Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  It wasn’t his fault I had a rusty lance embedded in my throbbing temple, a sandpaper tongue, and a tremor in my knees. It wasn’t his fault I’d forgotten this date set up two weeks earlier, and that when I looked at his heavily oiled chestnut hair, parted cleanly down the middle with flakes of dandruff showing along that straight white part, and the little bow tie, cocked twenty degrees off center, I felt a dizzy unpleasantness only partly attributable to last night’s whiskey.

  Someone, someone would happily marry Benny Fertig and all those other boys my mother had mentioned as likely prospects—Sidney Cohn, Daniel Abrahamson. I was only wasting his time.

  But at least we might have had a nice day of it, walking ever so slowly down a boardwalk, staring out at wintry coastal views, trading innocent childhood memories as I let last night’s toxins percolate out of my system.

  But no such walk was in the cards. Benjamin needed to show me an elevator, downtown.

  Slipping a bill to the operator, a man who seemed to recognize him, and then a second one when the elevator operator seemed intent on balking—the poor man was risking his employment by leaving us alone in the elevator, with the vehicle in our hands—Benny purchased our solitude and made me spend ten minutes in that hot shuddering box, showing off his ability manipulating the motor control to joggle us to the right level at each floor, and lecturing me on the complications of modern elevator engineering and design, since that was to be his trade. He’d just gotten a new job designing them. My own father had put in a good word. My mother had also put in a good word, to Benny’s mother, about what a delightful girl I was, and that I didn’t date very much, and seemed lonesome on occasion.

  “Is it true? You’re feeling a little lonely?” Benny had asked.

  “Well, not exactly . . .” but he didn’t wait for the answer.

  And how many children did I want? He wanted four: two girls, two boys. One shaggy dog.

  And hadn’t I had enough school, and would I be done with this rather pointless, unpaid interlude at Johns Hopkins very soon? Boy, he’d hated school. Women are lucky, Benny said. “School, work, all of it optional. And with labor-saving appliances, pretty soon a lady at home won’t have anything to do but press a few buttons and then, what? Go shopping, I guess.”

  And did I have a favorite skyscraper in Boston or New York? His company’s elevators were in all of them, and perhaps over ice cream—“Yes, please!” I said, anything to get out of the elevator and back down on the ground floor, where there was a soda shop with padded booths and water for my whiskey-parched tongue—he could tell me everything he knew about elevators and his dreams for the future.

  It could have been worse.

  He didn’t try anything, either behind those closed elevator doors or in the car on the way home. And he talked so long and asked so few questions that my mind was free to wander back to the events of the night before, the stories about John, Mary, and Vida, my dazed distraction mistaken by Benny for confusion about the subject of weight maximums and hydraulics, safety mechanisms and vertical traffic patterns, about which he was willing to explain all over again.

  “Ever heard of the elevator algorithm?” he asked. I had not.

  Why does the voice and scent of one man make us cringe; the scent of another, swoon?

  Those were the questions. Not what a lady at home would do once we all lived in a push-button world, or whether elevators would ever be fully automated, or how fast an elevator would have to travel once skyscrapers, many times higher than any built today, truly brushed the sky.

  Chapter 8

  On Monday morning I found a dozen red roses tied up with a spruce-green bow waiting for me in the lab, and raised eyebrows on the face of every nurse and technician I happened to pass.

  Nothing happened, I wanted to stammer, my face warming in response to the insinuations. What could I do with the flowers anyway? I delivered them to a receptionist at the psychiatric intake desk.

  Later that day, John Watson gestured for me to enter his private office, stepped carefully around me, and closed the door softly before returning to his desk.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Only then did I notice the small bandage over a cut on his cheek and the way his right hand kept crawling into the front pocket of his jacket.

  “It doesn’t hurt too much,” he said when he noticed me looking. “But it’s true. My knuckles aren’t as tough as they used to be. I guess you box all the time or not at all.”

  I’d been so caught up in the stories of his philandering that I’d forgotten to ask, until now, how he’d managed to throw such an effective punch.

  “Oh that,” he said, a hint of boyish pleasure in his voice, though he looked unsettled. “I’m afraid to say I was a shameless scrapper back in my South Carolina days.”

  He took off his glasses and rubbed the small red marks on either side of his nose. “I was arrested a couple times. For nigger fighting.”

  I waited for a moment, taken aback by the vulgar turn of phrase.

  “I’m not going to defend that,” he said. “You know where I stand now, on matters of race—and violence. I was looking for all kinds of trouble, and I found it. Are you going to take a seat or will I be giving my full confession while you stand there?”

  I hurried to lower myself into the chair on the other side of the desk. He’d already told me a little about his upbringing on the farm, his parents and the riverside revivalist tent meetings he deplored. He told me now about coming to the University of Chicago with only fifty dollars in his pocket. When I got up my nerve to ask him about the Mary Ickes and Vida Sutton stories, he admitted that it was all true. It bothered him less that I knew about his early affairs than that I’d sat alone with two of his old college friends, not very good friends as it turned out, gossiping behind his back. Seeing his hurt look, I recognized he had a reason to feel betrayed. Yet how else could I have come to understand him, except by listening to their tales?

  “And I suppose you might want to know about my present marriage,” he continued.

  “That’s your own private business, Dr. Watson. All of it is.”

  “So we’re back to ‘Dr. Watson,’ are we? Then what’s the point of digging up my past if it doesn’t even make us closer friends?”

  His thumb went up to the gap between his teeth, until he noticed and pushed his hands down onto his lap.

  “I’ve embarrassed you,” he said. “First, with the fight and then with the flowers—I guess roses send the wrong message but I just can’t stand those poinsettias—and now with all my pathetic boyhood stories. And that’s without me even telling you that I’m stuck in a loveless, sexless marriage to a woman who can’t stand me half of the time.”

  “I doubt that’s true.”

  “What? That it’s loveless? Sexless?”

  I looked down at my lap. “That she can’t stand you.”

  “Well,” he said. “There I go. Embarrassing you again. Now you know the real John Broadus Watson, warts and all. But I’m getting carried away. I’m losing track of the point I wanted to make, about Friday’s scuffle.”

  He stood up and came around the desk slowly, as if crossing an icy street, considering each step, finding his traction. I thought at first he was going for the door, but then he approached and stood behind me, hands on my shoulders, fumbling—the quiver of his own fingers perceptible until he rested the palms more firmly. That slight tremble, weighted with unclear intentions, accelerated my pulse.

  “That silly fight at the restaurant,” he said from behind my back, in a low and serious voice, “was about jealousy. A completely natural and utterly useless emotion. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  I took a deep breath, tried to force myself back into a state of relaxation, to assume nothing, to take pains not to read too much into a gesture.

  “No, I . . . I really don’t.”

  “If yo
u take away all the useless emotions, the errors in men’s ways of responding irrationally to the world, do you know what you have?”

  It was a test of some kind, but if it were merely a test, why was he speaking so huskily, his breath coming fast and shallow?

  “You have no rage,” he said. “You have no fear. Rosalie, you have no war.”

  And I was back for the briefest moment at Vassar again, the morning we’d heard the war was over—millions dead, but it was over—and we’d all trooped out at 4 a.m. in our coat-covered nightgowns and skipped between the buildings, dancing and hugging. Someone had a German army helmet—a souvenir collected by an uncle in the army, who’d expected it to go on display in the library or in a history-club cabinet—and we climbed a hill and dug a hole and buried it, feeling like warriors ourselves. Several girls had broken down into tears. A girl named Lucy had thrown herself down on the ground, legs splayed, face melting—and I’d looked askance at those emotional prostrations. But listen now, here: even a grown man, a psychologist, Dr. John Watson of Greenville and Chicago and Baltimore, was trembling with the emotional residue of that Great War, that useless conflagration.

  “It’s so close, the changes we can make, but we’re not there yet,” he said. “I don’t know sometimes if I can get there on my own.”

  A warmth spread from my throat down into my stomach and across my lap. “Rosalie,” he said, the breath on his neck making my skin tingle, “You know I’m not a perfect man. And you know I’m an unapologetic flirt. Trouble finds me, on occasion.”

  I didn’t dare to answer, or even turn my head. I only waited, the air electric, my mouth dry. I tilted my cheek toward him and lifted my chin just a fraction, admitting him into the curve of my neck, where I knew his lips would register the heat and rhythm of my own heart pounding. Anything to save me from having to speak: to say yes or no or aren’t there rules? or what about your wife?

  When he stood up a little straighter—backing away for only a moment, I thought, finding a better angle of attack—I took that moment to breathe and regain my composure. “I don’t know what to think about this.”

  “So don’t think,” he said. Was there a hint of irritation in his voice?

  Of course. Don’t think. I hadn’t thought of that.

  I closed my eyes, muscles tensed. I waited for his hands to move from my shoulders. I imagined them moving down my arms, onto my ribs, my waist, and up again, moving to the front, to my breasts, cupping them in his hands. When they got there, if he paused, I would whisper, I don’t mind.

  But it was too late. I opened my eyes again. He’d removed his hands. I could still smell his cologne and feel the phantom pressure of his fingertips kneading my shoulders. I could still feel the ghostly longing coming from parts of my body he hadn’t even touched, a taste of shame far in advance—because we hadn’t done anything. Not yet.

  I heard him step toward the door. Something had changed in his bearing.

  “And the next time you want to hear stories about John Watson,” he said, “just remember to come to me. I’m not a bad storyteller—better than that son-of-a-bitch Henry Follett.” He cleared his throat. “Are you waiting for something, Rosalie?”

  The words wouldn’t come. I stammered, “You—you don’t have a cigarette, do you?”

  That stopped him short, hand on the doorknob. He went back around to his desk, watching my face, and opened up a little Camel cigarette tin. When he handed me the cigarette, my hand was shaking so much, I hurried it to my lip, where it still quivered as I took the lighter he passed me. He wouldn’t do me the honors.

  He said, “You’re staring at me just now like you opened a hatbox and found a possum curled up inside.”

  “Yes, in a way I sort of feel like I did.”

  He cracked a smile, and then raised his eyebrows when I didn’t laugh or smile back.

  “Don’t think,” he’d said. The very word—think—wouldn’t do. “I don’t know what to make of you,” I said.

  “What to make of me? You thought I was going to kiss you. You thought I was going to seduce you, just a minute ago.”

  I was busy trying and failing to light the cigarette with useless fingers, which saved me the trouble of answering.

  “Maybe I almost was,” he said. “But first off, I sensed your considerable hesitation. Was I wrong about that?”

  Was he wrong? What was I supposed to answer? That I was willing, possibly eager, a loose woman who barely needed persuasion? Oh, why couldn’t I summon any excitement for the unmarried, appropriate Benny Fertigs of the world?

  When it was clear I wasn’t about to confess anything, he said, “Resistance might be appealing to some men. But it isn’t appealing to me. Physical pleasure isn’t something I try to trick another person into.”

  “I didn’t think you were trying—”

  “And second, I remembered. You’re too old for me.”

  “Too old?”

  “You’ve got to understand, when I was seduced by Mary, she was only nineteen. But you know that story now.”

  I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard—the ridiculous, arrogant nerve of it. I was exactly half his age.

  “And frankly,” he said, “by the time we married, she already had plenty of negative traits that were too far gone to decondition.”

  “She was ruined, in other words,” I said, finding my spine. “But not you. You have no bad habits.”

  “Oh, I’ve got plenty of them.”

  “Drinking? Being with women?”

  Though it wasn’t even lunchtime yet, he opened a file cabinet drawer and poured amber liquid into a small glass, the spilled drops betraying a mild tremor. “I never said either of those things were bad habits. Nothing bad about bourbon or about sex. I happen to like sex very much, especially.”

  I’d just managed to light the cigarette and take the first puff, which triggered an inexpert cough.

  “That’s right, sex,” he said. “The most natural thing in the world. Doesn’t even cause a hangover, which is more than I can say of my other favorite thing.”

  “So what’s your bad habit, then?”

  “Fear of the dark,” he said, half-squinting. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  “How . . . how . . .” I said, irritated by his jocular tone, “how dare you call me too old?”

  “That’s better. Stand up for yourself. Don’t just sit there like a scared rabbit. Where’s that girl from the New School lecture, who kept out-talking me? She was smart, and mouthy, and driven. As I recall, she could even catch a ball.” Try as he might to be incendiary, his tone was slipping. The act was falling apart. “I liked that girl.”

  I wanted to hear him say that. I would have given anything for him to repeat it. But I also clung to my righteous indignation.

  “And what about Essie? What about all the nurses?”

  “That’s different,” he said. “That’s just play. And anyway, all men are attracted to nurses. It’s just a fact.”

  “Which makes it all right, in your estimation.”

  “All right if the nurse doesn’t mind. Did Essie look unhappy to you, the day you barged into my office?”

  The proof that he had seen me come in that day added burn to my cheeks.

  “You’re saying it’s perfectly acceptable for you to cheat on your wife.”

  “Is it cheating when she and I don’t make love anymore? When we barely even talk? It’s the law that’s made things complicated, not me.”

  “Don’t you love her even a little?”

  “No, Rosalie. I don’t.”

  When I didn’t reply, he said, “What you’re looking at, what you’re studying with those big blue eyes of yours, is something rare in nature: one of the only honest men you’ll ever meet.”

  I lifted my chin and tried to sound bravely offended, but my voice cracked. “My fa
ther’s honest.”

  Whether it was the words or my sudden near-slip into inexplicable teariness, that ended the game for him. “All right, honey. I’m sure he is.”

  He got up and came around the desk again. “Only this once, because we’re friends,” he said, and then bent over to place a quick kiss on my cheek. “You may be surprised to know there are many women who want to be pursued—too many for a lifetime of pursuing.”

  I’d bought his line in that moment. I’d figured he went after the women he wanted most. I didn’t realize that he wasn’t used to being the one to cross the line.

  All his life, women had hunted him. He had no trouble giving in to his urges, but it was exactly that: giving in. Reacting. Not initiating, except through design: surrounding himself with attractive women, making no secret of his appetites and inclinations. That strategy fit his model of human behavior perfectly: create opportunities for certain kinds of stimuli, and then—logically, naturally, faultlessly—simply react. Behaviorism was about control, certainly, but he wasn’t the one who believed that sexuality or even adultery should be restricted. In his mind, sex was not one of civilization’s problems. Things like rage and jealousy needed to be controlled, yes, but not sex itself.

  And that line about me being too old? Preposterous, even for him.

  Which meant, I suppose, that I had the upper hand. But I didn’t feel that way. I only felt defenseless and confused. I had a brief sense of how our young, puzzled subjects must feel—fingers nearly poked in their eyes to assess their blink reaction times, bodies plunged into water without warning, furry animals sent scurrying across their legs.

  Seemingly out of the blue, he said, “I was out hat shopping with Polly on Saturday.” He added meaningfully, “Downtown.”

  “That sounds pleasant,” I said, too emotionally confused to fake interest.

  “For the first thirty minutes, maybe. I left Polly to try on the fiftieth hat, and I walked across the street to get some fresh air, and I saw you in a booth near the window, with a young man. Not the most handsome, but sure of himself, I could tell from the way he kept tossing his head back, laughing at his own jokes. Rosalie, I couldn’t help it. I kept watching. He kept talking, and at first, I tried to tell myself he must be an interesting fellow. And good for you. Good for the both of you. But then his mouth kept moving, and I looked at your face, and you weren’t even looking back at him, and I felt a little surge of hope, because maybe you didn’t have strong feelings for this young fellow after all, and then dread, because you’re too nice for your own good.”