by Marco Vassi
“Well, here we are,” Julia said at last.
“What do they call it” Martin asked. “The Crossroads of the World?”
She smiled. “Remember how excited we were when we decided to move to the big town? New York seemed like it would be the most sophisticated, hippest, richest place in the world. And it’s just a big garbage can. Nothing but unhappy people and poisoned air and noise and violence.”
“Do you think we would have been better off staying in Simpsonville? Me teaching gym and you raising babies in the back yard?”
“Who knows?” Julia replied. “We might have even become swingers and saved our marriage.”
“What are we now?” he mused.
“Statistics. Marriage statistics, divorce statistics, migration statistics, population statistics, income level statistics, rise-in-homosexuality statistics, people-who-have-begun-to-follow-gurus-statistics.”
“Is there a chance?” he asked.
She swept the area with her eyes. The din of traffic was so loud that it was difficult to hear or speak. Grotesques lurked in little psychic crannies up and down the street. The promised storm had absconded entirely and the earlier promise of fresh air in Central Park had become a false hope, replaced by an atomosphere that might make a gas chamber seem merciful by comparison.
“A chance for what?” she replied. “You see the way things are. We’re a suicidal race of creatures. What you and I are going through is nothing but the reflection of what’s happening everywhere, to everyone. The whole show is folding, falling apart.”
“Not all of it,” he said. “Babba is not part of this. My friendship with Robert is not part of this. Your love for Gail is not part of this.”
“And our marriage? Is our marriage part of this?”
“It was.”
“And so? We can’t go back to that?”
“We can go forward.”
“Where?” she asked. “Your place or mine? Or neither?”
“Or both.”
The little patterns of energy between them were beginning to dance once more. Front of body called to front of body. They hesitated, then shrugged, and gave themselves up to an embrace. It was peculiar. One might almost have expected the entire stage to collapse, for traffic to stop and the degenerates to straighten up and the air to clear, that two people could lovingly hold one another amidst the ruin of their civilization and the ashes of their dead marriage. They hugged each other tightly, her breasts murmuring against his chest, his cock whispering to her cunt.
They stepped back, still holding hands.
“I honestly don’t know which way to turn,” she said.
“What are the possibilities?”
She frowned at the question, taking it first as rhetorical, and then stopping to think about it.
“We could go back to Ohio and try to be normal.”
He shook his head at just about the same moment she did. The suggestion was definitely a possibility but not on the level of practical reality.
“We could just turn our backs on one another and walk away and not see one another again.”
“And then what?” he asked. “Each of us would find another mate of the opposite gender and begin again.”
She nodded.
“Maybe your guru could whisk us away to India and we could live happily ever after in Paradise.”
“Babba says he’s going back to the jungle for a year or so. He says he can’t stand the rat race any longer.”
Julia laughed. “Did he really say that? The rat race?”
Martin nodded. “Someone taught him the phrase and he uses it all the time. He’s like a child with a new toy.”
“Well, we don’t seem to be doing too well,” Julia went on. “It’s absurd to even mention your moving back into the apartment, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said, “As much as part of me wants to. We would just kill each other. And hate each other for what we had to give up.”
“Well,” Julia sighed, “the only other thing I can think of is going to the country and starting a commune.”
“Who?”
“You and me and Robert and Gail and Eliot.”
“Eliot?” Martin said. “I barely know him. I’m not sure I even like him.”
“But he’s Gail’s husband, and Gail’s my lover, and I’m your wife, so if you want me, you see, the line leads right up to Eliot.”
“And I suppose Eliot has a mistress he’d want to bring also.”
Martin put his arm around Julia’s shoulder and they began walking again, heading west, deep into the hooker territory, the subterranean atmosphere of Eighth Avenue.
“Martin?” Julia said after a few minutes.
“Yeah?”
“What are we going to do? I don’t mean just you and me, but all of us. All the statistics. The people getting divorced, the people deciding that they can’t live with anyone at all anymore?”
“I don’t know, darling,” he replied. “That’s a big question. I’m still trying to figure out what to do tonight.”
They turned the corner of Eighth Avenue and began to walk uptown once more. On the next street over, peering down the block, Martin saw a large, red neon sign: Dixie Hotel. It was the place where the whores took their tricks.
He pulled Julia a bit more closely to him and guided her down the street. At the entrance, he stopped. She looked up, a bit perplexed.
“Here?” she said.
“I think it’s perfect,” he told her.
“But what will we do here?”
“We’ll make love all night long, listening to the hookers fucking strange men through the cardboard-thin walls, and we’ll be naked without clothes and without possessions and then, in the morning, we’ll . . . we’ll . . . “
Across the city, Robert knelt naked on a concrete floor in a bar called The Toilet while a burly man pissed on his face.
Twenty blocks away, Gail called Julia’s number for the fourth time in less than an hour. She was upset because she suspected that Julia might have met a man at the meeting she said she was going to, and was beginning to feel the first twinges of insecurity, and had already begun to mistake the sensation for that of jealousy.
In a penthouse overlooking the city, Eliot stood by the parapet of his sun deck and sipped at a martini. He was tingling with the rare joy of conscious solitude.
And in a spacious room in an antique apartment on the upper East Side, Babba watched a Joan Crawford movie on color television while he puffed on a pipe filled with potent and aromatic hashish, shaking his head from time to time and wondering if any of the thousands of people who called themselves his followers and devotees had even begun to get the point.
The earth continued to turn and Julia’s question was gently whisked into the night. Martin had no answer. And so they stood there, uncertain, hesitant, filled with need and suspicion, like children at a horror movie, afraid to look yet unwilling to look away, peeking through their fingers at the screen.
While, from across the street, two pimps talked about the incongruous couple and made rapid estimates on where they might have come from, why they were standing there, and what they would do next. The conversation ended with a fifty-cent bet as to whether the man and woman would go into the hotel. They leaned against the building, picked their teeth, and waited to see which way the species would turn.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or l
ocales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 1993 by Marco Vassi
ISBN 978-1-4976-3464-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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