Her inner sliding brings her to: "Maybe because you sense that this is your last chance."
"My last chance at what?"
"At sharing yourself with me."
"What are you saying?"
"Jack, it's no good. It's hurting your marriage and isn't doing me any good either. It did at first. You're a great guy – just not my guy. After some of the jerks I've been dealing widi, you're a saint. I mean it. But I got to deal with reality, I've got to think about my future. Already, Ahmad's gone- all he needs from me is some food in the refrigerator."
"I need you, Terry."
"You do and you don't. You tliink my painting's a crock-"
"Oh no. I love your painting. I love it that you have this extra dimension. Now, if BetJi-"
"If Beth had an extra dimension, she'd break through the floor." She laughs at diis image, sitting up in bed so her breasts bounce free of the sheet, their top half freckled, the half witii tiie nipple untouched by die sun no matter how many other men have put their lips and fingers there.
The Irish in her, he thinks. That's what he loves, that's what he can't do witJiout. The moxie, the defiant spark of craziness people get if they're sat on long enough-the Irish have it, the blacks and Jews have it, but it's died in him. He wanted to be a comic but he's become a humorless enforcer of a system that doesn't believe in itself. All those mornings waking up too early, he was giving himself time to die in. Learn to die in your spare time. What did Emerson say about being dead? At least you're done with the dentist. That struck him forty years ago, when he could still read something that mattered. This zaftig redhead isn't dead yet, and she knows it. But he has to protest to her, of Beth, "Let's leave her out of it. She can't help the shape she's in."
"Oh, crap. If she can't, who can? As to leaving her out of it, I'd have loved to, Jack, but you can't. You bring her with you. There's a look on your face, a look that says, 'So help me, dear Lord, this is just for an hour.' You treat me like a fifty-minute class period at school. I can feel you waiting for the buzzer." This is the way, she thinks. This is the way to repel him, to make herself repulsive-attack his wife. "You're married, Jack. You're too fucking married for me."
"No." It comes out as a whimper.
"You are," Terry tells him. "I tried to forget it, but you wouldn't let me. I give up. For my own sake, Jack, I got to give up. Let me go now."
"What about Ahmad?"
This surprises her. "What about him?"
"I worry about him. Something's fishy with this furniture store."
Her temper is getting short; it has not been helped by Jack's lying there in the sweaty warmth of her bed as if he was still her lover and had some rights of tenancy. "So what?" she says. "Something's fishy everywhere these days. I can't live Ahmad's life for him, and I can't live yours. I wish you well, Jack, I truly do. You're a sweet, sad man. But if you call me or come around after you go out the door today, it'll be harassment."
"Hey, don't," he says brokenly, just wanting things back the way they were an hour ago, she greeting him with a wet kiss that carried down to their groins, the apartment door not even closed behind them. He liked having a woman on the side. He liked her baggage: her being a mother, her being a painter, her being a nurse's aide, forgiving of other people's bodies.
She gets out of the bed that smells of them both. "Let go, Jack," she tells him, standing just out of his arm's reach. With a wary quickness she bends down to retrieve some of her clothes where she dropped them. Her tone is getting pedagogic, scolding. "Don't be a leech. I bet you're a leech on Beth, too. Sucking, sucking the life out of a woman, dragging her down into your feeling so sorry for yourself. No wonder she eats. I've given what I can, Jack, and must move on. Please. Don't make it hard."
He begins to resent and resist this cunt's scolding tone. "I can't believe this is happening, for no reason," he says. He feels soft, too limp and damp to get out of her bed; her image of a leech has penetrated him. Maybe she's right; he's a burden on the world. He stalls. "Let's give ourselves some time to tb.ink about it," he says. "I'll call you in a week."
"Don't you dare."
This imperious command gets his goat; he snaps, "What's your reason again? I missed it."
"You teach school, you've heard of a clean slate."
"I'm a guidance counselor."
"Well, give yourself some guidance. Clean up your act."
"If I got rid of Beth, what would happen then?"
"I don't know. Nothing much, probably. Anyway, how would you get rid of her?"
Indeed, how? Terry's bra is back on, and her jeans are being angrily tugged up, his inert nakedness becoming increasingly shameful and abject. He says, "O.K. Enough said. Sorry if I've been thick." Still he keeps lying there. A melody from long ago, when the downtown bristled witJi movie marquees, enters his head-a cascading, slippery tune. He croons the concluding phrase: "Deedee-dit-dtf-dat-daaa."
"What's that?" she asks, angry tiiough she has won.
"Not a Terry tune. Another kind, Warner Brotliers. At the end a stuttering pig would pop out of a drum and say, "Th-th-that's all, folks!"
"You're not cute, you know."
He kicks off the sheet. He likes the feel of being a naked hairy animal, spent genitals flopping, yellow-soled feet smelling cheesy; he likes the flare of alarm in the other animal's glassy bulging eyes. Standing naked, his creased and sagging sexagenarian self, Jack Levy tells her, "I'll miss the hell out of you." As the cool air licks his skin, he remembers reading years ago how that paleontologist Leakey, who found the world's oldest human in the Olduvai Gorge, claimed that a naked human being could run down and kill bare-handed any prey, even a toothed predator, smaller than he. He feels that potential within him. He could wrestle this smaller member of his own species to the floor and strangle her. "You were my last-" he begins.
"Your last what? Piece of ass? That's your problem, not mine. You can hire it, you know." Her freckled face is pink with defiance. She doesn't get it, that she doesn't have to fight him, being crude and spelling everything out. He knows when he's flunked the course. He feels his exposed flesh as dead weight.
"Hey, Terry, easy. My last reason to live, I was going to say. My last reason for joie de vivre."
"Don't do a sentimental kike number on me, Jack. I'll miss you, too." Then she has to add hurtfully, "For a while."