I spent more time with Cliff than at my apartment. After school we would drive old roads in the cream puff Volvo to see springtime, and at his apartment we’d have martinis and I’d cook supper and we would correct papers and talk about my lesson plans and watch reruns on television. Sometimes I eventually went home, but I stayed the night often enough to buy a separate supply of necessities: in his bathroom now were my hairbrush and comb, my face cream and body lotion and powder and lipstick and eye makeup and toothbrush and deodorant and razor, and even my Tampax.
Cliff solemnly opened the box of Tampax and took out the directions. He read aloud, “If you’re a new user of Tampax, let me help you!”
I said, “I always wonder where they think we’ll put it if they don’t tell us. In our ear?”
On the Tuesday nights when I had my class he took me to Durham and waited the two hours in the library, reading. On Friday nights we went to the drive-in theater which showed skin flicks. On Saturdays I did both our laundries in the brand-new laundry room in the apartment building, and he took first my car and then his to the automatic car wash. I gave him a banjo concert. We had suppers of the fried shrimp appetizer, and virtuously nothing more, at the Chinese restaurant. On Sundays we went for Sunday drives and had Sunday dinners of ice cream cones at the UNH Dairy Bar. We never went to the ocean.
But the first Saturday in May I had been with Kaykay and Grace. In Grace’s car, because it was the most comfortable, we drove to the Jordan Marsh in Maine. The Bridal Salon was very intimidating, with long mirrors and fragile furniture, and the elegant clerk was intimidating also, except not to Kaykay, who, her usual brisk self, scrutinized the sample dresses, interrogated the clerk—“Chantilly lace,” they said to each other, “bishop sleeves, lantern sleeves, bell skirt, chapel train”—and chose a lacy gown that seemed to me so unreal it might be something I’d dreamed of in my childhood, a storybook gown.
All the samples were size ten. Round and round the room, a parade of white and pastel gowns, brides and bridesmaids, all the same size.
With Grace, the authority, as consultant, we chose bridesmaids’ gowns of soft yellow—“lemon organza,” said Grace and Kaykay and the clerk. In the dressing room, I thought that at least this dress seemed more familiar, somewhat like the “formals” I’d worn, escorted by David, to high school proms and to fraternity dances at Brompton, although most of those had been strapless dresses with net stoles which puffed out around your shoulders. David in a dinner jacket. I could almost smell gardenias.
I didn’t fit the gown; I am size seven.
Grace and I ordered ours, and Kaykay ordered one for her sister who would be matron of honor, and then, while Kaykay and the clerk were discussing veils, I looked over and saw Grace staring at the wedding gown Kaykay had chosen. Grace’s hands were clenched, a muscle jumped in her jawbone, and her face was as white as the lace.
When we got home, I drove to Cliff’s, and we sat in the wicker chairs on his porch and drank our martinis. The smell of lilac bushes was hot and purple and achingly sweet.
I had to be with him, I couldn’t be alone. For now that I knew where David was, if I were alone I would drive to Pleasantfield to see the school where David taught and the place where David lived, and maybe, maybe see David.
This Friday night, however, we didn’t go to a skin flick. We had supper, and then I came back to the apartment to help Grace, while Kaykay was at Bob’s, write out the invitations for the bridal shower we were giving Kaykay. We finished by nine thirty. I made ham and Swiss cheese sandwiches for the picnic Cliff and I would have tomorrow when we went fishing in North Riverton, and Grace and I discussed the food and drink to serve at the shower. Grace was very knowledgeable about showers, so, although I preferred the idea of straight booze and canapés, I eventually agreed with her on fruit punches, hard and soft, and little sandwiches and cakes.
Then we each had a scotch and watched some of Bracken’s World, and then Grace took a sleeping pill and went to bed. I bathed, put on a nightgown, made another drink, turned out all the lights, except the lamp on the bedside table, and got in bed to begin rereading The Old Man and the Sea. My turn had come to have the copies of the book for one of my freshmen classes, and I must start teaching it next week. I opened it.
There was a loud splintering bang in the living room. I spilled my drink on the bedclothes, and when I looked up a man was standing in my doorway.
He said, “I’m going to fuck you. I’m going to give you a fucking like you never had.”
This wasn’t happening.
He said, “I’m going to fuck you like you’ve never been fucked.”
I was freezing, I was sweating. An ice cube melted against my leg. Very carefully I put the book on the bedside table and got out of bed.
I said, “Would you like a drink first?” My voice was shaky, but it was a voice. “You made me spill my drink.”
He kept looking at me, and I realized how short and how transparent the nightgown was. The Levi’s I’d been wearing were lying on Kaykay’s bed. I reached slowly for them and slowly began to put them on.
He said, “I’m going to fuck you.”
Grace, I thought, should I yell at Grace, tell her to lock her door, to go out her window for help? She wouldn’t hear me, she’d taken that sleeping pill. What about the other people in the other apartments, would they hear? I tried to see the man’s face, but the hall was dark.
I tucked in my nightgown and zipped the fly of the Levi’s. I said, “Why don’t I get us a drink?” Hopeless, hopeless, helpless, helpless, why in God’s name didn’t I take a karate course instead of Analysis of Teaching? Teaching. I assumed a stronger teacher’s voice than I ever used and said firmly, “We’re both going to have a drink, and I do hope you’ve got some cigarettes because I would like one,” and walked toward the door in much the same way I used to walk into elementary school battles when I was a kid, holding myself rigid, my eyes open but blind.
He stepped aside and I walked into the living room.
He said, “Don’t turn on the lights.”
I headed for the kitchen. There were knives in the kitchen. No. He’d get the knife away from me and kill me as well as fuck me. I said, “How on earth can I make the drinks without a light? Don’t be ridiculous,” and the telephone rang.
I was close enough to it to pick it up immediately, before he could tell me not to.
“Hello, Emily, this is Cliff. You’re up, I was afraid I’d wake you, but I couldn’t keep from calling. I miss you.”
“Yes,” I said.
The man stood uncertain, watching me. I was beginning to be able to see that he was younger than I’d thought, maybe twenty-five or so. His jacket and trousers were dark; he wore desert boots. Who was he?
Cliff was saying, “There’ll be mayflowers at the brook, I’ll show you where the mayflowers are.”
“Yes,” I said.
There was a pause. Then he said, “Emily, is something wrong?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to come over? Right now?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus God,” he said and hung up. I listened to the dial tone.
The man said, “Come on, we’re leaving.” He seized my arm.
“All right,” I said, twisting loose, talking very fast, “I’ll come with you, but I’m not going anywhere with all this goopy cream on my face, what would people think? I’ll just go clean it off and put on a shirt,” and I walked into the hall, opened Grace’s bedroom door, stepped in, and locked it behind me.
“Grace. Grace, wake up. Please.”
She didn’t. I shook her hard and still she didn’t, and I looked at the door and thought frantically, if he can break the living room door he can break this. Should I stay here with Grace or should I get out, is he after me in particular or any girl? Grace slept with the window closed, and the room was warm and smelled serenely of face cream and sleep. What should I
do, what should I do? I slammed open the window. Thank God, the windows were new; I never could work old ones. I sat on the windowsill, swung my legs over, and jumped down.
The nighttime landscape of rubble, the silent empty trucks looming like monsters.
I ran across the newly seeded lawn and hid behind a pile of cinder blocks. From the swamp behind me thousands of spring peepers shrilled in pulse beats as fast as mine.
The people in the other apartments must have gone to bed, for their windows were dark, all except one which showed between curtains the blue light of a television screen. A car started up somewhere and drove off. I peeked out, but it was too far away for me to see more than its headlights merging into the other headlights on the road that became the Miracle Mile.
Then another set of headlights drove in, very fast, and I saw the familiar Volvo shape. I ran toward it, the car stopped, Cliff leaped out and grabbed me.
“Emily, what’s going on?”
“Some guy broke in, I think he’s gone now, a car drove off.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“You wait here.”
So I waited while he went into the building, and I tried to slow my breathing.
“All right,” he called. “He’s gone.”
The living room door was ripped open.
Cliff said, examining it, “These goddamned flimsy new buildings. Emily, your feet are bare, you’ll catch your death.”
“Better than a fate worse than,” I said, and started laughing and shaking. Cliff put his arm around me and held me against him as we walked into the kitchen. He began making drinks.
“Is Grace okay?” he asked.
“Oh, God, she’s locked in, I locked her door and went out her window,” I said, and started laughing again. “I’d better come back in her window.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Well, she slept through all this, so I guess she’ll sleep through that.”
“Did you know the guy? What did he look like?”
“It was dark, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before. Noticed him, anyway.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He said he was going to fuck me. He was rather tiresomely repetitious about it.” I took the glass he gave me; the ice rattled loudly when I tried to drink. “Was he after me, and if he was, how’d he know I live here? Has he been watching me in some store or something, did he follow me?”
“He wasn’t a student?”
“No, he was older.”
“I think you should call the police.”
I opened a cupboard and swiped a pack of Salems from Kaykay’s carton. We lit cigarettes; he looked up the number of the police station for me and dialed and handed me the receiver. While I reported, he went out the door and came back through Grace’s room. The cop sounded bored.
When I hung up I said, “He asked if I wanted someone sent over, I told him I guessed not. I think he thought I was lying about the whole thing.” And I was suddenly more angry at that than I was afraid of the man who’d broken in, and the anger steadied me.
“Jesus God,” Cliff said. “What if I hadn’t phoned?”
I said, “I’d’ve probably tried to kick him in the balls and got beat up instead,” but with the steadiness came a curious sense of triumph. I had been handling the situation somewhat, and perhaps I might have gone on handling it.
Most likely not. And when Cliff said, “I’d better spend the night here,” the fear returned at the thought of the man’s return, and I looked at Cliff, tall and solid and bearded, and said, “Yes.”
He said, “Before we leave tomorrow, you ought to call the building manager and ask about getting the lock and door repaired.”
“I intend to,” I said. Then I said, “Thank you for coming over.”
“Oh, Christ,” he said.
We finished our drinks. I said, “Would you like to use my toothbrush?”
The spilled drink had dried. We undressed. Cliff wasn’t wearing any underwear, he had just pulled on pants and a sweater after talking to me, and he’d already emptied his pockets at his apartment, so on my bureau there was no jumble of their contents, as there was at his place, as there had been on David’s bureau always: cigarettes, wallet, keys, handkerchief, coins. Here were only the car keys. I missed seeing the rest.
Cliff didn’t get into Kaykay’s bed. He got into bed with me and held me close. We didn’t say anything for a long time. I listened to my heart still racing, and I couldn’t go to sleep.
Cliff said, “Look. Let’s get married.”
“What?”
He laughed, but when he spoke his voice, though joking, was embarrassed. “It’s not such an outrageous idea as all that, is it?”
Yes, yes, it was.
He said, “We’d live in North Riverton and you could write.”
“I’m through writing.”
“Well,” he said. “You could teach. I’ve been trying for weeks to figure out a way to say this, and I haven’t been able to, but there’s another English opening in North Riverton. You’d have better classes than here, we could divvy up the college prep classes and you could have some seniors and juniors for a change. And we’d be working together.”
I got out of bed, turned on the lamp, and fetched the cigarettes from the kitchen. Cliff sat up in bed. I lit a cigarette and handed him the pack and climbed back in beside him. I balanced the ashtray on my knees.
I said, “Is it because of tonight? You don’t have to protect me, it’ll probably never happen again.”
“Emily.”
“Say I applied for the job and got it. Why couldn’t everything keep on like here?”
“North Riverton isn’t Millbridge or Hull. The townsfolk haven’t been made so tolerant as people down here, there’re no UNH kids, graduate students, whatever, shacking up all over the place. If they found out we were living together, or damn near living together, we’d get fired.”
“Oh.” The same thing no doubt would happen in Thornhill.
He said, “Anyway, I want to marry you.”
Stunned, flattered, scared, bewildered.
He said, “We could wait until school is over, if you’d rather. We could get engaged.”
“We’re too old to get engaged.”
“Wouldn’t you like a ring?”
I thought of the symbols David had given me in high school and college, first his little gold football on a chain around my neck, then his fraternity pin on my breast. I said, “My hands are hideous.”
He said, “I’ll give you a hideous ring, to match.”
“I’m a lousy teacher.”
“Not so lousy as you think you are.”
“I’m not?”
“No. The only thing is, the pay is lower than here. You must be making six thousand now, and next year with the new pay scale you’ll make about sixty-five hundred, right? Well, maybe I could wring sixty-two for you out of Matthew, but I’m afraid that’s about all.”
It seemed plenty. I still judged salaries by the forty-one hundred dollars which had been David’s starting salary in Thornhill.
Cliff said, “When I was at my interview, I picked up an application form for you, just in case.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think what to say.
He said, “I want to live with you in North Riverton. I want to work there with you.”
“I might not get the job.”
“You’ll get it.”
I said, “I can’t think straight.”
David. David.
Cliff said, “There’s nothing to think about. We’ll get married and go to North Riverton and live happily ever after until we’re buried under A-frames.”
A direct question: “How come you never got married before?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
“No, how come?”
“Well, North Riverton High School wasn’t exactly teeming with the women of my dreams, so I never got involved that far with any girl, a
nd then at the university there was a girl, but after a couple of years I all of a sudden realized I didn’t like her, and then there was the army, and then after teaching for a few years, I don’t know, I got into the habit of being on my own, and when I saw what other people were putting up with, mortgages and washing machines and kids’ dentist bills and God knows what, I began to count my blessings.”
“So why me?”
“How the hell should I know? It must be your hideous hands and your dirty feet.”
“Oh, Jesus, they’re filthy, aren’t they, I completely forgot—”
“Emily, Emily,” he said, laughing, and started to kiss me.
“Our cigarettes!” I said. We put them out and looked at each other. I said, “Remember that time at the housewarming party, you were drunk and made that pass at me right on this bed?”
“Don’t I. I didn’t dare ask you out for three months afterward. And I had to try to be a good guy and big pal and not leer at you in the teachers’ room.”
And now we were beginning to have our own history together.
But would he ask about David? He had never mentioned David, not even that day at the beach.
“Emily,” he said. “I love you.”
This was something else he’d never said. I stroked the smooth skin of his shoulder and the curly hair on his chest. I realized that sleep was dragging at my eyelids. God, I was tired. “Let me think it over,” I said. I put my head on his shoulder, and he placed the ashtray on the table and turned off the lamp. It was snug and safe here with him. To thank him, I said, “I love you.”
There were little silver umbrellas on white paper, there were silver ribbons, there were voices twittering over all the presents as Kaykay, sitting on the rug, unwrapped each one, admired it, and handed it along to be admired by everyone else. Jam and mustard pots, sheets and towels, salt and pepper shakers, salad bowls, they circulated the room and returned to Kaykay until she was surrounded by them, highball glasses, mixing bowls, chip-and-dip bowls, and casserole dishes. Grace gave her an electric carving knife. I gave her The Graham Kerr Cookbook, because it wasn’t on her lists.
One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 13