Run With the Hunted (42 page)

for as long as those things stay solved

in the history of woman and

man, it's different for each

better and worse for each—

for me, it's splendid enough to remember

past the marching of armies

and the horses that walk the streets outside

past the memories of pain and defeat and unhappiness:

Linda, you brought it to me,

when you take it away

do it slowly and easily

make it as if I were dying in my sleep instead of in

my life, amen.

 

 

Dee Dee had a place in the Hollywood Hills. Dee Dee shared the place with a friend, another lady executive, Bianca. Bianca took the top floor and Dee Dee the bottom. I rang the bell. It was 8:30
PM
when Dee Dee opened the door. Dee Dee was about 40, had black, cropped hair, was Jewish, hip, freaky. She was New York City oriented, knew all the names: the right publishers, the best poets, the most talented cartoonists, the right revolutionaries, anybody, everybody. She smoked grass continually and acted like it was the early 1960's and Love-In Time, when she had been mildly famous and much more beautiful.

A long series of bad love affairs had finally done her in. Now I was standing at her door. There was a good deal left of her body. She was small but buxom and many a young girl would have loved to have her figure.

I followed her in. “So Lydia split?” Dee Dee asked.

“I think she went to Utah. The 4th of July dance in Muleshead is coming up. She never misses it.”

I sat down in the breakfast nook while Dee Dee uncorked a red wine. “Do you miss her?”

“Christ, yes. I feel like crying. My whole gut is chewed up. I might not make it.”

“You'll make it. We'll get you over Lydia. We'll pull you through.”

“Then you know how I feel?”

“It has happened to most of us a few times.”

“That bitch never cared to begin with.”

“Yes, she did. She still does.”

I decided it was better to be there in Dee Dee's large home in the Hollywood Hills than to be sitting all alone back in my apartment and brooding.

“It must be that I'm just not good with the ladies,” I said.

“You're good enough with the ladies,” Dee Dee said. “And you're a helluva writer.”

“I'd rather be good with the ladies.”

Dee Dee was lighting a cigarette. I waited until she was finished, then I leaned across the table and gave her a kiss. “You make me feel good. Lydia was always on the attack.”

“That doesn't mean what you think it means.”

“But it can get to be unpleasant.”

“It sure as hell can.”

“Have you found a boyfriend yet?”

“Not yet.”

“I like this place. But how do you keep it so neat and clean?”

“We have a maid.”

“Oh?”

“You'll like her. She's big and black and she finishes her work as fast as she can after I leave. Then she goes to bed and eats cookies and watches t.v. I find cookie crumbs in my bed every night. I'll have her fix you breakfast after I leave tomorrow morning.”

“All right.”

“No, wait. Tomorrow's Sunday. I don't work Sundays. We'll eat out. I know a place. You'll like it.”

“All right.”

“You know, I think I've always been in love with you.”

“What?”

“For years. You know, when I used to come and see you, first with Bernie and later with Jack, I would want you. But you never noticed me. You were always sucking on a can of beer or you were obsessed with something.”

“Crazy, I guess, near crazy. Postal Service madness. I'm sorry I didn't notice you.”

“You can notice me now.”

Dee Dee poured another glass of wine. It was good wine. I liked her. It was good to have a place to go when things went bad. I remembered the early days when things would go bad and there wasn't anywhere to go. Maybe that had been good for me. Then. But now I wasn't interested in what was good for me. I was interested in how I felt and how to stop feeling bad when things went wrong. How to start feeling good again.

“I don't want to fuck you over, Dee Dee,” I said. “I'm not always good to women.”

“I told you I love you.”

“Don't do it. Don't love me.”

“All right,” she said, “I won't love you, I'll
almost
love you. Will that be all right?”

“It's much better than the other.”

We finished our wine and went to bed....

—
W
OMEN

she's young, she said,

but look at me,

I have pretty ankles,

and look at my wrists, I have pretty

wrists

o my god,

I thought it was all working,

and now it's her again,

every time she phones you go crazy,

you told me it was over

you told me it was finished,

listen, I've lived long enough to become a

good woman,

why do you need a bad woman?

you need to be tortured, don't you?

you think life is rotten if somebody treats you

rotten it all fits,

doesn't it?

tell me, is that it? do you want to be treated like a

piece of shit?

and my son, my son was going to meet you.

I told my son

and I dropped all my lovers.

I stood up in a cafe and screamed

I'M IN LOVE,

and now you've made a fool of me …

I'm sorry, I said, I'm really sorry.

hold me, she said, will you please hold me?

I've never been in one of these things before, I said,

these triangles …

she got up and lit a cigarette, she was trembling all

over. she paced up and down, wild and crazy, she had

a small body. her arms were thin, very thin and when

she screamed and started beating me I held her

wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred,

centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and

sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted.

there was no living creature as foul as I

and all my poems were

false.

Henry took the pillow and bunched it behind his back and waited. Louise came in with toast, marmalade and coffee. The toast was buttered.

“Are you sure you don't want a couple of soft-boiled eggs?” she asked.

“No, it's O.K. This is fine.”

“You should have a couple of eggs.”

“All right, then.”

Louise left the bedroom. He'd been up earlier to go to the bathroom and noticed his clothes had been hung up. Something Lita would never do. And Louise was an excellent fuck. No children. He loved the way she did things, softly, carefully. Lita was always on the attack—all hard edges. When Louise came back with the eggs he asked her, “What was it?”

“What was what?”

“You even peeled the eggs. I mean, why did your husband divorce you?”

“Oh, wait,” she said, “the coffee is boiling!” and she ran from the room.

He could listen to classical music with her. She played the piano. She had books:
The Savage God
by Alvarez;
The Life of Picasso;
E. B. White; e. e. cummings; T. S. Eliot; Pound; Ibsen, and on and on. She even had nine of his
own
books. Maybe that was the best part.

Louise returned and got into bed, put her plate on her lap. “What went wrong with
your
marriage?”

“Which one? There've been five!”

“The last. Lita.”

“Oh. Well, unless Lita was in
motion
she didn't think anything was happening. She liked dancing and parties, her whole life revolved around dancing and parties. She liked what she called ‘getting high.' That meant men. She claimed I restricted her ‘highs.' She said I was jealous.”

“Did you restrict her?”

“I suppose so, but I tried not to. During the last party I went into the backyard with my beer and let her carry on. There was a houseful of men, I could hear her in there squealing,
‘Yeehooo! Yee Hoo! Yee Hoo!'
I suppose she was just a natural country girl.”

“You could have danced too.”

“I suppose so. Sometimes I did. But they turn the stereo up so high that you can't think. I went out into the yard. I went back for some beer and there was a guy kissing her under the stairway. I walked out until they were finished, then went back again for the beer. It was dark but I thought it had been a friend and later I asked him what he was doing under the stairway there.”

“Did she love you?”

“She said she did.”

“You know, kissing and dancing isn't so bad.”

“I suppose not. But you'd have to see her. She had a way of dancing as if she were offering herself as a sacrifice. For rape. It was very effective. The men loved it. She was 33 years old with two children.”

“She didn't realize you were a solitary. Men have different natures.”

“She never considered my nature. Like I say, unless she was in motion, or turning on, she didn't think anything was happening. Otherwise she was bored. ‘Oh, this bores me or that bores me. Eating breakfast with you bores me. Watching you write bores me. I need challenges.'”

“That doesn't seem completely wrong.”

“I suppose not. But you know, only boring people get bored. They have to prod themselves continually in order to feel alive.”

“Like your drinking, for instance?”

“Yes, like my drinking. I can't face life straight on either.”

“Was that all there was to the problem?”

“No, she was a nymphomaniac but didn't know it. She claimed I satisfied her sexually but I doubt if I satisfied her spiritual nymphomania. She was the second nymph I had lived with. She had fine qualities aside from that, but her nymphomania was embarrassing. Both to me and to my friends. They'd take me aside and say, ‘What the hell's the matter with her?' And I'd say, ‘Nothing, she's just a country girl.'”

“Was she?”

“Yes. But the other part was embarrassing.”

“More toast?”

“No, this is fine.”

“What was embarrassing?”

“Her behavior. If there was another man in the room she'd sit as close to him as possible. He would duck down to put out a cigarette in an ashtray on the floor, she'd duck down too. Then he'd turn his head to look at something and she'd do the same thing.”

“Was it a coincidence?”

“I used to think so. But it happened too often. The man would get up to walk across the room and she'd get up and walk right alongside of him. Then when he walked back across the room she'd follow right by his side. The incidents were continuous and numerous, and like I say, embarrassing to both me and my friends. And yet I'm sure she didn't know what she was doing, it all came from the subconscious.”

“When I was a girl there was a woman in the neighborhood with this 15-year-old daughter. The daughter was uncontrollable. The mother would send her out for a loaf of bread and she'd come back eight hours later with the bread but meanwhile she would have fucked six men.”

“I guess the mother should have baked her own bread.”

“I suppose so. The girl couldn't help herself. Whenever she saw a man she'd start to jiggle all over. The mother finally had her spayed.”

“Can they do that?”

“Yes, but you have to go through all lands of legal procedures. There was nothing else to do with her. She'd have been pregnant all her life.

“Do you have anything against dancing?” Louise continued.

“Most people dance for joy, out of good feeling. She crossed over into dirty areas. One of her favorite dances was The White Dog Hunch. A guy would wrap both his legs around her leg and hump her like a male dog in heat. Another of her favorites was The Drunk Dance. She and her partner would end up on the floor rolling over on top of each other.”

“She said you were jealous of her dancing?”

“That was the word she used most often: jealous.”

“I used to dance in high school.”