Beth lay with her eyes closed and an arm thrown across her face. She wanted to cry, but found she could not. Ray lay on her and said nothing. She wanted to rush to the bathroom and shower, but he did not move, till long after his semen had dried on their bodies.
“Who did you date at college?” he asked.
“I didn’t date anyone very much.” Sullen.
“No heavy makeouts with wealthy lads from Williams and Dartmouth … no Amherst intellectuals begging you to save them from creeping faggotry by permitting them to stick their carrots in your sticky little slit?”
“Stop it!”
“Come on, baby, it couldn’t all have been knee socks and little round circle-pins. You don’t expect me to believe you didn’t get a little mouthful of cock from time to time. It’s only, what? about fifteen miles to Williamstown? I’m sure the Williams werewolves were down burning the highway to your cunt on weekends, you can level with old Uncle Ray …”
“ Why are you like this?! ” She started to move, to get away from him, and he grabbed her by the shoulder, forced her to lie down again. Then he rose up over her and said, “I’m like this because I’m a New Yorker, baby. Because I live in this fucking city every day. Because I have to play patty-cake with the ministers and other sanctified holy-joe assholes who want their goodness and lightness tracts published by the Blessed Sacrament Publishing and Storm Window Company of 277 Park Avenue, when what I really want to do is toss the stupid psalm-suckers out the thirty-seventh floor window and listen to them quote chapter-and-worse all the way down. Because I’ve lived in this great big snapping dog of a city all my life and I’m mad as a mudfly, for chrissakes!”
She lay unable to move, breathing shallowly, filled with a sudden pity and affection for him. His face was white and strained, and she knew he was saying things to her that only a bit too much Almadén and exact timing would have let him say.
“What do you expect from me,” he said, his voice softer now, but no less intense, “do you expect kindness and gentility and understanding and a hand on your hand when the smog burns your eyes? I can’t do it, I haven’t got it. No one has it in this cesspool of a city. Look around you; what do you think is happening here? They take rats and they put them in boxes and when there are too many of them, some of the little fuckers go out of their minds and start gnawing the rest to death. It ain’t no different here , baby! It’s rat time for everybody in this madhouse. You can’t expect to jam as many people into this stone thing as we do, with buses and taxis and dogs shitting themselves scrawny and noise night and day and no money and not enough places to live and no place to go have a decent think … you can’t do it without making the time right for some god-forsaken other kind of thing to be born! You can’t hate everyone around you, and kick every beggar and nigger and mestizo shithead, you can’t have cabbies stealing from you and taking tips they don’t deserve, and then cursing you, you can’t walk in the soot till your collar turns black, and your body stinks with the smell of flaking brick and decaying brains, you cant do it without calling up some kind of awful —”
He stopped.
His face bore the expression of a man who has just received brutal word of the death of a loved one. He suddenly lay down, rolled over, and turned off.
She lay beside him, trembling, trying desperately to remember where she had seen his face before.
He didn’t call her again, after the night of the party. And when they met in the hall, he pointedly turned away, as though he had given her some obscure chance and she had refused to take it. Beth thought she understood: though Ray Gleeson had not been her first affair, he had been the first to reject her so completely. The first to put her not only out of his bed and his life, but even out of his world. It was as though she were invisible, not even beneath contempt, simply not there.
She busied herself with other things.
She took on three new charting jobs for Guzman and a new group that had formed on Staten Island, of all places. She worked furiously and they gave her new assignments; they even paid her.
She tried to decorate the apartment with a less precise touch. Huge poster blowups of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham replaced the Brueghel prints that had reminded her of the view looking down the hill toward Williams. The tiny balcony outside her window, the balcony she had steadfastly refused to stand upon since the night of the slaughter, the night of the fog with eyes, that balcony she swept and set about with little flower boxes in which she planted geraniums, petunias, dwarf zinnias and other hardy perennials. Then, closing the window, she went to give herself, to involve herself in this city to which she had brought her ordered life.
And the city responded to her overtures:
Seeing off an old friend from Bennington, at Kennedy International, she stopped at the terminal coffee shop to have a sandwich. The counter circled like a moat a center service island that had huge advertising cubes rising above it on burnished poles. The cubes proclaimed the delights of Fun City. New York is a Summer Festival , they said, and Joseph Papp Presents Shakespeare in Central Park and Visit the Bronx Zoo and You’ll Adore our Contentious but Lovable Cabbies . The food emerged from a window far down the service area and moved slowly on a conveyor belt through the hordes of screaming waitresses who slathered the counter with redolent washcloths. The lunchroom had all the charm and dignity of a steel rolling mill, and approximately the same noise-level. Beth ordered a cheeseburger that cost a dollar and a quarter, and a glass of milk.
When it came, it was cold, the cheese unmelted, and the patty of meat resembling nothing so much as a dirty scouring pad. The bun was cold and untoasted. There was no lettuce under the patty.
Beth managed to catch the waitress’s eye. The girl approached with an annoyed look. “Please toast the bun and may I have a piece of lettuce?” Beth said.
“We dun’ do that,” the waitress said, turned half away as though she would walk in a moment.
“You don’t do what?”
“We dun’ toass the bun here.”
“Yes, but I want the bun toasted,” Beth said, firmly.
“An’ you got to pay for extra lettuce.”
“If I was asking for extra lettuce,” Beth said, getting annoyed, “I would pay for it, but since there’s no lettuce here, I don’t think I should be charged extra for the first piece.”
“We dun’ do that.”
The waitress started to walk away. “Hold it,” Beth said, raising her voice just enough so the assembly-line eaters on either side stared at her. “You mean to tell me I have to pay a dollar and a quarter and I can’t get a piece of lettuce or even get the bun toasted?”
“Ef you dun’ like it …”
“Take it back.”
“You gotta pay for it, you order it.”
“I said take it back, I don’t want the fucking thing!”
The waitress scratched it off the check. The milk cost 27¢ and tasted going-sour. It was the first time in her life that Beth had said that word aloud.