Darling Read online

  "I know. We're all good at that."

  "What do you mean? Do you know what I suffer?

  "Yes, we're good at that, too."

  "Why do you sound so bitter?" Laura demanded. "Why are you angry that we love?"

  "Because that's all we know how to do and we do it so stupidly."

  "We can do other things."

  "What? What can we do? We can't do the one important thing. We can't let anybody love us."

  "That's not true. I pray that Christopher loves me."

  "You fool." Gloria was enraged. "We're all fools. We can't accept love. Never. We want to be the victims, to be the worshippers. We want to be our master's master and our slave's slave. We're falling all over each other racing to see who can fall lower. That's what we want ... to idolize ... that's what we call our love ... never, never to be known."

  "What does knowing have to do with it? You make no sense," Laura interrupted.

  "The whole problem is one of knowing. To be loved we must be known, discovered. That's the unforgivable intrusion ... to let somebody in. We all cherish our sharp, ingrown secret weapons we use to fight off the invaders who dare to love us. We pick an impossible creature and we kneel prostrate at his kicking feet and implore him to love us while we hide our face and give him a distorted torture mask."

  "We have a right to find that love," Laura whispered.

  "But we'll never find it," Gloria screamed. "That's what's so appallingly pathetic. We'll never find it. It doesn't exist. It's a fantasy, a punished child's dream."

  "Why do you say that? We'll find it. I know we'll find it."

  "Where? In your dead mother's arms? You think this horse opera we carry on is love? To find one fighting, resistant man and try to devour him?"

  "I just want to be near Christopher."

  "You liar. Is near ever enough? We need to swallow them, to chew them into delicate chunks and swallow them. A foot apart is too terrible for us. I may never do it," Gloria continued, "but at least I know that the way to love a man is to let him be separate. To let him live, out there, in his private threatening world. To let him have a thought not manufactured in our own want-mad brains. I don't know if I can ever do it," Gloria's voice was a wail, "but that's the way, I'm sure."

  Laura was upset. "If Christopher loved me, if I was sure he loved me, I'd let him be separate."

  "My God," repeated Gloria, "how hopeless. The more closed in we are, the more skillful we are at picking the prisoner to love. The locked-up men, the sentenced men. Sentenced to find women like us, women who can fall lower than they, women the convicts can never love."

  "My adoration is making me ugly," Laura mused. "Christopher can do anything he wants with me, and when this happens to a woman she is hideous. Look at me; I'm a shadow. I'm one of Christopher's mediocre statues, waiting patiently for him to chip an expression onto my face. Oh God, I know I bore him."

  "Don't torture yourself," Gloria begged. "In many ways your love for Christopher makes you more beautiful. You have sacrifice on your face, and that is a kind of beauty."

  "Sacrifice!" Laura snapped with contempt. "Sacrifice to whom and for what? To Christopher, the modern girl's surest lay? What do I sacrifice? My sanity? My pride? To be fucked by my husband when he comes home for a rest from fucking somebody else?"

  "Pride has nothing to do with it," Gloria said. "And you know it's not for the fuck. You'd live with Christopher in absolute celibacy for twenty years, if he'd just stay with you."

  "That's cruel, Gloria."

  "No, no, no. Listen to me. I don't mean it to be cruel. Don't hear in my words some lousy pat definition of married love. It's not the fuck. We tell ourselves it's the fuck because it justifies us. It's a simple little test that everybody understands ... but it's not true. Does Christopher have some magic in his prick? Or is the magic in you? Why can the other women give him up so easily? Christopher's been given up by more women than they have birth control pills. It's something else Christopher does to you. He enters a secret chasm in your heart, or psyche, I don't know. But once he enters, he lives there. Christopher walks about in you as if you were a house without doors."

  "But why can't I walk about in Christopher? Do you realize, Gloria, what he is? Yes, I say he's beautiful, because when I say he's not, the suffering is worse. That makes me not only insane, but a fool. But Christopher is so weak, so inexcusably, fragilely, stupidly weak. He needs me to be accused of the things he can't do. Christopher wouldn't want so many women without me sitting at home suffering his infidelities. He runs to me the way he would to a mother, proudly singing, 'Momma, I had a good fuck.' And I'm suppose to sign the report card and promote him into another class."

  "You're right, Laura, and you know it. Are they just going to sit in your head like stinking Chinese eggs? Or are they going to change your life with Christopher?"

  Laura sat quietly for a full minute. She lit another cigarette, striking five matches before the tobacco flamed, and released the smoke in her mouth.

  "My knowledge of Christopher has been putrefying in my head for a long time."

  "Please," Gloria said, as the tears rolled wet on Laura's face. "Please, please, please..." and she could not say, "Don't weep. Free yourself." Because the freedom was not in Laura.

  "A few times when Christopher left me, I felt, well, that I was finally finished with him. When he flew to California with that idiot starlet, then called me from Los Angeles to tell me that he felt with pleasure every inch of the three thousand miles that separated us, I almost didn't care. I mean, it just passed endurance, and I didn't feel anything. I thought it was over."

  "You had an affair with Carl then, didn't you?" Gloria said.

  "Yes. It was the first and only affair I've had since I've been married. And it really was quite nice. Carl is warm and sweet and attentive."

  Gloria winced. "Quite nice. How you must have hated it."

  "No. I wasn't hating it. I wasn't feeling it. I wasn't feeling anything. That's what terrifies me. That my life without Christopher will be a long, painless nothing."

  "But then you weren't really over Christopher."

  "Who knows. I don't know. I didn't think of him. I didn't dream of him. I didn't rush to the movies to see his starlet perform. It was the only time since I've known Christopher that I've let him out of my head. But nothing came in to take his place. I was stupefied for six months."

  "Another six months might have done it. Another six months and you might have loved somebody else."

  "I don't know. You see, Christopher came back. When he knocked at the door, and I opened it, I knew that I had been waiting for him for six months."

  "We have more stamina than that," Gloria said. "You wouldn't have waited forever. A few more months and you might have opened the door to a stranger."

  "The day I stopped waiting, I would start decaying. Yes, I can see my skin growing moldy. I can feel the tissues of my flesh turning to water."

  "But, my God," Gloria cried, "why are we talking? Why do we bother to repeat our third rate, monstrous tragedies to each other? Look at me. I'm beaten up, bleeding and black and blue. Is this my statement? Is this the total of my expression? What right do you have to say you'd decay? Why do we find the words if we want to stay in the cave? You have no right not to live more happily. You have no right to give your intelligence and will and body and goals and yesterday and tomorrow and now to Christopher."

  "Rights," mocked Laura. "As if there were any rights. You had no right to be beaten, and the man had no right to beat you. But you were both fit only for the cave."

  "Then what are we waiting for?" Gloria lamented. "Why don't we die now, kill ourselves? Group suicides. If we lurk in the cave, we're not living. We died three million years ago."

  "But," said Laura, "we've seen a bit of light."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "We've seen the light of victory. I'm waiting, yes. I'm waiting for Christopher. I want him to look at me and see that I'm beautiful and val
uable. And that day I'll be beautiful and valuable. And maybe that day I'll leave him, or that day we'll really get married. But I want that day. I can live for it."

  "When will Christopher see that you're beautiful?"

  "When I am."

  "I tell you you're beautiful now."

  "And I don't hear you."

  Gloria leaned back on the pillows. "I hate your waiting," she said. "It disgusts me."

  Laura pushed her boyish hair behind her ears. "I have given so much pain and love and hate to Christopher. More than to anyone in the world in my life. And I want one day for him to feel it. It will make my wait not a wait, but a process. A dawning of love."

  "Can Christopher feel you?"

  "Not now."

  "I live in the now. Tomorrow is just too much of a chance for me."

  "If I felt that," Laura paused and spoke slowly, "I would kill Christopher."

  "Kill him?" said Gloria with interest.

  "Yes. If Christopher will never come to me, I want him to die."

  "It would be better," said Gloria, "if you just decided to live. That might be the same as Christopher's dying. He might even come to you then, and you'd find out he was dead!"

  "That's why I'd kill him," said Laura. She laughed foolishly. "I don't want to be disappointed."

  "Maybe he'll come to you," Gloria murmured.

  "Shall we have some dinner?" Laura asked. She clumsily moved the conversation away from the area that whispered, "It might not happen. Christopher may never be yours!"

  "Yes," agreed Gloria. "There are some eggs and bacon in the refrigerator, and a can of soup in the pantry.

  Laura walked into the kitchen and Gloria heard her banging the refrigerator door shut. Then, lying back, she heard the bacon sizzling and tried to remember the words she had said. They had nothing to do with the rapist. But that was different. The rapist was not to be her life – she was killing him to live. But she had said to Laura, "It would be better if you just decided to live." Afterwards, perhaps. First her vengeance, and then a life out of the caves. Laura was not waiting for vengeance, but for love. That was why she was doomed. We can't wait for love, but can only create it out of the present with the imperfect feelings sifted to us through a gnarled tree of family. I must be insane, reasoned Gloria. Laura lives what she speaks, and so do I. Except for the one enraged thorn in my flesh that demands his death. I am insane now, and the words I speak come out of a well tutored yesterday. I'm the most savage waiter of all ... waiting for death.

  Laura came back into the bedroom. She had washed her face, but fresh tears were staining her cheeks.

  "I wish I were beautiful to him. I wish I looked like a Hollywood starlet."

  "If I were beautiful, I'd torture him. I'd fuck his father and his brother and his best friend." Gloria seemed in a trance.

  "I just want to be what he wants. I don't care about anything else. About freedom, or soul, or truth, or..." Laura laughed, "beauty."

  Gloria moved her head to look at Laura. "Kill him," she commanded.

  The two women shared the moment, and Laura shrugged her shoulders nervously and said, "Let's be a bit serious. Actually I came here to ask you if you'd like to spend a week at Fire Island. It's warm enough now, and the cottage is in good shape."

  Maybe he's on Fire Island

  , Gloria thought. I pray to God I find him there... "Kill him," she repeated to Laura. "Don't wait for him. Kill him."

  CHAPTER X

  Fire Island is close to New York City – quite close and quite chic. Not chic the way it once was, but it still attracted the city-imprisoned artists and writers and advertising executives and publicity hawks. They rushed every weekend to Fire Island to run as innocently as Polynesian primitives along the white beaches and the rough Atlantic surf. But though they conspicuously took off their shoes and walked the wooden-planked streets of the island, they brought their insulated "aren't-we-having-a-good-time?" attitudes with them. And they had a very good time; the thousands of empty gin bottles were proof. The men wore faded jeans and bared their white smoke-choked chests to the air. Some of the men on the island were very beautiful. They lived from resort to resort, exciting the men and women with the exposed confidence of their muscles.

  The women wore pants or designer shorts. Skirts were taboo on the island. The shape of their legs and Fifth Avenue fashion decreed the length and tightness of the pants. Sometimes they were rolled ruggedly over the thighs. Their shorts often were cut high enough to show the subtle crease where the thighs swelled into buttocks and the front of their shorts V'd into their loins. V marked the spot. These women cruised the island looking for bulls. They were too anxious to have a good time to be disappointed. If a man showed his horn, they were convinced. And they played a voluptuous game, pretending they could gore each other.

  There was practically no electricity on the island, no cars, no paved roads, no buildings made of steel, and no stairs that reached up to great heights. The island insisted on simplicity. The houses were open to the sea and the islanders' feet felt the sand-grit on the floors, their bodies felt it between the sheets, and their teeth felt it in the hamburger.

  There were about six separate communities on the island. In each section there had settled a different perversion, tortured by the anonymity and accusations of the big city. Here the lesbians took off their tight secretarial skirts and high heels, and did revengeful dances. The faggots took off their city manners and hugged each other in the silent sand dunes, loving and screaming and being jealous and crying and drinking, and getting on the Sunday night boat for home.

  They had to supply a city identity on the let's-be-children-again island. Where are you from? And what do you do? And oh, you were at that party, too. I don't remember seeing you there. But once everybody knew who everybody else was, then it was all right to fuck with child-like joy.

  The island was shaped like a floating penis, eight times as long as wide, tapering to a bulbous end. There was the Atlantic cooling one side of the narrow stretch of land, and a bay filled with docked yachts on the other. A ferry traveled every few hours from Long Island, depositing gritty vacationers on the shore, and the same ferry took them back, drunk and sunburned.

  To get to Fire Island they caught the train at Pennsylvania Station or drove to Amityville where the ferry would be waiting.

  Gloria and Laura drove to Long Island in Laura's small convertible. They kept the top of the car down and let the wind have its way with their hair. They looked young and carefree, speeding down the fast highway, and they spoke about dresses and Gloria's coming exhibit. They scrupulously avoided mentioning Christopher. Laura had carefully donned her best New England reserve and it was obvious that she could not bear to mention Christopher's name. But her silence enveloped them in her husband's perseverance, and the motor of the car hummed "Christopher," and the water at the left rippled the same sound. Gloria's face had lost its swollen contours, and she leaned back on the cool leather seat and felt happy to be leaving the city. It is difficult, she realized, to live all year in the city. Especially, when you're used to big houses and lots of space. She hadn't sensed how closed in she was until they'd driven over the bridge and seen the trees and lawns she'd grown up with.

  "It's good to get out of the city, isn't it?" She turned to Laura.

  "God, yes," Laura answered conventionally. "Sometimes I think I'll just choke if I don't get some air in my lungs."

  Gloria was bored with the familiar patter. "It isn't so bad in the winter. But in the spring and summer, you just have to get away."

  "I'm sure," Laura responded, "we'll feel much better when we get into bathing suits and dive into the water."

  That was the wrong thing to say. They were supposed to feel magnificent now. Gloria lit a cigarette.

  "Let's go swimming as soon as the boat docks," she suggested. "It shouldn't be much after five."

  "Leon is giving a cocktail party," Laura reminded her.

  "Christ," said Gloria. "He's been
there all winter giving cocktail parties. Doesn't he know how to do anything else?"

  "Leon is nice."

  It was obvious that Laura was hating Gloria for the broken words that she had spoken to her a few nights before. It was because of the Glorias of the world that she wanted Christopher so desperately – to show them they were all wrong. To prove that she had something private and wonderful with Christopher that none of them could see. Had Gloria fucked Christopher?

  Gloria, sitting beside Laura, studied the tense, drawn look of her companion. She knew that Christopher had not been heard from since his liaison with the model. Then she saw a twitch of hate on Laura's mouth, and a message came to her with frightening clarity. She wanted to say, "Laura, I never had Christopher. There has never been anything between us." But she knew how insulting that would be, how clearly that would declare, "Christopher is public property."

  They got to Amityville at a quarter to three – perfect timing, because the boat was leaving at three o'clock. They would be on the island earlier than they had expected – four o'clock at the latest. That would leave plenty of time for a long swim. Gloria was happy about that. There was a lot of city living to wash clean in the ocean.

  The white houses of Amityville gleamed brightly in the sun. The two-story wooden houses were fronted with green grass and cultivated flowers. They looked very safe and very civilized.

  The residents of Amityville hurried into their homes when the ferry loaded to cross the channel. She could feel them pulling back starched curtains, and staring at the slightly disgusting voyagers. They heard tales about the island, and worried about the proximity of their children to the debauchery. They resented the intruders, with all the small-town hate they could muster for the "summer people" – clumsy aliens who stepped on the lawns and got too brown in the sun.

  The boat was half-filled, and more cars were driving up all the time. Gloria and Laura left the car in the expensive parking lot, minding wordlessly the rise in prices that marked every vacation. The car would wait there until they returned.