" Gloria, baby, are you there? Can we just forget about last night? I promise, I won' t say another word about us… I mean that way. It' s a beautiful day, the sun is shining, the winter chill is off. Let' s drive up to Westchester and have some lobster in the Rye Inn."
" That would be great," she said. " Get me out of the city today."
" Gloria, you' re an angel. I don' t think there' s another girl who' d forgive me for last night. I don' t know what got into my head."
Sense, she thought. Last night was the first time you ever sounded like a man… the first time you ever made me feel like a woman. She shook her head, Christ, do I have to be beaten and bullied into being a woman? Well then, beat me, bully me, I have to live. For the first time I want to live.
" I' ll pick you up in an hour. Is that okay?"
" What time is it now Paul? Ten o' clock? Good. Come over for coffee and eggs at eleven, and by twelve we' ll be on our way."
" Great," he said, his voice relaxed and relieved. The husky whisper of the first few seconds of conversation had evaporated. " I' ll pick up some cheese Danish and we' ll have a picnic. I love you, Gloria. I love you even if I am a stupid ass."
Too bad for me. Too bad the stupid asses go for me. And they admit it, too. The stupid asses are always very honest. I wonder if we can make a deal. I turn him into a man and he pays back by turning me into a woman. No, the only thing he could turn me into is a cow – a big, fat, contented, cud- chewing- in- the- green- fields cow.
" In an hour then, baby," Paul sang.
" I' ll be waiting for you," she answered.
When she hung up the phone, she was dreadfully alone again. And she realized that she was afraid. She pulled herself off the bed and kicked off the shoes she had worn all night. Her toes felt stiff and cold. She walked to the window and rolled the bamboo blind up. The windows were dirty on the outside, the way New York windows always were because you weren' t allowed to sit out on the sill and wash them, the way you could in Kansas City. In Kansas City, you lived in a house that had two floors. Two floors of a wooden house, and the windows always glistening and clean. Her eyes filled with hopeless tears. Here she lived on the fourth floor. A wonderful studio with all the light she needed to paint. Of course, artists didn' t really need light anymore, doing their crazy patterns of color. The artists didn' t go out into the sun the way Cezanne had. It didn' t matter how a tree looked with the sun coming through the leaves. Artists were city dwellers now, painting sunless images in sunless rooms.
She opened the window and looked up and down the quiet brownstonelined street. Down below, a car was parked badly. Two girls with short hair and tight jeans passed, touching in their walk and dress and faces that told the world that they were in love… that at night they gripped each other' s short- cropped heads and dug into each other' s hidden sex. They had looks of frozen, corrupted purity.
Small fenced- in trees lined the street. A skinny man with corduroy pants passed, carrying a canvas under his arm. Another sunless artist. Then a hurried young man wearing horn- rimmed glasses, scurrying like the rabbit inAlice in Wonderland, rushed by balancing thick books against his tweed coat. Gloria laughed. Boy oh boy, you' d better read fast. You' ve got lots to learn, my bright young man. Hurry, or you' ll die before you finish St. John' s list of classics.
We' re all insane, reading and painting and blowing tunes. And all the time we want a thick- tongued maniac to grab us in a dark hallway and jam sex into us. All the money I wasted on paint and canvas and school. All the time I was just a cunt. An unused cunt. Those are the biggest cunts of all. Cunts as big as our heads.
She closed the window, suddenly afraid again to be alone in the room. I wonder if he knows my name? I wonder if he' ll look me up in the book and come back? But I must forget about him. I must forget and go on living.
She walked into the bathroom, the pale eyes invisibly following her. She leaned over the bathtub, the gesture bringing a throb of pain to her temples. She turned the hot water tap; soon smoke and splashing water filled the tub.
She walked out into the small kitchen and filled a kettle with water. She set the kettle on the stove and turned the automatic gas jet. A flame shot up and she jumped back, suddenly realizing that she was standing in her kitchen, staring transfixed at the white eyes in the pattern of spots and cracks on the wall. Oh God, I' m trapped. I' m trapped.
Gloria wandered into her studio… the main room of her top floor apartment. The walls were covered with her paintings. An unfinished canvas hung on the wall between the two windows. Her canvasses were too large for her to use an easel. She painted by dipping into brilliantly hued buckets of paint and splashing her frustration and confusion across the white canvas. All the colors of her life leaped at her from the walls and she felt surrounded by mute enemies. She fell across the sofa in the middle of the room. It was covered with an Indian throw. Tiny flowers and men on camels marched along the border of the couch. She reached over to the coffee table that she had made out of wrought iron legs and an old mahogany kitchen table. The first cigarette of the day tasted like blood in her mouth. She smashed it out in her Mexican pottery ashtray and went back into the kitchen. She poured the boiling water through a drip coffeepot and poured a full cup of black steaming coffee. She brought the cup into the bathroom, putting it down on the closed toilet seat and unzipping her black dress. The rapist, the white- eyed devil, hadn' t bothered to take her dress off. Just pulled it above her knees. Didn' t care that she had full, nipple tipped breasts. Didn' t care that her white back exposed the long slim line of her spine. Didn' t care that the musk of her body lay hidden in her armpits, that her hips curved out from a smallsculpted waist. Only wanted to get to her cunt. No other part of her existed for him. Not her head, or her heart, or her round, throbbing, blue- veined breasts. Only one place his prick wanted to go… only one thing he cared about, his prick. His prick and her cunt and they could fly to the moon.
She lowered herself into the tub and the water turned pink with her clotted blood. She grew faint. The water rushed into her cunt, settling hot in her moss- covered cavity. It brought the memory of him back to her with painful immediacy. I must find him. He' s got to come back to me. Does every vagina feel the same to him? Didn' t he feel, inside me, that he' d come home? Will he want another woman tomorrow? Is he with another woman now, shoving his magnificent prick into her pink, hot flesh? The thought brought tears of rage and jealousy to her eyes.
She took a soft sponge and soaped her body – her thighs, and the blood coating them, her slightly muscled calves, her arms and breasts, and her tear- stained face. Her body felt the prickly sensation he had left in it. A blind glutting desire. She remembered the Greek fable about Io. Io had wandered between heaven and earth, a gnat biting at her, leaving her no peace… torturing her with its persistency.
I' m just as damned. He' s left a scar in my cunt. An itching, burning scar. And only his prick can heal it. He' s got to come back to me. He can' t leave me to wander the earth like Io. She started to cry.
But I' m an artist. I' ve won a drawer full of prizes. I' ve been shown in the Whitney exhibition. He can' t have ruined me. He can' t have left me with nothing to live for but his enormous cock. Just thinking of the rigid boned flesh that had jutted from beneath his hard stomach made her tremble with excitement. I' m lost… lost.
She pulled herself out of the tub and dried her body with the big Cannon towel. She wiped herself gently, with rhythmic concern. When she put the towel between her legs, her thighs pulled tightly together, as if her secret need had its own secret will. Her fingers wandered to her hot vagina. She separated the taut lips with her fingertips, exploring the smooth inner membranes that were the color of conch. She felt the throbbing clitoris. It jumped at her heated prodding. " I can' t," she murmured. She knew that if she flung herself across the bed and induced her own pulsating orgasm, she would be left with a hotter desire. Only the white eyes could save her. She walked into her bedroom, feeling the cruel urge between her legs. Her eyes reflected torture. I' m going crazy. I am crazy.