“Listen, this is hard to explain, but this relationship is causing me a lot of hostility and anxiety. I’m doing things that I wouldn’t normally do, so I think that we shouldn’t see each other anymore.”

“What?” She looked concerned.

“I can’t deal with this anymore.”

“You’re just feeling bad now, that’s all.”

“No, I feel used, I feel like you’re getting what you want and I’m not getting anything.”

“And what exactly am I getting?”

“I’m like…a hungry dog that’s following you everywhere and you won’t feed me but you won’t let me starve either.”

She said she was sorry for the undeliberate grief she had caused and agreed that we probably shouldn’t see each other any longer. After work, for the first time in a month, I went right home, but all was dark. I didn’t know it, but I was too late. Sarah left a note; her brother had picked her up and brought her back to her parents’ house on Long Island for the holidays. That night I did laundry, took a shower, and after a low-calorie meal and a little TV, I went to bed.

Eunice called me the next day to announce that she had just got her airline tickets and she was going back to Gary, Indiana, for winter break. She asked if we could meet somewhere before she left. I said no, curtly wished her a happy life, and hung up.

During the next few days, I got increasingly lonely. Pepe noticed me whenever we passed in the theater. He would scowl. I think he wanted me to work more for my raise. The twelve point eight cents an hour didn’t seem to have much effect on my life. It seemed to affect his life more. Then I learned that the two box office girls who had worked almost as long as me had also asked and were reluctantly granted raises; now it was costing him thirty six and a quarter cents per hour and it was coming out of his personal income. After work that night, a friend offered me complimentary tickets to the Ritz Christmas party. I didn’t care much for places like that, but I didn’t want to be alone for Christmas. So after a turkey hero I got spruced up and went.

While waiting to get into the Ritz, I wondered what possible dance halls the place could have been. I was once waiting for a friend in front of the Saint, which I later learned once housed the old Fillmore East. An old hippie stopped in front of me with a surprised look of recognition. He started making a bunch of frantic and overexcited gestures. When he caught my attention, he asked me if I worked there. Before I could reply he sighed and pointed inside the place.

“One night,” he took the liberty of saying, “I took more acid right in there than anyone else anywhere, ever!”

The Ritz had peaked about a year before and now it was on the decline, but so was I. Area, the Saint, Danceteria and the Palladium had divided its clientele. The club phenomenon seemed to be a three-way synthesis between concert halls of the late sixties, dance halls of the forties, and singles bars of the seventies. Someone, probably the late Steve Rubell, pieced together these cultural Portosans: Scrub some massive old toilet of a place, bait it with a bit of glamour, Andy Warhol protégés set the vortex spinning with initially coveted, now annoying, comps. Once the masses dropped in, trapped and floating, they were flushed down with exorbitantly priced drinks. By the late eighties, Area, the Saint, and Danceteria would be out of business.

That night there seemed few alternatives. After a half an hour of watching music videos and drinking beer, I made a pass at one of the many chubby Jersey girls bouncing around on the dance floor. Another bland band was strumming its heart out without exciting anyone. I was about to leave when I noticed a guy in his mid-forties get onto the center of the dance floor wearing a John Travolta white suit, complete with vest—a dated image of how “youth” was presumed to look. Dancing with him was a young girl in a flimsy evening gown. As I inspected closely, I couldn’t believe my fucking eyes—Eunice! I slowly moved closer. They were dancing tightly pressed, his hands playing along her back, slowly resting down on the cheeks of her buttocks. Wild conjecture and reckless speculation started structuring.

Could this be a paternal figure who had changed her diapers years ago, perhaps a much older stepbrother from a previous marriage who wrestled with her when she was a sexless adolescent? A kissing cousin or a cuddling uncle? For a moment they slipped into a splash of light, and the contrast of his olive-leathery skin against her milky lightness completely obliterated the relativity theory. Perhaps it was a neighbor or a landlord or some avuncular figure who was gay as a gooseberry. But in a moment they were kissing and his orbiting hands were wildly grazing around her body. What the fuck was going on?

I had no right to be jealous, but I hated Yuletide deception. I stormed out. With all the cash in my pocket, which came to the entire twelve point eight cent bonus multiplied by the week, I was able to afford two quarts of Budweiser. I returned home, downed both bottles, and became victimized by a drunk-abusive imagination: Eunice was probably soothed by his paternal pontifications, intoxicated with tropical drinks, the tab was on him. He probably feigned an excuse to stop over at his house. Once there, she’d lay down while he waited in a distant shadow for sleep to snare her. Her clothes would slowly, mysteriously be zipped, clipped, and slipped off her body. Soon she would be lying exposed, legs half parted, on his bed, deceptively king-sized since even his wife no longer slept with him, enticed by new sheets for the occasion. Eunice’s doll-like eyes slowly blinking, a melody in her mind, an easily earned grin, attention nodding, fading.

Stay here tonight. Home is far. The walk, dangerous. The night, cold. Sure, she replies, as if with a slumber party companion. His wife—the menace—away for the holidays, an annual Florida getaway ritual. His slithering and forked tongue moving up and down the PG-13 parts of that luscious body. Wait till she’s asleep. He’s barely restraining, knowing full well this is the last time he’ll drain the goblet, a valediction to the vagina. Beyond this—memories. When her liquor-naive body can resist no more, and the chasm of slumber finally gulps her, he leers. First, just a veiny, reptilian hand stroking along those sacred miniature curls. A gourmand enjoys his banquet slowly, sumptuously. But starvation collapses pacing, hot, flushed thoughts race: if passion were reason, erectus ergo sum!

Middle-aged, unilateral copulation; grunt/rasped breaths, a semi-erect display, a monsoon of sweat, his nose beginning to itch and run, palpitations, a free hand grants a nipples tweak, lips stroked, reactions reaped, but…but…premature sputterings, flounderings, a disheartening sperm count, hyperventilation…sleep.

Sarah awoke me the next morning. I was naked and shivering. The blanket had fallen to the floor. Sarah had come home earlier than expected. “I couldn’t take the parents.” Apparently everything her mother served was garnished with guilt.

I was glad to be back with Sarah. Despite the holiday break, though, she was still heavily embroiled in school matters and the hunt for a good graduate school. I sensed something was wrong when at one point I tried to kiss her, and she pushed me away and said, “Not now.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Why are you such a mess?”

“I’m always a mess. You should be concerned when I’m not a mess.”

“I suppose,” she replied in a small and distant voice.

The only affection I could offer Sarah seemed generated from my hostility to Eunice. At one organic moment I hugged and kissed Sarah, but she remained distant and finally she lapsed into silence. I attributed it to her being worn thin by the parents. She needed to be left alone a while. It was already five o’clock, the sun had set—a cold day was now bleak. I was scheduled to work that night. I kissed her, changed my clothes, and went off to the theater.