Audrey began attending a macramé class at a nearby community college (Macramé: Fun and Function), and began a small friendship with a woman, some fifteen years her junior, who expressed fascination and delight at the fact that Audrey was a vegetarian, and mentioned, more than once, that she had long considered abandoning meat. Things went along, and Audrey invited her to dinner a few weeks later, at which she and Billy seemed to get along very well. She loved the dinner — eggplant, tomatoes, fresh corn, and yellow squash made into a kind of pedestrian ratatouille, salad, carrot cake — one of Audrey’s specialties — and herb tea. Billy suggested that he “did”—oh, it’s not, he hinted, important — this and that, and Akina, the new friend, was deeply impressed by the reticence of the really interesting Billy. Audrey, of course, helped the scene along, as always: smiles, silences, the works.
They began seeing a lot of Akina, a small, dark woman who wore, more often than not, a strained, worried expression, as if she were about to be interrogated, and whose light-coffee complexion appeared to be — how to put this? — manufactured. Perhaps it was. It was summer now, and when the three went to the beach, Akina, who couldn’t swim, seemed either unaware or uncaring that a profusion of her black pubic hair flourished wildly at either side of her bathing suit’s crotch. This sight may have maddened Billy, for soon he and Akina were committing adultery with, as they say, abandon, and soon Billy moved out, leaving Audrey hurt and bewildered.
Billy left his job at UPS, at Akina’s urging, so that he could “do” all the things that he was capable of; she had realized, of course, that Billy could do nothing at all, but she thought that with his — with his what? — he would make a really great life for them both. Billy had some money, slyly saved in a bank account unknown to Audrey, and they lived off that and the few dollars Akina made working in a boutique on St. Mark’s Place, just then beginning its ascent into the diligently fake disreputability it would soon attain. He ignored Audrey’s pleas for financial help, smoked more “dynamite weed” than ever, and, with Akina’s urging, began to eat meat again: vegetarianism was for dumb fucks — like Audrey! They did a lot of laughing over their lamb chops.
Audrey knew that Billy would tire of Akina, re-embrace his lost, mysteriously vacant life, and return home to her. She suggested that this sort of thing had happened before and that she was, always, to blame for Billy’s sexual escapades, and that they had been mutually planned. She smiled Billy’s secret smile, his I-can’t-talk-about-it smile, and lighted a cigarette made of some sort of rank legume. “Billy,” she said, “well … Billy.” Then she changed the subject; she, and it, obscured in a cloud of smoke that smelled very like a burning barn.
— L—
He didn’t understand Los Angeles. It seemed to him a demented collection of buildings scattered haphazardly over a vast area. This lack of understanding was profoundly intensified by the fact that he not only was unable to drive, he had no sense of direction. The old friends from New York with whom he and his restive and discontented wife were staying, took them here and there during their two-week visit, but his pale role as complaisant passenger made the city even more lavishly and bewilderingly strange, for he was never able to locate or isolate or even remember anything that might have served as a landmark, and only knew where he was moments before his host turned into the street where his little cottage stood behind a scrubby lawn that ran directly to the curb with no sidewalk intervening, a commonplace, as he discovered, in California: a place with no sidewalks: pedestrians knew just where they stood.
Perhaps this sense of disconnection, this topographical anomie, contributed to his emotional desuetude, his stunned vacancy, when his wife abruptly left him one sunny, blue Los Angeles day, with a man she had met at a party they’d attended, a man whose name he didn’t know nor face remember: a nonentity, if it came to that. The note she left for him was cheerful, even breezy, as if he had been in on the whole affair and had helped plan it. But he soon realized that he, too, had become a nonentity, now that his wife had left him, that he had “lived,” so to speak, only in relation to her and her curiously blithe selfishness. His host and hostess were enormously kind to him, and took great care not to seem pitying, although this care was in itself a form of pity, as he and they knew. He was, perhaps, made more contemptible to himself as he thought, as he knew, that the man who had stolen — as he had come to think of it — stolen his wife, did not know his name or face either; he could clearly hear his wife’s voice: “Oh, what do you care what his name is? Take me away!” His face burned with the cuckold’s shame.
He spent two week’s after his wife’s departure drinking steadily, one might say stupidly; he drank until he passed out, began drinking again when his brain flickered awake, then drank until he passed out — this went on and on, and half-permitted him to think that he didn’t know what had happened to him: well, he didn’t. After he sobered up, he left Los Angeles, defeated and dulled, to return to New York on a Trailways bus so as to grind himself into his misery a little more, a little deeper; a man of perhaps fifty in the seat next to him performed fellatio on him in the dark early morning somewhere near Joliet, and he absurdly thought that he was getting even with his wife, the bitch. Someone liked him, even if it was this sad old cocksucker.
But New York was of no help, it didn’t feel at all like home to him, it existed in a kind of aquatic grayness of sleet and dark clouds and sympathetic friends, all of whom performed their parts as carefully as possible, rarely bringing up his wife save once in a while, to call her a bitch, a whore, even, transgressively, a cunt. He stayed with two of these friends, a man and wife, and in the comically sad way in which life crawls and stumbles its way through time, this couple had always been thought of by their passive guest with a kind of jolly but mocking contempt: now he slept on their pull-out Carlyle couch, ate their food, and drank their liquor.
He began to talk to them about his wife, to confide in them, to think of them as the intimate friends that they assuredly were not. In his neurotic and uxorious gloom, he said, in many different ways, the same thing over and over to them: Where is my wife? I want my wife! He would take her back no matter what, ask her nothing, forgive her everything, she could walk on him, kick him, she could spit on him! if only she would come back to him, come back and make him the complete slave and idiot of abasement that he so longed to be. His was a continuing performance that went beyond humiliation, a groveling masochism of which he embarrassingly seemed fully aware. They watched him in silence as he blubbered and wailed; it was horrifying. But not to him.
A week or two into the crazed life that he was sedulously creating for himself, he found out, somehow, that his wife and her kidnapper, her rapist, her Svengali and sinister sexual magician, her depraved wizard, her slavering satyr with his enormous phallus eternally ready for her, only her … he found out that they were living in St. Louis. He had no address for them, and no way of thinking them — of thinking her — into the landscape: what did St. Louis look like? But he unexpectedly got the address from his host, who had a friend in St. Louis, an assistant professor at Washington University. He had no idea how any of this had come about.