We’d come to an unspoken agreement that we were going to make love on the bed. Or maybe it was a spoken agreement because I remember she didn’t say “make love,” she said “fuck,” but still, I held the fleshy mounds at the base of her thumb and led her to the bedroom. I told her about a movie I’d seen in which a man blindfolds a woman, ties her to a bed, and makes love to her, and because we’d tried almost everything else, that’s what we did. We took off the rest of our clothes and I found a pair of socks and tied her hands to the top of the black bedstead. She had long, thin legs and a tight strong belly, and she lay back on the bed while I tied the fairly loose knots. I wasn’t especially turned on by the cotton socks holding her arms, but there we were. I found an airline sleep mask in a drawer by the bed and I used it to cover her eyes, and at first she didn’t like it because she couldn’t see, and she liked to see, but she didn’t resist. It was clear from her docility that this was going to be my experiment, as if, like a challenge, she was saying, Show me something new. And because I wanted something new, I knelt between her legs. They were spread slightly and I spread them even more. She was waiting there, quiet and passive, and all the things I used to do, I did. But all those things weren’t having the desired effect. I put my tongue where it liked to go, and moved my tongue, up and down and sideways, above and below and all around. I knew what she liked, or what she used to like, and according to plan, this would be the moment when, pretending to be Steve, I would get an erection, and after some general preparatory touching we would start fucking, as she liked to say. But in saying no to Steve I was saying no to myself, and where Steve had been, now there was a void. And nothing was filling that void. I certainly wasn’t, and as my tongue did its thing, circling around the center of her sensitivity, she wasn’t getting excited, and I wasn’t either. My dick, or my mind, or more accurately my imagination, wasn’t getting aroused. And without arousal, well, I could kiss her where she liked to be kissed, that’s true, and I did. And at the same time I was manually trying to stimulate myself. But none of it was working. There was no question in my mind that she was beautiful, or beautiful enough, so it wasn’t about her beauty. Or her willingness. Or the time of day or the color of the walls. It was my own unwillingness I was straining against. I could feel the sweat seeping out of my armpits and I could tell my unwillingness was winning. And I don’t remember if I held her arms, or if I kissed her breasts or the skin at the base of her neck. I remember that after a while she easily slipped her hands out of the loose knots, pulled up the sleep mask covering her face, and she looked at me. We both knew what it meant. Nothing was said and nothing needed to be said. We rolled away from each other and lay on the bed.
In the movie Detour, the main character has taken on the identity of Charles Haskell, who died at the side of the road, and by becoming Haskell he acquires money and a car and the possibility of getting what he wants — the girl he loves. His plan is to find her, then abandon the role of Haskell, and become who he really is. And it would all be smooth sailing except the woman hitchhiker he picks up knows about Haskell. She knows about his pretending to be Haskell, and when she reads a newspaper story about a possible inheritance, she demands that he keep pretending. And for a while he does. For a while there’s the hope that it’s only temporary, that he’s only temporarily staying with her and planning his life with her. He thinks it can’t go on, but it does go on, and he hates it. The woman continues blackmailing him, and because he doesn’t believe he can do anything, he plays along until, after one of their frequent arguments, she takes the phone into the bedroom. They’re holed up in a rented room in downtown Los Angeles and she closes the door and he can hear her talking to someone and he would like to talk to someone, and at a certain point he can’t stand it anymore. He gets tired of pretending. What seemed like a possible utopia has turned into the opposite of utopia, and because he wants the phone, he takes hold of the phone cord and begins pulling, pulling and pulling until finally it stops being pulled. Suddenly the room gets quiet. He opens the door, walks to the bed, and finds her body, limp and dead, lying on the bed, the phone cord, like a noose, wrapped around her neck.
I looked up. There was Jane, buttoning the buttons of her dress. She was standing and I was lying on the bed, and although I knew what she probably wanted, at that point I was tired of pretending. We both were. I was tired and she was tired, and we could both see that life wasn’t long enough to keep pretending. In an effort, I suppose, to facilitate the end of that pretending, I sat up.
“At some point,” I said, “we should talk.”
“Let’s do that.”
And then we stopped talking.
She was dressed and I got partially dressed and we were standing next to each other, facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes. We were very still. And the thing about stillness, it’s infectious, and because we were still, we got more still.
She was very still when she said, “Goodbye.”
I admired her honesty.
She slipped into her shoes, and I said something like “I’ll see you” or “I’ll call you,” or actually I said, “I like you,” which sounds odd, but I did, and then she turned and walked to the door.
I was expecting myself to say “Wait” or “Don’t go,” or something. But I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything. And she didn’t say anything. And when she walked out the door the room became very quiet.
There was something about Charles Laughton. Although I looked nothing like him and my life was nothing like his, I found his inability to locate happiness intriguing. He used to say he “liked to imitate great men,” meaning, I think, that he used the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the not-quite-human Caliban to show the world who he was. That made him happy, but because he didn’t always know who he was, and because most of the time he hated who he was, performance was often frightening. He also said, “Before you amuse others, you have to amuse yourself,” and during the dress rehearsal of Galileo I think he was trying to do that. An audience had been invited to this particular rehearsal, and the temperature in Los Angeles at the time was reaching the mid-nineties. Whether it was the heat or Laughton’s idea of what Galileo would do, there he was, standing center stage, one foot propped nonchalantly on the other, one hand on his hip and one hand deeply inside his pocket — a pocket sewn onto his costume by Brecht’s wife. He was playing pocket pool, scratching his balls and maybe more, and yes, he was revealing himself, but some people in the audience didn’t want to see what he was showing. They wanted something else. He was showing them a part of themselves they were happy to overlook, and some of the people, somewhere in the darkened theater, began making noise. He’d created the façade of Galileo, but the façade was falling away. He was revealing his fear and his anger and his sexuality, and he was willing to do it and ready to do it except for the noise. The noise, to him, signaled distrust, and distrust, like a poison, was contaminating him.