Waiting in Vain

by Colin Channer

  Ian still loved her then.

  He loved her until, instead of stopping it as he knew he should have, he took one look at her luscious thighs and pliant lips and lay on top of her like the others and smothered his love to death. He would always hold her dear. Always have a special affection for her. Always like being close to her. But he could never love her, he told himself, because she was a whore. Since then a part of him always hated Margaret, for he blamed her for his inability to love.

  “Come here,” she whispered, sliding her panties over her hips.

  He glanced up at the TV as he lay down in her softness. How would he explain this to Phil? She locked her ankles round his neck. How would he explain that he and Margaret have a connection that no one else would ever understand?

  “Who do you love?” he asked. He wanted to beat her. But mental pain was deeper and more lasting than physical pain, he knew. So he loved her up sweetly, told himself he was an anxious finger slipping into a wedding ring.

  Who did she love? Margaret wasn’t sure anymore. She’d been with Phil for a couple of months now, and she was falling in love. Not so much with him, but with his innocence, his naïveté, his faith in human goodness—but most of all his acceptance of her as a person. She was thinking now of the first time they’d slept together after the ménage with Ian.

  “How is it that you make love so beautifully?” he’d asked as they showered.

  “Because I’ve fucked a lot of men,” she replied. She wanted him to understand that it was just a fling. There was a part of her that didn’t think she deserved more than that.

  “Good,” he replied, “because I haven’t slept with many women, so maybe you could teach me. I’m quite inexperienced for my age.”

  After he’d come out of the hospital, she’d told him to come and stay with her until his new audition date. He couldn’t afford to fly back to England and return, she knew; she also knew it would be difficult for their relationship to prosper in Ian’s shadow. After a few days, however, her neighbors began to complain about his practicing. So he went back to Ian, without knowing the depth of their history together—he thought that she and Ian were just fuck buddies.

  Ian.

  The man she lived to please. The man who knew her body like a musician knows his chosen instrument. The man whose touch was so unerring that when she was flat—like now—he could slide his fingers down her spine and bend her back in tune.

  “Who do you love?” he asked again.

  His eyes were half closed, the skin on his face rumpled like the damp sheets beneath her.

  “You,” she said, smiling. In her mind her cervix was the head of a talking drum, and he was playing a love song to the gods.

  “If you love me, then prove it,” he whispered. “Surrender everything. Turn over.” He reached for the lubricant. “I want complete surrender.”

  He was sweet and attentive afterward, wiping her down with a cool, wet towel as she lay on her back hugging herself, her shoulders drawn up to her ears, as if she were afraid that her fluttering legs would propel her body through the open window. He brought her water, and held the back of her head as she cotched herself on her elbows to quench her only remaining thirst, and he kissed her brows as he wiped her lips. Addressing her as “baby,” he went to draw her a bath, his brows flexed haughtily after breaking her down with his cock, which was badly chafed but throbbing with excitement after escaping the noose of her anus.

  “Is it wrong for me to be doing this?” she asked when he returned. She was sitting up with her legs crossed. There was a sweet burn beneath her.

  His arms were splayed on the window ledge. He was pulling deeply on a Craven “A,” jetting blue smoke in the face of the reddening sky.

  “What you mean?” he replied without looking around.

  “Sleeping with you behind Phil’s back. Fucking you again after telling you I didn’t want that anymore.”

  He turned around, his face ablaze with triumph. She gathered the sheets around her to shield herself. Fuck! She’d taken the light in his eyes for compassion. Recognizing her mistake made her angry. Gave her strength. She lay down again, feeling the urge to spit on him.

  He sucked his teeth, looked at her and sucked his teeth again, thought she was cowering. Of course you can’t look me in the eye, he thought. I’ve just reminded you of how much you need me, of how you can never be faithful to any man as long as I’m alive. I’ve got the handle, baby. You’ve got the blade.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” he said, stonily. “You’re a whore. Y’have a whore mentality. You cyaah get away from yourself.” He crossed his ankles and flicked some ashes in his palm, trying to appear controlled; then, forming his lips in a kiss to taunt her, he took a sip of smoke to calm his nerves.

  “What makes me a whore?” She threw off the sheets and stood in front of him. Naked and afraid, but determined to protect on Phil’s behalf the seed of pride within her.

  “Because you open your legs for any man,” he snapped.

  “Call me what you want, Ian, but opening my legs is easier for me than opening my heart. You of all people should understand why.”

  He crumpled beneath her words—a cornstalk in a shower of hail. “Why Phil?” he heard himself say. “What about me, Margaret?” His thoughts imploded, sucking in his cheeks and eyes.

  “Ian,” she replied, “have you ever opened your heart to me?” She jabbed a finger in his face. “Phil has.”

  “So why are you here?” he said, his voice breaking. His hands were at his sides with the palms turned toward her—ready to catch mercy if it were thrown his way. “Why are you here if he means so much to you?”

  “Because I keep hoping that one day you can make me feel like it wouldn’t be a risk to open my heart to you,” she replied, taking his hands and wrapping them around her waist, holding him now and speaking into his chest, which was bare and smelled of tar and sweat. “But how can I when you call me a whore?” She pulled away and stepped back two paces as she felt herself becoming weak again. “Ian, until you can look me in the eye and tell me you’ll respect me … and that you’ll leave the past alone and judge me by the goodness I always try to show you, I’ll remain with Phil. Can you look me in the eye and do that?”

  He looked away quickly, scared by what he saw reflected in her pupils—himself, or a version thereof, trying to look at her through different lenses. To humanize her would make it too easy to forgive her. And forgiveness was the first step to redemption. He was afraid of that. It would make him vulnerable. Bitterness had served him well as a strong defense.

  “Let this be the last time,” he said, walking away from her. There was a gun beneath the bed. In a suitcase. A Ruger nine millimeter. Black handle with chrome barrel. Loaded. Two clips. With fifteen rounds each. “Leave now … I’m beginning to fucking hate you.”

  “This is goodbye,” she said. “I hope you know that.”

  She began to button her shirt. He lit another cigarette and leaned out the window. At the water’s edge, giant cranes rusted on thirty-foot legs, hooks dangling from their arms like hands with broken wrists. Was it true? Is this really the last time? As the smoke filled his chest he felt his heart shudder, then spark, then spin. Then it fell through his body in a whining spiral, a helicopter gunship downed by fire.

  I made her this way, he said to himself. It’s not her fault. He was thinking now of her first return to Paris—of how much she’d changed just a year later. She was worldly and confident. Sexually experienced. They fucked the first night. He wanted to make love but she didn’t want to do more than fuck. She told him that. Placed her hand over his mouth and said that, when he told her that he loved her. Love, she said, meant entanglement. Which was why she was single—and would always be. You’re a man, she said, when he tried to discuss it … you should understand … we know how we feel about each other … fucking other people shouldn’t change that … sex is just release … so let’s be open … lies are too hard to live with.

&
nbsp; And he accepted this. He had to. He had made her that way.

  You don’t know how this feels, he thought now as he watched her jam her foot in her shoe.

  The best work of his best years had been secretly dedicated to her. He was thinking especially of Seoul now. The Olympics. The commission to create the ornamental friezes for the stadium. Each of the female figures—six hundred and seventy-two of them—had parts that were modeled on hers. Eyelids. Kneecaps. Shoulder blades. Toes. Guilt was a brilliant muse. Fire thought he’d come to America to run down fame. What did he know? But then what had he told him? Nothing. Why add more to his plate, which was already filled up with Blanche. He’d even asked her to marry him—this fucking bitch who was leaving now—and she’d said no. Said some fuckery like, Only if we’re allowed to see other people.

  And he’d beaten her. Kick way her leg-dem. Siddown pon her chest and pin down her hand-dem. Take out him stiff-up cocky and baton her face. Buss up her lip. Blood up her mout. Swell up her wandering eye.

  Then tried to kill himself … sucked on a pistol for a half a day, but the bullet wouldn’t come.

  “Goodbye, Ian.”

  He looked up from the floorboards. She was on the landing now. Her hands gripped the railing as if she were thinking of vaulting downstairs to get out of his life a bit sooner.

  “What should I say to Phil?” he asked.

  “That he should pack his things and leave.” There was a gun under the bed. Maybe he should pull it out and shoot her.

  Ian went out for a walk at about eight o’clock that evening, dressed in black. The Puerto Ricans were out on the sidewalk in their lawn chairs listening to salsa and watching the Mets on their portable TVs. Ian stopped for a little bit with a group outside a bodega and sat on a beer crate and watched part of the game, shaking hands with all the neighborhood folks who came to pay their respects to El Jamaiqueño, whom they hadn’t seen in a little while.

  He moved on, and walked up Kent Avenue—the foreshore road that runs from Fort Greene up to Long Island City in Queens—through Williamsburg, where the Hasidim scurried out of his way; to Greenpoint, Little Poland, where he stopped in at a bar and shot a round of pool; then on to Astoria, Little Athens, where he had dinner at Uncle George’s.

  He walked a lot that night, moving in a hunched-over shuffle like a laborer carrying a sack of cement. And he stopped in at many places. Illegal gambling dens. Warehouse raves. Strip clubs. Churches. Crack houses. Poetry readings in performance spaces. Artists’ studios. Cafés. Liquor stores. Record shops.

  He walked around until he could find nowhere else to go, then walked back home.

  It was two A.M. The street was deserted. The lights in the tortilla factory across the street were on, and a few cars were parked along the curb. But there was no sound—at least none that he could hear, because his hearing, like the rest of his senses, had turned inward.

  Sitting down heavily on his doorstep, Ian began to think about himself and Margaret, picking up their history at the point when she left Paris.

  Margaret had been the reason that he’d moved to the States. He’d kept in touch with her and continued to see her whenever he could, which was about three times a year. Because of what she’d experienced on her last night, Margaret left Paris a changed woman and in very short order had jettisoned Mr. Boyfriend along with all the trust and stability associated with a committed relationship. She neither requested nor expected a commitment from anyone, including Ian. Out of this came the ground rule that permitted—and to a great extent encouraged—openness about their myriad involvements.

  At the time, Ian thought he was being cool. But as he sat on his doorstep, thinking about his past with Margaret, he realized that they’d done this to avoid dealing with the wedge that had been driven between them when he’d participated in her violation.

  He would fuck her friends. She would fuck his. He would talk about his kinky experiences, she would talk about hers. And over time they succeeded in burying each other beneath the dirt that they shared, creating a thick coat of crusted muck that made it difficult for them to really touch.

  Margaret’s departure sparked a creative explosion within Ian that set off a chain reaction of commissions, media hype, and skyrocketing prices throughout Europe. Striding confidently between the classical, postmodern, and primitive, Ian was on his way to stardom. What was not known, however, was that all his work—his grand statues in expansive plazas and detailed architectural friezes on public buildings and exquisite accessories in expensive homes—was an attempt to win the love of Margaret Weir. All his work, in his heart, was dedicated to her.

  It didn’t matter to him that she had never made it as a musician, or that she had made only a minor success of herself in broadcasting. He knew what it felt like to love her, and he wanted to love her again. And he wanted her to love him—at least initially. But once he began to believe that winning her love was futile, he tried not to love her. He decided that it would be a bad thing. Whenever he found himself coming too close to loving her, he intentionally screwed things up. But still, he needed her.

  His decision to move to New York came one night when he attended a party at the Factory—the kind of party where a rum and coke was an unchased drink and some powder, and a girlfriend was more likely to be a friend than a girl, even in those days of shallow relations.

  Contrary to his reputation, he was quiet that night. He was just interested in smoking as much herb as he could, and wasn’t talking much. Freddie Mercury came over and tried to make conversation, and as they talked, Keith Haring joined them with Sylvester and Diego Peña in tow.

  “André Six come yet?” Ian muttered into Diego’s ear.

  “Why? You wanna see if he should be renamed André Neuf?” Diego replied jokingly.

  “I want see who him coming wid,” Ian replied flatly.

  “You know these models, Ian, they always come with some tired bitch.”

  As Ian anticipated, André came a few hours later with Margaret. He was doing a lot of work for Calvin Klein then, and Willi Smith. He was tall and big-boned.

  Margaret had told him a lot about André—too much, in fact, for too long. For once it seemed as if she was becoming involved above the waist, at least as high as the liver. And he found that threatening.

  He had invited her to the party and she had turned him down, saying that André had already invited her.

  “Well, I’m asking you now,” he insisted.

  “But I already told him yes,” she replied casually.

  “Well, cancel,” he commanded.

  “I can’t,” she replied nonchalantly.

  “Why?”

  “He wouldn’t like that.”

  “So?”

  “So he wouldn’t like that, and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  “When did feelings begin to count?”

  “They count sometimes.”

  “When do mine count?”

  “You don’t have any.”

  “But he does, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “C’mon, Ian, I was joking. Don’t tell me you’re serious. We’ve never been like this. It’s always been come and go as you please.”

  “I’m tired of that,” he said, stonily.

  “Well it suits me fine,” she snapped, put off by his insistence.

  “Fuck you!”

  She laughed to annoy him and walked away.

  He watched her and André as they elbowed their way through the crowd. He watched them dance and he watched them kiss, unaware that he was crying until Diego told him discreetly.

  And he felt something taking over his body. He called it mischief then, this thing that took him over to a bubble gum machine in a corner … this thing that made him insert coin after coin until he got a ring … this thing that made him walk up to Margaret and whisper in her ear to meet him in the stairwell … this thing that made him stand his ground when she said no.

  And
ré was standing next to her, looking on intently as he held her hand and slipped the ten-cent ring on her finger and told her to read his eyes.

  “What do you see?” Ian asked.

  “Immaturity,” Margaret whispered.

  “Yes, but that’s not it,” he whispered back.

  “You’ve got some nerve,” she whispered. “You—”

  “You’re mine, Margaret,” he interjected. “And we’re leaving. Let’s stop pretending. We’re special to each other. Let’s … stop … pretending.”

  He squeezed her hand and pierced her soul with the pins of his eyes, determined to bully her, beg her, bamboozle her—anything to make her leave with him.

  He felt it when she relented. It was nothing that she did. He just knew. They were connected that way.

  Emboldened by her collapse of will, he turned and walked to the door without so much as a backward glance, then stopped and waited with his arm outstretched behind him … waiting … a little nervous … but waiting … willing her to come to heel … a little unsure … but waiting … until he felt her hand in his. And he decided on the spot that he was not going back to Paris.

  He had called it mischief then, this thing that made him make that bold move. But as he sat on his stoop thinking about all these moments he began to wonder if this thing was more than that. And the longer he thought about it, the more he was convinced that it was in fact more. And although he had screwed things up back then, it had taught him something. Maybe he needed to make another dramatic move—if it turned out that he really wanted to risk hurting her and himself again.

  Ian tried to clear his head, then went inside.

  He paused downstairs in the studio. The unsold pieces from the show that Fire had seen were packed up in boxes. Only two of them had sold. What did Fire think? He hadn’t said. Which meant something. He started up the stairs. And Miss Gita? Would he go and see her for her birthday? And …

  Phil was on the phone speaking to Margaret. He was packing. Fuck. How would he be in touch with her now?