Lit Riffs (3 page)

So he did, a little sheepishly to be sure. He wanted to apologize, but felt so, well, dazed and confused right then, that he had no idea how to even begin to try. He knew he had done something stupid, ugly, and thoughtless, but he hadn’t really meant anything by it, it was simply a product of his inexperience, which of course mortified him even
more
, till he felt he’d better get dressed and go or he was gonna wind up sitting there paralyzed. He’d never in his life felt more like a little boy, just as she had never felt more used, fucked, and then slapped down, put in what any cur of a male would be sure to think of as her rightful place, if for no other reason than that she was poor and single. She hated him, and all men, at that moment, and there was nothing in the world that could have changed that at the time.

When he was fully dressed, he stumbled across the bed, nearly breaking a leg and spilling across the floor, but no, he made it to his feet, though he still felt too wretched and ashamed to stand straight up all the way, so he kind of hunched across the room, hesitating by the door. He turned a bit, but was afraid even to look at her.

“Get out.” It was the voice of a sidewalk as it hits a drunk in the face. Except he was no longer drunk. He felt it, every dollop of loathing, contempt, finality. Sick in the pit of his gut, moving with the spindly gait of somebody staggering away from an automobile accident, he turned the knob on the door and let himself out. She turned her face to the wall, which was oily and stained in places and where she faced it almost black with the accumulated dirt and lives of so many people, most of them down-and-outers, over so many years, and she cried hard, bitter convulsive tears that seemed to come tearing out in great chunks like the face of some cliff smashed away by … what? One too many assholes? Solitary middle age with no real prospects in sight? The sudden sensation that it just might be the sum total of her life, for this was all she had managed to piece together in over four decades, and what in god’s name did she have to look forward to? Who wants a fifty-year-old hooker who’s particular about her services (no S&M, no showers, no really kinky stuff of any sort) in the first place? Or get in on the ground floor of some new, “straight” business … yeah, sure. Even waitresses had to show some list of past employments. All she had to show, really, was a succession of men: two failed marriages, countless lovers, most of them as callous as this one had turned out to be or worse, various marginal forms of employment (go-go dancer, topless waitress, hooker, massage parlor, call girl … it all boiled down to the same thing), no family contacted in decades, no kids, not even a pet, no library or record collection amassed over the years that could now be presented to herself as some kind of evidence proving she knew not what … nothing. Alcoholism. A lifetime of self-con, pretending she was some schoolgirl on a spree when everybody else her age was married, employed, or both. She was so ill equipped for real life, she reflected, that she wouldn’t even know how to commit suicide properly. Fuck it up no doubt. She laid her face in the black place where the two walls met, while more sobs heaved up from her very guts like boulders. In the next room, somebody turned up a radio playing some awful, maudlin song; they didn’t want to have to hear her.

He staggered on down the street, still in shock, found his way home, sat down, and tried to piece it all together. On one level it was all so simple, on another it was just too abrupt a jolt from too great a height to too miserable a sink. That plus the knowledge that he’d hurt someone, and he did have some though hardly a complete idea just how badly, and it was the person that on that day of his life he wanted most in the world to avoid hurting. Again he felt himself overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness and self-hatred. He sat like this for hours, barely moving a finger joint, almost in a trance, as the darkness fell over the city and filled the room. Finally, around 10 p.m., he got up and turned on the lamp. Then he sat down again. He knew that punishing himself this way, to such masochistic extremes, he was only reconfirming, again and again, the very conviction of immaturity which had, aside from the pain he’d inflicted, made him feel that way in the first place. But he was young and male and selfish enough to be more concerned with whipping himself and turning it into a grand melodrama than with what she must be going through.
Well
, he thought ruefully a couple of hours after turning out the light,
at least here’s another song for you
. Which of course made him feel even more ashamed. He fell into a fitful sleep, sitting up in his chair. He dreamed that he was a dog pawing the legs of passing women, all of them classy, fashionable, gorgeous, and looking up he saw the sneers on their faces. “Stupid mongrel mutt, go piss on somebody else’s leg.” One kicked him, and he went limping away. No one in the streets would even look at him, not even the beggar children: he was a mange-ridden stray.

She did not sleep. All night and all the next morning she sat on the bed, after the last tear had choked out, and stared at absolutely nothing. In the early afternoon she moved one limb. Then another. A bit at a time, she physically collected herself. For what she was about to do she hardly needed a mind. Finally she looked in her purse: £6. She snapped it shut, stood up with it in her hand, and walked out the door, which she did not bother to lock. Down the stairs, down the street, into another bar. It was a bar where lots of low-rent johns hung out, and she was going to be broke again soon. She took a stool and ordered a drink. And another. And another.

When he awoke, he felt stiff and sunbaked, sitting up like some mummy in a chair. He remembered everything, and the self-loathing had not abated, but at least now he was capable of planning and executing some course of action. For some reason he trusted himself just a hair more than last night. He left his apartment and headed straight for the bar where they’d met. When he didn’t find her there, he walked out and headed down the street, looking in every bar along the way until he came to the corner. Then he walked back, checking every bar on the other side. He didn’t drink.

Three hours later he walked into a dim, small bar on a side street, he saw her, hesitated, then clumsily approached. Her back was to him; she was looking down into her glass of wine. Standing behind her, he said, “I’m … so
very
… very
sorry
… I didn’t mean it … I mean … I just didn’t know …” The more he talked, the worse he was. With all the dignity of the longtime alcoholic who knows she’s drunk and couldn’t care less because unlike in the movies there are worse things in the world, namely, almost everything else in the world, she turned to face him. In the deadest voice possible she intoned: “You-have-got-some-fucking-nerve.” She looked at him; he couldn’t meet her gaze. She grew almost waspish: “Wasn’t yesterday enough? I’m not gonna give you the rest of your kicks by beating you. Although I will say you are a miserable whelp and one of the poorest excuses for a man I’ve ever met. But you know what? You’re not even the worst. Don’t kid yourself. You’re just another creep on the street. Now go wallow in somebody else’s miseries. I’m sure there’s a candidate just down the bar.” She paid for her drink, making sure to leave a tip, picked up her purse, and walked out.

He didn’t see her for two weeks. She felt better after the confrontation, but surprised herself with the realization that she also felt sorry for him, he really
didn’t
know what he was doing. He really
was
just a kid. She was taking a lifetime of sons-of-bitches out on him. Not that he didn’t give every indication of quite likely growing up to be one fully as practiced at true brutality as the rest. It was just that, somehow, even as she sensed his selfishness, she couldn’t help being touched at least a little by his confusion, his genuinely repentant albeit masochistic manner, and her own inclination to give him the benefit of the doubt. Why? she kept asking herself. And finally concluding:
Maybe just because you have at this point absolutely nothing else to do with your life
. Which, once she’d articulated it, was obviously as pathetic a reason for doing absolutely anything as any of his.
Fuck it
, she thought, tricked her landlord and a couple of others she forced out of memory as soon as the episodes were done, and started drinking again, moving slowly from bar to bar at her own unset pace.

He hadn’t been able to look a woman, any woman, in the eye since she’d told him off in the bar when he’d gone to find her. For several days he sat in his room; finally he called a friend and told him the whole story. “C’mon,” laughed the friend, “she’s just a whore. Don’t be a sucker.” “Fuck you,” he said.

Crass as his friend had been, he’d come away knowing one thing: she was no more perfect than he, and he’d been putting her on a pedestal purely in the interests of his masochism. Whether or not she might actually be a prostitute was a matter of no moral judgment to him one way or the other. If he had suspected she was one, it had been a secret excuse to romanticize her. Slowly, somehow, without further contact, he began to perceive her as a human being. As all that fell into place, his anger at himself assumed a more fitting perspective. Finally, he saw that even his groveling apologies—perhaps in a way
especially
them—were at bottom selfish. She’d been right. For some time now, he’d been in the habit of treating women with casual unconcern—like shit. It was an act that worked more often than not, but it also ensured that he’d always end up with the same kind of woman, and ultimately alone. Now that he had encountered somebody he was capable of caring about, he’d exploited her in a way that was probably even worse—to expunge his guilt over all the others he’d mistreated, to put himself in their place, to know how it felt to be treated just that shabbily. He also felt that, if they could ever clear all this up, there might be some possibility for … what? Something more than what he’d been accustomed to. On the other hand, it might just be that all it had amounted to was an incidence of random lust, proof of which lay in the very fact that the instant they’d tried to verbally communicate, all hell had broken loose. He wondered at times if he shouldn’t just forget the whole thing, or take it as a lesson learned and go on with his life. But gradually he came to realize that one way or another she was almost all he ever thought about. Which might mean that this was just a particularly twisted teenage crush, but he had to find, see, and at least try to talk to her again. For better or worse.

She’d been on the bottle long enough to have long since lost track of the days. In one bar she ran into a guy she’d once lived with, a comparatively decent sort, who’d given her some money. “Take better care of yourself,” he said evenly but with real concern. “You’re too good a person to go out this way.” She asked him what the fuck he cared. “I guess I probably don’t,” he admitted, “except insofar as we were once lovers; if I cared for you enough to live and sleep with you then, part of that must still exist now. You see what I mean? I don’t know if I loved you. But I did care. And I still care, and maybe I always will. I don’t know what’s happened to you and I don’t think I want to, but do me a favor and try to pull yourself out of this downslide. You know that’s a coward’s way out, and I never would have been attracted to a coward in the first place. You’re the same person and so am I. I don’t want anything out of you now except that you maybe show some of the spunk that drew me to you in the first place. I mean, what the fuck? Why kill yourself over some asshole? Why give him the satisfaction? Just
start
is all I’m saying—put one foot in front of the other, and keep doing it. Things’ll get better, not today or tomorrow, but by and by. You’ll see. I’ve been down there, too.” He laughed. “Otherwise, terminate the soap opera with some style: go get a pistol out of the nearest fuckin’ pawnshop and BLOW YOUR FUCKIN’ BRAINS OUT!”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Then both laughed at the same time, not loud and hearty by any means, but for real. It was her first real laugh, since … well, yeah, since all that. “I’ll even loan you the money,” he said. They laughed again. Between his sense of humor, the pep talk, his shaming her for being maudlin and giving yet another creep any satisfaction whatsoever, plus the basic knowledge that at least one other person in the world actually cared with no strings attached, she came out of it.

“Let’s go fuck,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Not today. Nothing personal.”

“Okay,” she said, and stopped drinking.

They embraced and kissed lightly, without tenderness or passion. They walked off in opposite directions. She had absolutely no idea what she was going to do with herself. It was enough merely to feel good, to nourish some resolve, however vague. She went back to her apartment and thought about her options for the rest of the afternoon. There certainty weren’t all that many of them, but how many did most people have? Fuck it. The first thing was to make some firm decisions, second thing to stick to them. Set her life in order. She picked up pad and pen and made a list:

• (1) Sober up. Stay that way.
  
• (2) Don’t fuck anybody else for money.
  
• (3) Don’t fuck anybody you don’t really want to.
  
• (4) Find some sort of straight job.
  
• (5) No more self-pity, no matter what happens.
  

That was enough. It took her three days to sober up. She faked an application form and got a shit job filing papers in an office building. Temp work termed permanent. It was hell. But she just did what she’d always done when she was fucking for money: shut off her mind and let Bach or Mozart play instead. Bit by bit, day by day, she regained her self-esteem. Even made friends, of sorts, on the job. Of course none of them were the kind of people you could really
talk
to—they were all women, and they all actually thought being a secretary was going to lead somewhere, or they just wanted to get married, and generally spoke in banalities of their lives and the things they had just bought or were planning/hoping to buy. She made one male friend who lasted exactly a week and a half, until he made a crude and clumsy pass at her over lunch, and when she politely refused, he began to sulk. After that he wouldn’t talk to her. Fuck him. One day she realized she had been celibate for over two months. At night she read or listened to the radio, what she could stand of it, which was very little, or watched TV, what she could stand of it, which was very little, mostly old movies and news. She thought about her life. It hadn’t been so good, in fact much of it had been an outright nightmare. But then she thought about the women she worked with, and their lives, with or without men, what they had amounted to so far or possibly ever could: they were so timid they might as well never have been born. She was better off with the nightmares. She’d learned a few things. When that thought hit her, she couldn’t help laughing out loud.