, it was Jessica who climbed into Coco’s bed first on that Sunday morning. />
  “Hi, baby snuckums.”

  Coco reached out, and Jessica, still sweet from sleep, rolled over into Coco’s crooked arm.

  “Gee,” she said, “Daddy sure leaves a lot of space when he goes away.”

  Coco’s heart fluttered, and she turned her head so she could see Jessica’s light blue eyes with their Hollywood-thick dark lashes.

  “When’s he coming back, Mama?”

  Temporarily the air escaped from Coco’s lungs again. “I’m not exactly sure.” Should she tell her now while they were alone and feeling close? But perhaps Gavin would call today, and then inflicting such a wound upon Jessia would be barbaric. As soon as Gavin called and Coco convinced him to come home, the children would realize everything she had told them was true.

  “In a couple more days, honey. It depends how fast he can finish his work.” But, oh, what if he never called? What if Gavin had fled to Pago-Pago like the man who wrote the story in New York Magazine and who felt sorry for his wife every evening as he watched the South Pacific sunset? Then what would the children think of Coco’s blatant cowardly lying? But still … Gavin was essentially a responsible Jewish lawyer, he wouldn’t not show up in his office after a long weekend. He hadn’t come that far yet … or had he?

  “Is this Sunday, Mama?”

  “Yes.” Coco lifted her free hand to press the slightly damp hair off Jessica’s forehead, and for a moment she saw the promise of her own features hidden within the face of her little daughter.

  “You know what I was thinking?” Coco asked casually, careful not to invest too much enthusiasm in her suggestion, since that would cause Jessica to reject it immediately. “Since Mike is going to be at Skip’s all day, maybe you and I could clean out some of our drawers and make them nice and neat.”