In the envelope was a check for $216; in the bottom left-hand corner of the check, where there was a line for explanation, it read: Cler. Assist. 18wks/6 hrs/wk @$2/hr.
She was unutterably depressed.
She took the check home and hid it in a drawer (she’d never told her parents about him), thinking she would keep the check forever. Then she thought he would be angry with her if she did that, so she spent the first morning of her vacation finding the savings bank nearest his home and opening an account there with his check.
Brigid got married to Patrick Kelly and began having babies.
Katherine was trying to get pregnant and couldn’t. With Brooks’s encouragement she was going back to school in the fall. She didn’t know just what she wanted to do with her schooling, she was just going to go to NYU and start working to get a B.A.
“Unless you get a B-A-B-Y,” Theresa said, meaning it as a casual joke, but Katherine burst into tears and ran out of the room.
“Theresa,” her mother said.
“I know you didn’t mean it to hurt,” said Brooks, on his way to find Katherine and comfort her. “But she’s very sensitive on this one, Terry.”
So would I be if I’d had an abortion.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Theresa,” her mother said, as though she didn’t believe Brooks’s statement that Terry had meant no harm. Theresa herself was surprised and upset. Joking didn’t come naturally to her, she’d begun doing it for Martin’s approval, and it was hard for her to believe that she could hurt anyone when she was being playful. Although certainly Martin could hurt her badly with his jokes. Which was different. There was always a heavy element of sarcasm in his humor.
She looked at her father to see if he was angry, too, but he was absorbed in the baseball game. Or pretending to be. Sometimes she thought that the TV wasn’t so much an escape as a filter through which he saw and heard everything but was kept from being affected by it too much. Like the beer that went with it. She wanted to run to him and ask if he was angry with her, but of course she didn’t; she just glared at her mother and said that Katherine could take a joke better than she could. Usually.
Katherine and Brooks were seldom around, anyway. They’d rented a house at someplace called Fire Island and were spending most of the summer out there, except that Brooks came into Manhattan three or four days a week to work. They kept inviting Theresa out there to visit but aside from the fact that she hated the beach, her jobs and her typing class occupied her five days a week. The typing class was from six to seven thirty in the evening and she was still baby-sitting from eight on for two of her regular families—the two that had typewriters. She was determined that by the time of Martin’s return she would be a breathtakingly rapid and accurate typist. She was already by far the best in her class.
In the four years that she was going to know him he would change and she would change, but their relationship would never change at all.
He would be pleased that she had become a good typist.
He would be lavish in his praise of her work and her intelligence. He would insist that if she were going to teach at all she must aim for university teaching. (It was the only way she would ever defy him. She kept her education courses down to a bare minimum but was bound and determined to teach young children, no matter what else she might also choose to do.)
When she was ill or unhappy he would be tender and sympathetic.
When they made love he would become hostile.
In the period after Kennedy’s assassination she needed to see more of him and instead she saw less, because his family also needed him more. Unexpectedly she found herself drawn into a circle consisting of Carol and Rhoda and Jules, whom she never saw in classes any more but ran across in the cafeteria on the day of the assassination. (She’d gone there because she was afraid to get onto the subway and go home.) She ended up traveling uptown with Jules, the only one of the three who lived in the Bronx. (Carol and Rhoda lived on West End Avenue; she was jealous of their proximity to Martin.) Jules was bright, not a little pompous but funny and fun to be with, and she was surprised and irritated when he asked her to go out with him after a few weeks. She felt he had spoiled something pleasant. She told him she couldn’t and he asked if she was having an affair with Martin Engle. She told him to drop dead and he snorted and said, “That’s an intelligent answer.”
That year the Engles rented their house in Connecticut to year-round tenants and took a beach house at Fire Island for the summer. Yes, she’d heard of Fire Island; her sister went there. As soon as it was out she was sorry.
“Your sister?”
She nodded.
“Theresa, I have known you for two years and you have never mentioned a sister.”
“I have two.”
He laughed. “Are you sure that’s all?”
“They don’t live at home,” she said. “They’re both married. I hardly ever see them.” Brigid had just had her first baby in April. She saw more of Brigid now than she ever had, for the new baby, Kimberley, was adorable, and she loved her.
He asked how old her sisters were and she told him. He asked their names, which she refused to tell him. He asked why she didn’t want to tell him and she told him, truthfully, that she didn’t know. He asked where her older sister went on Fire Island and she told him, untruthfully, that she’d forgotten. The Engles would be going to Seaview; did that sound familiar? No, it didn’t. (Katherine and Brooks had gone to Ocean Beach and were going back there this year.)
When he returned in September he was different, although at first she didn’t understand why. He was no longer interested in working on the manuscript they had slaved over months before; he said they could take their full professorship and stick it. There were more important things in life than professorships, and if he’d ever had any interest at all in the Jewish-Canadian-Socialist-intellectual circle in Montreal in the early twentieth century, he didn’t have it any longer. As a matter of fact, what he was considering doing was the lyrics for a musical show. He’d met a very interesting guy out there, a composer, who said that what Broadway needed was a few decent lyricists, and an idea for a musical had immediately popped into his head. He had always smoked a pipe but now he smoked what he called his “home-rolled” and between that and a few articles in copies of the Village Voice that Rhoda was always carrying around, Theresa finally realized that Martin Engle was smoking marijuana.
“You must think I’m pretty dumb,” she said to Martin, the first time she saw him after that. “Do you think I haven’t known all along what you’re smoking?”
He smiled. He had grown more consistently benevolent with her. Less likely to be irritated if things weren’t exactly right. He offered her a drag and she refused; Rhoda had described the experience—the colors, the dreaminess, the pictures, the not caring—in a way that made Theresa think of going under ether, of losing consciousness against her will, which terrified her.
“Why don’t you want to share with me, Theresa?” he asked. She was sitting in the big chair; he was at the desk but he’d just been sitting there, staring.
“It’s not that I don’t want to share with you,” she said. “It’s that I have no interest in trying it at all with anyone.”
“It’s marvelous for sex,” he said. “You might even have an orgasm.”
She looked at him helplessly. She’d seen the word once or twice but she really didn’t know what it meant; nor had she known she was lacking something. She’d thought the only thing wrong with their sex life was that he made love to her so infrequently. Although lately he had shown a little more inclination to let her lead him into sex. If he was just sitting at his desk, smoking or staring, and she hugged him, or teased him, or sat on his lap, he would come back to the bed with her. But she’d begun to feel that there was something wrong with this. She was begging. She grew self-conscious and couldn’t summon the abandon she’d once had in seducing him. She would sit in the chair, or sometimes even stretch o
ut on the studio bed in what she hoped was a seductive position, but he would ignore her. Maybe the trouble with her was that she didn’t have orgasms. Whatever they were.
ORGASM (F. orgasme, fr. Gr. orgasmos) Physiol. Eager or immoderate excitement or action; esp. the culmination of coition.—orgastic, adj.
The next time she saw him she took a couple of drags on his joint, coughing and choking. He got her water, laughing. She took a couple more drags, went over to the studio bed and went to sleep. When she woke up he was grinning down at her, telling her it was time to go to school. He didn’t offer it to her again.
Katherine admitted, when Theresa asked, that she and Brooks used it all the time, that she’d first had it as an airline stewardess. She’d even had acid a couple of times—Theresa would never breathe a word of this would she? No, of course Theresa wouldn’t. To whom would she breathe it?
By a year later everyone who wasn’t totally involved in conspiracy theories of the assassination (Jules belonged to a group that met two afternoons a week to discuss them) was talking about grass and acid. She and Martin never made love any more. He got calls all the time but not on the intercom. Katherine and Brooks were renovating a brownstone on St. Marks Place and Brigid was pregnant with her second baby.
In a month she would graduate. Martin had never said a word to her about what would happen when she graduated after a conversation the previous fall in which he’d shouted that she would be just throwing away her mind if she went into public school teaching. She knew he was going back to Fire Island this summer, that he would have the children with him, that his wife was planning to be there less than she had the previous summer. He would have a mother’s helper living there with him. For a couple of weeks she had been trying to broach to him the subject of hiring her to be the mother’s helper. Then she wouldn’t have to once again wait out the summer to see him. Not that she could fool herself any longer that he minded their separations. But with her graduation it was going to be so much more difficult to see him; she might have to work for him in the evening. How would he feel about that? She knew relatively little of what his life was like. She knew other girls pursued him; yet after four years she was still here with him. His wife was still there; he had never said anything about her except that she was perfect; yet once when Theresa had asked him after sex why he was angry with her, he’d said he always disliked women after fucking them. She’d blanched because she had never thought of what they did as just fucking. Now she wondered if he fucked his wife at all, and if so, whether he disliked her afterward.
She had learned to use—imitate—a certain ironic tone in bringing up difficult questions. It wore off if he challenged her, yet with other people she could maintain it consistently; in some of her classes now, particularly her Ed classes, she was thought to be a somewhat sophisticated and terribly ironic person.
Now, throwing her legs over the sides of the chair, curling a lock of her hair around one finger and looking at him with a wry and totally artificial smile, she drawled, “I have an idea. How would you like to have a very intelligent, literate mother’s helper who can type this summer?”
“It sounds like an abominable idea,” he drawled back. “Why do you ask?”
Tears came to her eyes and she couldn’t answer him for fear of crying outright.
She got up, thinking she would just go to the bathroom and cry and wait until it didn’t show any more that she’d been crying. But he caught her wrist as she went past him toward the door and pulled her toward him. Making her sit down on his lap. He put down his pipe. (He didn’t smoke grass in the morning any more, claiming that it interfered with his work.)
“What is it, Theresita?” he asked gently. “Have you been seeing yourself as my mother’s helper—father’s helper, we should say?”
She nodded, looking down at the buttons on his shirt.
“Scrubbing the floors, emptying out the ashes?”
“Very funny.”
“Cooking the meals? Spending endless hours with my children on the beach, which you hate?”
“I don’t even know if I really hate it,” she said. “I never go there so how can I know?”
“July second of this year wouldn’t be a very good time to find out. Aside from anything else, the sun out there is pretty brutal.”
“If you were there,” she said, still not looking at him, “I would like it.”
“You are very sweet, Theresa,” he said. “But I would be doing you a disservice if I let you do it.”
She got up but he came with her, his arms around her, push-walking her gently to the bed and down onto it. Then he made love to her, tenderly, for the first time in so long that she really couldn’t remember just when the last time had been.
“I love you so much, Martin,” she said.
“Ah, yes,” Martin said. “Love.”
It left her uneasy. But now they began spending the May mornings in bed instead of at work, and then giggling like naughty children because she would have to take home papers to get them done in time. Once or twice he told her not to worry about them but she said she wasn’t worried, she just wanted to do them. Things were better between them than they’d been in the whole time they’d been together and she didn’t understand why she was anxious, unless it was that he never talked about what would happen the following year. She was afraid to disturb this lovely interlude by asking.
Then, as they were leaving the apartment house on the Friday before the last week, a girl with long blond hair walked into the building and made a high sign to Martin, and when she asked who the girl was he said that she was a teenager who lived in the building. When she asked what the sign meant he said it meant only two more weeks until they went to Fire Island, that she was their mother’s helper for the summer.
“Teenager,” Theresa said. “She doesn’t look any younger than me.”
“That may be,” he said. “But in point of fact she’s barely seventeen.”
“I’m too young to be obsolete,” she said, quite seriously.
He laughed. “The one thing you will always have me to thank for is developing a sense of humor behind those sad green eyes.”
She said nothing but her anxiety had turned into dread. She was approaching, from too great a distance to know as yet where she was heading, the knowledge that her future did not contain him.
On the following Wednesday, the first day of their last week together for the term, she asked him what his plans were for the following year. He said that he had no plans at all for the following year; that he would doubtless continue at CCNY (which of course she hadn’t questioned) although he felt rather strongly inclined to join a couple of young friends of his who were going to set up house in Katmandu; that he might do another musical (the first one had been dropped after almost getting financed for off-Broadway); that he would continue exploring his head for new colors; that he might divorce his wife, since all his friends were doing it, just to see how it felt to have that particular peak experience. Except that this would impose upon him a financial burden which would make it necessary for him to finish his manuscript and get his promotion.
He might divorce his wife just for the experience.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Are things really as simple as all that?”
“No, of course not. Half the members of the Department can’t stand me; that’s why I don’t get my promotion.”
She was sure he was willfully misunderstanding her.
“Anyway, the manuscript has no particular appeal to me right now. Maybe because it deals with a group of intellectuals whose only medium was words, and I have no great interest in words at the moment. Or perhaps you’ve noticed.”
She had noticed him paying less and less attention to his classes; to his papers; to what she wrote on them. Or rather, she’d seen without noticing. He never even bothered to change anything she’d written now.
“You haven’t . . .” She had to word it carefully, however li
ttle interest words had for him now. She was stepping in water that looked calm but was rumored to have fatal currents. “What are your plans . . . for me . . . for next year?”
“My plans for you for next year,” he said. “Hm. Well, my plans for you next year, love, are that you shall begin teaching, that you shall go forth from the cloistered world of City College, that you shall live a little and learn a little and get high.”
Her body acknowledged what he was saying before her mind did. She began trembling.
“What about working for you?”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“Yes I do.”
“Then you’re a foolish girl and I haven’t taught you as much as I thought I had.”
“When will I see you if I don’t work for you?”
“Ah, Theresa, you’re making this very difficult.”
Then it was true. She could no longer conceal from herself what he was saying. She sank back into her seat and stared at him. He was looking at her. His eyes bored a hole in her and the hole was her whole self. She was an empty whole. For a while she had been attached to something else and a hole attached to something else wasn’t a hole any more, or at least it didn’t feel its emptiness, but now the something was floating away from her and she was going to be empty again.
“What did I do?” she managed to croak out.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, you haven’t done anything, love-child, it’s just time.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand?”
“Why I’m not going to see you any more.”
“Theresa,” he said. Very kind and patient. She wanted to kiss him. “You know the Bible . . . For everything there is a season”? He began singing softly, “For everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” He paused. “Do you hear what I’m saying, Theresa?” He had never been so kind, now that he was sending her away forever. “You are a lovely girl and we have had a long and good friendship. And now it’s time for us both to move on.”
Looking for Mr. Goodbar Page 7