“Hey, that’s great, Frankilee!” I said, using his mother’s diminutive.
“How about celebrating?” he said. “I’ll meet you downtown after work.”
It was an assistantship, far too prestigious for him to turn down. But it hardly paid enough to live on. Come September it would be his turn to work and mine to study according to our master plan, but that was obviously out of the question now.
I maintained a firm silence through both martinis, concentrating on the bartender’s art. For me to be anything but supportive was perverse. I could certainly not be so selfish as to act out my “neurosis” and sabotage what was going to be an exceptional career. Self-destructive, too, since Frank’s success would carry me up with him. If I could not be content with his success, the least I could do was wait, or state my terms. After all, I was still young. (Young!) My turn was coming. There were many dissertation widows at Columbia: none of them complained.
I tried to be gracious as we moved to a booth to map out our future. Publications and professorships, sabbaticals and grants to study abroad. The gates were open. Applying for the right grants with care would get us anywhere Frank chose to go.
“I hope you realize,” I said at last, for the record, “I’m not moving out of New York City for any professorship, except maybe to Europe.” I chastised myself for my failure of enthusiasm, but I no longer cared what Frank thought of me. Bitch? Okay. I could just see myself pouring tea at, say, New England University. Sasha Raybel, faculty wife.
“Don’t worry,” said Frank with his wry condemning smile, “no one would dream of asking you to make any sacrifices.”
Job hunting was the same as the year before, only I was a year older. In the employment agencies where I took typing tests and hopefully filled out forms, there were more pretty girls than I had remembered. Too many; New York, so glamorous and promising, was a tough city.
Every night, returning home jobless, I brushed my hair one hundred strokes and took long hot baths to soak the filth out of my pores. I thought I would never soak clean.
“Face cream?” taunted Frank. “What kind of a job are you looking for?”
I didn’t know what kind. My singular assets were worthless without experience behind them. Besides, they were already slipping. I needed my looks. What was Russell’s Paradox again? What was Plato’s doctrine of the soul? I drifted off into sleep each night trying to remember, except when Frank, claiming his due, left his own books early to join me in bed. If I could, I pretended to be already asleep when he came in, but more often I received his odd hurried thrusts, matching his rhythm and milking him quickly with affected groans and sighs so he would turn over the sooner and let me dream in peace.
“Guess who.”
It was a voice from the dead. “Roxanne!”
“Right. Glad to see you’re still passing tests.”
“Where are you?”
“At Penn Station. We’ve moved to Fort Dix in New Jersey, and I’m just in for the day. Want some company?”
“Do I! How are you? Do you know how to get here?”
Frank looked up from his book, keeping his finger on the spot of the page where he had left off reading, while I explained who it was.
“Very nice,” he said. “I’ll go to the library after she comes and leave you two girls alone. You probably won’t want me around anyway.”
I ran around emptying ashtrays and straightening up. I wanted it nice for Roxanne. I was ashamed to introduce Frank to her, who had known Alport.
“I brought you some poems from the sticks,” said Roxanne in the doorway as though it hadn’t been years since we’d seen each other. She looked strong and beautiful. She hadn’t aged a day, not even with childbirth. We had both let our hair grow long and abandoned lipstick. I wanted to hug and kiss her, but we didn’t touch.
“Come in. This is Frank.”
She handed me a long envelope and gave a shy hello to Frank. “I’m glad to meet you,” she said. “You probably won’t like my poems, but you’re welcome to read them too.”
“I’d be glad to read them for you. Sasha has spoken of you often. I’m due at the library now, but I’ll be back later. Please excuse me.”
I couldn’t wait till he was out the door, he embarrassed me so. Due at the library!—like an important book.
“Quick. Tell me. Have you left your husband?” I asked Roxanne as soon as he’d left.
“Not yet,” she said, “but I’m preparing my escape.” Her hair fell delicately over her pale cheeks. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “Once my Sasha starts nursery school I’m going to look for a job. Meanwhile, I’ve made up a résumé and I commit at least one act of attrition a day.”
“Attrition?”
“Sabotage.”
“What kind of sabotage?” I asked, pouring us some coffee. Roxanne smiled her old inward smile that spoke of a certain pain.
“All kinds. There’s no end to what you can do if you just attend to it.”
“What do you mean?”
“First there are the dailies: mismating the socks, scorching the favorite shirt, not hearing him when he talks to me, over-Accenting the scrambled eggs. You wouldn’t believe what a mere first lieutenant can demand to be served for his breakfast, and every course presents a new challenge to the ingenious homemaker.”
She was in marvelous form, though I didn’t believe a word she said. Frank would have called her “shrill.”
“But besides the dailies, there are the specials,” she went on, dissolving sugar in her cup. “Sometimes I read him recipes out loud when the ball game’s on, rub his nose in it. I used to leave dirty diapers in selected spots. And once,” she said, her eyes lighting up, “once when he and his buddies were going fishing, I put a raw egg in his lunchbox instead of a hard-boiled one.”
She spoke with such glee that I began to suspect it was true. “What happened?”
“To me? Nothing. I played innocent. But you should have seen Whit when he came home.”
Later, after lunch, she showed me snapshots of my namesake, a curly-haired blond with Roxanne’s faraway look.
“Why are you still living with him?” I ventured.
“No money,” she said plainly. “Can’t leave till I can come here and get a job. Can’t get a job till I can do something with Sasha. If I left now, I know I’d wind up in Virginia with mother. But don’t worry, I’m preparing. I don’t intend to spend my life stuck on some foul army base. No,” she leaned back on the sofa and looked around our drab quarters, “this is where I want to be. New York. Columbia. Free.”
I felt sorry for her, imagining her alone and divorced. In her shoes, I thought, I would have made do. That was the main reason I intended to have no children. But to have no husband either? Perhaps she could get another husband. It seemed unlikely with a child to raise—what man would put up with someone else’s child? It was a wonder how strong Roxanne was, given her handicaps. I wished I had the guts for such risks. I admired her more than I pitied her.
At last I opened my own old wound, telling her about Alport’s wife and how I happened to get married.
“At least you have a husband you can respect,” said Roxanne. “I don’t think he likes me much, but then he didn’t marry me.”
I knew what she meant. Everyone had the same response. “You have to forgive Frank for being so formal,” I said. “It’s just his style. People usually think he’s judging them, but really he’s just shy. Even with me. He hardly ever opens up.”
But by then I knew Frank’s silence wasn’t shyness at all. He simply had nothing to say to me. Roxanne saw in five minutes what it took me almost a year to discern: he disapproved. Of her, and of me too. I had long since stopped being exceptional. When he did speak it was usually with a smug wit that put one instantly on the defensive or else in affectionate mindless baby talk. His silences themselves were accusations. He came across like one’s father, making one want never to hang up one’s pajamas or clean up one’s room.
&nb
sp; “Well,” said Roxanne, with a pensive smile, “it’s probably better to have a husband who never opens up than to be stuck with one who never shuts up.”
After several weeks I finally landed a receptionist job in a trading-stamp company on the East Side where I was supposed to sit alone in a large plush room on the executive floor and screen out undesirables without offending. Desirables were to be entertained. By memorizing a rogues’ gallery of executive photographs, I was to distinguish the faces of the million-dollar customers from the mere thousand-dollar ones and know whom to serve coffee or a highball, and whom to get rid of. The job required tact and paid eighty dollars a week. The executive assistant who hired me said, “I like you. You’ve got class written all over your face.” I was not permitted to read on the job (“it doesn’t look nice”), but on the other hand, no one ever asked me if I could type.
I spent the long hours between customers picking my cuticle and daydreaming. I played games with myself, guessing what sort of man would walk in next. When the elevator opened and a customer came in, it was a little event. I liked some of them; I felt awkward with others. But with each one, million-dollar, thousand-dollar, or just messenger boy, I was obsessed to know if he thought me desirable. I began to devise little tests for finding out. But no matter how clever the tests, I never could be sure. I kept outsmarting myself with my subtle criteria.
In a desperate attempt to defy my limitations and know the unknowable, I made an ultimate test. Was it diabolical or just an extension of my job? I went to bed with a customer.
He was a heavy-set, middle-aged highball-drinking customer from my own Midwest who, out of admiration or inattention, took me for a New Yorker. He came into the office late one morning, leafed through several Time magazines and Fortunes, and was still waiting to see my boss at lunchtime.
“Have lunch with me?” he asked.
“Why not?” I answered. He reminded me a little of Mr. Winograd. Both had hair growing out of their ears and both were millionaires.
We went to his hotel, only two blocks away. No one broke the Muzak as we rode up in the elevator. I looked straight ahead at the light moving behind the floor numbers. 12. 14. 15. 16. So this is how it’s done, I thought. I wondered how he had known I was willing to go to his room.
He put the do not disturb sign on the door handle and turned the key in the lock. Then he gave me a big smile.
“Do you have a contraceptive?” I asked, embarrassed. I thought: I’ll have to get a diaphragm for the office.
“Sure thing,” he said, grinning. “‘Always be prepared,’ is my motto.” He took a condom out of his wallet and held it up. “See?”
We undressed, fucked, and dressed again. “I hope you’ll excuse me,” I said, checking my face in the mirror. “I’ve got to get back to work now.” I was sorry there’d be no one to tell.
“What about your lunch?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about that. I never eat lunch.”
“That’s not good,” he said, shaking his head with paternal concern and tucking a bill in my coat pocket. “You should eat.”
I didn’t peek at the bill until I got back to the office. The mere thought of it lying there in my pocket was exhilarating enough. All the way back, my heart pounding in time with the clicking of my heels on the pavement, I kept thinking: if he thinks I’m beautiful it will be twenty dollars at least. Twenty struck me as a very large amount. But of course, with my enormous capacity to trick myself, I might actually have been setting what I knew to be a low price just to save my ego. Like the excuses I had given myself for my mistakes on Trixie. I was never able to devise a thoroughly unambiguous test.
It was a fifty-dollar bill. I was jubilant. I looked in the mirror. I am beautiful, I thought.
But when my customer came back from his lunch a couple of hours later and acted as though he didn’t know me, I was quite as uncertain of how I looked as I had been in the morning. There was really no way to tell.
“How do you do? I’m Dr. Webber. Please sit down.”
I sank into a deep leather chair opposite his large desk. The room was soothingly dark, but even so, I couldn’t look at the doctor. Or at the motel-modern pictures on the wall, or at the family photos in a silver frame, or out the shaded window. I focused on the telephone.
“Perhaps you would like to tell me what made you seek help?”
With those pictures and that voice how could he possibly help me? But having an answer ready, I decided to use it. “I think I’m frigid,” I said. It came out softly, as though I were on the verge of tears. Nevertheless, I forced myself to look at him as I said the word.
He was grey and slim, with a goatee. Younger than he sounded. I had an urge to curl up on his lap.
“I see,” he said. He matched the fingertips of his left hand with those of his right, leaned back in his own leather chair, and contemplated the digital connections. Looking down his nose that way made him seem cross-eyed. “How old are you Miss Raybel? Or is it Mrs. Raybel?”
“Twenty-three. Misses.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” smiled the doctor. “You’re very young. I can think of no reason that you can’t be helped.”
“Really?” I could think of several myself.
He got out a long pad and, poising a pen over it, asked me quietly, “How long have you had this condition?”
“I guess always. Though I didn’t know it until recently.”
“I see,” he said writing. I fancied him jotting down, always. He looked up. “You have never had an orgasm, then?”
Had I? I squirmed with embarrassment. Couldn’t the doctor tell without asking me? Wasn’t that what they were trained to do?
“I don’t know,” I said. Did it count, I wondered, that Alport could kiss me to joy? “Anyway, not through intercourse.”
I didn’t know which embarrassed me more: my confession, or my choice of the word intercourse. Impossibly equivocal.
He watched me, waiting. I was grateful for the darkness. I knew I was expected to continue, but I didn’t know what to say. The more I wanted to please him, the more impossible to speak. I counted the holes on the telephone dial and was astonished to find ten, one for each of the sins I had come to confess.
“How long have you been married?” he asked at last, helping me out. Such a considerate doctor.
“Three years.” I thought he would write down three and give me respite, but he didn’t. He waited for me to proceed as deliberately as I waited for him to produce the next question. At last, thoughtfully fingering his beard, he leaned back and said kindly, “Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself, Sasha?”
Of course I was licked before I even started. I had never been one to explain myself. The very things I needed to confess, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even select a vocabulary. Intercourse was out. Fucking? Relations? Having sex? Fornicating? Sleeping with? Going to bed with (even if there were no bed)? Each was wrong in its own way.
“I find it difficult to talk,” I started honestly, “about my problem.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “Talk about anything you like. Anything at all.”
But each thing I thought of to say was sure to convey the wrong impression or strike a false tone. I tried to think of something both intelligent and shocking, something telling and rare, something to make this doctor know that I was not, in Dr. John Watson’s memorable words, just another ordinary “quacking, gossiping, neighbor-spying, disaster-enjoying” neurotic frigid woman—a textbook case; but I could not. I said nothing.
At last Dr. Webber interrupted my interminable silence to announce the session nearly over, time to arrange for appointments and fees. “What does your husband do?” he was careful to ask.
“He’s the Haversham Ellis History Fellow at Columbia this year,” I said, instantly ashamed of the pride in my voice. “I’m a receptionist,” I added for penance.
Mother had offered to help with the bills, but I didn’t mention that. I hoped the fee would be l
ow enough that I wouldn’t be forced to turn tricks at lunchtime, which might further damage my psyche.
Finally we settled on a fee. A bargain, considering. The doctor waited as I put on my jacket. When I finally left through the larger of two mysterious doors, I wondered if he was observing my ass, and if so, what he thought of it.
More parties, more contempt. It was enough to make one cynical! In Columbia waters I had to swim carefully to avoid being caught in the net laid for nonconforming traffickers in capitalism. I had worked in a bank, then in a trading-stamp company: clearly suspect. Unless I was careful to denounce them (yes, even Trixie), I was sure to be judged guilty. As to my other activities, reading poetry on the subway was the certain mark of a dabbler. Starfish were as unacceptable at Columbia as they had been in Baybury Heights. Like the Ugly Ducking, I seemed always to be swimming in the wrong part of the bay.
Again, I surmised the safest mode was silence. As more of our friends took advanced degrees and wives, I camouflaged my reading matter in plain brown paper covers and withdrew further into myself. A closet dilettante, biding my time.
I was seeing Dr. Webber regularly, Mondays and Thursdays, after work, and though I tried to do what was expected of me, I found myself talking about everything except what really mattered. In fact, it was by observing what I was unable to say that I discovered what really mattered: whether or not he found me beautiful.
I was frantic to know but could not bring myself to ask. Even if I could someday manage the question, how would I make him answer it? And if he should miraculously answer, how could I know he was telling the truth? I couldn’t even ask him if he thought me pretty, an easier, an almost innocent question, and one common courtesy would dictate he answer yes. But like one obsessed, I could not ask. (Aha! he would have said had he known my obsession, why do you want to know?) Instead I tried to captivate him. I concocted dreams with secret messages for him to decode. I drenched him in anecdotes and plied him with metaphors. I gave him my favorite poems to read. Leading him to the well of my beauty if he’d happened to miss it, I told him of my various conquests and seductions, exaggerating to inspire him to drink.
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen Page 18