Looking for Mr. Goodbar

by Judith Rossner

  Sometimes they would do Patricia a favor and just take her kids so she would have the day to herself. Then afterward they might take the kids to City Island and have lobster dinners (the kids ate hamburgers) as a special treat.

  Twice they went away together for long weekends—once to the Berkshires, where they sat on the grass at Tanglewood and listened to chamber music (neither of them had ever been there before) and once to Pennsylvania Dutch country (James had been there a couple of times). When she asked him why he didn’t take a regular long vacation he told her, smiling, that he was saving the time for their honeymoon trip to Ireland. When she gave him a dirty look he chided her for not letting him have his little jokes, but they both knew that he hadn’t been joking.

  When he was planning to stay with Theresa for the night, James would let his sister know in advance and she would pick up their mother at the time when the day nurse left, taking her back to stay with her own family overnight. Theresa tended to avoid any situation in which she had to be with James’s mother. She couldn’t meet the older woman’s helpless eyes without being overwhelmed by guilt. Don’t worry, she always wanted to say, I have no intention of taking your son away from you.

  Toward the end of the summer she let James pick her up at her parents’ house a couple of times. (She kept looking for changes in her father but he remained the same.) When her father said that James seemed like a nice fellow, it served to reinforce that fear that had crept up on her recently that she had been sinking, out of sheer lethargy, into the quicksand of Irish Catholic life in the Bronx.

  She wished Evelyn were around. She needed very badly to talk to someone who would understand her feelings about James and about marriage. There was no one in her family who wouldn’t think she was crazy not to want to marry James—except for Katherine, who would understand for the wrong reasons. (Katherine could never understand James’s good points—his loyalty, the quality of his intelligence. Katherine probably wouldn’t see why she’d stuck with him for this long. She would hate Katherine if Katherine were to make fun of James, or be condescending.)

  It struck her now that not since her high school days had she had a really close girlfriend. Someone she could talk to easily, and not just in time of crisis. Talk. Say whatever came into her mind. Of all the women she’d come into contact with, chattered with, had lunch with, Evelyn was the closest, yet even with Evelyn she’d never really let down her guard. Surely she had a much better sense of Evelyn’s life than Evelyn had of hers. Evelyn was pretty, and quiet, but with a temper. Evelyn kept her temper in when her boyfriend was in town because her boyfriend didn’t believe in hassling. Then he would leave to go on the road (often, she knew, there were girls with him) and she would go home and have a fight with her mother and then she would settle down and gradually she would get peaceful, and then Larry would come back and the whole cycle would begin again. She didn’t know what to do about it; if she told him to leave she was sure he would do just that, without a murmur.

  But what did Evelyn know of Theresa? To Evelyn’s concerned questions after the Tony episode, Theresa had responded with a laugh and reassurance that he was a great lay, and not as dangerous as he looked. She had told Evelyn a little about James but nothing about the rest of her life. She often implied to Evelyn that the demands made by her family on her were bigger than they really were, as a way of explaining why she wasn’t around more, more available for movies and other things Evelyn liked to do with her friends. (She had a lot of friends; Theresa didn’t like the ones she’d met.)

  Now Theresa felt she would really like to be closer to Evelyn, and she was surprised and delighted to hear from Evelyn before school began. They had dinner. Evelyn was looking lovely. She had a deep tan and her long brown hair was swept up on top of her head. (Theresa had been bright red most of the summer.)

  “How was the summer?” Evelyn asked.

  “I don’t know,” Theresa said. “Boring. I . . . I’m having a difficult time with James.”

  Evelyn sighed, smiled sadly. “Why is it,” she asked, “that if you ask a woman how she is, the first thing she tells you is about her husband or boyfriend?”

  Theresa was startled into a silence which Evelyn took for consideration of her point.

  “Do you see what I mean?” Evelyn pressed. “If you ask a man how he is, he tells you about his work, or something he’s doing.”

  “That was what was on my mind,” Theresa said. She was upset and a little angry; she had wanted for so long to have this talk.

  “I’m sorry I jumped on you that way,” Evelyn said immediately. “Please don’t be mad at me, I just . . . it just happened to . . . the summer turned out to be so different from the way it was supposed to be, and it was all because men kept . . . we, some of us, at any rate, kept letting men fuck up our plans.”

  They’d planned, for example, to have a rap session at least once a week for all the women in the house, but the only time all of them were always there was the weekend—Friday night to Sunday. The ones who were there all week liked Friday evening but the ones who were commuting got there on Friday evening all hopped up and wanting to go someplace and dance. Saturday was difficult because at least a couple of the women who went out Friday night ended up not coming home, or just coming home long enough to grab a bikini and go back out with the new guy. Saturday night everyone, or almost everyone, wanted to go the parties and then Sunday you had the same difficulties, only worse. It was demoralizing to even those people who were most serious about the groups. It was even more demoralizing as a symbol of the way women let men occupy the central place in their lives, giving no thought to their own selves, their cores, their brains.

  Terry nodded, resentful because that was exactly what she had wanted to talk about, anyway, not letting that happen to her with James.

  The reason Evelyn had especially wanted to see Theresa, she said, was that a new group was being put together that she thought Terry might be interested in joining.

  Never.

  “The first thing about the group is that the women all have real lives of their own. Two of them are writers, one’s a lawyer, one’s a stockbroker, and then there’s me.”

  Impressive. Scary. It would be frightening to be with a bunch of women like that, she’d never have anything to say. Even Evelyn, though just a teacher like herself, played several musical instruments and had all kinds of interests Theresa knew nothing about.

  It would be a consciousness-raising group, Evelyn went on. The idea was that women thought they had their own unique problems, and that the problems were emotional, while in reality their problems were shared and political. Imposed on them by the culture (not just this culture, of course). Theresa pointed out to her that not wanting to get married and have children was the opposite of a cultural problem, that the culture thought it was just fine to do all that, and Evelyn, smiling, said that was exactly the point. Not only did the culture think it was fine, the culture said it was the only thing you could do if you were a woman. You had no options. That was exactly what they were fighting. Some of the women in the group were married or living with someone, others weren’t, but none wanted to feel that they should be or had to be or that they didn’t have an identity that was deeper and more important than their relationship to a man.

  For the first time Theresa felt a stirring of interest in what Evelyn was saying. Evelyn picked it up and kept talking but she kept coming back, always, to the group. Theresa had to go to the group to see how many women had the same problems as she did. How many women disliked their own bodies. Theresa looked at her sharply; they’d never talked about anything like that. Evelyn didn’t know about her back, her operation, her scar.

  “Women always think there’s something wrong with them.”

  Seldom with such good reason.

  “They’re too fat or too thin, their breasts are too small or too big, they’re too tall or too short, they have a bad complexion or an appendix scar.”

  Theresa stood up.


  “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Theresa said. “I just got restless.”

  “Let me just finish my coffee,” Evelyn said. “Then we can take a walk, if you feel like it.”

  Reluctantly she sat down again.

  “The point is,” Evelyn said, “we’re taught that we have to be perfect. Like objects in a museum, not people. People don’t have to be perfect, only objects do.”

  What if you have a sister who happens to be really perfect? Then how do you handle it?

  Evelyn urged her to come to the group and Theresa promised to think about it but she knew that however interesting some of the ideas were to her, she wouldn’t be able to sit around with a bunch of women and talk about them.

  “I may join a woman’s group,” she said to James the next time she saw him.

  “Oh?” James said. “That sounds interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” he said, “because they seem to be trying to come to grips with a lot of real problems women have.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as needing a sense of identity aside from being just a wife and a mother. Giving women the feeling of having alternatives, which everyone needs. To feel that it’s all right—desirable—to develop their intellects, to be ambitious, competitive, and so on.”

  “You approve of that?”

  “Of course I approve of it. One of the qualities I enjoy in you is that you love your work.”

  “I don’t love it as much as I used to.”

  “Well,” he said after a moment, “that’s a problem, too. Finding work you can enjoy . . . that’ll continue to be interesting. Making it interesting, ironing out difficulties.”

  “You’re so slick,” she murmured.

  “I’m not being slick,” he said, just a little annoyed. “I’m answering questions as well as I can.”

  “Now you’re angry with me.”

  “No, I’m not angry. I just want to be taken at face value.”

  But your face is this bland Irish face.

  “The fact that words come easily to me,” he went on, “doesn’t mean that I’m insincere.”

  “Prove it,” she teased.

  “Ah, Theresa,” he murmured.

  “What else?” she asked quickly, because he was looking at her with that look he sometimes had, a look of longing—of love, if you wanted to be corny about it, a look which if James had been more aggressive she would have had to literally run from, since it threatened to devour her if she ever gave in to it. “What are the other enormous problems we should be grappling with?” she asked. “I mean, if I have my career already I don’t have to bother with that one.”

  “Well,” he said, speaking very slowly now, as though trying to disprove her accusation, “there’s the question of self-image. Women are always so worried about their appearance. Clothes, makeup, and so on. They feel it’s demeaning, they want to be valued for who they are, not for what they look like.”

  “You mean I should burn my brassieres?”

  He blushed. She laughed.

  “That’s just some silly, extreme symbol,” he said. “It seems to me that much too much has been made of it.”

  “All right, then. I should never wear makeup.”

  “Not just you,” he said. “Even women who look much better with it shouldn’t.”

  “I look much better with it.”

  “To me you’re just as beautiful without it.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said irritably, “I can’t talk to you. You’re crazy. You have this absolutely crazy picture of me.”

  “You see, Theresa?” he said softly. “That’s what the women’s groups are for. To give you a better image of yourself.”

  “Go away,” she said. “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to sleep with you.”

  But he didn’t go.

  She was restless. School began, and that helped for a few weeks, but then she settled into the routine and she felt it again. She was bored. She felt the need of a man. A Tony, not a James. A good hard fucking and no words. At least a few times a week it crossed her mind that what she really felt like doing was going running again. At Luther’s. Mr. Goodbar. Wherever. Just pick up some anonymous muscular type and get laid. And never see him again. Yet something stopped her. There was some inhibition there that she hadn’t felt before. Finally she decided that it had to do with James and what James would think if he knew. If he knew about her past life. If he knew she was perfectly capable of . . . Then she got furious with him for inhibiting her.

  In that mood of anger with him she went to Luther’s, picked up a large, fat man who said he was a newspaper reporter, came home with him at three o’clock in the morning—drunk, both of them, out of their minds—and rolled into bed, where he couldn’t get an erection and informed her that his wife had castrated him.

  Well, call me up when someone sews it back on.

  At the door he asked plaintively if she would hang up on him if he called her. She said she wouldn’t, but she wouldn’t give him the number, either. She told him to look it up.

  James’s friends Arthur and Sally, whom she’d met at Orchard Beach during the summer, had a party to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary. There was a large amount of drinking, dancing and joking, a great number of the jokes having to do with when Theresa was going to give in and marry James.

  She laughed uncomfortably. “He hasn’t even asked me,” she said.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked when they got home.

  “No,” she said.

  “Can I hope for the future?” he asked.

  “There’s no one I’d rather marry than you, James,” she said. “I just don’t want to get married.”

  “I hope I can change your mind,” he said.

  She smiled and knew she was a coward, that she would never marry him. That she didn’t tell him so because she was afraid that if he knew the truth, he would leave her. And she didn’t want him to do that. Not leave altogether, forever.

  She finally went to a meeting of Evelyn’s consciousness-raising group.

  “I need to talk about my mother,” one of the women said. Her name was Susan. She was blond, very pretty, a stockbroker. Her mother was dying of cancer. “I have this horrible feeling of never having even known her. All my life, my father . . . was like a god to me. I worshipped him. I couldn’t understand why he ever married my mother. He was so special and she’s just . . . I always thought she was just this ordinary, everyday . . . I had no sense of her dignity, her nobility, really. She raised five kids and kept a house and gave him the support he needed and totally subjugated herself to him, to all of us, really, to our needs, and now when I think . . . She’s even dying with dignity. She doesn’t confess to being in pain, the most she’ll admit is that she’s tired. But . . . have you ever seen anyone die of cancer?”

  “No,” Theresa said, because Susan seemed to be looking at her.

  “She’s actually a very intelligent woman,” Susan went on after a moment, as though the question had been rhetorical. “She only went through eighth grade; after that she went to work. She got married when she was sixteen. But when I think of it now, whenever we had homework, any of us, she was the one who helped us with it. Not my father, he was hardly ever there when we needed him. And she knew the stuff. Or she knew how to find the answers.” Susan burst into tears. “I just realized I’m talking about her in the past tense.” One of the other women put her arm around Susan and Susan cried on her shoulder.

  Terry was at once moved and discomfited.

  She went up to see her parents; she hadn’t been there since summer. Her father looked the same but her mother looked ravaged. She thought of Susan.

  “You must be exhausted,” she said to her mother. “If you ever just want to get away for a couple of days, I could come up and stay with Dad.”

  Her mother looked at her with what she was sure was suspicion. “I’m fine,” her mother said. �
�There’s nothing wrong with me. You want to come up and visit, come up and visit.”

  Her mother was making Thanksgiving dinner, as usual. So was Patricia making it, for James’s family. They were both invited to both dinners.

  James suggested, half jokingly, that the families combine.

  “Ha ha,” Theresa said.

  They decided to have dinner with Theresa’s family, then go to Patricia’s for the evening. Theresa asked James if his mother wouldn’t mind this terribly. He said he’d thought about this; he felt she would mind, but not terribly. That she would have Patricia’s family with her, and other members of their family as well, and that in recent months she’d gotten accustomed to having him around less than before.

  “She doesn’t like it, though,” Theresa said.

  “I think she cares more for my happiness than her own,” James said.

  “Doesn’t that make you feel guilty?” Theresa asked.

  “No,” James said, “strangely enough, it doesn’t. Patricia’s the one who feels guilty toward my mother.”

  “That’s because you’ve done so much more.” And maybe because she knows she doesn’t really want to have her living there.

  “Maybe,” James said. “But after all, Patricia’s always been there when she was needed.”

  Brigid and her family came, of course. And Katherine—without Nick. They’d had an argument. It didn’t matter, Katherine said, what the argument was about. It would pass. Basically everything was perfect between them. Everyone knew by now that it was the couples who didn’t fight who were really in trouble. Katherine paid a great deal of attention to James, and seemed fascinated by everything he said.