by Rhoda Lerman
“Aren’t you going to ask what’s wrong?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I trust you. If you need the day off, it’s your business. I wish you well. I don’t want to know. I’ll pray for you.”
“Pray for the baby.” She hung up, cursing me to a third party before the phone reached its cradle. I didn’t hear from her until Tuesday. Nor did I call her. I rationalized my not calling her but I knew the reason was that I couldn’t stand hearing whatever gothic tale she had to tell me.
Richard, who was obviously into phone calls at erratic hours, called me again early Saturday morning, offering to bring steaks over that night and, because it was a forsythia-sky-blue day and I was happy and part of me really did want to be the right girl, I borrowed pieces of furniture, sheets, and dishes from everyone in the building, lugged home four flowering azaleas and a ficus tree that probably would impair my spine for a lifetime, licked the apartment clean and prepared strawberries Romanoff, readied a Caesar salad, whipped up more cream just in case and, among other things, sang Richard’s song about the girl he would marry all the day long until he called at three to say he had to leave at ten but would be over at six, had his alarm clock set for six and would take a nap. The free spirit asked no questions. The free spirit was learning. But he hadn’t come at six and I was wildly angry and called him. Error. I woke him, he said, as his alarm went off and he’d been dreaming about the owl and the pussycat. I was no longer wildly angry. The synchronicity, like Merlin’s sand of enchantment, flung me into my darkest mythic levels. Instead of asking practical questions like where are you and when will you be here, I wanted to know what level our reality was on. What did our meeting really mean?
“I have a friend,” he told me, dreamy and groggy, “who insists that the owl is a girl. I say boy. Who would you identify with, Stephanie, girl that you are?”
If he hadn’t said friend, I might have said pussycat. I have a friend who rolled over on a hot August night and said, dreamy and groggy, to his wife, “Honey, I gotta go home.” Who do you talk to in your sleep, Richard? Who are you dreaming with? The veil of enchantment was lifting rapidly. I said, “The owl, definitely.”
“Really, I could have sworn you’d say pussycat. She says the owl,” he told someone else. “Well, I told my friend we’d have to accept your decision because you are a born romantic. But why the owl?”
And there’s one born every minute. Who does your friend think you’re talking to? “The owl because every time you mention another goddamn friend I want to ask who.”
There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end and then silence and then, quietly, pleasantly, “Hold on a minute, honey, while I splash some cold water on my face and answer nature’s call, okay?”
Nature who? But I held on and when he came back many minutes later, perhaps seven, perhaps ten, he said, “Jesus, it’s really late. Would you forgive me if I freeze the steaks and take a raincheck? By the time I shower and shave and dress and get over there, I’ll have to leave and that would be unfair to you.”
What was I to do? Ask him if he were constipated? I murdered petal by petal our centerpiece until the petals were red pulp in my hand but I held because he told me in melodious lilting words about poetry and silly things like owls and pussycats and how talking with me on those levels really turned him on because he loved to hear me dreaming and someday he would catch me asleep and when my eyes were doing those REM things to show I was in a dream state he would touch me on my lovely ivory shoulder and ask if I would let him into my dream before it went away. And he told me how lucky we were to find each other, that it was part of a cosmic design and he extracted a promise from me that if I ever thought he was full of shit—his words, not mine—I should tell him so because it makes him feel secure that someone can be totally honest and care enough to help him. Even if it hurts. I would have saved myself a lot of time if I’d picked up on the “even if it hurts.” At that point though, I couldn’t imagine hurting him, tempted as I was to love him and I was still slightly enchanted while I listened to his promise that he would think only of me until we were together again and signed off with his “Catch you later.” The catch you later lifted the final veil. It wasn’t until I looked around at the very real ficus tree and the four azaleas and the red pulp in my palm that the white anger rose in my volcanic neck.
I am such a sucker for myth, magic and cosmic promise. Again I had allowed myself to be charmed. I had allowed him to break the date without a murmur, without a question. Why would fifteen minutes, I tried not to think, make any difference? If he had to be at my place at six, why had he set his alarm for six? And why did he have to leave at ten? And why, if all he did was sleep on Saturday, couldn’t we have gone away this weekend instead of waiting for the next? I had a strong feeling he was manipulating me.
But I couldn’t really expect to understand him that quickly, I thought, and I decided not to think about him or the weekend or the owl. Maybe he had diarrhea. At any rate, I had a new ficus tree and my apartment was gleaming. I gorged myself sick on the whipped cream and stopped thinking about Richard.
Until Sissy arrived on Tuesday, slung her knapsack on my desk, and burst into large tears. I handed her Kleenex, the knapsack and bills of lading to retype. “How’s Monica,” I mumbled as she left my office, heaving.
“Don’t ask.”
I didn’t ask.
Forty-five minutes later, she stormed into my office. “I really appreciate your concern. Thanks a lot.”
“How’s Monica, Sissy?” I offered more audibly.
Her mouth turned down into tears. Through the tears she looked at me with proud and defiant animal eyes. “She kept the baby.”
“What baby?”
“Monica is pregnant.”
I had been right. I couldn’t stand hearing whatever it was she needed Monday off for. “What do you mean pregnant? What do you mean pregnant?”
Sardonic now, superior. “I mean she is going to have a baby. We Lesbians aren’t barren, you know.”
“Oh.” I looked at Sissy and I felt her pain thundering into my own center. I recommended what I saw as a logical and sane solution. “There are agencies, Sissy. Miriam can help.”
Sissy gagged on hot fresh tears. “Only a man would say that. You better not try anything!”
“Look,” I tried again. “Tell me how it happened.”
That too was the wrong approach. I could feel the walls closing in on me. Sissy sat down on my desk, pushing papers into piles. Her shoulders shook. All I could separate from the strangling noises was Baskin-Robbins. It didn’t help much.
“Sissy, dear . . . get a grip on yourself.” How I wanted to run from that office and scrape all of the plaster of her insanity from me. “Here, try to tell me how it happened.”
She looked up at me with her sudden killer clarity. “How the hell do you think it happened?” And rooted around in her knapsack and handed me a Muriel. I tried to hold on. “It was important for our marriage and so we found a father.”
“Oh my God.”
“It isn’t easy. Don’t think it’s easy, Stephanie. We’re not programmed the way you are. We live on a frontier.”
I swung around to my window, hoping the bases of her choice were at least worse than my own. Hers seemed more rational.
“We’re going to write about it someday and we’re going to emerge better people for it.”
“Forget the philosophy. How did you choose the guy?”
Sissy was very at ease now. The Muriel was in shreds in my lap. “Straight leg, flare leg. Elimination. We got stuck on Oshkosh painters but dropped that. Lees or Levis, that took days but we ended with straight Levis. Then all the guys in straight Levis who bought ice cream cones. See?”
“Of course.”
“And then Rocky Road or S’Mores.”
“Rocky Road?” I didn’t know where the responses were coming from, a hole in my head, floating out to the hole in Sissy’s head
.
“You do understand. I knew you’d understand. Then three scoops, two scoops or one. Two was moderate. Then chocolate sprinkles or plain. Then who licks and who chews.”
“God help me.”
“Lickers cling and are too sentimental. So she went home with the one we liked. It was a very troubling time for both of us, you know. If it’s a girl we’re going to name it after you because we love you.” She found another Muriel and passed it to me. “Try to smoke it this time.”
“No way. No way. Don’t get me involved. I lick. I hate chocolate. I don’t want any part of your insanity. No way, Sissy.”
“It isn’t insane, Stephanie. It’s just because you’re programmed. Straight people are programmed on straight lines.”
“The hell I’m programmed.”
“She almost lost the baby, you know. I feel so guilty.”
“The hell I’m programmed.”
“Once you realize you’re programmed, you’ll be free. But you are programmed, believe me.”
“Why didn’t you have the baby . . . you’re programmed too then . . . she’s the woman, you’re the man.”
“Shit, I just didn’t like ice cream. That’s all.”
I asked Sissy to take the rest of the week off and stay home with Monica, but she refused because she couldn’t do it to me, she said. She knew how important a week it was. She would stay by my side. “Look,” her last remark of the day was, “you’re lucky you’re programmed. Don’t feel bad.”
It was after that remark that I began to think about Richard. I began to think about Richard a great deal that week. The museum had closed my chapel. The Armengols were shrouded in spattered drop cloths and a pockmarked painter in Oshkosh paint pants replaced the windows with sixteenth-century stained glass. I became so assiduously aware of his pocks and his pants, even though he was quiet and pleasant, I could find neither solace nor solitude in my chapel. Miriam was finally so annoyed that I’d called her as often as I had to ask why Richard hadn’t called me that she, explaining she had a heavy case load (one of which was herself), locked me out. “Stay off the phone, honey, and give him a chance to call you.” And so I spent my lunch hours that long week, except for one, with my Bison Brand in my briefcase and the Unicorn in the Hall of the Unicorn Tapestries.
I thought of myself as a rational well-centered woman who could think as well as feel. And so I sat before the Unicorn each day and forced myself to think. Mostly I felt. The Unicorn always did that to me, which was why I avoided the Hall, the romance and the charm. The gentle magic beast in its millefleur fields and the happily married Anne and Louis, Queen and King of France, were, as I had known they would be, simply too much for my rational nature and I was soon lost in the immensity of the tapestries, the tiny beasts, the delicate flowers and the utter charm of my friend, the Unicorn, while I sat and considered Richard. I considered what Richard had said, what Richard had done, what Richard would say, what Richard would do—a dozen conversations I held before the Unicorn, and then I considered what I had said, what I should have said, what I had done, what I had not done, and then I seriously considered Richard’s acts and words and how my acts and words would change his acts and words, how my moves would change his events. Sweet, heady, androgynous, lucid tête-à-têtes before the Unicorn and each one ended with the smug decision that my legs were plenty good enough and ended with me in a pastoral scene—something between horny Cretans and langorous Tahitians with Richard humming and rocking his head to a mythic melody as we undressed under the thatching. And when I had come dead end in my consideration of Richard, I would then consider the Unicorn. Eventually during that long week, I began to think of both Richard and the Unicorn together, and my romantic daydreams were becoming Skinnerian—I was trying to control the behavior of another human being.
I wanted to tell Miriam where I was with the Unicorn but when she finally called late Tuesday night, whispering into the phone, I knew she wasn’t ready for the Unicorn. “This one you’ll never believe. Guess which late-maturing adolescent spent the weekend in the hospital?”
“Are you all right?”
“I was an early maturer, but our friend has a broken foot and a broken arm. I have to stay home and baby him because he thinks I tried to kill him.”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t try, but I almost did.” She began to laugh, that absurd, wild laugh she releases after her Il Duce stories. I couldn’t stand it. “I can’t help laughing. I have stomach cramps every time I walk into the bedroom and see him there. But I have to stay home: he won’t have a nurse. Comic books, chocolate chip ice cream and we’re playing pishy pashy like it’s a Russian chess meet.”
“So?”
“My late-maturing adolescent decided to paint the eaves Saturday morning, which aren’t aluminum? And he’s a little shaky all the way up there on the ladder, so he ties a rope around his waist, okay? Throws it over the roof and ties, oh God, the other end to the bumper of my car.” She started to laugh again. “It worked fine until I ran out of cigarettes.”
“Miriam, how far did you go?”
“Just . . .” the giggles, “. . . just until I heard him bouncing across the roof. Every time he told the story in the hospital he had the nurses in stitches because he was so serious. And soon he figured out they thought he was funny and then he was Jack Benny and they rolled him around the place in his wheelchair. He had a ball. He’s almost grateful.”
“But is he okay?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s too mean to die.” I heard him calling her in the background. “Got to go.”
Part of me thought it was a great story. The other part wondered if she really had intended to kill him. Miriam wasn’t into objectivity. For myself, I returned to contemplating the Unicorn. The next day I called her and she answered thoroughly annoyed. “Miriam, I think Richard and the Unicorn have a lot in common.”
“Sure” she clipped. “They’re both horny. Listen he doesn’t like me on the phone.” And hung up.
I knew more about the Unicorn than I knew about Richard. But some information did ring true about both my friends. The Bestiary described the splendid horn of the Unicorn as anfractuous and chocleary. Chocleary wasn’t even in the dictionary but anfractuous certainly applied: winding, roundabout, devious and tortuous. That resonated. Actually I really knew nothing about Richard and nobody really knew anything about the Unicorn. All was conjecture. The only conclusion I reached after those lunch hours was that both Richard and the Unicorn were absolutely charming and completely elusive and regularly unknowable.
Finally I stopped thinking about the meaning and I began, slightly nonconsummated as I was, without even being aware that I had begun, to consider how I could capture my Unicorn. How I could get Richard to lay his head in my lap. For I also knew from the Bestiary that not a single Unicorn had ever come into the hands of man alive and although it was possible to kill them, it was impossible to capture them. Except, another strange archaic source offered, “if a virgin be led to the woods where the Unicorn lurks and he will see her and lay his head in her lap and allow himself to be caught.” That was interesting. But if the Unicorn—all spirit, all knowledge, enlightenment—allowed himself to be captured, he must have known his program. That’s when I began to reconsider Sissy’s remarks about programming. If I were programmed, then Richard too was programmed and maybe he was programmed for a girl like me. Maybe that’s what the right girl meant.
And he had reacted to my owl remark, unkind as it was, because he was already committed to the programming. I was the right girl. He wasn’t angry because I had said something a right girl shouldn’t say and thereby showed myself as the wrong girl. What he’d found was that the right girl, the one he might not be able to avoid, had bitch in her. That’s what bothered him. He was fighting his programming. And I mine? Actually, it might have meant I could do no wrong. Once the right girl, always the right girl. The worse I became, the more he would realize I was the right girl, because if you are programm
ed in the ways we are, then the right girl is your nagging mother or your castrating big sister. The wrong girl is the one who is loving and kind and open. There was a great deal to say for the Queen capturing the Unicorn by wounding him instead of laying her head in his lap. At any rate, the concept was far more appealing than a two-scooper straight-legged chocolate-sprinkled Rocky Road chewer.
I had no idea where my line of thinking was leading me but day by day I drove closer to my low conclusions. I was beginning to put together patterns and I needed to tell them to Miriam. But poor Miriam, it seemed, already had the plaster under her fingernails and was clearly out of control. I realized that when she called me at home Wednesday night. There was no laughter behind her voice this time.
“Vus machsta?”
“Oh, Miriam, I’m so glad you called.”
“You packed for your weekend?”
“I don’t know where we’re going. Listen, I have to tell you. . . .” Miriam wasn’t listening any longer.
“Pink, blue, soft lushy things, don’t forget. Listen, I gotta tell you this story. . . .”
Why did she have to tell me? The hostility between Miriam and II Duce was beginning to horrify me. I wasn’t amused. I didn’t want to hear. I couldn’t afford to hear. And anyway, I didn’t want to tie the phone up in case Richard were to call. “Sure, Miriam.”
“Remember I told you how the nurses pushed him all over the hospital and he went avisiting? Remember? It seems that he went into one room where a kid is drawing illustrations for a medical text. Okay? She’s taking her pictures from a slide projected on a wall, a huge slide. And it’s a diseased vagina or some goddamn thing. He can’t stop talking for days in between the pishy pashy about the picture and how young and innocent she is. And how honest she is. And how honest she is. And he’s in love.”
“With the kid?” Below the wisecracks, somewhere, Miriam had to feel something, some pain.
“Says so. Says she’s honest. He respects her for her honesty, and he wants some time off when he gets better because she promised to see him ‘socially.’ But, he wants to be honest too and not sneak around so he wants my permission. Is that cute? How do I compete with a young kid? Innocent, I’m not. Diseased, I’m not. But I thought I was honest at least. He got boxes of candy from her already and little cuddly cards. The whole kindergarten shit, bunny rabbits, mice with fucking bonnets. And he shows me everything because he thinks . . .”