Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  It was a good party, even though I was too self-conscious to enjoy it. The records were mostly old jazz and blues—Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, Hector’s specialty I later learned. There was a man there who had programmed a computer to play chess, and a woman who had tended bar in Paris, and a lot of funny stories going around to which I paid less attention than necessary and laughed overlong.

  Once, a little before midnight, I walked into the kitchen for ice and unexpectedly came upon Will there. I behaved like a child caught at the cookie jar.

  “Oh! Excuse me!” I felt myself flush.

  A sprig of mistletoe hung only three feet away, at the entrance to the dining room, but nothing came of it. Hastily I got my ice and retreated out the same door through which I had entered.

  I flipped through a pile of records for something to do.

  “Soothe me with your caress, sweet lotus blossom,” bellowed Jimmy Witherspoon to Omer Simeon’s clarinet. “Even though I know it’s just a fantasy—”

  “What’s a lovely thing like you doing off here in a corner?” asked someone as though I were single and available.

  A couple we had known years before at Columbia walked in late in the evening. They were old admirers of Frank. “What are you doing here?” they asked me, and “How was Europe?”

  “You look sensational, Sasha,” said the husband. “Travel evidently does more than just improve the mind.”

  “I love your hairdo, Sasha, I love your shoes,” said my enemy his wife.

  “Where’s Frank? I hear he’s teaching downtown now.”

  “He’s around here someplace,” I said scanning the room. And then suddenly I caught sight of Willy Burke laughing his big, good-natured laugh in a corner with a pair of women I didn’t know and I wanted to leave.

  Frank was sitting bored and superior on a sofa. “Let’s go soon, okay?” I said.

  “I’m ready to go any time you are,” he answered with that indifference he tried to pass off as accommodation.

  After we found our coats and galoshes, we approached Hector and then Willy for goodbyes.

  “It was good to see you again,” said Willy. “Maybe we can all get together for lunch one of these days.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. Frank beside me smiled his all-suffering smile and turned to the door.

  That night before going to sleep I put a net over my hair, hoping to preserve the professional French twist one day more. It didn’t work. I must have had torturous dreams, for when I woke Sunday afternoon, hairpins were scattered on my pillow and my hair was undone. Hearing Frank typing in another room, I surmised we wouldn’t be going out that day anyway. I took the rest of the pins out of my hair, piling them on the night table beside me. Pulling the covers over my disheveled head, I retreated into sleep, sorry I had awakened.

  Each time the phone rang in Clayton Advertising’s “research library,” where I sat with two women named Joan clipping competitors’ ads from magazines, I rushed to answer it. For three days it was only the account executives demanding instant information. “Hi, doll. Get me a list of all the urban markets in Illinois with over 35,000 population. And hurry. I need it before two. In triplicate. That’s a good girl.” But on the fourth morning—a cold, wet Thursday—it was he.

  “Sasha Raybel? This is Willy Burke.”

  I was already smiling when I picked up the phone, hoping it would be he.

  “Does your name have a C in it?” he asked jovially.

  “No. No C. How did you find my number at work?”

  “I have my sources. I’m calling to ask you, are you free for lunch?”

  “Today?”

  I wanted to say no. I had expected to have some notice. I knew I didn’t look the way I had at the party, and he would be disappointed. There were weekday circles under my eyes and other imperfections. I had on a coarse white turtleneck perpetually dirty at the cuffs, and my hair, pulled carelessly back, was tied with a shabby scarf. A ghastly quarter of a century old. Nevertheless, feeling that itch it was hypocritical to deny, despite my qualms and vows, I accepted.

  “I’m free. But I don’t have much of a lunch hour. From twelve to one exactly.”

  “I’ll pick you up in the lobby of your building at twelve sharp. So long, lotus blossom.”

  We sat across from each other in one of those little restaurants too elegant to hire waitresses, where the waiters recite the menu and place on each table a basket woven of pasta filled with pommes soufflées. The headwaiter knew Will and was so discreet in overlooking me and my wedding ring that I figured he was used to such lunches.

  “If you put yourself in my hands, I’ll see that you have a delicious meal,” said Will.

  “But can’t you see I’m already in your hands?” I answered coyly. However shabby my sweater, I could still use my eyes with the old bus-stop swagger.

  We flirted outright over a martini. (“Do you usually have lunch with married women?” “Hardly ever. Do you usually go to lunch with single men?” “Never.” “Then shall we make it our secret?”) Until quite unexpectedly, staring deep into the hole in the olive in my second drink, I saw straight through to the inevitable end and wanted to leave.

  “What do you want with me?” I asked with an impermissible seriousness.

  “I? Why, to enjoy you,” answered Will.

  His answer, appropriately airy, made it worse. I was sick of affairs; I had grown old being enjoyed.

  “Let’s enjoy this lunch and then forget it,” I said, straining for levity. But even that was presumptuous, for he had not yet suggested anything more than one lunch. Squeezing the universe into a ball, I had lost my appetite.

  “Don’t be silly. I expect to be waiting for you in the lobby of your building tomorrow at noon.”

  “Well, don’t,” I said. “I really don’t want to see you again.” Oh God, a voice inside reproached me, must you women always get so serious? And on a first date, too?

  “You seemed to be enjoying yourself well enough until approximately two minutes ago. What happened?” He looked puzzled.

  “Nothing.”

  It was too absurd for me to sit there pouting. Martinis were the end of me. How could I explain that I was only a fake adventuress?—a nice girl who wanted all or nothing.

  On Will’s face was the same incredulity I had seen whenever I’d tried to say no. Jan Pulaski had had it, and Mr. Winograd, and Leonardo, and others I couldn’t remember. It was a look that made me feel obliged to sleep with any man who had taken the trouble to buy me a cup of coffee.

  Suddenly an unexpected insight lit up Willy’s face. “Why, you’re the poor little rich girl. Your trouble is you’ve obviously never been pursued. So lovely and so neglected. Well, lotus blossom,” he announced, breaking into a confident smile, “get ready for a new experience. I am going to pursue you.”

  The next day when I arrived at work, on my desk was a slender green bud vase sporting a single long-stemmed American Beauty rose. (“Hmm,” quipped one of the account men, “did the rose come in on the breakfast tray?”) The note beside it said, “see you at lunch.” Will wouldn’t reveal how he managed to get it there, or how he sneaked in the fresh rose each succeeding week. “I have my ways,” was all he would tell.

  We lunched that day on roast beef sandwiches Mr. Romance brought in a paper bag. We ate them on a stone bench in Rockefeller Center where, touching knees, we scintillated like the lights on the giant Christmas tree, toes tingling with cold and lust.

  “I’ll be here at five to take you to dinner. First, champagne cocktails.” He grasped my arm firmly as we walked back to my office.

  “Not tonight,” I laughed. “I have to go home after work.”

  “Why?”

  “I have a husband waiting for his dinner, remember?”

  “Do you want to go home and cook his dinner? Rather than eat with me?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do it?”

  Though it was my kind of argument, I had no answer. There had
been reasons for my return to Frank across an ocean and a continent, but at the moment I could barely remember them. (I had tried to explain them to Roxanne. “I fell in love in Spain. Love, beautiful sex, everything. I was even trying to figure out how to make it last. But then I got sick and everything collapsed. I had a terrible scare. I could get sick again. Or get fat. It was an awful discovery. Now with Frank, whatever happens to me, he’ll just have to take care of me.” And Roxanne had answered flatly, “You’ll never get fat.”)

  “Come on,” urged Willy. “Call him up and say you’re not cooking tonight.”

  So glibly said. Blow my setup for sex and a dinner? “That’s easy for you to say. You have nothing to lose.”

  “Neither have you. Not if you trust me.”

  Trust him—it was a luxury so hazardous it was the last thing I would do! “I could even lose my job if I keep getting back late from lunch,” I said as we entered the Advertising Building lobby and I saw the clock.

  “Quit your job. Come work for me. I’ll teach you all you need to know about the programming business.”

  “I did manage to learn a thing or two before I met you,” I snapped. “You act as though you’re the first man in my life. Actually,” I said, trying to deflate him as I entered the elevator, “if you get that far, you’ll be my thirtieth.” I rounded to the nearest ten, hoping to match his audacity.

  “As long as I’m the last,” he smiled.

  Late that afternoon I received a phone call from Western Union. A telegram. be in lobby at five everything arranged. It was signed, number thirty.

  I left work fifteen minutes early that evening, running all the way to the subway. Elementary tactics: One must flee in order to be pursued, I remembered from junior high.

  “You’re early,” said Frank.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I had a headache and wanted to beat the rush hour. But don’t feel you have to drop everything just because I’m ahead of schedule.” I was in no mood for rote conversation anyway. “Go on and finish what you were doing. I don’t mind.”

  “Perhaps I will, then,” said Frank politely. “Actually, I have a tough lecture tomorrow, and I’ll probably be working late tonight. I’ll do a little more now, then take a break at six when the news goes on.”

  I cooked smothered pork chops that night; I remember chopping the onions. Each morning before leaving for work I set to thaw our nightly meat purchased and frozen on Saturdays, and that morning it was pork chops. I remember feeling ashamed to be crying even though it was only from chopping onions.

  For once I was glad Frank turned on the news at dinner. With my mind in a turmoil of traitor thoughts I was glad to be relieved of our matrimonial pleasantries. Later, after the news, while I was doing the dinner dishes with Frank off in his study again typing out his lecture notes for the following day, the question suddenly intruded on my mind, What am I doing here? and again, as in Europe, I could think of no answer.

  I had not asked that question since I had returned from Europe full of fresh vows. But of course even the best intentions change nothing. After Frank and I had each taken new jobs and moved into our new apartment, after he had presented the “German Question” and I had cooked the new European recipes for our old friends, we were approximately where we had always been. Many of our friends had moved up a rung on the familial ladder while we were abroad: the single ones had married, the married ones had reproduced; only Roxanne, living divorced in a Grove Street tenement with little Sasha and working as a secretary in a publishing house, had moved in the other direction. Otherwise, it was the same scene as before. The men discussed exams administered instead of exams suffered, the women spoke of recipes instead of restaurants, the students at N.Y.U. were younger than the ones I remembered from Columbia, but it was the same empty life, stretching as far as one could imagine in both directions.

  “How can you go through life just preparing for your old age?” Roxanne had asked me. She had climbed out of a bad marriage through a messy divorce, and with a baby besides. How could I hope to make her understand?

  “Listen, Roxanne,” I had answered her, “the men I went out with in Europe only cared about one thing. One told me that was what he’d gone to Europe for, to get laid, honest to God. They told me about their unobliging wives and the loves they’d left at home—I was just a last resort. Which makes me think I’ve already entered my old age.” Nothing new to Roxanne. “To tell you the truth,” I had even confided, remembering the unmentionable clap, “I wouldn’t mind living the rest of my life without sex. It’s not such a big deal. Lots of people live without it.”

  “Those people,” Roxanne had answered caustically, “have got God, or politics, or somebody else.”

  Somebody else. I finished the dishes and put the pork chop bones outside to rot, but the question kept returning. What am I doing here?

  I threw in the dish towel and telephoned Roxanne.

  “Do you think I could spend a night or two with you? I can baby sit if you want to go out.”

  “What happened? Did you and Frank have a fight?”

  “No, no fight.”

  “Of course you can come here.”

  I went into the bedroom and packed a bag. Then I put on my coat and walked back to Frank’s study.

  “I’m leaving,” I said from the doorway.

  He looked up over his glasses, surprised. “Leaving? Where are you going?”

  “To Roxanne’s.”

  “What for?”

  “For good.”

  He did a double take out of an old movie, then stood up and thrust his hands in his pockets. “You’re leaving for good?” I nodded.

  “But why?”

  “That’s the wrong question. The question is, why stay? There’s nothing for me here. So I’m leaving.”

  He began walking back and forth in front of the typewriter. “Nothing for you here? What about the apartment? What about me? I love you.”

  “You do not.” It all sounded vaguely familiar, like snatches of an old play. “You don’t even know me.”

  Frank nervously lit a cigarette. “Your trouble is,” he said, puffing himself up into his classroom stance, “you don’t know yourself. You’re one of those pathetic people who squander their lives not knowing what to do with them. What a waste you are. Nothing satisfies you.”

  I didn’t want him to start calling me the names again. But I couldn’t resist saying, “Maybe you can suggest something interesting for me to do with my life, Professor? Paint perhaps? Pursue a hobby?”

  “It’s your own choice, baby. If you were willing to do something, to have children like normal women—”

  “Then,” I cut in, taking one long stride into the hall, “it would be a lot harder for me to leave you!”

  (Normal women. “You look perfectly normal to me,” Roxanne had said, scrutinizing me the first time I had visited her after my return from Europe. “What do you mean?” I had asked. “Your letters were very confusing. So high, and then so low. From the way you described yourself, I really thought you’d been disfigured or something. And then Frank told me you’d got sick and gone crazy.” “Crazy!” I had gasped. “A man thinks you’re crazy if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with him!” We had laughed over that, but it was true.)

  “I’m sorry I said that,” said Frank following me to to the door. “Please don’t go.”

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you would want me to stay? We have no life together. You know you’ll be much better off without me.” I was uncomfortably aware of Frank’s lecture waiting to be typed. It was getting late. “I’m sure there are women around who would be happy to be your wife and have your babies. But not me.”

  “Don’t be obtuse.” He shifted out of focus. “It’s you I want.”

  I knew better than to ask why. I’d heard it before. It was his problem now. I picked up the bag again. “I’ll give you six months before you find someone else.”

  “And just how long,”
he asked archly, turning his pleas to accusations, “will it take you to find someone else?”

  “I’m not looking,” I answered equivocally.

  I opened the door. Even though I was leaving, I felt guilty to be consuming so much of Frank’s good working time on my personal problems. “You can call me at work if you need to. I’ll be in touch with you.”

  Downstairs I suddenly realized I had forgotten to pack my diaphragm. I pushed the elevator button for our floor, rode back up, and let myself quietly into the apartment. Down the hall in the study I heard Frank already typing away. I tiptoed into the bedroom and slipped what I needed into my purse, then left again without disturbing him.

  I didn’t tell Willy I had moved out. Whatever I might have said, he would certainly have thought I’d left Frank for him, and then he might never have called again. When I found myself being steered by the elbow through the Advertising Building’s revolving lobby door as though to an ordinary midtown lunch and instead into Willy’s Chevrolet waiting at a hydrant, I wondered if he had found out anyway.

  “Where are we going?” I demanded.

  “Don’t worry, someplace nice. Leave everything to me,” said Prince Charming and headed west across town into the crush of Christmas shoppers. “Don’t count on going back to work this afternoon, though.”

  On the West Side Highway I discovered Prince Charming was a maniac driver.

  “At my office they fire people who take long lunch hours,” I said half-heartedly. Ladies in distress were supposed to protest only up to a point.

  “You don’t have to worry,” said Will, looking more frequently at me than at the road, “I’ll take care of you.”

  There was nothing to do for self-protection but keep my foot poised over an imaginary brake and think positively. I was too nervous for a true adventuress.

  The Harlem River was the northern boundary of the world to me, so when the Henry Hudson Parkway crossed the Harlem into the Bronx, I stopped wondering where we were. I was out of my element; for all I knew, the next stop was Canada. It was a terrifying drive on those icy highways, but as the old saying has it, at least I knew I was alive.