Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  An hour later I finished off a last glass of champagne and went to the Purser’s Desk to sign up for second sitting. I wanted my meals to be long and leisurely. With a weekful of parties in every public room, and me the best-looking female passenger I had seen so far, I knew it would likely be a pleasant crossing. But I wanted more than that. Since this brief ocean voyage would be my last taste of freedom before I surrendered in New York a second time to a loveless marriage, I wanted one last dose of love.

  By the time I married, I had been in love up to my chin. For a whole year I’d wallowed in it, waking up and licking it off my fingers like a child gorging itself after Hallowe’en. But even without Mrs. Alport to tell me, I knew it wasn’t nourishing enough to live on, and I didn’t choose it for my daily diet. As the philosophers implied, love was the frosting that made life delicious, not the stuff of sustenance. I made a “sensible” marriage instead.

  I hadn’t really wanted to marry at all. I wanted to make something of myself, not just give it away. But I knew if I didn’t marry I would be sorry. Only freaks didn’t. I knew I had to do it quickly, too, while there was still a decent selection of men to choose from. Dr. Watson might be right about personality not hardening until thirty, but old maids started forming at twenty-one. I was twenty. The heavy pressure was on. In years I was still safe, but in distance I was borderline. I had finished college and started graduate school. The best catches were being picked off while I was educating myself right out of the running.

  I had altered my ambitions once for love; I didn’t dare do it again. My first love, philosophy, still claimed me. Now I had to choose a mate who would share me with it. That ruled out Prince Charming.

  After a lot of careful thought I chose Frank. Not that he was perfect—no one is. But I was fond of him, none of his parts were missing, and unlike all the other eligibles I knew, he seemed willing and able to make a little room in his future for mine.

  Franklin Raybel was in the History Department at Columbia, studying Modern European History. He had a perfect name for a title page and a graduate fellowship, which meant he probably had a good future. It was an important point for me, because if we were both going to be teaching, my husband would have to be able to get a job at a university large enough to accommodate me, too.

  Like me, Frank was a Midwesterner sufficiently threatened by New York to need fortification. From Gary, Indiana, and twenty-seven, he had come farther and further than I. I would have preferred someone from the Philosophy Department, but my Columbia classmates all treated me either as an interloper or an anomaly. “So you’re the dish I heard about; I was hoping I’d get into a class with you,” they said. In my seminars no one ever listened to a single word I said without grinning, and then as soon as I had finished they’d all return to their heated disputes as though I had never spoken. They treated me a little better than they treated the older woman in the department, at least acknowledging (after class) that I existed. But it was still a terrible comedown after Baxter College, where my classmates had listened to what I had to say and Alport had encouraged me.

  Those Columbia classes were all the more disheartening because in them were held the headiest discussions I had ever been privileged to sit in on. Theses and antitheses, arguments and counterarguments, premises and conclusions ricocheted off the walls and exploded midair above the mahogany conference table in brilliant illuminations. After only a couple of weeks of classes, however, I felt so intimidated, and then stupid, that I didn’t dare participate. I just did my reading and tried to look as though I considered all that disputation beneath me. I chose obscure minor figures to write my papers on, hoping no one in the seminars would know enough about my subjects to ridicule me. And on weekends when the philosophers invited me to their parties, instead of sitting dumb and pretty through their snappy talk, I helped their girlfriends from other departments (English, Teacher’s College, Barnard) serve the food and coffee that kept them going at each other till two A.M.

  “How come you’re studying philosophy?” my colleagues would ask me over beer with bemused smiles. “Do you really want to get a Ph.D? Do you really expect to teach?” The way they asked their questions, I knew better than to answer yes. I quickly learned that there was only a handful of teaching jobs in philosophy in the country—all coveted, all for them.

  “I just like philosophy, that’s all,” I’d answer. “I don’t know what I’ll do with my Ph.D. Maybe I can work for a philosophical journal. Maybe I can teach in a finishing school.”

  Franklin Raybel spared me such questions. He talked too little to talk down. Sitting in Riverside Park of an autumn Sunday afternoon, we read the poetry of Yeats or Donne together, equally moved. As philosophy was considered a “harder” subject than history, Frank allowed that I might be serious, even awarding me a certain respect. He once listened to my explanations of Leibniz which, he later told me, he was able to repeat to advantage in his own department. He was gentle and noncommittal, permitting me to select our movies and set the time for our meetings; he gave me his favorite books to read and picked me the last buttercups along the Hudson where warm Sundays found us walking.

  “Loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not, loves me,” he said self-consciously, stripping a buttercup of all five petals.

  “No, silly,” I laughed. “Buttercups will always come out ‘loves me.’ You can only get the truth from daisies. Buttercups tell you something else.”

  “They do?” he asked surprised. “What?”

  “Whether or not you like butter.”

  He looked dubious.

  “Really,” I assured him. “Hold them under my chin. Closer.” I thrust out my chin invitingly and closed my eyes. “Now—is my chin yellow or not?”

  He tipped my jaw up with his index finger and kissed my mouth. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “That means I like butter. Now let me do it to you.”

  I took the bouquet from his hand and held it under his chin, brushing shamelessly against him. His only trouble, I decided, was shyness.

  “Well?” he asked, his eyes half-closed.

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid you definitely don’t like butter. That means we’re probably incompatible,” I concluded with a pout.

  “Flowers can lie,” said Frank, and daring to push them to one side, kissed me again.

  To find out the truth of it (and because I had a paper due and would not go home to Baybury) we spent Christmas vacation in an off-campus room of a friend of his. Compatible? Let me say we were not incompatible. I craved appreciation. The better I fucked the more he liked me, inspiring me to put on an ever better show. I could see from how cheerfully he brought in Chinese food for us to eat in the room and how eagerly he introduced me to several of this friends that he was pleased to spend the time with me. I was pleased too: there were worse sensations than being wanted. But I didn’t expect him to come out and “love” me. We had hardly ever spoken personally.

  “How can you say you love me? You hardly know me,” I said, turning down the phonograph to hear his first shy declaration. I was quite surprised. Even in Baybury, where strangers had not uncommonly declared their love in mash notes or anonymous phone calls, I was always surprised.

  He told me quite plainly how. “You’re the first girl I’ve ever known who was smart and beautiful,” he said. “The pretty girls I’ve gone out with have always turned out dumb, and the ones with brains have never been more than good friends. I can’t help it,” he confessed, “but I know I’ll never love a girl who doesn’t have both.”

  So! He considered me exceptional, appreciating my best aspects, and at the same time revealed himself innocent and honest—good qualities in a husband. If, as the poet says, only God can love one for oneself, at least Frank didn’t try to play God. A true liberal, he would likely respect his wife and treat her well.

  I investigated. “What are you thinking about? Truth, now.”

  “You really want the truth? I happened to be thinking about yo
ur resemblance to a certain painting by Boucher of Mlle. Morphy, who was a favorite of Louis XV…. Don’t misunderstand,” he added, “I mean your looks, not your character.”

  He knew I’d been no virgin—knew, in fact, I’d had an unfortunate affair with a married man—but he liked to think of me as an innocent led astray. As to my professed belief in free love, it was fine if I were involved with someone like him, but dangerous if I were involved with someone as unscrupulous as Alport. He overlooked it as he overlooked my dashing across the street against every traffic light: antics of impetuous youth.

  Between Christmas and intersession I examined him closely. If there were ten good reasons to marry him, why then I would do it! On Ash Wednesday, while people in churches repented, I stayed in my dorm and made a list.

  Ten good reasons, and besides, it was time. We’d each be getting what we wanted.

  “If you really love me so much,” I sprang on him over spring vacation, “then why don’t you want to marry me?” A sly, question, worthy of my fellow philosophers.

  He reached for his cigarettes, stalling. But he fell for it.

  “What makes you think I don’t?”

  “Well, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s get married.”

  “Well …” He hesitated, but I knew I had him. “Okay.”

  I waited while he nervously lit a cigarette; then, handing him an ashtray and blowing out his match, I said softly, “How about tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow! We can’t tomorrow! It takes time to get the license and everything.”

  Oh, he was squirming.

  “As soon as we can get the license, then.”

  “In the middle of a semester? Why not wait till summer? What’s the big rush?”

  “No rush exactly,” I said. “Just, if we’re going to do it ever, we might as well do it now. There’s no reason not to. When in doubt, do it!”

  “But what about our families? This is crazy. I’ve never even mentioned you to my parents.”

  “Is it their life?” I asked contemptuously. “It’s ours! Would you let your parents influence you? They should be happy to be notified.”

  He could certainly have said no if he’d wanted to. I couldn’t force him to say yes. He could have composed his own list of pros and cons.

  “Look,” I said, with a hint of impatience. “It’s not as though we were planning to have a family. We’ll ask for cash instead of wedding presents and live on that, and we can both work summers till we get our degrees. If it doesn’t work out, we can always get a divorce.”

  How could he dispute my logic without seeming small-minded? Magnanimously, he succumbed.

  “Okay. Everyone will probably think we’re mad, but if you want to, we’ll do it.”

  We kissed. I was positively high.

  “You crazy adorable little girl,” he said, warming to the notion. “Shall we call our parents now?”

  “Remember,” I warned, “once we tell them, there’s no going back.” (If he says yes three times, it must be true.)

  “I know.”

  We go to the phone booths at the back of the dorm lobby to call. He calls first. I listen to him tell his mother (my mother-in-law!), smiling wrinkles into the corners of his eyes. He hands me the phone. “How do you do, Mrs. Raybel, this is Sasha…. We really just decided this very minute. You’re the first person we told…. We’ll let you know just as soon as we know. Mother.”

  Then I put in a call to Baybury Heights.

  “Mom? Guess what? I’m getting married.” I can just imagine her face! “To Franklin Raybel. A graduate student in History from Indiana…. This coming weekend at City Hall, if we can manage it…. No, darling, of course not. Really, nothing like that. I’m getting married ’cause I want to…. Yes, really-really…. Oh, mother, you’re so silly…. You’ll meet him and see for yourself.”

  I cover the mouthpiece and lean out of the booth to kiss Frank. What a nice gentle husband I’m getting.

  “Well, Mom, aren’t you going to wish me luck?”

  Dear Sasha,

  Just a note to offer my personal congratulations on the completion of what was obviously your thesis. The incorporation of outside intelligences is what this family needs badly, and my personal feeling is that you have likely done well. Lots of luck, and my best to your husband.

  Affectionately,

  Uncle Bob

  Dear Sasha,

  I knew all that talk about never getting married was just a cover. However crazy you behave sometimes, underneath you’re a sensible girl. And why not? You come from a sensible family. I look forward to welcoming Franklin into our family. It will be nice to have a brother, and maybe someday a nephew.

  Love,

  Ben

  Almost immediately, the habits of matrimony took over. I had used my dime-store wedding ring for the City Hall ceremony, but when it began to tarnish and itch, I gave in and bought a gold ring, the cheapest we could find. We stayed in our respective dorms for about a week, then moved into a rooming house together off Riverside Drive. To avoid confusion, I changed my name on my graduate records to Mrs. Franklin Raybel. Did I only imagine the philosophers treating me with a new respect?

  Except on weekends when we went out for Chinese food or heated Chef Boyardee spaghetti dinners in the communal kitchen (our room came with “kitchen privileges”), I continued to eat in the dorm where, with no refund forthcoming, my meals were paid for. But we studied together evenings, taking a break to walk down Broadway holding hands and returning to sleep in the same bed. No more sneaking around; no more blind dates; no more wasted hours on the telephone; no more lonely Sundays. I brewed us real coffee for breakfast, using the coffee grinder someone had sent us for a wedding present. We drank it in our room with doughnuts from the A&P, and on Sundays we’d spend half the day in bed reading the New York Times together. It was a pleasure to snuggle up at night to another body; it was a pleasure to be married.

  One day, not long after we had moved in together, a large envelope arrived in the mail from my mother. In it were a few late congratulations that had been sent on from Indiana, and two copies of a clipping from the Cleveland Post. The Women’s Page announcement of my marriage. The copy, though embarrassing, was the usual so-and-so, daughter of so-and-so, marries so-and-so, son of so-and-so; the couple will reside in New York City. The shocker was the large reproduction of my high school graduation picture which accompanied the article. The reporter must either have remembered me or have checked back into old Baybury yearbooks; for there under the picture, in boldface type, was the caption: SASHA DAVIS, FORMER BAYBURY HEIGHTS PROM QUEEN, WEDS GRADUATE FELLOW AT COLUMBIA.

  I was overcome with shame. Frank had never seen a picture of my other self. Even I hardly recognized her with those shiny cheeks and that eager smile, those long thick lashes and carefully tousled hair. Had she said “cheese”? Was that Joey Ross’s Keystone pin on her sweater?

  She was someone else, not me. The picture was a gross distortion, at once too lovely and too crude. Studio pose, magazine lighting, years past. I tore it into tiny pieces and flushed them down the hall toilet, grateful Alport would not see it, grateful Frank was not home. (“Gee, Sasha,” Frank would say, focusing from the clipping to me, “You mean I’m married to a Queen of a Bunny Hop?”) But when I went back to our room and saw the second copy mocking me from the table, for some reason, instead of tearing it up, I folded it carefully into a square and deposited it with the rest of my past (my scholastic aptitude scores, my list of lovers in a secret code, my childhood poems) in a manila envelope I kept hidden among my sweaters. There was really no decent hiding place in my new life; I would have to rent a post office box for mailing things to myself.

  A little later Frank returned from his class. “Any mail?” he asked.

  “Nothing much,” I said, pouring us each a cup of freshly brewed coffee. “Just some more greeting cards from your relatives.” I wondered if the lie showed. My mother always said she
could tell when I was lying. Something I did unconsciously gave it away. Like Pinocchio’s nose suddenly growing.

  “What do you mean, my relatives?”

  “Your Indiana relatives.”

  “Then what’s this big envelope from Cleveland doing here?” he asked.

  On our wedding day I had promised Frank grudgingly that I would not sleep with anyone besides him, though I’d made it clear that the promise was against my principle of free love. Now, hoping to throw him off the track, I exploded with a terrible precedent.

  “What is this, an inquisition? Can’t I even get a letter from my own mother without your thinking I’m having an affair? That envelope is what the cards came in.”

  Frank said nothing. Instead, he punished my outburst with a withering look and a perfectly pronounced French couplet the meaning of which I didn’t understand.

  “What does that mean?” I snapped.

  “Oh, never mind,” he said, satisfied to have made me ask. And with a sigh he picked up his book and withdrew.

  It was our first quarrel. It set a pattern for all that would follow, and of course there would be others.

  When we went to bed that night, Frank said, as calm as an afterthought, “Sasha, you’d better understand right now, if I ever find out you’ve been unfaithful to me, I’ll divorce you on the spot.”

  Though I wanted to be a good wife, from the beginning I found it impossible to subdue my desires. I was in fierce competition with my husband, though Frank, completely absorbed in his own studies, was probably unaware of it. He believed he had married an impulsive girl, even a supergirl, but not a separate, feeling woman. He was years ahead of me at Columbia, and though I read faster and studied better than he, I had too far to go to catch up. He was the darling of his department; I was nothing in mine. Though we had agreed to study like fury till our money ran out and then take turns getting jobs, at bottom we both knew it would be he who would get the degrees and I who would get the jobs.

  After the summer we took a cheap one-and-a-half-room apartment on West io8th Street. Together we built bookshelves of raw boards and stolen bricks, and slept on a Hide-a-Bed we bought at the Salvation Army Store. But once we were settled into our appropriate young-married quarters, Frank withdrew behind his glasses into his studies, and that whole year we never had one genuine conversation. Though Frank was a live-in husband, we were more like roommates than man and wife, and I had never wanted a roommate. Even during supper when we might have talked, Frank turned on the evening news, reserving his words for the young men in his department, with whom on weekends he never tired of discussing department politics.