Perforated Heart

by Eric Bogosian

  I said, “If it makes you feel any better I ponder the same question.” I was lying. I never ponder the question as to why we loved one another. I know why I loved her. Why I still love her.

  There was a pause and the waitress pounced. “Get you folks anything else?” I glanced at the girl. Said nothing. She got the message and moved off, but not before I noticed the blond peach fuzz of her freckled upper arms. In the gaps between thoughts, I wondered what this waitress would look like naked and goose-pimpled on my bed. I wondered what her little avenue tasted like. How old was she, twenty-five?

  Elizabeth was watching me. Could she read my thoughts? I said, “What we felt for each other can’t be altered. Whether you wish it never happened or not. Whether we understand it or not.” I dared her to look away. I should have leaned over and kissed that mouth. Picked her up, laid her out on the table, let it all flood—the love, the desire, the overwhelming truth of what we were to each other. Fucked her right there. My intensity melted her momentarily, incrementally.

  She said, “You repeated the story about me and my father.”

  “That story’s been told a thousand times in a thousand different ways.”

  “Not my story. How much I loved him. How he would tuck me in at night. How gentle he was. How my world imploded when things changed between us. How cold everything became. You even used the word ‘imploded’! That’s my word. My personal history and my word.”

  “So if you use a word, I’m not allowed to use it?”

  “Richard, anyone who knows me, even people who don’t know me are going to understand that you are describing me. You detail our sex life, you describe our sexual intercourse! Things we said to one another, the way you would touch my back. You even describe the shape of my bum, the pucker of my asshole for God’s sake!”

  “You have a divine asshole, the Platonic asshole. No pun intended.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Plato said that there is a perfect thing after which all things are modeled. Your sphincter—”

  “Plato had zero interest in my body! Shut up about my body! Don’t be a jackass!” I was impressed by her restraint. There was a time when I could tease her into throwing things. “So look, Richard, Russell says I can sue you.”

  “Don’t tell me what Russell says or Russell wants. What do you want me to do here, Elizabeth? Spell it out.”

  “I don’t know. If I sue, it will probably just bring more attention to your pathetic exercise.”

  “Have to agree with you there.” Beat. “Look, Elizabeth, I’m sorry if you are uncomfortable with my writing.” I placed my hand on hers. It seemed like the right thing to do. She didn’t take it back.

  Her eyes reddened. Was she going to weep into her skim decaf cappuccino? “Richard, is that all I was to you? A pair of breasts? A cunt? A sphincter? Those words of yours, those passages came at me like an ambush. Fortunately I was home alone because I literally had to race to the bathroom and throw up.”

  “You threw up? Really?” No one else will ever react to my writing the way she does.

  “I felt like throwing up. No, I didn’t! Okay? But I felt like it.” Beat. Her brow tightened. She disengaged her hand. “Maybe I should write a book about your cock.”

  She was losing the argument. “Elizabeth, I don’t expect you to see things the way I see them. But no matter how you parse it, I did love you. I still love you. But I can’t and could never love you the way you loved me. I’m me, not you. And my love is carnal. It’s just the way life is. And I write about life.”

  “Whatever we were or did, you didn’t have to tell the whole fucking world!”

  “I thought those passages were very flattering.”

  She wilted. “So now the book is out there. And I guess you have me checkmated, Richard, because you know I can’t sue you without bringing even more attention to the fucking book. But you must be punished.”

  It was time for me to let her run with the line. Easy, easy, let her think she was having her way, and finish this. I attempted to look contrite. “I’ll write another book and put your side of it in there.”

  She unlocked her gaze from mine, fiddled with her spoon. “You want to make things right, pay me.”

  This is what she had come to say. “It’s that simple?”

  “I don’t want or need your money. I only wish you hadn’t done this in the first place. But it’s done. You hurt me. I have no idea why you wanted to hurt me, but you did. So pay me. I can’t think of any other way to hurt you. Or I will sue.”

  “How much money do you want?”

  “I don’t know. A percentage of the royalties.”

  “I’ve already spent my advance.”

  “Russell will figure it out. He’s good at that stuff. As you well know.” Russell was once my lawyer, before Elizabeth pirated him away. She gazed into his eyes. That’s all he needed to follow her to the ends of the earth. I doubt she pays him a retainer.

  “Elizabeth, you and Russell draw up some kind of proposal. Don’t even send it to me. Send it to my new guy. He’s good at that stuff too. We’ll all do what we can to work this out.”

  “I don’t trust you.” She was pouting. My God.

  “I can ask Leon to recall the book. I will if you want me to.” I had to make it clear she has no fallback position. It was a nonoffer offer.

  “That would be the same thing as suing you. The minute Leon recalls the book, everyone goes out and buys a copy. Quotes will be posted on the Internet.”

  “So have Russell call my guy.”

  “I’m exhausted. Just seeing you exhausts me.” She looked tired. It hurt me that I could do this to her. But it was her own fault. She should have forgiven me when she had the chance.

  Now that we had the negotiation part behind us, I felt like we were on the same team again. That somehow she’d won, even though she hadn’t, so now we could talk to each other like grown-ups. The woman has always had absolutely perfect lips. Lips I kissed thousands of times. Those lips belonged to me, and because they belonged to me once, they belong to me forever. So I said, “You’re tired? You can come by my place and lie down for a while.”

  At this, her eyes narrowed and sparked. “Right!” She stood, leaving the bill for me. She didn’t say goodbye. She was gone.

  I exited the café, ignoring the curious glances from the crowded tables. Were they recognizing me, or recognizing Elizabeth and so wondering who I might be? No matter. I took a long walk by the river. I delighted in the symmetry of the landscaping and greenery that didn’t exist when I first arrived in the city. It occurred to me that I cannot conceptualize a relationship without thinking of it as a transaction. “I’ll give you this, if you give me that.” Perhaps it’s because I excel at transactions. Problem is, once the transacting’s over, I don’t know what to do with the damn relationship. I want to keep bartering. Something, anything. If my prick no longer interests you, how about pain? We can give each other pain.

  I could have pretended that I didn’t give a shit about Elizabeth, but we both knew something was still there. Or at least I knew that she touched me in a way that no one else ever has. When it was good, we were like children together, at least for a while. But I couldn’t be a child. Not in this world. And so I couldn’t stay in that dreamworld she wanted to inhabit. There were wars to be fought. Kudos to receive. Interesting women to know. Elizabeth fell in love with the anarchic side of me, but couldn’t stand living with it. And that’s that.

  September 26, 1976

  Got up this morning and did fifty push-ups and a hundred sit-ups. Also did some yoga and meditated.

  Jennifer and I went on a “date.” After we saw a movie in the Village, I picked up a bottle of wine and we ended up at her place, which is in a part of town I don’t know very well. We made out on her couch. She was really into sex, right away. Her hair had a faint chlorine scent, she must be a swimmer. Her body was small and tight. Her admirable butt was muscular. We fucked, but I was kind of
drunk and still tired from my night out with Jack so I was slow getting it up.

  Finally after all kinds of soothing sounds from her I managed a soft erection and we kind of stuffed it in. By then my whole effort was focused on staying hard and this made me even more nervous, so I pounded away and came too soon. She didn’t seem to care. I left her place feeling pretty unsatisfied.

  When I got back to the apartment Dagmara was out. I found Haim slouched on the living room couch watching Mannix reruns and eating ripe tomatoes as if they were apples. I told Haim the story of my lousy sexual peformance with Jennifer. It felt like a confession.

  Haim thrust out both tomato-slick hands and grabbed an imaginary girl. “So what do you care if your prick is soft! You have a beautiful girl in your arms, you eat her, you squeeze her, you suck her toes, you lick her legs.” He illustrated all this with a fat tomato. “Don’t worry about the prick. The prick is boring, it’s a schlong, a schmuck, a piece of meat, worth nothing without your passion. It gets hard, it doesn’t get hard, so what? It just goes in and out, in and out. Every man has a prick, but how many men know how to love! Kiss her! Fress her! Give her all you’ve got. That’s what a woman wants.” He finished the tomato in two huge bites.

  I smoked a joint, took a bath and then wrote this down. While I was writing this, Dagmara returned with her date for the evening, a Slavic guy wearing a shirt three sizes too small for his hairy barrel chest. He was in heat over Dagmara, perspiring and tongue-tied. Obviously she’s not fucking this guy either. She’s got everyone on a string, my Polish blond bombshell. Am I the only one to get lucky with her? Note to myself: Get another blow job from Dagmara if possible.

  September 27, 1976

  Day off for no particular reason. That’s the way it is down in SoHo. Downtowners are hippies. Jonathan has decided he wants to go to New Orleans and he let me have a day off.

  Been writing most of the day. Trying to capture some of my impressions of the city on paper. The goal is to build a montage of layers, of images, one on top of another. Voices, sounds, pictures. Swirling around, jumping from one to the next. Pynchon is a great inspiration. Also Kerouac, of course. They write cinematically. That’s the way to do it, in cuts like a movie. James Joyce was way ahead of the pack with this. That’s what writing has to be in the future. Undeniable. Blazing. Majestic.

  The videos at Erehwon are an inspiration too, ironically. They jam things together in a cool way. There’s a word they use around here, “interface.” The energy of the work is in the “interface and the frame.” (Just finished reading Susan Sontag’s book of essays, Against Interpretation.)

  I have to energize my writing, like the music over at Max’s Kansas City. Like a machine gun. Blam-blam-blam. My writing must be lethal. My words have to threaten. Most writing is about what people are thinking. Like something from another century. It’s dead. Real people don’t think, they talk and they act. Without knowing why they talk and act. Thoughts have nothing to do with anything. Thoughts come after. No one in a movie has a thought. You can’t see thoughts, why read about them? Psychology is as dead as a Freudian cigar butt.

  I have to experience life so I can know what I’m talking about when I write. I have to dance and fuck and get high and see everything! My life should be rock concert and my writing an Altman documentary of that rock concert. Make it dense and well made, but entertaining at the same time. Like Shakespeare—entertain the royalty and the groundlings. Is it possible?

  There’s so much shit out there. Why do I bother? Kerouac ran into so much resistance. All writers do.

  Anyway, I am trying to write this short story about a guy and his pet cat. He’s incapable of love with a human being but he’s in love with his cat. Almost a sexual thing, but I don’t want to be clear about that. Maybe he kills his next-door neighbor over the cat. I don’t know, it’s not really working.

  LATER:

  I was writing down the above when Haim came rolling in with his friends. He’s best buddies with the other street vendors who work in front of the museum: the hot dog guy, named Joe, of course, and the ice cream man, Tony.

  They had a woman with them. The woman was not particularly young or pretty, in fact she looked worn-out and depressed. Like they kidnapped a housewife off the street. She could have had rollers in her hair or wearing an old bathrobe, that’s how suburban she looked.

  When she entered the apartment, she didn’t say a word and didn’t seem curious about me at all. But Haim and his buddies were in a boisterous mood. They were lugging huge grocery bags of beer and chips and cigarettes. I tried to ignore them. But it was impossible to write while they bustled around.

  Next thing I knew, Haim was setting up a little movie projector on the coffee table. Then he drew the blinds, flipped on the projector and started screening a movie on the wall of the living room. It was a porn movie, poorly shot and filled with really sudden cuts. It began with a woman alone in her apartment. She was dusting her furniture. Then I guess the doorbell rang (the film was silent) so she trotted over to her front door and there was a delivery man standing in the doorway carrying a box. She let the guy in. And then the film cut to an extreme close-up of this greasy purple hard-on sliding in and out of a dark hairy vagina. It was so close-up that for a few seconds I couldn’t grasp what I was looking at. Really gross.

  Obviously, by this time, I’d given up on my writing and emerged from my “room” to hang out with the boys. Haim had thrown a thick arm across the shoulders of the depressed-looking woman. He was all friendly with her, like they were at a movie theater on a date. He waved me into the room. “Richard, come in, come in! Watch the movie, it’s good!” I tried to avoid staring at the woman, I couldn’t understand why she was watching this porn surrounded by leering men.

  Haim got up off the couch and threw his arm around my shoulders. In a hoarse whisper he said, “You want to get your cock sucked? She’ll fuck you too!” Like I was a co-conspirator with these guys. Over Haim’s shoulder I spied the woman on the couch, who looked like she was in mourning. Tony and Joe sat on either side of her, stupid grins pasted on their faces. Maybe they always looked like that. I didn’t know, I had just met them.

  This woman should have been home serving her kids a tuna casserole. She should be answering phones at a bank! It was obvious she should have been anywhere on earth but here in our high-rise apartment with Haim, his roommate and the vendors. I thought, she hates us. I say “us” because I was now a member of this group of assholes.

  I whispered to Haim “I’m kind of working right now.”

  Haim shrugged and slapped Tony on the knee. “You first, Tony, you go.”

  Tony grabbed his beer, and took the woman by her hand. Haim pointed the way to the bedroom door with a nod of his bald head. Tony took a last pull on his beer and led the lady into the room and out of sight. The slamming door made a sad hollow sound in our tiny apartment. I returned to my desk and began to write this but it was impossible to concentrate.

  After about ten minutes, Tony emerged and Joe took his place. Another ten minutes passed and Joe emerged wearing a sheepish smirk. The woman darted into the bathroom. Haim leapt up and bellowed at the bathroom door, “Hey, let’s go!” The woman emerged from the bathroom looking lost and frightened. Maybe she wasn’t a professional hooker and did this on the side when she wasn’t housewiving. Haim murmured something and, like a sleepwalker, the woman slipped past him into the bedroom. The door slammed for a third time. The situation had the erotic aura of a barbershop. “Next!”

  After a pause of about a minute, a tremendous rhythmic booming began to shake the wall. I expected cracks to appear in the plaster. Neighbors could have heard all this, but it was the middle of the day, only the aged were in the building. Finally, thankfully, the booming ended. A muffled moan. A pause. Then Haim threw open the door of his bedroom (the bedroom he shares with Dagmara), grinning, mopping the sheen of perspiration off his bald head.

  “Now your turn. We warmed her up for you.” />
  “Nah, it’s okay, Haim.” I was standing in the kitchenette area, pretending to drink a glass of juice, spying on Tony and Joe.

  “We have her for an hour. You don’t have to pay.”

  “Yeah. I…”

  “She’s a nymphomaniac. You don’t want to hurt her feelings, do you?”

  Was it possible she’s a sex-starved female who has a thing for street vendors? Didn’t matter. I whispered to Haim, “Tell her I’m gay. Please?”

  From the corner of my eye I again saw the woman skittering from the bedroom to the bathroom. A snap and click as the door locked. It creeped me out to think she might be using my soap. My towel. Maybe my toothbrush! When she finally emerged, the men were arguing about a soccer match.

  The woman stood waiting for their attention. I said, “Haim?”

  As if he were paying a cabdriver, Haim dug into his trouser pocket and found a wad of bills. He carefully peeled off several twenties and thrust them into her hand. Without meeting his eye, she said “Thank you” and slipped out our front door like a melancholy ghost. Haim and his buddies guzzled the rest of the beer, rewound the film and watched it one more time. Finally they all left.

  I was happy to see them go, but I guess their presence satisfied my curiosity about hot dog vendors and ice cream men. They hadn’t said much. All I really got was that they are regular guys. Regular heartless guys. Like me. Because I realized after they were gone, that if they weren’t here, if I had been alone with her, I would have had sex with her. Just to get to know her better.

  February 1, 2006

  I continue perusing my journals from the seventies. It’s beyond me how I was able to survive in New York City, let alone set down roots as an author. In passage after passage I spout the most conventional wisdom, conceptualize in the most irksome way and go on and on about how I’m going to “conquer the world.” What an ass! The young man I was did nothing exceptional other than drink and get laid. I’m embarrassed by my former self.