I stumble for miles in the rain and wind, trying to damp down a sense of outrage, and what is even harder, trying to stifle my self-loathing. I've paused twice in the first half hour to vomit in the bushes. And now I notice my shirt-front, blood-stained from my still draining nostrils. What a night.
But I have to keep moving: if I stop I think I'll go mad. I don't want to think anymore about anything. I don't want to feel anything. All I have is my old stand-by therapy: strenuous exercise into exhaustion. Run then walk. Run some more and walk some more.
Once I stumble off the curb and fall into the flooded gutter. I lie there in the deserted street, letting the water stream under me. I listen to my ragged panting and feel some comfort as it subsides.
I'm suddenly aware of the heavy symbolism of the scene. If I'd read it in some fiction I would have found it too farfetched, too self-conscious, too unbelievable. And yet here I am, supine in the gushing gutter, and I'm almost able to smile at the picture I must present.
Maybe I pass out for a while, right there in the street: I can't account for several long periods in this wild, catastrophic night. I begin to run again but soon stop. A dizziness comes over me and I have to sit on the curb. It occurs to me that I haven't eaten anything in sixteen hours, but food doesn't interest me. I doubt I could sleep either: my ultimate soothing, life-restoring therapy stolen from me as well. But suddenly I have the urge to try.
I cannot stagger my way through the city indefinitely. Sooner or later I have to pause and get on with something resembling a life, even if it means facing agony and humiliation head-on for a while. But where to go? My own bed is occupied by a rutting female and her current stud. I don't want to bother Connie or go to a hotel.
So where do I go instead? Which haven in this storm-tossed night? If the lunatic scene in the gutter wasn't unbelievable enough, how about this: in less than an hour I find myself in the bleak lane behind Dana's apartment!
Her car isn't in its usual space and the lights are out. She's obviously still entertaining her new friend at my place, so why shouldn't I avail myself of her facilities in exchange? Brilliant thinking, Mason, the ultimate in rationality. You've outdone yourself this time.
I clamber up the rotting woodwork of the garage for the second time in less than a week. I cross the roof and haul myself up onto the rain-slick deck. Her floor-length glass doors are open only three inches on a screw bolt but I know the trick of opening them: she has demonstrated several times her foolproof way of never locking herself out.
In seconds I'm standing in the half-light of her bedroom, gazing at her unmade bed and a flashing red light on her bedside answering machine. The blood is pounding in my ears and my heart is lurching. The sound of my breathing fills the room.
It occurs to me suddenly that this is madness, that this is the behavior of a lunatic. But I make no move to leave. I stand in the center of the room trembling and panting and dripping. I can't take my eyes off the bed. I reach down to touch the coverlet but withdraw my hand as if from a flame.
Instead I snatch a half-slip from the floor and hold it to my face. With my free hand I press the playback on the answering machine and a series of voices begins. Most of them are male and several don't identify themselves by name. The only one I recognize is Glen.
"Dana I need to see you. Call me."
Before the next message is over I remove the slip from my cheek and begin tearing it apart. The shredding sound triggers something in me and I step to the closet and pull out items at random. I shred a blouse, a shirt, another blouse. A dress gives me trouble so I toss it aside and grab something lacy and delicate. I rip it apart and let it fall to the floor with the rest.
I realize that I'm making strange whimpering sounds. I continue in desperate silence, selecting items of lightness and delicacy: all the lovely feminine pieces that she wears so alluringly. I discard all the sturdier fabrics and find the low-cut top she wore the night she left the concert with her tattooed friend, and this I take special pleasure in destroying.
But the very next piece I take hold of is the simple, girlish dress she had on the night she and I had dinner together for the first time, and at once I am undone. Something weakens in me and I sink to the floor midst all the debris. I run the garment through my fingers in the dark. My trembling has stopped and my breathing is almost regular.
The senselessness and futility of what I'm doing suddenly overwhelms me. I sense the depth and power of my feeling for this woman, intact still, immovable for the foreseeable future. Once again - how many times is this now? - I know beyond a doubt that a relationship has ended almost before it's begun. Yet once again I have to face the fact that months will pass before my emotions catch up: months and months of raw misery and longing.
Will I never learn? Will this agonizing process never get any easier? The sense of outrage I feel doesn't make it any more bearable. I know I can shred Dana's wardrobe till there's nothing left intact and it won't alter a thing. I could trash her place, set it on fire, and it would do no good. The tenderness is still there and will be for a long time, in spite of everything.
And as I think this I crawl from the floor into her bed, dragging the pile of shredded clothes with me between the sheets. I lay my head on her pillow and breathe her in. The scent of her permeates the bed and I bask in it for an insane moment or two. My limbs are tense and ache from the long night of street prowling. I stretch and try to relax. So what if I fall asleep? Isn't oblivion what I need more than anything? So what if Dana and her paramour come home to find me sleeping in a pile of tattered clothing? What more can they do to me?
But of course I don't sleep. Instead I lie there smelling Dana and thinking of her and her men, in this bed. I think of Vince, and Glen, and maybe Philip and who knows who else. And I think what this particular obsession, this almost total preoccupation with things sexual has brought me to: my ultimate relationship, the best I can do, made up of lust and love, tenderness, adulation and desire, a relationship that seems to go beyond my usual obsession and into other realms entirely, and where do I end up?
Alone in a loveless bed with a tangle of shredded female attire while my heart's desire fucks a tattooed stud across town in my own loveless bed. What do I have to do for a truly balanced life? How many times can I make the worst possible decision while hoping I've made the absolute best? I didn't choose Dana really, though, did I? She chose me. But this is no comfort.
The awful truth is that even at this late stage, humiliated and yes, devastated by what she's put me through, and will continue to put me through, I would still give anything to change places with tattoo-boy, to be in my own bed with her again. Yes I admit it freely. How low can I go in my own estimation? Isn't the wet gutter enough? How can I need this woman so, after a night such as this? How can I ache for her physically and in every other way?
And yet I do, and to the point where I can wallow in profound humiliation alone in her bed, not even caring if she and her current beau discover me here wrapped in her tattered garments. My only consolation is that at least I didn't try on the damn clothes before I shredded them.
I can't move. I wonder if I'll ever move again. I'm paralyzed. But then a notebook on the other night stand catches my eye and I sit up and flick on a light. It appears at first glance to be just another college notebook but is in fact a day-to-day journal of Dana's most intimate thoughts and feelings, and it goes back for over a year. Not only that, but it contains pictures: a series of black and white photographs that slip from between the pages as I skim through them.
They are erotic shots of Dana in various stages of undress, culminating in a set wherein she's completely nude. She's posed on the bed and floor of this her bedroom, and in another bedroom I don't recognize. There are even several shots taken outdoors, some in a wooded area and others on a deserted street. She's attired at the start in various short skirts and low-cut tops. Then she is naked but for garter belt and stockings, draped across her bed in a series of erotic poses.
In several shots I can see her bookshelf in the background, with some titles in clear focus: Eliot's 'Four Quartets,' Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons,' a collection of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Softcore porn in a literary setting. Perfect.
I wonder if she's taken the photographs herself then discount the notion. It's unlikely she took the shots in the other bedroom. And what about the outdoor shots? Highly improbable she was alone when those were taken. They are posed on a deserted street somewhere in the city and show Dana in a long raincoat - how appropriate - with nothing underneath but the familiar garter belt and stockings. She's flashing for the camera and gazing into the lens with a fierce, challenging glare. And somehow in spite of the sleazy nature of the shots, she's radiant, stunning, beautiful.
In a fever I wonder who took these amazing pictures and then I glance at the notes on the pages from which the photographs fell. No agonized guesswork is necessary, for in her usual immaculate handwriting she has provided the text to accompany the pictures.
