‘Of Lenny?’
‘Hell, sure. He’s photogenic? Few lines ’bout his college education, moral opposition to warfare, work … fine work he doin’ with the mentally ill. That’s a nice story there. Print a nice picture to go with it. Ain’t all about riots and homemade napalm. We wanna raise awareness of the quiet protestors.’
Evelyn has a sudden image of being lifted onto the kitchen table, her legs pushed open. She hates herself. ‘Well, I probably have a picture you can use,’ she says, then has a bright idea to get away. ‘I can look now. There’s a box of photos in the bedroom.’
Jim’s smile widens.
It will be okay, Evelyn thinks, setting down her untouched coffee. Though it feels good, too good, to brush against Jim on her way out of the room, it will be okay. Though the bead curtains also feel good, too good, shivering against her naked arms and shoulders. The curtains knock and sway behind her. She will be alone soon. He will not follow her. A married minister wouldn’t follow a married woman down the hall and into her bedroom while she is so damp-haired and obviously braless, would he?
‘Nice curtains.’ Jim’s voice blooms behind her. ‘Did I ever tell you … nice bead curtains?’
Evelyn feels the absurdity of the things she says, words plucked and strung together with the ordered randomness of a code. ‘Lenny looks cute here, but his hair is a bit long.’
‘Oh, that is cute,’ Jim murmurs, taking the photo and adding it to the pile of contenders on the bedspread. It was not Evelyn’s idea to sit on the bed, and this makes her feel less guilty about being there.
‘Well, I suppose this won’t work. He’s shirtless again.’
‘Probably he needs a shirt.’
Evelyn shucks a series of photographs showing her without Lenny: sometimes smiling, sometimes not, sometimes with her hair piled high, sometimes with bangs and a bob. In one snapshot, taken just after her return from France, she stands beside her fairer-haired mother and sisters, looking plain and utterly miserable. She notices Jim peering closely at this picture and tells him, ‘As you can see, I’ve always been plain-looking,’ and he nods gently, smiles and hums in gentle agreement.
‘Mmm-hmm.’
They are not touching. His hands in his lap are beautiful and golden like lion paws, his sideburns thick and black, his head as compelling as the head of some noble black-haired animal — yet they have not touched. ‘Lenny after graduation. Perhaps,’ she says, and her lips feel dry, her bones like glass. There is a beauty spot on his cheek and he smells strongly, sweetly of himself. Ilovehim Ilovehim, she thinks in a tumble. If only I could touch him … just once.
‘Mmm,’ Jim says, taking the photo from her. ‘Perhaps.’
He proceeds to add the photo to the pile, to shift his body closer to her. Then he does something both unexpected and expected: lifts the box of photos from her hands, sets it down, and turns to her with an expression of complete benevolence.
‘Ev-e-lyn,’ he croons.
She sees it coming. Like a rushing train. Like tear gas in a crowd. In the eternal seconds before it happens, she’s hearing the whistle, seeing the hand reach for the grenade, and she can’t stop it happening. Everything in her holds itself sharp and tense in expectation of catastrophe; everything is steel tracks, stinging eyes, bone waiting to be compressed. It’s happening and she can’t stop it happening; Evelyn by her knowledge tree and that moment of radical innocence before the lightning strikes. Jim. Jim.
It’s the way he holds her face, like a delicate thing, and the indelicacy of everything else. Tongue to the brain. Pleasure smoke in the belly. An incomprehensible burning all over her skin, like chemicals. She’s gone blind or she’s seeing into the flames that know her future, seeing a madness of bitter, swirling red, and she has to say something.
‘This isn’t right,’ she says.
‘Bullshit.’
He kisses her again. Again, a bitter taste, and sore little thumps of pleasure from within, like people knocking to get out of a burning building. His hands gliding over her body, flicking at her nipples, teasing her, hurting her. It hurts, oh, it hurts to feel this good.
‘I can’t …’ she says.
But of course the words seem false with her smell so frank between them and her lips still wet from kissing. He isn’t holding her face anymore but the place where her ribs meet her waist, and she feels he could break her right in half, crush her whole body like grapes, without any consequence to either of them.
‘You want me,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘And you ain’t hiding it well, baby.’
It’s hard to argue with this. Evelyn closes her eyes and lets his hands roam to her hips, her haunches, feeling less like a human being than a well-formed female animal, all heat and response. His face is buried in her neck and hair. There is panting, groaning, the delightful friction of their bodies through layers of clothing. ‘I’m gonna fuck you like you never been fucked,’ Jim rumbles in her ear, and her insides twinge in anticipation, and then it is like a light has been switched on.
‘Jim,’ she says, her voice thin and urgent. ‘Don’t. Please.’
He raises his head with an expression of faint annoyance, a black forelock hanging over one eye. ‘Well, hell, honey.’ He laughs grimly. ‘You really tellin’ me there ain’t a, ah, overwhelming attraction here? You sayin’ you don’t think about me?’ He strokes her thigh, softens his voice to a purr. ‘I think about you, sweetheart. All the time.’
‘I think about you,’ Evelyn confesses. To deny such a thing would be like denying the blood in her veins. ‘It’s just, my father is a minister.’
As soon as she says it, she knows how stupid it sounds, that she has surely diminished herself in his eyes, because he starts laughing. Not cruelly, but laughing, sitting up and wiping his crinkled eyes and shaking his black head. She feels all at once like a little girl, lying back on the bed; her flattened breasts a little girl’s breasts, her mind as prim and useless as a dollhouse. If she could fly from the room, from her body, she would. Yet all she can do is listen to Jim’s laughter and know it is her due; she’s a white girl with white-girl problems.
‘Don’t wanna be laying down with Daddy? That’s fair, that’s fair …’ Jim smirks down at her, then straightens his face. ‘Can’t say I didn’t anticipate this kind of resistance, honey. I just hoped you were, uh, more mature, more advanced than that. I guess that’s my mistake.’
Evelyn opens her mouth.
‘Oh, don’t apologize. That don’t do me no good. I love you … bitch. Nobody ever loved you so much as me, not even your daddy. Someday you’ll see that. But not today. I’m sorry, I miscalculated.’
Jim sighs and rises from the bed, and Evelyn is overwhelmed by dread: of being alone with herself, permanently unworthy. She sits up. Her hands are pale and empty. In a faint voice, she says, ‘Jim.’
‘Nothin’ you can say, baby. You ain’t ready.’ He takes his sunglasses from his shirt pocket. ‘Should probably get yourself together before Lenny-husband comes home. If I didn’t know better, I’d think: that’s a woman who’s just been screwed.’
Within a few minutes of Jim’s departure, Evelyn has her hair pinned up, a shawl on over her house-dress, the photo box stowed away, the bed remade. She stands at the edge of the room, touching her lips and trying to grasp the enormity of the situation. Did he really say ‘I love you’? Did he really call her a bitch? Are they really both married to other people? Is she free or not free?
All these things, Evelyn considers, before bursting into tears.
7.
If the phone rings once after midnight, she is to go into the kitchen and wait for it to ring again. Usually, it rings within the next five minutes, but there are nights that test her faith — twenty minutes, thirty. On these nights, she stands motionless, observing the moon over the backyard, afraid of doing anything more lest she wake her sleeping husband. And when the
call comes, she swiftly brings it to her ear and murmurs, ‘Hello,’ in a frail foggy voice like she has a cold, and waits for Jim to respond.
‘Mmmmmm. Evelyn. Tell me …’
He is counseling her. He has counseled others, in his time as a minister, though never under these circumstances. It is important that they remain objective. He does not trust them to speak in the flesh and not give in to temptation. To give in to temptation prematurely, Jim says, could be disastrous to her psyche, as well as her commitment to the Temple. Her commitment means more to him than their personal relationship, as much as he desires to see this relationship fulfilled on all levels.
Jim tells her that he needs her to be honest. Honest and vulnerable, ‘like with the Frenchman’. He knows vulnerability does not come naturally to her, that she is a woman who has never truly ‘been mastered’. He expects the process will be especially painful for her. He wants her to remember always that he loves her, and that nothing she reveals to him during these sessions can possibly change this.
‘Tell me ’bout the girl,’ Jim requests the first night they speak. ‘Tiny girl Evelyn.’
So she tells about the girl that she was: a bright, responsible girl with a nice smile for photographs and strangers, nice manners, clean clothes, clean hair, not a lot of imagination. A girl who was kind to her dolls and little sisters, who took genuine pleasure in keeping her bedroom neat, pleasing her parents and teachers, dressing up for church and school in saddle shoes, bobby sox, plaid skirts. She was a girl who never made up stories but liked when her parents read to her, as she liked reading to her sisters when she was old enough. She liked the fairytale worlds: green jungles, purple mountains, vast oceans, the triumph of good over evil. Life seemed full of good things, an essential optimism, until she was in junior high and suddenly it wasn’t.
‘What happened to you, baby?’
It wasn’t anything that happened. It wasn’t anything that was said or done. It was just as if she woke up one day and her skin was thinner, the world sharper, all the wind knocked out of her. She took to crying privately about things she had no control over — the Holocaust, Hiroshima, slavery, genocide. She stayed back after classes and asked questions of her teachers that caused them to praise her sensitivity. She felt instinctively that this praise was false, that they were missing the point. One week, IQ tests were done, and the results were read aloud and there were gasps when it came to her own; this, too, seemed false, filled her with a grand sense of injustice.
‘You didn’t feel you deserved it.’
‘I never felt I was intelligent, in any way that mattered. I was never good enough.’
‘And Mommy-Daddy? What they say ’bout that big IQ?’
Not much, but they must have noticed the change in her. She remembers a lot of hushed discussions, displays of warmth, encouragement, hugs. She remembers crying facedown on her bed and her father sitting beside her, consoling her. There is shame in this memory. After that, she remembers going places with her father — a retirement village, an orphanage, a home for amputees — and feeling gradually stronger. She turned thirteen and became more self-conscious about hugging her father, even brushing her arm against his, but she was proud of what a good man he was, found him brave and true and handsome in his clerical robes, loved him.
‘I loved him too much. I guess I always knew that.’
Jim lets her cry. She tries to be brief and quiet about it, but cannot get rid of the feeling of constraint in her chest. ‘You’re doin’ good,’ he soothes her. ‘I thank you for your honesty.’ He asks her to speak more about the love that was too much.
She loved her father more than she felt was right. That’s all. She developed breasts and underarm hair and grew to her adult height of five feet, three inches. There was a pressing need to distance herself from her father, physically and mentally. Boys liked her; this helped. Girls liked her, listened to her, elected her president of various clubs; this helped, too. She was independent, vocal, never cried in front of her parents again, knew how to argue and intimidate others with her intellect. She challenged her father about religion and, while never having the courage to declare herself an atheist at his table, made it known that she did not think the Methodist Church was the pinnacle of morality.
‘Tell me, honey … Was rejecting God just a way of rejecting Daddy?’
Evelyn considers the moonlight, the silence like a coin dropped down a bottomless well.
‘To be honest, I think I stopped believing in God the day I stopped believing life was a fairytale.’
Night after night, they trot ‘tiny girl Evelyn’ into the dark kitchen, have her smile her bunny-toothed smile and pirouette, and then rob her of her innocence. Sex is something they must discuss in her presence, but also things like sex — self-pleasure, suicidal thoughts, the general desire for oblivion. ‘How old were you, baby, when you started …?’ Eight or nine. ‘What did you think about?’ Oh … men. Men’s hands. Men’s shadows. The looming presence of a man above or behind her. ‘Were you ashamed?’ Not ashamed, really. She knew that it was private, a thing only for alone in her bedroom after dark, but really it felt too good to be ashamed of.
Jim is pleased to hear this.
Jim wants her to talk about her misery, so she tells him about Elliot Goldberg, the gloomy Jewish boy she dated as a high school junior. She tells him how Elliot’s gloominess appealed to her, how they spent hours talking about the Eichmann trial, Babi Yar, Mengele’s experiments, dark and tortured regions of the human soul. She tells him how sometimes she felt flashes of what might be termed ‘anguish’, ‘anarchy’, ‘absurdism’, and would soothe herself by contemplating the shelf of household poisons. Yet she never did anything more, couldn’t justify the selfishness or the pain it would cause her parents, or perhaps was just too attached to her privileged existence.
‘I’m glad you’ve thought about it, baby. Shows you serious ’bout life.’ Jim’s voice is tender, understanding. ‘But the only reason to lay your life down is if something’s worth dyin’ for. Anything else, that’s self-indulgence.’
He has her tell him about the boys and men — too many to count on one hand, though not so many that it takes all of two. She tells about Percy, the faceless boys and men after him. She tells about the middle-aged businessman when she worked at that hotel in the summer of ’64, how strange it was to be accosted in her boyish bellhop uniform, how she felt like Joan of Arc stripping naked for him, how she had given his twenty-dollar tip to a panhandler. ‘You liked that?’ Jim asks about certain things she tells him, and if his voice registers mild astonishment at times, he quickly covers it up by talking about ‘ass-fucking’, telling her she’s anal retentive and will need to be fucked up the ass at least once if she’s to become a better human and socialist.
She tells about Jean-Claude, in more detail than she has before. How, though it was she who broke it off, she’s never gotten over the sense of having been wronged by him; of having revealed herself too much, without truly being seen. How she still thinks from time to time of what might’ve been, if Jean-Claude had seen her a little more clearly, cherished her more, fought harder for her. How she had lugged her suitcases dutifully to Switzerland, Italy, Spain, in the weeks immediately after the breakup, realizing only later that she had been hoping he would turn up somewhere, had, in fact, been expecting him to come after her; slowly coming to terms with the fact that he would not.
‘All sisters gotta learn someday, men only care ’bout what’s right in front of them.’ Jim hums sympathetically. ‘Course, I can’t live that way. I see everything, darlin’.’
Sometimes they are not completely objective. Sometimes, talking about sex, he gets carried away telling all the things he’d like to do to her and she says, ‘Oh,’ in a small startled voice, and he says, ‘Don’t play so fucking innocent.’ Sometimes he cusses at her for whole minutes at a time, and she doesn’t know whether to weep or to moan
with gratitude. Once, for reasons unclear to her, he becomes infuriated, tells her he can’t deal with a bitch like her always intellectualizing everything, and hangs up the phone. She waits for him to call back, but he doesn’t, and so in her forlornness she goes to the bedroom and tries to make love with Lenny, but it’s hopeless — there’s only one man for her.
Jim knows, in his mysterious way, about her going to Lenny, and the next time they speak, he tells her he would prefer if she were celibate. He tells her he hasn’t slept with Rosaline in seven years, and that a similar vow on her part could bring them closer.
They talk about her beliefs: her atheism, her Marxism, her existentialism. He tells her, ‘That’s all nice and sophisticated, honey, but there’s things beyond that. I mean, things like destiny.’ He asks her how she feels about past lives, reincarnation, and she tells him she doesn’t know, honestly has never given it much thought. ‘I only mention it, sweetheart, because I cherish your soul. Beyond this life. And, uh, I can’t help feeling, we got unfinished business. Last time we were together, see, you died too soon.’ He wants to know if she’s willing to go back with him, way back, and she says yes, she will go, anywhere, as far as he can take her.
‘Close your eyes, sweetheart.’
He does things with his voice, low dark things that make the air tremble and the spaces within her widen like pools of rain. She knows that she is in the kitchen, holding the phone, yet also that there are other places she could be, and when he asks her to tell him what she sees, she says, ‘A cold place.’ When he asks her what she’s doing, she says, ‘Traveling somewhere,’ and then, after considering the rocking motion within her, ‘I am on a train.’ He asks where she is going and she tells him, ‘Where the people are.’ What people? ‘The people, the workers.’ She tries to elaborate on the fluttering feeling in her chest and says, ‘I am not alone,’ and also, ‘Something is going to happen when we reach the station.’ He asks if he is with her and she says yes. He asks if she is a woman.
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