Evelyn’s four-year-old son had a nightmare in which Evelyn appeared with a big knife stuck in her head. She has scheduled him for psychotherapy five days a week.
Margaret says she went back to Cesar’s. The Jamaican asked her to dance again. She refused. She liked him, but she kept a closed face. If she showed interest, he’d think she was in the same mood as last time. They would dance, then go out to his car and make love. She said, “I have a Ph.D. I can do anything. I can even read fashion magazines. He’s a nice guy, but he’d never understand me.”
Deborah’s dentist, a little Jewish man, talks incessantly and she can’t say a word because her mouth is pried open, under investigation by steel instruments, and also hooked like a fish by a suction tube. Nevertheless, her dentist says things that require an answer, so she grunts and moans to say yes, no, really, how nice, too bad. Last time she saw him he carried on about Buddhism, which he studies with monks in a temple. He said, incidentally, that he’d learned to levitate. When he finished working, Deborah could talk. She asked if he meant “meditate” rather than “levitate.” He said, “No. I meant levitate.” She asked him to show her. He said, “No, no.” She pleaded with him. He refused. She refused to leave. He said, “Just once.” He turned his back to her, crouched slightly, and lifted off the floor. I waited for Deborah to continue, but that was the end. She had no more to say. I snapped at her, “He did not levitate.” She said, truly astonished, “He didn’t?”
Evelyn goes shopping Monday through Sunday. Clothes, jewelry, books, records, prints, paintings, ceramics. Her house of many things shrieks good taste. The latest dress style isn’t always right for Evelyn, but she is the first in town to wear it. She believes her clothing and her automobile say something about her. After shopping, Evelyn feels she’s done good. She must know she is too wide for a zebra-striped dress, but still, it’s the most new thing, and it gives her moral sensations to wear it with bright red socks, her black pearl necklace, and a wide aluminum belt. All of it is hidden under her black cape, which she throws off in the restaurant, driving the women in the place mad with envy.
Margaret doesn’t like oral sex because she was once forced to do it at gunpoint, in a car, in the parking lot next to the railroad tracks, outside the bar where the guy picked her up. I wish she hadn’t told me. I hear freight trains. I see people coming out of the bar, laughing, drunk, going to their cars while she crouches in misery and fear, the gun at her head. How easy, if I had the gun at his head, to pull the trigger.
Eddie calls her Stop-and-Go. She’s up early and moving, then collapses into hours of marijuana. It’s like everything with her, he says. No degrees. Truth or lies, good or bad, stop or go. She criticizes Eddie constantly. He can’t do anything right. He wants to break up, but plans to provoke her into doing it by hanging a picture she doesn’t like in a place she finds disturbing. They’ve already argued about that. He took the picture down, but he plans now to put it up again. She’ll see that he is saying the house is his. She’ll go. He says she becomes affectionate after a fight. He finds her adorable then. He says she dislikes his father for his Jewish traits, and also dislikes Eddie for his. He says she doesn’t even know what they are, then smiles in a silly way, as if he weren’t really offended. Tomorrow her mood will be different. She’ll forget what she said today. Her feelings aren’t moored to anything, no important work, like his medical practice, for example. He is accomplished; successful. The woman is merely herself, except when she objects to him. He thinks it costs him nothing and it makes her feel real. He says, “Let me ask you something. You and me, we’ve had dinner together a couple of hundred times. Is there anything about how I eat that looks to you Jewish?”
“Is that what she thinks?”
“How I eat, how I dress, how I talk, how I fuck.”
I laugh.
“O.K. She doesn’t treat me well,” he says. “She disapproves of me. Criticism is my daily bread. But I’m never lonely with her, never bored. I’m miserable. But this word ‘miserable,’ in my case, is not the end of the discussion. It’s only the beginning. There are kinds of misery …”
Feelings swarm in Eddie’s face, innumerable nameless nuances, like lights on the ocean beneath a sky of racing clouds. Eddie could have been a novelist or a poet. He has emotional abundance, fluency of self. He’s shameless.
“Believe me, I’m not a faithful type. I’ve slept with a hundred women. More. But it’s no use. She hits me, curses me. She says, ‘I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to be turned on.’ No matter. It begins to happen. She relaxes, lets me disgrace myself. She tells me,‘Lick the insides of my legs while I make this phone call.’ My father slaved six days a week, year after year, to put me through medical school. For me to do this, to lick this woman, he went to an early grave.”
The paper was thick and creamy, textured like baby flesh. Every night she opened to a new page, wrote the date, then “Dear Diary,” then thought for a minute, then quit. After a while it came to her that she had no internal life. Ortega says this is true of monkeys. But monkeys are known to dream. Evelyn says, “I never had a dream.”
She was once making love and the bed collapsed on her cat, who was asleep underneath, and broke its back. Since then, she says, sex hasn’t been the same for her. Then she dashes to the sink, grabs a knife, and looks back at me, her teeth shining, chilly as the steel, welcoming me to the wilderness.
Margaret tells me her lover is wonderful. “He makes me feel like a woman,” she says, “without degrading me.” I don’t know what she means, but can’t ask. What is it to feel like a woman? or to be made to feel that way?
I said to Margaret, “When we talk we make a small world of trust.” Quickly she says, “There are men so loose of soul they talk even in their sleep.” She laughs, surprised by her good memory and how wonderful Shakespeare is. She didn’t get it right, but the point is that it no longer mattered what I was going to say. I said, “You didn’t get it right.” She was talking, didn’t hear me.
I asked Deborah out to dinner. She said, “You looking for an exotic date or something?” Now she tells me that she went to an orgy in Berkeley. It was highly organized. On Wednesday, everyone met at the home of the couple, an engineer and his wife. People talked, got to know one another, then went home. They returned on Friday and took off their clothes. “But you didn’t have to undress or do anything,” said Deborah. “I only wanted to watch.” But so many of them begged her to undress that she finally consented, except for her underwear. Then she lay on the floor. The engineer, his wife, and their friends, all of them naked, kneeling on either side of her, mauled her. She was being polite.
“A Japanese angel.”
“I didn’t behave like them,” she said.
Sonny was my best friend. Then she says, “I met a man last night.” My heart grew heavy. I couldn’t count on her anymore for dinner, long talks on the telephone, serious attention to my problems, and she’d no longer tell me about herself, how well or ill she slept last night, and whether she dreamed, and what she did yesterday, and what people told her and she them. She said, “I don’t know why, but I feel guilty toward you.”