Kitty. No one had ever called Katherine Kitty before. Theresa wished she had a special name. Not Tessie. Not a baby name.
A shithouse! He still laughed when he thought of it. Kitty had kicked out the guy she was living with and two stewardess friends had moved in. The whole place was pretty bad but Kitty’s room was unbelievable. He’d never seen anything like it even in his bachelor days (he had to admit he was pretty neat, himself). His ex-wife would have had a hemorrhage. Never mind his ex-wife, the Collier Brothers wouldn’t have lived there! Three-month-old take-out Chinese food in the drawers! The only reason the place didn’t smell even worse was that she didn’t close the drawers and the hot apartment air seemed to be drying the stuff out faster than the bacteria could rot it! He remembered asking her where she kept the thousand-year eggs!
Theresa was fascinated by these glimpses of a Katherine she didn’t know, yet resentful of the way Brooks’s infatuation with Katherine made him view her as some kind of prize—her failures were her greatest successes! When he talked about her taking eighteen credits her first term because she was so terrified of going back to school that she had to plunge right in, Theresa had to sit on the impulse to say that was just plain idiotic. And what was all this business about Katherine being so scared of school when she was always first or second in her class? Brooks said it was true Kitty was a pretty smart kid, but a Catholic school in the Bronx wasn’t NYU. Not that NYU was one big think tank, either, but there wasn’t actually a college in the country where Kitty would have to worry about grades if she’d just focus her energy. Concentrate. Do her work.
On the beach they talked politics—the war in Vietnam, mostly—and watched bodies. Theresa was the only one in their group who didn’t wear a bikini but then she wasn’t really in the group, anyway. She felt like a tourist in a land where everyone was dark and oily and sexy and spoke a language whose words she knew but which, when put together in sentences, had no impact on her. Nor had she experienced any sexual feeling since the loss of Martin. In the evenings they stayed home and smoked grass and played the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and danced (or went to one of the dancing bars). Sometimes they had what they called a party but it was hard to tell those nights from the others. Theresa would sit in the living room where everyone was, but mostly she would stay curled up in one corner with a book, making believe that Martin had found out she was here and even now was looking for her.
Rafe and Marvella, who shared the house with Brooks and Katherine, were, along with them, the hub of the sexual activities—the dancing, whatever was going on. At first Theresa wasn’t sure. Both strikingly handsome, with dark hair and deep sunburns, looking like sister and brother, Marvella was a photographer and Rafe an artist. Or so it was said. You couldn’t have guessed from anything that happened out here. They smoked all the time and were the only ones in the group who used acid with any regularity. They made Theresa uncomfortable because there was nothing about them that she could latch onto as real. If she’d often had the sense of Katherine as a façade with little solid matter beneath, she knew this wasn’t really true, that somewhere beneath the gorgeous groovy surface of her older sister lay a human being with some substance, even if that substance was largely a sense of sin. While Rafe and Marvella seemed to have sprung full-blown from the mind of someone planning the second half of the twentieth century. They were never tense or wound up. They never sat around saying they really ought to be working. They bore no one malice, not even themselves. Their two children, Eamon and Tara, were the darlings of the group. Five and seven respectively, they were almost as cool as their parents, and never bothered anyone. They watched TV during the day when the other kids were on the beach. When Brooks’s kids finally came out with them in August it was understood that Eamon and Tara would be their friends, but Brooks’s kids always wanted to be out on the beach or making a hut or finding things to sell on a sidewalk stand. They wanted Eamon and Tara to join them but Eamon and Tara would watch them work for a while, then drift back to the house to see what was on TV.
Brooks’s children were delightful, too, although they didn’t fit with the grown-ups as easily as Eamon and Tara. But they were quite independent, made friends with other kids on the beach and required little attention. Theresa had only seen them once or twice when they visited their father in New York and of course it had been different there. She was disappointed that they didn’t need her more.
When there were parties, if she’d had some wine and someone asked her to dance, she might do it. Otherwise she just read or watched. She refused to smoke. She’d lost the fear since little had happened when she’d smoked with Martin, but there was a great deal of joking about getting turned on by grass and she most definitely didn’t want to be turned on. Katherine laughed when she said that, that she didn’t want to like sex any more than she did, but it was no joking matter to her; the morning papers weren’t into women’s sexuality yet and to admit the need when there was no man to fill it seemed to be telling the world that you did forbidden things to yourself to gratify that need.
Katherine and Brooks kept urging her to mingle with a younger crowd, people who weren’t married, but she had no desire to do this. She was comfortable where she was, though she wasn’t happy. She couldn’t even remember how happiness felt.
When she woke up very early one morning on the floor behind the sofa, having fallen asleep during the party the night before while trying to finish a book, and saw four naked bodies lying loosely entwined on the rug in front of the sofa, her first thought was, Oh, so that’s what it looks like to be happy—and only later did a variety of other reactions set in.
They were all sound asleep. Katherine was lying in Rafe’s arms; Rafe’s head was on one of the huge embroidered pillows they kept on the floor. Brooks’s head lay not five inches from Rafe’s on the pillow, his body going in another direction. Marvella was curled up between them, her head on Brooks’s stomach. Not his stomach, really. Her face was touching his pubic hair. Her feet were under Rafe’s body.
Tiptoeing out of the room, guilty at having seen them, she went upstairs and got into her own bed. The light was coming through her window and she didn’t want to get up again so she buried her head under the blankets, but when she closed her eyes she saw Marvella’s face next to Brooks’s penis, which jolted her more fully awake than she’d been the whole time until then. The picture drew her so strongly and repelled her so sharply once she got there that the two feelings tossed her between them and she didn’t fall asleep again until late morning, when the others had gotten up and were moving around the house.
When she came out to the beach that afternoon Brooks and Marvella were discussing a show some painter they all knew was having at a gallery in Cherry Grove. They were perfectly casual. You’d have thought they were two strangers who’d just met on the sand.
She was happy in the classroom in a way that she’d never been in her life. She gave and took so much that she came home exhausted at the end of the day but she didn’t nap because if she slept then, she couldn’t fall asleep at night, and it was too depressing to lie in bed awake for hours when everyone else was sleeping. She still thought about Martin a great deal but it was from a greater distance, now. She still dreamed about running into him whenever she was in Manhattan but she could understand now, if only intellectually, that their affair had had to end. She also understood that she had idealized Martin somewhat. He was the first person she’d ever known who talked—who was—the way he was, and one of the effects of the summer, although she hadn’t realized it until she got home, had been to make her realize that at least some of Martin’s virtues, his clever way of speaking, his bored sophistication, were not unique. Not that she ever wanted to know anyone else like him. One per lifetime was enough. She didn’t believe she could survive another.
She was friendly in a remote, polite way with the women who taught with her. Once in a while she would leave the building for lunch with one of them. Occasionally one would suggest going
to a movie or concert, but she never felt like it. (She had lunch every month or two on a Saturday with Carol; Rhoda was working for a publisher and terribly busy. Eventually she realized that the only reason she wanted to see Carol was to stroke her memories of Martin, so she stopped doing that.) If she hadn’t allowed herself to be drawn into the dope-colorful rock-loud lives of Katherine and Brooks, that life had left her with a casual disdain for the ones most of the people she knew were living. She baby-sat for Brigid at least once a week.
Her biggest problem in teaching was the knowledge that she would part from her children at the end of the year. She loved them—corny but true, as she said once to Carol—as though they were her own, even the difficult ones. She had chosen first grade because her most exciting school memory was of suddenly being able to look at a page and understand what was on it, and she had that sense of excitement with her children as they began to read. She was authoritative in some ways, loose in others. She led them into long, marvelous discussions stemming from chance questions or remarks they made. Once one of them asked what he could do that his shadow couldn’t do and they spent half an hour moving around the classroom in the sunlight to find out and another half an hour discussing the fine points (What could you really do that your shadow only seemed to be doing?). Another time, when they came in all soaked through on a snowy, slushy day, and found her in the front of the room, looking warm and dry, one of them asked her quite seriously if she was waterproof? From this flowed not only a lengthy discussion of who and what was waterproof, but various other experiments with the nature of water and wetness.
Katherine kept urging her to get a place of her own in Manhattan but it wasn’t until the middle of her second year of teaching that she began to feel restless enough at home to even consider it. She sent out letters to a large number of schools in Manhattan just to see what would happen. Of the few that answered, one was on the Lower East Side, not far from Katherine and Brooks’s brownstone. Katherine urged her to take it but it wasn’t until the tenant in the bottom studio apartment of their house gave notice that this became a realistic likelihood. The tenant had been paying a hundred and fifty dollars a month but they would only take a hundred from her. She accepted the job in May and moved to the new apartment at the end of the school year.
In the back on the ground floor were two very domestic homosexuals who had a beautiful garden and cooked cordon bleu meals. Katherine and Brooks were on the main floor and the top floor was occupied by what turned out to be two males and one female, although it was hard to tell, for they were less sexually differentiated than the homosexuals downstairs, each having shoulder-length straight blond hair, blue jeans drawn tightly over no rear end to speak of, and that look that was just becoming commonplace on the streets of New York—of having been someplace that made them realize that Earth was a two-bit town.
Katherine wanted to give her a lot of furniture but she wouldn’t take any of it except a double bed. She was apprehensive about moving into the same house as Katherine, determined to stave off any attempts to dominate her life. (In her mind this was a temporary move; she was afraid to move out entirely on her own.)
She spent the entire summer decorating her apartment and took enormous pleasure in doing it—in everything from the painting and plastering to the selection of each and every object she acquired.
It was basically one large room with two windows looking up to the street. In the back were a pullman kitchen and a small bathroom. She painted the walls yellow and the ceiling sky blue. Then she pasted star decals onto the ceiling in the patterns of Orion and Gemini and Capricorn and the Milky Way. They shone in the dark after you’d left the light on for a while, and at night she lay in bed gazing up at them, as from the grass, enchanted. An imaginary lover lay beside her; they seldom spoke, they just made love or were together.
From a thrift shop on Second Avenue she had a blue velvet pillow. From a pile of discarded furniture on the next block she got a wooden bookcase which she sanded and antiqued so perfectly as to astonish herself. Thus encouraged she got an oak rolltop desk from a store on Third Avenue that was going out of business; it cost only two hundred dollars because it needed to be refinished. She bought a flowered armchair, new, out of the window of Sloane’s, because she happened to pass there one day and see the chair and love it. From Grand Street, which she discovered quite accidentally on a long walk one hot summer day when it was nearly deserted, she bought a blue bandanna-printed quilt that was half price because it was a second. It reminded her of one in Martin’s study. She bought a white pedestal table and two matching dining chairs.
She delighted in every object, from the blue drapes she made herself because she loved the fabric (she’d never sewn before) to the tiny wooden Swedish and Norwegian animals she got in the Village, to the old-fashioned print of a clownfish with its ornate frame and quaint caption:
One of the greatest enemies of small fish is the sea anemone, which looks like a flower but has long tentacles that are full of poison. For some reason the sea anemone does not harm the clownfish. When threatened by danger the clownfish swims in among the anemone’s tentacles where other fish will be afraid to follow.
“Fantastic,” Katherine said when she saw the apartment. “I love it. It’s unbelievable what you’ve done with it!”
She saw very little of them although Katherine was always inviting her up, when they bumped into each other, for a cup of coffee or to share a pizza dinner. Aside from being genuinely busy and wanting to preserve her independence from her sister, being with them wasn’t the way it had been before. If Brooks had once been so adoring of Katherine that he annoyed Theresa, he was now irritated by those very qualities in Katherine—her sloppiness, her failure to cook for him—that had once charmed him so. Not that he complained a lot, but he was quiet and withdrawn and sometimes came out of it with a small burst of temper, which made Theresa uneasy. Katherine was less flighty-casual with him, more deferential, yet there was something going on underneath Katherine’s deference that contributed to Theresa’s unease. She didn’t think about it a lot but she avoided them.
Her situation at school was different, too, not so much with the students (she’d been relieved to discover that she enjoyed the black and Puerto Rican children as much as the others, and she was, as usual, comfortable and confident in the classroom) as with the staff. Where in the Bronx the staff had been almost entirely made up of middle-aged and older Jewish and Irish women who’d gone into teaching when it was the only decent job they could get and who hadn’t stopped at any point since to decide whether they actually liked doing it, the staff here was only half composed of women like that. The remainder were young and often enthusiastic, largely white but sometimes black, mostly female, but there were two men, one black and one white, both dreamy-eyed, both bearded. Their mood paralleled hers in a way she hadn’t felt before—idealism about the children and their possibilities, combined with a remote, dope-tempered cynicism about the schools, the government, the country.
Theresa had become much more radical in her ideas without ever getting involved with any group. Gradually she was becoming less frightened of black people—maybe because she wanted to so badly but also because she was seeing more of them than she’d ever seen, close up, at any rate. Her new attitudes made it a little easier for her to be with people like the other young teachers because it relieved her of some of that specific social guilt she’d felt, right through her days at City College, over being a secret racist. Being really no better than her parents in her ideas.
One evening in November Katherine said she felt like talking and invited Theresa to dinner. Theresa went because she hadn’t seen them in so long. Katherine poured wine for both of them without asking if Theresa wanted any. Only one small light was on in the living room but the dim light was pleasant; the apartment didn’t look quite as bad as in daylight.
“How’s school?” Katherine asked. She was very subdued.
“Great,” Terry said, but she
volunteered no further information. It was very important to her that Katherine not be a part of her life in school.
Katherine said nothing. She looked depressed. She took a sip of wine and spilled it on herself.
“Oh, God,” she said, and burst into tears.
“What’s wrong?” Theresa asked.
“I’m pregnant.” Looking at Theresa, through the tears, as though she were sure Theresa had a whip and was going to use it on her.
A picture flashed into Theresa’s mind. Katherine and Brooks asleep on the rug with Rafe and Marvella. Rafe and Marvella had been back there this year, and God only knew who else.
“Mother of God,” Theresa said. “It’s the same thing you did last time.”
Katherine’s face was blank. She stopped crying.
“What do you mean?”
“Not knowing who the father was. Or have you been—?”
“I knew you knew,” Katherine said matter-of-factly. “Anyway, it’s not the same. It’s different.”
“How come you got so thin if you’re pregnant?”
“I can’t eat. I throw up.”
“Does Rafe know?” she asked after a while.
“Rafe? Why? Oh, you mean . . . It doesn’t matter.” Avoiding Theresa’s eyes. “He doesn’t . . . they weren’t the only ones.”
Of course.
Brooks called to say he was working late with someone on a brief; Katherine told him to bring the someone down because Theresa was there and they could all have dinner together.
“I know the whole thing must be hard for you to understand,” she said to Theresa. “I don’t even know how to explain it, it’s just something that happened. When I was working for Pan Am I knew there was a lot of sex around but I never did it. Slept around a lot, I mean. I was . . . maybe it sounds silly to you but when I had the two boyfriends, the one in L.A. and the one in New York, I was leading the cleanest, most careful life of anyone I knew. I used to get teased because I was like a nice married lady at both ends of the run.”
Looking for Mr. Goodbar Page 9