Strange Are the Ways of Love Read online

“It’s pretty late. I figured—”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. I can go home by myself.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Jan. I’m not a sex criminal. I just—”

  “I’m not afraid, Mike.” She was conscious of an edge to her voice but he didn’t seem to notice it.

  “Well—”

  “It’s just that I’d rather walk home alone. I can’t explain it, but I’d rather be alone. Do you understand?”

  “Not really. I’d like to walk with you.”

  “It’s not far. I have things to think about.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Uh-huh.” She smiled. She didn’t feel like smiling but she knew that it would make things easier.

  “All right. But at least let me walk with you as far as my place.”

  When she hesitated he said, “Not even that, huh? I’ll see you.” He started to turn from her.

  “Mike?”

  “What?”

  “You’re not mad, are you?”

  “Not mad. A little disappointed.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “You shouldn’t be. I...I mean, you didn’t do anything wrong. Do you understand?”

  He nodded. “Sort of.”

  “Good,” she said, forcing another smile. “Good night.”

  “I’ll see you.”

  He turned and walked along Minetta Street toward Sixth and his apartment, and she watched him for a minute, watched him walk with a firm stride. Then she turned and walked off in the opposite direction. She heard him whistle, and she recognized the tune as Danville Girl.

  It was better being alone. The night seemed much darker and vaguely empty. Now that he was gone she no longer wanted to hurry back to her apartment, but there was no place else to go, nothing else to do. She followed Minetta Lane up to Macdougal, surprised to see The Shadows just a few doors from the intersection.

  Quickly she headed home. She followed the same route she had followed the night before, but it seemed as though last night had been ages ago and that she had walked the same route over and over. Her feet automatically carried her toward Barrow Street.

  Mike wanted her. It was more than desire on his part—he loved her, or could fall in love if she gave him half a chance. But she had no intention of giving him that half-chance.

  Laura wanted her, too. And Laura would love her, because she would see to that. Laura was the person she wanted and needed.

  By the time she reached her apartment she was exhausted and her bed felt good to her. It was late, very late, and the room was properly dark and the bed properly soft and cool. She slept naked, with nothing between her body and the smooth bedsheets.

  I’ll see you, he had said. She hoped that he wouldn’t. He deserved a lot more than she could possibly give him. He deserved love, and she knew that she could never love him.

  She had so much love stored up, so much love that she had been saving and hiding for so long.

  But it was not for him.

  Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow she would fall into the darkness. That was where she belonged, and her ridge was now too thin to hold her any longer. Her pilgrimage to New York was a success already. She had found the answer to her question, and although the answer wasn’t the one she would have preferred, it was as she had expected.

  Now she knew what she was. It was time to accept it.

  Tomorrow.

  8

  AS HE CLIMBED THE STAIRS he was struck by the utter silence of the building. The party was over now. Only the smoking ruins would be left. And Saundra would go right on living among them. Maybe she would throw away some bottles or empty an ashtray here and there, but she would make an all-out effort to maintain the general disorder.

  The silence was deafening. It was after four, and even Saundra’s charm hadn’t been able to sustain the party any longer than that. He laughed silently, thinking that the guests hadn’t had the opportunity to say good-by to their unwilling host. Not that they would have even if he had been there. It was all part of the ritual. You avoided good manners because society imposed them on you and the Village imposed the reverse. You fought manners, just as you fought cleanliness and belief and emotion. You had to prove forever that nothing really mattered to you, that you were living your own life and would continue to do so even if it killed you.

  It hadn’t bothered him before. In the past he lived in filth and missed meals and begged and stole, but before not even the hunger bothered him. Now, for some reason, he wanted more than what he had. More precisely, he wanted something different, but the intensity of his desire made it appear to be something more important and more valuable than what he had at the moment.

  What exactly did he want? He paused on the stairway, hunting for a word that would sum up the change in his desires.

  Respectability? No, he had lived too long alone and within himself to begin worrying about the opinion of the world. Security? Partly, but it was more than that.

  Direction? That was closer. Inevitably, he was getting older, and the period for a person to find himself had to end when he grew older. It might be considered colorful for a guy to knock around the country at sixteen, but by the time he got to be twenty-three he wasn’t colorful any more. He was just a bum.

  Sometimes he felt that he was making progress. The audition with Comet, for instance—if that went through he had a chance, and if the chance worked he would have a start in the right direction.

  Purpose? Yes, that was probably close enough. If one word could embrace everything, purpose was the word. Maybe nothing mattered, as the code of the Village declared. Maybe they were all right and nothing at all was important. But even if they were right, where were they? What did it get them?

  He himself needed purpose, a reason for existing. It would sound corny to the skeptics. But there it was. If there was no purpose it was necessary to invent one for himself. What was it Voltaire had said? If there were no God man would have invented Him. Maybe the same thing could be said for purpose. His goal was his music, and if that was meaningless he had to make it mean something for him. He had to make each step along the way seem significant and important.

  Otherwise there was no real point to anything. He might as well be dead, or never have been born to begin with.

  The audition, for example. It would be important. God, he would be good! He’d play them like fish on a line. He’d figure out what songs those bastards wanted to hear and he’d sing them the way they would want to hear them.

  Compromise? Yes, it was a compromise. He was selling out, but somehow the idea of selling out didn’t hold the terror it once held for him, the terror that seemed so awful to the little world of coffee shops and Village parties.

  He hadn’t mentioned the audition to Jan. Paradoxically, Saundra was the only person he had been able to tell simply because he knew it had made the least possible impression upon her. She undoubtedly had forgotten by now.

  But he would tell Jan. It had been a mistake to kiss her but it had been something he couldn’t help. God, she was a moody kid, getting all panicky from a kiss. At any rate she had forgiven him, and she certainly seemed to like him. Would she fall in love with him?

  He didn’t know. Nor did he know whether what he felt for her could be described as love. He wasn’t sure just what love meant, or whether such a state actually existed outside of novels and poems and songs.

  He knew at least that he had never been in love. There had been women, and there had been a few women that it had hurt him to break with, but there had been nothing he could think of as love. He knew that he enjoyed being with Jan and that he was comfortable with her, more so than with any woman before. But was it anything deeper than that?

  He didn’t know. He felt vaguely that it might be good to be in love with a girl like Jan. A man might be able to go farther if he had someone to go along with him. A man might care more about things if someone else cared, too.

  He wondered idly whether she
was a virgin. She probably was, and he was surprised to realize that he somehow hoped she was. It didn’t make sense; he had always wanted his women to be as experienced as possible.

  Maybe it did make sense, in a strange kind of way. If he was in love.

  Maybe he was in love. Whatever in hell love was . . .

  “Is that you, Mike?”

  Saundra’s voice broke into his thoughts, intruding just as sharply as the two girls had intruded upon him and Jan in the courtyard. The silence was gone. Twenty-four Cornelia Street was noisy again.

  “Mike?”

  He took a deep breath and began to climb the stairs.

  “Laura?”

  She turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub, reaching for the towel. God, a shower was good! It was good in the morning to wake you up, but it was even better at night when you were hot and sticky from the heat and stickiness that was New York in July. First the hot water pelting down on you while you soaped yourself and worked the shampoo into your hair, soaping and rinsing until you were clean all over and your hair squeaked like a violin when you pulled a strand of it between your fingers.

  And then the cold water that stung like needles, like the torture of a thousand cuts, and you wanted to get out from under it but you liked the way it snapped and bit at you and the way it cleared your head and closed up your pores and made you feel even cleaner and much more alive.

  “Laura? Christ, aren’t you done yet?”

  The shower hadn’t quite worked. Sometimes you needed more than a shower. Sometimes you were too dirty for soap or shampoo to cleanse you, dirty inside in a way that made you want to open your mouth under the shower and wash yourself out. And then you could soap and rinse until you were limp and you felt better but it still hadn’t quite worked. Somehow you were still dirty.

  “I’m coming,” she said.

  She was dry and she should go in now to Peggy, but she didn’t want to go, not yet, not for a moment.

  What did she want? That was a good enough question. Whatever it was she kept on looking for it, looking for it in bed after bed, even breaking down for awhile and paying $25 an hour to look for it on a couch until she decided that analysis wasn’t the answer, that perhaps there was no answer, or that the only conceivable answer was to keep on looking for something that wasn’t there and never would be there. To search a thousand beds, and to bring a thousand girls to help you look for it in your own bed in your own room, and never to find it because it wasn’t there at all.

  Yes, she knew what she was going to do. She knew precisely what she was going to do and why she was going to do it.

  Musical Beds.

  It wouldn’t work. It had never worked and it never would work, and Jan Marlowe would be the memory that Peggy was going to be, that Peggy was destined to be even now while she waited impatiently in the bedroom. Jan Marlowe had not yet reached the bedroom but already she was waiting to become a memory. She was a potential memory, as surely as a fetus was an unborn corpse.

  Perhaps if she could ever have a child, if she could feel her belly growing larger and know that a lover had made it grow, perhaps then the game could end.

  Of if she could father a child. The thought was first ridiculous and then as perfect as it was unattainable. If she could give a girl a baby, even a girl like Peggy who was becoming a bore already and who wouldn’t last more than another night, no matter how good she was in bed with the lights out.

  There was something inevitably ephemeral about a relationship that could never bear tangible fruit. In bed with a girl—almost any girl—she could feel that they were building something, that their bodies together were moving toward a goal.

  And when the climax had been reached and passed the vision passed with it. Nothing was built, nothing would endure.

  Each time she was fooled. Each time the quick and beautiful spasm seemed to bring fulfillment and left only emptiness. And she knew she would continue to be fooled forever.

  Jan Marlowe. She wouldn’t have to wait long now, just a day or two at the most. There was no mistake possible in interpreting the look in the girl’s eyes or the expression on her face. The boy who had been holding her in his arms was quite meaningless, a red herring that didn’t fool her at all, a very insignificant bit of camouflage.

  A day or two more. That was all.

  “Damn it, Laura!”

  She sighed softly, turned out the light, and reached for the door.

  The apartment was worse than ever.

  That was the first thing he noticed. Even before he was aware of her his eyes took in the mess that was the apartment. Beer cans covered the floor, some standing upright while others lay on their sides with beer leaking out of them onto the rug. There were empty wine bottles as well, and he wondered momentarily whether she would throw them out or attempt to drip candles on them. Once she had gone on an elaborate candle-dripping spree, carving deep grooves in the side of each candle so that they would drip faster and cover the bottles rapidly so that people wouldn’t know that she had just started with her candle-dripping.

  That night they had made love by candle-light.

  No, she wouldn’t start that again. The bottles would go and the beer cans would go, but the stains would remain in the rug forever. He closed his eyes for a second and pictured her kneeling on the floor and methodically rubbing dirt into the rug for atmosphere.

  “It’s about time.”

  Then he saw her. She was lying on the bed as usual but in a slightly different pose this time. Her shoes and socks were off, tossed somewhere among the debris of the party. She was still wearing her sloppy paint-spattered dungarees that would rot before they wore out, but her sweater and bra were off.

  Her breasts were bare. She was lying flat on her back, not even using a pillow, and her breasts jutted upward proudly. Her skin was milky white and the contrast with the dungarees and with the dark wine-colored blanket was striking. Her breasts would have been magnificent except that they were hers and that most things that were hers seemed phony and empty.

  It was funny. When those breasts were encased in a sweater, a person would guess that they were the most necessarily phony thing about her. They looked too good to be quite true. But they were all real, all hers, all firm and solid flesh. They were the only real thing about her.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Out for a walk. I couldn’t take the party any more.”

  “Oh? I thought it was a good party. Everyone else seemed to like it.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Everybody said you were good tonight, too.” She remained motionless on the bed, only her lips moving and her breasts rising and falling as she breathed.

  “I got kind of stoned.”

  “You didn’t go out alone, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Who were you with? That little square from the coffee house?”

  “She’s not a square, if you mean Jan.”

  “So she’s not a square. That who it was?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  He felt himself getting angry, irritated at the way she talked and the way she was completely oblivious to the disorder of the room.

  “Did you go to bed with her?”

  He hadn’t expected that. But he should have known that she would ask, known it despite the fact that he had never made a half-serious pass at another girl since they’d started living together.

  “No,” he said, finally.

  “Too bad.”

  She sat up on the bed and stared at him, opening her eyes very wide. Her eyes were large to begin with and larger with the eye-shadow, and now with her eyes wide open and her eyebrows raised she looked almost like a caricature of herself.

  “But you wanted to, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Of course you did. I knew that much from the bit you pulled at the Renascence. You’re not too subtle, Mike.”

  “I’m no
t?”

  “No. No, subtlety isn’t one of your strong points, Michael Hawkins. Come over here, will you?”

  He was sitting in a chair across from her and he didn’t want to move at all, and he especially didn’t want to go to her.

  “What for?”

  She shook her head in exasperation. “God, you know what for. What’s the matter with me, Mike? Aren’t I any good? I try to be, you know. Aren’t I good in bed any more?”

  “Yes,” he said, thinking. You’re good, all right. Like an actress, with every movement and every moan polished and rehearsed and absolutely meaningless. You’re marvelous. You’d make one hell of a whore.

  “I know I am. Half the guys here tonight wanted to make me, you know. So why do I have to beg you?”

  He stood up, forcing a smile. “Let’s fix up the pad a little,” he suggested. “It’s pretty messy.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “It’s terrible, Sandy. Let’s at least get rid of the beer cans.” He stooped over and started to pick up cans from the floor.

  “That can wait. There’s something else I’d rather do just now.”

  Her voice was husky, and he wondered whether she actually wanted him or whether the huskiness was just another part of the act, another gesture.

  “Let’s clean up first.”

  “To hell with it.”

  “Come on.”

  “Not now,” she said. “That can wait.”

  “Dammit, it can’t wait! I’m sick of it, Sandy. I’m sick of the sloppiness all the time and I’m sick of the damned parties and the goddamned beer cans all over the floor!”

  She jumped to her feet and grabbed him by the shoulder, knocking the beer cans from his hands. “Damn you,” she shouted, “I like it this way! And it’s my apartment and I pay the rent and you can just leave the goddamned cans on the floor and—”

  She broke off suddenly. He wasn’t angry because for once the mask had slipped and she had said what she meant without stopping to think how it would sound. He turned from her and kicked a can, watching it skitter across the floor, bouncing off a wine bottle and rolling along the rug.

  His eyes followed the can until it stopped rolling. Then he turned to her, seeing how ridiculous she looked in her dirty dungarees with her breasts and feet bare. He looked at her breasts without feeling anything, seeing her body only as a body to be serviced.