Chez Cordelia

by Kitty Burns Florey

  I bought myself a slab of pizza and ate it on the Ferris wheel. The Ferris wheel was full of couples, mostly necking, and my seat creaked, and I couldn’t wait to get off. As I did, a tall skinny person with a red beard and long, scraggly hair put his hand on my arm. I expected him to say, “Any spare change?” but he said, “Delia. Delia, honey. I’ve found you.”

  It was Danny. He was eating an orange ice, in a paper cone, and he sucked at it, expressionless but for a faint grin, while I gaped. What stunned me most was not seeing him, so suddenly and after so long, but his appearance. He looked sick—every kind of sick: physical, mental, sick at heart, sick unto death. He looked like he needed a bath, a bed, a nurse, and about a million brewer’s yeast tablets. He kept his free hand around my arm; it was like a claw, and his fingernails were long, longer than mine, and yellow, and dirty. And there was a little parade of pimples across his cheeks. And he wore a filthy old rag of a sweatshirt that read PUNK across the front.

  I said, “Danny,” and found it was all I could say. I had known him since I was in first grade. I had fed his cat and eaten his cookies and coveted his life and baited his hooks and told him my dreams and made love with him and packed his lunch, but he was a complete stranger to me, and I could think of nothing to say to him.

  And there was nothing I wanted to say to him—not to this dirty, scrawny man with the long hair and the (it seemed to me) wild eyes. There was something dangerous and desperate about his eyes. He just ate his ice and watched me and I looked back at him. Neither of us spoke again until he’d sucked all the orange from the ice and thrown the rest of it on the ground. Then he said, “Let’s have a ride.”

  We got on the Ferris wheel when it stopped, and he took my hand and smiled at me, and it was—just for that little second—the old Danny.

  When he began to talk, the new Danny took over. The new Danny was brasher, aggressive, domineering. My Danny had been, above all, gentle—too gentle to hurt a worm with a hook, too gentle to fight in a war. And he had let me boss him; I never realized that until I saw how he’d changed. There would be no bossing this Danny—no controlling him at all. I looked into his wild eyes and saw what you might expect to see in the eyes of those horses who run wild on the western plains: desperation, a touch of craziness, and a powerful determination not to be broken to the saddle.

  That’s not what he said, though. He held my hand and talked, talked, talked. He was sorry he’d left me, he wanted us to be back together, he wanted to settle down, he was ready now, he’d had his little time—that was how he put it: “I’ve had my little time, Delia, but it’s over now, I’m back, and I want to start again.”

  I made him answer my questions, though in a way I no longer wanted to know those answers, having pondered them so long. He told me everything readily.

  “What was in the paper bag?”

  He had to think, then he remembered. “My lunch, of course.” The lunch I’d packed for him to take to work. I’d never thought of that, and I felt silly that it had been so unmysterious, and that I’d thought bombs, cash, a gun, dope.

  The rest of his explanations were equally reasonable. He’d left in his pajamas because he didn’t want to wake me by getting dressed. That had been the main thing on his mind, to leave without disturbing me, without having to face me and explain. He was half crazy, he said (and now he’s the other half, I thought to myself), he had to get away, he had to go off and think and pull his life together. His parents’ betrayal had unhinged him, he said, and I—I hadn’t helped. It was I who’d pushed him into that groove, I who’d forced the idea of Hector’s on him when he knew as well as his father did that the place had gone stale. It was I who’d kept him from getting ahead at the factory, who wouldn’t let him work nights, wouldn’t let him commit himself, wouldn’t let him give up the dream of owning the store, wouldn’t help him pull out from under his parents’ thumbs …

  I listened, stunned, while he made his flat explanations, analyzing himself and me and our marriage with the glibness of an Alan with a grudge. I kept wondering where he got it all—from some dropout therapist somewhere, some nut with a mission to bring psychotherapy to the downtrodden. The Ferris wheel carried us creakily up over the fair and down again and up. The sun was setting off in the distance behind West Rock, and the sky was orange and pink and purple, blazing. Down below I saw one of the men who’d offered to buy me a beer, the nice-looking one, with another girl. I saw Nina stop in her spacey wandering and scribble in her notebook. I took all this in, I felt my mind turn toward the scene—sun, sky, crowd, Nina—and away from the new Danny and his awful words. For—new and strange though he might be—the words, I saw, had truth in them. I’d forced him into that car that October morning. It was because of me that he wore this old sweat shirt, and let his hair get long and greasy, and had the look of a wild horse in his eyes.

  Later—days and weeks later—I thought over what he said to me and rejected it—or, at least, amended it (why had he let me run him? why hadn’t he talked to me about it? and what about our happiness? that wasn’t something I’d bossed him into, and it was real). But up on the Ferris wheel, with Danny’s grip on my hand and the seat swaying and squeaking, and the sun setting behind West Rock, and his voice going on and on and on, I drowned in the truth of it. His side of the story—like Juliet’s at the dinner table—rose up and grabbed me and pulled me under. The immensity of things scared me (crowds, sky, words), and I gasped out, as if the details were what mattered, “But who was driving the car?”

  Danny chuckled. “Oh, that was May.”

  “May?”

  “May Wyeth. You know. Ray Royal’s old girlfriend.”

  “May?”

  “Sure. May. I knew she was planning to split, so I asked her if I could hitch a ride to Texas.”

  “Texas?”

  “I figured Texas was about as far away as I could get.”

  Of course: Texas, where the wild horses were. And I had pictured Danny in, maybe, Meriden or Hartford. The Ferris wheel slowed and stopped. Danny bought us two more tickets and we went up again.

  “Ray never told me,” I said, remembering my instinctive distrust of him.

  “Why should he?” asked the new Danny.

  “Did Ray know you went with her?”

  “Are you kidding? Besides, I didn’t go with her. I just hitched a ride. She went with a guy named Whit.”

  Whit? “Tall, thin guy with a moustache? Black?”

  Danny laughed. “Hell, no. Whit’s just a little guy, with a bald head. And Irish.”

  Was he lying? Could all this be true? Had Danny been in Florida with his parents these ten months? In California with my parents? Working for the CIA? I felt for a moment like the hero of one of those movies who’s caught unwittingly in a web of conspiracy and can’t trust anyone.

  “May and Whit left me off in North Carolina. I decided I didn’t want to go all the way to Texas. North Carolina already seemed pretty far.”

  “And what did you do in North Carolina?”

  He became evasive for the first time—raised his eyebrows, turned down his mouth, and bobbed his head from side to side in a gesture that was new to me. “I managed.”

  “What do you mean, you managed?”

  But it was all he would say. He loosened his hold on my arm and stared out over the fair. His profile was the same—freckled and beautiful—and I wondered why I felt no tenderness for him.

  “Danny, you were gone almost a year,” I said finally. “What were you doing all that time?”

  “Getting along,” he said cryptically. “Same as anyone.”

  We were quiet while the Ferris wheel carried us up and over and down. The sky was dimming, the colors getting smoky. It was nearly dark.

  “What are you going to do now?” I asked as we stopped again.

  “I want to talk to you some more.” We got off and started to walk around. “I want to hear about you. I want to talk about getting back together. I’m different now. Things wou
ld be different now.” I saw that. “Better,” he added. I doubted it. I was glad to get my feet on the ground, to be down where the sky was less visible, where humanity pressed in on all sides. I felt safer there—though safe from what I couldn’t tell you—until I glimpsed Juliet and Alan at the ring-toss booth. Juliet looked glum, as if she’d been crying recently. Alan looked determinedly cheerful; he often said how he liked to get out and mix with the people, he felt it helped him in his work.

  I backed Danny away and around a corner. The last people I wanted to see just then were Juliet and Alan.

  “Let’s get out of here and go someplace else to talk,” I said. I had in mind a bar or a coffee shop. I spotted Nina and caught her arm. Danny lurked behind me. “Nina, I’ve run into an old friend—” I spoke low, lest Danny come up and indignantly insist on being properly identified. “We’re going out for a quick beer—is that okay with you? I’ll come back later and meet you?”

  “I think I’ll split anyhow,” she said. “I’ve watched it enough. Now I feel like writing it.” She grinned at me. “Any good quotes? Hear anything meaningful?”

  “Not really,” I said. “The sunset from the Ferris wheel—”

  “Yeah, I got that, thanks.” She had her writing gleam in her eye. I knew she would go home and make it all up on the typewriter, and it would be more like the street fair than the street fair itself. “Have fun,” she said, and then she leaned close to me and whispered, “Little did our heroine know when she left the fair early to have a drink with an old friend, that her life would be irrevocably changed from that moment,” and giggled. Nina was always saying things that began, “Little did our heroine know …” or “Who could have foretold …”—as if life were some sleazy book. I never liked her doing it—sometimes what Nina called wit I called plain silliness—but now her words made cold dread sit on me. My head began to ache, and as I watched her walk away toward where her car was parked I was actually on the verge of calling her back, of asking her to join us, to lend her safe, good nuttiness to the coming encounter between Danny and me. But of course I didn’t.

  “That’s my friend Nina,” I said sorrowfully to Danny.

  “Nice ass,” he said, silencing me. For a moment or two I debated seriously whether he could be some crude, filthy man impersonating my sweet Danny.

  He had a car, which surprised me, and we drove to Juliet’s apartment. It was his idea, but, thinking it over, I decided it would be best. I didn’t want to be seen with him—not without shame, I admitted this to myself. And I wanted to be on my own ground, where I could kick him out if necessary. If we went to a bar he could strand me there. I foresaw our talk as a battle that would end with one of us walking out on the other.

  It wasn’t quite like that. The first thing Danny wanted to do was take me to bed. I should have known that was on his mind, but it was so far from mine that he took me completely by surprise when he held me around the waist as soon as we got upstairs and said (panting from the four flights), “Where’s your bedroom?”

  I didn’t try to dissuade him. He scared me, and I pitied him, and he was my husband, once beloved. It seemed enough.

  But our coming-together was bad. Danny couldn’t get an erection—he was so nervous he whimpered. And when he did get one finally, with my help, he couldn’t keep it. He got just inside me and then slipped out again, limp, and during these clumsy and humiliating preliminaries, in spite of the fact that he needed a bath and that I no longer loved him, I found myself getting excited. I remembered Malcolm Madox and worried: have I sunk so low I can respond only to men who disgust me? Tears ran down my cheeks. I took his soft, cheesy penis between my palms and wept.

  “Come on, come on,” Danny kept saying, though whether he was instructing it to perform or me to do something about it, I don’t know. At any rate, I tried. I petted and coaxed and stroked. The only thing I wouldn’t do was take it in my mouth. I suppose that’s what he wanted, but I balked. (He smelled so bad, and Malcolm Madox had soured me on penises in general.) I was remembering, as if it were a previous incarnation (so misty and remote it seemed), the old days when Danny and I had approached, joyfully, all possible parts of each other from every possible angle.

  “Maybe we should just forget the whole thing,” I said finally, careful to keep the tears out of my voice. I suppose I said this at the wrong time. The words moved Danny to a frenzy of passion or fury, I wasn’t sure which. He pressed his naked body to mine violently, digging into me with his long nails, and thrust his poor penis between my legs, where, miraculously, it got hard enough to function. He worked it into me, frantically and with difficulty—our bodies were such strangers to each other. He pounded against me for a few seconds, and it was over. He sighed deeply and collapsed on my chest and then reached down to his pants pocket on the floor and dug out his cigarettes.

  My tears hadn’t stopped, not once, but I kept them silent. He was not the Danny I’d loved since I was a kid. I thought as we lay there, with the cigarette smoke drifting around us, that maybe that Danny had never existed anyway, except in my head. Maybe the old Danny had been this one all along, and my parents and my sisters and my aunt had seen him plainly. But I put the thought away in some mental closet and I have never taken it out again until now. It hurt me too much—it still does hurt me.

  Danny smoked and asked me questions. What had I been doing? What had I lived on? Did I still have my coin collection? Had I had any lovers since he left? Why was I with Juliet?

  I wiped my eyes on the pillowcase and told him everything, all except where I worked. I said I was unemployed, blushing and trembling in the dark at the lie. But I told him the truth about my descent into depression after he left, and my mother’s attempts to get me to go to college, and my job at Madox Hardware, and my kleptomania, and Malcolm’s blackmail, and my being fired. I told him about Alan’s health foods and Juliet’s oddness, but he interrupted me.

  “You’re not working now?” He sounded suspicious, and I wondered if he’d tracked me to Grand’mère, but I stuck to it. I told him I was living on my savings and looking for a job.

  He was silent for a while, and so was I. I pulled the sheet up over myself, and he pulled it down again, smiling in the dim light. I was afraid he had plans for more … I can’t call it lovemaking—more of what we’d just been doing, but he said only, “You don’t have to cover up. I’m your husband.”

  “I was just cold,” I murmured, edging the sheet up again.

  He let it stay. “Delia—” He inhaled enormously, and I wondered where he got the wind for it, after his ragged breathing at Juliet’s door; and, watching him lower the cigarette over the side of the bed (where he flicked the ashes on the floor), I saw what looked like sores and scratches on the inside of his arm, and my stomach dropped sickly. Needle tracks? I didn’t know, I’d never seen needle tracks. I tried to think: had his eyes been bright? pupils dilated? I didn’t even know what to look for. And I couldn’t ask him. I was afraid to. But it was a measure of his change, the new capabilities I sensed in him, that the idea of dope leaped instantly into my mind.

  “This guy Madox, the son—you never went to bed with him?”

  “Never!” I said indignantly—though, if I’d been pressed, I would have had to admit that the horrible Malcolm appealed to me only slightly less than Danny did at that moment.

  “You just jerked him off?”

  “Yes—please, Danny, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “What does this son of a bitch do, work for his father or what?”

  “He goes to college and works there on vacations.”

  “Damn college boys,” Danny said bitterly, and I wondered what in his ten months away had happened to inspire such vehemence. He used to idolize Ray, who’d gone to Yale. “And you never had anybody else?” he persisted. “No other guys?”

  “I told you, no,” I said. I wanted to get up and wash myself. I wanted him to leave before Juliet and Alan got back. I suppose I sounded impatient.

&nb
sp; “Don’t snap at me.”

  “Sorry,” I said shortly. To my horror, he began to cry. He lay on his back and sobbed, screwing up his face, and I could do nothing. I just watched him. His dreadful beard shook. I told myself: hold him, Delia, put your arms around him, let him cry on you. I remembered him crying over the prospect of having to kill people in the war. I made myself say, again, “I’m sorry, Danny,” and at the sound of my voice he stopped, sniffed long, and got out of bed with his cigarette.

  “I’ve got to go to the john.”

  I heard the cigarette hiss in the toilet, and then I heard him urinate. When he came back he began putting on his clothes, talking rapidly, with an odd cheeriness. “You don’t seem too anxious to get back together with me, Delia. Honey. But I’m ready to settle down, I’ve got a few projects on. I’m going to get in touch with my parents, make everything up, I hold no grudges. And I’m going to get a job, get some decent clothes—” He laughed, holding out his ragged sweatshirt before he slipped it over his head. “I’m going to start fresh.” He’d developed an arrogant little toss of his head, almost a tic. “The next time you see me I’ll be a new man.”

  “You’re a new man now,” I said. I got up and went down the hall to the bathroom.

  His voice followed me. “You wait,” he said. “You’re not going to believe it, Delia. I’m going to come and get you and you’ll be so impressed—you’ll be impressed out of your mind. Wait and see.”

  I took a clean washcloth and soaped it and washed myself, and then I brushed my teeth and splashed cold water on my face. “Just go—go!” I kept saying softly. The running water drowned out his voice. Juliet’s bathrobe was hanging from a hook, and as I put it on I heard the apartment door slam.