Suzanne Davis gets a life

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  WAS I ETERNALLY fated to make an ass of myself with men? Eleanor, a morbid truth teller, said yes. She’d known me since the fourth grade, and I’d been doing it since then; why would I change? Pauline, with a more positive attitude and a devotion to self-improvement, said no; she saw my romantic disasters, numerous though they might be, as learning experiences that would eventually lead to success.

  I liked Pauline’s answer better, although I did realize that it had points in common with the way she spoke to Rose when Rose had trouble coloring inside the lines in her coloring book: “Keep trying, sweetie; you’ll get there.” Still, it was nice to have someone believe in me other than Dr. Chit-turi, whom I was paying to believe in me. And so I let Pauline go on and on about the value of making mistakes, how if you’re thrown from the horse, it’s important to get right back on, and other comforting platitudes.

  She also took the opportunity to start nagging me again about coming back to book club. I had put her off on the subject for weeks, book club being what had launched me into my unsavory affair with Derek and thus tainted by that association. But Pauline made the point that it was weak-minded to let Derek define the experience. “Besides, we need you back,” she said. “Bathsheba is so smug and pedantic, and she’s always picking on Derek. If he weren’t such a monumental asshole, I might feel sorry for him. We need you to lift the level of the discussion.” This was definitely aimed at stimulating my vanity, which it did, my vanity being easily stimulated.

  But what really convinced me to go back to book club were the supplications of Philip and Kurt, who wanted to join. They needed intellectual stimulation, they said, and this would allow them to meet Derek and thereby be in a position to ridicule him for my benefit, as the true friends they were. This too appealed to me.

  When I told Pauline about bringing along Philip and Kurt, she was enthusiastic: “It would be great to have them,” she said. “We need to break out of our demographic. I’ve been telling Roger to get some of the black mayoral aides to join, but he says they’ve already been snapped up by the more multicultural clubs. I’m so glad your gay friends are available.”

  Thus, when I finally succumbed to Pauline’s urging to return to book club, I did so with Philip and Kurt in tow. The meeting was held, as usual, in Pauline’s apartment, no one else being in a position, due to lack of space or unmanageable clutter, to serve as host. As soon as I walked in, I noticed Derek sitting next to an imposing-looking woman in expensive hippie-ish garb, a mop of artfully disheveled hair, and an expression of extreme annoyance on her face. This, I surmised, was Bathsheba. Derek had his familiar hangdog look, but seemed to brighten when I entered and immediately shot moon eyes in my direction, which I studiously ignored. How I could have possibly found this man attractive was now beyond me. My wonder at the fact seemed to mark some sort of progress—and I made a note to tell Dr. Chitturi.

  As I looked around, I noticed that the cushions that had been used in the past for makeshift seating had disappeared and that chairs had been brought in from the dining room to replace them. As Pauline explained to me later, Bathsheba had objected to the cushions. She did not have to sit on one herself; there was plenty of room for her on the sofa next to Marsha and Herb, but she had decided that Derek looked foolish sitting on a cushion and that he should not do so. This had caused a skirmish, as Derek said he wanted to sit on a cushion and didn’t care if he looked foolish, to which she replied that he might not care, but that she did; she was married to him and thus his foolishness reflected on her.

  Pauline had recounted this contretemps as evidence of the incipient demise of the relationship. “I’m not against having strong opinions,” she noted, “or trying to control your husband’s behavior within reason. I insist, for example, that Roger not belch in front of Rose, drink beer from the bottle, or put his feet up on the couch. But you have to pick your battles. If you start worrying about his looking foolish doing this or that, you’ll never get to the end of it. Men look foolish practically all the time, especially when you’re married to them, and if you can’t accept that, you shouldn’t bother being married.” This is one of the many nuggets of wisdom that Pauline has imparted to me in the course of our friendship.

  Nonetheless, Pauline had accommodated Bathsheba in removing the cushions and bringing in the chairs. Derek and Bathsheba were seated on two of these, next to each other but angled so that they were facing in opposite directions. Marsha and Herb were, as usual, sprawled on the couch, while Karen and David were again seated on the low chairs in front of the coffee table. Additional chairs had been set out for Philip, Kurt, and me. I noted that Stephen, the wispy math teacher (who I had recently discovered was not really wispy), was absent. I felt a pang of disappointment, recalling the conversation we had had at the Doggie Meet and Greet when he surprised me by remembering something I’d said at book club months earlier. This had indicated that he was a good listener. And a man who listens well is about as rare as a well-priced New York apartment that doesn’t face a brick wall.

  “He’s taking a hiatus from group,” explained Pauline; “he won’t say why, but he sends his regrets.” She said this and sighed, and I could tell that what she really meant was “you had your chance, and now he’s probably met someone else”— which, I admit, immediately raised my opinion of him. According to Dr. Chitturi, this is one of those patterns (i.e., thinking more highly of people when someone else decides they’re worthwhile) that I need to work on.

  Once we had all assembled, Pauline took a few moments to thank Kurt and Philip for coming and supplying the gay perspective. She didn’t say this in so many words, but her reference to “the panache of a new viewpoint” had to be code for the gay perspective.

  I thought she would dislodge Marsha and Herb from the sofa in order to give Kurt and Philip the place of honor, but they insisted on taking the chairs next to me. When we were finally settled, we all got out our books—Daisy Miller, chosen by Pauline because Henry James is an important writer whom everyone remembers having vaguely disliked reading in college. This, for Pauline, constituted a powerful incentive to read him again.

  “Shall we get started?” She clapped her hands in the manner of a first-grade teacher.

  “Why are all the women in the books we read named Daisy?” asked Derek, a question that everyone ignored.

  “Personally, I can’t understand what all the fuss was about in this book,” Pauline launched in. “I know Henry James is supposed to be profound, but I couldn’t see the point he was going for here.”

  “Couldn’t get into it either,” noted Roger. “Very wordy, no action.”

  “They assigned this story in my freshman English class in college,” said Derek, glad to partake of the consensus view. “I couldn’t read it then, and I couldn’t read it now.”

  “You can’t read anything,” Bathsheba observed. “You have the attention span of a flea.”

  Everyone grew still at this barb, worried but also hoping that an entertaining fight might ensue.

  “I happen to be busy with a job, unlike some people,” Derek responded after a pause—it was hard to attack Bath-sheba in substantive terms; even on short acquaintance, I could see that most of her flaws were of the ineffable pain-in-the-ass sort.

  In this instance, moreover, Derek’s attack was ill-chosen, given the number of stay-at-home mothers present. Pauline and Karen both looked daggers in his direction, and Bathsheba, knowing she had this powerful phalanx behind her, straightened proudly: “I have a job,” she replied righteously. “I am the mother of our children. Indeed, this is more than a job; it is a calling. And yet I still manage to keep my brain alive.”

  “Just because you read The New Yorker doesn’t make you an intellectual giant,” rejoined Derek.

  Heads had been turning back and forth as if at a tennis match in which it was clear in advance who was going to win. It was only a matter of time before Bathsheba would hit a fast low ball to a corner that Derek could not reach.

  “Y
ou cannot possibly know what I read, since your eyes are glued to the television as soon as you get home. You’d think a grown man would be ashamed to watch those reality shows.” This was a low blow—no one likes to be accused of watching reality TV, and I happen to know that Derek has a predilection for The Bachelor, having caught him engrossed in it more than once when he thought I was in the shower.

  “So what did you think of the book, Bathsheba?” Pauline intervened. Although she enjoyed a good fight as much as the rest of us, she also felt obliged to keep book club on track.

  “It seemed lightweight,” Bathsheba replied, still glaring at Derek. “But then, I prefer late James. I happened to recently complete The Golden Bowl, which is 900 pages in the Penguin edition, in between reading The New Yorker”

  This seemed to give her the match, and everyone settled back to resume the discussion.

  “Having the heroine catch malaria because she stayed out too late in the Roman forum was pretty contrived,” noted David. “I didn’t buy it.”

  “Can you really catch malaria that way?” asked Karen worriedly. In her concern for Matthew’s well-being, she seemed prepared to cross Rome off her list of future vacation spots.

  “I don’t think so,” Pauline reassured her. “That was the nineteenth century. I’m sure they’ve solved the mosquito problem by now.”

  “I don’t care what you people say—I loved the book,” said Kurt. “Daisy was a free spirit—an unfettered, spontaneous American girl.”

  “A shooting star,” agreed Philip.

  “But none too bright,” noted Marsha.

  “She reminded me of a girl I used to date,” said Herb. “Good-hearted but flighty.” “

  Did she die young?”

  “No, she married a contractor in South Jersey.”

  “What do you think, Suzanne?” asked Pauline, graciously turning to me.

  I’d read Daisy Miller, along with The Great Gatsby, in my American Studies class in college, where the discussion had focused on Kurt’s point: Daisy Miller as the quintessential American girl. I personally didn’t buy it. After all, I am an American girl, and I wouldn’t go gallivanting off to the Roman forum at night if everyone said I would catch malaria. I hate mosquitoes, and I’d sooner meet someone in a nice hotel bar. I said this to the group, and it was well received as an example of my rapier wit.

  But as I was talking I also realized that it wasn’t really Daisy Miller who interested me. It was the narrator, who was telling us what happened to Daisy Miller and whose relationship with her never got off the ground. “This guy, Winterbourne, bothers me,” I proceeded to announce. “Daisy wanted him to commit, and he wouldn’t do it.”

  “You have a point there,” acknowledged Pauline. “He watched what was going on but he didn’t lift a finger.”

  “He was a very passive sort of guy,” agreed Marsha.

  “He was a bastard,” I pronounced vehemently, warming to my point.

  “Maybe he just wasn’t that interested,” noted Herb. “He liked her, only not that much.”

  “He was interested enough to tell the story,” I noted. “He was watching her like a hawk.”

  “He was curious,” said Roger.

  “He was a voyeur,” said Pauline.

  “He was gay,” said Philip.

  I have to say that Philip’s statement seemed a cogent insight, and one that, in the book, as in life, I had missed. Everyone laughed, even Bathsheba and Derek—and Pauline later told me that the gay perspective on the classics had been a great success.

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER book club, I happened to run into the not-so-wispy Stephen in the mailroom. I’d seen him fleet-ingly a few times since our encounter at the Doggie Meet and Greet, and he was always in a hurry. Once, I’d seen him leaving the building with an attractive blond, confirming Pauline’s suspicion that I had missed my chance. He looked like he was in a hurry today too, and yet he paused long enough to say hello. Now that he appeared to be taken, I could also note that he had a nice smile.

  “I’m afraid I’ve been busy,” he said, referring to his absence from book club. This was precisely what I’d said when I believed, fleetingly, that I had found my Prince Charming in the person of Philip. In the lexicon of the New York singles scene, “being busy” obviously means “I’ve met someone, and going to book club is no longer at the top of my list of things to do.” But Stephen, to his credit, did not appear dismissive of me as I had been of him, which says something further for his character and gave me another reason (along with the fact that he had apparently been snapped up by someone else) to think more highly of him than I had before.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t make the discussion of Daisy Miller,” he continued, sounding sincere. “I would have liked to hear what you had to say. I didn’t love it, but I read some others in the Henry James collection I have that I liked better. The Beast in the Jungle, for example. That really scared me. Have you read it?”

  There were a number of things to surprise me in this communication, which happened to be the longest speech I’d heard out of the mouth of the no-longer-wispy-appearing Stephen. First was the fact that he expressed interest in my point of view. No doubt he was just being polite, but since most men couldn’t care less about being polite, when you find one who is, you notice. Second was that he’d read beyond the assignment. It brought back the impressive way he had identified a relevant passage in The Great Gatsby several months back—clearly, he had a functioning brain, also a novelty. Finally, he was asking about The Beast in the Jungle, a story that made a strong impression on me when I read it in college, and which I still think about sometimes when I’m feeling especially bad about my life. (Please note that if you haven’t read The Beast in the Jungle and think you might ever have the urge to hunker down with a very dense piece of writing that is likely to depress you, you should skip the next paragraph.)

  Here’s the gist of The Beast in the Jungle: There’s this guy who thinks he’s fated to have something very important happen to him. One day, he meets a woman, and he tells her about this feeling, and she agrees to wait with him to see what it is that will happen. They wait and wait until she finally dies, and when he goes to visit her grave, he suddenly realizes that she was in love with him, and that, if he’d loved her back, this could have been the thing he was waiting for. So—his revelation is that he missed his chance, and now what is going to happen to him is a big nothing.

  This may sound pretty silly, and a lot of people in my college English class said that it gave them a headache, but it got to me even then, and it’s bothered me ever since, making me wonder, for example, if I missed my chance with Bob or Roberto or some other guy I never took seriously. This would include Stephen, who was standing right there in front of me looking much less wispy than I had thought, but whom I hadn’t noticed until he was snapped up by someone else—which isn’t the same thing as dying, like the woman in the story, but close enough. Any one of these people might have been the love of my life, and, given that, like the guy in the story, I was fated never to realize this until it was too late, I was probably going to have a big nothing happen to me too.

  I didn’t say this to Stephen, of course, acknowledging only that I knew The Beast in the Jungle and yes, I thought it was scary.

  “The woman in the story was an idiot,” he noted.

  Once again, I have to say, I was surprised. It never occurred to me to blame the woman in the story. She always seemed to be the innocent victim of the main character, who couldn’t see what was there right in front of his nose. “The woman?” I said now. “Why do you say that?”

  “If she loved the guy, she should have told him how she felt and given him a chance to respond.”

  This was certainly a different angle, and, as I thought about it, there was something to what Stephen said—especially since it had the value of making me feel better. I mean if the woman was to blame for not saying what she felt, then maybe all my disastrous relationships weren’t entirely my fault either.


  “But maybe I missed the point,” Stephen added quickly. “After all, I teach math; literature isn’t really my thing.”

  “Stories like that don’t have one point,” I noted graciously. This happens to be one of the few practical insights I gained from my overpriced and otherwise useless English degree. “Now that you mention it, the woman was pretty passive.”

  Stephen seemed pleased that I could see his point, and I think he would have said more, but Pedro told him he had a message and gave him a folded sheet of paper that seemed to distract him—no doubt a note from his new girlfriend, who, given that I was now seeing some value in him, was bound to be there as the inevitable obstacle.

  Fortunately, I too was pressed for time. I had to pick up a copy of the New York Post for Brodsky (who liked to do close readings of Page 6) and a jar of Sanka for Mrs. Schwartz, who believed that all coffee, with the exception of Sanka (perhaps owing to its unpalatability), was at the center of an insidious capitalistic cartel. I needed to run these errands and get back before the pest control guy was scheduled to arrive. If I missed pest control, I risked a cockroach infestation— precisely the sort of thing that counts as urgent when you live in New York.

  NOT LONG AFTER my unfortunate fling with Yves, I called Pauline and mentioned my renewed interest in getting a job in the mayor’s office. Yes, it would mean seeing Derek more than I might want, but my desire to get out of the vicinity of air-conditioning engineers, even if it meant replacing them with sanitation workers, had suddenly grown more acute.