Dying Inside

EIGHTEEN.

When Toni moved out of my place on 114th Street I waited two days before I did anything. I assumed she would come back when she calmed down; I figured she’d call, contrite, from some friend’s house and say she was sorry she panicked and would I come get her in a cab. Also, in those two days I was in no shape to take any sort of action, because I was still suffering the aftereffects of my vicarious trip; I felt as though someone had seized my head and pulled on it, stretching my neck like a rubber band, letting it finally snap back into place with a sharp thwock! that addled my brains. I spent those two days in bed, dozing mostly, occasionally reading, and rushing madly out into the hall every time the telephone rang.

But she didn’t come back and she didn’t call, and on the Tuesday after the acid trip I started searching for her. I phoned her office first. Teddy, her boss, a bland sweet scholarly man, very gentle, very gay. No, she hadn’t been to work this week. No, she hadn’t been in touch at all. Was it urgent? Would I like to have her home number? “I’m calling from her home number,” I said. “She isn’t here and I don’t know where she’s gone. This is David Selig, Teddy.” “Oh,” he said. Very faintly, with great compassion. “Oh.” And I said, “If she happens to call in, will you tell her to get in touch with me?” Next I started to phone her friends, those whose numbers I could find: Alice, Doris, Helen, Pam, Grace. Most of them, I knew, didn’t like me. I didn’t have to be telepathic to realize that. They thought she was throwing herself away on me, wasting her life with a man without career, prospects, money, ambition, talent, or looks. All five of them told me they hadn’t heard from her. Doris, Helen, and Pam sounded sincere. The other two, it seemed to me, were lying. I took a taxi over to Alice’s place in the Village and shot a probe upward, zam! nine stories into her head, and I learned a lot of things about Alice that I hadn’t really wanted to know, but I didn’t find out where Toni was. I felt dirty about spying and didn’t probe Grace. Instead I called my employer, the writer, whose book Toni was editing, and asked if he’d seen her. Not in weeks, he told me, all ice. Dead end. The trail had run out.

I dithered on Wednesday, wondering what to do, and finally, melodramatically, called the police. Gave a bored desk sergeant her description: tall, thin, long dark hair, brown eyes. No bodies found in Central Park lately? In subway trash cans? The basements of Amsterdam Avenue tenements? No. No. No. Look, buddy, if we hear anything we’ll let you know, but it don’t sound serious to me. So much for the police. Restless, hopelessly strung out, I walked down to the Great Shanghai for a miserable half-eaten dinner, good food gone to waste. (Children are starving in Europe, Duv. Eat. Eat.) Afterwards, sitting around over the sad scattered remnants of my shrimp with sizzling rice and feeling myself drop deep into bereavement, I scored a cheap pickup in a manner I’ve always despised: I scanned the various single girls in the big restaurant, of whom there were numerous, looking for one who was lonely, thwarted, vulnerable, sexually permissive, and in generally urgent need of ego reinforcement. It’s no trick getting laid if you have a sure way of knowing who’s available, but there’s not much sport in the chase. She was, this fish in the barrel, a passably attractive married lady in her mid-20’s, childless, whose husband, a Columbia instructor, evidently had more interest in his doctoral thesis than in her. He spent every night immured in the stacks of Butler Library doing research, creeping home late, exhausted, irritable, and generally impotent. I took her to my room, couldn’t get it up either—that bothered her; she assumed it was a sign of rejection—and spent two tense hours listening to her life story. Ultimately I managed to screw her, and I came almost instantly. Not my finest hour. When I returned from walking her home—110th and Riverside Drive—the phone was ringing. Pam. “I’ve heard from Toni,” she said, and suddenly I was slimy with guilt over my sleazy consolatory infidelity. “She’s staying with Bob Larkin at his place over on East 83rd Street.”

Jealousy, despair, humiliation, agony.

“Bob who?”

“Larkin. He’s that high-bracket interior decorator she always talks about.”

“Not to me.”

“One of Toni’s oldest friends. They’re very close. I think he used to date her when she was in high school.” A long pause. Then Pam chuckled warmly into my numb silence. “Oh, relax, relax, David! He’s gay! He’s just a kind of father-confessor for her. She goes to him when there’s trouble.”

“I see.”

“You two have broken up, haven’t you?”

“I’m not sure. I suppose we have. I don’t know.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” This from Pam, who I had always thought regarded me as a destructive influence of whom Toni was well advised to be quit.

“Just give me his phone number,” I said.

I phoned. It rang and rang and rang. At last Bob Larkin picked up. Gay, all right, a sweet tenor voice complete with lisp, not very different from the voice of Teddy-at-work. Who teaches them to speak with the homo accent? I asked, “Is Toni there?” A guarded response: “Who’s calling, please?” I told him. He asked me to wait, and a minute or so passed while he conferred with her, hand over the mouthpiece. At last he came back and said Toni was there, yes, but she was very tired and resting and didn’t want to talk to me right now. ‘It’s urgent,” I said. “Please tell her it’s urgent. Another muffled conference. Same reply. He suggested vaguely that I call back in two or three days. I started to wheedle, to whine, to beg. In the middle of that unheroic performance the phone abruptly changed hands and Toni said to me, “Why did you call?”

“That ought to be obvious. I want you to come back.”

“I can’t.”

She didn’t say I won’t. She said I can’t.

I said, “Would you like to tell me why?”

“Not really.”

“You didn’t even leave a note. Not a word of explanation. You ran out so fast.”

“I’m sorry, David.”

“It was something you saw in me while you were tripping, wasn’t it?”

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said. “It’s over.”

“I don’t want it to be over.”

“I do.”

I do. That was like the sound of a great gate clanging shut in my face. But I wasn’t going to let her throw home the bolts just yet. I told her she had left some of her things in my room, some books, some clothing. A lie: she had made a clean sweep. But I can be persuasive when I’m cornered, and she began to think it might be true. I offered to bring the stuff over right now. She didn’t want me to come. She preferred never to see me again, she told me. Less painful all around, that way. But her voice lacked conviction; it was higher in pitch and much more nasal than it was when she spoke with sincerity. I knew she still loved me, more or less; even after a forest fire, some of the burned snags live on, and green new shoots spring from them. So I told myself. Fool that I was. In any case she couldn’t entirely turn me away. Just as she had been unable to refrain from picking up the telephone, now she found it impossible to refuse me access to her. Talking very fast, I bludgeoned her into yielding. All right, she said. Come over. Come over. But you’re wasting your time.

It was close to midnight. The summer air was clinging and clammy, with a hint of rain on the way. No stars visible. I hurried crosstown, choked with the vapors of the humid city and the bile of my shattered love. Larkin’s apartment was on the nineteenth floor of an immense new terraced white-brick tower, far over on York Avenue. Admitting me, he gave me a tender, compassionate smile, as if to say, You poor bastard, you’ve been hurt and you’re bleeding and now you’re going to get ripped open again. He was about 30, a stocky, boyish-faced man with long unruly curly brown hair and large uneven teeth. He radiated warmth and sympathy and kindness. I could understand why Toni ran to him at times like this. “She’s in the livingroom,” he said. “To the left.”

It was a big, impeccable place, somewhat freaky in decor, with jagged blurts of color dancing over the walls, pre-Columbian artifacts in spotlighted showcases, bizarre African masks, chrome-steel furniture—the kind of implausible apartment you see photographed in the Sunday Times’ magazine section. The livingroom was the core of the spectacle, a vast white-walled room with a long curving window that revealed all the splendors of Queens across the East River. Toni sat at the far end, near the window, on an angular couch, dark blue flecked with gold. She wore old, dowdy clothes that clashed furiously with the splendor around her: a motheaten red sweater that I detested, a short frumpy black skirt, dark hose—and she was slumped down sullenly on her spine, leaning on one elbow, her legs jutting awkwardly forward. It was a posture that made her look bony and ungraceful. A cigarette drooped in her hand and there was a huge pile of butts in the ashtray beside her. Her eyes were bleak. Her long hair was tangled. She didn’t move as I walked toward her. Such an aura of hostility came from her that I halted twenty feet away.

“Where’s the stuff you were bringing?” she asked.

“There wasn’t any. I just said that to have an excuse to see you.”

“I figured that.”

“What went wrong, Toni?”

“Don’t ask. Just don’t ask.” Her voice had dropped into its lowest register, a bitter husky contralto. “You shouldn’t have come here at all.”

“If you’d tell me what I did—”

“You tried to hurt me,” she said. “You tried to bum-trip me.” She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another. Her eyes, somber and hooded, refused to meet mine. “I realized finally that you were my enemy, that I had to escape from you. So I packed and got out.”

“Your enemy? You know that isn’t true.”

“It was strange,” she said. “I didn’t understand what was happening, and I’ve talked to some people who’ve dropped a lot of acid and they can’t understand it either. It was like our minds were linked, David. Like a telepathic channel had opened between us. And all sorts of stuff was pouring from you into me. Hateful stuff. Poisonous stuff. I was thinking your thoughts. Seeing myself as you saw me. Remember, when you said you were tripping too, even though you hadn’t had any acid? And then you told me you were, like, reading my mind. That was what scared me. The way our minds seemed to blur together, to overlap. To become one. I never knew acid could do that to people.”

This was my cue to tell her that it wasn’t only the acid, that it hadn’t been some druggy delusion, that what she had felt was the impingement of a special power granted me at birth, a gift, a curse, a freak of nature. But the words congealed in my mouth. They sounded insane to me. How could I confess such stuff? I let the moment pass. Instead I said lamely, “Okay, it was a strange moment for both of us. We were a little out of our heads. But the trip’s over. You don’t have to hide from me now. Come back, Toni.”

“No.”

“In a few days, then?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand this.”

“Everything’s changed,” she said. “I couldn’t ever live with you now. You scare me too much. The trip’s over, but I look at you and I see demons. I see some kind of things that’s half-bat, half-man, with big rubbery wings and long yellow fangs and—oh, Jesus, David, I can’t help any of this! I still feel as if our minds are linked. Stuff creeping out of you into my head, I should never have touched the acid.” Carelessly she crushed her cigarette and found another. “You make me uncomfortable now. I wish you’d go. It gives me a headache just being this close to you. Please. Please. I’m sorry, David.”

I didn’t dare look into her mind. I was afraid that what I’d find there would blast and shrivel me. But in those days my power was still so strong that I couldn’t help picking up, whether I sought it or not, a generalized low-level mental radiation from everyone I came close to, and what I picked up now from Toni confirmed what she was saying. She hadn’t stopped loving me. But the acid, though lysergic and not sulfuric, had scarred and corroded our relationship by opening that terrible gateway between us. It was torment for her to be in the same room with me. No resources of mine could deal with that. I considered strategies, looked for angles of approach, ways to reason with her, to heal her through soft earnest words. No way. No way at all. I ran a dozen trial dialogs in my head and they all ended with Toni begging me to get out of her life. So. The end. She sat there all but motionless, downcast, dark-faced, her wide mouth clamped in pain, her brilliant smile extinguished. She seemed to have aged twenty years. Her odd, exotic desert-princess beauty had wholly fled from her. Suddenly she was more real to me, in her shroud of pain, than ever before. Ablaze with suffering, alive with anguish. And no way for me to reach her. “All right,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry too.” Over, done with, swiftly, suddenly, no warning, the bullet singing through the air, the grenade rolling treacherously into the tent, the anvil falling from the placid sky. Done with. Alone again. Not even any tears. Cry? What shall I cry?

Bob Larkin had tactfully remained outside, in his long foyer papered with dazzling black and white optical illusions, during our brief muffled conversation. Again the gentle sorrowing smile from him as I emerged.

“Thanks for letting me bother you this late,” I said.

“No trouble at all. Too bad about you and Toni.”

I nodded. “Yes. Too bad.”

We faced each other uncertainly, and he moved toward me, digging his fingers momentarily into the muscle of my arm, telling me without words to shape up, to ride out the storm, to get myself together. He was so open that my mind sank unexpectedly into his, and I saw him plain, his goodness, his kindness, his sorrow. Out of him an image rose to me, a sharp encapsulated memory: himself and a sobbing, demolished Toni, the night before last, lying naked together on his modish round bed, her head cradled against his muscular hairy chest, his hands fondling the pale heavy globes of her breasts. Her body trembling with need. His unwilling drooping manhood struggling to offer her the consolation of sex. His gentle spirit at war with itself, flooded with pity and love for her but dismayed by her disturbing femaleness, those breasts, that cleft, her softness. You don’t have to, Bob, she keeps saying, you don’t have to, you really don’t have to, but he tells her he wants to, it’s about time we made it after knowing each other all these years, it’ll cheer you up, Toni, and anyway a man needs a little variety, right? His heart goes out to her but his body resists, and their lovemaking, when it happens, is a hurried, pathetic, fumbled thing, a butting of troubled reluctant bodies, ending in tears, tremors, shared distress, and, finally, laughter, a triumph over pain. He kisses her tears away. She thanks him gravely for his efforts. They fall into childlike sleep, side by side. How civilized, how tender. My poor Toni. Goodbye. Goodbye. “I’m glad she went to you,” I said. He walked me to the elevator. What shall I cry? “If she snaps out of it I’ll make sure she calls you,” he told me. I put my hand to his arm as he had to mine, and gave him the best smile in my repertoire. Goodbye.