The minute they are gone he pulls me toward him. I see a red blot of lipstick at the corner of his mouth. I kiss his lips. I smell what I’m pretty sure is Cheryl’s scent, her musky perfume, the hint of vanilla coming off her lipstick print. But when Louie’s tongue finds mine, I manage to forget about her.
“I brought you a really chintzy gift,” I whisper.
“Oh, Katinka, you brought me something wonderful.”
We share a Milky Way. Louie tells me about the accident, how he slipped on the patch of ice at the very start of his route, how the mail spilled all over the walk ruining a Highlights for Children and a Bon Appétit, how his leg swelled up so fast they had to cut the pants leg off his uniform, how when he looked at his leg stuck out in such a funny way he didn’t think it was his, how nice the neighbors were, how one brought a blanket, how another sprinkled kitty litter so the ambulance could climb the hill, how all he thought about was me, about what I would think when he wasn’t there to deliver me my mail. “At the hospital, they asked me who to notify,” Louie explains. “I wanted it to be you. “Miss Katinka O’Toole,’ I wanted to say. But in the end, I figured it had better be my folks.”
“You did the right thing,” I say. “They don’t like me,” I add.
“Who?”
“Your folks. I’m sure they think I’m terrible.”
“They think you’re wonderful. They certainly will when they get to know you.”
“What about Cheryl? Funny how she managed to get in to visit you. They must know her pretty well. They must like her.”
This Louie doesn’t deny. “Cheryl’s okay,” he says.
“You must be all pretty close. For her to come ahead of your own family on the first day of your surgery.”
“You know hospitals. If they’re busy at the nurses’ station, visitors can sneak through.”
“That’s not what I mean. That’s not the point.”
“The point is—you came, Katinka.”
“And she brought you this teddy bear.” I pick it up.
“An awful silly present for a grown man. That’s the problem with us, we still think of each other as sixteen. I much prefer the MilkyWay.”
I am inordinately pleased. I point to the box of chocolates on the table next to his bed. “Somebody brought you these fancy ones.”
“Cheryl. That just goes to show you.”
“Show you what?”
“How much she knows me. They’re the kind filled with cherries. I’ve always hated them.”
I laugh. “Me, too. They’re Seamus’ favorites, though.” I pause. “You know,” I say, “he’s on this very corridor. In the opposite wing.”
“Professor O’Toole?”
I nod.
“No kidding. I knew he had back surgery, but right here? Maybe I’ll go visit him when they let me out of bed.”
All at once I feel nervous. “He’ll probably be gone,” I say. I hope. The possibility of Seamus and Louie meeting in the hospital corridor brings out my teenage fears of people talking behind my back, junior and senior prom dates comparing notes. Not that I was any happier about Seamus’ being on Louie’s route, but how much time did they have to get beyond small talk? In a hospital, though, afternoons slow to the pace of one of Chris Smith’s tortured steps. Time enough for Seamus to find out the particular nature of Louie’s and my relationship. Time enough for Seamus to switch from a treatise on James Joyce to a treatise on Katinka O’Toole. I can just imagine Seamus’ version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Not So Young Man. He won’t bother to mention Melissa and Melinda, only Katinka’s inadequacies as a brilliant professor’s wife.
Now I wind my fingers around Louie’s hand. I hold tight. “I’d just as soon you wouldn’t talk to Seamus,” I begin to plead. “I prefer to separate the pieces of my life.”
Louie’s voice is soft, his grip is hard. “Sometimes that’s impossible. Secrets aren’t all that easy to keep. Some, anyway,” he amends.
“Do you have secrets, Louie?”
His brows arch. His face wears the mask of innocence donned by naughty boys who’ve been dipping fingers into the forbidden cookie jar. “Of course not, Katinka,” he vows, making an effort to meet my eye.
I pull my hand away. “Then what are you saying? That we should tell everyone? Tell everyone about us?”
“Not until you want to. I’m a mailman. You, you’re … well, educated, a teacher, a writer. You’re a different class.”
He’s said it: class. In America, class is the thing “that daren’t speak its name.” What we both feel, fear, have felt, have feared has now been given words. It hovers in the air between us, up near the pulleys and the wires and the intravenous drip, the invisible bacteria to invade the healthiest romance. If these are the words of communication, they’re ones I don’t want to hear. “Shit,” I say. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. Though the truth is I’ve always wanted a classy girl, a classy college girl.”
“You sound like my mother,” I say. But what he really sounds like is a character from An American Tragedy, a book that lately seems to have been hovering around the edge of my consciousness. I composed an essay on Dreiser once for an American lit course criticizing the way he wrote. The professor gave me a B minus for being more concerned with Dreiser’s style than with what he said about the poisonous distinctions of class. Louie could be Clyde. Cheryl, Roberta the pregnant factory worker. Me the society girl for whom Clyde drowned Roberta in the lake. Never mind that I am hardly a society girl, that Cheryl’s hold on Louie doesn’t seem to bother him—in fact he may even welcome it. You can still make the analogy. Of course that’s the power of fiction, I rationalize, its universality. Any character can be tailored to a real-life counterpart. Any story adjusted to a modern time. Since the sixties, the boundaries between people are more flexible.
“Anyway, whatever happens with us it’s been all worthwhile,” he says.
It depends on what happens with us, I think, picturing Roberta’s drowning, Clyde’s death in the electric chair. I shudder. I blame the weather, the hospital, seeing Cheryl for giving me these morbid thoughts.
“Besides,” Louie grins. He pokes my ribs. “I’d never talk to Seamus about you.”
“Then what would you talk to him about?”
“Men talk. The Sox. The Celts. Books. Sometimes he gives me lists to read.”
I touch his cast. “You’ll have a lot of time for that.”
“But not for your class, Katinka. I won’t be walking for months. I’ll have to drop out. The story of my life.”
For a moment I’m relieved. My wish come true. But then I realize that Louie’s absence from my class means Louie’s absence from my bed, means Louie’s absence from my vestibule. May all your wishes come true, I remember, is an oriental curse.
Louie points to his leg. “It’s going to be tough. I won’t be able to work. I won’t be able to drive. I’ll be laid up at home in bed for quite a while.”
“I’ll have to make conjugal visits.”
“With my parents upstairs! If only! My mother never leaves the house. She starts cooking dinner the minute the breakfast dishes are done. Every ten minutes she’ll bring me a snack. It’s a three-decker. With Sheetrock walls thinner than cardboard.”
“You are a grown man, Louie,” I say, “with only yourself to support. Why do you live at home anyway?”
Louie frowns. He plucks at his hospital gown. “It’s convenient. Cheap.”
Cheap maybe, I think, but certainly not convenient. At least, not for love affairs. I have a thousand questions, but it seems hard-hearted to interrogate someone who’s just had surgery.
Louie brightens. “Hey, if you come for dinner, we can play footsie under my mother’s dining room set.”
“As long as I sit near your good foot,” I say. “We’ll work something out. All that food, you’re going to need some exercise.”
The nurse comes in bearing a basket of towels and soap. She needs to change Mr. Cappetti’s bed, she
explains. She needs to sponge him down. She has white hair pulled into a bun and is as straight and thin as the pole that holds his IV. She opens a bottle of medicinal-smelling liquid soap the color of chartreuse.
“I suppose I’d better go,” I say.
Louie hands me Cheryl’s box of chocolate-covered cherries. “How about taking these to Professor O’Toole?”
I put them back on the table on top of the tortoiseshell comb. I shake my head. “Another time. Today you’re the only invalid I want to see, the only one that neither rain nor sleet nor snow could keep me from visiting.”
“Katinka,” Louie implores with the voice of a child, his arm outstretched.
But the nurse is already working on his neck, pushing her wash-cloth around his golden skin. I can’t even figure out where to squeeze in a kiss. Her fingers, not mine, touch the curls of his chest. I study Louie behind the stick of the nurse. I want to cry for his leg, for his beautiful eyes, for his knowledge that things may not work out, for the parts of his body that are no longer so often or so easily going to be mine. What are his secrets, I wonder. “I can’t stand this,” I nearly cry. “I’ll miss you so much. We’ll figure out a way.” But at the very moment I am saying these words, at the very moment I am feeling most deprived, I am aware of a window of opportunity opening to let in Jake Barnes.
8
Jake Barnes telephones and offers to pick me up for tonight’s dinner at Harvest restaurant. I demur. “The walk will do me good.”
“Is this a generic objection or specific one?” he asks.
“Meaning?”
“Whether you object on principle to a person of the male persuasion fetching you.”
I remember his ex-wife. “Specific,” I say. “I need the exercise.”
He sounds relieved. “It’s still icy out there,” he warns.
“I’m the original Admiral Byrd.”
“Of course. I forgot you’re from Maine.” He laughs. If I’m determined to be hearty, he explains, he’ll drive in with Zenobia and Harriman, whose house is only a mile away from his.
“You live in a house?” I ask.
“I’m the original Homo sapiens domesticus. You act surprised.”
“As a born-again city person, I find it hard to picture single people with backyards and bedrooms up a flight of stairs.”
“A center entrance colonial. My ex-wife loved it, but when she left me, she left the house to me. “I hate it,’ were her words. “Living room on the right, dining room on the left, half-bath under the stairs. Boring and predictable, just like you.’”
He gives an apologetic half-laugh. His voice, turned up on the last line, implies a question.
Leaving me no choice but to reply, “Boring and predictable are not the terms for someone who reads The Sun Also Rises for a first date.”
“I hope you can still say that when you get to know me more.”
Now as I push through Harvest’s heavy glass doors and hang my coat on the hook next to the public telephone, I wonder if getting to know Jake Barnes more means getting to know Louie less. Isn’t there some principle of physics about displacement, some law that states two bodies can’t occupy a single mass. Lately, I’ve got more mass to be occupied. My mornings are flat, my nights empty. Since Louie’s roommate’s condition has improved—the fever and infection that kept Chris Smith in the hospital has started to clear up— visiting hours with Louie leave no privacy. Chris’ curtains are open. The ellipse his legs make is narrowing. He wants to chat. He’s a new man. He’s thinking of getting bar-mitzvahed. His fiancée’s parents have come round. “With a vengeance,” Chris boasted. “I’m practically the messiah.”
“If that’s all it takes,” Louie said, “a little foreskin …”
“Not on your life,” said I protectively. “Anything lopped off you is something that I’ll miss.”The truth is I miss Louie even when I’m at the hospital with him. Though I stagger my visits to avoid the Cappettis and the ubiquitous Cheryl—who Louie keeps insisting is a “family friend”—I still feel bereft. It’s hard to analyze. Is it because I have to share him with nurses and orderlies and a messiah newly circumcised. Or is it just sex. Is Louie a sex object? Am I becoming one of those fast, overstimulated girls Miss Deegan my seventh-grade hygiene teacher always warned us about. Last night my bed seemed so large, my sheets so cold, I forced myself to focus on my class, grateful for its distractions. I tried to think of India Germaine’s story, how to fix her point of view. But my point of view was fixed on Louie.
Now I try to find Jake Barnes. As always on Friday nights, Harvest is mobbed. People are three deep around the bar. It’s happy hour. A happy hunting ground. I have two friends who met their husbands here. One ended badly; one’s still going strong. As for me, I never had much luck, always being sidled up to by men with red faces who want to discuss politics. “If only Kennedy …” one of them starts, eyeing me. I sidestep his boat-shoed foot. Briefcases and shopping bags crowded against the railing make an obstacle course. Somebody trips, and somebody’s new Caphalon wok slips out from its cardboard box. A gray-haired man in a continental suit with a nipped in waist—not made for his American hanging out body—sends a bottle of champagne to two blond girls standing at the horseshoe curve of the bar. The man looks familiar. When he salutes the girls, like Montgomery in old newsreels, I recognize him, recognize the same jaunty salute with which he serves chopped liver on a Bulkie roll from behind the deli counter in Inman Square.
I see no sign of Jake, of Zenobia and Harriman Slade. I check my watch. I am exactly on time. I could have a drink and survey the prospects even though I’m already sure the pickings are slim. Not that I’m in the market. Imagine fitting yet a third man into this jigsaw puzzle that has become my life. I yawn. You’d think with such uneventful nights I wouldn’t be so tired. What I’d really like is a Leonard Woolf. “Virginia better today,” Leonard would write in his diary, or “Worried about V’s lack of sleep.” Oh that somebody would be uxoriously worried about Katinka’s lack of sleep.
The man in the boat shoes moves down to the end of the bar where the two blond girls are drinking the deli man’s champagne. You’re wasting your time, I want to say to him. And probably I am, too. I move away to find the maître d’, who informs me that while things are being readied in the dining room, the party in question is having a drink at the corner of the long table behind the bar. It’s not surprising I didn’t see them since this end of the table is out of sight, tucked behind a wall, good for a discreet tête-à-tête, lousy for people watching. I never sit there myself. Being a writer I need a first-row center view of people, proximity and acoustics to hear their dialogue.
When they see me, Jake and Harriman break off their own dialogue and pop up like perfect jack-in-the-box gentlemen. This isn’t easy since they are wedged behind table legs and have been sunk into a squishy Marimekko-pillowed banquette. Then ensues some complicated jostling. Both Harriman and Zenobia Slade have to step out into the main room to let me squeeze in beside Jake. “I’ll just sit here,” I say pointing to a bentwood chair.
“No, no,” they chime.
When we are as cozy as four mismatched peas in our Marimekko pod—the handsome Slades, the short chipmunk-cheeked Jake, me in black wool and combat boots—Jake asks what I want to drink. He and the Slades have already been served. Jake holds a martini. Zenobia and Harriman are tippling goblets of wine.
“The house white,” I say, indicating Zenobia’s and Harriman’s stemmed glasses.
“They’re having Chardonnay,” Jake explains.
“I like the house white. I always order it.”
“Maybe it’s time for a change,” coaxes Jake in the gentle voice of a shrink.
My first instinct is to hold my ground. My second—how far I’ve come!—is to consider the possibility: perhaps it is time for a change.
The Chardonnay arrives with nary a pause between request and its delivery. Jake Barnes watches me sip it with such intensity I could be the Times rest
aurant reviewer on whose pronouncements depend whether he’ll be slicing onions or slicing his throat. “It’s fine,” I say. “Marvelous, actually.” The wine tastes fruity, cold velvet on the tongue, richer than what I’m used to. But I have a certain ambivalence about people who know what I want better than I know what I want. Especially when they turn out to be right. Maybe Jake’s wife ran off with Harriet from the health club simply for the surprise. Or maybe she couldn’t stand to be told anymore what to eat. Don’t put your eggs all in one basket, I hear my mother say, don’t put your mail all in one bag. Look Ma, I’m dating, I want to cry, all too aware of being jammed up against Jake Barnes’ diminutive-seeming thigh.
I remember a blind date I once had with a tiny MIT student in an enormous cashmere coat. He bought me a dish of ice cream at Brigham’s. “We’re not leaving until you finish every bit of this,” he’d commanded when I’d pleaded a curfew. Are arrogance and pomposity necessary components in the equation of insecure short men? To be honest, Jake’s style is more suggestion than ultimatum. I shouldn’t generalize. My father, not tall enough for even junior varsity basketball, never overcompensated by bossing my mother around or becoming a born-again gourmet. Besides, Jake isn’t that short, I remind myself now. He’s taller than I am even in my thick rubber soles. It’s the comparison with Louie, those long and lovely and broken bones. I start to feel sorry for Jake whose wife did abandon him to a center entrance colonial. Perhaps if he had a significant other couched in his right-side living room, he might learn to love the reheated tuna noodle casserole (with the house white) served in his left-side dining room. “I don’t know that much about wine,” I say. “I’m afraid I’m a bit of a Philistine.”
Jake Barnes smiles. “Stick with me, kid. We’ll get your palate into shape.”
If only it were a matter of palate. If you are what you eat, then I could be anything. I sip the delicious wine and think how easily I could get used to it. How easily I could slip beyond the house white.
Harriman brings up property values. Jake discusses real estate. Zenobia bemoans the lack of funding for the arts. I bemoan our local Chinese take-out, which is being renovated by Harvard and turned into an office for student affairs.
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