Richard Yates

by Easter Parade (v5. 0) (epub)

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. All right.’

  ‘I vowed I wouldn’t ask you this,’ he said, ‘but now that I have your marvelous thigh in my hand I’ve got to know. How many affairs have you had?’

  ‘Three.’

  He winced. ‘God. Three. I was afraid you might say eight or ten, but in a way three is worse. Three suggests real, important affairs. It suggests you’ve been in love with three different men.’

  ‘I don’t know what love is, Andrew. I’ve told you that.’

  ‘You told me that last year. And you still don’t know? Well, good; that’s something, anyway. Because you see I do know what love is, and I’m going to work on you and work on you until you do too. Oh, listen to me – “work on you.” That sounds as if I meant – God, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t have to apologize.’

  ‘I know. That’s what Dr. Goldman keeps telling me. He says I’ve spent my life apologizing.’

  There were more martinis at the Greek restaurant, and wine with dinner, and when they started home to her place he seemed a little drunk. She didn’t know whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

  ‘This is taking on all the aspects of a major sporting event,’ he said as they approached her steps. ‘A championship fight, or something. The contender’s been in training for a year; can he make it this time? Stay tuned for Round One, after this word from—’

  ‘Don’t, Andrew.’ She settled her arm around his broad back. ‘It’s not like that at all. We’ll just go upstairs and make love to each other.’

  ‘Ah, you’re so sweet. You’re so sweet and healthy and kind.’

  They tried for hours – they tried everything – and it was no better than the best of their times last year. In the end he sat slumped on the edge of the bed as if on a prizefighter’s stool, his head hanging.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘A technical knockout in the fourth round. Or was it only the third? You’re the winner and still champion.’

  ‘Don’t, Andrew.’

  ‘Why not? I’m only trying to make light of it. At least the sportswriters will be able to say I was graceful in defeat.’

  And the following night he scored a victory. It wasn’t perfect – in its climactic moments she failed to respond as fully as she knew she should – but it was what the author of any sex manual would have called an adequate performance.

  ‘… Oh, Emily,’ he said when he’d recovered his breath, ‘oh, if only this had happened the first time, last year, instead of all those miserable nights of—’

  ‘Sh-sh.’ She stroked his shoulder. ‘That’s all in the past now.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘All in the past. Now let’s think about the future.’

  They were married soon after her graduation, in a civil ceremony at the Municipal Building. The only attendants, or witnesses, were a young married couple of Andrew’s acquaintance named Kroll. When they walked out across City Hall Park afterwards for what Mrs. Kroll insisted on calling ‘the wedding breakfast,’ Emily found herself in one of the busy lunchtime restaurants she had come to with her father long ago.

  They told their mothers first. Pookie wept into the telephone, as Emily had known she would, and made them promise to come and visit her the next night. Andrew’s mother, who lived in Englewood, New Jersey, invited them for the following Sunday.

  ‘… Oh, he’s nice, dear,’ Pookie said when she’d cornered Emily in the cramped kitchen downtown, while Andrew sat sipping coffee in the next room. ‘I was a little – well, frightened of him at first, but when you get to know him he’s really awfully nice. And I love the sort of formal way he talks; he must be very intelligent…’

  Andrew’s mother was older than Emily had expected, a blue-haired, wrinkled and powdered woman wearing knee-length elastic stockings. She sat on a chintz-covered sofa with three white Persian cats, in a room that smelled of recent vacuum cleaning, and she blinked at Emily repeatedly as if having to remind herself that Emily was there. In a bright, airless sun porch called ‘the music room’ there was an upright piano, and there was a framed studio photograph of Andrew at the age of eight or nine, dressed in a sailor suit, seated on the piano bench with a clarinet across his chubby lap. Mrs. Crawford opened the keyboard and looked imploringly at her son. ‘Play something for us, Andrew,’ she said. ‘Has Emily heard you play?’

  ‘Oh, Mother, please. You know I don’t play any more.’

  ‘You play like an angel. Sometimes when there’s Mozart or Chopin on the radio I just close my eyes’ – she closed her eyes – ‘and picture you here – right here at this piano…’

  In the end he gave in: he played a short selection from Chopin, and even Emily could tell he was hurrying through it, seeming to play sloppily on purpose.

  ‘God!’ he said when they were back on the train for New York. ‘Every time I go out there it takes me days to recover – whole days just to get to the point where I can breathe again…’

  Only one visit remained to be made – to Sarah and Tony in St. Charles – and they put it off until the end of the summer, when Andrew had bought a used car.

  ‘So,’ he said as they sped along the wide Long Island highway. ‘At last I get to meet your beautiful sister and your dashing, romantic brother-in-law. I feel as if I’d known them for years.’

  He was in a sour, touchy mood, and she knew why. His sexual performance had been adequate all summer, with occasional lapses, but just lately – in the past week or so – he had fallen back into the old habit of failure. Last night he had suffered a premature ejaculation against her leg, and afterwards he had wept in her arms.

  ‘Was he in the service?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Laurence Olivier. Who’d you think I meant?’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ she said. ‘He was drafted into the Navy, but they assigned him back to Magnum as naval personnel.’

  ‘Well, at least he didn’t storm the beaches at Normandy,’ Andrew said, ‘and win the Silver Star with fourteen Oakleaf Clusters – we’ll be spared that kind of an evening.’

  It wasn’t easy to find St. Charles from the spidery lines on the road map, but once they were in the village she saw enough landmarks (BLOOD AND SAND WORMS) to guide Andrew out to the Wilsons’ place. Beside the driveway was a small hand-lettered sign reading GREAT HEDGES, and she recognized the lettering as Sarah’s.

  The young Wilsons sat on a blanket on their front lawn with their three sons toddling and chirping around them in the afternoon sunshine; they were so absorbed in each other that they didn’t see their guests arrive.

  ‘I wish I had a camera,’ Emily called. ‘You make a lovely picture.’

  ‘Emmy!’ Sarah sprang to her feet and came forward across the bright grass with both arms held out. ‘And you’re Andrew Crawford – it’s so nice to meet you.’

  Tony’s greeting was less effusive – his smiling eyes, crinkled at the corners, seemed more amused than pleased, as if he were thinking Must I really put myself out for this fellow? Just because he’s married to my wife’s little sister? – but he shook Andrew’s hand firmly enough and managed to mumble appropriate things.

  ‘I didn’t know even Eric was on his feet now,’ Emily said.

  ‘Certainly,’ Sarah told her. ‘He’s almost eighteen months old. And that’s Peter there, the one with the cookie crumbs on his face, and the big one’s Tony Junior. He’s three and a half. What do you think of them?’

  ‘They’re beautiful, Sarah.’

  ‘We just came out here to get the last of the sun,’ Sarah said, ‘but let’s go inside. It’s cocktail time. Darling? Would you shake out the blanket, please? It’s all cookie crumbs.’

  Cocktail time, in the carefully cleaned-up living room, meant that the Crawfords had to sit and watch with fixed smiles while the Wilsons went through the old Anatole’s business of entwining arms for the first sip. For what seemed a long time after that the party failed to ignite. Shadows lengthened on the floor and the west windows turned bright gold, and stil
l the four of them were stiff and shy. Even Sarah was less talkative than usual: she told no rambling anecdotes, and except for a few awkwardly phrased questions about Andrew’s work she seemed constrained in his presence, as if afraid she might appear trivial to such a learned man.

  ‘Philosophy,’ Tony said, swirling the ice cubes in his empty glass. ‘I’m afraid that whole field’s rather a mystery to me. Must be ve’y difficult to read, let alone teach. How does one go about teaching it?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Andrew said, ‘you know; we get up there and try to educate the little bastards.’

  Tony chuckled approvingly, and Sarah turned her laughing face on him as if to say You see? You see? I told you Emmy wouldn’t marry a creep.

  ‘I say, are we ever going to eat?’ Tony inquired.

  ‘I’ll have just one more cigarette,’ Sarah said. ‘Then I’ll get the boys to bed, and then we’ll have dinner.’

  The small roast was badly overcooked and so were the vegetables, but Andrew had been warned not to expect very much in the way of food. It began to seem that the visit might be a success after all, for all of them, until they moved back into the living room after coffee.

  There were more drinks then, in taller glasses, and the trouble might have been partly that: Andrew wasn’t used to drinking that much, and he grew a little over-earnest in recommending a Jugoslavian movie, or ‘film,’ that he and Emily had seen. ‘… I don’t see how anyone could fail to be moved by it,’ he concluded, ‘anyone with any belief in humanity.’

  Tony had looked sleepy through most of the recital, but the last line brought him awake. ‘Oh, I believe in humanity,’ he said. ‘Humanity’s perf’ly all right with me.’ Then his mouth went into a subtle shape of wit, suggesting that his next remark would bring down the house. ‘I like everyone but coons, kikes, and Catholics.’

  Sarah had started to laugh in anticipation of whatever he might say, but when she heard it she cut her laughter short and lowered her eyes, displaying the fine little blue-white scar of the gymnastics bar long ago. There was an uneasy silence.

  ‘Is that something you learned in your English public school?’ Andrew inquired.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘I said is that something they taught you in your English public school? How to say something like that?’

  Tony blinked in bewilderment; then he mumbled something inaudible – it might have been ‘Oh, I say’ or ‘Sorry’ or it might have been neither – and stared at his glass with a jaded little smile to show that he for one had had quite enough of this tiresome nonsense.

  Somehow a measure of decorum was restored. They managed to labor through a ceremony of small talk and smiles and goodnights, and then they were free.

  ‘The Country Squire,’ Andrew said, gripping the steering wheel tight in both hands as they droned along the highway toward home. ‘He was raised with the English upper-middle class. He’s “practically an engineer.” He lives in a place called Great Hedges. He’s sired three sons out of his beautiful wife; and he comes up with a remark like that. He’s a Neanderthal. He’s a pig.’

  ‘It was inexcusable,’ Emily said. ‘Wholly inexcusable.’

  ‘Oh, and by the way, it’s true what you told me,’ Andrew went on, ‘they do read nothing but the Daily News. When I went out to the bathroom I passed a stack of Daily Newses about three feet high – the only bona-fide reading matter in that whole lovey-dovey little house.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Ah, but you love him, don’t you?’

  ‘What? What do you mean? I don’t “love” him.’

  ‘You’ve told me,’ Andrew said. ‘You can’t take it back now. You’ve told me that when they were first engaged you had fantasies about him. You had fantasies that you were the one he really loved.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Andrew.’

  ‘And I can imagine what you did to support those fantasies – to flesh them out, so to speak. I’ll bet you masturbated over him. Didn’t you? Oh, I’ll bet you tickled your little nipples until they came up hard, and then you—’

  ‘Stop it, Andrew.’

  ‘—and then you went to work on your clitoris – picturing him all the time, imagining what he’d say and how he’d feel and what he’d do to you – and then you spread your legs and shoved a couple of fingers up your—’

  ‘I want you to stop this, Andrew. If you don’t stop it I’ll open this door and get out of this car and—’

  ‘All right.’

  She thought his rage would make him drive too fast, but he was carefully holding the car under the speed limit. His profile, in the dim blue light of the dashboard, was clenched in the look of a man controlling himself against impossible odds. She turned away from him and stared out the window for a long time, watching the slow movement of endless dark, flat land and the red throbbing of radio-tower lights high in the distance. Did women ever divorce their husbands after less than a year of marriage?

  He didn’t speak again until after they’d crossed the Queensboro Bridge, until after they’d crawled through traffic to the West Side and turned uptown, heading home. Then he said ‘Do you want to know something, Emily? I hate your body. Oh, I suppose I love it too, at least God knows I try to, but at the same time I hate it. I hate what it put me through last year – what it’s putting me through now. I hate your sensitive little tits. I hate your ass and your hips, the way they move and turn; I hate your thighs, the way they open up. I hate your waist and your belly and your great hairy mound and your clitoris and your whole slippery cunt. I’ll repeat this exact statement to Dr. Goldman tomorrow and he’ll ask me why I said it, and I’ll say “Because I had to say it.” So do you see, Emily? Do you understand? I’m saying this because I have to say it. I hate your body.’ His cheeks were quivering. ‘I hate your body.’

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1

  For a few years after she divorced Andrew Crawford, Emily worked as a librarian in a Wall Street brokerage house. Then she got another job: she joined the editorial staff of a biweekly trade journal called Food Field Observer. It was pleasant, undemanding work, writing news and feature stories for the grocery industry; sometimes when she composed a headline quickly and well, so that the spaces counted out right the first time –

  ‘HOTEL BAR’ BUTTER

  HITS SALES PEAK;

  MARGARINES FADE

  – she would think of her father. There was always a dim chance that the job could lead to employment on a real magazine, which might be fun; besides, college had taught her that the purpose of a liberal-arts education was not to train but to free the mind. It didn’t matter what you did for a living; the important thing was the kind of person you were.

  And most of the time she thought of herself as a responsible, well-rounded person. She lived in Chelsea now, in a place with tall windows facing a quiet street. It could easily have been made into an ‘interesting’ apartment, if she’d cared enough to bother about such things; in any case it was big enough to give parties in, and she liked parties. It also made a snug little temporary home for two, and during that time there were a good many men.

  In the space of two years she had two abortions. The first would have been the child of a man she didn’t like very much, and the central problem with the second was that she couldn’t be sure whose child it would have been. After that second abortion she stayed home from the office for a week, lying around the apartment alone or taking hesitant, painful walks along the empty streets. She thought of going to a psychiatrist – some of the people she knew went to psychiatrists – but it would cost too much and might not be worth the effort. Besides, she had a healthier idea. On a low, sturdy table in her apartment she set up the portable typewriter her father had given her as a high-school graduation present and began work on a magazine article.

  ABORTION: A WOMAN’S VIEW

  She liked the tentative title, but couldn’t settle on an opening sentence, or what she had learned to call a ‘lead.’

  It is painful, dangerous,
‘immoral’ and illegal, yet every year more than ________ million women get abortions in America.

  That had a nice ring to it, but it set her up for a kind of hortatory stance she would somehow have to maintain throughout the article.

  She tried another attack.

  Like many girls of my age, I had always assumed that abortion is a dreadful thing – to be approached, if at all, with the fear and trembling one reserves for a descent into the outer circles of hell.

  That sounded better, but even after she’d changed ‘girls’ to ‘women’ it failed to please her. Something was wrong.

  She decided to skip the lead for now and plunge into the body of the article. For many hours she wrote many paragraphs, smoking many cigarettes that she was unaware either of lighting or of putting out. Then she went over it with a pencil, scribbling revisions in the margins and sometimes on whole new pages (‘Rev. A, pgh. 3, p. 7’), feeling a heady sense of having found her vocation. But the messy stack of manuscript was there waiting for her in the morning, after a fitful sleep; and she had to acknowledge, with an editor’s gelid eye, that it didn’t read well at all.

  When her week of sick leave was over she went back to the office, grateful for the orderly rhythm of an eight-hour day. For several evenings and most of one weekend she worked on the abortion article, but in the end she stowed it in a cardboard box that she called ‘my files,’ and put the typewriter away. She would need the table for parties.

  Then suddenly it was 1955, and she was thirty years old.

  ‘… And of course if you want to be a career girl that’s fine,’ her mother said on one of the rare and dreaded evenings when Emily went down to her place for dinner. ‘I only wish I’d found a satisfying career when I was your age. It’s just that I do feel—’

  ‘It’s not a “career”; it’s only a job.’

  ‘Well, all the more reason, then. It’s just that I do feel it’s time for you to – oh, I won’t say “settle down”; Lord knows I never settled down; I just mean—’