by Laura London
“Maybe the world didn’t eat a balanced breakfast.”
“That’s it. The four food groups…”
Silence reigned. She noticed his fist, trailing on the carpet fringe, clenching and unclenching.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she said finally.
“No. This may sound a little juvenile, but I want to tear the living room apart.”
“Would you mind starting with the recliner? It’s reminded me of a dentist’s chair since the day we brought it home.”
More silence. Then, through tight jaws, he said, “We’ve got that damned awards dinner tonight.”
It was no secret to her that he wasn’t looking forward to receiving the adulation of his peers. To him it meant the raising of a simple act of conviction into a glamorous sham. She thought, God, he’s complicated. All of a sudden she felt rather exhausted. Trying to stifle the peevish resentment that was nibbling in an embarrassing way at her temper, she went over to pick up the lamp, watching him light a cigarette, drinking the smoke as though it were a fluid. The way he held the cigarette cupped into his palm reminded her that, however pervasive the influence of his family had been, he had spent much of his adolescence in the company of some very tough folks.
“The awards dinner is your place in the sun,” she said. “You’ve earned it.”
“My place in the sun…” He repeated the phrase as though he was getting some private satisfaction from disliking it. “It came right out of your skin, didn’t it?” He sat up, regarding her with a straight look of startling brilliance. “Does some ephemeral honor make up for the days you’ve spent alone, for all the leaky faucets and broken garbage disposals and the terrible anxiety? Does it make up for the threatening letters?”
New life quickened her resentment. The last thing she needed was for him to have heard about the letters. “Who told you we got threatening letters?”
“My grandmother. It slipped out. Apparently she forgot I wasn’t supposed to know. So I phoned my father about it this afternoon. I can hardly believe you’ve been keeping something like that from me. What if something had happened to you? What if one of those maniacs who wrote those letters had decided to attack you? Do you know what I’ve been doing on the way home? Counting the ways someone could get into this house.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I slept with a bazooka.”
He just stared at her.
“Look, you know what a chicken I am,” she said. “Do you think I’d take any risks? Sandy wired the doors and windows with an intrusion warning device. You never saw it because I made him remove it when we heard you’d be out any day. And you will note he put deadbolts on the doors. Furthermore, there are neighbors on every side who knew what was happening, and the phones have one-touch dialing to the precinct number.”
He was standing, shaking his head, his fear turning over and over inside him. Quietly he said, “Someone could have been waiting for you in the garage.”
Her mind called up the image of those stark winter nights, hushed and frozen, when the darkness fell early; of herself driving alone and tired into the black crater of their garage.
“You could have been beaten.” The wide line of his lips had paled. “You could have been raped.”
He’d spent years as a court reporter, watching the shattered victims of assault give their heart-racking testimony on witness stands. Some nights he had come home harrowed, unable to make love to her. And she knew that the anger and blame that stood out tautly in his face was directed inward. But the lacerated heat of it seemed to flow from his eyes into her, and suddenly the weight was too much. She felt her own needs thrust against it, thrusting upward, rejecting it. For six months she had spent every waking moment in a terrible dread for his safety. Didn’t he realize that?
“You could have been raped!” The words spilled out of her.
His lips parted in a hiss of exhalation, and he gave her a surprised look and then started to laugh with bitter hilarity. “Don’t worry,” he said. “My virtue is intact.” He sat back down, his eyes closing. She could mark each breath by the uneven rise and fall of his chest. “My virtue is intact, if nothing else. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m not myself…” Jesus, he thought, what have I said to her? That she could have been raped in her garage. What a hideous thing to say to a woman.
He opened his eyes on her, standing icy-cold, straight as a rocket in her towel, the frigid rage in her horizon-blue gaze wrapping all of her in a kind of insistent dignity.
“It’s too bad something didn’t happen to me,” she said. “Then I’d be the one with the permission to act so shattered.”
She turned from him and ran upstairs, whacking the bedroom door closed behind her. The sound reverberated with a snap somewhere inside him; it was like being struck awake. He found himself admiring her exit, even as he regretted having been the cause of it. Smoking, hunching his shoulders back against the couch, he tried to bring some objectivity to the wreckage of his emotions. I’m acting like a kid, he thought. Why am I acting like a kid? What the world didn’t need was to stop revolving on its axis because he was tense.
“Christine, I’m sorry,” he shouted.
The bedroom door opened momentarily. “I don’t accept apologies that are bellowed up the stairs.”
In the bedroom he found her sitting in front of the mirror sticking hot curlers into her hair with shaking fingers. He leaned on the doorjamb.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She picked up a roller. One finger slipped from its spine into the hot inside and got burned. She dropped the curler, picked it up again, and rolled it furiously into her hair.
“Ouch. Damn. I don’t know what you’re apologizing for.”
“For dumping my day in your lap. For yelling at you about not telling me you were getting those letters. If the situation had been reversed, I wouldn’t have told you either.”
He got rid of his cigarette and stood watching her, becoming increasingly enchanted by the graceful domesticity of being alone with her like this in marital intimacy.
She was taking out the rollers when she said, “There’s something else, isn’t there? Besides the letters.”
“Work problems. Can we talk about it later?”
“That depends. Do you still want to tear the living room apart?”
As she lifted her hands to brush her hair, the light movement pressed her breasts upward to swell against the towel. The ends of her curls floated on her bare shoulders, and he imagined how they would feel against his face.
“No. I want to tear the towel away from your body.”
She put her elbow on the dresser and stuck her chin into her palms. “I should roll my hair more often.”
“It must be my proletarian upbringing. A woman in hair rollers does something to my libido.”
Watching him cross the room slowly toward her, she took a long keen breath and said, “My mother always did say that if you were going to let a man see you in curlers, you might as well invite him into your bedroom.”
His hands fell on the towel, gently gripping it, gently lowering it. “Then,” he said, “we don’t want to disappoint Mother.”
* * *
The Milwaukee Press Club had always intrigued Christine. It had an atmosphere of worn gentility, the rooms shabby and aging but cozy, like a second-rate men’s club fallen on hard times. Jesse said it reminded him of the visiting parlor in a rest home for destitute English lords. Green chalkboards covered the walls, with their marvelous dated autographs of past visitors: “Charles Lindbergh Aug. 20th, 1927”; “Lillian Russell 2/8/1916”; “Woodrow Wilson 17 Nov. 1910”; “Walter Cronkite April 13, 1975.” Scattered in strategic places between the chalkboards were bulletin boards bearing the house rules and long lists of club members who were behind in their dues. Defiantly anachronistic and rarely polished brass spittoons were scattered here and there on the darkly patterned carpeting, mercifully holding nothing more revolting than an occasional gum wrapper.
The rooms were packed for the awards dinner and bubbled with the sounds of friendly argument and hearty drinking. Streamers of pipe and cigarette smoke hovered at eye level like an acrid early morning mist. Jesse and Christine paused in the entrance hall, taking off their coats. He eyed the list of delinquent dues payers that fluttered there and saw his own name. “Gimme a break.” He gestured at the list in exasperation. “Don’t they read the papers around here? I’ve been in jail!”
Leaving Chris visiting with the Journal dance critic, he went off to bring himself up to date with old Louie, the manager, who wore a green eyeshade. The small, untidy office was empty and he was wondering whether to wait a minute when Angela Currie whisked into the room behind him. Before he could avoid it, she slid her arms around his neck and kissed him.
“Congratulations!” she said.
He disengaged himself quickly. It was clear she had more on her mind that congratulating him on the award he was going to receive. The kiss had been serious, and she had closed the office door—and she had tried this once before. She was the news director for the city’s largest AM radio station, and he had been booked into a room in the same hotel as she had when they were covering the state Republican convention last year. She had asked him to come to her room on the pretense of a jammed suitcase, and while he’d been suspicious, he’d gone because she was probably telling the truth, and what if she was and he didn’t help her? There was a formal reception in two hours that the press had been invited to attend. Taken again. There had been no jammed suitcase and, as soon as he was in the room, she’d put herself into his arms and lifted his hand to her breast.
It was a very nice breast, but it had done absolutely nothing for him, beyond the faint surprise that people actually did things like that in real life. Now, looking through the transparent chiffon dress that was tilting off her shoulders, he was experiencing the feeling of a kid munching popcorn in the front row of a movie theater and going “ugh” when people kissed. Strange flesh.
“Am I a scalp to you, or what?” he asked.
She looked up at him with dark, delicious eyes. “When you say things like that, it makes me wonder whether you know how attractive you are. We’re adults, right? Please take that moralistic look off your face; I’m not doing this because I’m out to get Christine. This has nothing to do with her. I only wanted you to know that I realize you’re going through a high stress time, and if you’re having trouble with Christine, I’m willing to be company. If you look on that as cheap sex, fine. I think that’s nonsense, but I can handle it.”
He felt a flicker of amusement as he thought, The trouble I’m having with Chris now is nothing compared to the trouble I’d be having with her if I laid you, kiddo. “Angie, think about it a minute. Am I shy?”
She didn’t need a minute. “No.”
“That’s right, I’m not. So I don’t have to be nudged into anything. I don’t want to, and that’s not going to change. I love Chris. She’s the only woman I desire. And even if she weren’t, I wouldn’t do anything behind her back. You know what else? You’re too smart to go around being outside action for some married guy.”
She slung her long black hair with impatient disappointment and a dark-eyed hurt that she did a credible job of disguising under a faint wry grin.
“Well, all right,” she said. “Man of steel. I leave for the last time with my tail between my legs. Tell me one thing. Does she realize what she’s got in you?”
He was spared giving an answer by Christine, who walked straight in and gave them both a startled look. Angela stared back with reddened cheeks and brushed past her.
Christine watched the lovely retreating figure and then turned back to Jesse. “Now what? The old suitcase trick?”
“Yep.”
“Honest to Pete.” She grabbed a Kleenex from the box on the desk and began to scrub the wine-toned lip gloss off his mouth. “That woman. I’m going to have to get you a can of Mace.”
They both expected to be upset by the incident. Instead it pulled them closer. He had been honest; she had had complete faith. The base of love they had made together was working.
In the club room they were met with a burst of greetings and gaiety. Drinks were waiting for them on the bar and Jesse stood with his arm on her shoulder and a scotch in his hand as they were surrounded by well-wishers. Shoptalk and affable gossip moved into teasing. In half an hour everyone within a twenty-foot radius was engrossed in a humorous argument about whether the nude should go. Jesse had sportingly ranged himself on the side of the feminists, who wanted to take it down. The man had a penchant for losing battles. Christine left for the powder room just as someone was proposing keeping the young lady and adding a male nude on the opposite wall.
When she found herself combing her hair in the mirror with Angela Currie and the anchorwoman from channel nine news, she was almost relieved to get this first meeting over with. Her color was high. So was Angela’s as she said, “He tells you everything, doesn’t he?”
“No. But he tries to.”
Angela snapped her purse closed and looked directly at her. “I think he’s a wonderful man.” Tightly she added, “You don’t have to worry about me.”
For once, Christine was grateful for her mother’s training, which enabled her to have the gallantry not to say, “I wasn’t.”
She was on her way back to Jesse when his editor, Phil Jackson, separated himself from the snarl of news-people by the piano. During Jesse’s months of confinement, she had grown close to Phil in shared anxiety, and she returned his quick bear hug with pleasure. She was fond of him, in spite of what Jesse said about Phil’s more-Lou-Grant-than-thou attitude.
There was one more wrinkle than usual in Phil’s brow as he said, “I just got here, so I haven’t seen Jesse yet. How is he?”
Concern was written all over him. Christine’s antennae went up. “He’s fine, Phil,” she said cautiously.
He was trying unsuccessfully to get his pipe started, puffing vigorously. “Thank God for that. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that he found out today. I didn’t want to tell him at least until after the awards, but you know how he is. He got sick of hearing no, and I couldn’t put him off any longer.”
Tell him what? Work problems, she thought. Obviously it had been bad news. Surely they wouldn’t have fired him. Salary cut? The paper was going under? Abstractedly she said, “I’m sure he understood.”
Jackson put up his eyebrows and stuck his lighter back into the pipe. “You think so?” he said glumly. “He threw a paperweight through my window. Well”—he sighed—“tonight will help.”
At the banquet, anyone watching would have thought that, indeed, it was helping, but Christine knew Jesse’s company manners when she saw them. He was uncomfortable. As the speeches singing his praises began, she put a hand on his arm and found that his forearm was rigidly tight.
Her gaze wandered back to the podium and above, to the elaborately carved wall niche above the speaker where the club mascot and namesake of Jesse’s award reposed. The Sacred Cat. It was the press club’s highest honor and it had gone in the past to some of the most illustrious names in journalism. The cat itself was the leathery remains of a once-living creature frozen in an animated posture, one paw upraised dramatically, yellow glass eyes glittering. To ask a club member why such a grisly object had been chosen as the club’s symbol was to be told the story of how the poor creature’s mummified remains had been discovered inside a hollow wall of the old press club after it had burned down at the turn of the century. “Yes,” you could say, “but why was it chosen as the club’s symbol?” And all you would hear was a repeat of the same story
of how the cat had been found when they tore down the old clubhouse. Somewhere down the line the cat had been wired for sound—a speaker inside the mummy was attached to a mike in the manager’s office, and old Louie with the green eyeshade would make it talk or sing or exhort the members to pay their dues. Jesse told her she shouldn’t waste her time figuring it out. Journalists often had a streak of warped humor.
The speeches continued, and she could almost hear Jesse thinking that words and phrases like courage, sacrifice, and upholding the great tradition of a free press were going for a dime a dozen. But she was beginning to bathe in the applause, the tributes to Jesse’s integrity, the frequent mention of herself—except that it was a long time to be under all eyes and to try not to drip anything on herself or scratch her head. Or to cry, when Phil Jackson presented Jesse’s award with an emotional speech and wet eyes.
Afterward she walked to the car with Jesse through the warm, muggy night. The starlings were calling.
“What a circus,” Jesse said. But his inflection was more affectionate than sarcastic. Christine felt herself relax. City lights faded the sky to the color of maple syrup. The streets were almost free of traffic at this hour in this part of the city, and the shop awnings flapped in a damp, peppery lake breeze. In the quiet, Christine heard the distant clank and muffled chugging of the Milwaukee Road rail yards, which never slept. She reached in her purse for the car keys and felt the Sacred Cat award, cold and solid in her purse in its wrapping of tissue paper.
Jesse reached for a cigarette from his pack. Hello, crutch. Intercepting a wifely glance from Christine, he said, “I need it.”
She put her hand to her jaw, rubbing muscles that ached from smiling. “You think you need it.”
He stopped and replaced her fingers with his own, running his fingertips lightly up and down her jaw in a soft massage, smiling. “Is that any way to talk to a hero? Didn’t you listen to the speeches? I can do no wrong.”
She pulled his arm behind her shoulder and began to walk again, holding his long straight fingers in her hands, polishing his wedding band with her fingertip. How she loved him—this entrancing Don Quixote of a man who thought he was nothing special for living to his principles. She remembered suddenly the many times and small ways she had tried to protect him. Not once had it been necessary. His spirit had sunlight all through it. The moods and the temper that chewed things to bits were nothing, the surface aftershocks of fatigue. Jesse, I understand now. I’d only forgotten in six months how very strong you are. Her fingers tightened on his.