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JOYCE CAROL OATES
by side on his bed, looking through a copy of the
New Yorker,
1aughing
at the cartoons. It was so peaceful in this room, so complete. They
were on a holiday. It was a secret holiday. Four-thirty in the after–
noon, on a Friday, an ordinary Friday: a secret holiday.
"I won't bother you again," he said.
He
flew
back to see her again in March, and in late April. He
telephoned her from his hotel- a different hotel each time - and she
came down to him at once. She rose to him in various elevators, she
knocked on the doors of various rooms, she stepped into his embrace,
breathless and
guilty
and already angry with
him,
pleading with
him.
One morning in May, when he telephoned, she pressed her forehead
against the doorframe and could not speak. He kept saying, "What's
wrong? Can't you talk? Aren't you alone?" She felt that she was going
insane. Her head would burst. Why, why did he love her, why did he
pursue her? Why did he want her to die?
She went to
him
in the hotel room. A familiar room: had they
been here before? "Everything is repeating itself. Everything is stuck,"
she said. He framed her face in his hands and said that she looked
thinner - was she sick? - what was wrong? She shook herself free. He,
.)
her lover, looked about the same. There was a small, angry pimple
on his neck. He stared at her, eagerly and suspiciously. Did she bring
bad news?
"So you love me? You love me?" she asked.
"Why are you so angry?"
"I want to
be
free of you. The two of us free of each other."
"That isn't true - you don't want that - ."
He embraced her. She was wild with that old, familiar passion
for him, her body clinging to his, her arms not strong enough to hold
him. Ah, what despair! - what bitter hatred she felt! - she needed
this man for her salvation, he was all she had to live for, and yet she
could not believe in him. He embraced her thighs, her hips, kissing her,
pressing his warm face against her, and yet she could not believe in
him,
not really. She needed him in order to live, but he was not worth her
love, he was not worth her dying. . . . She promised herself this: when
she got back home, when she was alone, she would draw the razor more
deeply across her arm.
The telephone rang and he answered it: a wrong number.
"Jesus," he said.
They lay together, still. She imagined their posture like this, the
two of them one figure, one substance; and outside this room and this
bed there was a universe of disjointed, separate things, blank things, that
