Payback

by Mary Gordon

  * * *

  —

  The boss has given her extra hours, so she leaves, exhausted, but glad of the cash, at ten in the morning, much later than usual. She walks up Madison Avenue, heading north to Fifty-Ninth Street, where she will catch the subway on Broadway. In the window of a small, clearly expensive store, she sees a pair of old-fashioned wooden skis; she’s curious; she knows enough of the world of skiers to know that they now vie with each other for the newest, lightest equipment; she wonders why anyone would want such a relic, such a guarantee of slowness when speed was the most desirable, the only desirable, quality.

  At first, she thinks she’s just overtired; it’s a hallucination; it must be. But she stands, fixed in front of the window of Climb Ev’ry Mountain.

  Her mother. Liesel Haubrecht, not yet Stolz. Smiling triumphantly on her skis on a perfect ski slope: blond, trim, perfectly coiffed, her perfect outfit. My mother. My mother young and beautiful. Has she found me? My mother who never loved me. Whom I did not love.

  She tears herself away; she won’t look at it, she won’t go back. She walks away, and then cannot resist the return. Wooden skis. Wool pants and jackets; a sign: VINTAGE SKI WEAR…STAND OUT ON THE SLOPES.

  Climb Ev’ry Mountain. The spelling stolen from the musical her mother loves that she loathes. The Sound of Music. How her mother swooned. Austria, she would say, her eyes closed, her body swaying, how wonderful…the mountains, the blue skies.

  Her mother. In a window.

  Walk away. Keep walking. Don’t come back.

  She knows she must. But she’ll come back tomorrow.

  First, she’ll sleep to make sure it isn’t only an effect of the fatigue she lives with habitually. She wants to run away, never come back, but she’ll make herself come back when the store is open. She will talk to someone.

  Where did you get that picture? I need to talk to someone.

  Lawrence Stolz. Her brother. Who changed her life undoubtedly for the better. By hiring her to work in his store after they acknowledge each other as brother and sister. But did her the favor at the end of allowing her not to be grateful because he had cheated her, and had not had the courage to face the reality of his own death. She is grateful to him for sparing her the obligation of gratitude because gratitude is another one of those tricks that make a space for weakness. And at first, she had been grateful when he signed over to her the $50,000, which is what he tells her was left to her in their parents’ will…they had died in an avalanche—she wants to laugh, it’s so perfect. Only after his death will she learn that, in fact, he was the trustee and in the trust there is much more coming to her.

  But for some time, she was impressed. Oh, yes, Lawrence Stolz could be impressive. Lean, tan, not as tall as he seemed; the military posture added inches, the silver crew cut, the manicured nails. The harsh judgments barked out like the military commander he was—two years a Marine—“The way you live is ridiculous. Your neighborhood is a drug den. It’s a miracle you weren’t raped on the street.” (Oh, I was, my brother, but not on the street.) Not asking her why she ran away, why she cut herself off. “None of my business and I don’t want to know. Buy some new clothes. You look like an ex-nun or someone trying to pretend she’s not a dyke.” Sends her to Saks Fifth Avenue but offers her no money for a new wardrobe, as a brother in a romance might have done. “How much money do you have…people are afraid to be honest about money. I’ll be your guarantor for an apartment on the Upper East Side but don’t ever default on your rent or I’ll let you live in the street.”

  Which she feels she has to be grateful for…but she tells herself she would have come to it anyway: the one present he ever gave her, Atlas Shrugged. She reads it, and it is a revelation. The Virtue of Selfishness. To both of them a sacred text.

  But she doesn’t have to be grateful to Lawrence, he gave her the books but she went much, much farther than he did, and she never flinched from the demands of the philosophy; not once, not once to this day. Grateful to Leonard Peikoff, for their ideas, for their clarity in expressing them. That was a kind of gratitude that wasn’t weakening, that didn’t demand or even suggest abjection or abasement, that forbade abjection or abasement, that insisted that one praise, congratulate oneself for having had the sense, the courage, to look truth straight in the face, or to jump on the back of the galloping horse truth. What people called luck was just keeping your eyes open, hearing the horse’s hooves as it galloped by and having the guts to jump on its back and hold on. The weak either didn’t hear the hoofbeats or were afraid to jump on. So one didn’t, really, need to be grateful or concerned about the weak, just to appreciate one’s own strengths and demand the same of others. Why did people find that unacceptable? There was only one reason for it: they were weak. There’s no weakening involved, though, to be grateful to Ayn Rand, to Leonard Peikoff, whose lectures she attended with the devotion of an acolyte whose loyalty was a pledge for life.

  Every week at the Objectivist Center; she was not quite comfortable there, but she felt something she rarely felt: that this was a place worthy of her time, worthy of her attention. What a relief it was to see well-tailored, well-coiffed men and women, not eternal boys and girls, with hair down their backs and clothes that had no pretense even of being made to fit, draping, hanging, too concealing, or too revealing, shabby fabric, imprecise line covered up by a mania for everything excessive, not of use, but only to shout out its presence: fur, feathers, sequins, velvet. What the people at the Objectivist Center wore was a witness for their reverence to work well done, standards respected, adhered to, an awareness that novelty was mostly a cover-up for shoddiness. BESPOKE TAILORING. Sometimes she passed a store on Madison Avenue with that sign in the window, and she was sure that some of the people she sat among had suits that were bespoke: the word pleased her, suggesting, as it did, that the wearer had only to say the word and someone would be on their knees, measuring, asking for approval…begging, almost, to be allowed to do his work.

  She tried to dress more like the women…but she’d cut her hair boyishly short, and, to a woman, they seemed to favor long hair pinned up or back and lacquered. She didn’t want that; she didn’t like the heavy feeling of long hair; when she’d cut her braid off, she felt she was freeing herself from some old promise, some old vow. But she followed their lead religiously in the cut of their straight-skirted suits…worn just to the knee—or their sheath dresses…simple, classic…the colors they favored: claret red, kelly green, occasionally black, occasionally navy blue. When she bought her first pair of flesh-colored panty hose and patent leather pumps, she felt proud of her membership in an admirable cohort, not afraid to look out of sync with the times…knowing that their standards were the right ones: the ones that would not change, but would be always desirable, always correctly seen by the right eyes, through the right lens.

  And it was exhilarating to hear Leonard Peikoff cut through the nonsense that passed for standards about art and literature.

  Abstract, nonrepresentational painting…done away with in a thrust: “the dabblings of mediocrities who haven’t the talent or discipline to learn the artist’s craft”—Jackson Pollock, throwing paint…what is that put against the nobility of a Rembrandt, recording the best that an individual could be…and Beatnik poets and novelists…drug-addled minds chanting nonsense…mystical gobbledygook—worshipping the dregs, valorizing the worst, the least that man could be…not even a gesture toward the heroic, like a Byron, a Victor Hugo.

  She read every word that Ayn Rand wrote, every book, every article in The Objectivist Newsletter. There was only one road down which she couldn’t follow her: her insistence on the importance of passionate sexual love. Heidi thought that was a slip on the part of the master; were her own appetites so overwhelming that she couldn’t see the weakening power of sexual desire? Sex was only two things, she believed: an itch or the species’ instinct to reproduce itself. If the basi
c impulse of civilization was the impulse of trade—why engage in a trade that was so often muddled, unequal, unsatisfying? One day, she hoped, she would meet Ayn Rand, and they would discuss this…perhaps Miss Rand would thank her…or perhaps explain. For herself, she was proud of the trade that her taking it up the ass represented: clear, measurable…cold as coins dropped into a glass dish, clearly interpretable as the shutting of a safe door. She promises herself that when she has enough money there will be no more need for sex.

  What had she read before she read that wonderful book? Cheap mysteries. And, picked up on the streets: a complete Shakespeare, which she read almost to spite Mrs. Gould: See, I don’t need you; I can do it on my own.

  But she reads with a new avidity everything by Ayn Rand, and finds on her own—she didn’t need her brother for this, he didn’t even know about it, a series of lectures by Leonard Peikoff, philosopher, her mentor. She is excited by the largeness of his terms. She understands everything now; why she had been, all along, on the right track in thinking she needed no one, and that the dead years were dead because she had no system, no philosophy to organize herself, to propel herself to action. Now she knows: she has choice, she has will. That what she would make of herself had nothing to do with her family, her mother who cared nothing for her, her father who enslaved himself, her brother who was nothing better than an animal. She and Lawrence had got themselves out, not by luck, but by intelligence and will.

  * * *

  —

  She works for her brother; her salary is meager, she is making less than she did with legal proofreading, but she doesn’t have to be an asshole whore, and she likes commerce; trade, as Ayn Rand taught her, the basic human drive.

  She is good at spotting trends because she understands the herd instinct, and she reads high fashion magazines to sniff the air of what will be desired next. Lawrence is grudging in his praise. When it comes, she relishes it, but forces herself not to be too pleased.

  These are good years. For the first time she has friends, met at the Peikoff lectures and the Objectivist meetings. She has small drinks parties in her new apartment, for the first time buying furniture of which she is proud: sleek, modern objects without much cushioning; primary colors, a kitchen whose metals gleam like weapons.

  But it’s her own idea to move to Arizona, she doesn’t have to thank Lawrence for that. One of the friends from the lectures tells her it’s the new place, the Sunbelt, people don’t want to live in cold places anymore; he suggests she make a trip and check it out.

  There are no mountains in Arizona but there are people who still want to hike and trek and she scouts the minor cities: she is good at finding markets. She has invested her inheritance well, lived modestly, so doesn’t need Lawrence to bankroll her first venture in Sundale: Desertrek: outdoor gear and clothes—she studies and transfers her knowledge of the northeastern ski-based market to something hotter, drier…a clientele who like to pretend they love nature when what they really love is an image of themselves.

  Nineteen eighty-two. Ten years since her betrayal by Agnes Vaughan, five years of paralysis, of victimization, two at her brother’s side, but more important, at the feet of the master, Ayn Rand. The Virtue of Selfishness.

  Lawrence is angry that she’s leaving him. She uses his own arguments against him: nobody owes anybody anything, what is important is the self’s own happiness. He can’t object; but he is cold and does nothing to make her exit easier.

  His life has become very grand. The Reagan years: the glamorous ’80s. He has, behind the counter, a picture of Nancy Reagan, who came to the store to look at the vintage ski wear. Brought there by Lawrence’s new friend, Pat Buckley, wife of William F. Buckley Jr., whom everyone considers a genius, even she had worshipped him as a teenager…but it’s Pat, the great society hostess whom Lawrence adores; she enlists him as an escort for some of her friends whose husbands are too busy and too bored to take them to galas and charity functions, because, “darling Lawrence, unlike so many of my dearest friends you have that butch thing. Ex-Marine…divine.”

  Only once was Heidi introduced to Mrs. Buckley, who said to Lawrence in passing, “Pity she didn’t get your looks. It would be so much easier if she were decorative.”

  * * *

  —

  Heidi reminds her brother that she doesn’t really fit in with his new life, so he doesn’t fight very hard to keep her in the store; gives her her “inheritance,” which he said he was keeping and investing for her so she wouldn’t “throw it away.” Only later, when he is dead, does she realize that he has been siphoning off money from her trust fund, one he never told her about, of which he is the executor.

  Face up to it. He faced up to nothing. He died nothing but a sniveling coward, tended by other snivelers. Asking for her forgiveness. Which she was glad not to give. But to pretend to give: preferring her contempt for his being duped by the sentimental reproaches of his bedside weepers. And after all, she does owe him something: for the release from the need for any kind of gratitude for him. Contempt rather than gratitude. An infinitely better choice.

  None of this will she allow to be known. She has an alternate plan; she has created an alternate life. From that book that got all the attention. Patti Smith. Just Kids. Patti Smith and the degenerate Robert Mapplethorpe. The glamour of degradation. That is what she’ll provide: the exciting sniff of the degradation of glamour. Nothing about her life working as a dry cleaner, as a nighttime proofreader, as someone cheated by her deluded and ultimately pathetic brother. No: she’ll give them what they want.

  Reality TV.

  * * *

  —

  The doorbell rings; it’s the tech people. Rich can deal with it. It’s what he’s good at. It’s what he’s for.

  It’s crucial that she hit exactly the right tone with Valerie Singleton. She’s not going to be able to use the tone that she’s best known for: exigent, probing, sympathetic while refusing sympathy.

  It’s all about mothers.

  What people don’t get is that to be a success on TV it’s not sex anymore, not in the old way; it’s about mothers. People watch the kind of mother they want, what they never got or miss because it’s not there anymore. So Oprah’s people want the pillow mom, and Laura Ingraham’s want the mom so miserly with her praise you’d do anything for it, and it will be the only praise worth having.

  Sex. It was something that had never been a problem. After the first time, she knew she was done with it, it wasn’t for her. There were only two reasons for it: to scratch an itch or to procreate. Well, if the itch arose she could take care of that herself…and as for a child…the idea had sickened her from the time she was a child herself. What she had figured out even before she’d read Ayn Rand was that sex was something that was part of a trade. But once she’d made her own money, she had nothing to do with sex. What had it been…thirty-five years, maybe. She’d still been young. And so the rejection, willed and powerful, was a more enduring, more satisfying pleasure. The pleasure of distance.

  Like setting up camp on the top of a mountain. Cool, high, dry…the mountaintop, the company of swooping birds—eagles, hawks, ugly up close but thrilling from a distance, and what people didn’t understand was that distance made everything beautiful, distance was the secret to a satisfying life. Birds swooping and landing on the dry high perch.

  She’d kept an eye on New Canterbury, on the Lydia Farnsworth School, subscribed to the local paper, checked the school website. So she was ready. Now.

  She loves words like contempt and betrayal; words that are weapons that shock and wound.

  Contempt because in order to be on the air she has to pretend to believe in forgiveness, to hope for forgiveness…whereas she sees forgiveness as only weakness and weakening. It’s justice that makes you strong, but you have to be strong enough for justice. Almost no one is strong enough for justice, and if you are marked
forever by what someone does to you it is only justice that they should be marked forever. Forgiveness erases the mark.

  She went back, always, to what Ayn Rand had said about trade, that trade was the operative word, in human exchange. But how did you trade, how did you determine a just compensation? The years were unequal, when the mark had been branded on young flesh it was always deeper, the scar more prominent, and the older person had fewer years to live out his punishment. She mustn’t use that word punishment, she meant payback.

  Forgiveness was erasure, and why should the mark, the brand, be erased? “Just let it go”—that was one of those new age bullshit clichés…just let it go. But where? To what?

  Why should the mark be erased? Was it ever erased when the victim had been hobbled, disfigured, dwarfed by what had been done? There were always scars.

  What was simple justice people called revenge.

  She looks at the framed article on the wall, the image of herself she likes best. She is all in leather, in the pose of a karate attack—she had come up with the idea, Diana Rigg’s pose in the old British TV show The Avengers. The posture of protection: warning. The article in the Brimstone Gazette that was meant to be damning but in fact boosted her ratings to a higher level than they’d ever been. The headline, bold above her fierce, strong image: “The Revenger: Blah Blah Blah and Boo Hoo Hoo.”

  How it pleased her to think that she had come up with that mantra for herself, “Blah blah blah and boo hoo hoo,” called up, taken out when the victimizer tried to explain him or herself, tried to suggest that he too had suffered.

  * * *

  —

  She walks to the wall so she can have the pleasure of reading the article again. It was always a pleasure, more so because the reporter hadn’t liked her but she had got the best of him.