Kramer vs. Kramer

by Avery Corman

  Later, when it all turned and he tried to remember if they were ever really close, he reminded her of that moment.

  “I don’t distinctly remember your being there,” she said.

  TWO

  THEY MET ON FIRE ISLAND, where he had a half share in a singles’ group house, which permitted him to come out every other weekend, and she had a quarter share in a house, which gave her every fourth weekend, and with what was left of these arithmetic possibilities, they were at one of three open-house cocktail parties that were held on the Saturday of the weekend they both happened to be there.

  Joanna was circled by three men on a crowded porch. Ted was watching her and their eyes met, as her eyes met with a dozen other men who were also hunting. Ted had been shuttling between a group house in Amagansett and the house in Fire Island, assuming out of the combined total of two singles’ scenes he would meet a Someone or at least a Someone Or Other. He had acquired the beach equivalent of street smarts by now, which was to know where to stand and what to do to meet the pretty girl on the deck surrounded by three men and about to leave with one of them.

  When Ted saw it was a person he had played volleyball with, he walked down to the front of the ramp to the house and leaned against the rail. He stopped him, exchanged banalities, and rather than appear to be rude, the man had to introduce Ted to his friend. She was Joanna and now they knew each other from the deck.

  He did not see her on the beach the following day, but he took a guess at her being on one of the three busiest ferries off the island on Sunday night, so he sat at the ferry dock, trying to look like a nonchalant weekender reluctant to part with the sunset. She lined up for the second ferry. Ted noted she was not with a man, but with two girl friends. Her friends were attractive, which would appeal to Larry of the station wagon. Ted’s friend, Larry, was divorced and an old station wagon was left over from the settlement. Larry used it to offer women something of value at the end of a weekend, a ride back to the city. Entire group houses of women could be given rides, Larry in his station wagon looking at times as though he were chauffeuring teams of stewardesses back from an airport.

  “Hello, Joanna. It’s Ted. Remember me? Do you have a ride?”

  “Are you on this ferry?”

  “I was just waiting for my friend. I’d better see where he is.”

  Ted strolled to the beginning of the dock and as soon as he was out of view, raced back to the house.

  “Pretty ladies, Larry!” and he rushed him out of the house down to the dock.

  Heading back to the mainland it was one of Joanna’s friends who asked Ted the inevitable. “What do you do?” He had not fared well with the question over the summer. The women he had been meeting seemed to have a rating system; and on a scale of ten, doctors got a ten, lawyers and stockbrokers a nine, advertising agency people a seven, garment center people a three, unless they owned the business, which got them an eight, teachers a four, and all others including “What exactly is that?”s, which was often Ted, got no more than a two. If he had to explain further what exactly it was and they still did not know, he was probably down to a one.

  “I’m a space salesman.”

  “Who with?” Joanna asked. He did not have to explain, a possible five.

  “Leisure magazines.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “How do you know them?”

  “I’m at J. Walter.”

  She worked at an advertising agency, good and not so good, he thought. They were in the same field. On the other hand, she was not an undiscovered librarian from Corona, Queens.

  Joanna Stern had come to New York with a liberal arts degree from Boston University, which she discovered was not the key to the city. She had to take a secretarial course to qualify as a secretary and moved from “glamour job” to “glamour job,” one less tedious than the next, as her office skills improved, and she was eventually executive secretary to the public relations head of J. Walter Thompson.

  When she was twenty-four she took her first apartment alone. She had become involved with a married man in her office and a roommate was inconvenient. The affair lasted three months, ending when he drank too much, vomited on her rug and took the train home to his wife in Port Washington.

  She would go back every Christmas to Lexington, Massachusetts and file a favorable progress report, “I’m dating and doing well at work.” Her father owned a successful pharmacy in town, her mother was a housewife. She was an only child, indulged, the favorite niece in the family, the favorite cousin. When she wanted to summer in Europe she did, when she wanted new clothes she had them, but as her mother was fond of saying, she was “never any trouble.”

  Occasionally, she would scan the want ads to see if there might be something else she could do in the world. She was earning $175 a week, the work was mildly interesting, she did not have much ambition to change. It was as she had said to her parents, “I’m dating and doing well at work.” Events had become familiar, though. Bill, her present married man was interchangeable with Walt, the married man of the year before, and of the nonmarrieds, Stan after Walt, but before Jeff, was interchangeable with Michael after Jeff and before Don. By the time she was thirty, at her present rate, she would have slept with more than two dozen men, which was beginning to sound like more than she wished to think of for herself. She was starting to feel a little cheap and used up. She informed Bill, the current entry, that weekends were boring without him and, baiting him, said she wanted to be invited up to his home in Stamford. Naturally, this was impossible, so they did the next best thing—they broke up.

  Ted was not next. She kept him in a holding pattern somewhere over Fire Island and Amagansett. Ted Kramer had arrived at this point after wandering in and out of women’s lives into his early thirties, as they had wandered in and out of his. He completed N.Y.U. with a degree in business administration, qualifying him to do virtually anything or nothing. He took a job as a sales trainee for a small electronics firm, went into the Army as a six-month reservist, and had a one-year career as a wholesale appliances salesman. He never considered the family business. His father was the owner of a luncheonette in the garment industry and complained for years, “I’m up to my ears in chicken salad and garbage.” Ted did not want this for himself either. An elderly woman, an old-timer in the personnel field, gave Ted what became the most important advice of his professional life.

  “Your big mistake is to try to sell products. You’re not pushy enough.”

  “What do you mean?” he said timidly.

  “You’re smart. You could sell, but not products. What you should sell is ideas.”

  A few weeks later she had placed him in a job selling ideas, as a salesman of advertising space for a group of men’s magazines. A salesman in this field had to know about demographics, markets; he had to work with research tabulations. Intelligence was required, and Ted Kramer, who was brighter than he was aggressive, had a calling.

  Ted and Joanna finally got together after the summer for their first date, dinner in an East Side pub, spending what would be considered, in the singles’ merry-go-round, a pleasant evening. They were on the scoreboard. They had seen each other in the city. A stockbroker, a copywriter, an architect, like people holding tickets in a bakery, were all lined up ahead of Ted. The stockbroker worried too much about stocks, the copywriter smoked too much pot, the architect talked too much about other women, and Ted and Joanna found themselves with their second date. In this singles’ scene, where anything imaginative would be noted, he did something moderately clever. He took her back to the very same place they went to the first time, telling her, “It worked for me before.” He was reasonably amused by the singles’ predicament they both shared, not as detached as Vince, an art director who had been standing around her desk and who told her he was bisexual, and not as desperate as Bob, a media supervisor who also had been standing around her desk and who was “on the verge of a divorce,” a line which she recognized from Walt and Bill.

&nbs
p; “What I usually do with someone I think I like—” Ted said.

  “You think you like?”

  “The relationship is young. What I do is ask them to go to Montauk for the weekend with me.”

  “Don’t you think it’s too soon for that?”

  “It could be a fantastic autumn weekend and we could find out we don’t have anything to say to each other.”

  “Or it could rain and we could find that out.”

  “But think of all the time we’d save. And all the money I’d save.”

  “I’ll take a rain check.”

  After a few more evenings together, he asked again, she agreed, he rented a car and they took a motel room in Montauk. The weather was clear, they did have some things to say to each other, and without banter, lying wrapped up in a blanket on the beach, they confided that they were getting weary of the singles’ scene. They went to bed on this shared confidence.

  The decision, then, was never that Ted Kramer had been selected by Joanna Stern out of all the others as the man she had to marry. What was significant with Ted was that she chose him at that time out of a somewhat interchangeable group of men she had been seeing as a person she might see more often than the rest. By the general standards of the world in which they moved, this meant she would sleep with him eventually, and by her own personal standards, she would not sleep with others at the same time. So Ted was simply one man like others who preceded him who became the key person at the time. It just happened to turn out, given Joanna’s growing malaise with single life, that no one followed him.

  They began spending extended periods in each other’s apartments, halfway houses, less than actually living with—more than just dating. He felt that he had won the gold ring on the carrousel: this person—in his field, aware of his work, sophisticated about the singles’ scene, exceptionally pretty, star of beach-house decks and Sunday cocktail parties—was his lady.

  The summer was coming, a critical time. Joanna could sense the stirring in the loins of the married executives who were thinking about getting into position with the office girls, even as these men were packing up the station wagons with their weekend underwear, their wives and their children. At his office, Ted had been asked to fill in his vacation schedule.

  “We have a momentous decision to make in our relationship,” he said, and for an instant Joanna was worried that he was alluding to a much more permanent arrangement. She was not up to that part yet.

  “I’ve got two weeks vacation coming. Want to spend it together?”

  “Okay. Why not?”

  “Larry is putting together a group house. We could get a room. We could have two weeks by ourselves plus every weekend.”

  She had never been to Fire Island or any of the usual summer spots attached, and neither had he.

  “It might be all right.”

  “Four hundred a person, full share.”

  “You’re a real wheeler-dealer.”

  “I think it would be nice.”

  “Sure. It’s a bargain. I mean, now that I know you don’t snore.”

  When Mel, the account executive, wife in Vermont, stood at her desk and asked, “What are you doing this summer and who are you doing it with?” Joanna replied, “I’ve got a place on Fire Island with my boyfriend.” This was the first time she had used “boyfriend” in a sentence referring to Ted, and it gave her pleasure to do it, especially when Mel quickly withdrew with an “Oh,” and took his loins elsewhere.

  Being together in a place where so many other people were on the prowl, where they themselves had once been hunting, made them feel unique. When they heard that a porch had collapsed at a singles’ cocktail party practically from the sheer weight of all that social aggression, they were happy not to have been there, to have been at the house eating Sara Lee brownies instead. The singles wandering with drunk or lonely faces along the walks, looking for a party, a conversation, a phone number, the Sunday night ferry rides back, last chance before the highway, people trying to salvage in five minutes what was not found all weekend—made them feel grateful for each other.

  The sex was gamy, salty, the delicious quality of always being on the sneak, angling to find the house empty. Most delicious of all was the knowledge that when the summer was over, they could still be together if they wanted to be.

  “Joanna, I’d like you to marry me. Please. I never said that to anyone in my life. Will you?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  They embraced with real affection, with feeling, but beneath it all, with gratitude for being able to prove that they were healthy, after all, and whole, and for not having to pace along the walks any more with drinks in their hands, looking.

  THE BABY HAD BEEN crying for what seemed like two hours. “Only forty-eight minutes on the clock,” Ted said. “Only.”

  They were drained. They had rocked, patted, bounced, walked, put down, picked up, ignored, strolled with, and sang to the baby, and still he cried.

  “One of us should go to sleep,” Ted said.

  “I am asleep.”

  Billy was four months old. Long gone was the baby nurse who handed over a child who never cried during the night, who never cried at all, it seemed. The day she left, this other baby emerged, with needs, who cried—often.

  After the baby was born, the family had descended, Joanna’s parents from Massachusetts, Ted’s parents from Florida—they had finally retired. Ted’s brother and sister-in-law arrived from Chicago, the family came and they sat, waiting to be fed endless snacks and drinks.

  “It’s a good thing I come out of the luncheonette business,” Ted said.

  “But I don’t. If I have to feed one more person, I’m going to hand them a check.”

  What they had been left with after the nurse had gone and the family had scattered was fatigue. They were not prepared for the endless output of labor and the exhaustion that comes with a new baby.

  “It’s been so long since we made love, I think I forgot where to put it.”

  “That isn’t funny.”

  “I know.”

  At first, Ted was concerned with the proper behavior in his new role. This meant he would get up with Joanna and keep her company while she breast-fed Billy, so at times there were three people nodding off in the middle of the night. After nearly falling asleep in the office on several afternoons, he began to limit his middle-of-the-night assistance to mumbling as Joanna got up to do it.

  By eight months, the baby was sleeping longer hours. The daytime labor for Joanna was still constant, though—washes, shopping, feedings. She knew she was supposed to look forward to seeing Ted come home at night because he was her husband. Mostly, she wanted him home to get some help—maybe he could sort the laundry, wash the kitchen floor.

  “Joanna, I am so horny—”

  “Honey, I don’t want to make love. What I want is a room of my own.”

  They laughed, barely, and fell asleep soon after.

  They kept hearing from people that “It gets better,” and eventually it did. Billy was sleeping through the night, a cheerful child and beautiful looking. Ted’s anxieties, right or wrong, that the baby might look like him appeared to be unfounded, since virtually no one was ever of the opinion that the baby looked like him. Billy had a small nose, large brown eyes, straight black hair, beautiful.

  As their life changed, their friends shifted. Single people belonged to another solar system. When they were first married Ted had moved into Joanna’s apartment in the East Seventies, which was in a building populated largely by singles and a few stray hookers. They moved a few blocks away to a family building, and their closest friends became Thelma and Charlie Spiegel, their neighbors from 3-G downstairs, who had a little girl Kim, three months older than Billy. Charlie was a dentist. A space salesman from Newsweek, Marv, with his wife Linda became part of their circle. They had a Jeremy, two months older. First-time parents of small children, they would sit over boeuf bourguignon and discuss bowel movements and toilet training, obse
ssed discussions of the comparative progress of their children—who was standing, walking, talking, pissing in a potty, shitting on the floor, and they stayed with it and it involved them all. Even at those moments when somebody might say, “Hey, can’t we talk about something else?” the transition was only slight and the something else was related—bringing up children in New York City, public schools or private schools, and occasionally, not all that often, movies seen or books read, assuming anyone in the room had the time to read.

  Billy Kramer at eighteen months was a child people stopped to look at on the street with his beautiful mother.

  At work, Ted had received a raise simply because he was a father now, he surmised, a member of a club. He went to Giants football games with an old college friend, Dan, a lawyer. He read news magazines and The Wall Street Journal for his work. He had work. Joanna’s club consisted of a few park-bench friends, some of the less controlling nannies, and Thelma, nothing quite as colorful in her mind as Ted going off to an office where he was with people over thirty inches high who spoke in complete sentences. And in her world there was no one, not the park-bench club, nor her old friends, nor Ted, no one with whom she could share the dirty little secret.

  She did bring it up, but they did not want to hear it.

  “I love my baby,” she said one day to Thelma. “But basically, it’s boring.”

  “Sure it is,” Thelma said, and Joanna thought she had an ally. “It’s exciting, too.”

  She lacked a forum. The women she knew were either not admitting it to themselves or were more accepting than she. During a phone call with her mother, she broached it.

  “Did you ever get bored?”

  “No, not with you. You were never any trouble.”

  Was there something wrong with her, then? One night, after listening to Ted and a long account of something that was troubling him, an argument with a colleague at work, she said what she was expected to, he should not let it bother him, and then she told him what was upsetting her—it wasn’t that she didn’t love Billy, he was so cheerful and beautiful, but all of her days were the same. “Being a mother is boring, Ted. Nobody admits it.”