by Vanda
“Calm down. Names don’t matter.”
“I’m not that.”
“All right, you’re not.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re making that very clear.”
“People say that people like that are sick. Is that what you think?”
“I don’t think about it at all.”
“How could I be that thing when you’re the only woman I ever …. That’s for my whole life.”
“Which isn’t a very long time. Look, Al, I don’t have the answers you’re seeking. For me, it’s just fun. I don’t need to explain fun. I just need to have it.”
The waitress set my cappuccino in front of me. I sat in silence drinking it.
“Finish your cappuccino, and then let’s go to my place. We can talk about this some more.”
I knew I shouldn’t go. I knew I’d be sending myself into the depths of hell where red-hot flames would lap at my feet. But I wanted to go. I wanted to go running straight into that hell. And I didn’t care about finishing my cappuccino; I wanted to go right away.
I didn’t really believe in any kind of literal hell. The hell I feared was amorphous, so hard to touch I probably would have preferred the Catholic hell with its fire and gnashing of teeth. That, at least, happened after you died. The hell I knew was always with me, always now.
That evening, we sat sipping tea in her parlor with the blackout shades drawn. A fire glowed in the fireplace and the lights were dim. Christmas carols played on the radio. Juliana stood near the fireplace, rubbing her wedding ring with her thumb. “It’s been quite a while since we’ve been in this room together,” she said.
“It’s very nice here. That mirror above the mantel is new.” The oval frame was gold, simple.
She put her tea glass down on the mantel and faced the fire. “What am I going to do with you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I suppose you don’t.”
I took a sip from my glass waiting for her to explain. Bing Crosby sang “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” on the radio.”
She looked in the mirror, but I could tell she was looking at me. She said to her own image. “When you do it, Juliana, you really do it, and you really did it this time.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“You’re brand new.” She turned to face me. “You’ve never had sexual intercourse, have you? Your hymen is intact. You’re a virgin.”
“What?” I nearly spit my tea out all over her couch. “Juliana, you’re not sposed ask people things like that. What kinda girl do you think I am?”
“I hoped you were the kind who’d at least had sex with her fiancé once, so I didn’t have to take care of it.”
“You can do that?”
“If I have to.”
“Well, of course, Henry and I never did that. I’m not a floozy.”
“A floozy? Oh, brother, what have I gotten myself into?” She left the room and came back with a bottle of wine and two glasses. “Wine?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She poured the wine and sat on the couch with me, but not very close. We sipped in silence for a few moments.
“Uh, Juliana? I’m—I’m not—not”—I thought I would choke on the word—“a virgin. Do you think I’m bad?”
“No. I’m relieved. I didn’t really want to do it. It can be painful.”
“But how could you do that? ”
“Another time. Sit back and enjoy the music.”
“Juliana?” I said, softly. “I’m—I’m frigid.”
She let out a quick laugh, almost choking on her wine. “Al, you are not frigid.”
“But how would you know? You weren’t there when Henry and I—”
“I assure you I know. Now, just listen to the music.”
And that’s exactly what we did. Listened to music. When I left, she didn’t even kiss me good-bye. I tossed and turned all night wondering why she was mad at me.
Chapter Forty-Four
I didn’t hear from Juliana for the next few days, which convinced me I had definitely done something to make her mad. I was afraid to call and bother her, but then I remembered she’d said she didn’t chase after her women, so I thought maybe she’d want me to call her. I did. Her maid answered—can you imagine, a maid? —and I left a message. Juliana called me back the next day. We met at Rockefeller Center, and she didn’t seem mad at all. And she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring.
It was cold and damp; a light afternoon rain sprinkled on our heads as we watched the ice skaters at Rockefeller Plaza. Soldiers and shoppers passed by. Then we walked to the three Christmas trees the city put up. One was decorated in white, one in blue, and the third in red. They were there to remind us that the war was still on, and lots of servicemen wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas again.
It got so cold we ran into Child’s for hot chocolate. Then we walked down to the RKO Theater at Times Square to see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . A Salvation Army worker stood near the theater ringing a bell next to her kettle—I threw a few coins in.
An usher, in his white gloves and red uniform with gold epaulets, guided us to the top floor with its gilded ceilings . We bought a bag of popcorn to share and waited for the balcony usher who was arguing with a Negro soldier and his date.
“Come on,” the Negro pleaded. “There’s plenty of room down front. Let us sit there.”
“Look,” the young usher said, “it’s the theater’s policy, not mine. You have to sit in the back. Be happy. Most theaters around here don’t let you people in at all. ”
The soldier sighed and guided his girl up the many steps toward the back balcony where other Negroes sat waiting for the show. The young usher then led Juliana and me to the front balcony. It was crowded with servicemen so it was pretty smoky. We sat on red, plush cushions.
The newsreel made me think of Max and Danny. All those soldiers marching and fighting, bombs landing all around them.
Creepy shadows crawled along the walls as the opening credits for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came on. As the movie got scarier, I stuffed more popcorn into my mouth. Toward the end, Dr. Jekyll’s girlfriend looks into Jekyll’s face and sees Mr. Hyde instead and screams. I grabbed Juliana’s arm. Popcorn went flying all over us.
“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,” I whispered.
She smiled and threw a piece of popcorn at me. “You scared me half to death.”
We both suppressed a giggle. I felt her hand on my knee and got scared for a different reason then but also excited. She ran her nails lightly up the inside of my leg, and my breath started coming out in hard clumps. Since I wasn’t wearing a girdle, Juliana’s hand could go all the way up to my underpants with nothing to stop it.
“Juliana,” I whispered, all the time staring at the screen, “we can’t ….” She threw her coat over both our laps. “Oh, no, Juliana, we shouldn’t do this.”
“I know,” she whispered.
I let my hand inch up her thigh as she poked her fingers past the leg of my underpants right to that place. “Uh, Jul—Juliana, oh, gosh—”
“Shsh,” she whispered, but she was laughing too.
I pushed my fingers past the leg of her underpants and let them circle her place. The whole popcorn container went flying up in the air as Juliana bucked forward. A few voices hissed, “Shsh.”
I gripped the arm of my chair with my free hand. “Oh, gosh, Juliana, I think I’m gonna—”
“Let’s go.” She pulled me by the wrist and we ran panting out of the movie theater. We pressed our backs against the wall of the RKO, laughing and catching our breaths.
“Oh, gosh, Jule, I almost—”
“Fun, isn’t it? Let’s go buy a Christmas tree.”
The Salvation Army lady, still ringing her bell, smiled and said, “God bless you.”
“Oh, yeah, God bless us.” I yelled back at the lady and tossed a few more coins in her kettle. If only she knew.
We charged through the cold air to c
atch the bus and hopped on just as it was about to leave. Juliana’s face was bright like she was a Christmas tree, lit from the inside.
“Juliana, look,” I whispered, “a Negro bus driver. I never saw one before. Did you? ”
“No.”
“Where are we gonna buy a tree?” I asked when we got off the bus.
“There’s a place in an alley over here. Let’s get a big one.”
Juliana and I carried the huge tree we bought on our shoulders the few blocks to her place, just the two of us. No men. Women were doing so many things on their own with the war on.
We dragged it up the front steps into the foyer of Juliana’s house and hauled it up the next flight. I pulled it from the front and Juliana lifted it from the back, and we got it half way through her upstairs door. We fell on the floor laughing. Well, I fell on the floor; Juliana fell into the tree. We rolled onto the floor laughing and she kissed me. I put my hand on the side of her face to see the deep blueness of her eyes. She started opening my dress buttons, so I opened hers. It wasn’t long till we were down to our underwear. I was about to unsnap her bra when she jumped up, saying, “Let’s decorate the tree.”
“Juliana! You can’t just leave me like this.”
“I can’t leave you wanting more?”
“Yeah!”
“By the time you have me tonight, sweetheart, if you have me, I want you on your knees .” She dashed past the music room, into the parlor, and ran into the small bedroom. She came out with two bathrobes slung over her arm. “Here put this on.” She threw me one of the robes. “Take the rest of your clothes off, first.”
“In the parlor?”
“Yes, Country Girl. In the parlor. I want to watch you get naked.”
“Oh, jeepers, Juliana, I can’t with you standing there watching me.”
She put her arms around me. “You are such a little Puritan.” She unsnapped my bra and slid it off. She took the bathrobe out of my hands and helped me into it. She unbuttoned my underpants and let them fall.
I wrapped the bathrobe around me while she dropped the last of her clothes and put on her robe. “Let’s decorate this tree. I think it should go in that corner.”
“But it’ll cover the picture of that lady. Who is she anyway? That picture wasn’t there two years ago.”
“Richard put it there.”
“Richard?”
“My husband.”
“Oh.” Hearing his name made him seem more real than I wanted him to be.
“It’s a portrait of his mother.”
It was a thickly painted picture of a woman with stern eyes, a long nose, and a pinched mouth.
“He commissioned it a few years ago but then never did anything with it. He became nostalgic before leaving for basic training and had it mounted on our wall. The old bat. ”
“What?” I laughed.
“I feel like she’s there to keep tabs on me.”
“I guess you don’t like her very much.”
“Well … this is where we’ll plant our tree. Over her face.”
We dragged the tree into the parlor. Juliana pulled out a large box of ornaments from the hall closet.
We managed to get the tree upright without getting stuck with too many pine needles. There was something so wrong and so thrilling about decorating a Christmas tree in your bathrobe with no clothes on and your special person next to you in the same unclothed condition. Still, I didn’t think the baby Jesus would approve.
Juliana reached into the large cardboard box and laid a few ornaments wrapped in yellowed tissue paper on the rug. “Ornaments from when I was a child in Bath.” She carefully lifted one from its paper. “This one,”—She held up a delicate glass bell—“was left in my stocking by Father Christmas, uh, Santa Claus when I was five. Hand blown by a Turkish artisan. My mother bought it years before my birth when she visited Turkey.”
“When the Sultan’s son fell in love with her.”
“Exactly. Most of the others she bought in Germany before there was any such thing as this war. A few come from a trip she made to Czechoslovakia.”
“She didn’t take you with her?”
“I was too little. I stayed home with my nanny.”
“Oh. Your nanny.”
She took a few figurines from their wrappings and laid them on the rug. There were wise men, and shepherds, and sheep. “I haven’t put this crèche up in years. Mother and I used to put it up every year around the Christmas tree. They’re all hand painted.”
I began putting the figurines near the base of the tree while Juliana pulled the yellowed paper from another figurine. I looked to see Mary, Jesus’s mother, lying in her hand.
“The holy Virgin Mother,” she whispered as if shocked to have found it there. Her hand began to shake like the statue was hot. She let it fall through her fingers onto the rug. “No.” Her voice shook. “We have to put these back.”
“It didn’t break.” I picked it up to show her. “See?”
“Put it back. Put them all back.” She began frantically rewrapping the figurines.
“What’s wrong, Jule?”
“It’s hard … hard seeing these holy images from my mother …. I’m so far—far from ….”
“Far from what?”
She sat back on her hip, covering her eyes with the back of her hand, catching her breath. She slowly wound her hand into a fist. “My mother was a good Catholic who always went to Church on Sunday. She sang in the choir, you know. Could you please put these back? ”
"Sure." I put the last of the figurines back into the box and took them to the closet. “What about your father? Is he still in Bath, England?”
“No. London.”
“You must be worried to death. What’s he doing there?”
“Working with the War Office advising Churchill. Close your mouth. You’ll catch a fly. Or maybe I should—”
She kissed my open mouth, and although I loved having her there I couldn’t help saying as soon as she released me. “Holy mackerel, advising Churchill!”
“Not by himself. There are others. And, from what I hear, no one truly advises Churchill.”
“But still. Juliana, who are you?”
“It’s my father, not me. I don’t know a thing about it. Now let’s get this tree decorated.”
When we’d finished the tree, we stood admiring it. The tinsel rain sparkled in the red, blue, and gold lights. Juliana took my hand in hers. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“I can’t believe I’m here with you and this Christmas tree and …. Juliana, I feel … inside I feel—”
“Shall we have some champagne?”
“Sure.”
Juliana poured two glasses and lit the fire in the fireplace. We sat on the couch quietly drinking and looking at our tree. “Everything’s so wonderful, Juliana. I think this is my best Christmas ever.”
“Hmm.” She took a sip of her champagne and suddenly looked sad. “Tell me about Christmas at your house.”
Part of me wanted to tell her about Mom, about her locking me out of the house, about her wandering in the basement in the middle of the night, about the sound of her howls seeping into my room at night through the coal ducts, about her cutting herself up, about her chasing me with a knife and my father tackling her to the ground before she put it in me. After that, they took her to the hospital for the first time. She stayed there for more than a year, and I’d sit on our porch almost every night waiting for her to come home. But I spose I was mostly waiting for the mother who used to be nice to me. I spose that’s the mother I’d been waiting for my whole life. But that mother never came home. She never came home again. I thought Juliana wanted a country story like the one I told her about my grandma and jumping in the leaves. I didn’t have one of those about my mother, except—“The sound of a little bell on Christmas morning.”
“What?”
“A bell. When I was small, my mother would tiptoe into my room on Christmas morning and ring a little bell over my h
ead. How do you describe a sound? I loved the light tinkling of that bell.” A few tears slid down my face, and I quickly wiped them away. “Juliana, my family’s nothing like yours. My mother’s crazy. Well, not always. When she has her spells. She used to be nice sometimes—when I was little—but now she hardly ever is. When she was crazy, she’d think I was an evil spirit that she had to destroy. Sometimes she threw me out of the house and locked all the doors and windows so I couldn’t get in. She didn’t mean to be mean. She just thought I was gonna hurt her.” I watched the flames devour the logs. I waited for Juliana to say—I don’t know—that it was okay, that she wasn’t afraid of me, that she still liked me. I waited; the silence got so loud.
Finally, she said, “Let’s have a bath.”
“Together?”
“Of course.” She jumped up, grabbing the bottle of champagne and ran into the hall. “Bring the glasses.” As I gathered up the glasses, she came back and stood in the doorway, her robe open. “Well? Are you going to ravish me or not?” Then she turned to walk back down the hall. I ran after her, the two glasses in hand. I heard the blast of the heavy press of water hitting the porcelain. She stood in the doorway of the bathroom. I put the glasses down on the back of the tub and turned her to face me. My eyes roamed over her body. ”Oh, gosh, you look so, so ….”
She un-cinched the tie around my waist and my robe fell open. She wrapped her arms around me, pulling me against her, our breasts pressed together. “Well, Country Girl? What are you going to do?”
I reached up and pulled her robe off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor; I threw off my own robe and kissed her.
She’d put bubble bath in the water and it had foamed into an ocean of bubbles smelling like lemons. The water was warm, almost hot. We lay in each other’s arms running washcloths over our bodies.
“Juliana,” I said. “I don’t want to call whatever we feel by any name, either. It doesn’t have to have a name.”
“Good,” she said and kissed me as we sank into the bubbles.
It must have been very early morning when I woke up in Juliana’s bed since the room was completely dark. I loved the feel of Juliana’s naked skin against mine. Her head lay on my chest and her breasts slightly below mine. I ran my hand over the delightful curve of her body. I thought she was sleeping, but she began to run her fingers up my inner thighs. Once more, I felt that marvelous tingle, and I wanted to do it over again.