Lion House,The

by Marjorie Lee

  "Didn't you get bored waiting?"

  "Bored? The quiet was heavenly. When I left the kids with the day's worker they were playing dodge-ball in the livingroom."

  We went into the kitchen then to refill her glass and to get one for me.

  "I've been thinking," she said, sliding onto a wooden chair. "How come you haven't divorced Brad?"

  The question took me by surprise. "Why would you ask a thing like that?"

  "Oh, I don't know... but it does seem rather obvious that you—well, that you don't really like him too much."

  "I do like him!" I blurted defensively. "It's just that sometimes he's a little—oh, a little impossible to live with, that's all."

  She laughed. "So I'd gather."

  "What do you mean?" I knew what she meant all right, but I was annoyed—as I always was when I had to face the fact that Brad's shortcomings were obvious. Now, willfully hurting myself, I pressed her further. "What, precisely, do you mean?"

  She looked away. "You know," she said.

  Had there, then, been sequels to the ice cube episode? My annoyance flared. "If you mean his penchant for les jemmes," I said, "don't take it to heart. You, baby, are approximately Number Twenty-Five..."

  She lifted the glass to her mouth with both hands and focused her eyes on the rim so they seemed to cross a little. Then she pulled one knee up against her chest. I was sorry I'd said it.

  "What I mean is—" I began, trying to make amends.

  "Forget it, Jo," she interrupted. "Standing in queues for things has never appealed to me. Not for inessentials anyway."

  I had been put in my place in a way I'd watched her stop others. Having enjoyed witnessing those thrusts, I was less intrigued when I myself was the target. "I happen to be used to it," I said, attempting to be light "Got him that way myself, as a matter of fact"

  She looked up, interested.

  "That was twenty-seven years ago," I said, wanting for some reason to tell her things. "He was twenty-two then and I was nineteen, in on a college vacation, supposedly visiting an old Baltimore aunt of mine. He was living in a little dive near the Patapsco River with this woman my aunt knew, named Sonya, who was old enough to be his mother. She must have been tired of playing Jocasta though, because she was really insistent about my coming up for dinner to meet him."

  "So you went?"

  "So I went. And stayed for three weeks, I might add. Then I had to go back to school; but after that it got to be my headquarters for holidays."

  She reached for a pack of cigarettes on the table and lighted one thoughtfully. "Could you—could you enjoy a thing like that?" she asked. "I mean—with her there? Wouldn't it sort of—cramp a person's style?" Then she faced me, eye to eye. "Unless, of course," she added, "one needed an audience for kicks..."

  Her earnestness amused me. "Don't tell me you're shocked," I said. "I thought you were rather Bohemian yourself!"

  "I am neither shocked nor Bohemian," she stated flatly.

  "Well, you sound pretty unfettered to me," I argued. "At least in comparison with most of the people around here. I can't say I've heard of many Pillars of Society going to cocktail parties with their slacks' crotches torn out."

  "Don't be deluded," she said. "Mere counter-phobic action. Jewish: Middle-to-Upper-Middle. Chicago's Marjorie Morningstar. Uncle was my grandmother's brother. Neville Sapperstein could have been my nephew! I'll admit I've made an honest try, Jo; but you can lose a leg unfettering yourself from a setup like that..."

  "It doesn't show at all," I said. "Not the kids, or Marc either. I wouldn't have known if it hadn't been for the law firm and the mention of Mill Pond. Not that I ever know who's what anyway...I never think of it," I added, flushing just slightly at the partial lie.

  "You don't have to think of it," she said. "I do."

  We were quiet for a few minutes. It wasn't until after I'd poured her another drink that she carried the conversation back to Brad. "He must have been really something in those days," she began.

  I was always pleased to dwell on Brad's looks. They were, I think, one of my major rationalizations for putting up with him. "He was incredibly beautiful," I said.

  "He still is."

  "Not as," I told her. "You should have known him then. I've got a picture upstairs. Shall I go get it?" I went before she answered. It was a little snapshot in a silver frame, sitting on the bedtable next to one of my father. I stood there for a minute looking at both of them, even though doing that always made me feel like hell. Brad's reminded me too much of the past and the crawling of time, towards what end I didn't know; and my father's had been taken on our old lawn just outside of Providence a week before he'd died of pneumonia brought on by nothing more than a common cold and no real interest in living any longer.

  I picked up Brad's and carried it down to Frannie.

  "Hey..." she breathed, and then she brought both legs up, feet on the chair edge, and stared at it between her knees.

  "Nice?" I asked, leaning over her from behind with my chin just brushing the top of her head.

  "Dorian Gray..." she murmured. Then, passing it back to me over her shoulder: "Take it!"

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing," she half-laughed. "I was just thinking of that portrait in the attic!"

  "Come on," I said, "he isn't all that bad." But the analogy had hit me and when I put the picture down on the sink top I turned my face away to hide my irritation.

  Frannie had a wrist watch on that day (the same one she was later to lose), and when she glanced at it, she whistled. "Have to leave immediately!" she said. "We're going to the Perloff's for dinner."

  "Oh, stay awhile. Brad'll be home soon. He'll want to say hello to you."

  "Can't."

  "Oh, come on. Please."

  I don't know why it seemed suddenly to matter so much, to matter at all, that she wait and see him. But there had been something exciting in telling her about our early relationship, in showing her the picture of him when he was young. Or maybe the remark about Dorian Gray was still cutting me. Maybe I wanted him to walk in and charm her out of the conviction she had that he was—inessential. Maybe it was twenty other things. I didn't know. I only knew that I wanted her to wait.

  She was still refusing when I heard his car in the driveway, and he was in before she could get out. "Hi, darlings," he said, putting an arm around each of us. His body between us seemed to act as a kind of conductor and I could almost feel her tighten on the other side of him. Then he dropped his arm from me and the current was broken. "Where are you rushing?" he asked, still holding her close.

  Carefully, deliberately, she freed herself. "Dinner party."

  "Oh." His face fell.

  "You could—crash," she said hesitantly. "Jeri and Len. It's not as if you didn't know them."

  He brightened. "Bring our own bottle?"

  "The Perloffs have enough bottles for everyone," I put in. "The point is: you weren't invited."

  "Invited? What do you need—an engraved announcement from Tiffany's? Frannie's their friend, and Frannie invited us."

  "You might call them first," Frannie suggested.

  "I'm not calling them first," I said. "I'm not calling them at all."

  She left then and Brad walked her out to the car. It was quite a while before I heard the motor start up and even longer before he came in again, looking, I thought, slightly on the Cheshire side. I supposed he had kissed her goodbye and was dying for me to ask so he could tell me about it. It wasn't simply Brad's pleasure to sow wild oats about the entire social terrain: he had to let me know exactly where they had been strewn and how they were doing. But in all our years together I had learned a warfare of my own: a refusal to reach for the bait, to even notice. So, when he returned from Frannie's farewell (which, at the time, I felt certain must have been distasteful to her) I merely handed him a drink and smiled back.

  But hidden gripes have a way of festering to large angers and in no time at all the evening became intolerable. T
hough I had been eager for him to come home while Frannie was still there, her departure left a frustrating void in its wake. Her absence, in some strange way, robbed the night of any possible compatibility. Over a pot-luck supper of cold chicken and leftovers I wished we had been invited to the Perloff's. Not that I had expected much come-on from that quarter. The close friends of close friends rarely like each other. Jeri was quite possessive and probably felt her relationship with Frannie and Marc threatened by the deep inroads Brad and I were making.

  At about nine I threw down a book I couldn't concentrate on and went upstairs.

  "Don't go to sleep," Brad said. "I'll be there in a minute."

  "I'm tired," I told him. "Come on, Jo," he pleaded. "Your way..." But even my way, without the awkward burden of his weight, would have been unbearable that night.

  I went up to the other bedroom and took my clothes off. Looking into the long mirror I saw the fullness of my breasts. Unaccountably, I thought of Frannie. I suspected that the loose boys' shirts she wore covered next to nothing. Brad was right: what was she? A little kid with big glasses and bitten nails. The realization of this somehow elated me; and seeing my body once more, I was suddenly filled with desire. I went to the door to call down to Brad. But something stopped me. I don't know what; but it stopped me cold. I turned, got into bed, and fell asleep.

  I rarely remember my dreams. But I did have one that night and for some reason it stays with me: I was walking down a street; a busy street, like Broadway. At the corner I saw a man. He was very tall and very handsome and around his neck he wore a beautiful orange ascot. I didn't recognize the man, but I seemed to recognize the ascot; so I went up to him, and took it off. As I was standing there looking at it in my hands, a girl appeared. She was quite young, almost a child. "Here," I said to her. "This scarf is your color. It belongs to you." At that moment she began to run. I ran after her. "Wait," I kept calling. "You forgot to take this, and it's yours!"

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Of all the women I had ever known (or ever will, I would think) Frannie was the most articulate about sex. Having thought in those first few months of our friendship that the subject would interest her little if at all it came as rather a surprise when during one of her daytime visits after school I happened casually and without purpose to toss the sexual ball into our conversation and found that she was quite willing to pick it up and run with it.

  We were talking, I recall, about college. She was telling me that her four years at the exclusive and progressive X—had been entirely serious; that she had been completely infatuated with new ideas and the processes of original thinking. I admitted that I could make no such educational claims; that my own four years at Y—had been one long trek from frat house to frat house; and that before my third, during which I met Brad, I had broken all records with the significant score of seventeen affairs.

  She told me then about a boy she'd been in love with in her Junior and Senior years: a Yale man and brother of a classmate of hers. "We had our first date in New York—blind," she said. "When I put him on the train he asked me up for the following weekend and I knew immediately and without the slightest question that that would be it."

  "How did you do?"

  "Not at all like they write it in the novels," she answered. "It's such a complicated, delicately-put-together thing, that first time. Why do writers always have to go and wreathe it with a ton of God damned orchids? Why not daisies or dandelions—you know what I mean?"

  I remembered my first: in the back seat of a car. And I remembered my description of it to the girls in the sorority. I told it the way Frannie had just said the writers did: full of hot purple orchids; no daisies or dandelions at all... I looked over at her, sitting in the armchair, her legs curled up under her; and she looked back at me, putting me on the spot. "I know what you mean," I said; but then, unwilling to give up my stand for hers, I added, "On the other hand, it would depend on the individual. After all, we aren't all─"

  "The honesty of the individual," she cut in. "Look, Jo—it's a big thing to become a woman, isn't it? A whole woman, that is. It doesn't just simply happen one day because you go to bed with a guy. Sex does, yes. But not true sexuality. That takes growing; and you can spend your whole life growing. You make such a thing of it, Jo. It's as if you keep trying to prove something all the time..."

  It was one of those moments when I wanted to drag her up and shake her like a rag doll. But then Brad walked in. He looked especially well that day and his mood was high as a bird's. "Knew you were here, Franni-o!" he said with a happy breathlessness. "Saw your car outside!" Passing the couch he bent to kiss me a brief but sweet hello. "You too," he said to Frannie, crossing the room. "Mmmmmm," he murmured as she lifted her face shyly. "Now let's have a drink!"

  "Just used the last of the soda," I said. "Drive over and get a case, will you?"

  "Sure. Who’ll come with me?"

  "Frannie will," I said. "She's been sermonizing for two hours. She needs a breath of fresh air."

  "You go, Jo," she said. "I have to get home."

  "Oh, no!" Brad groaned. "The party's just beginning! Stay for dinner. Call Marc and tell him to come here from the office."

  "You forget: I'm the mother of three hungry children. Though come to think of it, Connie cleaned today. Maybe she'd feed them and sit tonight."

  So she called, and Connie agreed. Then she got Marc and he was game too; a few minor finish-ups and he'd be up in an hour.

  "Get that soda," I told Brad. "If they aren't closed now they will be any minute."

  He held out his hand to Frannie. "Come on, Mrs. Browne darling."

  Pausing with one arm in the sleeve of her coat she turned to look back at me. "Let's all three of us go," she suggested.

  "Can't," I said. "I'm the cook."

  I got a chicken out and filled it with an easy apple stuffing. Then I began tossing us a big raw vegetable salad. But all the while I had this funny feeling about being alone. It wasn't resentment, exactly; I didn't need any help with dinner and Frannie was zero in a kitchen anyway. But somehow I wished she hadn't gone. Realizing then that I had been the one to send her I felt even odder. After all, it was kind of silly to give Brad the chance to go off with anyone considering the messes he'd got into in the past; and another thing: that little talk with Frannie had ended on a slightly irksome note. What had she been trying to say? That I was lacking in some way that she wasn't?"

  I nicked my finger on the paring knife and yelped. When I heard the car brake outside I thought it must be they. But it was Marc. I was pleased. In all the months we'd known them I'd never been alone with him; never had the opportunity, really, to talk to him. Of the four of us he seemed the most remote. I don't mean that he wasn't friendly; he was. It was just that Frannie, Brad, and I had built an intensity into the relationship to which Marc seemed immune. I wondered about it. Did he display this hands-off quality with all people, or was it only with us? Then there was his relationship with Frannie; I wondered about that too. While I often sensed an easy warmth between them, their outward behavior with each other was undemonstrative. I had never seen them kiss or touch or speak even the semblance of an endearment. At times they struck me as two close but casual siblings; at other times I got the feeling that Marc played Stabilizing Father to Frannie's complex and precocious Little Girl. I had recently read de Beauvoir: there was something called the infantile woman. Could that be Frannie's cubby hole? No; I was constantly having to remind myself that appearances were too often misleading. What of the sudden adultness; the unexpected femininity; the peculiarly disturbing insights which, even when unspoken but only glanced or smiled, could pierce the sheath of my own maturity and cast me headlong to the level of a child?

  As Marc stood beside me in the kitchen there were a hundred questions I wanted to ask him: about her, about him, about them; but wanting to, I was afraid; and, too, I didn't know how or where to begin. "They're getting soda," I told him. "They ought to be back any minute now."
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  A shadow of annoyance crossed his face. "What's the matter?" I asked.

  "She knew I was coming, didn't she? She could have been here."

  "Well, they'll be back soon. We ran out of soda, and─"

  "So you said." He took the bowl in which I'd made the stuffing and began washing it.

  "Don't," I said. "I'll clean up later."

  "Force of habit," he explained. "Have you ever seen our kitchen after Frannie's boiled an egg? The Augean Stables."

  "You can't have everything," I said. "Marry a writer and bask in the pride of bylines. It's worth it, isn't it?"

  "Completely invalid," he answered. "That's her theory; but the truth is: it's just an alibi for ducking the dirty work." He was taking pot-shots at her. I'd never heard him do that before.

  "Complaint Department?"

  He looked up. "Not really," he said, leaning against the sink, nibbling a heart of celery. "If she changed I'd have to adjust all over again. It was hard enough the first time."

  * * *

  We were getting nowhere; though where I wanted to get I wasn't quite sure. No; that's not true. I knew what I wanted to know: I wanted to know about Frannie. I wanted to know what she was like: all of what she was like—when she was home alone with him; when she wasn't playing to the gallery. But why? Was my curiosity strange, uncalled-for? I doubt it. Writers seem always to be objects of interest; maybe because somehow we've all come to assume they have an inside track to Love. Well then, did Frannie? Surely she had written of it; written of it well enough to sell. But that was merely a matter of words on paper. What happened when this same emotion belonged not to a cast of literary characters, but to Frannie herself? What words would she choose then for its expression? What look? What everything? But it wasn't the sort of question you went around asking people's husbands; least of all husbands like Marc. He was smart and deep and sensitive all right; but unlike Frannie who, once unblocked, could pour like Niagara, he kept his thoughts to himself.

  He was watching me now. "You're looking pensive," he said. "What's on your mind?"