"All right," Andrea acted calm but you could tell she was suppressing an outburst of emotion. "Tell us again, what happened?"
"Why should I tell you anything, anyway?"
Baxter was beginning to whine.
"I had nothing to do with it! The one you should be brow-beating is her!"
He pointed contemptuously at his wife.
"We're not trying to 'brow-beat' you --""We wouldn't start there anyway," Frogman interjected.
" -- we only want to know exactly what happened," Andrea finished, casting a sidelong glance at her boyfriend. "And we're not sure we should trust her."
And then she cast her glance at Sandy.
Sandy was sitting in a far corner of the living-room, far away from Andrea, Frogman and Baxter who were sitting in the center of the room, and very far away from Leoda who stood leaning menacingly by the door at the opposite end of the room. Sandy doubted that she would've spoken, even if they'd asked her to.
While the others talked, she thought to herself that her silence was a refusal to justify her actions to anyone. Then she realized that she refused to justify her actions at all, even to herself. With a numbed coolness of spirit, she considered the the reasons why she was afraid to face the moral consequences of her actions. Then she realized that she could consider her motives for refusing to justify her actions, but she could not come any closer to actually justifying them within herself. Her lips curled into a sardonic grin at the thought of this calming infinite regression.
"No, Andrea," came a harsh voice. It was Leoda. "I'd like to hear what she has to say. It might even be funny. Hear that Sandy? Tell us your side of the story. Give us a good laugh."
Sandy didn't look at her.
"Tell us what you were doing out there Sandy," Leoda continued. "Tell us what on earth you could've been thinking about when you deserted Freedman."
Sandy continued to stare into space.
"Do you hear me Sandy?" Leoda began to cross the room as she spoke. Andrea, with a look of concern, rose behind her. "Are you dumb or what?"Sandy turned and looked up at Leoda who was now towering over her; she paused for a moment and then she said, in a small voice, "I'm sorry, I was thinking about something else. What did you say?"
At that, Leoda screamed, "You bitch!" and struck Sandy's face with the back of her hand. Sandy fell from her chair against the wall and to the floor, bruising her shoulder and thigh. Leoda picked her up by her shirt and threw her against the wall.
Before Leoda could do more, she was restrained by Andrea, who threw herself gently but firmly against the old woman.
"Leoda!" she cried. "This isn't going to solve anything! Come, sit down.""Incompetent scheming bitch!" Leoda muttered as she was being led reluctantly away. "Just trying to cover for her own mistakes by destroying everyone around her!"
Dazed and aching, Sandy steadied herself and began to walk towards the bathroom.
"I have to clean up," she said weakly."Yeah, go clean up," Andrea answered without sympathy.
Sandy went to the bathroom and locked the door behind her. She took a glass of water to wash the blood out of her mouth. The wound stung in the cold water. She spat, then rose from the sink and viewed herself in the mirror. Her lower lip was beginning to swell, her blouse was torn and there were cuts along her shoulder blades made by Leoda's fingernails. Depressed by the sight, she turned away from the mirror.
She began to feel weak, almost nauseous, and supported herself with the towel rack by the shower. There was an obstacle to her breathing and she instantly knew what it was: her real emotional response to what had happened. She could feel it growing inside of her, now obstructing breath, but soon blocking all her vital functions. She had to let it out -- she couldn't fight it. But she knew that if she did, that she'd begin to cry and she'd never stop crying. Eventually she'd choke to death on her own sobs. It would destroy her either way and so she took what seemed the most dignified course and tried to hold it in.
She heard a knocking at the door, and then a rattling of the knob. "Go away!" she cried at the anonymous caller. Resting her head against the glass door of the shower, she ignored further rattlings of the door.
Sandy was almost ready to burst with it when she heard a voice from behind and beneath her.
"Y'know, a total lack of humanity in a woman turns me on."
Miraculously, Sandy regained her composure in an instant. She whipped around, then looked down on Frogman, who smiled impishly up at her while he put away the pen-knife he'd obviously used to break in with back into his pocket.
"You!" she cried angrily. "For Chrissakes, get out of here!""Naw, I mean it," he said in mock innocence.
Sandy considered him for a moment. Then, the same cool grin that had crept onto her face before was there again, only now its meaning was different, as Sandy accepted the terrible role given her by others. Sandy, quickly, and without warning, grabbed both Frogman's shirt and coat collars and lifted him off the floor, and, as she swung him into the shower stall, she reached into his pants pocket for the knife and, catching it, ripped the fly out of his pants, letting them fall around his knees.
It was over in less than a second. Frogman was suspended against the shower wall by Sandy's left hand; the right held the pen-knife, with its cold steel blade just under his penis.
"I bet this makes you want to kick yourself for sharpening your knife so often," she said, laughing diabolically. "You want to fuck a monster? Well, all right Romeo... use it or lose it."
She thought that was really funny and laughed hard.
Frogman's eyes gleamed with a mixture of terror and delight.
"Do you, uh... you mind if I, well... warm it up a little?" he asked politely."No," she answered, feeling generous, "go right ahead."
Frogman probably could've escaped Sandy as she she lowered her hand to unzip her own pants, but all he did was masturbate, frantically and passionately, with a wild gleam in his eyes. His rise was quick and she had to lunge herself against him in order to catch him before he ejaculated.
As they reached their peak, Frogman began gasping, "Put it back! Put it back!" and after a second's hesitation, Sandy understood what he'd meant and put the knife back against his penis. And he lasted another fifteen minutes.
When they were done, they'd both sunk to the floor of the shower, and, as Frogman pulled his penis out for the last time, Sandy suppressed a playful desire to really amputate it this time. Even though both of them were gasping loudly, Sandy could hear voices on the other side of the wall. Of course, they were screaming by now, and everyone on their block could probably hear them.
"...And what have I always said Andrea?" Leoda was obviously well into her speech. "Tell me, you know, I've always said you can't trust those two. They think they're so damned smart. They think they're smarter than the bunch of us rolled together. Someday they'll just screw us over like dirt and toss us aside!""That's not true!" Baxter was nearly sobbing. "I have never blown a mission; I have never betrayed anyone I worked for, until this, and it's not my fault anyway!"
"It isn't? Then why didn't you do something? Why didn't you shoot her?" Leoda demanded.
"For Chrissakes Leoda! That's my wife!" Sandy could tell that he really was crying now. "Anyway," he added, "she's the pilot, and that would've only gotten me killed too!"
Sandy was beginning to feel guilty about everything until he said that. Now she thought that Leoda could have him. And she did.
"Well, you should've done it anyway. You should've done it a long time ago.""I know, I know..." Baxter sobbed.
"I've had enough of this!" Sandy told Frogman.
Frogman looked hurt. "I thought you enjoyed it."
"No, not that! I mean the conversation out there. You think you know somebody after a few years together and then one day they turn around and it's a total stranger standing there."
Frogman stared at her for a moment then said, laughing, "I know just what you mean."
Sandy laughed too. She took off her pants, which were bunched around her ankles, wet from the water of the shower and sticky with semen. She sat, naked below the waist, with her shirt unbuttoned, resting. Frogman could only stand the sight for so long. He leapt from his place and buried his face between her legs, trying to suck out all the semen he'd put into her. This tickled quite a bit and Sandy began giggling. She reached behind her and turned the cold water on, full force. Frogman jumped, at first full of profanity, then laughter. Sandy screamed herself, not realizing that she'd hit herself too. Both dripping, they crawled into each other's arms arms and laughed hysterically. Then Frogman went back to eating her out, this time more gently.
Outside, all of this amorous activity was drowned out by Leoda's yelling.
"I can see you're not going to do anything to help unless your precious wife gives you permission. And you Andrea, well, you're no good without Frogman. Where the hell is he anyway? Maybe he's gone out to do something about poor Freedman all by himself. That wouldn't surprise me one bit -- going out into the cruel hard world to save a friend, without any help from his so-called 'Friends'. Well, he's not going out there alone. I'm going to find him and I'm going to help him find Freedman. God knows what a poor old woman can do, but if strong young people are just going to sit on their butts and bitch and whine, then there isn't any other choice. Good-bye!"
With that, Sandy heard loud footsteps and the door slamming.
"Good God, I thought she was joking!" Andrea cried. "Leoda, come back!"
Sandy heard the door slam again. Then there was silence.
The silence lasted for only a few seconds. Then Sandy began to differentiate a relatively steady sound that had been going on throughout Leoda's final tirade. It was the sound of Baxter crying. Sandy thought it was the most pathetic and disgusting sound she'd ever heard in her life.
Sandy soon found her shower-soaked blouse too much to bear and she began to peel it off. Her movements half-aroused Frogman, who was now fast asleep in her lap. After she tossed the last of her clothing aside, she quietly hushed Frogman and then began gently stroking his hair. He stopped moving.
Soon, Sandy heard the door slam once more. Now there were two sobbing voices in the room.
"The stupid bitch!" Andrea cried bitterly. "Let her get herself killed! Where the hell is Frogman anyway? He never went out."
Much to Sandy's irritation, Andrea began wandering about the apartment, calling, "Frogman!" while Baxter went on sobbing away in the living room. Sandy knew it was only a matter of time before a confrontation took place. Frogman was beginning to stir. Sandy decided to wait stoically for the outcome.
Andrea burst into the bathroom, looked around for a second or so until her eyes landed on the shower where Sandy, completely naked, was embracing a half-asleep Frogman.
"Frogman?" she asked, as if she only barely recognized him. "What are you...."
She stopped, realizing that the answer to any question was painfully obvious. Then her eyes met Sandy's, and, to Sandy's surprise, they weren't angry or vindictive, only bewildered and appealing. Then she ran out of the bathroom and Sandy heard her yell, "C'mon Baxter, let's get the hell out of here!" When the door slammed the last time, all that followed was real silence.
Sandy woke early the next morning, sometime before dawn. She was a little surprised to find that the man in bed with her was not her husband but the near-dwarf she had thought only a few hours ago the most repulsive creature in the world.
It amused her, slightly, to partly rise and turn to him and say, "Well Romeo, women with no trace of humanity turn you on. Do they really?"
She lay back down on her side of the bed and began to laugh. Then she began to cry. Then she began to weep so violently that she thought she'd never stop.