The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [93]
She was weeping hysterically now with rage and grief. “You can go,” she cried out, “leave here, you beast, you dirty, filthy beast.” And when he swung and hit her in the face and dragged and knocked her on the bed she knew she had fallen into a trap; that he had deliberately made her angry to excite himself. When he threw his body upon her she tried not to respond but she sank under his frenzy, and as always, succumbed to a similar frenzy of her own. But tonight was worse than it had ever been. They sank further in their bed and their passion. He made her take long drinks from the whisky bottle and humiliated her in every way. He made her crawl on hands and knees and beg with her mouth open. He made her gallop around tike room in the darkness, changing pace with his commands. Finally he took pity on her and said, “Whoa,” and she stopped. Then he let her come into the bed and into his arms.
“Now say your husband was a fairy.” He got ready to push her out of bed again.
With a childlike drunkenness she repeated after him, “My husband was a fairy.” She was silent after this and lay supinely on the bed. He made her sit up so that he could see the shadow of her long, cone-shaped breasts. Like footballs, almost exactly like footballs. Eddie marveled. Dressed she seemed ordinary. He had experienced a thrill of delight the first time he had discovered that treasure.
“I feel sick, Eddie,” she said. “I have to go to the bathroom.” He helped her there and sat her naked on the toilet bowl. Then he fixed himself a drink and lay back on the bed.
Poor Elfreida, Eddie Cassin thought, poor Etfreida. Do anything for a stiff dick. When he had spotted her on the Strassenbahn the first time, he had known everything about her from the quick look she had given him. Now, sated, void of passion and hate, he wondered at his cruelty to her, a wonder without regret, and his willful destruction of the memory of her husband. And what kind of a guy was he to marry a woman with a head like that? From what Elfreida had told him at the beginning the guy was really crazy about her, and with a body like hers you could forgive a lot of other things. But not that head, Eddie thought.
He made another drink and went back to bed. So she had the luck to find the one guy in the world who would marry her, the one person who had the eyes to see her soul beneath the mask nature had given her, and from what she said and what the picture told you, a real hell of a guy. And he was corrupting that memory.
He could hear Elfreida throwing up in the bathroom. He felt sorry for her, knowing that he had terrorized her to quell his own panic. Now, finally, irrevocably, the last roots of his Bfe had been torn away. He couldn't blame his wife. He had never been able to hide his disgust when die was sick. And carrying the kid she had been ugly, always throwing up like Elfreida now. He had never touched her then.
Eddie took another drink. His mind became hazy but he kept thinking of his wife as if she were standing beside him, legs spread apart; and into his mind came a picture of the old ice box his mother used to have, how he went down every day to the cellar of the coal man and brought up in a heavy wooden bucket the frosty block of ice, and then emptied the great hollow basin underneath the ice box which caught the water as it melted and dripped out And when he emptied that great basin every morning, in the murky water floated bits of decayed food, shreds of newspapers, wet clotted wads of dirt, and dead cockroaches, ten, sometimes thirty, floating cm their hard brown shells, their thin threadlike feelers flattened into the water like innumerable streaks of watery blood. In his mind now his wife was standing with legs thrust apart, the gray enameled basin resting on the floor between her ankles. And falling slowly down from her body were decayed bits of food, the clotted dirt and the dead, brown-shelled cockroaches, falling end over