by Sidney Hart
“Christ. He just sent me his plan the other night, I haven’t had time yet, tell him. Or just say I’ll do it. I’ll do it.” I’d been so preoccupied with Sarah I hadn’t decided what to do about Harlan.
After cleaning my station and washing up I met Sarah on the side porch of the hotel. We usually met there. After her dinner she spent time with Heidi until Harlan and I finished work. The two girls would busy themselves trying on each other’s clothes and exchanging lipsticks, makeup and, I was fairly certain, intimate confidences. The waiters were done before the busboys so he and I arrived separately and Harlan and Heidi would just go off, never waiting for the double date I had tried to arrange. I also suspected that Sarah had told Heidi she’d prefer not to do that. The wariness Sarah had fostered in me, first for Harlan but then, unwittingly, for herself as well, did not alter our meeting place. When she saw me she waved but remained leaning against the railing that rimmed the porch. It was still thrilling for me to look at her, to imagine touching her, but I perceived something was wrong. At first I wondered if it was about me. The change that had occurred had made me more chary and cautious with her, but then I could see it was something coming from her. She didn’t smile her little puckered smile and she began to talk as soon as I stood next to her, no greeting, no embrace, no kiss. I dreaded that she was about to tell me she’d decided to stay with Hank and was here to say good-bye.
“I know you won’t like what I did but please believe me, it was for your own good.” Sarah wouldn’t even look at me. She fidgeted with her cuticles, pushing at them with her thumbnail. I waited anxiously for her to go on. “Harlan flirted with me tonight after he came for Heidi. We’d been playing some music while we waited for him to come and by the time he showed up Heidi was in the bathroom so we were alone. The music that was playing was a slow song and I could tell by the way he looked at me that if I were to encourage him he would make a pass at me. So, this time, because he’s done it to me before, when he smiled and winked at me in a way that could be understood to mean only one thing, I smiled back. It was as though you were irrelevant, you didn’t exist, your name never even came up. There was no sense that you were his friend and that I was your girlfriend. He would have met me later, gone anywhere I asked, done anything I allowed. You didn’t count.”
“All this from the way that he looked at you?” I said numbly.
“No, damn it. Do you want me to give you all the gory details, Mel, is that what you need?” If a painful sense of shame was hiding behind her protest I was too much on guard to notice.
“Yes, that’s what I need!” Harlan’s suggestion that Sarah was criticizing him to deflect attention from her own doings had remained in my thoughts. I had raised my voice and was loud enough to disturb some men who were playing pinochle at a nearby table. A gruff, “Hey!” silenced me. “Sorry,” I called out. “Let’s take a walk,” I said softly, but inside I was in turmoil. We left the porch and walked down the hill to the area of the swimming pool. It was too cold to swim and most of the hotel’s guests were at Show Night. We sat down on deck chairs, the lights inside the pool casting an eerie, rippling aquamarine light across Sarah’s face.
“Give me the details, exactly what happened.” Her shoulders slumped as she began.
“I didn’t have to say anything to him. I moved a little closer to him and then I looked down and away from him. He put his hand on my shoulder. I shivered, not from excitement but from disgust and revulsion. Heidi was just in the next room, Mel, and Harlan, Harlan had no concerns, no scruples.” I could see that she was shivering again but I feared that if I were to touch her the feelings of disgust would spill over on to me. “Heidi called out she’d be right in and Harlan put his lips near my ear and said ‘midnight at my car, and you won’t be sorry’.”
“What did you say?”
“Go fuck yourself. Can you believe that? I never curse, but I was so furious and ashamed I said ‘go fuck yourself’ to him. And I knew when I brought this back to you you’d try to find some way to make it not be what it really was.” The episode with Harlan now out in the open she was calmer; her arms were folded across her breasts and her hands caressed the curves of her shoulders with light, soothing strokes. I felt the same sense of sickness I’d experienced reading the rejection letter from college, a sense of terrible disappointment and loss, not the impotent rage of helplessness. I didn’t know if I had any control of what was happening with Sarah and me, and part of me could not believe Harlan had actually proposed a tryst with her, but then which one was I to believe? Maybe Sarah was trying to provoke him to make a scene in front of Heidi. Neither Sarah nor Harlan was proving to be particularly monogamous or loyal. My head was spinning and I couldn’t think straight. Though I had wanted to see Sarah, be with Sarah, hold Sarah, right then I didn’t want her near me. In an almost preternatural way, sensing my withdrawal, she got up and walked to the edge of the pool, her arms still folded across her breasts. “I think I’d like to go back to my room now. I don’t feel very well.”
When we were walking back to her building she said, “You don’t believe me, do you.”
“Sarah, of course I believe you, it’s just that, well, possibly there was some kind of misunderstanding, a tease, a joke, I don’t know. I’d like to think he didn’t mean to be serious.”
She stopped, turned, looked intently at me and, shaking her head, she said, “You don’t believe me, it’s written all over your face. My God, you don’t believe me. You believe that insane story about judge Crater but you don’t believe me!” She hurried away towards her room and when I caught up with her she held her hand up to stop my approach and said, “Good night, Mel.” and marched into her dormitory leaving me standing at the door.
No matter how I tried to excuse the behavior Sarah had described, how I weighed possible alternative explanations, not that I could come up with any, it began to be clear to me there was no way I should ever trust Harlan again. Was he capable of trying to seduce my girlfriend? Of course he was and I became sick to my stomach considering it a likelihood not just a possibility. A cold sweat broke out all over my body and the same faintness that had overwhelmed me the night with Diana overtook me. I sat down on the stairs of Heidi’s porch and lowered my head to my knees. Sarah would not make up such a story; that kind of deceitfulness and maliciousness just were not in her. He must have said something, done something to make her feel so disgusted by his very presence. And as I struggled with my confusion and injured disbelief the doubts Sarah had introduced became a swinging wrecking ball aimed directly at the already shrunken remains of my idealized creation of Harlan, one that shattered the foundation supporting the once colossal image I had erected. The entire summer it was as if I had hypnotized myself into an uncritical idolatry of Harlan and I’d behaved like a worshipful attendant who saw in him only the good. To acknowledge this now was totally humiliating. At last I asked myself why it was that Harlan had no friends. Was it because he really was so self-contained and independent or was he, like Abe Melman, hiding something from the rest of us? And when Sarah told me about his attempt to put the make on her, then what would he expect me to do? Ignore it? Make excuses for him again? It was almost ten o’clock and in a tormented and angry state I returned to the waiter’s quarters, tears of sadness and rage spilling from my eyes, feelings of loss and thoughts of betrayal twisting around each other inside me. I had hoped to model myself after Harlan, to learn from him, to become something like his replica. How ridiculous and pathetic that now seemed.
At the threshold of the door to the waiters’ quarters I stopped. What point in going inside now? Who would I wish to see there? I went down to the bar to be alone, have a few drinks and then go to bed after everyone else was asleep. I had no desire to drink myself into drunkenness or be a maudlin barfly, it was just somewhere to go other than my room. Julie, the bartender, smirked when I sat down. “Tom Collins?” he asked in a sarcastic voice, but before I could answer Louisa, the dance instructor, sidled up to the ba
r and said, “No, no, we’ll have two seven and sevens and make it snappy, Julie, I need a drink.” Louisa was probably at least twice my age, thirty-six or seven. We had rarely spoken but acknowledged each other with smiles and friendly nods when passing around the hotel. She was very attractive and there were times, before Sarah had come into my life, that I’d daydreamed about her so it was especially peculiar for her to be joining me just as Sarah was pulling away. She sat on the bar stool next to me and patted my shoulder. She’d already been drinking before she arrived and her hair reeked of cigarette smoke.
“It’s Mel, isn’t it?” she asked, lighting up a Pall Mall, “I know you were sometimes called Jack but I’ll call you Mel. My brother Myron has a real problem with his name but there isn’t a short version like Mel. I mean what would it be, My? This is my brother, My. I’d sound like a stammerer.” She laughed and took another deep drag from her cigarette. “I heard about your girlfriend problem so I thought I’d give you some company tonight.” Our drinks arrived and she quickly took a large swallow of hers while I sipped at mine. “Drink up, drink up, you’ll feel better. It’s what’s helped me through my love affairs.”
“How did you hear about me and Sarah?”
“People talk, Mel, people talk. Here they talk about very few things, tans, weight, money and sex. You and Sarah were pretty obviously … well, you were going with each other so people talked when she went to visit her old boyfriend.” The ash on her cigarette had extended a gravity defying distance from the ember and before it collapsed on the bar she tapped it into the ashtray with an elegant gesture. It was a skill she’d mastered because I’d seen her perform that trick before. It had men staring expectantly at her cigarette waiting to see if she’d miscalculate the burn time and drop ashes all over herself, but she never did. “I know this is hard to believe, but you’ll survive this and get over it. First loves never last. It took me a long time to get over my first love,… she’s your first love isn’t she?” I nodded. “Yeah, mine was a Steve. A lawyer. He came up here with his wife and kids my first summer as a dance instructor. I was such a sucker for him I could kick myself from here to Canarsie. Don’t you like your drink you’re not drinking it. Julie, another seven and seven please. Yeah, he was a lawyer of the tall dark and handsome variety. He signed up for lessons his first day here. Said he wanted to learn everything I could teach him but it was pretty clear pretty fast he wasn’t talking about dancing.” She shook her head ruefully, took a puff from her smoke and then finished her drink. Her mouth was always busy; talking, drinking, smoking at any given moment. It was amazing she had time to breathe. “He wore these loafers with tassels on them. I couldn’t take my eyes off his feet when I was teaching him because those tassels looked so stupid to me.” I laughed, and thought about the belt on the back of my khaki pants. “What’s that, I kept asking myself, how do you fall for a guy with dumb tassels on his shoes?” And she began to laugh at her own story.
“How could you fall for a guy who wears shoes with tassels,” I teased, joining in with her laughter.
“That wasn’t even the worst of it, that was just his shoes. He said he’d leave his wife, Judy, but not until after his mother died. She had a weak heart and wasn’t long for this world but he didn’t want to be the one to do her in. She’d croak if he ever left Judy because she luuhhved Judy even more than she luuhhved him, her own son. What a load of crap.” Louisa downed her second drink in one long swallow and waved her glass at Julie who nodded and poured another. “Love’s a killer, Mel, a real killer. I wish I could live without it”
“Well, beware of lawyers bearing tassels,” I said, pushing away from the bar. I hadn’t wanted company, certainly not like hers.
“Hey!” she said in a loud voice that made people turn to look at us, “You have to see the whole picture. You’re just a kid, what the hell do you know about anything,” she said, wagging a finger at me. The seven and sevens had transported Louisa to the nasty subbasement of intoxication. More embarrassed than angry, I blushed and started to leave. “Don’t go, baby, I’m sorry. Louisa is getting the meanies, isn’t she? Sit down, stay a while, come on, don’t leave.” “No, I really have to. Long day coming up, the regular meals and, you know, a big steak dinner.” “Yeah, yeah. Go on, it’s okay, you’re too young for me anyway.” She took another mouthful of her drink and scanned the bar. “Way too young.”
I was relieved to get away. Another broken heart, I thought, as I walked back towards my room. When you add it all up, the amount of time spent hoping and searching for love and the amount of time spent pining and grieving for a lost love probably exceeds the time spent actually loving by a factor of at least three. Still, when you have it, when you are in love with someone who makes you feel loved, well, who would want to live without that?
It was still too early to go back to my room so I wandered over to the main building of the hotel and watched the guests rocking on the front porch. I recognized a pair of couples from one of my tables. They had pulled their chairs into a little semicircle and were gently rocking while exchanging pleasantries. I didn’t want them to see me. I didn’t want to have to make idle conversation or pretend that everything was fine. I moved quickly away to the side and into the hotel parking lot. Walking between the cars I was able to pass unnoticed through the guest parking closest to the hotel’s main building. It was cold. I could see the vapors of my breath when I exhaled through my mouth. The temperature was saying the summer was almost over. The cars that had been driven only recently radiated their engines’ heat through their hoods. Now, as the steel contracted back to its resting shape, it emitted sudden metallic pings. The cars made me think of people, couples, together, easy, talking and laughing or just being. They’d have gone to town or to a movie and then driven back and parked, strolled back to their cabins or rooms, comfortable, unhurried. Then, once inside and alone, they’d undress, bathe, touch, and make love. At least that’s how I thought I’d do it when it’d be me taking a vacation with my wife. Wife? Right then I wasn’t even sure I still had a girlfriend, why was I thinking wife? But why not? Isn’t a part of one’s youth spent living in the imagined future?
I kept walking farther and farther back between the cars until I reached the area reserved for the hotel staff’s cars. There were no metallic pings or warm hoods back here. Then I heard the creak of a car’s springs somewhere nearby. Standing still and waiting I heard the creak again only now it had become a rocking and repetitive rhythm. I looked around trying to locate the car, hoping I was not standing too near. I had no interest in intruding on a couple after what had happened to me in the old shed when I was with Rosie. The rhythmic creak became more rapid and urgent and then I saw it was Harlan’s car that was rocking and swaying four or five car lengths away from where I was standing. He must be with Heidi, I thought, and not wanting to embarrass her, Harlan probably didn’t know the meaning of that word, I hunched down right where I was. The creaking ceased just as I did that, as though they’d seen me duck and they had frozen. I peeked over the fender of the car I had knelt next to and tried to see what they were doing but the windows of the car were fogged with the moisture of their breath. There was some laughter and the muffled sound of voices, but I couldn’t discern what was being said. Then I realized they probably didn’t know I had stumbled upon them and were very happy on their own, pleased and content. I squatted down again thinking of how to get away without bringing attention to myself when I heard the car door unlatch and swing open. Like a child I squeezed my eyes closed and ducked my head. The sound of a woman’s squeal, the sound of a slap on the metal of the car and then Harlan’s laugh made me look up. From the back I saw the long ponytail, like Heidi’s, but this girl was smoking a cigarette, something Heidi would never do. She took a long drag and turned as she exhaled so her face was hidden in a dense foggy cloud of moist breath and smoke when, holding the cigarette aloft she said, “I only do this for you.” I knew that voice. I knew it as well as any face. I didn’t have to wa
it for the smoke to drift away or even look up to know it was Sarah, my Sarah, who was speaking.
I heard a groan that made the marrow of my bones rumble. The groan grew louder and stronger. Then a loud cry, a disembodied sound, a single shrill and resounding word: “NOOOO!!” assaulted the night, awoke the sleeping crows whose carping cries of alarm startled me into the awareness that it was I whose howl had shattered the stillness. I sank to my knees weeping and covered my face with my hands. The sound of clicking car door locks and hurried footsteps did not raise my gaze. I was helpless with sobbing. Finally, I rubbed my eyes and rose like someone lost and confused. Harlan’s car, still and empty, was just a few feet away. Stumbling forward I touched its cold hood and then, abruptly, snapped the radio antenna from its base and flung it away into the darkness. Achieving no satisfaction from that impulsive act and adorned with guilt I looked up at the star filled sky and for an instant felt the terror of insignificance that had gripped me as a child on my first trip to the planetarium. We are nothing. But, then, why such pain if we are nothing? Why?
They were gone. A man approached, I didn’t know who he was, maybe a guest, maybe a member of the security staff, it didn’t matter. He put his face directly in front of mine and stared into my eyes. He said, “keep it down people are trying to sleep” and left. I was glad he didn’t ask me if I was okay. I was definitely not okay.
In an almost stuporous state I wandered out of the parking lot. I found myself trying to deny what I had seen, arguing that it wasn’t possible, that it was impossible because Sarah didn’t trust or like Harlan and would never be alone and intimate with him. I began to retch. This whole thing was disgusting. Who was it in the cloud of smoke if not her? Who? As much as I wished to deceive myself it was useless. I knew the music of her voice, the ballet of her gestures, the costume of her falling coiffure. My heart was broken.
