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  She hated Margaret. Once she had touched Margaret's small breast, and Margaret had laughed and said, "Your hand is hot and sticky." There was something disgusting in Margaret's mocking knowledge. She knew all about babies and men and kissing, and once had described how some men put their tongues in girls' mouths, and that was called a "soul kiss." Gloria had become faint with nausea.

  "Couldn't a person choke?" she'd asked.

  "You breathe through your nose, stupid," Margaret had replied. But the answer said much more. It said, "I know a secret, Gloria. I've learned all the things you have to learn, if you can. And look at me; I can take it. Can you take it? Can you accept the things you have to learn?"

  Gloria wanted to say, "I can; I can. It's all going to happen to me."

  Margaret's adolescent face was secretive when she said, "Oh, here he comes."

  Darting in and out of the labyrinth of tables and chairs was a tall, dark-haired, dark-jacketed man. He reached their table and sat quietly beside Margaret. He turned disinterested white eyes on Gloria, and her heart smothered in agony.

  Margaret turned to Gloria with old eyes in her young face.

  "Have you met my future husband?" she asked. Her thin, unformed body did not make the announcement ridiculous.

  "No," said Gloria, and her agony was visible. "How do you do."

  The white-eyed rapist nodded to her without taking his eyes off Margaret. Margaret turned to him and said perfunctorily, "Sit down and stop staring at me. My God, Gloria, I get the feeling he doesn't know how to breathe unless he stares right into my eyes."

  Gloria looked at the sullen-shaped mouth of the rapist. His eyes were lowered and expressed the sadness of a rebuffed child.

  How do you do it?

  Gloria wanted to ask. How do you enslave the man who refuses even to detest me? She tried to relax into her own sorrow, to relinquish her pain to her body, to feel it so completely that she would not feel it at all. She lifted a container of milk to her lips, and her trembling hands spilled the milk over the table.

  "My, my," Margaret chided, "I believe Gloria is upset. Gloria is very sensitive, rapist," and she turned to the motionless man. For the first time his face altered the expression of slavish devotion he reserved for Margaret. His mouth shaped into a mocking cruel smile. He took Margaret's hand in his and kissed it. Gloria felt herself melting into her mind's contortions.

  "I think Gloria is in love with you," Margaret continued. "Isn't that romantic? That's why I'm marrying you darling, so that I can play with Gloria's dreams."

  The rapist who had not spoken, seemed to say, "Do with me what you will."

  Margaret leaned over and whispered something to him. He laughed out loud. She whispered it again, and more urgently. Gloria heard her say, "Kiss her that way."

  The rapist got up and moved around the table to Gloria's chair. He took her head in his hands and pulled it back till her lips were raised to his.

  "Do you want to?" Gloria pleaded. "It's all right if you want to."

  His tongue was stopping her words, cutting her breath.

  "You breathe through your nose, stupid," Margaret directed. "He's pretty good at that. I think I'll hire him out. Rapist, I think I'll hire you out."

  Gloria could no longer hear her; she was choking under his icy unloving caress. She did not have the courage to push him away, so great was her body's yearning. She sank into his mouth, and Margaret's laugh. She sank deeper and deeper into a smothering humiliation – the pain beyond tears or flesh. The laughter grew vague. She opened her eyes and found herself panting against the pillow.

  She was motionless in her bed for a long time. Her heartbeat settled to an unheard rhythm. The dream was more terrible than her ugly search for the rapist. There was still a more sickening poison within her than the one she had tasted the night of the rape. Would her suffering one day have to equal the dream? Wanting him was a torture, but to be mocked for it would make her insane. For him to prefer another would be an unbearable insult. Then his death would not be enough. It would be too late, too meaningless for him to die. She had to kill him for something that existed between the two of them, not only for the rage in her own heart. She had to kill him because he wanted to die; the rape was an invitation to murder.

  She had despised and feared Margaret all of these years. If they met, they would have a civilized lunch and talk fondly of the old days. There would be a mutual contract to deceive.

  There is an agony that a man cannot give us. Only a woman who shares our airless dungeon can fill us with final despair. When we cut at each other, we know our futility. A man can make a woman feel like a woman. That's when they achieve us. But a woman can make a woman feel like nothing – like a shapeless, sexless, mute animal. That's how we destroy each other.

  CHAPTER IX

  She looked at the clock on the dressing table and saw that it was two o'clock. The sun poured in through the open windows, and she wanted nothing to do with the sun.

  Her skin stuck to the sheets where the blood had congealed during the night. Her slightest motion opened the wounds. She touched her jaws and mouth, and found her face tender and swollen. She reached to the bedside table for the hand mirror. She stared long at her reflection. Her eyes were dark-rimmed, but peaceful. Her mouth was split and bruised. It would be difficult to speak, but there was nothing she wanted to say. Thank God she was sick. It was a welcome reprieve; now she could offer herself the devotions due an invalid. The sickness of her mind had at last conquered her body. The fever that would register on the thermometer would entitle her to rest. The next best thing to love was rest. The next best thing to rest was death. The rapist was not important. The welts rising on her back – that was her true concern. At last, her body was a fitting prison. The pain of her flesh equaled the pain in her heart, balancing and finally negating the untouchable torment.

  She remembered the heap of naked flesh that she had dragged to the second floor landing. It was two o'clock; he must be gone by now. Had one of the tenants found him sprawled clumsily in his own sweat? He seemed a timid man, except for the drunken beating he'd administered. Probably when sober he would recall the evening with shame. She didn't think he'd repeat the visit. Possibly one night, drunk and hot, he would. But she didn't particularly hate him. He had proved a valuable executioner. The leather belt was still in the bed beside her. C.D. Charles the Divine. The room was comforting and familiar, and she lay back in a curious repose.

  She was too sore to bathe; she could barely sponge her face. She put fresh sheets on the bed and then put on a pair of starched cotton pajamas. The house was in a disorder that upset her, upset the feeling of tenuous calm. But solutions, this free afternoon, were everywhere. She called the maid service and then got into bed with a book.

  She got up from the bed and found a woolen shawl that she wrapped around her shoulders. It was too warm, but she wanted the comforts of illness. She did not wait for the rapist, but seemed to wait for her mother to walk into her bedroom with a tray of orange juice and tea and thinly sliced toast. She recalled the love her mother had showered on her when she was sick. It was worth the aches to hear the hushed voices outside her door ... to be coaxed into tasting the delicious dull food.

  Gloria heard the key turning in the lock and she knew that the maid had arrived. The woman poked her head into the bedroom and announced herself.

  "Anything special you want done, Miss Gloria?"

  "No," said Gloria. "Please just clean up the mess."

  The maid stepped into the room. She looked closely at Gloria. "Why, you're sick," she said sympathetically.

  "Yes, very," Gloria sighed contentedly.

  "Shall I call the doctor for you?"

  "I'll be all right," Gloria assured her. "I just need a few days' rest."

  The woman remained staring at her. Finally, she said in a choked voice, "Who did it to you?"

  "I did it to myself," Gloria explained.

  The woman had an aged cynicism. "It's pretty hard to
blacken your own jaw."

  "It was very difficult. But if you try very hard, you can manage anything."

  The maid started to walk out of the room. Her shoulders shrugged disapproval.

  "Oh, please," Gloria called her back, "can I have a tray with orange juice and lemon tea and a few slices of toast?"

  "I'll get it for you first thing," the maid promised, and seemed to like Gloria better for the request. She knew how to act towards children afflicted with the flu. Gloria had a seven-year-old's expression etched peaceably on her face.

  Gloria leaned back on the crisp pillows and opened a Joseph Conrad novel. It began, "He was an inch, perhaps two under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders..." It was relaxing to sink into someone else's imagination. Hers was limited. The only light in her world came from two white eyes. She turned the page and did not notice the maid entering with the tray. The tea steamed through the nozzle of the teapot. The lemon was sliced thin and yellow in the cup. She saw that the maid had placed a small dish of strawberry preserves and a few round chocolate cookies on the tray. The childlike kindness filled her eyes with tears. The woman was pathetically concerned.

  "Here, here," she soothed, "you'll soon feel better."

  "I feel wonderful." She was surprised by her emotion-cracked voice.

  "You're a very brave girl," the woman reassured.

  Gloria could not bear the automatic affection.

  "Would you turn the radio on?" she asked.

  She decided to listen to a thick, impassioned Edith Piaf. The French accent was as tragic as the defeated lyrics of the song.

  Maybe I'll go to Paris

  , Gloria speculated. After I kill him, I'll go to Paris. She heard the vacuum cleaner buzzing under the chairs and tables in the living room. She loved the apartment being cleaned.

  This is what the people around me have been doing. They've been resting, sitting in soft chairs and repeating familiar sensations. I want to rest, too, when he's dead. Then I'll rest.

  Joseph Conrad carried her into the pride of heroes, and she dozed in the warm room. When she awoke, dusk was falling heavy and quiet in the streets. Her terrible aloneness that had been her peace, assaulted her. The maid had left the flat clean and empty as a stage set.

  Gloria wandered into her studio. The ashtrays were sparkling on the tables. The few drops of paint that had stained the floor were scraped away. The immaculate room mocked her, "No one lives here anymore."

  She walked hastily to her paints and squeezed some crimson pigment on her pallet. She mixed the paint with her spatula and spilled the paint, in drops, on the waxed floor. She pushed her bare toes into the paint and smeared it frantically along the floor and onto the white wall. Then she got down on her knees and stupidly rubbed the paint over her pajamas, then pulled them off and rubbed the pigment into her unhealed flesh. She was crying, lamenting her brief succor of rest. She rubbed the paint into her cunt; her pubic hairs became flaming and heavy. She reached to press her red palms against her cheeks. The fellows are crazy for the lady in red...

  The doorbell rang. It continued persistently.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  "One minute, please," she called.

  The jangling sound brought her down to earth. She poured turpentine on a white cloth and rapidly wiped the paint off her body, hands and face. She gathered up her pajamas and dropped them into the bathroom hamper. Then she took her paisley robe and belted it around her waist. Her face in the mirror was swollen, less swollen than it had been in the afternoon, and strangely serene. She hoped, now that her head was calmer, that her visitor was not the rapist. It seemed the greatest deceit that someone else had beaten her. The rapist would not object to signs of another man's love on her, because he did not love her. But she was his to destroy.

  She opened the door and Laura was there opening her bag, fumbling for one of her eternal cigarettes. It was a relief to her that Laura was breaking the nervous solitude of her evening.

  "Come in," she said. "I'm glad to see you."

  Laura studied her face with alarm. "Christ!" she said. She looked behind Gloria's shoulder and saw the unmade bed through the opened door. "Get back into bed," she urged. Gloria was feeling dizzy from the few minutes on her feet, and she hurried under the protecting blankets.

  Laura looked confused and unhappy. "What happened to you?" she asked.

  "I fell off a horse," Gloria told her.

  "I'll bet you did."

  "Well, I had a frisky gentleman caller."

  "My God. Is it anyone I know? He should be arrested or shot," Laura said.

  "No," Gloria explained. "It's somebody nobody knows. He's just about getting an introduction to himself. I made him a little angry."

  "Angry?"

  "He was very sensitive, and I called him an ox, or something like that."

  "Gloria," Laura said, "I don't want to go on as if you're on the couch and I'm not, but you're not trying to get killed are you? I mean, I can perfectly well understand the decision, but it doesn't seem fair to make someone else do the dirty work."

  "Why, you cunning girl," Gloria said with distaste. "How did you guess? You didn't nearly use up your twenty questions."

  "I'm sorry," Laura smiled. "I suppose I'm trying to get knocked off myself, going around with my juicy welcome insights. I just think this is a pretty insane world, and I get a kick out of taking informal surveys."

  Gloria studied Laura's face – her mousy hair, cut like a boy's, a thin mouth that could look like a thread when she was thinking or angry. But her eyes bulged with an eagerness and warmth that made her face seem compassionate and lovely. Laura's face was always pale and a few thin blue veins were transparent in her temples and forehead. She came from an inbred Boston family and had a starchy dry elegance. But her aloofness was only a part of her family inheritance, and she voraciously befriended the penetrators of her manner. Along with her family looks, she had inherited enough money to support a very artistic husband. He made sculpture and she made him. Laura always looked breathless and overworked; her heart constantly quickened with her husband Christopher's infidelities. He always came back to her, and after four years of marriage, neither of them knew if he returned for the convenience of her bank account or the comfort of her unquenchable love.

  Laura lit another cigarette with a burning butt, and then tucked the blanket under the mattress. She was disastrously neat and tried not to show that she was tucking the sheet in with hospital corners. Gloria watched her feverish and disjointed movements.

  "How is Christopher?" she asked.

  "Christopher is fine." Laura's voice was tight.

  "Is he sculpting?"

  "Oh, yes. Christopher is absolutely undaunted."

  "Well, he's got plenty of energy," Gloria said.

  "Last week," Laura continued, not stopping for Gloria's words, "he did a Henry Moore. It had a really magnificent hole in it."

  Gloria laughed.

  "The night he finished it," Laura leaned back in her chair, "he felt faint tremors of failure. But just at the crucial moment, he saw my nail file and got an important idea for a Brancusi."

  "You're too harsh, Laura," Gloria warned.

  "No, no," Laura insisted. "I mean that's all I have, to know what Christopher really is. My ounce of truth. If I ever woke up one morning and looked at his work and thought, 'Christopher is a genius,' I'd hang myself."

  "Christopher," Gloria suggested, "has very good taste in sculpture."

  "Sure," Laura agreed. "He's a connoisseur. That's because he isn't even good enough to be mediocre. Really, you think I'm vindictive, but Christopher couldn't sculpt a faithful horse or a southern general or a convincing wreath."

  "Well," Gloria said, to keep the conversation unhysterical, "I think that Christopher could use a little life study. I mean just work from a model for a few months."

  "I thought so, too," Laura said dryly.

  "So?"

  "So
I convinced Christopher to get a model for a few hours a day."

  "Oh."

  "Oh, yes. So now Christopher gets her services for nothing. In fact, he's living with her. He can study from morning to night. She may succeed where I've failed. She may make a great artist of him." Laura began to cry.

  Gloria looked silently at the miserable girl. She understood the torment of choosing the one object, of wanting the one man. She knew how the world emptied to make room for the one enormous figure of the disinterested. She also felt, lying bruised on her bed, that the whole game was a monotonously programmed circus. The wanted and unwanted, the necessary and unnecessary; and too often nothing more necessary than the unwanted and nothing more unnecessary than the wanted. She thought of Christopher and Laura, how violently they stimulated each other into aliveness. Laura with her love for Christopher, and Christopher with his love for the woman on the other side of the street. She knew that if Laura lost Christopher and recovered – and of course, she would recover – she would find another Christopher; that her husband's piddling conquests were meaningless to him without the tortured balm of Laura's tears.

  "It's ridiculous," Laura sobbed. "I know I'm ridiculous."

  "No, of course not," Gloria soothed.

  "I'm the only woman to take him seriously. He builds his prison cell and his comfort out of my love. That's what makes it all ludicrous. You know what I think of Christopher. I think he's beautiful. Sometimes I feel myself choking when he's in the room with me. I think he's precious and beautiful and fine and courageous."

  "Then he is beautiful for you," Gloria answered. Laura's love cutting deeply, wounding her as the clever and cutting evaluation of Christopher's talent had not touched her. Yes, she thought, love has more pain than hate.

  "I love him. I love him so much," Laura sobbed.