“No.” She had in fact told several people.
“That wasn’t very smart.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t know me at all. Anything could happen to you.”
She put her glass on the coffee table, crossed the floor and dropped to her knees between his legs. She threw her arms around his thighs. She nuzzled his groin with her nose. He tightened. She unzipped his pants. “Stop,” he said. “Wait.” She took his shoulders — she had a surprisingly strong grip — and pulled him to the carpet. His hovering brood of images and plans was suddenly upended, as though it had been sitting on a table that a rampaging crazy person had flipped over. He felt assaulted and invaded. This was not what he had in mind, but to refuse would make him seem somehow less virile than she. Queasily, he stripped off her clothes and put their bodies in a viable position. He fastened his teeth on her breast and bit her. She made a surprised noise and her body stiffened. He bit her again, harder. She screamed. He wanted to draw blood. Her screams were short and stifled. He could tell that she was trying to like being bitten, but that she did not. He gnawed her breast. She screamed sharply. They screwed. They broke apart and regarded each other warily. She put her hand on his tentatively. He realized what had been disturbing him about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his. His wife did not have this empty quality, yet the gracious way in which she emptied herself for him made her submission, as far as it went, all the more poignant. This exasperating girl, on the other hand, contained a tangible somethingness that she not only refused to expunge, but that seemed to willfully expand itself so that he banged into it with every attempt to invade her. He didn’t mind the somethingness; he rather liked it, in fact, and had looked forward to seeing it demolished. But she refused to let him do it. Why had she told him she was a masochist? He looked at her body. Her limbs were muscular and alert. He considered taking her by the neck and bashing her head against the floor.
He stood abruptly. “I want to get something to eat. I’m starving.”
She put her hand on his ankle. Her desire to abase herself had been completely frustrated. She had pulled him to the rug certain that if only they could fuck, he would enter her with overwhelming force and take complete control of her. Instead she had barely felt him, and what she had felt was remote and cold. Somewhere on her exterior he’d been doing some biting thing that meant nothing to her and was quite unpleasant. Despairing, she held his ankle tighter and put her forehead on the carpet. At least she could stay at his feet, worshiping. He twisted free and walked away. “Come on,” he said.
The car was in the parking lot. It was because of the car that this weekend had come about. It was his wife’s car, an expensive thing that her ex-husband had given her. It had been in Washington for over a year; he was here to retrieve it and drive it back to New York.
Beth was appalled by the car. It was a loud yellow monster with a narrow, vicious shape and absurd doors that snapped up from the roof and out like wings. In another setting it might have seemed glamorous, but here, behind this equally monstrous building, in her unsatisfactory clothing, the idea of sitting in it with him struck her as comparable to putting on a clown nose and wearing it to dinner.
They drove down a suburban highway lined with small businesses, malls and restaurants. It was twilight; several neon signs blinked consolingly.
“Do you think you could make some effort to change your mood?” he said.
“I’m not in a bad mood,” she said wearily. “I just feel blank.”
Not blank enough, he thought.
He pulled into a Roy Rogers fast food cafeteria. She thought: He is not even going to take me to a nice place. She was insulted. It seemed as though he was insulting her on purpose. The idea was incredible to her.
She walked through the line with him, but did not take any of the shiny dishes of food displayed on the fluorescent-lit aluminum shelves. He felt a pang of worry. He was no longer angry, and her drawn white face disturbed him.
“Why aren’t you eating?”
“I’m not hungry.”
They sat down. He picked at his food, eyeing her with veiled alarm. It occurred to her that it might embarrass him to eat in front of her while she ate nothing. She asked if she could have some of his salad. He eagerly passed her the entire bowl of pale leaves strewn with orange dressing. “Have it all.”
He huddled his shoulders orphanlike as he ate; his blond hair stood tangled like pensive weeds. “I don’t know why you’re not eating,” he said fretfully. “You’re going to be hungry later on.”
Her predisposition to adore him was provoked. She smiled.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” he asked.
“I’m just enjoying the way you look. You’re very airy.”
Again, his eyes showed alarm.
“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel like I’m seeing a tank of small, quick fish, the bright darting kind that go every which way.”
He paused, stunned and dangle-forked over his pinched, curled-up steak. “I’m beginning to think you’re out of your fucking mind.”
Her happy expression collapsed.
“Why can’t you talk to me in a half-normal fucking way?” he continued. “Like the way we talked on the plane. I liked that. That was a conversation.” In fact, he hadn’t liked the conversation on the plane either, but compared to this one, it seemed quite all right.
When they got back to the apartment, they sat on the floor and drank more alcohol. “I want you to drink a lot,” he said. “I want to make you do things you don’t want to do.”
“But I won’t do anything I don’t want to do. You have to make me want it.”
He lay on his back in silent frustration.
“What are your parents like?” she asked.
“What?”
“Your parents. What are they like?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have that much to do with them. My mother is nice. My father’s a prick. That’s what they’re like.” He put one hand over his face; a square-shaped album-style view of his family presented itself. They were all at the breakfast table, talking and reaching for things. His mother moved in the background, a slim, worried shadow in her pink robe. His sister sat next to him, tall, blond and arrogant, talking and flicking at toast crumbs in the corners of her mouth. His father sat at the head of the table, his big arms spread over everything, leaning over his plate as if he had to defend it, gnawing his breakfast. He felt unhappy and then angry. He thought of a little Italian girl he had met in a go-go bar a while back, and comforted himself with the memory of her slim haunches and pretty high-heeled feet on either side of his head as she squatted over him.
“It seems that way with my parents when you first look at them. But in fact my mother is much more aggressive and, I would say, more cruel than my father, even though she’s more passive and soft on the surface.”
She began a lengthy and, in his view, incredible and unnecessary history of her family life, including descriptions of her brother and sister. Her entire family seemed to have a collectively disturbed personality characterized by long brooding silences, unpleasing compulsive sloppiness (unflushed toilets, used Kleenex abandoned everywhere, dirty underwear on the floor) and outbursts of irrational, violent anger. It was horrible. He wanted to go home.
He poked himself up on his elbows. “Are you a liar?” he asked. “Do you lie often?”