Purpose? Yes, that was probably close enough. If one word could embrace everything, purpose was the word. Maybe nothing mattered, as the code of the Village declared. Maybe they were all right and nothing at all was important. But even if they were right, where were they? What did it get them?
He himself needed purpose, a reason for existing. It would sound corny to the skeptics. But there it was. If there was no purpose it was necessary to invent one for himself. What was it Voltaire had said? If there were no God man would have invented Him. Maybe the same thing could be said for purpose. His goal was his music, and if that was meaningless he had to make it mean something for him. He had to make each step along the way seem significant and important.
Otherwise there was no real point to anything. He might as well be dead, or never have been born to begin with.
The audition, for example. It would be important. God, he would be good! He’d play them like fish on a line. He’d figure out what songs those bastards wanted to hear and he’d sing them the way they would want to hear them.
Compromise? Yes, it was a compromise. He was selling out, but somehow the idea of selling out didn’t hold the terror it once held for him, the terror that seemed so awful to the little world of coffee shops and Village parties.
He hadn’t mentioned the audition to Jan. Paradoxically, Saundra was the only person he had been able to tell simply because he knew it had made the least possible impression upon her. She undoubtedly had forgotten by now.
But he would tell Jan. It had been a mistake to kiss her but it had been something he couldn’t help. God, she was a moody kid, getting all panicky from a kiss. At any rate she had forgiven him, and she certainly seemed to like him. Would she fall in love with him?
He didn’t know. Nor did he know whether what he felt for her could be described as love. He wasn’t sure just what love meant, or whether such a state actually existed outside of novels and poems and songs.
He knew at least that he had never been in love. There had been women, and there had been a few women that it had hurt him to break with, but there had been nothing he could think of as love. He knew that he enjoyed being with Jan and that he was comfortable with her, more so than with any woman before. But was it anything deeper than that?
He didn’t know. He felt vaguely that it might be good to be in love with a girl like Jan. A man might be able to go farther if he had someone to go along with him. A man might care more about things if someone else cared, too.
He wondered idly whether she was a virgin. She probably was, and he was surprised to realize that he somehow hoped she was. It didn’t make sense; he had always wanted his women to be as experienced as possible.
Maybe it did make sense, in a strange kind of way. If he was in love.
Maybe he was in love. Whatever in hell love was...
“Is that you, Mike?”
Saundra’s voice broke into his thoughts, intruding just as sharply as the two girls had intruded upon him and Jan in the courtyard. The silence was gone. Twenty-four Cornelia Street was noisy again.
“Mike?”
He took a deep breath and began to climb the stairs.
“Laura?”
She turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub, reaching for the towel. God, a shower was good! It was good in the morning to wake you up, but it was even better at night when you were hot and sticky from the heat and stickiness that was New York in July. First the hot water pelting down on you while you soaped yourself and worked the shampoo into your hair, soaping and rinsing until you were clean all over and your hair squeaked like a violin when you pulled a strand of it between your fingers.
And then the cold water that stung like needles, like the torture of a thousand cuts, and you wanted to get out from under it but you liked the way it snapped and bit at you and the way it cleared your head and closed up your pores and made you feel even cleaner and much more alive.
“Laura? Christ, aren’t you done yet?”
The shower hadn’t quite worked. Sometimes you needed more than a shower. Sometimes you were too dirty for soap or shampoo to cleanse you, dirty inside in a way that made you want to open your mouth under the shower and wash yourself out. And then you could soap and rinse until you were limp and you felt better but it still hadn’t quite worked. Somehow you were still dirty.
“I’m coming,” she said.
She was dry and she should go in now to Peggy, but she didn’t want to go, not yet, not for a moment.
What did she want? That was a good enough question. Whatever it was she kept on looking for it, looking for it in bed after bed, even breaking down for awhile and paying $25 an hour to look for it on a couch until she decided that analysis wasn’t the answer, that perhaps there was no answer, or that the only conceivable answer was to keep on looking for something that wasn’t there and never would be there. To search a thousand beds, and to bring a thousand girls to help you look for it in your own bed in your own room, and never to find it because it wasn’t there at all.
Yes, she knew what she was going to do. She knew precisely what she was going to do and why she was going to do it.
Musical Beds.
It wouldn’t work. It had never worked and it never would work, and Jan Marlowe would be the memory that Peggy was going to be, that Peggy was destined to be even now while she waited impatiently in the bedroom. Jan Marlowe had not yet reached the bedroom but already she was waiting to become a memory. She was a potential memory, as surely as a fetus was an unborn corpse.
Perhaps if she could ever have a child, if she could feel her belly growing larger and know that a lover had made it grow, perhaps then the game could end.
Of if she could father a child. The thought was first ridiculous and then as perfect as it was unattainable. If she could give a girl a baby, even a girl like Peggy who was becoming a bore already and who wouldn’t last more than another night, no matter how good she was in bed with the lights out.
There was something inevitably ephemeral about a relationship that could never bear tangible fruit. In bed with a girl — almost any girl — she could feel that they were building something, that their bodies together were moving toward a goal.
And when the climax had been reached and passed the vision passed with it. Nothing was built, nothing would endure.
Each time she was fooled. Each time the quick and beautiful spasm seemed to bring fulfillment and left only emptiness. And she knew she would continue to be fooled forever.
Jan Marlowe. She wouldn’t have to wait long now, just a day or two at the most. There was no mistake possible in interpreting the look in the girl’s eyes or the expression on her face. The boy who had been holding her in his arms was quite meaningless, a red herring that didn’t fool her at all, a very insignificant bit of camouflage.
A day or two more. That was all.
“Damn it, Laura!”
She sighed softly, turned out the light, and reached for the door.
The apartment was worse than ever.
That was the first thing he noticed. Even before he was aware of her his eyes took in the mess that was the apartment. Beer cans covered the floor, some standing upright while others lay on their sides with beer leaking out of them onto the rug. There were empty wine bottles as well, and he wondered momentarily whether she would throw them out or attempt to drip candles on them. Once she had gone on an elaborate candle-dripping spree, carving deep grooves in the side of each candle so that they would drip faster and cover the bottles rapidly so that people wouldn’t know that she had just started with her candle-dripping.