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.
" 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 valuable. And that day I' llbe 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."