Looking for Mr. Goodbar

by Judith Rossner

  “Well, then,” she said, softly now, because there were tears in his eyes and she was already regretting what she was about to say, “maybe you’d better forget about me. Maybe it’ll be much less painful if you fall back out of love.”

  He lowered his eyes so that she couldn’t see the tears in them, which now welled in her own throat. He was still wearing the batik tie, neatly knotted over the white turtleneck. He looked very dear and she wanted to run to him, sit on his lap, press his face to her bosom, but she knew she couldn’t do that because he would misunderstand.

  Time went by. Ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Neither of them moved. It was good that Tony had called. That this happened. It had to happen sooner or later, better to get it over with.

  James stood up. Slowly. He looked very tired. His body. His face. He had aged many years since he lowered his eyes from hers.

  “I think I’d best go home, Theresa,” he said. “I need to be by myself for a while. Think.”

  I really love you, James, I just—She was confused by the unbidden thought. But that was silly, she understood what she’d meant by it. She did love him, in a way. Just not the way he wanted her to.

  She nodded.

  He put on his coat. It was a very well-tailored camel’s-hair coat. It was always clean. At the moment that didn’t seem so ludicrous as it sometimes had.

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “I’ll call in a few days.”

  She lay where she was, staring at the door motionless, for a couple of hours. Sometimes she was thinking but sometimes her mind was totally blank. Often, after a blank period, Rose’s face would suddenly come into view. During the few chats they’d had since the school year began, Rose had been cold to her. Not cold, exactly, but—as though she’d given up on Theresa. She wanted to tell Rose not to give up on her. She wanted to tell Rose that there was hope. That she was, after all, only twenty-seven years old, and she hadn’t even tried to change. Her throat ached a little as she thought of how unfair Rose was being, to view her with such skepticism. As though, if James wasn’t what Theresa wanted, there couldn’t possibly be anything she wanted.

  What did she want, anyway? She tried to think of some specific thing she wanted, in the present or in the future. She’d never really thought in those terms and it was a problem for her to do so now. When she tried to focus on what she wanted, her mind bounced away to things she ought to do during the Christmas vacation, like take her winter coat to the cleaner’s and pay some bills. Of course there were things anyone would like to have, that went without saying. A fur coat. A warm body beside you in the bed. But as for the future . . . realistically, how could you know what you’d want in the future? You could only know who you were and what you wanted now. How could you be so sure you would exist in a year, much less that you would want what one year back in time you’d thought you would want?

  The phrase “controlling your own destiny,” which Evelyn had used more than once, had a delightful ring to it, but there were huge limits, after all. You couldn’t control which men you met, or which ones liked you. You could make sure you didn’t have a baby, if you worried about that sort of thing, but you couldn’t make sure you did. (How many years had Katherine been trying, on and off, to get pregnant, and she could never do it at the right time?) If you drove a car you could make fairly sure that you wouldn’t smash into something else, but you could never control whether someone smashed into you.

  Controlling your own destiny.

  Actually she was sorry she hadn’t continued to go to Evelyn’s consciousness-raising group. The same thing would have happened with James, but she would have felt much better about it. They would have supported her. They all supported each other in their determination to become more independent, less subservient to men. She could use the group’s support now. She had no illusions that James would come back to her and she missed him already. She wished he hadn’t said he would call; it would have been preferable to know for once and for all that they were finished. If she knew for sure, then she could make plans. Sally and Arthur were having a New Year’s Eve party, to which she and James had planned to go. Now she probably wouldn’t be going. Evelyn was also having a party; they’d thought maybe they would go there first.

  Maybe she would call Evelyn in the morning and ask if she could still join the group. She’d responded to so many different points, really, at that first session, it had been foolish not to go back. Just sitting there listening to each woman discuss what was wrong with her own body had been a revelation. One of them had felt as self-conscious, as deformed by an appendix scar, as she herself did about the scar that ran down her back. The other woman’s scar wasn’t comparable, but still, it was interesting. She would definitely call Evelyn in the morning. If she didn’t do something like that she might spend the entire Christmas vacation just lying here in this helpless way.

  So much of her life she had felt strapped down.

  She looked at the light fixture in the ceiling. Of the three bulbs, one had burned out months earlier and a second had died recently. She would change it during the vacation. Better yet, she would move.

  That appealed to her. She had never loved this place as she had the first one. Even the way she’d decorated showed that. So little thought. Her old possessions were there and she still loved them. But the things she’d added—the flokati rug, the fur pillows, the thirties mirror with the blond wood frame and the frosted designs on each side—they didn’t look as though they belonged in the same apartment with the other stuff. As though two people with different tastes and personalities had pooled their belongings in one room. A bad marriage. When she moved she would get someplace with a separate bedroom with four walls and a door. And a living room. She needed more space. She didn’t know how she’d survived this long with barely space to breathe. She would spend tomorrow looking for an apartment. Maybe on the Upper West Side, this time. That was someplace she knew nothing about. It would be an interesting change. She would spend all day tramping around looking for an apartment. That way she would be too tired, by nighttime, to pace around the apartment waiting anxiously for Tony to make up his mind to pick up the phone and call.

  He didn’t.

  She’d called Evelyn. Evelyn wasn’t sure how the group would feel about having someone new come in at this stage, but she’d ask next week. She hoped Terry would be at the New Year’s party. Terry said she wasn’t sure but she’d try.

  She’d looked at apartments all day but seen nothing remotely reasonable. She looked again the next day. But she had trouble sleeping at night, which sapped her energy during the day. She took aspirin but they didn’t help. She called Katherine because Katherine always had storehouses of tranquilizers in the apartment. She’d forgotten that Katherine and Nick had gone to Aspen. Maybe she’d try to find a doctor who would give her a prescription for tranquilizers. The trouble was, she’d never gone to a doctor in the whole time since she’d left home, and she was afraid to start now. (She always had the sense that if she was ill and she went to a doctor he would find more things than she’d ever suspected were wrong—a veritable Pandora’s box of secret ailments that would cost a fortune to correct.)

  She dreamed that she was on her knees in a cold, dark place. Her chin was resting on something padded. She couldn’t move. Things were being done to her but she didn’t know what they were because she could almost but not quite feel them.

  She woke up and turned on every light in the apartment, then was upset by the glare and turned off most of them.

  Maybe she should go to a shrink. Not the kind who really messed with your head but the kind Katherine had been seeing for years, who helped you understand some of your real motives. Katherine was exactly the same person she’d been years ago but she seemed to have much more understanding—a whole set of satisfying explanations to prove how different things were this time around.

  In her next dream she was trying to get home to her apartment on St. Marks Place. She was crawling, on her knees. It wa
s hard to find the apartment because the whole street was covered with some kind of dark material that turned it into a tunnel so you couldn’t see the sky. And the sidewalks were covered with jive-ass spades with knives, hustling everyone, except they didn’t see her because she was on her knees. Just as she was finally getting close to her house a huge red Checker cab chased her right up onto the sidewalk and out of the dream, but not quite into consciousness.

  In a later dream she was telling a shrink about the first dream. She was sitting facing him but he had no face. Just a pair of glasses resting on a sharp nose on what was otherwise a blob of pink skin. They were in a store on St. Marks Place—on the same block as the Circus—except that the front of the store had been torn away, maybe by a bomb or some kind of explosion, so you could see the whole street. Except it didn’t look like St. Marks Place. There was a river and some dark woods and the BMT subway was running through and there were trapezes in some of the trees. She started to tell the shrink about the first dream, about the tunnel and the people with knives, but as she talked she realized that the shrink was getting bigger and bigger and was now easily twice her size. She began to laugh because it struck her as very funny that a shrink should be getting bigger and bigger instead of shrinking. And then the next thing she knew she was lying strapped down to his couch, and a voice that wasn’t a human voice (because he didn’t have a mouth) but came from some mechanical device inside him, was saying, “We’re going to straighten you out, Theresa. We’re going to have to straighten you out.”

  She awakened, struggling against the straps that were binding her. Crying. At first she wasn’t certain she was out of the dream but even when she was sure that she was awake, her anguish remained and she cried and cried. Her pillow was soaked with tears and still she couldn’t stop crying. It was four o’clock in the morning. She put on a sweater and jeans and her winter coat, took keys and money and left the apartment.

  There was no one at all on Sixth Avenue; at first she thought she was the only person awake in the world, although here and there an apartment light was on. But then she saw a few people—men, mostly. Staggering along. Curled up in doorways. One throwing up in a wastebasket. Creeps. So bad even the Statue of Liberty wouldn’t let them huddle under her robes. A very young queen, his arm around an elderly dwarf, smiled at her as they passed. A dwarf out of the circus. The mention of the circus stirred some memory but she couldn’t place it.

  Fourteenth Street, devoid of its shoppers, its hangers-out, its cheap wares spilling out of large brown cartons on the sidewalk, was unbelievably ugly. The garbage stood out on the street as though some maniacal artist had gone around outlining it with a black crayon. She returned to Sixth Avenue and headed uptown. Two small, thin, bleary-eyed Puerto Ricans made their clucking, sucking noises at her, obviously too spaced out to care if she responded. A cabdriver slowed down to ask her if she was crazy, walking around the streets like this at this hour. She shook her head. He said she should get in the cab, if she didn’t have money he would take her where she was going. She told him she didn’t know where she was going. He was reluctant to drive off and leave her.

  “I’m all right,” she said. And thought of James. She wished James were with her right now. Not even talking. Just walking, with his arm around her. She couldn’t think of anyone else it would be pleasant to be with right now. The taxi drove off. Somewhere a police siren wailed. She was beginning to feel cold.

  She didn’t see another person walking between Eighteenth Street and Thirty-second.

  At Herald Square she dropped onto a bench and closed her eyes. She was cold but she didn’t care that she was cold. She didn’t want to go home yet. She wanted to walk so far and so long that when she got home and fell into bed she would be too tired to dream.

  She was there for a long time before she realized that two benches down a man, or the body of a man, lay curled against the slats. She stared at him, or it, wondering if he was dead or alive. At some point a police car went by, its siren at a low wail, and it occurred to her that she should tell them about the man, so if he were alive . . . if he were alive, what? They would wake him out of what might be a not-too-bad sleep and take him to a jail or a hospital and he would be no better off than he was now. He would feel the cold for the first time. The thought of the hospital brought back, for the first time, the dream, memory, whatever it was she’d had of herself on her knees . . . in the cast . . . during . . . or before . . . when? The operation on her spine. At the split second that it hit her, she rose from the bench and moved swiftly across the enclosed park area, climbing over the benches on the other side, half walking, half running across the street, until she was in front of Gimbels. Where to now? Downtown? Across?

  Suddenly it occurred to her that for much of her life she had been running away from that table. From the helplessness and the humiliation. She could see herself walking . . . on Rhinelander Avenue, on Pelham Parkway, on Convent Avenue, on St. Marks Place, on Eighth Street. Once her mother had called the doctor to see if Theresa wasn’t hurting herself with all this walking, and the doctor had said that if it hurt her, she probably wouldn’t be doing it. But that wasn’t actually true. Sometimes it hurt and she did it anyway because the need to move far outweighed the pain. The need to know that she could move. That she wasn’t being held down. She was free. Freedom was no vague philosophical concept; it was movement, pure and simple.

  She admitted her tiredness to herself for the first time but she wasn’t ready to give in to the extent of taking one of the cabs that still zipped by, probably on their way to Brooklyn. It was almost five in the morning. Slowly she started walking downtown.

  Maybe the idea she’d had earlier and then forgotten wasn’t such a bad idea. She would go to a shrink. If she didn’t do that she would have to do something else drastic. Take a leave and travel. Something. Or go back to school. Or take a job abroad. A shrink was probably the best idea. What she needed now was to come to a better understanding of some of the events of her childhood that had affected her life so strongly without her realizing it. She’d never thought in terms of a cause-and-effect relationship—this had been done to you and therefore you did that—so that it had been unsettling, fascinating, though, to suddenly feel that very distinct relation between being confined in a cast and needing to move. It would be quite an extravagance, of course, seeing a shrink. Particularly for something that probably wouldn’t really change her life in any way. On the other hand, she could stop any time she was feeling a little better . . . or if she didn’t like the way it was going . . . or if she liked it but it was going too fast, if her money was going too fast.

  By the time she’d reached home and climbed the two flights of stairs to her apartment she was exhausted almost beyond belief and thought she would fall asleep instantly. But as her head hit the pillow, the thought I can’t ask Katherine and how else will I find someone? jolted her awake, so that while the exhaustion was still there, she couldn’t sleep, but lay awake trying to think of different people, aside from Katherine, whom she might ask about a shrink. Finally it occurred to her that she might, once school began, ask not only Evelyn but also Rose. The more she thought about it, the better an idea this seemed. Not only because Rose was basically sympathetic, however distant she’d been out of concern for James, or because she and Morris were Jewish and most shrinks were Jewish, but also because it would be a way of acknowledging to Rose that her failure with James was at least partly her failure, not all his. Rose would appreciate that; it might make her feel more friendly toward Theresa again. Theresa felt she could use a friend like Rose.

  As the sky began to lighten she fell into a sleep punctuated by dreams that were frightening enough to make her want to wake up, which her body wouldn’t allow her to do, so that she would struggle almost to the surface and fall back into blackness again.

  Tony called and asked what she was doing New Year’s Eve. She said she thought she was going to a party with James but she wasn’t sure. He said he’d
call her that night and check her out. She told him she didn’t believe him because he hadn’t called the last time he said he would. He said he couldn’t help that, he’d had to go out of town on a business deal.

  “For the garage?” she asked sarcastically.

  No, he said, he wasn’t working at the garage any more. He was into something big, he’d tell her about it when he saw her. She told him he should come up right now and tell her or forget about it.

  “Whatsa matter, love?” Tony said. “Ain’t James giving you what you need?”

  She hung up, sorry she’d even asked him to come. She wasn’t even horny. Hadn’t been for a while. Maybe it was the depression; her juices weren’t flowing.

  She stayed up all night and slept during the day, in her mind marking off the days until the end of Christmas vacation the way a prisoner marks off the days to his release. She felt totally alone.

  James called late in the afternoon of December 30th, awakening her from a strange dream in which she had found a beautiful new apartment on the Upper West Side, signed a lease, painted and decorated the rooms, then moved uptown to find herself back in the same old place. She picked up the phone without being fully awake and said hello without thinking of who it might be.

  “Hello, Theresa. It’s James.”

  “James,” she said, her voice and mind hazy, “James, I—”

  “Is this a bad time for you?”

  “No,” she said. “I was asleep.”

  “Shall I call back later?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m all right.”

  Shoot.

  “I’ve been thinking a great deal,” he said. “As you might imagine.” His voice was almost the same as usual—perhaps just a tiny bit more reserved. “I spent a good deal of time, at first,” he went on, “trying to see this thing from your point of view, an independent woman who always had a great deal of freedom, and so on. Trying, well, as I said, to see it your way. But after a couple of days I realized that what I was doing was futile. Not that understanding and compassion are futile, but that in the long run, no matter how well I understand your feelings, I have to act from mine, so that the only thing I could really do was to understand exactly how I feel about our—about you and me—and act on that, and that you would act upon your own feelings.”