Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  The next day when I arrived at work, on my desk was a slender green bud vase sporting a single long-stemmed American Beauty rose. (“Hmm,” quipped one of the account men, “did the rose come in on the breakfast tray?”) The note beside it said, “see you at lunch.” Will wouldn’t reveal how he managed to get it there, or how he sneaked in the fresh rose each succeeding week. “I have my ways,” was all he would tell.

  We lunched that day on roast beef sandwiches Mr. Romance brought in a paper bag. We ate them on a stone bench in Rockefeller Center where, touching knees, we scintillated like the lights on the giant Christmas tree, toes tingling with cold and lust.

  “I’ll be here at five to take you to dinner. First, champagne cocktails.” He grasped my arm firmly as we walked back to my office.

  “Not tonight,” I laughed. “I have to go home after work.”

  “Why?”

  “I have a husband waiting for his dinner, remember?”

  “Do you want to go home and cook his dinner? Rather than eat with me?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do it?”

  Though it was my kind of argument, I had no answer. There had been reasons for my return to Frank across an ocean and a continent, but at the moment I could barely remember them. (I had tried to explain them to Roxanne. “I fell in love in Spain. Love, beautiful sex, everything. I was even trying to figure out how to make it last. But then I got sick and everything collapsed. I had a terrible scare. I could get sick again. Or get fat. It was an awful discovery. Now with Frank, whatever happens to me, he’ll just have to take care of me.” And Roxanne had answered flatly, “You’ll never get fat.”)

  “Come on,” urged Willy. “Call him up and say you’re not cooking tonight.”

  So glibly said. Blow my setup for sex and a dinner? “That’s easy for you to say. You have nothing to lose.”

  “Neither have you. Not if you trust me.”

  Trust him—it was a luxury so hazardous it was the last thing I would do! “I could even lose my job if I keep getting back late from lunch,” I said as we entered the Advertising Building lobby and I saw the clock.

  “Quit your job. Come work for me. I’ll teach you all you need to know about the programming business.”

  “I did manage to learn a thing or two before I met you,” I snapped. “You act as though you’re the first man in my life. Actually,” I said, trying to deflate him as I entered the elevator, “if you get that far, you’ll be my thirtieth.” I rounded to the nearest ten, hoping to match his audacity.

  “As long as I’m the last,” he smiled.

  Late that afternoon I received a phone call from Western Union. A telegram. BE IN LOBBY AT FIVE EVERYTHING ARRANGED. It was signed, NUMBER THIRTY.

  I left work fifteen minutes early that evening, running all the way to the subway. Elementary tactics: One must flee in order to be pursued, I remembered from junior high.

  • • •

  “You’re early,” said Frank.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I had a headache and wanted to beat the rush hour. But don’t feel you have to drop everything just because I’m ahead of schedule.” I was in no mood for rote conversation anyway. “Go on and finish what you were doing. I don’t mind.”

  “Perhaps I will, then,” said Frank politely. “Actually, I have a tough lecture tomorrow, and I’ll probably be working late tonight. I’ll do a little more now, then take a break at six when the news goes on.”

  I cooked smothered pork chops that night; I remember chopping the onions. Each morning before leaving for work I set to thaw our nightly meat purchased and frozen on Saturdays, and that morning it was pork chops. I remember feeling ashamed to be crying even though it was only from chopping onions.

  For once I was glad Frank turned on the news at dinner. With my mind in a turmoil of traitor thoughts I was glad to be relieved of our matrimonial pleasantries. Later, after the news, while I was doing the dinner dishes with Frank off in his study again typing out his lecture notes for the following day, the question suddenly intruded on my mind, What am I doing here? and again, as in Europe, I could think of no answer.

  I had not asked that question since I had returned from Europe full of fresh vows. But of course even the best intentions change nothing. After Frank and I had each taken new jobs and moved into our new apartment, after he had presented the “German Question” and I had cooked the new European recipes for our old friends, we were approximately where we had always been. Many of our friends had moved up a rung on the familial ladder while we were abroad: the single ones had married, the married ones had reproduced; only Roxanne, living divorced in a Grove Street tenement with little Sasha and working as a secretary in a publishing house, had moved in the other direction. Otherwise, it was the same scene as before. The men discussed exams administered instead of exams suffered, the women spoke of recipes instead of restaurants, the students at N.Y.U. were younger than the ones I remembered from Columbia, but it was the same empty life, stretching as far as one could imagine in both directions.

  “How can you go through life just preparing for your old age?” Roxanne had asked me. She had climbed out of a bad marriage through a messy divorce, and with a baby besides. How could I hope to make her understand?

  “Listen, Roxanne,” I had answered her, “the men I went out with in Europe only cared about one thing. One told me that was what he’d gone to Europe for, to get laid, honest to God. They told me about their unobliging wives and the loves they’d left at home—I was just a last resort. Which makes me think I’ve already entered my old age.” Nothing new to Roxanne. “To tell you the truth,” I had even confided, remembering the unmentionable clap, “I wouldn’t mind living the rest of my life without sex. It’s not such a big deal. Lots of people live without it.”

  “Those people,” Roxanne had answered caustically, “have got God, or politics, or somebody else.”

  Somebody else. I finished the dishes and put the pork chop bones outside to rot, but the question kept returning. What am I doing here?

  I threw in the dish towel and telephoned Roxanne.

  “Do you think I could spend a night or two with you? I can baby sit if you want to go out.”

  “What happened? Did you and Frank have a fight?”

  “No, no fight.”

  “Of course you can come here.”

  I went into the bedroom and packed a bag. Then I put on my coat and walked back to Frank’s study.

  “I’m leaving,” I said from the doorway.

  He looked up over his glasses, surprised. “Leaving? Where are you going?”

  “To Roxanne’s.”

  “What for?”

  “For good.”

  He did a double take out of an old movie, then stood up and thrust his hands in his pockets. “You’re leaving for good?” I nodded.

  “But why?”

  “That’s the wrong question. The question is, why stay? There’s nothing for me here. So I’m leaving.”

  He began walking back and forth in front of the typewriter. “Nothing for you here? What about the apartment? What about me? I love you.”

  “You do not.” It all sounded vaguely familiar, like snatches of an old play. “You don’t even know me.”

  Frank nervously lit a cigarette. “Your trouble is,” he said, puffing himself up into his classroom stance, “you don’t know yourself. You’re one of those pathetic people who squander their lives not knowing what to do with them. What a waste you are. Nothing satisfies you.”

  I didn’t want him to start calling me the names again. But I couldn’t resist saying, “Maybe you can suggest something interesting for me to do with my life, Professor? Paint perhaps? Pursue a hobby?”

  “It’s your own choice, baby. If you were willing to do something, to have children like normal women—”

  “Then,” I cut in, taking one long stride into the hall, “it would be a lot harder for me to leave you!”

  (Normal women. “You look perfectly
normal to me,” Roxanne had said, scrutinizing me the first time I had visited her after my return from Europe. “What do you mean?” I had asked. “Your letters were very confusing. So high, and then so low. From the way you described yourself, I really thought you’d been disfigured or something. And then Frank told me you’d got sick and gone crazy.” “Crazy!” I had gasped. “A man thinks you’re crazy if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with him!” We had laughed over that, but it was true.)

  “I’m sorry I said that,” said Frank following me to to the door. “Please don’t go.”

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you would want me to stay? We have no life together. You know you’ll be much better off without me.” I was uncomfortably aware of Frank’s lecture waiting to be typed. It was getting late. “I’m sure there are women around who would be happy to be your wife and have your babies. But not me.”

  “Don’t be obtuse.” He shifted out of focus. “It’s you I want.”

  I knew better than to ask why. I’d heard it before. It was his problem now. I picked up the bag again. “I’ll give you six months before you find someone else.”

  “And just how long,” he asked archly, turning his pleas to accusations, “will it take you to find someone else?”

  “I’m not looking,” I answered equivocally.

  I opened the door. Even though I was leaving, I felt guilty to be consuming so much of Frank’s good working time on my personal problems. “You can call me at work if you need to. I’ll be in touch with you.”

  Downstairs I suddenly realized I had forgotten to pack my diaphragm. I pushed the elevator button for our floor, rode back up, and let myself quietly into the apartment. Down the hall in the study I heard Frank already typing away. I tiptoed into the bedroom and slipped what I needed into my purse, then left again without disturbing him.

  • • •

  I didn’t tell Willy I had moved out. Whatever I might have said, he would certainly have thought I’d left Frank for him, and then he might never have called again. When I found myself being steered by the elbow through the Advertising Building’s revolving lobby door as though to an ordinary midtown lunch and instead into Willy’s Chevrolet waiting at a hydrant, I wondered if he had found out anyway.

  “Where are we going?” I demanded.

  “Don’t worry, someplace nice. Leave everything to me,” said Prince Charming and headed west across town into the crush of Christmas shoppers. “Don’t count on going back to work this afternoon, though.”

  On the West Side Highway I discovered Prince Charming was a maniac driver.

  “At my office they fire people who take long lunch hours,” I said half-heartedly. Ladies in distress were supposed to protest only up to a point.

  “You don’t have to worry,” said Will, looking more frequently at me than at the road, “I’ll take care of you.”

  There was nothing to do for self-protection but keep my foot poised over an imaginary brake and think positively. I was too nervous for a true adventuress.

  The Harlem River was the northern boundary of the world to me, so when the Henry Hudson Parkway crossed the Harlem into the Bronx, I stopped wondering where we were. I was out of my element; for all I knew, the next stop was Canada. It was a terrifying drive on those icy highways, but as the old saying has it, at least I knew I was alive.

  We speeded along in silence, cutting a wake of white through the barely plowed roads. I tried to remember the condition of my underclothes as outside, sunlight glinted off icicles.

  An enchanted region. If the Hudson River was the moat, somewhere lay a castle. Up past the shimmering Tappan Zee Bridge, at last, I spotted the redwood motel suspended on top of a mountain.

  “There?” I asked.

  “There.”

  “With Manhattan full of hotels, you pick a motel up some icy mountain,” I teased.

  “You could walk out of a Manhattan hotel,” said Will, leaning over to kiss me.

  Our tires spun as we climbed toward the craggy top where a dragon waited to be slain.

  In the dining room facing across a chasm into distant snowy woods, we ate our lunch. Rather, we faked lunch. For even after two fast martinis to steady our knees we were too nervous to try the impressive shrimp salads the waiter placed before us.

  “I can’t,” I said, looking at it regretfully.

  “I can’t either,” said Will.

  He signed the bill with a room number ascertained in advance, and wrote in a tip. The waiter smiled. Will held my arm as we proceeded slowly down the corridor with admirable restraint to our room.

  I was wearing a perfectly simple black wool dress that zipped up the back, and my hair was pinned in a sort of bun. In those waning years of the fifties long loose hair was a secret to be revealed only in the bedroom. With such ceremony as Rapunzel might have shown, I drew the pins slowly out of my hair and shook it loose over my shoulders while Will bolted the door. Then I stepped down out of my shoes.

  “My love,” he breathed, taking an awkward step toward the center where I stepped to meet him. No witch intruded. He wrapped me in his arms and kissed my eyes and mouth with princely grace.

  The largest wall of the room was a picture window. Outside, snow was falling heavily. It would feel strange to make love in the bright light before the open woods; nevertheless, retrieving both my hands, I lifted my long hair off my neck and presented Willy Burke with the zipper.

  I had always considered independence and commitment mutually exclusive options. I had gone for independence in marrying, but now I was ready to reconsider. With Frank and without him, my independence had proved illusory, not to mention boring; in fact, I suspected I was already suffering from emotional rickets.

  Could it be that I’d been living by a mistaken premise? An excluded middle? Was it possible that the poets, and not the philosophers after all, had the right of it? I had sought ten good reasons to marry and ten again to leave; but maybe one compelling reason was enough. My husband’s profession had made little difference to me. Maybe commitment would make more.

  Now, if Willy Burke were as devoted as he claimed (“All I want, Sasha, is to make you happy”), there was still time to switch my bet. It would take a large risk and an act of faith, but theoretically, at least, it could be done. Four years to thirty, the game wasn’t over yet.

  Weeks before the first buds of spring Willy and I moved into a tiny two-room Village sublet on Perry Street. Paying my last respects to independence, I insisted we split the rent (too high for me to manage alone), but in everything else we attempted to become what Willy called “one person.”

  “Reading! With me home? Close that book!” said Willy, bursting in on me with an armful of quivering sticks.

  “What are those?”

  “Quince.” Aping the prophets, he announced they would spring to life before my eyes if I only had faith.

  “Those sticks?”

  “Buds, flowers, fragrance, seed—just wait.”

  “Like us,” I laughed, closing forever my book.

  “Like us.”

  It was a risky business, this commitment. People had been known to die of it. There was always the chance that Willy, invariably late, would wind up a no-show; the possibility that after I had given up my apartment, my salary, my swagger, my cool, my wicked eye, he would turn out his pockets with a sheepish smile, head for the door, and leave me with nothing but dregs of wine and ashes of roses pressed between the pages of some abandoned book.

  But I determined to risk it. I had scoffed at romance through the entire five years of my first marriage, resisting all pressure to adjust. And what had it got me? Sneers and lies. Now, I was starting from scratch, five years behind everyone else, without even Roxanne’s resources to live alone. If there was to be a second time, it had to be radically different. If Will was the man, and his style Romance, well, it would be a refreshing change from the indifference I was accustomed to. Between the champagne cocktails and the flowe
rs, there might at least be some fun in it.

  My dearest darling Sasha,

  Your father and I were stunned to learn you are getting a divorce. Even before I opened your letter something told me it was going to be bad news. What can I say, except to tell you how much we love you and how truly sorry we are?

  From the time you entered your teens I have worried about how you would manage. You had a difficult and painful adolescence, always full of surprises. But I never for one instant lost faith in you. Even in the worst moments I believed that if we just gave you your rein and loved you, eventually you would justify our trust and settle down. You were always such a fine, clever, and basically considerate child with all the potential of a devoted wife and mother, capable of making someone truly happy. Though I was surprised when you chose to marry Frank (at last I can say he never seemed to me really worthy of you), still I trusted your good judgment.

  And now it’s to end in divorce. I constantly ask myself: where did I go wrong in raising you? What did I do to make you wind up unhappy? Lord knows I tried my best to be a good mother.

  If we had been a little wiser, maybe we would have known how the wind was blowing. When you wrote you were going off to Spain without Frank, I said to Abe, this is not right, though I would never have dreamed of saying it to you. (Maybe I should have.) If you had only had children, this tragedy might have been averted. Without a sense of purpose and responsibility even the cleverest woman is bound to be unfulfilled. Dearest, there is nothing that cements a marriage like children. In fact, when we offered to help pay for your psychiatrist, it was in hopes that you would come to want a family. But it was not to be.

  Well, what’s past is past. I am sure you will marry again and make a wise choice. You are fortunate to be young enough for a second chance. (I know a young man right now—the son of an acquaintance of mine who lives in New Jersey—who would probably be delighted to meet a girl like you. Let me know when I may send him your address.)