"Paul. Has Claire gotten there, is she there yet?" He felt bits of rock-salt in the corners of his eyes, and fingered them tighter into the folds of flesh as he tried to place the voice. It was someone he knew, a friend, someone "Harry? That"s you, Harry?"

On the other end of the line, way out there in the night somehow, Harry Dockstader swore lightly, quickly. "Yeah, me, me already. Paul, is Claire there?"

Paul Reed was suddenly a.s.saulted by the overhead light going on, and he snapped his eyes shut against the blaze, opened them, closed them again, and then finally popped them open completely to see Claire Dockstader standing at the light switch by the front door.

"Yeah, Harry, she"s here." Then the weirdness of her being here came to him fully, and he demanded, "Harry, what the h.e.l.l is going on, Claire"s over here, why isn"t she with you? Why"s she here?"

It was an inane conversation, totally devoid of sense, but his synapses were not yet in focus.

"Harry?"

The voice on the other end snarled, gutturally.

Then Claire was coming across the room at him, wrathful and impatient, ferocious in demanding, "Give me that phone!" Each word sharply enunciated, much too fine for this hour of the morning, each syllable clear and harsh and very thin-lipped, only a woman"s way. "Give me that phone, Paul. Let me talk to him...h.e.l.lo, Harry? You sonofab.i.t.c.h, go straight to f.u.c.king h.e.l.l, die you b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Ooo, you bas-tard!"

And she literally flung the receiver onto the rest.

Paul sat on the edge of the bed, feeling himself naked from the waist up, feeling the rug under his bare feet, feeling that no woman should use language like that at this hour. "Claire...what the h.e.l.l is going on?"

She stood trembling for a moment, valkyric in her fury, then stalked, half-stumbled, fell across the room into the easy chair. Upon touching the seat she burst into tears. "Ooo, that bas-tard," she repeated, not to Paul, not to the silent phone, to the air perhaps. "That lousy chaser, that skunk and his chippies, those b.u.ms he brings up to the house. Oh G.o.d Why"d I Ever Marry That Skunk!"

It was, of course, all laid out for Paul in that sentence, even without the particulars-even at the hour-and the ring of his own recent past was so clear he winced. The word chaser did it. His own sister had called him that when she"d heard he and Georgette were divorcing. That d.a.m.ned word: chaser. He could still hear it.

Paul rose from the bed. The one-and-a-half in which he managed to live (now) alone, suddenly seemed close and muggy with a woman in it. "Claire, want some coffee?"

She nodded, still running through her thoughts like prayer beads, eyes turned inward. He moved past her into the tiny kitchenette. The electric coffeepot was on the sideboard, and he hefted it, shook it to see if there was enough left from the last brewing. A heavy sloshing rea.s.sured him, and he plugged in the cord.

As he returned to the living room, her eyes followed him. He dropped onto the bed and slid upward, bracing the pillow behind him. "Okay," Paul said, reaching for the cigarettes beside the phone, "lay it on me. Who was it this time, and how far along were they when you caught him?"

Claire Dockstader pursed her lips so tightly dimples appeared in her cheeks. "Only a philanderer like you, as bad as Harry, just as big a Skunk, could put it that way!"

Paul shrugged. He was a long, lean man with a thatch of straw-colored hair; he raked the hair off his forehead and applied himself to lighting the cigarette. He didn"t want to look at her. A thing in his living room, soon after Georgette, too soon, even a friend"s wife. He pulled at the cigarette, and at his thoughts: neither satisfied. He seemed too long for the bed, ungainly, hardly of interest to a woman, yet apparently it was not so, for she stared at him differently now. A subtle shifting of mood in the room, as though she had suddenly realized she had not only broken into his living room, but into his bedroom as well, a room in which other things than just living were done. They were very close, but held apart by a circ.u.mstance that both realized might at any moment melt. Uncomfortable, suddenly, the both of them. He covered himself with the sheet, to the waist; she looked away.

Coffee perking, popping, distracting, thank G.o.d.

"Christ, what time is it?" Paul asked (himself, in self-defense, more than her).He pulled the travalarm from the nightstand and stared into its face, its idiot face, as though the numbers meant something. "Jeezus, Jeezus, three ayem, Jeezus; don"t you people ever sleep?" He was a pot, calling a kettle black. He never slept, never really went to bed, so who was he fooling with this line out of suburban rote?

She shifted in the easy chair, rearranging her skirt that had ridden too high up her thighs, and Paul once more marveled at the joys of the miniskirt hemline, if one was a leg man, which he had decided with the advent of the miniskirt hemlines, he was. She caught his stare and toyed with it for a moment, then allowed it to vaporize in her own eyes, not just yet returning his proposition.

It was happening, just this easily. A pact of guilt and opportunity was being solidified, without the decency of either admitting its necessity. Paul had been separated not nearly long enough to attempt morality of a high order, and Claire was still burning with outrage. Neither would say the name of the game, but both would play, and both knew it would happen.

And as soon as Paul Reed admitted his loneliness, his guilt and his desires were compounding to produce (why fool around, name it!) adultery, an act of love performed without the catalyst of love, something unpleasant began to happen in the empty, dark, far comer of the room.

He was unaware of its beginnings.

"Why did you pick me for your flight?" he asked her.

"You were the only one I could think of who"d be awake this late...and I wasn"t thinking too clearly...I was too furious to think straight." She stopped talking; she had said much more than what she had said. Of all the places she might have gone, of all the seedy bars where she might have been picked up and laid in retaliation, of all the married friends she and Harry had accrued, of all the cheap hotels where an innocent night of sleep might be purchased for eight dollars, she had picked Paul and his living room that was a bedroom that was a hole in the world where guilt could be born out of frustration and pain.

"Is that, uh, coffee ready?" she asked.

He slid out of bed, nakedly aware of her eyes on his body, and went into the kitchenette. He ached in places he did not want to ache, and knew what was going to happen, for all the wrong reasons, and knew he would despise not only her and himself when it had been done, when they had killed something between them, but that he would barely think of it again. He was wrong.

When he handed her the coffee cup, their hands touched, and their eyes locked for the first time in this new way, and the cyclic movement began for the millionth time that night. And once begun, the cycle could not be impeded.

While slowly, steadily, in the dark corner, what had begun to happen, nasty as it was, went on unnoticed. Their insensate pa.s.sion a midwife at that strange birth.

Simply the mechanics of divorce were gristmill enough to powder him into the finest ash. Simply the little pains of walking through the apartment where they had b.u.mped into one another constantly, the lawyer talks, the serving of the papers, the phone calls that lacked any slightest tinge of communication, the recriminations, and worst of all, the steadily deteriorating knowledge that somehow what had gone wrong was not real, but a matter of thoughts, att.i.tudes, dreams ghosts vapors. All insubstantial, but so omnipresent, so real, they had broken up his marriage with Georgette. As if they were substantial, rock- hard, real, physically tearing her from his arms and his thoughts and his life. Phantom raiders from both of their minds, whose sole purpose in life was to shrivel and shred and shatter their union. But the thoughts and vapors and gray images persisted, and he existed alone in the one-and-a-half where they had set up their gestalt, while she rattled the knucklebones and murmured the incantations and boiled up the mystic brews, all set down so precisely in the grimoire of divorce. And as the pattern of separation progressed, a boulder racing mindlessly downhill, needing only the most impossible strength imaginable to halt its crushing rush, his life set itself up in a new sequence, apart from her, yet totally motivated by her existence and the reality of her absence.

Earlier that day he had received a phone call from her. One of those backbiting, bitter, flame- colored conversations that ended in him telling her to go to h.e.l.l, she wasn"t getting any more money out of him till the settlement, and he didn"t give a d.a.m.n how badly she needed it.

"The Court said a hundred and twenty-five a month separate maintenance, and that"s all you"re getting. Stop buying clothes and you"ll have enough to live on."

Chittering reply from the other end.

"A hundred and twenty-five, baby, that"s it! You"re the one who moved out, not me; don"t expect me to support your nutty behavior gratis. We"re through, Georgette, get that drilled into your platinum head, we"re all done. I"ve had it with you, I"m fed up with all the dirty dishes in the sink, and your subway phobia, and not being able to touch your G.o.ddam hair after you"ve been to the beauty parlor and-oh, c.r.a.p, why bother with all this...the answer is..."

Chittering interruption, vitriol electrically transmitted, hemlock hatred telephonically magnified, poured directly into his mind through his ear "...yeah? Well, the same to you, you stupid simplea.s.s broad, the same double to you. Go to h.e.l.l!

You"re not getting any more money out of me till the settlement, and I don"t give a d.a.m.n how badly you need it!"

He had slammed the receiver back on the stand, and continued getting dressed for his date. When he had picked up the girl, a brunette he had met in his insurance agent"s office, a secretary there, it was as though he was collecting unemployment, getting something to which he was ent.i.tled, but that nonetheless smacked faintly of being on relief.

Picking up this girl for the first time was precisely like collecting unemployment. Enough to keep him going, but not nearly enough to sustain him in a supportable life. A dole. A pittance, but desperately necessary. A casual girl, with a life of her own, whose path would cross his this once, and then they would stumble past, down their own roads forever, light-footed, unlighted, interminably.

"I"m afraid I won"t be very charming company tonight," he told her as she slid into the car. " A woman who looks very much like you, gave me considerable heartache today."

"Oh?" she inquired guardedly. It was their first date. "Who would that be?"

"My ex-wife," he said, telling her the first lie. He had not looked at her, save when he reached across to open the door. Now he stared dead-straight ahead as he pulled the unpolished Ford away from the curb and swung it into traffic.

She sat looking at him speculatively, wondering if accepting a dinner date with an office client was such a good idea after all, no matter how engaging a sense of humor he had. His face was not at all the youthful cleverness he had presented to her on those three occasions when he had come to the insurance office. It was a harder substance, somehow, as though whatever light, frothy matter had been its basic component previously, had congealed, like week-old gravy. He was unhappy and disturbed, of course, there was that in abundance; but something else skittered on the edge of his expression, a somnolence, and she was strangely frightened by it-though she was certain it meant harm not for her, but on the contrary, very much for him.

"Why do you let her give you heartache?" she asked.

"Because I still love her, I suppose," he answered, a bit too quickly, as though he had rehea.r.s.ed it.

"Does she love you?"

"Yeah, I guess she does." He paused, then added in a contemplative monotone, "Yeah. I"m quite certain she does. Otherwise we wouldn"t try to kill each other so hard. It"s making us both very sick, her loving me."

She straightened her purse on her lap and tried to find another pa.s.sage through the conversation, but all she could think was, I should have told him I was busy tonight.

"Do I look very much like her?".

He stared straight ahead, handling the wheel casually, as though very certain, very sure of it, as though he derived a deep inner satisfaction from driving, from propelling all this weight and metal precisely as he wished. It was as though he was with her, yet very far away, locked in an embrace with his vehicle.

"Oh, not really, I suppose. She"s blonde, you"re brunette. Just around the temples, maybe, and your hair, the way you wear it pulled back on the side that way, and the skin around her eyes crinkles the same way. That, and the tone of your skin. Something like that; more reminds me of her than any actual look-alike."

"Is that why you asked me out?"

He thought about it a moment, pressing his full lips together, then replied, "No. That wasn"t it. In fact, when I realized that you reminded me of her, I wanted to call the office and break the date."

I wish you had, she thought severely, I wish I wasn"t here. With you.

"We don"t have to go, you know."

He turned his head, then, seemingly startled. "What? Oh, say, h.e.l.l I didn"t mean to depress you.

This thing has been going on for months, and it"s just one of those miserable problems that has to work itself out. Don"t think I was trying to wriggle out of buying you a meal."

"I didn"t think that," she replied coolly. "I merely thought you might want to be alone this evening."

He smiled, a strained little smile that was half frown and part sneer, and moved his head slightly.

"Christ! Anything but that. Not alone. Not tonight."

She settled back against the vinyl seat cover, determined suddenly to make him uncomfortable, in defense.

What seemed to each of them like elastic hours stretched past, and then he said, in an altogether new tone of voice, a forced light tone each knew was false, "Where would you like to go? Chinese? Italian?

I know a nice little Armenian restaurant...?"

She was silent, purposefully, and it served its purpose; he was uncomfortable, unhappier than before, and in the next instant it pa.s.sed and he felt hateful, outright nasty, wanting to either get her into bed at once, or dump her, but not have to suffer this way through an entire evening. And so she defeated herself, as the rock wall slid up to cover the gentleness he would have demonstrated later that night.

Deviousness replaced gentleness, sadness.

"Listen," he said smoothly (once again, a new tone, a lacquer-finished tone, chromed and slick), lightly, "I didn"t get a chance to shave before I picked you up, and I feel like a slob. You mind if we stop off for a minute at my place, and I"ll run a razor over my face?"

She was not fooled. She had been married once, had been divorced, had been dating since she was fifteen, she knew exactly what he was saying. He was offering a private demonstration of his etchings. Her mind turned the offer slowly, examining it-in that breathless eternity of a moment in which all decisions are made-and studying each shimmering facet. She knew it was a bad idea, had no merit in any way, that she was a fool to think seriously of it, and that he would back off if she made the slightest sound of disapproval.

True true, a bad idea, one to reject on the spot, and she rejected it. " All right," she said.

He turned sharply at the next comer.

He looked down at her face, and abruptly saw her at the age of sixty-five. He knew with a crystal certainty what she would look like when she was old. Superimposed over the pale-and-pink firm immediacy of her face framed against the pillow, he saw a gray line-mask of the old woman she would one day become. The mouth with its st.i.tch-lines, tiny pickets running down into the lips; the dusty hollows lurking beneath the eyes; dark s.p.a.ces in the character lines and in the planes of expression-as though whole sections had been sold off to retain life, even at the cost of losing appearance. The sooty patina covering the flesh, much like that left when a moth has been crushed, the powdery fine ash of its wings imprinting the surface on which the death had occurred. He stared down at her, seeing the double image, the future lying inchoate across her now-face, turning the paramour beneath him into a relic of incognito spare parts and empty pa.s.sions. A dim, drenched cobweb of probability, there in the eye sockets, across the mouth he had kissed, radiating out from the nostrils and pulsing ever so faintly in the hollow of her throat.

Then the vision melted off her young face, and he was looking at the creature of empty purposes he had just used. There was a mad, psychotic light flickering out of her eyes. "Tell me you love me, even if you don"t mean it," she murmured huskily.

There was a hungry urgency, a breathless demand in her voice, and a fist closed around his heart as she spoke, a chill ruined his aplomb, his grasp of the present, so recently returned to him. He wanted to pull out of her, away from her, as far as he could, and crouch down somewhere in the bedroom in a patient, fetal security.

But the corner of the room he might have chosen was already occupied. Darkly occupied by bulk and a sinister presence. The breathing in that corner was coming laboriously but more regularly than before; it seemed to have become more steady, pulsing, as they had entered the apartment; and during the parry and counter and riposte of their encounter it had metronomic ally hurried itself to a level of even oftenness. Oh, it was taking form, form, form.

Paul sensed it, but discounted the instinct.

Deep breathing, stentorian, labored-but becoming more regular.

"Tell me. Tell me you love me, nineteen times, very fast."

"I love you I love you I love you I love you," he began rattling them off, propped on one elbow, counting them on the fingers of his left hand. "I love you I love you I luh-"

"Why are you counting them?" she demanded, coquetishly, in a bizarre grotesque parody of naivete.

"I don"t want to lose track," he answered, brutally. Then he slipped sidewise, falling onto his back, on Georgette"s side of the bed (feeling uncomfortable there, as though the ridges and whorls of her body were imprinted, making it lumpy for him, but with the determination not to let this girl lie on that side).

"Go to sleep," he instructed her.

"I don"t want to go to sleep."

"Then go bang your G.o.ddam head against the wall," he snapped. Then he was forcing himself to sleep. Eyes closed, knowing how angry the girl beside him had become, he commanded sleep to come, and timorously, fawnlike in a deep foreboding forest, it came, and touched him. So that he began to dream again. That dream, again.

In the eye, the right eye. The point of the poker entered, did its damage, came away foul. Paul flung himself violently from the sight, even as the crew-cut young man toppled soddenly past him, still alive somehow, crawling, dying by every bit of flesh through every rotting second. Starlight and darkness slipped by overhead as Paul whirled, spun, found himself in another place. A plaza, perhaps...

A crowd, down the smart sleek shop-bordered street-a posh street (where?) in Beverly Hills, perhaps, glistening and elegant, and seeming almost dazzlingly clean with rhodium-finished permanence- growling, coming toward him.

They were masked, caricatured, made up for some weird mardi gras or costume party or gathering of witches, where real faces would reveal real persons, and thus provide a hook for their d.a.m.nation.

Strangers, boiling hurling sweeping down the street toward him in a chiaroscuro montage of chimerical madness. A vision out of Bosch; a bit of underdone potato or undigested Dali, hurled forth from a dream- image by Hogarth; a pantomime out of the innermost circle of Dante"s Inferno. Coming for him. For him.

At last, after all these weeks, the dream had broken its pattern, and the ma.s.sed terrors were now coming for him in a body. No longer one at a time, vis-a-vis in that never-ending succession of pleasant a.s.sa.s.sins. Now they had gathered together, grotesque creatures, masked and hungry.

If I can figure out what this means, I"ll know, he thought suddenly. In the midst of the multi- colored haze of the dream, he knew abruptly, certainly, that if he could just make some sense from the events unreeling behind his eyes (and he knew it was a dream, right then), there would be a key to his problems, a solution that would work for him. So he concentrated. If I can just understand who they are, what they"re doing here, what they want from me, why they won"t let me escape, why they"re chasing me, what it takes to placate them, to get away from them, who I am who I am who I am...then I"ll be free, I"ll be whole again, this will be over, this will end, it"ll end...

He ran down the street, the white clean street, and dodged in and among the cars that had suddenly appeared in lines, waiting for the light to change. He ran down the street to the intersection, and cut across among the slowly moving vehicles, terror clogging his throat, his legs aching from the running, seeking an escape, an exit, any exit-a place of rest, of security where he could close the door and know they could not get in. "Here! We"ll help you," a man shouted from a car, where he was packed in with his family, many children. Paul ran to the car, and the man opened his door, and Paul managed to crowd past him as he pulled the seat forward, offering entrance to the back seat. Paul squeezed through, pushing the man up against the steering wheel. Then the seat was dropped back, Paul was in the rear with the children, and the car was piled with (what? fuzzy, indistinct) clothes, or soft possessions that the children sat on, and he was forced to lie down across the back deck, under the rear window (but how could that be?

(he was a full-grown man, he couldn"t squeeze himself into that small a s.p.a.ce, the way he had when he had been a child and gone on trips with his mother and father and laid down under the back window because the back seat was filled up, the way it had been when his father had died, and he had gone away with his mother from their home to the new home...

(why did that memory suddenly come through so lucidly?

(was he a grown man, or a small child?

(please answer!) and he could see out the back window, and the crowd of terrifying masked figures, bright-eyed and haunting, were being left behind. Still, somehow, he did not feel safe! He was with the ones who could help, that man driving, he was strong and would drive fast through the traffic, and save Paul from the haunters, but why didn"t he feel safe...why?

He woke, crying. The girl was gone.

There was one who chewed gum while they did it. An adolescent with oily thighs who had no idea of how to live in her body. The act was sodden and slow and entirely derelict in its duties. Afterward, he thought of her as a figment of his imagination, leaving only her laugh behind.

She had a laugh that sounded like pea pods snapping open. He had met her at a party, and her attractiveness stemmed chiefly from too many vodkas & tonics.

Another one was completely lovely, and yet, she was the sort of woman who gave the impression, upon entering a room, of having just left it.

One was small and slight and shrieked for no other reason than that she had read pa.s.sionate women screamed at the climax-in a bad book. Or more aptly, an undistinguished book, for she was an undistinguished woman.

One after another they came to that one-and-a-half, casual adulteries without purpose or direction, and he indulged himself, again and again, finally realizing (by what was taking shape in the corner) what he was doing to himself, and his life that was no longer a life.