She turned on a dim light and with forefinger to her lips she indicated the couch. Then she stood with her ear to the door of the adjoining room and listened intently to make certain that Georgie was asleep. Finally she tiptoed to my side and sat herself gingerly on the edge of the couch. «Be careful,» she whispered, «it squeaks.»
I was so bewildered that I neither whispered nor moved a muscle. What Georgie would do if he were to find me sitting there I didn’t dare to think. So he was dying, at last. A horrible end. And here we were, sitting like guilty mummies in a poverty-stricken garret. And yet, I reflected, it was perhaps fortunate that this little scene could only be played in a muffled key. God knows what terrible words of reproach she might have hurled at me had she been able to speak out.
«Put out the light!» I begged in mute pantomime. As she rose to obey I pointed to the floor, signifying that I would stretch myself out beside the couch. It was some moments before she joined me on the floor. She was standing in a corner stealthily removing her things. I watched her by the faint light which stole through the windows. As she reached for a wrap to throw about her naked figure I quickly unbuttoned my fly.
It was difficult to move without making a sound. She seemed terrified of the thought that Georgie might hear us. I understood that he had conveniently saddled me with the responsibility for his suffering. I understood that she had silently acquiesced and that her terror now was a recoil from the ultimate horror of betrayal.
To move without breathing, to entwine ourselves like two corkscrews, to fuck with a passion such as we had never experienced before and yet not make a sound, required a skill and patience which would have been admirable to dwell on were it not for the fact that something else was going on which affected me profoundly… She was weeping without tears. I could hear it gurgling inside her, like a toilet box which won’t stop running. And though she had begged me in a frightened whisper not to come, that she couldn’t wash because of the noise, because of Georgie in the next room, though I knew that she was the sort who gets caught just by looking at her, and that if she were caught it would go hard with her, still, and perhaps more because of the silent weeping, more because I wanted to put an end to the gurgling, I came again and again. She too passed from one orgasm to another, knowing each time that I would shoot a wad into her womb, but unable to help herself. Never once did I take my cock out. I would wait quietly for the answering needle bath, jam it tight like a cartridge, and then go off into the electrically moist darkness of a mouth with the soft lips of an artichoke. There was something fiendishly detached about it, almost as if I were a pyromaniac sitting in a comfortable chair in my own house which I had set fire to with my own hand,, knowing that I would not budge until the very chair I sat in would begin to sizzle and roast my ass.
When eventually I go to the landing outside and stood embracing her for the last time, she whispered that she needed money for the rent, begged me to bring it to her on the morrow. And then, as I was about to descend the stairs, she pulled me back, her lips glued to my ear. «He won’t last another week!» These words came to me as if through an amplifier. Even to-day, as I repeat them to myself, I can hear the soft whistling rush of air that accompanied the sound of her almost inaudible voice. It was as if my ear were a dandelion and each little thistle an antenna which caught the message and relayed it to the roof of my brain where it exploded with the dull splash of a howitzer. «He won’t last another week!» I said it all the way home, a thousand times or more. And every time I commenced this refrain I saw a photogenic image of fright—the head of a woman sawed off by the frame of the picture just below the scalp. I saw it always the same—a face looming out of darkness, the upper part of the head caught as if in a trap door. A face with a calcium glow about it, suspended by its own dream-like effort above an indistinguishable mass of writhing creatures such as infest the swampy regions of the mind’s dark fears. And then I saw Georgie being born—just as she had related it to me once. Born on the floor of the outhouse where she had locked herself in to escape the hands of his father who was blind with drink. I saw her lying huddled on the floor and Georgie between her legs. Lying that way until the moon flooded them with mysterious platinum waves. How she loved Georgie! How she clung to him! Nothing was too good for her Georgie. Then north on the night train with her little black sheep. Starving herself to feed Georgie, selling herself in order to put Georgie through school. Everything for Georgie. «You were crying,» I would say, catching her unawares. «What is it—has he been treating you badly again?» There wasn’t any good in Georgie: he was full of black pus. «Hum that tune,» he would say sometimes, the three of us sitting in the dark. And they would begin to hum and croon, and after a time Georgie would come over to her, put his arms around her, and weep like a child. «I’m no god-damned good,» he would say, over and over. And then he would cough and the coughing never stopped. Like hers, his eyes were large and black; they peered out from his hollowed face like two burning holes. Then he went away—to a ranch—and I thought maybe he would get well again. A lung was punctured, and when that healed the other one was punctured. And before the doctors had finished their experiments I was like a bundle of malignant tumors, rearing to explode, to break the chains, to kill his mother if necessary, anything, anything, only no more heartaches, no more misery, no more silent suffering. When had I ever truly loved her? When? I couldn’t think. I had been searching for a cosy womb and I had been caught in the out-house, had locked myself in, had watched the moon come and go, had seen one bloody pulp after another fall from between her legs. Phoebus! Yes, that was the place! Near the Old Soldiers’ Home. And he, the father and seducer, was safely behind the bars in Fortress Monroe. He was. And then, when no one any longer mentioned his name, he was a corpse lying in a coffin a few blocks away and before I ever realized that they had shipped his body north, she had buried him—with military honors! Christ! What all can happen behind one’s back—while you’re out for a walk or going to the library to look up an important book! One lung, two lungs, an abortion, a still-birth, milk legs, no work, boarders, hauling ash cans, hocking bicycles, sitting on the roof watching pigeons: these phantasmal objects and events fill the screen, then pass like smoke, are forgotten, buried, thrown in the ash can like rotted tumors, until…. two lips pressed against the waxen ear explode with a deafening dandelion roar, whereupon August Angst, Tracy le Crevecoeur and Rigor Mortis sail slantwise through the roof of the brain to hang suspended in a sky shimmering with ultra-violet.
The day after this episode I do not go back to her with the money, nor do I appear ten days later at the funeral. But about three weeks later I feel compelled to unburden myself to Maude. Of course I say nothing about the whispering fuck on the floor that night, but I do confess to escorting her to her rooms. To another woman I might have confessed everything, but not to Maude. As it is, with only a thimbleful spilled out, she’s already as stiff as a frightened mare. She’s not listening any more—just waiting for me to conclude so that she can say with absolute finality—NO!
To be fair to her, it was a bit mad to expect her to consent to my suggestion. It would be a rare woman who would say yes. What did I want her to do? Why, to invite Carlotta to live with us. Yes, finally I had come to the extraordinary conclusion that the only decent thing to do would be to ask Carlotta to share her life with us. I was trying to make it plain to Maude that I had never loved Carlotta, that I had only pitied her, and that therefore I owed her something. Queer masculine logic! Dingo! Absolutely dingo. But I believed every word I uttered. Carlotta would come and take a room and live her own life. We would treat her graciously, like a fallen queen. It must have sounded terribly hollow and false to Maude. But as I listened
