Saline Solution (9 page)

A merciful numbness enveloped me. Miriam also copped out by cauterising all connections to her emotions. Her father looked down the hallway several times, embarrassment softening his face. Having his wife's sexual hangups so pointedly and publicly exposed must have been excruciating for him. I wondered what it must be like to fuck her.

The next four hours were a pastiche of Old Testament angst with Freudian undertones of smut. Unfortunately, no one in the room was alert enough to observe passively the goings-on, to watch them with interest and wonder. We all got caught up in our performances, and the air grew thick with recriminations, accusations, and tears.

'But aren't you happy we were honest enough to tell you?' I found myself saying over and over again. They kept looking at me as though I were a plague carrier.

By midnight it was clear that they were in for an all-nighter, and both parents wanted to have a go at Miriam without my interference. The father drove me to the bus stop. He was in a state of frozen calm. 'You realise that you have totally destroyed our lives, don't you?' he said. By that time I was almost ready to believe I had. 'Excuse me,' I said. 'Sarcastic bastard,' he said. 'I'm being very sincere,' I said, 'I really feel bad.' He lost his cool. 'Feel bad!' he thundered and took his eyes off the road to lash at me with a glance of hatred. 'I ought to kill you.'

I rode back to the city without thinking, took a cab to my pad, and fell asleep with my clothes on. At six in the morning, the phone rang. It was Miriam. Her father was standing in the middle of the basement floor, tearing his hair and ripping his clothes, destroying the family Bible page by page, and wailing, 'My little girl ... we were going to put her name in the book on her wedding day ... oh my sweet little girl . . . my innocent little girl . . . oh my precious little darling . . . and now she's ruined . . . my little girl is dirty all over.'

'What am I going to do?' she asked after she had described the proceedings.

I wasn't awake long enough to have put on a set of cushioned responses, and the words came out spontaneously. 'Let him scream,' I said. 'It's probably the first time in years that he's felt anything at all.'

I heard a hassle on the other end of the line, and Miriam's mother broke in. 'Please,' she begged, 'I don't care about what happened. Just promise you won't do it again.'

'Do what again?' I asked.

'Oh,' she moaned, and burst into a fit of crying. 'Just don't . . . make . . . love ... to her again.'

'You're crazy,' I said.

Another period of confused sounds, and Miriam's voice. 'Promise her, please,' she whispered. 'Just say it, so she'll

stop suffering so much.'

'Well,' I thought, 'so much for the people who think that higher education is some solution to the world's problems.' Here was a mother blackmailing her daughter with anguish, just to keep her from some simple fucking. 'All right,' I said, 'tell her I promise. But I tell you I'm not promising any such thing.'

It was two weeks before Miriam would fuck again, and the first time was in the midst of tears, begging her mother's forgiveness between gasps of pleasure. As she spread her legs to let me enter a deeper part of her cunt, she re-lived all the emotional upheaval of that night. It was a strange experience to fuck a woman who was in the throes of hysteria.

Afterwards, she confided that her mother had told her she would never have sex with her father again. 'Every time I even think about it,' she said 'I picture you in
his
arms.'

'Well, why doesn't she just fuck me herself?' I said, and Miriam burst into tears again.

The relationship was over. There was no way to continue with even a pretence of affection. We continued for another month, hating each other for the inevitability of the pain we were causing each other. Our sex became more freaky. The sadism and masochism which had been merely stylistic now lost all its grace. Until the last time we fucked. It ended with my pissing on her in the shower, then dragging her to, the kitchen floor, shoving a coke bottle up her cunt and a broomstick up her arse, while she grovelled at my crotch and licked my balls. Finally I yanked her head back by grabbing a fistful of hair, and jerked off into her stretched mouth. As soon as the come spilled onto her tongue and she swallowed it with exaggerated motions of distaste, the bond between us was severed.

'I think it's finished,' I said.

'Me too,' she said. And she dressed and left.

Vacuums in the void wonder at the slip of silk on thigh. All the moods washing like wind through the undifferentiated atom of all atoms excreting self-conscious illusions whose profundity evaporates before the kindergarten notions of time and space.

What of the priest who followed the alarmed and holy altar boy to the spot where a consecrated wafer had fallen some days earlier?

'Look,' said the lad, 'Jesus' body lying in the dust.'

The fifty-year-old man picked it up, sniffed it, and popped it into his mouth. 'Potato chip,' he said, and destroyed Catholicism in a stroke.

I finished with the photos and stretched out on the bed, a familiar tingling and tightening in my groin. Every moment we lived was another photograph; each breath was another nail in the coffin of permanence. We ended before we began, and life was a mockery of all aspiration. The letter from the abortionist lay on the night table, and I wondered whether there was any point in taking the life of the foetus seriously. Even if it were born, it would only have to suffer through the meaningless and terrifying round of daily life, and then die, going back to nothingness whence it came. Why disturb it in the first place? To destroy it would be to destroy nothing at all. Although I seemed to remember reading somewhere, or hearing somewhere, that life was sacred. Was that another pious notion, akin to the belief in continuity? How did it stand up in the face of countless light-years of ordered chaos surrounding the petty speculations of the fragile, limited, and temporary minds of fearful manwomankind?

There was nothing for my mood but self-abasement. I went down to the Village and prowled the area between Sheridan Square and the Women's House of Detention. At three in the morning the dregs of the pervert underground flaked off from their failed scenes and congregated at the Twin Brothers coffee shop, or the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. I found a tall unshaven blond leather boy leaning against a building. We did business with our eyes. I approached him. 'Are you interested in size?' he asked. 'Sure,' I said, 'why not?' He had a nine-inch cock which he forced again and again into my throat as I knelt before him in one of the darkened hallways of the unfortunate planet Earth.

VII

I drove out of the city at five in the morning. The muggers had called it a night and most of the skulkers had cleared the streets an hour earlier. The garbage men were invading by the thousands, their clanking tank trucks thinning out through the predawn silence. The air was as wholesome as the inside of a chimney.

When I got back Lucinda was still asleep, and Francis and Bertha were having breakfast on the sun deck. On the island, it was a golden morning.

'Have one,' Francis said, holding out a reddish-brown tablet. It was mescaline. I downed it with a sip of orange juice and sat down with them.

In the years I had known Francis, his relationship with women always followed the same pattern, a starburst meeting; a highly articulate and intense courtship filled with psychic flowers and sexual sensitivity; and a broad sweep of her mind with his magnificent loft, his books and records, his paintings, his prominent friends, his endless metaphysical rap. For a while he would ride high on the energy released from his fusion with her, and always she would make the error of assuming that at last she had found

the man of her secret dreams.

Then the money would run out, and she would have to go out to work, while he excused himself on the grounds that he was working on some compelling project. Only too anxious to support a genius, she would go out to earn the necessary bread. Predictable patterns of resentment and guilt followed, and the relationship would be corroded through the friction of ill-fitting gears. He would end by deciding that she was not stable enough or sensitive enough or intelligent enough to understand him, and dispose of her in one form or another. Since he is basically a kind and good person, he would not be brutal, but wean her away slowly, paying the dues of seeing her through her changes, through her tears and fears, until she could separate herself.

His current partner in life's dance was Bertha, a twenty-three-year-old, mildly gifted photographer and painter. A Scorpio with a cunning sense of self-interest and possessiveness. Either Francis was allowing himself greater vulnerability or needed a drastic change after his previous and masochistic sculptress. Bertha was pointedly jealous of my friendship with Francis, and was entirely upfront about it.

'Perhaps after a few years, when I feel more secure with Francis, it'll be possible to let someone into our relationship in a close way. Right now I can't trust you.'

I admired her honesty but was angered by her stupidity. She had the usual female superstition that because she let a man have her cunt, she was somehow more intimate with him than a male friend of many years. Perhaps it was just my bitchiness that refused to see the way in which that was true.

'Can't you two keep the peace at all?' Francis said, playing his game of obtuseness pretending that he was not involved in the matter, trying not to let either of us see how deeply he loved the other.

'I grant that you're a triple Leo,' I said, 'but don't you think it's a bit presumptuous to think you can take on
two
Scorpios?'

She and I exchanged rare smiles of comradeship, the astrological tie providing a thin but implacable bond between us. I sized her up: timid, small-titted, and on the occasion I saw her naked, sporting a thin straightforward cunt. Like the rest of us, she was out for what she could get. And being a woman, that immediately involved finding a man to serve as her hitching post. On absolutely cool appraisal, I realised that the problem was my not really wanting to fuck her, except perhaps casually, her bent over a kitchen table, not bothering to take her clothes completely off.

'If you weren't such a silly little bitch,' I said, 'You'd realise that I am as much a shield as an intrusion.'

She thought about it for a moment. She smiled. 'You're right,' she said, but then her eyes clouded over. She had forgotten about it almost as soon as it entered her consciousness.

The battle continued everywhere, even in the closest friendships and love affairs, even among people who had no actual cause for war. I grew weary with the spectacle of ourselves. And began to get the first mescaline rushes.

We decided to take a walk. 'Do you mind if I come?' Bertha asked. She hadn't dropped, and knew from experience that she might be resented among people who were tripping.

'I don't want you around if you're not tripping,' he said.

'Oh God, I really hate you sometimes,' she said to him.

'What the fuck,' I said, 'let her come. What difference does it make?'

I knew full well what difference it made, yet I couldn't extricate myself from the negative energy bond that had coupled the two of us. Thus secret pacts are born; we enlist others to engage in our games, to become sympathetic or complimentary to our needs and complaints, to serve us or let us serve them, to do anything so long as the contract is honoured. Where there might have been communion among people, dissension entered and we had to resort to communication. And when the faculty of communication all but disappeared from the species, the mode of contact became complicity. To be honest in any human relationship, especially in marriage, has become a matter of two people holding loaded guns to one another's heads and negotiating from there.

The three of us set off down the beach and walked towards the Grove. When the mescaline flashes became very heavy, we stopped to lie down under a lean-to which someone had put together of driftwood and logs. Bertha went off by herself. Stretched out on our backs, Francis and I drifted into a silent mutual reverie, each feeling his own ecstasy, yet letting the waves of wonder wash back and forth freely from mind to mind, from body to body. It was a high and pure form of relating, a rarified sharing, something I have never experienced with a woman.

'Dig the Sistine Chapel,' Francis whispered.

Because we knew one another's heads so well, a few words were enough to open an entire era. The Renaissance came to life.

'Michelangelo,' I said. And the wonder of his genius shimmered in our awareness.

'Do you know what da Vinci called him?' Francis said.
'Tkat stonecutter. '

Understanding at once the consummate supremacy of da Vinci, and the warm iciness involved in being able to put down, with inner justification, a man of Michelangelo's scope, overwhelmed us, and we broke up in giggles. Many of our trips were like that, conversations in mental shorthand.

'Then there was Giotto,' he said, 'who founded the Renaissance.'

He was off on one of his favourite compulsions again, the notion that the painter's intellect is superior to that of any other artist. Once he had taken me on a ten-hour trip through the New York museums, teaching me about painting, and I learned more than I could have studying six years for a Master of Fine Arts degree. But I didn't want to go through it again, so I cut him short.