A Week as Andrea Benstock Read online

  “Any place in particular?”

  “You know the neighborhood better than I do.”

  “There’s a bar around the corner from my place that I drop into every now and then. It’s just a neighborhood ginmill but it’s quiet and comfortable.”

  “That sounds fine.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having a couple of beers myself.”

  He paid the check, and she didn’t even make a token effort to split it with him. Well, he’d asked her out, hadn’t he? Maybe she’d buy a round at his bar, if they had more than one round.

  She wondered if he’d had his heart set on a movie. Too bad about it if he did. There was no need to be self-sacrificing, no need to pretend to enthusiasms she didn’t feel. She might never see this man again, and if she didn’t they would both survive. Neither of them was anything to the other; they were together because being together would, with a little luck, be preferable to being alone.

  She might sleep with him or she might not. She had not yet decided. He wanted her to, she could tell that much, but he wouldn’t be devastated if she decided otherwise, any more than she would have been crushed if he hadn’t wanted her.

  A shame she hadn’t been this sensible ten years ago. But you had to learn things. You weren’t born knowing them.

  The bar he took her to was dim and quiet. There was no waiter, so he got her scotch and his beer at the bar and brought them to the table.

  The conversation moved at once to a more intimate level. They talked about their respective spouses. She said she’d wanted to have Robin fly down over Christmas, but that her husband had refused. “If I want to see her I can come there, that’s the position he’s taking. He says she’s too young to fly by herself but that’s bullshit. She’s old enough.”

  “He just wants to make things tough for you.”

  “That or he’s afraid I wouldn’t send her back.”

  “Sounds pretty paranoid.”

  The mutual sympathy was automatic in conversations of this sort, and she no longer found it surprising. Here she was, a woman who had left her husband on her own volition, and here he was, a man whose wife had pushed him out of his own house, and each of them was automatically assuming that the other’s absent spouse was in the wrong. In actual fact she probably had more in common with his wife than with him, as did he with Mark. Sex, she decided, and where you happened to be had an awful lot to do with the way you chose to look at things.

  “You deserve a lot of credit,” he said. “It took a lot of guts to do what you did.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Of course it did.”

  “My mother thinks it would take more guts to stay. In a way it would have because I just couldn’t stand it.”

  “There’s a difference between guts and beating your head against the wall, isn’t there?”

  “That’s what I was doing. Beating my head against the wall.”

  “It feels so good when you stop.”

  “It certainly does. I can’t really talk to my mother any more. I call her once a week out of a sense of duty but it’s pointless. We were really extremely close, but then I went and left my husband and my child, and I might as well have fucked a zebra in Hengerer’s window. That’s a department store in Buffalo.”

  “My parents both passed away. My father when I was in high school and my mother passed away five years ago. No, it’s six years.”

  “It’ll be three years next month since my father died.” She hated euphemisms for death. “I think he would have understood, but maybe not.”

  “It’s a generation gap thing. We were talking about this in my group just the other day.”

  He was in therapy. He had established this early in the conversation, dropping it in the way some people would let you know they had gone to a good college. It seemed as though everybody in New York was in therapy in one form or another. None of the people she knew in Buffalo went to psychiatrists, and the prevailing sentiment echoed Samuel Goldwyn’s maxim that anyone who did go to one ought to have his head examined. At first she had wondered if she was simply running into a disproportionate number of mentally disturbed people, but they didn’t seem abnormal to her. Then she realized it was simply something that New Yorkers did.

  Cal had been in individual therapy at various times, and for the past two years had been in group therapy. Once she asked him if he thought it helped.

  “Well, you have to think it helps,” he’d said. “Don’t you? Or otherwise you stop going. But how can you tell, really? If you function better, or feel that you’re functioning better, it might be the effect of group or it might have happened anyway. And if things go badly they might have been worse without group, so you can’t tell. I usually feel better after I’ve been to a session.”

  “That’s something, then.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Andrea. You can get rid of headaches by taking sugar pills if you think they’re aspirin. Maybe it’s just one big emotional placebo. One thing, though, is that you wind up dumping all your emotional garbage on a crowd of people you don’t really care spit for, and they don’t really care about you, and that way you avoid boring your friends with all that tripe. Instead you bore them with talk about your therapy and how deliciously healthy you’re getting.”

  Sometimes she thought about going. Sometimes she would have a bad night and before falling asleep she would resolve to find out about a group for herself. But in the morning the whole idea would seem senseless. She was functioning well, she would tell herself, and even cut-rate group therapy was an expense she could not readily afford, and people who used therapy as a crutch wound up being unable to walk without it.

  “I have booze and sex instead,” she told Cal one time. “They serve about the same purpose. They make me feel better afterward.”

  David told her one insight he’d had in his group. “I’ve got to get out of the habit of looking for exclusive relationships. I went straight from a marriage into an apartment with the girl I told you about. Cheryl. I’m sure I got into that because I couldn’t face being alone. Now I know better. It’s going to be a lot of years before I want to be that seriously involved with another person.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  “I don’t want to live with anybody. I don’t want to feel obligated and I don’t want anyone obligated to me. I don’t want to worry about hurting someone.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t want to be hurt myself. I want to have a few good friends that I see occasionally and sleep with occasionally. That’s what I want.”

  He delivered the last part of his speech with his eyes deliberately avoiding hers and his fingers busy twisting a paper napkin. His words, she decided, amounted to a rather artful proposition. And she had the feeling he’d delivered the line precisely that way before, complete with the bashfully diverted eyes and the gee-whiz number with the napkin. Well, she didn’t blame him. It was a good line and it was natural for him to get all the mileage out of it that he could.

  She waited until his eyes came around to meet hers, and she put just a touch of a smile on her lips. “I think we both want pretty much the same thing,” she said, very levelly.

  At the first party she’d gone to in New York she ran into a man who had known Winkie. She couldn’t remember how they got there conversationally, but somehow her name had come up.

  “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Winkie Welles. What was her first name again?”

  “Winifred.”

  “That’s right, of course. Winkie Welles. She was at Time-Life for a while when I was there. Then I think she went over to Holiday in editorial.”

  “She was with Holiday when she died.”

  “That was all so long ago. She was a crazy kid, as I remember her. Beautiful and brilliant, but crazy. She took her own life, but I don’t remember how.”

  “Pills.”

  “If you say so. And she was your best friend at Bryn Mawr?”

  She said, “Do you happ
en to know why she killed herself?”

  “I don’t think I’d have heard, and I certainly don’t remember if I did. We were never terribly close. Just that we worked together, but I lost track of her when she switched jobs. I think she was having an affair with a married man. I could be wrong about that. But if all the researchers at Time-Life with married boyfriends killed themselves the company would have to close up shop.”

  “I wonder why she did it.”

  “I wouldn’t even know who to tell you to ask.”

  “Oh, it’s not important. I’m sure there are people I could have written to years ago and I never bothered. What’s the point? I think I know why she did it.”

  “Oh?”

  “I think she was afraid she couldn’t help turning into her mother. A road company version of her mother.”

  “If you say so.” The man no longer seemed vitally interested in the ghost of Winifred Welles. “Say, to change the subject—”

  But she had not wanted to change the subject. “My situation was just the opposite,” she said. “I wanted to be my mother. I didn’t realize it but that was what I wanted. I thought it was what I was supposed to do.”

  “Is that right.”

  “But I finally found out I couldn’t do it. Or rather I could do it, because if you do something for almost ten years that proves you could do it. But then I couldn’t go on doing it, if you understand the distinction.”

  “Uh-huh. I’ll be right back.”

  He meant, of course, that he would not be back, but she had not cared, For the moment she was content to stand alone and apart, remembering Winkie, remembering too the several persons she herself had been in the years since she and Winkie had been close.

  And she hadn’t liked that man much anyway. And there were plenty of other men at the party, and it was easy enough to go home with one if that was what you wanted.

  And now she was going home with David Kolodny. His place was right around the corner, he told her, and would she like to see it? “I’d like that,” she said. Outside a stiff wind was blowing. She drew her coat together at the neck, took hold of his arm, let her body lean a little against his as they walked. Neither of them spoke. The silence was easy and comfortable, joining rather than dividing them.

  His apartment was on the tenth floor of a twelve-story building. She stood at his window while he was in the bathroom. The view was unspectacular, but at least he had a view. Her single window faced a blank wall.

  Not that she envied him his view. Her apartment suited her, for now, for the time being.

  When he emerged from the bathroom she remained at the window. She heard him approaching but did not turn until he was at her side. There was just the briefest moment of awkwardness, that inevitable awkwardness, and then he took her in his arms and was kissing her.

  And then everything was all right. It was anticipation that could rattle you, making you live in your head excessively. Liquor helped in that regard, closing off some of the doors in the brain, shutting down certain hallways and corridors. And now he was kissing her and she was learning the taste of his mouth and the feel of his body against hers and it was really quite all right.

  They clung together by the window, kissing with some passion but no urgency. He put a hand on her waist, dropped it to fasten on her buttock. He drew her body hard against his and gave her a squeeze. She moaned softly and brushed the tips of her fingers over his face. They would be good together, she knew. He knew intuitively what she liked and his sense of touch was good. And she liked his smell, and the feel of his skin.

  His bedroom was smaller than the living room. It contained a queen-size platform bed, a chest of drawers, and a bookshelf made up of bricks and unfinished pine boards. They kissed in the bedroom and he touched her breasts and ran a hand down over the front of her body. His fingers pressed her for a moment at the junction of her thighs, then drew away. His other hand dropped from her shoulder and she watched him unbutton his shirt. Then she began undressing.

  There was no chair to put her clothes on, so she followed his example and made a little pile of her things in a corner of the floor. He finished undressing before she did and he leaned against the wall by the side of the bed and watched her. She was not at all self-conscious, enjoying the way he was looking at her and the effect it was having on him.

  “Ah, you’re beautiful,” he said.

  In bed he held her and kissed her and she was able to lose herself in his embrace. Then his kisses, moist and sensual, trailed down over her throat and onto her breasts. This was exciting but at the same time it detached her from the excitement, as if the imposition of passivity transformed her into a spectator. It was lovely to lie like this, loose-limbed and receptive, open to his hands and mouth, oh yes, it was lovely, but one needed a sort of mental jiu-jitsu to enable the brain to turn itself off while the body was being turned on.

  “Beautiful. What a fine body.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.”

  “I want to be very nice to you.”

  He crouched at the foot of the bed, coaxing her legs apart with his gentle hands. She felt the soft skin of his face against her thighs, and the tickle of his moustache. He teased her a little, blowing warm breath against her, and she liked the teasing and rolled her hips in response to it. Then he put his mouth on her and his tongue moved to taste her and she sighed.

  “Darling,” he said.

  “Oh, do that forever.”

  He was very good at this, and perhaps not the least of her enjoyment came from his own pleasure in the act. Men differed most from one another in the way they ate you. There were those, of course, who didn’t do it at all, but their numbers seemed to have decreased dramatically in recent years. And there were those who managed to convey that they were doing you an enormous favor, and others who seemed to regard the ritual as a component of seduction, a necessary technique in the arousal of a woman. For others it was clearly a quid pro quo, something not terribly distasteful one did in order to get one’s cock sucked in return. Oh, it was much nicer when the man liked to do it.

  She held parts of herself back, unwilling to commit herself entirely for fear that this might be a prelude for him, that he might want to switch the channel to fucking before she could get off. But he went on and she relaxed, knowing that he would bring her off this way, that he wanted to, and now her response was quicker, deeper, and she reached the point where she knew she was going to make it, and the knowledge drew away the final veil of inhibition and reserve.

  “Oh, darling, yes, oh, oh, yes, oh—” it only took her a moment to recall his name—”oh, David, oh!”

  In his bathroom she used the toilet, then washed her hands and face and swished some of his toothpaste around in her mouth. She wet a washcloth and cleaned up some of the traces of intercourse, then rinsed out the washcloth and replaced it on its hook. His bathroom was tiny, like her own, but she had to admit he kept it cleaner. It still surprised her to find that some men who lived alone were almost compulsively immaculate. Others were complete slobs. There seemed to be no middle ground.

  Perhaps David had someone in once a week. She wondered if Mark had kept Lucinda. He had a full time housekeeper, but he might have retained Lucinda for the heavy cleaning. Lord, how many years had Lucinda been with them, anyway? And how many words had they exchanged in all that time, beyond hello and goodbye and here’s your money and I be in nex’ week, Miz Benstock?

  Had she so much as thought of Lucinda since she left Buffalo, had her name even come to mind before this moment? She didn’t think so. And what did Lucinda think of her, assuming Lucinda bothered to think of her at all?

  What did any of them think of her?

  Not that it mattered, not that it mattered at all.

  Other things mattered. It mattered that she had been eaten superbly and fucked quite competently. That she was reasonably sober now and had no particular desire for another drink. That she wanted a cigarette desperately. This last, her desire for a cigarette, mat
tered a good deal more to her than the opinions of people four hundred miles away.

  She returned to the bedroom and looked for her purse in the pile of her clothes. “Don’t go,” he said.

  “Just getting a cigarette.”

  “Good. Get two.”

  “I didn’t think you smoked.”

  “Once in a while. If I smoke a pack in a month it’s a lot for me. On second thought just bring one cigarette. I’ll have a couple of puffs of yours.”

  “Do you think we know each other well enough for that?”

  He laughed, a good hearty laugh. She joined him in bed and lit a cigarette, then passed it to him. “A pack a month,” she said.

  “If that.”

  “I’ve tried cutting down and it just doesn’t work for me. I get terribly tense and can’t stop looking at my watch. I’ve managed to quit entirely for a month or so at a clip but I always go back to it. Maybe living alone it would be more possible to quit. Were you ever a heavy smoker?”

  “Never. Just one every once in a while to be sociable.”

  “That’s very unusual.”

  “I guess so, but it seems perfectly natural to me.”

  The cigarette passed between them until she found an ashtray beside the bed and stubbed it out. “I ought to be getting home soon,” she said.

  “Stay the night.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “There’s a good place on Broadway for brunch. Great Bloody Marys, first-rate eggs benedict.”

  “You’re tempting me.”

  He turned on his side to face her and ran his hand over her body. She felt a wave of very lazy sensuality pass through her. She put her face against his cheek and took his penis in her hand.

  “Would you like to put it in your mouth?”

  “Hmmm,” she said, thoughtfully. She had both hands on him now, stroking him, feeling him grow in her hands. “That’s an idea,” she said.

  “Would you like to?”

  She moved lower so that her cheek touched his stomach. “Would you like it if I did?”

  “Yes, very much.”