“Will you get someone else?” Licking her lips because they were so dry she could barely speak.
“Of course I’ll get someone else,” he snapped out. Irritably. Then he caught himself. He became kind again. “I always have someone else, Theresa. It’s not that I’m replacing you. I’m not even leaving you. You’re leaving me. Because it’s time.”
She was leaving him. She stood up, gathered two or three books and walked out of the apartment. She said good-bye to the elevator man and walked out to Central Park West. The sun was so bright it was nearly blinding.
The sun spilled onto the sidewalk. Burning her.
It was eleven o’clock.
She walked up to Central Park West and 110th Street, where the park ended. It was almost eleven thirty. She walked through Harlem to 145th Street. It was twelve fifteen. She was aware of men saying things to her occasionally but they had no reality. She walked across 145th to Convent and then up to 155th Street. It was a little after two. She walked across the 155th Street Bridge, hearing an occasional hoot or whistle but ignoring it, receiving an occasional offer of a lift and automatically refusing. She dropped her books into the water below the bridge. In the Bronx she walked up to the Concourse and started north without particularly thinking. She’d never been right there before but she knew which way she was going. She reached Fordham Road at four thirty and turned into it, heading toward Pelham Parkway. She’d stopped somewhere along the way but she was no longer sure where or for how long.
At eleven o’clock that night she walked through the living room, where her parents were watching the Late Show, failed to answer her mother’s query about where she’d been, got into bed with her clothes on and passed immediately into a sleep so deep that at four o’clock the next afternoon her parents got frightened because they couldn’t wake her up, and called her doctor.
She woke up as he examined her and stared at him lifelessly. He asked her how she felt. She said she was just tired but she said it in such a dead, zombie-like voice that the doctor was startled and examined her further for some sign of illness. Her feet were badly swollen.
“I walked home from school,” she said. It was an automatic lie; she’d always said she was at school when she was with Him.
Her mother gasped. “What for, Theresa?”
“I felt like it,” Theresa replied, and closed her eyes again. When she opened them it was Monday morning. Both her parents were in the room. Her father was looking at her with such grave concern; her mother had been crying. What for? She stirred and her body ached as though she’d been in one position for a long time. She had a bad taste in her mouth and there was a stale, sour smell that she eventually realized was her own body. If she had felt anything at all it would have been embarrassment at her own bad smell.
Martin. She wouldn’t want Martin to change his mind now and come looking for her. She would be mortified if he were to come now.
Her father said, “It’s Monday, Theresa.”
She understood the significance of what he was saying but it didn’t seem to really matter. She’d missed the last couple of days of classes.
“How do you feel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Should I call the doctor again?”
“No. I’m not sick.”
“What happened?”
Everything.
“Nothing.”
They stood indecisively at the foot of her bed. Understanding that she wasn’t ill, knowing she needed something to be done, not knowing what it was.
She said, “I’ll get dressed.”
Her father said, “Are you sure you’re all right?”
She said, “Yes.”
Her father said, “All right, then. Get dressed and we’ll see.
She said, “I’ll take a bath first.”
She waited for them to leave although she was still wearing the clothes she’d gotten into bed with on Friday. A dark-green shirt-dress. (Theresa of the Dark Colors, Martin had called her once, but he hadn’t told her to buy other clothes or she would have.) Then she got up, moving slowly but still getting so dizzy that she sank to her knees.
“Theresa?” Her mother’s anxious voice, outside the door.
“I’m all right. Go downstairs. I’m going to take a shower.”
Slowly she got to her feet, leaning against the dresser until the dizziness had passed. Still very slowly she got her robe from the closet, went into the bathroom, got off her clothes, got into the shower they’d started for her. In the shower she tried to figure out something she could do, someplace she would go, but that turned out to be irrelevant, for when she’d gotten dressed in jeans and a man’s shirt and very slowly made her way downstairs, it became obvious to everyone she could barely speak, much less go anyplace.
The sight of food made her ill.
On Tuesday when she still couldn’t eat they took her to see the doctor, who again found nothing wrong but said that if this continued for another few days they would put her in the hospital for extensive tests. She knew then that she would have to eat in a few more days because she would never go back to a hospital. She was already ten or twelve pounds below her normal weight and was still losing at the rate of two pounds a day. She was slim for the first time in her life, a fact to which she was totally indifferent. But then she was indifferent to everything. When people talked to her it was as though they were on the other side of a closed window.
On Thursday her mother called Katherine and on Friday Katherine drove up in the little red MG Brooks had bought when they moved from Third Avenue down to St. Marks Place. (When Brooks’s children visited them they rented a car large enough for all of them.) Katherine, wearing white bell-bottoms and a black exotic-looking top which everyone a few years later would know was Indian, wore her hair in pigtails and looked like a kid. On most women of her age—Katherine was twenty-eight, for Christ’s sake—it would have looked disgusting, but Katherine managed to bring it off.
They had briefly come so close together, the two of them, just before Katherine met Brooks. And then they’d gone their own ways, only to touch, intimate strangers, at times like this. Now they would be close again. They would tell each other secrets the way animals lie down on their backs before each other—You see? I am harmless. I give you this opportunity to hurt me. Then Katherine would go back to her own life and Theresa would . . . Theresa would stay home. Of course. That was what she always did in the long run. She stayed home.
She’d taken a teaching job near home in preference to one not far from Martin’s, even before she knew—or knew that she knew, as she now thought of it. What had been in her mind at the time was to show Martin that she was making no demands on him. That is she had thought she could go to him directly after school, that didn’t mean he had to be thinking the same thing. She could dash down directly on the subway. Or do whatever else he wanted her to do.
From her seat on the front porch she watched Katherine glide up the walk as though it were the aisle of an airplane, then gracefully run up the front steps. Her father was at work; her mother had conveniently disappeared.
“Tessie,” Katherine said, startling her slightly because she hadn’t heard the name in so long. “My God, you look beautiful! Mom prepared me for anything but this!”
She smiled politely. Thinking how she wished she had told Martin her old name. Thinking that if Martin could see her now she might be able to enjoy the fact that she’d lost almost fifteen pounds in the week since she’d seen him or touched food. (They were making her drink water. If her mother tried to trick her by adding something to the water, she gagged. She was supposed to enter the hospital by Monday if she didn’t start eating.)
“It’s not just the weight,” Katherine said. Katherine had been after her for years to lose weight. “It’s your face. You look so peaceful.”
In some strange way it was true, of course. If in one brief chat with Martin Engle she’d been robbed of a future, she’d also been robbed of the tightrope she wa
lked toward it.
“What’s happening, Tessie?” Katherine asked. “They’re so worried about you.”
“That’s because they’re afraid I’m physically ill,” she said calmly. “I’ve told them I’m not ill. I just don’t feel like eating.”
“When do you think you’ll feel like eating?”
“On the day when if I don’t start they’ll send me to the hospital.”
Katherine smiled. “You make it sound so simple.”
Are things really as simple as all that?
Theresa shrugged.
“Are you finished with school?” she asked politely.
“Yes,” Katherine said.
“Everything went all right?”
“Fine,” Katherine said. “I think I’m going to take a Soc major with a Psych minor, but I’m not sure yet.”
Theresa nodded.
“You missed your graduation,” Katherine said.
“It didn’t matter.”
“You did graduate? Nothing went wrong with school?”
“Nothing went wrong with school.”
“Why do you say they’re only worried that you’re physically ill?” Katherine asked. “I think they care if you’re depressed, too.”
“Well,” Theresa said, “I guess I’m depressed. So I guess they can care.”
“Is the doctor giving you something for it?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“He doesn’t favor pills, and I don’t want them, and he was concerned about the effect without food.”
“I have twenty different pills right in my bag,” Katherine said uncertainly. “If you change your mind.”
Theresa was silent.
“I guess,” Katherine said, “the truth is, I’m a little hurt. I want to help but I don’t know what’s wrong and I feel you don’t trust me enough to talk to me.”
“But I am talking to you.”
“But you haven’t told me what’s wrong.”
“You haven’t asked me.” Not outright. She’d just been sort of fishing around. Never guessing anything to do with a man. None of them would.
“What is it, Theresa?”
“A man.”
Katherine sighed. “How could I not have known? Nobody but men can do that to us, can they?”
There was something at once repellent and seductive about the sentence. Katherine was offering her a haven. Membership in a club. A club where hurt women could lick their wounds together. As though Katherine knew what it was to be hurt; she was the one who did the hurting.
“How long have you known him?”
“Four years.”
“Oh, wow,” Katherine said. And Theresa couldn’t conceal from herself just the faintest hint of pleasure at Katherine’s surprise. “You used to say that I was the big liar in the family.”
“I never lied,” Theresa said quickly. “I just said I was with friends from school. And it was true.”
“He was from school?”
“A teacher.” She got suddenly irrationally concerned that Katherine would be able to find out who it was. “I never had him for anything, but he taught there.”
“What happened?” Katherine asked.
“He went back to his wife.”
“Mmm,” Katherine said. “That’s a rough one.” Katherine, the stewardess of life, consulting a flight manual.
Not that she hadn’t expected it, Theresa found herself adding. Not that she hadn’t urged him to forget her and go back to his wife. After all, he had three children who adored him.
“Oh, children,” said Katherine, as though saying now she understood, it explained everything.
“I suppose,” Theresa said, “you’re going to tell Mom and Dad.”
“No,” Katherine said, “of course not. But you should tell them something. They’ve been worried sick about you.”
“If I start eating again they’ll forget all about it.”
“What about in the meantime?”
“Tell them it’s because I haven’t been to church in too long,” Theresa said with a grin. If a little life was returning to her it was returning not to her body or soul but to the sardonic imp Martin Engle had found in her mind. “As a matter of fact, I’ll go to church with Mom on Sunday and get cured. I’ll walk in very slowly—”
“Theresa!” Katherine protested, laughing.
“Why not? I’ll walk in very slowly. I’m pretty weak now, anyway. Maybe I’ll take Dad’s cane from when he had the sprained ankle. And then after the mass I’ll throw up the cane and shout, ‘I can walk again!’ ”
Katherine giggled. “It’s not all that bad an idea, though,” she said after a moment. “I mean, not all that stuff, but you could go to church and say you felt better and sort of slowly—”
“Why?” Theresa asked. “Why should I?”
“Because if you’re not going to tell them the truth, you have to tell them something else.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re worried about you,” Katherine said, obviously puzzled. “Because they love you.”
But she didn’t believe that, hadn’t believed it in years. How could they? How could they not believe it would have been better for her to have died the first time she was ill instead of turning into whom she had. She might get angry at them when she saw the pleasure in their faces when Katherine visited, but she got angry because they were right, not because they were wrong. True, Katherine was a hypocrite who never let them see her real self, but after all, weren’t they right to prefer that? What was so great about real selves? About the way people really were when you stripped off the pretty faces and hypocritical manners? Once during a TV newscast years ago on a political scandal in the city she’d heard her father say, “They’ll be sorry they opened up that can of worms,” and the image had stayed with her. The can was a bright, neat-looking can on the outside but the worms were pink and slimy and looked more like intestines, or something else you’d find if you turned yourself inside out, than like the dry gray worms that crawled through the ground. She remembered now how once, just once, a year or so after the operation, maybe less, she’d looked in the mirror at her back and seen the shiny wormlike scar in her back and never looked again for years. Until the day before she’d begun City and met Martin Engle and by then the scar had imbedded itself much more deeply in her. Now it was just a neat seam where someone had opened her up to get her straightened out.
“I don’t think there’s much love lost between us,” she said. “I just think we sort of accept each other for what we are, now. As soon as I have the money I’ll move out.”
She had more than seven hundred dollars, of course, from her three years of work with Martin. This year he had paid her by the month.
Katherine sighed. “You’re impossible. For years Mother’s been telling me when she tries to talk to you, you run. And you won’t even sit in the same room with Daddy unless you’re eating or the TV’s on.”
“So what?” That was as much because she knew it was what they wanted as for any other reason.
“So, you don’t let them—”
“Listen,” Theresa said, with an insincerity so palpable that she couldn’t believe Katherine wouldn’t see what she was doing. “I’m feeling a little better already, Katherine. I’m really glad we talked.”
Katherine was uncertain.
“I really . . . I’ll start eating. I’ll come out of it. You’ll see, as soon as I begin to feel better they’ll stop worrying.”
The next day she had some pretzels and the following day, dry cereal. Then tuna fish, then peanut-butter sandwiches. But it was a couple of weeks before she could eat meat again.
Meanwhile Katherine and Brooks went off to Fire Island for the summer. Katherine wanted Theresa to come with them. At first Theresa refused entirely, but Katherine kept saying she could change her mind at any time. Finally she told Theresa that Brooks’s children were going to be there in August and Theresa would really be a big help if she came. S
he could be like a mother’s helper. And if she didn’t like it, she could go home any time Brooks went into the city. At first Theresa said she thought not, but then she daydreamed of running into Martin, her new, svelte, peaceful-looking self, and although she didn’t believe in the possibilities of the daydream, she said she would maybe try a weekend or two in July with Brooks.
Driving out and ferrying across to the Island turned out to be the best part of the weekends. Brooks was a great talker. Where Martin’s conversation had been clever, his conversation a series of feints and jabs, Brooks was fluid and peaceful, his conversation punctuated only by laughter at himself or the world in general.
He was one of those men who’d awakened one day at the age of forty in his home in Scarsdale, turned to look at his wife, a still attractive but very typical Scarsdale wife-mother whose greatest problem in life was getting decent maids, thought about the appointments he had in his law office that day and suddenly said to himself, “Hey! What the hell am I doing here? I’m following someone else’s plan for my life!” And a year later, after a lot of bitterness and a lot of anguish over leaving his kids, he’d had a separation and then a divorce. He’d had absolutely no intention of ever getting married again. And then one day on an airplane he’d met this absolutely beautiful girl who had no more interest in marriage than he did. Who didn’t even care what he did for a living, for Christ’s sake. Who was perfectly happy to see him for dinner, a movie and a good lay without knowing that his father had one of the three biggest Jewish law firms in Boston and he himself was a partner in one of New York’s most prestigious firms and had published a law text that was used in half the law schools in the country. Who didn’t care if he could even afford the place he was living in.
She didn’t have to care, Brooks. If she met you on an airplane doing business, she could take some things for granted.
He had to admit he’d really gone for that, but he still didn’t think he’d have gone all the way if he’d never seen the place where Kitty lived.
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