This Is Not for You

by Jane Rule

  “Because I am guilty,” I said. “And I don’t feel persecuted. I’m out of E.’s danger, Doris. I’m in no fear of being truly moral.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Doris said. “I’m not so sure.”

  Joyce telephoned twice while I was in London. Doris asked no questions, but she seemed relieved. I was not. I wanted a rest. I went to the theater. I called on the late Turners at the Tate. I saw the shows at the selling galleries. Doris and I went to call on Ann. Frank and I played chess. Still, it was not long enough. I went back to Washington, passive but reluctant.

  Fortunately Joyce was very much involved with her husband at that time. We had only one evening together in two weeks. She was apologetic, suggesting but not explaining certain problems that she had. He would probably be out of town the second weekend in November. Would I save that and spend it with her at her house? That seemed comfortably far off, easy to agree to. About that time I had a telephone call from you inviting me to New York for Thanksgiving. It was that date I looked forward to. I didn’t put my mind to much else.

  It was Tuesday evening, the second week in November, that I came home to find Andrew waiting for me. He had obviously been drinking for several days, hadn’t shaved or changed his clothes. What is worn and ill fitting is less derelict than an expensive suit so abused.

  “It’s a wonder you weren’t picked up for vagrancy,” I said. “Come inside.”

  He seemed more dazed than drunk. I didn’t try to talk to him. I sent him into the bathroom with the suggestion that he shower while I shopped for dinner. I came back not only with food but with a pair of jeans, a sweat shirt, and a razor. He was in the bedroom, still in his clothes, asleep. I had a drink, read the evening paper, finally fixed myself a meal. At eleven o’clock he was still so deeply asleep that my taking off of his shoes, trousers, jacket, and shirt didn’t disturb him. I made up the couch in the living room for myself. When I got up at seven, he still didn’t wake. I began to wonder if something had happened to him, if he had been hurt, but, when I went in to him, his breathing was normal, his color good. He must simply be exhausted. I left a place set for him at the table, a note by his grapefruit, telling him about the jeans and the razor. Several times during the day, I thought of phoning, but, if he was there and awake to answer, I didn’t know what we would say to each other. And the phone ringing on and on unanswered would be too specifically worrying.

  “A quick drink tonight?” Joyce suggested.

  “I can’t. I’m expecting an old friend for dinner.”

  “Oh?”

  “Andrew,” I said, trying not to be irritated.

  “Oh.”

  He was sitting in the living room, reading, when I got home. He had shaved and put on the jeans, the sweat shirt, and a pair of clogs I had left in the bathroom. The kitchen and bedroom had been tidied. His white shirt was drying on the shower curtain rod in the bathroom.

  “I’ve made martinis,” he said, as I hung up my coat and changed my shoes.

  “Good. Why don’t you pour while I get dinner started?”

  “Langer isn’t as good on the visual arts as she is on music and drama, is she?” he asked, his hand shaking as he filled the glasses.

  I answered vaguely, openly, so that he could go on to make his specific point. He sat at the table with his drink while I cut up peppers and then mushrooms and made a salad. He spoke a sentence at a time with long, uncertain pauses.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go into the living room. I can ignore this for a while now.”

  We sat without talking then. I was not yet willing to ask questions, and Andrew was obviously not troubled by the silence, looking, as he must have been, for a way into or out of the story he expected himself to tell eventually.

  “I may be here for a while,” he said finally.

  “Fine.”

  “I think I’ve probably left Ramona.”

  We both sat with that possibility until Andrew was prepared to explore it further. I got up to get the martini pitcher and turn down the vegetables.

  “She’ll be all right,” he said. “You know her play?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s sold it to TV. She’s working on another. She says she’s full of them.”

  “Is that why you left?”

  “It’s why I could leave.”

  “What about the gallery?”

  “I have to think that through still. It’s as good as finished now, but we’ve got debts. Dan wants to keep it open until after Christmas. I don’t suppose another six weeks matters all that much.”

  “Does Dan know where you are?”

  “No. I’ll have to let him know.”

  “How long have you been gone?”

  “I was trying to think. Since last Saturday, or maybe it was Sunday.”

  I had all sorts of comments to make, but they were either too harsh or too complicated for the moment. What Andrew needed, before any real sorting out was done, was food and rest. He ate uneasily that first night, but he didn’t drink after dinner. We listened to music until it was time to go to bed.

  “I’ll make up the couch,” he said. “I suppose that’s where you slept last night.”

  I let him, though I could tell it was hard on his head to do so much leaning over. He needed to be thoughtful. I put Gelusil and aspirin in plain sight on the shelf above the bathroom basin.

  “Don’t get up until I’m gone in the morning,” I said. “I’ll leave you coffee and juice.”

  “Where’s my suit, by the way?” he asked.

  “At the cleaners around the corner. I can pick it up tomorrow night on my way home.”

  “I don’t seem to have any money,” Andrew said. “I could cash a check.”

  “Not to worry,” I said.

  I left him twenty dollars in the morning, but it was still on the table when I got home that night. Andrew was in the kitchen, inventing dinner from things he’d found in the refrigerator and cupboard. He was, in a quiet way, enjoying himself.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he said.

  “I never have.”

  “No. Ramona does. Funny about that. She says she wouldn’t mind if I were bad at it. But she’s not bad at it, either. She’s a very good cook.”

  “I put your suit in the hall closet.”

  “Thanks. I had an overcoat, too. I must have lost it. I think I left it on the train.”

  Over cocktails, I explained the problem I had about the weekend.

  “I tried to put it off,” I said, “but I’m supposed to go to New York to visit Esther over Thanksgiving, and Joyce was—”

  “Go,” he said.

  “She suggested that you come, too.”

  “No, Kate. I’m fine here if you don’t mind my staying.”

  “It would be a help to me if you did come.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. If you don’t mind coping.”

  He smiled. “I’d like to meet her.”

  I should have explained about Joyce’s husband then, but it was awkward. It was not a time for my life to seem as complicated and unreasonable as Andrew’s. I shifted the conversation to a couple of alarming, funny stories I had heard that day, typical of the sick humor Washington has always enjoyed. Andrew got up then to finish fixing dinner.

  The dishes were done and we were on our second cup of coffee in the living room before Andrew settled to talk about himself. He was much easier, feeling much better than he had the night before, but he still did a lot of hesitating, a lot of sudden breathing. Much of what he said at first was petty and defensive. He was trying to convince himself that the problems of his marriage were caused by such a difference in tastes and values that solutions were impossible. He talked about their arguments over Lissa, over furnishing the apartment, over their social life, over his work.

  “Ramona is, basically, a very nice girl who eventually wants a house in the suburbs, a bridge club, and a dog. If she never saw Europe again, if she never looked at another paint
ing, she wouldn’t be unhappy. She could even get along without the theater as long as she had a television set. And the books she reads are available in any bookmobile or drug store. I can’t live with her, Kate. I can’t even talk to her. I don’t know why I ever thought I could. But in London she did seem interested in other things, not exactly well informed, but interested. And when she made ridiculous remarks, I thought she knew they were ridiculous. She doesn’t. Nine-tenths of her humor is just accurate blundering. Dan said, after the first opening we had, she’d better stay home and babysit. But why should she be blamed for that? She can’t change. She would if she could. The harder she tries the worse it gets. It’s the same with Lissa and the house. And with me. You know, just a month ago, after I’d told her to stop being so cheap about her clothes, she went out and bought black underwear! When I said I hoped she didn’t intend to impress prospective buyers with that, she cried. But, if your wife doesn’t know, after you’ve been married four years, that black underwear isn’t your sort of amusement, what hope is there?”

  “She gets frightened, Andy. People are clueless when they’re frightened.”

  “I know. But it isn’t as if I beat her. And I try not to be critical, but, even when I don’t say anything, she knows me too well…”

  She didn’t understand him; she knew him too well. I didn’t try to argue. I waited. Surely, he’d get restless enough with silly complaints to come to the point. He couldn’t avoid talking about the problem of his work forever.

  “I’ve tried to explain to Ramona that this gallery thing isn’t just a matter of money. Maybe we’d have to go pretty deeply in debt at first, but it mattered to me. She didn’t see why I couldn’t take another job as well. Nothing has persuaded her that I have any real trouble getting a job. She thinks I’m just choosy. But, if I wouldn’t work, she would, and I could stay home with Lissa. Can you imagine?”

  I didn’t say yes. I listened.

  “Then she offered me the money from her play,” Andrew said in a tone of such shock and anger that he might have been reporting an attempted murder.

  “She wants to help, Andy,” I finally said with some anger of my own. “What in hell is so shocking about that?”

  “I’m not going to live off my wife!”

  “But Andy—”

  “I am not going to scrounge around with my little hobby while she pays the rent.”

  “Then why don’t you pay the rent?”

  He was quiet for a long moment. “Would you mind if I had a drink?” he asked finally.

  “Of course not. I’ll get it for you.”

  I poured us both strong Scotches. Andrew was staring at his hands when I went back into the living room.

  “Maybe if I went west…” he said, after he’d taken a long drink. “Maybe if I went alone, I could get something. Then later, if Ramona wanted to, we could try it again. Maybe…” But he shook his head.

  “Andy, you’re running scared.”

  “You’re damned right I am,” he said. “You’re damned right.”

  “So stop. Just stop a while. You don’t have to go all the way west. There are jobs right here. I’ve got to know quite a lot of people.”

  “Can you picture me as a civil servant?”

  “Well, I am.”

  “But you have the patience of a martyr. Kate. I haven’t any.”

  “Because you thought you didn’t need any, Andy. Now you do. You simply have to decide—”

  “You young ones,” he said. “I’m too old to jump through hoops. I’m too old.”

  “You’re too stubborn and too bitter. Sometimes I think all you want to do is prove your father’s point.”

  “I have,” he said, finishing his drink. “That much I have done.”

  “Well, then, you’d better think up something else to do. You’ve still got half your life to live.”

  “Shall we have another?”

  “One more,” I said. “Then that’s enough.”

  “And let’s talk about you for a while. Ramona says…” but he hesitated.

  “What does she say?”

  “That we always talk about ourselves and our problems when you’re around.”

  “You’ll have enough of me and my private life over the weekend. Don’t worry about that. Have you seen Esther?”

  “Oh yes, quite a lot of her actually. Ramona has, anyway. She’s pretty tedious just now. She’s got only two subjects at the moment, neither of them in my range.”

  “Two?”

  “God and John Kerry.”

  “Who’s John Kerry?”

  “A wretchedly ambitious young doctor she met on board ship. You’ll meet him when you go to New York.”

  “Will I like him?”

  “Maybe. He’s pleasant enough. It’s just that nobody seems to be there. He’s very nice to Esther. And he’s very patient with God, too.”

  “Christian?”

  “I doubt it. I think he’s one of those fellows who believes in himself.”

  “Is Esther serious about him?”

  “As Ramona would say,” he began, not noticing this time, “is Esther ever anything but serious? She even told me John reminded her a little of you, but the similarity is too subtle for me.”

  It was unreasonable to feel disappointed. It had been so many years since you’d been free of other people that I’d probably not have known how to deal with four days alone with you. But I had been imagining it.

  I thought of trying to get back to the subject of Joyce before we went to bed, but she couldn’t be easily introduced into the conversation. It was not until we were driving out to her house on Friday after work that I told Andrew a little about her. We were within two or three minutes of arriving when I mentioned that Joyce was married. Even then, it wasn’t a direct statement.

  “Her husband’s away for the weekend, but maybe you’ll meet him next week. A nice sort of guy.”

  “Husband?”

  “Take the next right,” I said. “It’s the white house down at the end of the road.”

  Joyce was shy of Andrew at first. She made bright, uneasy conversation, her voice loud, her gestures exaggerated, but her nervousness was good for him. He liked that kind of requirement. As I watched his persistent approval and good humor, I remembered that he was a man with numerous sisters who must have been both competitive with him and in need of his good opinion. I wondered if they missed him, if they made any attempt to represent his cause with their father. But Mr. Belshaw didn’t sound the kind of man anyone would persuade. He could be indulgent, but he was dictatorial. Andrew was not really unlike him. He used the power of taste rather than the power of money to assert himself, indulged people more often than he agreed with them, and that, in most circumstances, is more flattering. Joyce knew he could not possibly approve of the wall plaques and hanging pots of ivy, the bowls in the shapes of nut shells and strawberries, the paperbacks and old school texts that mixed on the book shelf. That he chose to make himself feel at home anyway was a compliment to something rarer and more important than shared tastes. His good looks, perhaps even more than his educated sensibility, gave him a power to use generously with women, and more men than are willing to admit it care about having handsome friends. Andrew knew how to use that power. I never heard anyone accuse him of being vain. He looked at people rather than mirrors, and I could see Joyce now reflecting his handsomeness with the feeling that perhaps she was, after all, more attractive than she sometimes thought. But I make Andrew sound more calculating than he was. He wanted to please Joyce, to put her at ease; therefore he gave her his attention.

  Just this talent in Andrew, which I loved and so often rested in, made you suspicious of him from the first. The peace you made with him did not so much include his good looks and good manners as ignore them, which left him only the currency of his mind, fortunately sound in any theoretical discussion. It was a good thing that you never saw him floundering in near idiocy with practical problems.

  Joyce was uncriti
cal and delighting. She didn’t suggest, or allow either of us to suggest, going to bed until well after midnight, and she and I didn’t spend the morning, as we always had before, being characters in her sexual fictions. We had finished breakfast by ten o’clock, and Joyce was looking for shoes and warm sweaters among her husband’s belongings so that we could take a long walk.

  “Doesn’t he make that sweater look marvelous?” Joyce asked, when Andrew had climbed ahead of us to the top of a small hill. “Have you ever met any of his sisters?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” she said, smiling.

  Andrew was calling to Joyce to ask her the name of a tree. He had discovered that she liked to name things, and he did her the further courtesy of remembering what she told him so that on the way home he could test his new vocabulary to please both Joyce and himself.

  Sunday it rained. We spent the day, as children might have, playing games of various sorts. Andrew was good at Scrabble, bad at Monopoly. Searching through the game box with Joyce, rejecting anything for two, he found jigsaw puzzles.

  “Stand back,” he said, delighted. “I’m an absolute genius with these.”

  His eye for color and shape, for emerging pattern, did make him very quick, and the process, which seemed to me tedious, gave him real pleasure. Joyce involved herself with him. I withdrew a little, watching his face, less strained now, younger. I remembered building sand castles on a beach. He looked up suddenly and smiled.

  “Where did you go?”

  “I was remembering sand castles,” I said.

  “Has Kate told you how we met, Joyce?” Andrew asked, careful that even so innocent a game for two be shifted.

  We sat up until eleven, Andrew tending the fire and the drinks.

  “Well, I don’t have to work tomorrow,” he said, standing up, “but I’ve got to see that my women do.”

  He had gone to bed, and Joyce and I were emptying ashtrays when the back door suddenly opened, and Joyce’s husband called cheerfully from the kitchen. For a second Joyce did not respond. Then she answered his greeting as cheerfully.

  “Isn’t it nice you’re home,” she said. “Kate’s just about to desert me, and I was longing for a nightcap.”