Free Saline Solution by Marco Vassi Page B

Thursday. We fucked in the afternoon and at night we went to see Rashomon.
    When it came to the husband's version, I began to get uncomfortable. And when the scene flashed showing him tied to a tree, looking down as the rapist fucked his wife, I began to sweat. The camera shifts to the rapist's back, the wife's hands beating against the rough cloth of his shirt. Gradually she hits him more softly, then stops. Her fist opens, and very very gently her fingers extend and just rest lightly on his back. The delicacy of the description took my breath away, and in a flash the awful feeling of abandonment I had felt when Miriam's hand slipped from mine returned full force. I turned to her and saw her staring at me, wide-eyed. My face screwed up in anguish.
    'YOU CAME!' I shouted at the top of my lungs, scaring all the other people in the theatre.
    If I had been ready to recognise that the instinct to plunder is a mark of man, I would have used Miriam for what I wanted and, when I was bored, dropped her, or come to terms with the exploiter in myself and stopped using my energy to pretend I was an angel. So I could neither continue smoothly along the path to sexual cynicism, nor break through into honest confrontation. Like so many before me at this particular crossroads, I toppled over into a futile effort to attain respectability. I decided that we should get engaged, regularise our relationship, tell her parents we were in love and sleeping together, have her come live openly with me in the city each weekend, and prepare for marriage upon graduation. She thought it was a bad idea, but let herself be persuaded.
    'I'm tired of sneaking around,' I said, 'I'm not ashamed of anything we're doing. We should tell your parents.'
    'You don't know my parents,' she said.
    'Oh, I know they're prejudiced,' I said, a bit too glibly, 'but, after all, they're educated people. They ought to be happy to have their child tell them the truth about things. They may not like your fucking me, but they should prefer that to your lying to them.'
    And so, on Friday the thirteenth, we rode to Jersey, past the oil refineries and the pork processing plants, to play out the drama of confrontation. It might have been obvious to an outside observer that I was in the way of punishing Miriam and her parents, and inflicting some form of penance on myself. We had dinner, exchanging polite hostilities, and I listened to a long Semitic tirade on the evils of mixed marriages. They didn't know specifically what was about to happen, but were stringing barbed defences just on general principles.
    4 We have something to tell you,' I said, over after-dinner coffee.
    4 Oh dear,' her mother said.
    I smiled. 'Miriam and I are sleeping together,' I said, 'and . . .'
    But I never got a chance to go on. Her father clenched his teeth and the fingers of his right hand closed spasmodically, crushing the napkin he was holding. Her mother turned chalk white and stiffened. Then she retched violently, jumped from the table, and ran down the hall to the bathroom where she heaved up the evening's meal in great voluble gushes.
    A merciful numbness enveloped me. Miriam also copped out by cauterising all connections to her emotions. Her father looked down the hallway several times, embarrassment softening his face. Having his wife's sexual hangups so pointedly and publicly exposed must have been excruciating for him. I wondered what it must be like to fuck her.
    The next four hours were a pastiche of Old Testament angst with Freudian undertones of smut. Unfortunately, no one in the room was alert enough to observe passively the goings-on, to watch them with interest and wonder. We all got caught up in our performances, and the air grew thick with recriminations, accusations, and tears.
    'But aren't you happy we were honest enough to tell you?' I found myself saying over and over again. They kept looking at me as though I were a plague carrier.
    By midnight it was clear that they were in for an