S*E*V*E*N

John D. MacDonald S*E*V*E*N

QUARREL, THE ANNEX, DEAR OLD FRIEND, and DOUBLE HANNENFRAMMIS originally appeared in Playboy Magazine

© 1967,1968, 1970 by HMH Publishing Co., Inc.

The Random Noise of Love

“I got to tell you what this flippy husband of mine pulled tonight, Irene. I’ll wait till Joe brings the drinks in. Well, hey! The booze is here already, huh? Here’s to it. If you get to it and can’t do it, and so forth. Cheers. Joe, what I wanted to tell you and Irene was what Marty pulled tonight that made us a little late getting here. Anyways, he gets all ready, see, and we’re at the door, practically, and I get a look at the necktie he has on and I told him it’s all dirty around the knot, so he should go change it. What he does with a necktie, like a nervous habit, is all the time tightening the knot and they get cruddy looking all the time, and guess who has to go through them every so often and weed out the cruddy ones to send to the cleaners. So he goes back to change to a clean tie, and I wait and I wait and I wait, and finally I go charging in to find out what’s holding him up, and you know what I find? You wouldn’t believe it! Here is this nut I’m married to, sitting on the side of the bed in his underwear. It’s like he’s some kind of go-to-bed machine. When he takes off the tie it starts the machinery. Tie, shirt, shoes, socks, pants. So he looks up at me with this kind of dumb look on his face, and I ask him is he maye going to come over here to see our good friends Joe and Irene in his underwear? He gives a kind of a jump and looks at himself and looks around, and then he has to get back into his clothes again. Isn’t that the limit? On the way over here I say to him, boy, it’s really going to kill Joe and Irene about why we’re late, and he says to me, he says, ‘Glad, what’s the point in telling anybody?’ So I say to him, ‘Jesus, Marty, you got to have a sense of humor, haven’t you? When something funny happens what’s the point in not telling your practically best friends?’ I always say if you can’t laugh at yourself you’ve had it, brother. Right? Right?”

When I push the button for her apartment, her voice comes over that tube thing. It makes her voice sound whispery and hollow and strange. “Yes?” And I seem to always just catch myself in time and say, “It’s Martin.” It sounds strange on my mouth to call myself Martin. It makes her glad for me to call myself that. And the way she says it, it becomes a different name. Mar-tin. Martin Harris. She says she doesn’t know any Marty Harris at all. She says she would not be in love with any Marty Harris. But she is in love with Marrr-tinnn. There are sweet little curves of the mouth, and she keeps her lips apart so that I can see the pink point of her tongue touch up there behind her upper teeth to make the t, and then drop to make the vowel sound, and then go back up again and flatten itself against the space behind her upper teeth to make the long nnnnn, the way she drags it out, in a kind of teasing, teasing in her own special way I never knew before. Like saying my name that way, over and over, after we have had love together, over and over, with a smiling look in her eyes, so that I know, just from her saying my name, that she wants us to do it again, as soon as I am ready, as soon as I can.

“Hey, you guys. Listen to this one. Yeah, right from the same place as always. Honest to Christ, I don’t know where that old joker out there gets hold of so many new stories alla time. Way the hell and gone out at the other end of Queens, the furthest account I’ve got and maybe the smallest. Marty, you used to cover that area, din’t you? You remember that Crandall that’s got the stationery store and looks like some kind of dignified bishop? Din’t he always have a joke every time you go check the tape and post his books? You know, I even wonner if that old bastid invents them. Somebody has to make up jokes. Anyways, here’s the one he tells me yesterday. There is this guy in a bar bragging to his buddies he can tell how old a woman is and what color hair she’s got even blindfolded. So they put up some money and he covers it and they go over to a cathouse and explain the bet to the madam. She goes along with it and they blindfold the guy and they bring in three hustlers, a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. The blonde is twenty and the brunette is thirty and the redhead is forty. They line them up without a stitch on. So this guy goes to the blonde first and gives her a good grope and... Hey, Marty! You heard it maybe? Where the hell are you going? Marty? Couldn’t you anyway answer me, you son of a bitch? You see that, you guys? What the hell is the matter with him lately. Should a guy just walk out on a joke, even if he has heard it? Shouldn’t he answer or apologize or something? What should it cost him. I tell you, I am getting goddamn tired of the way he’s acting lately. Where the hell was I? Oh yeah. The blindfolded guy, he gives the blonde a good feel, and then he says...”

Sometimes with Andrea, when we have made love solemnly and slowly, making it all last, when it is a second time, soon after the first, gentle, not so hungry, making it go on and on, there can be that feeling that right now, right here, you know all there is to know. You have found the secret to the whole thing. It is the way you wake up in the night sometimes with the answer to everything so clearly in mind you know that if you can write it down, it will change the world. But it fades away before you can capture it.

Sometimes it is like last Friday, when I figured that if I worked fast enough and hard enough I could cover every account on my sheet for that day, and get to her place by one thirty, and have from then until ten after five, the latest I could leave and still get back to the office in time to turn everything in.

But on the third from the last account they had put that new girl on the cash register. She had screwed up the tape and the department symbols and the totals. Even working through without lunch I didn’t clear it until after two o’clock. There were two more places to cover, and so I said the hell with it, and I saw a cab with people getting out, so I took the cab and I was holding Andrea in my arms at two thirty, saying her name and, for some fool reason, feeling like crying.

Last Friday, in all that dreamy gentle on-and-on of the second time, it wasn’t as if I were doing anything, or we were doing anything. It was like being in some kind of small boat on little waves in a long dream. While it was going on I could hear the whole city out there, all the nearby things, trucks and horns and things like that, and then things farther away, like sirens and airplanes and steamship horns. Under it all I could hear that great soft sound that is under all the other sounds, that muffled humming droning sound of some kind of a giant machine down there under all of the city. It had always been there, I guess, but I had never listened to it.

Then all of my hearing turned back inward, away from the drone and the far things and the near things, back to the nearest thing of all, all the sounds of our gentle loving. Martin and Andrea. Andrea and Martin, making their magic thing. A little padded, secretive creak of bed and bedding. A small gritty sound of strands of her long blond hair caught between her cheekbone and the edge of my jaw as I rubbed my face across hers seeking her mouth. Bump of hearts. A humming of my blood in my ears, as when you listen to a seashell. A tiny husky whispery sound of the caress of her hands on my back. When she shifts slightly, a moist sound, repeated twice, as if her other lips are also kissing, also greedy. Then in a cant and change and deepening and reaching of her stroke, and in a harsher and faster huff-sigh, huff-sigh of her misty hot breath, she tells me that soon she will come.

Last Friday, as her arms tightened, as her breath began to reach and catch, over and over, I decided that this time it would be all for her alone, and I elbowed myself higher to look down upon the changing, growing strangeness of her small face, her eyes wide-staring, turning from side to side, mouth agape, tongue curled up and back, breath now snorting and whistling, her fingers digging small and hard into my back, thighs rolling farther open, knees higher.