AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When he came back to bed, she was sitting up, the covers tight around her, crying. She'd heard him saying it, all right.
'Tulpen,' he said, putting his arm around her.
'No, "Biggie,"' she whispered.
'Tulpen,' he said, and tried to kiss her.
She shoved him away; she was out to get him now. 'I'll tell you one thing,' she said. 'Old Ralph Packer never called me anyone else's name.'
Trumper moved away and sat at the foot of the bed.
'And you want to know what?' she yelled. 'I think it's bullshit that you don't make love to me enough because of your old prick!'
Then the beige blowfish came up to the glass again, stared at Trumper and went through its gross routine once more.
What Tulpen said was true and he knew it. What pained him worse was that this conversation wasn't new. He'd had it all before - a number of times - with Biggie. So he sat at the foot of the bed, wished for catatonia and achieved it. When the phone rang a third time, he didn't care whether it was Ralph or not. If he could have moved, he would have answered it.
Tulpen probably felt as lonely, because she answered it. 'Sure,' Bogus heard her say tiredly. 'Sure, come on over and make your fucking movie.'
But Trumper still sat there like a stone worrying about the next transition. To be in Ralph's movie required that he get out of the movie he was in now, didn't it?
Then Tulpen put her head in his lap, her face turned up to him. It was a gesture - she had many of them - as if to say, OK, a bridge in our complex landscape is now at least defined, though not yet crossed. Maybe it can be.
They stayed in that position for a long time, as if that were as good a way as any to get ready for Ralph.
'Trumper?' Tulpen whispered finally. 'When you do make love to me, I really like it.'
'So do I,' he said.
26
'Gra! Gra!'
JUST HOW LONG his mind was lost he didn't know, or how fully he'd recovered it by the time he was aware of some more writing in the typewriter before him. He read it, wondering who had written it, poring over it like a letter he'd received, or even like someone else's letter to someone else. Then he saw the dark, crouching figure in the bottom corner of his French windows and startled himself by suddenly sitting upright and moaning, while simultaneously in the mirroring window, a terrifying gnomelike replica of himself reared up and bleared like a microscopic specimen.
It was when he recognized the moan as his own that he also heard the growing commotion downstairs in the Taschy lobby, or perhaps as close as the second floor. Not remembering where he was, he opened his door and screamed some hysterical gibberish at the faces peering from the open doorways up and down the hall. Matching him terror for terror, three faces screamed back to him, and Trumper tried to identify the other noise, which was rising like fire from the second floor.
Which tape is this? When was I in an asylum?
Cautiously he crept toward the stairwell; all along the hall no one ventured out a doorway - for fear, perhaps, that he'd scream at them again.
Up the stairwell, Frau Taschy's voice reached him. 'Is he dead?' she asked, and Trumper heard himself whisper, 'No, I am not.' But they were talking about someone else.
He moved down to the half-landing and saw a crush of people milling in the hall below. One of the whores was saying, 'I'm sure he's dead. No one ever passed out on me like that - never.'
'You shouldn't have moved him,' someone said.
'I had to get him off me, didn't I?' the whore said, and Frau Taschy looked scornfully down the hall at a man emerging from a room, zipping his fly, carrying his shoes under one arm. The whore emerging behind him said, 'What is it? What's wrong?'
'Someone died on Jolanta,' someone said, and they all laughed.
'You were too much for him,' said another of the ladies, and Jolanta, who was wearing only her girdle and stockings, said, 'Maybe he just had too much to drink.'
Along the hall, dark and head-down men burst from rooms, carrying their clothes, as darting in their movements as startled birds.
'He's too young to be dead,' Frau Taschy said, which seemed to make the scurrying men sidle past her even more fearfully. It was as if they'd never thought of it before: Fucking can be dangerous. It can kill even the young!
Such a notion hardly came as a surprise to Trumper, who moved confidently down from the half-landing into the sex-smelling hall, as if his mind had now adjusted and accepted the creature in the window as his own reflection or as if he were asleep. In fact, he wasn't sure that he wasn't.
