“I love you,” he said.
She said nothing.
“Baby?” His hand on her shoulder. “I hurt you, didn’t I?”
“I’m all right.”
“I wanted it to be good for you. But… well, maybe it has to be painful the first time, for a woman. How do you feel?”
Dead, she thought. Dead and turning cold.
“It’ll be better for you,” he said gently. “It’ll be better.”
It never was.
They walked through cool streets now, She was smoking a cigarette. It burned down until it began to burn her fingers, and she dropped it quickly and swayed, trying to step on the butt. Her foot missed the cigarette and she giggled. She tried again and missed again, and Megan stepped on the cigarette for her and they walked on.
“I drank too much,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Such lovely wine. Such lovely food, but such very lovely dovely wine. Oh, I’m drunk, I’d better get home, Megan.”
“Not like this.”
She stopped, stared owlishly at the blonde girl. “No?”
“No. First we’ll walk off some of this wine. Then you can come up to my place for some coffee. You need to unwind, Rhoda. If you went home now I would worry about you. You might start to cross a street and decide halfway there to try walking under a car.”
“I’m not that drunk, am I?”
“ Almost.”
She giggled again. They had crossed a street and they had turned a corner, and she didn’t recognize the neighborhood. A narrow crooked street, mostly residential with a handful of first-floor shops. Little brick buildings three stories tall and brownstones four or five stories. A dark sky overhead, starless. A chill to the night air. Megan’s hand holding hers.
“I’m sorry I’m so drunk,” she said.
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have kept filling your glass. I can drink wine all night long without getting much of a glow, and I have a habit of forgetting that not everyone has the same kind of hollow leg. How do you feel now?”
She considered this. “My head,” she said solemnly, “weighs less than a trio of feathers.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s beautiful. I could walk forever, I think.”
“I live on the next block. Feel like coming up for coffee?”
Megan’s building was much nicer than the one she lived in, cleaner and newer and with less of a transient air about it. Yet none of the Villagey charm was lost. The old-fashioned atmosphere of a brownstone was maintained, merely enhanced by the renovation. The hallway was thickly carpeted, the walls freshly painted, the air fresh-smelling. Inside, the apartment was a perfect reflection of Megan herself. It was done simply but elegantly in blues and greens. The furniture was modern without being garish. There were surrealistic paintings on the walls, a few bits of sculpture, a pastel of Megan.
Megan, she knew, was an interior decorator. She worked free-lance, taking an occasional job and earning a small living without working very hard at it. She seemed to be good at her work. Rhoda was impressed.
“Beautiful,” she said. “Everything is beautiful.”
There was a bedroom, small but adequate. There was a minute kitchen and a small bathroom. The living room was quite large, with a part of it set up as a sort of alcove with a round teak table and four chairs. They had coffee there. Megan made thick, strong coffee and they both drank it black and smoked cigarettes. Rhoda did most of the talking. She had not really talked to anyone in far too long. The wine had loosened her up, and the coffee had not yet sobered her, and Megan was easy to talk to. She found herself opening up, found the words spilling out.
She talked about her marriage, about two years with Tom Haskell, two years that had never worked out for her at all. Sex had been the main problem, but from it all sorts of other problems had quickly sprung into existence. With the realization that she could not enjoy sleeping with Tom came the realization that she should never have married him in the first place, that she did not want to be a wife at all. And from that step it was only a short leap to the knowledge that she did not love him, that she had never loved him.
The sex part did not improve. After the first time there was no pain, but there was no pleasure either. Tom would take her-at ever less frequent intervals-and he would move around on top of her like a stallion, while she lay beneath him, the joyless recipient of his passion. Sometimes she could make herself believe that it was his fault, that his ineptitude as a lover was responsible for her failure to enjoy lovemaking. Other times she could not escape the conclusion that the fault was her own. She was a cold woman, a woman incapable of passion, and that sort of woman should have the sense to remain unmarried.
And yet she was not sexless. Sometimes she would be sitting home during the afternoon, sitting alone with a book, sitting listening to music, sitting perched in front of the television set while the monotony of a game show or soap opera went on in front of her. And a wave of desire would pass through her body, a rush of warmth that could only be the beginnings of lust.
This never lasted, nor was it ever directed toward her husband. It lacked direction, this flow of passion-it was anonymous, aimed at nothing and no one, quickly over and done with. She could never feel desire for Tom or for any other man, but these occasional spasms of desire made her aware that she was a sexual being, somehow.
“We never had much of a chance,” she told Megan. “Tom was a normal man. Maybe some men can live with a cold wife without caring. He wasn’t that kind of man. We bad fights, pretty horrible fights. He wanted me to go to a psychiatrist. I-I wanted to, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
Megan squeezed her hand.
“I knew he was seeing other women. There was no reason why he shouldn’t. I was almost glad, after awhile, because that meant he wouldn’t bother me that way. We settled into this flat dead life. Sometimes he came home for dinner and stayed home, and we would watch television together or go to a movie. Sometimes he stayed downtown and didn’t get home until three or four in the morning. He would come home smelling of some other woman.”
“Heavens.”
“It might even have lasted. He never asked for a divorce, I think he hoped I would turn into a woman again.”
“You are a woman.”
“You know what I mean. He could still make love to me. I never refused him. That was one thing, at least. I never refused him. I thought something might happen, that it might change and it would be good for me. I couldn’t quite believe it, but I hoped so. Once I thought I was pregnant.”
“What happened?”
“I wasn’t, that’s all. I was terrified, because I knew that if I had a baby I was stuck, that the marriage would stay that way.”
She crossed the living room, walked over to the window. The blinds were drawn. She opened them part way and looked out at a battery of lights across a courtyard. Megan was at her side but she did not turn to look at the blonde girl.
“I’m running off at the mouth,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“Is it the wine? Why am I telling you so much?”
“Because you’ve got to get it out of your system.”
“You’re easy to talk to. You’re good to listen. Tom didn’t fight the annulment. He didn’t argue at all. It was something he would never have suggested, I don’t think. If he could stand living with me for two years like that, I guess he could have stood it forever.”
“Rhoda-”
“But he went along with it once I let him know it was what I wanted. He said he hoped I would be happy. He said I would probably like it better living alone, because then I could crawl into my shell and hibernate my way through life. He apologized for saying that. He was wrong anyway, because I don’t want to sleep my life away. I hate being lonely and I’m alone all the time and I dream bad dreams. The same dream, night after night. Running and being chased, that kind of dream.”