“All right. I’ll get it myself.” He got the stick and snatched the blanket from her body.
She sat, her legs curled in a kneeling position. “Don’t,” she said. “I’m scared.”
“You should be scared,” he said. “I’m going to torture you.” He brandished the stick, which actually felt as though it would break on the second or third blow. They froze in their positions, staring at each other.
She was the first to drop her eyes. She regarded the torn-off blanket meditatively. “You have really disappointed me,” she said. “This whole thing has been a complete waste of time.”
He sat on the bed, stick in lap. “You don’t care about my feelings.”
“I think I want to sleep in the next room.”
They couldn’t sleep separately any better than they could sleep together. She lay curled up on the couch pondering what seemed to be the ugly nature of her life. He lay wound in a blanket, blinking in the dark, as a dislocated, manic and unpleasing revue of his sexual experiences stumbled through his memory in a queasy scramble.
In the morning they agreed that they would return to Manhattan immediately. Despite their mutual ill humor, they fornicated again, mostly because they could more easily ignore each other while doing so.
They packed quickly and silently.
“It’s going to be a long drive back,” he said. “Try not to make me feel like too much of a prick, okay?”
“I don’t care what you feel like.”
He would have liked to dump her at the side of the road somewhere, but he wasn’t indifferent enough to societal rules to do that. Besides, he felt vaguely sorry that he had made her cry, and while this made him view her grudgingly, he felt obliged not to worsen the situation. Ideally she would disappear, taking her stupid canvas bag with her. In reality, she sat beside him in the car with more solidity and presence than she had displayed since they met on the corner in Manhattan. She seemed fully prepared to sit in silence for the entire six-hour drive. He turned on the radio.
“Would you mind turning that down a little?”
“Anything for you.”
She rolled her eyes.
Without much hope, he employed a tactic he used to pacify his wife when they argued. He would give her a choice and let her make it. “Would you like something to eat?” he asked. “You must be starving.”
She was. They spent almost an hour driving up and down the available streets trying to find a restaurant she wanted to be in. She finally chose a small, clean egg-and-toast place. Her humor visibly improved as they sat before their breakfast. “I like eggs,” she said. “They are so comforting.”
He began to talk to her out of sheer curiosity. They talked about music, college, people they knew in common and drugs they used to take as teenagers. She said that when she had taken LSD, she had often lost her sense of identity so completely that she didn’t recognize herself in the mirror. This pathetic statement brought back her attractiveness in a terrific rush. She noted the quick dark gleam in his eyes.
“You should’ve let me beat you,” he said. “I wouldn’t have hurt you too much.”
“That’s not the point. The moment was wrong. It wouldn’t have meant anything.”
“It would’ve meant something to me.” He paused. “But you probably would’ve spoiled it. You would’ve started screaming right away and made me stop.”
The construction workers at the next table stared at them quizzically. She smiled pleasantly at them and returned her gaze to him. “You don’t know that.”
He was so relieved at the ease between them that he put his arm around her as they left the restaurant. She stretched up and kissed his neck.
“We just had the wrong idea about each other,” she said. “It’s nobody’s fault that we’re incompatible.”
“Well, soon we’ll be in Manhattan, and it’ll be all over. You’ll never have to see me again.” He hoped she would dispute this, but she didn’t.
They continued to talk in the car, about the nature of time, their parents and the injustice of racism.
She was too exhausted to extract much from the pedestrian conversation, but the sound of his voice, the position of his body and his sudden receptivity were intoxicating. Time took on a grainy, dreamy aspect that made impossible conversations and unlikely gestures feasible, like a space capsule that enables its inhabitants to happily walk up the wall. The peculiar little car became a warm, humming cocoon, like a miniature house she had, as a little girl, assembled out of odds and ends for invented characters. She felt as if she were a very young child, when every notion that appeared in her head was new and naked of association and thus needed to be expressed carefully so it didn’t become malformed. She wanted to set every one of them before him in a row, as she had once presented crayon drawings to her father in a neat many-colored sequence. Then he would shift his posture slightly or make a gesture that suddenly made him seem so helpless and frail that she longed to protect him and cosset him away, like a delicate pet in a matchbox filled with cotton. She rested her head on his shoulder and lovingly regarded the legs that bent at the knee and tapered to the booted feet resting on the brakes or the accelerator. This was as good as her original fantasy, possibly even better.
“Can I abuse you some more now?” he asked sweetly. “In the car?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Gag you? That’s all, I’d just like to gag you.”
“But I want to talk to you.”
He sighed. “You’re really not a masochist, you know.”
She shrugged. “Maybe not. It always seemed like I was.”
“You might have fantasies, but I don’t think you have any concept of a real slave mentality. You have too much ego to be part of another person.”
“I don’t know, I’ve never had the chance to try it. I’ve never met anyone I wanted to do that with.”
“If you were a slave, you wouldn’t make the choice.”
“All right, I’m not a slave. With me it’s more a matter of love.” She was just barely aware that she was pitching her voice higher and softer than it was naturally, so that she sounded like a cartoon girl. “It’s like the highest form of love.”
He thought this was really cute. Sure it was nauseating, but it was feminine in a radio-song kind of way.
“You don’t seem interested in love. It’s not about that for you.”
“That’s not true. That’s not true at all. Why do you think I was so rough back there? Deep down, I’m afraid I’ll fall in love with you, that I’ll need to be with you and fuck you … forever.” He was enjoying himself now. He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers.
On one hand, she was beside herself with bliss. On the other, she was scrutinizing him carefully from behind an opaque facade as he entered her pasteboard scene of flora and fauna. Could he function as a character in this landscape? She imagined sitting across from him in a Japanese restaurant, talking about anything. He would look intently into her eyes….
He saw her apartment and then his. He saw them existing a nice distance apart, each of them blocked off by cleanly cut boundaries. Her apartment bloomed with scenes that spiraled toward him in colorful circular motions and then froze suddenly and clearly in place. She was crawling blindfolded across the floor. She was bound and naked in an S&M bar. She was sitting next to him in a taxi, her skirt pulled up, his fingers in her vagina.
… and then they would go back to her apartment. He would beat her and fuck her mouth.
Then he would go home to his wife, and she would make dinner for him. It was so well balanced, the mere contemplation of it gave him pleasure.