“Don’t you think my sister is gorgeous?” she asked when Katherine went into the kitchen to help.
“She’s an attractive woman,” James said.
“She’s also more intelligent than I am,” Theresa said.
“Oh?” James said. “How can you tell?”
Brigid’s children also seemed quite taken with James. At first Theresa suspected that they gravitated toward him in very much the way children always gravitated toward the one object in a room that wasn’t supposed to be touched, soiled or broken. Then she realized that as usual she was being unfair to him, that neither he nor any of the children was the least bit concerned over his white sweater and well-tailored gray flannel pants, that they simply liked him because he didn’t press them but waited for them to come to him and then gave them his full attention when they did. James and Patrick and her father talked a great deal about football and seemed to enjoy themselves. Brigid’s due date was just a few weeks away and she sat, mountainously contented, on the sofa, never moving except to the table for dinner, and then back at the end. As they sat at the dinner table, laughing gaily and eating, all of them, like some scene out of a Dickens novel, Theresa found it increasingly difficult to breathe. She hadn’t eaten all day but she barely ate now because the breathing difficulty made her feel that she would choke as the food went down. When Katherine commented that she was barely touching her food, she said that she had a huge, rich dinner the night before and was feeling a little sick now. Only after she’d said it did she begin to feel that she wanted to throw up. But when she went into the bathroom to vomit, almost nothing came up because she hadn’t eaten all day. As she sipped at her coffee in the living room, her hand trembled so that she had to be careful not to spill the hot liquid, and the breathing difficulty continued until she told James that she thought she might be ill and she wanted to go. He insisted on calling for a cab.
“I don’t want you to take me home,” she said, although she was in a cold sweat and her hands were trembling. “I can get home by myself. You go to Patricia’s.”
“I’ll take you home and then, if you’re all right, I’ll go to Patricia’s.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said, “once I get home.”
They were silent in the cab, he with his arm around her, concerned; she, sick and upset. In the apartment he helped her off with her coat, pulled back the covers so she could lie down on the bed.
“I’ll be all right,” she said. She was chilled and she pulled the covers up over herself.
“I’m sure you will.” He pulled over a chair and sat down next to her bed.
“Patricia and the others are going to wonder about you.”
“You’re right.” He went to the phone, dialed, told whoever answered that Theresa had gotten ill and he might be up by himself later.
“You can go now,” she said, her teeth chattering. “I’ll be okay.”
“I liked your family,” James said. “Particularly your father.”
“He’s going to die,” she said. “He has cancer.” And began crying.
James came to the bed, sat down, took her hands.
“Theresa,” he said, “I . . . did you just find out?”
“No,” she said through the tears. “I’ve known for months.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t talk about it.”
“Is that what . . . did it sort of well up on you today?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure what happened. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.”
“Can you breathe now?”
“Yes. I’m just cold.”
He got under the covers, stopping only to take off his shoes, and held her. Gradually she stopped shivering.
“You’re going to wreck your clothes,” she said, although she was still in hers.
“Don’t do that,” he said shortly.
She squirmed around under the covers so that she was facing him.
“I’m sorry.”
He smiled. “I accept your apology. Under the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“Whatever circumstances.”
She wanted to take off her dress but she didn’t want this to be an invitation to him. After a while, though, he got up and took off his jacket, then his pants.
“You’ll never get up to your mother’s,” she said. “I mean Patricia’s.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “I want to stay here with you.”
“I don’t need you to, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I want to.”
She got out of bed and went into the bathroom to put on her flannel granny gown. She washed and got back into bed, sitting propped up against the wall. He sat at the foot of the bed in his neat white underwear and his dark blue socks that clung wrinkleless to his legs.
“Theresa,” he said, “why did you never tell me about your father?”
I don’t know. I didn’t want you to pity me. To sense a weak spot.
“Why did you never tell me about your mother?” she countered.
“I would have. I hardly knew you, then.”
“I don’t feel as if I know you well, now.”
Pain and astonishment played on his face. “Do you mean that?”
She nodded. “I don’t mean that I’m not fond of you, James,” she said, “because I am.”
He smiled wryly. “Well, that’s something.”
“But knowing you. That’s something different. I don’t understand you. I don’t sense your dark side.” If you have one. If you don’t, well that’s worse.
“You mean you think I’m all sweetness and light? What a lovely thought.”
“You’ve never gotten really angry at me even though sometimes I’m a perfect shit.” If you could give me a good beating when I acted like that, I would like you better for it. I might even be able to enjoy sex.
“I don’t get angry at people I love. At most I suppose I get a little irritated. Or hurt . . . It hurts me that you didn’t tell me about your father.”
“I didn’t tell anyone.”
“I would assume”—he was choosing his words particularly carefully—“that I was . . . closer to you than most people.”
“You mean because we sleep together?”
“In a way. Except that’s a bit simplified . . . or backwards, even. We sleep together because we became very close.”
“I’ve slept with men I hardly knew.”
“Is that true, or are you saying it to shock me, the way you sometimes do?”
“It’s true.”
His face was expressionless. She got scared. Then angry. Who the hell was he to pass judgment on her? She’d had more fun in one night in bed with some of those men than in all the months with him. Then scared again.
“You don’t like that.”
“No. To me it implies . . . a lack of self-regard, I suppose. Not valuing yourself enough to—”
“Jesus Fucking Christ!” she exploded, seeing the flinch she’d once enjoyed so much. “You sound like something right out of the nineteenth century!”
“Maybe,” he said. “Actually when I read novels about the nineteenth century, the eighteenth, even, it doesn’t seem to me that people were really so different from the way they are now, that is—”
“Maybe you’re not,” she retorted. “Plenty of people are.”
“In behavior. That’s true. But deeper down—”
“Deeper down,” she repeated. “Screw deeper down.”
He was silent. She’d really turned him off, now. Well, if that was the way it had to be, then it was. He’d have had to know sooner or later. In a moment he would put on his pants and jacket and go home. She would never see him again and that was sad, in a way, but also a relief. If he left right now maybe she’d drop down to Mr. Goodbar and see what was doing. Or maybe go out and get something to eat. That was what she really wanted, as a matter of fact. She was starved.
“I’m hungry,” she announced, without premeditation. “I’ve got to get something to eat.”
“Shall I take you out?” He seemed almost relieved.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I feel like getting dressed again.”
She looked in the refrigerator but there was nothing but some white bread and a pitcher of orange juice.
“Yich,” she called in from the kitchen. “Nothing here!” She was high now but not at all in a good way; she felt in danger of falling off whatever she was on and breaking her neck.
“Why don’t I run down and pick something up and bring it back?” he called in.
“Are you serious?” She couldn’t believe he would do that now.
“Of course. That way you won’t have to get dressed.”
“But you will.”
In a moment he’d slipped into his pants and jacket.
He smiled. “No problem. What would you like?”
“Mmmm.” She thought about it, dancing around the room because she couldn’t stay still, she was too tense, too high. “Let me think.” She turned on the radio but didn’t even note whether it was talking or music that was on. “I know, hot dogs. Three hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut, and some French fries. And Doctor Pepper.”
He was smiling at her. He was an idiot. He was a love. He was crazy. It was music. She danced. What did she care if he was crazy? That was his business.
But as the door closed behind him she had a moment of overwhelming fear: He was leaving. He’d used the food as an excuse to get out and never come back. He was gone. She was alone again. Alone. She would be alone for the rest of her life.
Now you’re the one who’s being crazy, Theresa.
James would never do that. If James didn’t want to see her again, he would say, in that calm, precise way of his, “I’m leaving you now, Theresa. I love you but I can’t cope with your being a whore.” No. Prostitute. No. What was the right word for someone who did it just for fun, not money?
She giggled.
Still, it wouldn’t be funny if he didn’t come back. She looked at the clock; it was just past seven thirty. She went into the bathroom and looked searchingly at her face—as though trying to see in it the answer to whether James would come back to her. She looked ghastly. If it were she coming back, she wouldn’t. That wouldn’t really help to find out what James would do, though, since he thought she was beautiful. The idiot. The crazy idiot. She put on some makeup. At twenty to eight she admitted to herself that if James disappeared from her life he would leave an enormous gap that couldn’t easily be filled, something she could not honestly say about any of the others. A cocksman could always be replaced, even if not immediately with one of the same quality. But James was something else. She felt a surge of almost sexual feeling toward him. If James came back, if she ever saw him again, she would try much harder to . . . to what? She would be nice. She would be reasonable. She would try to . . . she would make a real effort to like sex with him. Maybe she should try to turn him on. Or at least turn herself on. She’d hardly had grass in the months that she’d been seeing only James. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? She was an idiot. Except it wasn’t going to matter because he wasn’t coming back. At a quarter to eight she started getting dressed and at ten to eight she went downstairs, wearing a jacket over her sweater and jeans, carrying only her keys. She met him in the lobby.
“Theresa,” he exclaimed, “what happened?”
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” she said with what she hoped came off as nonchalance.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he asked.
“Because you were disgusted with me,” she said. Flip. Now that she knew he was here.
“Disgusted?”
“Deeeeesgusted.”
He shook his head. He couldn’t imagine how she would think that. He never got disgusted with people he loved.
He held up a paper bag. “I had to go to Fourteenth Street for the hot dogs,” he said.
“You’re a love,” she said.
“That makes it all worthwhile,” he said with a grin.
She got some grass. He didn’t seem particularly surprised when she offered him a joint, but he didn’t want to try it, either. She smoked one by herself and experienced mild pleasure instead of total anesthesia. She got into the habit of smoking a joint just before they went to bed. He asked why and she said it improved sex. She asked teasingly if he didn’t want to try it; he said that sex was quite good enough already, thank you. She said, “Don’t mention it,” and they both laughed.
For Christmas he gave her a ring. Not a diamond ring, he was too smart for that, but a thin gold band with a small ruby surrounded by seed pearls in an old-fashioned setting. It had never occurred to her that it would be a ring, not even when she saw the little box—a jewelry box, was what she’d said to herself. She was overwhelmed. She felt everyone watching her and she looked up and blushed.
They were at Patricia’s. The kids had gotten all their presents and were occupied with them except for the oldest, Eileen, who was almost a teenager and was developing an interest in romance. She was watching. Involuntarily Theresa’s eyes went to James’s mother, who sat, half asleep, half smiling in her wheelchair.
She said, “Thank you,” in an almost inaudible voice. There were tears in her eyes and she pretended to be looking at the ring so no one would see them.
“Do you think you can get her to try it on, Jim?” Frank asked.
Everyone laughed.
She started to say she couldn’t just now, but somehow the laughter at the idea of her not putting it on had made that impossible. She took it out of the box and very slowly (she was having that same difficulty breathing, as though she were putting something around her neck instead of her finger) slipped it down on the fourth finger of her right hand.
“Wrong hand,” Patricia said.
“Ssshh,” James said. “She can wear it wherever she likes.”
It seemed to just fit and yet it felt strange. She’d never worn a ring before, she’d seldom worn any jewelry, but most particularly not rings. She kissed James’s cheek. He looked very pleased—proud, even.
She had bought him a rather wild but quite beautiful batik tie which she thought he would never wear. He immediately put it on over his turtleneck sweater.
She kept slipping the ring off and then putting it on again. It didn’t seem tight and yet it squeezed her finger, made it itch when it was on for any length of time.
They went for a while to her parents’, then back to her apartment. It was well past midnight. She put the ring in the top drawer of the dresser. It briefly crossed her mind that maybe her apartment would get broken into and the ring would be stolen (there was little else of value) and she wouldn’t have to wear it any more.
The phone rang. The first thing that entered her mind was that something had happened to her father. He’d been visibly tired, more so than her mother, for the first time since she’d known of his illness.
“Hello?”
“Merry Christmas,” said a voice. “Where the hell you been?”
Tony.
James was looking at her. She avoided meeting his eyes.
“Out.”
“You busy now?”
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You can call me.”
“Okay, love,’ he said. He made a long, low, suggestive noise in her ear, a sort of sucking-inhaling noise, to which her mind reacted with irritation and her body with a thrill that left her momentarily weak. She hung up. She went into the bathroom to take off her clothes. That was what she often did before going to bed with James, no matter how often they’d seen each other naked. She went into the bathroom to strip and put on a robe. There was something very yich about it. They might as well be married, some farty old married couple, for all the real sexuality and romance
in their—what?—friendship?
James was sitting in the armchair, fully clothed, pretending to be absorbed in a magazine. She put on the radio but there was nothing but Christmas music, which irritated her for some reason, and she turned it off. She would have to get a record player. She had never owned one and suddenly that seemed ridiculous. Not ridiculous, pathetic, really—a symbol of so many things she’d never had that she still wanted. If James started with her again about marriage she would ask him how she could possibly get married when she’d never even had a record player. He wasn’t looking at her.
She took off her robe and got under the covers, leaning on one elbow.
“What are you sulking about?”
“I wouldn’t call it sulking,” he said. “I confess to feeling jealous of anyone who feels free to call you at this hour.”
“He feels free to call anyone at any hour. That’s the way he is.”
A pause. James was having great difficulty. “Do you like him?” he finally asked.
She shrugged. “He’s a good lay.”
He blanched, if you could say that of anyone who was so pale to begin with. He regarded her gravely.
Gravely. Because I just buried myself.
The hell with him! If he doesn’t like me he can go and take his ring with him!
“Have you been . . . sleeping with him all along?”
“I feel free to.” Not wanting to admit that she hadn’t. Needing to make the point of her freedom.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I feel free not to answer your question. And you can take your ring back if you don’t like it.”
“This has nothing to do with the ring, Theresa. The ring was a gift. Because I love you.”
“Love,” she said bitterly. “Is that what love is? Thinking you own someone?”
“It’s not a question of ownership.”
“It’s not a question of this or that,” she mimicked. “Or the other thing. What is the question exactly?”
“When you love someone,” he said, very slowly, his voice trembling, “it is very painful to think of her making love with someone else.”
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