Looking for Mr. Goodbar (21 page)

Her mind went to the knife on the floor, then skittered away to the quilt. She would have to wash it in the morning. She would put all the linens on the bed into the wash.

The room was very quiet with the radio off. He began to move inside her again. She wasn’t really ready. He was probing. Trying to find a place that was particularly good. He wanted to hear her moan again.

“Not yet,” she said.

He laughed. “Am I too much for you?”

“Too much what?”

He pushed hard and a little cry of pleasure escaped her. He laughed and did it again but then the next time she fooled him. As he came out of her almost all the way, she pulled away from him and turned on her stomach, hiding her face in the pillow. He rolled over on top of her but suddenly she got scared again; the pressure of his weight hurt her back. She struggled to get him off.

“Get off me,” she said. “I can’t breathe.”

He got up so that he was kneeling, one of his legs on either side of her, very lightly sitting on her. Rubbing his penis into the space between the buttocks. Then it seemed that he was going to try to stick it in there.

“Stop that,” she said sharply.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Don’t get excited. Some girls—hey, what’s this?” He had found the scar that no one since Martin Engle had seen. Her trunk became rigid and her head and arms and legs flew up out of control.

“Hey! What happened?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Let me up.”

“What are you, sensitive?”

He wasn’t getting up. She was caught. Her body went limp with futility.

“That’s more like it,” he said, kissing her back. “What’s it from, hon? You can tell me. You think I never seen scars before?”

“I used to be a fish,” she said. “That’s where they took out my gills.”

“You’re cute. Did I ever tell you you was cute?”

“I don’t remember.”

“And you don’t remember how you got the scars.”

“Sure I remember, I told you, I used to be a fish . . . no, a mermaid. No, I know, a hand puppet. I was a hand puppet and that’s where they stuck their hands in to make me work.”

He was leaning over her, fondling her breasts. Kissing her back. His penis was still hard but it rested on her lightly, he didn’t push it. Sometimes it rested on the half-moon, sometimes between her legs. Her heart was beating very rapidly, which was strange because all the worst things had already happened and what could she be frightened of? The knife on the floor? That would be silly. You weren’t scared of a switchblade knife just because it was there any more than you were scared of a kitchen knife. Or a scissor. She squirmed around under him so that she was lying on her back, and looked at him for the first time since he had forced her to . . . but already her mind was moving away from the sharp memory. The light was on. With Martin sometimes the light had been on. Never since.

He grinned. “Hi.”

She smiled.

He looked different to her now. Not like such a kid. There were lines in his face. Maybe fatigue. He looked like someone who might have been in battle in Vietnam.

“Can I see your knife?”

“Huh?”

“I just want to see what it looks like.”

“You never seen a switchblade?”

“Not open.”

He shrugged. “Sure.” He leaned over without getting off her; she held his thick, muscular thighs so he wouldn’t fall off the bed.

“Turn out the light,” he said.

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

Her heart was pounding again but she couldn’t admit that she was scared—after all,
he
had no interest in the knife,
she
was the one who’d asked him to take it out. She turned off the light and suddenly—click—a fluorescent blade glowed in the dark and her heart leaped almost out of her chest.

“Okay,” she said, hearing a tiny scared voice come out of her, “you can put it away now.”

He laughed. “Whatsa matter? Don’t you like my friend?”

“I like him fine,” she said, “but put him away.”

The blade clicked shut and he let it drop to the floor again. He leaned over her, kissed her cheek. A thrill passed through her body.

“Whatsa matter, fishie? Did I scare you?”

Suddenly the atmosphere was thick with sex again.

“Sure,” she said softly. “You terrify me.”

“I’m really a nice guy,” he said, kissing her neck, then her breasts.

“I’m not so sure about that,” she said, her voice catching in her throat as another thrill passed through her.

“Sure I am.”

“Did you ever kill anybody?”

“Only in the Army.”

And then they were making love again.

A little light was coming through the window when she finally fell asleep in his arms. When she awakened it was eight o’clock
Thursday night and she was alone. She had missed an entire day, including school. She ate three grilled cheese sandwiches and drank two bottles of Coke. Then she called Rose and told her she’d taken double tranquilizers and gone into a near coma. Rose said she was so relieved to hear Terry’s voice. They’d been worried when they hadn’t heard from her and they’d called the apartment a few times in the morning but there’d been no answer, Terry told Rose the ring was pretty low, anyway, so it wouldn’t be startling.

On Friday at school she got teased about taking an overdose of sleeping pills. On Saturday night James Morrisey rang her bell promptly at seven.

She’d put on jeans
and a sweater, telling herself that nobody got dressed up any more but knowing exactly what she was doing. Knowing full well that James Morrisey would show up at her door in a shirt and tie and suit, as indeed he now had.

“You’re disgustingly punctual,” she said.

“I didn’t know it was a fault,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “now you know.”

“All right,” he said. “May I come in anyway?”

A little bit flustered that he wasn’t more flustered by the awful way she was acting, or the way she’d dressed, she let him in and closed the door.

“Are we having dinner with the Pope?” she asked, eying his suit.

“Only if you know where he’s eating tonight,” James said.

Frustrated in her attempts to irritate him, she looked around the apartment.

“What was I in the middle of doing?”

In point of fact she had finished her school planning during a lengthy period of insomnia Friday night, had been too restless to read or watch TV, and had been walking around the apartment trying to decide what she really felt like doing.

“Take your time,” he said, sitting down.

She felt irritable and her back hurt a little, maybe a result of her athletics with Tony the other night. She smiled to herself.

“No, forget it,” she said. “I’d just as leave go. Where’re we going, anyway?”

“I made a reservation at Lüchow’s.”

She was disconcerted again. When she’d first moved to the Lower East Side she’d passed Lüchow’s and heard music from inside and thought it looked nice, a place where it would be fun to be. Then she’d learned that Katherine and her friends disdained Lüchow’s, that it was too big, too noisy, too straight and too fattening. A meat and potatoes place, as opposed to rice and bean sprouts, say, which they were all into by this time. A place where the provincials went on Saturday night to drink beer and get red-faced, then shit-faced, and then stomp their boots to German band music.

She smiled condescendingly. “Meat and potatoes.”

“My favorite foods.”

“So heavy,” she complained, thinking that she was not only saying something she’d heard Katherine say but she was saying it with Katherine’s intonation.

“They have a wide selection, actually,” James said. “Fish and so on.”

“How about Chinese food?” she asked, smiling naughtily. She hardly ever ate Chinese food, although Katherine adored it.

He smiled back. “No. They don’t have Chinese food.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant how about going for Chinese food?”

“I don’t eat Chinese food.”

“You’re so difficult.” Again unable to suppress a smile because she was being such a brat.

He smiled, too. She was amusing him.

“Do I have to change my clothes, then?” she asked.

“I don’t know if they have any dress rules,” he said calmly. “I can call and ask.”

“I wasn’t thinking of their silly rules. I meant I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

“Why would the way
you
dress embarrass
me?
”

She was embarrassed herself now, of course. “I meant, if that’s where your gang hangs out.”

“My gang,” he said, “if I have such a thing, which I seriously doubt, but the friends I have whom you might call my gang hang out in the Bronx.”

“When you say hang out it sounds as if it has quotation marks around it.”

“It does. It’s your phrase, not mine.”

“Don’t you ever use slang?”

“Not very often.”

“Why not?”

He thought about it. “It doesn’t seem to come naturally to me. Maybe because I have rather precise habits of speech and slang tends to be imprecise.”

She wanted to smack him. Instead she said, “How about words like motherfucker? They’re not imprecise.” And watched with satisfaction as he flinched. (In point of fact she’d never said it aloud before and she flinched herself as she said it; she could only pray he hadn’t noticed.)

“There are various ways to be imprecise,” he said after a moment. “You can substitute the general for the specific, for example. Or you can be very specific but not about the thing you intend to specify. I’ve heard that phrase used many times but never to describe the situation it very specifically refers to.”

She laughed. “What if you were having a fight with someone who’d done that specific thing? Then would you use it?”

“I very much doubt it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not my nature. I’m not sure that it’s yours, either.”

“Would you call yourself a mama’s boy?”

“You mean was I born of woman?”

“I mean are you a goody-goody?”

“As opposed to what? A baddy-baddy?”

“Why do the Jesuits answer every question with another question?”

“Is there a better way to answer questions?”

“Oooohhhh . . . I’m going to change my clothes. I feel like it, anyway. I just didn’t have time before.” She felt uncomfortable saying that to him. The small lies that came so easily with others were hard with him. That exasperated her further.

From the closet she took a kelly green jersey dress she’d bought when her father was still in the hospital but had never worn. Every time she opened the closet she thought about it. She loved it but was embarrassed to wear it. Only after she’d had it a while had it occurred to her that it was the most brightly colored garment she’d ever bought. Now, without letting herself think about it twice, she marched into the bathroom, put on the dress, combed her hair, put on makeup, came out of the bathroom, put on high-heeled shoes, then faced him with a combination of defiance and anticipation.

“All set now?” he asked.

She nodded. She would not under any circumstances let him see that she was disappointed in his failure to react to her improved appearance. The closest she could come to admitting it to herself was to say that somewhere in the mixture of largely negative feelings she had about going to straight Lüchow’s with straight James Morrisey on a straight Saturday night date was a tiny desire to have someone tell her she looked pretty.

She got her raincoat and started to march out of the apartment ahead of him. She knew she’d be cold in a raincoat but she always wanted to throw off her heavy, binding winter coat before winter had really ended. He said that it wasn’t a particularly warm night and she’d be cold. She said she wouldn’t be cold and started out of the apartment again. He asked if she had her keys and she blushed furiously because she didn’t.

“Why does that embarrass you?” he asked.

She could see that he wasn’t being provocative, he was really curious, but for some reason she felt upset and endangered. She shook her head and fought back tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I—”

She grabbed her keys, locked the door and dashed down the stairs and through the lobby without waiting for him, into the blessed darkness.

He asked if she would like to take a cab and she said she would prefer walking. He said that he was sorry he’d upset her, however inadvertently. She told him not to worry about it. She didn’t know why she’d been upset. Which was true. She didn’t see how it could have had anything to do with that silly business. She said she’d had a crazy week in general, maybe that was it. She was just tense from the week in general. (It didn’t sound right but it appealed to her; she didn’t want him getting the mistaken notion that anything connected to him could be important enough to bother her.) With Tony she’d been upset and then confused and then ecstatic and then exhausted. Then she’d slept, and since awakening she’d been on what you could best describe as a natural high. Not happy, exactly, but elated. Looking forward to seeing him again. In the whole time with Tony, during the really bad part, she hadn’t cried. Or even fought back an impulse to do so. Why now? When all that had happened was that James had made her feel a little foolish about some keys? Maybe she’d held it in. Everyone knew by now, you read it all over the place, that if you held in your emotions at one time, they came out at another.

“Did anything happen during your crazy week that you feel like talking about?” James asked.

“No, not really,” she said. “The kids were a little wild yesterday.” She explained that she’d overslept on Thursday out of exhaustion, hadn’t even remembered to set the alarm. Something that had never happened before. “No one even realized I wasn’t there until nine thirty or so.” The class had gone quite wild and the
noise drew the teacher from the next classroom. They’d tried to get a substitute but it was too late, so they’d divided up the kids into different classrooms, which totally threw them. Even when kids had a regular sub they were often a little crazy and out of control, or so she’d heard—she’d never been out, so her kids were really unfamiliar with the whole experience.

They’d been totally uncontrollable Friday morning, as though to express their anger at her for deserting them. Finally, after lunch, she’d decided to confront the matter head on. She’d had them gather their chairs around hers for a discussion and asked that each one of them give her an example of an unpleasant surprise. Something that had happened that they didn’t expect and that wasn’t nice. Something they were supposed to do and couldn’t, someone getting sick, or going away. Juan said he was supposed to get a bicycle for his birthday but then his father lost his job and couldn’t give it to him. A couple of others gave examples and then one of them, Elsie, talked about the death of her grandmother, who’d always taken care of her while her mother worked. One day she’d come home from school and her grandmother wasn’t there. Theresa asked how she felt about her grandmother and it was beautiful—as though Elsie knew her plan and wanted to help. “I was mad at her,” Elsie said. “When I see her next time I’m going to tell her I didn’t like what she did.”