Nine & a Half Weeks (10 page)

A wave of nausea rises from the pit of my stomach. I swallow hard. The sour taste lasts only for a moment. 1 stretch my arms as far above my head as they will go and find-as my shoulder muscles respond to the pull, and the band of muscles across my chest, and the stomach muscles below-that a shifting, a sliding has begun in my body while I was still afraid of throwing up. The stir gathers momentum and depth, embracing small rivulets, now plentiful from all sides. He spins me around, his hands steel clamps on my shoulders, and shakes me, my head bobbing. His hands close around my throat, I slide to the floor, my eyes shut. I lower my circle of arms joined at the wrists around his neck and entwine my ankles above the middle of his back.

“Barely worth it, wouldn’t you say?” He grins down at me over a forkful of steak. “A Candid Camera stunt’s livelier.” But his eyes shine as if he had a low-grade fever and I don’t need to wonder whether mine do too.

I HAD NEVER allowed anyone to read my diaries. They had been a fitful business, sometimes carried on intently in lurching subway cars (one hand shielding the page from passengers standing above me, selfconscious sidelong glances at those touching my thighs to the right and left); equally selfconscious at my desk, between a hurried return from a demonstration with a client and a staff meeting scheduled fifteen minutes later; or alone at night, a foot away from a mute and bright three-inch Kojak running heavily down a windy street, his crook of the evening sliding around a corner, garbage cans silently sent sprawling on sidewalks; or in locked bathrooms, crouched on a cold toilet cover, water left running in the sink so as not to let on to the man in my bed that I was writing: “This is getting to be… I used to want… long overdue …”; daily entries obsessive for months, then neglected for no clear reason for half a year except for sporadic sentences, “March 8, raining, hair wretched.”

1 had always been wary of people who published their diaries. It seemed a violation to me to have a true diary read publicly, and a diary written to be read by others-having lost its purpose: to be one’s secret place-could at heart be no more than variations on “March 8, raining, hair wretched.”

Some years back I had surprised a lover holding my open diary. Though I knew he could scarcely have read a word, so short a time had I been gone from the room; though I knew he was unhappy at how things stood between us and had maybe hoped for a clue; though 1 knew that my leaving him over the diary would not be to the point, the incident clearly a pretext even to me-still I thought, that’s it, this does it. I said nothing and watched him close the book awkwardly. I left, and for weeks thought of him only in terms of half a sentence: “… reading my diary, too.”

Since I had met him I had written every day, three or four sentences at first, soon pages and pages. When he picked up the diary one evening out of my open briefcase next to the coffee table, and began to leaf through it, a curious mix of sensations rose up my spine: dismay at first; then relief, enchantment, exultation. How had I been able to bear it? All the times when he hadn’t read this notebook, how long had it been, there had been no one to read me. An adolescent’s code, a dense scribbling complicated by a smattering of leftover Latin, meant to be indecipherable to anyone but me-and sometimes beyond even me, mere weeks later. All the times of rushing to bureau drawers when the doorbell rang, sliding notebooks under slips and handkerchiefs; all the times of last-minute looks around a room to make sure something I didn’t want seen, something I wanted no one to know about, hadn’t been left exposed. Always to be laden with recesses not to be opened to anyone; the grim isolation, the bleakness of privacy. Over, 1 thought, it’s over, he knows me completely, there is nothing to hide, and sat down at the foot of the couch and watched him read.

JUST CALLED HIM at work, reassuring to hear the receptionist’s voice recite a company name, then croon, “Just a moment please.” Reassuring to hear his secretary answer half a minute later, reassuring to listen to her say, “… may be out to lunch, if he is he didn’t tell me, may I take a message?” I need reassurance. Left the office at ten-thirty, no appointments for the rest of the day, planning to get caught up on backlog working at home; and now this, instead.

He calls back. “We’re an anachronism,” I whisper, reading from the dictionary into the phone in a raspy voice; nearly every one of the definitions incorporates the word “error.” “It’s not normal to wander around a man’s apartment on a Monday afternoon, obsessed.” One cup of syrupy coffee nursed for hours, chain-smoking, time slipping away. “I’m scared.” And why not, I think, even as I whisper into the phone, my bridges burning behind me in bright rows, signposts of what I’ve abandoned for him: a comprehensive-if secondhand-grid of a code:
how
one* lives*, assembled over decades. Eyes looking ahead, open wide as in a trance, no idea yet what I’m looking at. There’s cause for alarm all right, it would be abnormal to be whistling through my days. The responses are correct, well-oiled brain/well-scrutinized emotional machinery ticking away in unison, all in gear. New events, not enough information available, are liable to be unsettling; new sequences more unsettling than isolated events, new processes more alarming yet….

“Anachronism,” he repeats after me, and there is a pause, and then he says lightly, “So maybe we are and so who cares. We’re fine.” “Tell me what to do,” I say. “Maybe you should go back to the office,” he says. “Do office work at the office. Or give it until three. If you’re not working by then, you’ll know.”

He’s set my afternoon out for me, it’s crisp and clear, divided into segments, so much for that, thirty minutes on that, no more pacing from room to room. I’ll do what he says. I’ll do what he tells me, forever. Too big a word, better stay away from those, you ought to know better. But what if I’ve found an absolute after all? Always, never, forever, completely: I’ll always love him, I’ll love him completely, I’ll never stop, I’ll do what he tells me forever-how stern a theology can you pick? The god of wrath, forever-and-on, unquenched desire, brimstone paradise. I’ve turned a believer of sorts after all, turncoat, traitor to what I have arduously taught myself: don’t cast me out, don’t ever leave me, desire unquenchable, as long as he loves me I’m saved.

I’m setting the kitchen timer for half an hour. It’ll be 3 P.M. then, I’ll get immersed in the new account then, a fat folder to be studied, I’ll plot my strategy. In the meantime I’ll type. The story a woman told me, how she lived with a man for the year it took her to write her first book, how at 11 P.M. every night he’d turn the TV up and say, “When will you be done with your typing?” She became adept at recognizing the split second when she had to stop-somewhere between 2 and 3 A.M.-just preceding the moment when he’d start hurling chairs, books, bottles.

Typing. Recalling in print, pressing wobbly black buttons. A more or less faithful machine recording a process: what he makes happen. The sleepy slave who, at dawn, sits at her master’s feet and recounts in a lullaby voice, a soothing singsong, what has happened to her that night, as the sky lightens and before they go to sleep, endlessly weary, limbs afloat.

Rapidly, too-55 wpm? Not that fast. Could I play his secretary, give up this lovely, absurd job of mine, be with him around the clock? Beverly, the friendly voice answering his phone: “… may be out to lunch, if he is… message?” From Queens, he explains, “they get paid more in Manhattan, how else are you going to get them out of Queens,” my brain registering feebly but of course I say nothing because my stomach surrenders under the blatant, indolent tone of his voice as he says, “You’ve got to pay those girls more, of course, how else…”; my stomach and thighs responding: faceless girls out of Queens or wherever, just like me, I’m one of them. But ME he loves, ME he allows to bury a face in his armpit, for ME he lights a cigarette with carefully squinted eyes, puts it between my lips, my mouth slightly open, waiting for what he’ll put into it next. Tongue, a dribble of wine, cock, a thumb, one square of bitter chocolate, two fingers, four, half a sauteed mushroom, tongue, cock again. For ME he puts a lit Camel between open lips, I make it glow in the dark, our damp thighs stick together while he says, in a low, lazy voice, “How else are you going to get the Beverlys out of Queens?”

Fifteen more minutes before I have to work. Set up by him as surely as if he knew what I need to do, which he doesn’t, not in detail. “If you’re not getting things done…” Sweet, slow cramp of surrender in my stomach, warm syrup thighs. Yesterday, as we finish dinner at this table, a child sings a nonsense ballad from a nearby window: boisterous, off-key, cheerful. I shout, “Who’s the noisy brat.” He laughs. He likes it when I raise my voice, he does it so rarely. The singing child didn’t hear me.

ANYTHING FOREIGN TO OR OUT OF KEEPING WITH A SPECIFIED EPOCH. The epoch’s a midsummer in the seventies. The out-of-keeping is me.

BY THE TIME the utter predictability of my orgasm sank into my brain, it had, of course, long been familiar to my body. There was no mistaking the power this man had over me. Like a well-made windup toy, whenever he set me in motion I came. Moods of wanting or not wanting to make love were moods I remembered as from a book. It was not a matter of insatiability but one of inevitability of response. He did what he did and then I always, inevitably, finally came. Only the preludes varied.

I’M HURRYING BACK from the washroom, where I’ve hastily brushed my hair, washed my hands, put on lip gloss. Walking rapidly around the corner and down the hall toward my office, I hear a colleague answer the night line. It is six-fifteen, a four o’clock meeting has lasted until a couple of minutes ago. Just as I reach my desk, ready to pick up my briefcase and leave, my phone begins to ring. “For you, love,” says a cheerful voice-we’ve made a good friendship out of a chance bond formed seven years ago, when we both started working here on the same day. There’s a click and the outside line is open. “Let’s go, time to get out of there, the Chelsea, room…” “I don’t even know where it is,” I say. “What’s the matter, you just surfaced at Penn Station?” “I’ve been in this city as long as you have,” I say. “I know, sweetheart. Trouble is, you can’t ever find your way around in it.” “I can too find my way around,” I say. “There’s no need for me to know where every sleazy little hotel…” 1 am bent over my desk, hair shadowing my face at either side like horse blinders. I’m holding the receiver in my left hand while the pencil in my right cross-stitches slowly and carefully around HOTEL CHELSEA, scrawled on the cardboard back of a notepad; the oval wreath consisting of precise, tiny x’s completed, I trace the verticals on the H, up and down, up, down again, smiling fixedly, his voice skipping on, “… never heard… stayed there?… every New Yorker.., a landmark. Half an hour.”

The cab driver has never heard of a Hotel Chelsea. He finds it with the help of a tattered collection of pages no longer held together by a cover, sporadically soaked with grease, smudged so thoroughly that I’m impressed by how quickly he deciphers the print. It is not a long ride.

The small lobby is cluttered with unmatched furniture, the walls covered with dusty paintings all done, it seems, during the last two decades. The only occupant besides me and a man behind a counter at the far end of the room is a woman who sits on a vinyl-cushioned black bench placed at right angles to a fireplace. Her deeply grooved face is a mask on a head so small as to appear shrunken. The high heels of her low-cut shoes are dusted with green glitter. Rolled-down argyle socks expose white calves, elegantly shaped as those of an adolescent dancer; what looks like a soldier’s dog tag hangs suspended on a shoestring against the Knicks T-shirt tucked into the waist of a salt and pepper tweed skirt. She is reading a Spiderman comic book; Birds of South America, a fat library book, lies on her lap. I regretfully stop myself from staring.

The elevator is small, the hallway into which it releases me bleak. I lean cautiously over the ornate, wrought-iron banister. Rows after rows of railing plunge below, the shaft bottomless in the dim light. I pull back sharply, annoyed with myself. Of course it’s a long way down, I tell myself, it’s twelve floors. … Though I try to walk lightly I’m unable to keep the heels of my sandals from clicking loudly on the stone floor. When I have found the right room I take a deep breath, glad to close a door against the silence and the gaping stairwell outside.

This time there are no packages heaped on the bed, there is no note. Six dime-store hooks, the size I buy to hang my most lightweight mementos, sit like bugs at irregular intervals on walls that need painting. The squares of white beneath the hooks make the surrounding wall space look even grayer and give the room an air of having recently been evacuated-a place where someone lived, hastily abandoned, no time to pack, cheaply framed family photographs hurriedly snatched off walls. A dead cockroach lies next to the cold water faucet on the back ledge of the bathroom sink, a smaller one near the bathtub drain.

I sit down on the orange chenille covering the single bed and cause the mattress to sag abruptly. I lean my briefcase against my calf and do not take the shoulder strap off my right arm but clutch my handbag under my elbow and hold on to the strap, my left arm crossed diagonally over my chest.

The phone finally rings. “Take your clothes off,” he says. “There’s a scarf in the top drawer, tie it over your eyes.” The large square-loosely woven white cotton with a narrow border of small, pink flowers; a present from two of my friends three birthdays ago-lies neatly folded in the left front corner of the drawer. I take off my dark blue T-shirt and linen pants, unused to the process of drawing clothes over my body with my own hands.

The door opens. He locks it behind him and leans against it, his arms folded. I feel my smile freeze, thaw, fade in rapid succession. He takes the three steps to the bed, yanks bedspread and top sheet together out of my hands, off my body, off the bed, slaps me so I fall over sideways, sprawling. I am momentarily disoriented. “Don’t cry now,” he says, his voice bland. “There’ll be plenty later. It was a simple enough thing to ask you to do.”