by Diana Ramsay
"I hope so. I guess they're hoping, too, or else they'd hardly be so generous about forking over a week's salary just like that."
"It's a calculated risk to them. If you make it, they'll take it out of the Christmas bonus. If you don't, you'll get one week's severance pay instead of the usual two."
"That's a nice thought. A really nice thought." She picked up her glass. Though it was no more than half full, her hand shook so badly that liquid sloshed over the rim.
"Just giving you the lowdown on the economics of corporation life. What's it to them whether you make it or whether you don't? It's rough, I know, but—"
"It's straight from the shoulder, as Margaret would say." Joyce emptied her glass and set it down with a loud click. "Exactly what is it that I inspire, Hank? I think I'd better hear it."
"Must you? I guess you must." He leaned forward and cupped her chin in his hand. "It's the impression you give of detaching yourself from the action and taking the long view, rather than hanging in there and running around the track with the rest of us. Or used to give." He squeezed her chin and released it. "Listen, babe, you better pull yourself together. You're fight on the brink. Anybody can see it. People don't like seeing it. Too much of a reminder of how close to the brink they are themselves."
"But I'm not—"
"Fortification first." He slid out of the booth and shuffled over to the bar, returning immediately with two martini glasses, frosted and filled to the brim. He put them on the table and sat down again. "Okay. Now let's hear the denials."
"I don't know why you think I'm on the brink of anything. Just because—"
"Oh, come off it! You're not a nincompoop, you're a bright girl. You don't have to be told that a bout with sleeping sickness means the mind is shutting out something it doesn't want to face."
"All right, I don't have to be told." She put her hand around the glass. Cold as cold could be. "But what's the alternative to shutting it out? Conjuring up pictures of her lying there like a broken doll? Dwelling on the thought that if it hadn't been for me none of it would have happened?"
"I've told you a million times, you've gone overboard on that. But telling's no use. You have to believe it. You know, I think it might be a good idea if you—"
"Don't tell me. Let me guess. You're going to suggest seeing a shrink."
He looked down at his glass. "It's what people usually do when things pile up on them."
"I know. Don't imagine I haven't thought about it. Quite a lot, in fact. I'm sure any psychiatrist could have a field day with me, dig up all kinds of treasure buried in my unconscious. But I simply can't afford to see one, so that's that. Fortunately, I have a mind that's capable of shutting things out and nerves that are capable of exerting control."
"Or a semblance of control."
"Well, the shadow will have to do until I've toughened up sufficiently to achieve the substance. I will eventually."
"Oh, sure you will. We all do. We all have to live with the knowledge of wrongs we've done to other people. Why the hell should you be any exception?"
Something in his tone sounded a warning in her head. Confession time. Leave now. Get out while the getting's good. But of course she couldn't do anything of the kind. Not to a man who had just bought her a couple of drinks. Not to a man she liked. And so, two hours and four martinis later, she had heard all about his twenty-year-long struggle to give physical satisfaction to his wife, who didn't know it was men he was drawn to, not women. No indulgence in anything like that, of course. Well, not for years anyway. Only his psychiatrist knew. And now, Joyce.
The next morning—her last at the office before the vacation—she found a bottle of Tanqueray gin on her desk. Taped around its neck was a sealed envelope. Inside: Sorry. Guess I foamed at the mouth a little yesterday. Last thing you needed. Keep laughing. Hank.
...
"I don't know about the rest of you," Ruth Elkins said, "but I'm voting no on the first amendment. Even if constructing a swimming pool in conjunction with Barton County does mean a lighter tax load, I don't fancy sharing the water with every Tom, Dick, and Harry."
"Right on," Harriet Wintergreen said. "I'm with you all the way. At least here in Moccasin you more or less know everybody. But who knows anybody in Barton County?"
"I do," Midge Haviland said. "My sister-in-law lives in Barton."
"That's not the point, Midge." Ruth set her jaw. It had always been a heavy jaw, and the jowls had expanded since Joyce had seen it last. "A community is a community, and we have a responsibility toward seeing that it remains one."
Midge looked crest-fallen.
"Now about that second amendment—" Ruth began.
And got no further. Both Harriet and Midge had plenty to say about the second amendment, and tried to say it simultaneously. Ruth was determined to have her say, too, and the result was a rather noisy free-for-all. Joyce was able to make out that the second amendment concerned busing children to achieve a better racial balance in the schools, and that all three Moccasin matrons were against it. Not that they were prejudiced. God forbid! Their long-winded eloquence offered reason after reason that was as far removed from prejudice as Beluga caviar from peanuts.
Easy enough to tune them out. Joyce gazed out the window at the house across the street—the house in which she had lived for seven years—with eyes that seemed to recognize nothing. It was like looking at a house she had never seen before. To be sure, the Havilands, who owned it now, had painted the once creamy stucco white, made a vast (and vulgar) flower bed of the front lawn, and drastically trimmed the elm at the side of the house. But all these things didn't explain the strength of her reaction. No amount of alteration could have rendered the house so unfamiliar. The change was in herself: paying a visit to Moccasin was like taking a trip to the moon.
The past was dead. Proof of its demise was probably worth having, though that wasn't what she expected when she telephoned Ruth this morning to say hello and received a ready invitation to come out for the day and join a hen party. She had come seeking an alternative—any alternative—to boredom. Anything that would hack away a small chunk of the three weeks. More accurately, the twenty-three days. In hours, five hundred and fifty-two. In minutes—But she could never bring herself to go as far as totting up the minutes. Too absurd. Like a kid calculating the distance to the end of the school year. Strange to find herself in the position of wishing time away. Strange, and not very pleasant. Like being in a stalled subway train all the time. She felt too tense to settle down to anything. Too tense to read. Too tense to eat. Too tense, even, to sleep, now that she had all the time in the world for—
"Hey, wake up, dreamer." Ruth snapped her fingers under Joyce's nose. "You're not trying to escape us by going off into a trance, are you?"
Midge gave a wail. "Oh, I hope not. I have a whole list of household things I have to ask you about, Joyce. Where did you get that pine paneling you used in the basement? I've hunted all over town and—"
"Oh, shut up and wait your turn, Midge," Ruth said jovially. "Say, Joyce, I meant to ask you on the phone about those soap animals of yours that made such a smash at our bazaar last year. You wouldn't have any more on hand by any chance, would you?"
Joyce laughed. "What a pity you didn't ask, Ruth. It just so happens I do have a few. I could have brought them with me."
Ruth looked ready to chew nails.
...
Dear Eliot,
I'm taking you at your word and asking a favor of you. It occurs to me that the furniture we placed in storage against such time as either of us had a need for it might just as well be sold. Most of the pieces are Colonial and ought to fetch a tidy little sum in the right markets. I don't know how you feel, but, for my part, I can't envision a future that encompasses a dining room big enough for the pine table, to say nothing of the sideboard.
My share of that tidy little sum would really come in handy right now. I'd like to get out of this dump (it seems more and more like a prison cell eve
ry day), but without some kind of stake moving is out of the question. What with one thing and another, I haven't managed to save a bean.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that you'll go along with the idea. If you're too busy at the moment to make the arrangements, you could send me the receipts from the storage company and I could handle things. The girl in the shop downstairs knows all there is to know about American antiques—I couldn't have a better guide to the marketplace.
Hope this finds you in good health and good spirits. How's the work going?
Love, Joyce
...
Dear Joyce,
Your idea sounds fine. I can't see a need, present or future, for all that dining room stuff. To tell the truth, I was all for selling everything lock, stock, and barrel when we sold the house, but you were so bent on storage that I didn't want to make an issue of it. By all means let's sell now. I don't mind telling you a bit of spare cash would come in handy for me, too. I've drawn up a budget and I've been pretty good about sticking to it, but things come up. You know how it is.
One thing I'm going to insist on—that we split fifty-fifty this time. So never mind any of the jazz about the lion's share of the bread going to the breadwinner. Anyway, you put a lot of work into refinishing the pieces. Remember how you used to stay up till all hours of the night oiling that table?
You don't have to worry about making the arrangements. The storage company has an office in Boston and I should be able to dispose of the stuff in a jiffy, given the passion for antiques that prevails in this academic neck of the woods. I'll get busy on it right away.
Hope you're okay in other respects. If there's anything else I can do for you, please don't hesitate to let me know. Any time. Any place. But I guess I don't have to tell you that.
Love, Eliot
...
Kitty Shanks's wall no longer opened prospects to the entire globe; the travel posters had given way to a coat of flat black paint. And the group had changed. Del and the other militants were gone ("They found the rest of us too docile," Kitty explained, rather tartly. "More inclined to talk than act. The trouble was, the kind of action they plumped for was on a par with taking pot-shots at Andy Warhol'), and the four faces new to Joyce looked as though they would have fitted smoothly into the social scene in Moccasin or some community just like it. Camaraderie was higher than it had been with the former membership, but the steady stream of banter did not lack bite. Now and then, a remark from which the teeth had been drawn was tossed Joyce's way, in line, apparently, with a policy of "include her but go easy."
Paula Vesey, one of the new faces, a rosy-cheeked butterball with thick, shining, prematurely gray hair, got things going. Her problem was her boyfriend, an engineer at the recording studio where she was the manager. To compensate for having to take orders from her by day, the engineer subjected her to the most humiliating indignities by night. She described them in some detail, her face suffusing with crimson, and then confessed that most of them followed blueprints set down in the works of Henry Miller. "He's really gone on Miller. He knows most of the books by heart—he can quote page after page without getting a word wrong. I've read Miller, too, so I can more or less guess what he's going to pull on me next. I feel in my bones that he's working up to that carrot deal or something equally horrible, and I don't know what to do to ward it off."
Nobody had much to say to this. There were a few murmurs of sympathy, and then somebody said, "Find yourself a new boyfriend." Paula gave a despairing nod, the tears trickling slowly down her cheeks, and that was that.
Next in the arena was sex-pot Veronica Stanton, never one to hide her light under a bushel, Joyce remembered. Veronica, too, was having problems with a boyfriend, but of a different order. This boyfriend was a major-league pitcher, a twenty-game winner four years in a row, but fallen upon hard times the past season. The owners of the ball club, greatly concerned, were subjecting him to a barrage of medical, dental, and psychological examinations. One psychologist had suggested that there might be a castrating female behind the difficulties and wanted to undertake an intimate study of the pitcher's life with the aid of cameras and tape recorders. "It sounds like a pretty screwy diagnosis to me. Bobby's been thinking all along that the trouble is the hop is gone from his fast ball and he hasn't got enough control of the sinker to really be effective with it, but now he isn't sure anymore. Now they've almost got him convinced the trouble could be mental. How do you know? How do you ever know? He's a great guy and I hate like hell to stand in the way of a cure, but shit, having a Peeping Tom—even a mechanical one—in the bedroom seems a bit much. I don't know what to do."
This provoked quite a bit of discussion. Some of the women thought that the problem was the pitcher's, not Veronica's, and she was under no obligation to help him solve it. Others thought that if he really was a great guy, if he wasn't exploiting her or keeping her down, she might just as well go along with the idea. Still others thought that it was up to Veronica to make her own decision.
And so it went. Most of the women were having problems with some man, and one by one the problems were aired. In no instance did the airing seem to point the way to a solution. By far the most hopeless was the problem stated by Rebecca Rosenberg—a new, aggressive Rebecca, very different from the timorous, tearful creature of a few months ago (though her nails were still bitten down to the quick). Her boyfriend was black and had grown up in Harlem, where the chief white oppressors, apart from policemen, were Jewish shopkeepers; Rebecca was Jewish and, inevitably, served as a psychological punching bag for his internal conflict. The advice that had been given to Paula, the only sensible advice under these circumstances, too, was not given to Rebecca. Instead everybody felt duty-bound to say something constructive ("Maybe you could take him to a synagogue—show him Jews are human, too." "Maybe you could adopt a black foster child"). Even among liberated women, it seemed, the conventions were something to reckon with, though they were a far cry from the conventions that had bound previous generations.
Later, bidding her guests goodbye at the door, Kitty took Joyce's hand and pressed it gently. "We've missed you, Joyce. Do come again next week."
Joyce's response was a noncommittal smile.
Come again? What for?
She was drinking too much. Much too much. It became harder and harder to postpone the first drink of the day untill the late afternoon. It took a real effort of will, and the effort was pretty futile, when you came right down to it, because making herself wait only caused her to tank up all the faster, the way the English, haunted by the specter of closing time, race the clock in pubs.
Joyce, too, was racing the clock. Only she was running ahead of it. Way, way ahead of it. Her metabolism had speeded up to an alarming degree. She could feel the blood rushing through her veins; could hear the accelerated thump, thump, thump, thump of her heart. Or imagined she could feel and hear, which amounted to the same thing. It was essential to slow herself down. Drinking helped. Nothing else did. She felt hemmed in by the four walls, but no sooner did she set foot outside than she longed to be back inside. What was there outside? No distraction that really distracted. No amusement that really amused. A temporary state of affairs. She would get back in stride when she returned to work. The three weeks would pass. Time always passed. Meanwhile, it was important to refrain from looking at the clock. Mind over matter—the tenet of a lifetime.
One morning the telephone rang. It rang at the crack of dawn, or what seemed like the crack of dawn. The sound was unearthly, surrealistic. How long had it been since the telephone had summoned her from sleep?
It was Irene. "Hi, kiddo. Thought I'd catch you before you left for the office. Something's come up that might interest you. A friend of mine is moving to San Francisco and giving up her apartment. I know you're not exactly overjoyed with your place, and believe me, Sal's would be a big improvement. It's only one room, but it's twice the size of yours. The rent's a hundred and sixty a month. A hundred and fifty-eight, ninety-
seven, to be precise. It's rent-controlled. Interested?"
"Interested? I'm practically turning handsprings. It sounds too good to be true. What's the catch?"
"No catch. Not even an agent's fee. The landlady won't have anything to do with agents because they've sent her too many dogs in the past. She prefers personal recommendations from her tenants. She lives in the building, but that's not as bad as it sounds—Sal says she's strictly live and let live. It's a good deal, Joyce. The location's good, too. West Seventy-first Street."
The Lincoln Center area—one of the few pockets of relative safety left in Manhattan. Joyce's heart leaped. "When can I see it?"
"The sooner the better. If you could possibly get part of the morning off—"
"No problem about that. I'm on vacation."
"Vacation? Now? With Thanksgiving just around the corner?"
"Well, I'm new. I had to wait until everybody else got back. You said the place is large?"
"Twice the size of yours at least. You'll like it, I promise you. I'll get right on to Sal and tell her to go to work selling you to the landlady."
"Thanks, Irene. Thanks very much."
It required superhuman effort on Joyce's part to write down the particulars, her hand was trembling so. A miracle. Nothing short of a miracle to have something like this served up to her on a platter. Her present finances would just cover it. Just. She might have to borrow to meet the moving expenses, but what the hell. A miracle was a miracle. Who would ever have imagined Irene in the role of miracle worker?
Yet another miracle awaited her in the mailbox downstairs—a check from Eliot for five hundred dollars. Her share of the furniture money, his note explained. For a moment, disappointment pushed her spirits down. The dining room sideboard alone was worth at least a thousand dollars, and as for the table—Had Eliot decided against a fifty-fifty split? Or had he simply closed with the first offer that came to hand because he didn't want to be bothered?