by Janet Capron
In the early morning, as the sun came up, we made love in a new way. Not exactly kissing tenderly, but sometimes into the act a gentle caress would creep. Someone might hold someone’s hand. We lay there with our faces pressed together, our eyes open, as if this were intimacy. Intimacy is torture, just as we had always suspected. Torture. To prove it, we lay there like that for hours at a clip.
Evelyn’s budget whorehouse was not far away. One weekday afternoon, when presumably business was even slower than usual, she decided to pay us a visit. She tracked us down at our local hangout, the Monterey Bar and Grill. She wore a sleeveless leopard-print sheath, which clung all the way to the middle of her calves, and gold sandals. Her toenails were bright red. So were her fingernails and lips.
She walked right past Eddie, who seemed not to notice, and over to where I sat at the end of the bar.
“You look awful, Janet. You look like you could get eighty-sixed from the women’s shelter. What did you let him drag you down for? Don’t you know any better than that by now? Never let a man take you down.”
“Hello, Evelyn, how’s tricks?” I said.
She sidled up close and put her arm around my shoulders.
“Janet, you and I used to be friends, sort of. I’m appealing to you now as a friend, capiche? As a friend. He’s no good for you.”
“Want a drink, old friend?”
“I didn’t come here to drink. Talk to me.”
“I love your son, Evelyn.”
She backed away as if she’d been slapped.
“You’re too old for him, Janet,” she screamed at me from the middle of the empty barroom. “Why don’t you leave him alone?”
“All right, Ev, darlin’, calm down,” Eddie said.
He took her by the arm and led her outside. Evelyn stood facing the sun, shielding her eyes and barking at Eddie. He turned and walked out of my view. I saw her chase after him. A few minutes later, he came back inside alone.
“She won’t bother us for a while.”
“What did you say?”
“I said she wasn’t going to get the chance to exploit your tender, little body anymore, that I was looking after you now.”
“Eddie, that’s kind of unfair. After all, your mother never really exploited me. She was good to me.”
“I told her I thought you were beautiful just the way you are, because I do. I told her to beat it.”
“You said that?” I asked, incredulous.
“Well, it worked, didn’t it?”
Eddie ordered another bottle of cold beer, then went over to the window, where he stood guard. The jukebox played on. It had a rich sound in the sweet silence of the vacant summer afternoon.
Still not yet ready to give up on her son, Evelyn sent her two emissaries. They appeared at our hangout on St. Mark’s Place the next afternoon. They were there, in fact, when Eddie and I arrived at the cocktail hour. It was one of those late-summer days when dirty clouds block the sun and every foul odor hangs undiluted in the thick air. Eddie was restless and probably looking for trouble, I thought. Except when he saw Michael with his sister, Ava, standing together by the jukebox, he stopped inside the door, pivoted on one boot heel, and walked back outside.
“Eddie!” his sister yelled.
He just shook his head.
He was gone. I remained on the spot, pulled in both directions. I watched Michael come toward me across the barroom floor. It had been two years. His stomach protruded a little more than before under the familiar off-white cowboy shirt that he wore with the shirttails loose. His temples were gray. Michael, my north star—Michael the überman set down among us for our possible salvation—Michael to whom I had always so freely gravitated—my other half! Well, perhaps not. He had lost the light. I compared—dared finally to compare—that punk outside with my old flame, and by God, I loved Eddie more. Eddie’s tight body, his streetwise prowl, those smoky eyes flickering with dark mischief—it really was Eddie. I turned to follow him. Just then, Michael reached my side and grabbed my arm.
“Janet, you know you’re killing yourself.”
I shook his hand away and kept moving.
Eddie and I waited behind the window of the secondhand record store across the street. We watched Michael and Ava come out and look around, presumably for us. Finally, they turned and began to walk west. They were both so tall. Ava in profile looked serenely beautiful, her dark hair pulled back in a luxurious ponytail. Then I saw Michael, in a few quick steps, scoot around her to be next to the curb. He was protecting her. They fell into an easy stride. I thought of how, in contrast, when we walked down the street, Eddie seemed always on the verge of pulling away. But I had chosen now for good. I watched Michael and Ava disappear in the St. Mark’s Place crowd, after which Eddie and I went back inside our gin mill, and I quickly got drunk.
Then right after Labor Day, which Eddie and I had celebrated by getting particularly ripped, my mother wrote to me with a proposition. I think she could smell my misery. It must have wafted all the way uptown to the Park Avenue co-op. She offered to take me away to Montauk for a week or maybe even two. Under other circumstances, even circumstances like the Mohican in summer with its Gramercy Park illusion of a breeze, I might have had the character to refuse. You don’t just desert your lover to go off with your mother, become her not-so-well-paid companion when it suited her. A lover is a grown-up, respectable thing to have, while a mother is not. But she had a hook: hotel reservations by the ocean.
At nine in the morning, an old Cadillac limo pulled up in front of our storefront on Sixth Street. Little children scattered like pigeons, while the elderly men on the stoop at the end of the block turned their heads in the direction of the car, watching its slow progress until they were sure it was not a politician coming to disturb them in the sun. The chauffeur, dressed in a tight light brown uniform, his tie loose, came around and opened the door in an absentminded way, looking off across the street, as if the whole charade were beneath him. Maggie climbed out, wearing a long fake-denim cotton shirt over lavender pants, big, thick prescription sunglasses, and old-lady sandals. She tossed her head and looked up and down furtively, as if she expected beggars or muggers, or both, to leap on her from the sun-drenched doorways.
I stood at the encrusted window and watched her. When had my mother decided to become old?
Behind me, Eddie lay asleep on the other side of the musty old curtain surrounding our bed. The night before, he had helped me pack. He even washed out some underpants for me and hung them over the tub. He was so jealous of my beach trip that the feeling had collapsed, imploded, into one of abject self-sacrifice. He certainly did not blame me. It was every man for himself in this world. He would have done the same thing. In fact, he would go to visit his own mother out on City Island. He would swim in the bay there. He would think of me every minute. He would get by somehow.
“Don’t screw around,” he said. “Promise me, Janet. Even you can be faithful for two weeks.”
“Oh, I promise, I promise. I’ll miss you like crazy,” I said, covering him with kisses.
But I felt like someone who was about to be sprung. I thought of Maggie as my savior come to lift me up from Hades, to rescue me from Pluto and his red-hot underground. I watched this unlikely knight of mine in her fake blue-jean-blue shirt with its incongruous ruffle and her clunky open-toed sandals swagger up to my door. She banged against it.
“I thought we agreed you would be waiting for me out on the street. You know this neighborhood makes me nervous,” she said as soon as I let her inside.
“It occurred to me you might want to see where I live.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
She did look around, though, her eyes squinting in the dark. She pulled back the curtain. “Oh, hello, Eddie,” she said.
He turned under the sheet. His morning hard-on poked up through it. “Hi, Maggie, what time is it?” he said, rubbing his eyes like a little boy.
“Time for us to get moving. Come on
, Janet, where’s your suitcase? Let’s go. The chauffeur is waiting out there.”
“Say hi to the chauffeur for me, Maggie,” Eddie said, turning his face to the wall.
I leaned over and kissed him. He grabbed me with one arm.
“Don’t cheat,” he said.
End of the Line
And I planned to be faithful. It was all I could think about for at least the first hour. Gliding past streets of stunted row houses and out onto the open highway next to Maggie in the backseat, who rattled on and on about how much the trip was costing her—the motel, dinners for two, and so on—I dreamed out the window about Eddie. The hangover had sanded my nerve endings to an extravagant pitch. I felt wave after wave of tender pity for him as I pictured him lying back there, under a sheet, in our hot box.
Once the car started hitting the potato fields, however, the specter of a drained and sweltering Eddie began to pall. Almost alone on the road on this weekday morning, we drove through the small resort towns on the South Fork, where big, fat oaks and glamorous copper beeches were planted at considered distances. On the central greens, willows dipped into the still ponds. Hedges and flowering bushes set off gabled, freshly painted houses. Maggie lit a cigarette and opened her window. Air swept in, gala fresh. She asked the silent chauffeur (whom she had tried to engage in conversation earlier, but who had cleverly refused to bite) if he would mind turning off the air-conditioning. Reluctantly, apparently against his principles, he obeyed. A sweet breeze blew against our faces. I began to feel prodigal. Why had I forsaken the bourgeois life? Order, refinement, design. By this time, I couldn’t stand to think about that melting asphalt netherworld and that pale, blank-eyed loser sunk in his circle of hell. He reminded me of those transparent animals, the ones with no coloration at all, who live in the heart of caves. My stomach heaved with disgust. I was free now, returned to my world.
Maggie shifted around in her seat. Silences made her nervous, suspicious. She felt conspired against. I could tell that she was casting about for some topic.
“Did Eddie get a job yet?” she asked me.
Of course, Maggie couldn’t care less whether Eddie worked. In her moral lexicon, work for work’s sake didn’t count as a virtue. Blue-collar outdoor kinds of occupations blurred as one. Besides, Eddie had been job-hunting since the day we met. It was a rhetorical question.
“Let’s agree right now not to talk about my love life,” I said.
“Why, you two breaking up?” Maggie asked.
“No, no, but the subject just gets us going,” I said.
“What is there to talk about? Everything I bring up is taboo. No matter what I say, you fly at me.”
“That’s because you’re always looking for a way in, a way to get to me. Let’s just stick to impersonal things, you know, like the trees, the beach, what’s on Masterpiece Theatre, stuff like that.”
“I don’t see what’s so personal about wanting to know whether Eddie’s working or not. Seems like a pretty ordinary question to me.”
“Forget it, OK?”
“Fine. We won’t talk at all then. We’ll just pass the days like the Dominicans. It’ll be good for the soul,” Maggie said, turning to look out the window.
Perfect circles of sweat had formed under the arms of the chauffeur in his miracle-fiber short-sleeved leisure shirt. He carried all four bags at once up the flight of stairs, where he deposited them just inside the door of our motel room. Maggie pulled her usual routine of “Just wait a second! I have to find my purse,” followed by endless rummaging until she located her wallet, then the long examination of its contents, the fingering of money, the contemplative look. Finally she tipped him—not enough, I thought.
It was a snazzy motel room, the kind at the time I liked best. All-American, with no individual character to intrude on the tactile experience of comfort: two queen-sized beds, a twenty-one-inch color TV on a swivel stand, a refrigerator, and a terrace overlooking the ocean.
I wanted to go out right away, have a beer, swim. Maggie insisted that I unpack first. She pulled off the bottom part of the hotel hangers and threw them on my bed.
“Now you do this or you can go back on the next train,” she said.
“All right, I’ll go back on the next train,” I said.
“That’s fine. I don’t know why I brought you here. You’re not fit company anymore anyway. Help me with this bag, will you? I can’t lift it,” she said, dragging her big suitcase across the room.
I did that, also helping myself to ten dollars out of her wallet. It had not eluded me for one minute that I needed a drink. I put on my bikini, which didn’t look half bad since I had sweated all the bloat away on Sixth Street, and covered it with one of Maggie’s beach jackets, the one with pockets. I excused myself and split, before she had a chance to object.
We both used to love the ocean, but ever since Maggie’s eyes went bad, she preferred to swim with her glasses on and her head above water in the motel pool along with the little kids. I walked across the street to the beach by myself, where I dove under the surf and swam parallel to the shore. I had the energy of an escaped convict.
Later that afternoon, I found myself sitting in a dark bar looking hard at where my life had gone. I couldn’t exactly blame Eddie. I knew, I took comfort in the fact, that he had never sunk so low before either—not on a day in, day out basis. We were like spelunkers. That’s what I told myself, spelunkers exploring the depths. I couldn’t leave him any more than you could leave a partner dangling from a stalactite under the earth. Nevertheless, something had to give.
Sometimes you throw your hands up in despair and it works, which was probably why Maggie seemed undeniably cheerful when I walked into the room. She was getting ready to go out to dinner. It was as if the question of whether she would be eating with me were beside the point. I was safely peripheral now.
“You’re home early,” she said.
“I thought we had a date for dinner,” I said.
“Since when did that matter to you?”
“Well, I’m here aren’t I?”
“And you’re drunk again, just like every other day so far this week. So what?” she said, arranging a white silk shawl over her shoulders. The skin sagged under her arms. I wanted to tell her to keep that shawl around her. She was wearing a sundress underneath it with one of those built-in bras that stands up by itself.
“I’m not drunk,” I said.
“Hurry up and put on some clothes if you want to eat,” Maggie said.
My impressionable mother never forgot the book she read years ago on the subject of alcoholism, the one that counseled the wives of alcoholics not to enable their spouses. This meant that she could contemplate leaving Rayfield in good conscience. To stay would be to enable him. It was a new idea at the time. She fitfully resumed the studied air of detachment she had learned from the book whenever it occurred to her. I recognized the old ‘you can’t get to me’ attitude. Forced as it was, it had its effect.
I went to the closet and pulled out a cotton dress that I had found at the Goodwill. It smelled like its previous owner, but I didn’t mind. The previous owner was obviously wealthy, and her odor was that of a cautious, contained woman. A kind of subdued sweat smell. Probably better than mine, I thought. This dress made me feel beyond reproach. It was seersucker, with its own real leather belt and little capped sleeves, which made me feel coltish and inspired me to assume poses. I stood at the mirror over the desk next to Maggie and applied lipstick in a very controlled way, only reeling slightly.
“I’m ashamed to be seen with you,” Maggie said.
“Ditto,” I said.
“What have you got to be ashamed of? I’m not drunk,” she said, gazing into the mirror and yanking up her bosom by the straps of her shiny cotton sundress.
“No, but you look tacky and that’s worse,” I said.
“Thanks. Thanks very much. Just for that you can sit here and starve for all I care. Or go back to those bums in the saloon. I’v
e had it with you,” she said, picking up a hairbrush, then slamming it down. Maggie was really pissed now, shaking with anger.
Naturally, I immediately felt the old remorse. It was as though I had spoken for the sole purpose of reminding myself of what heel I was. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it,” I said.
“What’s so tacky? The dress? It’s just a sundress. Everyone wears them out here. It’s comfortable.” She was smoothing the front of it, looking down at herself. “Is it that awful?” she asked.
“Of course not. Don’t pay any attention to me. Plus which, as you so wisely pointed out, this is Montauk. What could be more appropriate?”
Maggie stared at herself in the mirror, sucked in her cheeks, her stomach, and then threw back her head. “Not bad for an old girl,” she said.
We walked away from the ocean, down the main road that led to the harbor. The land was so flat it created the illusion that the house lights in the distance were far below us. It was dark on the road. Maggie made me take her hand because she had night blindness. Even though we were walking on a sidewalk, she was afraid of tripping and falling and, for all she knew, being left there on the pavement to die. So she clung to my limp hand as cars flashed their brights, illuminating this spectacle of two women who looked like stumbling refugees fleeing from a war-ravaged town.
“Stop walking so fast. You know I can’t see,” she said, squeezing my hand until it hurt.
“Would you loosen your grip, please? What do you think, that I’m going to run away and leave you out here? You’ve got all the dough, remember? And I’m hungry,” I said.
She relaxed immediately and chuckled. “That’s right, isn’t it?” she said. “I know I’m safe with you as long as you need something.”
To the left, a lake shimmered, reflecting the twinkling lights that were hanging from the branches of the trees. We turned off the main road and gingerly made our way along a sandy path to the Grey Swan Inn. There was a half-hour wait. The main room was packed with tables like a dining hall in a dorm. Babies in high chairs were screaming at their mothers in their lobster bibs. I suggested we go to the bar, a relative oasis. Strangely enough, Maggie was receptive to the idea. It was agreed that I could have one drink there and then only a carafe of wine with dinner.