Rebecca's face had turned dark pink and she was shrieking at me; her voice was so loud and shrill I couldn't understand a word she was saying. She continued to slap me in the face I blocked a few of the blows, but some connected and then she leaned forward and started to bite me, just below my left cheekbone. I grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her off me. But she wasn't through. Still shrieking, she started slapping me harder in the face, and I knew I had to do something. I couldn't just lie there and let a hundred-pound woman beat the living shit out of me.
Like a wrestler escaping the three-count, I raised my legs off the floor, brought them down, then raised them again swiftly. The action was enough to catapult Rebecca and her slight frame off my chest, and my hands did the rest. Grabbing her hips, I continued her momentum and she flipped over my head. I heard her bang against the hallway wall, but I didn't wait to see if she was okay. I rolled onto my side and got onto my knees, then turned to face her head-on. Sure enough, she was coming after me again, her hands spread open like claws, closing in on my face. This time I was ready, lowering my head and grabbing her by the waist. It wasn't hard to force her onto the floor and pin her down. She was still shrieking, spitting at me, acting like a mental patient, and I just wanted the noise to end. My hands moved off her shoulders to around her neck and I started squeezing. The sudden silence was a big relief, and I was barely aware of the shade of blue her face was turning. If I just squeezed a little harder… I let go just in time. Rebecca was coughing, trying to catch her breath, and I backed away, trying not to believe that I'd almost strangled her.
I became aware of someone banging on the front door. Then I heard Carmen, the old Italian woman from next door, saying, "Will you stop with all the noise in there? You two are fighting and screaming all the time, I can't even hear my television. Hello? Hello?" She continued to bang on the door.
Rebecca was still coughing, rubbing her neck where my hands had been. I looked down at my hands, which were still curled into the shape of her throat.
"I know you're in there," Carmen said. "Open this door right this instant!"
"Shut the hell up!" I screamed, and then I stood up and marched into the bedroom. I went into one of the closets Rebecca had taken over, grabbed a big armful of her clothes, and stormed back through the hallway. Rebecca, still kneeling on the floor, saw me pass, but didn't say anything.
I opened the front door and saw Carmen standing there. She was a squat, hunched-over old biddy with a big bun of black hair.
"I hope that wasn't me you were speaking to that way," she said.
"There's so much screaming coming from your apartment every day I can't hear what the people on TV are saying."
"I'm sorry, all right?" I said.
"This better stop right now or I'm gonna call the police," she said.
I sidestepped around her and went toward the vestibule and then outside. From the top of the stoop, I tossed Rebecca's clothes toward the sidewalk. Carmen was gone from in front of my apartment, but Rebecca was still in the hallway, trying to grab my leg as I went back toward the bedroom.
"I'm so sorry, David," she said. "Please forgive me. You have to forgive me."
Ignoring her, I grabbed more of her clothes from the bedroom closet, then went by her again.
"Don't do this to me, David," Rebecca said. "I'm warning you."
I dumped the clothes onto the sidewalk, then returned to the apartment.
This time Rebecca clung to my legs as I attempted to pass.
"Please don't leave me," she said desperately. "I can't lose you again I can't go through that again."
She was making no sense. I decided I just needed to get away from her as soon as possible.
I wriggled free, then said, "If you're not out of here by the time I get back, I'm tossing the rest of your shit onto the street."
I grabbed a jacket and left the apartment. The annoying homeless guy who always panhandled to the curbside diners on Amsterdam and Columbus by singing "What a Wonderful World" had started collecting Rebecca's dresses. I walked right by him and headed down the block.
I didn't have a destination, but when I approached Dublin House, a bar on Seventy-ninth and Broadway, I decided to go in. It was a dark, dank, narrow bar that Barbara and I had gone to a few times. I sat on a stool near the front and ordered a Bud. The bottle arrived, and when I put my hand around it I remembered how I'd had my hands around Rebecca's neck. With a gulp of beer I tried to wipe that image from my mind, and then I saw myself holding Ricky in a headlock, ramming his head against the steel door. I told myself that none of it was my fault, that in both situations I'd acted in self-defense, but I wasn't sure I believed it.
I took another swig of beer, then looked down the bar and saw Barbara.
She was with a guy, laughing at something he was saying. I looked closer and realized the woman looked nothing like Barbara. She had the same wavy brown hair, but her nose had a bump on it that Barbara's didn't, and Barbara had been much better-looking.
The woman was looking at me, and I shifted my attention straight ahead, not wanting her to think I'd been staring. I took another sip of beer, then took out my wallet and slid out the picture of Barbara. I stared at the picture, drinking my beer, remembering when it was taken on the night of her junior prom. She blew off all the parties and her friends to stay at home with me, and we spent the whole night just hanging out, listening to music and laughing.
"Why do you still have that?" she asked. We were at her apartment on Eighty-fourth Street, watching some TV movie, when I took out the picture and showed it to her.
"I don't know," I said.
"Rip it up."
"No way," I said, keeping it away as she reached for it.
Thinking about Barbara made my eyes start to tear. I put the beer bottle down with too much force and it slid out of my hand and smashed behind the bar. The bartender came over and offered me another.
"It's okay," I said, suddenly feeling very hot. "It was almost empty anyway."
I left a dollar tip and exited the bar quickly. As I wandered onto Broadway I decided that it was stupid to leave Rebecca in the apartment alone. She was probably so pissed off at me for dumping her clothes on the street that she'd started tossing out my stuff in revenge. I jogged toward Eighty-first Street, and then, as I imagined all of my personal things on the street, being rummaged through by that homeless guy, I started to run.
Approaching my building I was relieved to see that the homeless guy wasn't there and that Rebecca hadn't tossed out any of my things; only a few of her tops and dresses were strewn on the sidewalk.
I entered my apartment, expecting to encounter Rebecca either crying hysterically, begging for my forgiveness, or attacking me again, but none of this happened. The apartment looked pretty much the same as when I'd left. I glanced down the hallway, seeing that the bathroom door was shut, and then I went into the kitchen. Scavenging in the fridge and freezer, I found a couple of pieces of hardened, week-or-so old pita bread and a half a box of frozen soy chicken wings. I cooked the wings and warmed the pita on the George Foreman Grill, and about five minutes later I was eating a very shitty dinner.
I cleaned up the kitchen, then went down the hallway, passing the still-closed bathroom door, and went into the bedroom. I changed into sweats, deciding that if Rebecca started acting psycho again, I'd just ignore her until she settled down. I definitely wasn't going to let her drag me into another fight.
Rebecca was still in the bathroom when I headed back along the hallway into the living room. With nothing else to do, I logged on to the Internet. I checked my e-mail just a spam message from a porn site featuring horny coed sluts and my 401 (k) account, which seemed to lose value no matter how I allocated my money. Then I surfed the Web for a while, reading news stories on Yahoo! I had to pee badly, and I got up and saw that Rebecca was still in the bathroom. I decided that she was staying in there on purpose, to punish me for dumping her clothes on the street.