Frog (77 page)

Chinese food and movies. In fact I've tried to bring some writers onto the scene to change that, but another time, hey? and feel good,” and he says “That's very kind, thanks.” Months later goes out of his way to pass their building. Looking through all the store windows around there just in case and sees her on one of the checkout lines of the supermarket on her block. Goes in, says he was heading for the subway, looked left just for a second and couldn't believe his eyes. “Watch out,” she shouts as the conveyor belt moves her food and she jokes how she sometimes thinks her hand's going to move with it when she's thinking about something else and disappear under the belt. “Who knows what's under there; I imagine teeth.” Laughs, at the same time realizing he's being phony since he doesn't think it funny. Invites him upstairs for coffee; Ricardo's in Germany for an opening of his work. Carries both bags, despite her protests, and remembers shopping with her when they lived together; always liked it. Coffee's rich, ground just for this brewing; king- or queen-sized mattress on the floor behind a screen. Very little furniture, all the lighting fluorescent except for two student lamps by their bed pillows, most of the place seems to be his studio. “Where do you work when you're home?” and she says in bed or at the kitchen table. “Ricardo pays the bills and is the at-home artist and it was his place so gets most of the space.” Lots of expressionistic nudes, still lifes, sunsets or rises over some Mediterranean fishing village it seems with mountains in the back and big storms boiling behind them. None of the nudes look like her except a little in the face: heavier breasts, larger aureoles, bigger bushes, darker hair, thinner legs, squarer buns. “Interesting; nice; good; exciting; terrific color, any of you?” and she says “Zillions, in every kind of pose, clothed and unclothed, including some frankly pornographic ones and a few unerotic nudes with him—'Artist and His Model'—but they go straight into the gallery or on the road. These are all early works to hide the cracks.” Books piled up against the walls, bunches of tiny dried flowers throughout the loft, bathroom smells from her soap; in it a life-sized mirror-image self-portrait, he supposes, looking as if he's about to break the mirror with his brush; dark, handsome, bearded, angry, long fat semierect penis; only painting so far he really likes. “That him in there?” and she says “It's embarrassing, that one. I like to tell people it's his nonexistent identical-twin brother, but maybe that doesn't help,” and he laughs when she does, again thinks he's a phony. Wants to throw her down and rip her clothes off and rape her. Give her time only to put her diaphragm in if that's what she still uses—looked for the case in the bathroom but didn't find it—but to tape her mouth if he has to and flatten her to the mattress, grab her ass from behind with both hands and push her up to him as far as she can go and to come fast and for the whole thing to be over with forever. Maybe for them to stay locked like that for a few minutes but without him looking at her and then if he can to come again the same way or with her turned over. To go to jail for it, long as they'd want to stick him in it—he wouldn't give any resistance. Kiss on the cheeks good-bye. “We really should do dinner,” she says. “Ricardo would enjoy meeting you.” “Sure he would.” “Why wouldn't he? He's interested in anyone with a serious purpose, doesn't have to be art, and says the two of you are much alike. He's punched his hand through a door and wall a few times too.” “I only did it that once and would like to forget about it.” He calls and they meet twice in the next two years, for coffee, the next time lunch. Ricardo sold the loft and went to Paris to live and work and she's following him in a month. She's studying art history now, also figure drawing. He says he'll take her to the airport by bus; she says she does have a lot of luggage so it would be a great help. In the flat she's staying at when he picks her up he says he has something he doesn't know if he should tell her. “Paris has evaporated,” she says. “I'm still madly in love with you, I'm sorry,” and chokes up. She looks consoling while busily getting last-minute things together. “I didn't know that and wish it weren't true. We've become good friends and I'd hate for anything to spoil it.” “Don't worry, nothing will; I'm not about to make a move on you.” Kisses her hands, just before she's going to board he hugs her good-bye. She keeps her head stretched to the side so he can't get at her lips when he kisses her. “Oh, I forgot,” though he intended it for now, and pulls out of his coat two gift-wrapped paperbacks and a jar of instant tea and she says “Gosh, where am I going to stash these? I haven't an inch of space left,” and he says he'll send them to her and takes them back. They correspond about once every other month. Tells her he's coming to Paris to live, always wanted to and isn't it the thing for a young writer to do? and he can't take another day of substitute teaching in junior high schools but put away enough money from it; maybe he'll get to see her, take her to lunch. Who you kidding? he tells himself. He's going because she's there and in her last letter she said things weren't going well with Ricardo; their relationship's often been tempestuous but now it was getting uncivilized. He thinks: she's usually broke, has no job there, they've been living outside of Paris and not going in much, she's written, so maybe she'll want to move into the hotel with him and let him support her awhile. At the least, if she's living off him, she'll let him screw her from time to time and maybe eventually something deeper might develop and maybe right away. Certainly if he learns French fluently, which he plans to, and gets a job there with some American firm or French firm needing Americans in editing or news or something like that—just writing anything—things will even get better for them. He calls her day after he gets there and Ricardo says she left today for New York and is probably this minute at the Luxembourg airport. He calls Icelandic there, they get her and she says “I didn't leave because you were coming, though I knew you were and wanted to see you, but because Rick and I had the worst fight of our lives and I didn't want to be in France or even Europe another second.” “Cash in your ticket, get your luggage off the plane if it's already on. And if you can't, don't worry, I'll buy you new clothes and reimburse you for your ticket some way if they don't refund it, but come stay with me at my hotel here or in your own room at the hotel—I'll take care of all of it for as long as you want and I won't make any kind of demands on you.” “Write me,” she says. “It'll give me surrogate pleasure reading about the wonderful experiences and people you're meeting in Paris.” Doesn't know anyone there, writes a little, walks around a lot, studies French at the Alliance Francaise every morning but gets to meet no one in his classes—Bulgarians, South Americans, Israelis, who only want to be with one another, and Africans who only want to meet girls-goes to bars young Americans and Scandinavians hang out in but can never open a conversation and nobody starts one with him. Calls Ricardo a month after he gets there and says he got a letter from Janine “and she said what a great cheap area yours is to live in, so I'm coming out by train to look around and wonder if I could stop by to get advice on what the good blocks are and so on,” which is all a lie: no letter so far and only wants to see where she lived, bed she slept in, guy she slept with, any new paintings of her, just any trace of her, and maybe Ricardo will also introduce him to some people, or give him names and addresses of Americans in Paris, who could become acquaintances or friends. Ricardo's short—he thought him tall from his self-portrait—muscular, rough looking, talks tough, New York, paint clothes, paint flecks in his hair and on his nose, place smelling of oils, polite, laughs loud, gives him a beer, bisquits, hard salami, the best chair, hovel a mess, parakeet flying in and out of its open cage, two pussycats she took in and left behind, says “She's a complex creature—we both know that—with no ambition or focus, which I didn't mind—did you?—since it meant she was always here for me when I was hungry or horny or hungover or boorishly talkative or things like that—but which other men might not like, her always waiting on or for them, and she hated. That the case, she should've stuck in acting; she could've made a potful and name at it with her magnetism and face—the eternal childknockout—and she was superb at it I heard. Anyhow, years of my shit, she wanted someone gentler, quieter, she said, and who'd ultimately want to marry and give her little snotnoses and help her raise them, and I guess I fooled around on the side a little too much too, even giving her crabs once, but put that burning lotion on you and you get rid of them quickly enough, and she knew that part of me from the start but it all must've built up. She's something though, right?—great cook, great in the sack, intuitive and ethereal and bright as they make them and with that right zing of cheer and throaty voice that gobbles you up—no wonder men at bars punched one another out and in every language just to have the privilege of buying the next bottle of mineral water for her.” No new paintings of her since for a year now he's only been doing old or decrepit nudes and mad people and idiots of both sexes when he isn't doing imaginary cityscapes. Wants to take Howard to a bar where she used to play darts and pinball and write poetry but he pretends to have a stomachache, “I think something to do with the water at my hotel which the
propriétaire
, if that's for the man, said was safe to drink,” thinks why the hell don't I tell him I can't stand him and am immensely jealous because he knows all he has to do to get her back is phone her and act nice and apologize and say everything's going to be peachy-keen between them from now on in and that even though he understands her all right she's too fucking good for him and that she only lived with him and stayed in love this long and would go back to him because she's a bloody self-destructive putz. Every time he gets a letter from her he goes to the small fenced-in park across from the hotel to read it, and if it's raining, to the café a street away to read it over coffee and a brioche, even if it's delivered in the third mail. Gets a writing fellowship to California and she says she'll meet him at the ship when it docks in New York. She's not there. Calls her at the apartment she's sitting for and she says “I phoned your home for the exact arrival time and your mother asked me not to meet you, that I've done enough harm and shouldn't even try to see you because if I do you'll probably stay here and forget the fellowship. I'm sorry she feels that way but I can see what she means. My changeability has had a long string of messing things up.” “You really think so? Ah, we're past that. Can I come over now?” “Love for you to.” “Where you going?” his mother says and he says “Janine, I have to give her something somebody gave me for her in Paris and was too breakable to send,” and she says “You're nuts,” and his father says “A glutton for punishment; let him out of here, he won't listen to us anyway.” Kisses her at the door. It was just to be on the cheek from his part but she puts her lips out, arms around him—he follows but lets his hands droop—and pulls him in, keeps him there. Gets an erection, backs away and says he's sorry, “thought I could control it though it used to happen all the time when I was a kid—could barely get on the dance floor with anyone,” and she says “It's natural so who's worrying about it? And so many men are homosexual these days or letting it all come out what's always been hidden or stifled, that I'm glad to see you haven't changed. Just because it'd be so surprising, I think I'd become a nun if you became a homo, I mean gay.” They go out for dinner, hold hands on the table, say little, gaze into each other's eyes, laugh about that, “What's come over us, monsieur?” and he says “Compression, dilution, shrinkage, the aging process, Irma the Girl in Wraparound Body Plastic, the Little White Cloud That Cried, good ole Yankee soil, light and loose summer clothes, but don't listen to me since I don't know anything, but probably nothing, niente, yenta,” kiss hands (hers), rub cheeks against knuckles (his), knock off a bottle of Chianti, later make love. He thought it could happen and at the table devised a plan for the walk back and after to help it take place: act the way he did when he saw her at the Lipsatzes two years after their first big breakup: indifferent, distracted, uninterested, looking at everything but her (store windows, passersby, traffic, sky), talking—little he did and which had to be extracted—about uninteresting things: weather, world, hands in his pants pockets. At the door he said what he'd planned to: “Well, I'll see ya,” waved (planned), turned (unplanned) to the elevator (if she didn't say anything he was going to turn back to her and say “Oh, good night,”) when she said “This might be impertinent and maybe completely undesirable to you, but would you like to spend the night here?—you can,” and he said “Where, on the narrow couch?” She was shaking her head and smiling but he said “No offense meant, but after that tiny bunkbed aboard ship for nine days I need a real box spring and mattress,” and she said “With me; I wouldn't have asked otherwise, but if there's to be a discussion about it then we should forget it because I don't want to have it in my borrowed public hallway.” “No problem, I'd like to,” and went around her before she could change her mind, which he thought she was thinking she might, inside, said he was very tired, “I'm going straight to the bedroom if it's all right,” she said “Good idea; I'm pretty tired and a bit tipsy too,” no kisses, made sure not to touch her or smile, till she came out of the bathroom naked, turned on the fan and climbed into bed—he was already in it, wishing they'd shared a beer on the couch and he'd slowly taken off her clothes and then she'd helped him off with his. Thinks it's going to be just this one time: way she turned over after they were done, no good night kiss, and moved away during the night each time he pressed up to her or put his foot on hers. “Something the matter?” he asked once and she said “Nothing, why should it be?” and he said “I hope it wasn't my disinterested attitude before we went to bed and possibly even on the street—I was just thinking about other things then: ship this morning, being back, flying to California in a few days—I don't even have a place there to stay yet or know how I'm going to get from airport to campus housing office,” and she said “You were fine, everything's all right, and I can understand: moving around so much can do it.” Nah, something's wrong: gaze and stuff at dinner were an act (not on his part) or the wine, or plus it, and going to bed with him, and he's being realistic here, not self-pummeling, was probably the first of her every-third-year gift to him for being such a dopey faithful friend. He should know by now nothing he does will work with her; even if she said she loved him he wouldn't believe it; he doesn't know what she'd have to do for it to take; if she said she wanted to come to California with him, he'd let her, but still wouldn't believe she'd stay. What would he care? She'd help him settle in, take away the jitters of a new place, few days' lays, fellow fellowists or whatever they're called would see he came with someone of substance or just beautiful and engaging and after she left there'd be other women out there: bigger, blonder, less something, more something, younger, fresh. If she said “Let's get married,” he'd say OK and if she actually did it—he'd never push—only then would he say it took, but maybe even then he'd be suspect. So maybe after a couple of years of relatively untroubled marriage; probably only then, and also with a baby or when she was visibly pregnant with the first. So he tries making the most of it when he wakes up and she's still sleeping. If there's one time he's going to remember her, this is to be it, but that's never worked much either. Slowly pulls the sheet off of her. She's on her back, knee up before it settles and rests, eyelids for a few seconds fluttering. Loves her body: hard, soft, no tan or extra bulge, light fuzz on her arms and legs; never shaved, freckled chest. Gently puts his face up to her pubic hair and skims his lips through it. Smells: no odor; inhales: there's something, more of urine and vaginal cream, but not much; wants to lick it but doesn't want to wake her. Could be she's awake, curious what he's doing, peering at him through the thinnest eyeslits. Maybe wants him to do what he wants to but doesn't want to show she's awake for it might stop him. If they only had a signal. Inspects her breasts, area around the aureoles, nipple tips, as much as he can see inside her vagina without parting it, legs, neck, arms, armpit, hair there, curves, midriff. To see if he can detect any change in her body since he saw her naked years ago. No new lines, scars, bumps, weight gain, gray. Face next to hers now; she's smiling while sleeping but no fluttering. Is she up, maybe waiting for him to just get on top of her and stick it in? He's ready and probably won't have another chance, maybe ever. Her reasoning: doesn't want him to think she wants it a second time when she does, long as he's here; then he might think she wants him to stay. No, not how women feel or think. Time he wanted to rape her; glad he didn't, her participation better than any forced lay, and of course other things: stigma, prison, her rage. And once in, which should be easy with last night's semen and grease and if need be his spit, even if she objected and didn't want it, he thinks she'd let him finish if he was quick. In a way rape but all she'd have to do was say get off and if he wasn't coming at the time or in a few seconds, he would. Oscillating fan lifting her head hair up and moving her pubic hair every time it blows her way, plus the horripilation on her legs. “You up,” he whispers, “or just your goose bumps and hair?” Smile doesn't turn smilier; she's asleep, lids fluttering again, or is that a trick? Only that once last night, he wanted it again but she said kind of drowsily “My poor pussy's conked out before I have, so not possible.” Wanted to say “You don't have to do a thing, just stay there, asleep if you want,” but caught himself moment before he was going to say it, also dropped the grin. “What do you mean ‘poor'—I was too rough or went in too far?” “I think I have the beginning of a yeast thing in there, but nothing that should spread.” “Then maybe in the morning if you're feeling better,” and she said “Fine… nice… what're we talking of?… really, sleepy, sweetie, OK?…” and then seemed to be asleep, that kind of breathing. Kissed her shoulder, erection jammed against her behind, hoping she'd make a little wiggling move or something suggesting he stick it in. Bet if he had, halfway or less, quarterway or just the head or tip, she wouldn't have noticed it. Should have, then moved the way he would and jerking it with his hand; probably so little left, wouldn't have been a mess. Six-thirty but bright out; puts his arm across her, sheet up and feels himself getting sleepy. Next thing: she's nudging him awake with her toes, sitting on the bed stretching, saying she's been writing a play these days, neglected to tell him because she didn't think he'd be interested, and is dying to get at it, so he'll have to leave right after a quick continental breakfast, and jumps out of bed. “You see?” he shouts and from the bathroom she says angrily “See what?” and he says “Nothing, something to myself how I should try to get some writing time in today too,” and wonders what did I mean? but glad he caught himself again. Over coffee and rolls she says she's going to her folks later for a few days, but they'll write. At the door he wants to say “One question only; why'd you sleep with me if you were planning to give me the quick heave?” and going down in the elevator thinks “I hate being so fucking mature,” and slams the wall with his palms, hoping she heard it and knows what the sound means. That night thinks of calling her at her folks and saying “One question only; why'd you even want to meet me at the ship?” Next day thinks of calling her there and saying “Listen, what are you doing that's so important in New York? You haven't your own apartment; you're living out of a suitcase; come to California with me. Not for loveydovemaking but because we're pals. We'll be around writers, you can write there and maybe even better than here. You say your play's about out-of-work stage actors? Well, distance does it, I learned in Paris, writing better than I ever did about New York.” Goes to California. Lots of things happen. Comes back to New York for Christmas to be with his family, didn't plan to but calls her, they go to a party, dance, holds her close and moves them slowly though not that kind of music, pot passed around but she won't touch it or even pass it so neither does he, her head against his chest, eyes closed he sees, when out of nowhere he says “You of course know I've never stopped loving you since I met you, but didn't I say almost the exact same thing last time I was in?—I forget,” and she looks up and says “Why do you?” and he says “Love you?” and she nods, kisses his chest, looks up again and nods and he thinks is he on to something here? maybe she wants to be convinced before she says she wants to go to California with him without him even asking her: personality, voice, looks of course, her hair, their sex, intelligence which he should have listed first, perceptiveness, humor, playfulness, even her changeability, her size, breath, shape, smells, kindness, gentleness, how she is with people, those she doesn't even know, upbringing, way she drives, folks, everything, he can't think of anything about her he doesn't admire or like very much or love, her searches, curiosity he means, all the things she's done and does, oh, they've had their differences, let's face it, but her background, foreground, middleground, she's laughing, ‘It's true, I just feel tremendously good with you, holding you like this, dancing, sitting, just knocking on the door here before, and things that can't be explained: biology, chemistry, psychopathology,” she's laughing, prospect of babies, brushing her hair, cutting her toenails, sudsing her back, kissing the top of her head like this, does it, she's laughing, “You name it; the full gamut; that's why, now that you asked,” and she says “Thank you, sweetie, all very nice, really, I appreciate it, needed it too, but I don't deserve it from someone so loving and good and after the way I've treated you,” and he says “Ah shucks, ma'am,” and she puts her lips up and they kiss and he thinks is this going to be it, tonight, tomorrow, she's finally decided on him or at least for the time being and who knows till when? don't say anything; no hopes up; just see. They dance some more, kiss, hold hands while sitting, woman she knows who wants to talk with her alone says “Boy, don't you two ever separate?” they laugh, later