I went from flashes of exhilaration to feelings of extreme vulnerability. If someone, some former patient, with an imagined grievance, wanted to assault me, there was no one to come to my aid on these streets. I felt some urgency about getting home. My anxiety focused on Rebecca and Adrienne. I needed them to need me to protect them from some kind of danger.
A woman, someone coming up from behind, called what sounded like “Yuri,” not a name readily confused with something else. I stopped reluctantly.
A
In the dream, he was dancing in the street with a waitress from the diner, a blowsy gum-chewing, red-headed woman. In real life (there is that too), I am walking down the street toward the diner when I see him. He has his bow-like back curved toward me. There is a woman, who might have been the sister of the red-headed woman in the dream, holding on to his arm. They go into the building, C leading the way like a tour guide. It is so much like the dream I will myself to wake. I find myself in a phone booth and dial his number incorrectly. One digit isn’t right, is blocked out. (Does it mean I don’t want to make connection?) I get a busy signal and dial again. This time I know I have the right number. I anticipate his voice. My heart is buzzing. The dream, I think (the trauma), must play itself out. The phone rings twenty-one times. Someone picks up the phone and hangs it up without a word. At least he’s not in bed with her, I tell myself.
Y
The apartment was in advanced disarray as if nothing had been picked up in the five days or so since I had seen her last. “Don’t look,” she said. I stood with my back to the room while Barbara made a few minor alterations. “Do you know what I’ve been doing?” she said. “I’m writing an adult novel about modern marriage.”
She took a folded up sheet of paper from her purse and read out loud the most recent version, she said, of the opening sentence. “When Hilda Karpatsky discovered one morning that she was in love with her husband’s best friend, she felt herself standing on a narrow precipice on which a move in any direction was to risk disaster.”
I hadn’t sat down, had accepted a glass of white wine, was moving about the living room looking for an uncluttered place to sit when the phone rang.
Barbara gave me a complicit look, let the ringing play itself out. The phone persisted beyond Barbara’s will to ignore it. “It might be important,” she said. She took the call in the bedroom. “I was in the shower,” I heard her say, then she lowered her voice.
When she returned ten minutes later to the living room, she had a pained smile on her face, the ironic look of someone who feels wrongfully punished. “Guess who?” she said.
I shook my head, could imagine. “Peter.”
“That was Adrienne,” she said. “She wanted to know if you were here.”
I could feel my face burning.
“I don’t know how I get into these situations,” Barbara said. “Adrienne’s my friend too.”
“Did you say I was here?”
“Yuri, the question really took me by surprise. I didn’t tell her, but I hesitated before I answered. She had to know I was lying.”
“I didn’t know I was going to be here,” I said. “How could Adrienne know?”
“She must have a detective following you. That’s all I need now is to get named correspondent in a divorce suit.”
“There’s no detective,” I insisted, though I wondered.
I imagined someone, some callow detective’s assistant with a scruffy beard, shadowing me. Had he followed me to the lawyer’s office?
Hysteria is seductive. I remember holding her tightly by the shoulders to calm her. When I let go (after how long? We were both possessed.) she punched me in the chest, in the heart it seemed. I couldn’t catch my breath and it panicked me. She threw her arms around me, said she was sorry, really sorry. I felt suffocated and pushed her away to free myself. She bumped into something — the arm of a chair — and disabled her back. “Please leave,” she said, bent over like an old woman. “You don’t live here.”
I saw my inflamed face in the mirror as I stepped into the hall. It was the madman in the mirror who shadowed me as I walked quickly home to Adrienne and Rebecca though the half-lit, night world streets.
R
When I closed my eyes, I could see the bugs marching up the stairs. They were the color, these bugs, of dark stairs. It was the way they got at you without being seen.
The bed was feeling buggy near my right foot. I stayed very very still. I was thinking, Turn on the light, Rebecca. I was thinking, Here goes. I’m turning on the light. I’ll get out of bed and turn on the light.
A
I’ve felt nothing toward Yuri for the longest time — neither love nor hate (each had its season). Then I wake during the night and I watch Yuri sleeping on his side facing away from me and I feel this surge of affection for him. (It is the day after I saw C in the street with the red-headed waitress.) I put my hand out and touch his arm as if I were a blind person reading braille. I stroke his arm with the tips of my fingers. He mumbles something that might be a name. (Who are you dreaming of, Yuri?)
He has his back to me and I lay against him front to back, my arms like a sash around his waist. (I am bewitched.) Now he stirs. He takes a long time to wake, his body flaming with sleep. We fit together like two replicas of the same model.
I am kissing his ear. Pressing my mouth against his ear. Sucking his ear. He moans, then reaches behind him to touch my leg. “What is this?” he asks in ironic complaint.
I move my hand along his arms, caress his arms. He doesn’t move. The touching, the repeated touching, excites me. “What do you want, baby,” I say. “Do you want to make love?”
“Okay,” he says, his voice thick. He turns around in a kind of retarded motion (it is the slowest I have ever seen you move) to look at me. It is as though it is not real to him.
“We don’t have to,” I say.
He moves himself on top of me and kisses me without tenderness or affection. “I don’t know if I want you,” he says.
“I think you do,” I say. “I think you love me.” (I don’t know why I said that.) “Well, should I put my diaphragm in?
I take his silence for assent, but when he moves off me, I can’t get up. I feel weak and lazy. I feel a kind of sensuous paralysis. “Do you want to get it for me?” I ask him.
“I want not Jiing from you,” he says in a hoarse voice. (The lie detector between your legs refutes your denial.)
“I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want,” I say. I remove my hand. I move all the way over to my side of the bed.
It is interesting what one thinks when one is prepared to think of nothing. I am free associating. I remember sitting next to Yuri in the movies (it was before everything) and wanting to be touched by him. I tried to will him to make the first move. I concentrated on making it happen. His arm brushed mine on the armrest we shared. The movie (it comes back to me) was an Italian film of “The Stranger.” I ran my finger along the back of his hand, then withdrew my hand. He reached over and took it back (he took my hand) and kissed the palm.
“If you want to make love, I’m still in the mood,” I say.
“I don’t want to make love to you,” he says. “It’s only my prick that’s interested.”
“Then why don’t you fuck me?”
“What I’d like to do is go down on you,” he says.
I resist offering an interpretation. (I do not say your intent is hostile.) I have been tormented my whole life by double consciousness. I watch myself feeling shy and somewhat (this surprises me) threatened by him, not answering because I want him to know what I am feeling without being told. I want him to be in touch with me.