Still, as I toodle along Walt Whitman Drive, I am more than relieved that Jake lives on a street innocuously posted Betsy Lane, named not for Betsy Ross he has told me but the developer’s first-born child. The developer, whose wife is Elaine, pushed for Elaine Lane until some buyers threatened to back out.
Jake’s development is fairly flat with streets laid out in a grid and bearing first names in a three-to-one ratio of women to men, the same ratio as current statistics of eligibility. I have reversed this trend if you add Seamus to Louie and Jake and eliminate Cheryl and Georgette. Though this is not quite playing fair. Maybe after Betsy, the developer went on to have two more daughters and just one son. I cross Jennifer Road to Elissa Street to Aaron Avenue. I turn the corner onto Betsy Lane. The houses are fake colonial with brick facades. They boast columns the size of Scarlett’s Tara, fronting what would be, stripped down, a modest-sized ranch. There aren’t trees yet but fragile-looking saplings dividing the plots.
Jake’s front door is painted forest green and opens the minute I turn off the ignition key. Jake hurries down the front walk in khakis and a sweater—no overcoat—and suede desert boots—his feet are tiny—and wrenches open the driver’s-side door for me. “Let me help you out,” he says. “I mean, is it okay if I help you out?”
He helps me out with the delicacy you would use to deliver a particularly fragile piece of mail. “Katinka,” he says. He smiles a Howdy Doody smile, broad with delight, so contagious I catch it and grin goofily back.
Though once inside the hall of his center entrance colonial, my comedy mask turns to tragedy as I survey the familiar terrain of divorce. There are dents in the carpeting where furniture used to stand, blank spaces on the wall where pictures used to hang. In the living room I see a lamp table with no lamp, one sofa beside the fireplace which had clearly been flanked with two. Across the hall in the dining room two folding chairs sit alone at the end of a table for eight stranded like unwanted relatives.
Jake shakes his head. His eyes are sad. He points to a blank space of wall. “The ravages of divorce. You would have thought that Laura, who practically lived in her white lab coat and was always carrying on about natural this and natural that, would have sworn off the material things of this world.”
I shake my head. “Seamus and I split everything right down to the last roll of toilet paper. It certainly ripped the scales from my eyes to discover the life of the mind could be cluttered with more objects than ideas.”
“People surprise you.”
“Amen.”
He helps me off with my coat. He hangs it in a hall closet where one yellow slicker sags from its hook and a bicycle pump and a tennis racket lie tangled on the floor. He’s about to add my pocketbook, which is a huge brown sack almost mailbag size, when I remember and snatch it back.
“I’ve got your article on “Tenancy by the Entirety.’ ” I take it out of my bag half rolled up, its corners bent. When I shake it open crumbs fall out, shopping lists, receipts, a price tag with its plastic tail. “I’m afraid it’s a bit of a mess.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Not the writing,” I hasten to add, “just the manuscript. I really shouldn’t keep good papers in here. My pocketbook’s the main trash barrel in my life.” I smooth out the cover and see that a ballpoint pen has leaked onto the title page so it reads Tenancy splat tirety. “But the writing is clean. Really crisp.”
“You’ve read it?” he asks, his eyebrows raised in incredulous arcs.
“Some,” I say.
He grins with such delight I feel ashamed.
“Not much,” I admit.
“And no wonder,” he says. “Whatever possessed me to give you such dry and deadly prose when your own stories are so…”Hepicks up a folder from the hall desk (minus its chair).The folder is blue and shiny and new with the scales of justice and the name of a law firm embossed on it. Inside lie my three Xeroxed stories as pristine as if they’d been handled with the white gloves you use for valuable antique manuscripts. “…whenyour stories are so wonderful!”
“They are?” I gasp, overdoing the surprise.
“Oh, yes. Now take for instance the baby, a character with no dialogue except a few coos, and he fairly leaps from the page.”
“He does?” This time I’m not acting.
“And this diaper delivery man. He’s no rocket scientist, no Harvard professor …” He looks at me intently, implying that rocket scientists and Harvard professors are my natural habitat. “… but you make him real and sympathetic. Not a stereotype but true to his kind. His plans for community college—a lesser writer would have stuck him in the Ivy League and changed his blue collar to white.”
And a lesser person like me would stick Louie in a Harvard writing class and change his blue uniform to tweed, but I don’t have time for self-flagellation because I need to pay attention to Jake’s rave reviews, which are as long and detailed as those articles about Salman Rushdie I have never quite finished in the New York Review of Books.
By the time Jake has finished with paeans to my humor, my dialogue, my original use of metaphor, I am consumed with guilt over the short shrift I have given “Tenancy by the Entirety.” But if I am not taken by his writing, I am starting to be more taken by Jake. His acute intelligence. His sensitivity. His interest in others—especially me. It’s a long time since someone sung my praises about a quality unrelated to my looks, my body, or where I went to school. Of course Louie likes my stories, too, I remind myself, and my body, and me. “I can’t get over this, a mailman in bed with a college girl,” Louie has said many times. “A college professor’s ex-wife!” When I accuse him of being too concerned with the trimmings, he takes offense. “Those are just extras. It’s you I want.”
And though I know it’s the extras that can tip the balance, I decide to believe him. Given the circumstances, what choice do I have?
And now, given the way Jake has studied my stories as if he’s cramming for the bar, I choose to believe him. I’d much rather have someone value me because of my writing than for the name written on my divorce decree or the veritas stamped on my diploma. Besides, let’s face it, Louie’s leg has put him on the bench.
Now Jake winds down in a final hosanna to my narrative voice. “You’re terrific, Katinka,” he sums up.
I nod. I lower my eyes. I try to exhibit becoming modesty, impartiality, even though I’m the kind of juror who’d award him everything plus triple damages. “Let me take your article back,” I say. “I hardly did it justice.”
* * *
We eat in the kitchen where Jake stir-fries shrimp and lemon-grass in a new-looking wok. It’s a nice kitchen, cozy with gingham curtains at the windows and blue and white Mexican tiles behind the sink. The table is set with a white cloth, chopsticks, wineglasses, and the small handleless cups that the Chinese serve tea in. Two saucepans hang from a near-empty pegboard on which the outlines of several different-sized pots and utensils are carefully sketched. I once saw photographs of Julia Child’s kitchen. She had an enormous pegboard on which her husband, Paul, had diagrammed every conceivable cooking implement, each of which hung in its designated place. I look at Jake’s pegboard, at the drawing of a skillet without the skillet. Never mind. My grandmother had no batterie de cuisine and still cooked up a storm. As Jake does now.
Jake serves dinner on the kind of thick white dishes you’d find in college dining halls. “Laura’s,” he explains. “Slowly but surely I’m filling in.”
I wonder if the gingham curtains and Mexican tiles are part of his filling in. I wonder what Laura’s kitchen looked like before she flew the coop. I picture something cold and white and clinical, more like a lab. This is confirmed when I notice the flowers are not in a vase but in a beaker. When Jake opens the refrigerator door, I see another beaker, which holds the orange juice.
Jake tells me about Laura. She was a solid cook if unimaginative. She followed recipes the way literalists follow the letter of the law. Spices were measure
d out as exactly as if she were handling dosages of toxic pharmaceuticals. She insists she has not sold out by leaving microbiology for massage, which is a valid science, too. She plays Mozart while constructing mathematical puzzles for her unborn child. When selecting a movie, she draws the line at PG13 even while the baby’s still in utero. She and Harriet will use feminist theory and massage therapy in equal measure in raising this child.
I tell Jake about my mother and Arthur, their wedding plans, the loss of my house. I tell him about my quiet, sweet father who used to send me letters from the office—on insurance company stationery—the summers I was at camp. “I’m hiding out at my desk,” he’d write, “because your dazzling mother is having the ladies in for bridge.” Or “Greetings from the office. Your clever and enchanting mother has taken up stenciling and the fumes are something terrible. But I love my two girls.”
Jake understands my feelings about my mother, about my house. How I am happy for my mother and sad for my father’s sake although my father would have wished my mother and Arthur every happiness.
“Your parents were happy together?”
“Absolutely,” I say. Jake’s eyes brim with sympathy. They are the pale blue of airmail envelopes.
We have coffee in the living room. We sit in the bay window, which though crowned by rods and hooks has no draperies. And thus we see right away that it has been snowing all through dinner. At the curb, Milly’s car is blanketed with more than a foot of snow. Jake puts his hand on mine. “The driving will be terrible. I think you should stay the night.”
And because the driving will be terrible, and because the dinner is wonderful, and because Jake is missing pans and draperies, and because he’s read three of my stories and I’ve read hardly anything of his article, and because Louie’s got a broken leg, and Seamus has Georgette, and my mother has Arthur, and Laura has Harriet, and because I write for Playgirl and am thus a slut, I agree.
* * *
We go to bed. It doesn’t work. “I’m afraid this Hemingway stuff is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Jake whispers, his voice muffled by the pillow he’s burying his face into.
“These things happen,” I say. I proceed gently, careful of his self-esteem, sensitive to how the body can let you down. Call Katinka O’Toole at 1-800-SUPPORT. “We’ve had a lot to eat and drink. We’re in your and Laura’s house, in your and Laura’s bed.”
“Actually not. Laura took the bed. This is the first thing I bought the day she moved out.” He holds my hands. His fingers are squishy mounds of flesh divided by knuckles and descending slightly in size like the three balls of a snowman. He gives a laugh. “A king-sized bed for a pint-sized guy.”
“Nonsense,” I say. Though he is small, but proportionate. When we lie side by side, our feet and chins are at roughly the same places. I’m pretty sure my feet are longer than his. The lights are off. There are shades at the window so I couldn’t see his face even if he weren’t hiding it in the pillow. But from his voice I can imagine it—shy, rueful, embarrassed.
“I’m glad the lights are off,” he says, “so you can’t see how embarrassed I am. I do wish they were on, however, so I can see exactly how beautiful you are.” He touches my cheek, my hair, rolls onto his side and cups my chin. “You are, you know.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Not in the least. Would you believe me if I told you this hasn’t happened before? Or hardly ever,” he amends.
“Of course,” I say. “It’s my fault for having introduced the whole topic of Jake Barnes. You’re the ideal reader.” I tease him, try to make a little joke. “Someone who studies The Sun Also Rises for a first date. You’ve overidentified with one of the characters is all.”
“So, Teach, what’s the solution?”
“Maybe a different book.”
He laughs. “Something like Lady Chatterley?”
“Perhaps,” I say. Uncanny, I think. In all of literature, these are the two characters we have picked. Though I myself am partially to blame for introducing Hemingway. These are the two characters that we, each in our own way, fear most. And though I’m not sure what character Louie himself would select, at some level I’ve already placed him in An American Tragedy. Perhaps overidentifying with a character is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I’d chosen Anna Karenina, would it follow that I’d be dating an aristocrat and contemplating throwing myself under a train? And what if he’d been named Heathcliff or Stephen Dedalus or—oh dear!—Alexander Portnoy?
But I am stopped from exploring such possibilities and their terrible repercussions by Jake’s tremulous sigh. “I so want this to work,” he says.
I say nothing. I wonder however what he means by this—the problem at hand—getting it up? Or the wider implications of a relationship? I think of Louie, of his totally responsive body. I have no doubt that Louie’s body has never failed to accommodate its desires. At least that part of his body below the waist and above the injured leg. I put my hand on Jake’s sloping, narrow shoulder and feel an enormous wave of tenderness. It’s a powerful feeling, one I’m at a loss to identify. Is it, I wonder, simply my instinctive need always to cheer for the underdog.
We fall asleep side by side in the middle of Jake’s vast bed like two cartoon characters stranded together on a deserted island.
I awake suddenly, not sure what time it is but sure not much time has passed. My mother! I think in the kind of panic I used to feel when I was a teenager out parking on the old Kennebec Road well after curfew. What if she wakes up in the middle of the night in the middle of Arthur’s bed and sees the snow. She knows where I am having dinner. But at three in the morning she won’t know where I am. She’ll call downstairs and get the machine. She’ll run downstairs and knock and knock. Perhaps drag out the superintendent with his ring of keys. And then what? Police? Hospitals? When she was in Maine and I was here, she never knew if there was a storm, how late I stayed out, whether I wore my boots and my gloves, took my vitamins.
But maybe she won’t wake up. Or if she does I hope she’ll reach for Arthur and think Katinka’s grown up and can take care of herself. Maybe she’ll think, gleefully, Katinka’s spending the night with a graduate of Penn and Harvard Law. No harm could come with someone so prestigiously educated. Or maybe—and this gives me a start—she’ll reach for Arthur and not think of me at all.
I must be literally twisting with these thoughts because Jake wakes up. “Katinka!” he exclaims as if he’s surprised to find me here. “How lovely,” he adds with undisguised delight. He reaches for me.
This time everything works. The blight of Hemingway lifts. And if Jake is not quite Louie—but who is? And if I’m not Lady Chatterley—who I never wished to be—together we are still something rather nice.
12
It’s Friday morning and I am in a fury of cleaning. Harriman and Zenobia are bringing Max over on their way to the airport tonight. This is crazy, I tell myself as I scrub out the medicine cabinet and test the childproof caps on bottles of aspirin and antihistamine. I polish the hot and cold water taps on the tub and sink. I burnish the chrome rail which holds the shower curtain. In the kitchen I have to stand on the counter to scour the refrigerator top whose grungy surface only a giant could gaze upon. It’s not as if a social worker is about to call to inspect the premises, to declare my apartment suitable for a child, to declare me suitable for a child. But if it’s crazy and if I’m crazy, I still clean and sweep and vacuum and mop until I am almost beginning to like it.
In my study I make up the folding cot I have borrowed from Arthur with the Red Sox sheets I have borrowed from Milly. I meant to do most of this preparation last night, saving me some morning hours to write. But after last night’s class—which went rather well, I must admit; Russell MacQuillen, Junior, took furious notes and Rebecca Luscombe admitted some of my criticism was “interesting”—my students invited me to join them for a drink at the Casablanca bar. How could I refuse this testament to my new-found popularity. I remember
when Seamus used to go out drinking with his favorite students, me included, how heady it felt, how he was in his element. I had a good time surrounded by upturned faces seeking the hidden meaning of agents, copyright laws, the perfectly prepared manuscript. And even though I have learned the painful lesson of how little the width of margins counts along the road to publication, I still relished being the fount from which all this crucial knowledge spilled. I confess I did overdo it on a topic on which I’m hardly the expert. After all it’s my students who read Publishers Weekly and have practically memorized the Literary Market Place. Nevertheless, while I did go on a bit about contracts and percentages, I managed to remind them that the actual writing had to take place before negotiating the paperback.
I floated home on my charm, my authority, and the three beers I was forced to drink to show I was both one of the boys and a lubricated literary animal. There were two messages on the machine, both from men. Look Ma, I’m popular, I wanted to sing. One was from Jake saying what a good time we’d had together. Another from Louie asking when we could make a time to get together. It was too late to call either of them back. It was too late to clean, to read Dr. Spock, or One Hundred Ways to Amuse an Eight Year Old. I fell into bed and slept the sleep of the Popular.
And woke to the panic of the unprepared. Now I look into my refrigerator and throw out everything that smells or wilts. Which leaves it almost entirely bare. I make a list. I need to go to the grocery store. I plan to go to the toy store. Maybe I’ll go to Hollywood Express and pick up some children’s videos. Mary Poppins. The Secret Garden, I think, or The Wizard of Oz. Immediately I segue to The Postman Always Rings Twice, Il Postino, Pony Express, and Deliverance. I fold my list and stuff it into the recesses of my pocketbook. Jake’s article is still there, a reminder that one can live other than a mail-centric life. I have lugged it around all yesterday, even to my class and to the Casablanca afterward. Spying its corner, my students would have assumed the great-American-novel-in-progress—in such a state of progress I’d need to keep it next to me. When I take out “Tenancy by the Entirety,” my pocketbook feels significantly lighter. Just as I put it down on the kitchen table my buzzer rings. “Brattle Florist. Delivery,” comes the voice over the intercom.
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