Shockproof Sydney Skate

by Marijane Meaker

  “Yes. Come on in.”

  She was wearing a light blue Lilly and sunglasses, which she took off, and then slipped out of her Swedish clogs as she sat down in the leather chair near his desk. “Are you watching something?”

  “No. It’s dubbed, anyway.” He turned down the sound on the set.

  She lit a Gauloise. “The traffic was murder.”

  “Albert drove Loretta back.”

  “Is this a new romance?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Shall I check with the service, or did you get the calls?”

  “There weren’t any. Cappy called.”

  “Sydney, I think I’m going to take my vacation early. I’ll probably leave Wednesday.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Liz and Annie and I are going to St. Thomas for two weeks.”

  “Good enough.”

  “If I can get the Gun people off my back, I’ll leave Wednesday night.”

  “Okay.”

  “That must have been made years ago.”

  “1955, according to Cue. Before anyone even knew Mastroianni.”

  “When I get back we’ll have to shop for college. You need a new winter coat. Winters are hell upstate.”

  “I could get one of those things where the lining zips out and use it for spring and winter.”

  “We’ll do all that when I get back.”

  “Cappy’s going to the Cape tomorrow.”

  “I know. I want to call her before it’s too late. I’ll do that now.” She picked up her clogs and stood up. “Sydney?”

  “What?”

  “Are things okay between us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything you want to discuss?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I want to check over your luggage, too. I think you could use a new footlocker.”

  “I need boots.”

  “I know. We’ll do all that when I get back. I’m going to fix a sandwich. Do you want one?”

  “I ate already.”

  On and on.

  Passing for any other conversation, save for those few seconds, so fleeting and unexpected that he could not be sure he had not imagined it, or read it in some novel and then interjected it into the proceedings. How had it gone exactly? Are things okay? / Yes. / Is there anything to say? / Nothing.

  Monsieur Meursault heard the judge’s voice asking him if he had anything more to say. After thinking for a moment, Meursault answered “No.” Then the policemen led him out.

  Later he heard her across the hall, telling Cappy over the telephone: “No, on the contrary. I think I’m relieved.” But he did not know what it was she was relieved over: the Alison thing, or this thing. He turned off Island Princess, and there was silence in the house for some time while Cappy talked and M.E. listened, occasionally said, “Yes,” “I know,” “Ummm hmmm.” She knew that he could hear, and he thought of closing his bedroom door, but she had not closed hers; he left it open, picked up Steps again, half read, half heard M.E.’s incidental remarks as Cappy did the talking.

  Then M.E. began to talk: about Annie’s suicide threat, and how she and Liz had gone directly to Westport after their phone conversation with Annie, about their plans for the trip to St. Thomas, on and on, until Shockproof began to feel comfortable with the hum of gossip emanating from M.E.’s room, and something to read: now, in Steps, the hero had found a disguise, that of a deaf-mute, and he acted out his wishes in pantomime, and this notion distracted Shockproof somewhat, so that it was some time before it registered with him that M.E. was not bothering to use code: “… the pity of it is,” she was telling Cappy, “there’s just no way now to convince Annie that she’ll ever love another woman as she loves Ellie.”

  Before she left for St. Thomas, M.E. never went back on code, and often as Shockproof adjusted to this new way of life, he remembered the hero in Steps jerking his shoulders and flapping his ear like a spastic, to indicate to people that he could not hear and could not speak. Once, when M.E. remarked at breakfast that one reason for the St. Thomas trip was so Ellie could move her things out of the house in Annie’s absence (“… sparing Annie that heartbreak”), he found his hand feeling his ear, remembering how in the deaf-mute charade, the ear was slapped repeatedly until people perceived the defect.

  He said, “It’s such a beautiful house. Won’t Ellie miss it?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  A week from the day she left, he spent the day unpacking a shipment of rabbits. One large fawn-colored Flemish Giant was nibbling on the hay in her box, forming it into a nest and pulling out the hair from her own body, to conscientiously line the nest. It was a sign she was pregnant, and he separated her from the others, leaving a note about her condition for Leogrande, since the next day was his day off. He checked in the order book on Leogrande’s desk to be sure ZZL was still filling the standard order for mice and ribbon snakes at Gray, A., on Gramercy Park South. As always, he made sure there was no mail from Lorna Dune.

  On his way home, he stopped at the stationer’s and selected a Morton Cooper, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and a Catherine Gaskin gothic from the lending library.

  An invoice from his father awaited him at home.

  Dear Sydney,

  Yours of 7 July received. “Daughter” was named before we bought her from Morton Goldman. Your stepmother is now visiting her sister in Jacksonville, Florida. With all its beaches and natural facilities, more swimming pools are sold in that state per annum than in Pennsylvania and New Jersey put together. Will we see you before you leave for college?

  Affectionately,

  Your father, Harold Skate

  He was living largely in the back of the house, save for brief intervals in the kitchen and bathroom. He made himself a peanut butter sandwich and opened a bottle of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, then carried it into M.E.’s bedroom and sat on the chaise staring at her personal bookshelf. The den contained most of their books, but they both had a private collection in their bedrooms; they had an understanding that they would not borrow from each other’s private collection.

  In M.E.’s absence he often looked through her personal books, knowing her habit of filing letters and mementos in particular volumes. For example, several notes and a few theater stubs dating back from the period with Cappy were contained in a slender red book of Charlotte Mew’s Collected Poems; there were two letters from Corita Carr in Crime and Punishment. There was a valentine from someone named Clarissa in Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt. At school, he had imitated M.E.’s system and filed letters from Estelle Kelly in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and a few of his father’s invoices in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary.

  He munched on his sandwich and opened a dozen books, finding nothing new. He weighed the idea of going through every book, then changed his mind and went back across the hall to his own room.

  For a while he watched Mike, Albert, and Hippy Hair attempt Greek dances down in the garden; then he shut the window and turned on the air conditioning. He had seen too many of those new movies where the characters’ pasts kept flashing jerkily across the screen out of context, and he fought the impulse to pretend he was in a film and that was happening to him. He fought any confirmation coming from his end that he was down, and was in fact laughing sometime later when the phone rang. He had just found the part in The French Lieutenant’s Woman when prim, pale, Ernestina wrote in her black morocco diary (with the gold clasp): Did not see dearest Charles. Did not go out. Did not feel happy.

  “Did not expect to hear from you,” he told Estelle.

  “The coast is clear,” she said. “The password is ‘Found Under Carnal Knowledge’—that’s the derivation of fuck, in case nobody hopped off a tram and told you. They used it in British Army medical reports—cor, fancy that. I learned a terrible lot in Merry Old Hawaii.”

  “Where are Gracious Me and Balls Off?” he said.

  “Points west by jet. Do you know what Cock Robin’s name was before he changed
it?”

  “Why don’t you come down here? My mother’s away.”

  “Penis Rabinowitz.… How soon?”

  “Anytime. I don’t have to work tomorrow.”

  “Splashdown in forty-five minutes,” she said. “Advise the Lunar Receiving Laboratory to stand by for rock samples, and ready the mobile quarantine facility.”

  Near midnight she was Black Star under Warren Webber, squeezing the hard, hot velvet instrument: He was stroking her slowly, with certainty, with man’s certainty, and she bit his chin with her teeth and wanted the velvet to burst inside her, wanted it to velvet her forever, wanted it, wanted it O God I’ve never had it like this, wanted it, I’ll die if it doesn’t happen now. I’ll die if you stop, want it, want it, deeper, fuller, slower, need it, faster now—

  “Stop pumping, you’re not even in me!” said Estelle.

  “I’ll build us another drink,” said Warren Webber.

  But on the way to the kitchen, like a sudden attack of hiccups, he heard himself sob, the sensation arresting him momentarily in the narrow hallway. The sound came like stabs. He leaned against the wall. They were hoarse, staccato, unpremeditated sounds, which he quickly transformed into the noise of a coughing fit.

  Then he got past it.

  “Do you want to know why I didn’t radio in for takeoff clearance this morning, Navigator?” They were walking toward Third Avenue to hail a taxi for Estelle. It was a sunny, summer noon; he planned to go back home after he caught a cab for her, and sleep off his hangover.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I didn’t wake up with an octopus.” Estelle was jumping the cracks in the sidewalk on Nineteenth Street, swinging a green straw bag with MAUNA LOA, Hawaii National Park threaded through its side in yellow.

  He started to say something when he saw Alison Gray. She was in her Triumph, with the top down, waiting for the light on the corner of Nineteenth and Third. Beside her, in the front seat, was a chunky fellow with long black curly sideburns, and those goggle-like large round yellow spectacles.

  “For once you didn’t have hangover hots,” Estelle said. “You actually stayed on your own side of the bed. Did you heave in the night or something?”

  Then Alison looked toward him.

  “Are we on the same wavelength this morning?” Estelle asked. “Pilot to tower, pilot to tower, can you read me?”

  “I see someone,” he said.

  Alison waved at him, and in an instant he was saying: “They make good pets.”

  “This one smells. He’s really super-stinky.”

  “He’s making himself smell.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s doing it on purpose.”

  “How gross.”

  “He does it on purpose.” Shockproof became hotly aware of the fact she had very large breasts for such a tall, thin girl.

  The light changed, the Triumph headed down Third.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Estelle complained.

  “I was being Richard Chamberlain in Petulia, having a sudden vision of my wretched, meaningful past. Click click. The present. Click click. The past.”

  “Piss off,” she said. “Do you know who Gracious Me idolizes? Glen Campbell. Because he asks his mother and father to be on his show. She likes Jug Ears, too.”

  “Who?”

  “Julie and Jug Ears. Click click. The future. Hail to the Chief: Jug Ears and the Swatch Off the Old Cloth Coat.”

  “Click. Click. The future,” Shockproof said. “The South Vietnamese government announced today that its armed forces have increased eight hundred men during the past seven years, a factor presumably in the six-hundredth withdrawal of American troops President Eisenhower will announce later this month.”

  They click-clicked and laughed through two empty cabs; then they stopped one, she got in, and Shockproof walked back home uncertainly trying to keep his thoughts just left or right of focus.

  Waiting for him on the front steps was the chunky fellow he had seen just a short time ago in the Triumph with Alison.

  “I’m Raoul Miller.” He reached for Shockproof’s hand.

  Fourteen

  KNIFING SUDDENLY SLICKLY

  I don’t suppose you’ve heard about Alison?” Raoul began. Some idiotic conversation had preceded this one, as Shockproof was leading him into the den; it had been about parking in New York, meter maids, and tow-away fees. Raoul, out front, had asked: “Is there someplace we can talk?”

  “What about Alison?” Shockproof said. He supposed this was the showdown he had been headed for ever since Quogue. No more vague passes at it, as though Fate were some punch-drunk boxer always missing the bag. Now the knuckle on the leather at last. Otherwise, what had Raoul come here for?

  Raoul had a white G-shaped pipe which he was packing. He was letting the question hang, while he scratched a match to light the pipe. Shockproof could not imagine him naked making love, or sending off a telegram signed Found (which implied at one point he’d been lost); he could not imagine him in a foursy, or deserving that first name. Norman was more like it; Howard; Kenneth.

  “I don’t know how much you really know about Ali,” said Raoul, sucking the pipe.

  “Not a great deal.” Let him be the one to blurt it all out; Shockproof was not going to admit anything. But he resented his calling her “Ali,” as though he knew some third face of Eve Shockproof didn’t know. Oh, Shockproof knew her; he knew her all right.

  “Ali and her urgencies and her crises,” Raoul said, “and yes, her élan.”

  Shockproof had his own urgencies: hangover thirst was one. To brush his teeth. To sleep.

  “Ali,” said Raoul, “and her compulsive adventurousness.”

  Leading up to the truth, ah?

  Your mother did—

  Your mother is—

  You are—

  Click click.

  Edens Lost; Angus asking Eve: “Aren’t you ever affected, ever touched by anything?”

  “I would have to think about that.”

  “In all the years I’ve known you, I’ve only seen you thrown once.”

  “Yes, well, that was unforgivable.”

  “Do you mean,” Angus asked leisurely, “killing the dog was? Or do you mean your giving away to hysterical behavior was unforgivable?”

  “A few days ago her father called me,” Raoul said.

  “Yes, and?” Shockproof said leisurely.

  “From the coast.”

  “And?”

  “I can’t say I was surprised.” Shockproof felt like telling Raoul he didn’t care whether or not Raoul could say he was surprised; keep out of it, Raoul, Shockproof felt like saying.

  “He said he’d received a call from Ali. She’d started off the conversation by saying she was lucky she had ten fingers, because it had taken nine to dial the number. Each time she dialed a digit, she imagined she’d lost a finger. She said she only had one left. Have you ever dropped mescaline, Sydney?”

  “No,” Shockproof said, and then—just as Raoul had said a moment before—Shockproof said, “I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “I’d hoped Ali was finished with those sophomorics.”

  “But she’s all right. I saw her in the car.”

  “All right,” said Raoul, exactly as Alison used to repeat words Shockproof would say, to show how far off target he was: “You look nice”—“Nice,” she would say; “What’s the matter?”—“What’s the matter,” she would say.

  Raoul said, “Well. She survived her trip, if that’s what you mean. It was a bummer. She was by herself. I got in touch with a doctor here in New York. He helped her, gave her Thorazine, hospitalized her. I flew in from Boston; her family flew in from L.A.”

  “I just saw her,” Shockproof blurted out again.

  “Yes. I know. That’s why I’m here. She’s at the apartment with her folks.” He glanced at his watch. “Probably by now getting ready to leave for Kennedy with her father. She’s going back to L.A. with him.” />
  Mercifully, the telephone rang. Shockproof ran to the back of the house to answer it, knowing that after the call he could slip into the kitchen and down some ice water. The call was from the garage on Irving Place; M.E.’s Mercedes had undergone its checkup and was ready to be transferred to her regular garage on Twentieth Street. In the kitchen Shockproof quenched his thirst. When the knuckle connected with the leather, would he react? Defend M.E.? Share blame? Why?—when Alison had done this whole damn thing to both of them. Her “urgencies”; her “compulsive adventurousness”—shit.

  He went back to the den. Raoul was on his feet inspecting the bookshelves, the way certain people enter a room, and in a studied, obvious way, pretend to be sizing up the person whose room it is, by taking in every picture, plant, and wall plug.

  “She hopes you’re not angry with her,” said Raoul, continuing his survey of the books. “And I think she means it, though it’s hard to tell when someone’s so polymorphous-perverse, what’s sincere and what isn’t.”

  “Poly what?”

  “Polymorphous-perverse,” said Raoul. “Perverse in all directions, as a child is. One of Freud’s theories.” He turned around and stuck one hand into the pocket of his trousers, jangling his change. “I know everything that’s been going on, everything. Sydney, Ali’s very disturbed.”

  He said it with the same emphasis Loretta Willensky had used in describing Estelle Kelly. Dis-turbed.

  “I suppose so,” Shockproof said feebly.

  “It’s easy to be taken in by her,” said Raoul. “It’s the strange paradox about borderline psychotics. It’s easier to be taken in by them than it is by neurotics. They have a better façade because they aren’t any longer building defenses. Instead, they’re going along with their fantasies; the fantasy life takes over, and they seem more relaxed and unconfused. Actually, they are more relaxed and unconfused. They’ve turned off.”

  Shockproof sat down in M.E.’s leather chair. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Has she ever told you that she didn’t want to hurt you, or that she had to do something because she didn’t want to hurt someone?”

  “I suppose so,” Shockproof said. “Yes.”