by Susan Isaacs
“Jane, listen to me. I’m a logical person.”
“And it’s not logical for me to feel this way.”
“No, it’s not. He likes you. You’re a friend to him. No more. You’ve told me so yourself, over and over and over. You simply have to accept him as a friend or, if it’s too painful, cut if off. Stop seeing him now that Hamlet’s over.”
“I can’t. Oh, God, I can’t.”
“Stop it. You can.”
“No, I can’t. You have Matt. You know what it’s like to have someone who’s the center of your life.”
Jane’s hair was loose, and Amelia stroked it as if she were soothing a distraught animal. “Easy, easy. Now I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Matt is my fiancé. But this boy isn’t the center of your life.”
“He is.”
“He is not. You don’t have a center, Jane. Don’t you understand? You haven’t been home to see your family in—what, three years? You spend vacations with me or Peg or Debby, and then you work every summer. And now it’s senior year and things are changing. All your friends are about to get engaged and married or go to graduate school, and you’re scared. Things didn’t work out with Peter last summer, so you don’t have a boyfriend, and—”
“He spent all July trying to get me to go to bed with him like it was some sort of military campaign, and then—”
“And then he hooked up with that girl from BU. Well, I wouldn’t have expected more from him and you shouldn’t have either. But that’s another story. Meantime, you’re twenty years old, rapidly approaching twenty-one, and you’re suddenly realizing that whether you go to Yale Drama or New York, you’re going to go alone. It’s frightening, I’m not saying it isn’t. But face it. Don’t get all wrapped up in some dream world.” Amelia hugged Jane. “This boy is smooth and good-looking and nice as hell. And I’m telling you, if you let him know how you feel about him, all that decency you keep raving about is going to disappear and he’ll look at you like you just made poo-poo on his shoes. Believe me. He wants some girl just as nice and rich and cool as he is, and they’re going to have nice, rich, cool babies and send them to private schools that are so snooty they wouldn’t even let us work in the kitchen. You know what they’re like.”
“Amelia, he’s not like anyone else. I swear.”
“Jane, don’t do this to yourself. He’s not worth it.”
“Oh, Amelia, you’re wrong. He is.”
At the end of his junior year, soon after Nicholas and Diana Howard were pinned, they laughingly decided something was wrong. They were so well-matched they should hate each other.
They were both from Manhattan families—their mothers had actually gone to school together—and they felt the same conflict: they loved what the city had to offer but really preferred country life. Diana claimed an ideal world would be one where three days a week she could spend afternoons going to museums and matinees, evenings at great French restaurants, nights at the ballet. “And the other four days, to be magically transported to some tiny little house in the woods, reading, working in my garden, going for walks. And you’re going to tell me that’s impossible.”
“Well,” Nicholas had said, “how about highly unlikely? Magical transport is a little beyond the average Wall Street lawyer.”
“No, it’s not, Nick,” she’d whispered, and then she’d kissed him.
Both preferred theater to opera, tennis to golf, England to France and Italy—neither had a flair for languages—pancakes to waffles and intercourse to foreplay. Rather than being bored, they found pleasure in sharing their thoughts with someone as receptive and congenial as the other. And because they were so exquisitely attuned, their first serious disagreement upset them.
“You’re acting as if I told you I was going to commit murder.” Nicholas stood and drew on his undershorts. He did not want to lie next to Diana, and he could not talk naked. Diana’s back rested against the headboard of the hotel bed. Her lower lip was thrust forward, more a sign of despondence than a pout. She clenched the sheet that covered her. “All I’m going to do is try out for a part in another play.”
“It’s the lead in the play.”
“So what?”
“Oh, Nick, come on. Once it’s fun. Twice is something else.”
“It’s not. Look, this is my last year of college, my last year to let loose before—Christ!—before a whole life of responsibilities, and I don’t see why you’re so—so emotional.”
“Me, emotional? Nicholas Cobleigh, listen to your voice.”
It was an October Saturday. He’d met Diana at the train and taken her to the football game, where they’d sat with a group of his fraternity brothers and the girls they were pinned to, drinking beer, laughing, not caring very much when Brown lost badly to Harvard. After the game the couples drifted off, the boys with girl friends from out-of-town schools escorting them to the Biltmore in downtown Providence, where the girls could change into dresses for the night’s fraternity dance and, in many cases, draw their boyfriends onto the high single beds for a few hours of luxurious private sex.
Diana’s short brown hair had been mussed by their grappling, and it curled into a cap of ringlets. Her face was round, her features dainty, her skin white and pink. She looked like one of his sisters’ dolls. To her right, on the nightstand, something caught his eye: his used condom. Its wrinkled, white, translucent skin made it look like a big dead worm. He took it into the bathroom, flushed it down the toilet, then came back and sat on the edge of the bed. Diana lowered her eyes. Nicholas put his forefinger under her small chin and lifted it until she was forced to look at him. He knew the gesture was false and cinematic, but he also knew it would work. “Don’t be angry,” he said.
“I’m not angry. But this semester counts for law school. You know that. It could mean the difference between Columbia and someplace else. And it seems so frivolous to me to risk your future just to act in some silly college play, a bedroom farce. Not even something serious.”
“I’m not risking my future.”
“You are. You know how much time the Hamlet took.”
“Would you feel better if I promised you it won’t affect my grades?”
“Nick!”
“It won’t. Come on, Diana. I probably won’t make it anyway. Ninety-nine percent chance I’ll get thrown out on my rear at the first audition.”
“I don’t see what attracts you about it.”
“It’s fun. It’s a diversion.”
“Do you like the people?”
“Yes. They’re nice.”
“They seemed artsy to me.”
“Not really. A couple of them are—well, theatrical, and they tend to be a little clannish at first, but once you get past that, they’re a really good group. And they’ve been very friendly to me.”
“Because you had a sponsor.”
“What do you mean?”
“That girl.”
“Jane? She’s not my sponsor. She just helped me with my lines.”
“And I’m sure she’ll be more than happy to help you with your lines again.” Diana had blue eyes with long, curly brown lashes—baby-doll eyes—and when she blinked Nicholas realized she was a moment away from tears.
“Diana, are you serious? Do you really think it’s Jane who’s keeping me involved with Sock and Buskin? I can’t believe it. You’ve met her, for God’s sake. Does she look like a threat to you? Does she?” Diana shrugged. “Jane Heissenhuber. Femme fatale.” He reached out and smoothed the skin on her throat and chest. “Is that how you see her, the kind of girl who drives men mad?”
Diana smiled. “Oh, Nick.”
“Did you notice my heart pound when we ran into her? Did you see my knees start to shake?” Diana pressed her cheek against his chest. “She’s a nice, good-natured girl,” Nicholas said, as he tousled Diana’s curls. “And that,” he added, bending to kiss her forehead, “is that.”
Although she had never gotte
n a rush, Jane had dated a fair number of boys from the time she arrived at Pembroke, although only three of them had really meant anything to her. In her sophomore year she’d dated Bob Curtis, a senior who was a fraternity brother of Nicholas’s. He was a tall, suave boy from New Jersey with thin hair who dressed a little too well and drank a little too much, but for a while he wowed Jane by sending flowers to her dorm and tracing the outline of her lips with the tip of his finger. He did little more than that, and by June, when he graduated, she knew him no better than she had in November. She saw him once after the summer. He was working as a junior account executive for an advertising agency in New York, and he came up to Providence for Homecoming weekend, but it had gone badly—he’d gotten drunk, thrown up in the restaurant, then fallen asleep on a couch in the Alpha Delta Phi house, and Jane had walked back to Pembroke alone. He never called again, and she was neither surprised nor really sorry.
She met her second boyfriend a few weeks after that. His name was Steve Breslau and he was a lab partner of Amelia’s boyfriend, Matt. She had never met a boy as sweet as he. If a day came that he had too much work to see her, he would call to find out how she was. He came to rehearsals and embarrassed and delighted her by applauding her performance. He bought her the Sunday papers each week, saying they were part of the Saturday night date. Although he obviously wanted more, he accepted her drawing the line at her waist and for four months contented himself with kissing her and caressing her breasts. He was attractive in a pale, long-faced, absentminded way, and although he himself was a little somber, he appreciated humor in others. They might have gone on to pinning, engagement, and marriage, but he was Jewish and his parents objected to his dating a Protestant girl and made him break it off. Steve cried when he told her his parents’ edict. Jane did not, and told him she understood, which she did not.
She’d known Peter Mackie from her first month at college, although she did not date him until April of her junior year. He was a year older than she, and one of the luminaries of Sock and Buskin. She played Amanda to his Elyot in Private Lives and they carried their bantering, bickering, and teasing straight through the performance into real life. Jane said “I adore you” to his “Aren’t you marvelous?” and she did. She followed him to Williamstown that summer and, although she could not afford a job with the theater—she needed to earn enough for the books, clothing, and pocket money her scholarship did not cover—she saw him daily. He was assistant stage manager for A Streetcar Named Desire. Within days he turned from sophisticate to animal. Each night, he strode into her room behind the motel where she was working as a chambermaid, pushed her onto the bed, and tore at her blouse and brassiere, grabbing and sucking hard on her breasts as if it were the way to draw all resistance out of her. She allowed that, and allowed him to take off his clothes and come on her, but she fought him each night as he tried to take off her slacks, even though he warned her that her teasing would drive him away. After more than a month, she decided to give in and told him so, but he yanked at the recalcitrant zipper of her slacks so hard it frightened her. Shuddering, she told him no. He left her and, that same night, found himself another girl.
Jane was thoughtful but not analytical. She had teasingly told Steve Breslau that she was frigid and he had smiled, but his disbelief did not reassure her. She knew she had never been left breathless. She knew that saying no took everything some girls had, but it was easy for her. In truth, she was not tempted. But she never allowed herself to ask why. She certainly never permitted herself to connect the horror and titillation of her father’s touches to her surfeit of control. In fact, she rarely thought of her father at all; she had not seen him since Christmas of her freshman year. And she never considered that the years spent under Dorothy’s censorious eye had turned her into her own harshest critic, the keen observer who knew precisely how unattractive her broad shoulders and long nose were, how unappealing her heavy thighs, how cheap-looking her big breasts—and how Bob, Steve, and Peter were all somewhat unmanned in her eyes for being blind to or tolerant of these and all her flaws.
But another force had shaped her also. She hardly ever thought of Sally any more, but in their three years together her mother had given her the best she had. There was enough Sally in Jane to soften her, to make her affectionate and kind and tolerant. There was enough of Sally’s skepticism and optimism to give Jane her honesty and her humor. And there was enough of Sally’s hot stuff aglow in the deepest part of Jane that she could yearn for Nicholas. She’d lie beside him on a chaise longue during rehearsals and, while he planted tiny kisses on her hand and called her “My dear, my darling Miss Whittleby,” she’d half imagine the lights were out, his kisses were on her mouth, his shirt was off—as in Hamlet—and her hands were stroking his beautiful, muscular back.
It was not until the day before technical rehearsal for The Other Sister that Nicholas bothered to consider that Jane had a life outside Sock and Buskin. A few days after they met, he’d spotted her at the counter in the Brown Jug eating a hamburger, hunched over class notes, a pencil stuck through the top plait of her braid. He’d nearly gone over, but she was studying so intently he was afraid to disturb her; also, he’d just come from Walgreen’s, where he’d bought athlete’s foot ointment and a foam vaginal contraceptive Diana was too self-conscious to buy for herself, and he did not want to speak to anyone while his private life dangled before him in a paper bag. His times with Jane were fun, but they were theater business: at formal rehearsals, or when they’d meet in one of the small rooms backstage or in the makeout room of his fraternity house, the only places she could help him with his lines and they could go over their scenes together without interruption.
But the day before the technical rehearsal he’d been walking across campus on the way to lacrosse practice, wrapped in a fog of self-absorption, imagining the hoots from his friends when he walked out on stage in complete hunting regalia, including scarlet frock coat and tight white breeches, for his first scene. From there, it was easy to imagine forgetting his lines, standing dumbstruck while Diana squirmed for him. “‘Mathilda Whittleby has fallen from her horse onto her nose,’” he proclaimed softly, to reassure himself, and just then Jane walked by, hand in hand with the handsomest boy he’d ever seen.
She was laughing hard, her head thrown back, her forehead and cheeks flushed, having such a good time and so absorbed in the boy she didn’t even notice him. Nicholas stared. The boy obviously didn’t go to Brown; he could never be overlooked. He was taller than Jane, probably six feet or so, and carried himself like a magazine model—his trenchcoat thrown over his shoulder, his strong chin a quarter inch higher than was natural, so the rest of his awesome features could be seen to perfection. But he didn’t look phony because he was obviously what magazine models aspire to be: physically flawless and completely self-assured. Nicholas turned as they passed. The boy had begun laughing and gave Jane a playful punch in the shoulder, never letting go of her hand. Jane reached in front of the boy, grabbed the hand that had punched her, and aimed the boy’s fist at himself, as if helping him punch himself in the face.
Nicholas discovered he was squeezing the hard rubber lacrosse ball he was carrying. He loosened his grip. He wasn’t sure what he felt, but if he had to put a name to it he would have said annoyed. He’d seen Jane nearly every afternoon since he’d agreed to play Fortinbras. He’d felt easy with her and thought they were on the way to being friends. He liked the idea, because he’d really never been friends with a girl and looked forward to it, because Jane was just the sort of person he admired, a sort of female Charlie Harrison; she was smart—smarter than he—good-natured, and fun. Sassy, teasing him that he trained his hair to flop over his forehead so he’d look boyish (not true), that he used his eyes as a weapon to stun girls into submission (he wasn’t sure), that part of the reason he wanted to act was that it shocked people close to him who expected him to do only what was conventional (true). “It’s as if you joined a bowling league instead of playing whatev
er that game is you play—the one with the stick that looks like a petrified butterfly net.”
“Lacrosse.”
“Acting isn’t for people like you. It’s a public admission that you’re not a responsible citizen.”
“I am a responsible citizen.”
“No, you’re not. First you say you’re for Kennedy—”
“Nixon wears his tie in a Windsor knot.”
“You really aren’t responsible.”
“Yes, I am. A Windsor knot is a symbol. He’s sleazy.”
“But to tell them you wouldn’t vote Republican, even though you know that supporting a Democrat—that’s practically admitting to treason. And on top of that you say you want to act in a play. You’re leaving yourself wide open. They’ll kick you out of the Power Elite. Go ahead and laugh, but it’s true. If you had any brains, you’d act under an assumed name. When they check your background for the Supreme Court, do you think they’ll believe this was just a youthful indiscretion?”
But despite her intelligence, she’d seemed completely guileless. Yet she never mentioned to him that she was going with someone, even though he’d told her more than he’d planned to about Diana, that although he wanted to marry Diana he didn’t think he’d be ready by summer, which was the time Diana seemed to have in mind. They were on their way back to Jane’s dorm after a particularly late rehearsal, and when he told her that she’d stumbled over a small rise in the pavement. “Sorry,” she muttered.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t you think I should get at least a year or two of law school under my belt?”
“Oh, Nicholas,” she’d said, her voice high with emotion. “Diana loves you.”