52

It wouldn’t have been any kind of a career anyway. That was what Kathy told herself after she’d quit the job she’d held for six months. For a week Melanie had worked in the crafts shop with her, but she hadn’t made it through her second Monday. Her agent had managed to get her a temporary booking with Klein, Leoper, and Klinge, a trio that worked trade shows. Leoper had hepatitis, so Melanie had been offered the job of replacing her for six weeks.

“I just feel I have to get back up on the stage,” Melanie had said to Kathy, “any stage. I’m at a strange place in my life. The man I loved is gone. And when I ask myself what’s left, the answer is my few friends—like you, Kath—and the theater. Show business is hard, but it’s not unforgiving. It’s like a family you can always go back to. You can be alone, but still feel you belong to something….”

“I understand, Mel,” Kathy had said. And she had, all too well. This job wasn’t something that could give you a sense of belonging, or an identity. Working in a crafts shop wasn’t being a craftsperson. For that matter, the craftspeople weren’t the sort you’d particularly want to number yourself among. There was the furniture maker who was a Christian Scientist and who “didn’t feel right” about the prices put on his pieces without a lot of soul searching. There were the women weavers whose rugs looked like sweaters and whose sweaters fit like rugs. There were the potters, with their spattered aprons and mugs of herbal tea. Kathy was simply not one of them, and didn’t feel like one of them, even though she went home at night smelling of hand-dipped candles and potpourri.

When Kathy found out that she was pregnant, there wasn’t any question in her mind about whether or not she would continue working. There was no way she was going to give over the care of her own infant to a stranger in order to sell the few liberals left in New York organic doodads.

Alison Lowenthal-Goodman was born a week after Kathy left the crafts shop. Kathy’s contractions had begun while she was watching Jimmy Carter address the nation in a cardigan sweater. The baby weighed seven pounds, three ounces at birth. When they brought her in to show her to her mother, Kathy knew that she had found her career at last.

Not one of the women’s magazines could make Kathy feel even a little guilty because she had found fulfillment enough in the role of a wife and mother. Her craft was to color the world that her tiny daughter would begin to grow in, her calling would be to make of her natural domesticity a fine art. After they brought the baby home, Kathy did everything she had once done—and so much more—with infinite care, and in every little thing she did she felt proud, happy, ennobled. The experience of motherhood wasn’t any less miraculous just because it was commonplace.

Laying Alison’s tiny things in a bureau drawer, testing her bathwater with her elbow until it was exactly the right temperature, putting her to sleep at night, watching her become with each new day more of a little human being, this was enough. It was more than enough. Even while shopping in the cramped Pioneer supermarket Kathy felt life’s plenty all around her.

Aaron was getting more and more concerned about money, though. He had been putting in long hours before Alison was born, as any young lawyer has to, Kathy knew. The senior partners who lived so well on the tireless efforts of their youthful associates kept track of everyone’s weekly accumulation of paper. When Aaron began to go into the office Sundays as well as Saturdays, Kathy would sometimes protest, but her husband’s standard reply was “What do you think’s going to pay for Alison’s college?”

Kathy was getting the idea, however, that Alison’s future was not all that Aaron meant to secure. Ever since the energy crisis he’d been showing a determination to block the kicks of the economy and life in general. He seemed to be making himself into part of a defensive line. One day, when Kathy was cleaning out their closet, she found a box of his wide ties. Men weren’t wearing them anymore, or wide lapels, either. The flared trousers had disappeared too. Everyone had had his wings clipped.

That very night Aaron came home with the news that he had been made a partner. Picking up little Alison, her father whirled her around and around, and the child shrieked with pleasure, and Kathy, tears of joy running down her cheeks, tried to hug them both, but she couldn’t quite catch hold.

When he put his daughter down, Aaron pulled a blue box out of his pocket. In it was a gold bracelet, for Alison.

“Aaron, she’s too young for anything that expensive,” Kathy said.

“No she isn’t,” Aaron said. He nuzzled the little girl and added, “Nothing but the best for you, Miss Lowenthal-Goodman, right?”

“That’s going right back to the store,” Kathy said.

“You go away,” said Alison to her mother.

As it turned out, the best was none too good for Aaron, either. Within a year they had left Manhattan for a house in Scarsdale. The house came with an empty two-car garage, which Aaron filled with a Volkswagen station wagon for Kathy and a BMW for himself. Sometimes he and Kathy and the baby would drive into the city on a weekend and walk around Soho. Aaron said he wanted to start an art collection. Kathy reminded him of Alison’s college and, when they were in a gallery, looked the other way.

Then one Saturday when he’d said that he had to go into the office, Aaron came home with a surprise purchase. It was wrapped in brown paper, and it was so big Aaron had to bring it into the house through the sliders in the family room.

“What is it?” Kathy asked.

“Is it a bike?” asked Alison.

“Wait’ll you see it,” Aaron said. He began to tear off the wrapping paper.

Kathy stood there dumbfounded as the thing emerged like the mummy from its sarcophagus.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” said Aaron.

“What is it?” said Kathy weakly. She had no idea what it was supposed to be, but she knew all too well what it was.

“This is our first acquisition,” Aaron said. “Our first major work of art.”

“Who did it?” said Kathy. It occurred to her that she had asked the very same question of Alison not three days ago, when she’d found a stain on the bedroom wallpaper that might or might not have been the dog.

“Julian Schnabel,” Aaron replied.

“Who’s he?” asked Kathy

“It’s not who he is now,” Aaron informed her. “It’s who he’s going to be. This guy is going to go places, and we’re buying him before his price goes up.”

The thought went through Kathy’s mind that she had congratulated herself only this morning for saving a dollar-seventy at the market with her coupons. Her heart sank. As the full horror of the “work of art” before her began to penetrate, Kathy’s heart sank faster; it plummeted. Between thick globs of ugly-colored paint were bits of broken dishes, chicken wire, pipe fittings, tin cans, junk. It looked like the artist had swept the street and then gone to work with Elmer’s Glue.

“Well, what do you think of it?” Aaron asked.

“I hate it,” Kathy said. “I think it’s absolutely awful.”

“What are you talking about?” Aaron said indignantly. “Look at this, Kath. Really look. Open your eyes.”

Kathy squinted.

“Tell me what you see,” Aaron urged.

“It looks like…a cover painting from the Reader’s Digest,” Kathy said at last.

“What?”

“No, really. I’m serious.” She pointed at the left side of the canvas.

“See,” she said. “There’s a seagull. Right there, in that clump of dried-out seaweed. There’s a seagull—the remains of one—rotting on the beach.”

“You are a Philistine,” Aaron said. He propped the painting against a wall, announced that he was going to make himself a drink, and went in a huff to the kitchen.

Alison crept up to the painting, stared at it, turned around, and said to her mother, “Pukey.”

Aaron returned with a hammer, a picture hook, and a big glass of Scotch.

“I’ll be hanged before this monstrosity will,” Kathy said. “Why didn’t you consult with me before you went out and spent the money on a thing like this?”

“Because I earn the money, that’s why,” Aaron replied. “You don’t. And I can spend my money any way I want to.” Before she could deal with what she’d just heard with her own ears, Kathy had to sit down.

“I don’t believe you said that,” she said. “My father used to say things like that to my mother, about how he was the bread winner—as if what she did wasn’t worth anything at all. Aaron. My God, you know better. That was just a cheap shot, wasn’t it, because you’re mad?”

“All right, I am mad. We’ve never hesitated to express the way we feel, neither one of us. And if you want to know the truth, I frankly resent your unwillingness to grow, to be part of anything outside your little world of this house. I can’t believe that anyone as committed to women’s lib as you are could be content living like some middle-class hausfrau.”

“So that’s what you think I am.”

Alison began to cry.

Her father picked her up.

“Leave her alone, can’t you?” Kathy said. “There’s no harm in her knowing that sometimes people fight.”

“I want to put this picture up,” Aaron said, jouncing his daughter with grim determination. “I want you to just live with it for a while and then see what you think of it.”

“Okay…if I can buy a shade for it that I can pull down during the daytime. I only exist in the daytime, you know. I would like that much…to keep the integrity of my daytime existence—as a hausfrau.”

The shade was never bought, but special lighting for the Schnabel was. The painting was a pain in the neck to dust, so Kathy used the vacuum’s brush attachment on it. Every so often she’d hear particles from the composition rattling in the tube.

At night an undefined fear would come over Kathy. Her sex life with Aaron had come down to a Friday or a Saturday night, and seemed to depend upon how good a time he’d had—and how much he’d had to drink—when they’d been invited out or had gone to dinner and a show. It took as long for passion to arise in him as it did for him to get out of bed on a Sunday morning. Dedicated as she was to housework, Kathy kept every day in perfect order, but she was still afraid, somehow, for tomorrow.

Tomorrow came on a Saturday night when they did not go out. They had eaten a small supper in front of the television set at nine o’clock, a half hour after Alison had gone to bed and an hour after her father had gotten home.

Aaron said he wasn’t hungry. He picked at his food for a while, and then he said, “Kathy, we have to talk.”

“About what?” Kathy said. Something in his tone of voice put her instantly on her guard. She was suddenly frightened, terribly frightened, but she didn’t want him to know. She picked up her napkin as if it were something she was trying to save from a fire.

“We have to talk about us,” Aaron was saying.

“About all of us…or just we two?” Kathy said.

“We two. Alie isn’t part of this.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call her Alie.”

“I might as well come straight to the point,” Aaron said, depositing his silver on his plate.

“And what might that be?” Kathy couldn’t look him in the eye.

“Kathy, it’s hard to have to say this—very, very hard. And I want you to know that basically you aren’t to blame. You’re a good person, a wonderful person. But the fact is, for me…there’s somebody else now.”

It wasn’t that she hadn’t suspected, but actually hearing him say it went through Kathy like a bolt. She couldn’t stop the tears from coming to her eyes.

“Kathy, don’t,” Aaron said.

“I’m all right,” Kathy said after a moment. “I’m okay. I feel rejected, and hurt, and sick at heart…but I’m okay. Really. So tell me, who’s the lucky girl?”

“Kath, please try to understand… It was just one of those things. She works in a gallery—”

“In Soho?”

“No, in midtown.”

“Have you set the date yet?”

“Kath, we’re just going to have to work things out…somehow.”

“What are your plans for our little girl?”

“Of course you can have custody of her…but I’d want to see her every week, and take her on some trips…” Kathy was crying again. She couldn’t stop herself this time. She hid her face in her hands.

“Kath, I’m so sorry,” Aaron said. “I really, truly am.” He reached out to touch her, but Kathy pulled away from him.

After a while she got control of herself again. She was exhausted, completely exhausted, and that dulled her pain a little.

“I can’t help wondering, you know,” Kathy said. “What she’s got that I haven’t got.”

“You’re both wonderful, incredible people. But she’s the one I’ve come to love…more. I have loved you, though, Kathy. You’re a wonderful, wonderful mother, and you’ve always kept the house immaculate, and you’ve always encouraged me, helped me along—”

“Is this my Bicentennial Minute?”

“It’s just that I want you to know you’ve been loved, and appreciated.”

“Thanks. Now, where do we go from here?”

“To tell the truth, I haven’t given it that much thought, Kath. I feel you’re entitled to this house, if you want to live in it, and of course I’ll take care of Alison—always—and whatever you need…to get you started.”

“Started over, you mean,” Kathy said. She looked around her kitchen as though she hardly knew it.

“I have to start from scratch,” she said. “What am I? I’m a housewife, plain and simple. I’m no good to anyone but Alison. My only…distinction…is that I went to school with Veronica Simmons. I wonder what she learned that I didn’t.”

“Don’t put yourself down, Kath, don’t.”

“Paula the movie star. I wonder if she’s ever really cared about anyone. She probably doesn’t give a damn now, about anyone or anything, except herself. They can’t even get near her—let alone dump her.”

From the bedroom down the hall came the sound of crying.

“My baby,” said Kathy. “She’s right on cue.”