But I hadn't been able to come with Jolanta; something else took possession of me outside Screaming Annie's door. 'Well, why didn't you say so?' Screaming Annie said, when I had still said nothing. She took me inside her room and shut the door. 'Like father, like son,' she said. She helped me undress; she was already undressed herself. No wonder she had to work so hard, I realized -- because she didn't know the system of charging for all the 'extras' that Jolanta charged for. Screaming Annie just did it all for a flat four hundred Schillings.
'And if you don't come,' she told me, 'that's my fault. But you'll come,' she assured me.
'Please,' I said to her, 'if it's all the same to you, I wish you wouldn't come. I mean, I wish you wouldn't pretend to. I would appreciate a quiet ending,' I begged her, but she was already beginning to mak
e curious sounds under me. And then I heard a sound that scared me. It resembled nothing I'd ever heard from Screaming Annie; it was not the song Susie the bear had coaxed out of Franny, either. For an awful second -- because there was so much pain in the sound -- I thought it was the song Ernst the pornographer was making Franny sing, and then I realized it was my sound, it was my own wretched singing voice. Screaming Annie started singing with me, and in the vibrating silence that followed our awesome duet I heard what was clearly Franny's voice yelling -- so close by she must have been standing on the second-floor landing -- 'Oh, Christ, would you hurry up and get it over with!' Franny screamed.
'Why did you do it?' I whispered to Screaming Annie, who lay panting under me. 'Do what?' she said.
'The fake orgasm,' I said. 'I asked you not to.'
'That was no fake,' she whispered. But before I had a moment to even consider this news as a compliment, she added, 'I never fake an orgasm. They're all real,' Screaming Annie said. 'Why in hell do you think I'm such a wreck?' she asked me. And why, of course, did I think she was so convinced about not wanting her dark daughter in the 'business'?
'I'm sorry,' I whispered.
'I hope they do blow up the Opera,' Screaming Annie said. 'I hope they get the Hotel Sacher, too,' she added. 'I hope they wipe out all the Karntnerstrasse,' she added. 'And the Ringstrasse, and everyone on it. All the men,' whispered Screaming Annie.
Franny was waiting for me on the second-floor landing. She didn't look any worse than I did. I sat down beside her and we asked each other if we were 'all right.' Neither one of us provided very convincing answers. I asked Franny what she found out from Ernst, and she shivered. I put my arm around her and we leaned against the banister of the staircase together. I asked her again.
'I found out about everything, I think,' she whispered. 'What do you want to know?'
'Everything,' I said, and Franny shut her eyes and put her head on my shoulder and turned her face against my neck.
'Do you still love me?' she asked.
'Yes, of course I do,' I whispered.
'And you want to know everything?' she asked. I held my breath, and she said, 'The cow position? You want to know about that?' I just held her; I couldn't say anything. 'And the elephant position?' she asked me. I could feel her shaking; she was trying very hard not to cry. 'I can tell you a few things about the elephant position,' Franny said. 'The main thing about it is, it hurts,' she said, and she started to cry.
'He hurt you?' I asked her softly.
'The elephant position hurt me,' she said. We sat quietly for a while, until she stopped shaking. 'Do you want me to go on?' she asked me.
'Not about that,' I said.
'Do you still love me?' Franny asked.
'Yes, I can't help it,' I said.
'Poor you,' said Franny.
'Poor you, too,' I told her.
There is at least one terrible thing about lovers -- real lovers, I mean: people who are in love with each other. Even when they're supposed to be miserable, and comforting each other, even then they will relish their every physical contact in a sexual way; even when they're supposed to be in a kind of mourning, they can get aroused. Franny and I simply couldn't have gone on holding each other on the stairs; it was impossible to touch each other, at all, and not want to touch everything.
I suppose I should be grateful to Jolanta for breaking us up. Jolanta was on her way out to the street, looking for someone else to abuse. She saw Franny and me sitting on the stairs and aimed her knee so that it struck me in the spine. 'Oh, excuse me!' she said. And to Franny, Jolanta added, 'Don't get involved with him. He can't come.'
Franny and I, without a word, more or less followed Jolanta down to the lobby -- only Jolanta went through the lobby and out onto the Krugerstrasse, while Franny and I went to have a look at Susie the bear. Susie was sleeping on the couch that had the ashtray spilled on it; there was an almost serene look on her face -- Susie wasn't nearly as ugly as she thought she was. Franny had told me that Susie's little joke about being the original not-bad-if-you-put-a-bag-over-her-head girl was not so funny; the two men who had raped her had put a bag over her head -- 'So we don't have to look at you,' they told her. This kind of cruelty might make a bear out of anyone.
'Rape really puzzles me,' I would later confess to Susie the bear, 'because it seems to me to be the most brutalizing experience that can be survived; we can't, for example, survive our own murder. And I suppose it's the most brutalizing experience I can imagine because I can't imagine doing it to someone, I can't imagine wanting to. Therefore, it is such a foreign feeling: I think that's what seems so brutalizing about it.'
'I can imagine doing it to someone,' Susie said. 'I can imagine doing it to the fuckers who did it to me,' she said.
'But that's because it would be simply revenge. And it wouldn't work, doing it to a fucking man,' Susie said. 'Because a man probably would enjoy it. There are men who think we actually enjoy getting raped,' Susie said. 'They can only think that,' she said, 'because they think they would like it.'
But in the ash-gray lobby of the second Hotel New Hampshire, Franny and I simply tried to put Susie the bear back together again, and get her to go to her own room to sleep. We got her on her feet, and found her head; we brushed the old cigarette butts (that she'd been lying in) off her shaggy back.
'Come on, come get out of your old suit, Susie,' Franny coaxed her.