I DIDN’T THINK ABOUT RICHARD’S DRIVING THAT WEEKEND. I SHOULD HAVE because Richard didn’t respond to traffic signals. As a matter of fact, Richard didn’t respond to traffic. But I took his nonresponse for blitheness and spirit although I don’t know why I didn’t then become just such a combination myself. Because my consciousness was fast slipping into my lowest chakra, I related Richard’s relentless detachment directly to Genghis Khan stealing me across the steppes, dragging me into a lonely tent while all China waited, pulling me toward him by my long and flowing hairs, taking me, his eyes slanted, his mouth open, and his topknot loosening as he jammed me in the white tiger skin tent, horses and prime ministers braying uneasily without and cold winds whistling across the steppes. I’ve always preferred claim and conquer. Once an Irishman drove me from an airport to a distant motel with his hand between my legs all the way all the way. I didn’t move. His hand dark in my white slacks simply remained there like a territorial flag. He had said to me, “Do ye want to?” And I’d said yes. With Richard I felt as if I’d signed a nonaggression pact gagged and blindfolded.
Richard was whistling also. A lot. Whistling he drove through to New Jersey whistling and whistling he left behind a chain of severely adrenalized drivers as his yellow Mercedes made its singularly swift approach to the condo in Leisure Village West. But windows up, air-conditioning purring, majestic music on the FM, both hands on the wheel at ten past ten as in Drivers’ Ed.—I didn’t think about the driving. I thought about sleeping with him and I thought about wrapping my legs and arms around him and sinking away to Dvo ák’s New World into Richard’s soft/hard magic. I squirmed in my bucket seat and thought about all of that while between whistles he talked about his sister Blossom’s big mouth.
“I could never marry a woman with a big mouth. Blossom used to make me cry. She’d always have a friend over and the two of them would plot ways to make me cry.”
“Really? Does anyone make you cry now?”
“Not unless I want them to.”
“Oh.”
“You understand that.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Of course.” Not.
I mulled that conundrum and listened attentively to the swelling variations on the theme of mother/sister/father/uncle/women who had victimized Richard. Even when we passed a tractor-trailer whose trailer wasn’t quite tracking as we swung in tandem down a steep grade and the Mercedes had to thin itself out to pass on the downward hurtle, even then I listened attentively while Richard warned me to look out for his uncle. He said nothing about the tractor-trailer.
“Watch him. I was involved once. My uncle met her, took one look, said ‘not a penny’ and turned his back on her.” As the left tire bumped up and off a concrete meridian he told me that he needed someone to help him cry. “When I get off airplanes, I’m sick with fear and I can’t cry. You’re the kind of woman who can help me cry. To face my fear realistically. I know that instinctively.”
Richard would understand later that he had the correct instincts but the wrong interpretations. “Richard, why don’t you tell me about your mother. Should I feel threatened?”
“My mother? My mother is a sick woman. She drains me. She gives me diarrhea. She gives me backaches, biological relapses, boils. If she informs you of my bowel habits by the grams, don’t be surprised. And she will begin every conversation with, ‘So what’s new in your court, Governor?’ No matter what I tell her, which is less and less each time, she says: ‘There is one law, Richard. A man marries and has children.’ ‘And has sons,’ my uncle will say, ‘so someone says Kaddish for him.’ ”
Richard continued to talk about relating and not relating and whistled show tunes against the Stockhausen on the FM. I allowed myself to think about Richard as a large, glorious hickory tree and I wrapped my arms around him for strength and heard his heart beat and he moaned softly and moved under my whispers while I nibbled at his pith. Later I lay in his shadow and his leaves touched my forehead and our sons danced around us, straight and strong.
“And watch my mother. She manipulates. Do you know how many nice girls whose mothers live in Leisure Village West or ride the bus or play in the Monday canasta game or shop at the same butcher call me at the office because my mother told her mother we’d have a lot in common and she was just passing through the city? Maybe two a week. A lot in common means she’s Jewish, she lives in one of the boroughs and has done anacrostics occasionally . . . sometimes I screw them to get even.”
He turned and smiled at me to see my reaction. “To get even with my mother,” he said.
“That’s not very Christian of you.”
“Of course you won’t make references like that around the folks.”
“Of course not.” That’s not what I should have said. What I should have said was: Funny, Richard, you make yourself sound like such a victim but you sure come on like Attila the Hung. But I kept my mouth shut.
I should never have kept my mouth shut. You miss a line, it messes up the rhythm. I was deep into silent metrical lines about honesty, openness and moral purity, when an old black Chevy, its trunk filled with tires and tied down precariously with thin ropes, roared ahead of us from an access road, went over a bump on a level stretch and threw up a tire. I squinted at it, wishing it away, as it bounced into the traffic, up and down, high and happy, like Genghis’s topknot, unwinding itself inexorably in my path. Other cars swerved, brakes screamed, but Richard advanced steadily on the tire. The tire couldn’t get his attention. Mine, notwithstanding a certain detached fascination, was no problem. I clawed upholstery and braked all the way. Richard, lobotomized, easy on the wheel, face serene, the governor’s governor set at 65 mph, still—although I had the impression he murmured moron at one point—ignored the oncoming tire.
“All she really wants is photos. She sits at the pool and all the grandmas have letters from camp and those long plastic fold-ups that flap down. . . .” The tire hit the undercarriage of the Mercedes lifting my half quite in the air. “Blossom’s kids fill some of the spaces. . . .” On two wheels we continued down the now empty highway. “The ladies at the pool think I’m gay because I’m thirty-three and not married.”
“Christ died at thirty-three,” I managed to whisper through my teeth.
“Non sequitur,” Richard accused happily. “Do cool the references, Steph.”
A few inches more and the Mercedes would have been on its back but Richard was obviously oblivious to the ramming and ripping of fenders and bumpers, to the cars throwing dust and gravel up as they retreated to the shoulders away from the still energetic tire. Other drivers we passed in what must have been only three or four minutes watched us with open mouths. It occurred quite irrationally to me that men who are shocked look very much like men who are coming. I wondered how Richard looked and if I would live to see such a moment. Hanging men have erections—where the semen lands beneath their swinging feet, the mandrake grows. I vacillated between visions of myself on my back, of the Mercedes on its back and prayer. And then the Mercedes came down perfectly in a four-point landing on the highway in the very lane in which we had begun our ascent.
“Used to be if a son didn’t marry it was testament to the fact that no other woman could make him as happy as his mother could. Now, we’re suspect. ‘It’s not normal, Richard. They don’t elect men like that, Richard.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘You know.’ ”
Nothing moved behind us. Soon the next pack of cars would catch up to the disaster area. A blue Subaru was turned facing up the highway and steam vaulted from the folded hood of a silvery T-Bird. Richard reached over and squeezed my knee. We passed the Chevy on the shoulder of the highway, its four doors flung open and its four young men examining the ropes and remaining tires. “You’re a good woman.” Good woman moved closer on her bucket seat but the knee action was non sequitur also. “They’re all nuts but they’re all decent. Once they accept you, they’ll turn the world upside down for you.”
I didn’t know if Richard was doing Genghis Khan or Evel Knievel. At one level, he was unaware of the tire. My knees, both of them, were shaking in what I wanted to think was desire but I knew wasn’t. Little wonder the wrecks and near wrecks piled up behind Richard. The rest of us, I would find out, his traffic, would sit inarticulate with rage, giving him the finger from our shattered Windows, stalled and steaming at the shoulders, while he, ignoring us all, arrived at his chosen destination, sighed mightily over a gin and tonic and remarked: “Christ, the traffic was a bitch.”
It was Sanka, Slender, and Sucaryl. “Christ, the traffic was a bitch. Folks, this is Stephanie.”
The sigh was as I had imagined, as was his mother and his uncle and the plastic, urethane, Syroco-cast indoor-outdoor condo at Leisure Village West. On the last leg of the trip Richard had recited chapter and verse from the “Book of the Dead for Brides-to-Be” and each place of judgment and weighing of my heart that he had forewarned me of, I passed. The uncle said nothing about pennies. His first remarks were: “Good teeth. Hasn’t she got good teeth? Good teeth, a fur coat and big ears to hold her down with, that’s all you need in a woman.” Then laughed at his own joke and asked me what my father did for a living.
I pretended not to hear him.
“And this is my mother. Mother. Stephanie.”
“I’m so happy to meet you. Richard’s shown me your pictures.”
“Likewise, I’m sure.” Except Richard had no pictures. Not of me.
“Say, you look like a girl whose father is a banker.”
I continued to ignore Uncle Myron. Richard winked at me and I ignored the wink. His mother looked nothing like the blown-up photos. The full doll’s face had dropped to bitter fat cheeks and the splendid hips into thick legs swelling painfully at the ankles to fold over the sharp leather edges of black Enna Jetticks. Unblinkingly, turning me into a photograph, she continued to stare at me with sea-shell eyes, rather deadly I felt, and served up more Sanka, Alba, rolls from egg whites according to Weight-Watchers and Cool Whip with something I would have thought, except under those circumstances, should have been real cottage cheese. Richard continued to wink. He was no different here than at the Four Seasons. His mother, who shuffled rather than bend the ankles into the tops of her shoes, simply became all nine waiters and he responded to her in the same way he had to them. I was touched by her loneliness and wondered what her name was. They were not bad people but simply desperately anxious to have Richard married. They were on my side. Later, his mother asked me quite covertly while the men were discussing no-fault, if I liked old things. Her tone suggested porny pictures but she meant, and pulled out for me from a box stuffed with newspapers, a lovely collection of Baleek, then majolica, then Imari.
The men ignored us. We were behaving quite properly as women should until I mentioned my work in the museum.
“That must be so exciting.” Her eyes came alive.
“It is. Right now . . .” and I only brought up the subject because I had a strong feeling no one had spoken to her in a decade except to ask for the Cremora and find out what suit she was coming in, “. . . right now, I’m bringing together a collection of stone crosses, ancient Christian crosses. One of them has a man with a tail on it. Can you imagine?”
No-fault stopped. Apparently I had—at least one. His uncle’s eyes and his mother’s eyes, four little sharp shells, crackled at each other. Richard opened a plastic box of plastic cards with Boy in Blue and Girl in Pink and suggested a little canister (his word, not mine) if his mother would clear the table. She flushed. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m not what you call liberated.” I didn’t know if it was the tail or the Christian and felt awful that I had embarrassed her. Later she told me quietly that she had boxes of old things in storage and that her daughter Blossom only wanted new things that matched and if I didn’t mind she’d like to give me some. “Delft? Maybe Wedgwood?” She was the trader with the beads and bracelets. I was the Indian. If I gave her pictures, she’d fill my china closet. All I had to do was keep Richard happy. Which meant, of course—though only I understood—making him cry. I looked forward to meeting Blossom.
“A piece, Myron?”
“A piece thin.”
We had more Sanka and piece thins of Baskin-Robbins ice cream pie and continued to play canasta. I thought about Richard through seventeen hands, through a vague steady heckling about what fathers do for livings, and I was still thinking about sleeping with Richard when I laid down three jokers and a deuce to announce my need for fresh air. He was not, as he demonstrated so succinctly on the sidewalk, of like mind. He had not been thinking at all of sleeping with me. I put my arms around him and drew my body into his under streetlights and trash cans, just like the first night, and he backed away quite nimbly, begging me, then and there, not to turn him on.
“I think we’d better define terms, Richard.”
“Aah,” he responded mellifluously. “Defining terms is a form of legislation. Every man becomes his own legislator. You can’t legislate a thing like this. It’s cosmic, darling, a higher law.”
The girl that he marries shut her mouth rather than offer up her own logic about the inviolability of cosmic spaces and the insufficiency of his argument. Making love would of course be following a greater natural law. “Richard,” I said clearly and simply, “I want to sleep with you. I really want to sleep with you.” It was not unacceptable for a free spirit to speak that way.
“Oh, God, I know, Stephanie. But the way I feel about you, if I were to take you to bed without knowing you, it would be jumping into the void.” He spoke so quickly I decided he had had the response ready in a brief somewhere in his pocket. Prepared by his secretary.
“Richard, I need to sleep with you.”
“Oh, honey, I want you terribly. I am very attracted to you. But you are a gift from God, Stephanie. I can’t misuse you. Look at the couples. Look at the divorce rate. God has given you to me, crossed our paths, and we can’t . . . we must try to do this right.”
“Couldn’t we just go someplace and be alone?”
“How would they feel if we left them, those poor old people?”
“Richard!”
I adored the way he looked under the streetlight. I had felt the strong full body he would offer me and I really hoped he was kidding. I tried again. “Richard, I don’t care about your mother terribly. I want to sleep with you. I want to make love with you. I want to go to bed with you.”
“You don’t care about my mother?”
“She’s a nice person, Richard, and your Uncle Myron is okay too. I care about you.”
“So, that is precisely why we are going to do this right. We’re not going to clutch wildly at each other in a dirty bed. You understood, Stephanie, that there were rules.”
Richard wasn’t kidding.
“I never knew the rules,” I said with a great emptiness. And anger began to flow quickly into the emptiness. “Okay, Richard. Okay. I have to ask you some questions. Just what do you mean by doing it right?”
“Don’t ask questions, Stephanie. It isn’t becoming.”
“I have every right to ask questions. Every right.”
“Why of course you do. Of course you do. But you see it annoys me.” Richard held my shoulders. Maybe he was kidding. “We’re not a couple of teenyboppers. I’m in love with you and I’m going to marry you. What more do you really need to know?”
I have to make a phone call, I thought. “I have to make a phone call.” Electrical charges and synapses and nerve sheathes were tightening and shuddering toward hysteria. “Can we go in there to make a phone call?”
I ran up the steps of the Harbor Village Spa. Faces, like ghosts, all fed on chemicals and pills, with open mouths, watched me from the bar. All layered like Richard’s mother, all polyestered and knit pantsuited and newly toothed, all long-nailed and polished and painted, like the lobsters in the case next to the phone booth, twitches and pulses and pacemakers, all waiting to catch somebody, something, long since gone, all afraid of dying alone, and I remembered the Armengols with the peace on their carved faces. Who would I call? My mother in Munich? And tell her I am in love with a man who wants to marry me but he doesn’t want to sleep with me until we’re married? “That’s lovely, darling, thank you for the good news. But we have guests right now. You’ll have to forgive me.” Jack? God, no. Dial-A-Prayer was busy. I called Miriam.
“Miriam, he really isn’t going to sleep with me! Can you believe it?” My voice was too loud. The painted people at the bar swiveled en masse and studied me.
“Christ, he really wants to marry a virgin.”
“It’s not so easy to become a virgin overnight, Miriam. Even a week or two.”
“It’s not so easy to get married either. Look, it’s a good sign. Just keep reminding yourself. It’s a good sign. He’s going to marry you. That’s why he isn’t sleeping with you. Okay?”
“Call Terry, Miriam,” I whispered. “Find out what the girl is like.”
“Terry?”
“Oh, Terry.”
“Please, Miriam.”
“Okay, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that you’re meeting his family. He wants to marry you. I have to hit you over the head with that. Don’t get into rejection. You’re the right girl. He’s going to marry you. Anyone can sleep together.”
“Miriam, don’t say that. That’s what he said.”
“So he’s right. Now, look. I’ll call your Terry. You come here Monday night for supper. It’s our anniversary.”
I hesitated. I had learned to hate Il Duce.
“He’s very different now. Come after work.”
“I’m a wreck, Miriam. Why doesn’t he want to sleep with me?” I didn’t mean to yell at her. “You sound like my mother. My mother told me if I was going to be an actress I shouldn’t believe men who told me that swallowing improves your voice.”
“And your mother also probably told you to walk straight, smell good, answer politely. And wear a gardenia in your hair. I’ll dance at your wedding. See you Monday night. Be good.”
Richard was whistling on the steps. I managed to look as if I’d twisted my ankle as I ran to him and he leaped to steady me as I came reeling down. He held me in his arms. It was what my mother taught me: deceit.
“Sweetheart!” He carried me to the lowest step and sat down next to me. “Is it awful?” The gold chain around his neck danced in the mercury lights of the Harbor Spa. I didn’t like him.
I rubbed my ankle and wished it to swell. He rubbed it. I laid my head on his shoulder. He stroked my hair. It wasn’t bad. As a game play, it had limited life, but it wasn’t bad. Except when you run out of limbs, the next moves have to become more degenerative. Four steps to herpes.
“Let me try to carry you home. Can you put any pressure on it?”
“I don’t think it’s broken or anything, Richard. Oh, Richard, how foolish of me.”
“Foolish, silly girl, wonderful girl. Here.” He hoisted me into his arms and carried me for a while. I wondered why it was he preferred me broken. I’m not that small. Richard began to breathe badly. “We’re going to have to do something else. You’re getting heavy.”
“I could take my clothes off. I’ll weigh less.”
He carried me back, struggling bravely, to the steps of the Harbor Spa and promised to return for me with the car. He kissed the top of my head. He broke into a run. What if he didn’t come back? But I knew he would. Some of the painted people from inside walked by me down the steps. I considered breaking into a run in another direction away from the entire scene, finding a train and going home to my ficus tree. The ankle didn’t even look swollen. Pinching it murderously, I considered bending it back and forth to stretch a ligament or something believable. He was back, three steps at a time, carrying a single rose.
“I prefer gardenias, Richard.”
“God, I’m sorry. I stole this from someone’s garden.” And he carried me to the car. I tried to remember how I should act if I were in pain. Laying my head on his shoulder and sniffing the rose seemed appropriate. Commonplace, but comfortable.
“Gardenias are really exotic. Roses are so Mother’s Day, you know.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
I received an Ace bandage, a cup of cocoa, a croissant with fake marmalade and my very own pillowcase embroidered “Hers” when we came back to the condo. Richard tucked me into bed. Then he tucked his mother into bed.
Lying next to his mother that night on the Castro Convertible—she breathing fitfully but smelling nice—I thought seriously about the girl at the piano. It was so easy for Richard not to sleep with me. Bind my loins with an Ace bandage and tuck me in next to your mother, safe and sound. Damn. He’s perfectly satisfied. They fuck like crazy and I’m going to end up like this old snoring woman next to me on the Castro. Her career: shopping. Her goal: someday, someday her men would need her for something more than chambermaid. Waiting, preparing herself to be needed, one of each in the cupboard, two of each in the medicine cabinet. We both lie here bound against the sins of the dark. The temptations are for other women. The wives get loyalty, life insurance, birthday cards, a new outfit each season, the paycheck every week and wait forever for an emotional commitment. Anything but that. No matter what it costs in Gucci’s and Pucci’s, anything but that. That’s on reserve. The girl at the piano has it right now.
We didn’t go to Westport. We had a late breakfast on Sunday. Uncle Myron brought his flyswatter to the table. Almost, and probably exactly, on signal, Uncle Myron and Richard’s mother left the table and retired to the corners of the room, like the trainers at a prizefight, and Richard took my hand. “Just tell me what your father does, Stephanie. They really want to know and it’s pretty rude the way you’ve been avoiding it all weekend.”
“He works in Munich.” I shrugged. I’d told him once. But he hadn’t believed me. Or, more likely, hadn’t listened.
“Stephanie, their coffee is going to get cold. Just tell me.”
“I didn’t tell them to leave the table.” I wasn’t being the girl that he marries at all. As I defended myself from my corner, I remembered Mrs. Slentz’s scene with the crocus plants at the Cloisters and I was inspired with a wonderful thought. If I had only blushed, my work would have been without flaw. As it was, it wasn’t bad. I waved the mother and the uncle back and then hung my head in shame while Uncle Myron tapped the table with the dangerous end of the flyswatter and I told them so softly and so parenthetically that because my grandmother had been a Hebrew—the flyswatter hung in the air—my grandfather’s gun factory in New Haven and my father joining the army as a career officer had nearly driven her berserk and I thought, that is, I stuttered and stammered, wishing for a blush or a provocative tear, that they would be offended if they knew we had become rich from war and that my father was a general. Of course no one heard a word beyond “my grandmother had been a Hebrew.”
“It is all right, isn’t it?” I ended with a fine quaver. The antique euphemism, in its Episcopalian inversion, was super. The word “Hebrew” plus the flyswatter hung over my lowered eyelids.
And all the while I had woven my tale, I had delicately, infinitesimally tipped my coffee cup in order that the cloth in front of Richard overflowed finally into his lap. He hadn’t moved.
The three of them were afraid to look at each other, incendiary as a shared glance could be at that moment. Over the fake marmalade buzzed a fly which ought also to have been fake. The fly and the steady drip of coffee from Richard’s lap to the floor were the only sounds until his mother broke the silence. “It’s okay. They should only look like you, sweetheart. See, Richard, her teeth. That’s what I mean by Connecticut teeth.”
“And the ears,” added Uncle Myron. “If the kids have her ears, we’ll save a fortune.”
I raised my eyes demurely to Richard whose temples were pulsing visibly. “Liar,” he mouthed at me.
“Richard! Shah!” His mother slapped his hand lightly. Either she lip-read or she intuitively understood. I couldn’t tell then.
“It’s the Eighth Army,” I added lightly. “I’ll show you pictures.”
“About your grandmother,” he braved, “I find it particularly difficult to believe. Whatsoever.”
I began to pat politely at his pants, delaying my napkin over his inner thigh and not responding to his challenge. The muscles twitched along his leg.
As if it were Richard, Uncle Myron picked off the fly. The marmalade slid to the floor under the impact and I, in my still small voice, as I joined the family unit as a compatriot, spoke: “Surely, Richard, it isn’t important to you one way or the other, is it?”
Uncle Myron laughed very loud. His mother covered her mouth. I allowed a smirk at the corners. Richard left the table.
The only thing Richard said to me about my grandmother scene was on the way back to the city. Since he didn’t have to be home until seven, we were going to the Cloisters. I didn’t ask who was at home. I knew. “I have a friend,” he mused, almost quizzically, as if somehow I could convince him he didn’t. “This friend would die before she made a fool of me in front of my family. I know she would.”
“Is she the one Uncle Myron wouldn’t give any money to?”
“It’s not important. Just that she’s a very nice person.” His voice was dreamy. I didn’t want to see his face.
“Richard, do you think your family liked me?”
But when I looked at his face, it was changing from the look of love that was for her to the bright charm and false smile that were for me. “Dear girl, of course; they adored you. You are everything any of us wanted.”