Payback

by Mary Gordon

  She leads him to the Warhol Marilyns. “You see,” she says, “he’s making the point that she is the object of our worship, that she’s no different from the Madonnas of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. And it’s not just random…you see the way the color of her lipstick, her lips—the lips that everyone wants to kiss—blend into the background. It’s the kind of harmony that the old masters were all about, only it’s true to our times.”

  “What a fascinating little thing you are,” he says. “Lovely and brilliant. A dangerous combination. May I take your arm? It’s my turn now, a different floor of the museum, a different era…quite a different way of looking at the world. Do you know Ensor?”

  She knows that he’ll be able to tell if she’s lying. “He’s not someone I’ve really paid attention to,” she says.

  “Ah, that’s the tragedy. Most people don’t pay attention to him at all. But I think he’s got the same fearlessness that you like in Warhol, the same insistence that we see the world as it really is.”

  He leads her to a canvas that Heidi has to force herself not to turn away from. Horrible is the word she wants to use. Two skulls against a candy-pink and blue sky. One wears a fur hat. Each has in his teeth one end of what looks like a leaf or a stick. But the title is Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring.

  She understands that this is some sort of test, and she knows just what she needs to do to pass it. She laughs. “That’s hilarious,” she says. “I love it.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly right. The hilarity of nightmare. Your friend Warhol thinks life is a joke, and my friend thinks it’s a nightmare…a nightmare that can only be survived by its absurdity.”

  She will use those very words to Miss Vaughan…she’s not sure what she’ll tell Miss Vaughn about…about this man, whose name she doesn’t know.

  “It certainly is enough to kill your appetite, but I wonder if I could invite you to my apartment for some lunch. I’m quite a passable cook and I’ll make you some real food, not the overpriced bibelots they serve in the café here. I promise not to offer you a herring.”

  Everything she’s been told should, she knows, make her refuse him. But he isn’t like anyone she’s ever known. She doesn’t want her time with him to end.

  “Sure,” she says. “I just need to be on a five o’clock train.”

  “To where, if I may be so bold to ask.”

  “Providence,” she says. “Providence, Rhode Island.”

  “And what do you do there?”

  Alarm spreads beneath her ribs, the pure hottest blue inside the flame. She must think of something, so he doesn’t realize she’s just a high school girl.

  “I’m waiting to think of something to do with my life that doesn’t bore me. Meanwhile, I live in my father’s house. He’s what’s known as a tycoon.”

  “One of the great houses of Newport?” he asks.

  She will steal the history of the people in town whose ancestors are in the graveyard by the Congregational church. That, she knows, always arouses interest, even from people who like to pretend it doesn’t. She will steal a sentence from Miss Letitia Barnes, speaking of ancestors in what she imagined was self-mockery but Heidi knew was camouflaged pride.

  “Oh, no, those overblown mansions were for the nouveaux riches. We think of the people who came over on the Mayflower as arrivistes. My family arrived on the Arabella, which landed months before the Mayflower. And then they founded my town.”

  “The true American aristocracy,” he says.

  She doesn’t know what will happen when he finds out her last name. Because she knows he will be part of her life, and eventually she’ll tell him that what she said was all a tease, and he will laugh and chuck her under the chin. Perhaps call her a minx. A vixen. One of those words from the novels she read when she was combing the library for books that would tell her about the life she knew she wanted, but did not know how to name.

  It’s raining hard, with a cold wind, as if it weren’t late April at all, but some wrathful November day; the rain is making it hard to see the buildings across the street, and she only has her jacket.

  “Luckily, like all true Englishmen, I have an umbrella. If I may ask you to take my arm.”

  The umbrella is large and his arm is thin but reassuring; she can’t see where they’re going, but she knows they’ll be all right. She is walking, under an umbrella, holding the arm of a man who finds her fascinating. She remembers the scene in Little Women when Jo takes Professor Bhaer’s hand. He was much older than she, and better educated. She had loved Little Women, she and Lorena Wilcox, the one true friend she had, who had lived next door until her parents moved from Vermont, she and Lorena Wilcox acted it out every day, taking turns playing Jo, obviously the only person in the book to be. They were friends; they were really friends; they enjoyed each other; they wanted to be with each other all the time. Heidi had cried when she drove down the street with her parents, waving at Lorena until she was out of sight. “I’ll miss her so much,” she told her parents.

  “Blah blah blah and boo hoo hoo,” her mother said. “You’ll write each other for a couple of months and never get in touch again.”

  Her mother had been exactly right.

  Lorena was her only friend for years until Edwina. Whose house sat next door. Whom she had adored. Edwina encouraged her to wear her hair in a single braid, as she did. Edwina took her to Providence to see art exhibits; included her when she and her friends went to coffee shops and drank their coffee black and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. But when Edwina moved to London, she never sent Heidi her address.

  The man, her new friend (she doesn’t know his name), is English. Possibly he is from London. Is it possible he knows Edwina? No, that’s ridiculous. But thinking of Edwina makes her frightened, and she takes hold of his arm, as if to ensure that he will break the pattern, that he will be fond of her as she is of him and will stay in her life. He begins singing a song she knows is quite old, “Isn’t it a lovely day to be caught in the rain.”

  “Do you know that song?” he asks.

  She won’t lie. People lied about knowing things and got caught out. It was one of the things she liked doing: catching people out when they were pretending to know something.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Fred Astaire,” he says. “It will be the first step in my education of you. Fred Astaire.”

  “I’ve seen a movie of his on TV. I really like old movies.”

  “Of course you do, you little marvel,” he says, taking her arm and pinching a bit of the fabric of her sleeve between his thumb and third finger. “Look at your sense of style, choosing this old jacket, which might look absurd on some people but on you is exactly right. You like old movies, then?”

  “Yes. I like black-and-white films best,” she says. It’s almost the truth; she loves the dark anxiety-filled movies with 1930s criminals and detectives, although her favorite movie is My Fair Lady, but she admits that to no one.

  “Cinema is my life,” he says, and she imagines him having had a career cut short by the vulgarity of Hollywood; she thinks he must be gallant, enduring the corruption of something he loved.

  He kisses her hand.

  “Fortunately, I live quite near,” he says, but the umbrella is so big and she has been so absorbed in the pleasure of being with him that she has no idea where they are when he walks up the stairs and turns the key to the door of his building, keeping the umbrella open until she is safely inside.

  The corridor is dark, the light coming only from a tarnished fixture on the ceiling; the elevator is papered with a pattern of ferns; it groans and wheezes like an old dog. Their heels make a satisfying sound on the black and white tiles of the corridor they walk down after they have left the elevator. He has indicated the way with a gallant sweep of his arm.

  Just inside, there is a tall ceramic cylinder with Ch
inese figures against a black background climbing up a steep green hill. He deposits his umbrella in it.

  “You must take off your lovely boots,” he says. “I’ll stuff them with newspaper, so they won’t lose their shape from the rain.”

  Under her elegant boots, she is wearing a schoolgirl’s navy knee socks, and she doesn’t want him to see them…but it’s impossible for her to walk around in her wet boots, so she flings the knee socks off and rolls them into a ball, placing them inside her jacket pocket.

  Now she is barefoot, and this seems wrong, but there is nothing for it. She must just pretend that it is the kind of thing that always happens to her in this careless life she has suggested that she lives.

  “Luckily, I have a lentil soup, which is just the thing for this weather, then perhaps an omelette aux fines herbes, and a little cheese. The pièce de résistance will be dessert: it is the thing the English are best at; the rest of our cuisine is rubbish. I remember a French friend saying, ‘Tout est bien avec custard.’ I feel fortunate that there’s one store in this benighted city where I can buy Bird’s Custard.”

  “You don’t like New York?”

  “Alas, my work has brought me here.”

  Eventually, she knows, she will be told the story of his career. But sensing that it is painful to him, she asks nothing.

  He pours her a glass of red wine. “Something to take the chill off,” he says, and she is worried; she has drunk almost nothing in her life—champagne at New Year’s, a sip of beer on a hot summer’s day. But to refuse a glass of wine would be to reveal her youth, her inexperience. He has taken her for a sophisticate, and she wishes to be nothing else in his eyes.

  The apartment is small; the kitchen is a little slit of a corridor off the living room, whose walls are covered with books, as she knew they would be; on one wall are a couple of paintings of cows drinking from streams—this disappoints her at first, but she decides it fits his gentle English character. The largest pictures are posters from old movies: Laura, the red letters matching the slash of the brunette’s lipstick, the yellow background insisting on danger, doom. Across from it, Notorious, which she is thankful she saw recently on The Late Show, Cary Grant carrying the semiconscious Ingrid Bergman to safety from the weak but lethal spy and his terrifying mother.

  At one end of the living room is a small table with forest-green place mats, one with a napkin in a light tan wooden ring. The man goes to a drawer in the small kitchen and brings out another napkin for her. The soup smells rich and nourishing; she is very hungry, as she was too nervous for breakfast. How ridiculous it seems now, that she was nervous about Jeanne Larkin. Her friend (she still doesn’t know his name, and it seems too late to ask now) would have no interest in Jeanne Larkin, and Jeanne Larkin would be as out of place in this situation as a fish in a cocktail bar.

  “To the beginning of things,” he says, raising his glass, and she knows enough to raise and sip from hers.

  She tells him that her mother is Swiss, and her father is in the pharmaceutical business. That she is an only child. That she’ll be making her way to New York, she knows, but not before she’s ready.

  He tells her he was in France during World War II, that it was terrible, terrible, and yet one had a “fantastic sense of being alive, and that life was meaningful.”

  He cuts a slice of bread and hands it to her on the point of the knife.

  He is talking about the liberation of Paris. She hadn’t realized that she had emptied her glass, and he pours more from the bottle in the middle of the table.

  “I’ll just see to the omelet,” he says.

  She drinks more from her glass. Everything is very, very pleasant, everything seems quite simple, as delightful as perfect weather. The omelet is wonderfully buttery, the bread is warm and crisp, the butter, a small rectangle in a crystal covered dish, seems cheerful, wholesome, eager to please.

  She seems to be talking a lot, she is talking about the conformity of everyone she knows in their opposition to the war in Vietnam…and she repeats her father’s words: “If you’re going to have a war, then do it properly and get on with it and get out.”

  “I couldn’t agree more, having been in war myself. But that’s rather an unfashionable position for people your age, who are intent on burning everything up in the name of…God knows…freedom, I guess they call it.”

  “I’m a conservative,” she says. She quotes verbatim from her father. “The trouble with liberals,” she says, “is that to them the future is a blank wall, they think they can write anything they want on it, as if all the writing on the wall of the past didn’t exist.”

  “Oh, let’s not be too serious,” he says. “I’m about to present you with the famous dessert. Pudding, we call it. For you Americans, pudding is only some poor imitation of our custard. You’re going to begin thinking I’m obsessed with custard. Perhaps I am. Well, a man needs to have a hobby.”

  She laughs too loudly, she knows, and she covers her mouth as if to make a joke of the idea of laughing too loudly.

  He goes to the record player and puts on a record that was at the top of the pile. “I knew there was a reason that Fred Astaire song came into my mind,” he says, and she hears the rhythmic lighthearted song “Pick Yourself Up.”

  Her friend is whistling the melody in the tiny kitchen. He comes in with two dishes: some sort of fruit covered with something yellowish, thicker than cream but more liquid than what she would have thought of as custard.

  Underneath the fruit is a layer of damp cake, soaked through in liquor. The differences in consistency—the wet cake, the firm berries, the warm liquidy custard—seem absolutely fascinating to her; it seems like the best dessert she’s ever had.

  Now Fred Astaire is singing, “Must you dance every dance with the same fortunate man,” and her friend stands beside her chair, half bows, and says, “May I have this dance?”

  She is frightened; she’s never danced with a man, or a boy, before. In all the dances with the corresponding boys’ private schools, she has never once been asked to dance. But she had been given dancing lessons, and she knows that if the man is a good dancer, you just follow. And she knows her friend will be good.

  He is singing in her ear, so sweetly she’s afraid she’ll fall asleep dancing. He must sense this, and he leads her over to the couch and sits her down. Then it happens, what she has been waiting for. He is kissing her. “I am being kissed,” she thinks. But then it isn’t like what she wanted at all; his tongue is inside her mouth; she feels like she can’t breathe, and he is trying to make her lie on the couch, but she doesn’t want to lie down, she doesn’t want his body on top of her like this, and she says, “I don’t want to, I don’t want to.”

  And then he is someone else; the man she has been with, the man who made everything happen that she’d wanted so much she was even afraid to wish for it, has turned into a panting, grasping animal, and he says, “Of course you want to, of course you want to. What did you think you were doing, coming here in that skirt that’s barely decent in those boots that are just shouting fuck me fuck me…you can’t do things like that, you can’t do things like that to me, I’m not some pimply faced boy you can tease until his balls turn blue. You did want this, this is what you were asking for, everything you did was asking for it.”

  It is easy for him to reach up her tiny skirt and pull off her underpants, and then…it is happening, the thing every girl has been told is worse than death, and it hurts, it hurts terribly, and she feels blood, but then he is making a horrible half-screaming noise and then he is gasping on her, and she will not cry, she will not, but she will make him get off her. She pushes him away, and he falls onto the floor.

  “Wash yourself off,” he says. “And don’t go around telling everyone how terrible men are.”

  He pulls on his pants and half sits, half reclines on the couch, covering his eyes with his
arm, as if he can’t bear to see what has just happened. She knows he wants her to leave as soon as she can. But she will wash herself first. She feels the blood between her legs; worse than the beginning of a period.

  In the bathroom, she wets the sour-smelling washcloth, rubs it over the sliver of green soap until it makes a lather. She washes herself, rinsing again and again. She makes a kind of sanitary napkin for herself out of layers of toilet paper. She places it in the crotch of her underpants, and then looks in the mirror, to see if she looks different, if she can recognize herself. On the shelf under the mirror she sees a plastic name badge. She recognizes the logo “Lowe’s Cinema.” Underneath the logo, in smaller print, “Henry Smith, projectionist.”

  She sees her face in the mirror. It is no longer tragic, it is no longer the face of a victim. Henry Smith, projectionist. “My life is the cinema…I came to New York for my work.” He runs a movie projector…that’s his work. He’s not a director, or a screenwriter, or an actor, or even a cameraman. He threads the tape, he switches the light; he makes sure the tape doesn’t snag or snap or burn up. Nothing he has done to her can really hurt her now. She walks out, no longer the crushed wet bird who made her shameful way into the bathroom.

  He is still leaning back on the couch, his face covered with his arm.

  She puts on her coat, takes her socks out of her pocket, removes the paper from her boots, puts them on, as slowly as she possibly can, and zips the zippers with a loud vindictive tug.

  “Henry Smith, projectionist, my life is the cinema,” she says, imitating his accent.

  He takes his arm away from his face, and the two of them exchange looks of what is too shallow for hatred.

  “Go to hell,” he says, “and get someone to teach you about douching. You stink like three-day-old fish.”

  Her short-lived triumph over him has completely disintegrated. He has let her know that there is nothing more loathsome than her body, that she is the kind of female who will engender nothing but disgust. There is nothing she can say that could reduce him to the level she is now; she is surprised that she can stand upright; and she knows that she is oozing a noxious substance, he’s perfectly right, that her femaleness is open and putrid and impossible to fully cleanse. She runs down the corridor, she won’t wait for the elevator, frightened that, in an elevator, close to another person, her offense will become public, a public nuisance, a danger to the larger health.