Faithless: Tales of Transgression Read online

  Yes, now. It’s time.

  An insomniac night preceding, a night of cruising I-96, and yet she felt fully rested, restored to herself. Tightly strapped into the passenger seat like a pilot at the controls of a small plane, yet controlled by the plane; secured in place, trusting to fine-tuned, exquisitely tooled machinery.

  At a careful distance she followed her former lover through the winding lanes of Pelham Park. Waited a beat or two to allow him to ease into traffic on northbound Route 11. Then following, with utter casualness. Once on the highway, a mile or so after entering, the Saab demanded more mobility, more speed, so she shifted into the outer, fast lane; she’d lowered both the windows in the front, her hair whipped in the gassy, sulphurous air, and she’d begun to breathe quickly. Now there was no turning back; the Saab was aimed like a missile. The Mercedes was traveling at about sixty-five miles an hour in a middle lane; her former lover would be listening to a news broadcast, windows shut, air-conditioning on. It was a hazy evening; overhead were massed, impacted storm clouds like wounds; at the western horizon, brilliant shafts of fiery, corrupt sun the color of a rotted orange; the industrial-waste sky was streaked with beauty of a kind, as a girl living elsewhere, she’d never seen. By degrees the misty air turned to a light feathery rain, the Saab’s windshield wipers were on at the slowest of three tempos—a caressing, stroking motion, hypnotic and urgent. Now she was rapidly overtaking the Mercedes and would exit close behind it for I-96; once on I-96 she would swing out again into the fast lane to pass slower vehicles including the Mercedes, one of a succession of vehicles, at which she need not glance. She had five-and-a-half miles in which to make her move.

  How many times she’d rehearsed, yet, on the road, in the exhilaration of the Saab’s speed and grace, she would trust to instinct, intuition. Keeping the silvery, staid-looking car always in sight in her rearview mirror even as she maintained her greater speed; hair blowing about her heated face, strands catching in her mouth. Her eyes burned like headlights; there was a roaring in her that might have been the coursing of her own fevered blood, the sound of the Saab’s engine. At high speeds, unhappiness is not a serious possibility.

  He hadn’t loved her enough to die with her; now he would pay. And others would pay.

  The glowing speedometer on the Saab’s elegant dashboard showed seventy-two miles an hour; the Mercedes, two cars behind, was traveling at about the same speed. She would have wished a higher speed, eighty at least, but hadn’t any choice; there was no turning back. Pinpoints of sweat were breaking out on her tense body, beneath her arms, in the pulsing heat between her legs, on her forehead and upper lip. She was short of breath, as if she were running or in the throes of copulation.

  Switching lanes, shifting the Saab into the next lane to the right, so abruptly she hadn’t time to use her turn signal, and the driver of a car in that lane protested, sounding his horn. But she knew what she meant to do and would not be dissuaded, allowing two cars to pass her in the Mercedes’s lane; then moving back into that lane, so that now she was just ahead of the Mercedes, by approximately two car lengths. Rain fell more forcibly now. The Saab’s windshield wipers were moving faster, in swift, deft, percussive arcs, though she didn’t recall adjusting them. In sensuous snaky patterns rain streamed across the curved glass. In the rearview mirror the Mercedes was luminous with rain and its headlights were aureoles of dazzling light, and staring at its image she felt a piercing sensation in her groin. She believed she could see, through the rain-streaked windshield, the pale oval of a man’s face; a frowning face; the face of the man who’d been her lover for one year, eleven months, and twelve days; yet perhaps she could not have identified the face; perhaps it was a stranger’s face. Yet the Saab propelled her onward and forward; she could almost imagine that the Saab was propelling the Mercedes forward as well. She was bemused, wondering: how like high-school math: if the Saab suddenly braked, causing the Mercedes to ram into its rear, with what force would the Mercedes strike? Not the force of a head-on collision, of course, since both vehicles were speeding in the same direction. Would both swerve into another lane, or lanes? And which other vehicles would be involved? How many individuals, at this moment unknown to one another, would be hurt? How many injuries, how many fatalities? Out of an infinity of possibilities, only one set of phenomena could actually happen. The contemplation of it left her breathless, giddy; she felt as if she were on the edge of an abyss gazing blindly out—where?

  It was then that she saw, in the rainwashed outside mirror, an-other vehicle rapidly approaching at the rear. A motorcycle! A Harley-Davidson, by the look of it. The cyclist was a hunched figure in black leather, his head encased in a helmet and shining goggles; he seemed oblivious of the rain, weaving through lanes of traffic, boldly, recklessly, now cutting in front of a delivery van, provoking an outraged response of horn-blowing, now weaving out again, into the lane to the Saab’s right, just behind the Saab. She pressed down quickly on the gas pedal to accelerate, to allow the cyclist to ease in behind her if he wished; there was no doubt in her mind he would do so, and he did; bound for the outer, fast lane in a breathtaking display of driving skill and bravado. And in the rain! Because he doesn’t care if he dies. Because there is no other way.

  She felt a powerful sexual longing for him, this hunched, bearded stranger in his absurd leather costume, this stranger she would never know.

  Acting swiftly then, intuitively. For Exit 31 was ahead, with its two exit-only lanes; many vehicles on I-96 would be preparing to exit, shifting their positions, causing the constellation of traffic to alter irrevocably. Within seconds the cyclist would have roared ahead, gone. In the dreamy space of time remaining she felt a rivulet of moisture run down the left side of her face, like a stream of blood she dared not wipe away, gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles ached. She saw admiringly that the Saab was free of human weakness; its exquisite machinery was not programmed to contain any attachment to existence, any terror of annihilation; for time looped back upon itself at such speeds and perhaps the Saab and its entranced driver had already been annihilated in a multivehicular crash involving the Harley-Davidson, the Mercedes, and other vehicles; perhaps it was a matter of indifference whether the cataclysm had happened yet or was destined to happen within minutes or, perversely, not to happen at all. But her bare foot was pressing on the brake; her toes that were icy with fear, pressing on the Saab’s brake as a woman might playfully, tauntingly press a bare foot against a lover’s foot; a quick pressure, but then a release; and another quick pressure, and a release; jockeying for position, preparing to move into the left lane, the cyclist might not have noticed, for a low-slung sports car was approaching in that lane out of a tremulous glimmer of headlights, quite fast, possibly at eighty miles an hour, lights blinding in the rain; the cyclist was rapidly calculating if he had time to change lanes, or had he better wait until the sports car passed; he was distracted, unaware of the Saab’s erratic behavior only a few yards ahead of him; and a third time, more forcibly, she depressed the brake pedal. Unmistakably now, the Saab jerked in a violent rocking motion, and there was a shriek of brakes that might have been the Saab’s, or another’s; the Harley-Davidson braked, skidded, swerved, seemed to buckle and to right itself, or nearly; she had a glimpse of the bearded man’s surprisingly young face, his incredulous eyes widened and wondering inside the goggles, in her rearview mirror, in the very fraction of an instant the Saab was easing away, like a gazelle leaping away from danger. Within another second the Saab was gone, and in its wake a giddy drunken skidding, swerving, a frantic sounding of horns; faint with excitement she held the gas pedal to the floor, racing the Saab to eighty, to eighty-five, the car’s front wheels shuddering against the rain-slick pavement yet managing to hold the surface, while behind her it appeared that the motorcycle had swerved into the outer lane, and the sports car had swerved to avoid a direct collision yet both vehicles careened onto the median, and there they did collide and crash; at the same time the Mer
cedes, close behind the motorcycle, had turned blindly into the lane to its right, and what appeared to be a delivery van had narrowly managed to avoid hitting it. The Mercedes and the van and a string of dazed, stricken vehicles were slowing, braking like wounded beasts, passing the flaming wreckage that would be designated the accident site. She saw this spectacle in miniature, rapidly shrinking in her rearview mirror and in her outside mirror; by this time the Saab itself was exiting the expressway, exhausted, safe; she was trying to catch her breath, laughing, sobbing, finally rolling to a stop in a place unknown to her, near a culvert or an underpass smelling of brackish water and bordered by wind-whipped thistles, and her spinal cord was arched like a bow in a delirium of spent pleasure and depletion; her fingers rough between her legs trying to contain, to slow, the frantic palpitations.

  Next time, she consoled herself.

  SUMMER SWEAT

  Dying versus Dead. It’s a fact. In the throes of the most destructive love affair of her life, with the composer Gregor Wodicki in the summer of 1975, Adriana Kaplan frequently wanted to die, washing down prescription Benzedrines with vodka in some desolate beautiful place (the Catskills, possibly), yet Adriana was never so distraught as to wish to be dead in any permanent way.

  She was too restless, inquisitive, troublesome a young woman for deadness. She especially wouldn’t have wanted her lover’s wife to outlive her.

  She wouldn’t have wanted her lover to outlive her by even a few hours.

  No choice! That’s why I’m happy. In those days happiness was only subtly distinguishable from misery, yet Adriana would not have wished her life otherwise. Running breathless to meet Gregor in the pine woods down beyond the old, rotting stables of the Rooke Institute, where they were young, brilliant, and neurotic together, forty minutes north of Manhattan on the east bank of the Hudson River. In the dense pine woods where on achingly bright summer days the shade was too dark. Splotched sunlight and shadow: neurological anxiety. So in dreams of subsequent years and even decades Adriana would see the unnaturally straight, tall trees more like telephone poles than trees, or like the bars of a labyrinthine cage. Few branches on their lower trunks and thick, pungent-smelling needled boughs over head. Why am I here, what am I doing risking so much, am I crazy? was not a question she could retain seeing Gregor loping toward her with his expression of rapt, dazed desire. How like a young wolf he seemed to her, greeting her by digging his strong pianist’s thumbs and fingers into her ribcage and lifting her above him as if Adriana, twenty-seven years old, and not a small-boned woman, was one of his children with whom he played rough (she’d witnessed this, from a distance) though with Adriana it was deadly serious, and no play in it. Gregor would pant greedily, “You came. You came”—as if, each time, he’d frankly doubted she would come to him. Eagerly Adriana embraced the man, a man she scarcely knew, her arms gripping his head, her heated face buried in his thick, often matted and oily hair, in a delirium of desire that allowed her, as with a powerful anesthetic, not to think if her lover doubted her love for him, and how she doubted his for her. Yet they couldn’t keep away from each other. And when they were alone together, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man’s body, her sweat-slick breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don’t don’t don’t don’t leave me. DON’T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

  After their secret meetings Adriana went away alone, back to her initially unsuspecting husband. She was bruised, dazed, triumphant. She was covered in sweat, and shivering. This was love, she told herself. Yet also it was sickness. I love you, Gregor I would die with you that’s why I’m so happy.

  Fatal. Rarely that long deranged summer did they find themselves in a car together. In the Wodickis’ battered station wagon filled with family trash and smelling still, as Gregor complained, of diapers, though his youngest kid was three now and by this time the stink should have faded. This was risky, driving anywhere in the vicinity of the Institute. For there was no reason for Gregor Wodicki and Adriana Kaplan to be alone together except the obvious. They’re screwing each other? Those two? The average IQ of any resident of the Rooke Institute for Independent Study in the Arts and Humanities was perhaps 160; it would have required an IQ of 80 to figure that one out. So there was the risk, and Gregor’s rushed, reckless driving, and in a fine misty rain he hit a slick patch of pavement on a country road and the station wagon skidded and his arm leaped out reflexively to protect Adriana from lurching forward into the windshield—“Watch out, Mattie!”—in his alarm mistaking her for one of his daughters. He didn’t seem to realize his mistake, nor did Adriana choose to notice, for they were laughing together relieved, thank God they hadn’t crashed. “We can’t be together in an accident,” Adriana said, more tragically than she’d intended, and Gregor said, “Not unless it’s fatal for both. Then, who cares?” He grinned, baring his imperfect, stained teeth. The left canine was particularly long and distinctive.

  Afterward Adriana deconstructed this incident. It was a good sign, she believed. He loves me as he loves his daughter. I’m not just one of the women he’s fucked in his lifetime, mixed together like family junk in a drawer.

  A family man. Though he had love affairs, some secret and some not, it was said of Gregor Wodicki by both friends and detractors that he was a family man despite being a frequent drunk, a user of speed, an unreliable citizen, a primitive-cerebral composer descended from Schoenberg, and a general son of a bitch. A family man who adored his kids and may have feared his wife, whose name, Pegreen, filled Adriana with mirth and anxiety— “Pegreen? No, really?” Gregor Wodicki was thirty-two years old in the summer of 1975. The father of five children of whom the three eldest were his wife’s from a previous marriage. He was one of the defiant, unapologetic poor. He borrowed money with no intention of repaying. He bargained with the director of the Institute for an increase in his stipend though he was already the youngest of the senior fellows in the music school. He was hotheaded, difficult, scheming even among a community of temperamental artists and scholars. It was said admiringly, grudgingly, that his music was brilliant but inaccessible. It was said that he’d been getting by on his “genius” since adolescence. The Institute director, Edith Pryce, disapproved of his behavior but “had faith” in him. He went for days even in the humidity of midsummer in upstate New York without showering. How’s that my problem? he laughed at the notion he might offend someone’s sensitive nostrils. It was said that Gregor and Pegreen smelled identical if you got close enough. And the kids, too. If you visited their house (as Adriana never did, though she and her husband were invited to big brawling parties there several times that summer) you’d be shocked at the disorder, yes, and the smells; particularly scandalous was a downstairs “guest” bathroom where towels hung grimy and perpetually damp and the toilet, sink, and tub badly needed scouring. There were dogs in the Wodicki household, too. A rented ramshackle shingleboard house at the edge of the Institute grounds. A family man who nonetheless quarreled publicly with Pegreen his wife, and exchanged blows with her to the astonishment of witnesses—slaps rather than full-fledged blows, but still. Sometimes in the late evening as summer heightened in a crescendo of nocturnal insects, lovesick Adriana drifted by the Wodicki house taking care to keep far enough away from the lighted windows so as not to be seen by anyone inside. A mere glimpse of Gregor through an opened window even if his figure was blurred was reward enough for her, and simultaneously a punishment. Aren’t you ashamed. How can you bear yourself. She was struck by the very shape of the Wodickis’ sprawling house, like an ocean vessel, every window blazing light and casting distorted rectangles out into the night.

  You could walk up onto that porc
h, you could knock on that door if you want. You could open that door and walk inside if you want.

  But never. Adriana never did.

  A family man though he confided frankly in Adriana, in a lumpy bed in the Bide-a-Wee Motel outside Yonkers, that his children were a burden upon his soul. The three older kids he tried to love but couldn’t, even his own kids, the three-year-old especially he found himself staring at in astonishment and disbelief—“Did I really cause that kid to come into the world? This world? Why? Yet he’s beautiful. He breaks my heart.” A knife turned in Adriana’s heart, hearing this. Though she wanted intimacy from her lover yet she was wounded easily as an adolescent girl. She said carefully, “Of course Kevin is beautiful, Gregor. He’s your son.”

  Frowning, Gregor corrected her, “Pegreen’s, too.”

  Pegreen the Wife, the Earth Mother. Six years older than Gregor, whom she’d seduced as a youth of nineteen; she’d been the wife of one of his music instructors at the New England Conservatory. A slovenly-glamorous woman with gray-veined black haystack hair; a fleshy, sensual body; and a beautiful ruined face like a smeared Matisse. Pegreen exuded a derisive sort of sexuality like an oily glistening of sweat; in fact she was noticeably warm in public, flush-faced, with damp half-moons beneath her arms and tendrils of hair stuck to her low, broad forehead. Her eyes were malicious and merry and she wore bright red lipstick like a forties screen actress. She wore tight-fitting summer-knit sweaters with drooping necks and ankle-length skirts with alarming slits to midthigh. She, too, was a musician and played piano, organ, guitar, mouth harmonica, and drums with a gay, giddy imprecision, as if mocking the deadly serious art of her husband and his colleagues. She had a loud, contagious laugh very like her husband’s and like her husband she had a weakness for vodka and gin, beer and wine, whiskey, whatever. She was said to be more experimental and therefore more careless in drug use than Gregor, with a sixties hashish habit. It was said that Pegreen was devoted to her difficult “genius” of a husband unless she was bitterly resentful of her difficult “genius” of a husband. Certainly they quarrelled a good deal, and exchanged blows harder than slaps in private. (So Adriana learned, marveling at a cascade of purple bruises on her lover’s back.) Pegreen was the Earth Mother grown ironic about mothering and wifeing and womaning in general. She would appear to have been a manic-depressive, though mostly manic, in high spirits. Yet one day following a quarrel with Gregor she bundled the two youngest children with her into the station wagon and drove as fast as the vehicle would go on the New York Thruway, the children screaming and crying in the car when a state trooper stopped her; she’d lost her license for six months, and began to see a psychotherapist. At one point she spent some time in a psychiatric clinic in Manhattan. Gregor said, “Pegreen meant to crash the station wagon, I’m sure. Yet she could not. Her ties are as deep as mine. She isn’t truly mad, she has only the showy outward energies of madness.” The most disturbing thing Adriana knew of Pegreen was that she’d acquired from somewhere a .32-caliber revolver which, she boasted, she carried “in my purse and on my person” when she went into the city. She laughed at the alarm and disapproval of her husband’s colleagues. She was a firm believer, she said teasingly, in the right to bear arms and in the survival of the fittest.