I STAYED a couple of days longer than I’d planned, long enough for Tom and Jennie to drop their reserve and have a fight during the evening news. A husband had killed his wife after escaping from a mental hospital. Tom said, pointing to the television, “I bet she was fooling around. That’s probably what made him crazy in the first place.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jennie asked.
Tom said, “Nothing. Just what it says.”
Jennie seemed to forget I was in the room. “Well, I know what it’s supposed to mean and I think you’ve got a lot of nerve. You think I’m going to get involved with Zap, don’t you? Or with somebody, with anybody. God knows who I could get involved with out here. Of course, it doesn’t stop you, does it? It didn’t stop you, did it?”
“Give me a break, will you?” Tom was shouting. “Zap came here to see you. You guys spent thirty minutes making four egg salad sandwiches. What am I supposed to be? An idiot?”
“You know, you’re really driving me away.”
Tom walked out of the room and Jennie asked me if I wanted to go with her for a ride. When he came back, she said, “We’re going out; I don’t feel like discussing this now.”
“Go wherever you want,” he said. We left him staring blankly at the television.
I looked out the window as we drove and I watched as the trees zipped past, illuminated only by our headlights. Neither of us had noticed how fast she’d been driving. “You see, he’s had a few affairs,” Jennie was saying. “Nothing serious. Just once or twice, and he’s told me about them. They always happen when things are bad between us.”
A rabbit, startled and afraid, froze by the side of the road, then disappeared back into the woods. Jennie told me, “I found out a lot of things I never knew about Tom after I married him.” But I understood Tom. He’d never felt good enough for Jennie. Her parents had convinced him of that and perhaps Jennie in her subtle ways had convinced him as well.
“You see,” she went on, “the problem is . . .” She laughed softly. “I still love him. I just don’t trust him. God knows, I’ve tried. You can’t almost trust somebody. You either do or you don’t.” I knew that only too well. If Mark left Lila that same night and begged me to try again, it would never be the same. Actually, I wasn’t sure.
“What are you going to do about Zap?’’ I asked quietly.
She frowned. “I’m not going to do anything. It would be wrong to do anything.”
“I saw you . . .”
“I know you saw us. So we were holding one another. That doesn’t mean we’re going to take off together.”
“It’s just that he still thinks he’s crazy about you.”
She laughed. “Oh, your brother. He always wanted what he couldn’t have.” Then she grew serious again. “I don’t want to hurt him. But, of course, I’m not leaving Tom. Or the children.”
I sighed. “Nobody ever wants to hurt anybody.”
I hadn’t noticed that she was pulling over to the side of the road. “Did you see that kid?” she asked.
I shook my head. “What kid?” I hadn’t seen anything.
“He was back there, hitching. He’ll never get a ride on this road.”
I was annoyed that our talk was being cut short. “Are you crazy? Isn’t that dangerous?”
But she had her heart set on picking up a hitchhiker. She shifted into reverse. “There are two of us and one of him.”
The argument didn’t hold up for me. “I don’t care. We were going to get a drink.”
I turned and saw a blond-haired boy rushing toward the car, a look of gratitude on his face. “We’ll get a drink after we drop him on the main road,” Jennie said, rolling down her window. “How far you going?”
The boy looked to be about eighteen and he kept pushing his long hair off his face. He wore an orange and black Princeton T-shirt and a pair of bleached-out jeans. He had a nice smile, so I assumed he wouldn’t drag us off into the bushes somewhere.
Bobby Jones introduced himself to us and jumped into the front seat beside me while I leaned forward so that he could climb into the back. He was going to a party outside of Cranford and if we could get him to the highway, that would be “just super.”
“You would have been on that road all night,” Jennie said.
“I would’ve missed the party if you girls hadn’t stopped.”
I was taken aback at the word “girls.” Both Jennie and I were old enough, technically, if I did a quick calculation, to be this boy’s mother. “Do you go to Princeton?” I pointed to his T-shirt.
“I’m here on a swimming scholarship. I broke their butterfly record last year.”
We were pressed tightly into the car and I could feel his arm muscles against mine. I pictured him as a butterfly, a yellow swallowtail, beautiful, elusive, transient, touching down on a soft petal, then moving on. “You look like a swimmer,” I said.
Jennie switched on the radio. The BeeGees were singing “Stayin’ Alive” and Bobby Jones started bouncing his left leg up and down. “We’re going drinking,” Jennie said.
“Well, it’s going to be a great party. Why don’t you come?”
“I told my boyfriend I’d be over.” Jennie started to speak with Bobby Jones’s relaxed, laid-back inflection.
“So give ’im a call.”
Jennie glanced at me and winked. “Well, we could give you a ride to where you’re going, but I don’t think I’ll go to the party. We’ve gotta get back.”
“It’s a long drive. I’ll jump in the back.”
I didn’t want him to jump in the back. “The dog sleeps in the back,” I said.
“I sure don’t want to smell like a dog tonight.” He fluffed his golden hair. He looked Nordic, Aryan, the opposite of men I’d known, completely uncomplicated. “You girls go to school?”
We gave him our names, so he stopped calling us “girls.” Jennie used her maiden name. I’d never changed mine. “I go to Rutgers,” Jennie said. “Debbie’s a junior at Barnard.”
“They got a nice pool at Columbia.” He turned to me. “What’re you studying?”
“She’s going to be an architect.” Jennie spoke for me, knowing I had a hard time lying.
“I’m not sure,” I put in. “Maybe journalism. Journalism and urban planning.”
“Sounds pretty heavy to me.” It seemed he had trouble absorbing the heaviness of my professional choices. He returned to the pool. “You swim in it?”
“All the time.” Jennie had started the game and I knew that for half an hour or so I could pretend.
“You swim distance or speed?”
Distance sounded as if it would entail less discussion, so I said I swam fifty laps three times a week and he nodded, impressed and silenced. What I liked about lying to him was that Jennie and I were conspiring again, the way we had when we were kids. And if Bobby Jones was dumb enough to believe we were college students cruising in our father’s car, if he wanted to ignore the fact that we were wives, mothers, divorcees, so be it.
He leaned against me and looked toward Jennie. “You go to Rutgers?”
“I’m studying art. I’m a ceramicist.” He didn’t understand the word. “A potter. I make pots.”
“Guess I got a ride with some very talented ladies.” And he took a flask from his back pocket. “Can you make bread with pots?” He handed Jennie the flask.
It took her a moment to translate that sentence into English. “Sure, people buy dishes, don’t they?” She took a swig, grimaced, and passed it to me.
“Wish I had some smoke, but those guys back there, my friends, they cleaned me out. I’ll get some more at the party. Why don’t we go? C’mon. Call your boyfriend. Tell ’im you’ve got a flat tire, but make sure he doesn’t come and get you.” As I passed him the flask, his fingers slid over mine. Then he took his left arm and put it across the back of the seat, and when I put my head back, it rested on his arm.
Jennie cut into the next Mobil station. “Got a dime?” she asked me. We got out of the car and I followed Jennie to the pay phone. “Fill ’er up,” she called to the gas station attendant.
“We’re not seriously going to that party, are we?”
“I could use a party.” She picked up the receiver to dial. “But we’ve told him all these ridiculous lies.”
“If he goes to Princeton, I’m a Rhodes Scholar. He’s just trying to impress us.”
“You think he’s lying?” But she motioned for me to be quiet and closed the door to the phone booth, shutting me out. I caught bits of what she said. That I wanted to see a film in Princeton; did he mind?
The station attendant finished putting gas into the car by the time Jennie was off the phone. She’d convinced Tom I was depressed by their fight and needed a film to cheer me up. In the car, Bobby Jones watched us, flask in hand, and he waved for us to come along. Jennie signaled for him to wait. “Let’s find a newspaper.” She handed the attendant her credit card and asked if he had one. He pointed to the office, where we found yesterday’s covered with grease. “O.K., did you see Star Wars?” I nodded. “Fine. We’ll tell him we saw Empire Strikes Back. I hear it’s more of the same.’’
This time Bobby Jones slid over and he sat in the middle, between us. He handed me the flask as I slipped in beside him. His arms were broad and I was wedged between his swimmer’s arms, his butterfly wings, and the window. “You girls paid with a credit card, huh? Not bad.” He laughed as Jennie started the motor and I tried to figure how old you had to be to pay with a credit card.
The party was in the garage of someone whose parents lived somewhere half the year and somewhere else the other half. We parked a good two blocks away, even though Bobby kept saying, “You can park closer.” But if the police raided, we didn’t want them to get our auto registration. The house, Bobby told us as we walked into the garage, was “off limits” without special permission of the host. “You know,” he said, saying the obvious, “if you’d like a little privacy.”
Everyone knew Bobby. He was slapping hands with all kinds of people and kept saying, “Gimme five, brother.” He made a general announcement that he’d brought “a couple of chicks along.” “This is Deborah,” he said, pointing to Jennie. “And this is Jennifer,” pointing to me.
“It’s the other way around,” I said.
He corrected the announcement. “I’m bad with names. Let’s get a drink,” and he took me by the arm. We were greeted by a black man named Victor, who wore coveralls and seemed gay and was serving some kind of brownish punch. And by Rupert, our host, who wore white jeans and red suspenders but no shirt. His chest was covered with thick, black hair. They called Rupert’s girlfriend, whose real name was Natalie, Chiquita Banana, and I never found out why. Natalie, who told me to call her Chiquita because everyone else did, took me aside. “You here with Bobby?”
“Well, he brought us to the party.”
“So that means you’re with him.” She wore a black T-shirt and no bra and she chewed a wad of gum in the side of her cheek. She was a freshman at Douglass and told me that almost everyone at this party went to Rutgers. “Oh, good,” I said. “Jennie should feel right at home.” I was growing more comfortable with misrepresenting ourselves, but I wondered if our clothes were correct. We wore jeans, T-shirts, sandals, but we both had bras. But it wasn’t just the clothes. I knew that, in no way, was I still able to resemble Chiquita.
“I go to school in New York.”
“It’s dangerous. I hate that city.”
“You get used to it.”
“Have fun with Bobby.” She grinned at me, envious, I thought. Then she disappeared into the crowd.
I found Jennie talking with Victor and helping him pour hard punch. “Watch out,” Victor said, handing me a cup and straightening his earring. “It’s a real sleeper. Bottles of hard stuff.”
The punch was in an old bathtub and there was plenty of it.
“We can’t stay late,” I whispered to Jennie.
“Would you relax and have some fun?”
Rupert had fixed up the garage for the party. It was clear that he came from some wealth. The garage was equipped with a quadraphonic system, complete with tape deck, headsets, a million records, and a tuner that looked like an EKG. Sound floated around me and seemed to come from all directions. I sipped my punch until I found I was having trouble standing, so I sat down on one of the three mattresses on the floor.
Couples lay in each other’s arms. A bleary-eyed boy passed me a joint and I took a toke. This isn’t a good idea, a small voice somewhere in the middle of my pituitary gland said. The girl who’d been lying in the arms of the bleary-eyed boy, a tiny, red-headed child, got up and walked away and began kissing a rather tall, gawky boy who leaned against a wall. They walked outside. The Village People sang “YMCA.” Then Kansas sang “Dust in the Wind,” making me feel mortal, vulnerable. After that, I didn’t recognize the music, and the bleary-eyed boy sat stupefied and looking lonely in the corner. I asked him what the music was and he knew all the groups. They had space-age names. Flying Saucer, Satellite Returns, Lunar Module, Jet Stream. Pink Floyd sang “Dark Side of the Moon,” which put the bleary-eyed boy into a trance until the red-haired girl returned and, no questions asked, the boy took her back.
Other couples drifted in and out of each other’s arms with equal facility and I felt like an anthropologist, trying to understand how these primitives bonded. “Hey, how’ya doing?” Bobby flopped down on the mattress beside me, squeezing my left biceps.
“I’m a little sleepy.”
“Oh, that’s the punch.” He took a joint out of the air, it seemed, puffed it, and passed it back into the air.
“What’s in it?”
“It’s easier to tell you what’s not in it.”
“Oh, great.” I leaned my head back against his arm. It took me a few moments to realize he was rubbing my arm with his index finger in a gentle circular motion whose intent could not be mistaken. After a few complete elliptical orbits, he whispered, “Wanta see the house?”
“Maybe we could just go for a walk?”
“Naw, too many mosquitoes. You’ll get eaten alive.” He was pulling me to my feet with a jerking stroke, as if he were raising a flag.
“I need some fresh air.”
“We’ll open a window.” But I was adamant and finally he agreed to take a walk. “Let me get a little ice for this drink first, O.K.?”
We passed Jennie. “I’m going for a walk,” I mumbled. She said something about when we were leaving but I didn’t quite catch it and she didn’t repeat it. The ice, it turned out, was in the kitchen of the house. Bobby fumbled in the freezer. I wouldn’t go beyond the kitchen, I told myself. The house had become in my mind some dark force of evil and corruption, some den of iniquity. Bobby hit the ice tray on the Formica and ice fell onto the counter. He plunked a few cubes into our glasses. The kitchen lights were bright and I didn’t want to look at him and be betrayed by a few white hairs, a wrinkle on my brow.
When he started to lead me toward the living room, I protested. “Look, you wanta go for a walk? The door’s that way.” For some reason that made sense to me, so I followed, but when we got into the living room, which was very dark with only the light of the street light, he paused. “Boy, am I tired. Let’s sit for a minute. I wanta talk to you.” Why is darkness sensual? I asked myself. Why is it we never want to make love in a kitchen under fluorescent lights?
But no one was going to make love here. I’d made that decision as we sat down on the sofa, and once I make a decision, I stick to it. The living room seemed like a good compromise, except after a few moments I felt uncomfortable there. The walls were covered with bad art, Jersey kitsch, and all the lamps had plastic slipcovers. The furniture was covered with white sheets, as if someone had recently died and the rooms weren’t to be used again.
I sat beside Bobby, twirling my glass in my hands and feeling very much the awkward age he thought I was. “I like you,” he said. I kept turning the glass, faster and faster like a globe, and Mark’s mother with her endless motion of hands came to mind. I stopped. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
I didn’t want to go but I found myself walking, climbing the stairs. We entered Rupert’s parents’ room, which had the biggest king-size fake brass bed I’d ever seen and yellow wall-to-wall carpeting. The whole house, I suddenly realized, was done in yellow wall-to-wall carpeting. I thought to myself, I can’t make love with yellow carpeting everywhere. And suddenly it was the carpeting and not the arms of an eighteen-year-old boy I couldn’t bear.
The bedroom had the whole family photographed above the bed in various stages of development and ecstasy. Baby pictures, wedding pictures, graduation, a football victory, a million shots of the family dog, usually with a blunt object between its teeth. We lay down beneath them, and Bobby began to move across my body in a perfunctory and predictable fashion. It made sense that this rather pure, simple boy would be the one to shatter Mark’s hold in a rather simple, meaningless act. No real man could do it, so I submitted and began to breathe deeply, the way I do when I go to the dentist.
He dug his tongue into my mouth about as far as a tongue could go and squeezed my breasts. “Take this off.” He tugged at my green T-shirt. His clothes, mine, were pulled off. Shoes fell like bombs. Two bewildered goldfish in a nearby bowl watched, wide-eyed but apathetic. Then he assumed what must have been his posture for a racing dive and proceeded to plunge. “I don’t have any birth control with me,” I said, suddenly brought back to my senses. “Don’t worry,” he gasped. “I’ll pull out.” Which is what he did, seconds later, spilling himself over the fake quilted spread, which matched the color of the indifferent goldfish. “Jesus,” he moaned, gritting his teeth, and I looked at him with the somewhat mesmerized expression of a person watching a television program for the hell of it.
“You were great.” He sighed, rolling over, embedding his sperm into a round stain on the polyester spread, and I fell asleep beside him, more as a result of the punch than of his prowess.
When I woke, someone was calling my name. I looked out, and in the driveway I saw Jennie, confused, calling me as if she’d lost a puppy. I shook Bobby as I left. “Gotta go,” I said. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Don’t go, babe.” He tried to pull me back down but I pulled away. “When can I see you?”
“In a week or so.”
“O.K., gimme your address.” I told him where I lived and gave him the phone number of American Airlines, confident he wouldn’t remember a thing.
The air was cool and fresh as Jennie and I walked to the car. “I’m afraid you’ll disapprove of me,” I offered as an apology.
“I’ve never disapproved of you in my life. So you went to bed with him, so what? Probably did you good.”
“I think it was the punch.”
Jennie put an arm around my shoulder. “I think it was the body.” We reached the car. She was also a little drunk, and Victor had gotten weird with her. That was when she’d begun looking for me. “Is that the first time?”
“First time.” I crawled into the front seat.
“How was it?”
“Awful.”
I turned on the radio. It was “Oldies but Goodies.” As Jennie drove, I wrote letters to Mark, informing him of my new involvement with Robert Jones. “Dear Mark, I hope this letter finds you well. I’ve been seeing someone for a while now, a younger man, not as smart as you but certainly more potent, and I think it would be best if we finalized things between us . . .” That didn’t seem strong enough. “Dear Mark, I hope you and Lila are well. I’m living with someone as well. Rob coaches swimming at Princeton, where he is finishing his graduate work in international affairs. We are incredibly happy . . .”
Jennie was speeding. “You should slow down,” I said.
“It’s really late. I didn’t know it was this late.” Her face seemed compressed into her eyes, her eyes squinting sharp on the road.
“I’ll talk to Tom. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried.” She wasn’t convincing.
The streetlights on the road rushed past me, and the road was bright, reflecting the lights. I thought about my body. How it felt raw and exposed, barely satisfied, and only half awake. The lights on the road, all evenly spaced, held me.