The waiter does everything quick, everything right — no sauce on the fish, dry wine, salad dressing on the side. Then he bends over her and whispers, “Why are you angry?”
She says, “I’m not angry.”
He says, “I can see that you’re angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Didn’t I bring you everything you asked for?” His voice becomes bigger, self-pitying. “Fish, soup, bread, wine. Everything you asked for.”
She says, “I shouldn’t have to ask.”
The waiter walks away rolling his eyes. He doesn’t understand American women. I rise, go to her table, and say, “Do you mind if I join you?”
She says, “What took you so long?”
She pressed my leg with hers under the table. Conversation stopped. She continued pressing, then pulled away abruptly. Conversation resumed. She did it to excite herself, that’s all. Her makeup was sloppy, her clothes were stylish. She’d start to say something, then laugh and say, “No.” I’d never seen anyone more depressed. She said, “Driving to work I brush my teeth. I’m the invisible woman.”
I said, “I locked myself out of my office and my car. I don’t even exist.”
She said, “I lost my checkbook and sunglasses. Nobody needs them.”
“I forgot my appointment. Nobody wants to meet me.”
She frowned. “You’re trying and that’s sweet. But I don’t care.”
Billy says, “Why don’t you let me do it? Afraid you might like it?”
Billy phones, says, “Want to play?” I think about it, then say, “The traffic is heavy. It will take forever to get to your place. I can’t stay long. I’d feel I’m using you. It’s not right. I don’t want to use you.” She says, “But I want to be used.” I drive to Billy’s place. She opens the door naked, on her knees. We fuck. “Do you think I’m sick?” she says. I say, “No.” “Good,” she says, “I don’t think you’re sick either.”
You know your feelings, so you mistrust them, as if they belonged to an unreliable stranger. He behaved badly in the past and is likely to do so again. But you can’t believe that. You believe you’ve changed. Then it happens again and the same feelings surprise you. Now you’re fearful of yourself because of what you can’t not do.
If there are things I’d never tell a psychotherapist, I would waste time and money talking to one. It would feel like a lie. I need a priest.
Sex in one place. Feeling in another.
Afterward, afterward, it is more desolating than when a good movie ends or you finish a marvelous book. We should say “going,” not “coming.” Anyhow, the man should say, “Oh God, I’m going, I’m going.”
Schiller says, “When the soul speaks, then — alas — it is no longer the soul that speaks.” William Blake says, “Never seek to tell thy love/Love that never told can be.” They mean the same as Miles Davis’s version of “My Funny Valentine,” so slowly played, excruciating, broken, tortured.
She wore baggy pants, a man’s sweater, no makeup, and had strong opinions about everything, as if to show, despite her exceedingly beautiful face and body, she damn well had a mind. I felt sick with regret at having met her, ready to forgive every fault, half in love with a woman I won’t ever see again.
The soul is known through intuitions, or forms without meaning — like fish, flowers, music … Certainly not a face.
“Do you think it’s possible to have fifteen sincere relationships?”
“Not even one,” says Billy. “Let me tie you to the bed.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want you to.”
“I’ll stop when you tell me. Just don’t say ‘stop.’ That only excites me. Say ‘tomato’ or something.”
Deborah wants to have her eyes fixed so they’ll look like white eyes and she hates her landlady who gave her the Etna Street apartment, choosing her over 157 other applicants. Her landlady assumed Deborah is a good girl, clean and quiet. “A Japanese angel,” says Deborah with a sneer. I was shocked by her racism. I hadn’t imagined that she thought of herself as Japanese. She showed me photos of her family. Mother, father, brothers, sister — all Japanese, but I hadn’t supposed she thought she was, too. What the hell did I imagine? Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxury that makes you deeply stupid.
Deborah holds a new blouse up to her chin, tilts her head, and says, “Do you like this blouse?” I look at it and at her, how she’s tilted her head so seriously, waiting for my opinion, but I can’t speak. She sees what’s happening and lowers the blouse. Her head remains tilted like an iris on the fine white stalk of her neck. She whispers, as if there were someone else in the room, “You’re hopeless. You’re like my girlfriend. I ask if she likes what I’m wearing and she says, ‘You’re beautiful.’”
Margaret says she went to Cesar’s Latin Palace and stood at the bar until some guy asked her to dance, a handsome Jamaican. Great dancer. She says there’s a divorced couple at Cesar’s who will not have anything to do with each other, except when they show up Saturday night and dance together, drawn to the music in each other’s body. When the number ends they separate instantly, without a word, and go to different tables. They’d rather drink with strangers. Then the great Francisco Aquabella starts slapping conga drums, driving the whole world to cha-cha-cha, and she feels the need for him, that one, the guy over there across the floor sitting with the white bitch, that one who is standing up and crossing the floor to her table, and she is standing up, too, even before he asks her to dance, feeling the music in his body. Don’t talk to me about love. Talk about cha-cha-cha, and the way he touches her. His eyes are cold, yet full of approval. When they dance, they belong to each other and nothing else matters until the music ends.
Kittredge loves pretty women, but he is blind, can’t pursue them. So I take him to a party and describe a woman in the room. He whispers, “Tell me about her neck.” Eventually I introduce him to her. They leave the party together. Kittredge is always successful. Women think he listens differently from other men. In his blind hands they think pleasure is truth. Blind hands know deep particulars, what yearns in neck and knee. Women imagine themselves embracing Kittredge the way sunlight takes a tree. He says, “Talk about her hips.”As I talk, his eyes slide with meanings, like eyes in a normal face except quicker, a snapping in them. Kittredge cannot see, cannot know if a woman is pretty. I say, “She has thick black hair.” When they leave together I begin to sink. I envy the magnetic darkness of my friend. To envy him without desiring his condition is possible.
Evelyn told me that Sally, her dearest friend—“Don’t ever repeat this!”—came down with the worst case of herpes the doctor had ever seen.