“Yes. Oh. Don’t hurt me.”
“Down,” he whispered.
He held her hand, helped her lower herself to the carpeted floor, then knelt between her legs. Memory now only increased the novelty of this desire; had she always been so serious, so grave, and yet so open and warm and pliant in her lovemaking? Penetrating her, he would have lowered onto her breast but she held him up with her forearms under his shoulders, whispering, “I want to see you.”
“Yes. Good.” The posture was awkward for him, hands splayed on the floor, but he maintained it. Below, their bodies moved together, rolling in the tidal motion, while their somber faces remained still. He watched her in wonder, the shadowed eyes, the soft smooth skin of her face, the parted lips, stray shards of light glinting from her moist teeth, her hair fanned on the carpet beneath her head and curling around her small ears. A door was opened in his mind, and he saw that for all these years he had been in love with Joyce. In personal exclusive demanding love with one individual human being; as though nobody else existed. He had spent years denying it, refusing to distract himself from his concern with all of humanity, refusing to recognize the awful jealousy in the early days when she would go to bed with Peter or Mark or any of the others who were still with them then; and all this time had successfully hidden from himself the truth.
Years ago, in college, he had memorized a portion of Pope’s An Essay on Man, thinking it expressed his own beliefs better than he ever could, and only now understanding he had always misunderstood it. In a murmuring voice, slowly, in time with their lovemaking, he recited:
“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind is man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great: with too much knowledge for the skeptic side, with too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, he hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; in doubt to deem himself a god or beast; in doubt his mind or body to prefer; born but to die, and reasoning but to err; alike in ignorance, his reason such, whether he thinks too little or too much.”
“Don’t think,” she whispered, and the hint of a smile touched her lips in the semi-dark. “Larry, don’t think at all.”
“I love you.”
“Oh, don’t say that. Not now.” Then, her expression fierce, she clamped his face between her hands. “Come in me.”
Yes. Still holding him so she could see his face, her own face suffusing, the eyes losing focus, she strained and pulsed beneath him, and he could feel the surge of her body just before his own final, demanding, insistent thrust. “Forever,” he cried, forgetting silence and noise, and collapsed atop her.
The darkness was comforting. Their bodies were warm together, her hands and arms were soothing as she stroked his back, the warm suspiration of her breath beside his ear was reassuring. His lower body trembled, spending itself, the aftershocks of orgasm rippling through him, but his head at least was at peace, drooping downward, forehead touching the friendly roughness of the carpet. A long stretch of Nontime went by, and then Joyce sighed, shifting beneath him, and he knew they had to go forward again. Lurch forward, into the impossible. He echoed her sigh, and lifted himself onto his elbows, feeling the sudden chill air on his chest.
“Larry.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Let him go.”
Larry closed his eyes. It was the other impossible goal; first to love Joyce, second to be finished with Koo Davis. “We can’t,” he whispered. “Peter would never allow it. Not now, not when he’s been humiliated.”
“Will he kill him?”
“No.” Larry was certain of that part, he’d thought it out before. “That’s just another way to admit defeat. Peter will want to make up for it now, to get his dignity back.”
“The longer we go on, the worse it is for us. For us.”
“It’s already too long,” Larry said, and kissed her, and rolled off onto the floor.
This bedroom had its own lavatory; Larry used it, then returned to find Joyce already dressed and standing in the bedroom doorway, frowning across the landing at the door of Koo’s room. She said, “I’ll watch him. You go talk to Peter.”
“I promised Koo.”
“Larry, it’s all right.” Something had made her stronger, more sure of herself. “I can deal with Mark just as well as you can. Besides, I think he’s gone, this time I think he’s finally run away for good.”
“None of us will get away for good,” Larry said, but he didn’t argue anymore. He shivered, all the warmth out of his body now, and began to dress.
It was the worst day of Peter’s life. He had gone through defeats before, and had his triumphs, and suffered those periods which can sometimes seem even worse, when nothing at all happens, neither for good nor ill, when one’s life seems to have stopped, when you might as well be dead—but this was the worst. To be made a fool of, a laughingstock, before the entire world. To have one’s plans exposed as the vaporings of a simpleton, a dunce with no grasp on reality, an ass, an egotistical buffoon capering in the streets—this was the way he described himself to himself, in his mind. His self-loathing was such that he positively strove to punish his cheeks, grinding and gnawing, biting till he couldn’t stand it any longer, then biting again. The tears glistening in his eyes, which might have been caused by humiliation, or rage, or regret, or despair, were from pain.
This house belonged to a friend of Ginger’s in the music business, and a smallish room behind the kitchen reflected this vocation. The room was soundproofed, and built into the walls was a complete small studio of recording and playback equipment. The furnishings were simple and quiet, with leather swivel chairs and Formica-topped small tables. A console along one wall contained the instrumentation for all the equipment, plus three keyboards. Two heavily draped windows looked out on not much at all; some shrubbery, the tall paling fence belonging to the neighbor next door. It was to this room that Peter retired, once the interminable horrible ghastly program was over, to sit in one of the leather chairs, unmoving, staring at the floor, enveloping himself in pessimism and despondency and self-hatred.
But such feelings about oneself cannot last. They are too painful to be endured for very long; soon we must either forgive ourselves or punish ourselves, with the strongest form of punishment for the strongest level of self-loathing being death. Peter was not a man to willingly end his own life—he was too utterly the center of his universe for that—so that soon he began to shift his angle of view and to see things in a slightly different way.
He wasn’t the one who had gone wrong. He had remained true to his ideals, true to the plan and vision of Revolution, while those others had fallen by the wayside. Eric Mallock! Who could believe such a failure from Eric Mallock? Had they castrated him?
It was true that Peter hadn’t fully researched all ten people before putting their names on the list, it was true he personally knew fewer than half of them, even at the level of nodding acquaintance, but surely a few years ago the reaction would have been very different. There wouldn’t have been more than one or two at the most who would fail to rally if placed on such a list. What had happened? Peter had remained constant, what had happened to all those others? Only three would even answer the call; one a renegade Panther, one an internationalist whose primary involvement wasn’t with the Second American Revolution anyway, and one a simple bank robber. Those three could rot in prison, they meant nothing to Peter at all.
It was the others, the seven. What a betrayal! Never mind that they’d made Peter look like a fool, it was the Movement they had betrayed, the Movement they had held up to public scorn and ridicule, the Movement they had turned their backs on. Peter’s self-hatred reversed itself, extended outward, enveloping the seven who had made this horrible thing happen.