Lion House,The

by Marjorie Lee

  Another day I saw Pam Coulton. She was coming out of Bonwit's with a package under her arm. I wondered what was in it: a robe, I fantasied; a pair of slacks; a cashmere sweater; something beautiful—for Foster.

  "Hi, Pam!" I called. "Oh, Pam!" But she didn't hear me, and hurried on.

  I thought of a line from Eliot: I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

  And then—the inevitable. Lunch hour, and rain. I scuttled around the corner of Fifty-fifth and Fifth and, like something out of an ancient slap-stick, ran head-on into Brad.

  Stepping back, we looked at each other. He spoke first. "You're wet," he said.

  "It's raining."

  He peered up, the drops glistening on his face and hair, and carefully examined the sky. "I guess it is."

  I wanted to walk on, but I couldn't. "How strange—to meet like this," I said.

  "Not strange," he said. "I've felt for months that you were just around each corner. I turn a lot of them every day. The odds were in my favor." He touched my elbow. "Talk to me?"

  "About what?" I asked; but I hadn't said no.

  We went into the Gotham—the dark bar at the back, and sat down at a little table. I ordered a Scotch and soda.

  "A Scotch and soda," Brad told the waiter, "and a lemonade."

  I didn't comment.

  "Has it been long enough?" he asked, when the drinks had come. "Have you found out yet?"

  "Found out what?"

  "That it won't work this way?"

  "But it has," I told him, trying to believe it. "It has worked—for me."

  "Cheers," he said, putting the cherry from his lemonade on my plate. "It hasn't for me."

  We were quiet.

  "I'm going away," I said after a little while. He seemed startled.

  "Where?"

  "Bermuda, maybe. For a month or so."

  "Can you swing it?"

  "My mother sent me a check during the summer; and I've got something saved from my salary."

  "Why Bermuda?"

  "I don't know."

  "Then: "Will you come back?"

  "To New York? I doubt it. Or at least, not to stay. I've had it with New York, I think."

  "Will you come back to me?"

  I looked up at the ceiling. "I'd like a sandwich," I said.

  He didn't ask me what kind. "A sandwich," he told the waiter. "Bacon, lettuce, and tomato; white toast; mayonnaise on the side. Nothing for me."

  The waiter left.

  "I've already had lunch," he explained. "Scrambled eggs, rolls, coffee and cake..." It was a footnote to the lemonade. It said: I'm trying now. I'm eating. I'm not drinking much. Look at me. Notice this. Think about it. I'm trying.

  I wanted to put my hand on his. Instead, I asked him about his job.

  "Still there," he said. "Hanging on. I don't know why they keep me."

  "I guess they like you."

  "They do," he said. "That’s the funny thing about it. They do."

  I picked up the cherry and ate it; and then the sandwich came, with the mayonnaise on the side, and I began eating that. "Why is it funny?" I asked. "Why is it funny that people like you?"

  "Did you ever think anybody ever liked me?"

  I glanced up. He was eying me intently, but without anger.

  I looked away.

  He drank the lemonade slowly and we finished together. When we got outside it wasn't raining anymore. "Can I walk you somewhere?" he asked.

  "No."

  He put out his hand. I took it. In all the years I had known him, we had never shaken hands. "When you get back," he said, "call me."

  "There's no reason to."

  "Yes, there is."

  I thought of the past. I remembered the other times: the partings and the comings-together; the tears and the promises; the new beginnings, and the same old ends. "Don't tell me," I said. "I've heard it before: you need me!”

  He lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed the inner side of my wrist. Then he smiled. "You've only got half of it, Jo," he said as he turned to go. “You need me."

  I didn't see Frannie again. Somehow we managed to keep from meeting at the same parties—which wasn't strange: I had dropped out of her crowd as quickly as I'd dropped into it. But a week before I left I saw Jeri and Marian, lunching at Schrafft's.

  Had I heard? they asked; the firm of Bendheim, Blatz and Mendes-Cohen was now the firm of Bendheim, Blatz Mendes-Cohen, and Browne. It had happened after the case Marc had handled—when he'd come back from Bermuda. And Frannie? Frannie was a new woman! The other day she'd made a batch of the most delicious French cookies anyone had ever eaten! And guess what—she was letting her hair grow. She was going to let it get real long; and wear it up in a bun.

  "Of course," Marian put in, "she'll end up looking ten years older!"

  "So what," said Jeri. "It's what she wants."

  I walked away with an ache inside. In spite of all the rot that went on with Frannie and Marian and Jeri, they were still friends; yet, with all the love there had been between Frannie and me—we were not. Hate isn't the worst thing in the world, you know... she had once said. Hate's even healthy—when it’s honest.

  On my way back to the office I thought of the memo on the Lion House.

  I guessed they would tell her they'd seen me; and that same week I got a letter from her. I didn't answer it. But when I packed to come down here I stuck it into a book and brought it along. I have it with me now; and here it is

  Dear Jo,

  Don't rip it to bits before you've read it just because it comes from me.

  I've thought of calling you, but haven't. I've been afraid you'd hang up—or maybe afraid you wouldn't.

  You'd think we'd have met somewhere, if only on the street. I've asked about you from time to time. That's how I learned (from the Hermans, at a party) that you were planning a vacation in Bermuda, and that after, you were thinking of moving

  away for good. If that happens, I won't know where you are. So I'm writing to you now.

  There are things to be said, even if they are to be last things. Slob that I've always been in some areas, I go hard for wind-ups and neat finishes.

  The day you walked out of here was one of the most crucial of my life. It took hours to crawl back to any kind of endurance. But, managing that, somehow, I also managed to crawl my way into Helen Paige's office the following morning at nine o'clock. She's more booked-up than the Public Library; but I guess the way I put it to her on the phone, she knew it wasn't for laughs.

  I've been seeing her five days a week since then. In time we'll knock it down to four, and then three; but, in toto, I'd sentence myself to a good four years. That, Jo, is how much there is to find out!

  We began with you, of course. But I sense even now, in the deep part of me, that it was a beginning which might really be considered an end. The true beginning began thirty-one years ago; and each hour on that beat-up old couch of hers takes me further and further back to it.

  If only I could tell you, even a little, what it’s like, how it works, what it does! But I can't. You can read the facts in any decent book, and they would bore you. Strong, rejecting mother; weak, deserting father; ergo: double-barreled shotgun, shooting hate, guilt, fear—in a vicious cycle of altering orders. Well, it isn't quite that simple; but neither is it impossibly complex. And there are so many other similar case-structures cluttering up the world that I sometimes wonder where in hell I ever got the idea that I was so God damned, gorgeously original!

  The feelings are something else again; and those might bore you too—because they're mine, not yours.

  If you're interested, fork up your own twenty-five-an-hour and see for yourself! I'm proselytizing, of course. Like all converts, I feel that nothing else exists, or ever will. It becomes your religion, and you believe that your couch is an Ark. Get on, you shout to everyone in sight, or you’ll be drowned! (And I'm not completely kidding. I wish you would, Jo. I hope terribly much t
hat someday you will. I would guess, though I have no right to, that you too are one of the Oedipus Wrecks!)

  As for Paige—what can I tell you? Aside from her actual brilliance as an analyst, she strikes a thousand inner chords of response. I hate her till it kills me; and I love her till it kills me. But this time, I suspect, I am facing the kind of killing which turns back on itself and leads, ultimately, to life.

  At the moment, I'm dying over something as seemingly unimportant as her clothes. Yours were bad enough, Jo—but hers are absolutely incredible! There are days when, I swear, she looks whorier than my own damned sex-box of a mother! I tell myself, however, that such deliberate unattractiveness can't possibly be blamed on poor taste alone; that in reality she suffers from some deep and unresolved neurosis...

  Another problem is her deplorable lack of appreciation of wit. I told her my gag about Fee and Sympathy—and you could have heard a pin drop. I'm quite sure she couldn't respond because of some long-buried guilt about all the money I'm paying her; probably her mother didn't love her enough and she doesn't feel she deserves anything!

  Last week I referred to her as my Psychoannihilist, and you could have heard half a pin drop...

  But I didn't really worry about her until two days ago. It was lovely out, and I went up to her office feeling, for the first time, as if I owned the world. "I like this business," I told her, lying happily on my back. "And when I get all through I'm going to write a book about it. The story of my analysis. And you want to hear the title?—

  I DISMEMBER MAMA!

  Well, I waited. (After all, I was Ko-Ko in The Mikado at camp when I was thirteen, and I know; you have to pause for laughs...) But this one never came. Finally I turned around and looked at her to see if maybe she had died or something. And you know what she was doing? She had put her knitting down (Oh, I forgot to tell you: she knits. Who she gives all those scarves and socks and sweaters to, God only knows!) and she was staring blankly, but blankly, out of the window!

  "Don't you think that's funny?" I asked.

  And you know what she did then? She stopped looking out of the window and, without the merest bat of an eyelash, started knitting again!

  Oh, Jo, oh Jo, oh Jo—I'm plugging for yucks, and I know it! I'm kidding, and covering, and crapping it up; and I'm not telling you at all, at all what I wanted to tell you when I began this letter! Why can't I? Why is it so hard to be serious? What is it with the Pagliacci bit? What did we used to say when we were kids—Oh me, oh my! It's better to laugh than cry...? Why is it better? I know. Because it’s safer. You may not have to find out so much if you keep yourself rolling in the aisles.

  But listen now, and I'll tell you what I wanted you to know: I'm all right. I mean I'm going to be all right. I'm sure of it. And one reason I'm sure of it is that I'm so damned fed up with not being all right.

  So—there it is. I'm going to be okay. And that butterfly net I was always so afraid of—well, Paige isn't whamming it down over my head the way I thought she would. I've been living inside of it all my life, and Paige is lifting it off! And not just the big net; the little ones too. You know how your stocking can run while you're at a party and because of a crazy thing like that you think nobody loves you? Or you meet someone you met a year ago and he doesn't remember your name so you wish you were dead? Or you don't go to bed with the most wonderful guy in the world on the night he asks you because you suddenly realize you forgot to shave under your arms...?

  Go get yours lifted, Jo. If you land a good job somewhere, save on dinners and clothes; save on everything, and do it! Don't not do it just because I tell you to. You know the old joke line—I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid. I've learned a lot in this short time: about me, about others. And what happened to us—well, you must know: it takes two to tango. Please go, will you?

  Love, Frannie.

  P.S. I don't bite my nails anymore.

  Well, that's it. All of it. And I had to write it down to get rid of it; to get rid of Frannie. Or maybe I mean—to put her in her proper place. But I couldn't, at home. For some reason—it had to be here in Bermuda, in just the house where Frannie was.

  For eight weeks I've spent every morning typing at this table. My cigarette stubs have left a few scars beside the ones she left when she was here. In the afternoons I've swum in her blue ocean, and climbed her perilous cliffs to get close to her blue sky. At night, before I turn the lamp of I see the top of the bedside cabinet, ringed with the glass marks of her gins and soda. There are more there now that have come from mine.

  When the whistle toots on the Hamilton Ferry, I think she loved the quaint and funny things; she must have found it charming. When the insects with their flutes inside cut up the night in strips of music, I ask: did she hear this? Did she keep the tune? And when the seaplanes pass over the roof top, beating my ears with a roar of lions, I wonder: was she afraid?

  I'm leaving tomorrow. I'm flying back to New York to get my things. And then, I'm going to call Brad. I'm going to tell him he was right: it doesn't work this way.

  What would Frannie say to that? What questions, what delvings into the hidden mind—to come forth with what irrefutable answers? Dig up! cries her credo. Lift out an analyze! Take apart, spread open, examine! Why is the big thing; Why is all; without the Why there is no chant for being!

  It's strange. Having had so much of Frannie, I need her less and less. Her word is no longer law; and I can disagree.

  She'll make it with Paige. If I know Frannie, she'll make it always, with anyone, at anything she sets her heart to. And the questioning is part of it, just as the answering is; just as the suffering is, and her own bright brand of laughter. In time, she'll make it with Paige—and she'll leave that sacred couch with the biggest, most fully answered Why in the world, carrying it out in her hands, above her head, triumphantly, like a child on a beach with a colored ball.

  But that's she; not I. I don't ask the meaning of every blade of grass, every pebble, every insignificant weed… walk on them as she does, and, as with her, they leave an imprint on my heel. Yet, I'm satisfied to have it there, willing to take it for what it is. Why it is, I don't know, don't wish to know, will never know.

  Brad was right that day as he stood in front of the Gotham and kissed my wrist before going: until now, I've had only half of it. The rest of it is: I need him. In the beginning I wanted him, and everything that came with him. I got it. Then I let it go. Tomorrow I'm going back to get it. Whatever it is, it's something to be kept.

  Does it add up? Does it make sense? God only knows. Living is a job for anyone; but anyone is free to choose the way to get it done.

  Frannie is doing it her way.

  Let me do it mine.

  THE END