Strange Are the Ways of Love

8

As he climbed the stairs he was struck by the utter silence of the building. The party was over now. Only the smoking ruins would be left. And Saundra would go right on living among them. Maybe she would throw away some bottles or empty an ashtray here and there, but she would make an all-out effort to maintain the general disorder.

The silence was deafening. It was after four, and even Saundra’s charm hadn’t been able to sustain the party any longer than that. He laughed silently, thinking that the guests hadn’t had the opportunity to say good-by to their unwilling host. Not that they would have even if he had been there. It was all part of the ritual. You avoided good manners because society imposed them on you and the Village imposed the reverse. You fought manners, just as you fought cleanliness and belief and emotion. You had to prove forever that nothing really mattered to you, that you were living your own life and would continue to do so even if it killed you.

It hadn’t bothered him before. In the past he lived in filth and missed meals and begged and stole, but before not even the hunger bothered him. Now, for some reason, he wanted more than what he had. More precisely, he wanted something different, but the intensity of his desire made it appear to be something more important and more valuable than what he had at the moment.

What exactly did he want? He paused on the stairway, hunting for a word that would sum up the change in his desires.

Respectability? No, he had lived too long alone and within himself to begin worrying about the opinion of the world. Security? Partly, but it was more than that.

Direction? That was closer. Inevitably, he was getting older, and the period for a person to find himself had to end when he grew older. It might be considered colorful for a guy to knock around the country at sixteen, but by the time he got to be twenty-three he wasn’t colorful any more. He was just a bum.

Sometimes he felt that he was making progress. The audition with Comet, for instance — if that went through he had a chance, and if the chance worked he would have a start in the right direction.

Purpose? Yes, that was probably close enough. If one word could embrace everything, purpose was the word. Maybe nothing mattered, as the code of the Village declared. Maybe they were all right and nothing at all was important. But even if they were right, where were they? What did it get them?

He himself needed purpose, a reason for existing. It would sound corny to the skeptics. But there it was. If there was no purpose it was necessary to invent one for himself. What was it Voltaire had said? If there were no God man would have invented Him. Maybe the same thing could be said for purpose. His goal was his music, and if that was meaningless he had to make it mean something for him. He had to make each step along the way seem significant and important.

Otherwise there was no real point to anything. He might as well be dead, or never have been born to begin with.

The audition, for example. It would be important. God, he would be good! He’d play them like fish on a line. He’d figure out what songs those bastards wanted to hear and he’d sing them the way they would want to hear them.

Compromise? Yes, it was a compromise. He was selling out, but somehow the idea of selling out didn’t hold the terror it once held for him, the terror that seemed so awful to the little world of coffee shops and Village parties.

He hadn’t mentioned the audition to Jan. Paradoxically, Saundra was the only person he had been able to tell simply because he knew it had made the least possible impression upon her. She undoubtedly had forgotten by now.

But he would tell Jan. It had been a mistake to kiss her but it had been something he couldn’t help. God, she was a moody kid, getting all panicky from a kiss. At any rate she had forgiven him, and she certainly seemed to like him. Would she fall in love with him?

He didn’t know. Nor did he know whether what he felt for her could be described as love. He wasn’t sure just what love meant, or whether such a state actually existed outside of novels and poems and songs.

He knew at least that he had never been in love. There had been women, and there had been a few women that it had hurt him to break with, but there had been nothing he could think of as love. He knew that he enjoyed being with Jan and that he was comfortable with her, more so than with any woman before. But was it anything deeper than that?

He didn’t know. He felt vaguely that it might be good to be in love with a girl like Jan. A man might be able to go farther if he had someone to go along with him. A man might care more about things if someone else cared, too.

He wondered idly whether she was a virgin. She probably was, and he was surprised to realize that he somehow hoped she was. It didn’t make sense; he had always wanted his women to be as experienced as possible.

Maybe it did make sense, in a strange kind of way. If he was in love.

Maybe he was in love. Whatever in hell love was...

“Is that you, Mike?”

Saundra’s voice broke into his thoughts, intruding just as sharply as the two girls had intruded upon him and Jan in the courtyard. The silence was gone. Twenty-four Cornelia Street was noisy again.

“Mike?”

He took a deep breath and began to climb the stairs.

“Laura?”

She turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub, reaching for the towel. God, a shower was good! It was good in the morning to wake you up, but it was even better at night when you were hot and sticky from the heat and stickiness that was New York in July. First the hot water pelting down on you while you soaped yourself and worked the shampoo into your hair, soaping and rinsing until you were clean all over and your hair squeaked like a violin when you pulled a strand of it between your fingers.

And then the cold water that stung like needles, like the torture of a thousand cuts, and you wanted to get out from under it but you liked the way it snapped and bit at you and the way it cleared your head and closed up your pores and made you feel even cleaner and much more alive.

“Laura? Christ, aren’t you done yet?”

The shower hadn’t quite worked. Sometimes you needed more than a shower. Sometimes you were too dirty for soap or shampoo to cleanse you, dirty inside in a way that made you want to open your mouth under the shower and wash yourself out. And then you could soap and rinse until you were limp and you felt better but it still hadn’t quite worked. Somehow you were still dirty.

“I’m coming,” she said.

She was dry and she should go in now to Peggy, but she didn’t want to go, not yet, not for a moment.

What did she want? That was a good enough question. Whatever it was she kept on looking for it, looking for it in bed after bed, even breaking down for awhile and paying $25 an hour to look for it on a couch until she decided that analysis wasn’t the answer, that perhaps there was no answer, or that the only conceivable answer was to keep on looking for something that wasn’t there and never would be there. To search a thousand beds, and to bring a thousand girls to help you look for it in your own bed in your own room, and never to find it because it wasn’t there at all.

Yes, she knew what she was going to do. She knew precisely what she was going to do and why she was going to do it.

Musical Beds.

It wouldn’t work. It had never worked and it never would work, and Jan Marlowe would be the memory that Peggy was going to be, that Peggy was destined to be even now while she waited impatiently in the bedroom. Jan Marlowe had not yet reached the bedroom but already she was waiting to become a memory. She was a potential memory, as surely as a fetus was an unborn corpse.

Perhaps if she could ever have a child, if she could feel her belly growing larger and know that a lover had made it grow, perhaps then the game could end.

Of if she could father a child. The thought was first ridiculous and then as perfect as it was unattainable. If she could give a girl a baby, even a girl like Peggy who was becoming a bore already and who wouldn’t last more than another night, no matter how good she was in bed with the lights out.

There was something inevitably ephemeral about a relationship that could never bear tangible fruit. In bed with a girl — almost any girl — she could feel that they were building something, that their bodies together were moving toward a goal.

And when the climax had been reached and passed the vision passed with it. Nothing was built, nothing would endure.

Each time she was fooled. Each time the quick and beautiful spasm seemed to bring fulfillment and left only emptiness. And she knew she would continue to be fooled forever.

Jan Marlowe. She wouldn’t have to wait long now, just a day or two at the most. There was no mistake possible in interpreting the look in the girl’s eyes or the expression on her face. The boy who had been holding her in his arms was quite meaningless, a red herring that didn’t fool her at all, a very insignificant bit of camouflage.

A day or two more. That was all.

“Damn it, Laura!”

She sighed softly, turned out the light, and reached for the door.

The apartment was worse than ever.

That was the first thing he noticed. Even before he was aware of her his eyes took in the mess that was the apartment. Beer cans covered the floor, some standing upright while others lay on their sides with beer leaking out of them onto the rug. There were empty wine bottles as well, and he wondered momentarily whether she would throw them out or attempt to drip candles on them. Once she had gone on an elaborate candle-dripping spree, carving deep grooves in the side of each candle so that they would drip faster and cover the bottles rapidly so that people wouldn’t know that she had just started with her candle-dripping.

That night they had made love by candle-light.

No, she wouldn’t start that again. The bottles would go and the beer cans would go, but the stains would remain in the rug forever. He closed his eyes for a second and pictured her kneeling on the floor and methodically rubbing dirt into the rug for atmosphere.

“It’s about time.”

Then he saw her. She was lying on the bed as usual but in a slightly different pose this time. Her shoes and socks were off, tossed somewhere among the debris of the party. She was still wearing her sloppy paint-spattered dungarees that would rot before they wore out, but her sweater and bra were off.

Her breasts were bare. She was lying flat on her back, not even using a pillow, and her breasts jutted upward proudly. Her skin was milky white and the contrast with the dungarees and with the dark wine-colored blanket was striking. Her breasts would have been magnificent except that they were hers and that most things that were hers seemed phony and empty.

It was funny. When those breasts were encased in a sweater, a person would guess that they were the most necessarily phony thing about her. They looked too good to be quite true. But they were all real, all hers, all firm and solid flesh. They were the only real thing about her.

“Where did you go?”

“Out for a walk. I couldn’t take the party any more.”

“Oh? I thought it was a good party. Everyone else seemed to like it.”

He didn’t answer.

“Everybody said you were good tonight, too.” She remained motionless on the bed, only her lips moving and her breasts rising and falling as she breathed.

“I got kind of stoned.”

“You didn’t go out alone, did you?”

“No.”

“Who were you with? That little square from the coffee house?”

“She’s not a square, if you mean Jan.”

“So she’s not a square. That who it was?”

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

He felt himself getting angry, irritated at the way she talked and the way she was completely oblivious to the disorder of the room.

“Did you go to bed with her?”

He hadn’t expected that. But he should have known that she would ask, known it despite the fact that he had never made a half-serious pass at another girl since they’d started living together.

“No,” he said, finally.

“Too bad.”

She sat up on the bed and stared at him, opening her eyes very wide. Her eyes were large to begin with and larger with the eye-shadow, and now with her eyes wide open and her eyebrows raised she looked almost like a caricature of herself.

“But you wanted to, didn’t you?”

He didn’t answer.

“Of course you did. I knew that much from the bit you pulled at the Renascence. You’re not too subtle, Mike.”

“I’m not?”

“No. No, subtlety isn’t one of your strong points, Michael Hawkins. Come over here, will you?”

He was sitting in a chair across from her and he didn’t want to move at all, and he especially didn’t want to go to her.

“What for?”

She shook her head in exasperation. “God, you know what for. What’s the matter with me, Mike? Aren’t I any good? I try to be, you know. Aren’t I good in bed any more?”

“Yes,” he said, thinking. You’re good, all right. Like an actress, with every movement and every moan polished and rehearsed and absolutely meaningless. You’re marvelous. You’d make one hell of a whore.

“I know I am. Half the guys here tonight wanted to make me, you know. So why do I have to beg you?”

He stood up, forcing a smile. “Let’s fix up the pad a little,” he suggested. “It’s pretty messy.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“It’s terrible, Sandy. Let’s at least get rid of the beer cans.” He stooped over and started to pick up cans from the floor.

“That can wait. There’s something else I’d rather do just now.”

Her voice was husky, and he wondered whether she actually wanted him or whether the huskiness was just another part of the act, another gesture.

“Let’s clean up first.”

“To hell with it.”

“Come on.”

“Not now,” she said. “That can wait.”

“Dammit, it can’t wait! I’m sick of it, Sandy. I’m sick of the sloppiness all the time and I’m sick of the damned parties and the goddamned beer cans all over the floor!”

She jumped to her feet and grabbed him by the shoulder, knocking the beer cans from his hands. “Damn you,” she shouted, “I like it this way! And it’s my apartment and I pay the rent and you can just leave the goddamned cans on the floor and—”

She broke off suddenly. He wasn’t angry because for once the mask had slipped and she had said what she meant without stopping to think how it would sound. He turned from her and kicked a can, watching it skitter across the floor, bouncing off a wine bottle and rolling along the rug.

His eyes followed the can until it stopped rolling. Then he turned to her, seeing how ridiculous she looked in her dirty dungarees with her breasts and feet bare. He looked at her breasts without feeling anything, seeing her body only as a body to be serviced.

“All right,” he said levelly. “What do you want? What are you paying for?”

“Damn you. Oh, God damn you!”

“Tell me.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to because he didn’t feel anything, not even anger.

“You son-of-a-bitch.”

“It’s your money. What do you want?”

“What do you want?”

Silence.

“What do you want, Laura? Tell me.”

It was coming. They were naked together on the bed and the room was in darkness except for a single dim lamp that cast their shadows against the wall. Their bodies were almost touching, but she knew that the inch or so that separated them was an illusion. They were actually much farther apart.

And the break-up was coming. It would be more upsetting than usual because Peggy was small and weak and strangely vulnerable, and while she no longer loved her she did not want to hurt her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I want.”

“But you don’t want me.”

Silence.

“You don’t, do you? You don’t have to say it. I know you don’t and it’s a hell of a thing to know. I still want you, Laura. I want you and you don’t want me and I know you don’t. And it’s a hell of a thing.”

“I—”

“Don’t. I saw it coming, Laura. From the minute she walked into that goddamned bar. And when you shouted at me for swearing.”

“I didn’t mean to shout.”

“You didn’t exactly shout. But it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot. It’s over now, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She was both glad and sorry when the word left her lips. There was a necessary finality about it, but that finality was so harsh, so cruel.

Peggy’s eyes closed. She was tense and knotted inside but her facial muscles were relaxed and she looked childlike in her nakedness.

“It’s funny,” she said. “She wants you, you know, and she’ll be here tomorrow. She’ll be here on this bed right where I am, and you’ll be with her, holding her and touching her. And I’ll be somewhere else.”

She opened her eyes suddenly and for a moment Laura thought she was going to cry. But she swallowed and went on talking.

“I’ll leave in the morning. That’s what you want, isn’t it? No, don’t answer. I know it is but I don’t want to hear you say it. She’s lovely, you know. I don’t think she’s been with a girl yet, do you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Probably not. How long do you think you’ll last?”

“God. I don’t know.”

“It’s funny.” She closed her eyes again and smiled. “You know, we lasted a little less than a month. And when we started I thought we would go on forever. It’s crazy. Nobody ever lasts, and I knew that, but I couldn’t help—”

“I felt the same way.”

“Did you? But you must have known. I knew too but I faked myself out. It was perfect for awhile, wasn’t it?” There was something desperate in her question, as though she had to have the right answer or nothing would be left her.

“It was good,” Laura said. “It was very good.”

“Was.” She opened her eyes and there were little tears forming at the corners, but she was fighting not to cry, struggling with herself. “That sums it up, doesn’t it? Was. It’s all over.”

Silence. She wanted Peggy to cry, knowing how desperately the girl needed to cry. At the same time she hoped selfishly that Peggy would get control of herself because she too would cry and she hated to cry, hated herself for the weakness of it.

I’m weaker than she is, she thought, and the thought was disturbing.

“Laura?”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s selfish.”

“That’s all right:”

“I... I still love you, Laura.”

No, she thought. And she said, “It will be over soon, darling. It hurts like hell but it ends, and that’s the compensation for the shortness of the love. The pain doesn’t last so long.”

“I know.”

“I mean it. It can be over in a day, Peggy. You have to learn that. You have to grab on to that and never let go because you’ll hurt and be hurt over and over and it never stops.”

“I know. But I’m still going to be selfish.”

“Go ahead.”

“There’s only one thing I want from you and it’s the one thing I have no right to ask. But if I have it I’ll be able to leave tomorrow morning without crying, and it’s very important to me not to cry. I’ll cry later, but I don’t want you to see me crying. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

She paused, choking back tears and breathing hard, and finally she said, “I want to make love to you.”

“Oh!”

“If you don’t want to—”

“Oh, Peggy!”

She felt like crying but she didn’t want to cry or to let Peggy cry. She knew how Peggy loved her and she remembered how she had loved her and now she wanted so little, so very little.

Twice she opened her mouth to speak and twice she closed it because she was afraid to speak, afraid she would cry instead. She didn’t have to say anything.

She moved toward Peggy until their bodies were touching, put her arms around her and held her close. She I pressed her lips against Peggy’s and kissed her.

And Peggy’s mouth opened under hers, and Peggy’s hands began to move over her body, gently and then more insistently.

And Peggy moaned.

For the first time in his life he felt like a male whore. He stood up from the bed and turned away from her, not wanting to look at her, not wanting to see her or think of her. As he pulled on his clothes his skin felt sweaty and grimy.

“Mike?”

He began tying his shoes, fumbling with the laces. It was over now. He had given her just what she paid for and no more, and now he could leave and never come back and not see her again, not ever.

“I’m a bitch.”

For some reason he found it impossible to walk out without looking at her. He turned and saw her lying face down on the bed, stretched out full length, and foolishly naked.

“I’m a bitch and I’m sorry. But it doesn’t make any difference, does it?”

“No.”

“Of course not. I guess we’ve had it. I suppose you’re leaving?”

“Yes.”

“Of course,” she said. “I guess I didn’t have to ask.”

Her voice sounded very tired, flat and exhausted. “I’ll miss you,” she went on. “It sounds silly but I think I really will. Can you believe me?”

“Yes,” he said, not really meaning it, not really caring one way or the other.

“And I’m going back home,” she said. “I think I should.”

“Home?”

“To the Bronx. I guess that’s my home. It’s not that horrible a place, Mike. It’s like any other place. I suppose people always hate the place they come from.

“But it will be good to get back to Parkchester. I don’t really belong here, and my folks are good people. Oh, they’re middle-class and all that, but I’m middle-class too. This is just a game, this Village scene. I guess it’s time to give it up.”

She broke off suddenly and turned on the bed, raising herself on one elbow to stare at him. “I sound like Marjorie Morningstar,” she said. “And I don’t want to. But I can’t help it.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I won’t miss this place,” she said. “I never really lived here. The girl who lives here isn’t really me, Mike. I wish you had had a chance to get to know the real Sandra Cohen. You might have liked her. She’s dull but she’s fairly nice.”

She sat up suddenly. “Don’t go yet,” she said. “Sleep awhile first. Wait until morning.”

“It’s morning already.”

“Sleep anyway. You’re tired, aren’t you? You might as well sleep here.”

He didn’t want to. He wanted to leave, and he took a breath and started for the door.

“Mike—”

He stopped and she said, “Please stay with me. You don’t have to touch me and I’ll sleep on the floor if you want but I don’t want you to leave yet. This is the last night I’ll be staying here, Mike. I don’t want to stay all by myself.”

It wasn’t that much. It was very little to give her, very little indeed, and besides he was tired and there was no place else to go.

“All right, Sandy.”

She smiled, and he saw that her eye-shadow was smeared from crying. He hadn’t heard her cry.

“Good,” she said. “But first let’s clean up the apartment a little. Okay?”

“Sure.”

He was fully dressed and she was stark naked as the sun began to stream through the windows and they bent over to pick up bottles and beer cans and discarded clothing, working to clean up an apartment that would never be clean.

It was over.

She didn’t feel anything but emptiness. They had made love and nothing had happened for her, and now it was surely over and nothing remained of it. For a week the bed had been their only real meeting-place; now it too was gone and nothing remained.

Musical Beds.

And some joker had stopped the music.

She lay on the bed, not wanting to touch Peggy any more and yet not wanting to withdraw from her, not yet, not until they both got up and Peggy packed up her things and disappeared. Then for a few hours she could be alone until she heard the music start and took another partner.

She couldn’t sleep. Even with the shade drawn the daylight filtered into the room; besides, she was too tense and mixed-up inside to relax.

Her eyes closed. She thought of Jan and tried to erase the thought, feeling guilty for it, feeling that it was wrong now and unfair to Peggy to think of another girl. There would be time enough later.

In a minute there is time.

There would always be time. Time was cheap. Everything happened in very little time, quickly, abruptly, and the edges were always jagged when the break came.

Decisions and revisions that a minute can reverse. Back and forth, up and down, in and out, over and over. There was always time and there was never time enough, and the decisions were always both right and wrong and never in-between. And never permanent.

Do I dare to eat a peach?

Oh, yes. Oh, definitely, to eat a peach, to gobble down a million peaches and each time to spit out the pit. A million peach-pits.

Tomorrow.

And Peggy began to cry softly into her pillow.