by Rona Jaffe
“You don’t want to leave me?”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t want to leave you.”
“You really love me, don’t you,” Margie said. She felt very tired, spent from crying and from emotion.
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
“You don’t thank someone for loving you,” Neil said.
“I know. But I thank you anyway.”
Margie Davidow, nee Haft, had been born in the thirties in New York City and had been brought up in a way that was so similar to hundreds of other upper-middle-class Jewish girls in New York that it was only a wonder she had not met Neil Davidow until she was nineteen years old. She lived with her parents and her younger brother Tommy in one of those enormous gingerbread-encrusted apartment buildings on Central Park West which bear names like Beresford and Majestic and San Remo and Century. The apartment house where the Hafts lived was called the Grosvenor. In the springtime they could look out of their windows and see the trees in the park beginning to bloom. They had been living in the same apartment for so long that by the time Margie was old enough to be called on by boys they could still afford the eight large, high-ceilinged rooms that looked so impressive to anyone living in a city as crowded as Manhattan. They had a colored cook and maid of all work who had been working for them ever since Tommy was born.
Lawrence, Margie’s father, was in the electrical-equipment business. He had been born in New York, but his two older brothers and older sister had been born in Europe and brought here when they were very young. His wife Etta had been born and brought up in Brooklyn, in the old days when there were many fine houses on leafy, tree-lined streets and all the outlying districts of Brooklyn were farms. Lawrence and Etta were extremely devoted to and proud of their two children—of their son Tommy, who clearly had the brains in the family, and of Margie, whom they considered very pretty. They had always known that Margie would marry young. She had been sweet and shy as a child, and although she loved to read she was not particularly interested in school work. She went to public school, and they planned to send her to a private high school. When she was twelve she went to a riding camp in Massachusetts called Oka-noka-wokee, where she had the usual crush on the riding counselor, an athletic young woman, who was the beloved of most of the young girl campers for no particular reason except that she was attractive, rode well, and there were no boys. When, a month after camp closed, Margie received a post card from the riding counselor, she put it into her diary and saved it, sentimentally, until years later she happened to find it again when she was cleaning her room prior to her marriage to Neil. She had looked at the post card, an innocuous thing bearing a pleasant, trite, and meaningless message, and she had wondered how even the oversized handwriting could possibly have seemed so romantic and unique to her years before.
Margie had attended the riding camp for three years and had stopped going because it bored her. Her parents had a summer home in Mount Kisco, an hour away from Manhattan, with a working fireplace in the living room, a barbecue pit and a wooden glider in the back yard, and a marble pedestal bearing a large silver ball on the front lawn near the driveway. Saturdays and Sundays they went to the Sunny Hills Country Club, where Mrs. Haft hoped Margie would meet nice young people, particularly boys. Until she was fourteen, Margie was rather afraid of boys. Then she decided she liked them. She went to the swimming pool at the club, and to the dances, and allowed herself to be kissed good night at her front door, and occasionally kissed a good deal more in a parked convertible when she was much older; and until her marriage she always associated passionate kissing with the sound of a car radio and breath that had the scent of gin. She had never really been in love with anyone until she began dating Neil. As a matter of fact, most of the time during those summer nights in her late teens, she paid more attention to the popular songs being played on the radio than to the mouth against her own, and just when she was beginning to forget the music and pay attention to the lips she always found herself obliged to wrench a hand away from the hem of her skirt.
She did not consider her virginity—and more, her almost absolute innocence—something either to be proud of or to do violent battle to preserve; rather, it was a fact of her existence, like the fact that she had dark brown hair and was five feet three. She was also a virgin. It was not even a question of character.
Margie attended Sunday school at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, where her mother hoped she would meet other nice young people. When she was thirteen she was confirmed, and attended seven confirmation parties in one afternoon, at which lemonade and cookies and small sandwiches were served, and at which one girl received twelve almost identical sterling silver brooches from various classmates. The Hafts were not particularly religious. They went to Temple on the High Holidays, and sometimes Margie’s father went on Saturday mornings as well. Margie’s grandparents on both sides had kept kosher. Her parents never ate a pork chop or a roast suckling pig, but they ate bacon if it was served at someone else’s home. Somehow it seemed as if there was something not quite so porklike, so alien, about bacon. A religious holiday, to Margie, was more of a gathering of all the relatives than an actual spiritual event, and she liked her relatives very much, especially all the young cousins. Once, in college, she was invited to go to the theater on Passover Eve by an agnostic boy she had been dating, and she had instantly refused, feeling for the first time a little as though she might be struck dead if she sat at a musical comedy instead of at the traditional family table. But religion was never something she turned to in times of stress, and secretly she believed that although God was good and infinite, He really was much too busy with things like people dying of cancer and automobile accidents to look down and pay attention to her own tiny crises. She hesitated to ask Him.
When Margie was sixteen her parents gave her a Sweet Sixteen party at the Cottage of the Hampshire House hotel. Her entire class at the Birch Wathen School was invited, and since there were more girls in the class than boys, several of her young male cousins were recruited, as were the older brothers of her girl friends. The party was expensive and a great success. The guests drank champagne punch which was mainly made of ginger ale, and considered themselves very sophisticated, and Margie, combing her long hair in front of the mirror in the ladies’ room, decided that when she was graduated from college she might try to be a movie actress, playing character parts. She did not confide this ambition to anyone, afraid someone might laugh.
At that time Margie was attending social dancing classes at Viola Wolff, as were most of her friends, and she liked to dance. She was very graceful and light on her feet, and she always looked forward to the weekly evening dances under the watchful eye of a chaperone. She had her first real night-club date, a double date with another couple, at the Coq Rouge. The boy she was dancing with was seventeen, the son of one of her mother’s associates at Hadassah, and he was very handsome, rather like Van Johnson. But when they were dancing closely together the boy had a physical reaction to the touch of Margie’s taffeta-covered thighs, a reaction which must have been much more embarrassing to him than it was to her. Margie’s first reaction was one of fright. She was thoroughly educated in sexual matters via several graphic and pompous books her mother had given her four years before. But the books had been mainly occupied with procreation rather than pleasure, and Margie’s first thought when this unexpected thing prodded her leg was, But I don’t want this responsibility. It’s too much! Her mind was filled with pictures of marriage and motherhood, not seduction, and when she suggested they sit out the rest of the dance the boy was as relieved as she was. Girls like Margie frightened him; they seemed so cold.
When she grew older she went to more dances, and to more night clubs. Her grades at high school were not particularly distinguished, and it was decided she should go to N.Y.U. for one year and then try to transfer to one of the seven women’s colleges. At the end of her freshman year at N.Y.U. she met Neil Davidow, at the annual Thanksgiving dance g
iven for the Guild for the Jewish Blind, commonly known more familiarly as “The Blind Dance,” and then she decided that she did not want to go to college out of town after all.
Margie’s parents did not object to her decision. They liked having Margie at home, and they suspected even before Margie did that Neil Davidow might be a prospect for marriage. Margie’s brother Tommy was studying to go to medical school. Margie often said, with great pride and no envy whatsoever, that God had given all the brains to Tommy and had none left for her, even though Tommy was two years younger. After she met Neil Davidow at the Blind Dance he invited her out for the following Saturday night. They went to dinner and to the theater. He asked her again for the following Saturday and she accepted. Neil was twenty-five at the time, and a stockbroker, and he seemed to Margie to be very old, sophisticated, and rich. He took her to dine at places where her college friends never could afford to go. He took her to see all the good plays, and to the opera. When he began to come over on Sunday afternoons to do the crossword puzzle in The New York Times with her he already seemed like a member of the family. Neil had been living with his parents on Park Avenue, waiting until he could save enough money to have an apartment of his own. The year he met Margie he took his own apartment, a large room with a dressing room and kitchenette in the East Seventies, and Margie’s mother fell into the habit of inviting him to the Haft apartment for dinner once a week because “the poor boy must be starving having to eat his own cooking.” After an evening of an enormous dinner and then two hours of Neil’s being left discreetly alone in the living room with Margie while her parents went to watch television in their bedroom, Mrs. Haft would always pack up a large box of leftovers for him to take home “so at least you won’t have to eat your own cooking tomorrow.”
After he had been dating Margie for six weeks Neil invited her to his apartment for dinner. She arrived, dressed in a black velvet dress, nervous and shy and domestic.
For several weeks now she had been thinking of what it might be like to be married to Neil. He had not yet said he loved her, and actually Margie could not decide whether or not he did. She did not know whether or not she loved him. But she could not help thinking of marriage, partly because she knew by her mother’s elaborately casual remarks that her parents were thinking of it, and partly because Margie at nineteen and a half could not think of any realistic way to spend her life except as someone’s wife. She already knew that Neil was kind; he was kind to her and he seemed to be a kind person by nature. He had money which he had made on his own, he had a wonderful future, he was intelligent, and he was nice looking. She could not think of any other qualities she could want in a husband—except for a wildly romantic passionate love. Love of that sort, that would burn forever but never consume, seemed so far to be something depicted only in movies and girlish novels. She had never known any married people who were madly in love. Certainly her parents were not. They were more like two halves of one person existing together very calmly. They fought sometimes, but it never meant that there was a rift. The attitude Margie’s mother and father had always shown to their two children was that they were Parents, with a capital P, and the idea of them as lovers in some faraway past seemed incredible. It was almost easier to think of them as blood relatives than as lovers, because, as many old married people do, they actually looked alike.
A month before, one of Margie’s older girl cousins had become engaged, and there had been a large engagement party. The cousin, Joan, and her fiancé had spent most of the party nuzzling each other and gazing with big soulful eyes, as if they could not wait to fling themselves into each other’s arms. But to Margie, watching and feeling rather embarrassed, it almost seemed as if the engaged couple were playing an expected role. Something about it did not ring true to her, though if anyone had asked her to explain why she felt so, she would not have known how to reply.
Thinking thus of marriage and love, she entered Neil’s apartment, and for an instant she was so afraid he might be able to read her thoughts that she could not meet his eyes. Neil mistook this for shyness because she was alone with him in his bachelor apartment, and when Margie seated herself gingerly at one end of his black tweed-covered sofa bed he carefully sat several feet away from her and offered her a cigarette. The gesture, at arm’s length, was awkward, and Margie, who seldom smoked, was unable for a few moments to make the cigarette light. This embarrassed her further, and she dropped the lighted cigarette into her lap.
Neil was up in an instant, trying to brush off the sparks, which really had done no harm. “You’re all right, aren’t you?” he asked worriedly.
“Oh, yes.”
“Have a drink. Would you like a martini?”
“Rye and ginger, please. Very, very weak.”
He occupied himself for a few minutes making the drinks, and Margie strolled about the large room looking at his paintings and books. She had never been in his apartment before, mainly because it had taken him a long time to acquire furniture. It was a typical bachelor apartment, with a television set facing the sofa bed, a desk serving as a room divider, and a coffee table in front of the sofa bed which doubled as a dining table. The bar was actually a collection of liquor bottles on the drainboard in the kitchenette. Everything in the room was expensive, modern, dark, and extremely stark. The walls were beige, and the rug was banker’s gray, and the tweed covering the chairs and the sofa bed all was black. To Margie it seemed very masculine and sophisticated, and somehow mysterious. She realized for the first time that men had secret lives of their own, as distinguished from fathers (who lived in frilly bedrooms with mothers) and little brothers (who lived in childlike rooms decorated by mothers and kept neat by maids). She wondered if Neil ever made love to girls on that sofa that could be transformed into a bed at a moment’s notice.
“How do you like the apartment?”
“It’s beautiful,” Margie said.
The very, very weak rye and ginger ale was not so weak as all that. Margie felt herself becoming less shy.
“Do you know how to cook?” Neil asked.
She shook her head. “Do you?”
“Very well. Despite what your mother thinks.” They both laughed. “At least, I can make good steak and salad, which is what I like best anyway.”
She thought of him living alone here and eating steak and salad every day in a Spartan way, in contrast to her mother’s overrich, well-balanced meals, and it made him seem very masculine. He went to the phonograph and put on a stack of classical records. Next to the phonograph there was a small table holding a chess set with the pieces arranged on the board to begin a game.
“I like Bach,” Margie said. “He’s my favorite.”
“Mine too.”
This time he sat down next to her on the sofa and a moment later he took her hand. “You have pretty hands,” he said. “So small.”
“The boy I’ll get engaged to is lucky,” Margie said. “He’ll only have to buy me a little diamond and it will look much bigger on me.” She smiled at him to show it was really a joke; and yet, was it so much of a joke? She looked down at her hand again, unable to speak.
“We’ve never been alone together like this,” Neil said. “Do you realize that?”
“We’ve been alone lots of times!”
“Oh, yes, in your apartment, with your parents breathing heavily in the next room. And in the theater, with people all around us. And in very dark restaurants, with waiters who have X-ray eyes. Six weeks, do you realize? We’ve never been alone.”
“I like it,” Margie said softly.
“I do too.”
Neither of them said anything for a moment. They were alone, and they had nothing to say. All the talking they had done had come easily, as if in the public places where they had talked to each other, conversation had been their only form of personal contact. Otherwise they would have been quite apart from each other. The curtain rises, the play begins, and each spectator is alone. Neil was not the kind of person who likes to hold
hands in the theater; he had too much interest in the play. In restaurants he ate, he talked, he did not bump knees or clutch hands beneath the tablecloth so she would have to cut her meat with the side of her fork. In the bars where they had gone he always knew the bartender and usually had an extended conversation with him. At home there were always her parents. But now they were alone and intensely aware of it.
“I never went out with a girl as young as you before,” Neil said. “Except, of course, when I was nineteen. I usually go out with girls of twenty-five.”
“I guess you think I’m a baby.”
“No. No.”
“Well … I don’t mind telling you … sometimes you seem so much more grown up than I am that I’m actually afraid of you. You know so much.”
He seemed amused, and pleased. “The better to teach you, said the big bad wolf.”
“You’re not a wolf.”
“No?”
She withdrew from his touch then, slightly nervous, and reached for her drink. She did not know why she was nervous; actually she was not the least bit afraid of him. They had kissed many times on the sofa in her parents’ living room, but Neil had never tried to do anything farther. The drink was making her brave.
“Have you ever—no.”
“Have I ever what?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m terrible. Strike it from the record. I’m drunk.”
“You’re not drunk, and I won’t strike it from the record. Have I ever what? Wanted to make love to you?”