by Rhoda Lerman
16
AS SOON AS I WAS IN MY APARTMENT, DEPRESSION COMING ON LIKE A Class D fog, I called Jack, who was, as I had hoped, easy, gentle, comfortable on the phone.
“Jack . . .”
“It’s been months.”
“You better believe it . . . .”
“What’s up?”
“How would you like to take me someplace absolutely sordid and make very dirty love to me?”
“How about your place?”
“Very funny. Anyway, I’ve cleaned it since I’ve become a serious prospective bride.”
“Still?”
I didn’t answer.
“The Biltmore is pretty repulsive. What do you want first, advice or love?”
“Guess.”
He laughed. “Under the clock in forty-five minutes.”
It would be like old times. Crazy and hilarious and ruined with Jack’s torment over whether I truly loved him or not, but good, always good. Honest, that’s what it was. Vile rooms, blue-movie scenes, pseudo-embarrassments in front of dumb desk clerks, like Jack pouring handfuls of ghastly dime-store jewelry out of his pockets into my purse as he signed the register. And fun. I had had no fun with Richard—and no honesty.
The Biltmore was everything we wanted it to be. If Van Johnson had walked in with June Allyson they would not have been noticed. It was still the forties. Our room wasn’t altogether sordid but it did approach a special degeneracy in the coarse, iron-on taped sheets, the blankets thin, soiled and frayed and the pillows relentless as shredded wheat. Even though the bedspread was uncommonly repugnant and I very much the tarnished woman, it was no longer amusing. I bit my lip for the times I had been in places like this and thought I was in love with Jack. And when he said, “You’ve been on my mind a lot. I remember how you feel when you come,” I remembered why I didn’t want to marry Jack. But as soon as I hit the all too solid pillows, loosed my favorite little “oh,” and let Jack become Richard while I lay six inches behind my own eyes, I was with Richard, nimble, quick and charming magical Richard and I responded overwhelmingly to my expectations of Richard as lover while the real Jack labored somewhere outside my reality. Whether Jack was aware of it I didn’t know, nor did it seem to matter. Much later, much much later, he commented discreetly on my increased responsiveness to him. “Well, the bastard isn’t screwing you yet, is he?”
“Go to hell.”
“Later I want to tell you my Mick Jagger story.” And then he fell into a deep sleep while I tossed and at last left the bed, paced the room, bathed and finally crawled upon a wide window ledge, wrapped myself in a blanket and Jack’s sweater and watched the city skies turning from black to cream.
In the old days Jack and I would have been wandering the streets of the sleeping city searching for pastrami sandwiches and cheesecake to quiet his torment. The milk trucks were already banging over the Con Ed metal plates on the streets when Jack punctured my vigil. “Hi, lady. What’s doing over there that’s better than over here?”
“Do you remember me when I was a nice girl, Jack?” I think I might have meant when he loved me.
“Who is that over there whimpering? Come over here. You’re still a nice girl, Stephanie.”
I kept my place on the window ledge. “Remember Playland, on the beach, when you told me no one could see us because the roller coaster went too fast . . . you made up the figures . . . they’d be gone before they knew what we were doing.”
“Under the boardwalk. And the cars got stuck. Hadn’t calculated on the cars getting stuck.”
“Why can’t it be like that again?”
“First times . . . you can’t go back. Not like that with your friend?”
I said nothing. He knew. I slid in beside him and he welcomed me. I knew it was immoral to cry into his shoulder over Richard, but I was crying too over Stephanie and what was happening to her.
“If I want him, I have to hurt him. I can’t love him. That is, if I want to get married.”
“Considering marriage a moral act, which I doubt, all morality contains the seeds of its opposites. On the basis that two human beings have to hurt each other to capture each other, marriage is immoral.”
“There’s self-preservation, you know.”
“You love him?”
“Don’t get personal.”
“There’s another woman?”
“Don’t get personal.”
“Come on, baby. There’s another woman.”
“You better believe it. But she’s pretty Italian and he’s into politics.”
Jack laughed. I hated him when he laughed. “You mean he thinks you’re a good political bet? A country club Christian with a Long Island jaw. Shit, Stephanie, a couple of hundred dollars, someone buys her clothes and teaches her to speak . . . anyway, if he’s such a good politician he should understand that an Italian wife is much more negotiable than a Pound Ridge prize like you these days. Christ, Stephanie, I hope for your sake he’s good in bed.”
“I hate you a lot.”
“You hate truth, sweetheart. Truth as I see it is you don’t love the guy at all. He’s not even sexually attracted to you and you’re grimly goddamned determined to marry the poor shmuck. And you know what I think? I think it smells.”
I pounded his chest. I smashed my fists against his ribs and he laughed, grabbing my wrists after a while. “Channel the energy, loved one. Don’t deny your anger. It’s a form of passion.”
When I stopped hitting him, he held me and rubbed my head silently until sunup. And then I brought him my hairbrush and we sat cross-legged while he brushed my hair gently, braiding and unbraiding, twisting and smoothing, and told me his Mick Jagger story. I tried to listen. It was about a woman who wanted to sleep with Mick Jagger.
“Who left her husband and her kids and started balling rock stars and each time, each guy, she’d say, ‘He was good but he wasn’t as good as Mick Jagger.’ In a few months she actually met the Rolling Stones. She slept with the equipment men first and said after each of them, ‘He was good but he wasn’t as good as Mick Jagger.’ And then she slept with the audio men and she said . . .”
“Please don’t drag it out so . . . and do the sides. Too much on the back.”
“Well, she finally balls Mick and she says . . .”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“I didn’t think you would. But you should. She says, ‘He was good but he wasn’t as good as Mick Jagger.’ ”
The point being, I understood, take me, Steph. There is no Mick Jagger. I went into the shower and knew there was more than that to the story and that Richard, no man, was ever as good as romantic girls dream them to be and there was nothing ahead of me except disappointment. And I screamed. As long and furiously and maniacally as I have ever screamed. When I was hoarse and dry and out of the shower, Jack was gone. He’d never done that before. I’d really become a different person. Even Jack didn’t like me any longer. That night with Jack, I think, was the last loving act, the last softness, I can remember. My last dance with truth.
17
JUNE WAS NOT MY CRUELEST MONTH. I WAS WILLING TO DO ANYTHING TO GET Richard into bed but nothing seemed to work. I nagged Richard a great deal and although that didn’t bring him to bed, it did keep him coming back for more nagging. Even though he was already talking about marriage plans for Christmas, I could tell from the way he looked at me that he was into the duality again. His someone seemed to be in pain—I could tell she was spending time away, running, threatening, returning to whip more cream. Richard wasn’t ill but there was still something gray about him, which indicated that no one was caring for him the way in which he needed to be cared for. I knew from sentences he left unfinished, from a sad look on his face when he mentioned picking up bread before he left me one afternoon, from the pain he felt when I was cruel, that she was a good person who did not give him pain. I could imagine then that I would even like her. He told me once, unguardedly, before he could slip back into the neurotic act he us
ually had pretty much together, that her CR group was pushing her to be more independent. He was worried that she didn’t have enough of her own life and he was encouraging her to find it. I hoped she might also. We had one long convoluted inane conversation about raising children. We used bottom lines in more paragraphs than the Sunday Times held, ending in ideas about identity. His. Hers. Mine. Richard didn’t talk to me the way you talk to a person you sleep with. They were serious, our conversations, and real, but thoroughly objective. And then, at one point that month, he told me he had seen his girl’s analyst. Not only was Richard’s girl in trouble, but Richard was also.
He didn’t know if it was time for him to marry, he told me. But he had narrowed his choice down to two people. “Guess who?” I didn’t respond. She was in such distress, he said, and I seemed so together. I didn’t think she was in such distress at all. I was certain she thought she would win by giving him everything he said he wanted: independence, freedom, sexual fulfillment, understanding, sympathy, whipped cream. But she didn’t know Richard. He said he wanted all of the above but I knew at gut level the only thing that Richard would keep coming back to was a nagging woman. He wanted to be nagged and he wanted to take me places. She was waiting like a good wife for him to come to his senses, secure in the belief that honesty, truth, and all those items always win out. So she was giving him enough emotional rope. But I was making the knots.
I nagged him. He took me places.
She owned the weekends. I, the business days. There were all those long lunches and short dinners during the week—so little space in which to flaunt the archetypal nightmare I was supposed to be. I did work on the capillary action however. His table manners needed cleaning up. He ought to be more careful about how he put his adverbs before his verbs because it was indicative of second-generation American. I refused to talk about his ties when he asked but did remind him often that his suit needed pressing, cleaning, anything, that his shirts were not looking as good as they once had and that when he met my family, although I knew how wonderful and bright he was, he ought to be careful because, although I knew it was only sincerity and a desire to please, he had a way of running off at the mouth, which, I added, was fairly typical of bright self-made men, especially in law and it would irritate my parents a lot. I mentioned often that sooner or later I’d like him to meet my friends. He was very agreeable to that but I never brought him any friends.
We did meet Jack once. Jack pushed past us both in P. J. Clarke’s and then swung back when he recognized me. He was very drunk and wobbly. It was only lunch-time. “For God’s sake. Stephanie. Baby!” Then he looked at Richard, lifted the bottom of Richard’s tie and said loudly, after examining it cross-eyed, “Jesus, Baby, where’d you pick that up, the Yeshiva?” I didn’t know if he was referring to Richard or the tie. I should never have told Jack about the ties.
Richard bravely attempted a rejoinder—“I’ve got a buddy in Tie City”—but Jack had already stumbled away toward the men’s room. I so wanted to run after Jack and laugh with him because I knew he was holding his sides over the sink, laughing or vomiting. I could have done both also. I wanted to be with Jack.
After lunch, Richard and I wandered along the streets, each trying to fill the other’s emptiness. There was no radiance in my face this time, not like the first walk we took together. We looked at diamond rings in velvet windows and talked about the shape I’d prefer. Richard, because he knew his own pain, didn’t ask about Jack. And all I could think of as we looked at pear shapes and emerald cuts was how easy it would be for the girl at the piano if she did indeed have a baby or simply announced a pregnancy or tried a suicide. But I knew she was too decent and in her decency she was losing. I was winning and I couldn’t afford to deal with sentiments and sympathies. I couldn’t afford to waste an afternoon and so as I walked out of one jewelry store, I said softly to Richard, “I understand you and your girl fuck like crazy and semen flies all over the apartment.”
Richard leaned against the door frame. He closed his eyes. When he finally opened them, he said, “Be my friend, Stephanie. I beg of you.”
And I said, “Of course, darling. I understand. I just am fascinated by the expression. Is it true?”
“No, no. It’s not true. Nothing is true.”
“But she said so. That you hum when you come and sing when you swing. Or is it the other way around?”
“God, Stephanie, this is so personal. Please. Can’t you see what you’re doing to me?”
“You’re going to have to face life, Richard. You are going to have to do something about her.”
Of course I could see what I was doing. The horrible thing, the really shocking and disappointing thing, was that it worked. It worked too well. There were times I wished he would free me of what he was making me become. Fold me in his arms and whisper, “It isn’t necessary, darling. Stop. I love you. You can love me. I want you to love me. God wants us to love each other.”
But he never did take me in his arms. I always wondered if it would have changed our direction. One afternoon he called me at work to tell me he had faced the duality. He had told her analyst that he was in love with me. My modus operandi was operating only too well and on a Saturday morning in July, which was my cruelest month, we were driving, just driving around without direction, no place for Richard to go, and he faltered. He asked me for a Saturday night date.
“You mean a real date on a real Saturday night?”
“Would you like that?”
“I would. If there’s a good movie. I hate to spend time watching a bad movie just to go to the movies.” He suggested three. I made up bad reviews.
“Well, we’ll do something. Let me make a call.”
When he came back from the phone booth, looking now sickly and sad, he told me it was off. “Something’s wrong. I don’t know. She’s upset. She’s really upset about something. God almighty. God almighty. I have to get home quick.”
In the car, windows closed, heat turned up high, although the day was in the eighties—I had claimed a chill—I asked him one of the few questions I allowed myself in those times. “Richard, do you love her?”
He salivated and swallowed very hard. It took him a long time to answer. “I feel I owe her something.”
“That’s what I mean. You are so evasive. Why can’t you be honest with me? I’m honest with you. Why can’t you be honest with yourself. Why can’t you face LIFE?” I didn’t lie back. He was so unutterably vulnerable I continued my offensive until a very serious squad car took over for me and, howling at Richard, signaled him unceremoniously to the side of the road.
My harangue continued, counterpointing the trooper’s. “You give him a ticket, Officer. Give him a big ticket. Make him pay, Officer. Make him know there’s a price. He doesn’t care what happens to anybody else. He just goes his way. He doesn’t care what the speed limits are. I’ve told him a hundred times ‘You’re going too fast. You are going too fast!’ You have to think about other people, Richard. You have to think about the lives of other people and do you think he does?”
“Ma’am?”
“Do you think he thinks about other people?”
“You have anything to say, Mister?”
“Stephanie, I can handle this.”
“What can you handle? You can’t even handle me. You expect to handle an officer of the law? You who think the laws are for everyone else? I hope you get put in jail.” I folded my arms across my chest. “Tell him about the little kid you almost hit when you drove off. Tell him that, I dare you. And he wants to be governor. Can you imagine?”
“Okay, buddy, you just drive on. Just drive on. Try to watch the lights and the signs, huh?” The trooper patted Richard on the shoulder and walked away shaking his head.
“Jee-sus!” I said to no one out the window. “I’m going to trust my whole sexual being to this man who can’t even handle a policeman. Jee-sus!”
“Take it easy, Stephanie, please.”
I apologiz
ed and reassured him that when we slept together, I would be easier. I wouldn’t be so uptight anxious, so angry. He said he hoped so. That was all he said. It wasn’t much to go on.
Then it was the last weekend in July. Although I’d seen a lot of Richard and been promised a lot more of Richard, his Virgin still had the keys to the kingdom and I had yet to dislodge her. I spent my times without Richard devising new and wonderful final solutions for the Virgin. I had never consciously wished for someone’s quick demise before and I was shocked at myself for finding those thoughts so close to the surface. And then we were going to Westport for Richard’s mother’s birthday party and I did not know what I would do because my month was almost up, nor could I gauge what I had already done. But somehow, Richard and I would have a showdown and it would have to be that weekend because after that weekend Richard was going to the Hamptons for his vacation and not, I had no reason to think otherwise, alone.
18
RICHARD’S MOTHER’S BIRTHDAY PARTY IN THE DEN IN BLOSSOM’S WESTPORT barn was my finest moment. Mrs. Slentz was sixty. Richard gave her a three-month trip to the Greek Islands, Rome, and Israel. She tore up the envelope from the travel agency without opening it. I watched the back muscles of Richard’s neck tighten and vibrate like catgut. “You know what I want for my present, Richard. You know.”
“Mother, not here, please.”
“And it shouldn’t be short and squat.”
Mark giggled and whispered wonderfully loud to Pamela, who was wrapped in pink angora, hair in curlers, curled in Pussycat’s lap. Smug. “Innocent Marie.” Pamela nodded knowingly.