He moved toward the door, taking a wide route around her. At the closet he stopped. “Where am I gonna go?” he said plaintively.
“Oh, God.” she moaned, as though stabbed, her knees buckling so that she was not totally supported by the couch. “Please go,” she said in a whine, sounding so weak, so desperate, that her life seemed to be at stake.
He stood there indecisively. He could soften her if he went back, pleading an apology. He wanted to — walking out into the night with nowhere to go felt forlorn. He took a step toward her. “Marion … ” he began.
“Go!” she said, and then, after a breath. “Please. Just go.”
“Well, when do I …”
“Call me at the office tomorrow. We’ll talk then.”
She’s gonna divorce me, he realized with disbelief. Tomorrow she’ll tell me she thinks we should spend some time apart, but really she knows now she means to be rid of me. He was appalled. Divorce had seemed to be his option, his threat. He wanted to call foul, summon the umpire and have the rules read. He was sure this wasn’t allowed. It infuriated him to contemplate her high-handedness: throwing him out, “we’ll talk tomorrow,” the whole uppity fake sophistication of it.
“Fuck you,” he said with relish, opened the door, stepped into the hall, and turned back to make sure that when he gripped the door handle and slammed it shut, he did a good job of it. “Fuck you,” he said again from the hallway and then pulled the door closed with every ounce of strength he could muster.
In the silence that followed, he waited, expecting to hear something from inside the apartment. What, he didn’t know. Tears? Cries of apology? Derisive laughter?
He heard nothing. The hall hummed with lights, the starts and stops of the elevators, faint sounds of televisions and stereos, but nothing from Marion.
He walked away, rang for the elevator, and considered his choices. Whom could he call? His oldest friend lived in Long Island. His parents were out of the question. His brother was in California, his sister in Vermont. To go to Karl or one of the other of his writing friends meant spreading the story among all their friends. And what was the story? Were they breaking up?
Yes, I’m never going back.
Then why avoid their New York friends? They would have to know eventually.
He rode in the elevator, walked out into the street. It was too late to go to a movie, except at Times Square, where he wouldn’t dare go at that hour. He could walk around for a while and then sneak back in and sleep in his office or on the living-room couch. Unless she bolted the chain. He hadn’t heard her do that. She might later. He could telephone and insist on returning …
My God. Tom Lear is probably gonna call tomorrow morning to talk about the manuscript, he remembered. Humiliation at his situation washed over him. Then he realized he could call Tom first and eliminate that danger of discovery. But where would he sleep? Her behavior was a fucking outrage. And his acceptance of it! Incredible. He just left. He could have planted himself in that chair. What the hell could she have done about it?
An image of her screaming at him answered. She had looked so furious, so insane and out of control, that maybe she would have attacked him, poured gasoline on him while he watched late-night television and burned him to a crisp. And on top of everything, the really fucking outrageous thing, was that if she did incinerate him, she’d probably become a hero, celebrated in a novel by a feminist writer, played on the big screen by Meryl Streep or Jane Fonda. His part would probably go to Dabney Coleman or Richard Benjamin. The villain as jerk, or the jerk as villain.
He couldn’t cheer himself up with this line of thought. It was humiliating. It was painful. It was stupid. And above all, baffling.
He stood out on Third Avenue, looking across its broad length, hating the fucking city. Huge and empty. Small and crowded. Too cold or too hot. Too lonely and without privacy.
When Norman Mailer got a new wife or stabbed an old one, it sounded romantic. People spoke with breathless excitement about famous writers getting bounced by their wives. Fuck it, he thought, heading for a phone, I’ll tell all of them. I’ll get them out of their fucking beds and tell all of them.
David Bergman listened to Patty typing. There were long periods of silence in between her bursts, unlike the steady flow when she had worked on the romance novels. With this writing, she was either quiet or frantic.
He punched another button on the cable-television box and got a scroll that told him the time, the weather, closing stock prices. He punched another, the sports channel, where they were showing a billiards championship.
She didn’t seem to know, but she had made him a character in her book. Sure, he was disguised. Indeed, she had romanticized him physically (just another insult), making him taller, his features handsome. But the heroine’s attitude, the male’s responses — they were portraits of the inner truth of their relationship. In a court of law you could never establish a similarity, but she had captured the real nature of their feelings. It was impressive.
He punched a button for a movie channel and groaned that Gandhi was being shown again.
And insulting. She was a good writer. Oh, she needed to learn some grammar, to be sure, her craft could stand more work, but the essential, the absolutely necessary ingredient of being a good novelist she possessed — her characters lived, they inhabited the reader’s skin, benign parasites mingling with the reader’s own feelings and prejudices until they seemed inseparable. She was much more honest as a writer than she was in real life. The heroine stayed with her lover out of inertia, fear of being loose in a big city, mollifying his ego, stroking his personality as effectively as she pleased his cock.
He punched another button and a tall red-haired woman was on screen saying, “Kneel, slave!” The camera, obviously a hand-held video one, awkwardly pulled back, revealing that she was dressed in a skintight leather outfit that exaggerated the curves of her ample body. At her feet was a pathetic-looking middle-aged man — fat, bald, his skin pasty, his ass hairy.
“Yes,” he said.
She struck him sharply on the back with a riding crop. It left a faint red stripe. “Yes, what?” she said, her tone also sharp, like a whip.
“Yes, mistress,” he said in an abject whisper.
“Good,” she said, tapping him lightly on the back with the whip. “Lick,” she said in a bored tone.
The camera bounced and jerked as it moved to show the man put his face near her black leather boot and tentatively touch the tip of his tongue to it.
David had an erection. He looked down at his pants, outraged. He had an astonishing hard-on. He guiltily looked across the loft at Patty’s back to make sure she hadn’t noticed. She couldn’t, of course, but his physical response to the screen implied things that horrified him and he dreaded her knowing. He could never convince her it couldn’t mean anything.
The redhead brought the crop down on his back, lower this time, striking part of his buttock. “Faster,” she said.
“Yes, mistress,” he answered.
The sexual excitement David felt amazed him. He knew of course what he was watching. He had never seen anything like it, had only seen such scenes done in brief burlesques in movies, a joke shot to make fun of a macho character. He had read the Marquis de Sade in college. He didn’t remember …