“Don’t relax,” said Rita. “He’ll be back in a minute.”
“It’s all right with me,” said Joey. He took a magazine off the table. It was open to a picture of a masked woman dressed in a red rubber suit that a man was inflating with a pump. On the next page, a naked girl was tied with belts in a kneeling position on a bathroom floor. An ornery-looking young fellow approached her from behind with a rubber hose; she looked over her shoulder, her lips parted in a look of coy fear. He was surprised at how pretty she was. Her cheekbones and shoulders were like Daisy’s.
Daisy and Joey emerged from the movie theater holding hands. “We have no place to go,” said Daisy. “It’s been a month since we’ve been alone in a room. And David won’t leave.” They walked, still holding hands.
“I feel so terrible about David,” she said. “He’s such a lovely, innocent person. He’s the purest person I know.”
“There are no pure people.”
“You haven’t seen David. He has such naked eyes. When you touch him, it’s like there’s nothing between you and him.” She looked at him quizzically. “You’re not like that. When I touch you, I don’t feel you at all.”
“There’s nothing to feel.”
“Don’t say that about yourself.” She dropped his hand and rubbed his back with her mittened hand. “Anyway, it’s good you’re not like David. Even as you are, I worry about you being too nice to me.”
He put his hand around her neck. “I don’t know what makes you think I have any intention of being nice to you.”
She turned and kissed him. He took a handful of her hair in his fist and pulled her head tautly back while he kissed her.
They sat on the cold stone steps of an apartment building. They unbuttoned their jackets and huddled together, his hands on either side of her softly sweatered body.
“You’re so strange,” she said. “It’s hard to talk to you.”
“How so?”
“You’re always talking at me. You don’t listen to what I say.”
“I seem strange because I’m special.”
“I think it’s because you take so many pills.”
“You should start taking them. Did you know the government gives them to soldiers who are about to go into combat? They sharpen the reflexes, senses, everything.”
“I’m not going into combat.”
There was a sound from above. They turned and saw a handsome, well-dressed middle-aged couple at the head of the steps. Joey saw a flicker of admiration in Daisy’s face as she looked at the tall blond lady in her evening dress. The couple began to descend. Daisy and Joey stood and squeezed into a stony corner to let them pass. The man’s shoulder scratched against Joey. The man coughed, quite unnecessarily.
“Excuse me,” said the woman. “We only live here.”
“You have plenty of room,” said Daisy sharply.
“You have no business being here,” said the man. The couple stood on the sidewalk and frowned, their shoulders indignant.
“Why do you care?” said Daisy. “We aren’t in your way.” Her voice quivered oddly.
“Ssssh,” said Joey. “Let them live their lives.”
“You are very rude,” said the woman. “If you’re here when we get back, we’re going to call the police.” She swept away, sweeping her husband with her. They were probably in a hurry.
Joey watched the woman’s dress fluttering along the pavement. “That was strange,” he said. “I’ve sat on lots of steps before and that’s never happened.”
Daisy didn’t answer.
“I guess it’s different in the East Village.”
Daisy sniffed wetly.
He reached into his pocket and got out his bag of jelly beans. He offered some to Daisy, but she ignored him. Her head was down, and slow, quiet tears ran singly down her nose. He put his arms around her. “Hey, come on,” he said. He felt no response from her. She didn’t move or look at him.
He dropped his arm and looked away, confused. He ate his jelly beans and looked at the pool of lamplight in the black street.
A Romantic Weekend
SHE WAS MEETING a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate. Perhaps her body tilted too far forward as she walked, perhaps her jacket made her torso look bulky in contrast to her calves and ankles, which were probably skinny. She felt like an object unraveling in every direction. In anticipation of their meeting, she had not been able to sleep the night before; she had therefore eaten some amphetamines and these had heightened her feeling of disintegration.
When she arrived at the corner he wasn’t there. She stood against a building, trying to arrange her body in the least repulsive configuration possible. Her discomfort mounted. She crossed the street and stood on the other corner. It seemed as though everyone who walked by was eating. A large, distracted businessman went by holding a half-eaten hot dog. Two girls passed, sharing cashews from a white bag. The eating added to her sense that the world was disorderly and unbeautiful. She became acutely aware of the garbage on the street. The wind stirred it; a candy wrapper waved forlornly from its trapped position in the mesh of a jammed public wastebasket. This was all wrong, all horrible. Her meeting with him should be perfect and scrap-free. She couldn’t bear the thought of flapping trash. Why wasn’t he there to meet her? Minutes passed. Her shoulders drew together.
She stepped into a flower store. The store was clean and white, except for a few smudges on the linoleum floor. Homosexuals with low voices stood behind the counter. Arranged stalks bearing absurd blossoms protruded from sedate round vases and bristled in the aisles. She had a paroxysm of fantasy. He held her, helpless and swooning, in his arms. They were supported by a soft ball of puffy blue stuff. Thornless roses surrounded their heads. His gaze penetrated her so thoroughly, it was as though he had thrust his hand into her chest and begun feeling her ribs one by one. This was all right with her. “I have never met anyone I felt this way about,” he said. “I love you.” He made her do things she’d never done before, and then they went for a walk and looked at the new tulips that were bound to have grown up somewhere. None of this felt stupid or corny, but she knew that it was. Miserably, she tried to gain a sense of proportion. She stared at the flowers. They were an agony of bright, organized beauty. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to give him flowers. She wanted to be with him in a room full of flowers. She visualized herself standing in front of him, bearing a handful of blameless flowers trapped in the ugly pastel paper the florist would staple around them. The vision was brutally embarrassing, too much so to stay in her mind for more than seconds.
She stepped out of the flower store. He was not there. Her anxiety approached despair. They were supposed to spend the weekend together.
He stood in a cheap pizza stand across the street, eating a greasy slice and watching her as she stood on the corner. Her anxiety was visible to him. It was at once disconcerting and weirdly attractive. Her appearance otherwise was not pleasing. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was. Perhaps it was the suggestion of meekness in her dress, of a desire to be inconspicuous, or worse, of plain thoughtlessness about how clothes looked on her.
He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, gentle face whom he had tormented off and on for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.”