“I don’t even want to take a goddamn shower!” he yelled at himself, and stood there panting, aching, his skin red, half of his head wet. After a moment the fury passed, and he washed himself quickly, shaving and dressing in a rush, as though late for an appointment.
Later he got to the kitchen. He picked up the New York Times and threw it across the room. It lay on the floor humpbacked, like a broken umbrella. He heated the coffee and sat down to drink it, staring at the kitchen phone, waiting for it to ring, waiting, as he had his whole life, for an explanation of why he had lost something he wanted.
Gelb lay between her legs, his head moving up and down while he worked his mouth over her clitoris. The warmth spread from there, radiating into her belly, down her thighs, her breasts feeling the heat wave over her like a rising tide. She felt gentle on the sea of sensation, floating there blissfully, basking in the sun of its relaxation. She could rest in the midst of its excitement forever, she felt, without the surf picking her up to crash on the shore.
She glanced down at him. His cold eyes were staring at her from under his eyebrows while he licked, checking on her progress. He was so achievement-oriented that he never seemed to relax, to let any experience simply be itself, a man forever tugging at the sleeves, straightening the tie, tucking in the shirt of life; always dressing for a job interview, desperate to make a good impression, or at least an impression. A-for-effort Gelb, she thought, and he began to move his tongue rapidly sideways, pushing her knob one way, then the other, and suddenly she was riding a wave, cresting up in the air, the sky spinning, her arms reaching for an anchor to hug. …
When she was done, he moved up to her navel and kissed it, smiling like a prankster. “Good, huh?” he asked.
“Yep,” she answered. “We’re getting better.”
“Oh, you’re so full of shit. I got you and you know it.”
“Oh, shut up.” She sighed. “What am I going to do about David?”
“Leave him,” he said, and put a hand around a breast, squeezing it, staring at the effect on her nipple.
“I just pack and say ’bye?”
“Yeah!”
“Is that how you’re going to do it with Elaine?”
Gelb looked at her angrily. “I have kids!” he claimed.
“Oh, please. You don’t give a shit about your kids.”
He sat up, staring furiously. She smiled sweetly. He frowned at his lack of effect. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes I do. You’ve got a great life. You’re the most important man in your held, your wife is beautiful and she loves you—”
“Bull—”
“—she loves you, your kids adore you, and you have a beautiful mistress who writes brilliantly. You don’t care what you feel about people, you only care what they feel about you, and you’re the center of everyone’s attention, which is the closest you can come to happiness.”
“You didn’t say you love me.”
“I don’t. I’m attracted to you. I like power-hungry greedy bastards like you. David’s just like you — only younger and not as mean.”
“You like talking tough, don’t you? But you’re whistling in the dark. You’re conventional. You want the three kids and the station wagon—”
“And a big fluffy dog to slobber on the upholstery.”
“Right,” Gelb said, smirking. This kind of exchange had become a game with them. She liked it, the saying of horribly selfish unsayable things. The abandon of it was thrilling, like their sex, heightened by the constant knowledge of the taboos they were breaking.
“So what I want to know,” Patty said, “is when you dump me? When does a mistress get too old? Forty?”
“Thirty-five,” Gelb said matter-of-factly.
“You mean it, don’t you?” Patty said aloud as it occurred to her. “You’re really not kidding.”
“Of course I’m kidding, love,” he said tenderly, but he moved off the bed toward the dresser, fumbling in a pocket for cigarettes. “You’re the one who doesn’t love me, remember? You’re going to bed with me so your book’ll do well.” Gelb puffed furiously on the cigarette once, glanced at his wristwatch stretched out on the dresser like a sun-bather, and said, reaching for his pants, “I’ve gotta get back to the office.”
She stayed in bed until long after he was gone. She stared down at her naked body. Small, white, young. There was some tiring in the skin, the beginnings of looseness — but she was beautiful. She looked too small, however, her belly button innocent and lonely, hovering quizzically above the center of all the fuss — asking her unanswerable questions about all the grief of love and men.
David looked them in their eyes, searching for a hint that they knew. He paced up and down the broad, crowded, messy street, his legs so weak from dreadful anticipation that he had to stop every twenty paces or so and lean against a building or sit on a stoop. He had arrived on the corner of Eighth and Twenty-third fifteen minutes early, located the phone booths she mentioned, and now watched them anxiously, terrified to make the final call and equally worried that somehow, impossibly, all the phones would be busy at the appointed hour and stay so for too long. In fact, they were rarely in use so far, but he kept his eyes on them, vowing to take possession of one if he saw a rush to use them.
In between his starts and stops he looked up at the buildings, many of them lofts or brownstones, their shades drawn, wondering in which one she was located. He stared at the blank, dirty windows, the traffic groaning and roaring beside him, and thought: No one would hear the screams. They were anonymous, these buildings, all the entrances desolate, monitored by intercoms, no doormen, no happy tenants with busy comings and goings. Maybe they were all whorehouses, each room occupied by sex: Perverts Row.
He walked himself toward the phone booths, grabbing on to the parking meters for support. He had prayed that the booth next to his would be empty, but the moment after he had situated himself, quarter ready to put in, a man got into the one next to him, able to overhear. But that was silly: his end of the conversation wasn’t worth eavesdropping on. “Do it,” he said to himself, and dialed. It rang three, four times, and he began to relax. She wasn’t there, he wouldn’t have to go through—
“Hello?”
“This is … this is Bill.”
“You’re early,” she said. “Call back in five minutes.”
He hung up. They hadn’t finished chopping up the last one, he thought, but this time the fear really did seem ridiculous. In her hello there was the harried tone of a shopkeeper juggling customers, bored with the work — despite all the rhetoric, he knew she was just a whore. She’d do what he wanted. In any event, she certainly wouldn’t really hurt him.
Now the wait was unbearable because he was eager. He called back in three minutes. She was in control now. “I’m in 684 West Twenty-Third, next to the florist behind you about twenty feet.” He had noticed the building, suspected it of being likely. “I’m in three A. See you in a minute.”
He hung up and walked quickly, not meeting anyone’s eyes, into the building and stood in its tiny vestibule, looked at the intercom system, none of the apartment buzzers supplied with names, and rang three A. The buzz back was instantaneous. He moved quickly to open the locked door and bumped into a man with a horrendously guilty look in his eyes who quickly brushed by him and out.
That was her last customer, he thought, and, getting into the small elevator that was right there, having left off the guilty man, he recalled what he could of his face: pale, unshaven, the eyes worriedly not meeting his, a miserable, hunted look. It made him feel better. And as he rode up, he wondered why. All his reactions were the opposite of what they should be. But nothing about this obsession, and his pursuit of it, had ever made sense. Except now, walking down the narrow hallway, past, to his surprise, a laundry room (what the hell was it doing in a common hallway on the third floor?) and up to a quite ordinary door, at last he felt it was over. He would know now, and even if his fate were to be a terrible one, the awful wondering, the constant doubts would be gone. He rang the bell gladly.