by Rona Jaffe
She combed her hair and powdered her face, humming with anticipation, not as if she were going out with Little Ricardo at all, but as if she were going to see Carlos again.
Ricardo was at her door in five minutes, precise and neat in his white suit, his hair combed back so tightly with lotions that it seemed to be painted on. His smile was bright and happy, as it always was; he loved life, he was happy even to be going to the same night club he frequented at least twice a week, with a woman he had known since he was born. Everything was always new to him, as to a baby. Leila kissed him affectionately on both cheeks.
“You are not with a girl tonight? You have come to take out an old friend? How kind you are!” she said mischievously.
“Ah, I cannot always make love,” he said happily.
His car was parked at the curb under a tree and a streetlight, its shiny white paint dappled with the outlines of dark leaves. “Would you like to go to Sacha’s?” he asked.
“Let’s just … drive for a while,” Leila said. “I will tell you where to drive.”
He drove slowly, glancing alternately through the windshield and sidewise at her. “Where are you leading me?”
“More slowly, please. Turn to this street on the left.” She smiled. “It’s so beautiful.”
“This street is beautiful? More than any others?” He raised an eyebrow at her.
“Slowly!” She was leaning out the window now, counting the floors of Carlos’ apartment house to find the one that was his. Those were his windows on the corner; he had told her he had a corner view. One was lighted. She wondered if the window were lighted because there was someone working inside the room or if it were only a lamp left lighted by a servant until someone came home to bed. “Please drive by again,” Leila said.
Ricardo was smiling at her. “You must find this a very beautiful street.”
“Only as a favor to me, Ricardinho. Please.”
“I will drive by this house a dozen times if you ask me to,” he said.
“You are always gallant.”
“No. I like to help a friend who is in love.”
He was circling the block to return. Leila looked at him in alarm. “In love?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then this is a very late hour to be buying real estate,” Ricardo said. He slowed the car almost to a stall. “Slow enough?”
She looked. It was a bright light in the window, the light of several lamps. They were wide, high, modern windows, the curtains drawn far apart. She could see the top of his bookshelf, and yes … she saw a figure moving about! “Once more. Only once more, Ricardinho.”
“You must be very much in love,” Ricardo said.
“No, it is nothing.”
They drove around the block again, and this third time Leila saw that the figure walking in the room was Carlos. She recognized him from the color of the suit he had worn at dinner. She sighed happily with relief.
“And now can we go to a boâte?” he said.
“With pleasure.” But she knew her heart was not in it and she hoped he would not guess from her tone.
“One drink only,” Ricardo said. He sounded sympathetic, a little amused, and still happy. “You owe me your company for one drink anyway, in return for my being your assistant spy. Only one drink, I promise.”
“I am a little tired,” she admitted gladly. “But I am always happy to see you.”
“Emotions are tiring, are they not?” Ricardo said. “I’m glad I don’t fall in love. I don’t think I would like it.”
“No,” Leila said seriously, “You would not like it. I don’t think I like it either. It is very painful, this love.”
CHAPTER 11
Some women, even if they never have children, are mothers. They may be childish, immature, romantic, but their attitude toward the people who are closest to them is more motherly than anything else. Perhaps they do not want to have any children; it does not matter. They are mothers to everyone else they touch. Margie Davidow had decided she was one of these, and it seemed to suit her. She knew she certainly was not the sexy type of woman—you had to think about sex or at least care about it to be one of those. She had none of those unconsciously seductive gestures that draw men to a girl who may be completely unaware of what she is doing to them. Margie’s femininity was in her way of dressing, her neatness, her point of view, her likes and dislikes, and her manners.
When Mort Baker moved in with her and Neil she was happier than she had been in years. She arranged her large private dressing room for him, the room she and Neil would have used for a baby if they had had one. She put blue sheets on the studio couch and a little vase of fresh flowers on the table beside the bed. She brought a large ashtray (men liked that) and a stack of books from America. Whenever she passed a store window and saw some little thing Mort might like to have in his room, she bought it. She had the maids launder his shirts after he had worn them only once, and if he stepped out of his wet bathing suit and left it lying on the rug making a slowly growing pool of dampness she would wring it out in the sink when he was not around and then hang it back on his bedroom chair. Mort and Neil shared a bathroom. It had just never occurred either to her or to Neil to use the same bathroom and let their guest have his own.
But she could not fuss over Mort in exactly the same way she always could over Neil because he was not so tractable. She had chosen Neil’s clothes since they were married because he admitted her taste was better than his. But she knew by instinct that she could never try to dominate Mort Baker.
In a way, she liked this. It made her a little afraid of him. If she wanted to buy him something, give him something important, she always had to do it as a sort of ruse. “We needed new towels for that bathroom; the old ones were getting shabby.” Or, “I bought this sweatshirt for Neil on sale and he says he hates red. You try it. They won’t take it back and it would be a shame for it to go to waste.”
All of this attention to his friend only pleased Neil. He knew Margie too well to be deceived by her little ploys, even if Mort was, but he also knew her well enough not to be jealous of Mort. At night the three of them sat up until two and three in the morning talking or playing records. He planned to teach Mort how to play chess, but they never got around to it. It seemed as if there was never time any more to play games; and all of this had happened in only three weeks.
One evening Mort said he would not be having dinner with them; he had met a girl on the beach and he was going to take her out.
“It’s about time,” Neil said pleasantly. “I was wondering how long you were going to be polite and hang around with us.”
“Don’t be insane,” Mort said.
“I’ll give you a key,” Margie said. “If … you need one.” She smiled at him like an ultra-progressive mother who knows her husband has told their son where to buy contraceptives. But she didn’t feel like a mother—suddenly she felt strange. “Is she Brazilian?”
“Yes, but she’s been living here for a shorter time than I have. She even speaks Portuguese with an American accent. It’s funny.”
“Well … maybe she can be your date for Carnival,” Margie said weakly. She didn’t know what was the matter with her; she felt as if she should encourage him to have an affair with this nameless faceless girl, and yet she had a sort of pleasant pain every time she spoke to him about it.
“Aren’t we all going to go together?” Mort asked. He seemed hurt.
“Of course. But … you don’t want to be stuck with us.”
“Everybody’s on his own at Carnival,” Neil said. “I’m even going to give you a night off, Margie, if you want. You can buy a mask and go to a ball with Helen and some of your other girlfriends and flirt with all the men.”
“And you?” she said, pretending to be jealous.
Neil put his arm lightly around Mort’s shoulders. “We are going to go to the Married Men’s Ball.”
“He’s not married!”
&
nbsp; “That’s all right,” Neil said.
“Where is it?”
“I won’t tell,” Neil said happily.
“You’ll tell me, Mort! Won’t you?” Suddenly it wasn’t funny any more; she felt left out. The light pain filled her chest and was no longer sweet. It wasn’t that she was worried about Neil’s having an afternoon affair at the Married Men’s Ball; she almost wished he would. It would make her feel less guilty toward him.
“You can go too,” Mort said. “You’re married. Just wear a mask so Neil won’t know what you’re doing.”
“She’ll spoil all my fun,” Neil said.
Margie looked Neil full in the face. “Oh, go to hell!” she said and walked out of the room.
As soon as she was in the hallway she felt ashamed. That was the first time in the entire five years of her marriage that she had ever said an unkind or unfair thing to Neil, even as a joke, and she knew what she had just said was not a joke. She went into her bathroom, locked the door, turned the water faucets full on in the sink and began to cry. What’s the matter with me? she thought, standing up with her palms braced against the edge of the sink as if she were about to be sick. She wanted to cry, to keep crying until all the tension was washed out of her, and when she glanced up and saw her contorted, red, ugly face in the mirror the sight made her cry even more.
“I want to go home,” she whispered. “I want to go home.…”
It was the first time she had said that; it was the first time she had even thought it. Now she had something real to weep about, although she knew in her heart it was not the reason. She conjured up visions of everything back home in New York that could possibly make her homesick—the green trees in Central Park in summer, the crowds rushing to the theater on autumn evenings, parties in winter when she looked down from a high window in an apartment on Central Park West and saw the tiny streetlights twinkling below in the cold like flakes of snow and knew she could turn back in a moment into a warm room where she knew everyone and where everyone smiled on her and Neil with approval. The herd, she thought; it’s gone. All gone, everyone who loved us and approved of us and smiled on our marriage because we were both young and healthy and Jewish and well-to-do. My parents were so happy, my whole family too; it was as if I’d joined them as a woman and they were all proud of me. Look at me, Mother and Daddy, I wanted to say. Look at me and Neil! Aren’t you proud of what I’ve done?
And now everyone is far away and we’re alone, and I’m afraid.
She opened the medicine chest to find an aspirin and gulped down two from the palm of her hand, without water, as she had trained herself to do since she had been living here in Brazil. It was so much easier than walking all the way into the kitchen. Her safety razor lay on the shelf beside the aspirin bottle. Margie picked it up, more as a whim, really. She didn’t really mean to cut her wrists. Why should she kill herself? She had everything—a home, a husband who was devoted to her, good friends like Helen and Bert Sinclair and Mort Baker. She had a glowing tan, she was healthy, she had beautiful clothes.… She took out the blade and laid the edge of the naked blade against the inside of her wrist against the thin blue vein. Did people really do this? Did it hurt?
She didn’t have the slightest intention of destroying herself, and yet she could not bring herself to put the blade down, not just yet. She really wanted only to hurt herself a little, to nick her skin, as if to give her heart and mind a physical reason for feeling the pain that she was feeling now. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. She only knew that she didn’t like herself very much and she wanted to hurt herself, just a little.
The cut hurt, but it did not bleed. Margie put the blade back into the safety razor and turned the handle until it was tight. She cut her thumb in the process, and the accidental cut on her thumb hurt more than the one she had deliberately inflicted on her wrist. She squeezed the cut on her wrist until it bled a bit, to disinfect it, and she sucked her hurt finger. I am a damn fool, she told herself. I hope nobody notices.
She washed her face and applied fresh make-up and brushed her hair. When she came out of the bathroom again the hall and bedroom were dark. “Neil?”
Mort was sitting in an armchair in the living room reading a magazine. He had one ankle up on the other knee and he was still wearing his wrinkled khaki shorts with the fringed edges that he had cut from his old Army suntan trousers.
“Where’s Neil?”
“He went to the movies.”
“Now?”
“He said he’d be back for dinner.”
“And why aren’t you dressed for your date?”
He looked up at her, and Margie saw that his face was rather grimy and he needed a shave badly, and she also saw for the first time a very vulnerable look on his face. He’s handsome, she thought in surprise. What a nice face—it changes expression so often you never forget what it looks like and just look at your memory of it, the way you do with most people’s. “I thought you might have cut your throat in there or something,” Mort said.
“I?” she said. She smiled at him, a calm, secure woman with no secrets; and kept her injured wrist closely against the side of her skirt. “Do you want some iced maté? I do.”
“I’ll get it,” he said, standing. “You sit there.”
“Sit. You’re still a guest even if you are one of the family.” She rushed past him into the kitchen and took a bottle of the iced, heavily sugared tea out of the refrigerator. The maids were resting in their rooms before dinner. In the pantry cabinet was the extra liquor supply. Margie poured one tall glass full of iced maté for Mort, and filled another tall glass only halfway. She searched in the liquor cabinet for anything that was already opened. There was white rum; that was good. It wouldn’t show, and didn’t some people make rum punch with tea? She didn’t care what she drank; she hated the taste of all of it. It had been a long time since she’d done this, and she didn’t even think she could bear the smell of liquor any more. She filled her glass to the top with rum and stirred it with a long spoon.
She brought the two glasses into the living room and sat on the sofa across from him, sipping at her tea and rum and trying to pretend it didn’t taste terrible. “I hope I didn’t embarrass you a while ago,” she said. “If I do scream at my husband once in a while I don’t want you to feel like a Peeping Tom. I honestly feel as if you’re one of the family, and so does Neil.”
“As what member?” Mort asked.
“Just … someone we both love.” She smiled.
“You’ve both been too tolerant for too long,” he said. “I’m going to cut out soon. The trouble is, Rio is full of tourists now because of Carnival. As soon as it’s over and they go away I’ll be able to find an apartment and I’ll be out of your community housing project.”
“You … like it here, don’t you?” Margie asked softly. “If there’s anything you want, just ask me or Neil. And please feel free to go out every night if you want to. You’re more than just a guest. I’ll have a key made for you in the morning.”
“The servants can always let me in. Don’t bother, Margie.”
“They go to sleep. If I was a man, and free, I’d want a key of my own.”
“Don’t overestimate the joys of freedom.”
“I wouldn’t know about them,” Margie said. “For me there’s always been someone. I don’t think I’d know what to do if I ever had to be alone. I guess I’m lucky that there was always someone.”
“Always someone,” Mort said. “What does that mean? I don’t even know what that means.”
“You? The rake?”
“Rake?”
“I guess that sounds like a term from the gay nineties,” Margie said, a little embarrassed. “I’m lucky I wasn’t born a boy. I wouldn’t know how to live that way. In a way I envy you. You can just live from day to day, you don’t own things, you don’t have to pretend anything for other people. Maybe if I’d had to live that way for a while I would have grown up.”
“You envy me
?” Mort said. “I always envy you and Neil. No, envy isn’t the word. I just like to watch you, without envy, because you’re really happy.”
“Yes,” Margie said. “We are happy.” She gulped down the rest of her drink and set the empty glass very, very carefully on the coffee table. She felt as though there was a thin mist in front of her eyes. “We are.”
Mort was watching her without saying anything. She smiled at him and lighted a cigarette. “Cigarette?” she asked. He shook his head. “I want you to be happy,” she said, trying to keep the words neat and precise. Her tongue felt thick. Half a glass of rum and two aspirins; wasn’t it funny how sometimes you could get so high on so little, and other times you couldn’t get fuzzy if your life depended on it. She felt a glow of warm feeling toward Mort Baker; he was their friend, hers and Neil’s, and she loved him. He was her son, her brother, the old college classmate, the friend of the family, all those wholesome things, and she loved him. She wanted to sacrifice for him to show him how unselfishly she loved him.
“I’m going to have a key made for you tomorrow,” she said, enunciating to keep the words clear. “I want you to feel free to stay out all night if you want to, and have lots of ‘honeymoons’ and be happy. I want only good things for you. I want you to be happy.”
“All right,” he said. He sounded distressed and he was looking at her in a strange way. “So I’ll be happy.”
“Aren’t you going to get dressed for your girl?”
“She’s not my girl; she’s a girl I met on the beach.”
“Where are you going to take her?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I just told her I’d take her to dinner. I didn’t even think about where we’d go.”
“Don’t you like her?” Margie asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Yet …” she said. She sighed. “What a magic word that is. I don’t know, yet.”
“There’s your freedom that you envy so much,” he said. “A whole long series of ‘I don’t know yet.’” He stood up. “I’d better get dressed or I’ll never know, because she’ll go away.”