Often one of them was there when the other called. She suspected that if this wasn’t particularly a factor in James’s interest in her, it was definitely helping to maintain Tony’s. For this reason she would force herself to talk to James when Tony was there even if she didn’t feel like it. Tony, who might have been complaining of muscle pains, or watching some garbage on TV (with the radio on) would then come over to where she lay stretched out on the bed, pretending to be absorbed in her conversation with James, and start kissing her neck or undoing her blouse or rubbing her thighs. Once he tickled the bottom of her feet and she let out a whoop and told James she had to get off the phone. Then she began pummeling Tony as though she really cared that she’d been given away. He liked that. He especially liked that she’d hung up the phone because of him.
James started calling her earlier in the evening, correctly sensing that she was more likely to be alone then.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” Tony asked when there was no call.
She laughed. “He calls earlier now.”
“He doesn’t want me here, huh?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“Well, that’s tough,” he said. “I got as much right to be here as he does.”
He sounded like a little kid staking out territory.
“How come you’re not saying anything?” he asked.
“What am I supposed to say?”
“He’s not paying for this joint, is he?” Tony asked suddenly.
“No, Tony,” she said patiently. “He’s not paying for it.”
“Who is?”
“I am.”
“With what?”
“With my salary.”
“How much it cost you?” He was not only suspicious, he was righteous; if he’d been a grown-up she would have gotten angry with him.
“Two hundred dollars a month.”
“It ain’t worth half that.”
She laughed. “To me it is.”
“This is a lousy neighborhood. Full of junkies. You oughta live in Queens.”
“Queens! Why would I live in Queens? I’ve never even been there in my whole life.”
“That’s impossible,” he said flatly.
She was silent. This time she couldn’t laugh.
“Queens is beautiful,” he said. “Nothing like this. My old lady lives in Queens.”
“I thought you lived in Brooklyn.”
“I live in Brooklyn. That don’t mean she . . . she kicked me out.”
“How come?”
“She said it was on account of dope but that’s bullshit, she never wanted me there. She didn’t want any of her boyfriends to see she had a kid as old as me. Forty-four years old and she’s still . . . the cunt.”
“What’d you expect her to do?”
“Forget it,” he said moodily.
She tried to jolly him out of it but he wasn’t having any. She wanted to ask him more questions about his family but his mood got worse when she tried, so she changed the subject to horses. Off guard, he began to talk about horses, about the race track. He had an uncle who was a jockey who’d brought him there all the time when he was a kid, that for him was the best place in the world, the only place, from the time he was five years old. He told her that he’d prayed when he was a kid not to grow over five feet four inches because he didn’t want to get too big to be a jockey, and when praying didn’t work he’d aimed for trainer. She asked him about the dope charges and his license but he got sullen again.
“You never tell me nothin’,” he said.
“What do you want to know?”
“What’s his name?” he asked quickly, like a machine gun firing.
“Who?” she asked, totally unprepared. “Oh, you mean James.”
“James what?”
“Uh uh. No fair.”
He looked at her as though to say he’d known all along she wouldn’t tell him anything.
“Would you like it if I talked to him about you?”
“Sure. Why not?” He was sitting propped up against the pillows, drumming on the night table. The TV was off but the radio was still on. She kissed him, tried playing with him a little. He shrugged her off.
“You feel like taking a walk?” she asked.
“You’re not getting me outa here,” he said.
“I meant I’d go with you, dopey.”
“Don’t call me dopey!” He raised his hand as though he were going to strike her but held it in mid-air; he was red with rage. She was scared, although she didn’t believe he’d hit her.
“If I really thought you were dopey,” she said, “I’d be afraid to say it.”
He lowered his hand, slightly mollified.
It was a lie, of course. His dumbness was one of his endearing qualities and set him apart nicely from James in her mind. The contrast between them was so perfect that she was beginning to enjoy the arrangement. She could see it continuing indefinitely like this, sex with Tony, dinner and conversation with James.
“Now,” she said, hearing herself, very much the teacher trying to bring an errant child back into the fold, “if you feel like taking a walk with me, that’s fine. If not, that’s fine, too.”
“I hate walking.”
“Is there anything else you want to do?” Coming onto him, rubbing his thigh, kissing his ear, playing with the lock of hair that had fallen just under the rim of his glasses. Pushing it back, curling it around her finger.
“If you work,” he said, “where do you work?”
“On Second Avenue.”
“Where?”
Not without some misgivings, she told him.
“What kinda office is that?” he asked scornfully.
“It’s not an office,” she said. “It’s a school. I’m a teacher.”
He stared at her openmouthed for a full minute before he said, “You’re kidding me.”
“No.”
“Whaddya teach, for Christ’s sake?”
“Little kids,” she said.
He stared at her with a mixture of awe and suspicion.
She laughed uneasily. “What’s the big deal?”
“No big deal.” But he continued staring as though he hadn’t seen her before.
She stood up, went into the bathroom, combed her hair, came back out.
“I’m hungry,” she said. “Want something to eat?”
“What the hell you doin’ fucking around in bars if you’re a teacher?”
“Mother of God,” she murmured, “I’m hearing it and I don’t believe I’m hearing it.” But she understood exactly what he was talking about, of course.
He said nothing. His expression was changing but she couldn’t read the new one yet. Less belligerent, maybe. More thoughtful. He was considering. Finally he smiled.
“If that doesn’t beat all.”
“I’m getting something to eat,” she said. “I didn’t have dinner.”
“You got any hot dogs?”
She didn’t because she had them so often for lunch from the Sabrett’s cart that she never wanted them for dinner.
“What I could really use,” he said, “is a steak and some spaghetti.”
She only had spaghetti in a can. He gave her a look of disgust and they both ended up eating peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches although he kept asking her if she called this a dinner. She wanted to point out that there were a dozen places in the neighborhood where they could pick up real food but he seemed determined that neither of them should go out. He ate six peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and then said he felt sick. He clutched his stomach and rolled his eyes, and when she asked what she could do, he said he’d better go home to his mother’s.
“To Queens?”
“I toldja that’s where she lives, didn’t I?” Grimacing with a pain that didn’t quite come off as pain.
“Yes. But you also told me you didn’t live there.”
“But wherever my mother lives is my home, right?” It was obviously a rhetorical question as far
as he was concerned. “And home is where you go when you’re sick, right?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It seems to me if I got sick in someone’s house I’d lie down and see if it passed. Or throw up, maybe, if I had to.”
He groaned. “What’d you say that for?”
One way or the other she would have responsibility for this illness.
He stood up, clutching his side.
“Are you sure you want to go?” If he wasn’t sick she wanted him to make love to her, and if he was, being on the train would make it worse.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
He didn’t call for the rest of the week and she was really nasty to James on Saturday night.
Tuesday Tony called.
“Hi,” she said, trying to sound casual. To conceal her relief that he hadn’t disappeared forever. “Were you sick?”
“Huh?” he said. “Oh. Yeah. But I’m okay.”
“Good,” she said. “When you coming down?”
“I dunno,” he said. “I’m working late this week. The guy who usually has the hours is out sick.”
“Mmmm. The bug’s passing around.” The peanut-butter bug.
“Listen,” he said. “Keep a week from Sunday open.”
“Okay,” she said. “What for?”
“Because I told you to.”
“I know that. But you never told me anything this far in advance and then suddenly you call and say keep open the Sunday after this.”
There was a long silence. As though he were overwhelmed by her genius in picking up the discrepancy. Then he said maybe he’d see her next Monday, he wouldn’t be working late any more by then. She said okay. But that was a week off and she was already so horny she was climbing the walls.
Into her mind came the time when she had gone month in and month out without sex. When she hadn’t even known the need was there. Maybe that was the whole thing. She wondered if Tony really had to work. Probably. He didn’t feel any obligation to her that would make him lie to avoid hurting her feelings.
Stop, Theresa.
She could go mad trying to figure out what was happening. She might go mad anyway. Just looking at the walls of the apartment. No. She wouldn’t do it. Already the decision was made. She started to get dressed, reminding herself that she’d meant to start working on some drapery material she’d bought the week before. She’d never felt about this apartment the way she had about the first one. It wasn’t that she didn’t want it to look nice; she just couldn’t get absorbed enough in the whole thing to do it. Even her schoolwork was often difficult to focus on these days. Partly it was the restlessness that grew each year when spring came in teachers and students alike. But beyond that was some undefinable change in her own attitude toward the school as a place, a home, that had occurred since the bitter days of the strike. And on top of this brew was the perpetual tension over Tony and—no, it wasn’t, couldn’t be, about James. There was no tension at all connected with James. Just this vague uneasiness about his liking her too much. Not that it was so awful having someone like you. The problem was that she’d come to sort of enjoy having him around to talk to, and she was afraid he would get too serious and then the whole thing would have to come to an end.
Whatever the reason, it had become more difficult for her to concentrate on her work or anything else.
She made up with more care than usual, put on jeans and the black turtleneck sweater, which she’d come to think of as her cruising outfit. It was a fairly warm evening and she would be warm until she got to the cool air-conditioned interior of—where would it be? Mr. Goodbar. It was a comfortable place with old gum-ball machines for table lamps and one wall covered entirely with a shellacked montage of candy wrappers.
In Mr. Goodbar she met a man named Victor who had something to do with advertising for General Motors. He had a wife and five children and lived in the poor section of Grosse Pointe, or so he said with a laugh. He looked like Rock Hudson, except older (he had gray hair), and stammered so badly before he got totally tanked up that it was difficult to see how he could carry on normal business sober. He was rather charming, once you got past the stammer, which he helped you to do by joking about it. Telling you he never stammered in bed, and so on. She went back with him to his room at the Americana and stayed there until Friday morning, calling in sick on Wednesday and Thursday, not without some misgivings.
He bought her a beautiful black nightgown from Bonwit Teller as well as lavender soap and Chanel bath oil. He also brought her magazines to read while he was out doing business, in case she didn’t feel like sleeping or watching color TV the whole time. They ate mostly from room service; he had proposed that she be his voluntary prisoner in the Americana until he left New York on Friday. She could leave the room if she wanted to, but not the building. If she wanted anything from the outside she need only ask for it. Did she want some clothes to wear on the rare occasions when they went down to the coffee shop? No, she didn’t at all mind wearing the same sweater and jeans. It wasn’t as though she were in them the whole time. In the cool half-darkness of the room, with the blinds always more than half closed against the noise and ugliness of midtown Manhattan, she wore the nightgown or her bikini pants. He giggled when she said it wasn’t as though she wore them all the time. They giggled together a lot. When he discovered her habit of ordering different drinks all the time and her particular fondness for sweet ones, he took to showing up in the room—late morning, afternoon or evening, with a different kind of liqueur. They drank arak from waxed-paper cups and discovered the strong licoricey stuff had peeled the wax off the inside so the clear liquid was flecked with tiny wax flakes. They drank it anyway, and when they made love later he swore that the wax was now coating her inside and making her more slippery than usual. Sometimes they drank instead of eating.
He told her that he actually didn’t do a great deal of this kind of thing, that he was actually a rather straight-and-narrow soul. He asked if she believed him and when she said that she did, he seemed relieved. After that he talked about his family, as though he could trust her because she understood that he was telling the truth. When he talked about them he stammered worse than he had at any time before.
His wife was in a sanitarium in Michigan and had been there most of the time for several years. His children were cared for by the help when he was away. The younger ones, anyway. The oldest had just gone off to college this past year. The next was sixteen. She was the one Terry reminded him of a little. Not just that they both had green eyes; it was something in her expression. Gwendolyn. Gwennie. You could never tell what she was thinking except that once in a while, from somewhere, would come this deeply penetrating, mischievous look, and you knew she knew you were just a lovable fraud and she’d been making fun of you all along. Theresa couldn’t recall any moment when she might have been looking at him with anything like that in mind, but it didn’t seem to matter. It was his scenario and it didn’t have to jibe with hers.
As a matter of fact, she didn’t really have one; the fantasy element in the basic situation was strong enough to sustain her interest. That and her pleasure in the idea that if Tony changed his mind and called her, she wouldn’t be there. That when James called she wouldn’t be there. Not then nor the next night. . . . James would be worried, she suspected. He might even check with Rose and then Rose would tell him that she’d called in sick. He would tell Rose then that it was strange there’d been no answer at her apartment for three nights. Terry would have to make up a story to cover.
Family illness. She hadn’t wanted to go into it over the phone but it wasn’t actually she who’d been ill, it was her mother. She’d had to stay in the Bronx for a few days. As a matter of fact, that was what she really should do this weekend—visit her parents. She hadn’t seen her father since a month or more earlier, when he’d still shown the exhausting effects of his illness.
At eight o’clock Friday morning she and Victor had their last coffees in the room at the Ame
ricana and left it together. He hailed a cab for her, kissed her good-bye, opened the door, closed it and handed the cabdriver a five-dollar bill. Then he went back to tell the bellhop he was ready to have his own bag put in a cab.
Rose was the first person she saw. Terry could tell that Rose knew she hadn’t been home sick but was too polite to say so.
“I wasn’t really sick,” she said. “I was at my parents’. My mother was sick.”
Rose said, “I hope it was nothing serious.”
Terry shook her head. “It was just flu. Medium case. But my mother’s not used to being sick so it was like the end of the world.”
Rose smiled. “You know who was very concerned about you?”
“Evelyn?”
Rose smiled. “James, Theresa. He really likes you, you know.”
Terry smiled. “He’s a sweet boy.”
Rose raised her eyebrows. “The way you say it, it doesn’t sound good.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Terry said hastily. “I’m tired and I’m . . . I’m really glad you introduced him to me, Rose.” She probably never actually said that until now and Rose would want to hear it. She’d been inconsiderate. “I really like him, too.”
“He’s not such a boy, either,” Rose said. “Supporting a paralyzed mother and a sister since he was eighteen years old.”
Theresa stopped short and stared wildly at her. “He never told me.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“What is she paralyzed from?”
“A stroke. After his father died.”
“I don’t know why he never mentioned it.”
“He wouldn’t,” Rose said. “Unless you asked.”
No. She wouldn’t have asked. In two days at the Americana Hotel with a man she hadn’t seen before and wouldn’t see again she’d asked more about his family and talked more of her own than she had with James Morrisey in the more than two months that she’d known him.
She felt as unreal as the days she’d just left. Dizzy. Frightened. Not because what she’d done made no sense to her but because it made perfect sense. It was precisely that fact, that she hadn’t seen him and wouldn’t, that she didn’t know him and couldn’t, that had enabled her to relax and open up to him. And that was what was frightening! It made her feel . . . as though she were standing in shifting sands. She thought now of an early childhood event she hadn’t remembered in years—her only memory from before she’d had polio. She had been perhaps two or three years old. It had been a very happy occasion, some grand family picnic with cousins on the Jersey shore, the kind of thing they seldom did after Brigid was born . . . after she herself had gotten sick . . . once her brother had died . . . once all the bad things had happened . . . once the sun had gone down and her hair didn’t shine golden any more. . . . It was early evening and the sun was low. They’d cooked steaks and corn and everyone was gathered around the fire and two-year-old Theresa had wandered off by herself down the shoreline a way, watching thoughtfully as the tide, which was going out, briefly pretended to come back in. It nearly knocked her off her feet but she kept her balance by rooting her feet more deeply in the wet sand. Except that suddenly the very sand in which she’d buried her feet for safety began moving fast beneath her, and for seconds that seemed like forever, she thought that she was losing the world. Then her father called her name and came toward her and the spell of fear was broken.
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