The Saline Solution by Marco Vassi

Author:Marco Vassi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2014-05-12T02:48:22+00:00

IX

How many lovers lie awake alone this night?

This is not the most vital consideration in this world of pain. Take aspirin, take television. Forget. But who cares? And when one cares, the sufferer clings to her with hatred for her concern. Cover me over, don’t show my shame. Neurotic pursuits into the midnight mind. Betrayal is epidemic, as unnoticed as breathing.

“He used to come over to screw me once a week,” Lucinda said.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” I shouted

She never spoke about her sexual past again.

“Why don’t you ever talk about yourself?” I said. She couldn’t win. I had to hurt her. She took me at my word, she obeyed me.

She went back to the city again, disconsolate this time, with something of the air of the child who must leave the playground feeling that the others would really prefer to be without her. It was a chillingly rapturous September morning as she stepped onto the ferry, crisp and yellow with sunlight. I remembered the years of buying new pencil boxes and notebooks in the bittersweet preparations for returning to school. During the night I had dreamt that Francis and I were locked in a room with a swimming pool, guarded by a mad nun.

“I really don’t want to go back to the city,” she said.

“Then don’t go.”

“You don’t want me here.”

“I don’t want you in my immediately physical vicinity, but it’s a big house and a big island.”

She preferred her hurt to my logic. “I’ll go see a movie,” she said. I heard the desolation in her voice, and I didn’t care. There was no malice in my mood, it was just that her wound did not reach the area of my concern.

“This is what it is like to be a monster,” I thought.

Perhaps it was this coldness which triggered her bouts of parasitism. I did not love her. And her soul growled with hunger. Once, when I was fucked by a stranger, he kept holding back his sperm, refusing to come, riding his sensation to the peak and sliding back. I grew desperate. My ass became a cunt became a vacuum, sucking at him, stuttering into him. Of course, he was delighted, this was just the effect he wanted, the pleading of the flesh for more penetration. At one point a surge of magnetic desire swept me by surprise, and caught him unawares. The sperm flew from him before he could catch himself. He froze in anger as his cock throbbed into me, and then he reared back and slapped me hard across the face. “You dirty bitch,” he said. I was stung, but inside myself I smiled in triumph.

That sweet smile of victory-in-defeat was something Lucinda’s Jewishness did not allow either of us to have. But it was an expression that had been burned eternally into my memory through Beverly, whose madness had made my twenty-third year on this planet almost my last.

I had been living with her and George and Julie in a welter of confused communality and exuberant Marxism in a Brooklyn brownstone.

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