BY THE NEXT MORNING I WAS ON MY WAY BACK TO THE CITY. I WASN’T SURE if I were totally numbed or simply feeling no pain. Nor did I care to make interpretations. I shared the backseat of Blossom’s station wagon with a very ugly four-foot wall-eyed pike who lived in a plastic bag on the floor of the car and sloshed back and forth as we drove to the city. Blossom, Mrs. Slentz and Mark sat up front. About as often as the car hit the expansion joints in the highway, Mark asked to sit in back with the fish. The women ignored him. He continued to ask. I had preferred his Mothra act.
Mrs. Slentz had bought the pike in Southport on the way out. Although I knew the pike was for the gefilte fish she would prepare for the Jewish New Year, I couldn’t understand why she’d bought it so early unless they force-feed the fish with herring or capers or something equally exotic from Zabar’s so it would be worthy for the holidays. Which meant she intended to keep it alive until then. Mid-September? Was she crazy? I had forgotten the day she stole the crocus plants and threatened to crucify the guard.
Blossom and Mrs. Slentz talked unendingly about Richard. Richard didn’t stand any more of a chance than the fish. He and I were going to have a setup, a terrific apartment which Uncle Myron would find and which the ladies would furnish and when Richard came home—Mrs. Slentz clapped her hands together so hard I thought a tire had popped—trapped. The two women prepared lists as we drove. Mrs. Slentz, beetle-browed, pursed lips, scratching into a notebook, was not the same sweet and simple mama she’d been.
There was a new kind of Kali power I’d never noticed before. Both women envisioned empty kitchen drawers and cupboards and efficiently, as if this were the voyage of the Beagle, categorized my needs and the evolution of our marriage. But they laughed too often. “An egg slicer. You can’t be happy without an egg slicer.”
For some reason that was very funny. Blossom added, “And a potato masher. How can she live with Richard without a potato masher?”
“A food mill,” threw them both into gales of laughter. I didn’t want to get involved at all, but hearing them, I thought there were surely some levels I wasn’t operating on. “Thermometers,” Blossom giggled. “You forgot the thermometers.” Both wiped tears of laughter from their eyes.
“Could you see my son without his Q-tips?” Even Mark paused in his requests to sit with the fish to laugh at the Q-tips. I closed my eyes and leaned my cheek against the cool window. Mrs. Slentz obviously noticed from the back of her head and turned around to reassure me. Her eyes were tearing with laughter.
“Don’t you worry, Stephanie. He’ll be happy. Just make Richard comfy. That’s all he needs. He really wants to get married.” The way in which she looked at me that moment, half with fear and half as if I were a Balenciaga she’d found on a bargain table at S. Klein’s, I wondered why she was helping me. I couldn’t understand why she would want me to marry Richard. She must have known that in two years Richard and I would hate each other. But she also must have known that I wouldn’t be a threat to her and that in two years I’d be helping her chop the gefilte fish and anything else she wanted because I would need her to fight with Richard. She must have known. I should have known.
At a rest stop, Mark climbed into the wayback and took the fish with him. He lay on his belly, supporting his chin with the palms of his hands and emulating the fish, every solemn slosh-eyed fish-eyed move, all the way into the city. When the fish rolled, Mark rolled. When the fish swam in his plastic, Mark swam. “Mama, do fish get nervous?”
“Does he make you nervous, darling?”
“No, but do you think he’s nervous?”
“No, darling, I think he’s happy because he’s going to be part of our holidays.”
“I like him. He has a name. His name is Newton.”
“Isn’t that nice,” Mrs. Slentz commented, annoyed to have her lists interrupted. She was, after all, ordering lifetime supplies in wholesale lots. All of her connections and her relatives would be involved. Washington had far less help supplying the Continental Army. Richard and I would never run out of anything.
“Doesn’t he get sick from all the sloshing, up and down?”
“Mark, your mama and I are making lists. We have to concentrate.”
But Mrs. Slentz interrupted her lists to tell me about Richard’s second cousin Philip, the writer. Philip kept marrying shiksas (her word) because he hated shiksas and as soon as he married one, he set out to destroy her and when she cracked up, wrote a book about her. Five already. Philip, however, was really nuts. Richard, she explained, had no hate in him, not an inch. And he didn’t write. A loving boy. I knew then—had really known late the night before, after the fight, after Richard had left—that Mrs. Slentz was well aware there was nothing in me even faintly bordering on the Semitic and that she’d known I’d been lying when I threw my birthday scene. She knew, but she didn’t really want to know about my manipulations. I wondered briefly if I were simply a two-year holding device just to get rid of Innocent Marie. But no, the lists were too complete. I was it.
Mark continued to chant up and down, up and down, up and down, until we had to stop at the roadside to clean Mark, my suitcase and the carpet of the car up and down. “Vomiting,” he told us from his mother’s lap, “makes me very nervous.”
“Mark,” I suggested, “maybe getting nervous makes you vomit.”
The grandmother and mother looked at me as if I were the mad one. I shut up and continued to wipe my suitcase up and down with oak leaves.
“Did he get any on the fish?” his grandmother kindly inquired.
“Mother!” Blossom felt Mark’s head for fever.
“It’s not so kosher, vomit. I’d have to go back and buy another fish.”
“Don’t make him feel guilty, for God’s sake.”
Mark started to cry. The women fought most of the way down until they stopped speaking with each other altogether. I managed not to listen, smell, or think.
When I was finally back in my own apartment I was inordinately happy to be rid of them all: the Slentzes, the horrible fish, the kid, the vomit, the whining, the insanity, and, amazingly, Richard. I didn’t want to think about any of them. His mother called me often during the next few days. I was polite and noncommittal. She told me about wedding dinners and invitations and getting a setup and mints and nuts and matchbooks with our names on them and then his sister called me and told me not to listen to her mother and then his mother called me and told me not to listen to her daughter and then Uncle Myron called and told me I should apologize to both Blossom and Mrs. Slentz for making so much trouble between them. I didn’t call any of them. And Richard didn’t call me for a month—although nobody actually lost touch.
The more I heard from his family, the more I turned off. The more I turned off, the happier I became. I had forgotten how happy I had been without Richard. I felt now like a kid who, trapped and twisted and strangled in her flannel nightgown, suddenly rips it off and sleeps naked. The days were good—hot, pure, cleansing August. Richard, his mother told me, was in the Hamptons and, she added gleefully, it was raining and he was having trouble with his boils. I really didn’t care. It was like losing forty pounds.
I threw myself into my work. The exhibition was nearly ready, becoming itself, somehow, in spite of my dysfunctioning. I began functioning again. I took directions from a now very competent Sissy. I prepared the brochure, featuring the Cornwall tailed man on the cover as I had wished. I loved my work and I loved myself and I was not alone. I didn’t bite my lip over sad songs about parting lovers nor did I peer wistfully into the windows of the Russian Tea Room where we had once been happy together. We had never been happy together. We had never even been to the Russian Tea Room.
And now I was happy. I met a Lladislaw who taught sculpture at the New School and I loved him for a weekend and a Monday and then forgot him. I adored a grinning smooth investment counselor Uncle Myron brought over to my apartment to discuss my trust funds. I could actually enjoy myself again.
The only flaw in my happiness those days was that I had to move from my apartment to the one Uncle Myron had found for me and which Mrs. Slentz had furnished, obviously with one phone call to Bloomingdale’s. “I want everything and everything should match.” It was a great, light, sunny apartment but the Bloomingdale’s stuff was god-awful. The toilet paper matched the towels matched the shower curtain matched the dishes matched the aprons matched the sheets matched the dust ruffle matched the dinner napkins. Everything was sprinkled with flowers. I shoved as much of it as I could into the cupboards and the closets, which were very deep. I had always wanted very deep closets.
But I loved the apartment and I decided, the hell with it. It was worth the agony I’d gone through and I was rid of Richard and I knew what it felt like to be free and uncommitted without Richard loading up my heart and gut with his elusiveness and his charm and his shit. Someday I’d decide what to do with Bloomingdale’s and what to do about the apartment but in the meantime I had a great place to entertain. Jack, Jim, Barry, Robert Redford, anybody. Whomever I wanted. A lot of sexy, willing, amusing, profound men who didn’t want to get married. And there were plenty around.
The bed, which horrified me at first—a note was on it assuring me that the bed was temporary and I’d have another one as soon as the warehouse found it—was a hospital bed. An honest-to-God crank-up hospital bed. The upper half and the lower half went up and down. It was most likely the one in which Richard’s father had died. It cranked up something vicious in me. I could be evil in that bed. I wrote imaginary ads for the Barb: “W/f w. hosp. bed fulfill yr. adult fantasies.” Romantic love was death anyway, wasn’t it? Good-bye the Armengols. Good-bye the Gothic Chapel and the tears. Good-bye illusions. I would get even with romantic love and get even with the concept of marriage and family and the entire strangling mess Richard had almost led me into. I could even think, with no animosity, of sending all the matching loot to Innocent Marie after she returned from her vacation with Richard. She deserved it. The two of them could eat in the bathroom or crap in the kitchen and still match in good middle-class taste. I was relieved to be free of it all. And I would really decide what to do about the apartment but I didn’t have to make any decisions yet, nor did I have to manipulate anything, anyone, any longer. I could just lie back and crank up and enjoy life. Let Innocent Marie suffer. That’s what she wanted anyway. That’s what they both wanted. Let her be in love. Thank God I wasn’t in love anymore. The thicket of the Unicorn is thorny. I was free.
I called Jack. Jack came up. We laughed a great deal. He called me a bitch. I agreed with him and then bit into his shoulder and I realized he was no longer in love with me either and we could have a very good time together. We did. I didn’t have to hold my breath anymore until the phone rang. I didn’t have to die with every word Richard said or every silence between his words. I could go out to dinner and actually digest. I could spend hours chasing a man around the hospital bed. I was no longer obsessed with marriage. I vowed never again to be obsessed by a man. Never again to be in love. Never again to be trapped by romantic love. All done.
It lasted until the engagement ring arrived in the mail. It could have been the potato masher, it was so big and ugly and Cedarhurst. I was wildly angry with Richard for knowing that I had turned off. That fuck, to figure I had turned off and try to manipulate me this way with the engagement ring. I don’t know why I didn’t try to reach him in the Hamptons. I simply picked up the phone and dialed his number in the city, quivering with the anticipation of telling him what to do with the ring, when the girl answered.
“Richard?” she questioned, softly, trembling.
“I thought you were with him.”
“Oh. I thought . . .”
“Yes . . .?”
I placed the phone in the cradle. I knew what she was doing there. She was hanging around in case Richard called, in case Richard came home. She would be there to rub his back or take his temperature or whatever had to be taken, given, shared. Clever little lady she was. I knew what she was into because I knew what I would have done. She’d be there for him by accident, sincere, straight, sweet and sorrowful. And that was her winning way. Innocent Marie was no better or worse than I was. She too had a vested interest in winning Richard in her way. And I had a vested interest in winning him in my way. Her way wasn’t any less moral than mine. Her vested interest was in being sincere because being sincere had probably worked for her in the past. And my way was to manipulate. That was the way I trusted. I knew exactly what the dance was between us. Her sincerity was just as manipulative as my manipulation. It wasn’t even Richard anymore. It was who would win the prize. She was just as convinced that sweetness and innocence would win as I was that manipulation would. If either of us were to back up, start again in a different way, we couldn’t. Right or wrong.
I had no idea if I’d chosen the wrong way. It seemed to be working better than her way. People might like Innocent Marie a lot better than they’d like me, but in the long run, it might make her sick, all that sincerity, all that peeling nakedness of soul so she can get what she wants from other people, using innocence as a weapon. She probably made up her own name when she met Richard. My way wouldn’t win me any popularity contests. But in the long run, for me, what did it matter? After all, what really matters in life is that you get what you want and I’d be damned, goddamned, if this girl with her sincere little tricks and her innocent breathlessness was going to be a better woman than I. Or if Richard, with his stinking manipulation of me—that ring!—would win. I would win. She was over there thinking right now that she had the magic, that only she could really handle Richard, that only she could really love Richard. I was thinking exactly the same thing: that I was more woman than she’d ever be, that I was the only woman who knew how to make Richard happy. Dumb little Natalie Nurse. At least I was smarter than she was. I’d show her.
I called Blossom. She shrieked at the same pitch as a new Miss America. I took the first train to Westport. Blossom, as in an Olympic race, handed me the keys to the Continental at the train station and I roared off toward the Hamptons. When I stopped for gas, I called Richard. “Don’t move. Don’t move, darling. I have your ring and I love it and I love you and I’m on my way. Stay right there.”
“Stephanie, would you pick up a thermometer? Rectal?”
“Of course, darling.” I hated to break my momentum but I stopped at a drugstore and, in the manner of the Slentzes, bought a half dozen matching. I was back into the obsession. The potato masher though was gleaming like a torch on my finger, the Continental purring and speeding toward Richard, and the radio was playing the kind of waltzes one dances with princes. I kept expecting to see Innocent Marie in a VW somehow trying to pass me and get to Richard first. Every time I saw a VW, in fact, I sped up. I should have known then that I wasn’t merely breaking the law of the highway, I was denouncing everything civilized within me and responding to my most primitive instincts. Not sexual. Worse. My smile when I greeted Richard was a thoroughly atavistic baring of teeth. Nevertheless he seemed happy to see me and grateful for the many thermometers. I wanted to throw my arms above my head and clench my hands and shout all over the beach: The Winner! Instead I hugged and kissed Richard who allowed me, warning me first that he might have a fever.
Richard and I threw everything from his cottage into black plastic leaf bags, tossed the leaf bags into the back seat of the Lincoln and headed toward the city. Neither of us mentioned exactly where we were going. We were just getting out of the Hamptons and back to the city. My intentions of course were that both of us end up in my apartment. Later, I calculated that I had spent approximately seven minutes kissing Richard and forty-five or more packing his things.