Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  At last I opened my own old wound, telling her about Alport’s wife and how I happened to get married.

  “At least you have a husband you can respect,” said Roxanne. “I don’t think he likes me much, but then he didn’t marry me.”

  I knew what she meant. Everyone had the same response. “You have to forgive Frank for being so formal,” I said. “It’s just his style. People usually think he’s judging them, but really he’s just shy. Even with me. He hardly ever opens up.

  But by then I knew Frank’s silence wasn’t shyness at all. He simply had nothing to say to me. Roxanne saw in five minutes what it took me almost a year to discern: he disapproved. Of her, and of me too. I had long since stopped being exceptional. When he did speak it was usually with a smug wit that put one instantly on the defensive or else in affectionate mindless baby talk. His silences themselves were accusations. He came across like one’s father, making one want never to hang up one’s pajamas or clean up one’s room.

  “Well,” said Roxanne, with a pensive smile, “it’s probably better to have a husband who never opens up than to be stuck with one who never shuts up.”

  After several weeks I finally landed a receptionist job in a trading-stamp company on the East Side where I was supposed to sit alone in a large plush room on the executive floor and screen out undesirables without offending. Desirables were to be entertained. By memorizing a rogue’s gallery of executive photographs, I was to distinguish the faces of the million-dollar customers from the mere thousand-dollar ones and know whom to serve coffee or a highball, and whom to get rid of. The job required tact and paid eighty dollars a week. The executive assistant who hired me said, “I like you. You’ve got class written all over your face.” I was not permitted to read on the job (“it doesn’t look nice”), but on the other hand, no one ever asked me if I could type.

  I spent the long hours between customers picking my cuticle and daydreaming. I played games with myself, guessing what sort of man would walk in next. When the elevator opened and a customer came in, it was a little event. I liked some of them; I felt awkward with others. But with each one, million-dollar, thousand-dollar, or just messenger boy, I was obsessed to know if he thought me desirable. I began to devise little tests for finding out. But no matter how clever the tests, I never could be sure. I kept outsmarting myself with my subtle criteria.

  In a desperate attempt to defy my limitations and know the unknowable, I made an ultimate test. Was it diabolical or just an extension of my job? I went to bed with a customer.

  He was a heavy-set, middle-aged highball-drinking customer from my own Midwest who, out of admiration or inattention, took me for a New Yorker. He came into the office late one morning, leafed through several Time magazines and Fortunes, and was still waiting to see my boss at lunchtime.

  “Have lunch with me?” he asked.

  “Why not?” I answered. He reminded me a little of Mr. Winograd. Both had hair growing out of their ears and both were millionaires.

  We went to his hotel, only two blocks away. No one broke the Muzak as we rode up in the elevator. I looked straight ahead at the light moving behind the floor numbers. 12. 14. 15. i6. So this is how it’s done, I thought. I wondered how he had known I was willing to go to his room.

  He put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle and turned the key in the lock. Then he gave me a big smile.

  “Do you have a contraceptive?” I asked, embarrassed. I thought: I’ll have to get a diaphragm for the office.

  “Sure thing,” he said, grinning. “‘Always be prepared,’ is my motto.” He took a condom out of his wallet and held it up. “See?”

  We undressed, fucked, and dressed again. “I hope you’ll excuse me,” I said, checking my face in the mirror. “I’ve got to get back to work now.” I was sorry there’d be no one to tell.

  “What about your lunch?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry about that. I never eat lunch.”

  “That’s not good,” he said, shaking his head with paternal concern and tucking a bill in my coat pocket. “You should eat.”

  I didn’t peek at the bill until I got back to the office. The mere thought of it lying there in my pocket was exhilarating enough. All the way back, my heart pounding in time with the clicking of my heels on the pavement, I kept thinking: if he thinks I’m beautiful it will be twenty dollars at least. Twenty struck me as a very large amount. But of course, with my enormous capacity to trick myself, I might actually have been setting what I knew to be a low price just to save my ego. Like the excuses I had given myself for my mistakes on Trixie. I was never able to devise a thoroughly unambiguous test.

  It was a fifty-dollar bill. I was jubilant. I looked in the mirror. I am beautiful, I thought.

  But when my customer came back from his lunch a couple of hours later and acted as though he didn’t know me, I was quite as uncertain of how I looked as I had been in the morning. There was really no way to tell.

  “How do you do? I’m Dr. Webber. Please sit down.”

  I sank into a deep leather chair opposite his large desk. The room was soothingly dark, but even so, I couldn’t look at the doctor. Or at the motel-modern pictures on the wall, or at the family photos in a silver frame, or out the shaded window. I focused on the telephone.

  “Perhaps you would like to tell me what made you seek help?”

  With those pictures and that voice how could he possibly help me? But having an answer ready, I decided to use it. “I think I’m frigid,” I said. It came out softly, as though I were on the verge of tears. Nevertheless, I forced myself to look at him as I said the word.

  He was grey and slim, with a goatee. Younger than he sounded. I had an urge to curl up on his lap.

  “I see,” he said. He matched the fingertips of his left hand with those of his right, leaned back in his own leather chair, and contemplated the digital connections. Looking down his nose that way made him seem cross-eyed. “How old are you Miss Raybel? Or is it Mrs. Raybel?”

  “Twenty-three. Misses.”

  “Oh, that’s fine,” smiled the doctor. “You’re very young. I can think of no reason that you can’t be helped.”

  “Really?” I could think of several myself.

  He got out a long pad and, poising a pen over it, asked me quietly, “How long have you had this condition?”

  “I guess always. Though I didn’t know it until recently.”

  “I see,” he said writing. I fancied him jotting down, always. He looked up. “You have never had an orgasm, then?”

  Had I? I squirmed with embarrassment. Couldn’t the doctor tell without asking me? Wasn’t that what they were trained to do?

  “I don’t know,” I said. Did it count, I wondered, that Alport could kiss me to joy? “Anyway, not through intercourse.”

  I didn’t know which embarrassed me more: my confession, or my choice of the word intercourse. Impossibly equivocal.

  He watched me, waiting. I was grateful for the darkness. I knew I was expected to continue, but I didn’t know what to say. The more I wanted to please him, the more impossible to speak. I counted the ‘Nes on the telephone dial and was astonished to find ten, one for each of the sins I had come to confess.

  “How long have you been married?” he asked at last, helping me out. Such a considerate doctor.

  “Three years.” I thought he would write down three and give me respite, but he didn’t. He waited for me to proceed as deliberately as I waited for him to produce the next question. At last, thoughtfully fingering his beard, he leaned back and said kindly, “Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself, Sasha?”

  Of course I was licked before I even started. I had never been one to explain myself. The very things I needed to confess, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even select a vocabulary. Intercourse was out. Fucking? Relations? Having sex? Fornicating? Sleeping with? Going to bed with (even if there were no bed)? Each was wrong in its own way.

  “I find it difficult to talk,” I starte
d honestly, “about my problem.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “Talk about anything you like. Anything at all.”

  But each thing I thought of to say was sure to convey the wrong impression or strike a false tone. I tried to think of something both intelligent and shocking, something telling and rare, something to make this doctor know that I was not, in Dr. John Watson’s memorable words, just another ordinary “quacking, gossiping, neighbor-spying, disaster-enjoying” neurotic frigid woman—a textbook case; but I could not. I said nothing.

  At last Dr. Webber interrupted my interminable silence to announce the session nearly over, time to arrange for appointments and fees. “What does your husband do?” he was careful to ask.

  “He’s the Haversham Ellis History Fellow at Columbia this year,” I said, instantly ashamed of the pride in my voice. “I’m a receptionist,” I added for penance.

  Mother had offered to help with the bills, but I didn’t mention that. I hoped the fee would be low enough that I wouldn’t be forced to turn tricks at lunchtime, which might further damage my psyche.

  Finally we settled on a fee. A bargain, considering. The doctor waited as I put on my jacket. When I finally left through the larger of two mysterious doors, I wondered if he was observing my ass, and if so, what he thought of it.

  More parties, more contempt. It was enough to make one cynical! In Columbia waters I had to swim carefully to avoid being caught in the net laid for nonconforming traffickers in capitalism. I had worked in a bank, then in a trading-stamp company: clearly suspect. Unless I was careful to denounce them (yes, even Trixie), I was sure to be judged guilty. As to my other activities, reading poetry on the subway was the certain mark of a dabbler. Starfish were as unacceptable at Columbia as they had been in Baybury Heights. Like the Ugly Ducking, I seemed always to be swimming in the wrong part of the bay.

  Again, I surmised the safest mode was silence. As more of our friends took advanced degrees and wives, I camouflaged my reading matter in plain brown paper covers and withdrew further into myself. A closet dilettante, biding my time.

  I was seeing Dr. Webber regularly, Mondays and Thursdays, after work, and though I tried to do what was expected of me, I found myself talking about everything except what really mattered. In fact, it was by observing what I was unable to say that I discovered what really mattered: whether or not he found me beautiful.

  I was frantic to know but could not bring myself to ask. Even if I could someday manage the question, how would I make him answer it? And if he should miraculously answer, how could I know he was telling the truth? I couldn’t even ask him if he thought me pretty, an easier, an almost innocent question, and one common courtesy would dictate he answer yes. But like one obsessed, I could not ask. (Aha! he would have said had he known my obsession, why do you want to know?) Instead I tried to captivate him. I concocted dreams with secret messages for him to decode. I drenched him in anecdotes and plied him with metaphors. I gave him my favorite poems to read. Leading him to the well of my beauty if he’d happened to miss it, I told him of my various conquests and seductions, exaggerating to inspire him to drink.

  “It’s interesting,” he observed, “that the only man you say you loved is a father, as old as your own father, and forbidden to you by the mother, his wife.” He ended on a question mark, hoping I would pick up the thread. But I wouldn’t. I found his tiresome moralizing silly.

  “I loved Alport before I knew he had a wife,” I said. “I’ve been to bed with older married men with more children than he. And not for love.”

  Sometimes I rebuked him for the genetic fallacy: taking cause for value—which only proved to him that he was probably “on to something”; and sometimes, planting my profile smack in his line of vision, I penalized him with silence.

  I would wait, smoking cigarette after cigarette, until he came up with a question. Usually it was, “I wonder why you are feeling hostile today?” or else it was his second-favorite conversational gambit:

  “What about Frank, your husband?”

  “What about him?” I would return. My husband, like my marriage, bored me, as, no doubt, I bored him. We no longer had any life in common. He was full of no’s and don’t’s while I liked to think I lived by yes and do. Frank did nothing but study during the week and see his friends on Saturday nights. He varied neither schedule nor sentence structure. The baby talk he had always used for addressing me in public he now used in private as well. Deceiving him had led me to avoid him, and since being in therapy exempted me from his sexual advances (“I’m still frigid, Frank, so don’t touch me”), our contact was minimal.

  “You hardly ever mention him. Don’t you think that’s rather … uh … unusual?”

  And then I told him once again that, not believing in romantic love and finding my husband sufficiently tolerant of my idiosyncrasies to permit me a modicum of freedom, I considered my marriage satisfactory. Apart from the sex, of course, which was my own problem.

  “And Frank? Does he consider it satisfactory too?”

  “He doesn’t complain,” I snickered. It was wrong of the doctor to call him Frank and take his side.

  “Don’t you think he knows about your … uh … activities?”

  “Oh, no!” I was shocked. “Do you think I should tell him?”

  The doctor said nothing. I knew my “activities” had no bearing on Frank. They might have, if I ever pursued them for love. But I never did. Frank, however, couldn’t be expected to understand that. A conventional fellow, he would feel himself wronged and required to do something if he knew.

  “What do you think, Sasha?” Dr. Webber asked, enigmatically stroking his beard.

  “I think it would upset him terribly to know, and I’m really not out to hurt him, whatever you think. It would mess up all his plans. He’d probably feel obliged to leave me.”

  The doctor nodded. He seemed to like that speech better than my other one, the one in which I weighed my own ten reasons for leaving Frank. That one made Dr. Webber break all his principles and actually give me advice:

  “If I were you, Sasha, I wouldn’t make any drastic changes right now while you’re in the middle of analysis.”

  He seemed to feel that the known was better than the unknown, another man would prove no better for me than this one, and a crazy nymphomaniacal penis-envying castrating masochistic narcissistic infantile fucked-up frigid bitch like me was lucky to have hooked any man at all.

  Actually, Dr. Webber seemed less interested in the practical questions surrounding my marriage than in the theoretical. Over the months I had been working painstakingly at getting him to reveal his premises, but with little success. Until one day, while I was discussing a dream I’d had the night before, a chance remark I made caused him to reveal his entire theory.

  That night I had dreamed a chess game in which I, a plain red pawn, had so yearned to reach the eighth rank and become queen that I had refused gambits, squandered opportunities, betrayed my team. Alone and unprotected, I went on trying for queen despite certain defeat.

  “What does being queen mean to you?” asked the doctor, suppressing a yawn.

  I couldn’t tell him about the Bunny Hop. Knowing I had once been considered beautiful might prejudice his own answer to the question I still hoped one day to ask. “The queen is the most powerful piece on the board,” I answered. “She outdoes everyone. She can move almost every way there is to move.” It was rich with symbolism and also true.

  “The most powerful? Is she more powerful than the king?” he asked with an insinuating smile.

  Either he didn’t play chess, or he was after something. I went along.

  “In the world a king may be more powerful, but in chess the queen is more powerful. That’s why as a little pawn I wanted to be a boy and as a woman I enjoy playing chess.”

  I was pleased with my answer, but nothing like Dr. Webber. I could tell by the way he sat up and began to scribble that he was through yawning for that session.r />
  “Can you think of what the dream might be saying?” he prodded.

  I considered. Frank had applied for a Fulbright for a year’s study in Germany. I was excited at the prospect of going abroad, but apprehensive as well; perhaps the dream took on that dilemma. As I was about to suggest something along those lines, Dr. Webber, impatient to share his revelation, leaned forward, reading from his notes.

  “Even as a little pawn you always wanted to be a boy. Yet you long to be a ‘queen,’” he said. “You have ‘betrayed your own team’—your own nature?”

  Dr. Webber’s crude “hints,” which I had always felt free to pursue or let lie, now came thickly. He was like a prompter, trying not to be heard, yet unwilling to let the lines be lost and the play ruined. The more I ignored his interpretation, the more certain he became.

  Didn’t everything, he asked, reduce for me to queen versus king? My belligerence, my seductions, my willfulness? Did they not all point to a profound conflict within my nature? Was I not always attempting to conquer where I should yield? take where I should give? Did I not identify with my father instead of my mother? Were not my very ambitions (to be a lawyer! a philosopher!), my rejection of maternity, my fantastic need to excel, my unwillingness to achieve orgasm—were they not all denials of my own deepest, instinctive self—my feminine self?

  I had never before seen Dr. Webber so animated, not even when he was advising me to do nothing rash. I felt the time had come to plunge in and pose my own question. Catching him off guard in an expansive moment seemed my best chance of getting a truthful answer. After all, self-knowledge was what I was paying for.

  He was still waiting for me to agree when, as casually as I could, I said, “Do you think I’m beautiful, Doctor?” If I could learn the truth about myself now, it would be worth all this painful analysis.