by Daniel Quinn
“What would be the point, Mitzi? I’m just working and nothing but.”
She whimpered a little. “I just get so goddamned blue on Friday nights, Greg. You know, being all by myself?”
“I know, Mitzi. We’ll chase the blues at nine-thirty, I promise. See you then,” he added and hung up before she could make any more suggestions.
At seven o’clock he was pulling page forty-five out of the typewriter when he heard a tentative knock on the door. He strode over and flung it open, saying, “Goddamn it, Mitzi.” But it wasn’t Mitzi.
It was Ginny, looking pale and shaky. “May I come in?” she asked.
Without thinking, he reached out for her and she came into his arms trembling.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She whispered, “This is my second mistake. Just hold me for a while, okay?”
He held her for a while, then walked her over to the sofa and sat her down. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She looked at him bleakly. “There’s nothing wrong. I’m here, Greg. Do you want me to be here?”
“Forever, Ginny. Forever. But you seem frightened.”
“Hold me, Greg. Now that I’m here, don’t stop.” When his arms were around her and her face was buried in his chest, she said, “Yes, I’m frightened, but I’m here. I always wanted to be here. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” he said, though he didn’t. “But what are you afraid of?”
She shook her head and brought a hand up to lie against his chest, next to her face. “That part can’t change, Greg. Don’t quiz me. Just accept me.”
“I accept you, Ginny. I love you.”
“I love you, Greg.”
His chest contracted in exquisite pain and he said, “I was afraid I was never going to hear those words.”
“I was afraid I was never going to say them, Greg. It was hard not to, that night.”
Greg started to ask her why she hadn’t, then told himself not to be a dunce. He reached down and lifted her feet off the floor and lay back on the sofa with her on top of him. For half an hour, except for his hand stroking her hair and her slow breathing, neither moved. Then she used her elbows to prop herself up on his chest. She looked down at him, smiled, and asked if she could have a drink.
“You can, provided I don’t have to carry you.”
She laughed and rolled off to the back of the couch. On his way to the kitchen, he looked at the desk and winced. When he returned with the drinks for both of them, she was sitting with her shoes off, looking around. “It’s an elegant room,” she said.
“An elegant room waiting for an elegant tenant.”
“You’re elegant enough. Show me the rest.”
He shrugged. “I won’t apologize for the bedroom. I’ve been working fourteen hours a day and wasn’t expecting company.”
When she’d had the tour, which she accepted without comment, she paused at his desk. “Is this what you’re working on? Obviously it is.” She picked up a sheet of typescript, read for a bit, and giggled. “What is this thing?”
He explained, and she asked if she could read all of it. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ve got a few things to do anyhow.”
She took the manuscript and curled up on the sofa.
Greg dug up a manila envelope and. scrawled Ted Owens’s address on it. Forty-five pages will have to do, he thought ruefully. He went into the bedroom and changed the sheets and pillowcases. Then, seeing that Ginny was still reading, he went into the kitchen and started washing the dishes. She joined him there a few minutes later. “It’s good,” she said. “I like it.”
“You do?” he said, genuinely surprised.
“Yes, don’t you?”
“I honestly don’t know yet. I’m too close to it. Find any typos?”
“No. But I wasn’t looking for them.”
“Good. Don’t. I’ve got to get it in the mail.”
“‘What? Tonight?”
He turned off the water and dried his hands. “Without fail, the man said.” He steered her into the living room. “Do you want to go with me to the post office? We could stop somewhere afterwards and have dinner.”
She considered this solemnly. “I think I’d rather wait for you here. If that’s okay.”
He touched her cheek and she looked up. “Anything at all is okay,” he said with a smile. Then he made a face. “I’d better cancel my wailing session before I leave.”
“Your what?”
He explained about Mitzi, then made the call. When he hung up after being yelled at for a minute and a half, he shrugged and said, “It’ll do her good to feel betrayed by someone new.”
“I’m sorry,” Ginny said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
He paused at the door. “I should be back in half an hour.”
She studied his doubtful look for a moment and then laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ll still be here.” She gave him a kiss. “I just want to spend a while getting to know your place.”
She was curled up on the sofa with a book when Greg returned, and finding her there gave him an unexpected rush of delight. Making herself at home in his home seemed to set a seal on her capitulation. He asked her what she was reading.
She glanced at the cover and tossed the book aside. “Damned if I know,” she said and got up to take him in her arms. “Is it all right if I change my mind about going out? I’m in a mood for celebration.”
“That’s fine. What mood is your mood in? You want someplace loud and crowded or someplace quiet and intimate?”
After a moment’s thought, she said, “First loud and crowded, then quiet and intimate. And then . . .
“And then?”
She laughed. “Then loud and crowded again. I don’t want this night to end.”
“Then we’ll see that it doesn’t,” he said.
On a Friday night, Blinkers, just a few blocks away, was as jammed as the locker room of a World Series winner, and the addition of the weirder extremes of rock and roll at earsplitting levels made conversation below a shriek impossible. When they’d battled their way to a small table, Ginny looked around wide-eyed and then pulled him closer to whisper a question in his ear.
“Christ, Ginny, you don’t have to whisper in here,” he shouted. “Nobody’d hear you if you put it over the public address system.”
“I said, is this a gay bar?”
“Sure. This is a classy gay bar, where the professionals hang out—doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, architects.”
Ginny seemed fascinated by the giddy, babbling surge of men endlessly circulating around them, delighted to see each other, all bursting with gossip, all sleekly trim and expensively dressed. “They certainly seem to be having a wonderful time.”
He smiled. “It’s hard to be glum in a gay crowd.”
“I would have expected to feel intimidated, but I feel sort of smug, being the only woman around.”
“Almost the only woman. The muscular gent in the Pierre Cardin suit at the end of the bar is a bull dike.”
“How can you tell?”
“I once spent an evening with her proving she could drink me under the table.”
“I don’t believe it.”
Greg raised his eyebrows at her. “You don’t? I lead a very adventurous life.”
Half an hour later a slender man in his fifties appeared at their table during a pause in the music and asked if he might join them. After exchanging a glance, they invited him to sit down.
“If I’m intruding,” he said, hesitating, “I do hope you’ll send me away. I wouldn’t want to feel I was simply exploiting your good manners.”
Ginny smiled and reached up to take his hand. “Please join us,” she said. “You can help us celebrate.”
He nodded solemnly and pulled up a chair. “Yes, I had the feeling you were celebrating.” Glancing from one to the other, he went on, “The two of you are positively glowing with delight.”
Ginny laughed. “In the midst of all this
delight how could you possibly pick us out?”
“Ah, this,” he said, looking around sadly. “This is largely just giddiness. And lust, of course. My name is Bruce, by the way. Bruce Eddison, two D’s, no relation to the inventor.” Ginny and Greg introduced themselves., and Bruce looked around again. “Unattached straight people—or semi-attached straight people—can never have this kind of fun together because men and women are playing different games. Here they’re all playing the same game, so they can just relax and enjoy themselves.”
“But not you?” Ginny asked.
Bruce smiled wistfully. “I’m a little old for the game. Or, perhaps I should say that I’m old enough to want something more than the game.” He made a face. “I shouldn’t bore you. I’ve just broken up with my lover.”
Ginny put her hand over his. “You’re not boring us. And you came here looking for . . . company?”
“Yes.” His pleasant, horsey face wrinkled into a smile. “And I end up sitting here with you two. Isn’t that strange?”
“Why is that strange?” Greg asked.
He glanced at the two of them. “Well, it isn’t really. Many people would think it was.”
“You mean because we’re straight?”
“Yes.”
Greg shrugged. “People are people, whether they’re straight or gay. Or am I being naive?”
Bruce looked at Ginny, started to say something, and was interrupted by an electronic howl that marked the beginning of a new tape.
Over the blare, Ginny shouted, “Why don’t we continue this somewhere else, where we can . . .” She finished with a helpless shrug at the pandemonium. After a moment’s thought, Greg suggested the Casbah, a Mideastern restaurant nearby, with a quiet, dimly lit bar and soft, spacious booths. Neither Ginny nor Bruce had ever been there.
“I’m a physician,” Bruce said in answer to a question half an hour later, “a profession for which I have little affection and no real talent. However,” he added with a smile, “it pleased my parents enormously and has provided me a comfortable income.”
“What would you have been by choice?” Ginny asked.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure how to answer your question, my dear. I have a passion, but not every passion can be bent into an occupation.”
“Well, what’s your passion then?”
Bruce smiled apologetically. “It’ll probably sound absurd to you. My passion is family portraits. Snapshots.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a little hard to explain. Because snapshot family portraits are so very commonplace and so superficially alike, no one troubles to look at them carefully. No one takes note of what the people in them are actually doing. Oddly enough, these portraits are often shockingly naked statements of family dynamics.” He looked at them diffidently. “May I show you an example?” Getting their nods, he reached inside his jacket for a sheet of paper. “This isn’t from my collection—I wish it was. It’s from an issue of Parade about a year back, and I clipped it because it’s so very astounding.” He unfolded it and passed it across the table.
Greg moved a candle nearer so that they could study it together. He saw four figures: an old woman in front, two younger women just behind her at either side, and a rather sinister-looking bearded man behind them. After a few moments Ginny nodded and Greg asked what made it so astounding.
“The father, a Russian émigré named Pyotr Melandovich, is leaning toward his daughter, is staring at her openmouthed, practically drooling. His wife, standing a little apart from him—actually leaning away from him a bit—is facing the camera, but her sideways glance is fixed on her daughter in a look of intense suspicion and jealousy. At first glance, the daughter seems to be giving the camera a lascivious leer, but if you look at it for a while the lasciviousness disappears and you’re left with a very doubtful smile. She’s the only person in the picture touching anyone—she has her hand on her grandmother’s shoulder. But if you look closely you’ll see what an odd gesture it is. Her hand is stiff, she’s carefully keeping her wrist from resting on the shoulder, as it would if she were relaxed. And the grandmother is hardly there at all. She’s looking off into space, disassociating herself from all of them.
“Three years after this photo was taken, the daughter took an axe to her father in his sleep, after having endured his sexual assaults for more than a year.”
“Oh,” Greg said. He looked at the picture more closely. “I see what you mean about naked: naked lust, naked jealousy, naked doubt.”
“And all while they were posing for a casual snapshot. It really is a family portrait.”
Greg nodded. “You have others like this?”
“Thousands. Not all as dramatic as this one, but many are. The poses people unconsciously adopt for such pictures are truly amazing. They’ll cringe under a touch, they’ll use elbows to keep two people apart or to keep someone away. Even the deliberate, playful gestures can be very telling.”
Greg said, “I’ve a friend who does dreams the way you do snapshots. You should get together.” Bruce gave him a doubtful look. “I’m not making fun of you. You’d make quite a team.”
“Tell me,” Bruce said after a few moments, “as a writer, do you think there’s a book in it?”
“You mean a collection of portraits and analyses? I don’t know. It’s an intriguing idea . . . Could you get releases from the people in the pictures?”
Bruce shook his head. “Most I pick up at garage sales and rummage sales and flea markets. There are a few junk dealers who save them for me. But most of the subjects are unknown.”
“Then no publisher would touch it. Unless you blocked out the faces, and that would defeat the purpose.”
Bruce sent Ginny a bleak smile. “So you see that my passion is one that can be turned to no practical account.”
Ginny, who had been slumped back into the booth, leaned forward and smiled. “You could set up a special practice—family portraits analyzed, twenty-five dollars.”
Bruce winced humorously. “What a dreadful idea.”
A few minutes later he pushed himself up out of the booth and said, “Now I’ll take my leave of you dear children. I mustn’t monopolize your evening.” As they began to protest, he held up a hand. “No, my dears, I’d much rather leave while you’re wishing you could have more of me than wait until you begin to wish you could have less of me. Do you understand?”
They said they did and let him go.
Ginny sank back into her seat and sighed contentedly.
“What now?” Greg asked. “Another drink? Or another bout of loud and crowded?”
“Another drink, I think.” She smiled. “But one bout of loud and crowded is enough.”
They had another drink and, when Greg asked for the check, learned that Bruce had taken care of it on his way out, including the round they’d just finished.
Outside, after looking up at the star-filled sky, Ginny decided against taking a taxi back to Greg’s apartment. “Let’s walk,” she said, “I still don’t want this night to end.”
Half a block beyond the Hotel Belmont, she stopped and asked if they could get a cup of coffee at the Tango. Greg looked at her with raised brows. “Sure. Why not?” They turned back and he thought, She really doesn’t want this night to end.
Sitting at the bar, they each ordered coffee and an almond liqueur. When their drinks came, Ginny asked nervously, “It’s still early, isn’t it?” Greg checked his watch. “Eleven-thirty.”
“Then let’s move to a table, okay? This feels so . . . temporary.”
He laughed, picked up his drink, and led the way to a booth. She slid in, sat back, and sighed. “Much better.”
Taking a sip of her liqueur, she sent her eyes around the room. “What did you call it? Designy? I’m not sure I agree. Design that calls attention to itself is bad design, and I don’t think this does. Only the message counts, and the message of this room . . .” She broke off and frowned down at her drink. “Sorry,” sh
e said.
“For what?”
“I’m babbling.”
He squeezed her hand. “Babble on.”
She stared into the corner they’d occupied two weeks before, and her eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Greg felt the breath go out of him as if he’d been kicked in the stomach.
She blinked away her tears. “I want you to hold me, Greg,” she said. “Hold me and don’t stop.”
He refilled his lungs in a long sigh and kicked the cubical table between them. “I’d be delighted to oblige, but this thing is sort of in the way.”
Ginny drained her glass, set it down, and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
That night in bed, Greg was nearly overwhelmed as they made love. Ginny shrieked like a madwoman, pummeled him with her fists, sprinkled his shoulders with tears, groaned like a soul in despair. And he cursed himself for worrying about what the neighbors must be thinking—and for letting this mundane worry make him impotent.
Finally, after several frenzied climaxes, she climaxed a last time together with him, and collapsed onto his chest, panting. “Don’t fall asleep,” she whispered. “Hold me.” And he held her until her breathing subsided into the regular measure of sleep. He moved his head against the hand cushioning his neck and thought drowsily, That hand is Ginny’s hand. Then he drifted off to sleep.
And woke up in the morning alone, in a strange bed, in a strange room hundreds of miles from Chicago.
PART
TWO
XIV
COMING FROM A WORLD OF BIRD SONG and wind rustling in the trees, bright sunlight filtered through the blinds on the window. It illuminated a room twenty feet square, decorated in cheerfully warm but muted tones. A large television set faced him across the room. Along the wall at his right stood a well-designed but purely utilitarian desk-bureau combination. A room, Greg thought, in a good motel.
He threw the covers aside and saw that he was wearing pajamas: unfamiliar, neither new nor old. He went to the window and adjusted the blinds, producing a scene from a picture postcard: lovely, tree-covered rolling hills against a background of blue mountains. The Ozarks? He shook his head and wondered why he wasn’t screaming hysterically, he felt completely calm, but there was something provisional about the feeling; it was being borrowed from a hidden pocket within him-self, like a twenty stashed behind a credit card for emergencies.
