Now how did I know? Because I was his one confidant, his only true friend he told me. Fred told me everything. He said that someone other than Marilyn had to know or it would not be real; lying next to his wife in the night or trapped with her in public places it indeed seemed to be lost to him, utterly shut off. If he had one true friend who knew, though, it would seem real even when it was not. That is how Fred explained it to me.
I found it something of a mystery, of course. Marilyn and Frieda, sisters, three years apart, short soft-edged women, little definition in their faces, the same lagging and hanging bulges under their clothing, indistinguishable in a soft or perhaps a harsher light. But who is to tell? Really, gentleman, who is to know? Fred had pictures of Marilyn. They were — she had insisted upon this — cut off at the neck so that only her breasts and pudenda were visible, some of the poses quite graphic. Marilyn touching herself and so on. He hovered over the photographs as he lay them before me and snatched them quickly off the table. I want you to see, he said. I want you to know. But you cannot tell and you cannot look for long. Because it is a pure thing between us.
Do you understand that? he said. It is a pure thing.
That is all I have to tell of Fred and Marilyn and their affair. What can I know? What apprehension have we of desire, of secret knowledge, of the expenditure of limbs and sighs in the secret passages? I neither sought this information from Fred nor wanted detail. What he told me was already too much and yet how could I refuse him? I was his little aperture into some external reality, some aperture which took down the walls of his life. Do you think this is easy? Fred said to me once. It is tearing us up. But she is happily married and that is it. That is where it all must stay. Can you imagine what the word “happy” must have meant to Fred if he would use it in this context? A man who used the word in this way either had never been happy or he understood it all too well. But I cannot speculate, gentleman. The Men’s Support Group is the place where we show our pain. Our thoughts or speculation are not revelations but masks for pain.
There is very little more, I said. Wilson and Chambers looked at me intently. It sounds as if the story is just beginning but it is close upon an end. Here is all the rest of it: after a long time George died, cancer, the liver, the usual kind of thing in his family. This was after thirty-five years. The cousins were grown, Marilyn had all the life insurance, the mortgage was paid. A tragedy but not all that much except perhaps for Frieda who took George’s death surprisingly hard. Harder than any of the rest of them. Well, maybe George and Frieda had their own cross-conversation going, yes? That is not something that occurred to me before this moment, I said. That is a sudden and new insight. Of course it is plausible. That may well be the fact: that Frieda and George were also lovers. That is not the payoff of this story, however.
I said I was close to the end but not quite.
Marilyn met someone through the church and remarried. There was no
question of anything else. Fred would not leave Frieda to marry Marilyn, it would have been a disaster. Marilyn might have been “free” if that is the word I am seeking but not in any meaningful, useful way. None of these people were free, I said. Not you or me or Fred or Frieda or Marilyn or George, no one was free and they knew it. That is why we have the Men’s Support Group, right? Wilson and Chambers nodded. Well, of course I am right, I said.
Look at it this way, I went on, if we were free we would not be here, we would be living our desire elsewhere. Whatever those desires might be. Of course we may not know what they are, which is all part of the problem.
Marilyn remarried. Someone named Arthur, I think. Maybe Max, someone even less important to the story than George and George as you can see was not important at all. Through all of this too — the bereavement, the solitary period, dating the new guy — Fred and Marilyn kept on humping. The motels, the hotels, a risky couple of times in the empty house whose mortgage was paid. That would never change, Marilyn said. It had never occurred to Fred that he would even have had to ask. Of course it will never change, she assured him when she saw his surprise. What does this have to do with anything else? Arthur or George or anyone, it’s always going to be us and the bed and the pictures, she said. I am getting old and fat Marilyn said so maybe not so much with the pictures any more.
Marilyn and Arthur went to the Grand Canyon for their honeymoon. This discomfited Fred a little: it was odd, the first time perhaps that he had ever felt anything resembling jealousy. Still, the situation was different: Marilyn had been at least nominally free and had been his love for all those decades and it was something of a shock to Fred when she and Arthur booked their two week honeymoon, then got married quickly at City Hall, only official witnesses, it wasn’t seemly, Marilyn said, Arthur recently widowed too and this second time she preferred not to marry in front of Fred if it was all the same to him. Not that she had given him a choice.
They flew away, landed in Arizona, got the rental car, went off to the Canyon and the rest of the things New Yorkers do when they go on that kind of tour. Tijuana, a border run was somewhere on the triptych. I am almost finished now, I said, this is the end of it. The phone by Fred’s bed rang at four in the morning one Wednesday, he yanked it in stupor, pulled from a dream of Marilyn’s breasts. He did not dream of her often but he was this time. Then he heard the voice on the telephone and cried Marilyn’s name with impunity because Marilyn was dead.
Marilyn and Arthur were in fact both dead. They had been hit head-on. The Interstate had dense fog and some big tanker had not seen the median line. They were killed instantly, the trooper said. We found your name and her sister’s in the effects. What do you want to 40? You’ll have to come out for the bodies, the trooper said. We can’t release them without a relative present.
That’s all, Fred said to me. He told me this a few weeks later. That’s all. Can you imagine this? The first thing I have to do is tell my wife, then I have to control Frieda’s hysterics, then I have to put water all over her body while she understands that her sister is dead.
I do not have, he said, the time to think that I have lost the love of my life-and that is what I call her in my heart for the first time, then, love of my life. In the first place Frieda needs me and there is no room for that and in the second place, Fred said, in the second place if I let myself go, if I tell my wife what I am feeling, if Frieda sees anything then I am doomed, I am lost forever. She will die and I will die too but not before knowing that I will be in hell for the end of time. The trooper calls back to say that they would like an estimated time of arrival because there is a lot of complicated paperwork and also the coroner would like permission for an autopsy. Can my wife give consent for the sister? Meanwhile they have turned up some name for Arthur in his wallet which it turns out was not consumed by the fire. They will go to that name for permission then. Nothing more, Fred said. Nothing more to say. Can you imagine this? Frieda is crazy, she is destroyed, she cannot move, she cannot travel; I call the children. They will come and stay with her. I do not even wait for them to show, I fly out there alone. I make arrangements alone. I view the bodies which is something else, I arrange for transport. Then I fly with the bodies in the plane, land, make all the calls from the airport, call a funeral home, turn it over to them, go for an interview, all of the time holding Marilyn’s ghost and trying to hold Frieda together and telling myself nothing.
I will not speak to myself, do you understand? I know that if I let myself go into this wholly then I will die too and with me everyone will die. My wife, my love, my sister-in-law, my marriage, my children, my destiny. The photographs. The cry when she was about to come.
I am a shoemaker, Fred said. A cobbler, I have no gift for language, no taste for emotion, no real sense of the heart. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know this of a shoemaker? We have no interior, we have no sensibility. We carry photographs secretly and bullshit the customers.
Then we have the funeral. Frieda asks me if I will say a few words, someone should, s
he is too distraught. It should not be a stranger, though. I say a few words. I have lost more than a sister-in-law I say to the cousins and the children and the fifty or sixty friends who have come out of courtesy. I have lost a sister, I say. Marilyn, my sister. Frieda and I have lost our sister. Then we go to the cemetery. Then we come home.
Now, Fred said to me, I am living the rest of my life every day and cannot cry unless I am away from the house of course but I cannot do that either because if I cry there or anywhere I will not be able to stop. So I go on and on, Fred said, and that is all I have to tell you but I hope you will please forget about the photographs and never mention them to me. Frieda is not herself any more, Fred said. I understand now that it was the Marilyn who lived within her who made life at all bearable for her and made her bearable for me.
But that is another situation, Fred said. I have nothing more to report.
Nor do I, I said finishing it off, the little light on the wall refracting the dust. I have wanted to tell this for a while, I said, but I did not know the way to do it. And having done it, I said, having given this, I do not know what it means. Is it Lear in Red Hook? Or am I a fool? Or is Fred the fool and all this agony while Frieda was casually fucking George all these years and for all we know sharing her secrets with Marilyn who shared no secrets with Fred?
I thought I needed support for this, I said, but now I do not know. I don’t know. That is all, I said. There is nothing else to say.
Wilson said I will tell you what I know about Fred’s situation by telling you what I know of my own.
Three years ago, Wilson said, I had an affair with my daughter’s roommate, a lovely young woman who Jan met through a listing service when she came to the city for her first job. The roommate, Elizabeth, was extraordinary. A Vassar graduate; 23, tall, thin, an assistant copy editor at an advertising agency working on automobile accounts: what do I know? What the hell do I know of any of that business? All of those firms and jobs are just names to me, I understand nothing. Profit and losses, auditors and dodging through the revenue service, that’s all I know, Wilson said. But oh my, oh my, did Elizabeth and I have a time!
I met her when I came to help Jan get settled in the apartment and, what can I say: the first time, that look, it was explosive. I could feel the pain and need arc all the way through.
And she told me later that she could see that pain as it struck and was hers too, she just wanted to find and take it out inch by inch. That is the way she talked to me from the first time. I had never talked that way with anyone in my life. I guess I had been more like your Fred and Frieda than I had imagined. I was just another of those men you see on the bus with the papers and charts spread on their laps, half-nodding on the way to and from work and you ask this: are they alive or are they dead? Do they know the difference? I thought that I was the one asking the question but Elizabeth told me, taught me, showed me that it was the other way. I had been that man. But no more, no more when we came together in that room on her sudden afternoon off with Jan definitely in training at the hospital — we always called first — and with the police lock set from the inside.
We were very careful but we made mistakes. That was the agreement from the start. We could have this but we could not afford any mistake because just one would be like three. Like four, putting in my own stake in it too. Four lives destroyed and how much freedom for her after all of this, Elizabeth asked. I had no answer but I made no mistakes either. Oh, what I discovered rooting on that bed! Oh what I learned of myself and the darkness and light at the excruciating taper of my life. But of course you know all about this, don’t you?
Well, don’t you? That is why we are here in the Men’s Support Group. We know, we know of the falling taper, don’t we? That’s why we come to this basement and spend these evenings together.
Chambers and I nodded. Wilson ran a hand over his face and was quiet for a while. We let that be. That is the arrangement. Finally, he looked up and said, Well it was extraordinary. I guess you can understand this kind of thing. Elizabeth was assaulted. Well, no, let me put it bluntly, we must escape the euphemisms which have so coiled and destroyed our lives. Elizabeth was raped. One night on the way back from the office.
I had worried about that, I had admonished her but she said that if we were to have the afternoons she would have to make up the time at night and what could I say? Someone dragged her into an empty subway car, he had a key, might have been an employee, and he raped her on the floor. It was brutal and quick and terrible. He was off at the next station. She bled a lot but got herself to go for help. She was in the hospital for almost a week, . there was a lot of bleeding and she had a clotting problem and they were afraid she was damaged inside. Children. That part, and then there were the AIDS tests and everything else.
The counseling. The sessions. They never got the guy of course. Oh, this was about two years ago, maybe they got him for something else that’s often the case, but no one ever confessed to it and they couldn’t put it on anyone. It was pretty bad. She was broken up inside about as badly as outside. She got through it but something went out of her forever. The light, the life, even her old darkness. And of course she could never be alone again. Jan stayed with her as much as she could but Jan was in medical training, she couldn’t give it up to care for Elizabeth or she would have lost the year and all the money. And Elizabeth couldn’t be alone. She moved into a residence for young women. Gave up the job because she was afraid to travel and after what happened she couldn’t care what the copy chief said. Her parents wanted to help her any way they could so after a while she went back home to apply to a school of social work. She wanted to get into victim counseling or maybe therapy for brutalized children.
There was another long pause. Chambers and I let it go on. The rules are strict on this. Well, that’s it, Wilson said. There’s nothing else at all. The last time I was with Elizabeth alone was the day before the rape, we spent the afternoon together. It was profound and beautiful, I thought. Then we had hopes for Saturday if I could convince my wife that I had extra work in the city and if Jan’s assignment in the 24-hour emergency room detail held. It would have been our longest time together but even if it didn’t work we knew that would have other chances.
Wilson tried to say more, could not, shrugged and sat for a long time. We were never alone again, he said. I couldn’t even reach out to her, couldn’t tell her how awful it was for me, couldn’t tell her anything at all. She could not be alone. Jane knew that. Jan hovered over us, my daughter. She was always in the room. Once I touched Elizabeth’s hand and the sensation was terrible: I felt the quivering and then as if from inside her, that sheer stab of revulsion. I moved away quickly. I don’t know if it was the exposure or the rapist. Was it the rapist she saw in my face as our hands connected? I could never ask her. I didn’t know. I lost her twice, Wilson said. Something like your man, Fred, with Marilyn but maybe not quite the same. It’s not clear. It is hard to tie all of this .in a unit, you know?
There’s no postscript, Wilson said. Elizabeth moved away 18 months ago and I haven’t seen her since. There’s no correspondence and no excuse to correspond. Jan tells me that she hears from Elizabeth occasionally but Jan doesn’t tell me much and why should she? How can I ask? What can I ask? She’s just my daughter’s friend, that’s all.
Should I start again?
Should I tell you of the room, the shadows, the dark messages in the walls as slowly we came together for the first time, each time being the first? No, I don’t think I have anything more to say. I want her to be all right, Wilson said. I love her, I want only her happiness. But at the same time in a way I am glad because I think this: I think that she will never fuck anyone again without that fear and horror at the bottom. I am the last person she will ever fuck for whom it was pleasure and perhaps love. That is all that I can take from this. That’s horrible, I know, Wilson said, and it’s not the worst with which I have to live either but that is all. Do you want anything more?
Much quiet now and after a while it became clear to all of us, Wilson, too, that he was finished. I don’t have anything to say, I said while they were looking at me. Well, Chambers said, moving around a little, there is this too. I do not know how to put this, but it is even simpler than the other parts and it has to do with me. Yours had to do with Fred, he said, and Wilson’s had to do with Wilson. I will break the tie because mine is personal too. Maybe everything is personal, what do you think? So my best friend, doesn’t matter what his name is, call him David, left his wife for another man after eight years and two kids. Left the wife, Dorothy, who was also a good friend of mine or maybe even a little more than that. She was devastated. It destroyed her — all the time he had been fucking her he had been imagining men, he told her when everything came out. Dreaming of cocks and pectorals to make himself get stiff and hard, to get himself to come.
You can imagine what this does to a woman. Dorothy and I had never had sex, I had never thought about it because I have this thing about my close friend’s wives, they make me impotent because I am a gentleman and this was my best friend. At the time this happened I had known David for a quarter of a century. But when she called me, when we had lunch in the city and she told me everything it was as if I had been given cock and balls back. I could feel her looking for them under the table. So the rest of it you know, Chambers said.
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 35