“I know, I know,” he whispered back. “He’s crazy. We’ll be there soon.”
They relapsed into silence. I’m soothing her. I wanna blow her head off and I’m soothing her. It was like being a teenager living with his mother. He’d want to scream at his mother, tell her she was a whining, unattractive, bitter woman, ungrateful to his father (always tired, exhausted from work) for providing her with a life of ease. A maid to clean daily, caterers for parties, expensive trips, all the clothes she wanted (though she continued to look drab, no matter what her hairdo or the style of her dress), and all the power in making family decisions. And yet, like Marion, there was no end to her complaints that she was neglected, ignored; no action or comment his father could make that she failed to deride or despise. How his father had had the will and courage to build his business in the fog of complaints and meanness his mother exhaled at home … No more remarkable, he imagined, than his own ability to persevere in his ambition to be a novelist despite Marion’s poorly concealed skepticism.
They arrived home. Fred gave the driver a big tip, knowing that would guarantee he wouldn’t say anything. To his surprise, the driver said, “Thanks. Sorry about the bump. They oughta fix the fuckin’ streets.”
“Yeah,” Fred said cheerfully, ecstatic that the guy was reasonable and decent. Marion had gotten out and gone ahead.
“It’s that fuckin’ fag we got for a mayor,” the driver said out his window while Fred closed the door.
“Yeah,” Fred said, not so cheerfully. He’s probably an anti-Semite, he thought to himself, convinced that anyone who disliked Mayor Koch had to be. An anti-Semite and stoned, he decided after another glance at the driver’s angry red eyes. Fred hurried to catch up with Marion.
She greeted him with: “What the hell did you give him a big tip for?”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” he answered with thorough bitterness. He almost covered his mouth, embarrassed by the release, but he forced that feeling away and strode into the elevator. Then he felt good. Not happy, but vigorous. No longer constipated by a little boy’s timidity.
Marion stood outside the elevator and stared at him. For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to get in. “You’re such a baby.” she said, and then finally entered, moving to the other side of the elevator as though they were strangers riding to different floors, different lives. He wished they were. He kept his glance downward until they got to their floor, looking up when Marion moved to get out. He watched her behind move while he followed her to the door. Although there was nothing exciting about either its shape or its motion, he felt horny for her. If only he could get her to bed without all the bullshit — if only he knew for sure what made her want to fuck. Other than his pressing her for so many days in a row that she eventually ran out of excuses, he couldn’t say what did make her want to have sex. Years ago, when they were kids in college, he didn’t remember that either of them had to initiate making love. They were both so thrilled to be doing it, it was automatic as soon as they were alone together. They would kiss immediately and soon …
There was an empty feeling to the apartment. The place was jammed with their things, eight years of living together, but their footsteps seemed to echo as though it were bare. Fred turned on the television to rid the place of the silence. Marion disappeared into the hallways. Probably gonna take a bath, Fred thought to himself bitterly. Well, I’m not going in there to apologize and whine just because I want some nooky. I’ll find someone else. She doesn’t think I’d ever do that, doesn’t think I’d have the nerve to have an affair. Maybe she doesn’t think anyone would have an affair with me, Fred thought, furious. She doesn’t want to fuck me, so she probably thinks no one else does.
There was a moment, a moment of nameless dread and despair, when he feared she was right.
Patty would! Fred thought, blessed by the aburpt recall of their kiss at that dinner party, the party that had firmed up his relationship with Bart and led to his book contract. Yes, that was another time Marion had whined. Just because he needed her help to throw a party, one little party in eight years to advance his career. She had made him feel like a piece of shit that night. He remembered his erection, surging madly when he met Patty’s gaping wet mouth. He had felt firm breasts against his chest. He knew her ass would also be a shape, a definite shape, not floating in a sea of blobby formless flesh like Marion’s. Yes. Patty would have fucked him and Marion was a joke compared to Patty, hardly part of the same gender. Patty would do it. Or she would have before she had a boyfriend.
If only he had the nerve to march into the bathroom (since Marion no doubt expected him to come in like a penitent dog wagging his tail, head down, eyes up balefully, hoping to be forgiven) and say, “Patty wanted to fuck me.”
What? He burst out laughing. Marion wouldn’t have the faintest idea that was meant as an answer to her behavior. He laughed again.
“What’s so funny?” Marion asked.
He gasped, turned to find her, as though he were a potential victim in a horror movie, his enemy having sprung from the grave. “You startled me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She was trying to be pleasant. “What’s so funny? I heard you laughing. I thought it was something on TV.”
Fred glanced at the set. He hadn’t been paying attention to it. “No,” he said, and offered no explanation.
“Why did you get so angry?” she asked. She squinted at him as if he were a distant object.
He made a sound, a disgusted laugh.
“I was just teasing at Elaine’s,” she said.
“Bullshit.” He stared at the television, afraid to meet her glance. It would be amused and tolerant, contemptuously forgiving. When she treated him like a child, he always became one: more interested in winning back her love than winning the fight. Even now part of him wanted to make up, knowing that to continue the hostility meant weeks of sexual deprivation.
“You’re right,” she said.
Her tone was firm, settled. He looked at her out of curiosity.
“You were being an asshole,” she said, again in a definite way, a telephone operator repeating a number. “You didn’t want me to come, and then everything I did, everything I said, you acted like it embarrassed you. You acted like I was a slob who doesn’t know how to behave. I have news for you. You were the one who behaved like a fool. Tom Lear thought you were the asshole, not me.” She put her hands on her hips, an outraged landlady, a middle-aged shrew. Fred felt ancient, cowed. He imagined he had communed with his father’s life: he understood, as he never had before, what that man felt while he sat in his Barca lounger, staring ahead at Monday Night Football, silently absorbing his wife’s verbal abuse. Had Dad also kept quiet, fearing he would never get laid again if he fought back?
No, impossible. His father would have gone out and fucked someone else. He must have stayed for the sake of the kids.
Then why the hell am I still here? he asked himself. “You’re pathetic,” he said at last in a weak voice, almost paralyzed by despair. He meant her delusion that he was the one who had been embarrassing. She was incapable of seeing herself truthfully.
“Get out!” Her chin quivered.
“What?” he said, almost with a laugh.
“Get out of my house!” she screamed, her face red, her shoulders shaking.
Fred got out of the chair, his legs trembling. She seemed insane, terrifying.
“I don’t want you here! Understand?” She moved at him, her hands clenched as though she meant to physically get rid of him.
“I live here,” he said inanely, pleading.
“I can’t stand looking at you! You make me sick! Get out of here!” She was screaming, her voice tearing her throat, the last words rasping from the exertion. She took a breath, put out a hand on the couch to steady herself, and then said in an exhausted whisper, “If you don’t get out of here now, I’ll have to leave. I don’t know what I’m gonna do …” She closed her eyes and shuddered.