The Girl That He Marries

by Rhoda Lerman

  If that lousy bastard Jack was right and Richard was the eunuch/unicorn waiting to be castrated, why would my Unicorn who had all the wisdom let me hurt him? “Because,” I told myself in Jack’s voice, “because he’s programmed for the wrong destiny. Wrong set of cultural values. He’s off the path, lady, and so are you. False principles. Wants to be Governor. And that’s the way he sees you—as the Governor’s Wife. It’s an ego trip for both of you and that’s not self-realization. But I don’t care about him,” Jack would say, “I care about you. Quit messing around with myths you don’t understand. They’re more dangerous than love.”

  I informed Jack in my head that I still hated him. I had once been in love with him. Then I could never get attention from him. But ever since I turned off he’s been waiting for a chance to give me another go-around. I was out of control with him then. Not now. Because now I don’t love him. Everyone I know is off the wall with love. Not loving, you stay in control. Loving . . . aah, when you love, you are out of control. I didn’t know then if I really wanted Richard or not; it was more an intellectual challenge. Armed with the rules, I wanted to play the game. And it was such a lucid, simple decision to play. The game could be warm and sexy and entertaining as long as I didn’t fall in love. After I caught him, then I could decide what to do with him as long as I remembered not to fall in love—and that would be the easiest part, I knew, because he was such a shit. Anyway, I decided, folding up my doodles and shutting the drawers of my desk hard and decisively, if I’m going to do it, I may as well do it right. I’d rather go to Bendel’s any day than off the wall. The right girl has to look like the right girl.

  “Sissy! Sissy! Get ready. You’re going to the dock and accept the crosses for me.”

  “Me?” Her face lit up. “How about you? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Something’s come up.”

  “Oh, Stephanie. I can’t let you do this to yourself. Don’t let a lousy man do this to you.” Her face had changed and her eyes were like the Unicorn’s. “It’s the highlight of your career.”

  “Christ, I don’t have time for emotions. Listen, I’ve been thinking of switching careers anyway,” I teased. “He’s doing nothing to me. I’m doing to him. And watch my steam. Look, seriously, you’re going down to the docks, authenticate the crosses, take the pictures and accept them for the museum. I’ll show the crosses to you in my book. These are the Cornish ones, not the Irish. You can take the book with you if you want. Okay? Be sure to say ‘I daresay’ a lot. I did last time. It works.”

  “What if they’re forgeries?”

  “No one’s going to forge tons of stone, for God’s sake.”

  “What if they find out I’m not you? I’ll lose my job.” Her face fell. I chucked her under the chin.

  “Tell them I forced you into impersonating me and then you can have my job. Come on, Sissy, it’s very simple.”

  Sissy blushed and seeing her blush made me feel warm toward her. She had always wanted my job, but I was also someone she admired terribly. Then I blushed. I understood why she didn’t want to go to the docks for me but I needed her to. “C’mon, Sissy, there won’t be any problem. You don’t have to say much. Take a clip board, write down a lot, work slowly. Just act mature. No one will ever know.”

  Fat tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “Please, Sissy.”

  “I can’t do it, not even for you. I’d do anything for you, Stephanie, but you shouldn’t be doing this. It’s immoral and it can ruin your reputation in your career.”

  “Don’t judge me, Sissy. I don’t judge you.”

  “No man’s worth it.”

  “Look, Sissy, I appreciate your concern but forget it; we’ll be old ladies together and I’ll rock and you’ll rock and I’ll say ‘Sissy, remember when I almost got married just to see if I could pull it off?’ ”

  “I’m going to spend my life with Monica and our child, not you.”

  “Dammit, I was just being metaphorical.”

  “Well, I’m not. This is very real. You’re selling out and you’re too wonderful a person to sell out for a man.”

  I can remember that conversation so well. Sissy, as she spoke to me, as she refused to go, was taking notes on the areas of the crosses I would need photographed. She found the camera, loaded it, studied its manual, studied the crosses in my book and pinned up the hem of my dress with paper clips—I’d pulled the hem while Richard was talking to his secretary. I turned as Sissy patted my leg. It was very disconcerting to have her look up at me, kneeling as she was and yet towering above me. I had never before measured her interior.

  “You are going to do it, aren’t you, Sissy?”

  “Yes. I have to.”

  “Sissy, when you and Monica . . . I can’t even imagine what you do in bed. . . .”

  “For beginners, it’s sort of like trying to braid your hair in a mirror. After a while you get used to it.”

  “Well, I try to accept it. I have tried. To me, it’s wrong. Please don’t judge me. What am I supposed to do? What alternatives do I honestly have if not marriage? Loneliness? Lesbianism? But I’m a heterosexual. I want a man. There’s no other way. I don’t have the courage to be alone and honest. And I’m afraid to wait too long—I’m not getting any younger or any prettier. So I’ve got your act or a house in Scarsdale. I want to get married. You can respond to loneliness, can’t you?”

  She nodded and then looked up at me, locking eyes. “I guess we all have to do what we have to do. I guess.”

  On the way out of the Cloisters, Sissy walked beside me as if she were a casket bearer. She was clearly bereaved for my soul. I was calculating the shortest way to get to Bendel’s. She hadn’t even asked me what I was going to do. Somehow it was better she didn’t know I was going shopping for clothes to impress Richard’s family. I kissed her cheek at the bus stand and gave her a ten-dollar bill for cabs. Astonished with the kiss, she began again to cry and I matched her this time tear for tear. We both fumbled for scraps of tissue and sniffed into our sleeves. She was crying for me. And I suppose I was also.

  “Get pink,” she sobbed. “Pink is the color.”

  I knew she’d ruin my day. She made me feel like a kamikaze pilot all the way to Bendel’s where I wrapped myself in silks. I looked, when I went back to the Cloisters, very much like my Connecticut friends. So what if he doesn’t make governor? I could do worse than a mildly corrupt senator. Truth is a lonely mountain. I’d rather have a man. Jesus, I hope he’s good in bed.

  11

  I DIDN’T THINK ABOUT RICHARD’S DRIVING THAT WEEKEND. I SHOULD HAVE because Richard didn’t respond to traffic signals. As a matter of fact, Richard didn’t respond to traffic. But I took his nonresponse for blitheness and spirit although I don’t know why I didn’t then become just such a combination myself. Because my consciousness was fast slipping into my lowest chakra, I related Richard’s relentless detachment directly to Genghis Khan stealing me across the steppes, dragging me into a lonely tent while all China waited, pulling me toward him by my long and flowing hairs, taking me, his eyes slanted, his mouth open, and his topknot loosening as he jammed me in the white tiger skin tent, horses and prime ministers braying uneasily without and cold winds whistling across the steppes. I’ve always preferred claim and conquer. Once an Irishman drove me from an airport to a distant motel with his hand between my legs all the way all the way. I didn’t move. His hand dark in my white slacks simply remained there like a territorial flag. He had said to me, “Do ye want to?” And I’d said yes. With Richard I felt as if I’d signed a nonaggression pact gagged and blindfolded.

  Richard was whistling also. A lot. Whistling he drove through to New Jersey whistling and whistling he left behind a chain of severely adrenalized drivers as his yellow Mercedes made its singularly swift approach to the condo in Leisure Village West. But windows up, air-conditioning purring, majestic music on the FM, both hands on the wheel at ten past ten as in Drivers’ Ed.—I didn’t think about the driving. I
thought about sleeping with him and I thought about wrapping my legs and arms around him and sinking away to Dvo ák’s New World into Richard’s soft/hard magic. I squirmed in my bucket seat and thought about all of that while between whistles he talked about his sister Blossom’s big mouth.

  “I could never marry a woman with a big mouth. Blossom used to make me cry. She’d always have a friend over and the two of them would plot ways to make me cry.”

  “Really? Does anyone make you cry now?”

  “Not unless I want them to.”

  “Oh.”

  “You understand that.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Of course.” Not.

  I mulled that conundrum and listened attentively to the swelling variations on the theme of mother/sister/father/uncle/women who had victimized Richard. Even when we passed a tractor-trailer whose trailer wasn’t quite tracking as we swung in tandem down a steep grade and the Mercedes had to thin itself out to pass on the downward hurtle, even then I listened attentively while Richard warned me to look out for his uncle. He said nothing about the tractor-trailer.

  “Watch him. I was involved once. My uncle met her, took one look, said ‘not a penny’ and turned his back on her.” As the left tire bumped up and off a concrete meridian he told me that he needed someone to help him cry. “When I get off airplanes, I’m sick with fear and I can’t cry. You’re the kind of woman who can help me cry. To face my fear realistically. I know that instinctively.”

  Richard would understand later that he had the correct instincts but the wrong interpretations. “Richard, why don’t you tell me about your mother. Should I feel threatened?”

  “My mother? My mother is a sick woman. She drains me. She gives me diarrhea. She gives me backaches, biological relapses, boils. If she informs you of my bowel habits by the grams, don’t be surprised. And she will begin every conversation with, ‘So what’s new in your court, Governor?’ No matter what I tell her, which is less and less each time, she says: ‘There is one law, Richard. A man marries and has children.’ ‘And has sons,’ my uncle will say, ‘so someone says Kaddish for him.’ ”

  Richard continued to talk about relating and not relating and whistled show tunes against the Stockhausen on the FM. I allowed myself to think about Richard as a large, glorious hickory tree and I wrapped my arms around him for strength and heard his heart beat and he moaned softly and moved under my whispers while I nibbled at his pith. Later I lay in his shadow and his leaves touched my forehead and our sons danced around us, straight and strong.

  “And watch my mother. She manipulates. Do you know how many nice girls whose mothers live in Leisure Village West or ride the bus or play in the Monday canasta game or shop at the same butcher call me at the office because my mother told her mother we’d have a lot in common and she was just passing through the city? Maybe two a week. A lot in common means she’s Jewish, she lives in one of the boroughs and has done anacrostics occasionally . . . sometimes I screw them to get even.”

  He turned and smiled at me to see my reaction. “To get even with my mother,” he said.

  “That’s not very Christian of you.”

  “Of course you won’t make references like that around the folks.”

  “Of course not.” That’s not what I should have said. What I should have said was: Funny, Richard, you make yourself sound like such a victim but you sure come on like Attila the Hung. But I kept my mouth shut.

  I should never have kept my mouth shut. You miss a line, it messes up the rhythm. I was deep into silent metrical lines about honesty, openness and moral purity, when an old black Chevy, its trunk filled with tires and tied down precariously with thin ropes, roared ahead of us from an access road, went over a bump on a level stretch and threw up a tire. I squinted at it, wishing it away, as it bounced into the traffic, up and down, high and happy, like Genghis’s topknot, unwinding itself inexorably in my path. Other cars swerved, brakes screamed, but Richard advanced steadily on the tire. The tire couldn’t get his attention. Mine, notwithstanding a certain detached fascination, was no problem. I clawed upholstery and braked all the way. Richard, lobotomized, easy on the wheel, face serene, the governor’s governor set at 65 mph, still—although I had the impression he murmured moron at one point—ignored the oncoming tire.

  “All she really wants is photos. She sits at the pool and all the grandmas have letters from camp and those long plastic fold-ups that flap down. . . .” The tire hit the undercarriage of the Mercedes lifting my half quite in the air. “Blossom’s kids fill some of the spaces. . . .” On two wheels we continued down the now empty highway. “The ladies at the pool think I’m gay because I’m thirty-three and not married.”

  “Christ died at thirty-three,” I managed to whisper through my teeth.

  “Non sequitur,” Richard accused happily. “Do cool the references, Steph.”

  A few inches more and the Mercedes would have been on its back but Richard was obviously oblivious to the ramming and ripping of fenders and bumpers, to the cars throwing dust and gravel up as they retreated to the shoulders away from the still energetic tire. Other drivers we passed in what must have been only three or four minutes watched us with open mouths. It occurred quite irrationally to me that men who are shocked look very much like men who are coming. I wondered how Richard looked and if I would live to see such a moment. Hanging men have erections—where the semen lands beneath their swinging feet, the mandrake grows. I vacillated between visions of myself on my back, of the Mercedes on its back and prayer. And then the Mercedes came down perfectly in a four-point landing on the highway in the very lane in which we had begun our ascent.

  “Used to be if a son didn’t marry it was testament to the fact that no other woman could make him as happy as his mother could. Now, we’re suspect. ‘It’s not normal, Richard. They don’t elect men like that, Richard.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘You know.’ ”

  Nothing moved behind us. Soon the next pack of cars would catch up to the disaster area. A blue Subaru was turned facing up the highway and steam vaulted from the folded hood of a silvery T-Bird. Richard reached over and squeezed my knee. We passed the Chevy on the shoulder of the highway, its four doors flung open and its four young men examining the ropes and remaining tires. “You’re a good woman.” Good woman moved closer on her bucket seat but the knee action was non sequitur also. “They’re all nuts but they’re all decent. Once they accept you, they’ll turn the world upside down for you.”

  I didn’t know if Richard was doing Genghis Khan or Evel Knievel. At one level, he was unaware of the tire. My knees, both of them, were shaking in what I wanted to think was desire but I knew wasn’t. Little wonder the wrecks and near wrecks piled up behind Richard. The rest of us, I would find out, his traffic, would sit inarticulate with rage, giving him the finger from our shattered Windows, stalled and steaming at the shoulders, while he, ignoring us all, arrived at his chosen destination, sighed mightily over a gin and tonic and remarked: “Christ, the traffic was a bitch.”

  It was Sanka, Slender, and Sucaryl. “Christ, the traffic was a bitch. Folks, this is Stephanie.”

  The sigh was as I had imagined, as was his mother and his uncle and the plastic, urethane, Syroco-cast indoor-outdoor condo at Leisure Village West. On the last leg of the trip Richard had recited chapter and verse from the “Book of the Dead for Brides-to-Be” and each place of judgment and weighing of my heart that he had forewarned me of, I passed. The uncle said nothing about pennies. His first remarks were: “Good teeth. Hasn’t she got good teeth? Good teeth, a fur coat and big ears to hold her down with, that’s all you need in a woman.” Then laughed at his own joke and asked me what my father did for a living.

  I pretended not to hear him.

  “And this is my mother. Mother. Stephanie.”

  “I’m so happy to meet you. Richard’s shown me your pictures.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure.” Except Richard had no pictures. Not of me.

  “Say, you lo
ok like a girl whose father is a banker.”

  I continued to ignore Uncle Myron. Richard winked at me and I ignored the wink. His mother looked nothing like the blown-up photos. The full doll’s face had dropped to bitter fat cheeks and the splendid hips into thick legs swelling painfully at the ankles to fold over the sharp leather edges of black Enna Jetticks. Unblinkingly, turning me into a photograph, she continued to stare at me with sea-shell eyes, rather deadly I felt, and served up more Sanka, Alba, rolls from egg whites according to Weight-Watchers and Cool Whip with something I would have thought, except under those circumstances, should have been real cottage cheese. Richard continued to wink. He was no different here than at the Four Seasons. His mother, who shuffled rather than bend the ankles into the tops of her shoes, simply became all nine waiters and he responded to her in the same way he had to them. I was touched by her loneliness and wondered what her name was. They were not bad people but simply desperately anxious to have Richard married. They were on my side. Later, his mother asked me quite covertly while the men were discussing no-fault, if I liked old things. Her tone suggested porny pictures but she meant, and pulled out for me from a box stuffed with newspapers, a lovely collection of Baleek, then majolica, then Imari.

  The men ignored us. We were behaving quite properly as women should until I mentioned my work in the museum.

  “That must be so exciting.” Her eyes came alive.

  “It is. Right now . . .” and I only brought up the subject because I had a strong feeling no one had spoken to her in a decade except to ask for the Cremora and find out what suit she was coming in, “. . . right now, I’m bringing together a collection of stone crosses, ancient Christian crosses. One of them has a man with a tail on it. Can you imagine?”