by Alison Lurie
“You never heard that,” she said.
“I — No. But let’s say I had my suspicions.” He put down his cup.
“So you think it could be true.” And if it is, she thought, Mac wasn’t lying.
Lennie hesitated. “I think it’s a possibility. The last time we met I definitely had the idea she was on something.”
“But if it’s so, maybe that was why —” Polly said. “I mean, if her mind was confused — she needn’t have wanted to die. And nobody really cared, nobody tried to help her. It was such a waste!” she cried out suddenly, causing other people in the cafeteria to look around.
“Yes, you could say that.” He nodded.
“With all her talent —” Polly tried to control her voice. “Such a damn stupid waste. It makes me so angry, that’s all.”
“Yes. Me too.” Lennie sighed heavily. “But then, we’re both angry people.” He smiled intimately at Polly.
It’s true, she thought, meeting his sharp direct gaze. And probably it goes back to childhood, the way most things do. Both of us stepchildren, with younger siblings everyone preferred to us. My father ran out on me and started another family; so did yours. It’s you I’m like, not Lorin. For a moment she looked at Lennie not as an opponent and a research problem, but as an ally, a possible friend. No. She mustn’t fall into that trap again.
“I suppose that’s a matter of opinion,” she said irrelevantly.
Lennie’s expression changed. “Like everything else,” he said. He leaned back and resumed his normal expression, a slight ironic smile. “Well. And are you going to reveal in your biography that my sister took drugs?”
“I don’t know,” Polly admitted, suddenly weary. Jeanne’s idea was that if Hugh Cameron hadn’t simply invented Lorin’s drug habit, he had probably been responsible for it. But could he have lied so coolly, and in such circumstances? Unbidden, a picture came into Polly’s head, of an empty half-finished house in Key West; of Mac’s face as he leaned toward her in the hot shadowy light. She blinked furiously, blinking it away.
“I told you you might find out too much,” Lennie said, looking at her. “That’s the problem with any book, of course. Your kind and mine anyhow. The less you know, the easier it is to write.”
He waited a moment; then, receiving no reply, pushed his cup away and crumpled his paper napkin. “Well, I guess I should be getting back to my office. But I tell you what, why don’t you come with me?”
“Well —” Polly hesitated.
“If she’s around, I’ll have my scatty little secretary make you a decent cup of coffee. I can see you didn’t care for what they brew here.” He gestured at the mug of dirty-looking lukewarm milk.
But the chauvinist remark had roused her to consciousness. “Thanks; but I can’t,” she said flatly. “I’ve got too many errands.”
On a soggy, snowy afternoon a few days later, Polly unlocked the door of her apartment and slogged in, heavy-booted and laden with parcels. “Hi!” she called.
“Hello there,” Jeanne answered from the sofa, which she had as usual converted into a kind of nest lined with pillows and magazines and student papers; with her pink cable-knit cardigan, her needlepoint and colored wools, her filter-tip cigarettes, and her favorite china ashtray in the shape of a scalloped heart.
“Hey, welcome home!” It was Betsy’s voice, childishly high and eager, but at first Polly couldn’t see where it was coming from. Then she realized that Jeanne’s girlfriend was lying on the carpet by the sofa in a yoga position. Her ass was propped on her hands; her long legs, in lavender sweat pants, were flopped back over her head, so that she looked up at Polly from between thin freckled ankles and white knobby feet.
“How’s everything?” Polly dropped her packages and bent over the sofa; but Jeanne, unexpectedly, did not turn her cheek for the usual kiss, or raise her eyes from a line of tiny zigzag stitches in bright green wool.
“All right,” she said in a manner that instantly informed Polly it wasn’t.
“So what happened about the apartment on Twenty-third Street?”
“We didn’t get it,” Betsy volunteered upside down.
“Oh, hell. That’s too bad,” Polly said, thinking that this must be their fifth or sixth housing fiasco since she’d returned from Key West. Either the places Jeanne and Betsy heard of turned out to be impossible, or they were no longer available. As might have been expected, Betsy’s abusive husband had refused to move out of the apartment in Brooklyn Heights. He wouldn’t even talk to Betsy’s lawyer; his position now was that she was having an emotional crisis and ought to see a therapist, recover, and return to him.
The trouble was, Stevie was coming home next week. Jeanne and Betsy would be away then: they were spending the holidays in a women’s commune in Vermont. But if they hadn’t found another place yet, where would they live when they got back?
If Stevie stayed in Denver, which looked more and more miserably likely, they would probably expect to go on living here. Polly wouldn’t have any reason to turn them out, though she would have liked to.
Or rather, she would have liked to turn Betsy out. Now that her classes were over, Betsy was around all the time. She seemed to take up more and more room in the apartment, and get younger and more helpless every day; look at her now, rolling around on the carpet like an overgrown child.
“There were... a couple ... of calls ... for you,” Betsy volunteered, breathing noisily between words in a yogic way and pointing her long white bony feet at the ceiling as if the calls had come from there.
“Yes. Garrett Jones phoned,” Jeanne remarked tightly, pulling a length of green tapestry wool through the canvas. “He said to tell you he’s sending those photographs you wanted.”
“Oh, good.” Polly unfastened her duffel coat. Obviously her friend was not only disappointed about the apartment on Twenty-third Street, but seriously miffed about something; what?
“And you had another call from that man in Key West,” Jeanne added, in a tone that answered the question.
“Yes?” Something inside Polly’s chest rose in a kind of excited hiccup, but she swallowed it down. It was over between her and Mac — it was only her weakness, her vanity that twitched to this news, that wanted to hear him say, one more time, So when are you coming back to Key West? (“You let me know before Christmas, and I’ll tell Tony not to rent my house in January after these tenants leave,” he had added when they last spoke.)
“It was about ten minutes ago,” Betsy offered helpfully, moving her legs in a scissors pattern.
Damn, Polly thought. “And what did he say?”
“I d’know,” Betsy said, breathing and scissoring. “Jeanne talked to him.”
“He left a message, would you phone him again tonight after eight. Again.” Jeanne underlined the word with her voice.
“For God’s sake,” Polly exclaimed. “You don’t need to look at me like that. I only called him once.” And only because I had to let him know what I’d told Lennie about the paintings, she added to herself — not aloud, for Jeanne knew nothing of this rash lie.
“I think you should call him again,” Jeanne said. “I think you should ask him to please stop phoning here, because you’re not interested in speaking to him.”
“I can’t do that. He might have remembered something useful to tell me; he might even have changed his mind about lending those canvases for the show.”
“If that’s really so, he can always write a letter,” Betsy said. “You could tell him that.”
“I suppose I could,” Polly conceded, looking at Betsy, who was now awkwardly pedaling an imaginary bicycle upside down. If it were a real one and right-side up, she would fall off and hurt herself.
“I wish you would,” Jeanne said. “You know it really upsets me, having to speak to someone like that. Someone who took advantage of you that way, when you were so vulnerable.”
“I know.”
“I should think it would be even more unpleasant for you.”
Not wanting to lie, Polly made no comment.
“Anyhow, let’s forget about that creep for a while,” Jeanne said in a different, warmer voice. “Come and show us what you found at Macy’s.” She shifted her papers to the coffee table to make room, and patted the sofa beside her, ready now to hear of Polly’s struggle with the grizzling gray weather and the jammed stores and buses, and to give her an affectionate hug.
“Just a second; I’ve got to stop in the bathroom.”
Polly headed down the hall; but on reaching her destination, instead of lifting the lid of the toilet, she sat down on it and began, very slowly, to pull off her boots.
Yes, it ought to be unpleasant for her to speak to Mac, she thought. She ought to want to put all that behind her. But she still couldn’t forget the way he looked, the way his body had felt, the way he had moved, the flat cubist breadth of his chest, his long hard legs, his long square-tipped fingers. Worst of all, she kept thinking of his cock: its length, its strawberry-vanilla hue, its slight upward curve.
After two weeks, she ought to be getting over this. She was getting over it, really; in a few months she might forget the whole thing, as she had said to Jeanne only yesterday. “Of course you will,” Jeanne had agreed. “Probably even sooner.”
But not everyone they knew was of the same opinion. Ida and Cathy, for instance, thought differently. When Jeanne told them about Polly’s adventures in Key West they hadn’t been encouraging. Not knowing that she was being overheard, Ida had said she wasn’t convinced it had been a temporary aberration, a last bout of fever. “Polly hasn’t got it out of her system, dear, and she’s not going to get it out of her system,” Ida had pronounced. “It is her system.” And Cathy had remarked that the sad truth was, you could never really depend on a bisexual.
Ida and Cathy were wrong, Polly told herself, lifting the lid of the toilet, for which Jeanne had recently bought a dusty-pink plush cover, and sitting down again. All she needed was a little more time; and maybe a new emotional interest. She stood up, washed her hands, picked up her salt-and slush-stained boots, and started back down the hall. On her way the phone began to ring. With her heart leaping about annoyingly, she answered it in the bedroom.
“Mom? It’s Stevie.”
“Oh, honey, hello!” Polly’s voice eased half an octave. “How are you? Is everything all right?”
“Sure, it’s fine. I just wanted to tell you, I’m coming back a day sooner than Dad wrote you. On the twenty-second. Is that okay?”
“Of course it’s okay. It’s great.” Polly laughed.
“And listen, Mom.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m going to be bringing a lot of stuff. Well, see, all my stuff.”
“You mean, you’ve decided, you don’t want to go back to Denver after Christmas vacation?” Polly gasped.
“No. I mean, yeah. I want to stay home.”
Home; the word repeated itself in Polly’s head like a muffled triumphant drumroll through the rest of the conversation, which was concerned with flight numbers, arrival times, and contingency plans.
“That was Stevie,” she cried, running into the sitting room.
“Oh?”
“He’s coming home a day early.”
“Ah.” It was clear that for Jeanne the time of Stevie’s arrival was a matter of indifference.
“And he’s not going back to Denver!”
“Not going back?” Jeanne stuck her tapestry needle into the center of a Victorian rose, and sat forward. “Well,” she said. “You must be awfully pleased.”
“You must be awfully pleased about Stevie,” Jeanne repeated an hour later, as she beat lemon juice and egg yolk together for a hollandaise sauce while Betsy, who usually served as her kitchen maid, peeled potatoes.
“Yes, I really am,” Polly answered. “But I know you’re not,” she added.
“Don’t talk that way,” Jeanne said, her voice rising to a soft quaver. “I’m very happy for you.”
“Sure, but I meant — I realize it’s going to be inconvenient for you and Betsy, having to move out so soon, I mean. And I’m really sorry. But what else can I do?”
A rhetorical question; however, Jeanne answered it. “Well.” She paused to add a lump of butter. “I thought maybe we could stay on for a while anyhow. Until we find something else, of course.”
“But there’s no place for you to sleep,” Polly protested. With a sinking sensation she imagined Jeanne and Betsy camped out in the sitting room: Jeanne on the sofa, and Betsy humped untidily on an air mattress alongside.
“There’s plenty of space in this apartment really, you know.” Jeanne smiled persuasively. “If Stevie moved into the spare room we’d all be perfectly comfortable.”
“I can’t turn Stevie out of his own room,” Polly protested.
“But it would only be for a little while,” Betsy whined. “And it wouldn’t be any trouble, really, Polly. We’d move all his posters and stuff, of course. And all our things are there already, and our bed.”
My bed, Polly thought. She imagined trying to explain to Stevie that Jeanne and Betsy had taken over his room. Then, for the first time, she imagined trying to explain to him why they were sleeping together in a double bed. “No, I can’t do it,” she stated.
“Jeanne said you wouldn’t agree,” Betsy remarked dole fully. “But listen; there was another idea that occurred to me.”
What had occurred to Betsy, it turned out, was that Stevie should be sent away again almost as soon as he got home. It was the logical solution really, she said, because the New York public high schools were so awful, while the private ones were expensive and snobbish. Besides, the city was a dangerous place for teenagers in a whole lot of ways.
What would be best for Stevie, Betsy thought, would be a nice liberal boarding school with high academic standards, somewhere in the real country — say some place like Putney in Vermont, where Betsy had gone herself. There was sometimes room at midterm for new students, and Stevie would probably adore Vermont. After Colorado he’d want to hike and camp out and ski. Betsy thought it was a great idea.
“Well, I think it’s a terrible idea,” Polly said, trying to remain calm. “Stevie’s just been away from me for four months; I’m not going to send him off again, even if I could afford it, which I can’t.” She looked toward Jeanne for support, but Jeanne only went on stirring the hollandaise.
“My mother was exactly like you,” Betsy said in her whining, stubborn way, starting to scrape at another potato. “She didn’t want me to go away to school. But I had a really great time at Putney. I think maybe you’re putting your own needs ahead of Stevie’s, and besides —”
“I am not —” Polly began, seething.
“— besides, it could even be emotionally damaging if you insist on keeping him too close to you; that’s what Jeanne and I think.”
“I don’t see why it should do Stevie any damage to be close to me,” Polly said, feeling angry and betrayed. “He’s been close to me for fourteen years.” Ignoring Betsy, she stared at Jeanne. “Is that really what you think?”
“No, of course not.” Jeanne moved the double boiler off the burner and turned around, wiping her hands on her flowered apron. “Betsy’s got it quite wrong,” she said in an easy, soothing voice. “Of course it won’t hurt Stevie to stay here, because you’re not a neurotic, anxious mother like hers.” She smiled at them both. “Stevie doesn’t need to get away from you, I told her so already. And naturally you want to keep him with you as long as you can.”
“Right,” Polly said with satisfaction, and gave Betsy a scornful look. You see, you stupid preppie, she thought.
“I know you love Stevie and want what’s best for him; and so do I,” Jeanne went on, smiling fondly. “But I don’t see why you can’t ask him to move into the spare room, just for a little while. And really I don’t imagine it would make all that much difference to him. He might even prefer it, because he’d have his own bathroom.”
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“But —” Polly began, choking up again. The spare bathroom had been designed for a maid back when maids would put up with anything: it was cramped, unheated, and disagreeable, with cheap rusted fixtures. The truncated and stained tub, with its cargo of discarded canvases, hadn’t been used since Polly moved in fourteen years ago. “I think he’d hate it,” she said, trying hard to speak evenly. “Having your own room is important for a kid; much more than for someone like you or me.”
“You may have a point,” Jeanne conceded. “Well, maybe we should move into your room instead. It’s not as big as Stevie’s, but it’s large enough for two people.”
“I didn’t meant to suggest —” Was Jeanne really proposing to turn her out of her own room? Polly looked at her friend as she stood by the stove. Everything about her was familiar, from her soft pale curls, caught back for cooking with a bit of rose-colored ribbon, to her scuffed black ballet slippers; but Polly felt as if she had never seen her before. “Anyhow, there’s not enough space in this apartment for four people,” she said. “It’s too crowded already with three.”
“It is kind of small —” Betsy began, but neither of them paid any attention to her.
“Now Polly, really,” Jeanne murmured, smiling. “You mustn’t exaggerate. This apartment is twice as big as the house I grew up in, and there were four of us there. I think you’re being just a little bit selfish, you know.”
“Well, I think you’re being a little bit selfish,” Polly said, beginning to lose control.
“I only suggested —” Jeanne began, but Polly rushed on:
“— And if you want to know, I don’t think you want what’s best for Stevie at all. I think you want what’s best for Jeanne and Betsy.”
“Oh, Polly!” her friend said in a soft shaky overdramatic voice. “Don’t talk that way!”
But the storm of flies had boiled up into Polly’s head. “Don’t tell me how to talk, okay?” she shouted.
Jeanne flinched as if she had been struck, but did not reply. She bent over the stove, her pink lips trembling, her eyes blinking with unshed tears, while Betsy stared at Polly accusingly.