She claimed in the next weeks to be feeling absolutely marvelous and to be capable now of buckling down to schoolwork in a way she hadn’t been able to for months. She was particularly excited by the psych course she was taking, not because the material was so great, it was all pretty basic stuff and could’ve been dull, but the teacher was incredible. He took, she explained, the best from each of the schools of thought and added a lot on his own. She had pretty well decided she was going to be a psych major. Dr. Chapman had promised her that he would get her into one of his electives the following year. He’d said there was no sense in someone with her intelligence going through a lot of crap courses without a glimpse of the real thing for another year or two. It was so nice, Katherine said, to be appreciated for her mind for a change.
Two months later, when the holiday season had passed, Katherine told Theresa that she and Brooks were going to separate.
“Oh, no!” Terry wailed, thinking they had been looking so much more loving lately. They’d all gone to a New Year’s party where Katherine and Brooks hadn’t wanted to break their midnight kiss when someone was tapping Brooks on the shoulder, like a joke, cutting in on his kiss. “Why? I don’t understand. . . . You’re doing it,” she said after a moment when Katherine didn’t answer. “Brooks wouldn’t do it.”
“Oh, Terry,” Katherine sighed. “What difference does it really make?”
“Plenty.” She was nearly crying with her anger at Katherine and the pain she felt for Brooks. “He loves you.”
“Loves me,” Katherine said with more than a touch of scorn. “He doesn’t even know me.”
“What does that mean?” Terry demanded.
“It means we don’t have very much in common, Terry. He’s a nice man and I’ll always be fond of him, but we’re into entirely different things.”
“Into,” Terry repeated. “What does that mean, ‘into things’?”
“I don’t mean entirely,” Katherine said, “I mean, we’re both into music and dope and all . . . but who isn’t now? But past that . . . Brooks, well, Brooks hasn’t really changed at all since I met him, you know, Terry? He’s given up Scarsdale and his teased-blonde wife and all but he’s still really very suburban. Law and order. The whole thing. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“No,” Terry said bitterly. Katherine had found the most wonderful man in the world and now she was throwing him away. It was ironic that only women who could do things like that got men like Brooks. She was more convinced than ever that she didn’t want to get married, but if she had, someone just like him was whom she’d want.
“The psychology thing isn’t just a thing, you know,” Katherine said.
“The thing isn’t a thing,” Terry repeated sardonically.
Katherine looked hurt. Good. She deserved it.
“I mean I’m really into—I’m really involved with it.” She was very earnest. She looked very young and earnest. She was thirty years old already but probably the people in her classes thought she was just one of the kids. “I’m going to stick with it. I love the field and I love the people who’re in it.”
“What does that mean, you love the people?”
What was in her mind when she asked was that you didn’t go into a field because you loved the people, you had to love what you were doing. That was the only safe thing because people could change . . . or go away. . . . But Katherine flushed and then Terry realized she’d hit on something.
“I mean I’m really into—I’m really involved with it.” She was trembling. “That the people in that field think more the way I do. It’s a way of looking at people. At life. A way of digesting experience, as Nick says.”
“Who’s Nick?”
“Nick Chapman. My psych prof.” Katherine proceeded with a description of Nick Chapman’s qualities as a teacher, a man, a human being, while Theresa thought about Brooks, upstairs, alone. She ached for him. It was very important to her that Brooks know she wasn’t on Katherine’s side just because she was Katherine’s sister, that her sympathies lay entirely with him.
“Is Brooks upstairs?” she interrupted Katherine’s narrative on the virtues of Dr. Chapman.
Katherine nodded.
“Is he all right?”
Katherine laughed shortly. “I really think you care more about him than about me.”
Terry said nothing.
“All right,” Katherine said, “I guess I asked for that, but for God’s sake, Theresa . . . from the look on your face someone would think I’d just murdered him.”
I feel as if that’s what you did.
“It wasn’t the kind of marriage you think, Terry. I don’t mean we weren’t close. We still are, in a way. I’m very fond of Brooks. But the really deep feelings were never there. It wasn’t even a marriage like, say, Mom and Dad’s, as bad as that is.”
This was something new to Theresa, who’d never thought very much about the quality of her parents’ marriage but had simply assumed it was what they wanted . . . that is more or less worked for them, if not for her.
“Why is it bad?” she asked in spite of her determination to be silent.
“Because it’s, how, how can I . . . the best way I can put it is the way Nick puts it, he said something once about people being bound together by lovelessness . . . isn’t that marvelous?”
Theresa shrugged. She didn’t know if it was so marvelous or not, especially if it was about her parents by some snotty NYU professor who’d never met them. If there was one thing that had seemed quite clear to her all along it was that her father put up with her mother because he loved her. Katherine was going on and on about negative bonds and friendship and never getting down deep with Brooks but Theresa thought maybe Katherine had no deep to get down to.
“Are you leaving the house?”
“Yes,” Katherine said with a sigh.
“Where are you going?”
“If I tell you I’m moving in with Nick you’re going to think I’m leaving Brooks for him,” Katherine said. “And that’s not true. I would have left anyway. I needed to leave.”
“But that’s where you’re going.”
Katherine nodded.
She never liked herself when she was with Katherine. Katherine brought out the Witness in her. The Teller of the Truth. The self-righteous little prig she thought at other times she’d left somewhere between St. Francis Xavier and City College. Now Katherine had caught her unawares again, all out of gear with the time and tides. Weeping for Brooks, who after all had not come to her for comfort.
“I can’t think of not being Brooks’s friend,” she said. “He’s been like a—not like a father to me, but like a big brother.”
“But nobody’s asking you not to be Brooks’s friend,” Katherine said. Her manner had suddenly changed. She was very appealing. The first female priest. “I want you to be his friend, he needs his friends now. I’m sure your being here will make it easier for him. He is upset. I don’t like to admit it because it makes me feel evil, but I know it’s true, even if I think breaking up is better for him in the long run, too. I don’t even think it’s the breakup he’s so upset about. It’s more being left. However bad a marriage is, however much both people know it should end, the one who does it feels better than the other one.”
“I guess,” Theresa said.
“Anyway,” Katherine said, “I really want you to take care of Brooks for me.”
That was strange. As though Katherine had ever taken care of him herself. She’d never done a thing in the house. Was he going to need more care now than he had before? What was she proposing exactly? And how had it gotten all turned around? A few minutes ago Katherine had been jealous of Terry’s concern for Brooks and now she was urging her to take care of him. She felt unsettled. Robbed of her own impulses, whatever they’d been. She had a headache. She wanted Katherine to go. She wanted to scream. She wanted to run away. She wasn’t sure what to do. She needed to get out but she also needed for Katherine not to see that. What the
hell had Katherine done to her? She felt as though she’d let herself be tied up, put in a trunk and sent to the bottom of the ocean with a vague promise that someone would get her out later.
She said, “I have to get out of here.”
Katherine was startled.
“I’ve been feeling restless all night. It has nothing to do with . . . with all this.” If Katherine knew what it was about she might find some way to change her mind. Katherine was a witch. “The kids have been difficult, I understand it’s the February-March Syndrome, they can’t wait for spring to come, they’re climbing the walls.” She laughed. “They knock me out and I come home and fall asleep and then I wake up full of energy and then I start climbing the walls.”
Katherine laughed, too. “Listen,” she said, “let’s go out together. I’ll buy you a drink.”
“A drink? I thought you didn’t drink any more.”
“We can have wine.”
It was a way to get rid of Katherine. They would go out together and have a glass of wine and then she would say again that she was tired or restless and she would slip away.
“Or we could go dancing,” Katherine suggested. “We could go to the Dom.”
“I’d rather just have a glass of wine.”
Corners, an Old-fashioned Bar, was like frozen orange juice—the real thing, only more so. The floors were tile, the bar and booths a dark wood, maybe mahogany. The lights were green globes suspended from stiff rods in the ceiling and didn’t shed enough light to bother anyone, or even enough to see very well. It was all men, she could just see as they sat down at the bar and she looked around, except for two couples. The two couples were in booths and there were six or maybe seven men at the bar.
“Some nights you can’t get into this place,” Katherine said.
Theresa felt strange being there. However much she might have read in recent years about women in bars, they were still in her mind very much a male preserve, an almost magical kind of place where men went to get away from women. She could remember the bar way down on Morris Park Avenue where Katherine had once long ago been sent to fetch her father because he was needed for some emergency and the line at the bar kept ringing busy when her mother phoned. Much later she had recognized the name when she was passing by the place, and on impulse, peered into it. It was late afternoon and only two men sat at the bar; behind it the bartender wiped glasses and looked at the TV and whistled. There was still daylight coming in but the dim lights were on anyway, as though you couldn’t drink in daylight. The dirt that wouldn’t show under the dim artificial light was clear now on the dim windows and the tile floor. She ran out as soon as the bartender saw her.
Katherine was talking to two men sitting on her right; now she introduced Theresa as her sister.
“I wish you wouldn’t always say I was your sister,” she whispered to Katherine. “It makes me sound like I’m not a person aside from that.”
“I’m sorry,” Katherine said. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
Terry shrugged. “Because it seemed silly.”
“If it’s how you feel,” Katherine said soothingly, “it’s not silly.” Whereupon Terry experienced once again that shift of feelings in which guilt over the way she felt about Katherine when Katherine was so nice to her overwhelmed whatever else she’d been experiencing at the moment.
Katherine went back to talking to the men. Theresa stared at the bar and sipped at her wine. To her left, a couple of stools down, sat a man who was alone and who she could feel was looking at her. She glanced at him quickly, looked away. He was very big, with a huge head of dark curly hair and a long straggly beard. The jukebox had stopped and after a moment he got up, put a coin in it, came back and sat down next to her.
He said, “Hi.”
She said, “Hi.”
He said, “My name’s Ali,” which seemed funny. The only Ali she’d ever heard of was Cassius Clay.
“Terry,” she said. She looked to see if he was really looking at Katherine but he didn’t seem to be. Maybe he didn’t realize they were together.
“I haven’t see you around,” he said.
“I haven’t been here,” she said.
“You live around here?” he asked.
“Sort of,” she said.
“I don’t blame you for not telling me,” he said. “You don’t know who you’re meeting in a bar.”
She smiled, shrugged to show that she was really casual, not worried. “I live on St. Marks Place. I’m a teacher.”
“No kidding,” he said. “What do you teach?”
“Little kids.”
“Perfect,” he said, “that’s who I’d want to teach if I was a teacher. They’re so pure.”
She searched his face for a hint of irony but couldn’t find any. Not that it was funny, or untrue, but somehow . . .
“When do you think they lose their purity?” she asked. “I mean, we lose it.”
“I dunno,” he said. “My daughter . . . let’s see . . . Elana is fourteen and she’s a beautiful kid but it’s been a long time since you could’ve called her innocent.”
His daughter. He didn’t look as though he had a daughter. It didn’t matter. She’d known after Carter that nothing was going to matter again.
“How many children do you have?” she asked.
“Four,” he said.
“You’re kidding,” she exclaimed, then she was embarrassed. She’d said it as though it mattered when it didn’t. Still, there was something about the situation itself, about the bar, the darkness, that lent an intimacy to their conversation that it wouldn’t have had elsewhere.
He shook his head. “I was married for sixteen years.”
He looked so young, with his beard and his jeans and his bashful expression.
“You don’t look it,” she told him.
“I know,” he said.
Katherine turned and said something to her that she couldn’t catch. She shrugged.
“Am I interrupting you all?” he asked.
“No,” she said. Then, suddenly, “I feel like getting out of here, anyway.”
He looked hurt. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m just restless. I didn’t really want to come here in the first place, I just wanted to take a walk.”
“If you feel like the company,” he said hesitantly, “I’ll walk with you. I could use the air.”
“Okay,” she said. She stood up and told Katherine she was going for a walk. Katherine glanced at Ali, smiled, said, “So long.” Theresa watched Ali carefully for signs of interest in Katherine but saw none.
They started uptown on Second Avenue. There was something really comfortable about walking with him. Partly it was his size. It made her think of walking with her father when she was very little. Once in a while when she was maybe in the first or second grade, when she’d recovered from the polio and it was good for her to have the exercise, he would take her for a long walk, perhaps on Pelham Parkway, perhaps across Eastchester Road. She would hold his hand. When she looked up what she could mostly see was his blue sleeve and his shoulder and then maybe a bit of hair or chin. It was the only time she ever got to be alone with him without any of the others, and as they left the familiarity of their own block and began to pass strangers on the sidewalk, she often wondered if these people didn’t think they were complete as they were. That there was no one else who belonged with them. That she had no sisters and when she went home that night she would cook dinner for her father.
“How did you get the name Ali?” she asked.
“My name is Eli, actually,” he said. Again that shy, sheepish smile. “I felt as if I needed a new name for my new life.”
It was ingenuous. The kind of thing she would never confess to anyone.
“You mean when you left your family?”
“I don’t like to think of it that way,” he said. “I think of it as I left my wife.”
“Do you see your children?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “My wife won’t let me.”
“That’s horrible,” she said.
“You think so?” he asked—almost dispassionately. “You don’t think it’s fair, even if I walked out on her?”
“Absolutely not,” she said, remembering Brooks’s delight in his children’s visits. What would happen to those visits now? “I have a friend who’s divorced and no matter how mad his wife was at him she never came between him and his children.”
“I need to hear people say things like that,” Ali-Eli said. “When I’m really down, like now. I sometimes think I deserve what she’s doing. Even though I know she’s a lunatic.”
It was as though she’d pressed a button; he began talking, his voice relatively expressionless, at first, but his face intent on his story, chapter and verse.
He had been raised in a super-religious Jewish family, Hassidim, he said, a word she’d never heard. His father was a Hassidic rabbi, his older sister was a Hebrew teacher. He’d gone only to Jewish schools, to yeshiva, when he was growing up. He lived in Washington Heights but he didn’t know what pizza was until he was fourteen years old.
When he was nineteen he had gone to the rabbi because he was so horny that he could no longer push thoughts of girls out of his head for long enough to do his schoolwork (he was by this time in his third year of a yeshiva college). One month later he was married to the rabbi’s daughter and ten months later he was a father.
His life in the following years was one huge miserable rut. He was super-straight, super-responsible, super-serious. He never laughed except with his children. In 1966 he was still going to synagogue faithfully. There was no way that he could have remained part of the life of that community and not gone to synagogue.
But the joke of it, the supreme and horrendous joke, was that this girl, this girl whom it was arranged for him to marry because he could no longer handle his own youthful sexuality and there was no other acceptable way for him to release it, this girl had turned out to be the coldest, dryest cunt on the face of the earth!
Terry felt her face flush but he didn’t notice. They were almost at Twenty-third Street but he seemed oblivious to how far they were walking. She was fascinated, both by the story and his ability to tell it to her. A total stranger.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar Page 11