“Poor baby,” she said, and wearily moved next to him. He accepted her gratefully and enjoyed the protectiveness of having her head on his chest.
“I wonder why that happened,” he said.
“It’s probably because we didn’t talk about the argument.”
“Oh, yeah?” He smiled as he realized that the bitterness he had felt about Joan’s behavior had been so quickly repressed. Such knowledge was still too new to be depressing. “Yeah, I was really pissed off at you,” he said casually.
“You were very mean, babes,” she said, only slightly less casually.
His attempt to absorb and accept this view of hers was intercepted by anger. “Well, that was just defense, you know? I mean, you fucked me up first.”
“What?” She moved away and looked at him. “How—” She stopped and then lay down. “It’s silly. You were upset.”
“Exactly,” he said in a loud quick tone.
There was silence and they both huddled into the blankets as if they were going to sleep. Richard’s nervousness increased as he remembered Joan entering the room on Sal’s back. He couldn’t believe she was so ready to ridicule him. “I’m gonna turn out the light, okay?” Joan asked.
“Uh, no. We’ve got to talk.” He said that grimly and tossed the covers aside violently. He got out of bed and hunted in his clothes for cigarettes.
She sat up, looking tired, and watched him. After he lit a cigarette, he stood at the foot of the bed. “I guess you don’t understand.”
“I don’t.”
“Yeah. Well, if that had been just a routine political discussion I wouldn’t have been right to be so upset that you wanted me to stop. She was talking about my father.” He paused and looked intently at her.
Joan returned his look and waited. “Do you want me to say something to that?” she asked at last.
“You don’t get it, huh?”
“Richard, I knew she was talking about your father.”
“Oh, come on! Fuck off!”
“What? What are you upset about?”
“I suppose you would have been casual about it if it had been your father. I suppose that it means nothing. I suppose it doesn’t even mean anything that she called me an intellectual.” Joan laughed. “What are you laughing at?” She looked stunned. “She was telling me I came from a family of intellectuals whose liberal perceptions—” He was overwhelmed by frustration. “She was calling me a pig.”
“Richard, you’re being crazy.”
“I’m telling you that’s what it amounts to.”
“Okay.”
She sat quietly, stubbornly. “Look,” he said. “Even if you thought I was too upset, then why didn’t you respect my problem? Why didn’t you just wait it out?”
“I can’t answer that. That’s not the way I saw it.”
“Well, goddammit, how did you see it?”
“Babes, do you have to yell at me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought you were very upset and I didn’t think you were doing yourself any good arguing with her. I mean, I thought it was silly to fight about it. We just thought it would break up the tension if we came in like that”
“Yeah, it sure broke the tension. I can’t believe you didn’t realize that I would think you were ridiculing me.”
“You thought I was making fun of you?”
Her expression was so incredulous that he suddenly felt foolish. “Of course. What else do you expect me to think?”
She smiled. “I didn’t expect that. You really thought that?”
“Yeah,” he said unhappily.
She looked at him lovingly, but with a mild amusement that he fancied contained a trace of contempt. “I’m sorry you thought that, babes, but I didn’t—I wasn’t making fun of you. I just wanted to stop the argument. So did Sal. He thought Lisa was crazy.”
The conversation had taken on a settled tone; Richard walked away from the bed and then back again. “Yeah, but you see she really wasn’t being crazy. She was just being straight about her arrogance toward people she considers nonpolitical, or nonactivist.”
He watched her reaction to this and it was obvious that Joan merely distrusted the sound of his words and had no understanding of them. “I mean,” he went on, “that’s the way most of those people feel about me.”
“What people?”
“Political
people.” He had snapped the word at her.
“Look. I’m not gonna get into this. I don’t know what’s freaking you out about this but I can’t deal with it. If you want me to support you no matter what happens or what you’re saying—I can’t do that.”
“Oh, then fuck off. Go to sleep.” He got into his clothes and she watched him, looking miserable.
“Are you leaving?” she asked plaintively.
He looked at her and laughed. “Boy, do you have an exaggerated sense of the force of my anger! No, you fool, I’m going to read. I just don’t want to be cold.”
He stayed up until dawn. He considered that an appropriate reaction and woke up to an empty apartment refreshed. Joan had left him a note explaining that she was out job hunting, and he was amused by this unusual care she took to explain her absence. He was pleased they had fought. He was especially pleased he had left her on the defensive. She had always been in control of their relationship because of her greater sexual experience, and he had discovered a major weapon to neutralize her.
Richard spent the last month of the summer smoking grass and bickering with Joan. They fucked once and he was perfunctory about it. It didn’t occur to him that Joan might become disgusted with his behavior. He also refused to analyze why he was so depressed.
In September, they spent one weekend cleaning the apartment. It was unbearable to do such work, but, after Richard had vacuumed and straightened vehemently, he felt his thoughts were just as ordered and clear as the apartment.
They settled on the bed and Joan furtively rubbed his groin and, when encouraged, she undid his pants and lowered them. Richard was heartened by his situation: his penis enveloped in the cool of her mouth, his novel coming out in two months. It was fantastic to consider, to add up, the things he had acquired in the last six months: an apartment, a checking account, a lover, a publisher, a summer vacation, a life ordered by no institution. He knew it was cynical to think of it this way but he did, gleefully and triumphantly. How frightening that that was all he enjoyed about them. The fact of their existence.
He loved it when Joan took his penis into her mouth, but there was something ruthless about looking down at her doing it. He felt it was impolite to enjoy it too much. And then the problem it created by bringing him to a climax. So when it became impossible to control his excitement, he stopped her. She lay back ready for him, and it was difficult to overcome the sudden depression that hit him. It was tawdry: the lights on, his pants bunched at his knees, and Joan lying there with her eyes closed, waiting.
“Babes,” he said with a slight tremble.
She opened her eyes, alarmed. “What?”
He got up and put his pants back on. “I don’t want to have sex.”
He expected an explosion but it was silent, internal. He saw its flash in her eyes. “Why?”
“God, this is so fucking tense.” Richard smiled, hoping to get rid of her severe expression. But she only looked more unhappy. “I’m sorry, babes,” he said. “I just feel fucked up.”
She began to cry! He was amazed. Great tears formed in each eye and rolled down her cheeks. He ran over and hugged her. It did something extraordinary to his privacy, his self-indulgence, when confronted with emotion. Even that brief amusement he felt at being in the middle of a classic scene between men and women was broken through. She sobbed in his arms, he felt his eyes ache and tears come. “I don’t know what’s happening,” Joan said. “I just feel so frustrated.” They both laughed at the word. “What’s the matter? You can’t stand my body?” She was so ashamed to ask that he was saying no before she finished the sentence. And he said no several times while she wept. He realized he had to explain his coldness, the anger he had allowed to silence him for the past weeks.
“I’ve been shitty because of that argument with Lisa. Wait,” he said, to stop her from protesting innocence. “I’ve always felt inferior in my family about politics. And I don’t like feeling inferior.” They laughed at this. “Even when Dad was telling us about Padilla, he didn’t address himself to
me,
he talked to those schmucks.”
“What schmucks?”
“Leo and Louise. What schmucks! Have you got a block about this?”
“Probably.”
“Anyway, I’m tired of it, I’m tired of being patronized. I’m tired of being thought of as a little middle-class kid who has no right to be impressive about politics. Mark telling me in Vermont that he’s a revolutionary! My brother has been parading around like Lenin for the past three years and they are all little snot-nosed kids.”
“That’s silly, babes.”
“That’s
what got me angry! Don’t tell me it’s silly. You hurt me badly when you say that. I know it may seem crazy. It isn’t important whether I’m right. I feel attacked about being a writer. Not even that. I feel like I’m being treated as some kind of a freak. At least the publication of my novel will stop that. But unless I jump on people for dismissing me on any political question, I’ll be miserable.”
“Richard, you think about these things in a destructive way. Nobody ignores you. If anything, people are a little frightened of you.”
“You’re
frightened of me,” he said, laughing. “The others aren’t.”
“Why should anybody be frightened of you? I mean, why do you want that?”
“Honey, you’re making me sound like a gangster. I want
respect,
not fear.” He tried to smile at her winningly, but his expression was more like a plea. She looked shyly at him and then impulsively hugged him.
“I respect you,” she whispered. “Even though you’ve given yourself to me.”
He laughed wildly at her joke and was excited by even this pretense that she could compulsively get him to bed. He immediately began to take her clothes off but she took over that task so that they could quickly be naked. He was delighted by the recklessness of their acts and it inspired him to dive toward her cunt. He had always hesitated to put his mouth there; there, at the center of the world—hairy, odorous, full of an unconquerable desire. He thought of it this way while crouched before it: in overwhelming, alienating metaphors.
She lay back and enjoyed his kisses and tonguing as if he were a dutiful pet. What he imagined her feelings to be while she touched his genitals were really his: he resented her pleasure, her passive acceptance of his self-abnegation. He worked carefully, methodically, at bringing her to a climax. And finally entered her for his own, by now jaded, ecstasy. But she was much happier after they had intercourse this way, even though it was clear to her that he didn’t enjoy it. Richard concluded that fucking was one-sided in this peculiar sense and understood why so many people seemed to be flailing about intellectually on the subject. He felt it was to his credit that he had faced the truth so quickly.
Early fall was Richard’s happiest time. He and Joan had their honeymoon, financed by his novel’s advance: their life was lazy and occupied by fucking.
But, in late October, his career reached a climax that lasted for a month. His novel appeared in the stores and was reviewed in papers around the country, including those he had read daily in what he came to think of as that other miserable obscure existence.
At last—all anyone talked about was his life and his novel. His parents called every other day to hear the latest review or tell him of someone else’s praise. At first it seemed as if there would be no limit to his success, but finally boundaries appeared—after a month his book began to be missed from the shelves and there were no more reviews in the morning mail or friends to tell him how good his novel was.
It was an exhilarating high, like nothing else he had experienced, and its collapse was terrible. He took it, physically, as badly as if it were a hangover. He woke up in the late afternoons with a grogginess it took hours to fight off. He felt stupefied until late at night when nervousness and regret over the wasted day kept him awake talking compulsively to Joan about his ideas for the “future of literature.” He would promise himself that he’d get up early and write, but Joan’s efforts to rouse him were shrugged off angrily until she refused to try any more.
Everyone else was pleased by his novel’s results and thought his life well taken care of. He could go to college if he wished or just get an advance on his second book and write.
Richard couldn’t accept that a year’s work and a year’s wait—a whole life of anticipation—were over in four weeks.
The change in people’s attitudes toward him was at first a delight, a delicate revenge. When he saw Mark at his brother’s apartment during the week his book was published he nearly burst out laughing at the humble manner that Mark adopted while telling him how “Joycean and painful your novel is. You deal really correctly with middle-class alienation.”
Richard had to look long at Mark’s face, and even then he couldn’t believe it. “Do you mean that or are you just kidding me?”
Lisa interrupted Mark’s answer. “Kidding! He’s been talking to me about it for two days.” She began saying something about how funny his book was but he heard only his own thought, like a voice-over in a movie: “So it takes a capitalist publishing house to stamp my ideas with approval so that you’ll respect them.”
Later, a man asked Richard what he did in a bored tone, and when Richard said he was a novelist the man seemed even more indifferent. Richard pictured how he appeared to this stranger: his hair long and unwashed, his shirt wrinkled, his jeans almost thoughtfully splashed with paint stains, and above all, the boyish face. “Have you published anything?” the man asked.
Richard had thought he wanted a final proof of contempt, because he could shatter it so effortlessly, but this acting out of what he knew intellectually, that he was nothing unpublished and everything once in print, was depressing. “Yes, my first novel was just published.” Richard had flashed his credentials but the man, after a start, wanted a closer look.
“Who published it?”
This was still asked with a trace of condescension, and Richard needed a moment before realizing that the man expected a university press or something equally small and comforting. Richard snapped his publisher’s name like a whip and at last brought the stranger to attention.