by Marco Vassi
When she’d felt the impulse to fuck Eliot the night before, all the considerations which might have stopped her were quickly and easily swept away into the hollow tube of erotic tunnel vision. She dismissed the problem of Martin. They were separated, and anyway, he would never find out. Besides, she had already cheated on him with Eliot a year earlier.
Dealing with the question of her relationship to Gail was a bit more tricky. Eliot slept with many other women; Julia knew that. So it wasn’t as though she were taking a faithful husband away for a rare fuck. Also, Eliot wasn’t Gail’s husband and probably would never be. Gail hadn’t spoken too much about their affair, but Julia got the impression that her friend, while deeply involved, had not let herself fully fall in love. At least, Julia had never heard Gail say the word. All in all, she had been ready to have her brief fuck with Eliot and then drop the incident into the garbage bin of history, to pretend that it never happened.
Then the roof had come crashing in. First Gail’s call while Eliot was still there, naked and contented. His hurried dressing and leaving while she had to go through a universe of changes in order to talk to her friend. The idea that Eliot would have stood Gail up in order to be with her was fraught with almost too much madness. Eliot was ten kinds of bastard in his way, but he was not a careless or thoughtless man. Such a thing was practically inconceivable, not because of any tenderheartedness on his part, but because he was always such a meticulous planner. The long long conversation with Gail which had to go on until Eliot reached her place was pure hell, including the paranoiac undertones of wondering whether Gail suspected that Eliot had been there.
Julia began the next morning, this morning, ready to tear Eliot’s head off, but the only trace of him was a message left with his office secretary that he would be out of town for two days, whereabouts unknown. Her morning coffee, a cigarette, and the Times had been the next order of business. She was to see Gail in the evening and wanted to be totally together, the previous evening utterly erased. That small hope was shattered by the first phonecall of the day, Gail calling to tell her that Eliot had proposed, that she was going to accept, that she realized that perhaps she had loved him all along.
The day had been spent nursing a dull headache, and while it shied back somewhat when treated with aspirin, the way a vampire is supposed to flinch at the smell of garlic, the pain settled in for a long visit. The obviousness of its cause was not a factor in its cure. Julia had one of two very unpleasant roads to travel: telling the truth or telling a lie. And each time she swung from one to the other, her head hurt a bit more. She considered canceling the date for the evening, but she knew she would have no rest until she’d seen Gail, talked to her, and either found a new way to relate or else lose the friendship altogether.
Thus, after work, she plunged herself into hot water and grass, hoping to find some rest from the dilemma, so that when the moment of confrontation arrived, she might at least act spontaneously. The spell of relaxation had removed her headache, but had not indicated what her decision ought to be.
Julia sighed, walked to the door, and opened it. Gail rushed in, threw her arms around her, and hugged her, dancing up and down. Julia remained rigid in the embrace, her body unyielding.
“Isn’t it fantastic!” Gail almost shouted.
Julia looked at her through lidded eyes and didn’t say a word. She was so silent, so stem, so set in her posture of withdrawal that the mood cut through even Gail’s reckless mirth. Gail’s mouth went in and out of a smile half a dozen times. Her eyes were like birds on a beach just before a storm, electric, sharp.
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Gail said at last in an exaggerated drawl which embraced the worst that a little child could possibly be experiencing and letting it know that whatever the problem was it could be fixed up in a minute. It was an attempt at humor, that quality which is born halfway between abandon and concern. Even her expression was like that of the schoolteacher she played to children each day.
Then she looked into Julia’s eyes. Then she knew that whatever it was, it was bad, very bad.
“Should we sit down?” Gail said. Her first thought was for her friend, guessing that something had happened to Julia, perhaps in relation to Martin. Or maybe it was the death of a relative or friend. Or grim news from a doctor. Gail was ready to drop all of her excitement and go to the aid of her friend.
Julia saw that, knew the depth of Gail’s friendship, knew that she herself would have acted the same in reverse positions. The brief bit of limited passion the night before now loomed as such a terrible mistake and Julia wondered how she could have rationalized it even for a second.
It didn’t seem like much at the time, she thought. I didn’t know he had a date with her. I didn’t know he was going to propose to her.
Gail took Julia’s hand and began to lead her to the couch.
“Should I put some coffee on?” she asked.
But Julia stopped. She knew it was then or never. The longer she stayed in Gail’s presence, the more difficult it would become to tell her. It would be impossible. And then she would have to live with it. She would be asked to be Maid of Honor at the wedding. And afterwards, how could she spend time in the same office with Eliot? She now swung as wildly into the direction of blame as she had gone in the direction of nonchalance the night before. She was taken with the worst symptom of panic—not knowing that one is in a panic. She turned halfway around to face Gail who was a step ahead of her on the way to the sofa. The room seemed carved out of flawed crystal. Everything stood out with stark precision, and yet nothing was whole.
“He was here,” Julia blurted out. “When you called last night. Eliot was here. When you called . . . he had just finished fucking me in the ass.”
Perhaps a society is possible in which the simple communication of mundane sexual activity might be noted and accepted with as much flurry as is given to, say, a listing of what one had for breakfast or dinner. Had Julia said, “When you called last night. Eliot was here. When you called . . . he had just finished eating an onion bagel with cream cheese and Nova Scotia salmon,” no one would have made much of it. The terrible contraction which the species had developed in relation to its erotic activity, however, propels people to rank melodramas of the most turgid variety, sometimes to physical violence and even murder. It is possible to envision a society in which an announcement such as Julia’s might be made with utter ease and received with some simple, offhanded remark? A “how droll” perhaps, or even “how icky.”
But the two women, intelligent, perceptive, experienced, and friendly to each other, could not, in light of all their conditioning, do anything but take the steps they did. Gail sucked her breath in sharply. Julia reached toward her. Gail drew back. Julia turned her head away. Gail looked out at Julia with eyes that signaled warmth through an iron grid of pain. In short, they did the dance of heavy news, taking an intrinsically neutral event and straining it, through the cheese cloth of social dilemma, into a cause célèbre, a scandal which eclipsed famine in Africa and earthquakes in Italy. It, in short, really gave them something to talk about.
“If you tell me you hate me and turn around and walk out and never speak to me again, I’ll understand,” Julia said.
Gail weighed the offer. Calculations ran through her mind like sand through an hourglass. But since all manifestations of everything which exists in the universe can be reduced to the result of three forces, even the seemingly complex rush of emotions that ransacked Gail’s wardrobe of rationalizations resolved itself into three factors: herself, Julia, and Eliot. Eliot was out of town for two days. He had left her apartment at eight in the morning and told her he wouldn’t be back until Thursday. Now she understood the real reason for his leaving. She wouldn’t be able to deal with him until he returned. His surprise would be a strong one for he couldn’t have imagined that Julia would tell.
“Don’t be absurd,” Gail replied.
“I’m too much in shock right now to know whether I’m more angry or hurt. And in any case, it’s done. If I walked out now, in ten minutes I’d be crazy wanting to talk to you about it. So. Let’s talk.”
“I’d make some coffee?” Julia suggested.
“Wine would be more like it,” Gail said.
“Well,” Julia said, the word almost a sigh. “Why don’t you have a seat? Make yourself comfortable.”
The sudden stilted structure of the distance between them was as noticeable as an elephant in a rose garden. Each woman was filled with a score of tiny impulses to do something to break the tension. But there was no quick route to relaxation. A lot of words had to be spoken, many feelings had to be exchanged, certain understandings had to be reached. It would be a long evening.
Gail shrugged, indicating that she saw as well as Julia did how awkward the situation was and yet how thin the pane of glass that separated them. Julia nodded, and then turned to go to the kitchen. In a few seconds she could be heard in a dialogue with glasses, bottles, ice trays. Gail looked around the large space. Her glance fell on the bed at the far side of the room.
It must have been there, she thought.
Now that she had a brief moment to sort herself out, she realized at once that whatever she felt, it wasn’t jealousy. Relieved, she was able to toss that label out of the box of rubber stamps she used for cataloguing her experience. She knew that Eliot fucked other women, and even as she considered marrying him she was aware that fidelity was out of the question. She had never asked that of him; all she wanted was discretion, consideration, tact. The fact that one of the women he fucked was Julia, however, brought her up short. How long had they been making it? Should she consider herself betrayed? After all, until the night before, she had no special claim on Eliot. She was just one of his cunts. Probably his number one, but that carried no status which anyone, including Julia, had to respect. But as a friend, shouldn’t Julia have told her? On the other hand, how did they define friendship? And perhaps this was the only time, and if so, then Julia was honest because she did tell. And what of Eliot? Gail was forced to smile when she thought of his performance the night before. No wonder he was so flustered. If he had made it with just any other woman, he wouldn’t have been so completely thrown. Then what about the proposal? Was that just a panicked coverup? Yet he did have deep feelings for her. It was all very interesting, very subtle.
I’m the injured party, and with that insight her mood shifted. She could afford to wait, to let the others do the explaining and apologizing. But even as she felt that, she was ashamed. Eliot and Julia must be suffering quite a bit. And they weren’t villains.
She sat on the rug in front of the couch just as Julia came back into the room with a tray of wine and crackers and cheese.
“It was supposed to have been dinner,” Julia said. She sat down on the floor, putting the tray down next to her. “I was going to make veal, but . . . “ She couldn’t finish the sentence. Unaccountably, she began to cry. Her shoulders shook, tears wet her cheeks, she covered her face with her hands. She made no sound. She wept like an actress in a silent film.
Gail watched her for a few minutes, coldly at first, detached from the other’s sorrow. But then something stirred in her breast, a sympathetic warmth, a tiny flickering like that of a candle name. Julia’s feelings flooded the air, and Gail breathed them in with every breath. She saw that Julia was not weeping only for herself, but for all of them. For Eliot with his super-controlled life, in which each encounter ran on as strict a schedule as German trams. For her, for Gail, a nobody schoolteacher being kept by a wealthy man, finally having her bondage made respectable by a marriage license. And for all the poor people on the planet, trapped in their pitiful limitations, in their paltry possessiveness, in their rancid identities.
Not surprisingly, Gail felt her own eyes go moist, and without thinking she reached out and put her arms around Julia’s shoulders. Julia stiffened, then let go, and in a second the two women were embracing one another tightly, sobbing fully, letting themselves be overwhelmed by the cataract of rushing feeling, the sweet release that even pain provides when it is expressed, given the full range of fecundating power.
They cried for a long time, while a world spun on, unconcerned. In the same building, a score of other dramas unfolded. A man and wife entered the ninth hour of a fight. They had reached the point where they were dredging up little tender secrets they’d told each other a year earlier, things they’d whispered late at night after making love, and had now shaped the truths into sharp barbs, dipped in the venom of anger and meanness, and were hurling them into each other’s heart, purposely, viciously, wanting to hurt, to tear, to destroy, like outer-directed scorpions doing a dance of destruction. An eighty-five year old woman lay on her bed and felt her body protest each time she took a breath. “It wants to die,” she said out loud to the empty room, “but I don’t.” And for the hundredth time that day she dozed and strolled down the long lane of memory to see if she could remember who “I’ was, knowing that death would come that way, surreptitiously, as she bent over to smell a flower that had bloomed before the century was born. On the roof a young boy had attained the goal he’d worked on for almost a month. A thin, pouty girl had consented, after much attention, false promises, and concentrated mauling, to pull down her jeans and let the youth roam inside her sticky cunt with the middle finger of his right hand while she rubbed the bulge in his pants with the palm of her left hand.
Beyond that multi-leveled stage, the city throbbed its night song. Millions of bulbs burned with indifferent heat upon the full range of human behavior. A surgeon in the emergency room of a city hospital stitched up a split scalp; a mugger stepped out from behind a truck and waved a gun at an elderly man; a hundred thousand people lifted glasses to their mouths in an effort to get drunk; a scholar discovered a nuance in an ancient Hebrew text; a priest put on street clothes and walked up and down Eighth Avenue until a hooker caught his eye; a mother hummed a lullaby as her two-day-old infant sucked at her nipple.
The darkness spread, east and west, north and south, deepening over the face of the globe until it began to meet the light, and twilight and dawn, evening and morning, night and day, striped the earth with perfect symmetry. Green and blue and white and black, the earth spun slowly on its axis, sang its circle about the sun, which followed its prescribed course in the galaxy, joining a billion billion galaxies in a vast and seemingly endless expansion into realms so far beyond human comprehension that only our fantasies suffice to give any solace to our minds.
Gail and Julia wept until their tears were done, and then they pulled back from each other. For a while they busied themselves with handkerchiefs, dabbings, blowings, and sniffings. Then, that out of the way, they had no alternative but to look at one another. They both smiled shyly, a bit embarrassed.
“I must look a mess,” Julia said, her hand going to her hair in a reflex gesture.
“You’re so very beautiful,” Gail said. “I mean, not just your looks. I’ve always known that you were attractive in that way. But I feel that this is the first time I’m really seeing you. I mean, what’s inside.” She pressed her lips together. “Oh, am I making any sense at all? I feel like I’m talking inside a big paper bag.”
“How about some wine?” Julia asked. “That should clear both our heads.”
She poured, and they lifted their glasses, made a silent toast, and drank. The alcohol was a solvent cutting through the glue of self-consciousness. It bit the tongue, flushed the throat, warmed the chest, and hit the belly like a felt hammer on a bronze gong. It was a very good wine, and they finished the first round, poured a second, and were halfway into that before either spoke.
“It seems we have a lot to talk about, and yet, suddenly, I can’t remember what was so important,” Gail said. “I came over to tell you that Eliot had proposed. And then you told me that you made it with him last night.
And I suppose I’m supposed to be outraged or vindictive, but right now I don’t feel anything but comfortable. Do you mind if I take my shoes off?”
“Take off whatever you like,” Julia said. The sentence echoed off the wall and bounced back on her, causing her to tilt her head slightly, but she dismissed the perception.
“How long have we known each other now?” Gail continued.
“I don’t know. Must be three years.”
“It’s funny. When I think of you, I always say to myself, ‘Julia my best friend,’ like that, all in one breath, ‘Julia-my-best-friend.’ And now that we’re sitting here, I realize I barely know you at all. That’s peculiar, isn’t it? After all this time, I realize I’ve never seen you cry, or cried with you. And there are some things we’ve never talked about.”
“I guess we’ve just enjoyed each other’s company and never felt the need . . . “ Julia began to say. Then she shook her head. “No, that’s bullshit. There have been a lot of things I suppressed. I guess I was trying to be polite.”
“You know I had a crush on Martin, don’t you?”
Julia kicked off her own shoes, and cut a piece of cheese. She popped it into her mouth. “No, I didn’t know.”
“I kind of fell for him when I used to go to the health club. It was a blow when I learned he was married But I tucked my pussy away and switched the vibration to one of pleasantness. Then he introduced us that night, remember? And I liked you so much all at once, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ve lost a stud but I may have found a friend,’ which is so much rarer.”
“I liked you a lot too,” Julia said. “Meeting you was so good for me. I was beginning to feel the first letdown after our Europe trip. And I had just begun working for Eliot and I got onto a kind of speed trip. So I was simultaneously depressed and strung out. And being with you was like the first breath I had taken in ages.”