“Don't ask me that.”
“Why not? You love me. I'm waiting for you to say you don't love me.”
“Please.”
“I didn't come all this way to let you off easy. You have to decide.”
In the kitchen, the teapot whistled. Victoria slid in her socks across the green linoleum floor toward the stove, gripping the telephone in her left hand. She touched the sizzling handle of the pot and pulled her other hand away quickly. On the wall beside the sink a hotpad hung, oily and besmirched by a thousand meals. She couldn't put her hand inside it.
“Ouch,” she cried, moving the pot to a wooden cutting board as fast as she could.
“What's the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Is he there?”
She marveled at how the voice on the phone of a man she had loved so dearly a few months before had devolved so insidiously into a whine.
“No.”
“Vic, I want to marry you.”
It was not an invitation, a plea, a question. It was an edict. She found a chipped mug in the cupboard, reasonably clean, and set it on the drain board. In the cabinet, she located a tea bag and placed it delicately into the cup. She used a dish towel found near the plumbing under the sink to protect her hand from the steaming kettle while she poured the hot water.
The water wet the leaves inside the translucent bag, making them soggy and a darker color, sending up a smoky drift of Lapsang souchong. Why did he have to want her now? She had run away, found someone new, and now all of the sudden, Jason couldn't live without her. It struck her as all wrong. His words were as murky as the contents of her cup.
“Why?”
“I can't live without you.”
Good answer. “You know,” she said, then blew on her tea while she paused to think, “I didn't do any of this to hurt you.”
Silence on the phone. While her words sunk in, she wiped the drops of water from the scummy counter. Sharing a kitchen with male roommates, it turned out, was no picnic. When the lights went out, the roaches scurried around the room, proud owners of the night. She reached under the sink, past Luther's gallon of half-drunk gin, and found some cleanser which she sprinkled liberally around the countertop.
“Is he better-looking?” Jason asked.
Tom was taller. His hair was darker. He looked good. The regularity of his looks, the cragginess, the nasal sound of his voice, these flaws reduced him to human, while his aspirations and intelligence elevated him.
“No,” she said.
“Then, why?”
She took a tentative sip of her tea, which was still too hot. Hardening herself against the pain, she let her tongue scald as the second, longer sip traveled toward her throat.
Because, she thought, I let go. I finally did. After years of holding on, dreaming, accepting lies as truth, she had let go. And now, too late, here Jason was, exactly where she had wanted him a long time ago. It was a pyrrhic victory. Now, she felt cold and distant from him. How to tell him? He had been her skin. He had held her soul together for years. She puzzled over the words she should speak. Should she tell him it was over? How could he understand that? Clearly, he clung to the idea that she was still accessible to him. Where was the grace in this situation? How did you tell someone that the passion between you, once so palpable, had burned to dust? Another man's smell, his sex, his squarer jaw, was now as established as her skeleton.
“I'm coming over,” Jason said, as if tired of waiting for her to say something.
“No!” she said into the dead phone.
By the time Tom came home, she had sizzled frozen corn to perfection, chicken-fried two steaks, and poured an entire bag of prepared salad into a bowl and drizzled it with dressing from a bottle. One of Tom's virtues was an undemanding palate. He ate to live, unlike Jason, who lived to eat very well.
Jason had not shown up.
They dined by candlelight, a stick dribbling over an old wine bottle at the table in the worn kitchen, any romance derived from the shush of wind and rattle of old glass in the windows. They turned on an old movie, but within minutes, were making love in the attic room he had painted in shades of blue.
She was on top because he liked it that way, and she was exploring some unfamiliar realms of feminine pleasures up there, when suddenly, the door flew open.
In stepped Jason.
But she didn't notice immediately. She was licking Tom's shoulder, relishing the salt and sweat of it. She only noticed when Tom stopped moaning and then stopped moving entirely.
“Get out,” he said distinctly.
She turned and saw Jason.
He stood frozen in a corner by the door, glows from a canister candle on the dresser bleeding red light down his cheeks. How long had he been there watching them?
“Jason?” she said, lifting herself off Tom and turning to look at him. “Who let you in?”
Immediately, she knew the answer. Luther had let him in, too drunk and oblivious to consider anyone else's problems, and too lazy to announce a guest.
Jason said nothing and everything. His eyes had assumed a largeness beyond normal, and the clenching and unclenching of his jaw scared her.
“You have to go,” she said before Tom could do anything. How must he be feeling, nude, wrapped in her body, totally vulnerable.
Jason swayed in the doorway. She saw for the first time a glinting in his hand. A gun? But… how could this be possible? She had loved him. She had given him everything, her entire heart and soul, and he had repeatedly trampled on them. He had stomped them until they didn't have a breath of life left.
All this thought was reduced to a moment of breathless suspense while she waited to see what he would do, feeling Tom's innocent blood pumping in the heart that was still close enough to her own to feel.
She had met Jason when she was in college in Los Angeles. He was her best friend Carol's buddy. She heard about him for months before they met, and that was exactly the source of all the trouble. What she heard from Carol, about his wit, his warmth, his loving family, she incorporated into a mythology. She invented a perfect man in her mind, smart, sensitive, funny. Creative. Against that, she didn't have a chance. At their first meeting, she fell, and she fell hard.
“What do you see in him?” Carol asked her, strangely upset.
“What a question. He's your friend. You like him, don't you?”
“Well, he has his problems.”
“Of course he does. He's human.”
But she didn't really believe it. Suddenly Carol, formerly Jason's biggest fan, became his biggest detractor. “He's too short for you,” she would say. “He's sleazy,” she said once. “Can't you see it?”
She couldn't. She liked his compact size, which made him less threatening. He was muscular to make up for a lack in height, and had a lovely narrow waist and dark, masculine whiskers that he had to shave daily. What did Carol mean calling him sleazy, she puzzled. Was it possible Carol was jealous?
She tested the theory and found it untenable. Jason had made a play for Carol ages ago which she had rebuffed. He flirted shamelessly with her on every occasion, and she discouraged him with playful insults, as sexually interested as a sister would be in a charming but disgusting younger brother.
Then she considered the idea that Carol was jealous of their growing closeness, because Jason had sniffed out Victoria 's excitement about him immediately, and began to circle in an ever narrowing spiral.
“Just because I like Jason and he seems to like me doesn't mean we won't still be friends,” she had told Carol.
Carol broke into a big belly laugh. “What a relief!” she had responded. “Gee, then I can be honest with you? You won't turn on me if I say something negative about him? I just hate friends that pull that kind of shit, loyal to the boy, even when it means sacrificing a sense of humor or perspective.”
“Just what is it you don't like about him?” she had asked one night after sharing a joint in Carol's living room.
Carol thought for a long time. “Jason's okay, running around with lightweights. But Vic, you're not like that. You're going to get in there and scratch his insides. It's you two together that feels dangerous to me. Somebody could get hurt.”
She dismissed Carol's worries right then and there. “Deep is good and right. Who wants a shallow life? People are emotional creatures. We've got to give that full scope, don't we?”
“See what I mean?” Carol complained. “Everything is so heavy with you. You go too far. Most people aren't cut out for high drama.”
She had shaken her head. “Hurt is human. How else do we know we live?”
“Vic, you drive me crazy, and I bet I'm not the only one.” Carol had left it at that.
When Jason and Vic finally went to bed together, a month after their first meeting, Vic was deeply, hopelessly smitten. In love, in the worst possible way. Awash in sexual chemistry, she felt satisfied beyond reason with his lovemaking, which later she might have called calculated. The tiniest touch of his fingertip sent gushers of hot blood flooding through her body. Sex synthesized her into an unthinking organism, which exploded fertility, big as a season, bursting with buds and pollinating the universe. She wanted to own him, possess his soul and every thought.
And Jason was an eager colluder. He wrote poetry and songs for her, oblique metaphors which were really all about him and not about her at all. But that was fair, in fact, because all her thoughts of him were really all about an idealized version of herself. She was in love with her own creation, a consummate specimen of humanity, and not with Jason at all.
This went on for quite a while, lots of letters, feverish phone calls in the dead of night, passionate meetings on a cold, sandy beach, on a roof still radiating heat after the sun went down, against the dirty wall of a garage. She didn't want to contain their lovemaking. She desperately wanted to be out of control emotionally, and so she was.
Jason, perhaps, came along for the adventure.
They wore out. Six months of mindless doggy happiness and two years of self-imposed blindness passed before reality began its inexorable drip, smearing her fresh, perfect painting of relationship bliss.
A weekend came and went without a letter. That Sunday night, her frantic worry had given way to a dark resignation. She called his house, even though he preferred to call her.
“He's not in,” said his mother. “Who shall I say is calling?”
As if she had no idea who Vic was. As if nearly three years hadn't registered with her.
When he did call, he was full of newsy gossip about his weekend. He had studied hard on Saturday, and taken on his brother's paper route for fun on Sunday. They did the route in his battered Karmann Ghia, high.
“So two hours kinda morphed into three.” Jason chuckled.
“Just you and your brother?” she had asked, unable to stop herself.
He changed the subject, and she knew, somewhere in the infinitesimal portion of rational thought still accessible to her, the colors in her mind began to blur, and the brightness toned down just a hair. She knew, but for a brief time, she ignored what she knew.
The fights began.
Victoria came from an argumentative family. She knew how to argue, how to wield sarcasm, how to twist facts. She had a terrible tendency, she was the first to admit, to bolster her opinions with specious facts.
Jason had a more subtle style. He opened his eyes wide, convinced with a guileless air of calm reason. Which made her crazy. And made her throw things.
Deterioration, particularly when he responded in kind.
He had another lover. She knew it. He knew she knew. The entire thing made her so tired, she spent days when she didn't have school lying on a couch with a blanket over her, moping and crying. He didn't call, just came by occasionally wanting sex. She gave him bitterness and grief.
After a few weeks of this, she came to her senses. She didn't wait for the usual call, the tentative plans that were dependent upon how cheerful she was willing to act. That morning the sun spread down the sidewalks and crept happily over the bushes and trees. Her usual place on the couch, in a cold, shadowy corner of the living room close to the phone, held no appeal.
Like a car in drive, inspired by the impulsive lurch of sunshine outside, she packed a bag with lotion, a paperback book, and a towel, popped sunglasses on her head, and hitchhiked to the beach. The day passed in a pleasant pageant of blue and white, with a touch of orange sun when she tilted her head a certain way. She swam out beyond the breakers, and had a conversation with a recovering heroin addict that made her glad to be alive and not addicted.
Jason was waiting on the porch when she came home. The ex-addict had taken her home on his motorcycle. When he saw Jason, he stopped short at the gate, gave her a wave, and jumped back on his bike and roared away.
She unlocked the front door, wondering what to say.
“Have a good time at the beach?” Jason said, and she heard caverns of unhappiness in his voice.
She let him inside.
“I've been trying to reach you all day.”
The accusation stood there naked for her to see. Seeing it, she didn't like it. “Want something to drink?” she asked. “I'm so thirsty.” She didn't wait for an answer. Tossing her things on the floor, she went into the kitchen and reached into the freezer for ice. “Beer?” she asked. He liked beer.
“Okay.” He drank the beer.
She put on some music, sat down next to him on the couch, and drank wine. While the music wound around them, tight as his arms around her shoulder, he drank another beer and another. Then he tried to steer her into the bedroom. She was surprised to discover she did not want to go there with him.
“Time to go, Jason,” she said, trying to disentangle herself from him.
He planted his feet in her living room. First, he flirted. She was lovely tonight, her skin glowing with the day's sunshine. When that didn't work, he pleaded. How far it was to drive home. He was tired. She didn't want him driving when he was so tired, did she? Then he got demanding and things got ugly.
He tried to force her.
She kicked him in the nuts.
He bellowed with pain and left enraged.
It being the end of the school year, she moved back home to San Francisco. Although her parents in Palo Alto offered her a safe haven, she checked the want ads in the Chronicle. Tom lived in a nice big apartment near Nob Hill with one other roommate, Luther. They needed another person to share the rent.
She liked Tom instantly. She even liked the way he answered the phone. “Whee!” he said. Later he explained that he was taking French, and she had misunderstood the word oui, but by then she was already captivated by his devilish smile and the cute room at the front of an old building fronting a Wayne Thibault-style San Francisco street, all flat planes leading straight up. She put a chair in the middle of the bay window and made that her power spot in the apartment, strewing newspapers, books, and dried coffee cups.
Jason wrote from L.A., and oh, could he write. His letters arrived almost daily through a slot in the front door, and his words balled up her insides until she stopped reading them. So he called. He told her about his fellow workers at the ketchup factory, making fun of them with a fondness that reminded her about the bigness of his heart. He engaged her in the furies of his creative struggles, made her laugh.
During the day she worked in an office, busying herself with the futile task of organizing other people's chaos. She missed Jason, the intimacy. His phone calls, when she took them, had the safety of distance behind them. She felt free to fantasize again, to imagine a closeness between them, to wonder about a future. But on the foggy summer nights, it was Tom, sipping Scotch out of thin glass, who radiated like a heater and drew her closer. Only the rude blare of the telephone could upset the peace when they would sit together at the table playing cards or trading jokes.
“You going to answer that?” Tom would ask.
Sometimes she answered, sometimes not. Always these calls from Jason were awkward because Tom sat there sipping or snacking, his warm, brown eyes fixed elsewhere, but every molecule of his body spinning in her direction.
One night in August, Tom went to a party with an old friend, a social worker named Peggy with muscular legs and a wide smile. Victoria spent the evening fussing, due to return to school in September, to L.A. Did that mean she returned to Jason, too? What about Tom? Tom's absence from the kitchen made her cranky, and when Luther came in to pour himself a little gin, not even drunk yet, she said nastily, “Oh, why bother with a glass when you can take the whole bottle?”
When Tom came home, late, she was waiting for him in the kitchen surrounded by the dirty dishes and cockroaches that had crept out, unafraid of the still, fuming woman at the table.
Tom lounged against the table, bubbling a little, as if the alcohol slogging inside him continued to brew. Ordinarily shy and wary around her, he reached a long arm out to snag her, pulling her close. Sniffing her hair, he said, “Ah. I knew you would smell just like this.”
Maybe if she hadn't been so jealous of Peggy, maybe if her nightly phone joust with Jason hadn't left her angry at herself for leading him on when she suddenly did not want a future with him and dreaded leaving San Francisco and the life she now led, she would have pushed Tom away. She valued their friendship. She did not want to jeopardize that by jumping into bed with him.
But the charged bolts of energy sizzled around them and she couldn't let go.
That first night, she let Tom hold her close.
The next night, they made love in his moody blue room, with the windows open and the cold night air seeping around and between the heat of their bodies, and she was hooked. All feeling for Jason faded into memory, into embarrassment. How could she have loved him? Examining the picture he had sent in a frame, she realized Carol had been right.
He was sleazy. He had little piggy eyes, and he had cheated on her and lied to her face.
The next time Jason called, she told him she didn't want him to call again. Frantic at her rejection, he stepped up his campaign, sending flowers, even a telegram. I LOVE YOU STOP
When she stopped responding, he had flown up. “I'm coming over…”
Life moves. That's the essence of it, force forward into progress, like mad lines of ants marching along, individual, mobbed, compelled. Yet, at that moment, while Jason's gun glinted in the corner of the attic room, and Tom moved out from beneath her, nothing progressed. Stalled, frozen, paralyzed, all these words did not do what happened justice. An eternal moment passed. She had time to assess the fundamental nature of the situation.
Jealousy.
Two men, one woman.
Elemental and immutable.
In her naiveté, she had not understood completely that they were not playing. These romances constituted the essential nature of life. Childhood was over. Adulthood was life itself, happiness, children. There were no higher stakes.
The gun glinting, as Jason raised it…
When she was very young, very very young, she played with dolls. She invented worlds where men were not necessary, where the characters reproduced asexually. They lived on the moon, powerful and unchallenged.
What happened in real life: staring at a gun. Something over for good. Accepting it.
“Aaaa!” she cried, then repeated herself. Jason's hand quavered. He stared at them. Blood bloomed on the chest of the man she loved.
“My fault?” she wondered, staring into the black hole of the barrel Jason now pointed at her. Everything on this warm, wild earth froze.
His hand wavered and his piggy eyes fixed. He brought the gun back, opened his mouth, and shot red all over the blue wall behind him. He slumped down on the rug, leaving behind two dead bodies and one living.
During the time their lives passed from active to inactive, she hesitated like a bee above a flower. Something was pending, something always hovered, and it was her life, lingering.
They died, they both died, and she stayed on to fly around in the sunshine and ponder that moment for the rest of her short days.