Dying Inside

I phoned. It rang and rang and rang. At last Bob Larkin picked up. Gay, all right, a sweet tenor voice complete with lisp, not very different from the voice of Teddy-at-work. Who teaches them to speak with the homo accent? I asked, “Is Toni there?” A guarded response: “Who’s calling, please?” I told him. He asked me to wait, and a minute or so passed while he conferred with her, hand over the mouthpiece. At last he came back and said Toni was there, yes, but she was very tired and resting and didn’t want to talk to me right now. ‘It’s urgent,” I said. “Please tell her it’s urgent. Another muffled conference. Same reply. He suggested vaguely that I call back in two or three days. I started to wheedle, to whine, to beg. In the middle of that unheroic performance the phone abruptly changed hands and Toni said to me, “Why did you call?”

“That ought to be obvious. I want you to come back.”

“I can’t.”

She didn’t say I won’t. She said I can’t.

I said, “Would you like to tell me why?”

“Not really.”

“You didn’t even leave a note. Not a word of explanation. You ran out so fast.”

“I’m sorry, David.”

“It was something you saw in me while you were tripping, wasn’t it?”

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said. “It’s over.”

“I don’t want it to be over.”

“I do.”

I do. That was like the sound of a great gate clanging shut in my face. But I wasn’t going to let her throw home the bolts just yet. I told her she had left some of her things in my room, some books, some clothing. A lie: she had made a clean sweep. But I can be persuasive when I’m cornered, and she began to think it might be true. I offered to bring the stuff over right now. She didn’t want me to come. She preferred never to see me again, she told me. Less painful all around, that way. But her voice lacked conviction; it was higher in pitch and much more nasal than it was when she spoke with sincerity. I knew she still loved me, more or less; even after a forest fire, some of the burned snags live on, and green new shoots spring from them. So I told myself. Fool that I was. In any case she couldn’t entirely turn me away. Just as she had been unable to refrain from picking up the telephone, now she found it impossible to refuse me access to her. Talking very fast, I bludgeoned her into yielding. All right, she said. Come over. Come over. But you’re wasting your time.

It was close to midnight. The summer air was clinging and clammy, with a hint of rain on the way. No stars visible. I hurried crosstown, choked with the vapors of the humid city and the bile of my shattered love. Larkin’s apartment was on the nineteenth floor of an immense new terraced white-brick tower, far over on York Avenue. Admitting me, he gave me a tender, compassionate smile, as if to say, You poor bastard, you’ve been hurt and you’re bleeding and now you’re going to get ripped open again. He was about 30, a stocky, boyish-faced man with long unruly curly brown hair and large uneven teeth. He radiated warmth and sympathy and kindness. I could understand why Toni ran to him at times like this. “She’s in the livingroom,” he said. “To the left.”

It was a big, impeccable place, somewhat freaky in decor, with jagged blurts of color dancing over the walls, pre-Columbian artifacts in spotlighted showcases, bizarre African masks, chrome-steel furniture — the kind of implausible apartment you see photographed in the Sunday Times’ magazine section. The livingroom was the core of the spectacle, a vast white-walled room with a long curving window that revealed all the splendors of Queens across the East River. Toni sat at the far end, near the window, on an angular couch, dark blue flecked with gold. She wore old, dowdy clothes that clashed furiously with the splendor around her: a motheaten red sweater that I detested, a short frumpy black skirt, dark hose — and she was slumped down sullenly on her spine, leaning on one elbow, her legs jutting awkwardly forward. It was a posture that made her look bony and ungraceful. A cigarette drooped in her hand and there was a huge pile of butts in the ashtray beside her. Her eyes were bleak. Her long hair was tangled. She didn’t move as I walked toward her. Such an aura of hostility came from her that I halted twenty feet away.

“Where’s the stuff you were bringing?” she asked.

“There wasn’t any. I just said that to have an excuse to see you.”

“I figured that.”

“What went wrong, Toni?”

“Don’t ask. Just don’t ask.” Her voice had dropped into its lowest register, a bitter husky contralto. “You shouldn’t have come here at all.”

“If you’d tell me what I did—”

“You tried to hurt me,” she said. “You tried to bum-trip me.” She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another. Her eyes, somber and hooded, refused to meet mine. “I realized finally that you were my enemy, that I had to escape from you. So I packed and got out.”

“Your enemy? You know that isn’t true.”