Part 8 (2/2)
”I'm afraid you must be mistaken, my dear,” he responds slowly, enunciating, as though she is mentally deficient, or a foreigner.
”Yes! Yes! That's his name. He's a Volga German. Someone who came from Russia to Germany, or was it Germany to Russia?” In her distress she is confused, cannot remember.
He raises his eyebrows at her, purses his lips. ”In any case, my dear, I a.s.sure you we have no one of that name here. We had a Gabriel at one point, but he left some time ago, and he was a Gabriel Hart, an Englishman, I believe. Perhaps you'd like a nice cup of soothing chamomile tea?” Clearly, he thinks she is mad.
She rushes home, shuts the curtains, takes off her clothes, and climbs into the double bed in the big blue bedroom, though it is only five in the afternoon. She lies with her face to the wall, s.h.i.+vering. When her husband arrives home he comes to her bedside and asks what is wrong, but she cannot speak. ”Go away,” she says.
She goes on lying there all the next day, refusing to eat, until her husband comes home again and finds her still in bed. He says severely, ”You must get up! This is ridiculous! There is nothing wrong with you.” He tells her, ”Perhaps, after all, you need to go back to work. Why don't you write something?”
She is walking through the hot streets one fall evening, alone, a year since she first met Gabriel. The light is dim, the shops shut up, and the side street, where she thinks she parked her car, deserted. The solitude of the tree-lined suburban street seems worse than any forest. The echoes of her childhood loneliness chime unbearably in her head.
She is not thinking about her ma.s.sages, the strange words Gabriel Wunderlich or whatever his real name was said to her in the dark room. She has tried to write about him, following her husband's suggestion, but she cannot find the end to the story.
It has been a long, tiring day. Increasingly, she finds all the sport she does tiring. After her swim, she ate a whole bar of chocolate gluttonously in the ladies' room. Then she gathered her hot white hair up into a tight bun on the top of her head. She noticed the brown spots on her cheek, the two broken nails and that none of them looked very clean. Staring at herself in the mirror, she drew back her lips and saw her long teeth, the pale gums receded. For the first time she understood the old expression, Long in the tooth.
Now she turns her head, aware that someone is following her in the deserted street. She hears the familiar squelch of the crepesoled shoes and smells the secret odor of the oil in the evening air. She says the name aloud: ”Wunderlich.” She wants to run, but in her high-heeled shoes and tight skirt, her heart beating hard, as in a dream, she cannot advance. She glances nervously over her shoulder into the shadows of the solitary street. She must get to her car.
But when she looks back, she sees no one. All she can hear is the sound of her own words, recording her life, the end of her story, and the crepe-soled shoes, echoing in her mind.
ATLANTIS.
BY RICHARD BURGIN.
Atlantic City She sat up in bed, rigid but strangely alert, as if trying to identify the sound of something underwater. When he touched her shoulder to try to make her lie down again, she turned toward the wall.
”What's wrong?” he said.
She shook her head back and forth.
”Rina, come on, what is it? You're scaring me.”
”I don't feel good.”
”Take a hit of that joint I made for you on the bureau. It'll help.”
”How long we gonna go on like this, huh? What's your plan, Stacy? Is there one?”
”What do you mean? I don't understand.”
”Course you don't understand,” she said, finally facing him. ”Things going along pretty much the way you want? Just stay high every minute with me in this tomb under the ground, that's below sea level, for Christ's sake.”
”I'm not high every minute.” He wanted to add that his place wasn't below sea level either but he wasn't 100 percent sure if it was or not.
”C'mon, can you face reality just a little? You wake up and have a Quaalude so you can take a shower. To counteract that you smoke a joint so you can have s.e.x with me in the morning. Then to get through the day you take more Quaalude or sometimes E. Then it's back to pot so we can watch TV and go to sleep. What do you think, you're gonna die if you aren't high for a minute?”
”Okay. We'll cut back a little. I'll cut back.”
”It's not just the drugs.”
”What?”
”We never go anywhere. We never do anything.”
”What're you saying? We go out.”
”Sure. We make heroic little runs for food to the deli or sometimes we even make it to the supermarket. We have to get high to do that too. And then, of course, we go out so you can get more drugs. How come we never go to New York anymore?”
He felt a surge of anger but told himself to stay cool. He'd seen her like this before and knew that if he just stayed cool things would eventually get better.
”I thought we agreed we'd had enough of New York,” he said, turning his head away, hoping to see a bit of a tree trunk perhaps, but the blinds were shut.
”I meant living there, I'd had enough. I didn't mean never visiting. I'm sick of these dealers and crack wh.o.r.es you go to all the time.”
”It was one guy and his girlfriend. You're exaggerating.”
”I'm sick of all the other Fort Lee zombies too. I'm too young to live like this, to just give up.”
He was scared now. Something in her tone of voice and in her eyes frightened him. ”I didn't think we were giving up,” he said softly. ”I thought we were just taking a little break, like a kind of vacation.”
”This ain't a vacation. We're just dying is what it is.”
”Come on, you don't mean that.”
”I do mean it. We have to get high to go to the bathroom and n.o.body's washed a dish in a week.”
He felt himself start to vibrate then. He didn't know if it was from the pot, his v.i.a.g.r.a, or if it were somehow cold in his apartment (though it was close to the end of June), or maybe it was just the impact her words and tone of voice had on him as if they robbed him of his sense of warmth.
”Okay, you tell me what you want me to do,” he finally said.
”Jesus Christ!” She looked at the little clock on the bed table. ”It's almost three in the afternoon. My sleep patterns are completely destroyed.” She put her hands over her eyes as if she were going to cry but then got out of bed decisively. ”I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to take a shower and then I'm going to get some food for us, and while I'm gone you think about what we're gonna do.”
”You worried about money? Is that it?” he said sharply. It was odd to talk to her that way when she was standing in front of him completely naked. She turned to face him again and he tried to stay focused on her face though he didn't want to see the look in her eyes.
”Yah, okay, I admit I'm a little concerned about what you're gonna do when your parents' money runs out,” she said. ”You haven't even tried to get a job since you quit your last one.”
He sighed, then stopped himself abruptly. Sighing was definitely the wrong route to take with Rina. Instead he told her that he wasn't going to start dealing, if that's what she was worried about, that he'd just done it for a little while years ago. He checked her reaction but it wasn't what he'd hoped for. She was slowly shaking her head back and forth again.
”We're setting ourselves up to get in a lot of trouble,” Rina said. ”Your landlady gave me a funny look yesterday.”
”A funny look? Big deal.”
”A killer look that said, b.i.t.c.h, I'd just as soon off you as not. I feel like any day she could call the cops on us.”
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