“But I hope that if you can’t trust me enough to tell me what’s going on, at least you’re seeing a doctor.”
“It’s my back,” she said weakly. “Can I lie down?”
“Of course you can lie down. What do you take me for?”
Ashamed but relieved, she stretched out on the studio bed, looking up at the ceiling, still badly wanting to cry. He probably wouldn’t want her to come back after this. He’d find someone else who could do the same work and wasn’t sick-crazy.
He came over to her and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“What about your back?” he asked, more softly, now.
“There’s nothing wrong with it, really,” she began, but then he seemed about to get up and walk away so she said quickly, “I’m not lying to you, I had—when I was a kid I had trouble with it, but it hasn’t hurt me in years.”
He relaxed. “What trouble did you have with it when you were a child?”
“It’s called scoliosis. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“It’s something wrong with the spine. I had an operation for it and it was all taken care of. I see the doctor a couple of times a year just to make sure, and it’s perfectly okay now.”
“Except that you’ve been in pain for a couple of weeks.”
“Only here.” It came out without thinking. “I mean,” she said quickly, “only when I sit in the same position for a long time. I think I strained it a couple of weeks ago.” She cast around in her mind frantically. “I was moving some heavy furniture. In my room. I think I just strained it.”
“I think you should see a doctor.”
“I just went a couple of months ago.” But he was tender now, and her fear was going away. “You don’t know how my parents are about . . . if I just tell them something’s hurting me they’ll have a . . .”
“Then perhaps,” he said after a moment, “my wife should have a look at you.”
“Oh, no!” She bolted up. “I’ll go to the family doctor. I promise.” He gently pushed her back on the bed.
“How old were you when all this happened?”
“Eleven, twelve,” she said.
“Which?”
“I was eleven when I had the operation.”
“How long were you in the hospital?”
She looked at him tearfully. Wanting to lie but afraid to. His wife was a doctor, anyway. He could find out. There was no point to lying.
“A year.”
He stared at her. He was obviously shocked. His shock stirred up something buried way down inside her, that sense of her illness as a badge of shame. In knowing that she had been in the hospital for a year, he knew something about her against which little could be balanced. She closed her eyes. A moment later she felt his cool hand on her forehead, stroking it softly, brushing back the wispy hairs. She wanted to open her eyes and look at him but she was afraid if she did he would take away his hand so she kept them closed. She held her breath as he bent over her, kissed her forehead, her eyes, her nose, her mouth. She couldn’t believe how tender he was being with her. Not at all as though he’d been repelled by her confession—almost the opposite.
“Move over,” he whispered.
Her eyes still closed she made room for him on the bed and he lay down beside her, on his side, stroking her hair, kissing her cheek.
“Poor little fishie,” he murmured softly.
She opened her eyes and turned on her side to face him.
“Why did you call me that?”
“I don’t know. Do you mind it?”
“No.” Because he had sounded as though he loved her when he said it.
“Then it doesn’t matter.”
She smiled.
“Such a sad smile you have, Theresa.”
She stopped smiling.
“And such beautiful green eyes. Or are they beautiful gray eyes?”
She shrugged. Their faces were so close—if only he would really kiss her. She moved toward him just a tiny bit. The room was very quiet; there were sounds from the other side of the wall but no crying. Maybe a radio was on.
“Were you in a great deal of pain?” he asked.
It took her a moment to realize that he was asking her about the operation.
“I don’t remember,” she said. “The only thing I remember is the scar itching afterward. The whole thing, itching.” The plaster cast. She’d gotten some kind of rash from it.
“Do you still have the scar?”
“A little, I guess.”
“Let me see it.”
She was dumbfounded. At first she thought he must be joking, but then she saw that he was perfectly serious. She didn’t know what to do.
“It’s just down my back.”
He nodded. He was waiting.
She was wearing a navy cotton shirtdress. (Katherine was trying to get her to wear brighter colors; Katherine said she dressed as though she were still going to Catholic school.) She could turn over and just pull it up from the bottom but somehow that image . . . of herself, with her back to him, pulling up her dress over her cotton pants and . . . she couldn’t do it that way. She would have to take off the dress. Or at least open it and partly take it off. She began undoing the buttons that ran the length of the front. Her cheeks were burning. She was excited. And ashamed. She looked down at the buttons as she undid them, squeezing them tightly to control the trembling of her hands. She ended up undoing all the buttons because she didn’t know what to do when she was finished. Finally she sat up and got her arms out of the sleeves, letting the dress fall in back of her, looking down to see what he saw. Pale, freckled skin. A plain white nylon bra. Katherine wore flowered bikini sets of lingerie. At that moment she wished—ached—to have had lingerie like Katherine’s. Without meaning to she looked up at him. And met his eyes, because he was watching her face, not her body. Quickly she turned over and lay face down on the bed, her face buried in her arms. In this position she felt her back again for the first time since she’d stretched out on the bed, but it wasn’t unbearable, just a dull ache. She was holding her breath; she forced herself to exhale slowly.
He undid her brassiere although it wasn’t necessary to see the scar, which began some inches below it. With one finger he began at the top of the scar and traced a line down it; when he got to her underpants he slowly pulled them down over her buttocks, reaching around her front when necessary to get them down. Then he went back to the beginning of the scar and traced slowly down again all the way. Then he touched the half-moon.
“What’s this?”
“It’s from the same operation.”
He leaned over her and kissed the half-moon, then the long scar, from the bottom to the top. Fondling her buttocks, her back, her shoulders. She wanted desperately to turn over and embrace him but she knew he didn’t want her to do this. Now he was doing something else—getting undressed?—she dared not turn to look for fear of displeasing him, and now he was climbing over her, straddling her, half-sitting on her, but without pressure. He wasn’t wearing his pants. He was leaning over her, kissing her—Oh, God, Martin, let me turn over, it’s hurting me! He was holding her buttocks now, raising them; if she arched her back it didn’t hurt as much but that was difficult. Now he was rubbing his penis between her legs, feeling for her opening, and then he was pushing into her, hurting her because she was dry and tight, slowly pushing in anyway until he was all the way in. Hurting. Feeling as though he were piercing some solid wall deep inside—maybe he would come right through her! Just when she thought she would scream out because the pain was unbearable, it lessened, and pleasure began to mingle with it, and then the pain inside disappeared and as the pleasure increased she forgot about her back and it got so good that it was hard not to moan, but she forced herself to hold in all sounds for fear of being heard on the other side of the wall.
He heaved on top of her and then he was still. A moment later he withdrew from her body and lay down beside her on the bed. For a moment she
couldn’t move—as though he’d cast her into a statue’s position and she was doomed to remain there—but then she forced her body to roll over on its side and after a moment she was able to slowly unlock her spine and stretch out. Her brassiere was tangled around her neck and arms and she took it off. She pulled up her pants. She turned to look at him; he was looking at his watch.
“Theresita,” he murmured, “when I tell you the time you will not believe me.”
Nor did she care. But it was different for him, of course. They both had classes at one and he couldn’t just cut his, although she couldn’t help wishing that he would, just this once.
It was twelve thirty.
“Quickly, quickly,” he said. “We must hie ourselves to yon campus.”
Obediently she got out of bed and put on her clothes. She felt sweaty and messy and was about to ask him if she could go to the bathroom when she realized it made no sense for her to have to ask. She took in her comb and after she’d washed herself, she combed her hair without ever actually looking at her face in the mirror. When she came back into the study he’d taken the sheets off the bed; only then did she realize that there must have been blood on them.
The next time she came he asked her if she realized that the following week was the last week of school and that she was now marking the last of the papers. She said that she did. He said that she could come the following week, anyway, because he would be preparing to go to the country and there were things she could help him with. Besides, he wanted to talk to her and he didn’t see when else they would have time. It was as though nothing sexual had ever happened between them. She thought he must be holding back because of the work to be done, but when she got there the following Wednesday all he was doing was cleaning out some old file cabinets. He asked about her back and she said it hadn’t hurt her since that day. He made her promise that if it hurt her over the summer she would go to a doctor; this was a painful promise to make for the implication was that she would not see him before fall, and she’d vaguely hoped for some kind of reprieve. Perhaps their conversation today would be about how they could meet occasionally during vacation.
He sat on the floor in front of the file, handing her things either for the wastebasket or for another file.
“Now tell me why you called it scoliosis instead of curvature of the spine,” he said suddenly.
It was the part of their lovemaking she hadn’t thought about since. The way it had begun. His interest in her illness.
“It sounded more medical,” she said uneasily.
He’d asked his wife.
“In other words, you were obfuscating.”
She was silent.
“Why don’t you trust me?”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you.”
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t like to talk about all that,” she said.
“Oh, all right.” But what he seemed to mean was that she needn’t talk about it but he didn’t feel like talking about anything else. They worked in silence for perhaps an hour and then she could bear it no longer.
“Why do you want to know about it?”
“Because I want to know about you. Because I care about you. Because your telling me is an act of faith.”
“Okay, then,” she said. “What do you want me to tell you?”
“Was it congenital or did it develop from something else?”
He’d had the question all waiting! He’d known she was going to give in! If it had been possible for her to get angry at him she would have been furious at that moment. As it was she just felt hopeless; she might as well do as he wished and get it over with.
“From something else,” she said tonelessly. “I had polio when I was little.”
“Are you serious?”
“When I was four. It was a mild case. I got better, it just left . . . a weakness on one side. Nobody noticed when it began to happen . . . it was very slow.”
“Didn’t your parents pay any attention to you?”
She nodded. “But when it was happening, when you could see it . . . my older brother died and they were very depressed.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Come over here, Theresa.”
She moved over on the floor next to him and he put his arm around her. She rested her head on his shoulder, continuing to talk because she knew that was what he wanted her to do.
“By the time we got to the doctor, it was too late for just a cast, so they used a cast, but then I had the operation, and then I had to be in the cast again.”
He kissed her forehead, rocked her gently with him on the floor.
“It didn’t hurt most of the time,” she said. “Honestly. Or if it did, I don’t remember. I remember I thought God was punishing me for my sins. Later I found out other people had committed some pretty bad sins and nothing like that had happened to them. I suppose that’s when I stopped believing in God. Or maybe it was earlier. I don’t know.” The last time she remembered believing in God was when she’d stood in the wet sand with the tide going out and her father had come looking for her. “When I tell you I don’t remember being sick when I was little, I’m not lying to you. I don’t remember any of it.” Except that my grandmother stopped coming to the hospital.
No! She sat up suddenly. She couldn’t be remembering—everyone knew she didn’t remember anything from that time! She looked at Martin, panic-stricken.
“What, Theresa?”
“My grandmother,” she said. Once there’d been someone she really loved, who visited her every day and sang to her in Italian and smoothed the hair from her forehead with hands that were cool and papery. That was her mother’s mother, Grandmother Theresa Maria, who was very old and thin and wore long skirts and suddenly one day had stopped coming to the hospital and disappeared forever. And when Theresa had asked where she was they’d told her Grandmother Theresa Maria had gone to live in California. “I can’t believe I’m remembering it now,” she said. Because you’re leaving me, Martin. “My grandmother died while I was in the hospital when I was four. For years after that every time a TV announcer said a show was coming to us live from California I’d strain for a glimpse of my grandmother.”
Martin smiled, brought her back in the circle of his arms. There was a buzzer sound and she started. There was a system between his wife’s office and the various rooms of the apartment, but it had never sounded in his study in all the time that Theresa had been coming. He reached up to the desk, just managing to touch the buzzer that signaled he was there without releasing Theresa.
“Ja wohl,” he said.
A calm woman’s voice said that there was a crisis, a child had just been brought in who had to be treated and Lulu was nowhere to be found and Jed had to be picked up at school at twelve and could Martin do it before he went up to City? He said that he would.
“Thanks, darling,” the woman’s voice said, and went off.
“So now you know the truth, Theresa,” he said solemnly. “I am a married man.”
She giggled. “I knew that all along.”
“Ah, you see? And I thought I’d deceived you.”
“Married men are much more interesting,” she said, trying to remember in which of the paperback novels she regularly devoured she had come across the line. “They’ve done their learning somewhere else.” She kissed his neck.
“Hmm,” he said. “A woman of the world. Why haven’t you dealt with any of your real life in your essays?”
“I was afraid of shocking you.” She giggled again.
“What’s gotten you giggly all of a sudden?”
“Don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you gave me some laughing gas.”
“What would you say if I told you that it’s almost eleven twenty and I should get ready to pick up my son?”
“I’d say make love to me first.” In her sudden giddiness it came out without warning and made her more giddy. Suddenly she got up and moved over so that she was sitting in his lap instead of next to him o
n the floor. She threw her arms around him and kissed him. He was thrown off balance and went down backward but she continued to cling to him, kissing him, rubbing against him until finally he gave in to her and returned her warmth. She felt quite wild and out of control; she was on a tightrope but he was there with her and if she fell, he would fall too. She unzipped his fly, lying on top of him. He asked what on earth had gotten into her but he was laughing and having a good time, too. She kissed him—his face, his neck. Leaning slightly to one side she took his penis out of his pants and caressed it. He put both his hands under his head and lay absolutely still, watching her. She got off her underpants and straddled him as he’d straddled her last time except that she was sitting on his penis, which felt marvelous, and she moved around on it and bounced up and down on it with almost total abandonment to pleasure, only the tiniest corner of her mind telling her that she was crazy, that she was too far out someplace, that when you were having this much fun something terrible had to happen next, be careful, Theresa, something terrible has to happen but doesn’t it feel wonderful—oh, oh, oh—
He came when she could have gone on and on and on.
He opened his eyes. She smiled. He watched her without smiling. Suddenly she became self-conscious. A little frightened. She got off him. He looked at his watch. He stood up, fixed his pants. When he spoke his voice was neutral but she was convinced that he was looking at her with hatred.
“I have to get Jed. Slam the door on your way out, don’t bother about locking it.”
On Friday, the last day she was to see him before vacation, a period she was not certain she would survive, he handed her an envelope and told her it contained her payment for the months that she’d worked for him.
She said that she’d thought he’d forgotten about that, that she had never wanted him to pay her. He said that was silly, her services had been invaluable to him, she had saved him countless hours of tedium and stress, and besides, the money was not only tax deductible but was meaningless to him. Which, of course, was why she didn’t want it.
He kissed her cheek and told her she was a lovely girl and he was going to miss her. He said he was expecting her to be a marvelous typist by September and then they would begin work on his masterpiece.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar Page 6