This Is Not for You

by Jane Rule

  “Who fell in love with them?” Joyce asked.

  “I fell in love with one of them.”

  “Which one?”

  “For the story it doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s just to establish authenticity. Anyway, the ugly, little rich girl who looked like a beautiful grown-up wasn’t really interested in being fallen in love with, not at first, anyway. She wanted instead to understand the nature of the world. Then she wanted to be a great sculptor. After that—but maybe I haven’t got the order straight—before she was thirty, anyway, she wanted to marry and have a child to fulfill herself as a woman. And after that she wanted to be a nun and serve God. The plan went pretty well for a while. She read some books, and she went to church, and she made some faces and other things for the world, but somehow the one, two, three of it all got multiplied. There were some giant steps to be taken, and, since she was really an ugly, little rich girl with a mean, real mother and not the beautiful grown-up she seemed to be, she landed once or twice a little short—short of understanding, short of being great, short of marriage into bed, and just now, in what ought to be the middle of the story, short of the nunnery into jail, not being wise enough or great enough or fulfilled enough to know the real difference between cells. And now her mean, real mother, who should have explained it to her in the first place, is looking for someone else to blame.”

  “Which of these characters did you have lunch with today?”

  “The mean, real mother.”

  “And?”

  “That’s all of the story there is,” I said. “Are we going to have another drink?”

  “Sure,” Joyce said. “But which one of the characters are you?”

  “I’m the author,” I said. “Authors have no place in their own stories, except to admit authenticity, and I did that.”

  “It’s not much to admit,” Joyce said, signaling a waiter for two more martinis.

  “I’m not guilty,” I said.

  “What a limited way to live,” Joyce said. “You know, I haven’t played this sort of game for ten years, not since I was your age. I wasn’t very good at it then, either.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just trying to be entertaining.”

  “Do you have a mother?”

  “No,” I said. “She died last year.”

  “Father?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any friends here?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably I’m resting. I’m not very good with people.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I’m really not,” I said, “except at a distance.”

  “All right,” Joyce said, smiling. “I should have kept mine, but you are entertaining. Shall I tell you a story now?”

  “You don’t owe me one. They’re not like cigarettes or working days.”

  “You’d better explain what that means,” Joyce said sharply.

  “Nothing,” I said, feeling frantic and miserable.

  “You had a rotten day, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, the sort of day that makes it unbearable to be around people… people I care about, anyway.”

  “Do you want to go home?”

  “If we could just not—” I tried to explain.

  “Not talk? Not risk anything? I’m not as good at that after five-thirty. Why don’t we have dinner some other night?”

  “But what about the work?”

  “Katherine George, you didn’t really think—”

  “I’m told I’m a good cook,” I said, finishing my drink.

  I did cook dinner that night but not until after midnight. Joyce, in my robe, was looking around the apartment. She was curious about the hi-fi equipment, the books, and the paintings.

  “You’re not going to be with me for long, are you?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “You don’t need the job. You’re using it. I’m not surprised. Not exactly. Oh, I do regret the last six months. This isn’t going to be a one-night stand, is it?”

  “What about your husband?”

  “He’s away a lot. We spare each other details.”

  I did not make up my mind; a decision didn’t really seem relevant, or the time for it had passed. It was not a circumstance I was accustomed to. The despairing rebellion of my appetite hadn’t ever before resulted in this kind of midnight snack, in conversation which could accommodate problems at the office, personal history, physical intimacy. I had come near it only once before with Sandy, but the minute we began to talk we stopped considering each other as sexual objects. For Joyce it was natural enough, for most people probably. For me, it was very awkward at first, politeness and crudity in comic collision in the same sentence or gesture. I felt as embarrassed as I might if I’d found myself serving chocolate milk and brandy with rare roast beef. And sometimes as much put off. But being put off helped in a way just as the fact of Joyce’s husband helped. It was slower and less physically painful than a broken nose but no less punishing finally. I don’t mean to suggest that I suffered. My own clumsiness and occasional distaste more often interested than frightened me. And I was more simply impatient than jealous when Joyce spent time with her husband. When I built him an amplifier, guilt had nothing to do with it. I was glad of ways to kill time. It was, like all my other experiences, one I could afford, but I speak only of the price. That’s all that should interest me now.

  That and the connection there obviously was between those first hours I spent with Joyce and the hours you were waiting for bail. The telephone call your mother had suggested was not put through. I didn’t really expect it, but I did send off an urgent note to you, asking you to phone when you could. As the days passed and there was no news, I tried to think what else I could do.

  “Isn’t there anyone else you could get in touch with?” Joyce asked.

  “No one I know well enough or Esther knows well enough.”

  “Why doesn’t she let you know?”

  “She might not have got my letter. She might not know anything yet herself. Her mother may not even have told her that I know. In fact, that’s likely.”

  “But I thought her mother approved of you.”

  “She did. If I hadn’t been so stupid—”

  “It’s a good thing I wasn’t there. I would have thrown something at her. All you did was buy her lunch.”

  “That was worse,” I said, “and I knew it.”

  “You’re a calculating girl,” Joyce said. “You deal the same way with me in the office, don’t you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You figure people’s emotional angles and usually give them plenty of space. My secretary’s never noticed, for instance, that there’s a large sharp-edged coffee table called ‘I can’t stand typographical errors until after eleven A.M.’ She doesn’t even know where her bruises come from. You never run into anything like that, or, if you do, you know it.”

  “I’m not that smart,” I said. “I do it by walking around a lot of furniture that isn’t even there.”

  “Yes, it’s true,” Joyce said, thinking about it. “But that’s flattering—for people who don’t want to go to bed with you, anyway. Months of nothing but a very wide, single berth!”

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “You didn’t know!”

  “It’s true.”

  “That’s not flattering because it suggests that the idea simply didn’t occur to you.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “Well, anyway, it occurs to you now, doesn’t it?”

  I let her gentle, curious confidence control my response. If she wanted me to work, I worked. If she wanted me to vanish, I vanished. I talked when she asked questions, and I let her distract me from the subjects she raised. That asking about you almost always turned into a sexual ploy didn’t surprise me. Joyce wasn’t really conscious of it; she played with the seasonings of jealousy and sympathy, that was all. Occasional
ly she told me about other people she’d made love with, always women. And she had a continuing curiosity about my sexual experience. She wanted details.

  “I don’t know why men like pictures. Stories are much better. I can look at you.”

  “I like pictures,” I said to tease.

  While she protested, I heard you protesting about Christopher Marlowe Smith’s collection which he insisted was simply educational. But you were earnest and embarrassed, trying to explain that learning by doing was better; professional demonstration, even in photographs, made you feel too inadequate to try. Joyce was gloriously scornful, treating me to the comic obscenity of various poses, a demonstration lecture which finally required audience participation.

  “Well, you fucked that up nicely,” Joyce complained, nearly asleep.

  “But I’m converted,” I said.

  She was satisfied, and why shouldn’t she have been? She received in fact all the fantasy tenderness, desire, ease I had refused you. And I should have been satisfied, too, in being so wholly taken, so wholly delighted in, the parts of my life gathered up in her pleasure. I was, sometimes for days at a time. I was glad of her, grateful for her, as I am sure I couldn’t have been if I had really loved Joyce as I loved you.

  Love is a hard word, but one can’t go on being adolescently embarrassed by it. Admit it to the vocabulary at all, and it has to play some part in a lot of relationships. I told Joyce often, a dozen times a meeting, that I loved her, and I did, in a way that I could afford. I never told you. It’s simple enough. I couldn’t be guilty of you. I hadn’t that kind of courage.

  And where in hell were you all those weeks? Did you ever get my letter? Did you ever know that I had seen your mother? Three months had gone by before the first of all those postcards arrived. This one, the picture of a temple, had carefully and clearly printed across the back, “I don’t like Japan.” (It’s a good thing you never tried for the Peace Corps.) They arrived fairly regularly after that, almost always temples. You seemed to be avoiding sculpture, the gods themselves, but you must have stood at the gates several times a day, while your mother read the endless guidebook facts, chanting against the chanting you strained to hear.

  I never did hear anything from you of your arrest or the final dropping of charges against you. It was Christopher Marlowe Smith, sightseeing in Washington, who invited himself for a drink and pieced the story together from a few facts, a few more rumors, what was becoming part of the legend of Charlie.

  “Yes, he went to jail all right, two years, I think it is,” Christopher Marlowe Smith confirmed with some satisfaction. “Esther’s mother bought her off, charges and all. Christ! You know I didn’t have any idea there was that kind of money involved. Probably just as well. I would have killed the guy, and getting off a murder charge can be pretty expensive. Just the same—”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” I said.

  “Maybe not. I’m a chiseler all right, but I’m strictly small change. Do you know a funny thing, though? When I first heard about it, I felt guilty. Why in hell should I feel guilty? I didn’t exactly give her to him, but she was so clueless about things and people. Charlie’s a very smart guy, Kate. To tell the truth, he scared me shitless. And shitless I went, home to the wife and kiddy. I was really glad when I heard she was out of it with nothing, not even a charge. I was relieved. You know, there’s one story going around that she was asked if she’d lived with Charlie as man and wife. She said, no. ‘Do you deny that you’ve had sexual intercourse with this man?’ ‘Of course not,’ she says, ‘you asked me if I was pretending to be married to him.’ It’s probably not true. I mean, I don’t think she was ever even questioned like that, but it does sound like her, doesn’t it? It’s a damned good thing she didn’t ever get into court. She’d be serving terms for everything from stealing out of the collection plate to sucking off. Her mother did the right thing.”

  “I wonder how her mother persuaded her,” I said.

  “She probably didn’t even have to. When Esther’s scared enough, she does what she’s told. You know, in a lot of ways she’s like my little kid, defiant as hell on the way through the plate glass, but sadly docile on the other side.”

  “But leaving Charlie there—”

  “Katie, from what I’ve heard, nobody has ever been so glad to leave anybody since the damsel got away from the ape.”

  “A pretty highly developed ape.”

  “Yeah,” Christopher Marlowe Smith agreed. “Fucked up enough to be a genius, but I don’t like queers so confused they like women—‘like’ used advisedly here. I wonder how much he knew about her money.”

  “If he didn’t know any more than she did, he’d be pretty ignorant.”

  “Anyway, Mama’s finally come to, and she better not let that one roam the streets again until she’s bought her a marriage license. Next time she’s picked up, they might notify the wrong owner.”

  “How are things with you, Chris?”

  “I think I’ve got another grant going for me. If my system works, I should last until 1964. It’s order that matters.”

  He stayed for dinner and tried to invite himself to stay for the night.

  “You’ve been so nice to me, Kate. Isn’t there anything I can do for you? Can’t I go to bed with you?”

  “Thanks just the same, Chris, but it’s not necessary.”

  He protested mildly for the sake of gallantry, but he was not hard to get rid of.

  That night I had uneasy occupation for my insomnia. I had always worried that Charlie would somehow get you into difficulty you couldn’t cope with, but I had never imagined that you might be unhappy with him, perhaps even frightened of him, hurt by him. Christopher Marlowe Smith didn’t know any but the primary colors, had a funny book morality, in which heroes could have all the ladies they liked as long as they kept to the missionary positions. He was quite simply jealous of Charlie. Remembering how easily you let Christopher Marlowe Smith out of your life, I had a sudden image of you walking away from the jail, Charlie blurring like a bad photograph at a barred window, shouting, but the sounds were not human; they were supersonic chords, sustained as the sound of machines, finally falling in the natural drift which was sleep. I woke a few minutes later, knowing that I identified not with you but with Charlie. Whatever he might have done to you, I was suffering his pain, not yours. My own pain, of course, in his invented person.

  There was a postcard in the morning from Athens: the Parthenon. Across the back of it was printed, “I’ve found Athena.”

  “You know, I don’t even know who Athena is,” Joyce said. “When I’m around you, I sometimes feel culturally deprived.”

  “She’s all kinds of things—virgin goddess of wisdom and war, mother of gods, a weaver, an owl lover, the patroness of Athens, daughter of Zeus who sprang full grown from her father’s forehead. For Esther she is Reason which directs Creative Energy, and it’s about time she rediscovered that.”

  “Oh,” Joyce said.

  “Don’t be put off,” I said. “It’s only a game we play with Greek gods instead of baseball players.”

  “Like chess and wiring amplifiers.”

  “And cooking,” I added to defend myself.

  “Let’s not both be defensive at the same time. I get afraid of boring you, that’s all.”

  “Only because I bore you,” I said. “People with odd interests can be pretty tedious.”

  “Why can’t you get a TV, Kate? Or subscribe to Playboy? Something my speed.”

  “I thought you didn’t like pictures.”

  “I don’t like you when you’re being so goddamned superior.”

  “Insubordinate?”

  Her hand lifted, then stopped. “Darling, what is it?” She was taking my hands away from my face. “I wouldn’t hurt you. I was only bored… tired, a little bit jealous. Kate?”

  “It’s just battle fatigue.”

  “No rough stuff, darling, ever. I promise. If I’m going to feel guilty abou
t you, I’ll just feel guilty, that’s all. I just keep thinking you’re not only bored rigid at the office but with me, too. The only more interesting job in that office is mine. So I ought to help you find something else, shouldn’t I? But what would I do? You’re such a lovely habit.”

  “Let me worry about it. I’m not worried about it. I’ll buy a TV.”

  “A kit?” Joyce teased.

  “No, instant TV, all right?”

  I was meeting more people, joining Joyce on the cocktail as well as the luncheon circuit. I was being brought to the official attention of heads of various offices. I was glad of the connections but not because I was looking for another job in Washington. I turned down two offers, which both pleased and troubled Joyce.

  “We’d still see a lot of each other,” she encouraged.

  “Let me worry about it,” I said again.

  I didn’t worry really. I was busy worrying about other people. Andrew had quit—been fired from?—his job and was, as far as I could understand, trying to set up a small business of his own with a friend, a selling gallery that would support itself at first by a curio corner, Japanese paper kites and camel saddles. It didn’t sound to me a hopeful way of raising the capital they needed in the first place. I offered to invest some money in it, but Andrew refused. He had his own collection of paintings to fall back on, and he was quite confident. After all, they had turned out to be a very good investment. There was no reason why he shouldn’t be able to use the same judgment in New York that he had in Europe. But, by the time I saw Andrew and Monk in July, he had sold nothing but his own paintings to buy what no one else was yet willing to invest in. He was still cheerful. But he was nervous.

  “New York’s a good market,” he said, as he showed me some of the work of the young painters he was interested in, “in some ways, too good. There’s too much stampeding. Innovation is too important. There aren’t trends here so much as explosions. This man, for instance, has plenty of talent, and he’s got his own vision of cool, lonely, oddly intimate space. Isn’t that a nice canvas? He’s Canadian. But look at this one—he’s jumped on the bandwagon since he’s come to New York. By the time he paints his way off it, there will be another one to get on, so out of a year’s work, there will probably be only one or two things that are his own. That’s not enough to make a painter. But somebody else, who isolates himself, stays with his own landscape, may take years, may not make it at all except for accidents of taste. It’s too much of a gamble. It’s getting to be like mining stocks. It shouldn’t be.”