Meanwhile, excited by Karen’s persistence in remaining near me and by her exaggerated enjoyment of even the silliest jokes I made about law students, I bantered from a sitting position with each of the arrivals. Her eyes looked steadily into mine and my sense of the ridiculous multiplied rapidly as my private calculations on how to get her into my bed became more frantic.
The dancing didn’t begin to dominate until everyone had arrived. Then the pockets of people that formed according to similarities in studies, dissolved into one mass, obscuring my view of Brian. The room filled with smoke—cigarette and marijuana—its perimeters littered with clear plastic cups filled with wine. The drugs seeped into the room like a mist and it swayed, the talk disconnected and punctuated by high giggles, the movements slower, with people falling onto each other inoffensively, the whole scene like a storm-tossed ship occupied by reckless passengers. So it was nothing for Karen, after finishing a particularly vigorous dance, to collapse on top of me, her face red and laughing as she buried it in my chest.
“Whoa,” I said at first, trying to free myself so that I could return to my aloof and isolated posture of observation. But when she lifted her head and looked up into my eyes with a little girl’s playfulness, saying, “Hi, Howie,” I relaxed and let her body settle onto mine. I put my hands on her ass and pressed her towards me. She closed her eyes: “Mmm, that’s good.”
“One way or another,” I said, “you’re gonna have to let me make love to you tonight.”
Her round, innocent face flushed. But it was the embarrassment of pride. “I never would have guessed,” she said softly, “that you were so emotional.”
“Come on.” I was erect and it pressed against her pelvis. “You know you’re beautiful. You know I can’t stand an evening of your flirting with me. If you’re playing with me, I’ll go the route, I’ll puff up B.B.’s pride to the skies. I’ll stand in the middle of the room and beg for you.”
She laughed. “I’m not playing.” She rolled off and let her free arm (the other was pinned behind my back) flail across the body of someone else on the couch. “I don’t give a fuck about B.B.,” she said to the ceiling.
I glanced at the poor unloved fellow, dancing near the windows, and then lifted myself up to look down on her. Her eyes were closed but they opened in a moment, their sarcastic gleam replaced by the limpid solemnity of honesty. “Good,” I said at last.
“I’ve read your Times article, did you know that?”
I lost my bravado and said weakly, “Really? No.”
She smiled. “You look scared. I liked it. I was really impressed that you could think about us, about our lives, so, you know, in general terms.”
“Thank you.”
She hit me with the hand I had had pinned. “Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Thank you.” She said with an effeminate emphasis on “Thank.” She frowned. “It’s so fake.”
“I’m sorry. I get embarrassed by how much I enjoy being complimented.”
“So enjoy it. That’s why I said it.”
“Oh, so you’re just flattering me,” I said, not being serious.
“No, you know I meant it. It’s the last time I’ll do it. You’re such a creep about it.”
“I am not! I’m just a fool. There’s a big difference. I’ve got another one coming out, so please do it again, and I won’t be bad about it.”
“Really?” She lifted herself up warily and let her head rest against the wall. “A sequel?”
Sequel was a sensitive word for me about my second article. I had the idea that I was a developing writer who had to be careful not to repeat himself. My pride and concern over the breadth of my total output was wildly out of proportion to reality. In fact, the Times had accepted my second article with the idea of presenting it as a follow-up piece (that was my concept while working on it) but I couldn’t stand anyone saying so. I had said nothing but she noticed my discomfort. “I’m sorry,” she said, touching me quickly with her hand. “That was a stupid thing to say, wasn’t it?”
“No, no. It is a sequel. It’s just that I’m upset about that. You know, that I can only get published on that subject.”
“Oh, you had other articles turned down?”
“Turn—no! I haven’t written any other articles.”
She laughed. “Well, then how do you know you’d be turned down?”
“I don’t.” She looked at me expectantly but I wanted this to go no further. There was no reason for me to trust this bubbly Wasp girl with my terrors.
“Then why,” she said hesitantly, aware that this was hazardous ground, “be upset? The fact that the only two articles you’ve written have been taken probably means that they all would.”
I smiled. A kindly smile; the one that the beneficent old gentleman on his deathbed bestows on his doting granddaughter when she lies bravely about the state of his health.
“Right?” she asked.
“Absolutely.” I looked away. I looked for something that I could politely do to get myself away from her.
Her eyes were now large and solemn. They took me in, for a moment, and then closed almost as if in pain. “When does it come out?” she asked without opening them.
“Um, in about three weeks. Or four. They’re not sure yet.” Silence. Silence in the midst of my generation’s music, drugs, and aggressive seductions. I began to get up from the couch and stopped only because I couldn’t be that rude. Brian would walk away, I told myself. He’d either grab her and fuck her, or he’d walk away. He might even blurt out his problem if he wanted her and that was the tribute demanded for the favor of her body. But here I was, uncomfortable because a woman had tried to be nice about my work, edging my way off the couch, condemning myself to fifteen minutes of masturbation, and rewarding B.B.’s insensitive, antiseptic personality with a night of love.
I was stuck, disheartened and paralyzed, watching her sad face, the eyes closed, her head leaning against the wall, when I felt the iron grip of my friend. “Howard,” his voice whooshed in my ear, “have you got her?”
I laughed because his breath tickled me and the question was impossible to answer. Her eyes opened and Brian sat down next to me, his face exhausted and sullen. “Well, yes or no?” he insisted.
“It was yes, but now I’ve made it no,” I said in a normal voice.
His eyes, narrowed from either fatigue or depression, squinted at me, “Indeed? How strange. Why?”
“Boy, you sound tired, Brian,” Karen said.
He put his hand on her knee. “Karen, I feel like I’m dying.”
“Go to sleep,” I said.
“Can’t sleep,” he said. “Answer my question.”
“How can I answer your question?” I looked at Karen.
“You’ve blown it?”
“No, I think I’m turning it down.”
He sighed. “What’s your excuse this time?”
I laughed sheepishly. Karen, lifting herself slightly, said, “What are you two talking about?”
Brian looked at her and said, “What were you and Howard talking about?”
She looked nervously at me. “His writing.”
“Ah ha!” Brian rocked slowly while laughing. “His writing. My God, what a mistake.”
“It is?” Karen was wide awake now, her eyes shifting hungrily from me to him.
“Brian, shut up,” I said.
“All right, kid,” he answered. He held his head in his hands and rubbed his hair so that it stood up in bunches. “Please don’t fight with me. You’re right, I shouldn’t have said anything. All I meant, Karen, is that Howard, quite naturally, is a little nutty about his work. Joan!” he yelled. “Where the hell are you?”
“But I just complimented him,” Karen said.
“That’s—” Brian began, but he saw my look and stopped. “Find Joan and I’ll get out of here.”
“Joan!” I yelled, and saw her entering the living room with another jug of wine. I waved
to her to come over, which she did, Brian saying, “I’m causing trouble, so get me out of here.”
“Before you go,” I said. “Did they refuse to ever play bridge with us again?”
“Yeah,” Brian said, lowering his head. “Even though it’s not their ball. ‘I don’t wanna play anymore,’” Brian said in a squeaky, whining voice. “Fucking assholes!” He rubbed his eyes very hard.
“Don’t do that,” Joan said, pulling at his arm.
“I’ll have you know,” Brian said to Karen, lifting his head, his irises surrounded by bolts of bloodshot lightning, “that this kid Howard is one of the greatest bridge players in the world. He has a highly sensitive communicating instinct that makes him one of the all-time bidders.” We were all laughing by the time he had finished. He looked absolutely crazed, but it was the disheveled hysteria of a little boy, not an obsessive fit of insanity.
“You should really get some sleep, Brian,” Karen said. “You look like you’re going to collapse.”
Brian got up suddenly, the couch’s springs bouncing us in his wake. He grabbed Joan’s hand and plunged into the dancers, making his way towards the foyer.
“Do you have to leave with B.B.?” I asked. I could feel my face was heavy with the cost of my question and she returned my look with equal gravity.
“I don’t have to, but—”
“You want to.”
“No,” she said impatiently. “But it would be unpleasant to do that to him.”
I nodded and she, full of some emotion, watched me eagerly. “Then how do I go about seeing you?”
“Just call me. You want my phone number?”
I imagined threading my way through the crowd to find paper and a pen, returning to jot down numbers. Like conducting an interview in the subway during rush hour. “I want to see you tonight,” I said, my voice surprisingly resonant. She looked pleased and worried. “I refuse to be a sensible person about this,” I said, almost angrily. “I want you tonight, even if it’s only to talk. Now, if you went and asked B.B. to take you home, he’d do it, right?”
“I hope so.”
She had smiled pleasantly but I retained my furious look. “Well, then you call and I’ll get in my car, pick you up, and bring you back here.”
“What if B.B. comes back here? The party doesn’t look like it’s gonna end.”
“If you knew he wasn’t coming back, would you do it?”
She calculated. What was she thinking? He’d insist on their fucking and she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, turn him down? Maybe I wasn’t handsome enough to make these kinds of romantic demands? If you don’t look like a star, you can’t be one. “Yes,” she said with decision.
I got up and pushed my way through the dancers. I’m Brian, I thought, I’m alive. I snapped the record release and listened for a second to the groan the dancers made the instant the music ended. “All right, everybody,” I said, my voice punching the air. “Brian’s wiped out and he’s asleep. I’m wiped out and I’m going to sleep.” I smiled at the stunned group. “We’ve got some heavy things to do in the morning. I’m sorry but we’ll have another big bash in a week or two, okay? You’re free to take the wine and do it elsewhere, but I gotta get you outta here.”
It took forever to quash any complaints and to hustle the slowed, drunken group out. Most parties finished with people collapsing at the scene and sleeping there, and so adult a procedure as leaving and going home to sleep was resented. But in a half-hour, they were gone.
B.B. and Karen departed about ten minutes after I shut off the music. I expected her call the moment I closed the door on the last partyer. I stared at the phone, and heard a muffled voice from Brian’s room, when I remembered that my sheets were filthy and I ran into my room to change them. When I was billowing out the blanket and spread, I saw puffballs of dust dance out from under my bed and skip across the floor. There’s no time, I thought, but I ran to the foyer for the vacuum; once I had turned it on, and was exploring under my bed for more pennies and matchbooks to get out of its way, I decided the whole room needed vacuuming. I was sweating when I finished. I looked around in despair because having removed the eyesores of the bed and dust, the pile of dirty clothes on the floor and the disorganized papers on my desk became more glaring. I glanced at the clock: it had been forty-five minutes since my announcement to the party.
I hugged the bunch of clothes to my chest, breathing in a strong dose of my own odors, and went to the bathroom. The hamper was jammed and I could squeeze no more than two things in it. I ran back to my room, dropping a pair of underpants on the floor that I had to bend over to retrieve, and then opened my closet to dump them. But there was no room for that, and, besides, I might open the closet and she would see. At last I solved it by depositing the laundry in a suitcase stored on a high shelf in my closet. I noticed the three dirty ashtrays on my way to my desk and emptying them into my wicker wastebasket showed me that it needed a dumping too. I shoved all the drafts of my novel, poems, articles, and plays into the biggest of my desk drawers, and pushed down on the mass to hasten the process, even though that meant many of the papers would be torn or crumpled. I looked over my shoulder at the pristine room while carrying out the waste-basket to empty it in one of the huge green plastic garbage bags in the kitchen.
Sure enough, just then the phone rang. But it was a girl friend of Brian’s whom he had been snubbing, and I told her he was asleep. It was more than an hour now. I was to wait forty-five more minutes before she called. I spent them sitting in my room compulsively arranging little piles of books, squaring my throw rug next to the bed, making sure that the Venetian blinds on each window were opened to the same degree, and adding a tack or two to the posters that were buckling away from the wall. “Howard.” Karen’s voice was tentative. She was relieved when I answered yes, saying, “Well, do you still want to come and pick me up?”
I recalled that absurd question while I drove through the silent streets to get her. It was good that she felt insecure about me: I needed something to bolster my ego against the fact that it had taken her an hour and a half to be rid of B.B. I was coasting slowly next to the curb, in order to make out the pathetically pompous and unreadable house numbers, when, in the house up ahead, a screen door opened tentatively, and then Karen emerged when I reached it.
She ran quickly to the car and opened the door, jumped in, and slammed it shut. She stared ahead for a moment and then looked at me. “Hi.”
I laughed. “Hello.”
She looked blank and then unsure when she leaned forward as if to kiss me. I moved forward and, after a moment of hesitation, she quickly pecked me on the mouth, saying, “Let’s get out of here.”
We said nothing during the short drive, except that she commented in a whisper on how deserted the streets were. At the door I said we should go to my room so as not to disturb Brian and Joan, a suggestion she accepted immediately. I felt naughty about saying it, because we wouldn’t disturb them, but I was glad to reach my room not because it made sex more immediate, but because I felt surer of myself surrounded by the books of my seers, the slogans of my parents’ politics, and the labors of my literary youth. “God, it’s clean,” she said.
“With good reason. I spent the whole time waiting for you cleaning.”
She laid her trench coat down on my bed carefully and looked at me with pleasure. “Did you really?”
“Don’t be flattered,” I said. “I would have done that even if I hated you. Actually, that’s not true,” I added.
She pretended anger. “I hope not!”
“Come to think,” I said, genuinely feeling the significance of it. “It really is unusual.” The only person I clean up for is my mother, I thought to myself.
She walked over to my desk and sat down at it, her hands rubbing the surface and then grabbing each side, as if riding it. “It’s such a small desk. I’m surprised.”
“Well,” I said, and pointed to my typewriter table, “I don’t type on it.”
&nb
sp; She glanced in that direction. “But you write in longhand first, don’t you?”
I laughed. “You make it sound like I’m doing it all the time. No,” I said, raising my voice, “I don’t write in longhand first. Not even my poetry. I know it’s unromantic, but that’s the way it is, when you have no talent, there’s no point in elaborate procedures. I don’t even check my atrocious spelling. There are copy editors for that. Make the bastards work, that’s my motto.” She didn’t laugh nervously or look stunned during my speech. She watched me, at first with careful amusement, and then looked away with a lightly dismissive expression.
“Okay,” she said. “I won’t talk about your work.”
“Bravo. Let’s talk about what you and B.B. talked about for an hour and a half.” I knew I was behaving like a callow fool, but it was uncontrollable, I wanted to be aggressive at all costs.
“No deal,” she said with a vicious smile. “When you explain why you’re nutty about your work, I’ll tell you.”
“Oh, boy, I’m out of my depth here. I need a wise guy in my life like a hole in the head.” She laughed attractively, her face reddening. I walked to the desk and sat on my haunches next to her, taking her hand. I was surprising myself with each move. I pulled gently and said, “Kiss me.”
She bent down, her short, bobbed blondish hair framing and softening her movement, and I put my arms around her as our lips met. Her back was strong and good to hold, her lips full and moist. I held the sides of her torso where her breasts began to form and pushed slightly to stop her from opening her mouth and pressing too hard. I wanted only to brush her lips, to shape them with mine.
The Game Player Page 16