Eastman Was Here

by Alex Gilvarry

  “Do you recognize anyone?” she asked. She pulled down a shot of the assassin’s face, half covered in shadow. “Maybe the boy?”

  “Never seen him,” said An.

  She thought about whether she would share these photos with Eastman. He had asked for them. She wasn’t pursuing the story so there didn’t seem harm in it. Only now, as she studied the face of the assassin, did she find the event compelling. She would follow up. At least find out his name. And if and when she saw Eastman again she would just tell him that the film was still being developed. Be protective of your leads, that’s what Bob H. told her when she first arrived. All newsmen, even the ones close to you, will scoop you if they get half a chance. Eastman didn’t look like the sort who would. He wrote literature, not news. Perhaps she should try to get to know him a little better.

  15.

  He no longer wanted to write about Channing and he was unsure if he ever really did in the first place. His request for an interview was partly a ploy to see her again, perhaps to develop a relationship. He craved companionship; without it he felt unsure of himself. The thought of a new love could creep up on you without realizing it, and you could begin to change your behavior without knowing why. His attraction to Channing, the slow burn of it, made him think of Penny. Not the sexual thrills that consumed him of late, but Penny at the beginning, when they were first making a life together. After the marriage and a few months at home in Brooklyn, once life resumed to normal, there were moments of complete stillness. Penny had the summers off so they would be home together in the house for the entire day. Eastman in his study, thinking, writing, brooding. Penny in her office upstairs, before it was the boys’ room, quietly doing the same. An equilibrium was found, hours would go by like this. At night, they would walk through their neighborhood, and when the weather was warm and he was feeling up to it, they might jog together in the middle of the street where the road was well lit. In the late evenings they actually said very little to each other. They went about their nightly routines of brushing teeth and washing their faces, then got into bed to read before shutting out the lights.

  It took time for two people to find the rhythm of their lives, a rhythm that could sustain them for years to come.

  Eastman was at the desk in his hotel room, trying to picture this same life with Channing. She wasn’t as elegant or pretty as Penny. She didn’t dress the same, and her clothes seemed to be those of a graduate student, jeans and collared blouses, things collected on the cheap. Of course, Channing was covering a war and was smart not to wear anything too dressy. She wasn’t here to meet men, damn it, she was here to work. Still, she had charisma and fearlessness. She was smarter than he was. Somehow this was a common theme among all the women he chose to be with. They were all much more intelligent. He felt it to be true. Eastman was drawn to intelligence. Who wasn’t? He was lucky to have been in all those stimulating conversations with women who showed him more than he knew, who introduced him to concepts he had previously ignored.

  He got up from the desk and pulled open the curtains. The sky was filled with smog. In the square below, motorbikes and cars drove along Tu Do Street spewing exhaust. He lay down on the bed and again he tried to picture himself together with Channing. Sharing a house in stillness. Doing the things he did with Penny. Only he was troubled. And the more he tried to visualize a different life, his thoughts returned to Penny, to the reality of his situation. He thought back to Penny’s strange behavior in the last few weeks, when she’d asked him to choke her to the point of her turning purple. What had that been about? Was she trying to rekindle some sort of sexual attraction toward him, knowing she was falling in love with another man?

  Eastman tried to imagine how she met Arnaud Fleishman. He auditioned the scenes. In a supermarket aisle. At a faculty Christmas party. At a dinner he had declined to attend. On the street near Fleishman’s Chelsea apartment. At that academic conference in Boston, the weekend before the choking incident. Yes, he decided it was the conference; that was when her behavior changed. Perhaps they met in the carpeted halls of one of those old Boston hotels along Commonwealth Avenue. She noticed him, the phantom Fleishman, in the audience at her panel discussion and he followed after her. They spoke of psychology, colleagues they had in common, overlapping areas of research. She was captivated by the fact that he was taking an interest in her work when her own husband showed little spark for it; in fact, she said to Fleishman, her husband had just recently called the field of psychology a load of crap one step beneath common sense and sociology. They shared a laugh at his expense. During one of their awkward pauses, Fleishman suggested that they have a drink at the hotel bar for further discussion of her paper. Flattered and maybe a little bit excited, Penny said yes. This was followed by a short dinner, which she allowed him to pay for upon his insistence. What a change of pace for Penny, or Penelope, as Fleishman was calling her. She wasn’t home in Brooklyn, exhausting herself over her two children. She wasn’t tending to every mood of her husband—his envy, malaise, rage, his erratic complaining. She was her own woman when she was away, full of personality and humor. And here she was, dining with a handsome gentleman who was charming the panties off her with every brush of his mustache. So what if Fleishman drank from his wineglass like a woman and sipped his after-dinner tea with his pinky pointing north. She was having the time of her life and he realized she wasn’t talking about her husband very much. Fleishman found it not strange, but fortunate. Maybe, just maybe, he could steal her from the sad louse. But Fleishman wasn’t thinking that far ahead yet—that would be giving him too much credit. He was handsome but aloof (a kind word for his brand of idiot). Penelope didn’t talk of her husband lovingly the few times she mentioned him, if at all, and this invited Fleishman to entertain the notion that there was no longer any love between her and her husband. He was more of a life partner than a husband, she might have said. The check was paid. Fleishman had a bottle of cognac in his room, just sitting there, he said. Just sitting there next to two glasses. But it wasn’t just sitting there, was it? It was placed there earlier, along with a stack of condoms and silk scarves and blindfolds. Yes, this Fleishman had a little rapist in him. Penelope wanted to go to his room, but she had a responsibility to her marriage, she might have said, and to her children. She felt confused and so she said no, but only at first. They parted, a lovely parting. Kiss on the cheek, a glance back over the shoulder. She couldn’t stop thinking about him when she got to her room, and knew now that not having that drink was a mistake. Fleishman, clever bastard, had planted his room number in her head at the end of dinner. “If you change your mind.” “The offer still stands.” “I’m in room such and such.”

  And she did change her mind. Penny never had it in her to have just an affair. With her, everything was absolute. She could handle the guilt of an affair, but what she couldn’t handle was the abnormal, the in-between. So this affair would be her walking out on the whole marriage. She made her choice in a glance over dinner.

  Once they were inside room such and such, Eastman couldn’t quite figure out how it began. Who touched whom? Eastman was too scared to picture her going down on him, even though he assumed it happened, knowing very well how Penny operated. He couldn’t picture how the choking was introduced. Was it a fantasy of hers to begin with? Some kind of rape fantasy that she was only willing to share with a stranger? Or was it Fleishman’s fetish? Was it he who wanted this degradation put upon himself? Eastman saw it clearly now. She tied Fleishman to the headboard with her stockings while he nibbled her tits. Fleishman wanted to be dominated, decimated, strangled beneath her. Perhaps it just slipped out, like a foul word one blurts during sex. He asked to be choked the closer he came to coming. Penny was not shy in bed, especially not the first time she took a lover. She gave it her all, and if it was in her mind that this would be a onetime affair, she would give it more than her all. “Choke me,” Fleishman begged. “Choke me while I come.” Not being the least b
it bashful, and close to orgasm herself, she did as he asked.

  Lying in his bed at the Continental, Eastman had a hard-on from the thought of his wife’s affair. Strange, though, he was also feeling a slight physical pain. Pain in his lower side near the liver and along his lower back. His longing for her was still real, even now, halfway around the world.

  He got up and walked around the room in his underpants, feeling himself through the cotton fabric. It took him a moment to devise the experiment, but when it struck him—like many bad ideas he’d had in the past several weeks—it seemed as reasonable and sound as any of his decisions. The only way to know Penny was to become her on some psychological level. Maybe her discipline wasn’t bullshit after all.

  With a belt and buckle, Eastman decided he would cut off the oxygen to his brain while he jerked himself off to the thought of Penny and Fleishman. And he had to move quickly if he was going to maintain his solid erection. Looking around the room, belt in hand, he noticed the bed didn’t have a headboard that would work. So Eastman thought the closet might be an ample place to conduct such an experiment. He put the chain lock on the hotel door first, then began to clear the closet by the bathroom. He hung all of his weight onto the closet’s rod to test that it would hold him while the hangers jangled. Good old French construction. The bar would hold his weight for the experiment.

  Looping the belt through the buckle, he formed the noose and placed it around his neck. The other end of the belt, where the creases across the belt notches told of his widening waist, he tied around the hanger pole of the closet. He made the knots tight and tested them, but he had only a few inches of slack. The prospect of success in the experiment began to turn him on; he felt like a kid back at Boys High, and the receding lump in his underwear began to rise again into a proper erection. Tied to the horizontal pole, he closed his eyes, bent his knees, and eased into it. He returned to the fantasy of his wife fucking Fleishman, hands tied to the headboard, and Penny pouncing on his large pink penis. She was cutting the oxygen off from Fleishman’s head, officially choking him out. With barely any breath left, he wanted more . . . more . . . more.

  Eastman, in the closet, noose tightened around his neck, underwear now about his ankles, was experiencing the same painful pleasure Fleishman was getting from Penny’s ravenous cunt. Eastman tugged at himself, leaning forward more and more. The grip of the belt tightened around his neck as he shifted the weight away from the balls of his feet. His face blew up red, blood rushed to his center. He kept his eyes closed and mind focused on blasting inside Penny. She would have let Fleishman finish inside of her and that was both repelling and exciting to Eastman.

  The experiment had already gone on for a few minutes and he didn’t seem nearly there. Was it working? Was he really embodying the passion or was he faking? Was the fantasy alone exciting him or was it the asphyxiation? These questions caused him to let go of his body a little more, to lean forward, away from the pole, tippy-toeing into the light of the room like a ballet dancer, both toes in pirouette. And yes, he was spinning. He began to feel weightless, euphoric, nearly there. He couldn’t breathe but sensed Penny a breath away from him. And had he not disregarded his recent back difficulties—psychosomatic or not—he would have completed his experiment. Instead, Eastman experienced a sudden failing of the body—back, legs, and all gave out on him until he was just an old fool hanging by his belt in the closet. He had hung himself, my God! He had truly hung himself and he couldn’t stand up to save his life. He felt something beyond pain, the quick snap down upon his larynx wasn’t strangulation but a hanging. He was desperate to get his stance, to pick himself up by his legs, but when he tried, the pain in his back pinched at him, returning him again to his self-fashioned noose.

  His hands and arms, gripping for the belt and pole, held him aloft for a few seconds, alleviating the pressure on his neck, allowing him to breathe. How badly the experiment had gone and so quickly, a slight pleasure into a fatal slip. Pain everywhere. Mind and body. He could just let it all go, and in a few minutes the pain would recede along with all of his worries. No, no. He was stronger than that. He came up for air once again, pulled through the pain, his biceps taut, and as he regained some of his breath, Eastman called for help.

  It took some time and several hoarse shouts. Meanwhile he was able to spread out his legs so that no pressure was placed against his back. Still, he was seesawing back and forth between back pain and asphyxiation, and when he screamed for help, which took the use of his core muscles, it sent him right back into choking.

  Help!

  There was a light tap on the door. Nestor! His room boy was just outside. He knew that polite, Vietnamese tap. “Nestor!” he screamed.

  “Mr. Easyman?” said Nestor.

  “Nestor, help! Open the door. Quickly, son!”

  “Mr. Easyman, but it is locked.”

  “Use a key, goddamnit!”

  Nothing happened.

  That was his last attempt to speak. Eastman was now out of breath and his arms were getting tired of hanging on.

  The room boy unlocked the door but was stopped by the chain that Eastman had fastened before he tied himself in the closet. Nestor could just barely squeeze his small face beside the doorjamb in order to see the spectacle, a dangling man flailing back and forth as if he was wrestling with an octopus.

  “Break it!” Eastman was gritting his teeth, his mouth plastered into a wide grin.

  Nestor disappeared. He didn’t know if the boy was coming back. For Eastman, hanging by his throat, swaying back and forth in pain, ten precious seconds were ten whole minutes. But the boy returned with someone strong enough to break through the chain, a passerby on the floor who Nestor was able to convince with his poor English, and the door burst open.

  In came the two people destined to save his life. Nestor, the room boy, and David Wheeler, the weary correspondent.

  • • •

  Wheeler grabbed him around the waist and held the poor fool up while small Nestor unfastened him. They brought him over to the bed and laid him out. He could breathe clearly now, and deeply. His belly rose up, blocking sight of his genitals, a sight he didn’t ever want to see again. What had they done lately but cause him more pain and suffering? Someone should neuter him, get it over with, maybe then he’d have the wherewithal to concentrate on something other than himself.

  Wheeler sat down in the lounge chair and lit a joint. Nestor stayed too, standing at the foot of the bed.

  “You all right?” asked Wheeler.

  He was, in that he was alive.

  “You tried to kill yourself.” Was Wheeler stating this fact in order to spare Eastman the embarrassment of what he was actually doing?

  “It was . . .” said Eastman, but his throat was too painful, his voice too hoarse.

  “Don’t talk.”

  “An experiment,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Ain’t that what suicide is. A great experiment.”

  Eastman pointed to Wheeler and said, “I wasn’t . . .”

  “Relax. I don’t judge, man. I know where you’re coming from. Whatever you want to call it.”

  Wheeler took a few drags and then brought the joint close to Eastman’s mouth, like he was to feed him. Eastman had quit marijuana, hadn’t had so much as a puff in a decade. But here he was, naked and alive in a Saigon hotel room with the two people who saved his life. He took the joint and puffed it with the desire to alleviate all of his pain quickly and without effort.

  “Man, I tried to kill myself once,” said Wheeler. “A girl had left me. She was a great chick. Great in the sack, great talker, knew how to treat a guy right. You know what I mean, man? Kinda girl just the thought of her gets you goin’. I was obsessed with her, man. When she was with me I felt like I could do anything. She was like a drug. Great tits, too. Real good in the sack. I don’t know what happened, but this chick
just lost interest and I couldn’t do anything about it. I used to drive around at night. Thinkin’ about just turning that wheel and running off the road, barreling into a fat tree. Fast and in the dark was how I’d do it. I thought about killing myself day and night. It was scary, man. This chick really fucked with me.

  “I think it was six months later. Bought a gun, some bullets, got drunk and high. Loaded one bullet and played Russian roulette until I would be dead. Three pulls, man. I took three pulls. Pissed myself, crying. I couldn’t pull it one more time if I tried.”

  “Mr. Easyman,” said Nestor, trying to get his attention. Eastman handed Nestor the joint, and the boy took it and held it for him. Nestor, not knowing what to do with it, passed it back to Wheeler.

  “So what did I do?” continued Wheeler. “Came here. I thought if I’m over here long enough it’s bound to happen anyway. Now it’s been five years in the service of the great Herald Tribune.”

  “That’s a moving story,” said Eastman. “But if you please, I’d like to be left alone.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, man,” said Wheeler.

  “No?”

  “No. Not like this. I think I’m gonna stay. Burrow into this chair here and take a nap for a while. Let you recover.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  Wheeler had already closed his eyes. “You can thank me later.” He got comfortable in the chair and seemed to doze off with the joint still in his mouth. He was breathing small inhales of smoke. Once Wheeler passed out, the roach fell onto his shirt. Nestor delicately removed it and put it out in a nearby ashtray.

  “Mr. Easyman,” said Nestor.

  “You want your tip. Take some piastres out of the desk. This stays between you and me and the man in the chair. Understood?”