Any Minute I Can Split (21 page)

“I don't know,” Margaret said. “I guess I didn't think about it much. I have a thing about . . . I hate to see people disappear forever.”

“You don't leave yourself any margin for error that way,” Hannah said. “You have to be careful who you say hello to because anyone you say hello to you might have around your neck for the rest of your life. Everyone should turn in their friends for new ones a few times a year.”

Margaret smiled.

“Why do people think I'm kidding when I'm being serious?” Hannah asked.

“I guess because there's something extreme . . . I can't believe half the time that you mean what you're saying.”

“But I always do,” Hannah said. “Even when I know it sounds crazy or it's only partly true.”

Roger came in without knocking, told Hannah he'd left the girls sitting in the grass, saw Margaret, stopped. Grinned.

“How does the other guy look?”

“Jesus,” Hannah said, “what a time for dirty jokes.”

“My wife's appearance,” Roger said, “is a dirty joke.”

“There's a certain implication there that I don't like,” Hannah said slowly. “As though Margaret did it to herself.”

“What difference does it make,” Roger demanded, “if she did it to herself or that psychopathic little bastard she screws around with did it to her?”

“I think it makes a big difference,” Hannah said. Margaret leaned back in the bunk bed like some tiny UN protectorate at a Security Council debate. “You're reminding me of all those Freudian bullshit artists who convinced the public that a woman who was raped must have gone out of her way to get it. Not that I want to give this thing sexual undertones.”

“Overtones.”

“Whatever.”

“And furthermore, you don't have to give it anything, it's there. It's always there.”

“You don't really believe that.”

A hostile note, previously absent, had crept into the conversation.

“Damn right I do. If there's a male and a female in a room there's sex in that room. It may be good and it may be bad and it may be perverted and it may be repressed or any other bloody thing, but it's there.”

“Oh, wow,” Hannah said, shaking her head, at once sad, hip and lofty, “I wish I'd known what was on your mind when we were having those long marvelous talks about art and education.”

“Don't worry about it, Hannah Banana,” Roger said, “you knew all right. Same thing as yours.”

“One thing I will not stand for,” Hannah said angrily, “is having someone tell me what's on my mind.”

“Or theirs,” Roger suggested.

Margaret was beginning to think the day would end better than it had begun.

Hannah was upset—and terribly wary, as though she were going through a scene she'd lived many times before.

“You seemed so straight to me, Roger. So open and honest.”

“That's me,” Roger said. “Open and honest.”

“You never made a pass at me.”

“I was saving it. A special treat. For your birthday or something.”

“Very funny.”

“I'm serious.”

Hannah shook her head. “I didn't figure you for the kind of guy that's got to perpetually prove he has balls.”

“You really think that's the only reason for having sex?” Roger asked sardonically. “To prove something?”

“No,” Hannah said, undeterred by his manner. “There's having children.”

Margaret searched the other woman's face for a hint
of irony but there was none; Roger was openmouthed.

“I begin to perceive the problem,” he said finally. “It's not that you hate men it's just that you hate sex.”

“Why is that my problem?” Hannah asked. “If you wanna make me and I hate sex, that's
your
problem.”

It gave Roger pause.

“You mean to say that you know you hate sex?”

Hannah nodded.

“What do you hate about it?” he asked curiously.

“The way it feels,” Hannah said calmly. “When I'm getting fucked I feel as though I'm getting fucked.”

Was this one of those times when she believed what she was saying even though it was only partly true? Of all the sexual confessions Margaret had seen, read or heard unsolicited from a variety of people over the years she could recall no simple declaration of distaste like this one. Her own experiences had run the gamut from extreme pleasure to moderate pain, the distinguishing difference, aside from the physical feeling, being that in the pleasure extreme her mind was disengaged while it dominated when sex was bad. Once when Roger was on acid which she'd refused to take he'd become extremely quietly loving to her. Smiling, never speaking, he'd led her outdoors to their shrub-enclosed back yard, where under the leafy umbrella of a beautiful dogwood tree he had undressed her, then himself, and they had lain looking at the stars through the foliage. The mosquitoes found them but when she complained to Roger that she was being eaten alive and wanted to go indoors he rolled over on top of her and in a manner at once graceful and deliberate covered every part of her body with his own, then made love to her in a tender all-encompassing way. And some strange, kinky, warped thing inside her had responded by feeling claustrophobic and resentful. He was trying to make her believe there was only one of them. He was all over her and now he wanted to be in her, too. And as he touched as far inside her as he could go she'd felt a sharp pain. She was suspicious of the idea that her
pain had been physical, it seemed more likely that she was reacting to the violation of some metaphysical air space. A space she'd thought of herself as perpetually trying to fill.

“Are you sure it isn't just that you never had the right guy?”

“You don't really think it matters, do you?” Hannah replied. “I mean if you hate swimming what difference does it make if you're in a pool or a lake?”

There was something wrong with the metaphor but Margaret couldn't put her finger on it.

“How about stoned?” Roger asked.

“I don't like the way being stoned feels, either,” Hannah said.

“Far out,” Roger said softly.

“I know what she means,” Margaret said. “I mean I don't always want to feel the way I feel when I'm stoned.” Copping out on the larger question.

“That isn't what I really meant, though,” Hannah said. “What I meant is that I don't feel the
need
to be stoned.”

“Maybe you could enjoy sex if you got stoned,” Roger said.

“But I don't
want
to enjoy sex,” Hannah said calmly. “Sex is just another dependency thing.”

Roger whistled. A long drawn-out whistle. Then he said, “Come on, Maggie, let's get out of here.”

Did he know how it sounded? Hannah's expression didn't alter but her frame seemed to sag. Had there been any actual change or was Margaret touched by the other woman's fear of being in need? Half-willingly she got up, said to Hannah, “See you later,” and followed Roger outside, only now feeling again the cuts and bruises David had inflicted on her. Her legs were Charley-horsed, as after a first dance class. She couldn't keep up with Roger as he strode across the yard to where the twins were sitting happily in the grass, watching the birds and cats and playing with gravel.

“The little creep really worked you over, didn't he,”
Roger said when she reached him. It was hostile but it was also friendly.

“He's gone,” she said. “I think for good.”

“Too bad,” Roger said. “If I knew then what I know now I'd have matched up the two of them, they're both out of their skulls.”

So he was willing to be her friend now if they could step together blithely over the bodies of Creepy David and Crazy Hannah.

“I don't know about Hannah,” she said, “but David isn't crazy.”

“Right,” Roger said. “He's just this sweet little kid who goes around beating up on people.”

“He beat me up because he was furious with me.”
For not loving him enough to make up for his inability to love me.

“And you loved it.”

“No. I don't think so.”

“Maybe I could do it better.”

She smiled, which made her lip hurt like hell. “That's practically the same thing you said to Hannah. Maybe I haven't had the right guy.”

“Very funny.”

“It is. And I guess I could give you the same answer. If I don't like how it feels what difference does it make who's doing it?”

“She really spooked me.”

“She spooked De Witt at first. He figured out she scared him because she refused to need him.”

“Oh, shit, what are you, shilling for the sisterhood?”

“What I'm trying to say is that part of me empathized with what she was saying.”

“So?”

“So I thought I ought to say so.”

“Why?”

“Because it would've been dishonest to pretend I had no idea of what she was talking about just for the sake of not arguing with you. You used to accuse me of being dishonest.”

He grinned. “But I got accustomed to it.”

“It doesn't matter,” she said, “because I'm doing it . . . arguing with you, whatever I'm doing, being honest . . . out of my own needs, not yours.”

“What makes you think I give a shit for your needs?”

“You're married to me.”

“I married you to fill
my
needs, not yours.”

“It must be possible to fill your own needs and not forget other people's entirely.”

He laughed. “What if one of my needs is to forget about yours?”

“Then,” she said, calmly and with no forethought, “maybe we shouldn't be married.”

He blanched. Or so she fancied.

“At least,” she said, “maybe we should think about it.”

“I don't want to think about it,” he said. “You think about it and let me know what you decide.” He went into the house. She hobbled after him. He went upstairs and she followed him up, pushing into the room just before he could slam the door in her face.

“Roger,” she said, “I don't want you to think this is something I've been thinking about because it isn't. It just came out when you said you didn't want to think about my needs.”

“Okay. So it came out. I did say it and it did come out. So do you want to get a divorce and get it over with?”

“I don't think of it as something to get over with. I haven't even been thinking of it at all. I don't even feel the
need
for it. There are people here who care about me and my needs so it hasn't been so important.”

“Right,” Roger said. “You don't need me at all. If you want someone to kiss your ass and worry about how happy you are, stick with De Witt.”

She stared at him, surprised and confused.

“De Witt doesn't kiss my ass, Roger.”

“Sure he does,” Roger said promptly. “He's just such a technician of other people's asses that you don't even notice.”

She was about to tell him he was talking nonsense when she remembered, suddenly and vividly, her brief
motel interlude with De Witt, when her body hadn't been able to be convinced by her mind that De Witt really lusted for her.

“Making love to somebody,” she blurted out, then paused, disconcerted, “ . . . being nice to somebody in different ways . . . isn't the same as kissing their ass.”

“It is if there's nothing that's really moving you to do it, if you're doing it because
they
want it.”

She couldn't answer that. “I'll have to think about it.” She was getting a headache and all her cuts and bruises were reasserting themselves. “I don't know if it's true . . . or if it applies here.” She left him and went downstairs.

De Witt had just brought into the kitchen the large graph-paper chart on which he would plot the planting. The peas, beans, spinach and lettuce were already in the ground and beginning to sprout; in another week or so they would sow the seeds for some of the less hearty crops and then, by the second week in June when frost danger was past, they would transfer to the outdoors the tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplants that had been brought to the cold frame from the greenhouse to harden off. She sat down facing De Witt, who was spreading the charts but then looked up and saw her bruised face.

“Margaret!” He stood up and came around to her. “What's happened to you?”

“It's David,” she said. “He had a fit.”

“Wait a minute. That lip needs some ice.” He got some cubes and wrapped them in a dishtowel then brought back the compress, sat down next to her on the bench, one arm around her, and with the other hand placed the compress on her lip and held it there. She felt a wave of sexual gratitude.

This is not ass-kissing, goddammit! This is being a good person!

She leaned her head on De Witt's shoulder. “I think he's gone for good.”

“David? Was this his farewell present?”

“Something like that.”

“I'm sorry.” He kissed her forehead. She put down the compress and he took her cold hands between his warm ones.

“I know what I must look like,” she said.

Very, very lightly he kissed the swollen middle of her lip. Very, very lightly she licked his lips. He smelled of rotted hay and cow manure, both of which smells struck her at the moment as being sensual in the extreme.

“De Witt,” she said, “did I ever tell you that Mitchell was David's stepfather?”

“No,” De Witt said. “I don't believe you did. I've wondered from time to time how he happened to find us.”

“De Witt, do you think there was something about my relationship with David that made this practically inevitable? I mean, do you think in some way I may have been asking for it?”

“No, of course not,” De Witt said. “Why should I think that?”