HOME SWEET SOMEWHERE

I remember his fingers pressing my throat, me standing up against the wall of the bedroom – not our bedroom – none of that place was ours – it was his and it was night and he was naked and it was dark and I wasn’t really frightened that he would kill me, knew that he wanted to hurt me very much and I was surprised how close this felt to having all my air cut off forever. I heard myself heaving in air with a rasping sound, but not fighting back, this all so expected, an evening with the lawyer boss – I’d gone because I was flattered to be invited – he an utter grown-up, in his forties with a Porsche and a divorce – me with a temp job and a few papers away from graduation and it’s winter, the December in 1977 when it snowed so much that day that all the offices closed early and people were cross-country skiing on Fifth Avenue, he drove me home – his car a romantic bubble inside the snowstorm – though it wasn’t my home – I didn’t have something as difficult to establish as a home – he drove me home – me the temp, he the lawyer I was just supposed to type for, he drove me to the big expensive apartment building where my boyfriend lived – the boyfriend who called this place home without hesitation – and where my boyfriend’s father lived – sometimes – during the week – though for him it was more of a holding pen, the result of some huge fight with his volatile wife, this their solution, the father would sleep here during the week on a four-poster bed in an otherwise bare room except for the TV – this apartment that had held so many scenes of harshness, bleakness that I had decided were part of being in love with someone, months -- by now it had been years, of Jeffrey talking about having other lovers – after all, what difference would it make really? – and then him finally going out and getting one – all fall, his delight in having someone else to go to, someone else to send him artistic postcards – he has someone else who knows him differently than I know him – and there is not a drop of fury in me just the black sheets of suicide always falling thick and fast because she is better than me, she must be – and so it is easy to say yes to everything the lawyer suggests – the lunch at the ultra posh restaurant where I don’t bother with food, just the margaritas or was it wine, and then, another day, I go to his apartment. It is not a secret. I don’t go on the sly. I remember only the hash, damp and dark and sticky, and the sex – not the whole nine yards -- I’m afraid to take all the freedom I supposedly have – but enough to make my point. I have somebody’s interest and he is interesting enough to have good hash, he’s not a little high school punk. Jeffrey has his published author with young child. I have my upper East Side lawyer with good hash. But I don’t spend the night. “I don’t like to sleep with two people in one night,” I say. It’s a line from a movie or a book I read once. It has nothing to do with me, and I go back downtown, back to the spacious apartment where Jeffrey’s dad sleeps away off in one bedroom and Jeffrey slams me up against the wall in the other, his fingers pressing against my throat.