JUNE WAS NOT MY CRUELEST MONTH. I WAS WILLING TO DO ANYTHING TO GET Richard into bed but nothing seemed to work. I nagged Richard a great deal and although that didn’t bring him to bed, it did keep him coming back for more nagging. Even though he was already talking about marriage plans for Christmas, I could tell from the way he looked at me that he was into the duality again. His someone seemed to be in pain—I could tell she was spending time away, running, threatening, returning to whip more cream. Richard wasn’t ill but there was still something gray about him, which indicated that no one was caring for him the way in which he needed to be cared for. I knew from sentences he left unfinished, from a sad look on his face when he mentioned picking up bread before he left me one afternoon, from the pain he felt when I was cruel, that she was a good person who did not give him pain. I could imagine then that I would even like her. He told me once, unguardedly, before he could slip back into the neurotic act he usually had pretty much together, that her CR group was pushing her to be more independent. He was worried that she didn’t have enough of her own life and he was encouraging her to find it. I hoped she might also. We had one long convoluted inane conversation about raising children. We used bottom lines in more paragraphs than the Sunday Times held, ending in ideas about identity. His. Hers. Mine. Richard didn’t talk to me the way you talk to a person you sleep with. They were serious, our conversations, and real, but thoroughly objective. And then, at one point that month, he told me he had seen his girl’s analyst. Not only was Richard’s girl in trouble, but Richard was also.
He didn’t know if it was time for him to marry, he told me. But he had narrowed his choice down to two people. “Guess who?” I didn’t respond. She was in such distress, he said, and I seemed so together. I didn’t think she was in such distress at all. I was certain she thought she would win by giving him everything he said he wanted: independence, freedom, sexual fulfillment, understanding, sympathy, whipped cream. But she didn’t know Richard. He said he wanted all of the above but I knew at gut level the only thing that Richard would keep coming back to was a nagging woman. He wanted to be nagged and he wanted to take me places. She was waiting like a good wife for him to come to his senses, secure in the belief that honesty, truth, and all those items always win out. So she was giving him enough emotional rope. But I was making the knots.
I nagged him. He took me places.
She owned the weekends. I, the business days. There were all those long lunches and short dinners during the week—so little space in which to flaunt the archetypal nightmare I was supposed to be. I did work on the capillary action however. His table manners needed cleaning up. He ought to be more careful about how he put his adverbs before his verbs because it was indicative of second-generation American. I refused to talk about his ties when he asked but did remind him often that his suit needed pressing, cleaning, anything, that his shirts were not looking as good as they once had and that when he met my family, although I knew how wonderful and bright he was, he ought to be careful because, although I knew it was only sincerity and a desire to please, he had a way of running off at the mouth, which, I added, was fairly typical of bright self-made men, especially in law and it would irritate my parents a lot. I mentioned often that sooner or later I’d like him to meet my friends. He was very agreeable to that but I never brought him any friends.
We did meet Jack once. Jack pushed past us both in P. J. Clarke’s and then swung back when he recognized me. He was very drunk and wobbly. It was only lunch-time. “For God’s sake. Stephanie. Baby!” Then he looked at Richard, lifted the bottom of Richard’s tie and said loudly, after examining it cross-eyed, “Jesus, Baby, where’d you pick that up, the Yeshiva?” I didn’t know if he was referring to Richard or the tie. I should never have told Jack about the ties.
Richard bravely attempted a rejoinder—“I’ve got a buddy in Tie City”—but Jack had already stumbled away toward the men’s room. I so wanted to run after Jack and laugh with him because I knew he was holding his sides over the sink, laughing or vomiting. I could have done both also. I wanted to be with Jack.
After lunch, Richard and I wandered along the streets, each trying to fill the other’s emptiness. There was no radiance in my face this time, not like the first walk we took together. We looked at diamond rings in velvet windows and talked about the shape I’d prefer. Richard, because he knew his own pain, didn’t ask about Jack. And all I could think of as we looked at pear shapes and emerald cuts was how easy it would be for the girl at the piano if she did indeed have a baby or simply announced a pregnancy or tried a suicide. But I knew she was too decent and in her decency she was losing. I was winning and I couldn’t afford to deal with sentiments and sympathies. I couldn’t afford to waste an afternoon and so as I walked out of one jewelry store, I said softly to Richard, “I understand you and your girl fuck like crazy and semen flies all over the apartment.”
Richard leaned against the door frame. He closed his eyes. When he finally opened them, he said, “Be my friend, Stephanie. I beg of you.”
And I said, “Of course, darling. I understand. I just am fascinated by the expression. Is it true?”
“No, no. It’s not true. Nothing is true.”
“But she said so. That you hum when you come and sing when you swing. Or is it the other way around?”
“God, Stephanie, this is so personal. Please. Can’t you see what you’re doing to me?”
“You’re going to have to face life, Richard. You are going to have to do something about her.”
Of course I could see what I was doing. The horrible thing, the really shocking and disappointing thing, was that it worked. It worked too well. There were times I wished he would free me of what he was making me become. Fold me in his arms and whisper, “It isn’t necessary, darling. Stop. I love you. You can love me. I want you to love me. God wants us to love each other.”
But he never did take me in his arms. I always wondered if it would have changed our direction. One afternoon he called me at work to tell me he had faced the duality. He had told her analyst that he was in love with me. My modus operandi was operating only too well and on a Saturday morning in July, which was my cruelest month, we were driving, just driving around without direction, no place for Richard to go, and he faltered. He asked me for a Saturday night date.
“You mean a real date on a real Saturday night?”
“Would you like that?”
“I would. If there’s a good movie. I hate to spend time watching a bad movie just to go to the movies.” He suggested three. I made up bad reviews.
“Well, we’ll do something. Let me make a call.”
When he came back from the phone booth, looking now sickly and sad, he told me it was off. “Something’s wrong. I don’t know. She’s upset. She’s really upset about something. God almighty. God almighty. I have to get home quick.”
In the car, windows closed, heat turned up high, although the day was in the eighties—I had claimed a chill—I asked him one of the few questions I allowed myself in those times. “Richard, do you love her?”
He salivated and swallowed very hard. It took him a long time to answer. “I feel I owe her something.”
“That’s what I mean. You are so evasive. Why can’t you be honest with me? I’m honest with you. Why can’t you be honest with yourself. Why can’t you face LIFE?” I didn’t lie back. He was so unutterably vulnerable I continued my offensive until a very serious squad car took over for me and, howling at Richard, signaled him unceremoniously to the side of the road.
My harangue continued, counterpointing the trooper’s. “You give him a ticket, Officer. Give him a big ticket. Make him pay, Officer. Make him know there’s a price. He doesn’t care what happens to anybody else. He just goes his way. He doesn’t care what the speed limits are. I’ve told him a hundred times ‘You’re going too fast. You are going too fast!’ You have to think about other people, Richard. You have to think about the lives of other people and do you think he does?”
“Ma’am?”
“Do you think he thinks about other people?”
“You have anything to say, Mister?”
“Stephanie, I can handle this.”
“What can you handle? You can’t even handle me. You expect to handle an officer of the law? You who think the laws are for everyone else? I hope you get put in jail.” I folded my arms across my chest. “Tell him about the little kid you almost hit when you drove off. Tell him that, I dare you. And he wants to be governor. Can you imagine?”
“Okay, buddy, you just drive on. Just drive on. Try to watch the lights and the signs, huh?” The trooper patted Richard on the shoulder and walked away shaking his head.
“Jee-sus!” I said to no one out the window. “I’m going to trust my whole sexual being to this man who can’t even handle a policeman. Jee-sus!”
“Take it easy, Stephanie, please.”
I apologized and reassured him that when we slept together, I would be easier. I wouldn’t be so uptight anxious, so angry. He said he hoped so. That was all he said. It wasn’t much to go on.
Then it was the last weekend in July. Although I’d seen a lot of Richard and been promised a lot more of Richard, his Virgin still had the keys to the kingdom and I had yet to dislodge her. I spent my times without Richard devising new and wonderful final solutions for the Virgin. I had never consciously wished for someone’s quick demise before and I was shocked at myself for finding those thoughts so close to the surface. And then we were going to Westport for Richard’s mother’s birthday party and I did not know what I would do because my month was almost up, nor could I gauge what I had already done. But somehow, Richard and I would have a showdown and it would have to be that weekend because after that weekend Richard was going to the Hamptons for his vacation and not, I had no reason to think otherwise, alone.