Payback

by Mary Gordon

  Heidi feels that what she’s wearing is ridiculous. She had bought the shortest possible skirt to show off the red boots Miss Vaughan had given her. And the jacket she had bought with Edwina on one of their thrift shop expeditions, a vintage World War II army jacket, with ribbons, insignias, brass buttons—Elsie had tailored it so that it fit her perfectly; the lieutenant colonel must have been very tall; the jacket reached just below her knees and she could cinch it tight with the fabric belt—which she had thought so original, so distinctive, now seemed merely show-offy. But she wishes she had thought to dress as Jeanne did: protected, contained, yet with the suggestion of warmth and an almost sleep-inducing comfort.

  Jeanne nods, and Heidi nods back. Neither of them speaks.

  As soon as they’re seated in the train, Jeanne takes a book from the canvas rucksack she carried. It was called Relativity: A Primer.

  “I thought you could get started on this.”

  “Thanks, I’ll take good care of it.”

  “It’s not mine. It’s Miss Datchett’s. Give it to her when you’re done.”

  “I’ll ask Miss Vaughan to give you something on cubism.”

  “Fine. I know nothing about it, as I imagine you know nothing about relativity.”

  “You’re right there.”

  “I guess you have some good reason for doing this. I’m doing it so I can have more time to work on dressage before the big meet.”

  “I’m just doing it because any minute away from that hellhole is good for me.”

  “It could be worse. You should hear what some of my friends in this Columbia class I’m going to say about their schools.”

  “Well, school is a prison they consign us to because they’re afraid of what we’d be up to if they let us out.”

  Jeanne looks at Heidi as if she were speaking a foreign language. She takes off her poncho. Underneath it is a black cotton turtleneck. Once again, Heidi feels she has misjudged; she’s wearing a V-neck sweater, light blue mohair; she hadn’t thought that the heat of the compartment would render the wool irritating to her bare skin.

  “Is your cape alpaca?”

  “Yes, my parents know these people in Vermont who raise alpacas.”

  “I always get alpacas mixed up with llamas,” Heidi says, feeling that for the first time she had said something acceptable.

  “They’re actually very different. Llamas are more than twice the size of alpacas.”

  “Oh,” Heidi says, feeling rebuked.

  Jeanne takes a large textbook out of her bag.

  “I have to look over these equations before my class.”

  “Sure,” Heidi says.

  She takes out the book on Picasso that Miss Vaughan had lent her.

  “I’m going to a lecture on Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art.”

  “Nice,” says Jeanne, not looking up from her equations.

  They pass the rest of the trip in silence. Heidi is pretending to read, but, in her misery, none of the words make sense. The Blue Period, the Rose Period, the impact of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon…none of it seemed to make any difference. She had hoped that she and Jeanne would become friends out of a sense of shared superiority. But Jeanne Larkin knew perfectly well that she was superior to everyone, including Heidi Stolz, and it was clear that she felt no need of friends. Heidi feels herself begin to sweat, and she’s terrified that before the end of the trip she will be stinking. She goes into the filthy tiny bathroom and smells her armpits, but the stench of the shit of strangers and the disinfectant intended to cover it means she has no idea how to judge the presence or absence of her own offensive smells.

  * * *

  —

  Jeanne says a perfunctory goodbye as they arrive at Penn Station and heads for the subway. Heidi envies the sureness of her step; not for a second did she have to look around for where she was going, but then, she’d been doing this for months, since the beginning of junior year, when Miss Science Datchett had found this course for her, because obviously Jeanne was too brilliant for the rest of them.

  Heidi tries to look like she knows where she is going; Miss Vaughan had advised that she walk to the museum, it wasn’t far; she had only to walk two blocks east to Fifth Avenue and then the walk was less than a mile, and Miss Vaughan thought Heidi would enjoy “taking in the sights. I know you have a wonderful eye; it will be a good exercise for your powers of observation.”

  An educational experience, Heidi nastily repeats Agnes Vaughan’s words, her soft voice in her mind. She was full of rage. How pathetic Agnes Vaughan must have thought she was, giving her the gift of the boots, setting up this stupid project so that she and Jeanne Larkin would have a connection. She isn’t sure whether she resents Miss Vaughan or Jeanne Larkin more.

  She decides it’s Agnes Vaughan, because she pitied Heidi, whereas Jeanne Larkin thought her simply beneath notice. Of all things, pity was the worst, the most impossible to bear, and in her refusal to bear it, she once more recognized herself.

  She saw almost nothing in the walk up Fifth Avenue; vaguely she takes in the lions of the Forty-Second Street Library, the Atlas statue in front of Rockefeller Center, the big church across the street. But mostly, she concentrates on her rage, and her desire to be free of them, free of them all, after another year of imprisonment in the oh-so-cozy Lydia Farnsworth School. Then she would surprise everyone; maybe she wouldn’t even go to college…she could hear Miss Vaughan’s gentle insistence on the importance of a liberal arts education, that she had a wonderful mind that needed to be cultivated, but she would refuse cultivation; she would look for something savage, something to mark the contempt she woke up with every morning and fell asleep cradling against the too-large breasts, her mother’s breasts, that she despised as she despised everything about her mother.

  Miss Vaughan had given Heidi her pass to the museum, so she didn’t have to pay or stand in line with the rest of the people, so proud of themselves for being where they were. She’s grateful for that; she hated standing in line; she hated hearing the ridiculous conversations, weather, food, love affairs, all of them, she believed, not worth the breath spent on them.

  * * *

  —

  She had never seen Guernica. She had never been to the Museum of Modern Art. But Miss Vaughan didn’t know that. The only times she’d been to New York, she came with her parents, and they came so that her mother could shop. She’d passed Saks Fifth Avenue, where she had bought the gloves for her mother, and she knew that a few blocks up there was Bergdorf Goodman, which her mother approached, awestruck, like a pilgrim approaching a shrine.

  * * *

  —

  She’s early, and she takes a seat toward the back of the auditorium. She doesn’t want to take out her book on Picasso, so she opens a small notebook that she carried for sketching, and begins to write random sentences, in order to appear engaged.

  Jeanne Larkin is a stuck-up bitch.

  Jeanne Larkin can go to hell.

  I hope she doesn’t get into Harvard or Yale or wherever she wants to go.

  I will not go to college. That will upset them all.

  The room begins to fill, and two men appear on the stage. The younger one introduces the speaker, a professor from Oxford, Trevor Havisham. He is going to talk about Guernica in relation to the Spanish Pavilion at the exhibition of 1937. There would be special access to the painting itself, the young man said; it would be cordoned off for this audience, the ordinary museumgoers would be kept back.

  She allows herself to indulge in her favorite fantasies. She is successful, she is famous. In this fantasy she is not the lecturer but the subject of the lecture: her groundbreaking work as a brave, daring artist. Enviable, envied. Heidi believes that being envied is the most desirable thing in the world.

  The lecturer is William F. Buckley, whom she admires and finds enormo
usly attractive. Her father watched his show, Firing Line, every Sunday and Heidi sat next to him, both of them cheering Buckley’s demolition of the hapless opponent who had put himself at Buckley’s mercy. It is one of the few times she feels close to her father. He says he is a conservative: “Liberals believe in the future, they think it’s a great blank wall and they can write any nonsense they like on it. As if there were no past…nothing to press on the wall. A conservative is someone who deals with the reality of the darkness of the past.” In seventh grade, she had expressed herself as a conservative, and everyone fell on her as if she were carrying a germ that could infect them all. None of their arguments moved her; she was bored by their optimism, and from then on, she refused to engage in political arguments. She hopes one day to be as articulate as William F. Buckley. She loves his voice, always contemptuous but never aroused, adding extra syllables, there was some liberal historian he loathed named Schlesinger, and he said the name Slezinger, drawing it out to make him seem somehow loathsome, reptilian.

  She imagines William F. Buckley saying her name, Heidi Stolz, with reverence. He had never known how to look properly at art before he discovered her work. He says he doesn’t know how she managed to achieve all that she did at such a young age. She is always twenty-five in her fantasies, but older looking, like the picture of Marlene Dietrich in her mother’s dressing room.

  The real-life lecturer is not interesting. He is speaking about a war Heidi has never heard of. The Spanish Civil War. Nationalists, Republicans…the words tumble around her brain and confuse her, and she resents the confusion: she blames the speaker. He mentions names she doesn’t know, Durruti, Prieto, and some she does, Dalí, Joan Miró. She has to think of something to tell Miss Vaughan, so she has to pay attention. If she tells Miss Vaughan the lecture was boring, she will get that sad look, that disappointed look, and Heidi will despise her and yet regret that she was the cause of that look.

  She writes a few things in her book. Hitler’s bombs, she writes, Hieronymus Bosch. Hieronymus Bosch is a painter she likes. One of the girls who was known for taking a lot of drugs, Linda Frank, made Miss Vaughan laugh when she said, “I think he was tripping,” when Miss Vaughan showed a slide of Bosch’s Last Judgment. Heidi hated it that everybody laughed, especially Miss Vaughan. She knew that she could never think of anything to make a whole class laugh. Even the teacher.

  The lecture is over. They are being shown to the painting.

  Heidi has seen it a million times, in reproductions, in slides in Miss Vaughan’s class. But never has the horror of it, the terror, the pain of the animals, particularly, the sheer panic of the horse, struck her as real. She would like not to be moved by it, as she has wedded herself to Andy Warhol’s cutting remarks about “great art.” But she can’t make herself move away She is still looking when the guard moves the velvet rope to allow the ordinary museum-goers access.

  “Too bad he was on the losing side.”

  She hears a voice behind her, an English accent, even more alluring than William F. Buckley’s, which she knows to be some version of American. She forces herself to turn slowly, as if someone behind her, speaking in an English accent, were of no importance to her.

  He looks nothing like William F. Buckley; he looks something like the actor who plays Marcus Welby, MD. Robert Young. Silver haired; he wears gray trousers and a blue blazer, light blue shirt, and (this does excite her) an ascot instead of a tie. He is not quite smiling; he radiates calm, a large composure, and he must want to talk to her, or he wouldn’t have come up behind her and said what he said.

  Who will she be for him? Nothing like this has ever happened to her. He is, after all, a stranger, the category she has been warned about since early childhood. But he is nothing like the kidnappers in her imagination, wild eyed, grizzled, their clothes grimy and redolent of their desire to do her harm. This man gives off a slight, not quite masculine fragrance, yet it isn’t feminine…is it lavender, something like that, something sweet and spicy, something she has never experienced before, certainly never in a man. A man who wants to talk to her.

  She knows that this is a rare opportunity; she can become whoever she wants to be for him. He knows nothing about her, nothing about her history, he has never heard of Jeanne Larkin or Joan LeBeau or the giggly girls with their stupid athletic boyfriends. He knows nothing about her mother; and she understands that she must make herself the most different from her mother that she can imagine. She must convey an extraordinary original mind, unmoistened by sentimentality or ordinary received ideas.

  “What does it matter? He couldn’t have stopped anything happening. No artist could. By the time he painted this, all the people, all the animals, were smashed to smithereens. I wonder how much money he made off it. Now he gets a million dollars for drawing an apple on a napkin.”

  “So cynical for one so young.”

  “How do you know how old I am?”

  “I’m trying not to think about it.”

  “Well, let’s not,” she says. This, she knows, is called flirtation. How did it come to her? Perhaps it was always there, just waiting for a worthy recipient, like a tennis player who has never played because she knew no available opponent who would be worthy of her skills.

  “Might I invite you downstairs for a coffee? Or in my case, forgive the cliché of my birthplace, a cup of tea?”

  Her heart races. This is the first time anyone male has ever asked her for anything. She tries to look undecided, consults her watch.

  “Briefly,” she says, proud of her word choice. Accepting, but with an undercurrent of reluctance, the delicious spice of holding back.

  She asks him to bring her a coffee, black, which she doesn’t enjoy but seems sophisticated.

  He is drinking tea, with milk and sugar.

  “What brought you to the lecture,” he said, “since you are obviously not a worshipper at the shrine of Santo Pablo?”

  She would rather die than say, “My teacher wanted me to come.” She shrugs. “A friend gave me a ticket and I thought, why not?”

  “And what did you make of our Oxford don?”

  It is her turn now to present everything she’s learned from Edwina, from reading ARTNews, Artforum, which she subscribed to after Edwina left, everything she can get her hands on about Warhol and the Factory.

  “Well, I don’t think art should be political…I don’t think it should be anything. It’s just there to amuse. Warhol says the most important thing is to not be boring. And let’s be honest, how many of us aren’t just bored to death in museums, after about half an hour people are screaming inside, dying to get out. Because they are, simply, not amused. Warhol is always amusing. He makes you laugh at yourself when you’re being your most serious. He makes you stop pretending. That’s what a great artist should do: make you see when you were pretending, make you see what it is you really value.”

  “And what does he value?”

  “Money and fame, just like everyone.”

  “Is that what you value, Miss Red Riding Boots, whose name I don’t even know?”

  “Just like everyone,” she says. “Heidi,” she says. “Heidi is my name.”

  He laughs.

  “What a wonderfully ironic name for someone who is the opposite of that good little girl. I’ll bet you’ve always been a bad little girl, haven’t you?”

  “That’s what I’ve been told,” she says. It isn’t true; she was never called bad, only hideous, annoying, stuck-up.

  “And what about beauty? Because you know, of course, that you are a beauty. Not candy-box pretty, but a real beauty, a rare, challenging beauty, that the eye can never rest on but it hungers for more, for what is behind those piercing eyes, for the next words to come out of that fascinating little mouth. It’s a kind of beauty a boy would not be able to appreciate. Or even a young man. I pride myself on my connoisseurship.”

 
She is grateful that her skin is olive toned and doesn’t show a blush, because inwardly she is blushing furiously. The sentence she has always waited for. And she didn’t even have to ask; she didn’t have to do anything. It was given to her, a pure gift. He is the one she was always waiting for. He has called her beautiful. But she mustn’t allow him to think that it matters to her, must make him think it’s something she’s always had and doesn’t need to prize.

  “Beauty is something people want to believe in because they want something to believe in, because they’re afraid of not having anything to believe in. Beauty is what people will pay to be near.”

  “Oh, my dear…I think we have many things to say to each other…we can be the missing parts of each other’s education. I’ll tell you what, you take me to your favorite Warhol, and I’ll take you to my favorite. You’ll have to wait to find out who it is. That will be part of your education.”

  Education. Somewhere she had learned that the root of the word education was the Latin “to lead out.” He was leading her out of the trap, the prison of her life. The man who would tell her who she really was so she could at last truly know herself.

  “Why not?” she says. She believes that something very important, something that will change her life forever, is taking its first steps.

  “You first—ladies first, as they say. Only we can’t say ladies anymore, can we? It has to be women. And I guess you have no ambition to be a lady.”

  “You never know what my ambitions might be. I like to keep my options open.”

  “Ah, the luxuries of the young. I’m afraid my options are quite limited. And so when I see something quite wonderful, I don’t want to let it go.”

  He brushes his fingers along her cheek, and she feels an excitement unlike any other she has ever known. Is this sex? Sex—that has always seemed to her brutal and sweaty and overbearing. This is nothing like that.