After my next appointment with Dr. Wald, Chris wasn’t at Jake’s. For the first time since I had gone to Jake’s, Chris didn’t come at all.
On the way home it was all I could do not to cry in front of Mother and Penelope. And I wondered what I was going to do from that afternoon on.
“And how was Dr. Wald today?” my father said when we sat down for dinner.
“I didn’t ask,” I said.
My father paused to acknowledge my little joke.
“What I meant,” he said, “was how is my lovely daughter?”
I knew he was trying to say something nice, but he could have picked something sincere for once. I hated the way he had taken off his jacket and opened up his collar and rolled up his sleeves, and I thought I would be sick if he stood behind my chair later. “Penelope is your lovely daughter,” I said, and threw my silverware onto the table.
From upstairs I listened. I knew that Penelope would have frozen, the way she does when someone says in front of me how pretty she is, but no one said anything about me that I could hear.
Later, Penelope and Paul and I made up a story together, the way we had when we were younger. Paul fell asleep suddenly in the middle with little tears in the corners of his eyes, and I tucked Penelope into bed. When I smoothed out the covers, a shadow of relief crossed her face.
THAT Saturday, Mother took me shopping in the city without Penelope or Paul. “I thought we should get you a present,” Mother said. “Something pretty.” She smiled at me in a strange, stiff way.
“Thank you,” I said. I felt good that we were driving together, but I was sad, too, that Mother was trying to bring me into the clean, bright, fancy, daytime part of New York that Penelope’s dancing school was in, because when would she accept that there was no place there for me? I wondered if Mother wanted to say something to me, but we just drove silently, except for once, when Mother pointed out a lady in a big white, flossy fur coat.
At Bonwit’s, Mother picked out an expensive dress for me. “What do you think?” she said when I tried it on.
I was glad that Mother had chosen it, because it was very pretty, and it was white, and it was expensive, but in the mirror I just looked skinny and dazed. “I like it,” I said. “But don’t you think it looks wrong on me?”
“Well, it seems fine to me, but it’s up to you,” Mother said. “You can have it if you want.”
“But look, Mother,” I said. “Look. Do you think it’s all right?”
“If you don’t like it, don’t get it,” she said. “It’s your present.”
At home after dinner I tried the white dress on again and stared at myself in the mirror, and I thought maybe it looked a little better.
I went down to the living room, where Mother was stretched out on the sofa with her feet on my father’s lap. When I walked in he started to get up, but Mother didn’t move. “My God,” my father said. “It’s Lucia.”
My mother giggled. “Wedding scene or mad scene?” she said.
Upstairs I folded the dress back into the box for Bonwit’s to pick up. At night I watched bright dancing patterns in the dark and I dreaded going back to Dr. Wald.
THE doctor didn’t seem to notice anything unusual at my next appointment. I still had to face walking the short distance to Jake’s, though. I practically fell over from relief when I saw Chris at the bar, and he reached out as I went by and reeled me in, smiling. He was talking to Mark and some other friends, and he stood me with my back to him and rubbed my shoulders and temples. I tried to smile hello to Mark, who was staring at me with his pale eyes, but he just kept staring, listening to Chris. I closed my eyes and leaned back against Chris, who folded his arms around me. When Chris finished his story, everyone laughed except me. Chris blew a little stream of air into my hair, ruffling it up. “Want to take a ride?” he said.
We drove for a while, fast, circling the city, and Chris slammed tapes into the tape deck. Then we parked and Chris turned and looked at me.
“What do you want to do?” Chris asked me.
“Now?” I said, but he just looked at me, and I didn’t know what he meant. “Nothing,” I said.
“Have I seemed preoccupied to you lately, honey?” he asked.
“I guess maybe a little,” I said, even though I hadn’t really ever thought about how he seemed. He just seemed like himself. But he told me that yes, he had been preoccupied. He had borrowed some money to start an audio business, but he had to help out a cousin, too. I couldn’t make any sense of what he was talking about, and I didn’t really care, either. I was thinking that now he had finally called me “honey.” It made me so happy, so happy, even though “honey” was what he called everyone, and I had been the only Laurel.
Chris kept talking, and I watched his mouth as the words came out. “I know you wonder what’s going on with me,” he said. “What it is is I worry that you’re so young. I’m a difficult person. There are a lot of strange things about me. I’m really crazy about you, you know. I’m really crazy about you, but I can’t ask you to see me.”
“Why don’t I come in and stay over with you a week from Friday,” I said. “Can I?”
Chris blinked. “Terrific, honey,” he said cautiously. “That’s a date.”
I ARRANGED it with Maureen that I would say I was staying at her house. “Don’t wear underwear,” Maureen told me. “That really turns guys on.”
Chris and I met at Jake’s, but we didn’t stay there long. We drove all over the city, stopping at different places. Chris knew people everywhere, and we would sit down at the bar and talk to them. We went to an apartment with some of the people we ran into, where everyone lay around listening to tapes. And once we went to a club and watched crowds of people change like waves with the music, under flashing lights.
Chris didn’t touch me, not once, not even accidentally, all during that time.
Sometime between things, we stopped for food. I couldn’t eat, but Chris seemed starving. He ate his cheeseburger and French fries, and then he ate mine. And then he had a big piece of pecan pie.
Late, very late, we climbed into the car again, but there was nothing left to do. “Home?” Chris said without turning to me.
Chris’s apartment seemed so strange, and maybe that was just because it was real. But I had surely never been inside such a small, plain place to live before, and Chris hardly seemed to own anything. There were a few books on a shelf, and a little kitchen off in the corner, with a pot on the stove. It was up several flights of dark stairs, in a brick building, and it must have been on the edge of the city, because I could see water out of the window, and ribbons of highway elevated on huge concrete pillars, and dark piers.
Chris’s bed, which was tightly made with the sheet turned back over the blanket, looked very narrow. All the music we had been hearing all night was rocketing around in my brain, and I felt jittery and a bit sick. Chris passed a joint to me, and he lay down with his hands over his eyes. I sat down on the edge of the bed next to him and waited, but he didn’t move. “Remember when I asked you a while ago what you wanted to do and you said ‘Nothing’?” Chris asked me.
“But that was—” I started to say, and then the funny sound of Chris’s voice caught up with me, and all the noise in my head shut off.
“I remember,” Chris said. Then a long time went by.
“Why did you come here, Laurel?” Chris said.
When I didn’t answer, he said, “Why? Why did you come here? You’re old enough now to think about what you’re doing.” And I remembered I had never been alone with him before, except in his car.
“Yes,” I said into the dead air. Whatever I’d been waiting for all that time had vanished. “It’s all right.”
“It’s all right?” Chris said furiously. “Well, good. It’s all right, then.” He was still lying on his back with his hands over his eyes, and neither of us moved. I thought I might shatter.
Sometime in the night Chris spoke again. “Why are you angry?” he said.
His voice was blurred, as if he’d been asleep. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t angry, but it seemed wrong, and I was afraid of what would happen if I did. I put my arms around him and started kissing him. He didn’t move a muscle, but I kept right on. I knew it was my only chance, and I thought that if I stopped I would have to leave. “Don’t be angry,” he said.
Sometime in the night I sprang awake. Chris was holding my wrists behind my back with one hand and unbuttoning my shirt with the other, and his body felt very tense. “Don’t!” I said, before I understood.
“‘Don’t!’” echoed Chris, letting go of me. He said it just the way I had, sounding just as frightened. He fell asleep immediately then, sprawled out, but I couldn’t sleep anymore, and later, when Chris spoke suddenly into the dark, I felt I’d been expecting him to. “Your parents are going to worry,” he said deliberately, as if he were reading.
“No,” I said. I wondered how long he had been awake. “They think I’m at Maureen’s.” And then I realized how foolish it was for me to have said that.
“They’ll worry,” he said. “They will worry. They’ll be very frightened.”
And then I was so frightened myself that the room bulged and there was a sound in my ears like ball bearings rolling around wildly. I put my hands against my hot face, and my skin felt to me as if it belonged to a stranger. It felt like a marvel—brand-new and slightly moist—and I wondered if anyone else would ever touch it and feel what I had felt.
“Look—” Chris said. He sounded blurry again, and helpless and sad. “Look—see how bad I am for you, Laurel? See how I make you cry?” Then he put his arms around me, and we lay there on top of the bed for a long, long time, and sometimes we kissed each other. My shirtsleeve was twisted and it hurt against my arm, but I didn’t move.
When the night red began finally to bleach out of the sky, I touched Chris’s wrist. “I have to go now,” I said. That wasn’t true, of course. My parents would expect me to stay at Maureen’s till at least noon. “I have to be home when it gets light.”
“Do you?” Chris said, but his eyes were closed.
I stood up and buttoned my shirt.
“I’ll take you to the train,” Chris said.
At first he didn’t move, but finally he stood up, too. “I need some coffee,” he said. And when he looked at me my heart sank. He was smiling. He looked as if he wanted to start it up—start it all again.
I went into the bathroom, so I wouldn’t be looking at Chris. There was a tub and a sink and a toilet. Chris uses them, I thought, as if that would explain something to me, but the thought was like a sealed package. Stuck in the corner of the mirror over the sink was a picture of a man’s face torn from a magazine. It was a handsome face, but I didn’t like it.
“That’s a guy I went to high school with,” Chris said from behind me. “He’s a very successful actor now.”
“That’s nice,” I said, and waited as long as I could. “Look—it’s almost light.”
And in the instant that Chris glanced at the window, where in fact the faintest dawn was showing, I stepped over to the door and opened it.
In the car, Chris seemed the way he usually did. “I’m sorry I’m so tired, honey,” he said. “I’ve been having a rough time lately. We’ll get together another time, when I’m not so hassled.”
“Yes,” I said. “Good.” I don’t think he really remembered the things we had said in the dark.
When we stopped at the station, Chris put his arm across me, but instead of opening the door he just held the handle. “You think I’m really weird, don’t you?” he said, and smiled at me.
“I think you’re tired,” I said, making myself smile back. And Chris released the handle and let me out.
I took the train through the dawn and walked from the station, pausing carefully if it looked as though someone was awake inside a house I was passing. Once a dog barked, and I stood absolutely still for minutes.
I threw chunks from the lawn at Maureen’s window, so Carolina wouldn’t wake up, but I was afraid the whole town would be out by the time Maureen heard.
Maureen came down the back way and got me. We each put on one of her bathrobes, and we made a pot of coffee, which is something I’m not allowed to drink.
“What happened?” Maureen asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Maureen said. “You were there.” Even though my face was in my hands, I could tell Maureen was staring at me. “Well,” she said after a while. “Hey. Want to play some Clue?” She got the Clue board down from her room, and we played about ten games.
THE next week I really did stay over at Maureen’s.
“Again?” my mother said. “We must do something for Mrs. MacIntyre. She’s been so nice to you.”
Dougie and Kevin showed up together after Maureen and Carolina and I had eaten a barbecued chicken from the deli and Carolina had gone to her room to watch the little TV that Mrs. MacIntyre had put there. I figured it was no accident that Dougie had shown up with Kevin. It had to be a brainstorm of Maureen’s, and I thought, Well, so what. So after Maureen and Kevin went up to Maureen’s room I went into the den with Dougie. We pretty much knew from classes and books and stuff what to do, so we did it. The thing that surprised me most was that you always read in books about “stained sheets,” “stained sheets,” and I never knew what that meant, but I guess I thought it would be pretty interesting, and that it would be some kind of sign that things had changed—that everything would be a new color. But I still don’t know what it means, because everything seemed exactly the same, except that I wished Dougie would completely disappear.
We went back into the living room to wait, and I sat while Dougie walked around poking at things on the shelves. “Look,” Dougie said, “Clue.” But I just shrugged, and after a while Maureen and Kevin came downstairs looking pretty pleased with themselves.
I SAT while Dr. Wald finished at the machine, and I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t.
“Am I going to go blind?” I asked him finally, after all those months.
“What?” he said. Then he remembered to look at me and smile. “Oh, no, no. We won’t let it come to that.”
I knew what I would find at Jake’s, but I had to go anyway, just to finish. “Have you seen Chris?” I asked one of the waitresses. “Or Mark?”
“They haven’t been around for a while,” she said. “Sheila,” she called over to another waitress, “where’s Chris these days?”
“Don’t ask me,” Sheila said sourly, and both of them stared at me.
I could feel my blood traveling in its slow loop, carrying a heavy proudness through every part of my body. I had known Chris could injure me, and I had never cared how much he could injure me, and it had never occurred to me until this moment that I could do anything to him.
OUTSIDE, it was hot. There were big bins of things for sale on the sidewalk, and horns were honking, and the sun was yellow and syrupy. I noticed two people who must have been mother and daughter, even though you couldn’t really tell how old either of them was. One of them was sort of crippled, and the other was very peculiar-looking, and they were all dressed up in stiff, cheap party dresses. They looked so pathetic with their sweaty, eager faces and ugly dresses that I felt like crying. But then I thought that they might be happy, much happier than I was, and that I just felt sorry for them because I thought I was better than they were. And I realized that I wasn’t really different from them anyhow—that every person just had one body or another, and some of them looked right and worked right and some of them didn’t—and I thought maybe it was myself I was feeling sorry for, because of Chris, or maybe because it was obvious even to me, a total stranger, how much that mother loved her homely daughter in that awful dress.
When Mother and Penelope and I got back home, I walked over to Maureen’s house, but I decided not to stop. I walked by the playground and looked in at the fourth-grade room and the turtle th
at was still lumbering around its dingy aquarium, and it came into my mind how even Paul was older now than the kids who would be sitting in those tiny chairs in the fall, and I thought about all the millions and billions of people in the world, all getting older, all trapped in things that had already happened to them.
When I was a kid, I used to wonder (I bet everyone did) whether there was somebody somewhere on the earth, or even in the universe, or ever had been in all of time, who had had exactly the same experience that I was having at that moment, and I hoped so badly that there was. But I realized then that that could never occur, because every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and every moment is just the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line. And I thought how maybe once there was, say, a princess who lost her mother’s ring in a forest, and how in some other galaxy a strange creature might fall, screaming, on the shore of a red lake, and how right that second there could be a man standing at a window overlooking a busy street, aiming a loaded revolver, but how it was just me, there, after Chris, staring at that turtle in the fourth-grade room and wondering if it would die before I stopped being able to see it.
[1985]
JOHN O’HARA
DRAWING ROOM B
NOBODY BIG HAD TAKEN Leda Pentleigh to the train, and the young man from the publicity department who had taken her was not authorized to hire the Rolls or Packard that used to be provided for her New York visits. Nor had they taken their brief ride from the Waldorf to Grand Central. This time, she was riding West on the Broadway and not the Century, and she had come to the station in an ordinary taxicab, from a good but unspectacular hotel north of Sixtieth Street. Mr. Egan, it is true, was dead, but his successor at Penn Station, if any, did not personally escort Leda to the train. She just went along with the pleasant young hundred-and-fifty-a-week man from the publicity department, her eyes cast down in the manner which, after eighteen years, was second nature to her in railroad stations and hotel lobbies, at tennis matches and football games. Nobody stopped her for her autograph, or to swipe the corsage that the publicity young man’s boss had sent instead of attending her himself. Pounding her Delman heels on the Penn Station floor, she recalled a remark which she was almost sure she had originated, something about the autograph hounds not bothering her: it was when they didn’t bother you that they bothered you. Of course, it was Will Rogers or John Boles or Bill Powell or somebody who first uttered the thought, but Leda preferred her way of putting it. The thought, after all, had been thought by thousands of people, but she noticed it was the way she expressed it that was popular among the recent Johnny-come-latelies when they were interviewed by the fan magazines. Well, whoever had said it first could have it; she wouldn’t quarrel over it. At the moment of marching across Penn Station, there seemed to be mighty few travelers who would take sides for or against her in a controversy over the origin of one of her routine wisecracks. Far from saying, “There goes Leda Pentleigh, who first said . . .” the travelers were not even saying, “There goes Leda Pentleigh—period.” The few times she permitted her gaze to rise to the height of her fellow-men were unsatisfactory: one of the older porters raised his hat and smiled and bowed; two or three nice-appearing men recognized her—but they probably were Philadelphians in their thirties or forties, who would go home and tell their wives that they had seen Leda Pentleigh in Penn Station, and their wives would say, “Oh, yes. I remember her,” or “Oh, yes. She was in Katie Hepburn’s picture. She played the society bitch, and I’ll bet she’s qualified.” Katie Hepburn, indeed! It wasn’t as if Katie Hepburn hadn’t been in pictures fifteen years. But no use getting sore at Katie Hepburn because Katie was a few years younger and still a star. At this thought, Leda permitted herself a glance at a Philadelphia-type man, a man who had that look of being just about to get into or out of riding togs, as Leda called them. He frowned a little, then raised his hat, and because he was so obviously baffled, she gave him almost the complete Pentleigh smile. Even then he was baffled, had not the faintest idea who she was. A real huntin’-shootin’ dope, and she knew what he was thinking—that here was a woman either from Philadelphia or going to Philadelphia and therefore someone he must know. The gate was opened, and Leda and Publicity went down to her car. Publicity saw that she was, as he said, all squared away, and she thanked him and he left, assuring her that “somebody” from the Chicago office would meet her at Chicago, in case she needed anything. Her car was one of the through cars, which meant she did not have to change trains at Chicago, but just in case she needed anything. (Like what, she said to herself. Like getting up at seven-thirty in the morning to be ready to pose for photographs in the station? Oh, yes? And let every son of a bitch in the Pump Room know that Leda Pentleigh no longer rated the star treatment?)
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 10