Mark Fishman - No. 22 Pleasure City

The mattress suddenly weighed more than it had a few seconds ago and the downward slant it took was enough to make Pohl and Violet turn their heads and see Angela climbing in for some of the action.

Violet gave Pohl a little shove with her warm hands, Pohl pulled himself out of her, dropped gently alongside her lean body, bent his elbow and the palm of his hand propped his head up while Angela, perched above them on her knees on the other side of Violet, hands flat on the bed sheet, looked them both up and down. Violet was shaking, she was angry.

“No matter how many lovers a woman has there’s always one she can’t bear to lose to another woman,” Angela said, winking at Violet.

Violet’s face was flushed, she’d heard that line before. She said: “Who’s she? And what the fuck is she doing here?”

Pohl didn’t have an answer for her, and since he couldn’t find anything to say it told him that he didn’t know what to do and the fact that he didn’t know what to do seemed to inform him there was a big problem here. He sat up and stared at Angela. A pulse beat in her throat. She was so beautiful he wanted to shut his eyes.

There was love that had everything to do with fucking, and there was another kind of love and fucking was part of it, and it was that other kind of love he felt for Angela Mason, a love that no matter how hard he tried he’d never get away from it because it was something that had burned and burrowed into him and it went deeper than logic and was on the order of a permanent fire working its way from the inside out.

“You better go,” he said, looking at Violet.

Violet sat straight up in bed, her hair fell across her face, she caught a few strands with her fingertips and put them in her mouth, ignored Angela, clenched her fists, and her slanted green eyes looked searchingly at Pohl. Angela rocked backward and pushed herself off the bed, found an armchair and sat in it with her legs crossed, waving her bare foot at the scene on the bed.

“Do you mean it?”

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“Do you know what you’re saying?”

“Now more than ever.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“I thought—”

“Please, don’t think. Just get out of bed and get dressed. It’s the right thing to do. Trust me.”

“Trust you?”

“Okay, don’t trust me. It’s not important. Good-bye.”

“Yes, good-bye,” Angela said from the armchair.

“You’ve got change coming,” Violet said, without looking at Angela, and she slapped Pohl hard on the face.

“You have every right—”

“Don’t talk about rights,” Violet said, climbing out of bed, gathering her clothes in her arms. She felt two pairs of eyes give her a shove out of the room.

The apartment door slammed shut, they were alone. Pohl reached for the bed sheets to cover his embarrassment, but the embarrassment went a lot further than his nakedness because he didn’t know how to handle the situation now that he’d got rid of Violet Archer. He’d been waiting a long time for an opportunity to see Angela, and the opportunity had come and he felt the weight and size of it on his shoulders, and it was a weight that came from the fact that he’d been wanting her for what seemed like a lifetime, and the size of it was on the order of something very big because here she was without any clothes on, sitting in a chair with her right foot waving at him, telling him to come up with something good or she’d disappear again.

He thought of how badly he’d wanted to see her, and he remembered how happy he thought he’d be when finally she was sitting with him in some restaurant or bar and they were talking, and when they were talking they’d be having a conversation about nothing and everything because nothing and everything meant something to them, and laughing, too, it was important that they’d be laughing, and then he’d know that something on the order of intimacy was getting under way between them. And so he used this particular memory to give him courage.

Now he was pretty sure it was going to be all right, and it was easier to breathe, easier to think. The whole thing was leaning toward his side of it. It was going along with him. Everything and everybody was going along, and what he told himself now was that even if he didn’t know the reason why she was here at least he knew that she wanted to be alone with him, she had something to say or do that had to be said or done between the two of them alone. The surprise he’d felt at first was wearing off, he wasn’t completely in the clear, but now he knew what he was going to do about it. He stared at Angela but she wasn’t looking at him. Her sea-blue eyes were darting around the room, studying it.

“This place needs some straightening up,” she said. “You ought to keep things neater in here.”

And everything positive he’d been feeling a minute ago collapsed in a heap on the floor and he went down into a black pit and he couldn’t feel a thing.

“You don’t have to tell me that,” he said, looking away from her at the disorder in the room.

He tried to climb out of the hole, got his head a few inches above it, saying: “Don’t you have something you want to tell me?”

“There are a lot things I’d like to tell you, but you wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me. I might not understand, but I’d like to know anyway.”

“How long have you been living here?”

“Oh, Jesus — you know how long I’ve been living here.”

“I shouldn’t have come.”

“What is it, Angela? Why don’t you talk to me?”

“I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”

“Why can’t you? What’s wrong with talking about it?”

“Because there’s no point in it now. And there probably wasn’t a point in it when I did what I’d done in the first place. At the beginning. That’s what I’ve learned. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing like that matters now. You believe me, don’t you?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“You can’t understand what you know nothing about.”

“That’s an awfully big thing to say. Try telling it some other way. I just threw another woman out of here.”

“I didn’t mean it to be cruel. That’s one thing. And the other thing is that what you did to her, you had to do.”

“And you know I had to do it.”

“Now who’s being cruel?”

“Come here. Sit down next to me.” He gestured toward the bed, patted it with the palm of his hand.

She didn’t move from the chair but her foot kept on wagging at him.

“I’m all right where I am,” she said. It was under a whisper.

“Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t.”

He sounded confident again, he knew that, but he knew too that there was a look of hard-up desire written all over his face, and that it kept her where she was, away from him and still in the room, but away from him.

The flames inside working their way out finally reached the surface and scorched him. He was suffering because of it, and he had to do something right away, move around, get out of bed and move around the room to take away the discomfort because it was really hurting him and he was going to get eaten up by the flames.

Pohl tugged at the bed sheets, pulled them out from under the blanket while keeping part of them wrapped around his waist to protect him from showing his weakness, then tried to drag himself out of bed, out of the twisted up mess he’d made of his bed, the thing he’d got himself tangled up in now, and the whole mess he’d made of his life and the time spent waiting for Angela Mason. She was something he really wanted and if she’d only work along with him it might go somewhere, but it wasn’t going to go anywhere, she wasn’t going to go anywhere with him, and nothing could make her do that since she herself wasn’t made for doing it.