Gould (11 page)

“Maybe?”
and she said “All right, we were, but never for a long-term life-together-for-forever or what for a while could be that type of tie-in and connection,” and he said “You just don't want to say ‘love affair' or ‘relationship,'” and she said “Certainly not ‘love affair': I hate that term worse than ‘relationship.' But also that the timing isn't and was never really right for us and we fought that and lost and now you should gather up all your things you have here and go. This will help you find that woman to have that child you want, while I'm—” and he said “But you're pregnant with our baby and I want that one, not just any woman's; yours,” and she said “Believe me, Gould, if you want a baby so much that you'd have it with a woman who absolutely doesn't want it or want to live with you and who'd make your life particularly miserable after having it till you'd want to brain her, I mean that, then you'll find another more wonderful woman much better in the ways you want from me.” “Speak English,” he said, and she said “Don't get mean and bitchy, I hate that too. A woman who's agreeable and very receptive to marriage and kids and who'll want yours and for them to look like you and you'll be happy with her because she'll love and admire you and give in and administer to all your needs and whims while with me you'll be unhappy and dissatisfied, always, I promise, and often depressed, with a brief respite from the unhappiness and rest of the mess only every now and then. I like and appreciate many things about you but as I said, I don't want our
relationship
to go on any longer than today or, if you want, from the time after you drop me off or pick me up at the abortion clinic, though where or why I came up with that drop-and-pick-me-up idea, I don't know—skip it,” and he said “I have to have this baby. If we do then you'll see, you'll want to be with it and me and you'll love having the baby, you'll adore it and thank—” and she said “No, absolutely and unqualifiedly not,” and he said “Then I'll have to force you to have it, that's all, if there's nothing else I can do,” and she said “Oh yes, and how?” and he said “I'm not sure—by stopping you from not having it,” and she said “And how do you think you can do that?” and he said “By locking you in your apartment or mine till you give birth, or that's one way,” and she said “Look, no more playing around—just get out of here, will you? I don't like the tone or the import and you're becoming a moron. Collect your stupid stuff some other time when you're less moronic, or I'll send it over, but now I want you gone,” and he said “It's no tone; I'm telling you, I could make you stay here, cutting you off from everything, or I'll drive you to some remote place someplace—Maine, Vermont—to keep you locked in. And then when it's too late to abort or miscarry, when your own health would be in jeopardy and there wouldn't be any doctor or butcher who'd do it, I'll let you out and you'll have to have the kid and if you want to give it to me, great, or if you think I'm too wacky to give it to or you won't to spite me and you want to put it up for adoption or hand it over to some relatives like your parents, then I'll say I'm the doctor—the
father
—and claim it and I'll make a good case for myself why I incarcerated you, and I'll get it. I'll get a lawyer to help me. I'll be willing to go broke and into debt getting a lawyer and other help. I'll do everything I can to get it. I'll get my family to back me, I'll get newspapers and stupid human-interest shows behind me. I'll contact anti-this-or-that organizations I've up till now had nothing to do with or never believed in     your own friends to say I was never nuts but just because I wanted this baby so much I became temporarily deranged or just overimpassioned,” and she said “You know—calm down—but you know, I never knew but you really
are
out of your mind—how come I never saw this in you before?” and he said “I'm not. I'm just showing you, but being serious in this show, how much I want our baby to live and if it has to come to this, how far I'll go to keep it. I don't want to lose this chance. I've always wanted one—I told you that the first time we dated, at that bar on a Hundred Thirteenth, whatever its name—that I'd wanted to be a father for years, and now this might be, for whatever reason, my last sentence, I mean ‘chance,' and the bar was the West End,” and she said “But look, and I'm saying this calmly and I hope you'll respond in kind, look at what you're saying. You think they'll give in to a madman—even let you see the baby for two minutes—who locks up his pregnant ex-girlfriend to have that child? You mentioned ‘sentence'; well, they'll give you a jail one, that'll be your baby. A five-year-old one, or ten, and where you can see it all the time, or if you're lucky just a few jolts with an electric rod to your frontal lobes should do it, if that's where it's done,” and he grabbed her wrists and shouted “You're having the baby, no two ways about it!” and she said “I am not, and get your hands off me, goon,” and he said “Then you're staying here with me for as long as I want you to,” and she said “I said get your fucking hands off me, you goon; get the fuck off and out of here or I really will sick the police on you and press charges and see that you're dumped into jail and stay there,” and he said no and held her wrists tighter and stared at her face, thinking maybe she'd agree to the baby if he just stared at her but knew that was stupid and she said “What the hell are you looking at? You think I'm a child and you can get your way that way? You look ridiculous, you look ugly, with your pointed eyes,” and turned away and said “And now you're hurting me; get off, you're making it even worse for yourself, goon, much worse,” and he said “I'm sorry, but say you'll have it, please,” and she said “Yes, I will have it but I'm lying,” and he said “Then I don't care how much I hurt you,” and squeezed harder and she screamed and he put his hand over her mouth, twisted her around till he was behind her, kept his hand over her mouth and thought What have I got myself into? What am I going to do now? But she has to see she has to have it. You just can't kill something you say you'll one day eventually want when there's a chance you might never have another chance to have that something, and he said “Listen to me, you can't kill something you say you'll eventually want one—” when she bit his hand and ran for the door and he caught her, stuck his wrist in her mouth from behind and twisted her around in back till she muttered through his wrist “Sop, you're baking it  .     shoking,” and started gagging and he let her arm go and took his wrist out but kept his hand loosely over her mouth and said “Don't bite; I don't want to hurt you; last thing I want to do; but I will, I might have to, you've got to have that baby,” and she started crying and he said “What utter baloney, every trick in the book,” continued crying, and he said “I won't go for that crap. Having the kid's more important than falling for your horseshit. The kid's what you should be crying for and particularly if you kill it, don't you see?” and waited but she didn't make any head motion or say anything but seemed to have stopped crying and he grabbed her hand, thought What should I do now? I should leave, give it up and get the hell away for all time from here, but maybe I can convince her, it's worth it trying, and said “Please, I'm not going to really lose my head, but change your mind?” and she said “You've lost it; you're going to pay you don't know how much for this, you goddamn goon,” and he pulled her to the kitchen, she tugged back and he grabbed her arms and pulled her harder, took the dish towel off the refrigerator door handle and tied it around her mouth but there was only enough cloth left in back to make the first half of the knot, knew she could easily rip it off, if it didn't fall off first, and scream, so it was more a symbolic shutting-her-up and that he might do worse if she fought him, though he just told her he wouldn't, walked her to the bedroom pushing her arms from behind, she was crying again and he tried not to look and believed the tears but under his breath intentionally loud enough for her to hear, he said “Fake tears, don't tell me they're real, but go on, blubber all you want, see how it feels,” though didn't know what he meant by the last remark: him, her, the baby? and when he got to the bed he shoved her cheekdown into it, knee up against her back but in a way where it wouldn't hurt and said “So this is what I'm planning. You listening?” and she shook her head and he said “You're having it, you're staying here, not leaving till I can sneak you to a place somewhere far away where you'll also stay. I'll disconnect the phone in the meantime. Or I'll answer it and say you're sick but you'll be okay, laryngitis, so you can't talk, or the flu, gastrointestinal, your stomach, and I'm feeding you soup, or sweet tea, taking care of you better than you've ever been, but no visitors, you're that bad off plus in no mood to see anyone. Then in a few days I'll say you miraculously recovered when you got a call from Europe for a job interview with a production company. I'll even tell your boss this if he calls, that the prospect suddenly appeared and it was too good to pass up, with the possibility to triple your current pay and complete medical coverage, so up his giggy for that's what you think of him and his part-time work and cheap company with hourly wages and no benefits or overtime pay, and who am I? Well, I'll say who I am: your man. I'll tell him, except for the last, all the things you've wanted to but have played too safe, though I can see why: money for the time being. And later that you adopted a cat weeks before and are still in Europe and I'm taking care of it, that's why I'm still here, not that anyone who knows us would think I need an excuse. Or I've sublet my own place for a few months and moved in here while you're away, that the renter offered me more money than I could refuse because of my apartment's location, not the building so much, and I was short of cash as I usually am, or something, but I'll work it out, what I'll say. Then I'll get a good friend who'll help me out—Benny would; he'd like the idea, not letting the woman get away with it and that the guy's got rights in this too. Not that so much, since he doesn't understand why any man would want a child, and one to raise on your own, if it came to that, even more incomprehensible, ‘for how do you get done the things you want to get done,' he'd say, ‘like your womanizing and getting drunk and sleeping till noon and going to the track anytime you want?'” He hoped for a laugh—that might start something good—but she kept her eyes shut: thinking, planning a way out or just saying, with her lids tight and face pointing away from him: This is the way I'm locking you out. “But Benny would help, get his brother's car and drive us up to this place the two of them rented for the year in upstate New York, near Albany, a shack, or ‘electrified cabin,' as the owner called it, where they fished and swam from and hoped to do some cross-country skiing, but I'll convince him this is more important. It'll be nippy at first, but we'll get lots of blankets—you'll have your own bed or cot, don't worry, and I won't touch you. And kerosene heaters or the electric ones, since the kerosene ones really aren't safe, if it already doesn't have some kind of interior heating, and line the windows and tape plastic sheets over them inside and out and do everything possible to stay warm, and then I'll let you go once you're ready to deliver. Late April, early May—when do you figure?” and took the gag off. No answer or look, eyes never opened, but the way they were clamped tight he knew she wasn't sleeping. And of course no one was going to think anything funny, as she didn't to his Benny routine before, with a gag on. “Anyway, once the time comes, or I'm saying the month or two before—you be the judge—I'll take you to the hospital for a checkup and whatever preparations you need to have the baby, but I'm not leaving you till then. Benny can drive up with food and things once a week. He'd do that for me and I know he can get his brother to go along with it or at least to let him have the car and me the cabin. They're very close, one's friend is the other's automatically, and Benny's been a true pal, though I was always disappointed in him never seeing the good—the worth, what you are—in you that I did. It's strange, two people you like so much but they can't get together. He thought you too wiseass, he said, sarcastic, a ballbreaker—my balls, and I'm not saying this to make you feel     to disparage you in any way. But you knew what he had to say already and never cared anyway. You thought him a jerk and could never see why I hung out with him. But he was loyal, never two-faced—no betrayals—or reproachful, and we had fun. Though he did say ‘Okay, go for it if you dig her'—his words, ‘go for, dig,' he was once a jazz drummer so that's how he still speaks—when I first met you and introduced you two; and I do, love you, I mean, and he also thought you pretty while I found you beautiful. And it—” and she said with her face still down in the bed “Oh stop with the love, your talk and what you're going to do with me in Albany and this Benny business—he thought me pretty, you found me beautiful; oh, big mushy pigwash, for it's all such manure,” and he said “It isn't, I'm telling you, and after it's over that'll be the end of it,” and she looked at him and said “End of what? What are you talking about? Do you know? Do I know? Endless minutes of it and it's all empty. You're talking like a jerk, worse than Benny, as if you've lost your intelligence and common sense, which you once had some of but he never did. Besides—but forget it—but your decency, anything good in you that was there before but which now resembles take-what-you-can-get-grab-beg-steal-embezzle-from-life stick-it-up-their-pisshole-asses giggy-giggy Benny. Just let me up—get your stupid leg off me, you goon—and out of here. No, you get out, this is my apartment, so I'm ordering you to and you have to comply,” and started squirming under him, tried sliding off the bed and he said “Please, relax, I'm not letting you up right now unless you calm yourself, and certainly not out, and I don't want you getting hurt falling to the floor. I swear it won't be so bad—having the kid and the months up to it with me. It might get a bit boring sometimes but it could also turn out to be interesting and even enriching. Anyway, different. All the books you want to read, good air, time to think, a healthy intellectual period and physical one too and I'll treat you beautifully throughout what you'll call an ordeal. Read to you, cook for—” and she said “Will you please!”—”do everything for you, that's the absolute minimum I can do, and we'll listen to music if you want, whatever kind, the radio, good TV, but this is what I'm going to do. I'm not fluffing off this kid to the nearest scalpel or suction pump or spoon, so face up and confront it yourself as you told me to do with something else. What was that?” and she said “What do I care? You're sending me to sleep with your talk,” and shut her eyes, face rested on the bed. “Maybe if I say and do nothing you'll give up trying to communicate with me and just leave peacefully and quietly but making sure the front door's locked when you go.” He got off the bed, sat across from it, thought “What now, the next step?” said “Scream once and I'm putting the towel back around,” but this time, the way her lids came together so loosely and forehead was uncreased, he thought she might be asleep. Later—half an hour, what he thought most about was how pretty she looked, soft features, beautiful hair and skin, wouldn't it be something now if she had gone along with it, he'd be flipping, maybe calling people, probably lying on the bed with his arms around her, and her head, as she used to like to nap, snug in his neck, maybe if he persisted gently and came up with some other strategy she'd come around but he didn't know what—she stirred, rubbed her eyes, he said “Have a good nap?” and she snapped her head to him as if just realizing he was there, sat up on the bed, he said “What're you doing?” and she looked contemptuously at him and stood up and he said “Where're you going?” she said “To pee, do you mind?” and he walked behind her to the bathroom. “Excuse me,” he said, when she stood in front of the toilet, waiting for him to leave, “but I'll have to stay by the door while you go. I don't see what else I can do, under the circumstances,” and she said “So ridiculous, so nuts, and the language: ‘under the circumstances' indeed. Don't you feel stupid? Well, screw you, you stupid prick, that's what I have to tell you. You like to hear it? You don't know it yet? It takes that many times to sink in? You're even shallower than I thought. Then ‘screw you, you stupid prick' again. I don't know how long you expect me to amuse you but don't count on it much longer,” and sat down and peed and he looked away. After she wiped herself and pulled up her underpants she said “You're trying your darndest to humiliate me, your way of settling scores, and over something in the past—I don't believe this baby bull at all—but it's not working. This is what I've learned today about you: you've the mentality and emotion of the crude jailer, and you should have become a real one. Perhaps then you could have—” and he said “I don't, not at all. I—” and she said “That's my very last word to you on anything till you leave,” and went back to the bedroom and he said “Oh, you'll—and I say this with no pride or self-gratutory