He said, “How about some dessert, angel? We got some lemon chiffon pie’s really good today.”
“Sounds good, but I don’t think so.”
“Aw, you don’t eat enough to keep a bird alive, doll.”
“Got to watch my figure.”
“Aw, c’mon. Not while I’m around to watch it for you.”
“You’re a dirty old man, Louie.”
“Just what I am and proud of it, doll.”
The flirting was automatic for both of them, easy and meaningless. In all probability she and Louie could pass on the street without recognizing each other. But in the few weeks she’d been a customer of his he had grown familiar with her in a pleasant way, and it helped to have people who recognized you. It gave you a sense of identity in a city that could easily become overpoweringly impersonal.
Already she was beginning to know people, a handful in the blocks around the store, a larger number in the immediate neighborhood of her apartment. In most cases she did not know the names of these people, or if she did her knowledge was limited to a first name. She knew Louie’s name because she had heard other regulars at the lunch counter call him by it. She knew the names of a couple of the checkout girls at the Red Apple at Eighty-ninth and Broadway because their uniforms had their names embroidered just above the pocket. She didn’t know the name of the stoop-shouldered man at the liquor store, but he knew hers and would cash small checks for her. The pharmacist knew her name because her prescription for birth control pills was in his file. His clerk at the front counter did not know her name, but did know her brand of cigarettes. She was, in sum, already becoming a part of the neighborhood she lived in. When she walked the handful of blocks to the subway in the morning, or from the subway to her apartment at night, there was almost always someone who gave her a wave or a hello, and sometimes she’d exchange greetings with half a dozen people or more.
All of this had happened in two months. It pleased her that she could have put down roots to such an extent in so short a period of time.
Of course there was another side to it. If she were to move to Australia tomorrow, would any of them notice she was gone?
All spring and summer things had been bad between them. She would alternate, sometimes blaming him, sometimes putting the blame on herself. There were times when it seemed to her that he really had nothing to do with the way she felt, that no one had much to do with what was happening inside her. She felt so cut off from everyone and everything that bordered on her life.
She began having orgasms infrequently, then not at all. Before long she came to dread his approaches. She could bear intercourse but found herself loathing the preliminaries. Foreplay became repugnant to her, and the less specifically sexual it was, the more offensive it became. Kissing and touching were awful. Sometimes she thought it was him, and she tried to figure out why his touch should repel her. She thought it might be a reaction, long after the fact, to his affair—perhaps she felt his body had been soiled by contact with another woman. But she could not really believe this was the case, and eventually she decided that she was simply rejecting intimacy with anyone.
Gradually she established a pattern of sitting up late after he went to sleep. It was evident that this bothered him but he did not attempt to talk about it, as they both avoided discussing any aspects of what was going wrong between them. That winter she had begun reading a great deal. She had always been a reader, but now it became the chief thing that she did. She would go to the library on Brighton and take out half a dozen novels at a time. She read during the day, when he was at work and Robin at school, and she read for an hour or two after dinner, and then she would read far into the night while he slept. It didn’t seem to matter very much what she read, as long as it was fiction and not terribly demanding, as long as it gave her the opportunity to lose herself between its pages. Mystery stories were good, and the library seemed to have an infinite stock of them. She would latch onto a writer and read her way through his work, then move on to another. Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen—she never bothered to puzzle out who had committed the murder, just let herself float along on the crest of the narrative.
Sometimes, when she didn’t feel like reading, or when there was nothing around to read, she would sit in the living room with a bottle and a glass and spend an hour or two sipping straight whiskey.
At two or three in the morning she would put her book away and rinse out her glass, and then she would slip into their bedroom and undress quietly in the darkness. She would always be very careful not to wake him.
Some mornings he would desire her upon awakening. He might touch her briefly while she slept, and then would roll his body on top of hers and take her. At first it usually seemed to be happening in a dream, but then she would awaken to feel his weight on her and his hips pumping rhythmically into her.
It did not bother her. She didn’t mind being fucked. She would keep her eyes closed and her body relaxed, and although she might meet his thrusts with little pelvic movements of her own, she did not really participate very much, nor did he seem to desire her participation. He was using her, of course, masturbating himself with her body, and it seemed to her that he had the right. He was getting little else from her, after all.
She wondered occasionally if he had anyone else. She didn’t think he did, but realized that she didn’t seem to care much one way or the other. When he had been seeing someone—and she-never did learn the identity of the woman he’d had an affair with, they never discussed it at all, never came closer to discussing it than they had done on that night when she told him about her father’s infidelity—when he had been having his affair, it had mattered enormously to her. And when she had known for certain that it was over the relief she’d felt had been monumental.
But that was then. Now it was hard for her to imagine what she’d been so upset about. She just didn’t seem to care. She didn’t seem to care about anything. She went to parties with Mark, spent evenings with one or two other couples. She went shopping with her mother, took Robin to her music lesson, drove her to Sunday school and picked her up afterward. She did all the things she had always done and walked through all the scenes of her life as if in a dream, as if sleepwalking.
In July he took her to New York for five days, a long weekend. They’d gotten into the habit of coming to New York once a year, and they had last driven down over Christmas vacation, taking Robin with them for the first time. So another trip just six months later was atypical, and although they didn’t discuss it she knew the motivation for it. He was concerned, and thought he would treat her to a trip as a peace offering of some sort. And perhaps he thought that being alone together would give them a chance to recapture the intimacy that had lately drained from their lives.
It was in New York, really, that she knew she would have to leave him.
They stayed at the Sherry-Netherland, ate in expensive restaurants, saw several shows. He would suggest things and she would agree, or he would ask her for suggestions and she would offer something she knew he would enjoy. They were together a great deal of the time and she was careful always to be pleasant company, cheerful and alert and seemingly involved. She went to bed when he did, and most of the nights they made love. She gave every sign of participating with enthusiasm and enjoyment, but she did not enjoy the lovemaking, nor did she enjoy the meals or the shows or the city itself.
On the last night after they made love she got out of bed and went to the window. Their room faced the park and the view, by day or by night, was quite magnificent. For just a moment she visualized herself raising the window and climbing over the sill. But she did not seriously entertain the thought of suicide. Rather she stood looking out at the city, her city, and wanted to reach out and take hold of it. She belonged here, she had always belonged here, this time she would know how to handle it, and it was high time she did something about it before it was too late.
But she didn’t say anything, not for weeks.
She went back to her life in Buffalo and it was like being in a black-and-white movie. There was no color. Everything and everyone bored her. Robin bored her, and it horrified her to realize this because she loved her child. And Robin was not and had not ever been a boring child.
She knew she was going to leave, although she did not know when, and she found herself walking through her days with a secret smile on her lips. Because she would be leaving all of this, she would lose all this monotony and go looking for herself again.
Her plan took shape gradually in her mind. At night she would sit up reading Perry Mason stories, but periodically she would set the book aside and look off into the middle distance, filling in some more of the plan’s details. She would go to New York. She would take an inexpensive apartment, probably on the Upper West Side. Something temporary, because she would need more space later on when Robin joined her. She would have enough cash to get settled, but as soon as possible she would find a job. The job, too, could be construed as temporary. It hardly mattered what the job was, just so it paid her enough to live on. She couldn’t expect anything terribly glamorous, wasn’t qualified for much, but she was bright and personable enough to get something.
Sometimes she thought of taking Robin. But she had to rule that out for several reasons. If she took Robin, Mark was sure to come after her. And it would probably mean pulling Robin out of school in the middle of the term, because school would start before she would be ready to leave. And she had to be settled before she could have Robin with her. It would be awful to be separated from Robin, but it would be worse to stay here, impossible to stay here.
She kept wanting to discuss it with them, to give them some clue. Her husband, her mother, her daughter. But there was never a right time, never a way to put the words together and utter them.
Her mother, she was certain, would think she was crazy. Literally crazy. Mark would want to talk things out, work things out, settle things in bed. And Robin—no, no matter how many times she tried to imagine herself telling Robin, she couldn’t make herself believe for one moment that the child would understand. It was not something a child could possibly understand, and not something she herself could properly explain.
It would be hard enough to leave. It would be impossible to stay, but still it would be hard enough to leave, and talking about it first would only make it harder.
One day in October she was ready. Robin was in school and Mark was at work. Andrea packed a large suitcase and a small suitcase. She drove to the bank and withdrew precisely half of the money from the joint savings account. She drove from there to a used car dealer on Delaware and Hertel and sold her car, accepting what he offered her. From the dealer’s office she called a taxi which drove her to the airport.
By two-thirty she was in a phone booth in La Guardia with a few dollars in change on the shelf in front of her. They could fail to understand her. They could hate her. Mark could make it difficult for her to get Robin.
But they couldn’t make her go back there. Nobody could make her go back. Nobody.
At four o’clock Cal gave the mail orders to the boy from the messenger service and sent him on his way to the Post Office. Then he looked at his watch and sighed. “Extraordinary,” he said.
“What is?”
“We’re all of a week away from the shortest day of the year. And today, paradoxically, is shaping up as one of the longest days of the year.”
“It hasn’t been so bad, has it?”
“Well, when they dwindle down to a precious few, as old Walter Huston used to sing. And Friday’s always a long day. Are you staying in town this weekend?”
“Where would I go?”
“Where indeed. I’m staying here and I wish I weren’t. I was hoping someone would invite me somewhere. On Friday I always get itchy feet. Speaking of which, Thank God it’s Friday, and let’s have a drink to that effect when we get out of here, what say?”
“I have a date for dinner.”
“Lucky you. I wish I did. Find out if he’s got a friend, why don’t you.”
“Oh, fun-nee.”
“But you’ve got time for a quick drink, don’t you? Of course you do.”
They went to a place on Forty-seventh and Madison. The bar was already mobbed with advertising types when they got there. Cal led her through the crowd to a small table in the back. They ordered drinks. She took out a cigarette and he had a match burning just as the cigarette reached her mouth.
When their drinks arrived he raised his glass. “To Friday,” he said, “and everything it represents. Namely the liberation of the human spirit from the shackles of voluntary servitude. To freedom, Andrea pet, even if only for a weekend.”
Her drink was a vodka martini, very cold and very dry and very large. “One of these is going to be plenty,” she said.
“Two will be magical.”
“Two would take the top of my head off and I might need it later tonight. Plus I don’t really have the time.”
“Heavy date?”
“Well, a date.”
“Somebody who promises to play an important role in the life of Our Girl Andrea?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I met him at a party a couple of weeks ago. No, wait a minute. It was just last weekend.”
“The photographer?”
“It was the photographer’s party. How did you remember that? I hardly remember.”
“I may take more of an interest in your life than you do, pet. Who’s this one? Not another camera pest.”
“No, he’s a school teacher. High school. I think he teaches history. Something like that, anyway.”
“What else is like history?”
“I don’t know. Social studies, civics, whatever.”
“He single?”
“Divorced. Well, separated.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s with the knowing uh-huh?”
“Just that the official definition of separated is that his wife wasn’t at the party.”
“Well, he said he was separated. I didn’t ask if he had a legal separation. I don’t, anyway. And I don’t care if he does, or if he’s cheating on his wifie-poo, or much of anything. The last thing I want right now is a relationship with a future, Cal.”
“Everybody says that. Constantly.”
“I happen to mean it. I’m serious.”
“Oh, I know. I’m just making maternal noises, that’s all. It’s a tendency of mine. You’ve remarked on it in the past, you know.”
“True. And I suppose I’m glad you care. I know I’m glad you care. But I’m a big girl now, baby.”
“Oh, I know you are.” His hand covered hers. “And I’m proud of you, if you care to know. The number I do on you, part of it is just teasing, you know.”
“I know.”
“And the part that isn’t, well, you do inspire concern, Andrea. You just seem so fucking vulnerable.”
“Well, that’s a hell of a thing.”
“Andrea, what’s the matter? Baby, sit down, please sit down. What’s wrong?”
“Just because I’m standing on my own two feet—”
“Well, don’t stand on them now. Sit on your charmingly boyish behind, won’t you? That’s better. Darling, are we being terribly touchy this evening or did I say something awful? Because I certainly didn’t mean to.”
She picked up her glass, took a long drink of the clear cold liquid. She felt a little steadier now. It was funny how his words had rocked her, how abruptly and dramatically she had reacted. Oh, she understood what had prompted her reaction, but it still was surprising.
“What did I say, Andrea?”
“Something just went down the wrong way, okay? Let’s just forget it.”
“All right.”
“If we could just change the subject.”
“Excellent. Let’s talk about shoplifting.”
“Oh?”
“Shoplifting,” he said. “I was thinking about it just this afternoon. It’s one thing I’ve be
en missing at the store. Now every bookstore I’ve ever worked for is positively plagued by boosters. That’s the underworld term for them, you know. Boosters. Some of them are devout lovers of literature who can’t afford to buy as many books as they’d care to own, while others are frankly in it for the money. I remember I was working at the Bookmasters store on Eighth Street and this one dude the size of the Flatiron Building came in with one of those canvas airlines bags, opened it up and began filling it with copies of the number-one bestseller, whichever it happened to be at the time. I think it was Death of a President. A big expensive book, anyway, and he took eight or ten copies easily, and do you know no one even considered stopping him? An intimidating presence. Junkies’ll steal the current books, you see, and then they can sell them to one of the used book stores as review copies for a fourth of the cover price. Now I would always tend to distinguish between the lovers of literature and the professional rip-off artists, you know, and I’d let the student types get away with murder. I didn’t own the store, after all, but I tended to come down a little hard on the junkies just to discourage their custom, because they were not at all the sort of people one cared to pal around with.
“But at our sweatshop I haven’t seen a book thief yet, and it’s the damnedest thing. The professionals won’t steal what they can’t sell, so that keeps them out, and I guess the various wogs who amble in looking for a good read just weren’t raised in a culture where books were made to be stolen. It makes me a little anxious, to tell you the truth. Maybe I’ve lost my old sharpness working here. Maybe I’ll find myself letting shoplifters walk all over me.”
How sweet he was, she thought. Breezing along with his monologue, not even pausing for her reactions to save her having to react. But it was all right now. She was all right now. What he’d said had echoed a conversation she’d had a week and a half ago, and it had caught her by surprise.
It had been a night in the middle of the week. She’d returned to her apartment late the night before to find the phone ringing as she entered. It had been Cass Drozdowski. He was coming to New York the following day on business and would be staying over. Would she have dinner with him?
A Week as Andrea Benstock Page 24
