Saline Solution (13 page)

'One may
always
escape into metatheatre, Francis; the new paradigm is here, demanding its worship.'

He looked up from his book. 'Explain?' he said.

Lucinda came into the room. I told her the story of what had just happened with the old man. She clapped her hands in delight. It was one of those moments when I am surprised to find a woman understanding the metaphysic of my message when even so perspicacious a man as Francis misses the point. For an instant I almost grasped a key to unlock the mystery of the sexes. It was not a question of superiority of inferiority, but of quality of perception, an angle of being. The door to the insight slammed shut.

'Metatheatre, eh?' Francis said.

'Why not metamovie?' Lucinda added.

'Metahologram,' I concluded.

The two women and I sent happy vibrations of shared vision dancing through the air.

'It doesn't grab me,' Francis said. 'Historically, we are in a period of a-history. Interface space. You are basically reductionist in your appreciation of reality. Truth subsumes all attempts to understand it. An epochal paradigm has to be comprehensive.'

'Fuck Bucky Fuller,' I said.

'Krishnamurti sucks,' he said.

'Why did you leave that way?' Lucinda asked. We were back in the bedroom. 'Don't you like me at all?'

'It's more complicated than that,' I said.

'Make it simple,' she said.

'What difference does it make?'

She stopped, almost caught in the swirl of dialogue, and then latched on to her emotion again. 'Don't you care at all?' she said.

'I care. But living with you is another matter.'

'I'm not sure I want to live with you either,' she said.

'The rent's paid until the end of the summer. There's no reason why we can't live in peace, and separate then. But you keep holding on now because you know you are going to have to let go in the future.'

'Oh, you are a bastard,' she said, killing me with the words.

'Fuck you,' I said. 'Don't try to make me feel guilty for not being what you think I ought to be.'

'If it weren't for the baby, it would all be manageable,' she said.

I took a breath. 'If you have it, I'll come live with you for short periods of time each year. That's all I can or want to do. Now the decision is yours.'

'You're no man,' she spat at me.

'And are you a woman?' I said.

We were back at the impasse. 'The only consolation,' I added, 'is that no one else seems to be any better.'

I went to root around in the kitchen. I ate and went back into the bedroom. She was lying naked on the bed. She had been crying and now looked extremely beautiful.

'Fuck me,' she said, softly, 'make love to me.'

As I took her in my arms she laughed wildly. 'After all, there's no chance I'll get pregnant,' she said.

IX

How many lovers lie awake alone this night?

This is not the most vital consideration in this world of pain. Take aspirin, take television. Forget. But who cares? And when one cares, the sufferer clings to her with hatred for her concern. Cover me over, don't show my shame. Neurotic pursuits into the midnight mind. Betrayal is epidemic, as unnoticed as breathing.

⁴
He used to come over to screw me once a week,' Lucinda said.

T don't want to hear about it,' I shouted.

She never spoke about her sexual past again.

'Why don't you ever talk about yourself?' I said. She couldn't win. I had hurt her. She took me at my word, she obeyed me.

She went back to the city again, disconsolate this time, with something of the air of the child who must leave the playground feeling that the others would really prefer to be without her. It was a chillingly rapturous September morning as she stepped onto the ferry, crisp and yellow with sunlight. I remembered the years of buying new penci] boxes and notebooks in the bittersweet preparations foi returning to school. During the night I had dreamt that Francis and I were locked in a room with a swimming pool, guarded by a mad nun.

'I really don't want to go back to the city,' she said.

'Then don't go.'

'You don't want me here.'

'I don't want you in my immediately physical vicinity, but it's a big house and a big island.'

She preferred her hurt to my logic. Til go see a movie,' she said. I heard the desolation in her voice, and I didn't care. There was no malice in my mood, it was just that her wound did not reach the area of my concern.

'This is what it is like to be a monster,' I thought.

Perhaps it was this coldness which triggered her bouts of parasitism. I did not love her. And her soul growled with hunger. Once, when I was fucked by a stranger, he kept holding back his sperm, refusing to come, riding his sensation to the peak and sliding back. I grew desperate. My arse became a cunt became a vacuum, sucking at him, stuttering into him. Of course, he was delighted, this was just the effect he wanted, the pleading of the flesh for more penetration. At one point a surge of magnetic desire swept me by surprise, and caught him unawares. The sperm flew from him before he could catch himself. He froze in anger as his cock throbbed into me, and then he reared back and slapped me hard across the face. 'You dirty bitch,' he said. I was stung, but inside myself I smiled in triumph.

That sweet smile of victory-in-defeat was something Lucinda's Jewishness did not allow either of us to have. But it was an expression that had been burned eternally into my memory through Beverly, whose madness had made my twenty-third year on this planet almost my last.

I had been living with her and George and Julia in a welter of confused communality and exuberant Marxism in a Brooklyn brownstone. She moved in with me after we had spent a night burning the ends of one another's hair with butane cigarette lighters. Her round face shone with imbecile intelligence and I couldn't stop shivering. Our fucking was superb. She was hanging out all the time. Her body was firm from dancing, breasts barely larger than a handful each, a perfect arse, and a rich cocoa skin. Touching any part of her was like touching cunt. Her mind swung from brilliance to stupidity with startling ease. She was also suicidal.

After her third attempt, I moved out. It was the night that George and Julie and I came home to find the house smelling of gas, blood over the kitchen walls, and my clothes and books in a torn scatter across the living room floor. We searched in horror for her body, but she was gone. The next morning I split before anyone else was awake.

'Well, where are you?' said George when I called him.

'I'm at a friend's house,' I said.

'Comrade, this is irresponsible,' he said, calling upon the Socialist conscience we were supposed to be sharing.

'Look, man,' I said, 'last week she came to bed with a knife and spent three hours muttering to herself. And I was afraid to get up and I couldn't go to sleep, and I had to just lie there, you know, just staying awake, until she finally conked out. Maybe with me gone she won't be so crazy. Maybe you can take care of her.'

'ME?' he shouted, with visions of what an International would really be like suddenly piercing his consciousness.

But just a few weeks after installing myself in another friend's pad, retribution struck. I had the place to myself for the evening and had invited Alice over, a strange girl who dug being whipped with army shirts that had metal buttons. We had just reached the point where glances were taking the place of words, when the phone rang. Ordinarily, at such moments, I ignore electronic intrusions, but on a whim I picked it up. It was Beverly. She was crazy again, and had somehow learned my number.

'I'm at George's,' she said. 'I'm coming over there.'

'But you can't know my address,' I said.

She snickered and let out a low mean laugh. And then she hung up.

I turned to Alice who had taken off her dress and panties and bra and lay expectant on the couch. I made some rapid calculations. Five minutes from George's place to the subway, three minute wait, fifteen minute ride, six minutes walk to here, that gave me twenty-nine minutes. I looked at Alice's body and remembered where we had left off. Perhaps I could give it twenty minutes.

It was Swiss. I had to take the entire sexual act and miniaturise it, leaving nothing out, rushing nothing, making it perfect but reducing the scale. I don't know what baroque compulsion required me to squeeze in a perfect mini-fuck before Armageddon descended in the guise of a mad black girl. The most tantalising part was that I refused to look at the clock; it all had to happen using my internal time sense.

Seven minutes, first vaginal caresses; eight and a half minutes, lick clitoris with tongue; twelve minutes, penetration; fifteen minutes, accomplish six variations from behind; seventeen and a half minutes, on her back, knees over elbows, hands on breasts, mouth to mouth, lower angle of entry end penetrate to deepest upper point; now, two and half minutes to ride, wider, wilder, heavier, more sensitive, she responds, she moans, she cries out, the vegatitive tremors begin in my spine; nineteen and a half minutes, and throw open all the switches, pump pump fuck fuck whee whistle bang bang whoosh, and come. Huff huff

Come on. Get dressed. She is bewildered. I'll explain in the cab. Whirlwind of motion. Confusion. No time for that, just put your underwear in your purse. No time for makeup. Come on. Twenty-six minutes. We are at the door, we are at the elevator, we stand in expectant silence the whole slow ride down. The metal doors open. I step into the lobby.

She is
THERE.

She stood five foot three, her frizzled hair a huge tangled crown above her head. She wore a brown corduroy jacket and dungarees, no shoes. The jacket sleeves were drenched with blood from each elbow to each wrist, and blood dripped down her fingers onto the fake marble of the lobby floor. She was swaying; her eyes told a story I couldn't bear to read. She peered up out of her daze, looked at me, and some strange focus snapped into place. She recognised me! And then she smiled.

'God,' I thought, 'don't smile. Please don't smile.'

She came up to me. 'Hallo,' she said, and then brushed past, pulled a fiteen-inch butcher knife out of her jacket and went towards Alice. 'First I'm gonna kill that bitch,' she said.

I grabbed her arm; she put the knife in her other hand. My hand went to her wrist; she tried to stab me. She was surprisingly strong. We wrestled for the knife, dancing in the lobby, down the stairs, and into the street. There was no one on the street. A third of the way up East Eighty-second Street, twisting, pushing, cursing. Finally I tripped her, and when she fell, I landed at her side, now pushing the knife back, trying to hurt her wrists so she would drop it. And then I had the flash. A police car turning the corner. Headlights pick up the sight. White man leaning over struggling bleeding black girl wielding huge knife. Bullets fly. Curtains.

'Hey,' I whispered to Beverly, 'if the cops come we're both fucked.'

Her eyes widened. Street wisdom returned. 'Cops?' she said. 'Give me the knife,' I said. I threw the thing down a sewer grate, and helped Beverly back to the building. Suddenly she was a little girl, hurt and aimless. She began to cry. 'Alice, help,' I said.

The beautiful girl came down into the street and put her arms around Beverly's shoulders and held her while I went to the corner to call a cab. The driver was a Jewish grandfather who had probably been in the concentration camps. When we stopped to pick up the two girls, he blinked once. When he turned and asked where we were going, he saw Beverly and gulped. We drove in silence down the East Side Drive on our way to Brooklyn Heights.

He half turned his head. 'Shouldn't we take her to a hospital?' he said.

'Nah, she's all right,' I said. He swallowed again. The tension mounted. He was torn between wanting to keep his cool, to not antagonise the crazies in his back seat, and an overpowering curiosity. Finally, he couldn't hold it in any longer. 'What happened?' he said.

My mind went blank. What kind of story could I make up to cover this?

And from nowhere came Beverly's calm gentle voice. 'We were having a birthday party,' she said, 'and when I went to cut the cake, the knife slipped.'

She leaned back, quite happy with herself. The rest of us rode all the way back with stunned glazed cuckoo clocks ringing in our brains.

Back in Brooklyn, Beverly reverted to type. She jumped out of the cab, and ran to one of the cars that cruise the hookers up and down Atlantic Avenue. She got in, and I could see the man's silhouette as they talked in the front seat. I could imagine what was happening in his head, the struggle between the fear of getting involved with a crazy girl, and the excitement of just what kind of a night he could have with her. In a few moments, the car drove off.

'Well, I don't know what to do,' I had said to Lucinda as she got on the ferry. 'And who can help? Can I go to a therapist? What can I say? "See here, there's a foetus growing in a woman's belly, and I put it there; that is, it is a child that I helped conceive. And I don't want to involve myself in the hassle of seeing it born and raised. Do I have the right to kill it?" What could they say? Yes? No? I think so? And then come up with a list of rationalisations as to why that particular decision was correct?'