Augusta Played (13 page)

“Are you all right?” Norman asked.

“Yes,” she said, uncertainly, wondering why men always asked that. Perhaps they thought that orgasms were dangerous for women. Or it could be that she didn't respond the way women were supposed to. But how were women supposed to respond to this? Nobody had ever done it to her before. The only man who had had the opportunity, after all, was Richard, and he had never even informed her that it was a sexual option. She thought it was possible that Richard didn't know about it. He was older; maybe his generation didn't do this particular thing, whatever it was called. Look how long Norman had waited. “Norman,” she said, “why did you do that?”

“Why!” Norman exclaimed, surprised. He had certainly never expected to have his motives called into question on this point. “Because I felt like it, that's why.”

“But you never did it before.”

“I never felt like it before.” He got up and went to the icebox, bringing back to the bed a container of chocolate ice cream and a spoon. “You want some?”

“No thanks,” she said. Then she said, believing she was complimenting him, “I wish you felt like it more often.”

Norman spooned up the ice cream in silence, mechanically. If there was one thing he didn't want to discuss with his wife after going down on her, it was why he had gone down on her. Why couldn't women ever understand that a man's emotions weren't voluntary but responsive? “I can't help how I feel,” he said, beginning to feel angry. For Christ's sake, his analysis had been an accomplished fact for years—it was over and done with, and some things he had talked about with Dr. Morris, he wasn't crazy to go over again with Gus. He much preferred talking about her.

She knew something was going wrong with the conversation and said, “That's not what I meant.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I didn't mean anything.”

She was hating herself for even having started the conversation. The television talk shows said young married couples should discuss sex candidly, but apparently that was only if the sex was bad. Here she was, trying to say it was good, and making things worse.

“You're getting ice cream on the sheets,” Gus said.

“Fuck the sheets.” Norman carried the now empty container back to the sink.

“I just meant it felt good,” she said, calling after him. “That's all.”

“Yeah,” Norman said. He was looking at her from the kitchen, her creamy breasts and pink nipples and golden hair and saucy mouth and hazel eyes, and the well-tempered clavicle, and it hurt him profoundly to feel that all this musical grace and pleasure, this smile like light and this seriousness of intelligence and purpose devoted to the sensual joy of sound—that his wife, Gus, should be dishonest with him. If she wasn't content sexually, why hadn't she said so before? And if she was content sexually, why was she carrying on like this now? He knew why—it wasn't the sex she was criticizing, it was his work. She had as much as said so that morning. Why couldn't she admit at least to herself what she was really talking about?

Gus was wondering why Norman did something to her which she was presumably supposed to like and then got angry when she said she liked it. “Come on, Norman,” she said, rising to the way he had said
yeah
, “don't try to bully me.” She was proud of herself for thinking of the word “bully.” It seemed to strike the right note between accusation and amusement.

“Women,” Norman said, slapping his hand down on the top of the television set so that the picture jumped. He spoke his words lightly, as if joking, but to Gus his eyes seemed to be on fire. She could see the ceiling light reflected twice over in his pupils. “Women are the real body snatchers,” he said. It occurred to Norman, as he said this, that he might just as well have said, “Men are the real body snatchers,” but then he thought, with some exorcism of anxiety, that that would
not
be equally valid: men might violate, but they couldn't threaten to take back what they had given; they were only visitors to the void, not the void itself.

“If you're talking about what I think you're talking about,” she said, “I already know all that stuff. Even the people who made that movie”—she pointed at the screen—“they probably know about it. Freud is old hat, Norman.”

“I'm not talking about Freud, I'm talking about women the way they really look to men.” He was using his seminar voice. “Now, you look reasonably human from most perspectives, but when my head is between your legs I can see just how sly you really are. You have devised a plan among you—or you do it out of innocent instinct—to incorporate our bodies in yours and take over the world. Metaphorically, of course.”

“Why metaphorically? Why not really?”

“You asked me a question, I gave you an answer. If you want to be facetious, that's up to you. I'm talking psycho-analytically, of course, not sexually. Sexually I love women. Especially you. But psychoanalytically is another story.”

“Did you ever tell this to Dr. Morris?”

“Tell it to him? He told it to me. I'm giving you a simplified version.”

“Thanks. It's considerate of you not to strain my brain.”

“Now you're getting huffy. I didn't say you were revolting, I only said women were, in a general psychoanalytic way. You yourself said it's something everyone knows. Why do you have to act so shocked?”

“I'm not shocked. I'm just shocked that you take all this so seriously.”

“I'm not taking it seriously, you are.”

“How can I not take it seriously? You just said you find me reprehensible.”

“I
didn't
say that.”

“You might as well have.”

“Gus,” he begged, “don't twist my meaning to suit your desire for vengeance. It's not my fault you're female. If you want to know what I think of you, I happen to think you're beautiful. I love you. Why do you think I married you?”

“It seems to me I asked you that once. Are you telling me now that the only reason you married me is for my looks?”

“I didn't say it was the
only
reason, I said it was
a
reason. Christ!”

“Christ yourself!”

“Now wait just a second. This is getting us nowhere.”

“I think it's getting us just plenty of places. Don't try to calm me down. I don't need calming down. You calm me down, and then the next thing I know you'll be congratulating yourself for controlling your hysterical wife.”

“You
are
hysterical.”

“Maybe I have something to be hysterical about.”

“I don't see that at all.”

“How could you? You're not a woman.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

“Isn't that exactly what you want to be told?”

“Gus,” he said, “don't try to be smart. It doesn't suit you.”

“I know I can't ever expect to be as incisive as you are. My brain is too subject to feminine airinesses. You might think I was a dedicated flutist, but playing the flute is merely the way I pass the time when I'm not castrating my husband. Metaphorically. Well, at least I don't play the flute metaphorically. I suppose you told me to work up a program simply as a way of pacifying me.”

“How did we get onto music?”

“There you go, trying to be logical again. You should know by now that women are incapable of logic.”

“I never said that. Did I ever say that? Jesus God Christ Almighty, Gus, be logical for once!”

“I am recalling”—she held her fingers to the sides of her head and closed her eyes—“I am recalling that this very morning I had occasion to state, in a three-way conversation with your friend and blood-brother Philip Fleischman, that the kind of work you do, Cultural Musicology I believe you call it, is derivative. You construed what I said as an insult. I could tell it at the time. Whenever you're offended by something, your face turns dark. Anger is your first recourse, Norman. Where other people might cry or sulk or run away, your natural impulse is to reach for a gun, or it would be if you had a gun. I looked at you this morning when you were looking at Phil, but you weren't thinking about Phil, and even Phil knew it. You were thinking you would like to throttle me, because I said your work was derivative. All right. Now you've done it. Throttled me.” She opened her eyes, her wide, honey-hazel, tilted, long-as-almond, sweetly questing eyes. Norman, looking at them,
could
have throttled her.

“If you think I gave you a truthful answer just in order to get back at you for this morning, that's ridiculous. You're the one who's evidently dissatisfied with the way things have been, not me.”

“I never said I was dissatisfied!”

“Yes you did. Very subtly. I'll give you credit for that.”

“I just wondered why you did something tonight that you never did before and why you never did it before. It's not as if I never did it to you!”

Dully, feeling frustrated, feeling somehow swindled, as if Gus had stolen a perfectly good evening and substituted something pyritic in its place, Norman tried to explain. “You have to admit,” he said, “if you would just be dispassionate and think about it, that the female genitalia inescapably have an aura of mysteriousness. When you put your mouth on me, you know what you're blowing. It's visually loud and clear, so to speak. Women have these sticky recesses.”

“You eat ice cream. You just finished off all there was in the icebox.”

“I like the taste of ice cream.”

She stopped. “I guess I get the picture.”

“I don't think so,” he said. “I think you're too wrapped up in yourself to get the overall picture. You're looking shocked and hurt again, but I'm not saying anything hurtful. I'm not even saying anything shocking. All it amounts to is that men and women have to approach each other with skepticism, but nobody said that was a tragedy. Except you. You're trying to make a tragedy out of it, and that's very Gentile of you. Lis ten,” he said, laughing with anguish, doing his best to lift the doleful night out of its dark pond, “I'll tell you a tragedy.” He lit a cigarette. He felt desolated. “Do you know how Webern died?”

“No.”

“One night in Vienna during the occupation, Webern stepped out of his apartment and lit a cigarette, and an American soldier, seeing the light from the match, assumed he was a spy and shot him dead.”

“That's
awful”
Gus said.

“Yeah.”

Gus shot Norman with her nailbitten finger, saying BANG, and Norman clutched his chest and fell back on the bed, lit cigarette pointing upward at the ceiling above his heart.

“What I don't understand,” Gus said, leaning over and speaking carefully above Norman's closed eyes, “is what any of this has to do with you and me. Nobody says you have to feel about me the way Freud felt about Martha.”

“It's descriptive law, not prescriptive. It's just the way things are.” Norman opened his eyes and almost kissed her on the mouth but refrained.

“Then why does it
feel
prescriptive? I never felt this was the way things were until you told me they had to be this way.”

“Can I help it if your education has been neglected? I warned you about those high notes, but you wouldn't listen.” He rolled out from under her face, dragged deeply, and smiled. The smile didn't work, and he put it away, stubbing it out as he stubbed out the cigarette. It was late. Maybe that was the whole trouble. More and more, it seemed that the middle of the night was the only chance he and Gus really had to talk, and by then his mouth felt dry from too many cigarettes during the day and his brain was like a room full of stale smoke. He paced the Persian rug, naked. Gus got up, threw on his shirt, and drew the curtains across the windows at the far end. “You shouldn't stand in front of the windows like that,” he said.

“Why not? I'm wearing a shirt.”

“This is New York.”

“I wish it was North Carolina.”

“You wish we had never got married.”

“That's not true, Norman.”

“All right, I agree. It was low. But it wasn't as low as what you said about my work. Derivative!”

“I'm sorry if it sounded like a slam, it wasn't meant to be one. I was just stating a fact. My work is secondary too. It's not as if I were a composer.”

“But you wish I were.”

“Did I ever say that?”

“That
old friend
of yours. Richard. I suppose he's a composer?”

“Then you suppose wrongly. He's a conductor.”

“But with original interpretations.”

“I told you, I was only stating a fact. And I was trying to make Phil feel better. You may not have noticed this about your lifelong friend, but he happens to idolize you because you use your brain and he hates himself for having such a frivolous job. He likes it, but he doesn't think he should. How many models named Dinky can a self-respecting man date? So I was only pointing out that you and I are just as parasitic as he is. We all live off of other people's ideas, musical and so forth. It's a fact.”

“Sure. And we both know, a fact is all you were stating.”

“On the order of ‘Roses are red'!”

“Some are,” Norman said. “Not all. If you're going to state facts, you'd better get them right.”

“All right, Norman, some roses are red. That's a fact. Did you ever hear me complain because some roses are red?”

“I've heard you complain because some aren't.”

“Do you mean you think I don't respect you because you're not a red rose?”

“In effect.”

“Well, that takes the cake.”

“I don't know what you mean by
that.”

“I mean—”

The telephone rang.

“Who would be calling at this hour?” Gus asked.