“Want to take it?”
Richard poked the string stick into her hands, and she got to her feet. She thought, Richard had worked on the kite last night when she was with Carol, which was why he hadn’t called her, and didn’t know she had not been home. If he had called, he would have mentioned it. Soon there would come the first lie.
Suddenly the kite broke its mooring in the sky and tugged sharply to get away. Therese let the stick turn fast in her hands, as long as she dared to under Richard’s eyes, because the kite was still low. And now it rested again, stubbornly still.
“Jerk it!” Richard said. “Keep working it up.”
She did. It was like playing with a long elastic band. But the string was so long and slack now, it was all she could do to stir the kite. She pulled and pulled and pulled. Then Richard came and took it, and Therese let her arms hang. Her breath came harder, and little muscles in her arms were quivering. She sat down on the ground. She hadn’t won against the kite. It hadn’t done what she wanted it to do.
“Maybe the string’s too heavy,” she said. It was a new string, soft and white and fat as a worm.
“String’s very light. Look now. Now it’s going!”
Now it was climbing in short, upward darts, as if it had found its own mind suddenly, and a will to escape.
“Let out more string!” she shouted.
Therese stood up. A bird flew under the kite. She stared at the rectangle that was growing smaller and smaller, jerking back and back like a ship’s billowed sail going backward. She felt the kite meant something, this particular kite, at this minute.
“Richard?”
“What?”
She could see him in the corner of her eye, crouched with his hands out in front of him, as if he rode a surfboard. “How many times were you in love?” she asked.
Richard laughed, a short, hoarse laugh. “Never till you.”
“Yes, you were. You told me about two times.”
“If I count those, I might count twelve others, too,” Richard said quickly, with the bluntness of preoccupation.
The kite was starting to take arcing steps downward.
Therese kept her voice on the same level. “Were you ever in love with a boy?”
“A boy?” Richard repeated, surprised.
“Yes.”
Perhaps five seconds passed before he said, “No,” in a positive and final tone.
At least he troubled to answer, Therese thought. What would you do if you were, she had an impulse to ask, but the question would hardly serve a purpose. She kept her eyes on the kite. They were both looking at the same kite, but with what different thoughts in their minds. “Did you ever hear of it?” she asked.
“Hear of it? You mean people like that? Of course.” Richard was standing straight now, winding the string in with figure-of-eight movements of the stick.
Therese said carefully, because he was listening, “I don’t mean people like that. I mean two people who fall in love suddenly with each other, out of the blue. Say two men or two girls.”
Richard’s face looked the same as it might have if they had been talking about politics. “Did I ever know any? No.”
Therese waited until he was working with the kite again, trying to pump it higher. Then she remarked, “I suppose it could happen, though, to almost anyone, couldn’t it?”
He went on, winding the kite. “But those things don’t just happen. There’s always some reason for it in the background.”
“Yes,” she said agreeably. Therese had thought back into the background. The nearest she could remember to being “in love” was the way she had felt about a boy she had seen a few times in the town of Montclair, when she rode in the school bus. He had curly black hair and a handsome, serious face, and he had been perhaps twelve years old, older than she then. She remembered a short time when she had thought of him every day. But that was nothing, nothing like what she felt for Carol. Was it love or wasn’t it that she felt for Carol? And how absurd it was that she didn’t even know. She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions. “Do you think I could?” Therese asked simply, before she could debate whether she dared to ask.
“What!” Richard smiled. “Fall in love with a girl? Of course not! My God, you haven’t, have you?”
“No,” Therese said, in an odd, inconclusive tone, but Richard did not seem to notice the tone.
“It’s going again. Look, Terry!”
The kite was wobbling straight up, faster and faster, and the stick was whirling in Richard’s hands. At any rate, Therese thought, she was happier than she had ever been before. And why worry about defining everything?
“Hey!” Richard sprinted after the stick that was leaping crazily around the ground, as if it were trying to leave the earth, too. “Want to hold it?” he asked, capturing it. “Practically takes you up!”
Therese took the stick. There was not much string left, and the kite was all but invisible now. When she let her arms go all the way up, she could feel it lifting her a little, delicious and buoyant, as if the kite might really take her up if it got all its strength together.
“Let it out!” Richard shouted, waving his arms. His mouth was open, and two spots of red had come in his cheeks. “Let it out!”
“There’s no more string!”
“I’m going to cut it!”
Therese couldn’t believe she had heard it, but glancing over at him, she saw him reaching under his overcoat for his knife. “Don’t,” she said.
Richard came running over, laughing.
“Don’t!” she said angrily. “Are you crazy?” Her hands were tired, but she clung all the harder to the stick.
“Let’s cut it! It’s more fun!” And Richard bumped into her rudely, because he was looking up.
Therese jerked the stick sideways, out of his reach, speechless with anger and amazement. There was an instant of fear, when she felt Richard might really have lost his mind, and then she staggered backward, the pull gone, the empty stick in her hand. “You’re mad!” she yelled at him. “You’re insane!”
“It’s only a kite!” Richard laughed, craning up at the nothingness.
Therese looked in vain, even for the dangling string. “Why did you do it?” Her voice was shrill with tears. “It was such a beautiful kite!”
“It’s only a kite!” Richard repeated. “I can make another kite!”
9
Therese started to get dressed, then changed her mind. She was still in her robe, reading the script of Small Rain that Phil had brought over earlier, and that was now spread all over the couch. Carol had said she was at Forty-eighth and Madison. She could be here in ten minutes. Therese glanced around her room, and at her face in the mirror, and decided to let it all go.
She took some ashtrays to the sink and washed them, and stacked the play script neatly on her worktable. She wondered if Carol would have her new handbag with her. Carol had called her last night from some place in New Jersey where she was with Abby, had told her she thought the bag was beautiful but much too grand a present. Therese smiled, remembering Carol’s suggesting that she take it back. At least Carol liked it.
The doorbell sounded in three quick rings.
Therese looked down the stairwell, and saw Carol was carrying something. She ran down.
“It’s empty. It’s for you,” Carol said, smiling.
It was a suitcase, wrapped. Carol slipped her fingers from under the handle and let Therese carry it. Therese put it on the couch in her room, and cut the brown paper off carefully. The suitcase was of thick light brown leather, perfectly plain.
“It’s terribly good-lo
oking!” Therese said.
“Do you like it? I don’t even know if you need a suitcase.”
“Of course, I like it.” This was the kind of suitcase for her, this exactly and no other. Her initials were on it in small gold letters—TMB. She remembered Carol asking her her middle name on Christmas Eve.
“Work the combination and see if you like the inside.”
Therese did. “I like the smell, too,” she said.
“Are you busy? If you are, I’ll leave.”
“No. Sit down. I’m not doing anything—except reading a play.”
“What play?”
“A play I have to do sets for.” She realized suddenly she had never mentioned stage designing to Carol.
“Sets for?”
“Yes—I’m a stage designer.” She took Carol’s coat.
Carol smiled astonishedly. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” she asked quietly. “How many other rabbits are you going to pull out of your hat?”
“It’s the first real job. And it’s not a Broadway play. It’s going to be done in the Village. A comedy. I haven’t got a union membership yet. I’ll have to wait for a Broadway job for that.”
Carol asked her about the union, the junior and senior memberships that cost fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars respectively. Carol asked her if she had all that money saved up.
“No—just a few hundred. But if I get a job, they’ll let me pay it off in installments.”
Carol was sitting on the straight chair, the chair Richard often sat in, watching her, and Therese could read in Carol’s expression that she had risen suddenly in Carol’s estimation, and she couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t mentioned before that she was a stage designer, and in fact already had a job. “Well,” Carol said, “if a Broadway job comes out of this, would you consider borrowing the rest of the money from me? Just as a business loan?”
“Thanks. I—”
“I’d like to do it for you. You shouldn’t be bothered paying off two thousand dollars at your age.”
“Thanks. But I won’t be ready for one for another couple of years.”
Carol lifted her head and blew her smoke out in a thin stream. “Oh, they don’t really keep track of apprenticeships, do they?’
Therese smiled. “No. Of course not. Would you like a drink? I’ve got a bottle of rye.”
“How nice. I’d love one, Therese.” Carol got up and peered at her kitchenette shelves as Therese fixed the two drinks. “Are you a good cook?”
“Yes. I’m better when I have someone to cook for. I can make good omelets. Do you like them?”
“No,” Carol said flatly, and Therese laughed. “Why don’t you show me some of your work?”
Therese got a portfolio down from the closet. Carol sat on the couch and looked at everything carefully, but from her comments and questions, Therese felt she considered them too bizarre to be usable, and perhaps not very good either. Carol said she liked best the Petrushka set on the wall.
“But it’s the same thing,” Therese said. “The same thing as the drawings, only in model form.”
“Well, maybe it’s your drawings. They’re very positive, anyway. I like that about them.” Carol picked up her drink from the floor and leaned back on the couch. “You see, I didn’t make a mistake, did I.”
“About what?”
“About you.”
Therese did not know exactly what she meant. Carol was smiling at her through her cigarette smoke, and it rattled her. “Did you think you had?”
“No,” Carol said. “What do you have to pay for an apartment like this?”
“Fifty a month.”
Carol clicked her tongue. “Doesn’t leave you much out of your salary, does it?”
Therese bent over her portfolio, tying it up. “No. But I’ll be making more soon. I won’t be living here forever either.”
“Of course you won’t. You’ll travel, too, the way you do in imagination. You’ll see a house in Italy you’ll fall in love with. Or maybe you’ll like France. Or California, or Arizona.”
The girl smiled. She probably wouldn’t have the money for it, when that happened. “Do people always fall in love with things they can’t have?”
“Always,” Carol said, smiling, too. She pushed her fingers through her hair. “I think I shall take a trip after all.”
“For how long?”
“Just a month or so.”
Therese set the portfolio in the closet. “How soon will you be going?”
“Right away. I suppose as soon as I can arrange everything. And there isn’t much to arrange.”
Therese turned around. Carol was rolling the end of her cigarette in the ashtray. It meant nothing to her, Therese thought, that they wouldn’t see each other for a month. “Why don’t you go somewhere with Abby?”
Carol looked up at her, and then at the ceiling. “I don’t think she’s free in the first place.”
Therese stared at her. She had touched something, mentioning Abby. But Carol’s face was unreadable now.
“You’re very nice to let me see you so often,” Carol said. “You know, I don’t feel like seeing the people I generally see just now. One can’t, really. Everything’s supposed to be done in pairs.”
How frail she is, Therese felt suddenly, how different from the day of the first lunch. Then Carol got up, as if she knew her thoughts, and Therese sensed a flaunt of assurance in her lifted head, in her smile as she passed her so close their arms brushed.
“Why don’t we do something tonight?” Therese asked. “You can stay here if you want to, and I’ll finish reading the play. We can spend the evening together.”
Carol didn’t answer. She was looking at the flower box in the bookshelf. “What kind of plants are these?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
They were all different, a cactus with fat leaves that hadn’t grown a bit since she bought it a year ago, another plant like a miniature palm tree, and a droopy red-green thing that had to be supported by a stick. “Just plants.”
Carol turned around, smiling. “Just plants,” she repeated.
“What about tonight?”
“All right. But I won’t stay. It’s only three. I’ll give you a ring around six.” Carol dropped her lighter in her handbag. It was not the handbag Therese had given her. “I feel like looking at furniture this afternoon.”
“Furniture? In stores?”
“In stores or at the Parke-Bernet. Furniture does me good.” Carol reached for her coat on the armchair, and again Therese noticed the long line from her shoulder to the wide leather belt, continued in her leg. It was beautiful, like a chord of music or a whole ballet. She was beautiful, and why should her days be so empty now, Therese wondered, when she was made to live with people who loved her, to walk in a beautiful house, in beautiful cities, along blue seacoasts with a long horizon and a blue sky to background her.
“Bye-bye,” Carol said, and in the same movement with which she put on her coat, she put her arm around Therese’s waist. It was only an instant, too disconcerting with Carol’s arm suddenly about her, to be relief or end or beginning, before the doorbell rang in their ears like the tearing of a brass wall. Carol smiled. “Who is it?” she asked.
Therese felt the sting of Carol’s thumbnail in her wrist as she released her. “Richard probably.” It could only be Richard, because she knew his long ring.
“Good. I’d like to meet him.”
Therese pressed the bell, then heard Richard’s firm, hopping steps on the stairs. She opened the door.
“Hello,” Richard said. “I decided—”
“Richard, this is Mrs. Aird,” Therese said. “Richard Semco.”
“How do you do?” Carol said.
They stared at each other, Richard with a square box in his hands as if he were about to present it to her, and Carol standing, neither staying nor leaving. Richard put the box on an end table.
“I was so near, I thought I’d come up,” he said, and under its note of explanation Therese heard the unconscious assertion of a right, just as she had seen behind his inquisitive stare a spontaneous mistrust of Carol. “I had to take a present to a friend of Mamma’s. This is lebkuchen.” He nodded at the box and smiled, disarmingly. “Anybody want some now?”
Carol and Therese declined. Carol was watching Richard as he opened the box with his pocketknife. She liked his smile, Therese thought. She likes him, the gangling young man with unruly blond hair, the broad lean shoulders, and the big funny feet in moccasins.
“Please sit down,” Therese said to Carol.
“No, I’m going,” she answered.
“I’ll give you half, Terry, then I’ll be going too,” he said.
Therese looked at Carol, and Carol smiled at her nervousness and sat down on a corner of the couch.
“Anyway, don’t let me rush you off,” Richard said, lifting the paper with the cake in it to a kitchen shelf.
“You’re not. You’re a painter, aren’t you, Richard?”
“Yes.” He popped some loose icing into his mouth, and looked at Carol, poised because he was incapable of being unpoised, Therese thought, his eyes frank because he had nothing to hide. “Are you a painter, too?”
“No,” Carol said with another smile. “I’m nothing.”
“The hardest thing to be.”
“Is it? Are you a good painter?”
“I will be. I can be,” said Richard, unperturbed. “Have you got any beer, Terry? I’ve got an awful thirst.”
Therese went to the refrigerator and got out the two bottles that were there. Richard asked Carol if she would like some, but Carol refused. Then Richard strolled past the couch, looking at the suitcase and the wrappings, and Therese thought he was going to say something about it, but he didn’t.
The Price of Salt, or Carol Page 10