That night, her parents took us to the Chevy Chase Club for dinner. In that atmosphere of comfort and bought privilege, we dined well and were lavishly deferred to—Eileen’s father, Conant Marshall, was a well-known lawyer with a D.C. law firm. As we were leaving the club’s dining room, I saw Skip just coming in. He was with a group of people that looked like family—mother, father, younger sister. He had on a light gray suit. I remember thinking how well it went with his shoulder-length auburn hair. I stared at him, hoping for some sign of recognition. It was slow in coming. His face, when he looked at me, was impassive, and then a frown flickered across his brow. When his forehead cleared, he started to smile, and the smile widened and grew, just kept on going until it was one big dazzling down-home grin. I grinned back, and then blushed.
“Who is that?” Eileen asked, her round blue eyes widening.
“Oh, nobody,” I said blissfully.
He waited there, nonchalantly standing with his hands in his pants pockets, while his mother turned to him and said something sharp, for the maitre d’ was waiting. We’d been slowly moving around the tables and were quite close.
I leaned slightly toward him. What irrepressible happiness! “Hello,” I said.
Later he teased me, told me that his grin had had a political content. He’d laughed because he’d guessed that we were all in D.C. for the same march, and yet there we were on the night before, preposterously dining with the nation’s Establishment.
“Mrs. Marshall, Mr. Marshall, Eileen, this is Skip Loomis …”
I thought his sister looked at me sullenly, but I went on looking at him, drinking him in: his square pleasant face boyishly dotted across the bridge of the nose with faded freckles; his amused hazel-green eyes; the way he stood, upright but relaxed, his shoulders nicely filling out the well-cut gray coat; his right hand now quaintly, protectively placed around his sister’s upper arm while she went on looking sullen, obviously wishing we would hurry on by.
Meanwhile, Skip’s mother, brilliantly arrayed in a mink jacket and a minidress of emerald green silk, fluttered all over Eileen’s mother, like a butterfly investigating a decayed log. Amelia Loomis was beside herself with southern charm, trying to ingratiate herself with Mrs. Marshall, a woman who I’d ascertained was nice but a dud. Eulalie Marshall was tall and shapeless, with buck teeth, no chin, and a mottled complexion that tended to erupt into worried blotches. She had on a long printed velvet skirt and a white blouse with a rufflike puritan collar that fell droopily over her narrow shoulders and reminded you of Cotton Mather and damnation and every boy you had ever sinfully kissed in a parked car.
While Mrs. Loomis whipped up a froth of small talk, Mr. Loomis simply stood and blazed away at everybody with his gorgeous teeth. He was big, athletic-looking, handsome, his crinkled black hair was crisply parted, his big energetic nose was slightly pocked, and although he was dressed conservatively in a dark suit (you knew perfectly well that Amelia picked out his clothes), there was something about all that suppressed masculine vigor crammed into the finely cut cloth that fairly shouted “sex!” as well as “money!” Lucky Amelia to have both.
In between smiles at Eulalie Marshall, Amelia would slip her husband a key word or phrase from under her peppermint breath—she functioned more or less as a prompter—and at one point I heard her mutter “thurrabred.” Her knowledge of the Washington social world was intimate and phenomenal, and you could tell that she’d retained every little nuance or factlet in some sort of complex interior filing system—she’d read about the Conant Marshalls somewhere, and had certainly heard of them, and for just this very occasion she’d been able to call upon her vast repository, a “Green Book” memory bank, to come up with a key clue: Eulalie and Conant Marshall were into breeding race horses.
Since I was with the Marshalls (old Washingtonians and more or less direct descendants of Chief Justice John Marshall, 1755–1835, while Mrs. Marshall had in her own right all kinds of quiet money made, I believe, in the era of patent medicines), the initial impression I made on the Loomises was no doubt quite good.
Before we said too-de-loos a deal was forged. We “young ’uns” were to go off with Skip for the evening; there was a party he thought we might enjoy. The sister was not invited. She whined. She perchance did not relish dining alone with Mama and Papa but was quickly maneuvered away by Amelia who grimaced at us, lifting her penciled reddish brows, meanwhile giving her daughter’s arm a vicious yank. I thought at first—and I may have been correct—that there’d been a primary confusion: Amelia thought I was Eileen or that it was Eileen her son was interested in. I thought I saw her money-green eyes flash ahead to the wedding: Skip in a morning coat, Amelia, the Mother of the Groom, in a new Adolfo. The wedding would be at the Washington Cathedral, the reception right here. She could just barely not lick her lips at the scrumptious thought of the Marshalls’ guest list—everybody in D.C. who was anybody and then some.
On the other hand, would she really have to ask her side of the family? Loony old Aunt Maude, for instance, her dead father’s ninety-one-year-old sister, who was perfectly capable of taking out her false teeth and setting them into her champagne goblet? Amelia wouldn’t even consider it but the poor old dear was childless—and owned valuable oceanfront land in North Carolina.
And to be perfectly truthful, whatever would she do about her sister Wanda, who was perfectly darlin’ but had this hideous little old drinkin’ problem? She’d been through every therapy known to man and now whenever she sat down next to anybody, anybody at all, she’d relate all about her drinkin’, her breakdown, her cancer, her chemotherapy cure, her husband who left her, and would even touch upon poor ol’ dead Daddy, blamin’ it all on him just ’cause upon occasion he would indulge in a discreet snort or two at the rear of his hardware and feed establishment, because Mama, after all, had been, always was your basic hard-line teetotalling Southern Baptist.
We set off for the party in Skip’s Peugeot, Skip driving and me in the front-seat-middle with my leg an inch from his, but pressed into the stick shift. This left Eileen next to the car door, but at every conversational opportunity, she’d angle herself across me, the better, I guessed, to gaze at Skip. We talked about the Berrigan brothers, we talked about religion. Skip had been brought up an Episcopalian. “Ooh,” Eileen squealed, “you too? Did you go to St. Albans?”
It turned out—surprise, surprise—that he had gone to St. Albans. It seemed we were now in for one of those long boring “did you know” sessions that go on so interminably and are meant to include some people while excluding others. But he (his adroitness pleased me) immediately cut her off with an easy, “Hey, I haven’t seen any of those guys since eighth grade. Anyway, I’m not too religious.” He gave me a half smile and murmured to me, “How about you? Are you religious?”
“I am!” Eileen volunteered eagerly. Couldn’t you just see her in fifth grade? She was the pretty, plump little blonde who knew all the answers and always frantically waved her hand—“Miss Kelly! Miss Kelly!”—in the teacher’s face. “I’m not really religious per se, but I find I’m very interested in religion.”
“What about you, Liz?” Skip asked deliberately.
“No, I’m not,” I said, with a kind of self-irony, “but my brother is.”
“How’s your brother doing?”
“All right,” I lied, and shrugged.
“That was an awful thing that happened with his roommate.”
“John’s changed dorms and he’s changed majors. He’s into philosophy and religion.”
“Sometimes an event like that can really transform a person, I mean in a good way. It can be a crystallizing experience.”
“Mmm,” I said.
“This is true,” Eileen said earnestly, giving me the benefit of her profile again. She wasn’t dumb, why did she sound so dumb? And really, she was pretty in a Dutch way, with her round pink cheeks, her high rounded forehead, her big blue eyes, which I’d always thought looked slightly simple. There w
as Dutch in her family. Her mother belonged to “The Old New Amsterdam Society,” Eileen had once told me, and her maternal ancestors went back to the New York Dutch of the early seventeenth century.
By now we were in a part of Chevy Chase so thick with boxwood and holly and overhanging tree branches and wrought-iron lampposts and ivy-draped brick walls that Skip had to lean into the misted windshield in order to peer through the crepuscular autumn light. The street was narrow, made narrower by long lines of parked cars. A car door slammed ahead of us and a noisy bunch of youngish people came in a group down the street. They turned in under an arched street lamp, between two brick pillars.
“This is it,” Skip said.
“Whose party is this, anyhow?” I asked.
“Stuart Rifkin’s,” Skip said. “D’you know him?”
“No.”
“He’s a good guy, actually. An SDS coordinator at Amherst. I’ve known him about two years.”
“Oh!” Eileen said. “I’ll bet you worked on the Summer Project, didn’t you?”
“Not really,” Skip said politely. “You two better get out here. I’ve got to cram into that space behind the Buick.”
Stu, our host, or someone like him, came to the door to let us in. The elder Rifkins were in France and now there were kids all over their expensive antique and oriental rug-laden home. The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Beatles were playing on the stereo, and everyone was smoking pot. Skip wandered off and talked to people, moving from group to group, couple to couple, shaking hands, nodding hello, smiling. He knew exactly how to put an arm around a shoulder, making the gesture friendly but not intrusive. He stopped in front of a girl who was as small as a child, and while she talked with all sorts of animated gestures, he listened soberly, and nodded. I saw him get a small black notebook out of his shirt pocket and write something in it, and then he nodded at her and turned away, and I had a searing attack of jealousy. It felt as if I’d just drunk lighter fluid, as if my entire gullet and gut were on fire, and then it passed, a flare that had burned itself out. He was talking to someone else, listening, nodding, and I felt fierce and empty, I couldn’t stop watching him. Who were all these people he was talking to? I was full of desire for him.
“Beer?”
I looked down at a short, stout person. “What?”
“You want a beer?”
“No, thanks.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like beer.”
“You wanna go upstairs and share a joint?”
“No.”
“Say, what’s your name anyhow, Madame No? Who are you here with?”
I turned away. Eileen had found a friend. She was talking to the guy who had answered the door. He had her backed up against the moiré-covered wall. Her knee was cocked and pressed against his thigh. She had on an orange minidress and black suede knee-high boots just like mine. One of her hands hung over the guy’s shoulder, dangling a beer can.
Skip came back and stood next to me, sipping a beer. “I’ve had it,” he said. “Would you like to get out of here?”
I said, “What about Eileen?”
He gestured toward the pale blue-gray wall. No one there. “I believe when last seen they were heading upstairs.”
“Wow,” I said, “already?”
He took my hand and started gently tugging me toward the front door. “They met in a previous incarnation. Where would you like to go? Would you like to see where I live?”
“You mean your house?”
“No, my office.”
“You have an office?”
“I share it with a bunch of people. It’s just a hole in the wall, really. A basement almost in Georgetown.”
“What’s it an office for?”
“Some of us in the area who are SDS. You’ll like it. It has the authentic murky feel of a French film, one about World War II and the Underground. You didn’t like the party, did you?”
“No.”
“Don’t like parties?” He had steered me out the door and down the street to his car. He paused at the car door and looked down at me curiously. His white shirt gleamed in the dark.
I said, “You forgot your jacket.”
He put his arms around me. “I know.”
We kissed and then he opened the car door. I got into the car feeling shaky. When he got in, he pulled me closer and we kissed again, and then he broke it off and started the car. He shifted and put his hand on my knee and we slowly drove down the narrow street. We came out on Connecticut Avenue, and he headed into the downtown traffic. The cars were fast and aggressive. It felt as if we were swimming at the bottom of the sea, carried along in a huge school of predator fish, barracudas or surging piranhas. He smoked as he drove. At traffic lights he would take a drag, shift, and then drop his hand onto my knee. I hadn’t had anything to smoke or drink, but nevertheless I felt strange, lightheaded and light-bodied, and the headlights and the lights of the buildings seemed to spin by us while we stood still.
“We’re here,” he said. It was a derelict neighborhood. A trail of garbage decorated the sidewalk, overflow from a trio of dented metal cans. The office was in the basement of a three-story brick building. We went down the steep stairs, he unlocked the exterior door, and then in the pitch black hall, unlocked a door to the right. He did this easily in the dark. I commented.
“Scotch tape on the key,” he said, and snapped on the lights. It was one long room, two desks, two typewriters, a file cabinet, a long sofa of brown leather. I smiled and thought, “oh.” The room smelled of oranges.
I said, “What is it you do here?”
He said, “What do you mean?”
“What kind of work do you do here?”
He shrugged. “Have meetings, get things coordinated.”
“But what’s your job, precisely?”
“I’m a contact to a couple of law students at G.W. who help with the legal stuff. Want a coke? It’ll be warm, we don’t have a fridge.”
“No thanks. How’d you get into this?”
“Mm … mainly through friends of mine, my roommates at Princeton. How’d you get into this?”
“I’m not really into this.”
“You’re not here for the deal tomorrow?”
“Yes, but that’s about it, an occasional peace march.”
“You’re not serious about it?”
“I think the war is wrong, yes. But I’m not in any organization.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not good at that kind of thing.”
He laughed. We were sitting on the sofa by this time, close but not very close. He said, “What are you good at?” There was something teasing and yet hostile in the remark.
I said, faintly, “Excuse me?”
His arm lay on the back of the sofa. He picked up a strand of my hair in his fingers and looked at it, and then he pulled. “Come here.”
“Ouch! I am here.”
“Closer over here. That’s it. Comfortable? Let’s get comfortable, okay? It’s too warm. Here, wait … let me …”
“What if someone comes in?”
“They won’t.” We kissed. He unbuttoned my blouse and slid his fingers under the lace of my bra. “Oh … nice. Oh, God, very nice. Sweet little … here, wait.”
“I want to take my boots off.”
“We don’t have time.”
“You said no one was coming.”
“I meant … oh God. Baby, just lie back, all right? Yeah, like that. Oh my God … Oh my … God .. oh.”
When he came back from the bathroom he said, standing there and looking down at me wryly, “A first?”
“Do I get a medal?”
“Do I?” He pulled on his shorts and lit a cigarette.
“How come you haven’t? Nobody you liked?”
“No.”
“Scared?”
“Nope.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, it’s not really your business. Know what? I think we’d
better go back. The Marshalls seem kind of old school and I’m worried about Eileen.” I wasn’t really worried about Eileen, but I felt jumpy and ashamed and wanted to get out of there.
“I’ll tell you something about Eileen, she can take care of herself.”
“How do you know that? You just met her tonight.”
“We grew up in the same town. I’ve heard about her. Believe me, Eileen is not old school.”
“Isn’t that what they call ‘hearsay’?”
“No. That’s gossip. But I have it on good authority. I know guys that have dated Eileen.”
“I never believe what guys say.”
“Do you know the Marshalls well?”
“No. I’ve only met them one other time, in June at my college graduation. Eileen was in my class. Mrs. Marshall’s horsey, very shy, kind of rigid. Crazy about Mr. Marshall.”
“Here’s some more gossip—he screws around.”
“I bet. Do you?”
He laughed as if I’d said something uproarious. “I think you’ve just committed the major faux pas.”
“No doubt.” I sat up and began pulling my clothes together. Obscene. I had done it with my boots on, and my pantyhose twisted around my knees. I stood up and began straightening the torn pantyhose. I felt like crying and instead gritted my teeth, determined not to. Was this it? Was this what it was?
He said, “Marshall’s a fantastic guy. He’s one of my real heroes. If Lyndon had listened to him, we’d be out of Vietnam by now. What’s he like?”
“Powerful, and knows it. Courtly. Very sexy. I don’t really trust him.”
Cool's Ridge Page 14