“Which explains why you want to join the Peace Corps and go to Africa. Or South America.”
She flushed. Became aware for the first time that they were surrounded by small Spanish men of various colors. Said, in a low voice, “I want to learn.”
“How do you expect to learn why Negroes in America hate whites by building huts in a small village in Africa where no one’s ever heard of America?”
She was silent. If he hadn’t thought before that she was stupid he surely did now.
“I know it sounds dumb,” she said. “It’s not something I’ve really thought out at all, I just . . .”
He said she wasn’t dumb but innocent, and that amazed her, for the one quality in the world that she cherished and knew she did not possess was innocence. She wasn’t sure when she had lost hers, except that it had to be before the Church said she had. It had to do with things you saw that you weren’t supposed to see.
“You once told me I looked haunted,” she said.
“Mmmm.”
“How can you be haunted and innocent at the same time?”
“Why don’t you explain it to me since you’re the one who’s managed it.”
“Ohhhhhhhh.”
He laughed.
They fell into the habit of going to that little luncheonette every Wednesday, at first just for coffee, then after a while for lunch. In January he told her which one of his Comp II classes she should register for. It was held at four o’clock in the afternoon, and she was upset not just because it meant going home in the dark those days during winter but much more because it meant the end of their Wednesday lunches. Then it turned out he meant her to schedule her classes later in the day in general, rather than earlier, since his own classes were almost entirely in the afternoon and he thought she might like to work for him sometimes in the mornings. Did she type? No, it was a shame. She might learn over the summer while he was away. That would be a great help to him next year, when a book he was drafting now would be ready for typing. In the meantime, there were other jobs she could be helping him with, most particularly reading papers for his required classes and marking them for grammar and spelling in detail, since, as they both knew, the greater part of the student body of the college was not literate in English.
She had to hold her breath for fear of screaming, so intense were the two feelings that this little speech aroused in her—the pleasure that he had chosen her and the anxiety aroused by the very mention of the fact that at some point he would go away. This wasn’t a reality she was prepared to face—that there would be a time when she could not see him for two solid months.
He lived across the street from the Museum of Natural History so she would have no trouble finding it. She didn’t tell him she’d never been there. That she’d never been on Central Park West. That in point of fact she’d seldom in her entire life been out of the Bronx before she began attending City, except to go to doctors and hospitals, and then her father drove her. It wasn’t until he gave her the apartment number—12B—that she ceased to picture the room where her richest fantasies occurred as being on the second floor of the mansion in Gone With the Wind.
Where would his wife be while they were working?
She couldn’t tell how old he was but she thought if he had children they would be young.
They would have to be someplace quiet, the two of them, if they were going to get any work done. That was for sure.
She woke up at four in the morning on the first day that she was to go, having dreamed that she was locked with him in a tiny closet while outside there were thunder and lightning. Other children were banging at the door, screaming to get in, and she said maybe they should open the door but he said that there just wasn’t room in that tiny space, even though the two of them were huddled close together under a blanket.
The dream was so delicious that she tried to get back into it but she was tense and excited and couldn’t fall asleep at all.
When she told the elevator operator she wanted 12B he nodded and said, “Dr. Engle,” which didn’t strike her really until he let her off and the door facing her read “Helen Engle, M.D.” She turned to the elevator operator and stammered, “I—I—”
“Is it the professor you wanted?” he asked.
She nodded. Her lips were dry.
He took her back down and directed her to an elevator in the back explaining that this was the entrance the professor’s people used during the doctor’s office hours.
The professor’s people.
She was taken back up in a somewhat larger but less elegant elevator. She was nearly suffocating with tension.
He opened the door, yawning, looking barely awake. She wondered what the elevator operator thought. She mumbled “Thank you” to the operator without looking at him. Martin Engle was wearing a bathrobe.
“Come in,” he said, “but don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee.”
She walked into a large foyer, ahead of which was a living room—not elegant, as the lobby had been, but comfortable looking. Full of big overstuffed furniture and bookcases. He walked off into another hallway; she stood indecisively until he called, “Come, come, come,” at which she followed him into a messy kitchen. He began pouring water into a strange glass contraption on the stove.
“My wife is an otherwise perfect human being who cannot make a decent cup of coffee.”
She laughed nervously. The water that he was pouring into the top of the glass thing was dripping down to the bottom as coffee.
His wife was a doctor. An otherwise perfect woman.
“You may sit down. You may even take off your coat and put down your books.”
She never took her eyes off him as he poured the coffee, fussed over it, brought cream and sugar, cups and spoons to the table, then did something with the glass coffeepot and brought that, too.
They drank their first cup in silence. (She had come to love coffee! When she drank it she was with him.) She began to relax, to feel at home, but then as that phrase, at home, entered her mind she felt uneasy again because it wasn’t her own home, although she had been feeling as though it were. Somewhere within a few hundred yards of her, separated by maybe two or three walls, was a lady named Mrs. Engle who was a perfect human being except that she couldn’t make a decent cup of coffee. What did that mean, anyway? She couldn’t really be perfect, and when you thought about it it was the kind of thing you could say about someone without actually liking her. It made her sound formidable. And she was a doctor. That helped considerably, remembering that it wasn’t Mrs. Engle but Doctor Engle.
“What kind of doctor is your wife?” she asked without thinking.
He looked up and smiled. “A pediatrician.”
The words swam around in her head for a minute with a lot of other doctors’ labels until she could identify it, fairly certainly, as a baby doctor.
“How’s that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t like doctors.” She blushed. It had just popped out, like her question, and it didn’t sound right. She never even thought about doctors, except once or twice a year when she had to see one, and of course that was never an experience you would look forward to, but now here she was . . . Sometimes she felt she could never just simply and easily say the right thing with him. Not that she could with other people, but with other people she didn’t care. When she wrote an essay for him she scribbled it over five or ten times before it was good enough. Then he read it and thought it was natural to her. She was a fraud. Not even really intelligent, particularly. Certainly she would never have been a doctor. You had to be very smart to even get into medical school.
“Why?” he asked. “A lot of people would die without them.”
“A lot of people die with them.”
“Did you have a bad experience with a doctor?”
“No, not particularly.”
“Why do you limp?”
She gasped. The sudden movement of her body made her coffee spill over the side of t
he cup as she held it. One hand got wet from it but she barely noticed; she was overwhelmed by a sense of unreality. He wasn’t real; she wasn’t real; they weren’t here; he hadn’t asked that question. He couldn’t have. She didn’t limp.
“I don’t limp,” she finally said, except that her voice came out in a whisper.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “That may have been too extreme a word to use. You have a slight sway, imbalance, whatever you want to call it, to your walk. It’s not unattractive. If I weren’t aware of such things I might never have noticed.”
No one, not her parents, not relatives, not anyone she ever knew had ever said anything about a limp. For a long time she’d had to wear one shoe with a platform in it, and then she’d started wearing regular shoes as though she’d always worn them. No one had ever said anything about the way she walked!
She had a wild desire to escape and stood up, about to walk away from him, from this place, when suddenly it occurred to her that as she went, he would see her limping. She sat down again. Staring at him. Frozen in the moment. Unable to make it pass.
“Theresa.” He put his hands over hers. “I’m sorry I’ve upset you.”
“You haven’t upset me.”
“Yes I have.”
Silence.
“Come,” he said. “Let’s go someplace where we can talk. It’s not very comfortable in here.” He waited. She said nothing. “We’ll go into my study. We’ll have our coffee there, it’s much pleasanter.” He put the coffee things on a small tray and held out his free hand to her. She stood up but she didn’t take his hand. The frozen moment was passing and now she had to fight tears. He put his arm around her and they passed gingerly through the kitchen, down the hallway, into a room behind a closed door. His study. It was strange. Totally unlike the rest of the house, with nothing out of place, and maybe quite beautiful, although she couldn’t tell yet, she wasn’t familiar with this kind of room. In front of one window was a huge table with many plants and a couple of piles of papers. At an angle to it stood a typewriter on a stand. In front of another window was a big soft chair. Then there was a studio bed covered with an elegant embroidered spread and dozens of pillows. On the floor was an Oriental rug. The walls were covered with Chinese prints and wooden carvings, most of which also looked Oriental to her.
He put the tray down on the big table-desk.
“Sit where you’ll be most comfortable, Theresa.”
She sat down on the edge of the studio bed because she was closest to that and now she was self-conscious about his seeing her walk. He sat down and put his arm around her; she grew rigid.
“I am not attempting to seduce you,” he said. “I am attempting to comfort you because I see that I’ve hurt you.”
But of course that was why she’d gone rigid. With an enormous effort of will she turned to him and with a voice as steady as possible said, “But I’d rather be seduced than comforted.”
He laughed and stood up. “That’s marvelous,” he said. “I think I’ll have it embroidered and made into a wall hanging—no, a pillow cover.”
She watched him steadily. She felt in some way that she’d gotten her own back. He gave her coffee, settled with his own in the swivel desk chair, facing her. One of the reasons she loved him was that she’d understood since she first heard him talk that all those sly or hostile or outrageous thoughts that had cropped up in her mind for years and remained unsaid because they would shock or upset or alienate the people she knew would be perfectly all right with him. If she could ever get herself to say them. He finished his coffee and poured another cup without offering her more. She wanted to get more but she wasn’t yet sure that was all right.
“This is where we’ll work,” he said. “You may sit wherever you like, at the desk, wherever. I’m going to give you the papers before I look at them myself. You will scan them carefully and red-ink every grammatical or spelling error. Hopefully I will then be less distracted by their illiteracy and will be able to simply read them quickly and make some appropriate comment. Very quickly, I should say.” He smiled. “At a glance. I have too much work of my own this year to be bothered with this nonsense.”
“Poetry?” she asked, shy again.
“And a scholarly work that I’m doing, not out of any interest at all in my subject but in the interest of getting a promotion.”
She smiled.
“You are amused.”
“It sounds funny. Like going from seventh grade to eighth grade.”
“Quite so.”
He was friendly but businesslike. There would be four sets of papers a week because he had four required courses. Later on, if he were feeling really self-indulgent, he might get her to do the same for his elective papers, which shouldn’t need that sort of thing but usually did. It would probably be best if no one in her class understood that it was she making the red marks; God’s words always carried more weight than those of the apostles, even if they were the same words. She nodded; she never would have dreamed of telling anyone.
“What would you consider a reasonable rate of pay for this work?” he asked.
She stared at him. It had never entered her mind that he would pay her; she was working for the privilege of working for him.
She shrugged.
“You must have thought about it.”
She shook her head. She didn’t want him to pay her because it made the work seem less personal.
“Have you ever worked?”
“Just baby-sitting.”
“And how much do you make as a baby-sitter?”
“A dollar an hour.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll start you at a dollar an hour. Slave wages. And if you are really good and fast we’ll raise it from there. Unless you prefer to remain my slave.”
I prefer to remain your slave. I prefer you not to pay me but to love me.
She was arrested by the sound of a baby crying someplace.
He smiled. “My wife’s office is on the other side of that wall.”
The wall the studio bed was against. His wife.
She stood up.
“Do you want me to begin today?”
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “You’re here and I have some papers.”
She went twice a week for the rest of the term, marking two sets of papers each morning. After a month or so he began to rely on her more completely. He told her to start making a lightly penciled estimate of the quality of each paper on the top. Before long he was just erasing the penciled words and writing a brief version of the same thing in his own hand. “I liked this,” or “Dull,” or “The opinions don’t seem honest, though I’m not sure why.” He was pleased to find that she, too, reacted when someone was trying to please rather than to express; to adopt an opinion not his own; to omit some essential part of an experience in the interest of self-protection. He always worked in the room while she was there, sometimes on his poetry (by hand on legal pads), sometimes on his scholarly manuscript (on the typewriter), sometimes, it seemed, just fussing with the papers she’d done or some other odds and ends. She would work in the big chair, watching him surreptitiously when she was supposed to be concentrating on the papers. Sometimes he just pulled dry leaves off his plants or stared out the window. He told her he didn’t know how he had ever managed without her. Occasionally she asked him a question about some paper and then he might lean over to her to see what she was talking about. Once in the spring she looked up as he was doing that and he kissed her mouth. Then he walked away. The next time she asked him a question he stayed in his chair and told her to read it aloud to him.
“You know that I love you, don’t you, Theresa?”
“Ssshhh. She’s going to hear us.”
“The hell with her, let her hear us. Let her divorce me.”
“She’s the mother of four of your children, Martin.”
“As a matter of fact, they’re not my children at all. They happen to be her children by a previous marriage.
”
She dreaded the summer, when they would go to their home in Connecticut. (His wife would commute in July but stay there in August.)
She was going to take both typing and steno in the adult education program at Columbus High School in the evenings and work full time baby-sitting during the day. She talked about baby-sitting and kept hoping he would tell her to forget about the typing and come be their sitter for the summer, but when she told him her plans, he simply nodded in approval.
In the middle of May she started getting headaches. She would be sitting in the big chair, marking papers, and the words would blur in front of her eyes. When she forced herself to focus on them, the headaches would begin. She didn’t tell him, but then a short while later the backaches began. Not backaches, exactly. As she sat working, the lower part of her neck would feel cramped and uncomfortable; when she moved from her original position, she would feel a sharp pain, as though she’d been locked in and had forced the lock. Then she would have to get up and stretch. Or go to the bathroom. He’d never again asked her about her walk. Until now that first morning had been pushed to the back of her consciousness, but now it forced its way back every time she stood up and feared that he would see how hard it was for her to stand straight. It became a game to see if she could bear to wait until a moment when she knew for sure he couldn’t see her. At the end of the second week of this she waited so long one morning that by the time she got up, the lock was too strong to break and she staggered. She almost fell to the floor but just in time reached out to the studio bed, leaned on it, then sat.
He swiveled in his chair and faced her.
“I don’t dare ask what’s been bothering you for the last few weeks,” he said coldly, “for fear that you’ll jump out of the window. Or turn into a block of ice again, then melt away until there’s no Theresa left to do my papers next year.”
Tears welled in her eyes. Her whole body wanted to cry. She was an idiot. She didn’t blame him for being angry with her. For hating her. She hated herself. Her back ached; she wanted very badly to lie down.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar Page 5