Chapter 7
"You still sound like you're reading the Lord's Prayer at a Sunday School recital," Bill snaps at me impatiently, slamming his script to the floor. "Lilly isn't soft, she's crass! She talks like nails and you're reading like pillows. She's sat on barstools her whole life, not sofas. You sound more like a school teacher than a whore."
"But she's not a whore, Bill," I say, defending my reading as best I can.
"No, you're right. She's not precisely a whore, but she's closer to a whore than a school teacher. There's no gentility in her voice, baby, no upper middle class softness. Get out of the suburbs, baby; get into the crummy city streets where Lilly lives!"
I'm nearly in tears as we begin the scene again. It's after midnight and Bill has been screaming insults at me over my reading since we began at eight o'clock to work through the play. Four hours of reading and four hours of insults and I feel like throwing up I'm so sick of him stopping me with a disgusted look and an insulting remark. Bill can be viciously sarcastic and he's been ridiculing my reading since the first line.
I begin again and get no more than a third of the way through the encounter scene when Bill starts mimicking me, making fun of my reading again.
"I'm trying, I'm trying! Would you kindly leave me alone!" I yell at him.
"That's better," he says, looking into my face with a dull look that says plainly he doesn't think I can act worth a damn. "When I bug you enough so that you feel vulnerable and pissed you begin to fight back, get defensive and angry. Well, Lilly's first reaction is always to get defensive, to get angry and to mistrust everyone. Only she wouldn't say 'kindly leave me alone,' she'd say fuck off. You've got to get that kind of tone in your voice, baby."
"Stop calling me baby."
"That's what I feel like calling you, baby," he says coldly.
"Get fucked!" I say to him as viciously as I can, and I walk out of the room into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. When I get into the kitchen I realize what I've just said. It's the first time in my life I've ever talked to anyone like that, the first time I've ever told anyone to get fucked. And what surprises me even more is that I meant it, meant those words and used those words. They came out of me not out of a script.
I pour myself a cup of coffee and begin to run through the day in my frazzled mind, and what a strange day it has been in my life. The episode with Bill and Bernie in the morning seems like a dream to me now, someone else's dream at that, so unlike anything I've ever done was it, and even though I actually did screw Bill right in front of Bernie it seems unreal and imaginary, like a flight of fancy. Yet it was real and I know I did it because I have that familiar uneasy feeling about it, and I don't really want to think about it for fear that I'll become guilt ridden and scared by my own lack of inhibitions and I'll panic as I usually do. Then the long afternoon of reading quietly to myself until I began to know my lines without even trying to consciously memorize them, reading them over and over to myself until they began to be absorbed as a part of me. That much I learned in Topeka and I'm thankful for it; to simply memorize lines does no good. Instead you have to absorb them like you absorb oxygen and sun through your skin. Then the almost silent dinner before beginning to read through the play together, Bill jacked up on bennies as he calls them, to keep him alert, and I jacked up because of the morning. And for the last four hours the incredibly frustrating agony of being insulted at every attempt to produce even the voice of Lilly much less the action. I shake my head in amazement and anxiety; I'm beginning not to recognize myself anymore. I don't sound much like me at all.
I go back out into the living room and see Bill studying the script like a madman bent over a piece of his own insanity, examining it for rational flaws. I sit down quietly on the floor facing him, afraid that if I disturb him he'll react with a new attack of some kind. He seems totally absorbed, though, and I think he doesn't even know I'm back until, without looking up, he speaks.
"Take off all your clothes," he says.
"What?"
"Strip, baby. You heard me."
I look at his bent head and studious expression devoid of any emotion, like ice, and I feel a sudden rebellion welling up inside me, an indignation that he should order me out of my clothes after he's been such a shit. Does he think he owns me? I wonder.
"I don't feel like it," I say flatly.
"I didn't ask you if you felt like it, I asked you to strip down, baby."
Still he doesn't look up but the ice in his face has melted into his voice and it scares me. I suddenly see him as a real madman, vicious and evil, and my fear rises, yet at the same time I feel myself intimidated by him and even attracted to him. A sexual surge fills my body and I stand and strip, hating myself for doing it and getting excited at the same moment. When I'm naked I stay standing and look at him, enjoying my advantage of height over his sitting form if nothing else and unwilling to relinquish even that small advantage when I'm being stripped of all else, physically and emotionally.
"Is this what you want?" I ask with a sarcastic tone in my own voice.
"Sit down and shut up," he says, still not looking up, and I sink to the floor in a crumpled pile of indignation and despair.
He throws my script at me and looks up.
"From now on, baby, we read and rehearse with you naked. You're going to learn what vulnerability and defense are all about. You're not going to hide behind your clothes any more than you are behind your middle class upbringing, dig?"
"Why do you keep insulting and humiliating me?" I demand, my voice suddenly losing control, angry.
"You don't know what humiliation is, baby, but you're going to learn. And I'll tell you something else; you want to be humiliated, baby; you're a born masochist and you know it deep inside you. You middle class bitches are all alike. You're shit and that's what you respond best to, that's what you learn from."
I want to run, feel the suffocation coming over me like a stream of steamy water, my eyes burning and wet. This morning when he lied so he could screw me instead of Bernie I felt so good, thought he liked me, perhaps even loved me in his own way, and now he treats me like dirt. I can't stand it, I think. If I stay and sit through this he's right, I am nothing more than a masochist, but if I leave he'll just call me a weak little girl. He's trapped me and I want to escape.
I fidget where I sit trying desperately to sort it out, and as I think about it the suffocation passes and I remain sitting. He looks at me and says we'll take it from where we left off.
I begin to read into my part and almost immediately I brace myself for a sarcastic remark. I feel doubly vulnerable sitting naked, my breasts loose and my cunt open, and out of sheer dread at being attacked I try to hide in the part, try to hide in Lilly, and a strange thing happens. My voice drops a register and sounds unlike me. It takes on a low, almost alcoholic slur with fear as its base and protection as its purpose, a sex come on and an emotional put off at the same time. And I feel safer in that voice, and the words, Lilly's words, seem to fit that voice, and I continue reading, getting deeper into her words, without hearing the sarcastic comment from Bill that I'm waiting for. I read completely through the long speech and when I'm finished, almost before the last word has left my lips, Bill comes in with his lines, only it isn't Bill either, it's a college kid with an unsure yet poised and practiced confidence about him and he carries me into my next line as easily as one note of music carries you into another.
We read on for the next half hour without speaking to each other except through the characters in the play, thumbing through to our lines and ignoring the lines of other characters in the play, until we get to the last part of the second act where we are alone on stage and about to make love in an almost surrealistic scene where it both is and isn't acted out, where it happens right before the audience's eyes yet doesn't quite happen. We read through the scene and I find myself getting confused and lost, the voice I've been using no longer working for Lilly; there has been a change and I can't find where it occurs. We read through the scene and get to the after part, the moment of sex and the reaction to it, and by that time I'm completely lost, have completely lost Lilly.
Bill stands up and glares down at me, and I see both Bill and the college kid at once in his cruel face. He strips down to his skin and his cock springs up erect and swollen.
"Do you know what happens there?" he almost shouts at me, and I look startled and scared at him, afraid to answer. His face is almost pathological, full of aggression and madness, and I feel his hard breathing as if he's hitting me with it. "You don't, do you? You wouldn't even think of that, you soft cunt!" He's furious with me and I don't know why, what I've done. I thought it was going so well until the last when I lost her, became confused. I look up at him and still can't answer though the fear is boiling up inside me as irrational as he seems, as if I do know what happens there in the play only I don't want to face or admit to it. "I'll tell you what happens, baby! He fucks her in the asshole, that's what happens, and she don't want that because she wants love and niceness like you do, only that's not what she gets and that's not what you're going to get!"
I feel the cold panic running through my blood as I stare up at him realizing what he is saying and scared too much to move. I've given too much of myself to him already to fight back now; he's got so much of me under his control already that I don't have enough of myself left to fight back with. I watch in horror as he comes toward me and puts his hands on my breasts, pushing hard against my soft flesh so that I fall back on the rug; then he is kneeling over me, his fingers digging into my hips as he rolls me limply over on my stomach. I don't fight but my lips shake and my eyes water and I begin to whimper and quiver with fright, and my voice squeaks out a plea for him to stop. He ignores it and I feel his fingers sink into the crack of my ass and pry my buns apart and I begin to whimper louder until the tears roll down my cheeks and I'm crying and sobbing in my cowardice and helplessness, in the knowledge that I won't, I can't, fight back.
Then my panic finds a way out. I tell myself it's all a part of the play, that he's acting it out for me so I'll know what happens, that he'll stop and I'll sit back up and we'll read the scene again and I'll know how to read it, how it must feel without ever having to submit to such a torturous act. His fingers pry into me, find the round button of my rectum, finger it and poke into it. I feel a nausea come over me, a panic so deep and irrational that my flesh is shaking like I'm in a fever of chills, and his finger jabs deep into my asshole and I tighten my buns in pain and tell myself that he'll stop now, stop any second now and withdraw his finger.
Only he pokes it in deeper and wiggles it around and I'm squirming under him and telling him to stop now, that I understand what it's like, that he can stop it now, oh, please. Then I feel the weight of his thighs as he straddles my ass and I feel his finger ream me open and I'm crying for him to stop as he withdraws his finger. I feel my body go instantly soft with relief and hear myself sobbing above his pounding breath and I'm so relieved and thankful that he stopped. His fingers are still spreading my buns apart but I hardly notice them now; it hardly matters; all that matters is that it didn't happen, that it is over.
As if from a dream rising, as if out of sleep into waking I feel his weight come down on me, press me into the rug, feel his cock jam into my rectum, feel my ass tighten against it but too late to keep him out, feel the excruciating pain shoot through my intestines and belly as he jams it up my asshole, feel my mouth open and my throat squeeze out the hissing scream of pain and humiliation as he buries himself to the hilt in my asshole, feel the humiliation turn to hatred and the feeling of betrayal, of being betrayed, used, abused, and ruined forever. And still he humps at me, jabbing the pain up into me like a burning iron. No . . . no . . . it's not true, it's not what it is, I keep thinking, keep returning to my fantasy of him stopping even while he's doing it, while he's screwing the shit out of my ass, and I feel my head fill with poison gas and my eyes fog with smoke and my head spin in disbelief and unimagined pain and helpless fury, and I know nothing else until I feel him pounding out his sperm and letting himself fall off me. Then the room is silent, filled with silence like a heavy weight over me, and the silence is broken only by my mounting sobs, and by my humiliation and hatred for him, for myself, and for all men everywhere that comes breaking out of me in a scream of animal rage. Then a long, long silence.