Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  They went everywhere. Dinner first and then the subways, although as time wore on, they skipped going out to dinner and went right down into the mouth of the Fifty-ninth Street station. She loved the hot summer dankness down there, the smell of grime and urine. They bought handfuls of stale peanuts and little miniature boxes of Chiclets from vending machines on the support pillars. They ate candy bars for dinner. They hardly talked to each other, which was okay too. Most of the time Carole just felt free. She would stand before the subway map, shut her eyes, and jab a finger somewhere. Jeremy would check his notes to see if they’d already done it, and if not, off they’d go. Whatever she wanted to do, he would do it too. By early July they’d done every mile of every line. “But we haven’t been stopping,” Carole said, not wanting it to end. “We’ve only ridden.” He was more than willing to stop everywhere, and she had the sense that he too was a refugee from home, killing time until dental school started again in the fall.

  They stayed out later and later, getting off at every stop. When she came in, at two or even three in the morning, her parents would be in bed and the lights would be out. But she sensed that they’d been waiting for her, that they’d turned out the lights and fled to their bedroom only moments before she came in, alerted by the sound of the elevator. Her parents the mice.

  Nothing was ever said in the clear light of day about the lateness of her nights with Jeremy Lyon. They’d have been troubled if they’d known where she was going, so she took the offensive, offering freely the names of places they’d gone for dinner and what she’d had, lies her parents eagerly believed. And when it seemed that they didn’t believe something, she tilted her head and looked at them in a way that said: You wouldn’t understand. It was their vulnerability, and she knew it. Particularly her mother’s, this sense that Carole had already journeyed beyond them. Carole tried not to use the tactic too often because afterward she felt bad. But if it helped to secure the brittle distance, then it was of value.

  What she loved from her nights with Jeremy was the excitement of going up the subway stairs in a new place, the way her heart raced not knowing what they’d find. It might be a neighborhood of people and vendors and light or a wasteland of asphalt and tenement houses. Her father would have a fit if he knew.

  Early one morning in late July they were sitting in a subway in Brooklyn. The car was empty except for the two of them. She’d been thinking a lot about the summer and about Jeremy and how easy it was to be his friend. How at first she’d gone with him to get away from home, and now it was just so natural. But something kept nagging at her about him. “Why did you think I’d hate you?” she asked him. “Remember? That night at the Cloisters you said, ‘Don’t hate me.’” She’d thought he was going to say that he thought everybody hated him or his parents did or maybe that he’d done something awful. That really was what she hoped it was.

  “Because I’m not going to put the moves on you,” he said, raising his voice over the noise.

  “Oh.” That was a surprise. Not that he wouldn’t, but that he was saying it, that that was his big secret. “Okay,” she said. “But I don’t hate you.” Anyway, by now she didn’t even expect him to. She already knew he wouldn’t. Somehow.

  Jeremy faced her and said, “Because I’m not like other guys you’ve gone out with.”

  For a moment she thought he knew about Eddie, but one look told her no. It was something else. “Well, sure,” she said. “You’re already finished with college and going to be a dentist.” She was deliberately missing the point, trying to steer him away from saying whatever it was because he was scaring her a little.

  “Listen to me. I like guys.” Now he was looking at her, his large dark eyes unblinking.

  “You mean—”

  “Of course I mean.” He turned abruptly, staring out the train window into darkness, his misery plain even from behind.

  She didn’t know what to say.

  Jeremy swung back. “See? You hate me.”

  “No!” From the furious look on his face, she would have thought he was the one who hated her. But she knew he didn’t. He needed something from her. She didn’t know what it was, but the moment was now. “No,” she said again. “Please don’t think that, Jeremy. I don’t hate you.”

  He seemed to deflate. “I’ve never told anybody.” He laughed, but his eyes were tearing up.

  She strained to think of what she could say or do for him, something to hold out that would make him feel better. People needed that much. They needed comfort. She imagined if she had been the one to tell her secret to him and not the other way around. What would she need to hear? She reached up and stroked his cheek as gently as her fingers knew how. “You’re not alone,” she said, meaning herself. “You’ll be okay.”

  He gave her a smile filled with disbelief. “Not alone?” Like it was the dumbest thing a person could say. “If my dad finds out, he’ll kill me.” His chin trembled, and not from the moving train, but because he might cry, this grown man beside her. “You don’t understand,” he said, his look full of need.

  “I think I do,” she said. “But there are worse things, Jeremy. Much worse.” She was thinking that she could make his anguish disappear with her own. All she had to do was tell him about Rita and he’d be home free, his worry insignificant.

  “Like what?” he said, smiling with new hope. “Name one.”

  She looked down into her lap, at her hands. “It’s not like you killed somebody or anything,” she said as steadily as she could, raising her voice to make sure he heard. And then she waited. When he didn’t say anything, she looked up into his face, thinking now was her turn to face the music, but he was looking blankly, incredulously, at her.

  “Well, of course not,” he said, annoyance slipping into his voice at how far off the mark a person could be. “Jesus, Carole. I didn’t push anybody over a cliff. It’s not like that. You don’t understand, and I shouldn’t have told you.” He sighed miserably. “But it’s not your fault. I don’t blame you for trying.” She looked back at her hands, haunted by how close she’d just come, what she’d almost done. “Promise you won’t tell anybody, please, Carole. Please.” He took her hand and shook it as if to wake her up. “Don’t tell your parents. You promise?” His words made her shrivel inside.

  “No,” she said. “Of course not. Of course I won’t.”

  On a night in August so hot the heels of her shoes stuck to the pavement, she and Jeremy were on their way to Castle Clinton at the lower tip of Manhattan. They hadn’t spoken again about what he had said. He’d called her again the next day. She hadn’t been sure he would. And they’d gone train riding again, as if nothing had ever happened. That was how it was with certain secrets. So big you could only mention them once.

  The subway doors opened, and a rush of skinny people came in, filling up the train with their tie-dye, batik, and minis. They were like clowns at the circus, the way they plopped themselves in among the other passengers and struck up conversations. Carole and Jeremy had seats smack in the middle of the train, and four people surrounded them right away—two women in expensive hip-hugger pants and hair to their waist, one of the men in a buckskin vest and leather fedora.

  They were talking about a party—inviting everyone on the train to it. In the Village someplace. Great drugs, the woman cooed to Jeremy. Andy Warhol would be there.

  They passed a bottle of vodka around and offered it to Carole, who shook her head. One of the men turned and started speaking fractured Spanish to two young women on the same bench. The women snapped angrily at him, and he backed away.

  “We’re going to Battery Park,” Jeremy said, as though these people were owed an explanation. She imagined it was the way he must have felt with Shelly’s parents. “But I guess we could—”

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s just see.” She asked the man, “Andy Warhol? Honest?”

  “Maybe,” the woman said. “Edie Sedgwick for sure.”

  “Who’s that?” Jeremy whisper
ed to her.

  “Rich girl drug addict,” Carole said. She had read it in the gossip columns.

  “Oh,” Jeremy said. “Of course.”

  “We’ll just look,” Carole said. “See what’s happening. I’ve never been to one of these things.”

  They got out at Bleecker Street, and Jeremy noted it on his pad. A few other people from the subway came too—people like them, dressed in regular street clothes instead of weird getups. Now that they’d been recruited, nobody seemed to care if they came or not. They were more caught up in talking with one another and whacking one another on the behind and screaming. They came to a warehouse-looking place, somebody rang a buzzer, and the ground opened up. It was one of those dumbwaiter contraptions, with bells ringing to warn pedestrians about the sudden hole opening up in the sidewalk. A platform rose, and they all stepped on it and went down to the basement level, the hatch closing back over them. It smelled foul down there, the stench of something rotting. The light was low as they were rushed past a furnace and whole rooms full of metal garbage pails. Then a narrow staircase up four or maybe five flights of stairs. When the door finally opened, it was another world. Music so loud Carole could feel it in her teeth. Women were standing on platforms, naked except for G-strings, their bodies snapping like whips. The light was blue and white, streaking across the moving crowd. She held onto the back of Jeremy’s shirt as they made their way through. “You okay with this?” he screamed at her.

  “Sure,” she screamed back. “You?”

  He started to dance. They must not have danced at graduation, or she would have remembered this, the snaky way he moved his body, his eyes shut tight. He slid out of her view, hidden by the crowd, then reappeared, turned, and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her this way and that until they were at the edge of the crowd against a wall, where someone was screening pornographic movies. “Oh, man,” Jeremy said, staring up. Carole watched for several moments. They were too close to see much, the images too big to comprehend. “I’m going to find a bathroom,” she said. Jeremy nodded without taking his eyes from the screen.

  There was a row of urinals hidden behind a wall of corrugated green fiberglass, and some toilets separated into stalls but without doors. At the far end, a small woman was standing with her back to Carole. She was barefoot, her nylons in shreds at her ankles, holding her shoes. Carole ducked into one of the stalls. When she came out, the woman was gone.

  And so was Jeremy. The movies had stopped playing on the wall, and a mob of people had moved into the space where he had been. She looked out over the crowd of bobbing heads, cut by flashing lights. The room went black for several seconds, then the lights came up so bright she could hardly see. She started moving through the crowd. It was like being invisible. Nobody looked at her or moved out of her way. There had to be hundreds of people, and she wondered, with a flicker of fear, if she’d find Jeremy again.

  “I thought that was you.” The voice was loud, almost yelling, at her side. She looked down. “Naomi?” How was it possible? “What are you doing here?” Had she followed them? Was she being tricked? She recognized the clothes, the shoes she was carrying. Naomi had been the person in the bathroom. What was going on?

  Naomi fluttered her hands and pointed somewhere and said something about Elayne. “But what are you doing here?”

  “We got invited by people on the subway,” Carole shouted, then wished she hadn’t. It sounded pathetic.

  “We?” Naomi was drunk, weaving slightly.

  “Jeremy and me.”

  Naomi looked unsteadily out at the crowd. “I’m engaged,” she said. She waved her hand in Carole’s face, a giant diamond on her finger. “Baxter Oliver.” She laughed.

  Carole didn’t even know the name. “Who?”

  “Columbia Law. I met him on the bus.” She had to shout over the music. “Love at first sight. For him anyway, and that’s what’s important.” She sobered up. “Elayne practically wet her pants when I told her. She’s been dreaming of the day I get lost ever since she married Daddy. She’s doing everything in her power to make sure it goes through. That’s why we’re here. Elayne wants to impress Bax. She got us invited to this thing because Bax likes art. Some Warhol underling she knows from TV. She thinks these things are about art. Elayne’s such a loser.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Somewhere, yeah. Where’s yours?”

  Carole looked around the room for Jeremy, remembering the way he was dancing, not willing to have Naomi see that and make snide comments. She shrugged. “I was looking for him,” she said. Naomi would make mincemeat of him.

  “What about Eddie?” Carole had to ask.

  “He had an audition for this new play. Man of La Mancha. Didn’t get asked back. Happens all the time, poor guy.” Naomi had to scream at her to be heard.

  “I mean, do you see him anymore?”

  Naomi wrinkled her nose. “Eddie doesn’t see how my being married will be a problem.” She looked around. “He might even be here,” she said, losing her balance, spilling her drink. “He gets off on that. Being places where me and Bax are. Turns him on.”

  Carole quickly scanned the people around them, but the crowd was thick. Faces upon faces. Eddie could be anywhere. He could be watching at that moment. She had to find Jeremy and get out of this place. “I better go find my date,” she screamed over the music.

  She circled the outside of the room. Near the bathrooms, she caught a glimpse of Jeremy and drew closer. He was dancing with two men, gracefully, not touching, moving in that odd way, with his eyes shut and a smile on his face. He dipped and swooped like a child imitating birds, carried away. After a time he opened his eyes and saw her there. He gave her a private smile, and she pointed to her wrist. Mouthed the words, Can we go?

  He snaked over to where she was. “Why the hurry?”

  “There’s somebody here I don’t want to talk to,” she said.

  It took a while to find their way out of the building, and then Jeremy wanted to finish what they had started out to do—down to Castle Clinton and the Emma Lazarus Memorial and then to Essex and Delancey Streets and Herald Square. He didn’t talk about the party or about dancing with the two men. He went back to writing the places they went to in his little book.

  By the time she got home, it was almost light, the latest she’d ever stayed out. Jeremy waited with her until the night doorman let her in.

  When she got upstairs, the apartment was dark and quiet. She paused inside the door and heard nothing. Tonight there wasn’t even that ghost of her parents scurrying away. They must have gone to bed long ago, no longer interested in when she came in because in only a week she’d be gone. Still, she tiptoed down the hall, feeling her way along the walls. As she was about to turn left down the hall to her bedroom, she heard her father’s voice from the living room. “Is that you?”

  The living room was dark. She couldn’t see him, but she knew where he was from the sound of his breathing, coarse and irregular now that he’d been wakened. “Where have you been all night?”

  “Tavern on the Green,” she said quickly, regretting it instantly because this was a restaurant he knew.

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Yes, I was,” she said.

  “Not all this time. I had to call Jeremy’s mother,” he said. “Vulgar woman, his mother. I had no idea.” She could barely see him, but, oh, the voice. “Do you know what it is to be humiliated? To have to ask the wife of an associate where my own daughter is?”

  He turned on the light beside the chair. He was still dressed in his suit and tie, as if he’d just gotten home from the office. “The wife of an associate?” His hands shook in his lap. He got to his feet, looming over her. “Well?” he bellowed. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “We went to a party.”

  “A party,” he thundered. “At this hour? What party? Where?”

  “Everybody goes. All the girls.” It had worked before, this mystique about all the girls at
the Spence School.

  “I asked you where. I asked you what party. Whose party?” Her father was coming closer to her.

  “Naomi’s engaged to this guy. Baxter, that’s his first name. I forget the last. It was down in the Village in this old warehouse.” The lie had enough truth to sound convincing.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Well, it’s true.” If he wouldn’t believe it, she would. “Andy Warhol was there. Edie Sedgwick.”

  “Who in the name of Christ are they?”

  “Famous people.”

  Her father bellowed at her, “Do you know what she said?”

  “What who said?”

  “That boy’s mother. ‘Oh, Jesus, Conrad, I thought you knew.’” He did a shockingly cruel imitation of Jeremy’s mother. “‘It’s a different world today. What with the pill and all.’” He got to his feet, looming over her. “Oh, Jesus?” he thundered at her. “What with the pill and all? Well?” he bellowed. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Until right then she had thought Jeremy was telling his parents the same thing she was telling hers, making up vague stories about restaurants and nightclubs. But all along he’d been using her to reassure them that he was a regular guy. That Jeremy had told his parents they were sleeping together came as a big shock.

  “I’m waiting for an answer.” Her father wasn’t as loud now. “Well?”

  Everything cracked like glass inside her. She felt the tears well up and spill over. She began to sob for the first time since that night, but he wasn’t moved. “Out until all hours with no explanation. We never know where you are. I had to learn from that woman that you and her son are—that you’re taking the pill—”

  “But I’m not—”

  Before she had the chance to see it coming, the flat of his palm hit her so hard across her cheek, she sank to her knees on the carpet. He was standing over her, breathing loudly. She dared not move but stayed crouched where she fell, studying the dark pattern in the Oriental rug, a tufted blue line snaking through the burgundy.