“No.” Therese smiled. “Does she look like she drinks?”
“No. I think she’s very good-looking, in fact. It’s just damned surprising, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“You so seldom make up your mind about anything. You’ll probably change your mind again.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe I can see her again sometime with you. Why don’t you arrange it?”
“She said she’d be in the city tomorrow. I don’t know how much time she’s got—or really whether she’ll call or not.”
Richard didn’t continue and neither did Therese. They did not mention Carol again that evening.
Richard spent Sunday morning painting, and came to Therese’s apartment around two. He was there when Carol telephoned a little later. Therese told her that Richard was with her, and Carol said, “Bring him along.” Carol said she was near the Plaza, and they might meet there in the Palm Room.
Half an hour later, Therese saw Carol look up at them from a table near the center of the room, and almost like the first time, like the echo of an impact that had been tremendous, Therese was jolted by the sight of her. Carol was wearing the same black suit with the green and gold scarf that she had worn the day of the luncheon. But now Carol paid more attention to Richard than to her.
The three of them talked of nothing, and Therese, seeing the calm in Carol’s gray eyes that only once turned to her, seeing a quite ordinary expression on Richard’s face, felt a kind of disappointment. Richard had gone out of his way to meet her, but Therese thought it was even less from curiosity than because he had nothing else to do. She saw Richard looking at Carol’s hands, the nails manicured in a bright red, saw him notice the ring with the clear green sapphire, and the wedding ring on the other hand. Richard could not say they were useless hands, idle hands, despite the longish nails. Carol’s hands were strong, and they moved with an economy of motion. Her voice emerged from the flat murmur of other voices around them, talking of nothing at all with Richard, and once she laughed.
Carol looked at her. “Did you tell Richard we might go on a trip?” she asked.
“Yes. Last night.”
“West?” Richard asked.
“I’d like to go up to the Northwest. It depends on the roads.”
And Therese was suddenly impatient. Why did they sit here having a conference about it? Now they were talking about temperatures, and the state of Washington.
“Washington’s my home state,” Carol said. “Practically.”
Then a few moments later, Carol asked if anyone wanted to take a walk in the park. Richard paid for their beer and coffee, pulling a bill from the tangle of bills and change that bulged a pocket of his trousers. How indifferent he was to Carol after all, Therese thought. She felt he didn’t see her, as he sometimes hadn’t seen figures in rock or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him. He was looking down at the table now, the thin, careless line of his mouth half smiling as he straightened up and shoved his hand quickly through his hair.
They walked from the entrance of the park at Fifty-ninth Street toward the zoo, and through the zoo at a strolling pace. They walked on under the first bridge over the path, where the path bent and the real park began. The air was cold and still, a little overcast, and Therese felt a motionlessness about everything, a lifeless stillness even in their slowly moving figures.
“Shall I hunt up some peanuts?” Richard asked.
Carol was stooped at the edge of the path, holding her fingers out to the squirrel. “I have something,” she said softly, and the squirrel started at her voice but advanced again, seized her fingers in a nervous grip, and fixed its teeth on something, and dashed away. Carol stood up, smiling. “Had something in my pocket from this morning.”
“Do you feed squirrels out where you live?” Richard asked.
“Squirrels and chipmunks,” Carol replied.
What dull things they talked of, Therese thought.
Then they sat on a bench and smoked a cigarette, and Therese, watching a diminutive sun bring its orange fire down finally into the scraggly black twigs of a tree, wished the night were here already and that she were alone with Carol. They began to walk back. If Carol had to go home now, Therese thought, she would do something violent. Like jump off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Or take the three Benzedrine tablets Richard had given her last week.
“Would you people like to have some tea somewhere?” Carol asked as they neared the zoo again. “How about that Russian place over by Carnegie Hall?”
“Rumpelmayer’s is right here,” Richard said. “Do you like Rumpelmayer’s?”
Therese sighed. And Carol seemed to hesitate. But they went there. Therese had been here once with Angelo, she remembered. She did not care for the place. Its bright lights gave her a feeling of nakedness, and it was annoying not to know if one were looking at a real person or at a reflection in a mirror.
“No, none of that, thanks,” Carol said, shaking her head at the great tray of pastry the waitress was holding.
But Richard chose something, chose two pastries, though Therese had declined.
“What’s that for, in case I change my mind?” she asked him, and Richard winked at her. His nails were dirty again, she noticed.
Richard asked Carol what kind of car she had, and they began discussing the merits of various car makes. Therese saw Carol glance about at the tables in front of her. She doesn’t like it here either, Therese thought. Therese stared at a man in the mirror that was set obliquely behind Carol. His back was to Therese, and he leaned forward, talking animatedly to a woman, jerking his spread left hand for emphasis. She looked at the thin, middle-aged woman he spoke to, and back at him, wondering if the aura of familiarity about him were real or an illusion like the mirror, until a memory fragile as a bubble swam upward in her consciousness and burst at the surface. It was Harge.
Therese glanced at Carol, but if Carol had noticed him, she thought, Carol would not know that he was in the mirror behind her. A moment later, Therese looked over her shoulder, and saw Harge in profile, much like one of the images she carried in her memory from the house—the short high nose, the full lower face, the receding twist of blond hair above the usual hairline. Carol must have seen him, only three tables away to her left.
Carol looked from Richard to Therese. “Yes,” she said to her, smiling a little, and turned back to Richard and went on with her conversation. Her manner was just as before, Therese thought, not different at all. Therese looked at the woman with Harge. She was not young, not very attractive. She might have been one of his relatives.
Then Therese saw Carol mash out a long cigarette. Richard had stopped talking. They were ready to leave. Therese was looking at Harge the moment he saw Carol. After his first glimpse of her, his eyes drew almost shut as if he had to squint to believe her, and then he said something to the woman he was with and stood up and went to her.
“Carol,” Harge said.
“Hello, Harge.” She turned to Therese and Richard. “Would you excuse me a minute?”
Watching from the doorway where she stood with Richard, Therese tried to see it all, to see beyond the pride and aggressiveness in Harge’s anxious, forward-leaning figure that was not quite so tall as the crown of Carol’s hat, to see beyond Carol’s acquiescent nods as he spoke, to surmise not what they talked of now but what they had said to each other five years ago, three years ago, that day of the picture in the rowing boat. Carol had loved him once, and that was hard to remember.
“Can we get free now, Terry?” Richard asked her.
Therese saw Carol nod good-bye to the woman at Harge’s table, then turn away from Harge. Harge looked past Carol, to her and Richard, and without apparently recognizing her, he went back to his table.
“I’m sorry,” Carol said as
she rejoined them.
On the sidewalk, Therese drew Richard aside and said, “I’ll say good night, Richard. Carol wants me to visit a friend of hers tonight with her.”
“Oh.” Richard frowned. “I had those concert tickets for tonight, you know.”
Therese remembered suddenly. “Alex’s. I forgot. I’m sorry.”
He said gloomily, “It’s not important.”
It wasn’t important. Richard’s friend Alex was accompanying somebody in a violin concert, and had given Richard the tickets, she remembered, weeks ago.
“You’d rather see her than me, wouldn’t you?” he asked.
Therese saw that Carol was looking for a taxi. Carol would leave them both in a moment. “You might have mentioned the concert this morning, Richard, reminded me, at least.”
“Was that her husband?” Richard’s eyes narrowed under his frown. “What is this, Terry?”
“What’s what?” she said. “I don’t know her husband.”
Richard waited a moment, then the frown left his eyes. He smiled, as if he conceded he had been unreasonable. “Sorry. I just took it for granted I’d see you tonight.” He walked toward Carol. “Good night,” he said.
He looked as if he were leaving by himself, and Carol said, “Are you going downtown? Maybe I can drop you.”
“I’m walking, thanks.”
“I thought you two had a date,” Carol said to Therese.
Therese saw that Richard was lingering, and she walked toward Carol, out of his hearing. “Not an important one. I’d rather stay with you.”
A taxi had slid up beside Carol. Carol put her hand on the door handle. “Well, neither is our date so important, so why don’t you go on with Richard tonight?”
Therese glanced at Richard, and saw that he had heard her.
“Bye-bye, Therese,” Carol said.
“Good night,” Richard called.
“Good night,” Therese said, and watched Carol pull the taxi door shut after her.
“So,” Richard said.
Therese turned toward him. She wouldn’t go to the concert, and neither would she do anything violent, she knew, nothing more violent than walk quickly home and get to work on the set she wanted to finish by Tuesday for Harkevy. She could see the whole evening ahead, with a half-dismal, half-defiant fatality, in the second it took for Richard to walk to her. “I still don’t want to go to the concert,” she said.
To her surprise, Richard stepped back and said angrily, “All right, don’t!” and turned away.
He walked west on Fifty-ninth Street in his loose, lopsided gait that jutted his right shoulder ahead of the other, hands swinging unrhythmically at his sides, and she might have known from the walk alone that he was angry. And he was out of sight in no time. The rejection from Kettering last Monday flashed across her mind. She stared at the darkness where Richard had disappeared. She did not feel guilty about tonight. It was something else. She envied him. She envied him his faith that there would always be a place, a home, a job, someone else for him. She envied him that attitude. She almost resented his having it.
13
Richard began it.
“Why do you like her so much?”
It was an evening on which she had broken a date with Richard on the slim chance Carol would come by. Carol hadn’t, and Richard had come by instead. Now at five past eleven in the huge pink-walled cafeteria on Lexington Avenue, she had been about to begin, but Richard was ahead of her.
“I like being with her, I like talking with her. I’m fond of anybody I can talk to.” The phrases of some letter she had written to Carol and never mailed drifted across her mind as if to answer Richard. I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.
“You’ve got a hell of a crush on her,” Richard announced, explanatorily and resentfully.
Therese took a deep breath. Should she be simple and say yes, or should she try to explain it? What could he ever understand of it, even if she explained it in a million words?
“Does she know it? Of course she knows it.” Richard frowned and drew on his cigarette. “Don’t you think it’s pretty silly? It’s like a crush that schoolgirls get.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. She felt so very sure of herself. I will comb you like music caught in the heads of all the trees in the forest . . .
“What’s there to understand? But she understands. She shouldn’t indulge you. She shouldn’t play with you like this. It’s not fair to you.”
“Not fair to me?”
“What’s she doing, amusing herself with you? And then one day she’ll get tired of you and kick you out.”
Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion? She was angry, but she did not want to argue. She said nothing.
“You’re in a daze!”
“I’m wide awake. I never felt more awake.” She picked up the table knife and rubbed her thumb back and forth on the ridge at the base of the blade. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”
He frowned. “Leave you alone?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, about Europe, too?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Listen, Terry—” Richard wriggled in his chair and leaned forward, hesitated, then took another cigarette, lighting it distastefully, throwing the match on the floor. “You’re in some kind of trance! It’s worse—”
“Just because I don’t want to argue with you?”
“It’s worse than being lovesick, because it’s so completely unreasonable. Don’t you understand that?”
No, she didn’t understand a word.
“But you’re going to get over it in about a week. I hope. My God!” He squirmed again. “To say—to say for a minute you practically want to say good-bye to me because of some silly crush!”
“I didn’t say that. You said it.” She looked back at him, at his rigid face that was beginning to redden in the center of the flat cheeks. “But why should I want to be with you if all you do is argue about this?”
He sat back. “Wednesday, next Saturday, you won’t feel like this at all. You haven’t known her three weeks yet.”
She looked over toward the steam tables, where people edged slowly along, choosing this and that, drifting toward the curve in the counter where they dispersed. “We may as well say good-bye,” she said, “because neither of us will ever be any different from what we are this minute.”
“Therese, you’re like a person gone so crazy, you think you’re saner than ever!”
“Oh, let’s stop it!”
Richard’s hand with its row of knuckles embedded in the white, freckled flesh was clenched on the table motionless, but a picture of a hand that had hammered some ineffectual, inaudible point. “I’ll tell you one thing, I think your friend knows what she’s doing. I think she’s committing a crime against you. I’ve half a mind to report her to somebody, but the trouble is you’re not a child. You’re just acting like one.”
“Why do you make so much out of it?” she asked. “You’re practically in a frenzy.”
“You make enough out of it to want to say good-bye to me! What do you know about her?”
“What do you know about her?”
“Did she ever make any passes at you?”
“God!” Therese said. She felt like saying it a dozen times. It summed up everything, her imprisonment now, here, yet. “You don’t understand.” But he did, and that was why he was angry. But did he understand that she would have felt the same way if Carol had never touched her? Yes, and if Carol had never even spoken to her after that brief conversation about a doll’s valise in the store. If Carol, in fact, had never spoken to her at all, for it had all happened in that instant she had seen Carol standing in the middle of the floo
r, watching her. Then the realization that so much had happened after that meeting made her feel incredibly lucky suddenly. It was so easy for a man and woman to find each other, to find someone who would do, but for her to have found Carol—“I think I understand you better than you understand me. You don’t really want to see me again, either, because you said yourself I’m not the same person. If we keep on seeing each other, you’ll only get more and more—like this.”
“Terry, forget for a minute I ever said I wanted you to love me, or that I love you. It’s you as a person, I mean. I like you. I’d like—”
“I wonder sometimes why you think you like me, or did like me. Because you didn’t even know me.”
“You don’t know yourself.”
“But I do—and I know you. You’ll drop painting some day, and me with it. Just as you’ve dropped everything else you ever started, as far as I can see. The dry cleaning thing, or the used car lot—”
“That’s not true,” Richard said sullenly.
“But why do you think you like me? Because I paint a little, too, and we can talk about that? I’m just as impractical as a girlfriend for you as painting is as a business for you.” She hesitated a minute, then said the rest of it. “You know enough about art anyway to know you’ll never make a good painter. You’re like a little boy playing truant as long as you can, knowing all the time what you ought to be doing and what you’ll finally be doing, working for your father.”
Richard’s blue eyes had gone suddenly cold. The line of his mouth was straight and very short now, the thin upper lip faintly curling. “All that isn’t quite the point now, is it?”
“Well—yes. It’s part of your hanging on when you know it’s hopeless, and when you know you’ll finally let go.”
“I will not!”
“Richard, there’s no point—”
“You’re going to change your mind, you know.”
She understood that. It was like a song he kept singing to her.
A WEEK LATER, Richard stood in her room with the same expression of sullen anger on his face, talking in the same tone. He had called up at the unusual hour of three in the afternoon, and insisted on seeing her for a moment. She was packing a bag to take to Carol’s for the weekend. If she hadn’t been packing for Carol’s house, Richard might have been in quite another mood, she thought, because she had seen him three times the past week, and he had never been pleasanter, never been more considerate of her.
The Price of Salt, or Carol Page 15