In any event, I hadn’t known Ben and Clara more than a few weeks — perhaps it was but a few days — when Ben decided to enter into a kind of emotional collaboration with me, an odd partnership, formed in alliance against Clara. I didn’t truly realize this until some few weeks later, and by then, Clara and I had already been adulterous, and I had no interest in who was doing what to whom for whatever reason. So long as I could see a future of sex with Clara, Ben’s motives were of no importance. I think that I had some notion that she’d ultimately become a wife to both of us, but that Ben, and only Ben, would have to suffer the usual domestic antagonisms. I would possess, unbeknownst to him, the spectacular whore.
Ben and I were sitting in their kitchen, and Clara was out. Ben seemed to me intent on making me believe that he was wholly unconcerned with her whereabouts, although he may well have been enraged and humiliated because of his knowledge of her wantonness. He may have considered that apathy and boredom would play better with me, the stranger on whom he had designs. I don’t know. He was playing what even I could see — and I couldn’t see much — was a weak hand. And yet, now, when I reflect on our wounded lives, I see that I have made the recorder’s mistake of deciding that this was but an act on Ben’s part, because I had, then, decided it was an act. But all memories, as even cats and dogs know, are suspect. As if it mattered.
We had got about halfway through a quart of cheap Spanish brandy, when Ben decided to make me, as I’ve suggested, a partner in his marital combat. I’m pretty sure I went along with this pathology, because, as I recall, I thought that any revelation about Clara would allow me to get closer to her, to become — it is absurd to say so — indispensable to her. I wanted a glimpse, that is, of her wonderful weakness, her amoral shabbiness. I would have been anything, or played at being anything, to stay in — the phrase is wildly comic — the bosom of the family. That Ben and Clara were, in some absolute married way, as one in their warped lives, was a truth that I would not countenance for a long time. Well, for years.
Ben had got quite drunk, and had pressed on me a book of Robert Lowell’s poems, but I had no clear sense of what he wanted me to do about it or with it. I put the book on the table, I took a drink, I picked the book up and leafed through it. Christ only knows what sort of raptly attentive face I had put on, but Ben suddenly remarked that Clara had given him the book last Christmas, because she knew how much he liked Lowell. I nodded and gravely riffled the pages, assuming what I hoped would pass as a pose of deferential admiration for Ben’s superb taste. And Clara’s! Ben’s and Clara’s! Ben repeated his line about this being a Christmas present from Clara, and at that moment, I looked, as I instantly realized I was meant to look, at Clara’s inscription. It read: Xmas 1960 to Ben. That the message was but a flat statement of fact was comically clear: this book had been given to Ben by someone on a date specified. Other than that, all was wholly suppressed. I looked up and Ben was smiling sadly at me, oh, we were partners, we were pals incorporated, but I was not yet wholly aware of my position as Clara’s future enemy, only as Ben’s confidant. I’m ashamed to say that I believe I felt sorry for him, the put-upon recipient of such cold apathy.
Not three weeks later, I fucked Clara, almost accidentally, or so I believed, standing up in that same kitchen, while Ben was out getting beer. She had her period, but I didn’t care, nor did she. Later, I sat in miserable stickiness as I drank one of the beers that Ben had brought back. The kitchen smelled of sex and blood, and my pants were flagrantly stained at the fly. I realized, yet without any shame, what a brutta figura I must have made. That Ben did his best not to notice made it clear that I had somehow been played for a fool. For a chump, really. Since I was quite obviously crazy, it didn’t matter to me.
Clara had been promiscuous long before I knew her, and from what I gathered over time, promiscuous long before she married Ben. She was recklessly sexual, with a vast anxious dedication to erotic adventure, although the word surely glamorizes her activities. She pursued these affairs with the sedulous dedication of a collector of anything, with, that is, the dedication of a kind of maniac. That such sexual avocation is solemnly described as “joyless” or “empty” doesn’t fit in Clara’s case: she was wholly and matter-of-factly pleased with her churning libido, and the prospect of picking up some happily dazed copying-machine salesman in the desolate lobby of a local movie theater and then silently and efficiently blowing him in his parked car delighted her.
Ben knew, before their marriage, all about her penchant for what she may well have thought of as the free life, and was much too hip and blasé to think that he could change her ways. Such a belief was, to Ben, just so much middle-class bullshit Christian baloney. But he did believe something that was much more absurd than faith in love as rescuer of the emotionally damaged, morally skewed spouse of song and story. To put it as simply as possible, he believed that Clara’s marriage to him would effect a change in her behavior. He would do nothing, or so I carefully reconstructed his thinking; there would be neither admonition nor recrimination, neither scorn nor anger, neither sorrowful displays nor contemptuous remarks. There would be nothing save an unspoken pity for this poor slut. Clara, annexed to Ben’s relaxed, nonjudgmental, affectless, and cynical life, would, so he thought, abruptly stop her frantic couplings in hallway and bathroom and rooftop and automobile, in park and doorway and elevator and cellar and toilet stall, her clothes on or off or half-off or undone. Her sex life would seem, when held against Ben’s sangfroid, utterly and irredeemably square, the provincial doings of a suburban Jezebel in sweaty congress with her balding neighbor. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Clara’s honeymoon and marriage was but a brief interlude in her marriage to herself, to her own endlessly interesting desires.
I never asked either Ben or Clara how accurate my guess was concerning Ben’s expectations and Clara’s blithe thwarting of those expectations. Not that they would have admitted anything of the sort — I can see Ben’s bemused stare and Clara’s smile. There is, however, the strong probability that it was when Ben came to realize that their union would do nothing to change Clara in the least, that he abandoned the marriage and became his wife’s dutiful if somewhat bored collaborator, and a voyeur who followed her erotic meanderings with a detached interest.