by Sol Stein
Peter wanted to get out into the street as fast as possible, but the coatroom woman—she was older than Alex, wasn’t she?—moved slowly, and by the time he got his coat and gave her a quarter, Paul was at his side.
“How are we going to get out of this one?”
“Maybe we don’t have to.”
“You should have consulted me.”
“I didn’t even consult myself, Paul. It just came.”
Paul, his anger flaring, marched back to the crowded room. Peter headed for the subway which would take him off Manhattan Island, Elizabeth’s island, to a suburb where Rose kept house for him and the children. He hoped the children were still awake. After seeing Alex Ragdale and his wife clutching at straws, he didn’t want to face an evening alone with Rose.
Chapter Two
Peter Carmody opened the door of his home, set down his bulging briefcase, and surveyed his domain. The two children were lying ass-up on the carpet, watching television, and didn’t turn to greet him.
Were they ignoring him, or had they simply not heard him come in?
He opened the door again and this time let it slam. Twelve-year-old Margaret whipped over and in a second was on her feet running toward his outstretched arms. Ah, he thought, she hadn’t heard me the first time.
Jonathan, a blasé thirteen, turned more slowly so that his eye would not lose sight of the television screen until the very last second. By that time Margaret was swarming all over her father, taking his hat, holding onto his arm as if it were the limb of a backyard tree.
“Hi,” said Jonathan.
“Not yet,” said Peter. “I haven’t had a drink.”
In an instant Jonathan and Margaret were both at the alcove bar, their hands moving perilously among the glassware, vying with each other for the martini mixings. The homecoming ritual had begun.
Peter was pleased. Waiters and wives, he thought, regretting the thought almost immediately, are paid to serve you. When children do it spontaneously…
It hadn’t been spontaneous. He had had to give the signal.
“Before I succumb to the decibels,” he said, “would one of you silence that box?”
Margaret left the martini mixing to Jonathan and turned off the TV set. “We were watching the news, like you said we could.”
That hadn’t been the news he had caught out of the corner of his eye.
“And after the news?”
“A program,” said Margaret, playing it safe.
“And then?”
“Another program.”
“I’m sure they were highly educational.”
Both children laughed. Peter joined in. What the hell, he had long ago lost the television battle.
“If the news intrigues you,” he said to them both, “read a newspaper.”
Jonathan was pouring the martini off the ice. “Newspapers are a bore,” he said.
That was an echo, not a thought originating with Jonathan, a thought remembered. The newspaper strike a year ago had convinced Peter how much of each day he had let drift away, running his eyes up and down columns, across lines, reading news and items that were not news in the hope that they would make his subway ride pass quickly and then discovering, when newspapers were not available, that he did not miss them, that somehow one heard about the important news anyway. He tried a book, a book he did not need to read for business, and surprisingly it had interested him the way books once had when he was twelve or thirteen. He had finished the book on the ride home that evening and felt an embarrassing sense of accomplishment—I read a book!—as if it were some sort of achievement, the resumption, after a hiatus, of an old pleasure.
He wondered why those bobbing heads on the subway, when there was a strike and the regular papers were not available, why did they go like lemmings for newspapers brought in from other cities, or the second-rate fly-by-nights, and behind these substitute screens of newsprint, scanning, scanning, before they were quickly or ultimately bored? Why did they not try a book? He noticed, with surprise again, that three or four, no, six, actually were reading books. For a moment he felt a bond, as if they were all members of a club, outlanders among the newsprint. Of course he had overblown the experience, the sense of triumph. He actually had a fantasy about millions of middle-class men suddenly discovering on their shelves at home the unread books, the books read by their wives or children or by themselves when they were younger, rediscovering the pleasure of getting lost in a book, as each surely must have done as a boy.
“Did you hear what I said?” asked Jonathan.
Peter, not knowing how long his mind had been distracted, or in fact what Jonathan had said that started him off this way, said, “Of course.”
Just then the swinging doors from the kitchen opened, and Rose came through to greet him. Her face was still beautiful in a public sense, a perfect oval topped by auburn hair, a nose that couldn’t be faulted, a fine mouth. It was the eyes really that troubled him as the years went on, their restless lack of ease, their defensiveness. Was it a tenderness they protected—Rose had been tender in the early years—or a vacuity? Rose’s surface was fine, perhaps brilliant, her clothes carefully chosen—she had even picked perfectly the chic, colorful apron she now wore while preparing dinner—her makeup barely visible as makeup, a ready public smile. But her eyes, the visible body openings, looked beautiful only when they were closed. Open, you saw the floundering within, the lack of purpose, of interior style, of personality one could wear when naked.
“How did things go at the office?” she asked out of habit, and Peter remembered suddenly that the book he had read during the newspaper strike was an English novel called The Go-Between. He had brought it home to Rose that night, finishing it on the train, and had told her what pleasure it had given him, and she had said, as he expected, that she would read it at once, that night in bed before going to sleep. As he recalled now, she had read less than a chapter and had never opened the book again.
He hadn’t reminded her. Was that a fault? A recognition of reality?
“Isn’t this the night what’s-his-name got his farewell party?” asked Rose, remembering the special reason for Peter’s late arrival home.
“Alex Ragdale,” said Peter.
“Yes, of course,” said Rose, her accent at its most controlled, a faint hint of carefully cultivated British English that always disappeared within several sentences but caught up again and again during the course of an evening, except in moments of tension, when Rose spoke like her mother.
“Weren’t you supposed to make a speech?”
Yes, he would have liked to tell the whole of it, the prelude with Paul, Alex’s terror of dropping off the cliff of retirement, what Paul had said, especially what he had said—one wanted to tell one’s wife stories of minor courage—but Rose had already declared herself on retirement when the company plan was introduced: retirement was a good thing, devoutly to be worked for.
“I made a short speech and came straight home,” Peter said.
She had skipped her ritual kiss on the side of his face, the point she had aimed for when she came through the swinging doors from the kitchen. “Good,” she said. “It would have been awful if you got here after Jack and Amanda arrived.”
He had completely forgotten. Guests for dinner. Oh well, the Baxters would make four. Four was better than two; it might keep an argument with Rose from flaring. Over what? Over anything.
Peter let himself slip down into his armchair.
“The children were perfectly adorable today,” said Rose. “They fixed up a tent with blankets in the basement, put up a sign saying ‘The Facts of Life’ on it, and called all their friends in. They charged a penny admission and let everyone into the tent at the same time.”
“What was on the inside?”
“Nothing,” said Rose. “Just another sign saying ‘The First Fact of Life Is: Know What You’re Paying For.’”
“What a dirty trick,” he said for Rose’s benefit. The children are a s
aving grace, he thought.
Jonathan, aping in his speech a cross between his mother’s attempt at an accent and a butler he must have seen on television, said three words as if they were three separate sentences. “It…was…fun.” In his hand was the martini, slopping ever so slightly over the side.
“Were the kids mad?” Peter asked him.
“They ran right home,” said Jonathan, “to try the same stunt on some other kids.”
That’s the way it is, thought Peter. When you’re conned, you learn how not to be conned exactly the same way next time, but what you relish is using your new-found knowledge to con someone else. How did childless couples ever learn about life? Oh, well, most couples who had children didn’t really observe the behavior of children closely either. Certainly he hadn’t until a few years back, when Rose’s speeches had become so predictable that he began to look to the children for surprise. They had become his university.
Jonathan handed over the martini, and Margaret set a cocktail napkin down on the table.
“Martooni,” said Jonathan.
“Houdini,” said Margaret.
Then both children together said, “Watch it disappear!”
Rose disliked these rituals. They were childish. So they were, thought Peter, but he and the kids liked them. Rose couldn’t be suffering as much as her expression pretended. He sipped the drink.
He sipped at it again, watching the children’s expression. He smiled. “It’s good.”
Immediately the children clustered to him, imperiling the drink, which Peter quickly set down, sensing—how do these feelings travel?—that Rose was about to make a short speech.
“Peter,” she said, “is it wise to make bartenders out of the children?”
In adolescence Peter hadn’t wanted to be the usual things—a doctor, a lawyer—engineering was a big and coming thing, but when he inquired as to what engineers do, he lost interest. He really wanted to be a king, as all boys probably do at one moment in time, though with Peter the idea became fixed, an interesting, unrealizable idea: to be in absolute charge. In high school—was it the first year or the second?—his class was given the assignment of writing an essay on a vocation, and it was then that Peter wrote his famous eight or ten pages on kingship which, when it became known, elicited snickers from some of the kids and surprise from the teacher, who gave it an “A” because it was well written and sparkled with quotations from Shakespeare and Shaw and some miscellaneous ones from Bartlett and seemed to have wit even in those parts he had composed himself. The essay was posted on the bulletin board along with the other “A’s,” which is where it earned its scorn from the other boys, though the girls in the class seemed to have a different view of it and, he later learned, talked about it a good deal among themselves during recess. One girl, a very pretty girl in fact, stayed after school to copy the essay out after asking his permission. He was flustered, of course, wondering why she had asked. Was it courtesy, or did she want to call his attention to the fact that she was copying it out?
Her name was Rose.
Actually Peter was annoyed at himself for suspecting Rose’s reason for copying his essay. She was paying attention—wasn’t that a good sign? A day or two later, she found her way to him during a recess and talked about his essay. She liked the idea of someone wanting to be a king, or something like a king.
Peter asked her to go to the movies on Saturday night mainly because of the way things were shaping up among his friends at the time. Two or three of them would have a date of sorts on Saturday, all going to the local movie, of course, and the rest would go to the same movie as a pack. There was a distinction in going to the picture with a girl, paying for her, buying popcorn for them both, nodding over at the stags, who had to act tough and restless whenever interest in the movie flagged.
When the boys were together they would talk about baseball mostly, but occasionally about a girl. For instance, there was a girl about their age—her name was B. (they never said her full name)—who was said to have actually had intercourse with three Italian boys on one night (the Italian boys seemed to go in for real sex, rather than just petting like the other kids). It was said of B. that on that night she and the three boys had all been in the room together, two of them watching while the other performed, switching until each had had his chance, and that then B. had actually done something—the descriptions varied wildly—with all three boys together.
The boys also talked about Verna, who was older and not very bright, who had left high school when her pregnancy showed and then afterward worked as a waitress in a place frequented by truck drivers. Verna was said to take one of the younger boys up to her one-room apartment occasionally, and things would go on with the baby right there in the crib.
Sex was beginning to be not only colorful anecdotes for the boys but a matter of economic interchange as well. There was quite a traffic in contraceptives in school. Peter was quite sure that most of the boys who bought them didn’t use them but resold them to other boys, even at a slight loss, in order to get hooked onto the bravado train.
Peter had taken a girl named Sally to the movies several times. She was two grades ahead at school, extremely witty and bright, which is the reason Peter gave for going with her; but when he was in the mood to tell himself the truth, his interest in Sally lay in the fact that her breasts were fully developed and she sometimes wore the kind of brassiere which let the nipples show through the dress. He sometimes held hands with Sally in the movies but couldn’t try anything else because it would shatter, he thought, the intellectual foundation of their friendship. Peter had a tentative date with Sally, but he was now convinced nothing would come of that, at least nothing to do with the sexual feeling that was preoccupying his days and sometimes exciting him beyond tolerance. So he called Sally and gave some tepid excuse about having a bad cold and then let his mind stray freely about Rose, who had agreed to go to the movies on Saturday night.
Suddenly Peter realized that Sally would probably be at the movies on Saturday also, would see him. Oh, well, if it made her jealous it might lead to something, and if it made her angry, it couldn’t be helped. Was that the beginning of duplicity?
As for Rose, Peter didn’t see why he should have any reservations about seeing how he could make out. She had made the first approach, she wasn’t a tramp like B. and Verna, and they didn’t have an intellectual rapport to spoil. He thought about Rose on and off for the rest of the week, and by Saturday he was quite prepared to see how far he could go with her.
It went as far as marriage, though it took seven years.
From the beginning, Rose was quite a feather in his cap. She was pretty enough to be stared at. She knew how to dress in a way which attracted a great deal of attention at dances and parties. She admired his ambitions, which were very large. And there was one other thing.
One evening after they had been seeing each other for several weeks, Peter had promised to keep Rose company while she baby-sat for the Burkes. The evening got off to a brilliant start when Peter picked up Rose at her home. He greeted her mother in the kitchen and then her father in the living room. Rose’s father was snoozily reading the Daily Mirror, a New York tabloid which contained very little news of more than local interest, pictures of car accidents, and publicity stills of Hollywood starlets, a newspaper held in contempt by Peter’s family for as long as he could remember. Peter shook Rose’s father’s hand, then took the tabloid from him, which surprised her father, and ripped it in two, which surprised everyone including himself. Rose’s father was livid, Rose’s mother, who hurriedly came in from the kitchen when voices were raised, was amused, and Rose—well, she was overjoyed. Her fellow had taught her father a lesson.
They left the house hurriedly, happily, and got to the Burkes just in time. As soon as the Burkes had left for their bridge game and Rose and Peter were alone with the sleeping baby, she kissed him, a long, slow, exploratory kiss which he broke away from only because he had an erection, which embarra
ssed him.
Rose put on a record and Peter, mainly to calm himself, made a big do about investigating the Burkes’ library, which didn’t help because in the course of his explorations he found behind some other books a copy of a paperbound and poorly printed book which Mr. Burke had probably brought back from a business trip abroad. Rose and Peter read the book together, glancing at the clock once in a while because the Burkes were due home at eleven. He didn’t know at the time if Rose was being aroused by the book, as he was, or was aroused by his excitement, but they did kiss again, and Peter had to exert every restraint to keep from touching her—until it happened. Rose—he never knew whether it was by chance or will—let her hand come to rest, it was only for a second or two, on his pants at a critical point. He looked at her face, expecting anger, though he had had nothing to do with it, and instead found a beatific expression, or was it admiration again?
It was half past ten. With so little time left, Rose helped him uncover her breasts, which were lovely, but as he touched them he thought he was going to have an orgasm right then and pulled away. She took this as an affront, so he had to explain, his breath coming hard, and she was so sympathetic and understanding, he was overwhelmed. They were kissing each other in a head-long rush to Peter knew not where, when he suddenly felt her hand moving in a way which alarmed him because it seemed so experienced and yet he was certain she couldn’t have had this kind of experience, and before his troubled thought could lead him anywhere, his reservoir of youth exploded.
There was a lot of fixing up to do before eleven but they made it, and when the Burkes returned, the book was back in place and the two of them were sitting on opposite ends of the couch listening to records.
Peter and Rose said very little on the way home, holding hands all the way. Peter was a little leery of going in because of the incident with the newspaper, but Rose assured him that her parents would be asleep. Which wasn’t quite true. Her mother did come out in her bathrobe just long enough to say, “Glad you’re home. Don’t stay up too late,” which Peter took to mean he might stay a while. When her mother went back and closed their bedroom door on the father’s snoring, Peter kissed Rose gently and learned something he was to know much better as the years went on, that to Rose a kiss was never a kiss but an introduction. Their bodies were very close when they kissed again. All Peter’s fears came bounding back, including that of her father’s wrath, but Rose assured him with what seemed like serene confidence that in her bedroom they couldn’t be heard. For a second Peter felt she was rushing and wasn’t it the man’s job to take the lead, but all this was brushed away by a fierce appetite, whetted and now seemingly uncontrollable.