Portrait of a Married Woman

by Sally Mandel

  “The kids have an extra baby-sitter tonight,” Robin said.

  “Aunt Titmouse from Dayton,” Jackson explained. Each of Robin’s multitudinous relations was named after a bird.

  Robin ignored him. “My Auntie Wren is here overnight on her way to Boston. I’m glad she’s around to keep an eye on the nest.”

  “Do they need it?” Jackson asked.

  “Veronica does,” Robin replied.

  She knows, Maggie decided. And Jackson doesn’t, or doesn’t want to. The waiter, who had perfect white teeth, asked Maggie if she wanted a drink. She ordered a glass of wine. As another customer squeezed past their table, the waiter pressed against her bare shoulder. After he had gone, the small area on her skin throbbed pleasantly.

  “Hello, troops,” Matthew said. He kissed the women and shook Jackson’s hand. There was always an initial formality between the men, but after an evening together, Matthew invariably declared that Jackson was a terrific guy and he was going to set up a lunch date. Somehow, however, he never got around to it.

  “Where’d you get that nice-looking corsage?” he asked Robin as he sat down next to Maggie. Robin wore a small bouquet of exotic blossoms over her left breast.

  “Oh, Jackson’s always bringing me flowers.” In her Mid-western drawl, the word came out “flaahrs.”

  “I think I last brought a bunch to Maggie when she was in the hospital having Fred. She’s not the flowers type.”

  Maggie stared at him.

  “I made Jackson some beaded ones for his office,” Robin said. She looked especially pretty tonight, Maggie thought. Part of the glow was due to her pregnancy. After two miscarriages, making it past five months had added extra sparkle to her eyes. Her hair puffed around her face in a bubble that had been the envy of every female two decades ago and was the despair of Robin right now. But Jackson liked it, so that was how it stayed.

  The waiter arrived with Maggie’s wine. She wished he would press against her again, but dinner was served expertly without so much as a feather touch. The conversations soon split into duets: Jackson and Matthew on real estate; Robin and Maggie on the merits of bearing children.

  “Jackson thinks I’m crazy to keep trying and I know he worries,” Robin said, “but look, Maggie, you’ve got your an …”

  Maggie laughed. She studied the scrap of paper she had been doodling on. She had sketched a cartoon of the waiter with the perfect teeth. “This isn’t exactly my idea of art.” Maggie crumpled the paper and tossed it in the ashtray.

  Robin retrieved it, smoothed it out, and examined it thoughtfully. “I don’t have much of a brain,” she said.

  “You’re a killer at the bridge table.”

  “That wouldn’t get me far in the world of high finance. I want babies. Maybe it’s because I come from a big family, who knows? I just want at least one.”

  “You don’t have to defend yourself, Rob. I think it’s a fine idea.”

  Robin shook her head. “Do you realize I’ve been pregnant almost nonstop for two years? And I get nuttier all the time. I lost Jackson’s coffee yesterday. I picked up his cup to fill it, went into the bedroom to fetch something, I don’t remember what, and when I came back to the kitchen, the cup was gone. We looked everywhere. I was ready to check into Bellevue.” She folded Maggie’s cartoon and slipped it into her handbag. “I finally found it when I went to change the sheets. It was in the linen closet.”

  Maggie laughed. “I remember. I always got this thing about open doors. I couldn’t bear any door that was even slightly ajar. And I was always drifting off somewhere. I’d wake up and wonder where I’d been. At work, on the bus, it didn’t matter.” She thought for a moment. “As a matter of fact, it’s been happening again lately, a little like that. Only, well, I know I’m not pregnant.”

  “I was hoping it’d go away once I had the baby.”

  “A lot of it did for me. Except that once you’ve got a child, you’re not in control anymore, and I don’t know if it ever comes back completely. Maybe when they’re all over twenty-one. I’m still waiting. Why did you save that cartoon?”

  “I always keep your stuff. For when you’re famous.”

  Maggie laughed. The men’s voices had risen to an impassioned pitch, so Maggie and Robin turned to listen.

  “He bought in sixty-eight—three bedrooms on Park for twenty-five grand!” Matthew exclaimed.

  “Jesus!”

  “How come you guys get so worked up over a pile of concrete?” Robin wanted to know.

  “There’s a great deal of magic in the rise and fall of co-op prices,” Matthew explained.

  “Uh-huh,” Maggie said.

  They were nearly through with their coffee when a couple drifted past the table. The woman stopped and swooped on Matthew with a little cry.

  “Matthew!” Her voice, like her face, was unmistakably that of Helene Sargeant, the actress. Matthew half-rose, but she placed her fingers with their long painted nails on his shoulder. And left them there, Maggie noticed.

  “Please don’t get up,” said Helene. She turned to her companion. “Darling, this is the marvelous attorney who saved me from those dreadful piranhas at Lunar Pictures.” “Darling” was obviously doomed to remain nameless, so Matthew made his introductions.

  “… and my wife, Margaret.” Maggie watched Helene’s face and waited for the inevitable shock. It came, reading: What’s brilliant, gorgeous Matthew Hollander doing with a dowdy number like you? Maggie wondered how difficult it would be to peel those white fingers off Matthew’s suit.

  Helene soon swept off in a cloud of chiffon and subtle perfume.

  “Whew.” Jackson was awed. “Do they always talk like that?”

  “Yes,” Matthew said.

  “I feel like a lump of pie dough,” Robin said, looking down at her pregnant bulge. “She weighs ninety-two pounds with her jewels on.”

  Maggie watched Matthew curiously. As always, he was unimpressed, by both Helene’s celebrity stature and her seductive interest in him. Maggie had attended cocktail parties where glamorous women draped their cleavages all over Matthew. He was polite, sometimes even flirtatious, but only in the friendly manner he applied to his interchanges with the fat Hungarian lady who cleaned his office at night. Maggie would watch with amusement as Matthew’s admirers became increasingly frantic in their efforts to engage his libido. Finally, if the attentions grew too heated, his face closed shop and he would move away. He didn’t like obvious women, he said, which was his major complaint about Phyllis Wheeler.

  “Helene reminds me of Phyllis Wheeler,” Matthew said.

  “Lucky Phyllis,” sighed Robin.

  “It’s no compliment,” Maggie said.

  “Helene’s much more attractive,” Jackson said. “More feminine.”

  “Phyllis is about as feminine as Attila the Hun,” Matthew pronounced.

  “Fred thinks she has nice legs,” Maggie said. “Anyway, it’s getting late. We ought to get the check.”

  “Better watch out,” Matthew went on. “Phyllis’ll have our Fred in the sack before he knows what hit him.”

  “That’s a little too young, even for Phyllis,” Maggie said carefully. She drained her wineglass and looked around for the waiter. Something moved in her stomach, and she visualized her half-digested pasta coiling and twisting down there in the dark, as ugly as disloyalty. Matthew knew how his contempt for Phyllis pained Maggie. If Maggie were only more like her sister, Jo, she would stand up and deliver a diatribe right here in the subdued murkiness of the restaurant.

  “Phyllis came to see me every day when I was in the hospital,” Robin said. “She always brought something, a little gift. She acts tough, but she’s a softie, really.”

  “She’d seduce Jackson or me without a qualm,” Matthew said.

  “That’s not true,” Maggie protested.

  “Well, let’s give her half a qualm then,” Jackson said.

  “You guys don’t
understand. That’s just sex,” Robin insisted.

  “She’s an aggressive bitch, not to mention nymphomaniac,” Matthew muttered. “I don’t know why Maggie hangs out with her.” Matthew now sounded as angry as Maggie felt.

  The people at the next table had turned to look at them. Maggie dropped her voice and articulated with clipped deliberation, “She can’t help it. It’s a sickness with her. She was raped by her cousin when she was eight years old, and she’s never gotten it all straightened out. Who could?”

  “She probably raped him,” Matthew said.

  Maggie forgot about the curiosity of the neighboring table and blurted out furiously, “You can’t stand her because she’s not a goddamn clinging vine like the rest of us.” As she glared at Matthew, Maggie felt that the only way to stop the trembling of her fingers would be to encircle his neck with them and squeeze hard. The fantasy terrified her. She dropped her eyes and murmured, “I don’t know where that came from.”

  “I suggest you find out,” Matthew said in his attorney voice.

  Robin was staring at them with the pain of a child watching its parents quarrel. Her lips moved as if she were trying to find the words to make it all better.

  Maggie reached over to take a sip from Jackson’s wineglass. “It’s all right, Robin. I’m all done being a bore.”

  “My flowers smell like cigarettes,” Robin said sadly.

  During the ballet, Maggie tried to concentrate on the dancers but was distracted by Matthew’s body beside her. He was a shadowy hulk she could barely see out of the corner of her eye, and yet every time he shifted in his seat, she was startled. She felt frantic to do something about that substantial shape but could not think what it was she ought to do. Halfway through the performance, she began to feel trapped. She was four seats from the aisle. What if there was a fire? She’d never make it to the exit. She was perspiring and sick at her stomach. It seemed forever until the ecstatic audience allowed the ballerina to make her final bow.

  Robin and Jackson got out of the cab first. In the elevator, Matthew said, “Nice music. Did you enjoy it?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “Jackson’s a good man,” he said serenely. “Think I’ll call him up and have lunch.”

  “You do that,” Maggie said.

  Chapter 4

  Maggie stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-third Street and closed her eyes. When she and Joanne were children, they had often played the blind game, tying scarves around their faces and stumbling about the house to see what it felt like. Maggie had watched her own children do the same thing. But this spot in front of St. Thomas Church at noon on a sunny spring day seemed likely to short-circuit the sensitive auditory system of any blind person. Ornate, exotic languages eddied around her: Chinese, French, Spanish, something Slavic. Beyond the traffic sounds of Fifth Avenue, a vendor hawked T-shirts, announcing designer names like station stops on a commuter train. To her right, a trio—violin, flute, and clarinet, she guessed—performed Vivaldi at the bottom of the church steps, and down the avenue she could hear the plink-plank-plunk of Caribbean kettledrums. She wondered if a blind person could identify his locale simply by listening to the sounds of a given corner. The subdued din of Madison and Eighty-first must differ from a street in SoHo or some busy intersection in the financial district.

  As she opened her eyes, the light changed again and she was jostled out into the street. It was pleasant to move along with the crowd, and besides, she wanted to be prompt for her semiannual lunch date with Hilary Vonderhyde. Ordinarily Hilary needed three weeks’ advance notice to squeeze a social lunch into her schedule, but this time Hilary had called only yesterday. Maggie was so curious that she canceled the appointment with her gynecologist and agreed to come.

  Maggie had not visited CinemInc since Hilary’s last promotion. Her new office was vast. It had corner windows and a plush, colorful decor. On the walls were framed graphics of CinemInc’s latest films. There were two medium-sized trees on either side of the couch. Hilary stood behind a sleek blond desk. She waved at Maggie and continued her telephone conversation.

  “No, get me Phil Kessler. I don’t want Mason, he’s no damn good. I gotta go. Just do it, okay, hon? I know you can. ‘Bye.” She hung up and came to give Maggie a kiss. Her electric-blue silk blouse and gray slacks showed off her figure. She was as tall and slender as Maggie, though her breasts were fuller. She rarely wore a bra.

  “I always like standing next to you,” Maggie said. “With Robin, I remember those awful days when I was tallest in the class.”

  “I know. I wanted to cut off my feet. Or head. Anything. I ordered us some salads. They ought to be here in a minute. Yikes, it’s been a zoo around here today. We’ve got two productions going in Manhattan and there’s an awful hassle with the Sanitation Department. Come sit.” She led Maggie to the couch and they each took a corner. Maggie leaned back into the cushions and sighed.

  “It’s a beautiful office. Congratulations.”

  “Not bad. They were scared shitless I was going to leave, but of course I wouldn’t have.”

  “You’re still loving it.”

  Hilary tapped her knee with her fist. “It’s my hedge against chaos, this place. It’s only outside I get into trouble.”

  A young man appeared at the door with two paper bags. He had a beard, a ponytail, and a necktie with bright red tongues on it. His eyes were innocent, ethereally beautiful, but his jeans were very tight. There was a bulge on the left side of his crotch which Maggie tried hard to ignore.

  “Be a love, Tom, and don’t let them get to me for half an hour.”

  Tom nodded and left.

  “Do you have to be gorgeous to work here?” Maggie asked.

  “I think that’s one of the reasons I’m comfortable in this place. Everybody’s so attractive it’s boring already. I don’t get looked at here, not like on the street.” She pried open a tinfoil container and handed it to Maggie. “The best fruit salad and frozen yogurt in town.”

  “Is it really so terrible being beautiful?”

  Hilary smiled at her. “I’m thinking of getting a nose job. I’m going to find some quack who’ll bust it all to hell for me, and while he’s at it, he can break a few teeth or rearrange them all snaggled and give me little squinty eyes. Maybe I’ll order banana boobs and spindly legs.”

  “I don’t think you’d enjoy it.”

  “I suppose not, but I’d like to try it for a day or two. You look pretty smashing yourself.”

  Maggie was wearing the loose black dress that showed off her long legs. Sunglasses with immense round lenses were perched on her head.

  “You seemed kind of down at Phyllis’s,” Hilary went on. “Is everything okay, really?”

  “Not to worry.”

  “She was on your case about your sex life.”

  “I went right home and raped the elevator man.”

  Hilary watched her in silence.

  “Really, Hil. I’m fine. Lord.”

  “Okay, but I don’t like thinking you’re off center. You’re the most stable person I know.”

  “Aren’t I entitled to a nervous breakdown like everybody else?”

  “How’d you like a job?” Hilary asked abruptly.

  Maggie set down her plastic fork.

  “Yeah, a job. Full-time. I need somebody to do publicity posters. The guy we’re using’s a schmuck. Everybody comes out looking like Richard Gere or Elizabeth Montgomery.”

  “Why me?”

  “You can do likenesses. You’ve had plenty of experience at the magazine.”

  “Are you doing this because you’re worried about me?”

  “You just told me not to worry.”

  “I haven’t had a job in ten years. More. I’d have to talk to Matt. The kids.”

  “What do they have to do with it?”

  “Lots. It would mess everything up, me working. I don’t even have the room at home, the material
s.”

  “You’ll work here, lovey. What do you say?”

  “I say … God. I don’t know what to say.”

  “The pay’s good. Four hundred a week to start.”

  “I think I made one-fifteen at Companion.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  Maggie laughed. “Wait.” She sat still while her yogurt melted into sugary soup. “What if you had to fire me?”

  “I’d be ruthless.”

  “What about our friendship?”

  “I can handle it if you can. If I dump you, I guess we might have a couple of tense bridge games.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Don’t be flattered, just do it. I need you. Now let’s forget it and finish our lunch. Yuck. It’s all mush.”

  “I feel exactly the way I did the night Matthew called and asked me out.” She waved her hands in front of her face as if she were erasing a blackboard. “Okay, okay, I’ll forget it. You still seeing Bill?”

  “I’m doing my best not to. Why am I so magnetized by bastards? It’s a classic case of self-contempt. I’m always inflicting these sadists on myself. If they’re nice, I just want them to go away.”

  “What about the detective, isn’t he nice?”

  “Oh, Lou’s all right. I let him touch me above the waist now, but I don’t think he’ll ever graduate to down below.” She stirred her yogurt absently.

  “Sex has become an awful bore. Here I am in my prime and orgasms are like great big yawns. Maybe I should get into group gropes or necrophilia. Oh, Christ, Mag, I look at you and Matthew and wonder if it’ll ever happen to me.”

  “What makes us so great?”