This Is Not for You

by Jane Rule

  I got not much more sense of Dan that evening than I had the first time I met him. I simply knew that I liked him, not only because he liked all of us, but that was important. When he heard that I was looking for an apartment, he suggested one in his own building that he knew was going to be available and offered to find out about it for me.

  “It would be a good location for you,” he said, “and it would be nice for me.”

  It turned out to be nice for both of us in those months I spent in New York. We got into the habit of having dinner together about once a week. I went to show openings with him and to the theater. We were more than socially convenient for each other and our paired friends. We were really companionable, for, though we rarely talked very personally, there was an assumed knowledge that made our friendship possible. We knew how to be discreet with each other without explanations.

  Before Dan and I were accustomed enough to each other to admit shared reactions, I met John Kerry, the man who believed in himself. He was a good-looking man, but he was not attractive. He was too spare, his features economical, his body in size and strength utilitarian. And, as he was made, so he behaved with never a wasteful gesture or word, never an emotional extravagance. Yet none of these details which were characteristic of him made him seem either dull or ungenerous because the one imbalance in his nature, his nerves, sang in the wires of his voice, splintered the light in his eyes, and made his stillness of body a demanding tension in the room. I have never met anyone who gave so strong an impression of being under control. My own willfulness next to his was almost comically insignificant, but we recognized each other, refused to react, and withdrew to our assigned roles.

  Never let it be said that a southern gentleman, for whom the southern lady is an idiot goddess, doesn’t know how to deal with an emancipated woman from the West or the North. He treats her exactly the way he treats his southern lady, and she loves it, not aware that the gentle deference is designed to turn her into an idiot goddess gradually; protection and admiration are habit-forming drugs. I was, of course, in no real danger. You, I could see, had already succumbed. I couldn’t resent it. It was too becoming. But how could John Kerry see you so absolutely open to him, so full of desire, and be in no hurry? Will. He wanted it that way. I had to teach myself all over again to be in the same room with you.

  That is, I think, the sense I had of John when I first met him, which had, as I look back on it, more to do with you than with him. Perhaps my view of him was always unnaturally colored by your response to him. When you talked about him, you spoke of no more than the spare, practical, confident man he was, but, when you were with him, you were so physically tuned to his tension, so desiring of his will, that I assigned him a sexual power I did not feel. Once I tried to explain my reaction to Sandy.

  “And why should you have expected to feel it, anyway? You’re not attracted to men,” she said, by way of comforting me.

  “Not exactly true,” I said. “I’m attracted. How I choose to react is another matter.”

  “You’ll always insist on the myth of bisexuality, even when it’s not to your advantage,” Sandy said with resigned good humor. “I only saw her at the wedding, and, if that was any example of how she’d been for months, I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with it. I don’t even remember what he looked like.”

  In any case, after the first evening I spent with you and John, your marriage to him seemed to me inevitable and therefore right. When later I had moments of violent reaction against him, it wasn’t difficult to explain them away as pure sexual jealousy. For one thing, I admired him. If he sometimes seemed frighteningly rational, cold in his judgments, he was always sound and never belligerent or ungenerous in an argument. Compared to Andrew, for instance, who could make such extravagant speeches, John seemed so much more trustworthy, so much more responsible. But he was never condescending to Andrew, and he often gave in to an almost boyish laughter when Andrew had taken a point beyond sane debate.

  “You win on imagery alone,” he’d say.

  We only once discussed my work with any seriousness. I was just beginning to understand the scope of the work the agency was involved in, and I was impressed by its success stories. I spoke with enthusiasm about the use of small amounts of money which could and did revitalize the economy of whole villages in Greece, in Sicily, in Korea, and gradually might even in Vietnam and some of the South American countries.

  “I don’t really approve of that kind of aid,” John said mildly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because while it goes on, we ignore the basic economic problems of these countries. Saving one child or one family or one village really accomplishes nothing while the economy of the country goes unchanged.”

  “But it’s not meant to be a substitute,” I protested. “What you’re talking about has to be done at a government level and must be done, but that’s going to be slow and burdened with political complications. This kind of aid, in the meantime, can go on humanely and intelligently.”

  “But it’s wasted. It’s like tending a hang nail of a patient who’s dying of cancer.”

  “No,” I said, “because a child isn’t a hang nail. It’s a bad analogy.”

  “You protest sentimentally, not logically”

  “All right,” I said. “Let me give you an analogy which will agree with your point of view. Would you refuse painkiller to a man dying of inoperable cancer?”

  “Not if the drugs were available, no, of course not. But I don’t give either energy or imagination to men or circumstances that I can’t improve. In your situation, for instance, I would rather have a relatively insignificant job in government where important changes could possibly, if not probably, take place than the job you have now which is obviously interesting and emotionally satisfying but finally useless.”

  “Individual people can’t mean much to you, then.”

  “No, they don’t, not as an idea, anyway,” he said, but then he gave one of his quick, economical smiles. “On the other hand, I wouldn’t like living in a world without people—women, like you.”

  The idiot goddess of sentiment, waster of the world’s resources—God bless ’em all. Just the same, I admitted his view as superior to mine, and I imagined that, if he had to make a choice, John Kerry could have chosen rational significance over a sense of personal fulfillment. He was simply careful not to put himself in a position where that had to be the choice.

  Only once, before the marriage took place, did I admit to any doubt about him. We had all gone to the theater together, Andrew and Monk, you and John, Dan and I. Afterwards Dan suggested drinks at his apartment. There was nothing unusual in the conversation. Andrew and John were good-humoredly arguing the social utility of theater, Monk contributing her random and marvelously distracting observations, you laboring the religious point of view. Dan and I did more tending of drinks than talking until after everyone else had left.

  “One for the road?” Dan suggested.

  “Lovely.”

  “I’m feeling violently indiscreet,” Dan said, but his face showed more distress than pleasure.

  “How unusual,” I said. “Why?”

  “There’s something wrong with him.”

  “Who?”

  “John,” Dan said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, but don’t you feel it? Do you like him?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I admire him.”

  “Oh yes, that,” and Dan shrugged with a slightly effeminate gesture which I saw only when we were alone together or occasionally when I saw him with one of his homosexual friends. “We all admire men—sane, responsible, successful, father figures of the world. But what Andy says about him is true—there’s nobody there.”

  “Or something wrong,” I said.

  “Did you wonder, when you first met him, if he was one of us?”

  “No,” I said. “That never occurred to me.”

  “It doesn’t to me any more, but it did.”
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  “I don’t find him attractive,” I admitted.

  “Neither do I.”

  “But Esther does,” I said.

  “Does she? Does she really?”

  “All you have to do is look at her, Dan.”

  “But, honey, she’s a bit that way with you, too. I make no parallel really, but part of it for her is that you don’t want her. I don’t think he wants her, either.”

  “Why would he marry her?”

  “We all have too many answers to that one, don’t we?” Dan said.

  “I’d like to think you’re being bitchy,” I said without edge.

  “I am. I know it’s not in character. I’m scared… and not just for Esther. Sometimes, when I forget for a minute how impressed I am with him, I catch myself looking at him and thinking, ‘You poor, poor bastard.’ ”

  “Envy compensation.”

  “I hope so. How are you dealing with yours?”

  “Not compensating,” I said, “just suffering. Now, get me one more for the road and think of something more cheerful.”

  “Has Ramona told you that she thinks she can’t be in the wedding?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Positive rabbits. Or is it negative rabbits?”

  “Really?”

  “Nice, isn’t it? I mean, they make such exceptionally good ones.”

  It’s not odd that Monk’s expecting another child reminded me that I could have had one of Andrew’s children myself. I was delighted for her and not at all envious, but I left Dan for the first time not liking him very much, which was a compensating reaction. Suspicious dislike is the most easily transferable of emotions.

  Before Monk had an opportunity to tell me her good news, she heard that her favorite brother—the one who had not been allowed to go to college and had drifted into the city, for a time into Robin Clark’s hands—had been killed in an automobile accident. Four days later, Monk had a miscarriage. In the weeks that followed, if she had literally shut herself away, it would have been easier to reach her. Instead, as soon as she was physically strong enough, she accepted all the invitations that were so important to Andrew, continued the house-hunting they had begun soon after they got back to New York, and helped you with shopping for the wedding. She was neither absent-minded nor bleak. But the brisk, attentive cheerfulness was a terrible substitute for the distracting, willful humor we were used to. She was thinner. Her face for the first time showed the strain. In two months, she seemed to do the aging the rest of us had spaced out over the years. We all talked about what should be done. No one had any novel notions: she should be able to cry; she should get away; she should find comfort in the Church. Oddly, none of us spoke to Andrew about it, perhaps because he never raised the subject himself. It was, after all, some part his own grief, too. The change in him was less marked and accounted for also by his coming inheritance. He drank very little, only enough to be polite. He spent more business and less social time at the gallery, which grew now in expectation of capital and was beginning to attract some serious attention. He was quieter, more attentive not only to Monk but to everyone. He never went out in the evening without her.

  As we watched, wanting to help and not being able to, each of us could remember a time when Monk or Andrew had been able to confront or comfort or advise. You and I particularly told the stories of those times to each other, but acknowledging the debt only made it seem heavier.

  “There isn’t anything to be done,” Dan finally announced with some impatience. “And nothing needs to be done, that’s our real trouble. They have each other.”

  “In fact, the real trouble is that we’re feeling left out. Is that what you mean?” I asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “But people shouldn’t be isolated from each other,” you protested.

  “They’re not isolated from each other,” Dan said. “I’m developing a new theory—love is not an audience participation activity. ‘Our gang’ has limitations. And that, for me, is a real step forward.”

  Gradually and reluctantly we accepted Dan’s view. You stopped feeling guilty about accepting Monk’s help with the wedding. I stopped making occasions for her to confess her grief or for Andrew to ask my advice about it. They began to be a little easier, a little less withdrawn. It was Dan who finally took a holiday, being the one who deserved it. You found your comfort in the Church. I didn’t learn to cry, but I hadn’t anything to cry about. I was enormously interested in my job, absorbed and content in a way I’d never been before.

  Like the party after your show, your wedding was somehow grander and more hopefully joyous than most. Was it again because people didn’t quite believe in it but were caught up in your belief, in your dedicated confidence? It was a large wedding, in expensive good taste, gathering all kinds of people. Your brother Saul came home from Europe to give you away. I hadn’t seen him in years. He looked startlingly like you. You could have been Shakespearean twins; I remembered the day of your haircut. But Saul had none of your capacity for arbitrary devotion. He was as wry and detached as he had been at fourteen, as nervous and as fond of you. The only emotional change I noticed in him was his marked courtesy with his mother, who tried very hard, for his sake, not to react with too much proud amazement. Frank and Doris came, able to combine other kinds of commitments as an excuse for the trip. When Christopher Marlowe Smith accepted his invitation, I promised Monk I’d introduce her to him because she didn’t believe that he was real. Sandy telephoned several days before the wedding to ask if she might bring a friend. She had just arrived in town. But the parties before the wedding and the wedding itself were not so much gatherings of personal friends as monumental tributes to matrimony itself which, if you had been less religiously involved, might have been horrible. As it was, no social requirement was too much for the tribute you wanted to pay yourself to the vows you were about to take. John guided you through them all with steady good humor and good will. I found that I was as sorry for him as I was relieved when it became obvious that his mother would not relent.

  It was an evening wedding, the reception a dinner and dance for five hundred people at the same hotel where, years ago, you had argued with your mother and Saul had sprinkled salt on the table. Mrs. Woolf, I think, owned it or a good part of it.

  Did you ever look afterwards at this particular album? I’ve looked at it often, perhaps because these photographs gathered together so many people I have known and cared about. But I’ve looked again and again at the pictures of you, too, and of John, trying to see in your faces evidence for a judgment that, at the time, I did not make. The past ought to be a real crystal ball, but it rarely is. None of the photographs caught the images I still can recall, the first of which is your sudden pulling of a grotesque face, eyes crossed, tongue forward under your upper lip, when one of your mother’s heavy-handed advisers hurried past the bridal party and on down the aisle just before the wedding march began.

  “For God’s sake, Esther!” Saul whispered, but he did laugh before his face clicked back into the solemnity (photographed several times) of giving you away.

  Then I remember not your face, for I stood behind you, but your strong right hand, resting on John’s arm. After you had been pronounced man and wife, I saw you turn your wondering, wonderful face to your spare husband, but for that moment I stopped attending.

  The photographs take over from there through the reception. I was busy being in them myself at first, then collecting scraps of other people’s concern and gaiety. I was with you again in ritual uselessness when you left the party to change. Your maid was waiting in the rooms your mother had reserved. She helped you out of your wedding dress and into the costume so carefully described in the newspapers the next day. I hardly saw it. I stood behind you at the mirror while your hair was fixed and watched the certain pleasure of the gift you were about to make of yourself.

  “Now, Effie, find Mother and find John. Tell them I’m ready.” When she left the room, you turned to me. “How do I look?
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  “Fair,” I said. “Fair enough.”

  We kissed as sisters do in plays, careful of each other’s makeup.

  “This is how it should be,” you said then. “This is how you told me to do it.”

  Then John was there and your mother, and the ritual of the night closed in again in crowds and flashbulbs. As the car pulled away, Dan was suddenly beside me.

  “All right?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just be a darling, will you, and see I don’t go home with anyone else?”

  “Had you anyone in mind?”

  “No,” I said. “Nobody at all.”

  Sandy and the young woman who had come with her were on their way out as we started back in.

  “Going so early?” I said, sorry that I hadn’t really spoken to them.

  “Not really our sort of party,” Sandy said, smiling. “Come see us, will you?”

  “Not our sort, either,” Dan said to me, “but that’s what makes it fun.”

  We set about then to dance until dawn. Nobody who didn’t know us would have found us a less good imitation of the romantic, young couple than you and John had been. We were, perhaps, even better at it, knowing what we were doing.

  There were in the days that followed so many parties and excursions involving Frank and Doris, Monk and Andrew, Dan and assorted other people that between such a lively social life and my work, I had hardly time to notice that you were gone. I was getting ready to leave myself for what was intended to be a European tour of agency offices. If I had known then that I would not be back in New York for over a year, I might have been less grateful for the distraction.

  A week after the wedding, we were all at the first successful opening at the gallery. It’s perhaps ironic that the gallery was able to pay off all its own debts before Andrew received the first money from his inheritance. It did not make him feel independent.

  “We couldn’t have kept it open to be successful,” he said. “My father wanted to teach me what a failure I’d be without money. I grant him that lesson. He was right.”