“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just . . . who’s in there?” Gesturing with her head over the top of the wall.
“The friends I stay with.”
“How many?”
“Three,” he said. “It’s this woman and her two kids, actually. Her husband left and she’s letting me stay here.”
“Letting you stay here.”
He nodded. “She’s a really good friend.”
Theresa dragged again. “She doesn’t care that I’m here?” Why was she asking? She herself didn’t really care if that woman cared.
He shook his head. “She’s not that way. She’s not at all possessive.” He passed her the joint again. “Why don’t you lean back against the pillows? You’ll be more comfortable.”
She looked back at the wall, then at him, and smiled. “I can’t,” she said. “It’s too far away. It’s sooooooo far.”
“I’ll help you.” He helped her back and then stretched out beside her and they smoked the second joint, smiling at each other. He asked if she wasn’t too warm with her coat on. She asked if he wasn’t too cold with his coat off. He said maybe he was and they took off her coat and stretched it over them.
“Now you won’t be cold, Ali-Eli,” she said.
“Hey,” he said, “I like that.”
“What do you like, Ali-Eli?”
She felt like the naughty princess in one of her old fantasies. When she closed her eyes she could see a beautiful girl on ice skates twirling around on her blades while twelve handsome men in tuxedos and Norwegian stocking caps chased her gracefully over the ice. She closed her eyes so she could see them better. Ali kissed her.
“Mmm,” she said. “They’re making figure eights but there are twelve of them so they don’t all fit.”
“Mmm?” He was massaging her breasts, now lifting her sweater. He was so big and soft and cuddly. Like a teddy bear. Once there’d been a teddy bear at the ice show; now she could see a hundred of him holding a hundred little girls who were her in his arms as he whirled around on the ice. She let Ali undress her, too limp and relaxed and absorbed in her pictures to do more than help. He grunted as he took off his own clothes. He was so big and white. A white whale.
“Moby-Ali-Eli.”
He parted her legs and before she knew it he was in her, but it was all right, she was ready. It felt fine. He came very quickly, and that would have been all right, too, except that instead of staying in her and waiting, he rolled off and lay on his back. She got cold and went under the covers. It wasn’t comfortable; the sheet was wrinkled up and full of crumbs and you could feel the mattress buttons right through it. Not nice. But not important. She’d have liked him to stay in her for longer but that wasn’t important, either. He was really nice. Lovable. A teddy bear. Moby-Ali-Eli-Teddy Bear. She drifted into a sleep full of teddy-bear images and then he was kissing her. In her sleep she turned to him.
“Terry. Wake up.”
“Hmm?”
“I want to take you home.”
She opened her eyes, disbelieving. The heaviness that was pleasant when you were making love was awful if you wanted to wake up.
“What?”
“I don’t want you to go home alone, I’ll walk you.”
If he was doing something for her why didn’t she feel as though he was doing something for her?
“I’m so sleepy,” she murmured.
“Mmmm,” he said. “You look beautiful when you sleep. A perfect little shiksa, fast asleep.”
She sort of liked that. She knew the word from Martin but when he used it there had always been a more ironic tinge.
“You want me to get up?”
“It’s better. It’d be uncomfortable in the morning.”
“Your friend?”
“Mmm.”
“I thought she wasn’t possessive.”
“She isn’t. But you know how it is. I’d be uncomfortable.”
“What time is it?” A delaying action.
“A little after four thirty.”
“How come you’re wearing glasses?”
“I took out my contact lenses.”
Slowly she forced herself to get up and get dressed. He was dressed already. She was cold. They went back through the big empty room and the triple locks and the awful elevator. She felt as though she were running a nightmare in reverse—too fast and light for it to be really scary but quite unpleasant nevertheless. Only the fact that she was still a little high kept it all from being worse. Downstairs and out again. He lifted her down from the cement platform. There was no one else in the streets until they got to Second Avenue, where a few spaced-out kids stood almost motionless on the corner. In a doorway two of them sat huddled together. Homeless. She shuddered. Imagine if you were always having to leave. Out of one doorway into another. Out of . . . she had the beginning of a thought but it eluded her. She felt lucky to have a nice cozy apartment to go to. It was really cold out. As a matter of fact, she was really glad he’d gotten her up. She wouldn’t have liked to wake up in that cold ugly loft in the harsh daylight and make conversation with Ali and his friend.
He came in with her and seemed reluctant to leave. She thought maybe he wanted to be asked to stay and that would be nice, getting into the cold bed with someone to put your cold feet against. She told him he was welcome to stay and he said he wanted to but he’d left his contact lenses under the ashtray and if he didn’t get to them before the kids woke up he’d be in trouble. She said okay. He took her number and she waited to hear from him for several weeks and then concluded that he wasn’t going to call. This bothered her, not in the way that Carter’s disappearance had—she was to be deprived of another marvelous time with him—Ali-Eli didn’t particularly even turn her on. But he was a nice, big, cuddly, amusing man; surely they could have seen each other once in a while. Had some fun. Nothing serious. Coming to the conclusion that she didn’t really care about hearing from him didn’t stop her mind working over the experience like a dog at a bone, though. Looking for some new shred of evidence to explain what was wrong with her that he, that Carter and Martin, that anyone could leave her so easily.
When she wasn’t thinking about Ali she thought of Brooks and Katherine. Katherine had moved out. She kept trying to bump into Brooks, who never seemed to be at home, thinking she would tell him how she felt, that she considered him a close friend no matter what, but she couldn’t find him to tell him. If she tried to go to sleep at a reasonable hour she would lie in bed, her mind bouncing back and forth between Ali and Brooks. If the phone rang she grabbed it eagerly, hoping it was one of them, although it always turned out to be one of the people she was friendly with at school. There was talk of a big strike the following term, largely over the issue of community control. Sides were shaping up already and the older teachers, who with one exception were fervently with the union and against the community, talked in small groups in whispers.
Finally one night as she lay staring up at the ceiling, worrying about Brooks, she heard a door open and footsteps overhead. Impulsively she got out of bed and got into jeans and a sweater. She almost ran out of the apartment without her key but then at the last minute she ran back, combed her hair, got the key and ran upstairs.
Her heart was beating wildly and she was out of breath, so she waited a moment, then knocked at the door. He opened it without asking who was there. Her heart was still pounding furiously. He looked awful—ten years older than when she’d last seen him.
“Hi, Brooks.”
“Hi, Theresa,” he said casually. “What’s doing?”
They were both embarrassed.
“Brooks, I just . . . I wanted to tell you . . .” He’d lost a lot of weight and lines of exhaustion cut deep into his face. His tan sweater hung limply on his frame. She couldn’t speak. Finally he asked her if she wanted to come in for a moment. She nodded.
The only light in the room came from the light machine that was mounted on a shel
f facing the sofa. In the moving light she could see that the apartment was neater than it had ever been when Katherine was there. In a strange way the neatness made it worse; while it was messy you’d assumed it would look all right if someone would just straighten it out. Now you could see how little concern had been there from the beginning.
“I’ve been worried about you,” she said. And she hadn’t even known what he would look like. Maybe in the back of her mind she’d even thought he would look better because he’d really be better off without Katherine. “I wanted you to know . . .” What had she wanted him to know? “. . . that I still love you like one of my own family.” She’d gotten it out.
“That’s sweet of you,” he said. He was smiling but as though she were talking to him long distance from California. “I really appreciate that. You’re a sweet kid.”
Kid. That was a strange thing to be calling her. She felt a little put down by it, as though he were saying she’d offered him something less than an adult could give.
She said, “I’m not sweet and I’m not a kid, I just—”
“Don’t you be mad at me now,” Brooks said.
“I’m not mad, I just . . . I’m almost twenty-five years old. I’m not a kid.”
“Anyone who’s sweet is a kid,” Brooks said. “That’s all I meant. Someone who’d never hurt anybody.”
It didn’t satisfy her but she felt a little relieved.
“Anyway,” she said, “please come down and have dinner one night if you feel like it.”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure I will, Terry.”
She turned to go and as she did a motion at the back archway caught her eye and she turned toward it. In the arch, leaning against one side, wearing a big floppy T-shirt and nothing else, was a very small, slim and beautiful girl with shiny black hair that came down to cover her breasts. She might have been eighteen but fourteen was closer. Terry stared at the girl, who was not the least bit uncomfortable, then at Brooks, who looked the same as he had two minutes before. Tired. Not caring.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t know you had someone here.” She felt unreal.
“Don’t make no never mind,” Brooks said with a fake Southern drawl, raising his hands in a gesture that told her not to leave worrying but to leave. Who was she kidding, he was a part of her family?
She said, “So long,” and walked out of the apartment, but as soon as he closed the door she began running down the stairs, tripping when she was most of the way down on a loose tread she usually was wary of, falling but barely feeling the hurt. In the apartment her mind, usually so full of a variety of thoughts she’d just as leave weren’t racing through, was quite blank. She started to get undressed and then knew there was no way in the world she was going to go to sleep with the two of them over her. Maybe never. Maybe she would move. It wasn’t such a bad idea, anyway. St. Marks Place got less and less appealing as the junkies took over and once or twice she’d talked to Evelyn about moving to the West Village, which was still pretty nice. She got her keys and left the apartment, walking uptown on Second.
She needed pretty badly to talk to somebody but it was almost eleven thirty, too late, probably, to call Evelyn. There was an older woman at school she liked and wouldn’t have minded being with right now. Her name was Rose and she was middle-aged and Jewish, like most of them, but she was pretty, with long curly gray hair, which she wore in a bun at the back of her neck, and pale pink lipstick. Rose was benevolent in a way that most of them weren’t. The other older women, if they weren’t talking about the union and fringe benefits and prices, were bragging about their children and grandchildren with an intensity that suggested some undeclared contest whose winner would someday be showered with all the fringe benefits in the world. Rose had no children. She and her husband, who was a lawyer, were very close. A lot of the other women, when they weren’t in a contest to see whose was better than whose, were telling stories to prove who had it worse. Whose husband was more demanding. Rose never complained about her husband. Occasionally she would tell stories about their two French poodles. And when she asked how you were, it didn’t seem to be just an excuse for telling you how she was. She seemed to want to know, though not so badly that she would push to find out. Theresa would really love to talk to Rose right now, but Rose would think she was out of her mind if she called out of the blue and said she needed to talk.
She wasn’t far from Corners. She would go there, maybe have a glass of wine, maybe . . . except she had no money. She couldn’t go in with no money. But as she told herself that, she had a picture of herself lying in bed with the sounds of mattress-pounding and springs creaking over her head. Not that the picture made any sense, the bedroom in Brooks’s apartment wasn’t even over her room, but the vision had the same force as reality, so that instead of turning around and heading for home she stood stock still outside of Corners, afraid to go in and unable to do anything else.
A man poked his head out of the bar and said, “Hi, honey.”
She looked at him without responding.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Cat got your tongue?”
“Hello,” she said.
“Good. Now tell me what’s the matter.”
“Nothing,” she said. “I just—”
“Why don’t you come in and have a drink and tell me about it?”
“That’s what’s the matter,” she said. “I felt like having a drink and I just realized I walked out without my money.”
“No need for a pretty girl to buy her own drinks,” he said. “Come on.”
She let him lead her into Corners. The bar was crowded but someone got up and gave him what must have been his stool, right at the end where the window was. He beckoned her to it and she sat down. He stood close to her. He signaled the bartender, who came over, smiling affably as if he knew both of them.
“What’ll you have, hon?”
She asked for a daiquiri without knowing why. She wanted something sweet, that was it.
He wasn’t particularly attractive. Not that he was ugly, but there was something a little strange-looking about him. He looked at once very coarse and very smooth. As though he’d once been made of rough granite and his surfaces had been sanded down. He had brown hair and a strong peasant face but his skin was smooth. He was wearing a nice business suit and spoke well and yet the overall effect was of the foreman of a construction gang, not a businessman. He was on the old side, maybe in his forties.
“So,” he said, “you ran out of the house so fast you forgot your money.”
She smiled.
“What happened?”
She didn’t feel like telling him anything but she couldn’t tell him it was none of his business while he was paying for her drink. She shrugged.
“Fight with the boyfriend?”
“Something like that.”
“Didn’t feel like it, huh?”
She was beginning to feel a certain revulsion toward him. She sipped her drink, saying nothing.
“Okay. You don’t want to talk about it.”
“Right.”
“Then talk about something else.”
It was peremptory; if she was aware that he was paying for her drink, he was, too.
“I’m a teacher.”
“No kidding,” he said. “What’re you doing in here?”
“Having a drink,” she said. “Remember? I took a walk and then I—”
“All right, all right.” He put up a hand to signal stop. “So you’re a teacher.”
“What do you do?” she asked so he wouldn’t ask where she taught.
“I sell space.”
She laughed.
“You think it’s funny.” His tone was irritable and yet she was sure he’d deliberately said it that way for laughs. “That’s because you’re a hick little chicken.” His manner was at once belligerent and seductive. Five minutes ago it would have upset her more but at his signal the bartender had just brought her another drink and she was begin
ning to feel nice.
“I know what it is,” she said. “But it sounded funny, anyway.”
“I don’t think it’s so funny,” he said. “Someone who sells space is basically selling nothing.”
She didn’t respond. She sipped at her drink. She knew she didn’t like him at all but she also knew he wasn’t bothering her. The daiquiris slid down like soda.
“Don’t you think that’s sad?” he pressed.
“If you do,” she said.
“If I do?” He checked her glass to see if she was ready for another one. Not quite. The whole thing was strange. Here was this strange man being nasty and buying her drinks at the same time. “What kind of answer is that? Don’t you have any opinions of your own? How’re you going to teach young kids if you don’t have opinions of your own?”
Another drink.
The strangest thing was that she was feeling very sexy. It couldn’t be him; it must be the drinks. She really felt like crawling into bed with someone. She looked at the bartender. That was who she’d really like to get into bed with. The bartender. Or Carter. Or—
Suddenly he began firing questions at her—where did she teach, her hours, her salary, the names of children in her class—and she realized that he was testing her. She giggled and he asked her what was funny now.
“That you don’t believe me,” she said.
“What’s so funny about that?” he asked, but he was responding to her own flirtatiousness. He was a little less belligerent, a little more sexual.
“You know funny things can’t be explained,” she said, her voice soft with suggestion. “You either get them or you don’t.”
“What you’re getting,” he said, “is loaded. I think I’d better get you home before you fall to pieces.”
That was pretty funny, too. That he was saying it as though taking her home had something to do with her safety.
I’m only doing it for your own good. Honey.
She finished her drink and ate the cherry with slow relish.
“You’re so nice,” she said, wide-eyed. “You’re only doing it for my own good.”
“Right,” he said, smiling. “I’m only doing it for your own good.”
Looking for Mr. Goodbar Page 13