OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  I lit another cigarette. Gerry had tried giving up smoking a year ago and now continually scolded me for not even trying. He said he smoked because he was always walking into rooms where someone else was smoking. I knew what he meant. I could give it up too. And had—lots of times. But whenever I had big decisions to make I needed a silent companion; anything that would sit there and smolder but not interfere. I didn’t inhale so it never bothered me when I sang and danced, but it did hurt my throat and make me feel like coughing. Okay, so I’d give it up when Gerry arrived and see if he would too.

  The moon was coming up over Waikiki now. Diamond Head was a black hulk in the reflection of the sea. Maybe he missed the plane from London. The meeting to discuss North-South problems could take place without him, I supposed. But I couldn’t.

  The phone rang beside the bed. It was nearly eight o’clock.

  “Hi,” said Gerry, as though we hadn’t been apart for weeks.

  I melted at his quiet voice. He talked differently when he was away from his office.

  “We’ve been at the airport in a reception hall,” he said. “We were there for an hour. Somebody was supposed to be attending to the luggage while they told us to wait. But nobody was. I finally collected it myself. When did you arrive?”

  “A few hours ago,” I said, not wanting to say how I’d counted each wasted minute.

  “I have to get rid of some worthy women who want to have a drink with our delegation.”

  “Worthy women?” I asked.

  “Yes, worthy women. They’re silly but they mean well. So I’ll take care of that and be down as fast as I can. I’m longing to see you.”

  I hung up, looked in the mirror again, swallowed my irritation at his chauvinistic remark about the worthy women and decided to change into my favorite green wool sweater.

  I opened my door so Gerry wouldn’t have to knock and wait for me to answer. The hallway was alive with Secret Service and visiting politicians from all over the world. I wondered how he’d get through without being recognized.

  I had my sweater over my head when I heard him open the door and come into the room. I knew he was there but I couldn’t see him because the wool got stuck on my earring. I felt his arms around my waist. My eyes were full of green wool. He kissed my neck. I could feel myself gasp both at the warmth of his mouth and also because the sweater was tearing at my pierced ear. I couldn’t move. He ducked his hand under the sweater and through the wool found my face. “Don’t ever move,” he said. “I like you just like this. Let me help you,” he offered. He released my earring, then kissed my ear.

  He backed away from me, looked me over. “I like that color,” he said. “It’s nice.” Then he walked around the room and said it was just like his. As I thought he would, he walked immediately onto the balcony and looked out toward Diamond Head.

  “Look at those palm trees,” he said. “They seem unreal, almost painted against that sky. Is that Diamond Head?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “It looks like a backdrop, but it’s real.”

  “It’s a paradise, isn’t it?” He took my arm and wrapped it around his waist. “Are you hungry?” he said. “You must be. You always are.”

  “Yes.”

  “So am I. Let’s eat.”

  So I went to the phone and ordered two Mai-Tais and some dinner. Gerry didn’t know what Mai-Tais were. He was amused by my asking for extra pineapple and went to the bathroom to soak in the tub.

  He was in there when the waiter arrived. I covered the dinner plates and took the Mai-Tais into the bathroom. I sat on the toilet seat while he soaked.

  He sipped his Mai-Tai through a floating cherry in the glass. He swished the hot sudsy water around his legs. They were too long for the tub.

  “So,” I said, “how’s it going? How’ve you been?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “What else? That’s what you always say.”

  “Well, we’ve been having our problems in London. You’ve read about it. Never mind about me. How is your life?”

  I told him about the new choreography for my show, about the exercise I did every day to keep in shape, about the health-food diets I was experimenting with, and about how hard it was to find good movie scripts for women. He asked why, and I said it must have something to do with a backlash reaction from militant feminism. Nobody seemed to know how to write women’s roles anymore because they didn’t know what women really wanted. At least, the men writers didn’t know. And the women writers wrote about how unhappy and unfulfilled women were. So who cared? When it came to entertainment, who would pay to see that?

  “I don’t know,” said Gerry. “I’m having enough trouble trying to decipher what people want … not what women want. I don’t mean to sound arrogant,” he said, “but we have an economy that’s failing for everyone and I’m not sure we are going to be able to keep our chins up.”

  I said I could see what he meant, and then he questioned me about what was going on in America. I hesitated, then told him I wasn’t sure. The American people were hard to figure out. Then I questioned him about what was going on in the world. We bantered back and forth, loving to savor one another as we talked and smiled and listened even if we were talking past each other. It wasn’t what we were saying, it was how we were saying it. That’s what we liked. We watched each other with a double fascination. We got something special from how our hands moved, our expressions, the way one would hold a head in a hand when trying to concentrate: one performer mesmerized by another.

  We talked about Carter, inflation, the dollar, even about Idi Amin and solar energy, and as we talked it was like making love with our minds on a double level, each word setting off tiny sparks and explosions in our heads. It didn’t matter whether the conversation was a new tax proposal or OPEC price hikes or women’s roles in movies. Some kind of sensual dynamic was operating. A dynamic that was hard for me to explain, but we were both familiar with it. I would say something about the oil fields in Iran and the need for the workers to be unionized and behind Gerry’s eyes he would melt over me like hot drawn butter. He was listening and heard my words, but I could feel a volcano slowly erupting inside of him spilling through his eyes. I didn’t want to reach over and touch him or kiss him or even climb into the tub with him. I liked the feeling of holding back and communicating on the double level. I liked the feeling of using words to control what was underneath, because I felt it was almost too explosive. I wasn’t sure why.

  I gazed at his body in the warm water. VitaBath suds bubbled around the outline of his skin. I watched how his penis floated. I wondered what that felt like, yet in some way I felt I knew.

  Gerry lay back in the tub and closed his eyes.

  After a few moments, I said, “Gerry?”

  He opened his eyes. “What?” he asked.

  “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “Reincarnation?” He was astonished. “My God,” he said, “why do you ask that? Of course not.”

  “Why do you say, ‘Of course not’?” I asked.

  “Well, because,” he laughed, “it’s a fantasy. People who can’t accept life as it is here and now on its own terms feel the need to believe such imaginings.”

  “Well, maybe,” I said feeling somehow hurt that he would ridicule such a theory so resoundingly. “Maybe you’re right, but more than a few million people do believe in it. Maybe they have a point.”

  “They have to,” he said. “Those poor buggers don’t have anything else in their lives. I can’t blame them, of course, but if they believed a little more in the here and now it would make jobs like mine a great deal easier.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean, they don’t tend to their lives as though they could improve them. I mean, they just exist as though it will be better the next time around, and this time isn’t all that important. No, Shirl,” he went on, his tone very determined, “I want to do something about the desperation of people’s lives now. This is all we�
�ve got, and I respect that. Why? Do you believe in that gibberish?”

  I felt put off by his put-down. I wished he would have been open-minded enough to discuss it at least.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Not really. But not Reilly either.”

  “Not Reilly?” he said. “What does that mean?”

  “Just an Irish joke, Gerry. Just an Irish joke to an Englishman, if you get my meaning.”

  He flipped one hand over in the water and closed his eyes again.

  Jesus, I thought, this metaphysical stuff certainly could get people upset. I wondered why. I didn’t feel threatened by it at all. It seemed like a good dimension to explore. What harm could it do? I could see his point about people not taking responsibility for their own destinies here and now, but how did you reconcile the injustice of the accident of birth into poverty and deprivation when others were born into comfort? Was life really that cruel? Was life simply an accident? Accepting that seemed suddenly too easy, even lazy.

  “This feels so good,” said Gerry, lolling in the soapy tub. “This is a nice bathroom. This tub’s too short, but it’s nice. In fact this hotel is lovely, but especially this bathroom. It’s just a bathroom, but it’s nice because you’re sitting here.”

  “Yes,” I said, shifting my mind away from my thoughts. “Bathrooms are private places, aren’t they? If you feel comfortable with somebody in a bathroom you’ve really got something important going with them.”

  Gerry smiled and nodded.

  A bathroom was a private, primitive place, a place for basics. I thought of the time years ago a lover of mine had smashed up the bathroom in a hotel room in Washington. He had swept his arms violently through the drinking glasses on the sink and thrown my hair dryer into the mirror, shattering its pieces clear into the tub. We had been arguing in the bedroom about his jealousy but it was the bathroom where he went to be violent.

  Then I thought of an incident in my childhood. I had lost the starring part in a school ballet I had dreamed for five years of doing. I remembered looking at myself in the mirror above the sink wondering what was wrong with me and before I realized what was happening I threw up in the sink.

  I thought of the first dinner party I had given in California.” I was so nervous and unable to cope as a hostess that I sat in my bathroom until dinner was over.

  I thought of the bitter cold winter day that Warren and I had played in icy mud puddles. I was six and he was three. Mother was angry. She plunged Warren into the tub to wash him and I could hear his anguished cries coming from the bathroom. I remembered the day he fell on a broken milk bottle and Dad had rushed him to the bathroom to hold his gushing bleeding arm over the tub. I remembered his pleading face looking up at Dad’s as he said, “Daddy, don’t let it hurt.”

  I remembered a housekeeper I had had who retired to the bathroom every afternoon at six and lit a candle in the tub and prayed.

  And I remembered how the most important, private, comfortable, relaxed and necessary place I could ever have wherever I was in the world was a well-lit room with a clean sparkling tub of warm, soft-flowing water. It helped me make transitions from depression, confusion and hard work. It helped me get in touch with myself. It put me to sleep. It soothed my aching legs. It woke me up. It coordinated my body and mind, gave me a burst of new ideas and hopes and wit. And whenever I was out during a day if I knew I had a nice bathtub that I could fill with liquid warmth in a nice bathroom to come home to I was happy.

  Gerry finished his Mai-Tai and handed me the glass. He washed himself and asked me to wash his back.

  “You know,” he said, out of the tub and drying himself, “I’m glad there is such a thing as a telephone, taxpayers or not. By the way, you were quite right about that. I am paying the bills myself. It would have been difficult for me if I hadn’t been able to talk to you all these weeks.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “For me too,” watching him swing the towel behind his back.

  “But you know,” he said, “I’ve been obsessed with your voice and I don’t like feeling obsessed.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, shivering a bit.

  “Well, I find that my whole day revolves around the time when I can find the private time to talk to you. It just depletes my energy, that’s all, and I don’t like the feeling.”

  I stared at him. What was he saying? It made me apprehensive.

  “Are you going to eat your cherry?” Standing there in his towel he looked at my empty glass.

  “No, it’s too sweet for me.”

  “May I have it?”

  I handed it to him and took his hand as he led me into the bedroom. We sat down to the now cold seafood Newburg on the room service tray. The waiter had brought only one fork. I gave it to Gerry. He didn’t notice that I was eating with a knife. I put my trench coat over him so he wouldn’t be chilled and he looked like a clean, overgrown, rugged cherub as he began to eat.

  “You know those scuffed shoes that you loved to see me wear all the time?” he asked. I nodded. “Well, my daughter threw them away into the dustbin. She thought I should have new shoes so she just threw them away.”

  “Your daughter threw away my favorite shoes?”

  “Yes.” He leaned forward in anticipation of what I would say with an almost lost smile on his face. I didn’t know what he expected me to say. So I said, “Well, maybe they smelled of perfume.”

  He leapt up, throwing my coat from his shoulders. He lifted me above his shoulders and hugged me to him laughing, and tumbled me onto the bed. His soft warm hands were everywhere on me. His hair brushed against my face. His nose collided with mine and squashed it. His skin was creamy and warm, smelling of VitaBath. He trembled slightly and hugged me close to him.

  I opened my eyes and looked at his face. It was astonished, ecstatic and abandoned all at the same time. I sat up and held his hair in my hands and tugged at it.

  “How do you keep your nails so long?” he said.

  “Do you think they’re too long?”

  “No. I think they’re beautiful. But they must be very strong.”

  He lifted his left hand in the air wiggling the little fìnger from which almost all the top joint was missing, lost in a freakish accident when he was very small. The damage had healed so well that one seldom noticed the finger, except when he himself drew attention to it. Now he said, “I have arthritis in this finger and it hurts. It’s only developed recently. I wonder why.”

  “Probably not enough vitamin C,” I said. “And no exercise.”

  We lay together watching him work his finger up and down.

  “You know,” he said, “I think I have this arthritis because I’m depleting my energy. I’m too obsessed with you. Yes,” he went on, “you know how life is made up of small but blinding insights?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know what you mean.”

  “I think I have to cool my feelings. I have to get back on an even keel.”

  “All right,” I said. “Make it easy for yourself.” I could feel my heart stop, frozen.

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve never had this kind of experience. Nothing anywhere near it. I don’t know what I think about it. And I don’t know why I feel so drawn to you. In spite of myself, I can’t stop it.”

  I stared at my long fingernails. “Maybe we’ve had another life together,” I said. I turned my head quickly toward him to see his reaction. “Maybe we left things unresolved between us and need to work them out in this lifetime.”

  A flush of confusion swept across his face. For one brief instant he didn’t ridicule my notion. Then his expression cleared and he smiled at me.

  “Sure,” he said. “But seriously, I don’t know what I want to do about us. I want you to know that.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know what you’re saying. I don’t know what to do either. So, why don’t we do nothing and for the time being just enjoy what we have?”

  “But I want to be fair with you,” he said. “I want to be fair
with everybody. I’ve always put my work first. And if I dissipate my energy now, I’ll lose what I’ve been working for. I have so much to do in the next eleven months and I’m reluctant to fragment myself.”

  I turned over and looked at him and sighed. “Yes, Gerry, I know all that. So have you considered giving us up? Just walking away from it?”

  He answered immediately and with certainty. “No.” And with genuine anxiety in his face he said, “Have you?”

  “No,” I lied. “Never. And I won’t.”

  He took a deep breath and went on. “But you see I’m terribly bothered by the idea that I might be disappointing you. That is a real problem for me. I don’t want to disappoint you.”

  “The way you don’t want to disappoint the voters?” I asked.

  “I have to ask you,” he said. “What do you want from me?”

  He caught me off guard. I thought a moment and said as if I had known it all along, “I want us to be happy when we’re together. I don’t understand why we are together either. But I don’t want you to have to choose between me and anyone or anything else. I think you can have everything you already have and me, too. You can have it all, can’t you? So you add one more dimension to your life. What’s wrong with that? Maybe life should include all kinds of dimensions we haven’t had the courage to embrace yet. I don’t need a commitment of any kind from you. I don’t even want one. I just want to know that you’re happy when you’re with me, and somehow we’ll figure out what it’s all about.”

  “But the more I have of you the more I want.”

  “Then take more of me. What’s wrong with that?”

  “That would mean giving up something else.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I haven’t got the time for you and for the rest of my life too.”