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“Good night, Walter,” she says. “I’ll be in tomorrow.”

“No you won’t. Get out of here. You’re being fired. I never want to see you again.”

“You don’t have to act that way.”

“I mean it. I really mean it. You ever come into this office again and I’ll have you arrested.”

“You owe me three days salary.”

“I’ll mail it to you.”

“I don’t trust you,” she says and looks at me intently, pauses one beat, says. “Is there any reason, you know, why I should? Is there?”

I take out my wallet, remove five twenties and put it on the desk between us. “Go on,” I say. “There it is. I’m not even docking taxes. Take it out of here. Get out of my life.”

“You don’t understand, do you,” she says and takes the money, puts it in her handbag, goes to the door, “you really don’t understand any of this, do you? That’s why you get nasty and sometimes do the things that you do. Not because you want to be mean so much but because you think that you’re the only sane one in the world and it’s just because almost everyone understands something and you don’t. You don’t, Walter. Well,” she says, “good bye.” And she leaves the office. I hear her tapping past the desks for a last time and then the slam of the outer door.

Poking my head through the window, I can see her walking down the street. A fine bitch, self-contained, good implacable ass, fine bearing. Well-constructed. If I had the M-1 rifle I had in the army I could lay her out on the street, small bright flecks of blood disturbing her implacability, but they took the M-1 away when we finished infantry training and not for the next year and a half did I ever get to handle a weapon. Company clerks are not particularly strong on armament of the heavy kind.

She turns the corner and is gone but she is a hell of a lot longer than that getting out of my life. A hell of a lot longer than that.

I never realized until the bitch’s leaving what she meant to me. And now, never again.

In the night, everything seems possible. Close the eyes, take the hand, take the long trip, make the pictures before the eyes. Moans, mingling, the wind, bodies amorphous then coalesced in the gaze. Make the pictures. Breasts from her, eyes from the other, hips from a third. A face. Perhaps a face glimpsed on the subway or on the street at noon many years ago. Touch the face, manipulate the breasts. Make the connection.

In the night all possibility, in the dawn, before awakening, in the half-broken sleep, shrieks, cries from under the earth, a feeling of distance, loss. Awakening then to the cold stone of the ceiling, the genitals shrunk like a flower, the hand curved skeletally underneath the cheek. The hand a reminder, a recrimination. Nevertheless, there will be other nights.

I never had such women as I had alone in bed in the nights, making all the changes. Never, never, never. Making all the lovely changes, up and down the scale, colors flashing in the night. Fist aflutter like a bird. Breath like diminished seventh chords to the ear. The ear a crackle on the pillow.

A member of a militant civil rights organization has been unjustly imprisoned on high bail and a protest rally is being held on the steps of the library to rally support and donations to his cause. I find myself invited to speak, as the representative of the new journalism, and because I wish to align myself with worthwhile libertarian causes, I go, but almost from the beginning of my speech, I am in trouble. The crowd does not want to listen.

It is raining for one thing — thick drops of hard water coming resonantly upon us — and for another the crowd has already heard too many speakers: a folk singer has led them in a thirty-two verse song against injustice, the dean of a large women’s college has predicted the end of America in our time, a noted writer has called for the breaking of the state, a professional revolutionary has recommended the removal (but through legal means) of certain important public figures. Police ring the demonstration suddenly; perhaps half as many police as attendees, only five hundred of us in all and now the rain has become heavy. The crowd has had enough of injustice and calls for revolution, they would like some stronger meat or at least a cessation, but there are at least a half dozen speakers still to be heard and not one of them will stand aside while the militant leader is in jail. They want to stand as one with him even though the television trucks have trundled back to the studios long since with their reels to be edited for the eleven o’clock news. I decide to try a humorous approach, saying that we need to get a little life in the resistance and I know exactly where to put the juice, but the line falls flat, and something ugly and murmurous seems to drift up from the crowd and come over me. “Seriously,” I say, “seriously, we have been trying now for two years at
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to say the things that you people have been saying here tonight; we have been trying to open up people’s heads and let a little sense in, make them understand that all the old shibboleths and myths are dying or dead.” A couple of random boos and hisses come up from the crowd, circling me and finally falling with the rain. It is enough to break something inside, what with the problems I have had both professionally and personally, and I find myself screaming into the microphone, “What the hell is the matter with you anyway? Don’t you understand that it’s too late, too late for any of this nonsense, the whole goddamned thing is falling down around our heads and the only thing that we can do is to pick up a few of the pieces and make a run for it? Don’t you see that? It’s too damned late for any of this crap. The age of rallies is over. Unless you want to pick up the pieces all your life!”

“You do, you son of a bitch,” someone shouts and it occurs to me, sweating in the rain, that my entire history as publisher of this newspaper seems to have come down to running bets to Belmont for a distributor and being heckled at rallies or panels. “You’ve been picking up the pieces for two years, that’s all you are, a piece-picker, not a peacemaker, why the hell don’t you get into the air and swing right? Yeah, swing right, swing right!” Other voices began to chant, and I lean toward the microphone and shout, “I believe in liberation! I believe in the sanctity of the human soul! I believe in the luxury of choices, don’t you understand that you have to make choices?”

Apparently no one does. Someone is at my elbow now, speaking quietly, reasonably, suggesting that there are several speakers yet to follow and it would perhaps be best to speed up the rally by giving everyone a chance and sending everyone home; it is getting cold and dark and the matter of donations has not yet been raised. “Donations!” I shout, picking this right up (it is possible that I have blown my cool but even in this loss there is a horrid cunning; I am more alert to things than ever before, there seems to be a genuine sharpening of the senses, a gathering-together, a coming to head). “Donations, that’s the ticket, everybody’s out for the buck, America is a supermarket and the hell with you! Everybody’s putting the knock on me because I’m making a few dollars, but who went out on the limb for you? Who’s taking the chances? Who’s actually down in the grit and the grime so that you folks can get a little piece of liberation, too, answer me that one! Answer me: do you think any of this is easy? Do you think that there isn’t a better way to do things, but you’ve got to get down in the mud and take things on their level, swing right and if you come up with a little bit of the shit on you, so what the hell’s the difference, it’s their shit, not yours. Theirs, all of it.”

“No, son, it’s yours,” someone shouts. The moderator of the rally, an energetic, very hip young evangelist in bell bottoms says to me. “That’s it, you’ve had your say, now turn over the mike,” and with a determined ecclesiastical hand, pulls me away. It is stunning how much force there is in that grip, for the first time I begin to sense the true mania that must exist in priests (even confused ones whose parishes are full of golden-agers in the West Village), and I try to fight my way past his grip but no hope, no hope for all of that. Several of the other speakers who have been ranged around the dais gather around me and with a series of yanks pull me all the way from the podium and assist me down the steps of the library and hurl me into the crowd. It seems that I have not been one of the major successes of the rally. The crowd, quite hostile at a distance, ignores me when I am thrust among them; no one looks at me. “For God’s sake,” I say, “what kind of shit is that? Don’t you understand that we’re all into the same bag altogether, the whole thing? Why must we make differences where there aren’t any?” No one answers. No one pays any attention. It occurs to me that for all the effect I am having upon the crowd I might as well go. So I do, hands shoved into pockets against the cold, head hunched against the wind, strolling to the corner of Forty-second and Fifth where I get a taxicab and go home. It seems that I have not had one of my major publishing successes here, but I am unable to detect, at this instant, whether or not it is part of a pattern.

At home I find a good portion of the apartment cleaned out and a long note from my wife on one of the end tables. It seems that she has decided to leave me, whether on a temporary or permanent basis she cannot tell at this time. The important thing is that there have been changes in her life and she feels that she cannot fight them but must continue groping toward the kind of person she is going to be, someday, if she can only continue to grow. She makes certain references to our sexual life which I cannot bear to read and thus skip over to find that her subsequent paragraphs have to do with how those elements of our sex life seemed to reinforce her own feeling of growth and change. She is going to live, at least temporarily, with Charles, the English teacher, but she will not leave his full name and address for me because she only knows that it will lead to a confrontation which she cannot handle psychologically at the present time. She might as well confess to me that she has not only been involved with women’s lib but psychoanalysis as well during these recent months; she has been seeing a certain doctor three times a week and he has brought her to an understanding and self-awareness which she has never had before. This doctor has made her see certain things in me which were very painful for her at first and which she did not want to accept, but gently he led her through them and finally she was able to grant the value of the insights and could understand that what he was saying about me was very accurate and very painful. She then summarizes certain of the opinions the psychiatrist and she have settled on about my personality, but again I can hardly bear to read them and pass on to the next page. It is a very long letter, typed, single-spaced, full of cigarette marks and ashes, and the following pages seem to be pretty much more of the same although there is a tender passage toward the end about our engagement and early married life which I find brings tears to my eyes. She closes with best wishes for me always, says that she relinquishes any further income from me or share of the savings (she will soon be starting a job in the fashion industry but can tell me no more) and advises that she will get a lawyer who will be in touch with me to arrive at an amicable settlement sooner or later. She is taking those few goods from the apartment which she bought or which mean the most to her but is sure that I will have no objection to this since she relinquishes everything else. She is really sorry, but of course part of growing up is to understand that things go on and people change and one can only have faith that it is all for the best. She signs it with one of the intimate pet names I gave her early in our marriage which is really quite stupid of her because this endearment more than any other fills me with rage and opens up within me as cold a stone of remorseless as anything which I have ever known.

“I’ll kill the bitch,” I find myself saying. “I’ll kill the lousy bitch for this when I find her.” But I realize that I do not know which bitch I am talking about; Virginia as well has not been very nice to me recently. “Both of them,” I say, appeasing the mad, logical inner voice, “if that’s the way it has to be, I’ll kill them all.” But reason intervenes to point out that this would be difficult, would demand planning and execution and, in the bargain, happens to be illegal at the present time. “The hell with it then,” I add. I want to wreck the apartment but wrecking is not quite my gig; I would have no idea of exactly where to start or how to do so in the most spectacular fashion and, anyway, I would only have to come back and clean it up later, which is discouraging.

There seems to be little enough that I can do. I pour myself a drink which is not satisfying since I am not a drinker, try to feel melodramatic as I sip it but this rather fails to work as well, and finally I decide to leave the apartment and strike out in the best way known to me. If she betrays me, I will betray her. (I have forgotten in this pose, my adulteries.) I will go to midtown and pick up a prostitute.

So I lock up the apartment and go to midtown and pick up a prostitute easily enough from one of the streets, but in the hotel it turns out that she recognizes my face; has, in fact, been reading the newspaper for years and years and for some reason this fills her with shrieks of whorish laughter. “They’ll never believe this,” she says underneath me, her breasts moving all over her abdominal wall as she giggles, as I try to pump her, “they’ll never believe this if I ever tell them; isn’t this the craziest thing? I mean, I was just so surprised when I recognized who you were; maybe I shouldn’t have said anything but I was just so
surprised.
” I huff and puff and try to discharge within her a mean, boiling load but there is absolutely nothing, and I slide off. “They won’t believe this,” she says again in a different tone of voice and then pats my prick and tells me not to worry, don’t feel bad about it, she knows how these things are, she’s been through it hundreds of times. I wouldn’t believe the stories she could tell me and anyway this one time she will remit the fee. The hotel I will still have to pay; she has nothing to do with that part of it. They gave us the room space and anyway they give her protection and shield her from the cops.