Saline Solution (15 page)

'Don't make me the villain,' she cried.

'Listen, if you won't play with me, and one and one and one isn't three, then the chill is on the lettuce leaf. And it's too bad, because it will be a resentment that will fester inside of him, whether he knows it or not, and just that will pop up at the crucial time in deciding, at some future date, whether you two still have a relationship or not. And maybe now you wish you'd never laid eyes on me.'

She leaned forward in the chair. 'I resent your male chauvinism and your insensitivity towards women.'

I almost hit her.
⁴
Who's been breaking his balls for the last four days to insure that all three voices be heard in this scene? Who has tried again and again to dissolve the false conditioned roles and bring you forth as a person in her own right? And haven't you consistently retreated behind your image as "his woman"?'

She nodded.

'My feelings towards you are the same as towards all other women: benevolent non-recognition. I need cunt, I need tit, I need food. That's woman. The rest is chitchat. I don't know enough about women to form an attitude. As far as I am concerned, men and women are different species. I don't put you up or down. My entire life is just an attempt to understand. Do you understand?'

Francis lit another little cigar. 'He's Valerie Solanas in drag.'

I tried to make sure she was really listening to this. 'It's like men and women are on different sides of a wall. And whenever I need one of the things a woman can give, I go to the wall and negotiate. I presume they do the same from their side. Whatever else you do on that other side of the wall is a mystery to me. Sometimes I put on woman's eyes and take a walk in your world, and I faint from the richness of it. It's gotten to the point where I prefer spending my time there more often. It's such a relief from the cardboard theatrics that men indulge in.

'Look, we fuck or we're alone. When I need to be alone, I go off by myself. When I want other people, then I want to fuck. You understand? That includes touching and talking and sharing vibrations. But serious, and deep. It's strange how you women don't take sex seriously, and yet pretend to yourselves that it is terribly meaningful, whereas men treat it so lightly, but to them it is horribly necessary.'

'You don't think I'm a person,' she said. 'To you I'm just a cunt.'

'Jesus Christ, your cunt is what makes you a woman. Don't you even know that yet? Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!' I yelled, punctuating each word by pounding my fist on the table.

'Not all men think like that,' she said, and simpered at Francis.

'Francis,' I said, 'you been telling this little girl how much you admire her
mind
, man?' He coughed in embarrassment.

'Don't you think I have a mind?'

'Sure you do, and it's a fine mind I'm sure, and you're a good artist, and a good cook, and you have a flair for clothing, and probably reek with marvelous attributes. But that's got nothing to do with the essential reality of the condition that exists between men and women. It's cock and cunt. Do you get that? I don't know how to say it any more simply.' I paused, out of energy for the moment, wondering whether this was all futile. 'Look, there's an easy way to find out just what I'm talking about. Have you ever made it with a woman?'

'No,' she said, harshly.

'Well, the next time you're with one of your girl friends, and when the two of you are really deeply into your closest rap, kiss her on the mouth and fondle her nipples and then go down on her cunt.'

'I don't want to do that,' she said. 'I'm not a lesbian.'

There was a long silence, and she looked thoughtfully from Francis to me and back again. 'What about you two?' she asked. 'Have you been to bed together?'

I looked down at the floor.

'Then everything you're telling me is a lot of shit, she said.

The courage had gone out of me, and suddenly I didn't want to fight any more. It suddenly became very important to end the war

'There are no villains,' I said. 'There is only action. I attack because I'm unhappy, that's all. I don't know how to solve it any more than you do. But please, let's stop pretending that there's no problem.'

'What do you want from me?' she said.

I felt the two of them as a unit, and flashed on my entire relationship with my father and mother. 'I'm not even past the borders of my childhood yet,' I said. 'All I have is my awareness.'

A sweet glow suffused the space and I saw the three of us naked and laughing, rolling in high grass, holding and stroking each other, embracing with trembling sexuality. And a jet plane screeched overhead, shattering the web of possibility. There was no way to sidestep the actual, and the actual was brimming with failure.

Francis looked at me. A shadow of pain crossed his eyes, and then he snapped to, stepping once more into his brisk cheerfulness. 'It's better just to leave it all alone,' he said.

I looked at Bertha. For the first time I could see her helplessness, her fear. And there was no support, no succour for her from the men in her life. She was learning what it meant to be a woman, yet still had much of the little girl in her. Delicious, to be fucking a chick like that. I got a quick insight on what their sex scene was. She would be physically exciting for six months, I imagined. Francis saw me evaluating her. He smiled. 'It's really choice,' he said.

'What does that mean?' she said.

I stood up. 'Sometimes, meaning is a woman,' I said.

I went into the bedroom, smoked a joint, and let my head settle. I heard the two of them go for bicycle rides, return, go upstairs, shower, and clomp into the bedroom. Within ten minutes I heard the bed move, and then the sounds of moans, his excitement and her ecstasy. I yawned. It was all so boring from the outside. But I sent them an abstract blessing, in empathy with their state. Finally, he came. I don't think she did, or if she did, it was a quiet orgasm.

I rolled over and faced the wall. There were the lines I had scrawled while very stoned a few nights earlier:

Sniper sniper sighting tight

In the cosmos of your night

What pope could hold that voidedged heart?

What power dare make it start?

I lay back and let my solitude enter me like a lover, and then I slept.

XI

On the day after Labour Day, Fire Island empties out with the suddenness of a douche bag whose stopper has just been pulled. The slightly shambled secretaries and yellow-rimmed executives finish their summer fuck feast, and go home with memories of near-rapture to sustain them for another brutal New York winter, until the spring arrives again, and the girls don whatever thin things the style moguls have decreed they shall wear that year, and bring to life the great American middle-class crotch once more.

Lucinda had not yet returned from the city. We were on the phone to one another several times each day, the geographic distance between us making possible a regeneration of tender feeling. When I woke up I called her again, but now there was no answer, she had probably gone to a movie. Francis and Bertha were probably still upstairs, sleeping off the aftertaste of their earlier climax. I decided to go for a bicycle ride.

Gliding down the dark paths of the island, a blanket over my shoulders, I threw shadows like a low-flying vampire. Only here and there did lights show in the houses off the walks. It was possible to hallucinate inward images of a thousand historical periods. I was struck by the atemporality of the space, and realised again that the present moment, the now, had no context within which it could be understood. But I was equipped with a spectrum of moods through which to perceive it. It was as though eternity came in flavours, like ice cream. By the time I rolled up to Carol's house, I vibrated in a state of phenomenological flux, and was giddy with the open potential of the moment.

There had been no conscious plan to go there. She lived with her three-year-old son, a lithe and indolent boy; a painter with great personal warmth and mediocre talent; and her mother, a
soi-disant
patroness of the arts who, sadly, had neither the style nor the wit to match her wealth. Visiting that scene was always a mixed bag, but I was hungry for any kind of human contact which involved a familiar face. But when I rode up the inclined path and onto the front porch, I saw no lights. I went around to the back, which jutted out into the bay, and sat on the wide deck, and watched the boats send their mysterious signal lights across the dark water.

The night was heavy with expectancy, the sky a portentous slate grey which showed neither moon nor stars. The only sound rose up from the gentle lapping of small waves against the pier wall which buttressed the property. I felt an odd stirring in my groin. There was something of the secret and hidden about the evening, a sense of murky pleasures about to be unearthed.

I heard a small noise and my skin tingled. I tried to pinpoint the directional source, and found that a very dim light was seeping out from under the door of the small house behind the main building. It was the place where Carol slept with the boy. Ordinarily, given the hour, I would have been to concerned about the impropriety of intrusion to go in there, but a sense of boldness had gripped me. I felt quite reckless.

Inside, lying on a mattress on the floor, was Carol. She wore a flannel housecoat and her eyes were glued to a television screen. I began to tremble. No thought formed in my mind, only a kind of aggressive premonition. I stood there for a full minute, watching the almost imperceptible movements of her body under the cloth, tuning in on her breathing, her tensions. Then she turned around suddenly and saw me.

She went through three changes within a second. At first she was frightened, startled; then she recognised my face and relaxed; finally, sensing my mood, she became fearful again.

I walked to her and stood over her. 'Hello Carol,' I said.

She rolled over onto her back and lay there, looking at me. The space between us congealed and we were locked together in the encapsulating contour of our gaze. I looked at her body very deliberately, as she continued looking at my eyes. Her nipples made mounds under the soft fabric, and the gown caught between her thighs, outlining the bulge of her pubic bone. I could conjure up no picture for arousal. The mere presence of that soft machine had my cock stirring. She looked down and saw the erection beginning. 'Please,' she said, 'just go.' Her tone was that of a dignified housewife to an impudent milkman. She had no way of knowing that I was the White Rabbit with a new taste for leather games.

I stepped onto the mattress.

'You have a strange sense of humour,' she said, trying to make her tone conversational, perhaps thinking to placate me. Oddly, as she responded to my behaviour, my behaviour became more real. There must have been some way for her to refuse to cooperate in such a way as to skewer my role. But, in some confusing way, she was adding fuel to the encounter.

I took my shirt off slowly, my eyes never leaving hers. 'Take that thing off,' I said.

The scene took on all the surreal sharpness of a Van Gogh landscape. All the objects in the room stood out in the clarity of form and colour, but ringed with a shimmering aura. Our words and actions fell into slow motion.

I opened my pants and let them drop. My cock was only half hard, and when she saw it, her mouth dropped open. She stared hypnotically. 'No,' she said. Then she shook herself and said. 'No' again, this time simply, matter-of-factly.

I knew there was a bridge I had to cross, and it involved not allowing myself to become embarrassed at the dramatics of the scenario.

It was too late to wonder how I got there, or what her inner drama was. She started to get up. 'This is ridiculous,' she said.

Her words snapped me back to the business at hand. I could almost hear the voice of a director urging me to be more attentive to cues. I wondered what celestial audience this performance was for.

I bent forward and slapped her across the cheek. She fell back. I knelt beside her so I could look into her eyes. I saw a total absence of will. She lay in complete suspension, waiting. Her passivity pleased me, but the impersonality of her mood chilled me. I wanted
her
, not just her body.

For a long moment we remained like that. 'What's your sign?' I said.

She giggled. Carefully, I grabbed the top of her dressing gown and pulled down, ripping it along one seam. I partially lifted her body from the mattress with the effort, and as the lower portion of the gown tore, her naked body fell back. I liked that, the way her body fell.

She lay in the classic pose of pre-ravishment, and I admired the sprawl of her arms and legs, the lay of her breasts, the aroma from her cunt. There was nothing to

do now but fuck her.

For the first time I became aware of another presence.The television screen threw its flickering grey shadows over her face, voices floated out of the box. I found myself turning towards it involuntarily as usual.

'This is insane,' I thought. 'We can't stop to look at television.' Carol wasn't moving. I assumed she has resigned herself to the experience and was just waiting for me to get it together.

'When will I see you again? Will I ever see you again?' A man was lowering himself through a trapdoor and looking up into the face of a young woman. She was close to tears.