The shack had no windows. The nights up there were cool, but this was August, remember, and the days were pretty hot. In the middle of the day, with the sun beating down on the roof through the trees, the inside of the shack could get really hot. What we finally worked out, we left the damper open on the fireplace and opened the door, and that caused enough movement of air to make the interior livable.
There’s somebody at the door. Now, I mean, present tense, not back there in the shack. They rang the bell just a second ago and now they did it again.
It wouldn’t be Betsy. The door’s unlocked, and Betsy would just come in, she wouldn’t ring the bell. And if it isn’t Betsy I don’t care who it is.
The windows here face the rear of the house, and I don’t have any lights on anywhere else, so they can’t be sure I’m home, whoever they are. Would it be Kay, come out to comfort me? I hope to Christ it isn’t, I might be just stupid enough and lonely enough to take her up on it.
I’m not going to answer. It’s long after midnight, Monday the 27th of November is down the drain for good, I have three days left in which to write nine chapters, this current episode on the treadmill is almost over, I’m not going to break into it by answering the door. I don’t want to know who’s there.
Besides, maybe they’ve gone away by now.
I was talking about the great thing at the shack. Most of the time up there was kind of dull and boring, though we both had ourselves about half convinced — I had myself about half convinced, I mean — that it was all very romantic. Living in the woods, completely on our own, nothing but us and a cozy fire and a big cozy bed. We screwed a lot, and the rest of the time we spent in busy work, not having anything to say to each other. I chopped down two trees and sawed them into lengths, showing masculine prowess and giving myself aching muscles I was too young to mention to Betsy. She, on the other hand, insisted on preparing gourmet dishes on a seven-hundred-year-old gas stove, none of which came out edible and all of which I ate, beaming ecstatically while she hovered in worry all about me.
As far as screwing is concerned, we’d already covered the ground in that subject, we knew what positions we liked, what foreplay we liked, what would turn us on and what would turn us off, so it was simply a matter of running through the entire repertoire in three days. We didn’t have that much of a repertoire, actually, so it was easy.
On the third day, our last day there, we were screwing in midday, the door open, two kerosene lamps burning because the interior of the windowless shack was always dark, and we were building up a good head of steam, the two of us. The position was — this is important, or I wouldn’t mention it — I was lying on my back and Betsy was sitting astride me, facing me, her knees along my sides. She was kneeling actually, and had settled back onto her haunches and my cock. I was pushing upward, and she was grinding her belly around, doing most of the moving. We called it Ed’s rest position, and did it whenever we wanted to screw but I was sort of tired.
Anyway, we were going along and all of a sudden Betsy stopped. I looked up at her, and she was staring at the door with a startled expression on her face. Oh, Christ, I thought, some hunter or somebody is looking in. I twisted my head around and looked at the door and what was standing there was a deer. Taller than I would have thought, and thick-bodied, but with big soulful brown eyes, looking in at us.
Tableau.
Me trying to think of something funny to say.
The deer abruptly bounded away, and I looked back at Betsy, still trying to think of something funny to say, and Betsy smiled at me in a rapt visionary sort of way and said, “God is happy we’re married.”
Oh, Christ.
The doorbell’s ringing again. Could it be her? Kay?
2
Driving north out of New York City, Beth Trepless fought to keep the tears out of her eyes. She wouldn’t cry, she refused to cry, and if the tears that wanted to come were at least as much tears of rage as they were tears of sorrow it didn’t matter, she did not want to cry and she would not cry. She wouldn’t let Paul have the satisfaction. Whether he knew about it or not.
What a fool she’d been! She drove north out of the city, taking Route 9 instead of the Thruway because she had practically no money with her, and the same thought kept circling and circling in her head. What a fool, what a fool, what a fool.
How could she not have known? How could she have lived with him so long and never suspected the sort of double life he was leading?
When she’d started to read that terrible diary this afternoon she hadn’t at first believed it could possibly be true. He had to have made it up, she thought, and she kept thinking that as long as she could. But the details were so complete, and when they referred to instances she could remember, absences and so on, they were so accurate that finally she d had to admit the truth to herself, that what she was reading was a factual, gloating, lustful account of her husband’s infidelities.
How many had there been? It seemed incredible to her that she’d never realized what he was up to, that he’d managed to hide his true nature from her so long.
And what now? Edwina was asleep in the back seat, the car was pointing north toward her parents’ home, up near the Canadian border, and what in the world she was going to do with herself now she had no idea. Her marriage lay in shattered shreds at her feet, and her marriage was her life, so it was her life that had been shattered.
She had been living a lie. Paul’s lie, not her own. She had been living it without knowing it, and now the lie had been exposed and could no longer be lived with any more. And there was nothing else to take its place, nothing at all to take its place.
She wished she could stop thinking about it but the thoughts just kept circling and circling in her head, spinning around the perimeter of her despair, outlining over and over the disaster that had befallen her.
When she saw the hitchhiker, she knew she shouldn’t stop for him, a woman alone in a car — Edwina was less than company — should never pick up hitchhikers, but she craved companionship, conversation, someone to help her take her mind off the horrible events of the day, so when she saw the hitchhiker she drove right on by.
No, God damn it. She picked him up.
I can’t do it. I don’t want to write a chapter about Betsy fucking with somebody else, no matter what alias she uses.
But it’s the only way out. Even if I manage to write the chapter about Paul and the whore, I have no place to go from there, no third chapter. I either have to make this an alternate-viewpoint book, back and forth between Paul and Beth, or I have to make it La Ronde. In either case, Chapter 2 has to be from Beth’s point of view.
I prefer La Ronde. Beth and the hitchhiker. Then Chapter 3 is the hitchhiker and some other girl, and so on until Chapter 9 is Paul and the whore told from the whore’s point of view, and Chapter 10 is Paul and Beth getting back together again.
But first I have to write Chapter 2, and in Chapter 2 Beth has to make it with somebody. And I don’t want to write that. I don’t even want to think it, so how can I write it?
This is ridiculous, I can’t go on like this. Things are going to hell all around me, here I am at Rod’s desk, using his typewriter, I don’t even have Chapter 1 any more, and I can’t write Chapter 2 because apparently I believe in sympathetic magic or something.
What a day this is. Ten o’clock in the morning and already it’s been too much day for me, and I can see from here I’m off on another useless chapter again. How many of these things have I done now? Thousands. And out of them I have one useful chapter and a couple of useful chapter beginnings.