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They went back to her apartment, and after sparring silently with kitchen cabinet doors slammed and the television being tuned too loud, they got to her bed, and he tried to
perpetuate the metaphor by fucking her in the ass. He had
her on elbows and knees before she realized what he was
doing; she struggled to turn over and he rode her bucking
and tossing without a sound. And when it was clear to him
that she would never permit it, he grabbed her breast from
underneath and squeezed so hard she howled in pain. He
dumped her on her back, rubbed himself between her legs a
dozen times, and came on her stomach.
Beth lay with her eyes closed and an arm thrown across
her face. She wanted to cry, but found she could not. Ray
lay on her and said nothing. She wanted to rush to the bathroom and shower, but he did not move, till long after his semen had dried on their bodies.
“ Who did you date at college?” he asked.
“ I didn’t date anyone very much.” Sullen.
“ No heavy makeouts with wealthy lads from Williams and
Dartmouth . . . no Amherst intellectuals begging you to save
them from creeping faggotry by permitting them to stick their
carrots in your sticky little slit?”
“ Stop it!”
“ Come on, baby, it couldn’t all have been knee socks and
little round circle-pins. You don’t expect me to believe you
didn’t get a little mouthful of cock from time to time. It’s
only, what? about fifteen miles to Williamstown? I ’m sure
the Williams werewolves were down burning the highway to
your cunt on weekends; you can level with old Uncle
Ray. . . .”
“Why are you like this?!” She started to move, to get away
from him, and he grabbed her by the shoulder, forced her to
lie down again. Then he rose up over her and said, “ I ’m like
this because I ’m a New Yorker, baby. Because I live in this
fucking city every day. Because I have to play patty-cake with
the ministers and other sanctified holy-joe assholes who want
their goodness and lightness tracts published by the Blessed
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Sacrament Publishing and Storm Window Company of 277
Park Avenue, when what I really want to do is toss the stupid
psalm-suckers out the thirty-seventh-floor window and listen
to them quote chapter-and-worse all the way down. Because
I ’ve lived in this great big snapping dog of a city all my life
and I ’m mad as a mudfly, for chrissakes!”
She lay unable to move, breathing shallowly, filled with a
sudden pity and affection for him. His face was white and
strained, and she knew he was saying things to her that only
a bit too much Almad6n and exact timing would have let him
say.
“ What do you expect from m e,” he said, his voice softer
now, but no less intense, “ do you expect kindness and gentility and understanding and a hand on your hand when the smog bums your eyes? I can’t do it, I haven’t got it. No one
has it in this cesspool of a city. Look around you; what do
you think is happening here? They take rats and they put
them in boxes and when there are too many of them, some
of the little fuckers go out of their minds and start gnawing
the rest to death. It a in’t no different here, baby! It’s rat time
for everybody in this madhouse. You can’t expect to jam as
many people into this stone thing as we do, with buses and
taxis and dogs shitting themselves scrawny and noise night
and day and no money and not enough places to live and no
place to go to have a decent think . . . you can’t do it without
making the time right for some godforsaken other kind of
thing to be bom! You can’t hate everyone around you, and
kick every beggar and nigger and mestizo shithead, you can’t
have cabbies stealing from you and taking tips they don’t
deserve, and then cursing you, you can’t walk in the soot till
your collar turns black, and your body stinks with the smell
of flaking brick and decaying brains, you can’t do it without
calling up some kind of awful—”
He stopped.
His face bore the expression of a man who has just received brutal word of the death of a loved one. He suddenly lay down, rolled over, and turned off.
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She lay beside him, trembling, trying desperately to remember where she had seen his face before.
He didn’t call her again, after the night of the party. And
when they met in the hall, he pointedly turned away, as
though he had given her some obscure chance and she had
refused to take it. Beth thought she understood: though Ray
Gleeson had not been her first affair, he had been the first to
reject her so completely. The first to put her not only out of
his bed and his life, but even out of his world. It was as
though she were invisible, not even beneath contempt, simply not there.
She busied herself with other things.
She took on three new charting jobs for Guzman and a
new group that had formed on Staten Island, of all places.
She worked furiously and they gave her new assignments;
they even paid her.
She tried to decorate the apartment with a less precise
touch. Huge poster blowups of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham replaced the Brueghel prints that had reminded her of the view looking down the hill toward Williams. The
tiny balcony outside her window, the balcony she had steadfastly refused to stand upon since the night of the slaughter, the night of the fog with eyes, that balcony she swept and set
about with little flower boxes in which she planted geraniums, petunias, dwarf zinnias, and other hardy perennials.
Then, closing the window, she went to give herself, to involve herself in this city to which she had brought her ordered life.
And the city responded to her overtures:
Seeing off an old friend from Bennington, at Kennedy International, she stopped at the terminal coffee shop to have a sandwich. The counter—like a moat—surrounded a center
service island that had huge advertising cubes rising above it
on burnished poles. The cubes proclaimed the delights of
Fun City. New York Is a Summer Festival, they said, and
Joseph Papp Presents Shakespeare in Central Park and Visit
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the Bronx Zoo and You ’ll Adore Our Contentious but Lovable
Cabbies. The food emerged from a window far down the
service area and moved slowly on a conveyor belt through
the hordes of screaming waitresses who slathered the counter
with redolent washcloths. The lunchroom had all the charm
and dignity of a steel-rolling mill, and approximately the same
noise level. Beth ordered a cheeseburger that cost a dollar
and a quarter, and a glass of milk.
When it came, it was cold, the cheese unmelted, and the
patty of meat resembling nothing so much as a dirty scouring
pad. The bun was cold and untoasted. There was no lettuce
under the patty.
Beth managed to catch the waitress’s eye. The girl approached with an annoyed look. “ Please toast the
bun and may I have a piece of lettuce?” Beth said.
“ We dun’ do that,” the waitress said, turning half away
as though she would walk in a moment.
“ You don’t do what?”
“ We dun’ toass the bun here.”
“ Yes, but I want the bun toasted,” Beth said firmly.
“ An’ you got to pay for extra lettuce.”
“ If I was asking for extra lettuce,” Beth said, getting annoyed, “ I would pay for it, but since there’s no lettuce here, I don’t think I should be charged extra for the first piece.”
“ We dun’ do that.”
The waitress started to walk away. “ Hold it,” Beth said,
raising her voice just enough so the assembly-line eaters on
either side stared at her. “ You mean to tell me I have to pay
a dollar and a quarter and I can’t get a piece of lettuce or
even get the bun toasted?”
“ Ef you dun’ like it . . .”
“ Take it back.”
“ You gotta pay for it, you order it.”
“ I said take it back, I don’t want the fucking thing!”
The waitress scratched it off the check. The milk cost 27C
and tasted going-sour. It was the first time in her life that
Beth had said that word aloud.
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At the cashier’s stand, Beth said to the sweating man with
the felt-tip pens in his shirt pocket, “ Just out of curiosity,
are you interested in complaints?”
“ No!” he said, snarling, quite literally snarling. He did
not look up as he punched out 730 and it came rolling down
the chute.
The city responded to her overtures:
It was raining again. She was trying to cross Second Avenue, with the light. She stepped off the curb and a car came sliding through the red and splashed her. “ Hey!” she yelled.
“ Eat shit, sister!” the driver yelled back, turning the corner.
Her boots, her legs and her overcoat were splattered with
mud. She stood trembling on the curb.
The city responded to her overtures:
She emerged from the building at One Astor Place with
her big briefcase full of Laban charts; she was adjusting her
rain scarf about her head. A well-dressed man with an attachd
case thrust the handle of his umbrella up between her legs
from the rear. She gasped and dropped her case.
The city responded and responded and responded.
Her overtures altered quickly.
The old drunk with the stippled cheeks extended his hand
and mumbled words. She cursed him and walked on up
Broadway past the beaver film houses.
She crossed against the lights on Park Avenue, making
hackies slam their brakes to avoid hitting her; she used that
word frequently now.
When she found herself having a drink with a man who
had elbowed up beside her in the singles’ bar, she felt faint
and knew she should go home.
But Vermont was so far away.
Nights later. She had come home from the Lincoln Center
ballet, and gone straight to bed. Lying half-asleep in her bedroom, she heard an alien sound. One room away, in the living room, in the dark, there was a sound. She slipped out of bed
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and went to the door between the rooms. She fumbled silently for the switch on the lamp just inside the living room, and found it, and clicked it on. A black man in a leather car
coat was trying to get out of the apartment. In that first flash
of light filling the room she noticed the television set beside
him on the floor as he struggled with the door, she noticed
the police lock and bar had been broken in a new and clever
manner New York magazine had not yet reported in a feature
article on apartment ripoffs, she noticed that he had gotten
his foot tangled in the telephone cord that she Had requested
be extra-long so she could carry the instrument into the bathroom, I don’t want to miss any business calls when the shower is running; she noticed all things in perspective and one thing
with Sharpest clarity: the expression on the burglar’s face.
There was something familiar in that expression.
He almost had the door open, but now he closed it, and
slipped the police lock. He took a step toward her.
Beth went back, into the darkened bedroom.
The city responded to her overtures.
She backed against the wall at the head of the bed. Her
hand fumbled in the shadows for the telephone. His shape
filled the doorway, light, all light behind him.
In silhouette it should not have been possible to tell, but
somehow she knew he was wearing gloves and the only marks
he would leave would be deep bruises, very blue, almost
black, with the tinge under them of blood that had been
stopped in its course.
He came for her, arms hanging casually at his sides. She
tried to climb over the bed, and he grabbed her from behind,
ripping her nightgown. Then he had a hand around her neck
and he pulled her backward. She fell off the bed, landed at
his feet and his hold was broken. She scuttled across the floor
and for a moment she had the respite to feel terror. She was
going to die, and she was frightened.
He trapped her in the comer between the closet and the
bureau and kicked her. His foot caught her in the thigh as
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she folded tighter, smaller, drawing her legs up. She was
cold.
Then he reached down with both hands and pulled her
erect by her hair. He slammed her head against the wall.
Everything slid up in her sight as though running off the edge
of the world. He slammed her head against the wall again,
and she felt something go soft over her right ear.
When he tried to slam her a third time she reached out
blindly for his face and ripped down with her nails. He
howled in pain and she hurled herself forward, arms wrapping themselves around his waist. He stumbled backward and in a tangle of thrashing arms and legs they fell out onto the
little balcony.
Beth landed on the bottom, feeling the window boxes
jammed up against her spine and legs. She fought to get to
her feet, and her nails hooked into his shirt under the open
jacket, ripping. Then she was on her feet again and they
struggled silently.
He whirled her around, bent her backward across the
wrought-iron railing. Her face was turned outward.
They were standing in their windows, watching.
Through the fog she could see them watching. Through
the fog she recognized their expressions. Through the fog she
heard them breathing in unison, bellows breathing of expectation and wonder. Through the fog.
And the black man punched her in the throat. She gagged
and started to black out and could not draw air into her lungs.
Back, back, he bent her further back and she was looking
up, straight up, toward the ninth floor and higher . . .
Up there: eyes.
The words Ray Gleeson had said in a moment filled with
what he had become, with the utter hopelessness and finality
of the choice the city had forced on him, the words came
back. You can’t liv
e in this city and survive unless you have
protection . . . you can’t live this way, like rats driven mad,
without making the time right fo r some godforsaken other
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kind o f thing to be bom . . . you can’t do it without calling
up some kind o f a w fu l. . .
God! A new God, an ancient God come again with the
eyes and hunger of a child, a deranged blood God of fog and
street violence. A God who needed worshippers and offered
the choices of death as a victim or life as an eternal witness
to the deaths of other chosen victims. A God to fit the times,
a God of streets and people.
She tried to shriek, to appeal to Ray, to the director in the
bedroom window of his ninth-floor apartment with his long-
legged Philadelphia model beside him and his fingers inside
her as they worshipped in their holiest of ways, to the others
who had been at the party that had been Ray’s offer of a
chance to join their congregation. She wanted to be saved
from having to make that choice.
But the black man had punched her in the throat, and now
his hands were on her, one on her chest, the other in her
face, the smell of leather filling her where the nausea could
not. And she understood Ray had cared, had wanted her to
take the chance offered; but she had come from a world of
little white dormitories and Vermont countryside; it was not
a real world. This was the real world and up there was the
God who ruled this world, and she had rejected him, had
said no to one of his priests and servitors. Save me! D on’t
make me do it!
She knew she had to call out, to make appeal, to try and
win the approbation of that God. I can’t . . . save me!
She struggled and made terrible little mewing sounds trying to summon the words to cry out, and suddenly she crossed a line, and screamed up into the echoing courtyard with a
voice Leona Ciarelli had never known enough to use.
“ Him! Take him! Not me! I ’m yours, I love you, I ’m yours!
Take him, not me, please not me, take him, take him, I ’m
yours!”
And the black man was suddenly lifted away, wrenched off
her, and off the balcony, whirled straight up into the fog-
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The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 24
