6

“ALL THE men can go off to the suicide center and get themselves quietly gassed to death?” John said. He was pacing back and forth in Pam’s apartment while she stood motionless and watched him. Her hint of a smile could drive him nuts if he let it.

“There’s a certain element of satire,” she said.

“Oh, you think so, do you? I think she meant every fucking word of it.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never met her. A lot of it could be a put-on . . . or maybe not.”

“Put-on, hell. She shot Andy Warhol, didn’t she?”

“Come on, man. Nobody’s offering it seriously as a program. It’s an interesting document. You’ve got a wound that’s been festering for a few thousand years . . . and you lance it . . . you’re going to get pus, OK?”

“Why the hell are you defending her?”

“I’m not defending her. Like . . . Fuck, why is this such a . . . Why are you so uptight? Don’t you see the humor in it?”

“Humor? Jesus. Men are really women and women are really men . . . The male is an incomplete female . . . a walking abortion. That’s supposed to be funny?”

She shook her heard and laughed. “Fuck, man. Yeah, it’s horrible, but . . . It is funny. Like the ultimate détournment on sex roles. Flip everything around one hundred and eighty degrees and see what it looks like. Like Swift’s modest proposal . . .”

“So this modest proposal is to kill all the men . . .”

“Hey, cool out, OK? You’re talking like I presented you with a critique and asked you to sign it. But that’s not why . . . If you take another look . . . I mean, isn’t it a fascinating document? A really interesting document? If you simply think that women have been denied the right to be like men, then isn’t it the logical . . .”

“Fascinating document? Interesting document? What makes you think that people won’t think it’s meant straight?”

“Maybe they will. And maybe it is. Jesus. Where the hell’s your anarchism? Trust the masses . . .”

She’d stopped smiling, had settled into a stance that looked poised and stubborn, her legs widely spaced, her feet in their dainty white socks pressed solidly into the hardwood floor. A part of his mind was saying, can this really be happening? Are we really having the first honest-to-God fight since we met each other—and are we having it because the Collective published selections from The SCUM Manifesto? It was nuts. He knew it was nuts, but he couldn’t stop: “You voted to publish it.”

“Yeah, I did.”

John had long ago drunk his tea, but he was still clutching the cup in his right hand. The part of himself that remained detached— that was sadly watching this shit go down—told him that if he squeezed the delicate white cup any harder, he was going to break it, but he didn’t care. It felt good to squeeze it. “If you published it, you dig it,” he said.

“Oh, fuck, man. You’re intentionally not understanding me.” She started to say something else but stopped; then she smiled again—the faintest hint of a smile. “She really got to you, didn’t she?”

His fury was so intense it couldn’t make words. He clamped it down, controlled it. His mind was racing. He needed to find something that would really devastate her. “The other women in the Collective . . . Your comrades in the Collective . . . How many of those women really hate men?”

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”

“Then why the hell did you publish Valerie Solanis? Oh, we don’t really hate men. Oh, no, not us. That’s a goddamn filthy rumor. We’ll just find the biggest fucking man-hating dyke we can find and publish her . . . Jesus, Pam, you’ve told me about those women. OK, so how many of them hate men?”

He saw her face go cold, turn into a mask. “Fuck you, man.”

“How many? A few? Most of them? It’s a political question, damn it.”

“It’s none of your goddamned fucking business.” He’d got what he’d wanted. She wasn’t talking in that quiet voice anymore. She was just as furious as he was. “Fuck you, John. I never want to hear ‘dyke’ again, you got that? Never. Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Sorry. But I’m mad, goddamn it . . . I’m just asking you. It’s political, goddamn it . . . the dominant tendency . . .”

“The dominant fucking tendency . . . Oh, fuck the dominant tendency . . . Jesus . . . What the hell do you want? . . . OK, the dominant tendency is separatist.”

“Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. So what about you?”

“Why the fuck would I be . . . ? What would I be doing . . . ? Shit. Having this goddamned stupid pointless fight with you? Jesus, man, don’t you know me at all? Can’t you read my theory from my practice?”

He saw her eyes look down at his hand; then she looked into his face. He was still squeezing the cup with his thumb and three of his fingers, but his index finger was pointed at her. Her eyes were saying something like, “Look at what you’re doing.” He didn’t want to look at what he was doing.

“You may not be there yet,” he said, “but you’re tempted, aren’t you?”

“What? To a separatist position? You’re goddamn right, I’m tempted.”

He’d heard a flicker of something in her voice—an opening, a way out. If he laughed, so would she, and it would be over. He couldn’t do it. “Fuck,” he said. “Go ahead. Why stop with half measures?” Clutching the cup, he jabbed his extended index finger directly into her face. “Go ahead. Quit fucking around with men. They’re defective . . . just walking abortions. Go on, you can do it. You can hate men with the best of them.”

BANG

He was left standing, stunned and stupid, his fingers vibrating with pain. The cup was gone. He’d heard it smash into the wall, shatter into a million fragments. Whatever had happened was already over. He remembered his hand, his index finger stiffened, pointing at Pam’s head. Then an explosion. Shock. Waves of pain still running from his fingers up the length of his arm. Pam’s eyes had no expression at all. They were looking into his eyes. In memory—a crackle of powder blue brief as a strobe flash. She’d kicked the cup right out of his hand.

He laughed. He sank to his knees laughing, then rolled onto the floor, convulsed, destroyed. She was laughing too—giggling like a little kid.

“Oh, fuck.” He sat up, found that she was kneeling next to him. He shook his fingers.

“Did I hurt you?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“You’re right, I’m not.”

“Jesus, Pam, where’d you learn to kick like that?”

“Karate,” she said, shrugging.

“My God, I didn’t know you were doing that. Why didn’t you tell me you were doing that?”

“You never asked me.”

“Christ, you keep saying that. It’s nuts. What else am I going to find out about you that’s a total shock?”

That one sent her off into another giggling fit. “Shit, man, you should have seen your face.”

“Oh, yeah, I can imagine.”

“Hey, look,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“Me too. I didn’t think you’d take it that way.”

Then, as though taking an invisible cue, they both fell silent. She was looking at him. She offered him her hand. He took it. She stood, pulled him to his feet. He tried to find something to say but came up with nothing. He tried to clear his throat, but his mouth had gone dry. He produced an idiot’s small discreet sound, something like a cough.

She was close enough that he could have reached out and placed his hand on the base of her throat—and he discovered with some alarm that he wanted to do exactly that. Touch her smooth live skin, trace her clearly defined collarbone to the deep hollow just above her sternum. He wanted to read her entire body, locate the mass of each muscle, the shape of each bone. He wanted to touch every vertebra, joint, tendon, and rib, every concavity or swelling or long fine line, every hardness or softness, every sinew of her. Then, in slow motion, she ran her fingers though his hair, held him, resting a hand on either side of his neck, looking. “I don’t think of you as a man,” she said and kissed him open-mouthed.

Tension coiling toward immensity, slush of fear in his chest, muscles tightening, he allowed her grave deliberate motion to push across a dangerous barrier. A girl hadn’t kissed him like that—as skillfully and aggressively—since Natalie. (How many years ago had that been?) It was wonderful to get turned on again—to know it in every singing nerve in his body. He wanted her so much that maybe it would be all right this time—if only he could get his treasonous brain to turn off. He was an animal touching another animal, moments away from being blasted away to nowhere like the white porcelain cup.

But he’d been here before, and no, nothing was going to be all right—not now and not ever. That old whipped-dog misery. He pushed her away, a movement as instinctive as if she’d caught fire. Christ, now he’d done it. He’d have to explain—come up with more words, more lies. “What’s the matter?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Do I turn you on?”

“God, yes.” He hated himself. His entire body was shaking. Surely she could see it.

“What’s the matter?” she asked him again. “What just happened to you?”

“Pam, I don’t know what happens.”

“OK, let’s try to figure it out.”

“It shouldn’t have to be something you figure out, should it? I mean . . . is it amenable to political analysis?”

“Shit, man, if it’s not amenable to political analysis, then there’s something wrong with our politics.”

Not getting it, not wanting to get it, he stared at her, tried to read her—find a way to translate her into something familiar. Then, finally, he did get it. When she said “total critique,” that’s exactly what she meant.

He stepped toward the door. Moving quickly, she blocked his way. “Don’t go,” she said.

He had to get out of there. He had to say something that would allow him to escape. After all these years, he still believed in the transcendent power of the old magical formula; as terrified as he was, he knew he had to say it. He thought it might somehow get him off the hook. “Pamela. I love you.”

“Oh, baby,” she said in that oddly muted, nearly singing voice he’d heard only a few times before, “you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.”

“I’ve got to cool out.”

She was firmly positioned in front of the door. He didn’t want to try to move her. “Come on, Pam,” he said.

“You come on,” she said, offering a hand. He couldn’t take it.

“I’ve got a real hang-up with saying the words,” she said, “like saying the words you just said. But I’ve got feelings too. Really strong feelings. So don’t think for a minute you can say that to me and then just walk out of here.” She took his hand. She must have felt how cold and wet it was. “Oy, you’re a mess. Come on, it’s OK .”

He allowed her to lead him away from the door. But she was leading him toward the bed. “Pam?” he said.

“We’re not going to do anything.”

“Look, for Christ’s sake . . .”

“Come on, man. We’re not going to do anything.”

She was gripping his hand as tightly as on that awful morning when she’d saved him at the Harvard bust. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said.

She led him behind the screen. It was a big bed, bigger than a double. Someone who wanted to sleep alone would never have picked a bed like that. “Pamela?”

“We’re not going to do anything.”

She drew him onto the bed, lay down next to him. “OK, you can breathe again,” she said.

He lay flat on his back, stared at the ceiling, listened to the moist thudding of his heart. She took both of his hands into hers, rubbed them. “Come on, baby, trust me. We’re not going to do anything. It’s just a nice place to have a conversation, OK?”

• • •

TALKING WAS something he could do. She’d led him across a fundamental divide—he knew that—and now they were on the dangerous side of the Japanese screen. The light from the big bay window set the rice paper aglow, and they were lying together inside that flat diffused light, saturated by the clarity of the whiteness—lying on their backs, not touching each other. Like the bedspread, her pillows were decorated with eyelet lace, and he felt again the vast calm of the space she’d created, felt almost protected by it. He could almost trust her. “I don’t really know you,” he said.

“Come on, man, you see me practically every day.”

“Yeah, but how many more things are there . . . you know, like karate? You say you’re not a secretive person, but . . .”

“I’ll tell you anything. What do you want to know?”

“OK. Let’s start with karate. How’d you get into that?”

“A lot of us are heavy into karate these days. As a direct reaction to male terror. Dig it, rape is a political act, an act of terror aimed at all women. Learning to defend yourself is like basic. The women in the Collective all study Korean style, so I do that with them, but I studied Goju in New York. I’ve got a brown belt in Goju. After ballet, karate’s the perfect thing for me. I need . . . I have to do something physical, man, or I just go crazy.”

“All right. And ballet? Tell me about ballet.”

“Fuck. You want to be here for a week? I don’t even know where to . . . OK, look,”—the pale pink ribbon floating on the wall above their heads—“I wore that in my hair when I was Clara in the Nutcracker. The only real solo role I ever had. I was the best goddamn Clara you ever saw. I saved that ribbon for years, but it made me sick . . . even to look at it. It was a big deal for me to put it up there.”

He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. “Tell me about the hospital,” he said.

“I knew you were going to ask me that. OK, I started fainting in class. I wasn’t living with . . . I was still living with my parents. I don’t know how my father got involved, but he came over to the school and took one look at me and said, ‘What are you doing to my daughter?’ and he slapped me in the hospital like instantly. Boy, was I mad at him. I wanted to kill him. But he saved my life. I was really fucked, man. My head was fucked. I thought it was normal to faint every day. I was working my ass off . . . of course I was going to faint. The only thing that was wrong with me was like four or five extra pounds. That’s what I thought. And if I lost that weight, I’d be perfect, and then maybe Mr. B would choreograph a ballet for me. Jesus, man, when I hit the hospital, I weighed eighty-four pounds.”

Again he waited for her to go on; when she didn’t, he turned to look at her. Her eyes searched his face. He couldn’t read her expression.

She sprang up, brought back the dope and papers, sat on the edge of the bed and began rolling a joint. “What are you going to call a Jewish girl?” she said. “Esther, Ruth, Miriam, Deborah? Shit, no, that’s too easy. I swear to God, my mother must have thought about it for days to come up with the right name . . . Fuck me, man . . . Pamela Lynne Zalman.”

• • •

SHE WAS an only child—“and that’s one more kid than my mother should’ve had.” Her father owned his own business, made good money. For as long as she could remember, her parents hated each other; when she was little, her father wasn’t around much. He’d wanted a son, so Pam was a disappointment straight from the womb. He was second-generation, had once had a big family in Europe, but most of them had died in the camps. The only relative Pam knew on her father’s side was Baba Zalman who lived all alone at the end of a subway line, read a Yiddish newspaper, and taught little Pam to spit when she passed a church so she wouldn’t get struck by the evil eye. But Pam’s mother supplied a vast collection of living relatives—the aunts and uncles and cousins Pam remembered from her childhood. Pam’s mother was known as a great beauty, “a real pritzteh.” The spoiled youngest of six children, Mrs. Zalman wanted her daughter to be the next Shirley Temple. “Well, shit, man, you can’t say I didn’t try.”

It wasn’t that Pam didn’t know what she was supposed to do or how to do it—“that little-girl cuteness”—but she could only do it for a while, always screwed it up eventually, reverted to her real self, “mad and bad,” a tiny bundle of raw nerves and craziness. She was a picky eater, painfully underweight. (“Yeah?” John said, “so was I.”) She was highly verbal, learned to read by four, could never keep her mouth shut, and couldn’t sit still. Dance classes were OK because they were physical, but school was hell. “If you sat me down and tried to tell me anything, you might as well have been speaking Russian.” If she didn’t like what was going on, she just got up and walked out. She wasn’t just a brat; she was a thug. She broke dishes, cut up her clothes, cut off her hair, murdered her dolls. She bit and kicked and punched other kids. Sometimes she kicked her teachers. She was the only girl in her entire school ever to get paddled by the principal. She was always peeing her pants. She slept in diapers until she was nine. She told John all of these things in a deadpan voice, her eyes fixed on the O’Keeffe painting. He knew why she had to tell her story that way.

Ballet saved her. She wasn’t one of those little girls with sugarplum fantasies, didn’t care if she ever got to wear a pink tutu. She loved the work at the barre. “I didn’t know it, but I desperately needed some sense of control. I used to have this sensation like I was going to fly apart into a million pieces. It’s terrible, man. It makes you crazy. And ballet gave me like a way to squeeze myself together.” She loved the Cecchetti syllabus, the way each step leads to the next, the way it all fits, the logic of it. When she was twelve, a talent scout from the School of American Ballet was auditioning kids on Long Island. “I was like this little mechanical ballerina doll. You wind it up, and it dances. I had no expression at all . . . never smiled . . . but oh boy, did I have technique. She asked me to do a fouetté. I couldn’t believe she meant just one. I got this screwy idea in my head that she wanted me to do the thirty-two fouettés from the third act of Swan Lake, so that’s what I did. Afterward there was this dead silence. Of course she took me.”

Her mother rented a dark little apartment on the Upper West Side so they could be near the school, but cramming Pam and her mother together into the same small space was a lousy idea—“two freaked-out hysterics in a sardine can”—so when Pam was fourteen, she started boarding with the family of another dancer. “It was like the Garden of Eden. Melanie and I were very close. Compared to my meshuggina family, I thought hers was motherfucking normal. We were going to this special high school for actors and dancers, and they didn’t give a fuck what we did, and we spent most of our time in ballet classes. I was in heaven.” When she was sixteen, André Eglevsky borrowed her for his production of the Nutcracker. Everybody loved her. She thought her career was taking off. Everybody loved her but Mr. B.

“I never did figure out why that son of a bitch didn’t like me. Maybe it was because I’d done most of my training somewhere else. Maybe it was because I didn’t look like Suzanne Farrell. Maybe it was because I talked too much, asked too many questions . . . Maybe it was because I was so crazy . . . like you could just feel it radiating off me. But everybody knew he liked his girls thin as pins, so I thought, hell, I can do that. All I have to do is stop eating.”

The doctor in the hospital said she had anorexia nervosa, atypical. “Well, of course it was atypical. Nothing about me’s ever been typical.” For the next three years Pam was in and out of the hospital. She tried to keep dancing, but it was impossible. Without dance, she had nothing to keep her from flying apart—she was nothing. She bounced from doctor to doctor, shrink to shrink. “Most of them were quacks . . . or real idiots. I was smarter than they were.”

She’d do anything to avoid going back to the hospital. She’d learned all the tricks of the trade by then. “Sinkers are great, man. They’re cheap, they’re small, you can buy them in any sporting goods store. If you’re wearing a blazer, you can put them in every pocket. You can sew them under your skirt. If you get a heavy-duty panty girdle, it’s amazing how many sinkers you can stuff into it. Those assholes would weigh me and say, ‘Oh, Pamela, you’re doing so well.’”

When it was obvious that she was losing weight again, they sent her back to the hospital. Once she was in, she wasn’t allowed to exercise—not even allowed to walk. If she wasn’t gaining weight, they’d shove a feeding tube down her. “Like it was all designed to punish you, make you even crazier.” One of the few things they let her do was read. She read obsessively. “It wasn’t for escape. I was like a feral child. I didn’t know a fucking thing, man . . . gornisht. I had to construct the entire world from scratch. And it was like really personal . . . how the fuck did I get here?” The right book hit her at the right time: Jules Henry’s Culture Against Man. “It blew my mind. I thought, whatever he’s doing, that’s what I want to do.”

Slowly, her life turned around. Her parents split up, and she moved in with her father. “He’d give me this look . . . like appalled and disgusted and just dripping with pity. ‘Oy, oy, oy, what is this miserable little thing? It won’t eat, it won’t talk, it won’t dance, it won’t do anything. It just lies there and cries.’ But he never gave up on me.”

She finally found the right doctor. He weighed her stripped naked. “Don’t give me any of that crap about modesty, Pamela. I know that all of you girls lie automatically.” He gave her blood tests to make sure she hadn’t drunk gallons of water. “You fall an ounce below a hundred pounds,” he told her, “you go straight back in the hospital. I won’t even let you go home first.” And she found the right therapist. “After all those charlatans, I didn’t believe in anybody . . . and then there she is, this funny middle-aged fat lady with glasses. Martha. So fucking far out, man. It took me a while to . . . But yeah, she trained with Paul Goodman. Gestalt therapy’s like . . . Do you know anything about it? It’s anarchist therapy. That’s how I got onto the whole anarchist trip.”

By the time Pam was nineteen, her doctor said she was “stabilized.” She was working with Martha twice a week. She finished her last courses for high school the same year she started at NYU. She had a goal again: she was going to be an anthropologist, better than Ruth Benedict, better than Margaret Mead. She was as nutty and compulsive at NYU as she’d been with ballet; if she ever got anything less than an A+ on anything, she cried for days. Of course for a doctorate in anthropology she’d have to go to Columbia—there really wasn’t any other choice. They didn’t just admit her, they gave her a scholarship. She got involved in SDS. History came along and blew her away. “And that’s the story of my mishigas, man. Now what’s yours?”

• • •

SHE PASSED John the freshly rolled joint and the matches. He took them but said, “No, not yet. In a minute. OK?” Right now he didn’t need the doper’s weird web, certainly not the doper’s paranoia. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed so he could sit next to her, so he could feel the floor under his feet.

He felt poised, balanced. It was like that deliberate moment he always sought just before he performed—that sense of gravitas as he stepped from secular to sacred space. The first night in the Bohemian Embassy—where Ian and Sylvia had played, by God—about to offer up his shit-kicker West Virginia voice, his repertoire of strange old mountain tunes to a huge bare room full of somewhat cool, somewhat reserved Canadian kids. To sit down in front of the mike, adjust it, pick up his Martin, check the tuning, look out at those polite faces. He was waiting for them just as much as they were waiting for him, and he felt—yes, of course, fear. Wiping his sweaty hands on his jeans. But also the kick, the juice, the clarity. Whatever I’ve got, you’re going to get it, like it or not. And they had liked it. That had been, not Raymond Lee, the cockroach in the corner, but John Dupre, the full-sized human being. As he would be again.

What she’d told him had changed everything. It was more than merely trust. He couldn’t have felt any more linked to Pamela if they’d shared the same womb. It was high summer in Boston, and she was wearing what she always wore in the heat—her powder-blue jeans and a boy’s white shirt with nothing under it. She was sitting sideways on the edge of the bed, one leg drawn up. The light through the paper screen was so flat and white it seemed to cast no shadows. Looking at him, waiting, she was a living Vermeer. Soon he would have to say something, but not just yet. The windows in her apartment were open, and he could hear the traffic outside, distant voices, someone’s stereo—not the drugged-out rock he might have expected in that hip building but a snatch of something crystalline and precise, Vivaldi or even Bach—and with that, the entire universe ignited with relatedness. Even the smell of her, not strong enough to call it a perfume, just the faintest hint of sweetness—allusive, evocative. “Fasting,” he said. “Yeah.”

He saw a wary movement far back in her eyes—knew that she was ready to defend herself. Karate must have been the perfect metaphor for something she’d known her whole life.

“There’s a point,” he said, “after . . . well, maybe after three days . . . when your hunger starts to feel pleasurable. Something sharp to push yourself against, like an inner knife blade. And then there’s the euphoria, like wow, impossible to describe. And the whole world gets hard-edged and clear. So clear. So fucking clear. Like an etching.”

He saw her surprise, puzzlement. “What are you . . . ? Are you asking me what it’s like? Shit, man, you’re right on.”

“No, I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. I’ve done it. Not like you. I only did it twice, but . . . OK, it’s like you’re right on the edge, and if you keep going . . . everything will get pure and clean and brilliantly focused . . . like sunlight on a mirror.”

“I can’t believe this. Are you putting me on?”

“No, I’m not putting you on. Listen. Everything’s charged with meaning. Your mind makes unbelievably brilliant leaps . . . It’s like the speed, the clarity. It’s like . . . Food would just slow you down. Food would just get in the way.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Exactly right.”

“What you’re trying to . . . This is hard to say . . . What you’re trying to break free from . . . It’s the ‘withness of the body.’”

Even her mental karate hadn’t prepared her for that. Her eyes filled, spilled over. She looked away from him, wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, man” she said. “This is heavy for me.”

He’d never imagined her crying. It hurt him to see it. “It’s heavy for me too,” he said. “Listen. It feels like something really . . . just unbelievably significant. Like a huge mental breakthrough’s going to happen at any moment. It’s right around the corner. A clarity you can’t simply choose. It’s going to enter you from the outside . . . in a blaze of brilliance. Soon everything’s going to be blindingly clear.”

“Yes.”

“But then you keep on going, and it gets farther and farther away. You get sick and crazy. Really crazy. You keep running the same weird tape loops in your mind.”

“Yes.”

“The only thing you can think of is to keep on going. You can’t let go of it. If you ate anything, you’d lose it. And you just get crazier and crazier.”

“Oh, yes. Fuck, yes. Did you stop yourself or did somebody stop you?”

“I stopped myself.”

“How did you do it?”

“I honest to God don’t know. What I associate it with . . . This is going to sound weird. It had something to do with playing the guitar.”

“Yeah, I can understand that,” controlled distant voice, “how that might work. But I couldn’t stop myself. If my father hadn’t stopped me, I would have died. You hit a point where . . . It’s like dying’s absolutely beside the point. Like your body is absolutely beside the point. That’s how you got there in the first place. So dying doesn’t even enter into the picture, you dig?”

“Oh, yeah. I didn’t go that far, but . . . oh, yeah.”

He saw a second wave of tears wash through her. She didn’t try to hide them. “Oh, man,” she said, whispering it, “I was so fucking crazy.”

His own eyes were stinging in sympathy. Because he didn’t know what else to do, he wiped the fat drops off her face. He kissed her forehead.

She wrapped her arms around him, and he held her for a moment, her head pressed into his chest. How could he ever have been afraid of her?

“I wasted so much of my life,” she said.

She kissed him lightly on the cheek, stood up, withdrew to the other side of the room. He could feel her urgency like a physical force—her need for space around herself, for distance between them. She stood in the white flat light, looking at him. He could have sworn that he’d never seen anyone as clearly.

“John” she said, “we’re a council. We’ve been a council for a while now. It doesn’t matter that there’s only two of us. Maybe we’ll have more members, and maybe we won’t . . . and maybe . . . Maybe we’ll go to bed, and maybe we won’t. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“Just don’t . . . Like saying ‘don’t worry’ is bullshit, because if you’re going to worry, you’re going to worry. But I really wish you wouldn’t. I mean . . . I don’t know how to say this. Don’t worry for my sake, OK? The important thing is that we’re a council. The apparent contradiction between the individual and the collective vanishes in practice, you dig? That’s what we’re doing right now.”

• • •

FOR ABOUT a week all Cassandra did was sleep. Like it wasn’t just the bronchitis, I think she was worn down to the nub. But then she started feeling better, and she kept trying to get up while Terry kept running her back to bed, like, “Wait until that cough starts breaking up,” because Cass would start coughing sometimes and you’d think she was going to bring up half her guts. And every day Ethan was saying, “Hey, she’s looking pretty good. Don’t you think so, Terry? Look how she’s getting her color back.” Meaning, looking almost good enough to MOVE HER ASS RIGHT ALONG OUT OF HERE. But Terry just ignored him and kept shoving Cassandra back into bed and feeding her herbs, and I thought that was really good of Terry. Before that, I didn’t think she liked Cass all that much.

And a lot of times Terry would go in and sit on the edge of the bed and rap with her, and I thought, hey, that’s really NICE. But then later on I started getting this uneasy feeling, and I’d be wondering what the hell they were talking about in there. Sometimes I’d hear snatches of Terry telling Cass about the Ancient Mother. Like all these little statues they found all over the East which were of women, “just cunt and tits,” Terry said, and to her that proved that women’s magic went back millions of years and would always be around no matter what kind of silly-ass God any man might invent, so I figured that they were mainly talking about Terry’s witch trip, but I wasn’t sure, and I couldn’t help wondering if they were ever talking about ME.

And there was one other thing. Even now I can’t bring myself to wish it never happened. As long as Cass was sick, we were goddamn well STUCK there, and it was starting to freak me right out. It was motherfucking CLAUSTROPHOBIC, you know what I mean? There was nobody forcing me to hang out in that insane place. Like I could have got in the camper and gone anywhere I damn well pleased, but I kept thinking I shouldn’t desert Cassandra in her hour of need—although I don’t know what I thought I could accomplish just by being there and bouncing off the walls. But I didn’t feel much like dealing at the moment, and I didn’t want to go float around with John because floating around with John meant floating around with Pam, and, to tell you the truth, Pam Zalman pricked my ass, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to go hang out at Lyons’ place. And then there was Ethan, and he’d turned into my good old buddy, and that made things even worse—because I was developing a pretty bad case for Terry. And you know the most bizarre thing? Like all the time Cass was in New York, the three of us got along just fine. Ethan and Terry just opened up their place for me like there’d never been any question of me going anywhere else, and they’d never said a word about me kicking in for the rent—or even for the food, for fuck’s sake—and that’s amazing considering Ethan’s one of the cheapest sons of bitches ever to walk God’s green earth. And all the time Cass was in New York, I had no problem with Terry. Like she was just a fantasy, right? Like I admired her from a distance, right? But she was my good buddy’s old lady, and that took care of that. But now somehow everything had got twisted, and it was so harsh I couldn’t even stand to talk to her, and she must have noticed because I remember her looking at me with a strange expression on her face, like . . . I don’t know. Like she’d just noticed me for the first time.

Well, one afternoon Ethan’s off somewhere and Cassandra’s asleep, or at least she’s supposed to be asleep. The bedroom door’s shut, and Terry’s cleaning the bathtub. I don’t know what to do with myself, feeling itchy and restless and low. I’ve been trying to read something, I can’t remember what, but I just can’t get into it. So anyhow I get up and drift into the bathroom thinking maybe I can get into a rap with Terry, and she’s cleaning the bathtub with some of that good old foaming cleanser. There’s blue foam all over the inside of the tub and she’s scrubbing away at it with a sponge. I don’t have my boots on, so she don’t hear me coming, right? I’m standing just inside the bathroom door, and she don’t know I’m there, and she just goes on scrubbing away at the bathtub.

It’s all burnt into my brain like I was branded with it. Terry’s barefoot, and one of her long brown legs is straight back, and she’s up on her toes, and I can see the creases in the bottom of her foot and the little pattern of dirt from walking around barefoot, and the other leg’s bent, taking most of her weight, and I can see the shift in her muscles as her body moves, and her black hair’s hanging down so I can’t see her face, and she’s wearing a very short white skirt and I can see almost all of her ass, and her ass is round and hard and I can see the muscles shifting in it as she moves, and she’s got on shiny peach-colored panties and they fit her just tight as a drum, like there’s the crack of her ass and the little hollows at the sides. She shaves her legs all the way up, they’re smooth and brown and I can see the long smooth muscles under the skin, and she’s bent there over the tub. I can smell her sweat, and the bathroom smell of the cleanser. And her panties are so fucking shiny and tight.

She finally straightens up and catches me staring at her. I can’t say a word. She just stands there with the sponge in her hand looking at me, don’t smile or anything. There’s little drops of sweat all across her forehead and her upper lip, and I’ll never forget her eyes. Big and round and black and shiny. And I’ve been CAUGHT, of course, because what I want is just written all over my face, but I can’t stop. Looking at her, and wanting her, and the wanting just hanging out front. And maybe I could have stopped it if I’d done it right then, but she has on one of those real thin blouses, and no bra, and her nipples come erect. I mean it’s not gradual, they just pop right up. And I’m GONE.

To this day I don’t know whether she stepped toward me or I stepped toward her or we just met in the middle. All I know is that her shiny panties are on the floor and my pants are down around my ankles, and when I put my fingers in, she’s already wet like the ocean, and then I’ve got my hands on her ass, easing her on down to the floor, and I’ve come into her with the most incredible wonderful feeling of coming home. Some part of me that’s still halfway in the real world hears Cassandra in the next room, just on the other side of the door, COUGH, COUGH. And so I’m trying to be absolutely quiet. Terry’s still got the sponge in her hand. She throws it away. And she gives the bathroom door a little kick. It swings shut, not quite all the way, leaving about an inch of space. She don’t say a word. I don’t say a word. We’re just going at each other like a couple of silent wildcats.

Right then I couldn’t think of a thing. But later, after I got my brains working again, I contemplated the fact that there are some women in the world that your body just fits with, you know what I mean? It helps if you like each other, but that’s not a requirement. And Terry was one of those women. So it didn’t matter a damn what our minds were doing, our bodies belonged together. It’s amazing how different women are from each other inside, but she really had that . . . I don’t know how to say it. It’s like she wanted me in her as much as I wanted to be in there. I felt that when I came into her. All that wonderful smooth wetness.

We’re panting. We’re biting each other. And I can’t PLAN what I’m going to do next. I can’t even THINK. But somehow I can manage to keep myself quiet. So there’s this weird silence, just us breathing, and I’m pushing her into the floor, just dying to get into her deeper and deeper. She bites down on my shoulder so she won’t yell out loud, grinding her teeth and tongue into me, the air kind of whistling through her nose, and I can feel the rise and fall of her ribs, like the way you feel a horse after you’ve been galloping. And goddamn, I can feel this fluttering inside her. Her whole body’s jerking and twisting, she’s drawing blood on my shoulder, and there’s a little stifled moan deep down inside her throat. And that just does it for me, and I’m there.

And then we’re just staring at each other. Neither one of us has said a word yet. And I hear in the next room, COUGH, COUGH. I slide out of her and stand up. I offer her my hand, and she takes it and stands up. I look into the bathroom mirror to see how my shoulder is, and there’s this perfect ring of bloody teeth marks, and I’m thinking, shit, how the hell am I going to explain THAT to Cassandra? I look at Terry. She’s still looking at me. She steps over to the toilet and tears off some toilet paper and wipes between her legs and then pulls her panties back on. I’d somehow got my jeans off, don’t quite remember doing it, so I get them back on and pull them up and fasten my zipper and my belt. Then we both take a deep breath, and she opens the door, and we walk out into the kitchen and fall down at the table. And I’m hearing, COUGH, COUGH.

I give Terry one of my smokes and she fires it up, and I fire one up, and we sit looking at each other across the table, smoking, with these perfectly serious blown-away faces, and still neither one of us saying a word. Finally she gets up and goes to the fridge and brings us some apple juice. And we drink that. Still looking at each other and not saying a goddamn thing. My brains are starting to work again, and I’m feeling this great incredible calm and at the same time this great incredible sadness. We just sit there, oh, for about forty minutes. Then she says, “You know, Tom, Cass is a hell of a lot better. You could probably leave any day now.”