“It’s interesting,” Joanne said during the intermission in the crowded lobby. “I sure never seen anything like it before. But I don’t quite know what’s suppose to be goin’ on.”
“It’s strange, is what it is!” Bob said, standing next to his wife, five years older than he. “It’s weird, that’s what!”
The bell rang for the second act.
I took Marilyn’s hand. “We better go back in. …”
When the young stranger came out of the room, the children played back an edited version of his comments. At the same time, they projected slides of the two boys having sex over the whole stage. The result was grossly distorted and mortally embarrassing, and the young man is finally destroyed. The klaxon-voiced Hackett, in the role of the mother, now turned to harangue the audience in the play’s closing movement: Yes, we are monsters. And you are the people we are destroying. But how much better for the world that we do — for while we only murder one person a night, you have murdered thousands with your bland ideas, your naïve optimism, and your good intentions wholly out of touch with the world’s real situation. However impure, we are the only good that is left. It is you who have brought this devastation in the first place — that is why monsters, such as we are, must kill you.
The effect was stunning — and disturbing, at least for me.
I can’t speak for Marilyn or Bob. But I felt it was truly moot whether I was monster, victim, or naïve optimist.
“I don’t think I understood it,” Joanne said as we left the theater. “It was interesting, though.”
Marilyn and Bob were pretty pensive too.
52.2. By the end of the week, however, she had announced — to my shock, to Marilyn’s, and I believe to Bob’s — that, kids be damned, she liked it up here and intended to stay.
Three days more, and she had a job as a waitress in a short-order chain on Twenty-third Street. “And I’m a real good waitress,” she told us.
She was, too.
52.3. After several false starts and a few weeks where I just felt too down to write, one afternoon when Marilyn was at work and I’d finally gotten back to my book, I heard Bob push into the apartment — the door was open — but kept on typing. Then I realized he was standing behind me. Maybe his breathing was different. When I glanced back, he looked absolutely wild-eyed. He said, slowly, hoarsely, “Come on, cocksucker, get the fuck in bed with me!”
I overturned the chair, standing up; then — though, before, I got to the door and locked it — we were in the bedroom. In the intense, desperate sex, neither one of us ever got fully out of our clothes. But when we were finished, Bob turned over, snuggled back into the arc of my body, and, holding my arm around his chest and both of us breathing heavily, we went to sleep on the crumpled blankets.
I was still dozing when the key turned in the lock. Of course it was just Marilyn … but seconds later, I realized it wasn’t.
Bob had a key to our apartment. But he must have left it back in his own place when he’d come over. I’d always told Joanne that if she needed anything, she could come over and just get it — use the key if I wasn’t in. And that’s what she’d done.
I opened my eyes.
With her black hair and dark features, Joanne stood in the bedroom doorway, looking upset.
My arm was around Bob.
I had the presence to realize that the only thing to do was to act as if nothing were wrong, nothing could be wrong, and nothing could have been wrong. “Hello,” I said sleepily, taking my arm from Bob’s chest. Getting up from the bed, I pulled my belt closed. “Did you need something …? Go ahead, just get it. I’m getting up anyway.”
“Bob’s here …!” she said.
“Yeah. We were taking a nap.”
Bob woke at his wife’s voice. “Hi,” he said. Fortunately — and independently — he’d decided much as I had.
Apparently Bob had been supposed to go out to the store to get some milk for coffee. He hadn’t come back. He’d come here instead. After an hour, Joanne had taken the key and come over to see if I had any in the icebox that she could borrow. I sent them, with half a quart, back to their apartment. Then I sat down at the typewriter — and closed my eyes.
There was no way she could have missed my arm around her husband. She’d been nervous the whole time, slightly confused, and I knew what that was. How, I wondered, would Bob get out of this one?
Later that evening, when I was returning to the house, I met Bob alone in the hall, as he was leaving. “What in the world,” I asked, “did Joanne say about walking in on us like that?”
A quarter of a smile away from deadpan, he said: “She wanted to know why you was sleepin’ with your arm around me.”
“What did you say to her?”
“You was asleep and maybe thought I was Marilyn — you probably didn’t even know your arm was there.”
“And she believed you?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “She ain’t said anything about it since.”
A day later I got home to hear sounds from the bathroom. When I stepped into the bedroom, through the bathroom door I saw, with a moment’s familiarity in the fluorescent light, Bob and Marilyn embracing, naked, against the sink, his shoulder faintly freckled, hers indented where bone inside pulled down the skin — because her arm was raised. A shank of her long hair was caught between them. Some of his, slightly long now, in bronze blades, mingled with it. They made standing love, hip to hip, against the white porcelain.
52.4. Over the next nights, at three or four in the morning, Bob would come into our apartment — with his key — and crawl into bed with us. We would make love. Then we’d hold him while he cried. “Love” was not a word we used much. I never doubted that Bob liked us. But at these times, when he seemed wholly vulnerable and a victim of his own miscalculations and mistaken judgments about what Joanne would want, what he could effect with her, I believe he loved us both, as well as what there was between us, as much as he loved anything.
When he’d first wanted to bring Joanne up, I’d wondered if we were being used, or deceived in his feelings. But I don’t think we were now. As deceptions go, it just would have been too complicated.
After staying with us half an hour in the dark, he would leave.
Then Marilyn would cry; and I’d hold her.
52.41. Somewhere in the Seventies along Central Park West, a tall, black guy in a denim workshirt sat on the back of a bench one chill afternoon in early spring. I was wandering downtown — probably after a visit to Bernie’s. We looked at each other. It was cool, sunny, somewhere in March of ’65. I smiled at him; he smiled back, motioned me over. I walked up. Immediately, with a trace of a Caribbean accent, he explained he wanted to ball. His name was Tony — oh, and one other thing: had I ever heard of a famous German philosopher named Oswald Spengler?
No, I said. I hadn’t.
Well, he was surprised. I’d seemed like an intelligent guy. He’d thought I must have.
Tony took me home to his basement flat, just off the park. The sex was downright athletic. In his single, subterranean room, he had a very high bed. And I think there was a fireplace that didn’t work. But afterwards, what was even more memorable, was that he broke out his two-volume edition — from the public library — of The Decline of the West. According to Tony, the author (Spengler) had solved all the problems of the world, and we only needed to pay attention to what he had to say in order to put civilization back on track. At one point, when Tony had to go to the store, he left me alone reading it for about twenty minutes.