by Jane Rule
“What do you want from me, Kate… anything?”
“Just this probably… getting out. That was bad this morning.”
“So was the night before, mostly You can’t mind much about that. “You did what you thought you had to, didn’t you?”
“I think so.”
“Well, that’s enough. I’m glad you came. There’s something I wanted to say to you, and I couldn’t have unless you’d come. I’ve been trying to figure out ever since that night what it was between us that made everything so bad, even what was good. I sat there in chapel this morning, ready to be furious, you two all dressed up in tents, going down the aisle like a couple of newlyweds, and I thought what a mucked-up fucking waste it was. I still think so. But that’s not it. While you were up there doing it, it was like me the night before: no mistakes, but nothing else either, except once or twice. And I thought, ‘I know what’s wrong between us. We’re friends, and I didn’t know it.’ Then afterwards, when you were just waiting for me to take a crack or try to make time with Esther, I saw that you didn’t know it, either. So I think you’re out of your head, and you think I am. It doesn’t matter. I could have a drink with you and Esther. It would be okay. Yes?”
“Yes,” I said, but I felt just a little the way I did when all those glasses began to fall, sad, helplessly sad.
I wonder if the reason so many adolescents love Fitzgerald is that he never outgrew that kind of sadness. It takes some measure of innocence to mix honor and depravity that way, and a setting is also necessary—the heavy night scent of eucalyptus, for instance, and the far, small, bright towers of a city He would have remembered the tune playing on the car radio. I don’t, but it might have been “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Those were the days before privately financed good music stations, which we would have felt required to listen to. They were also the days before it was popular to support persecuted minorities, better still to belong to one. Neither Sandy nor I knew that we were making an emotional investment which fifteen years later would give us almost Negro status with very little Negro pain. The attitudes we were developing and the decisions we were making were based on an older morality for populating those coastal hills and inland valleys. Though the Jews had already been burned and the smog already sometimes smarted in our eyes, we were still prepared to be the victims rather than the heroines of a population explosion so violent, its fallout of conformity so deadly that even the conservative Church would begin to question its doctrines of moral sickness and health. What a waste all Sandy’s angry aggressiveness now turns out to be. And how many silly years it took me to discover that I was playing my game of hide-and-seek mostly by and with myself. But we didn’t know then. Sandy still doesn’t.
Last year, when I had a drink with her after a concert, she asked me to send money to another of those amateur little magazines she has been supporting for years.
“Isn’t it time that people with freckles stopped forming leper colonies?”
“Is that why you live alone?”
It’s not as easy as that. Once, briefly, not even true. Habit. Like not going to church. I gave it up on that Sunday as people give up smoking, and, though I have been occasionally since, I am not a practicing Christian. The second Sunday I missed chapel I had a phone call from the chaplain. Would I like to have sherry with him and his wife that afternoon at five? Certainly I would not, but I went. And after the sherry was poured, the chaplain’s wife arranged to be in the kitchen attending to supper.
“I didn’t really have time to tell you,” he said, “what a fine service that was, not just the sermon, the whole service. The president said he was going to write you a note. Did he?”
“Yes,” I said. “It was very nice of him.”
“But something went wrong for you,” the chaplain said.
“I’m frantic about my other work,” I said. “It took more time than I had.”
He started to say something and then stopped, but he wasn’t waiting for me to say anything more. He was testing the bridge he was going to try to walk.
“I have left the Church twice,” he said finally, “to sin in peace. I didn’t come back frightened. I came back tired, tired of myself.”
Tiredness of myself is what’s driving me away, I might have said, but I didn’t. I let his offer lie between us. We talked around it about my work, about plans for next year, about your show which was scheduled for the middle of the week.
“Performances and occasions,” I said. “Robin Clark told me a story the other day about a youngster just out of reform school. He’d been sent to the Catholic farm. When Robin asked him how it was, he said, All day long we dug potatoes, eight hours a day, and what did we get at the end of it? Communion. Starving to death and nothing to eat but communion.’ ”
“Which is what this spring is for you.”
“Pretty well,” I said.
He had the kindness and good sense to leave me alone after that. I meant to go to call on him and his wife at the end of term, but I never did find or make the time to do it.
It was easy enough for you to find no time for chapel when I didn’t. For the week before your show, you rarely attended lectures, and often Monk or I would take both lunch and dinner to the studio for you. I didn’t confess then to a mild envy of both Monk and you, for you both had places for work, tools, and props. I liked the studio better than the theater, which always seemed to me a little seedy, too crassly make-believe. The studio was a simple shack by the creek, always either too hot or too cold, corners filled with rags, half a dozen dusts pooling and sifting under the wrapped-up work of the day, all in a strong glare of critical light. Occasionally after dinner, if no one else was in the studio, I’d stay a while with a book, liking your absorbed company, the occasional fragments of conversation. In this way I had seen stages of most of your work. I did not expect your show to surprise me, but it did.
There I saw the four years I had known you gathered together in one place, beginning with the figures whose heads were the right size for their hands and feet in postures our bodies have learned only from their clothes, idealized bulk of matriarchal virgins naked at a movie. Then what you called the shrunken head series, which were all very small, military, naked lead soldiers marching off to war. Next came the mythical animals with Miltonic morals, gargoyles ready to brush their teeth and be put to bed. Surely, you were the one who should have disproved the existence of evil. Then came what Monk called donuts for Henry Moore, circles and figure eights whose loose ends sometimes flowered into faces. I had seen them all, and I had known that resemblances were sometimes strong. What I hadn’t seen was the progress your concept of yourself had made against my static face. Whether my face was perched on top of a young body already stiffly suffering vaginal senility, was a death’s head in the mouth of a gargoyle, or bloomed at the end of a fragile stalk, it was the same serene mask.
“I’ve envied you,” Sandy said quietly, as we stood together waiting for you to be able to leave. “I still do, but I don’t envy her. I can see you better than that in the dark.”
“Not better,” I corrected. “More clearly.”
Your work had never been taken very seriously by your teachers, who found you both too easily influenced and unconsciously distorting. Technically you were both ham-handed and picky so that small areas of obsessively careful detail often lived in a large carelessness of design. None of them imagined that you’d amount to much; yet they were puzzled by your almost humble confidence that you would and weren’t willing, quite, to disabuse you of it. Perhaps that was why the party after your show, unlike any of the others, turned into a mild sort of orgy.
Twenty of us started out, and we picked up others along the way, some connected with the college or the neighborhood, others friendly strangers, mostly men to balance the party I found myself with a grotesquely tall medical student who chinned himself on street signs. Sandy settled with the young music librarian who looked enough like her to be her brother. I think they may have bee
n dimly related. It was a musical family. You spent the earlier part of the evening trying to deal with Richard Dick, who had turned up without his wife and was telling you that he’d made an awful mistake: you were really the one he’d cared for all this time. We had begun with beer, but gradually more and more orders of whiskey came to the tables. Some people were trying to dance in a space entirely canceled if people came out of the men’s and women’s toilets at the same time. Richard and Robin were preparing to have words. A stray freshman was sick. Someone began to ask for identification cards. Just before we were thrown out, the sculpture instructor suggested that we go back to his house where there was wine and room to dance. In a sorting out of cars, we lost a few of the drunkest and strangest, but it was still a large and boisterous party as it continued in private, more united now in celebrating the night for you.
You rarely drank very much, but I was not surprised to see you uncertain of your footing and giggling. You’d had very little sleep for several weeks and enough to drink to let yourself be as tired and relieved and foolish as you felt. Richard was now too drunk to be more than a superficial nuisance, and there were a number of others who insisted on dancing with you, on taking you out to the terrace, where the drugs of eucalyptus and bright distant city helped the cheap wine to make no one feel responsible for nothing very important.
Wanting a rest from my acrobatic giant, I took my turn with Richard, who decided now with gallant lack of focus that really I was the one he had wanted all these years, but he mistook a wine bottle for me and followed it out into the kitchen. I moved toward the door and met you in it.
“Absolutely everybody’s kissed me tonight but you,” you said, your face very solemn and childish.
“Then it’s probably time to go home,” I said, not seeing Sandy until I tried to move past you out onto the terrace. “Is this everybody?”
“Somebody,” you said.
Sandy met my anger with a shake of her head and a hand on my arm. “You have such a bad memory, Kate. Kiss the girl. It’s a game everybody’s playing on the terrace.”
“Kiss the girl,” someone else called, and it became a chorus, a song.
And so, there in the doorway, I kissed you on the mouth, for the crowd. And you moved on into the room of dancers.
“I’m going to take her home and come back for you,” Sandy said. “All right?”
“I should have brought my car,” I said.
“And your sense of humor. I haven’t had a drink since we got here.”
“All right,” I said.
I had begun helping to clean up by the time Sandy came back, and she stayed to dry glasses.
“I am too tired,” our host admitted. “You finish. I sleep. Have coffee if you like.”
We did, taking our cups out onto the terrace.
“Did she get back all right?”
“Yes, and Monk was right behind us so I left her to put Esther to bed.”
“Quite a night.”
“Kate—”
“Don’t start, Sandy.”
“But she was crying.”
“She was tired and had too much to drink. All right. It’s hard on her.”
“It’s a little hard on you too, isn’t it?”
“But I enjoy it,” I said.
“You don’t, you know. But I suppose you think you’ll last. It’s only a couple of weeks now, isn’t it? But then she’s going to be in London, too.”
“That will be different. There wasn’t any problem here until about a month ago.”
“Well, come on. Let’s go. Say, what happened to your flagpole?”
“Five men carried him out some time ago, same ones who took Richard.”
“Men.”
“Men,” I said to you the next day over a 4 P.M. breakfast. “It’s time you met some men.”
“All right, Kate.”
“We’re not going to share a flat in London. In fact, we’re not going to see much of each other for a while.”
“All right.”
“Little dog, don’t you understand?”
“I guess so. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s what you want.”
“That’s right,” I said.
And there was nothing left then of our college days together except what is recorded in too many home movies and too many albums, yours among them here on the shelf, our young faces under Oxford caps, across our throats and shoulders gold hoods against black academic gowns: Ramona Ridley, Sandra Mentchen, you and I.
II
THROUGH CONNECTIONS AT THE bank, Frank found me a flat in the neighborhood of the British Museum, and Doris furnished it for me with things from their attic. I hadn’t much mind for my surroundings in those days, and I paid almost as little attention to my bank account, into which Frank or Mother seemed to have put a substantial supplement to my Fulbright money. I was not what they or I considered extravagant. I was expected to live comfortably. It was arranged. By the middle of August, my trunks had arrived to be unpacked into waiting book shelves and drawers. I had established myself with the butcher and green grocer, found a char who would come in two mornings a week, and bought my first picture to hang in the front hall, a Picasso line drawing of two female nudes in passive company.
“Do you really want to live alone?” Doris asked, turning from the drawing, her arms full of parcels.
“Yes, I think so. At least, I don’t mind at all.”
“When does Esther arrive?”
“The end of the month. She’s going to Edinburgh first, for the festival.”
“And she’ll stay with you until she finds a place,” Doris said.
“Yes.”
“You should have taken the double bed.”
“She can sleep on the couch,” I said.
“Darling, you really ought to cover up that bite on your neck.”
“It isn’t a bite,” I said, covering it quickly with my hand.
“Well, nibble then. The teeth marks show.” She had put her parcels down and was rummaging in her handbag. “There.” She had found a Band-Aid. “All these years in London, and I’ve never met a cannibal. I lead a sheltered life.”
“Do you?” I said, letting her put the Band-Aid on my neck.
“Umhum,” she said. “I never did have the fear of God put in me, but I don’t like the look of the v.d. clinics or jail.”
“Are you going to start worrying about me and nagging me after all these years?”
“I suppose not,” Doris said, “though somebody should. It’s the only part of being loved that you’ve missed. You might even like it.”
“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t like it.”
“Put these eggs in the fridge, and get me a vase for the flowers. Don’t make a face. You don’t have to do anything about them. The char will pitch them when they’re finished.”
“Do you want a drink?” I asked. “Frank sent over a bottle of Scotch, a bottle of gin, and half a dozen bottles of wine yesterday.”
“Well, yes. I’m glad he remembered. Do you notice he’s a bit dopey these days?”
“I hadn’t, no,” I called, in the kitchen by this time.
“It’s usually a woman,” Doris said, following me out. “But sometimes it’s just business.”
“Do you mind, Doris?”
“As little as I can manage, and he’s very discreet, which is thoughtful of him. Sensible, too. If I ever met one of them, I’d kill her.”
Doris had found the vase for herself and was arranging rust and violet snapdragons. She did not seem at all distressed.
“I never really know how you feel,” I said.
“That’s because I tell you, which is always confusing. You never tell me a thing. I can make you up for myself, whole cloth, and never be uncertain.”
“What would you like me to tell you?” I asked.
Doris went on arranging flowers until her silence made me wonder if she’d heard my question. I didn’t want to repeat it.
“What I’d really like to kn
ow you can’t tell me. You don’t know yourself,” she said finally “Don’t put any more gin in that. It doesn’t save steps. I’ll still want another.”
That was always the way conversations were between Doris and me, sparring and scatty with more flavor of intimacy than intimacy itself. I almost always enjoyed them because I could be as frank or as frankly evasive as I liked, but after she’d gone I sometimes felt heavily lonely for an ease between us that there never really was.
What was it that she wanted to know? Had it to do with you? But there was no point in discussing you with Doris. There was nothing to say.
Rather early in the morning on the first of September, you phoned from Paddington Station. I could hear the inevitable Scottish cold in your voice and the inevitable uncertainty.
“Come right over,” I said. “There’s plenty of room for you.”
“What will I do with all my stuff?” you asked, relaxing into plaintiveness.
“Check your trunk and bring everything else.”
“How do I get there?”
“By cab.”
“There’s a queue ten miles long,” you said, your voice fading away as you looked to confirm your own statement.
“Jump it,” I said.
“Jump it?”
“All right, don’t jump it. People will move along. I’ll have coffee waiting.”
An hour later I opened the door to you and a cab driver and a corridor full of luggage. You looked simply awful.
“You look wonderful,” you said, as all three of us shifted suitcases into the sitting room. “You look marvelous. You have no idea how marvelous you look.”
“I’ll take care of the cab driver,” I said.
When I came back into the room, you were sitting on the couch without having bothered to take off your coat.
“God, it’s good to be here. Up all night on the train. Exhausted. Filthy cold. It rained every bloody day we were there. We swam everywhere we went. Spent the family fortune in taxis.”
“We?”
“John,” you said. “I’ll have to tell you about John. He’s going to phone. What time is it?” and before I could answer, “Are you sure it’s all right to be here? Are you sure you have room?”