Leaving Brooklyn (18 page)

“I not only think it, I know it.”

“You're probably right. Isn't what you did called taking advantage of someone?”

“Oh, taking advantage. The first time, yes, that was a little crazy. You came back, though.”

“I had to. The lens.”

“Audrey, come now.”

“I've been to so many doctors. It's a real drag, starting all over. “

He grinned. “I won't let it go to my head, then.”

I didn't understand that either. “If it's not taking advantage, then what do you feel so guilty about?”

“Interference. Disrupting your—what shall I say—innocent life. Don't you see? What it makes me out to be.”

“But I didn't mind being disrupted—”

“Oh, I know. Don't I know it,” he moaned. Rather wittily, I thought. “I've figured that out.”

Just when he was starting to be interesting, to sound almost like a book, I would have to leave him. And he accepted that so easily. I had prepared, steeled myself as if with a girdle from the lingerie shop window, to hear more wild words. But he wasn't talking about drowning in desire or running away; he was thinking of getting tea bags and aspirins for Helene on the way home. Our talk reeked of finality—otherwise we wouldn't have talked at all. As scary as the mad words had been, this was worse. Quite safe.

“If you feel it's so wrong,” I said, “why do you do it?”

“I told you why last time. I didn't think you wanted to hear it again. Why do you do it? Do you know?”

“But I don't feel so guilty. I'm not losing sleep over this.”

“No? You must wonder something about it.”

“Well, yes, I do.” I frightened myself, speaking so candidly. I was never so candid with anyone in Brooklyn, and besides that, he was a grown man.

He put his hand on my stomach. He moved it down till it covered all the hair and rested it there, cupping the pubic bone.
“Well, what?” He pressed down as though to encourage me, or push an answer out of me.

“All right. What you see in me, really. Since you hardly know anything about me. That's what I don't get.”

“Audrey,” he said soberly, “you are painfully amusing.”

My eyes filled with tears. “I thought,” I whispered, “you would give me an answer.”

He kissed me and began caressing me again, murmuring in my ear that he loved me. I was confused. I had thought that part was over. And he had never said it like that, calmly. Perhaps I was supposed to say, I love you too, but—God, the purity of her!—I would have had to figure out first whether, in any sense of the word, I did love him, and there was no time for figuring.

“Turn over,” he said softly.

He wanted that. Well. Of all the ways, this was not the most pleasurable—I couldn't come unless he reached around to touch me with his fingers—but it gave another sort of pleasure: being overpowered and weighed down, the warmth of him on my back and his breath on my shoulders, the sheer animal absurdity, the discomfort, the hard breathing, and his collapsing on me at the end—both of us collapsing like a house of cards, flat onto the leather couch, and his covering me from top to toe like someone shielding a child from enemy gunfire.

I turned over and he climbed on top of me and whispered my name. I thought I was ready—like the bride in the wine-colored book—but something was wrong. He seemed to be floundering around. When I realized what he was looking for my brain flipped over as my body had done. This was beyond inconceivable.

“No!” I twisted but he gripped me tight, one arm around my waist, and he was already there.

“Please, Audrey.”

“No. Get away.”

“I won't hurt you. I promise. You tell me if it hurts and I'll stop. Please,” he whispered, and I felt a widening, and he was inside.

“Oh no,” I said, but I wasn't struggling my hardest. I was getting interested. Horrible as this was, it was not boring, it was not Brooklyn. It might never happen again.

He pushed farther in and there was a slight searing, then a deep ache. Something dreadful was going to happen to my body, a splitting. Any minute.

“Stop, really.”

He stopped. “Did I hurt you? I'm sorry.” He reached around and began fingering me in front and my body started moving without my wanting to, little shudders. “Ah,” he said.

I was moving with him, going somewhere I had not dreamed people could go, way beyond books. I was nothing anymore except the moving and knowing I would die of this or be punished for it. For there must be something truly wicked in me, to be always ready to be interested. He pushed farther in and it hurt again.

“No, stop!” I almost called out his name, but not quite.

He stopped and his hand stopped too. I was bereft. I gave a little cry.

“Well, what do you want, Audrey?”

Now that he was still, the pain was gone. The only pain was the absence of his hand touching me.

“Oh please,” he whispered again. “Say do it.”

He was lying to me. It was not a situation for “please.” He could do whatever he wanted and he knew it.

“Just… just do…” The words wouldn't come out.

“No, Audrey.” Not a tone you could say “please” in. A stern teacher, or my mother holding fast to her terms. “Not just for you. But I'll stop everything if you say so. Do you understand?”

He began moving again, slowly and carefully, and as his hand came back to me I gasped and burst into tears, and that was how it went. I couldn't tell if I was shaking from the sobs or from the pleasure, and after the choked noises in his throat and after he slipped out and fell beside me, I punched his couch, then turned around and punched him.

“What are you, some kind of pervert or something?”

He caught my wrists. “Do you really think so?”

“I don't know what I think. I don't know anything anymore.” Hearing my words, I knew why he felt guilty.

“If you don't know by now… No, I'm not some kind of pervert. I just wanted to show you something.” He held my wrists in one hand as if to show me, too, how useless was my flailing about. “That's what you wanted all along, isn't it? A thorough education?”

“I don't know what I wanted.”

“I think I did my part pretty well, assuming you wanted to find out all about it. A little something off the beaten path.”

“Oh, how can you say things like that! I didn't want anything! I didn't even want the goddamn lens.”

“Well, I want something, dammit.” He let go of my wrists. “I want you to remember me.”

“Oh!” Something shifted in my head and I felt a settling of vision, as when a dizziness begins to pass. Or as if my eyes were seeing together, merging for the first time. What I saw was him. He was a person, like me. He wanted to be remembered, to have a place. All of a sudden I wanted to kiss him and say the kinds of words he said, but I couldn't, not after what he had done. “I would have remembered you anyway, without… that. But you also wanted to hurt me, didn't you?”

“No, I didn't intend to hurt you.”

“I didn't say you
intended
to. I said you
wanted
to.”

“Very fine distinctions for a little girl.”

“Don't be patronizing.”

“You're the patronizing one. You' ve always been. All right, maybe I did want to hurt you.”

“But why?”

“Why do you think? You've hurt me.”

“Me?” I rose up on my elbows to look down at him. “I haven't done a thing.”

“You're exactly right. That's how you hurt.” He stood up. “Let me have a look at the lens before you go.”

“I don't have it with me.”

“You don't?” He studied me for a moment, went to his desk, and reached under some papers. “You should have it checked from time to time. Your eyes are still changing. I'll give you the name of another doctor.” He looked funny, leafing through his address book stark naked.

“Another doctor? Ha! Just what I need. No thanks, I think I'm very well used to it by now.”

“As you like. You can tell your mother I said you don't need to come anymore, and don't forget to use the cleaning solution. You can get it at any drugstore. Call me if it ever starts to hurt. Or call someone.”

“Could I have one of those?” I pointed to the box on his desk.

“What for? A souvenir?”

“I said I'd remember you. No, I just want one. You gave one to that man before me.”

“Don't play games with your eyes, Audrey. You can do damage, fooling around.”

“I won't. I'll use it for a costume or something. A pirate. It's a useful thing to have around the house.”

He plucked an eye patch from the box, stretched the elastic, and flicked it over to me. It landed on my stomach. I ran my fingers over the black buckram and held the patch up to my good eye, then my bad. I was so intrigued by this new toy that I would have put it on right then, only I didn't want to hear him scold.

“Is it okay if I make a phone call?”

“Sure, go ahead.” He was gathering his clothes. Suddenly he stopped. “Who are you calling?”

“My mother. To say I'll be late. You don't trust me, do you?”

“Not entirely. One word from you could destroy me.”

“I'm not that kind of person.”

I sat down in his swivel chair and picked up the phone. I had a plan. I was about to stage a scene, fantastical, born of too great a strain, too wide a sundering. I was going to talk to my mother in our ordinary Brooklyn way with the eye doctor close
by, naked—the reverse of the telephone scene she had staged at home two weeks ago. He would be looking at me, maybe even touching me, while I told her I was finished studying with Arlene. In this way, at last I could bring my two worlds together, just as double vision, worlds side by side, can be corrected by a lens that fuses them. I was the one connection between the worlds; my voice humming over the wire would be the audible lens through which they merged. I needed this, even if only for a moment. And my mother, with her single vision, would never know what I had accomplished. She would never know the adventure of my life, in which I was giving her this vicarious role. Only the eye doctor would know.

But as I was dialing he went into the bathroom to dress. I suppose he did trust me to some extent, and he was no voyeur. My plans were ruined, everything stayed split. I heard the water running, and then my mother answered the phone.

“It's me. I'm leaving in a while. We had a lot to go over.”

The eye doctor is washing, I was saying to her in another, secret voice. If my bad eye had had a voice it would have spoken these words. He's washing the traces of me off his… everything. He's rinsing out his mouth, rinsing me off his tongue and gums and the soft epithelial tissue inside his cheeks.

“Oh, Audrey, I was wondering what happened to you. We were just eating. I'll leave supper for you on a plate, 'cause I want to clean up. They 'll be here in less than an hour.”

“Okay. Don't worry, Arlene'll walk me to the subway.”

I'm sitting in the eye doctor's chair with no clothes on. Oozing onto the chair… If you only knew…

“All right, 'bye. The studying go all right?”

“Fine.” I can still feel him in me. Every opening. I'm very warm, Mom. Very.

I dressed quickly and wanted to rush out. It was over. I hated elaborate good-byes. But he took me in his arms and kissed me, stroked my face and hair and murmured words about not
forgetting me. Just as in the movies. And I did my part gracefully enough, I thought.

My things were in the waiting room. He actually held my coat as I fumbled my way into it—I hadn't enough practice to do that with grace. It was painful to change, under his gaze, into a gawky schoolgirl, looping a scarf around my neck and hoisting a loaded book bag over my shoulder. I couldn't risk speaking—I was afraid I would cry, I felt so sorry for both of us, so cleaved and bleak, and my life evaporating before my eyes. How could I return to Brooklyn, where this didn't exist? But where else could I go?

Halfway down the hall I turned and waved. He was in the doorway, his hands raised and flat against the frame as if holding it up. His shirt was rumpled and his tie loose around his neck. He looked younger than he had ever looked, very young, almost of an age for me. I fled to the elevator.

The snow had stopped, leaving the sky velvety and clear, with frosty stars. Everything was lightly covered, and the sounds of cars and footsteps and doormen's whistles were all softened. I put the eye patch over my good eye. I would walk to the subway that way, half blind, with the white city shimmering hazily around me. The glowing globes of street lamps expanded and broke into starbursts, dazzling and blinding me with splinters of light. In between the lamps were impenetrable stretches of darkness—I couldn't see people approaching until they were nearly on top of me. I stretched out my arms for balance, the way we used to do playing Blindman's Bluff at birthday parties. The church was a huge amorphous mass, its fine points and articulations lost in blur and darkness: a cave, not a haven. The headlights of cars were blinding too, bearing down on me like monster eyes; crossing the streets was madness. I needed to find my life, not lose it. I took off the eye patch and hurried to the subway.

I had forgotten to be afraid of the subway, and in fact there was little need for fear. Close to seven o'clock, rush hour was over. I found a seat, tugged
Anna Karenina
out of my book bag,
and didn't look up until my stop, which I could feel by the length and rhythm of the ride, the intervals between the Brooklyn stations I no longer needed to count—they were imprinted on me like the stages of phylogeny are imprinted on the embryo: Clark, Borough Hall, Hoyt, Nevins, Atlantic, Bergen, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn Museum, Franklin, Nostrand, Kingston, Utica.