Looking for Mr. Goodbar

by Judith Rossner

  “Okay,” she said, hearing a tiny scared voice come out of her, “you can put it away now.”

  He laughed. “Whatsa matter? Don’t you like my friend?”

  “I like him fine,” she said, “but put him away.”

  The blade clicked shut and he let it drop to the floor again. He leaned over her, kissed her cheek. A thrill passed through her body.

  “Whatsa matter, fishie? Did I scare you?”

  Suddenly the atmosphere was thick with sex again.

  “Sure,” she said softly. “You terrify me.”

  “I’m really a nice guy,” he said, kissing her neck, then her breasts.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” she said, her voice catching in her throat as another thrill passed through her.

  “Sure I am.”

  “Did you ever kill anybody?”

  “Only in the Army.”

  And then they were making love again.

  A little light was coming through the window when she finally fell asleep in his arms. When she awakened it was eight o’clock Thursday night and she was alone. She had missed an entire day, including school. She ate three grilled cheese sandwiches and drank two bottles of Coke. Then she called Rose and told her she’d taken double tranquilizers and gone into a near coma. Rose said she was so relieved to hear Terry’s voice. They’d been worried when they hadn’t heard from her and they’d called the apartment a few times in the morning but there’d been no answer, Terry told Rose the ring was pretty low, anyway, so it wouldn’t be startling.

  On Friday at school she got teased about taking an overdose of sleeping pills. On Saturday night James Morrisey rang her bell promptly at seven.

  She’d put on jeans and a sweater, telling herself that nobody got dressed up any more but knowing exactly what she was doing. Knowing full well that James Morrisey would show up at her door in a shirt and tie and suit, as indeed he now had.

  “You’re disgustingly punctual,” she said.

  “I didn’t know it was a fault,” he said.

  “Well,” she said, “now you know.”

  “All right,” he said. “May I come in anyway?”

  A little bit flustered that he wasn’t more flustered by the awful way she was acting, or the way she’d dressed, she let him in and closed the door.

  “Are we having dinner with the Pope?” she asked, eying his suit.

  “Only if you know where he’s eating tonight,” James said.

  Frustrated in her attempts to irritate him, she looked around the apartment.

  “What was I in the middle of doing?”

  In point of fact she had finished her school planning during a lengthy period of insomnia Friday night, had been too restless to read or watch TV, and had been walking around the apartment trying to decide what she really felt like doing.

  “Take your time,” he said, sitting down.

  She felt irritable and her back hurt a little, maybe a result of her athletics with Tony the other night. She smiled to herself.

  “No, forget it,” she said. “I’d just as leave go. Where’re we going, anyway?”

  “I made a reservation at Lüchow’s.”

  She was disconcerted again. When she’d first moved to the Lower East Side she’d passed Lüchow’s and heard music from inside and thought it looked nice, a place where it would be fun to be. Then she’d learned that Katherine and her friends disdained Lüchow’s, that it was too big, too noisy, too straight and too fattening. A meat and potatoes place, as opposed to rice and bean sprouts, say, which they were all into by this time. A place where the provincials went on Saturday night to drink beer and get red-faced, then shit-faced, and then stomp their boots to German band music.

  She smiled condescendingly. “Meat and potatoes.”

  “My favorite foods.”

  “So heavy,” she complained, thinking that she was not only saying something she’d heard Katherine say but she was saying it with Katherine’s intonation.

  “They have a wide selection, actually,” James said. “Fish and so on.”

  “How about Chinese food?” she asked, smiling naughtily. She hardly ever ate Chinese food, although Katherine adored it.

  He smiled back. “No. They don’t have Chinese food.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant how about going for Chinese food?”

  “I don’t eat Chinese food.”

  “You’re so difficult.” Again unable to suppress a smile because she was being such a brat.

  He smiled, too. She was amusing him.

  “Do I have to change my clothes, then?” she asked.

  “I don’t know if they have any dress rules,” he said calmly. “I can call and ask.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of their silly rules. I meant I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

  “Why would the way you dress embarrass me?”

  She was embarrassed herself now, of course. “I meant, if that’s where your gang hangs out.”

  “My gang,” he said, “if I have such a thing, which I seriously doubt, but the friends I have whom you might call my gang hang out in the Bronx.”

  “When you say hang out it sounds as if it has quotation marks around it.”

  “It does. It’s your phrase, not mine.”

  “Don’t you ever use slang?”

  “Not very often.”

  “Why not?”

  He thought about it. “It doesn’t seem to come naturally to me. Maybe because I have rather precise habits of speech and slang tends to be imprecise.”

  She wanted to smack him. Instead she said, “How about words like motherfucker? They’re not imprecise.” And watched with satisfaction as he flinched. (In point of fact she’d never said it aloud before and she flinched herself as she said it; she could only pray he hadn’t noticed.)

  “There are various ways to be imprecise,” he said after a moment. “You can substitute the general for the specific, for example. Or you can be very specific but not about the thing you intend to specify. I’ve heard that phrase used many times but never to describe the situation it very specifically refers to.”

  She laughed. “What if you were having a fight with someone who’d done that specific thing? Then would you use it?”

  “I very much doubt it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not my nature. I’m not sure that it’s yours, either.”

  “Would you call yourself a mama’s boy?”

  “You mean was I born of woman?”

  “I mean are you a goody-goody?”

  “As opposed to what? A baddy-baddy?”

  “Why do the Jesuits answer every question with another question?”

  “Is there a better way to answer questions?”

  “Oooohhhh . . . I’m going to change my clothes. I feel like it, anyway. I just didn’t have time before.” She felt uncomfortable saying that to him. The small lies that came so easily with others were hard with him. That exasperated her further.

  From the closet she took a kelly green jersey dress she’d bought when her father was still in the hospital but had never worn. Every time she opened the closet she thought about it. She loved it but was embarrassed to wear it. Only after she’d had it a while had it occurred to her that it was the most brightly colored garment she’d ever bought. Now, without letting herself think about it twice, she marched into the bathroom, put on the dress, combed her hair, put on makeup, came out of the bathroom, put on high-heeled shoes, then faced him with a combination of defiance and anticipation.

  “All set now?” he asked.

  She nodded. She would not under any circumstances let him see that she was disappointed in his failure to react to her improved appearance. The closest she could come to admitting it to herself was to say that somewhere in the mixture of largely negative feelings she had about going to straight Lüchow’s with straight James Morrisey on a straight Saturday night date was a tiny desire to have someone tell her she looked pretty.

 
She got her raincoat and started to march out of the apartment ahead of him. She knew she’d be cold in a raincoat but she always wanted to throw off her heavy, binding winter coat before winter had really ended. He said that it wasn’t a particularly warm night and she’d be cold. She said she wouldn’t be cold and started out of the apartment again. He asked if she had her keys and she blushed furiously because she didn’t.

  “Why does that embarrass you?” he asked.

  She could see that he wasn’t being provocative, he was really curious, but for some reason she felt upset and endangered. She shook her head and fought back tears.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I—”

  She grabbed her keys, locked the door and dashed down the stairs and through the lobby without waiting for him, into the blessed darkness.

  He asked if she would like to take a cab and she said she would prefer walking. He said that he was sorry he’d upset her, however inadvertently. She told him not to worry about it. She didn’t know why she’d been upset. Which was true. She didn’t see how it could have had anything to do with that silly business. She said she’d had a crazy week in general, maybe that was it. She was just tense from the week in general. (It didn’t sound right but it appealed to her; she didn’t want him getting the mistaken notion that anything connected to him could be important enough to bother her.) With Tony she’d been upset and then confused and then ecstatic and then exhausted. Then she’d slept, and since awakening she’d been on what you could best describe as a natural high. Not happy, exactly, but elated. Looking forward to seeing him again. In the whole time with Tony, during the really bad part, she hadn’t cried. Or even fought back an impulse to do so. Why now? When all that had happened was that James had made her feel a little foolish about some keys? Maybe she’d held it in. Everyone knew by now, you read it all over the place, that if you held in your emotions at one time, they came out at another.

  “Did anything happen during your crazy week that you feel like talking about?” James asked.

  “No, not really,” she said. “The kids were a little wild yesterday.” She explained that she’d overslept on Thursday out of exhaustion, hadn’t even remembered to set the alarm. Something that had never happened before. “No one even realized I wasn’t there until nine thirty or so.” The class had gone quite wild and the noise drew the teacher from the next classroom. They’d tried to get a substitute but it was too late, so they’d divided up the kids into different classrooms, which totally threw them. Even when kids had a regular sub they were often a little crazy and out of control, or so she’d heard—she’d never been out, so her kids were really unfamiliar with the whole experience.

  They’d been totally uncontrollable Friday morning, as though to express their anger at her for deserting them. Finally, after lunch, she’d decided to confront the matter head on. She’d had them gather their chairs around hers for a discussion and asked that each one of them give her an example of an unpleasant surprise. Something that had happened that they didn’t expect and that wasn’t nice. Something they were supposed to do and couldn’t, someone getting sick, or going away. Juan said he was supposed to get a bicycle for his birthday but then his father lost his job and couldn’t give it to him. A couple of others gave examples and then one of them, Elsie, talked about the death of her grandmother, who’d always taken care of her while her mother worked. One day she’d come home from school and her grandmother wasn’t there. Theresa asked how she felt about her grandmother and it was beautiful—as though Elsie knew her plan and wanted to help. “I was mad at her,” Elsie said. “When I see her next time I’m going to tell her I didn’t like what she did.”

  “And how did you feel yesterday morning when you came in and I wasn’t here the way I always am?”

  “I was mad at you,” Elsie said, and burst into tears.

  Theresa had gone over to Elsie and brought the little girl back to her chair and held her in her lap for the remainder of the discussion. Not only to comfort Elsie but to encourage the others to express how they felt by showing that Elsie was being comforted, not punished, for her honesty. Sure enough, one by one, most of them had admitted varying degrees of anger, fear and confusion at her not being there. Then she’d explained to them that she’d been so tired that for the first time in all the time that she’d been teaching she had fallen asleep without setting the alarm and slept right through the night and the morning. She’d told them she was sorry she’d disappointed them, and promised she would do her best to never let it happen again. But if it did happen they’d know it was something she hadn’t been able to help.

  They’d put back their chairs and been angelic for the rest of the day.

  They were halfway across Fourteenth Street, by now, heading toward Lüchow’s.

  “That’s a beautiful story,” James said. “You sound like a marvelous teacher.”

  “I love teaching,” she said with a fervor that astounded her. “I’m never happier than when I’m teaching.” This was true but it surprised her that she could say it to him. She had times of pleasure outside the classroom, in sex, for example, but happiness was quite genuinely there only when she was with the children.

  Talking about it, though. She had never done that with anyone outside of school, except Evelyn or Rose, who were already part of school. Mentioning that she was a teacher in her bar pickups (all except Tony) had been a way of saying that she wasn’t just some dumb, broke broad hanging around to get a drink or get laid. A status thing. But the thought of sharing with anyone her teaching experiences . . . Still, she had to admit it felt good to hear him say that. He was intelligent, and even if she didn’t really like him, it was pleasant to have him recognize her worth when she hadn’t even been parading it for him, but only making conversation.

  “Until I got to high school, the sisters were the only teachers I ever had,” he said.

  She wrinkled up her nose to show distaste, though of course it was true of her, too.

  “They weren’t all that bad, actually,” he said. “Although I have to admit I didn’t have trouble with even the worst of them.” He smiled. “I was a goody-goody.”

  She returned his smile. He was pretty likable, in a way. It wasn’t that she even disliked him, actually; it was that she wasn’t attracted to him. She couldn’t see ever having sex with him. She could put aside his Irish choirboy face for long enough to talk to him, but she was sure she could never even kiss him and she didn’t know how she would handle the situation if he should try.

  In Lüchow’s they were finally led to seats which James refused because they were so close to the band that you had to shout to be heard. Another table farther back was found and they ordered drinks, Scotch and soda for him, a martini for her. It wasn’t very cool to drink any more, but at least a martini was the most sophisticated drink. She had to stop herself from making a face when she tasted the first sip.

  “Actually,” he said, “I had at least one extraordinary woman as a teacher. She didn’t possess the kind of emotional understanding you do but she was extremely intelligent, as I think many nuns actually are. She read voraciously and thought about what she read. Not like most Catholics, who put their minds in straitjackets at an early age.”

  “Aren’t you still a Catholic?”

  “More or less, but I don’t like to think of myself as that sort of one.”

  She was silent.

  “Anyway, Sister Francine went to Fordham and then out to work in a prison in Illinois someplace. Someone should write about her. Within the strictures of the Church, and certainly they were considerable, before the whole radical Catholic movement had even been heard of very much, she was a tough, brilliant, determined, independent woman.”

  “You sound like a eulogy. Or an essay. My Kind of Woman by James Morrisey.”

  “I don’t know that I have any kind of woman.”

  The waiter came to check their drinks. James said they would order and asked what she wanted. He did have a certain social g
race; it was probably recently acquired. She ordered shrimp and James asked for lamb chops.

  “You like strong women,” she said.

  Something there was that couldn’t really be interested in a man who liked powerful, intelligent women. Something there was that wanted a man from Marlboro Country. Smart only in the way he subordinated his girls. Swaggering, suave. With a dick so long that you rode it as though it were a horse. A rocky horse.

  He said that a woman’s movement seemed to be developing and asked if she wasn’t sympathetic to it. She said sure, why not, which wasn’t exactly a lie but it was the closest thing to a lie she’d told him. (She wasn’t prepared to really think about that one.) The truth was that the new woman’s movement made her uncomfortable. The equal pay demand seemed all right but she had that, anyway, and she was upset by the stridency of much of it. The demands. It seemed that men must surely dislike women who were so demanding. Evelyn had begun to talk about a group of women she met with once a week and had invited Theresa more than once to join them, but she’d always made some excuse.

  “I don’t really belong to it,” she said. “I’m not comfortable in groups.”

  “It’s funny,” he mused. “I’m most comfortable in a group. Choral group, lawyers’ group, church group, whatever you might think of.”

  She went out with him six times before he kissed her good night. She became almost eager for him to do it, not because she wanted to kiss him but to get it over with. His kiss was light on her lips, as she would have expected. She was unmoved by it. As she would have expected.

  She smiled naughtily. “Now you’re not a virgin any more.”

  “Ah, Theresa,” he said. “You’re so cruel to me. Why?”

  Because you like me too much, was what came into her head. But of course that was ridiculous. It wasn’t that simple.

  She refused to see him during the week, telling him that it was impossible for her to go out and get up for school in the morning. The real reason was that Tony worked weekends at the garage, while she never knew just when he was going to show up during the week.