by Marco Vassi
She glared at the door for a few seconds, and then went into the kitchen to prepare a vodka martini. The first broadside had ended without any serious damage on either side, and was more like a skirmish than an outright battle, having the flavor of two battleships feeling each other out before getting down to serious warfare.
Gail smiled grimly to herself as she made the drink, acting out the ritual of tumbler, ice, alcohol, and lemon. Part of her couldn’t help but be relieved that he was back; her worry had been genuine. But now he had to pay for making her worry, and she was to be allowed to whip him until her anger was drained. Afterwards, she knew, they would make love. It was perfectly obvious to her that he had been with another woman. Its very transparency, in fact, provided the edge of amusement that kept her anger from total venom. She knew that he was at that very moment washing off the traces of the crime.
Gail wasn’t jealous of Eliot on the level of superficial encounters. She knew the sort of appeal he had, and the amazing resources of erotic energy. During an average day, he would come into contact with several high-powered attractive women, or young impressionable secretaries. It’s odd, she pondered, one thinks of a secretary as somehow being in a different category from a woman, as though it were a species all its own. She knew that Eliot loved her, insofar as he was able to love, given his enormous defense against feelings. He often reminded her of the little boy who, at the end of the cowboy film, is disgusted that the hero kisses the heroine instead of his horse. She would have been threatened to the core if she had had any suspicion of his approaching a serious relationship with someone else; but when she imagined him with a woman, it was always in the form of a conquest; and that gave her a small sexual jolt between her legs. No, her state of mind at the moment was not rooted in jealousy, but in simple indignation at having been left waiting and worrying.
Eliot’s passage was not so straightforward. He was in potentially very serious trouble. If Gail ever learned that he had been with Julia, there was no telling how violently she might react. A brief image of her rushing at him with a kitchen knife flashed through his mind. Or she might just collapse, which would be more difficult to deal with. Gail sitting woodenly in a chair, her eyes vacant, her jaw slack, the sorrow of double betrayal turning her skin to chalk held far more terror for him than any histrionics of anger ever could. But that was only the beginning. For after her came Julia. She had not known that he had a date with Gail at the very moment she was arching her buttocks and inviting him to penetrate her and drive her to that form of shameful glory which we call the orgasm. Their meeting was touchy enough, but they tacitly excused one another on the grounds of prior agreement, and the fact that they had already proved they could fuck without its spilling out into their lives. Besides, there had been a sense of fitness in their getting together, a karmic balancing that could not be defended on rational grounds. But when Gail called, and Julia learned what the situation was, the vibrations in her apartment began to fog all visibility beyond the strong message that he had better leave at once. His only salvation with Julia lay in his certain knowledge that she would not hurt her friend by letting her know what had happened. But she could and probably would make life very difficult for him at the office for a few days. As he soaped his crotch a second time, feeling foolish about doing it, he tried to take a quick inventory of exactly how vulnerable he was to Julia. He shuddered. She had enough on him to send him to jail for ten years. Not that he had ever done anything blatantly crooked, but that more than a few of his deals resulted in safety variances being waved via judicious gifts to mine inspectors. He just knew that a prosecuting attorney would consider the payments bribes, and that was an ugly word for which people were arrested and put in prison.
And beyond all that was his awareness that he wanted to see Julia again, that his desire for her, which had been filed under “inactive” for so many months was blazing again. Leaving her place was difficult for more than one reason; when the phone had rung he was just beginning to feel the second erection, one that would last for hours, and was starting to smile at the visions of opening Julia up beyond anything she’d ever experieiced before, even with her athletic husband who, Eliot was convinced, didn’t understand about dirty sex and clean sex. That was the real source of Eliot’s appeal, more than his money and sheer staying power; ultimately, he was a back door man, burning his way into women’s secret gardens and evoking their most cunty dreams, playing dirty old man to the little girl in them.
“And then there’s muscle brain,” Eliot said to himself as he stepped out of the tub. He had met Martin five or six times and finally it became painfully obvious to both of them as well as to Julia that they would never manifest anything more friendly than a strong dislike for one another. Eliot grudgingly gave Martin full marks for his physique and took Julia’s word that he could be a responsive lover, but nothing would ever convince the older man that the younger stud had anything but chopped beef where there should have been a brain. Now, however, he faced the unpleasant prospect of Martin’s possibly finding out that he had fucked Julia, and in all of her openings, and in Martin’s very bed.
What would he do? Eliot wondered, having no illusions as to how long he would last should the gym instructor decide to beat him to a pulp.
“Well,” he sighed, drying himself, wrapping a dry towel around his waist, and putting his hand on the doorknob, “it’s the lady or the tiger all over again.” Then suddenly, unaccountably, he felt very young, very rakish and devil-may-care. He was up to his eyes in trouble, and it made his heart light to know that he was still capable of causing havoc with sex. One woman loved him; another was slightly foolish for his cock; and he faced the possibility of a jealous husband. Thus, when he opened the door and stepped into the living room, he was smiling. But Gail, whose anger had largely abated, was expecting the same slightly frightened and contrite man who had gone into the bathroom. When she saw Eliot emerge, washed, powdered, calmed, and smirking in smug self-satisfaction, her rage erupted once more.
He saw his error in timing a split second before the cocktail glass came hurtling at him, and had just enough time to duck as it smashed into the wall in back of him, the vodka, olive, toothpick, and lemon slice splashing in random disarray behind it. He straightened up and faced the reality, the fact that all the trouble he had been fantasizing was here, real, and would require that he invest time and patience in dealing with it. He would not be allowed the pleasant tingle of transition from one woman’s asshole to another woman’s cunt.
“I was worried sick!” she said, throwing the words at him with as much force as she had used on the glass.
“Now, now,” he said, his hands raised in front of him in a gesture of placation, padding toward her steadily and warily. He got a picture of himself that was quite unpleasant, a short, pudgy middle-aged man in a dingy apartment trying to make nice to his mistress because he’d kept her waiting a few hours. The fact that he was a powerfully weathy financier, and attractive and virile enough to have a dozen of the world’s most beautiful women ready to lie at his feet, made his present situation all the more ludicrous.
What is it with her? he thought looking at Gail as she stood facing him, her face slightly puffy from tears and worry, and wearing a goofy housedress which totally obscured her body. She’s a great lay, but so are most of the women I fuck. She’s not any more intelligent, or interesting or amusing. What is it about her that can make me put up with this kind of scene?
It was then that he saw the truth of his feelings. The thing that made Gail special was that he was, in his way, in love with her. It was a word that ordinary caused him to wrinkle his nose. He had seen too deeply into the human heart and known too clearly precisely what money could do even in relation to that supposedly most sublime of human feelings. Although, once, when he was in his early twenties, there had been a woman and he had laid his heart at her hands, surrendering himself to her, only to realize that it was to his own emot
ions that he was yielding, and that what she responded to in him was not what he gave her but the spectacle of a man vulnerable. At once he had frozen and retreated, not wanting to act the part of a freak in a circus sideshow. When he broke off the relationship, she wept. His final words to her had been, “You’re crying for yourself. Please have the decency to do it in private.”
Maybe I should just get dressed and tell Gail to fuck herself, he thought. Instead of going through this whole tedious repentant husband routine. But again, he stopped himself. He had acted badly, and he did feel guilty, and he looked forward to his punishment. If Gail had tied him to the bed and whipped him with a belt, he would have been the happiest man in the world. And she the most exultant woman. But they were not in touch with the authentic needs of the psychic organism; they did not even entertain the possibility of direct action, and so drifted off into the great arcane verbal substitute, the big waste of time.
“Don’t give me that ‘now, now’ shit,” she said, her voice already rising. “Where the fuck were you?”
“I was at a meeting,” he said, checking his levels of truth and duplicity like a person testing the safety bar of the roller coaster car before it takes the first enormous dive.
“How was she?” Gail retorted. By this time she had forgotten that she was basically amused at his having had another woman.
Eliot executed a sharp military turn and shifted his direction away from her and toward the kitchen. He now needed the drink he had previously asked for as a ruse. Also, he was still enough in control to understand that the best way to deal with accurate accusations is to allow them to glance off one’s mind. In that way, they are registered but don’t have to be acknowledged. It was a trick he had learned in Hong Kong when he had stayed in the same hotel as Jesuit priest there on some obscure church business. Eliot and the priest had become drinking buddies and had exchanged secrets of each other’s trade.
He moved into the kitchen and began fixing a second drink. His entire left side was tense, for he didn’t know whether she would follow him. When he saw that he would be alone, he called out, “Would you like a martini?” There was a long, a very long pause. Then Gail replied, her voice a bare croak.
“Yes,” she said.
Eliot smiled to himself. He had survived another round. He didn’t know how many there would be altogether, but it was like a judo match. She would come at him or try to get him to go at her again and again until they were both exhausted or until a clear victory had been won. He was willing for her to win, and even wanted that, because she was in the right and because it would remove the resentment. But he didn’t want to be battered or badly beaten, so he would fight as best he knew how. This could end in his attaining the final point, which would introduce a significantly weighty element into their relationship, something which might push them to a new level. For the first time that night Eliot considered the possibility that he and Gail might actually split up, and the insight was immediately followed by alternating waves of exhilaration and sadness.
When he finally turned and went back into the living room, holding the two glasses in front of him, he was a much more sober man than he had felt himself to be for quite some time. As so often is the case in life, one slips quite suddenly from the embrace of normality into the kiss of crisis without so much as a caress to mark the transition.
Again, Gail responded to his mood. As he mixed the drinks she at first sat on her couch, then sagged into it. Beneath the veneer of anger there lay a pit of corrosive exhaustion. She had a sour taste in her mouth and was looking forward to the clean cut of the vodka to scrape the fuzziness off her tongue. She too had shifted from the tactics of the immediate to the strategy of the structural, beginning to feel the edges of questions that had been put on the shelf since that night when Eliot had wanted to drink her piss. And when he came toward her a second time, now holding the drinks, she sensed the deepening of awareness in him, and let herself be washed over with the imminence of decision.
Eliot sat next to her. She took a glass. They clinked rims and smiled at each other the way two boxers touch gloves in the center of the ring before trying to beat each other into insensibility.
“Cheers,” he said.
They sipped in silence for a few minutes. Outside a brigade of fire engines boomed down the street, klaxons blaring. Gail’s cat strode into the room glanced at the humans, found them dull, and leap onto the window sill where she gazed down onto the street, pondering whatever it is that cats ponder when they sit with the rapt absorption and stillness that might make a zen monk envious.
“Where were you?” she said at last, calmly now, conversationally.
Eliot took a surreptitious breath. This was the first major shift, the dangerous hurdle, the trap of reasonableness. Coming after the recent explosion, her peaceful sweetness threatened to melt something in him which might cause him to blurt out an explanation too close to the truth. His first impulse, for example, was to claim that Julia had been taken with a fit of hysteria because of the accumulating pressures of her breakup with Martin, and that he had taken her for a drink and talked her down from her suicide threats. And that in the process he had had no chance even to get to a phone. This would have caused Gail to capitulate at once, blaming herself for doubting him, for being angry. Then it would have been all peaches and blowjobs, as Gail outdid herself in making dinner for him and pleasing him erotically. Of course, as soon as she finished with him, she would be on the phone to Julia. Julia would then have to think very, very, very quickly indeed to piece together how the situation was moving.
That would be a test for my super-efficient little executive secretary, he thought, suppressing a smile.
But such a scheme, like nuclear warfare, was unthinkable.
“I . . . “ he began, and then fell silent, staring at the rug. His mind was an absolute blank. He literally didn’t know what sort of story to make up.
“I want to marry you,” he said.
Her mouth fell open. His mind reached up a hand and slapped itself across the forehead. They were both flabergasted. Little chill thrills of delight ran up her spine. This was the last thing in the world she expected. Little thrill chills of fear ran down his spine. This was the last thing in the world he expected.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Neither do I,” he replied, quite honestly. But now that he had the opening sentence, the rest of the paragraph was much less difficult. It was easier to be logical than to be original.
“It occurred to me this afternoon,” he went on. “I was sitting at my desk, planning the Hartsville deal, thinking about seeing you tonight, hating the idea of coming to this place, remembering all the reasons why you want to remain financially independent.” He took another sip of the martini. Everything he had just said was true. It was amazing. Once the initial lie was given and accepted as a premise, there was suddenly a space for the truth to rush in. It was much like the philosophical notion of as-if which takes as its first premise that any first premise must be a mental construct not having anything to do with the chaos of creation, but which will serve as a compass to see one through without having the boat prematurely sunk.
“And I got to thinking about our relationship. What is it now, fourteen months? And wondering what we do next. I mean, how long can we go on playing this game? So, I thought about splitting up, and that didn’t feel good. And before I knew it, my mind was jumping in the opposite direction.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this,” Gail said. She was gazing at him with open wonder.
“I can’t either,” Eliot replied, smiling openly this time, the inner and outer duplicities finally congruent. Maybe that’s what truth is, he thought, when you’ve finally got all your lies lined up like needles and you can pass a single thread through them all.
Gail put down her drink and sat up and pushed herself toward him. She took his hands in hers.
Everything had been abruptly and finally forgotten. Eliot saw the change, and mused that he had been utterly successful in extricating himself from his triple bind, for this move would absolve him with Julia and stave off any possible recriminations from Martin should he ever learn of the fact that Eliot had fucked his wife. On the other hand, it was a heavy price to pay for an indiscretion.
But then, what the hell, he thought, maybe deep down I do want to get married. And the moment he allowed himself to think that, the next words came spontaneously to his mouth.
“I’ve reached the age in life where I’ve done everything else,” he said, returning the pressure of her hands. “The only thing left is to have a child. And I want to have a child with you.”
Gail leaned forward and put her face against his chest. She began to weep. Eliot and the cat regarded one another quizzically. The cat, of course, couldn’t understand the dialogue, but it knew that something rather significant was happening between the humans, and it had at least a rudimentary awareness that what affected them affected it. Eliot was taken, as many people are, by the fact that cats are simultaneously less intelligent and more conscious than monkeys, even of the talking kind, and in his state of abstraction was caught in the revolving door between the cat’s organic and psychic levels. The confusion and intensity got too much for the cat also, and it leapt lithely to the floor and strode into the kitchen to see whether the remainder of the evening’s meal hadn’t congealed too badly to be nibbled at.
Gail pulled back and looked deeply into Eliot’s eyes. Her soul was a well of questions.
“So when it came time to leave the office, I went for a drink. I figured that would make me a half hour late, but that’s no big deal. But the more I drank, the more I realized that I was going to ask you tonight. And I couldn’t get on the phone to tell you what was going on, or even just to make an excuse. You’d have picked up my agitation immediately, and perhaps been even more worried.”