She yawned. “I think I’ve had it.”
“You going home?”
“I guess. I’m a little restless, I could take a walk, but I’m tired. I didn’t get much sleep last night.” He wanted to come with her, she felt, but didn’t know how to go about suggesting it. “I have some wine at my place, if you’d like to come up for a while.”
He glanced at George, then stood up. “Yeah. Sure.”
He didn’t say anything to George before they left. On the street, she asked him if he knew George from work. He said no, he didn’t know George at all. George was just a friend of a friend of his who’d suggested they have a drink together. He hadn’t realized until they were in the bar that George was a queer.
In the apartment she didn’t turn on the ceiling light, but walked over to the night table while Gary stood in the doorway, and turned on the light there. Then he came in and she locked the door behind him. He looked around and took off his jacket. She went into the bathroom and combed her hair; she was worried about how she looked to him. She couldn’t tell if he was attracted to her or had just come along because he had nothing better to do. When she came out of the kitchen with the wine she found him sitting in the armchair. She settled against the pillows on her bed. She was-high and horny and she was waiting. Waiting, she thought, smiling to herself, to begin the New Year with a bang.
He stared into his wine as he’d stared into his beer at the bar.
“You’re talking too much,” she said. “I can’t keep up with you.”
He looked up. “How come you was reading in the bar?”
She shrugged. “I like to read and I like to sit in bars. I’d go nuts if I had to stay in here every night and look at the walls.”
“You should try jail,” he said. “You’d really go for that.”
“Have you been in jail?” she asked with interest. A little excited by the possibility. He didn’t look like a con. If anyone ever looked as if he’d come straight from rustling steers in Marlboro Country . . .
He nodded.
“What for?”
“Petty larceny. Possession. Assault.”
She whistled, impressed. “Who’d you assault?”
“A cop. I was trying to get away.”
“I once hit a cop,” she said, wondering why she was lying. “In Washington. In a demonstration.” It was Evelyn who’d done that.
“You get busted?”
“We all got taken in but they didn’t book all of us.”
“How come?”
She shrugged.
“You have the limp then?”
She stared at him. He’d asked it quite casually. Only two people in her life had ever talked to her about her walk—and they’d both known her well. She’d assumed for years that most people thought she had this sort of sexy walk, and now here was this stranger asking as though it were her most immediately obvious trait. It cut the ground from under her high. It was a warning. There were people who could start new lives and people who couldn’t.
“I have an ingrown toenail,” she said.
He shrugged. “I just meant maybe that’s why they let you off.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Except the whole thing never even happened. I was just trying it on for size.”
He stood up and began pacing around the room.
She was feeling a first small dislike for him but she didn’t want to acknowledge it. If she acknowledged that she didn’t like him she might have to tell him to get out, and she wouldn’t get laid, and she was depressed, and she wouldn’t be able to go to sleep if she didn’t get laid, and then she might not ever get to school the next day, and she had to get to school, school was the oasis.
He stood with his back to her, looking at the clownfish.
She said, “You queer like your friend?”
“No, cunt,” he said. “I’m not queer like my friend.”
She put down her drink, yawned and stretched. “I think maybe you are. I think maybe if I feel like fucking tonight I should go back downstairs and find someone straight.”
He came over to the bed and stood over her. “You’re not going nowhere.”
“Mmmm,” she said, “maybe you’re right.” Her heart was beating furiously but her manner was indifferent. “I’m tired. I’m going to sleep.” Slowly and deliberately she pulled off her shoes. Then her socks. She stood up not two feet from where he was and unzipped her jeans, watching herself, thinking, I can’t believe I’m doing this. This isn’t me, it’s someone else. She let her jeans drop to the floor and kicked them aside. She reached for the bottom of her turtleneck, the bright yellow turtleneck, her heart beating so furiously she could barely breathe. The air between them was crackling with electricity. She pulled off the sweater. “Would you slam the door when you go out, please?”
He pushed her back onto the bed and came down on top of her heavily, kissing her, pressing her lips so that it hurt. His penis was hard against her. She struggled out from under him because she could hardly breathe. He moved up, too, but he wasn’t so heavy on her now. She was enormously excited and when he groped for her breasts under the brassiere, she reached back to open the clasp, to help him. She pulled at his shirt to get him undressed but he moved away from her and did it himself while she pulled off her pants, and then he was in her, and she was moaning with pleasure, coming and hoping that he wouldn’t come soon because she wanted him to go on and on and on.
Which was what happened. He never came in her. He would get tired and stop for a while and maybe they would change their position . . . at one point she sat on him and she really liked that, but he didn’t and made her get off . . . and then they would begin again in some other way, maybe a little better than the last, maybe not quite as good, but always good. So good that sometimes she would shake her head—no, no—because it was so good she might not be able to stand it, she would burst. And then she would come again and the excitement would die down and he would go down some and lie inside her. But he never came.
Finally they stopped. He rolled off her and they lay silent on their backs for a while, not looking at each other. She felt contented and sleepy but she didn’t want to go to sleep, yet, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to fall asleep while he was still here. He’d given her a lot of pleasure but she wasn’t totally easy about him. About the idea of turning over a new leaf in the morning with him in her bed. She was cold. She got under the covers. He didn’t, which was a relief. Maybe he would just go and she wouldn’t have to worry about it. She looked at his handsome face. He was staring up at the ceiling. He still had his erection but he didn’t seem aware of it. As though it were part of someone else’s body. He turned over so he was lying on his side, facing away from her.
“Hey,” she whispered, “don’t fall asleep,” but he didn’t seem to hear her. Then, as she waited for some response from him, she realized that he was masturbating to get off, that he was going to come all over her quilt, and she was seized first with revulsion toward him and then with the fear that he would know that she knew. She didn’t know which feeling was worse. She lay on her side without moving, facing his back, barely breathing for fear that he would become aware of her awareness. As ashamed as though it were she doing this disgusting, humiliating thing in the bed next to someone else. She was enraged—with herself even more than with him, for letting herself be put once again into a helpless, vulnerable position.
His body shuddered and then relaxed. Slowly she let herself breathe again. He was still. She waited a few minutes.
Then she said, as calmly as she could, “You can go, now.”
He was silent.
She tapped his arm. “Hey, don’t fall asleep.”
He said something she couldn’t understand. He was obviously half asleep already and that frightened her because there was no way in the world she could spend the night here with him in her bed.
“Hey,” she said, “don’t fall asleep. You’re not sleeping here.”
He didn’t turn aroun
d but she could see his body tense.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want you to.”
“Why don’t you want me to?”
Because you’re a pig. You came all over my beautiful quilt, you filthy pig. Because you’re a bum with a record. Because—
“Because I hardly know you. Because it’s one thing to fuck someone you don’t know and another thing to look at him over coffee in the morning.”
“I won’t have coffee.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I just fucked you pretty good, didn’t I?”
You fucked yourself better, you pig.
“You were okay.”
“Fuck you,” he said, “I ain’t going nowhere.”
“What are you talking about?” It came out in a scream although she hadn’t meant it to. She was really frightened now. She could see she might have to get him out by force and she didn’t know how she’d do it. “Where the fuck do you think you are?”
“I’m right here, cunt,” he said “and I’m staying until I get some sleep.”
She pushed at him but he was like a mass of stone, there was no way she could ever get him out. Panic was accelerating to hysteria now—she would never get him out and she would never get her sleep and she would never get to school.
“If you’re not up in one minute I’m calling the cops.”
There was a moment when neither of them moved. And then suddenly she reached for the light switch and he whirled around on the bed, grabbed the phone off the night table and hurled it across the room. Terrified she leaped out of the bed and ran across the room toward the door but he got her and dragged her back. She screamed and he covered her mouth.
Wait a minute! Something’s gone wrong!
She was kicking and struggling with all her might but it was no match for his. He pulled her back to the bed, struggling all the way, his arm around her face so that she couldn’t breathe, all she could think about was breathing.
Wait! Just let me breathe a minute! Help! Mommy, Daddy, dear God, help me!
He threw her down on the bed and sat on her, his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.
James! Dear God!
Then suddenly the pillow was over her face and terror blotted out her mind entirely so that her body kept struggling but her brain wasn’t working at all. It snapped back for a moment because the pillow loosened on her face and she could feel his fingers between her legs, invading her vagina, and she caught her breath and heaved under him and somehow the pillow was off and he was a huge mass, looming over her, sticking his penis into her, and she began screaming again and he tried to cover her mouth but she kept screaming, and then he had the lamp in his hand, raised over her head, and it was going to come down on her head, and Help Mommy Daddy Dear God, help me—do it do it do it and get it over w—
JUDITH ROSSNER was the author of ten novels, including Perfidia, Olivia, and the national bestseller August.
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BOOKS BY JUDITH ROSSNER
Any Minute I Can Split
Attachments
August
Emmeline
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid
To the Precipice
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1975 by Judith Rossner
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First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition July 2014
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Interior design by Claudia Martinez
Cover design by Evan Gaffney
Cover photograph © Hans Neleman/The Image Bank/Getty Images
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Judith Rossner, 1935–2005.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
p. cm.
1. Single women—Crimes against—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 3. Murder victims—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.O848 L6 1975
813'.54
84150751
ISBN 978-1-4767-7472-5
ISBN 978-1-4767-7332-2 (ebook)
Looking for Mr. Goodbar Page 28