HE CALLED WEDNESDAY FOR LUNCH THURSDAY. HE TOLD ME HE’D BEEN up to his neck in the wards and at lunch I asked him if he were a psychiatrist.
“A lawyer.”
“What are the wards?”
“Se hable espanol?” he asked. He didn’t pronounce the tilde.
I offered him an un poco. I should have offered him a Spanish lesson. He said, “When the right girl comes along, the right girl comes along.” I was impressed by his ability to make a decision but not with the decision. We were at the Four Seasons and nine out of the ten waiters listening to us and watching us eat spoke Spanish with tildes. It wasn’t an unusual gift.
Richard was a wee ipso facto for me and in response I shoved velvet chocolate cake into my pretty little mouth. Actually it was a large slice of chocolate icing. I don’t remember what else we had for lunch because I didn’t know what we had for lunch. The chains were moving across the windows and something was awry in the wiring or the overhead lighting so that there was a severe ringing in my ears every few minutes. Our ten waiters didn’t seem to hear it. I toyed with the idea of asking Richard if he heard it also but decided not to just in case it was psychosomatic. No one else around me was holding their ears. In fact, as I examined the room, except for the waiters, everyone around me looked like Richard.
“That’s why I’m so busy. I’m being ‘groomed.’ You’ll meet my mother. It’s very funny. She calls me ‘The Governor.’ ”
“Is that what you’re being groomed for? Governor?”
“Well, ultimately, but you never know what happens. Let’s say I’m in the bullpen, right office, right backing. I leave the big decisions to the professionals.”
I never eat dessert but I spooned whipped cream onto the chocolate icing, a nice self-destructive act. I heard a waiter say, “Thank you, Mr. Doubleday” to a man with a blue plaid suit, a blue plaid tie and blue plaid eyes who was probably the best tennis player in Sneden’s Landing. Richard didn’t yet seem to have a last name although the waiters acknowledged his presence. Everyone looked as if he were being groomed or had been groomed for something.
The waiter had said to Richard, “Yes, Sir?”
And Richard had answered: “The usual.”
And the waiter brought the usual in a covered dish. God knows if Richard had ever eaten there before. That’s what grooming is. And he was well-groomed. The one finger swishing through the martini I could have lived without. His tan was deeper than the blue plaid man’s tan but the blue plaid man was older and didn’t have to work so hard at being groomed. A Richard would have a limousine if he could. A blue plaid man would have his chauffeur-driven Land Rover. Richard ate the usual carefully. I, of course, had said, to be amusing, “Make it two.” Richard’s eyes kept moving beyond mine. He had jockeyed with me for the window seat. And since I had not been able to pull it away from the wall for him, he pulled a chair out for me so that I faced 52nd Street and he faced his constituency. Now his eyes lit up as he nodded at people passing us. The problem with men like Richard, in fact with Richard in particular, is whether I want to go to bed with him or to the Democratic National Convention. I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell if I were getting hooked on him or his potential. If he hadn’t taken me here, if he hadn’t swished his pinky around in his martini just once, if he hadn’t been so smooth and so bursting with possibility which I couldn’t read as sexual or political, I might decide what I wanted from him.
Richard also knew how to slide his cream along the rim of his coffee cup. And he knew how to involve me with a swift expedience.
“Stephanie, does there always have to be pain and suffering when people love?” He was equally solemn about the cream and the question.
I allowed the question to float between us, trying not to laugh at him.
“You see, Stephanie, I’m disillusioned.”
Disillusioned means I want love. They usually say jaded when they want sex. I smiled Delphically.
He smiled crookedly, attentively still. “You might say jaded.”
Aah. It was delightfully pornographic. I licked my lips over the cream. He licked his lips over the cream. I tasted the promise of him as he was watching me. You don’t get to walk arm-in-arm into the Executive Mansion together and lick lips. You never get both. I was pleased to consider the licking of lips but I had a strong feeling then as I would later that if he had sat facing the window he would be watching himself and not my lips. I should have known then I was buying into the Democratic National Convention.
“I’ve even considered . . .” He looked at me seriously. I couldn’t fill in the blank. “Well, let’s talk about you.”
“What are you grooming for, Richard, at present?”
“Councilman, probably, next election. But these things are years away. Right now I’m grooming for you.”
I lifted my coffee cup and murmured, “Sweet.” Delphi was empty. I truly could not read Richard. “Well, I’m the wrong girl, Spanish-speaking or not. My family’s midwestern Republican, they tend toward reactionary. They send money to the Liberty League and the only reason my mother quit the Birchers was because she thought some of the little ladies were Lesbian.”
“Really?” He was casually interested. I couldn’t offend him.
“No. Not really. They don’t even vote. My father thinks politics is too pushy. He’s a general—minor, but heavy career. I mean he is Army.”
Richard laughed. “Do you think he’d let his daughter marry a Jewish Democrat?”
“Only if he’s governor.”
“I’m serious.”
It was a surprise shot and I had no return except not to take him seriously and so I laughed. The whipped cream dribbled from the corner of my mouth. I wiped it, blushing. Somewhere, I’d overheard men joking about making love to shiksas. When they come, creamed chipped beef dribbles out of the corner of their mouths.
I was suddenly uncomfortably aware of how unlike Richard I was. He was wiping the side of my mouth with his large napkin. As he leaned toward me he saw someone he knew and stood to talk to him, dropping the napkin on the table. I sipped my coffee. The power had shifted to him. And I had to recoup. He began to talk above me, animated, behind me, about ward politics. It was absolutely fascinating and he made great sense. I closed my eyes. I could imagine him on a podium; he became FDR waving from the open car; he became Jack Kennedy. He became Adlai, and I loved him. I stood beside him smiling to applause, shaking hands at street rallies. I had a breast removed. I changed my mind. He sat down and picked up his napkin.
“Unless it’s an advantage to the woman, I don’t believe in introductions,” he explained impressively.
I sipped my coffee coolly now, knowing he was a mistake and quite relieved with my decision.
He sipped his coffee coolly also. I wondered if he’d made a decision. “Stephanie,” he broke our summit silence, “tell me something.”
“Mmmm.”
“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone before in your life. Tell me your secret.” How did he know I had secrets?
“Why?”
“Because we have to start someplace and life is too short to wait.”
“And you’re a busy man.”
“You’re not being fair.”
“I don’t know you. I have no reason to trust you or not to trust you.” I had made an error. I had let him sniff the faint spoor of hostility. I hadn’t meant to. With me and with men like Richard the faint spoor of hostility worked better than musk.
“Listen,” his hand covered mine. He was leaning forward. “You and I have to believe in something. That’s the kind of people we are. We can start believing in each other.”
“Oh, Richard . . .” I don’t know what I meant.
“We can, can’t we?”
He was so sincere that day. He meant everything he said. Then. They always do as they’re saying it. I removed my hand from under his. I had time either to recoup or to take my vote and leave the hall. His eyes swam before me. You have to trust someone, sometime. It might have been the time. I decided it was the time. There had been other times that hadn’t been the time. And I did so like the interaction.
Girlishly, I smoothed my well-cut hair from the sides of my well-born face. Girlishly, I pulled at a lovely earlobe. Girlishly, I looked into my bowl of whipped cream as if it held tea leaves. Girlishly and sincerely, I said at last, “Well, I’ve always wanted to be a dancer.” Girlishly, I sighed. Victoriously, he smiled. Little did he know. I never had quite defined integrity. I had just assumed it among midwestern WASPs.
He took my hand again.
“You know,” I continued. “Free, floating.”
Sometimes that secret worked but sometimes it didn’t work. It was, though, my truth. I thought perhaps this time it might work because Richard seemed like the kind of man it might work on. They all seemed like the kind of man it would work on and I had never given up the hope that if they weren’t, I could change them into the kind of man it would work on: a man to share my dreams.
I think it must have worked. He held my hand between both of his and said huskily, “Yo te amo, Stephanie.” I nodded. The waiters, who were probably going to imitate him in the kitchen later, had to move away from the table. “That’s what we have to believe in.” How had the waiters managed not to laugh?
God, the lines were wonderful. He was pure cliché and yet I liked to hear him except I hoped that if he were going to leave out the tilde his professionals would put him in Dutchess County and not the South Bronx. His hands were warm and silky. I preferred the jaded to the fumbling.
But before I could respond or not respond with something terrific and jaded like “mi casa es su casa what are you doing this afternoon,” he had motioned a waiter, flashed his gold American Express card, which I tried to read upside down, flourished his signature as if it were the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and then we were leaving, his elbow steering me very firmly between the tables as he nodded and greeted a lot of men eating the usual. He seemed known, quite known. Maybe the usual was really the usual. The power was exciting, the potential of his power even more so, but I would have to keep the two separate. Perhaps that’s what kept ringing in my ears—the charges of power he was giving out. Maybe I could help him with his accent. Maybe I could be his transformer. Maybe that was the lure. At the checkroom, he lifted my hair to help me on with my raincoat and as he did, he blew hot breath against the back of my neck. “I want you. I want to love you. Very much,” he said as he smoothed my shoulders under my coat. “I want to feel you come.” I shuddered involuntarily. I was so damned suggestible. Hypnotists were always after me too.
Although I had strong doubts about him as a. governor, b. husband, c. trustworthy, d. sharer of secrets, I had no doubts about sharing my shuddering with his jaded propensities.
“I wish,” he whispered as he guided me past the palms, “I wish you didn’t have to go back to work this afternoon, Stephanie. We could get close somewhere.”
“I don’t have to,” I said softly. He opened the doors to the street. I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. On the sidewalk he closed my eyelids with his fingers and explored my face. I could feel my eyelids quivering like moth wings.
“So?” he said or asked. “Are you ready, Stephanie?”
I didn’t know what he meant. But I knew what Mona Lisa was up to. You just smile. You don’t expect to understand them. He hailed a cab as I stood smiling beatifically, as I told him my address. He told the cabbie. All the women the masters did were whores anyway. A palmist told me once you can tell by their hands. I smiled. I climbed into the cab. And then he closed the door. He was on the street. He smiled.
I had no time to heal my face. I pressed it against the window as he motioned me to roll the window down. I did so while he looked at his watch.
“Stephanie, darling, not this time. Not this time. This time I don’t want to make any mistakes.” And then he patted the cab and it drove off. I went home because I couldn’t have faced work anyway. I didn’t scream until I was home. I had, for all my manipulative girlishlies, deserved exactly what I got. And I still didn’t know his last name.