In the kitchen, the teapot whistled. Victoria slid in her socks across the green linoleum floor toward the stove, gripping the telephone in her left hand. She touched the sizzling handle of the pot and pulled her other hand away quickly. On the wall beside the sink a hotpad hung, oily and besmirched by a thousand meals. She couldn't put her hand inside it.
“Ouch,” she cried, moving the pot to a wooden cutting board as fast as she could.
“What's the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Is he there?”
She marveled at how the voice on the phone of a man she had loved so dearly a few months before had devolved so insidiously into a whine.
“No.”
“Vic, I want to marry you.”
It was not an invitation, a plea, a question. It was an edict. She found a chipped mug in the cupboard, reasonably clean, and set it on the drain board. In the cabinet, she located a tea bag and placed it delicately into the cup. She used a dish towel found near the plumbing under the sink to protect her hand from the steaming kettle while she poured the hot water.
The water wet the leaves inside the translucent bag, making them soggy and a darker color, sending up a smoky drift of Lapsang souchong. Why did he have to want her now? She had run away, found someone new, and now all of the sudden, Jason couldn't live without her. It struck her as all wrong. His words were as murky as the contents of her cup.
“Why?”
“I can't live without you.”
Good answer. “You know,” she said, then blew on her tea while she paused to think, “I didn't do any of this to hurt you.”
Silence on the phone. While her words sunk in, she wiped the drops of water from the scummy counter. Sharing a kitchen with male roommates, it turned out, was no picnic. When the lights went out, the roaches scurried around the room, proud owners of the night. She reached under the sink, past Luther's gallon of half-drunk gin, and found some cleanser which she sprinkled liberally around the countertop.
“Is he better-looking?” Jason asked.
Tom was taller. His hair was darker. He looked good. The regularity of his looks, the cragginess, the nasal sound of his voice, these flaws reduced him to human, while his aspirations and intelligence elevated him.
“No,” she said.
“Then, why?”
She took a tentative sip of her tea, which was still too hot. Hardening herself against the pain, she let her tongue scald as the second, longer sip traveled toward her throat.
Because, she thought, I let go. I finally did. After years of holding on, dreaming, accepting lies as truth, she had let go. And now, too late, here Jason was, exactly where she had wanted him a long time ago. It was a pyrrhic victory. Now, she felt cold and distant from him. How to tell him? He had been her skin. He had held her soul together for years. She puzzled over the words she should speak. Should she tell him it was over? How could he understand that? Clearly, he clung to the idea that she was still accessible to him. Where was the grace in this situation? How did you tell someone that the passion between you, once so palpable, had burned to dust? Another man's smell, his sex, his squarer jaw, was now as established as her skeleton.
“I'm coming over,” Jason said, as if tired of waiting for her to say something.
“No!” she said into the dead phone.
By the time Tom came home, she had sizzled frozen corn to perfection, chicken-fried two steaks, and poured an entire bag of prepared salad into a bowl and drizzled it with dressing from a bottle. One of Tom's virtues was an undemanding palate. He ate to live, unlike Jason, who lived to eat very well.
Jason had not shown up.
They dined by candlelight, a stick dribbling over an old wine bottle at the table in the worn kitchen, any romance derived from the shush of wind and rattle of old glass in the windows. They turned on an old movie, but within minutes, were making love in the attic room he had painted in shades of blue.
She was on top because he liked it that way, and she was exploring some unfamiliar realms of feminine pleasures up there, when suddenly, the door flew open.
In stepped Jason.
But she didn't notice immediately. She was licking Tom's shoulder, relishing the salt and sweat of it. She only noticed when Tom stopped moaning and then stopped moving entirely.
“Get out,” he said distinctly.
She turned and saw Jason.
He stood frozen in a corner by the door, glows from a canister candle on the dresser bleeding red light down his cheeks. How long had he been there watching them?
“Jason?” she said, lifting herself off Tom and turning to look at him. “Who let you in?”
Immediately, she knew the answer. Luther had let him in, too drunk and oblivious to consider anyone else's problems, and too lazy to announce a guest.
Jason said nothing and everything. His eyes had assumed a largeness beyond normal, and the clenching and unclenching of his jaw scared her.
“You have to go,” she said before Tom could do anything. How must he be feeling, nude, wrapped in her body, totally vulnerable.
Jason swayed in the doorway. She saw for the first time a glinting in his hand. A gun? But… how could this be possible? She had loved him. She had given him everything, her entire heart and soul, and he had repeatedly trampled on them. He had stomped them until they didn't have a breath of life left.
All this thought was reduced to a moment of breathless suspense while she waited to see what he would do, feeling Tom's innocent blood pumping in the heart that was still close enough to her own to feel.
She had met Jason when she was in college in Los Angeles. He was her best friend Carol's buddy. She heard about him for months before they met, and that was exactly the source of all the trouble. What she heard from Carol, about his wit, his warmth, his loving family, she incorporated into a mythology. She invented a perfect man in her mind, smart, sensitive, funny. Creative. Against that, she didn't have a chance. At their first meeting, she fell, and she fell hard.
“What do you see in him?” Carol asked her, strangely upset.
“What a question. He's your friend. You like him, don't you?”
“Well, he has his problems.”
“Of course he does. He's human.”
But she didn't really believe it. Suddenly Carol, formerly Jason's biggest fan, became his biggest detractor. “He's too short for you,” she would say. “He's sleazy,” she said once. “Can't you see it?”
She couldn't. She liked his compact size, which made him less threatening. He was muscular to make up for a lack in height, and had a lovely narrow waist and dark, masculine whiskers that he had to shave daily. What did Carol mean calling him sleazy, she puzzled. Was it possible Carol was jealous?
She tested the theory and found it untenable. Jason had made a play for Carol ages ago which she had rebuffed. He flirted shamelessly with her on every occasion, and she discouraged him with playful insults, as sexually interested as a sister would be in a charming but disgusting younger brother.
Then she considered the idea that Carol was jealous of their growing closeness, because Jason had sniffed out Victoria 's excitement about him immediately, and began to circle in an ever narrowing spiral.
“Just because I like Jason and he seems to like me doesn't mean we won't still be friends,” she had told Carol.
Carol broke into a big belly laugh. “What a relief!” she had responded. “Gee, then I can be honest with you? You won't turn on me if I say something negative about him? I just hate friends that pull that kind of shit, loyal to the boy, even when it means sacrificing a sense of humor or perspective.”
“Just what is it you don't like about him?” she had asked one night after sharing a joint in Carol's living room.
Carol thought for a long time. “Jason's okay, running around with lightweights. But Vic, you're not like that. You're going to get in there and scratch his insides. It's you two together that feels dangerous to me. Somebody could get hurt.”
She dismissed Carol's worries right then and there. “Deep is good and right. Who wants a shallow life? People are emotional creatures. We've got to give that full scope, don't we?”
“See what I mean?” Carol complained. “Everything is so heavy with you. You go too far. Most people aren't cut out for high drama.”
She had shaken her head. “Hurt is human. How else do we know we live?”
“Vic, you drive me crazy, and I bet I'm not the only one.” Carol had left it at that.
When Jason and Vic finally went to bed together, a month after their first meeting, Vic was deeply, hopelessly smitten. In love, in the worst possible way. Awash in sexual chemistry, she felt satisfied beyond reason with his lovemaking, which later she might have called calculated. The tiniest touch of his fingertip sent gushers of hot blood flooding through her body. Sex synthesized her into an unthinking organism, which exploded fertility, big as a season, bursting with buds and pollinating the universe. She wanted to own him, possess his soul and every thought.
And Jason was an eager colluder. He wrote poetry and songs for her, oblique metaphors which were really all about him and not about her at all. But that was fair, in fact, because all her thoughts of him were really all about an idealized version of herself. She was in love with her own creation, a consummate specimen of humanity, and not with Jason at all.
This went on for quite a while, lots of letters, feverish phone calls in the dead of night, passionate meetings on a cold, sandy beach, on a roof still radiating heat after the sun went down, against the dirty wall of a garage. She didn't want to contain their lovemaking. She desperately wanted to be out of control emotionally, and so she was.
Jason, perhaps, came along for the adventure.
They wore out. Six months of mindless doggy happiness and two years of self-imposed blindness passed before reality began its inexorable drip, smearing her fresh, perfect painting of relationship bliss.
A weekend came and went without a letter. That Sunday night, her frantic worry had given way to a dark resignation. She called his house, even though he preferred to call her.
“He's not in,” said his mother. “Who shall I say is calling?”
As if she had no idea who Vic was. As if nearly three years hadn't registered with her.
When he did call, he was full of newsy gossip about his weekend. He had studied hard on Saturday, and taken on his brother's paper route for fun on Sunday. They did the route in his battered Karmann Ghia, high.
“So two hours kinda morphed into three.” Jason chuckled.
“Just you and your brother?” she had asked, unable to stop herself.
He changed the subject, and she knew, somewhere in the infinitesimal portion of rational thought still accessible to her, the colors in her mind began to blur, and the brightness toned down just a hair. She knew, but for a brief time, she ignored what she knew.
