“Yeah,” Michael said. “Well, that’s a terrible story, all right, and the worst part is I don’t believe it. Now, listen, dear. You know I’m crazy about you; you know I’d do anything in the world for you, but I’m not taking any more of this bullshit, do you understand? Christ’s sake, I don’t think you even know what’s true and what isn’t.”
“Well, I certainly don’t see how an attitude like that deserves any comment at all,” she said quietly. She got out of bed and walked away, and from the tense shape of her back he thought she might be ashamed, but then she turned and gave him a calm, appraising look. “You’re very brutal, aren’t you,” she said. “At first I thought you were a sensitive man, but you’re really very brutal and unkind.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, trying for a tone of great weariness.
That was about as bad as things got during the fall, and even then he knew they would pick up. If he allowed her to sulk for a while, and to take a shower and change her clothes, he knew she would find some easy, face-saving way to become a sweet companion again; and by that time he’d be willing to have her back on any terms.
He never tired of showing her off to other men – even to strangers, even in restaurants of her choosing that he couldn’t really afford – and he happily brought her along to a bar uptown to meet Tom Nelson once, when Tom was in the city for the day. He knew Tom’s face would go slack and weak with envy at the sight of her, and it did. That particular afternoon came close to being wrecked, though, when Jane leaned attractively across the table and said “What do you do?”
“Oh, I’m a painter.”
“Modern?” she inquired.
Tom Nelson blinked several times behind his glasses to suggest it had been a good many years since anybody had asked him a question like that. Then he said “Yeah, I guess so, sure.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose any kind of work can be fun if you like it, but personally I loathe modern art. All modern art leaves me absolutely cold.”
Tom began carefully molding a soaked cocktail napkin around the base of his drink then, and it was time for Michael to fill the silence with whatever quick, inconsequential talk came into his head.
That was another thing about Jane Pringle: she didn’t really know very much. Her stepmother had taught her a lot about clothes, and she’d heard enough talk around the office to develop strong opinions on current Broadway shows – she could always tell you which of them were great and which were trash – but she hadn’t bothered with many other kinds of learning since her time as an inattentive, daydreaming adolescent in boarding school. Her ignorance was so wide that Michael wondered if her lying might have begun as a way of trying to disguise it.
She told him she would have to spend Christmas with her father and stepmother because they’d been looking forward to it for months; then she called him from their place and said she’d decided to stay over for the New Year’s holiday too.
When she finally did get back to Leroy Street she seemed a little distracted. Even after she’d sat down with Michael she kept glancing around the apartment as if unable to believe she had ever really lived here, and once or twice she looked at his face in the same uncertain way.
“Well, I had a glorious time,” she told him. “We went to thirteen different parties.”
“Yeah? Well, that’s quite a – quite a few parties.”
She had a new hairstyle now, too short for his liking, and seemed to have acquired a new set of mannerisms to go with it: crisp, businesslike, no-nonsense. Someone had given her an amber cigarette holder of the kind designed to trap poisonous tars, and she used it faithfully for the rest of the winter, allowing it to distort her face in a clenching, squinting way that made her look ten years older and not very smart.
In February she said it would be more sensible to have a place of her own, and he agreed with her. He helped her study the “Apartments Available” columns of the Times as carefully as if she were his own daughter starting out in the world. They found a suitable place in the West Twenties, overlooking the gardens of the General Theological Seminary, but Jane declined the landlord’s offer to have it painted before she moved in: she wanted to paint it herself, she said, “so it’ll feel more like my own apartment.”
And that meant Michael had to stand with her in paint-and-hardware stores while she hesitated much too long over choosing just the right shade of off-white, just the right kinds of paint rollers and brushes; it meant he had to wear spattered jeans and climb a stepladder and breathe the paint fumes and tire himself out, wondering all the while what the hell he was doing this for.
Once when Jane was high on another stepladder, dressed in a too-scanty pair of shorts and a too-scanty halter, reaching out to touch up the molding of a front window, there came a happy chorus of cheers and whistles from young Episcopalians in the shrubbery across the street. She laughed and waved to them; then she arranged herself into a slightly more provocative position on the ladder, and blew them a kiss.
Later, she told Michael she wanted her bedroom painted black.
“Why?”
“Oh, just because. I’ve always wanted a black bedroom. Doesn’t it seem sort of delightfully sexy?”
When the paint job was finished, black bedroom and all, he decided to leave her alone for a few days; maybe even for a week.
The next time he went to see her she seemed as eager as ever to have him in her bed, but in the aftermath of it she wanted talk in a way he didn’t find congenial. She explained to him, in language she could only recently have learned from some book of pop psychology (How to Love, by Derek Fahr?) that she thought their “relationship” might be more “valid” now that it was “structured on a more realistic basis.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” he said. “So when d’ya wanna do this again? Tuesday?”
On another evening she said “Two of the Seminary boys dropped in today; they were terribly nice, both very shy. I gave them tea and fig newtons – oh, not the little cheap ones; the good imported English kind – and we had a delightful time. Then one of them had to go to a class or something, but the other one stayed for hours. His name’s Toby Watson and he’s just my age. After he graduates he’s going to work his way around the world. Isn’t that exciting?”
“No.”
“He’s going to go all the way down the Amazon and all the way up the Nile, and he’s going to climb one of the Himalayas alone. He said it may take two or three years out of his life, but he said ‘I think I’ll be a better person for it, and a better priest.’ ”
“Yeah, well, okay.”
The end of it came abruptly, on the phone, when he called one day to ask if he could come over that night.
“Oh, no,” she said, sounding frightened, as if “no” might not be enough to stop him from coming over anyway. “No, tonight’s out, and so’s tomorrow; so is every other night this week, actually.”
“How come?”
“What d’you mean, ‘how come’?”
“You know; I mean why?”
“Because I have a house guest.”
“ ‘A house guest,’ ” he repeated, hoping to make her see how false it had sounded to him.
“Well, certainly. In a normally active social life, having occasional house guests is a perfectly normal part of social activity.”
“So do you want me to quit calling you altogether, then?”
“If you wish. That’s entirely up to you.”
For hours after he’d hung up the phone, knowing he didn’t have a girl anymore, feeling he’d never really had this one at all and wondering if he’d ever really wanted her anyway, Michael walked around whispering “The hell with it; the hell with it.”
“Well, shit, it’s too bad, though,” Bill Brock counseled him, “because she was a pretty girl. I could’ve killed you when I saw you leaving the party with her that night. Still, you don’t want to let yourself sink back into isolation, Mike; that’s the worst thing you could do. There’s plenty of good stuff around, if you p
ut your mind to it.”
And for a while it seemed he was putting his mind to nothing else. It was almost as if sex itself, or rather a determined venereal questing, had taken the place of ambition in his life.
There were two girls, one after the other, who each had separate, carefully explained reasons for not wanting to see him again after a single night. Then he spent five or six weeks with a muscular woman who lived on unemployment checks but had enough yellowed newspaper clippings to prove she was a dancer, who often cried and complained that what he felt for her was “something less than love; something a lot less than love,” and who ultimately confessed that she’d lied to him about her age: she wasn’t really thirty-one; she was forty.
And there were times when he struck out – when he would sit in an agony of conversation at some restaurant table with a girl who’d keep looking around the room, or down at her plate, until the time came for him to take her back to wherever she lived; then she’d say “Well, it’s been nice,” and all the way home his mouth would taste of failure.
By the end of that spring he was daunted enough to look for easier ways of spending his time. There were agreeable couples to visit; there were other single men to drink with; there were even books to read – he had almost forgotten about reading – and as his daily work improved it often left him too tired for adventurous evenings anyway.
A young writer named Bob Osborne and his girlfriend Mary, both in their twenties and planning to be married any day now, were the couple he found most agreeable to visit. He always felt so good in their company that he was careful not to go to their place too often, or ever to stay too long, for fear of seeming to impose on their youth and generosity; so it was a nice surprise when the girlfriend appeared at his door one afternoon, and he greeted her like a jovial friend of the family: “Well, Mary; good to see you.”
“Look,” she said, “I can explain everything.”
And he was slow even to recognize that remark. He asked her to sit down; he went into the kitchen to get her a drink, and there he remembered that the last time he’d seen this couple he had made them both laugh by pointing out that “Look, I can explain everything” was the most commonly used line of dialogue in the history of American movies – the same little joke that had won the approval of Tom and Pat Nelson in their upstairs apartment in Larchmont, years ago. Sometimes it seemed that he’d said six or eight funny things in his life, and that what passed for his sense of humor would always depend on a skillful recycling of old material, over and over again.
“You and Bob get married yet?” he asked the girl as he brought the drink to a low table near her chair, and that was when he remembered her name: Mary Fontana.
“Well, not quite,” she said, “but it’s set for the twenty-third – that’s eight days from now, I think. Oh, thanks, that’s lovely.”
Then he sat across from her, smiling in courtesy as she talked, allowing himself to admire her long bare legs and her fresh summer dress. Everything about her looked nice.
Bob had decided to hole up alone at their country place this week, she told him, because he wanted to make the final changes in his book and have it done before the wedding, so she’d stayed in town to take care of a few last-minute things – shopping, closing out her old apartment, meeting Bob’s mother for tea at the Plaza; stuff like that.
“Well, good,” he said. “I’m glad you stopped by, Mary.”
But he didn’t begin to get the overwhelming point of her visit until he had almost obliged her to spell it out for him.
“… So I talked it over with my analyst today,” she said in a steadily weakening voice, bending to put her glass on the coffee table, “and I don’t think he approved, exactly, but he didn’t raise any – didn’t raise any objections, either. So anyway …” She sat straight again, swept back a heavy lock of her dark hair, and looked gravely into his eyes. “Anyway, here I am. As you see.”
“Well, Mary, I guess I don’t quite under – Wow.” And he swallowed. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Christ Almighty.”
They both stood up at the same time but he had to get awkwardly around the coffee table before he could take her in his arms; then she melted against him with a moist little moan he would never forget. She was tall and supple and smelled of lilac perfume with a faint tang of lemons, and her mouth was marvelous. He couldn’t believe this was happening, but it did make its own kind of sense: the nicest girls in the world might be frightened of marriage when the time came, might impulsively turn away from it, if only for a few days, with some other available man who’d caught their interest – and only a God damn fool could fail to be honored by a thing like that.
Soon her fresh summer dress was on the floor and so were the little drifts of her weightless underwear, and she slid into his bed while he fought free of his own clothes.
“Oh, Mary,” he said. “Oh, Mary Fontana.”
Then he was all over her, making a feast of her flesh with his hands and his mouth, making her gasp and whimper, but it wasn’t long before a wave of fear broke over him: What if he couldn’t get it up for this girl?
And he couldn’t. The important thing at first was to keep her from knowing it, and that took him into ever-more elaborate preliminaries, stalling and stalling, until all her liveliness ebbed away.
“… Michael? Are you all right?”
“Jesus, I don’t know; I can’t seem to – can’t seem to get started, is all.”
“Well, that’s not really very surprising,” she said, “considering the way I sort of – burst in on you with all this. Let’s just wait awhile, okay? Then we can try again.”
But at midnight and later they were still trying. Nothing worked. They were a couple of laborers engaged in a subtle, self-defeating job that could only make them weak with frustration and fatigue. And during the long intervals, sitting up with cigarettes in the darkness, they both found solace in autobiography.
Oh, it hadn’t been easy to be an Italian girl at Vassar. It hadn’t even been very nice to be an Italian girl at Coward-McCann, because some of the people there seemed to assume she’d be sort of cheap and on the make. It often seemed that nothing in her life had been very nice, for that matter, until she met Bob. Or was that the wrong thing to say? Did it bother him when she talked about Bob?
No, no, of course not; that would be silly. They both knew what was going on here.
And they both knew too, all too well, that nothing was really going on here at all.
Well, he couldn’t really say what had gone wrong with his marriage, even now – and maybe nobody ever could, about any marriage – though he guessed it probably did have something to do with his wife’s money. And the story of his wife’s money would take a little explaining; it might be difficult to understand even then; but did Mary want to hear it?
Mary did, and after hearing it she said it was wonderful that he’d taken such a firm stand and stuck to it all those years. She didn’t think she’d ever known a man as “principled” as that.
Well, but hell; who knew? Maybe if he’d floated along on Lucy’s fortune they might both have been an awful lot happier, and Laura too; maybe he could even have gotten more work published.
But then he would’ve had to be somebody else, Mary pointed out. He couldn’t have been who he was without that essential integrity. Besides, if he weren’t who he was, she wouldn’t be here.
And Michael thought that was nice – she was a girl who knew how to pay a compliment – so he took the cigarette from her fingers and stubbed it out in the ashtray along with his own. Then he kissed her slowly a few times, murmuring her name and saying she was lovely, and began to fondle and stroke her again. He kept her sitting beside him on the bed until his hands had persuaded her that everything would be all right this time; then he let her turn and bring up her legs and lie on her back. But it was no better than the times before.
The following day, jittery from too little sleep, he tried to appease his shame by taking Mary Fontana for a long slouching w
alk through the Village. She clung to his arm and gave it pleasant little squeezes now and then, but he did most of the talking, saying charming things in a flat, jaded voice that had come to sound a little like Humphrey Bogart’s. If he couldn’t be a man for her, at least he could be a character.
When they went to the White Horse, though, he stopped trying to entertain her. All he could do there was discover once again what a pretty girl she was, with her long neck and dark eyes and sweet mouth; it was almost as if the beer and the afternoon light were conspiring to make her more desirable than his wretched state of mind could stand.
But there was still time – they had the better part of a week left – and he knew it would be disastrous to abandon hope too soon.
Back at his place she made a shy, irresistible suggestion – “Want to take a shower together?” – and in the shower she was magnificent. He could have stared all afternoon at the nodding and swaying of her small, proud tits as she soaped and rinsed herself, and he was fascinated with the way her lovely thighs didn’t quite come together at the top: the generous little space between them there was wide enough for two or three fingers and dense with the hanging curls of her big pubic bush, as though nature had meant her to be more emphatically a woman than most other girls.
Oh, Jesus, if he was ever going to have her it would be now. And he was more and more sure it would happen as they went about the business of toweling each other dry.
“Now,” he kept murmuring. “Oh, now, baby …”
“Yes,” she told him. “Yes …”
They were scarcely able to walk in their need to embrace, but they made the distance to the bed and lay ready for the consummation that would settle their lives.
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