Look at them. The two biggest cunts in the world.
It popped into her head, disembodied from the rest of the afternoon. What was so upsetting about it? He’d called her a cunt before.
But there hadn’t been anyone else around, then. That was the difference. The things he said to her when there were just the two of them in the closeness of her apartment might be crazy but they didn’t count like something in the real world, where there were witnesses. She had realized some time earlier that she thought of it that way, that of the compartments into which she’d divided her life, only some were labeled real. School was real. Visits to her parents were real. What else? Tony was unreal. James was . . . James was real. What did she mean by real, then? Tony was no less himself than James was James. Maybe it had more to do with who she was when she was with them than with who they were. She was more herself, the real Theresa, in some ways with James, than she’d ever been with anyone. Maybe that was why it had always been such a strain to be with him; her whole self had been engaged, even if it was usually in keeping him at a distance. Her whole self except for her sexuality. And that had only made it more difficult, more engaging. She’d had to constantly define her boundaries for fear of his stepping over them. While with Tony there was no boundary except around her mind, which was not susceptible to invasion by him.
Or hadn’t been, anyway, until there were witnesses. They’d gone out together into the real world, she and Tony. And it hadn’t worked.
He was spreading her legs now, sucking her, getting her ready. That was all right. It felt pleasant. He could make love to her if he wanted to. As long as she didn’t have to make love back. Or get undressed. Or do anything. He slipped off his pants, not bothering with his shirt. He got into her. She was so far away that it took her a while to realize that his erection had disappeared.
She laughed because it seemed like such a perfect ending for the day. Her movement made his limp penis slip out of her.
“Boy,” he said bitterly, “you’re some doll.”
“I’m sorry,” she said listlessly.
He got up, put on his pants and stalked out of the apartment without another word. Her first thought was that she was never going to see him again and that was all right. Then she saw that his suit jacket was still neatly hung over the back of one of the chairs, and she thought, with a mixture of relief and regret, that he would have to come back after all.
But she was wrong. He didn’t. She hung the jacket in the closet because she was sure that if she got rid of it, he would show up within a week and be furious with her. When summer came and she had her warm clothes cleaned and put them in a garment bag in her big closet, she put the jacket in along with the other things.
Meanwhile, in the next few weeks, she saw only James, at first enjoying him more than she ever had. He sensed her mood in the first week and talked less than usual. Often now, if they sat together in a movie or at the apartment or in a coffee shop, he would hold her hand or keep his arm around her. Sometimes he kissed her cheek or forehead and tried to draw her into an embrace, which she usually avoided.
In the middle of June she went with him to the wedding of a cousin of his. She wore the black dress, partly in a mood of defiance (she wasn’t sure it was appropriate, a sexy black dress for a wedding). She swept up her hair and wore a lot of makeup and big silver earrings.
“How beautiful you look,” he said.
She stood stock still—a resistance to her immediate impulse to run into the bathroom, change her clothes and wash off her makeup.
He laughed. “You can’t stand compliments, Theresa. I’ve noticed that about you.”
“How clever of you,” she retorted. It was the first time she’d been sharp with him since the episode with Tony.
He looked at her helplessly.
“Would you like to stand there all afternoon admiring my great beauty? Or do you want to go to the wedding?”
“I’d be quite happy to stay here with you,” he said, “but there are people waiting in the car.”
People. Car. Panic. It hadn’t occurred to her that they would be going with other people. It made sense, of course; the wedding was in New Jersey. She just hadn’t thought about it.
“Who?”
“Just family,” he said. Sensing—and misinterpreting—her panic.
“Family.”
Look at them, the two biggest cunts in the world!
His mother. Was his mother out in the car? Paralyzed? She really should have bought some nice flowery dress that was appropriate for a wedding. What was wrong with her?
“My sister and her husband, and their two older girls. And my mother.”
“Are you sure they have room for me?” Knowing it was a funny question but somehow hoping that she would get by with it.
“It’s a van,” he assured her gently. “Patricia and Frank’s. We have a special contraption in the back,” he went on when she didn’t respond, “that secures my mother’s chair. We wheel her up on a ramp and then secure the chair in the back. Frank is very good about making things like that. The children are sitting in the back seat with Patricia . . .” He sensed her nervousness and he was talking to reassure her. As though she were a skittish horse being soothed into walking into a trailer. “You and Frank and I will sit in the front.” When she was depressed she’d appreciated his understanding; now it made her uneasy; if only because it worked. His very matter-of-fact description of the basic physical setup in the van had somehow calmed her slightly.
“Is it going to rain?” she asked.
“No,” he said, “I don’t think so. But I have a couple of umbrellas in the van, just in case.”
She smiled.
“You may not tease me while there are people waiting for us,” he said, smiling back.
The blue-and-white van was parked in front of a hydrant. She climbed up with help from James, who then got in and introduced her to the others, except for his mother, who was asleep. (She slept most of the afternoon. In the brief period that she was awake James introduced them and Theresa thought she saw fear in his mother’s eyes.) His mother said something unintelligible. It turned out that she was fully paralyzed on one side, only partly on the other.
Patricia looked very much like James except that she had light, reddish hair. The girls both looked like her. Frank looked like James’s description of him—homely, gruff, decent. In general she found she knew them better than she would have expected to just from James’s descriptions. She thought of him as having perceptions quite different from her own. How then could he look at his family and see what she saw?
Since I met you I have found you to be a delightful and interesting person.
She smiled to herself, and James, apparently deep in a conversation with Frank about the price of replacement parts for the van, turned to whisper in her ear, “Share your joke with me.”
She shook her head. “I can’t now.”
“I’ll remind you later.”
The wedding was bearable, the bride feigning shyness and the groom feigning the lack of it. The reception was in a large hall. There was a small band and plenty of liquor and once she’d had a few drinks she found she was having a good time. James turned out to be an excellent traditional dancer, and confessed to her that at some point he’d taken lessons. She was briefly self-conscious when she realized how good he was, but he led her well and strongly and she began to really enjoy herself. Once in a while James went out of his way to introduce her to someone and it finally occurred to her that there was an element of pride in his bringing her to meet people. Naturally. She was such a beautiful, charming, delightful person.
“There’s that smile again,” James said as they danced away from a cousin who’d said that Theresa and James must come out some Sunday afternoon for a barbecue. “Now you have to tell me what it’s about.”
“Or else?” she teased.
“Or else I’ll do something outrageous.”
“Such as?”
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��Oh . . . such as asking you to marry me.”
“That’s not very funny,” she said, knowing that it sort of was but being not at all amused by it. Being, in fact, so disconcerted that for a moment she lost track of the step and stood in confusion on the dance floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I meant it to be. At least in this context.”
“What I was thinking that made me smile,” she said suddenly, “is that I was surprised you described your family so well when you have such a distorted view of me.”
Now it was his turn to be confused. “I do?”
“When you say things about me I never recognize myself.”
“What, for example?”
“Forget it,” she said irritably.
“But I can’t,” he said. “I can’t forget it if I’ve hurt your feelings.”
“It’s not that you’ve hurt my feelings,” she said. “It’s the opposite! You make up these crazy—you make me sound like some kind of ridiculous fairy-tale princess. Beautiful, fascinating, charming—” She stopped because he looked torn between astonishment and laughter and she felt torn between anger and tears. Compounded by a feeling that she was the one who was being absolutely ridiculous in spite of the fact that everything she said was right and true.
People danced around them, occasionally joking about their standing still in the middle of the dance floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “I see that you’re serious.”
She looked down so he wouldn’t see that her eyes were filling with tears after all. He tried to lift her chin but she resisted him.
“You understand that I mean what I say about you. You must. Because you haven’t accused me of lying, just of having a—a sort of glorified view of you.”
She nodded. Her jaw was trembling with the effort not to cry.
“Well,” he said, very lawyerish, “it seems to me there are two possibilities. One is that my view of you is simply accurate. Much closer to reality than your own. The other is that I have a somewhat rosy picture because I’m in love with you.”
Oh, my God. How had they gotten into this whole conversation, anyway? Why had she come to this stupid-ass wedding?
“Actually, now that I think of it, there’s a third possibility. That what I see is true but I see it more readily because I’m in love with you.”
She turned and plunged through the dancing couples and ran out of the hall into the parking lot. He followed her. It was raining lightly. He’d been wrong, she thought with a minor twinge of satisfaction.
She ran through the parking lot toward the van, thinking she would just lock herself into it and wait until the others finished. She got in but James followed her, wedged into the seat next to her until she got up and moved over to the driver’s seat.
“Theresa.”
“Leave me alone.” She was crying.
“It’s so hard for me to understand you.”
“Then don’t.”
“I’m not demanding anything of you. I’m just telling you how I—the way I feel slips out, I don’t even mean to say it, much less to . . . I can wait. I don’t want to press you. I know we’ve only known each other for a few months.”
It didn’t seem like a few months; it seemed she’d known him all her life. She hated him.
“But you react as though I were threatening your life. As though I were demanding that you marry me instantly or else.”
“Don’t you ever make grammatical errors?” she asked bitterly.
“I won’t dignify that with an answer,” he said.
“Love!” she burst out. “I hate that word. I don’t even know what it is.”
“Maybe you just haven’t experienced it yet.”
“Maybe nobody has, including you.”
He shook his head. “Not true.”
“I think it is true. I’ll tell you what I think. I think you made up your mind a little while ago you were going to fall in love and you better find someone to do it with, and I was just the first person that came along that—”
“You weren’t the first,” he said quietly. “I’d been out with quite a few women.”
“What was wrong with them?” she demanded.
“It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with them.”
“Then what’s so special about me?”
He was silent for a long time. “It seems to me,” he finally said, “that there’s something a little ridiculous about my sitting here defending myself against the terrible charge of having fallen in love with you. You are special to me. I’m not sure if I know all the reasons. That is to say, I know the qualities I—like, enjoy, whatever, about you. But I don’t particularly know why they add up to being in love with you—or even if they’re the same as the reasons I’m in love with you. I can only tell you that you’re not being fair to me or to yourself when you assume that you just happened to sort of—”
“All right. I wasn’t being fair. I’m not a fair person.”
He smiled. “Here we go again. Theresa telling me what a bad person Theresa really is.”
“It’s true,” she said, but she smiled a little in spite of herself.
“Maybe. It’s irrelevant, in any case.”
Silence. She stared through the front window. The rain had gotten heavier and there was no way they could get back to the hall now without getting soaked and being horribly conspicuous.
Maybe somewhere there was humor in her having avoided most of her own family’s social gatherings since she was an adolescent and now having two disasters in a row at other people’s. Nor was it a coincidence, she knew, that it was around their families that the bad scenes with Tony and James had occurred. Families brought out the worst in everyone. She had noticed about herself that she could go for weeks, even months, without thinking of, say, Katherine, but as soon as they were together she was flooded by the old feelings of suspicion and dislike for Katherine, of distaste for herself. (Brigid’s having children had somehow changed that relationship for the better; where she’d often pretended Brigid didn’t exist, the children now absorbed her attention to an extent where it was unnecessary to pretend.)
“I think my sister’s pregnant again,” she said, startling both him and herself. She was flustered. She laughed. “That was the end of a chain of thought.”
He nodded. “Katherine.”
She shook her head. “My other sister.”
“You’ve never mentioned another sister.”
“That’s impossible. Brigid. She’s married—she has three children already.” She took her wallet from her bag and showed him the pictures of Brigid’s three children as though this alone disproved his claim to not having heard of Brigid. He smiled at the picture of the three of them, sitting like angels in front of the Christmas tree.
“You adore them.”
She shrugged. “I don’t see them very much. They live too far away.” She’d said it in all seriousness but now she realized it was weird and she’d better cover with a joke. “The Bronx. That’s another country. Or maybe you’ve noticed.”
“Fortunately there seems to be considerable overlap in the language.”
He, too, was relieved that they’d managed to get to a lighter plane.
“I wonder if it’s raining in the Bronx now,” she said.
“Most likely,” he said.
“I guess we’re stuck here for the duration,” she said.
“Unless we want to make a run for it or it dies down. It’s a shame I don’t have the keys, I could move the van close to the entrance.”
She yawned. “And we don’t even have the Sunday papers.”
“Actually,” he said, “there’s a News in the back.”
“You’re kidding. Where?”
“I’ll get it.”
He stooped to go between the seats and around to the back. On impulse she followed him. Behind the back seat the floor of the van was covered with indoor-outdoor carpeting, except for a track where the wheelchair came in and was se
cured. On the other side was a stack of something which turned out to be slabs of foam rubber, covered by a green vinyl tarp. James had mentioned that Patricia and Frank took their kids camping in the summer. The windows had curtains, which were pushed aside. On the floor the Sunday News lay untouched except for the comics, which had been read and refolded on top.
“Mmm,” she said, sliding down against the stack of foam rubber so that she was sitting on the carpeted floor. “How cozy.”
He stood bending over in the van. Waiting.
“What’s this? Foam rubber? Can I have a piece?”
He pulled over the tarp in such a way that she wouldn’t have to move and took down a piece of foam rubber for her. She stretched out on it, leaned up on her elbow and looked at him provocatively. She almost thought she might let him make love to her now.
“Mmm,” she said, “this is delicious. I may go to sleep instead of reading the papers.”
“Would you like me to close the curtains?”
“Mmm.”
He closed them. She lay curled . . . coiled . . . on her side. Teasing. Waiting. Challenging him. Okay, James, you finally got me in the mood. Let’s see what you do about it. He sat on the edge of the back seat, watching her. She glanced quickly at the magazine section, put it aside, yawned.
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