He came at once, and in the moment of his coming he hated her vehemently and he almost wept at his own anger. She continued to grind against him mercilessly, repeating the words “Oh, love,” lovelessly. He did not help her. He was sure she was unsatisfied when finally she stopped; he didn’t give a damn.
The room went still.
He lay exhausted and spent and angry on the twisted sheet.
He looked at her silently. Her eyes were closed, she was still breathing harshly, her hands clung to her own breasts, holding them tight.
In a little while, he rose and began dressing. She did not say anything. She watched him quietly, lying on the bed in angular tense softness, the white curve of her hip in negative silhouette against the dark wall behind her, her head propped on one hand, her elbow bent. When he was fully clothed, he walked to the kitchen door. He took the chain from its slot, and unlocked the door.
He looked back at her briefly where she lay on the bed still and silent with her head on her hand and her elbow bent, gazing at him with anger and fear in her green eyes.
“Goodbye,” he said, clean and sharp.
“I knew,” she answered, and he went into the hall and closed the door.
9
He went down the steps, quickly, propelled by an anger bordering on revulsion, wanting to get away from the girl as quickly as possible, frightened because he had nowhere to go, furious because he had lost himself again on the tangled sheets of her bed. He did not know what he had expected from this girl, but he knew it was not a coldly mechanical lay in a room with her brother’s picture near the bed. He had felt something fiercely alien emanating from this girl, and it had been contagious so that whatever they did together had become a war — what the hell had they been trying to prove? He recognized all at once that at least part of his anger now was founded in disappointment. He had not expected a practiced woman; he had wanted a young girl shining with truth, rare and awestruck beneath his hands, succumbing to his supplications, the way Doris had been long ago. This girl, this Janet in the clothes and in the body of his Doris, had promised innocence and delivered experience. But more than that, she had brought to him something he did not deserve. She had come to him with a hatred... no, not a hatred, a seeking, yes, a seeking as blind as his own, knowing he would not satisfy her needs, and blaming him for it beforehand. Each grinding movement of her body had become a whiplash, each uttered “Oh, love!” had become an urgent plea, denied in advance each time it was spoken. It could have been otherwise, and this was why he hated her now. And yet, with a calm reasoning that was yet more infuriating, he knew it could never have been otherwise and that he had been a fool to even hope for anything but what had happened.
Hating her, he walked up Broadway angrily, not knowing where he was going, and not caring, striking three matches before he finally lighted his cigarette, and then discarding the cigarette at once as he went into the subway kiosk on 96th Street. He saw no one. He was in a cold and isolated shell of anger and self-pity, and everyone who passed him was an obstruction, something to be overcome, something to push aside, something that stood between him and where he wanted to be.
He did not know what he hoped to find in Central Park, or even whether he could again locate the bench upon which he had awakened earlier that day. He knew only that he thought of that bench as his birthplace, and that his encounter with Janet had shaken something deep inside him, so that now not only his identity was in doubt, but his very existence as well. He wanted to see that bench again. He wanted to reassure himself that he had indeed awakened there this morning, that there was indeed a measure of reality to his life.
To his surprise, he found the bench without any difficulty, but it seemed a little more weatherbeaten than he had remembered it, scarred by time, decrepit. An old man and an old woman were sitting on the bench in bright sunshine. She was reading a newspaper, and he was sitting with his eyes closed, his head tilted back, his gnarled hands resting on the head of his cane. Buddwing looked at the bench and at the old couple, feeling oddly dispossessed, wanting to go to them, wanting to say, “I beg your pardon, but this is my bench, this is where I was born, don’t you see?” He walked past the bench rapidly. The depression was still with him, but now it threatened a vaster gloom. It seemed to him as he passed the bench that he was about to lose even the things that were comparatively fresh and new, that six o’clock this morning was about to recede into an irredeemable past as obscure as the deeper past from which he had come. He sensed that Gloria and Schwartz, were he to see them again, would now be as old as the man and woman who sat on his bench in brilliant sunshine; Eric would be a teen-ager; L.J. and the others would have advanced to middle age; even Janet, whom he had left not twenty minutes ago, would now be a fat neurotic matron. He could not imagine having moved so far and so fast in the space of six hours, and yet he knew that the present was being threatened by the recent past as well as a past that was unfathomable.
It was high noon in New York. Fifth Avenue was alive with tourists and shoppers. Everything had changed; this was not the landscape he had known earlier this morning. Harsh out-of-state accents jangled on his ears and his nerves, people jostled him, the sounds of traffic boomed interminably, the sun hung suspended in the sky directly overhead, a giant unblinking eye. He shoved past a group of excited children coming out of F.A.O.’s, and then quickened his pace, anxious to get anywhere out of this crowd. Snatches of conversation touched his ears, fading into his auditory range as he walked, fading out again as the talkers passed beyond him and out of his life, throngs of strangers he had known briefly and not at all well.
He walked with his head level as the stream of people moved against him, parting before him, the out-of-town women with their spring hats, the New York girls with their perky rapid walk and their darting shopping eyes, the strolling Park Avenue gentlemen with their homburgs and their gloves, the dancers heading for 57th Street, with bowling-ball backsides and muscular calves and a curious identifying duck waddle, the old ladies and the young actresses in mink, the homosexuals strolling with discreet fingertip touches, the idle traffic cop watching the snarl of automobiles and buses and taxicabs, the delivery boys carrying cardboard cartons of coffee, the geographically incongruous whore, the young Boy Scout staring up at the buildings, all of whom he knew briefly in the few seconds it took for their faces and their voices to come toward him, and abreast of him, and then disappear behind him.