"You prick," they said (and I was relieved when I saw they were not going to beat me up. I was being set free). "We could have had her."
"We'll get her without him."
That thought struck pathos into my soul. I was not allowed to feel like her hero for long. By the time I returned upstairs, she was at her desk chatting with both of them over what had happened, flirting brashly with them again, especially with the tough, coarse, sinewy one she hadn't liked (mending her torn silk stocking with colorless nail polish, lifting her breasts for him as she had always done for me, tilting her head and tempting him with her ruby, saucy smile. He was a tough, swarthy Italian, like Forgione, and I felt he had just shoved me out of the way again, as he had downstairs. I hated her. My feelings were hurt. I felt she would have fucked for him from that time on sooner than she ever would for me, if he was smart enough to pose and wait--"I'm on my back, he's in my crack," was part of another bawdy song she liked to sing to me--even though she still liked me better), and I felt pangs of jealousy. (What good did it amount to, being liked, if she wanted to fuck for people she didn't like?) "You were jealous," she said. "Weren't you?"
I must have been gazing at her moon-eyed with all the pain of my broken heart flooding into my expression. I have never been able to cope with jealousy. (I wish someone would teach me how.) It leaves me weak and at a loss for honest words. I can't make jokes. My eyes water and I want to cry. (Marie Jencks would accuse me of staring at her like a mooncalf. Perhaps I did, especially after I found out about her and Tom in the storeroom. I wanted to be absorbed into her embraces also. I didn't like feeling left outside. I still do stare at girls who are attractive, and look away quickly if they stare back. Today, I chuck brassy, overpowering women of twenty-eight like Marie Jencks under the chin nimbly and pass them by with a half-hearted falsehood. Today, girls of twenty-eight don't try to boss me around. Derek's nurses do.) Other men go berserk with jealousy and fly into Herculean rages. I produce tears.
I was never jealous of her and Len Lewis. (I felt he should be jealous of me.)
"He wants to leave his wife," she confided about him. "He used to think I was too young. By now I've showed him I'm old enough. I like him, he's so shy. I like older men. I like younger men too. It's the ones in between I have trouble with. I don't like football players anymore. Maybe I do. Now I can teach them a few things."
"Teach me."
"Get a room."
"I've got no money."
"I'll chip in."
"Where do you go?"
They went to empty restaurants for dinner one evening a week, sometimes two, and then sat in his car awhile and talked and petted. He lived far out in Queens and had to start back early. He didn't drink. She was teaching him how.
"He enjoys it. I make him feel young."
"How?"
"I kiss him very softly and slowly like this ... all over his face for a long time. Then I do it harder and faster. I breathe hard. He thinks I can't control myself. I like doing that to him. He says nobody ever kissed him the way I do."
"I'll bet he's right."
"I'll bet nobody ever kissed you the way I can."
"Do it now."
"His wife wouldn't know how. He's never had a modern girl friend. I slip my hands inside his shirt and rub my fingers against his chest. His hair is soft and curly. Like a kitten. Nobody ever did that to him before. He's fifty-five years old. I tickle him with my tongue. Soon I'll let him touch these."
"Come outside."
"He doesn't know I'll let him if he wants to. I talk a little dirty to him. He likes it. So do you. Don't you like my nipples? If you'd go slow once in a while, you'd see how pointy and hard they get. I like to talk dirty too. I love to say words like nipples, pointy, and hard. And tongue."
I had my hard-on again.
"Come outside."
"Well, hello, dear," she greeted, winking at it. "Good to see you again."
I reached for an accident folder with one hand and slid the other into the side pocket of my trousers. I blushed with pleasure.
She grinned, pleased with her prowess, widening her eyes with mock astonishment and pursing her lips into an open pink circle of admiration and surprise. I know now what that open circle was intended to suggest. (I've seen it since on gorgeous faces of photographers' models in the best fashion magazines.) I didn't believe then that girls really did such things (although I'd seen comic-strip drawings). Now I know they do and I'm glad. I love it more than ice cream. (I am anaclitic, I guess, when I'm not sadistically aggressive. When the telephone rings at home, I want someone else to answer it.) You can't get good ice cream anymore. (Everything is getting worse or going away. The Woman's Home Companion is gone, and so is The Saturday Evening Post, and Look and Life, and soon even Time may run out for all of us as well. Colleges are going into bankruptcy. Restaurants I like are closing.) It tastes like gum and chalk. Virginia was peaches, strawberries, and cream with touches of rouge on her ripe, lustrous cheeks. She shaped her lipstick often by pressing her mouth together. Her legs were smooth and glistening in unruffling silk stockings, and even her somewhat chubby feet seemed rich and sweet as butter compressed into her shiny tight shoes with their high spiked heels. Women wore shiny black pumps with high spiked heels when I was young, and evil-looking, skinny men were unshaven and wore loose black socks in the dirty movies I saw. (Penny and other girls make me take my socks off for just that reason. My wife never saw any of these movies and doesn't. I often leave them on with her as a ruse. I am an evil-looking, skinny man in an old dirty movie, and I am defiling her. My wife has no idea that she is a character actress in a dirty movie of mine. She may, however, for all I know, be the leading performer in one of her own.) Dirty movies have gotten better, I'm told. Smut and weaponry are two areas in which we've improved. Everything else has gotten worse. The world is winding down. You can't get good bread anymore even in good restaurants (you get commercial rolls), and there are fewer good restaurants. Melons don't ripen, grapes are sour. They dump sugar into chocolate candy bars because sugar is cheaper than milk. Butter tastes like the printed paper it's wrapped in. Whipped cream comes in aerosol bombs and isn't whipped and isn't cream. People serve it, people eat it. Two hundred and fifty million educated Americans will go to their graves and never know the difference. (I wish I could get my hands on a good charlotte russe again.) That's what Paradise is--never knowing the difference. Even fancy bakeries now use a substitute for whipped cream that looks more like whipped cream than whipped cream does, keeps its color and texture longer, doesn't spoil, and costs much less, yielding larger profits.
"It tastes like shit."
It tastes like shit. Nobody cares but me. From sea to shining sea the country is filling with slag, shale, and used-up automobile tires. The fruited plain is coated with insecticide and chemical fertilizers. Even pure horseshit is hard to come by these days. They add preservatives. You don't find fish in lakes and rivers anymore. You have to catch them in cans. Towns die. Oil spills. Money talks. God listens. God is good, a real team player. "America the Beautiful" isn't: it was all over the day the first white man set foot on the continent to live. The Fuggers were all right as long as they stayed in Germany: then they sent their mothers here. Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain. The faces of the rich and the poor age from nativity into the same cramped, desiccated lines of meanness and discontent. Women look like their husbands. God had no computer. He had to use clay, which was hard to work with, and a human rib, which was a little easier. God was just and fairly ambitious, but in a rudimentary way. He had to use the flood once (He couldn't think of smog or nerve gas) and fire and brimstone. People between rich and poor radiate uneasiness. They don't know where they belong. I hear America singing fuck off.
The peregrine falcon is just about gone (done in by DDT. The shells of the eggs laid by the female, of course, grew too thin to survive incubation without cracking). The hot dog is going too. Soon
there'll be no more whales; my wife and I will just have to make do without them. The good old American hot dog is filled with water, chicken innards, and cereal (the same cereal they divert from bread and rolls and replace with synthetics and additives). Mom's apple pie is frozen. Mom went public several years ago. There is no Pa. She did it with gas.
"He did it with gas," she told me about her father, when I could bring myself to ask. "The rest of us were away in the country for the summer. He did it all alone in the garage in his car. I'll never forget it. I didn't want to go to the funeral. I heard somebody say he turned all red. My mother made me. I've always hated my mother for the way she treated him. 'Look what he did to me,' she kept wailing all week long to whoever would listen. I don't like to talk about her."
She did it with gas also, in the kitchen of her mother's house in New Jersey, which was most inconsiderate of her, since we had better ways of killing ourselves by then. We had plastic bags. (Last night, my wife had another one of her bad dreams. I didn't wake her. Afterward, after all the smothered moaning and spastic shuddering, she began to snore lightly, and I did wake her, to tell her she was snoring and complain she was not letting me sleep. She apologized penitently in a drowsy, cranky voice and turned over on her side while I looked at her ass. I smiled and slept well.) She was no longer at the office when I telephoned on my first furlough home after returning from overseas. Ben Zack told me. She was no longer on the premises. (Neither was I. Ben Zack didn't know who I was. I keep the old codger guessing.) She was no longer on the payroll. Whoever was at the switchboard had never heard of her (has still not, probably, heard of me) and gave me Ben Zack, who was still on the payroll in the Personal Injury Department as an assistant to Len Lewis, who was still there then too.
"Virginia Markowitz?" Ben Zack repeated in a tone of bemused surprise. "Oh, yeah. Didn't you know?"
"What?"
I didn't tell him who I was but felt he could see me anyway. I told him I was an old college friend of hers from Duke University, a football player, and wanted to get in touch with her. That last part was true. I was an officer. I had wings, and I wanted her to see them. I wanted to station myself erect before her in my uniform and suntan and exclaim: "Hey, Virginia. Virginia Markowitz--look! I'm all grown up now. I'm twenty-two years old and a real smart aleck, and I get lots of good hard-ons. Let me show you."
But she wasn't there.
(She was no longer employed by the company because she was dead, you know.)
"Oh, no," Ben Zack explained with patient good humor, as though pleased to have someone to talk to about her. "She's not employed here anymore. She's dead, you know, poor kid. She killed herself about a year and a half ago."
"Was she sick?"
"Nobody knows why."
"How?"
"She did it with gas."
"Did she turn all red?" I was tempted to ask in an outburst of caustic bitterness the next time I dialed the switchboard and asked to speak to her.
"I'm afraid I don't know," I could hear him reply in the manner of serious courtesy he was developing. "I wasn't able to attend the funeral. I don't get around too easily, you see."
"Then she's really out of a job now, isn't she?" I thought of observing irreverently.
(And am not positive if I did. I sometimes think of saying something and am not certain afterward if I did. Even in conversations I know are imaginary, I'm not always sure I remember what I've imagined.) "She doesn't work here anymore, if that's what you mean," he might have replied tartly. "I'm not sure I understand."
She was out of a job, one of the unemployed; she had been let go for committing suicide and would probably have difficulty finding a suitable position anywhere (in her new condition and without favorable references) else but in one of the file cabinets downstairs where I would have laid her if I could while she was still alive and kicking (I bet she would kick, until she got cramps) and should have done it to her right there on the desk if I only knew how. If there was room enough on that desk for titanic Marie Jencks and Tom, there was room enough for tiny us.
That was the time to have done it (if I'd wanted to). We signaled salacious caresses to each other all day long with coded phrases and patches of melody from ribald songs we shared.
"I asked for number one. She said let's have some fun. Ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba."
I would color a lot and feel my happiness bubble up into tingling ripples of joy and warmth. I have never been so pleased by intimacy with anyone since. She would smile and color a lot with merriment too, dimpling. She was always pleasant with me, even when she was having her period (I wish my wife was) and imagining that her face was breaking out into ugly boils and craters. (It wasn't.) "Look what she did to me."
She killed herself before she was twenty-five, doing it with gas, as her father had done before her (and maybe his father before him--she didn't say--deserting me without two weeks' notice) and leaving me feeling destitute again in a phone booth in a train terminal. After a moment of utter shock, I found myself feeling like a foundling again, abandoned heartlessly in a soiled telephone booth in Grand Central Station (through tears, I saw banner headlines and front-page photographs in the next day's editions of the New York Daily News and Mirror, which is gone now too. O, weep for the peregrine falcon and the New York Mirror: ARMY OFFICER FOUND ABANDONED IN TERMINAL PHONE BOOTH. No Clue to Identity) in my Mediterranean, bronze suntan (which was turning yellow) and natty military officer's uniform (spotless dry-cleaned pink gabardine trousers and forest-green regulation tunic with ribbons above the breast pocket, or both pockets--I forget things like that. I had done well in the service. I was a twenty-two-year-old success) with a malodorous, black telephone instrument in my hand announcing her death. Things stank. I thought I smelled my armpits, neck, and feet stinking.
And then the air cleared (a breeze, a breath of fresh air) and I was glad--glad, God dammit--glad she was gone and dead and that I would never have to see her again. (I would not have to screw her.) And glad that I was the one who was still alive.
I had not realized how much hidden tension I was under (I had jokes massed on my lips to conceal and ameliorate it) until I watched the sweat flowing in torrents from the hand holding the telephone. I was released from my obligations. I did not have to say hello, make a sociable wisecrack (and hope she'd remember and want to see me. She could have been married, engaged, going steady, and I would have believed none of it. I would have believed she had lost interest in a seventeen-year-old file clerk like me and was going with older married men and gangsters). She was a challenge, and I did not have to meet it. I did not have to make a date, show up early, sip whiskey, look her over (while she looked me over), sound her out to see if she was still the same, move her into some kind of bedroom, undress with her (until we were both naked), and then get right down to the sheets with her and look it squarely in the eye once and for all. I had no idea what I would find, what she would look like. (And I was still afraid.) I still didn't want it from her. (And I didn't want to see. All I still wanted, I think, was to lay it in her hand and have her lead me around with it like a domesticated pet.) I would have preferred malted milk. I have cravings for food. I have a weakness for dairy products and never liked baseball. I could have handled it all with a dashing display of confidence and technique, but I was so glad I didn't have to (she was dead, God dammit. And she was also nearly twenty-six). I had a rich chocolate malted milk in a tall, cold glass at a lunch counter in the train station and called another girl who'd been crazy about me the last time I was in, but she had moved out west to marry a sheet-metal worker in an airplane factory who was making a big salary. I called another girl I'd laid once a year and a half before who didn't remember me by name and sounded so absurd in her tinny and stand-offish mistrust that I laughed and made no effort to remind her. (She was putting on airs.) I had no one else to call. I had no close friends around. Before the week was out, I went back to the air base a few days earlier than I had to. I felt more at home
in the army than I did in my house. (I feel more at home in my office now than I do at home, and I don't feel at home there. I get along better with the people there.) I don't think I ever had a good time at home on a furlough. I don't think I've ever had a good time on a vacation (I'm not sure I've ever had a good time anywhere); I find myself waiting for them to end. We have too many holidays. Birthdays and anniversaries come around too often. I'm always buying presents or writing out checks. The years are too short, the days are too long. I called Ben Zack again before I went back and pretended to be somebody else. (I did that twice. I couldn't help it.) "I asked for number two.
She showed me what to do."
"How odd," he said.
I inquired innocently about Virginia as though I had not done so before. I told him I was a former eastern intercollegiate boxing champion from Duke University.
"It's really very strange," he said.
Calling Ben Zack again like that was a malicious trick, a practical joke. It did not feel like a joke. It felt like a willful, destructive crime, a despicable act of obscene perversion. It felt thrilling and debasing. It felt like it used to feel that time I was telephoning hospitals for a while to inquire about the condition, my very words: "I am calling to inquire about the condition ..." of people I knew who had just died. "I'm sorry. Mr. _____ is no longer listed as a patient," they'd say.
I was always in fear of being discovered (have always felt myself on the very brink of imminent public exposure.
"Look, there he is! That's the one. That's who he really is," someone, a woman, will shout, pointing at me from a crowd in an open place, and all the rest will nod in accord, and everything will be over for me.
It surprises me still that they could not read my mind over the telephone, could not see my clammy sweat).
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