Shockproof Sydney Skate

by Marijane Meaker

  Shockproof turned back to the entry preceding that one. It was yesterday’s date, and Shockproof was looking for himself.

  Raoul sent me a telegram. “Into the crowned knot of fire, and the fire and the rose are one.” He signed it. “Found.”

  I returned with “Only the loving find love.”

  I’m going through a bored phase.

  Shockproof returned the notebook to the table. The King was curled up between his legs on the velvet love seat and he took her and put her in her cage.

  “I’m super-sorry about the interruption,” said Alison, returning from her telephone call. “Hey. Guess what?”

  From her huge shoulders down she is one long underbelly erect in light above him; he says in praise softly, “Hey.”

  “What?” Rabbit said.

  “I thought of a name for her.”

  “Hey.”

  She answers, “Hey.”

  “You’re-pretty.”

  “Come on. Work.”

  Galled he shoves up through her and

  “Let’s call her Dr. Teregram.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s my analyst’s name.”

  “Okay,” he said. “If you want to name a snake after your analyst.”

  “It’s super-appropriate.”

  “Fine … Is it a psychoanalyst?”

  “Yes.” Her face was suddenly aglow and she clapped her hands and gave a squeal, running across to the cage, ruining his image of her as this cool Bryn Mawr coed out of Our Crowd. She cooed, “Hi, Dr. Teregram.”

  “Did you just start going to this analyst?”

  He remembered when Corita Carr began analysis. She used to come home after her session and pour straight double bourbon, drink it standing up in the kitchen, and mutter, “That son of a bitch!”

  Alison said, “I started being shrunk way last September.”

  “Do they analyze you at Bryn Mawr?”

  “The analyst comes to Bryn Mawr.”

  “To your room?”

  There was a real mystique to psychoanalysis, Shockproof knew—rules, protocol; it was like a tribal rite. Once at a large sit-down dinner, Corita Carr had remarked that she had discovered she was jealous of the goldfish in her doctor’s office, because they never had to leave. The whoops of laughter from everyone amazed Shockproof. Corita Carr had leaned across the table and said, “You had to be there, Sydney.”

  Alison said, “Oh wow, not to my room,” and let out a surprise giggle. “She goes to the infirmary, and I go there to see her. It’s staged in the infirmary, just in case you don’t suspect you’re sick.”

  “I’ve never been shrunk.”

  “I didn’t ask to be.”

  “Did your parents make you be, or did Bryn Mawr make you be?”

  “Bryn Mawr never makes you be anything. My parents did. My mother was in analysis for eight years. She still goes back in times of crisis.”

  “How could she make you be analyzed?”

  “By telling me I couldn’t go back to Bryn Mawr,” Alison said. “But now I don’t mind it. I’m getting all these really super-helpful insights, and I think I’m Dr. Teregram’s most interesting case, too.”

  “Nobody in our family’s ever been analyzed,” he said.

  “Where’s Mr. Skate?”

  “In Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He’s remarried.”

  “That’s neat,” she said. “My parents don’t have the guts to get a divorce.”

  “M. E. Shepley Skate and Harold didn’t make it much past the first month of connubial bliss.”

  “Hey,” she said, “you’re neat. Will you mail some letters for me as you leave?”

  “Is that a hint?”

  “I’m way behind schedule today; it’s really gross. I’ve been on the horn too much.”

  He walked across to the cage and said, “Well, goodnight, Dr. Teregram.”

  Alison let out another squeal at the mention of her analyst.

  Then she said, “I’d smoke with you or something, but I have to be at Elaine’s Restaurant by seven o’clock.”

  She was wearing Y again.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

  She reached into the pocket of her mini and took out some letters and a postcard. “There’s a mailbox right on the corner of Gramercy South and Irving.”

  He took the mail. “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

  “Next time we’ll turn on,” she said. “I’ve got some Acapulco Gold in the vegetable bin. If I wanted to sell it, I could probably get thirty dollars.”

  As he rode down in the elevator, he read the postcard. It was addressed to someone in Los Angeles.

  Dear Sandra,

  It’s really gross not to be in L.A. this summer. I miss it, but I am nearer Raoul. Hey. Guess what? Raoul sent me a telegram: “Into the crowned knot of fire: and the fire and the rose are one.” From T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets. He signed it “Found.” I returned with “Only the loving find love,” from D. H. Lawrence. Please write what’s happening. New York is boring. Ali.

  Five

  DON’T LOVE ME SWEETHEART / I MIGHT STOP LOVING YOU

  It was Harold Skate’s practice to write letters on Skate Pool invoice forms. There were two sheets to a form. Shockproof was expected to put his answer beneath his father’s message (extending it, if necessary, to the extra invoice always enclosed)—then to rip off one for his own records, and forward the duplicate for his father’s files.

  That Friday morning, the following invoice arrived as he was having breakfast with his mother.

  Dear Sydney,

  Please find enclosed herewith a check for forty-five (45) dollars. In replying, please acknowledge receipt of this money.

  Your stepmother and I will be in New York City on Tuesday forthcoming, at the Commodore Hotel for a business conference.

  We look forward to seeing you.

  Use the enclosed to purchase three seats (one for you as our guest) to something light on Broadway. Your stepmother and I have seen Fiddler on the Roof and Butterflies Are Free. Neither of us would be particularly interested in comedies about the race issue or with nakedness, since this is also a vacation of sorts.

  We had a barbecue for twenty in our backyard last night.

  Affectionately,

  Your father, Harold E. Skate

  M.E. said, “He probably has a copy of every letter he’s ever written or received.”

  “What were his letters like to you?”

  “Not very different from this one,” she said, handing the invoice back to Shockproof.

  “Boy, I sure don’t see you two together, at all!”

  “Boy, you sure don’t,” she said.

  They usually had breakfast in a corner of the kitchen overlooking the garden. The basement of the town house was rented out to two NYU students, Mike and Albert, who often suntanned in the garden, encircled by the various sand sculptures Cappy made the summer they had spent on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Shockproof had a great deal of privileged information about both boys. At night he would often not turn on his lights in his room, and crouch by the window listening to what they said to one another, to others, and about one another.

  Mike was the Don Juan of the twosome. He was always making deals with Albert, so that Albert would not return until 2 A.M.on certain evenings. Mike was an encyclopedia of romantic clichés when he entertained a girl. They would be sitting out under the stars turning on after Mike had made them charcoal steaks, and Mike would wait for a moment of silence. Then Mike would reach for the girl’s hand and say softly, “Hello.”

  Sometimes, “Hi!”

  Another of his favorites was to wait for a break in the conversation and say, “Mary?”

  “What?” Mary would say.

  Mike would say, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Thank you for being Mary,” Mike would say.

  Sometimes Mike would not say anything, but reach across instead as though he were delivering a slow-
motion punch, barely grazing the girl’s chin. He might follow with “Glad you came.” Sometimes it was put as a statement of fact; sometimes it was a question.

  Then there was Mike’s psychosemantic side.

  “Aileen,” Mike would say, “I love you. I may even be in love with you.”

  “Betty,” Mike would say, “I love you. But do you know something? I also like you, genuinely like you, as a person.”

  Albert was the garden intellectual. He romanced his dates by playing Bach full pitch over the hi-fi, and sometimes recorded discussions by Herbert Marcuse, Stokely Carmichael, and Thic Nhat Hahn. If Albert made out, Shockproof had no glimmering of it. He had never even seen Albert holding hands with one of his dates. Albert’s women were of the leather shoulder bag, leather sandal variety, with steel-rimmed spectacles, no makeup, and leather watch straps.

  Albert prefaced almost everything he said with a so-and-so said, as Dostoevski said, as Terry Southern said, as Martin Buber said, as Marshall McLuhan said; he often sounded like one of the dead Kennedys giving a major policy address, stealing support for his ideas from Bartlett’s.

  M. E. Shepley Skate answered the telephone on the first ring, punching a yolk of her egg with her fork as she picked the cradle off its receiver with her left hand.

  “Annie!” she said. “Hi! Love. How are you?”

  The distaff side of Ellie and Ann: Ann MacReynolds. She was most famous as a female computer in a TV spaghetti commercial, which M. E. Shepley Skate had cast. She said “I’m programmed for Porproganni!” and then a box of spaghetti wearing a black mask and a silver saber waltzed away with her. She also played in various productions at La Mama and New Dramatists.

  M. E. Shepley Skate said, “Yes, I know where Ellie’s staying, but Annie, is it fair to ask me?”

  Shockproof waited to be sent out of the room on the inevitable errand. He downed as much of his scrambled eggs as he could, while they were still warm.

  “I can tell you she’s not staying with the alleged new person,” said M. E. Shepley Skate.

  M.E. listened for a while and then said, “No, Annie, she does not bring whoever it is here. I wouldn’t do that to you, and neither would Ellie. Annie. Love. You know better.”

  M. E. Shepley Skate snapped her fingers to get Shockproof’s attention. She cupped her hand over the receiver and said, “Sydney, would you get me a fresh pack of Gauloises from my purse in the bedroom? Please?”

  Shockproof put down his fork and got up. Halfway down the hall he could still hear his mother. “If you think Ellie’s taking this any better, you’re very mistaken, Annie. Seriously. And I promise you I haven’t even met this alleged new person.… What? Well, what the hell is she if she isn’t alleged? Nobody’s met her!”

  Shockproof sat down on the bed in his mother’s room to give her extra time. He took her purse from the bedside table, opened it, and found the Gauloises. There were several match-books from Stay. The front covers said:

  fay foote’s

  STAY

  The back covers said:

  don’t go

  STAY

  don’t go

  STAY

  don’t go

  STAY

  don’t go

  STAY on 3rd

  at 90th Street

  In the morning before she went to work, Shockproof’s mother always reached into the enormous crystal brandy snifter for matchbooks. The Stay matchbooks were never put into the snifter. Before she went to the office, M. E. Shepley Skate usually removed the Stay matchbooks from her bag and coat pockets.

  Shockproof had never been to Stay, but he knew Fay Foote. Fay Foote was a legend in gay life. Shockproof had overheard more about Fay Foote than anyone else. Fay Foote was notorious in au courant straight circles, too.

  Back in the years when M. E. Shepley Skate was with Cappy, Fay Foote had been paid fifty thousand dollars by a gay boy to marry him. She had been promised a thousand a month thereafter for life. The gay boy was Foster Foote of Foote Refineries in Dallas. Before Fay married him, he could not come into his inheritance. His grandfather’s will stipulated he was to have a wife.

  Foster Foote also helped set up Fay in the restaurant business. In addition to Stay, Fay Foote owned Linger in Southampton.

  Fay Foote looked like Anne Bancroft playing Mrs. Robinson. She was always rumored to be off in Acapulco with a famous actress, or in Rio with the wife of some famous person. She was always tanned and just back from Tangier, Antigua, Gstaad, or wind-burned and home from St. Moritz or Aspen.

  Women were reputed to enter Stay on their husband’s arm, and leave on Fay Foote’s. Often it was the husbands who took the tumble, but Fay Foote was not AC-DC. Shockproof had heard other expressions for it such as double-gaited, both ways, and bi, but he had never forgotten Fay Foote’s way of saying she wasn’t like that. Out at Judy Ewen’s in Amagansett last summer, while Shockproof was making a batch of mint juleps for everyone, he had heard Fay Foote holding forth out on the terrace. “I’m just not succotash!” she had exclaimed.

  That same weekend, when Shockproof was trying to sleep one night, he had overheard this between M. E. Shepley Skate and Fay Foote:

  —Sydney digs, Shep.

  —No.

  —You’re out of it, if you think he doesn’t.

  —Why do you think he does?

  —He’s not a dumb-dumb, Shep. He knows where it’s at.

  —Sydney’s very intelligent, but don’t mistake intelligence for sophistication.

  Shockproof put his mother’s purse back. He thought of Estelle Kelly. Before yesterday he had always called Estelle Kelly the day after, no matter how badly she had treated him during her postsexual depression.

  He would miss Estelle Kelly, and from time to time regret that he had put all that behind him to enter a new phase.

  He would have to go to the library and find The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, in order to discover what this thing was about the crowned knot of fire and the rose.

  For a time he sat on the bed trying to improve on yesterday’s conversation with Alison. He should never have asked her if the analyst came to her room at Bryn Mawr. Of course the analyst didn’t come to the room. He knew enough from Corita Carr’s analysis to know the analyst didn’t budge for the analysand. Once, back in the time when there were newspaper accounts of people setting fire to themselves in protest over something, Corita Carr had been unable to persuade her analyst to find her some matches, so she would not have to continue her hour without a cigarette. Her analyst refused, saying he did not smoke and had no matches. Corita Carr had begged him to just step out into his apartment, go to the kitchen, and light her cigarette from his stove. Her analyst refused. Corita Carr had groaned at him. “I can’t believe you’d treat me this way. I could douse myself with kerosene and set myself afire, I’m so traumatized by this whole thing.” Her analyst replied, “May I remind you that you have nothing with which to ignite yourself?”

  “That son of a bitch!” Corita Carr had said. “Oh, that son of a bitch!”

  Another thing Shockproof never should have said was “Is that a hint?” when Alison said, “Will you mail some letters for me as you leave?”

  He should have just left. Cool. Promenade.—You were there when I was not. I was there when you were not. Don’t love me, sweetheart, or I might stop loving you.

  Another thing he should never have said was the second “I’ll be in touch.” One “I’ll be in touch” was just right. Two threw things out of whack. He sighed. M.E. was right. He was definitely not sophisticated. He was no Raoul who knew enough to sign telegrams “Found.” “Lost” was more his style, and now he remembered the scent of Y, felt his stomach give, and Alison Arnstein Gray, did first what no one had ever done better … well holding arms, quick searching tongue, the flat eyes, the good taste of mouth, then uncomfortably, tightly, sweetly, moistly, lovely, tightly, achingly, fully, finally, unendingly, never-endingly, never-to-endingly, ca-ROOOOOOOOM—Shockproof blew off his head
with a twelve-gauge shotgun. So much for the affair between “Papa” and A.A.G.

  Shockproof was almost to the kitchen when he heard the windup of his mother’s telephone conversation with Ann MacReynolds.

  “… So Liz and I had dinner with her at Elaine’s.”

  He froze, remembering Alison saying yesterday she had to be at Elaine’s.

  “I think she needs the money, but she’s too well brought-up to admit she’d do it for money. I had to say something about charity and her prerogative blah blah if she wants to donate the money.… Are you kidding, Annie? Dear, she’s nineteen. A lit-tle young.”

  You child, she gasped, you don’t understand, you can’t understand—God help me, I love you. And now she had the girl in her arms and was kissing her eyes and mouth: Mary … Mary.

  When Cappy had lived with them, she had a small cache of books she kept hidden in the bottom drawer of her file cabinet. The first one which Shockproof had ever smuggled out to read was The Well of Loneliness.

  “Good-bye then, Ann. Don’t be a stranger,” said M.E.… then, “Sydney?”

  “Coming.”

  “Your breakfast is cold.”

  “I had all I can eat.”

  “What’s the matter with you all of a sudden?”

  “Nothing is.”

  “Something is.”

  “Is she going to do it?”

  “Is who going to do what?”

  “Alison. Is Alison going to do the commercial?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She’s always talking about money.”

  “Are you always standing out in the hall listening?”

  “I heard the tail end.”

  “I was telling Annie: she’s only nineteen. That’s a lit-tle young to be thrown into the commercial rat race.”

  “Or any rat race,” he said.