by Jane Rule
It was the way I wanted to leave you. I had notice of a job in Washington, D.C., and I could have gone to it at once, but I delayed the appointment for a month. There was no point in it. You had no time for anyone but Charlie. It was true that you had begun to work again, but you were not sculpting. You were making machines for Charlie. When you weren’t out together collecting old motors and parts of motors at the town dump or buying expensive tape recorders or stealing wire from hi-fi shops, you were together in the apartment that was now entirely a workshop. I could drop in if I liked. Charlie didn’t notice, but anything beyond his notice was beyond yours, too. Among the parts and sounds, you spent your days, Charlie’s servant and accomplice. I ducked under and climbed over wires, listened a while, sometimes even cooked a meal which we would eat together, sitting cross-legged on the floor, but I wasn’t really there. Or was, in a dimension I wasn’t prepared to accept. Charlie would explain to anyone, but he was really telling the steps he was taking to himself. It didn’t matter who overheard. He was the first intelligent person I knew to make what has now become a cult virtue of inarticulate speech, one-man jargon. I understood nearly nothing about his work. He was somewhat clearer in his talking about you.
One day I found you sitting on a pile of scrap metal, having your hair cut. Charlie waved the scissors to direct rather than greet me. I sat down on the chair he indicated and watched until your hair was as short as his, which was as dark as yours and long for a man’s.
“There,” he said. “We need this. Now we change clothes.”
He was taller than you but finer boned. I watched you trade shirts and then trousers, quite decently. He looked at you and smiled.
“You’re enough woman still—even for me. You have a witness.”
“How does it look?” you asked.
“As he says, like a bad disguise,” I answered, getting up.
“I’ll call you ‘brother cunt’ until it grows back again,” he said.
I started toward the door.
“Kate?”
“I came to say goodbye. I leave for Washington in the morning.”
“I’ll walk you back,” you said.
You looked at yourself in every shop window along the way, not vainly or nervously as most people do. You were curious. And, as I looked with you, I had to admit a sharp, new attractiveness in you, not crude, except in the sense of primitive. I looked away and let myself record the familiar street instead.
“You don’t like it, do you?” you asked finally.
“You should have made some sort of agreement with him, E.”
“I have. No limits. No barriers.”
“Whatever he wants whenever he wants it.”
“But I can want, too,” you said, nearly hostile. “I can take. I can be his lover. He’s not afraid.”
“His whore and his master. His slave and his keeper,” I declaimed, but quietly.
“And I would have been for you.”
We were standing in front of my hotel, shoppers pushing past us.
“You look like your own little brother,” I said, trying to smile. “Somehow, take care of yourself, will you?” I touched your hand, your chin. “Don’t shoot it out with the cops.”
I had not really planned to leave for Washington in the morning, but I knew I had to leave town. My trunk had already been shipped. I’d sold the car. It wouldn’t take me more than a couple of hours to pack. I picked up the phone and called Los Angeles, not really expecting Sandy and Esther to be at home. Esther answered the phone.
“I’m on my way east,” I said. “I wondered if I’d go by way of Los Angeles.”
“We’ll be here for at least another week. When can you come?”
“In the morning?”
She called to Sandy, who came to the telephone. “What plane shall I meet?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll make my own way.”
“Is Esther coming with you?”
“No,” I said. “No, she’s staying here.”
As is so often true for me, the urge to talk vanished as soon as the opportunity offered itself. I arrived at Sandy’s apartment soon after lunch and allowed myself to be persuaded to stay that night and the next, but, as soon as that was settled, I felt embarrassed and uneasy, regretting the impulsiveness of my trip. Esther, reading my nervousness as a need to talk with Sandy alone, went out to shop, probably for the second time that day. All the time she was gone, I asked political questions about the South American countries Sandy had toured recently. Because she was interested and well informed, I gradually began to relax. I asked her then what she knew about electronic music.
“I’m a prejudiced performer, not a musicologist,” she said, but it was a preface rather than a closing remark.
After two hours, Esther returned with one small parcel.
“Well, you don’t have to do that again,” Sandy said, grinning. “It isn’t you Kate’s shy of. Is it late enough for a drink? Or do you want to drink with us?”
“I do,” I said. “I want to talk, too. I just don’t know exactly what’s on my mind.”
“Let me get the drinks,” Sandy said, “and I’ll tell you.”
“She sometimes sounds a lot smarter than she really is,” Esther said, “but then you probably know that.”
I noticed again the receptive liveliness of her face. I wanted to say something pleasant to her or something amusing, but I did not know how to be either in the assumed intimacy I could feel. I didn’t say anything.
“I made a fool of myself last time you were here. Don’t let me do it again, will you?”
“You weren’t foolish.”
“I was. I think I must have been frightened of you, and I wasn’t really prepared for Esther at all.”
“People rarely are,” I said.
“And she was so completely different the next time we saw her. That must have been simply terrible for you.”
“Yes,” I said. “She did come back here, did she?”
“Oh yes. She spent the night and left from here in the morning.”
“I’d forgotten.”
“Esther?” Sandy called. “Where are the onions?”
“I’ll get them.”
Sandy came into the room with a pitcher of martinis.
“Now. What happened when Esther got back? And what’s happened since?”
“She had a long talk with a man named Charlie, finished off her contract with Christopher Marlowe Smith, and is now living with Charlie.”
“And how do you feel about it?”
“Awful,” I said.
“And how does she feel?”
“Properly had. Marvelous.”
“So what’s the trouble? I thought that was the goal. No, don’t tell me. I know—he’s not good enough for her.”
“He’s had three wives, a handful of children, and probably not the balancing number of divorces. He steals. He takes drugs, apparently.”
“We’re none of us perfect,” Sandy said. “At least he’s not a homosexual.”
I didn’t answer, resting in the pain I suppose I’d been waiting to have inflicted. Esther was handing around onions.
“What are you going to do with your private life now?” Sandy asked.
“Give it to charity,” I said.
“A lay sister?”
“Why didn’t you love her, Kate?” Esther asked suddenly “She loves you so very much.”
“A wrong sort of question,” Sandy said. “Kate can’t answer it in front of us. She’s, for one thing, too polite. Anyway, I’ve already explained it to you.”
“But you can’t really think that going to bed with a woman is wrong,” Esther persisted. “What about Sandy and me?”
Esther left Sandy the end of that summer. Or perhaps Sandy ordered her out. Esther was not the sort of girl to leave alone, even in a room, much less in a city. And Sandy, who had so thoroughly and unhappily explored the kind of living Esther apparently enjoyed, could not stay indulgent. A good many mar
riages are no better and last no longer. At least there were no legal delays and expenses. At the time Esther asked her question, I had no answer. What happened to them afterwards doesn’t really prove the point I didn’t make. For one with my nervous, negative morality, risking failure is less terrifying than risking success. I could more easily have died for you than lived with you, and I know how ridiculous that is.
IV
THE FIRST MONTHS IN Washington were my trial by cold water for saving the world. I was not really surprised, but nothing could adequately have prepared me for that sort of endurance test, except perhaps reading C. S. Lewis, which I had. How often I thought of Ransom’s night under the tree with the devil calling over and over again, “Ransom, Ransom,” until, when he finally replied, “What?” the answer was always “Nothing.” Survival in climates of boredom and futility where the greatest temptations are extending the coffee break, losing the last twenty memos, and playing jokes on the telephone is the most uncelebrated and even mocked virtue of our time. I was fortunate in two things, a natural earnestness about duty and a boss who found my good manners helpful at her official luncheons. There was plenty that was useful, if depressing, to learn.
When I was not at the office, I was at home reading official documents. Because there was no one to provide a human world for me, I had none, not even a chess partner. Shopping for a record player, I discovered kits for the first time. For my present occupation, they were an even better power fantasy than chess. When I hooked up and turned on the first amplifier I ever wired, watched the light come on and then heard the sound, I believed for an unserious moment that all my careful following of Washington directions might one day make a policy machine I could control. There was that about it, but, of course, there was also a soldering iron. And there were the wires. One corner of my otherwise serene apartment was probably, more than anything else, a shrine to you. It’s too bad we couldn’t have played amplifiers as some people play chess, by mail. I did write you a letter or two, but I had no answers. Perhaps that’s why it is so easy to write this now, out of a long habit of nearly futile pages. What I never supposed you really read I don’t quite believe you won’t read now. It comes to the same thing.
Andrew and Monk did answer my letters with more and more insistent invitations to visit them in New York. Much as I wanted to see them, I delayed the trip because seeing them again would be a kind of confrontation I wasn’t prepared for. It was one thing to talk a little about you with Sandy, quite another to talk with Andrew and Monk. And I was not ready to admit either my boredom or disappointment with my job. Andrew’s letters, in particular, were urgent, finally almost angry. I telephoned in the early spring to say I had a long weekend.
“You should have your third-year home leave by now,” Andrew said, but he was pleased just the same.
“Wouldn’t it be better if you got me a hotel room?”
“Better for you maybe, but not for us.”
He met my train, which I hadn’t expected because it got in at around four on a Friday afternoon. The surprise of seeing him there covered my surprise at the change in his looks. At twenty-five, I had not yet begun to expect my friends to age. And Andrew had never really seemed the nine years older than I that he was. He was still an unusually handsome man, but the light had gone out of his skin and hair. His face was thinner, yet he carried himself as if aware of a new and burdensome weight with unexpected mannerisms of trouser hoisting and hair smoothing, a man nervous about his looks as Andrew had never been.
“I told Ramona we’d have a drink before we came home to give her a chance to get things organized with the baby.”
Once we were in a bar, sitting at a small table, he seemed more familiar to me. Something of the boy of the world had grown into a man of the world in the still easy good manners, a confident pleasantness with people who did him some service. But his face warned me against open questions, which no longer seemed possible. I thought of Doris, who was convinced that this was no way to make a man of Andrew, while I answered perfectly safe, technical questions about my job.
“How are you really, Kate?” he asked suddenly.
“A bit uncertain,” I said. “A bit lonely.”
“Does it make sense, what you’re doing?”
“I’m not sure yet, Andy. It’s too soon to tell.”
“Not for me it isn’t,” he said. “I’ve got to talk, Kate. We may not get another chance this weekend. I can’t talk with Ramona. She just can’t or won’t understand.”
“Then talk,” I said.
Through his four and my two whiskeys I listened to a monologue so reminiscent of the one I had heard all those years ago on a walk to San Telmo that again I couldn’t even interrupt to reply. Oh, some of the basic subject matter was different. Peter was never mentioned, and homosexuality was only a minor reference in a new context. But Mr. Belshaw was still at the center of it, more monstrous than ever, and the rage against the victims of this life was simply redirected to himself.
“For two months, Kate, I was first asking and then begging for a job, anything finally. I couldn’t even pay the rent. ‘Thirty-four years old? Never worked?’ I had to go to my father’s friends. I felt as if I were asking for charity, and that’s exactly what they’d been told to give me. Do you know, one of those bastards even suggested that I be a sort of gigolo for his daughter? ‘Take her to shows and things, my boy. Just the one to do it with all that travel and culture.’ ”
He had finally found a job in an advertising agency, but he was more or less an office boy, even sent out to get coffee for the twenty-five-year-old junior executives nearly fresh from M.A.’s in sociology at Columbia.
“And when I try to explain to Ramona that it’s just not possible, she talks about having to begin at the bottom. Do you know, she isn’t even ashamed of me. That’s what I can’t bear, Kate. That’s what I simply can’t bear.”
There had been no nurse when Monk came home from the hospital with Lissa, which for Andrew seemed as primitive as letting Monk drop her baby in a field. They had no money for new clothes, for theater tickets, for entertaining friends.
“What’s the point to living if you have to live like this? Ramona says lots of people do. Do you know what she says, Kate? Can you imagine? She says, ‘The honeymoon’s over.’ I’ve married Kathleen Norris in disguise! If only she’d bitch about it, if only she’d come out with one ordinary complaint… I sit there and disintegrate before her eyes. Look at me: hair and teeth falling out, bloated with drinking up my child’s piggy bank future. And Ramona says she really doesn’t mind doing her own hair. She doesn’t. And she looks marvelous. She doesn’t look old enough to have a child. People think I’m her father. And all the time that bastard sits up there gloating over my freedom, my dignity, my sanity. He doesn’t give a damn that I have a wife and child.”
“What are you going to do about it, Andy?” I was finally able to ask.
“Something,” he said. “I’m going to do something.”
“Don’t have another drink. Being alcoholic isn’t your style.”
“I’m learning to adjust.”
“A Lawrence father figure.”
“A New York City coal miner—at least that has flair to it. Let me tell you about the psychological principles of the irritating commercial.”
But he allowed himself to be taken home, which was a pleasant two-bedroom apartment north of the George Washington Bridge, sparsely but handsomely furnished, the walls crowded with Andrew’s extraordinary collection of paintings, two or three of which he’d sold to buy all the furniture they needed. Monk was not exactly prepared for us. The moment when she could have left the baby with a bottle and the dinner in the oven and greeted us serenely had passed some time ago. We walked in to Lissa’s howling and Monk’s frantic, last-minute preparations of a meal no sane, young mother would try to cook. I hoped her unreasonable gesture was more for Andrew than for me. I had not had enough married friends to feel comfortable about the hour and a half
I had just spent listening to Andrew’s unhappiness, though his criticism of Monk was nothing but a complaint about her kindness and good humor. I am never good at being late. Andrew went to Monk first, who ordered him to deal with the baby, which he did, picking her up and bringing her to me. She was as appealing a combination of them both as I had imagined, the beginning wisps of her mother’s red hair, her father’s almost shocking blue eyes. She gave me an indignant look and turned her face away.
“Hey!” her father said, holding her out from him. “What’s that all about?”
She glared at him, grabbed his nose and squealed a primitive satisfaction.
“Try not to get her too excited,” Monk called from the kitchen.
A moment later she came in, and what Andrew had said about her was true. I could have thought that what the last four years had done to him had not marked her at all, except that an unaltered face is as much a defense as one too quickly eroding. And there was in her manner, as the evening passed, all the experience of her once theoretical doubts. She was uncertain not only with Andrew but with the baby, almost unfamiliar, as if she’d been called in that afternoon to play the part. They tried very hard not to disagree about what to do with Lissa, who woke and cried every hour. Andrew obviously thought she was old enough to be disciplined. Monk couldn’t bear the idea.
“Don’t you think it’s unfair of God to have arranged it this way?” she asked brightly “I mean, she’s so helpless in the hands of absolutely amateur parents.”
I don’t suppose Monk meant that they needed a nurse, but Andrew, convinced that they did, suffered such remarks with only superficial patience. That he was better than Monk with Lissa gave him no comfort and was certainly not reassuring for Monk. She was more in awe of him than I could understand, helplessly inept and eager in her attempts to please him. He did try to be pleased, but much of what she did he did not want to see his wife doing. Her “thrifty, witty” curtains, her delicious but inexpensive meals, her cleverly revised wardrobe all depressed him. Though it was easy to be furious with him, it was hard not to feel sorry, too.