I said fuck you to my job as a proofreader, and I vacated my room in the rundown upper west side brownstone I was staying in where I shared a kitchen with other roomers.
You are not going to go on with that proofreading job and you are not going to continue living in that hole.
He had pinned me against the wall and was holding me so that I was unable to move and had to hear him and understand that he meant what he said.
You have no right to be self-destructive, he said.
You've read Camus, he said. It's perfectly alright to commit suicide, but if you do not. If you choose not to commit suicide, that means you commit to live, and if you commit to live, then you have got to know what living entails. It means always giving meaning to the world yourself, because actually there is no overriding meaning in the world. But if there is no meaning in the world, life is death. So if you reject death, then you have to have a real life. You have to give yourself to life and take from life. And you don't. You are wasting life.
I know, I said, and he let me go. I was free of his grip so that I might draw my body up to his a stretch and draw his face down to me and touch his lips with mine hoping he would take me into him beginning with his lips and swallow me with his kisses.
I felt the slightest qualm of insecurity as he came into me. I was unsure if he was moved by desire or by something else. I was not sure what. Duty? Will? A sense of doing it for me because I wanted it, not because he was driven to it by desire for me?
Feeling that way, it was perhaps unwise that I moved in with him. But I did. I moved into his place and what I began to learn was what it meant to be obedient.
I had once been easy-going, I thought, even if that thought would seem ridiculous to anyone who had seen me before I became his. Before, then, I did not have to worry about what someone thought of me. I could block that out entirely.
But now what I was learning to feel as a constant feeling was the feeling of feeling insecure, of always being afraid that I was doing, had done, or would do something displeasing.
There was a definite hierarchy. He was above me; I was below him. It was what we both wanted.
It was what we both wanted?
It was what we both wanted.
I had never been in a relationship where the role of obedience was so clearly spelled out.
But the problem of obedience is implicit in every relationship, and the cause of rancor and resentment in many. Both partners demand the obedience of the other. The word, however, never enters their conversation or even their thoughts. Each fight they have is the result of one of them feeling hurt when the other one does not listen to him and do as he says, that is, obey him as he wants to be obeyed.
It is the case among people in heterosexual relationships, too.
I don't ask much of you, many years ago I heard a mother on the street, pushing a stroller, cry at her five year-old, just that you obey me.
Daniel explained it to me. Without a regulated obedience freely given by one partner to the will of the other so that there is one will between the two of them, the dominant will; without one partner being entirely in willing, even ecstatic submission to the will of the other; and without the other partner willing and wanting to be master and determiner, relationships are impossible.
I want to be in a relationship with you, Daniel said, looking into my eyes as he caressed my head. Do you understand what that means?
I do, I said.
That you will submit, willingly, knowing it is what you want to do.
I will, I said.
Daniel smiled a slightly sardonic smile as he put his arm around my shoulders and led me to a man standing by a large window overlooking the Planetarium. He held a glass of scotch from which he took sporadic swallows and held forth to a group of younger, junior executive types.
I have to introduce you to someone, Daniel said.
I had never seen him like that, doing something he was reluctant to do.
Eliot Freemont was formidable. He had an overweening sense of self-appreciation.
I shook his hand when Daniel introduced me.
You've deserted me for this raw youth? he said to Daniel with a wink.
You could have done worse.
I could not have done better, Daniel said.
Freemont never yielded.
You have always underestimated yourself, he said.
A handsome woman, her black hair cut short like a man's, wearing an ivory-colored silk shirt and a short black leather skirt that showed most of her long and strong legs, glinting in the sheen of her invisible stockings, which had a great black seam running from the heel of her open-toed, cross strap, high-heels up the back of her legs to disappear insid the hidden area underneath her skirt approached. She was holding a flute of champagne and sensed something uncomfortable was happening, but knew nothing more; say, what it might have been about.
She put her arm protectively round Daniel and drew him away from Freemont and from me, too.
Daniel resisted. His body stiffened. He shook his head and repeatedly said no. But she thought he was saying no in muttering anger at something she was unaware of between him and Freemont. She wanted to get him away from there, to prevent him from getting into an open conflict with Freemont. She pulled at him. He was torn away from me just when he knew he had to be near me. He was pierced by the sense that he was betraying me. It would look like he was deliberately sacrificing me to Freemont to further his own interests by leaving me alone.
Daniel what is the matter? Martha said.
It's nothing, he said, trying to shake her.
Then he added, knowing she was his friend, that he had to get me away from Freemont.
Oh, she said, slyly, he's...
He's someone very dear to me who needs careful tending.
Then why did you introduce him to Freemont in the first place?
Because I'm stupid. But it does not matter now. What matters is that I have to get him out of it now.
It can't look like that, she said.
Don't worry, she said. It does not look like betrayal is in your friend's nature. Leave them alone. What happens has to happen. Don't make it bigger than it is, she said and smiled slyly at her own joke. Dance with me, she said, and pulled him into a dance when the sound system began the throbbing seduction of the pounding beat of Martha and the Vandellas singing Dancing in the Street.
Meanwhile Freemont was acting like a fool in front of me, but I realized without knowing exactly how, that he was important. I wished Daniel had told me more, but I knew something was expected of me, and I imagined that Daniel had arranged this meeting as a test whereby he was putting himself at considerable risk, as well as me, depending on how I handled myself now, and, more important than that, how I handled Freemont.
I did not know what he was talking about but Freemont went on about his role in negotiations to develop the new complex of high rises by the river.
Is it in yours? he said. I did not know what he was referring to.
What? I said.
I could not tell if his wink was deliberate or an involuntary twitching of his eye.
I'm not following, I said.
And I was sure you were expert at it.
At what? I said, truly mystified.
Following, he said.
I said nothing, trying to figure out my next move, and knowing that the size of his ego would cause him to understand silence as attention.
Why don't you come over to my place afterwards, by yourself? he said.
He's overbearing and sinister, I said to Daniel hearing in my voice the remnant of the reproach that I would not permit myself to direct at him. We walked south on Fifth Avenue before we hailed a cab downtown. We passed windows filled with cozy parlors and iced-over ponds upon whose glassy surfaces lovely figurines of happy skaters danced.
He's a dangerous person, Daniel said, and I hate myself for having fed his vanity and leaving you with him.
I'm not sure his vanity was exactly fed, I said. But why is he important?
He can make certain that you never design a building, large or small, public or private, in the entire state of New York, in Connecticut, and in Massachusetts.
He's that powerful?
He's that powerful.
So you've got to be careful.
You've got to be careful.
I was.
You were?
Yeah, tonight. He asked me for my cell number.
What for?
Daniel knew it was a stupid question and he did not resent the look I gave him letting him know it was.
Because I would not go home with him, I said.
He asked you to go home with him?
You did not know he would? I tried to say it in as neutral a way as possible.
Now that you say it, yes; I'm sorry.
He said I would make a good bitch.
The bastard.
I was good.
Daniel looked at me without saying anything.
I said that I'd be happy to see him when I was with you, but otherwise it was impossible. I was monogamous.
We can have dinner some night, the three of us, he said.
Talk to Daniel, I said.
He's clever, Daniel said
Was I ok? I asked.
You were terrific, Daniel said.
No, I said. I was only truthful. I belong to you.
When we got home, I bathed him and myself.
Around the bed I set a circle of candelabras and lighted us with flame.
Lie down, I said.
After he had, I licked every inch of his body until my tongue brushed his lips and parted them and I delivered myself to the inside of his mouth and became the breath he breathed.
I backed up and touched his cheeks with the palms of my hands and looked without anxiety into his eyes. I was slow, like the lapping water that touches the shore, that breaks into lace, and is absorbed by the first inches of the shore where the ocean gives way to the earth.
He returned my gaze with the same intensity and tenderness.
Our faces glowed with gladness.
We kissed and I was glad at everything he did.
I'd rather we did not see him, I said the next morning between sips of strong, sweet, hot coffee.
What do you intend to do now? he said.
I knew he was taking the conversation back to the requirement that I do something now that I was neither proofreading nor spending my time courting frustration by trying to live in a fairy tale.
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