“All right,” said Paul. “Last time we did it with you resisting.”
“To the end,” said Frances. “I’m a game girl, aren’t I?”
“This will be easier and shorter,” he said. “You just act dead.”
“Dead when?” asked Frances. “After the good-night kiss?”
“No kiss,” said Paul. “He gets it in while you’re still asleep. Here. Take off your clothes and put on this shirt. Pretend it’s a nightgown.”
Frances began unbuttoning, unzipping, and untying. Her bare skin burned and shrank, as if she were stripping in front of strangers. Covered, she felt better. Paul’s shirt was as long on her as a clergyman’s cassock.
“Are you ready?” asked Paul. “You can’t cop out in the middle.”
“I’m O.K. Just as long as you don’t cut off my breath.”
This time she got into the bed and lay on her back.
“No,” said Paul. She opened her eyes. “Lie on your stomach and face stage right. He’ll be coming at you from stage left. It’s more powerful if he turns you over. Come on. Let’s do it.”
She turned onto her stomach. She could hear Paul moving around, darkening the room. There was no light coming from anywhere, not even from underneath the blinds. There was a lump of hot lead in her stomach. A trail of ants was progressing up her thighs. They were rounding the tops of her buttocks, where there should be no nerve ends. A good actress would be counting and emptying her mind, or relaxing the segments of her body one by one. Or thinking dead thoughts and conjuring up dead images: eyeless statues, blasted stumps, quilted satin, banks of clouds, sheets of rain. Frances was tense, not limp. She did not feel dead at all; she was feeling flayed.
She heard a skitter, like a rat across the floor. Then a creak—surely a weight lifting off the chair springs. The bed gave, it was a knee pressing down on the mattress. She clawed the sheets to stop her body from sliding. Any second his hand would land upon her shoulder.
She opened her eyes halfway. What made the room so black? If this were a normal rehearsal, there would be work lights on the stage and in the hall. The lights were required by law, to prevent injuries to actors or crew. She was outside the reach of union regulations. There was no foreman from the actors’ guild to voice her rights. Paul had been up before the guild that year already, on charges of exploitation. He had kept little Josey Ware going over the same long monologue for twelve straight hours. Someone had called her husband, who dragged her off the stage and carried her home. The incident had been smoothed over, and she was back on the show five days later. Paul had shrugged it off. Josey’s work was much improved. “I had to break her down to help her break through.” He had more confidence in means-end arguments than Joseph Stalin. Frances’s reaction had been partisan and derisive. “Actors’ rights,” she had jeered. “Actors are children. You know their needs better than they do. They’re lucky to have you!”
Now, for failing in charity, for sitting in the seat of the scornful, and for siding with Management, Frances would be punished. She was comforted to think so, at least, since it gave her a reason for lying face down on Paul’s bed, wearing Paul’s shirt, in his pitch-black room, waiting to be raped, when every other reason had deserted her.
The rape was on, and there was no saying “Oh, it’s just old Paul, that big old bear, furry old funny old Paul, cries in movies, won’t share milk products, locks the car doors going through Harlem, Paul’s a screech, he’s the universal Id, who but old Paul …” It didn’t work. He was someone else. He was Dr. Strangerod.
This person, who had turned her on her back, was working at her limbs and chest with flat, splayed palms; and Paul was as deft and steady as a fly-caster. He had left wet smears on her face; and Paul never slobbered. He pushed her legs apart at right angles, and set his knees on her thighs to hold them down. He started driving at her soft closed flesh. Whales have bones, and men do not, but he was as hard as wood. Her brain was dim, like the brain of a fish, and she tried to think. This could not happen in any theatre; there are laws and censors. She dimmed out now, and fought back weakly to the surface. She saw some hope there, like a shaft of light through the blinds. He can’t do this on stage, so he will have to stop. He will rehearse to the brink; he won’t go over. He has his marginal attention, his internal monitor; he says actors who lose themselves in their parts are just like lunatics. …
Still he drove and he thrust; she was lashed to a machine. She could hear strange grunts, and Paul was always still and seemly. This is a rape, the same as in an alley. …
She felt a thud, which bounced her on the mattress. It was the impact of a fist pounding down on the bed beside her. Her thighs were free, but she found that it hurt to move them. She heard a crash, like an object breaking against the wall.
“I can’t get in! You closed up like a clam! You locked me out!”
It was Paul’s own voice. When the light switched on, she could see it was Paul’s own form, towering over the bed in a kind of majestic snit. But peevishness is fearful in a person of such large size. When she asked to leave a movie in the middle, he could look like that, or when she had a date for dinner with a friend on a night when he wanted her to take rehearsal notes. Once he had seen the cat on her bed and he had yelled like that. The cat was lying on top of her pillow, curled in a circle. “You let that cat drag his anus on the sheets? I’m not sleeping in there!” They had driven back downtown to his loft, at three in the morning. Now he never spent the night in her apartment unless she changed the bedclothes right in front of him and locked the cat in the bathroom until they got up for breakfast the next morning.
Paul stopped towering, and began to hover anxiously.
“What’s the matter? You look awful. You’ve lost your color.”
He rubbed her cheek. She brought her knees very slowly to her chest and rolled over on one side, facing away from him. She felt bleak and empty, like the surface of the moon. She wanted to burrow her head in the pillow and sleep it off. Paul did not like it when Frances was silent and inert. It scared him. It put his universe out of whack. He wanted her up and hopping, so he poked her shoulder.
“Come on, little chicken, on your feet; nobody loves a dead person.”
He poked again, and shook the shoulder for good measure.
“Do you hear me? You need a hamburger. I’ll take you to Cullinan’s. God damn it, Frances, if you’re sick I’m going to kill you!” He bent down and pulled back her eyelid, looking for signs of life.
Frances gave up. She had enough strength to fasten her teeth onto his wrist, but not to bite down. She did not have enough strength to resist the move to Cullinan’s, although she hated an actors’ bar. Models named Ingrid with heart-shaped mouths would beg Pete Cullinan for introductions to Paul, because they had notions about breaking into acting and had heard that Paul sometimes used amateurs and beginners. That was true; Paul liked to mold an actor early, the way the Jesuits like to take on a child before it is seven.
Frances let Paul stand her up. He dropped her skirt over her head and zipped up the waist, a little off center. He stuffed her arms into the sleeves of her shirt, but he made her button it. He was too impatient. It was midnight. The action at Cullinan’s had been under way for almost an hour.
Paul got out his comb and took a few swipes at her rumpled hair.
“All right, little waif, I’ve got you in shape. Now we have to hustle.”
They rode uptown in a cab. When he wasn’t taking his pulse, Paul was making notes. They were an agenda for a meeting with a rich young show-business lawyer, who might or might not be at Cullinan’s that night, and might or might not be persuaded to kick in some funds for the incest play, which ate money the way a secondhand Cadillac eats gas.
Frances let her head fall hard against the seatback, in a position portraying extreme fatigue and weakness. Her weakness was more the result of shame than of muscles strained in the course of the rape improv. Her body was tired, but her mind would not let her rest. I a
m an underground person, I am a worm, I am less than a flea. I have no fight; all girls should take contact sports in school. I want to go home; the hypnosis index is due. I am like a sheep. I am a set of tracks to roll over. No. I’m the roadbed. I want to see Toby. Toby is my only male friend. He sent me that thing on the retreat house; I wonder if they take girl pilgrims. I want to live in silence, with kindly nuns. …
“I can’t,” said Frances, out loud to Paul. “I feel like a piece of Swiss cheese.”
“Oh, no?” he said. “Baby, that’s your lookout.”
They stopped for the light near the corner of Forty-fourth. She could see Cullinan’s green awning down the side street. Paul leaned forward and told the driver her address.
“I’m getting out,” he said. “You’re making a big mistake.”
She gave a sweet, sad smile, like the youthful Lillian Gish. She was smiling at his back, however. He had slammed the door. Paul had two main voices, one for pleading and one for threats. Tonight he was threatening ingénues and the hardening of his heart. Frances was punchy from threats. She thought of St. Sebastian. Another arrow, to him, more or less, must have been all the same.
Even worms and fleas have an instinct for self-protection. Frances spent the next three days working at home, ignoring the phone. She asked her secretary to cancel her appointments, and to tell callers she was down South with an author on a publicity tour. She had to put herself out of touch, because Paul was a bird dog. She had hidden out once before and he had bribed the doorman, who let him into her apartment with a duplicate set of keys. When he was in a hurry, and her telephone rang busy, he would tell the operator there had been a death in the family, and break in on her call. If he suspected she was not down South, he might watch her building. As it was, she went out for groceries after dark, when he was at the theatre, wearing a kerchief over her hair and a raincoat that was much too big on her. This bit of intrigue added zest to her retreat. She spread her index cards in rows upon the rug, and spent the days happily shifting around on her hands and knees. She loved her job, and even found virtue in the donkeywork.
By the end of the third day, she was restless nonetheless. She wanted to give Paul a healthy jolt; she did not want to lose him. She decided to answer the phone, but it would not ring.
The doorbell rang instead, and then again. Someone was pounding the door, which rattled on its hinges.
Paul stood there. He threw his arms wide open. She ran to him and he lifted her off her feet.
“Little creature,” he said, “don’t despise your poor bad animal.”
“You forget how large and you hurt me.” She sobbed, and clung to his waist.
“Look. David and Goliath.” He turned her toward the mirror. “Maybe we are mismatched.”
“I’m your sidekick dwarf,” laughed Frances, and he squeezed her harder. Between weeping and laughing she got her spirits back. By the time she was restored, there was a large wet patch on Paul’s shirtfront.
“Oh, Lord,” she said contritely. “Do you want me to get my hair dryer?”
“No, leave it,” said Paul. “You drool when you’re happy, too.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I pestered Ruthanne till she told me.”
“I’ll get her,” said Frances.
“No, you won’t,” said Paul. “She held out on me for three whole days. She was pretty tough.”
Paul was late for the theatre. When he left, Frances tried to go back to work. She kept sitting down and stopping, or getting sidetracked by lint and cat hairs on the rug. She felt addled and lighthearted; her mind was scattered all over the room, like her index cards. For one moment she mourned the loss of her concentration, and the shape and silence of her abbreviated retreat. Paul had planted her feet back on the high road to adventure. Left to herself, she would have stuck to the side roads. She was Sancho Panza; this phase of her destiny was to be lived out as a straight man.
The windows in Toby’s office looked out over the Charles River. It was a privileged view, for Toby was a senior editor. He was emeritus before his time, a kind of resident scholar. He had turned down the more visible post of editor-in-chief. “I hate budgets and personnel,” he had said to Frances. “And besides I’d have to keep my door open.”
The staff at Harwood had learned to approach Toby’s office on tiptoe. They never marched up and knocked on his door; they hovered, and tapped. Frances had even heard Albion Harwood, the president, whispering to an English publisher, “That’s Toby Foster’s door; he does our Double Dome books.” Publishers revere academics, and Toby dealt with professors. If he could talk to them, his colleagues reasoned, he must be their peer and rival. Hammy Griner, the editor-in-chief, apologized to Toby for every Harwood book on the best-seller list. Hammy was round and whiskery. He would hunch his shoulders forward and duck his head, reducing himself in physical stature as if to portray his distance from Toby’s intellectual standards. Toby did nothing to check the course of Hammy’s self-abasement. He would stand two feet away, the distance he chose for any close encounter, and let Hammy tie himself in knots and run on like a louver-door salesman. Hammy would break down, molecule by molecule, while Toby’s contours would grow sharper and sharper, like Percival about to lay hands on the Grail. Frances hated to see it. She had sometimes intervened, lifted Hammy off his knees, walked him back to his office, and restored him with coffee and book chat.
It was not Toby’s fault. He believed in the life of the mind. He did not see other people except as containers of ideas. Frances hardly minded; he tuned her in and out all the time. “Small talk is fine,” he liked to say, “but we have to remember it’s small.” Toby was restful to be with, for a man. He didn’t like to touch, to emphasize a point, or to express affection. He didn’t flirt, unless he was flirting when his drawl got more pronounced. Frances never felt like prey around Toby, and assumed he lacked the predatory instinct. She wondered, at times, about Pom and her whipstitch energies; she remembered the two blond babies, and the picture fell into place. She thought Toby might be that rare Christian man for whom marriage was an ethical laboratory.
Paul was suspicious of Frances’s accounts of Toby. “Those simon-pure types are cesspools,” he said. She would frown, but she didn’t answer back. In fact, Frances had dug a pit in her excellent memory. Into the pit she had dropped Toby’s sexual gossip, and his jokes about cabbage leaves and nose flutes, and covered it over with sod and sticks, like a bear trap. Now and then he would make another blue remark, and she would plunge down the pit, like the bear, and remember that he had this sixth-grade tendency. He looked like a grown-up altar boy, and she appointed herself chief curator of that image.
They were sitting across from each other at Toby’s kneehole desk, trading entries for the college poetry contest. There were more than a hundred poems. So far, only two had reached the semifinals. If they both liked a poem, they would stop to read it aloud.
“Here’s a little number called Dominatrix.”
Toby handed Frances a coffee-colored sheet of stationery. Frances flinched. Somehow his face had widened and flattened. The Pale Loiterer had been snuffed out, and replaced by a sneering lecher. She understood why Dürer gave evil figures, like Christ’s torturers, the monkey features of the feebleminded.
“Is it good?” she demanded, “or just vile?”
Toby smiled. “Some choice borrowings from Huysmans,” he said.
Frances had already heard Toby’s lecture on Decadence, which started out as a comparison with Symbolist diction, and spiraled down to the prevalence of corpse-passions. She had asked Toby the meaning of “algolagnia,” and been treated to anecdotes about upside-down crucifixions, and whipping closets fitted out with slanting floors and drains. She had stopped Toby in the middle of a sentence. He accused her of denying literary masters their full humanity. She had no intention of provoking another lecture, so she slapped the poem on top of the pile of rejects.
Toby seemed to take her gesture in go
od part. He pulled the stack of unread entries onto his lap and counted them to himself, moving his lips. When he looked up at Frances, his face was once more beautiful. She smiled at him fondly, affirming his better self. Some part of him was stuck in puberty, that was all.
“Eighty to go,” he said, ruffling the pile. “Forty tomorrow and forty Saturday.”
“I told Paul I’d be back Friday. I’d better call him.”
“Ask your friend to come up Saturday night. We can celebrate the end of this charade.”
“Good Toby. You solve all my problems. I think he’s off for the weekend.”
Back in the cubicle that was her temporary Boston office, Frances sat waiting for the stage manager to call Paul to the telephone.
“Ho, ho, ho,” he said when she had issued the invitation. “Does that mean I get a shot at old Pom?”
“I warn you,” said Frances, “if you do one overliberated thing …”
“I don’t like you,” said Paul. “You try to stifle my joy of life.”
She was almost in tears. “Just forget it. I’ll come back down.”
Paul heard the break in her voice with satisfaction. It unsettled him when she was away or out of reach. When they were separated, he tried to provoke her to strong emotion, to be sure she was still his creature and under no new influence. Frances knew this pattern, but the knowledge never forearmed her. She reacted each time like a hamster to the sound of the bell.
Then Paul let her off the hook, with the tact he usually reserved for actors. “Did you find any big talents?” he asked.
“I think so.” This colleagueship pleased her. “One girl from Northeastern.”
“You read her to me Saturday night,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the Fosters’.”
The rest of the conversation was as easy as milk. But when Frances put down the phone, she was filled with misgivings. Did she want Pom and Toby and Paul alone together in one room? There was more wisdom in keeping these parts of her life discrete. She was not afraid Paul would shock or outrage other people; she was afraid other people would not live up to Paul. When he was around, she began to see types and not individuals. Knowing the Fosters still gave her a foothold in her own tradition. If they failed her, she would have to throw safe custom aside. Nowadays Frances was measuring herself against Paul like a child whose parents cut notches in a doorframe to show him his height from year to year. How tall was she the last time she had measured? She wondered how long it might take before she would reach him.
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