The Girl That He Marries

by Rhoda Lerman

  “Stephanie.”

  I had written my last name also. He didn’t read that.

  Along with his first name was a phone number. “Richard,” I returned.

  “My office.”

  Something of the purity of the situation, the way what should be happening seemed to be happening, became entangled with his office number. I didn’t know why. His eyes were gray-flecked, his grin incorporated a convincing percentage of his orthodontic teeth, fleetingly crooked, a dimple in a strong chin, slightly uneven nostrils, a lovely soft dusting of downy hair spread between his nostrils and his cheeks, creature hair. Interesting. Not fascinating. But interesting. I put his note in my pocket.

  He offered me the couch. I sat next to him as he took my hands, looked deep into my eyes, just like the movies, while I tried not to flutter or flush. “Stephanie, it would be so easy to make love to a girl like you.”

  Yes? No? The perfect dilemma. Keep your mouth shut; let him think he’s in control of the situation. How to relate to a man. How to find a man to marry. This is it. Is this IT? Don’t say, “That’s a hell of a line.”

  “Do you understand me?”

  “I think so, Richard.” I tried to sound serious, just as he sounded, but actually I wanted to laugh.

  “Good. Because what I need is a friend. A real friend, Stephanie.”

  I nodded for space.

  “And I want you to be my friend. Really.”

  If I had thought or perhaps understood then, I would not have reached up to the pale sea-creature blond hairs, waving like cilia along his cheeks. I didn’t think. A page buzzed, preparing itself to flip over, clicked, flipped, and another page began to buzz. He reached up to feel the cheek I had touched.

  “Anything wrong with my skin?”

  “You left some hairs, that’s all.”

  “Oh.” He hadn’t liked my touching him.

  “Anything wrong with my touching your cheek?”

  “Nope. As long as you understand, Stephanie.”

  He spoke my name as my piano teacher had when I couldn’t lift the fourth finger of my left hand. “You’ll never play the piano with a lazy finger like that, Stephanie,” he would grumble behind me while I struggled with that utterly paralyzed extension of myself. Later my mother told me it was my ring finger which wouldn’t move.

  “Stephanie, do you understand?” Richard’s face was close to mine.

  “Maybe I don’t really know what you mean, Richard.”

  He loosed my hands and I folded them in my lap. I thought he might kiss me. He leaned an elbow on the couch arm and chewed lightly on his manicured thumb, lips pressed together. The calendar clock never gave up. We would sit here forever, the month ending, the year ending, and I, stupidly, happy with anticipation and thoroughly discontent as if there were two of myself, waiting to be kissed and wanting to scream.

  He spoke at last from his reverie. “I’ve never had a good friend since Steve. I’ll tell you about Steve sometime. I want you to be my friend. Will you?”

  “I’d be glad to.”

  “There are rules, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  He didn’t tell me the rules. He laid his hand on my wrist. “I won’t talk to you any more tonight. You have to think about being my friend. We’ll go out and enjoy the party and do whatever we expected to do if this hadn’t happened. I won’t take you home. But I do want you to go home and really think about being my friend. Seriously.”

  The calendar clock seemed to speed up. He said nothing, rocking his head to the tick of the clock, tapping his feet into the depth of the Rya. I waited until the blood danced around his hand, up and down my arm. His rule was that we wouldn’t speak. I had no idea what he wanted. Once a man had turned to me in terror in the lobby of a hotel and said, in true pain, “Meet me in Room 414. I’ve had a terrible accident.” His face was ribbed in agony.

  It could have been a brilliant pickup and I laughed until something motherly clicked and reminded me that he was an utter stranger who might truly need someone to help him. I followed him to his room and as I came in past the bellboy, he was screaming from the bathroom, “I haven’t been laid since my colostomy. Since June?” Only a woman like you so intelligent would understand.” I ducked out past the bellboy who held a vested suit reeking of fresh excrement, beyond the naked screaming man and flushing toilet and running bathwater and out, racing away. I could still hear the echo down the corridor, “Who needs you anyway? You look like an aging Pepsi ad.”

  “Stephanie, when can I call you to know what you’ve decided?”

  “Listen, are you crazy?”

  “I’m not trying to make a pass at you, Stephanie. I love you. I just have to know if you’re going to be my friend. When can I call you?”

  His hand tightened over my wrist.

  “How about Sunday at two? Can I call you Sunday at two?”

  “Sure.” He handed me my notepaper for my phone number.

  “Let me walk out first. You count to one hundred. Sunday at two?” I was into the eighties when I asked myself what the hell I was doing. By one hundred, I was free to come out and I saw him sitting at an ebony piano on a deep white swath of Flokati. A young girl with rich thick henna hair and buckteeth that were almost predatory leaned against him. A very young girl, in something patchy and poor from India. He riffed on the piano badly and then slid into a familiar tune from Show Boat, anachronistic, not even camp, unlike the girl, the Flokati, the scene. I didn’t recognize the song until the girl began to sing it in a wonderful high voice. It wasn’t Show Boat, it was Annie Get Your Gun. It was “The Girl That I Marry.” I realized they knew each other well. He had just told me he loved me. I held a glass of soda water at eye level and peered over the icy lip for his eyes to catch mine in the significance I thought I had just become deserving of. He never looked at me. He kissed the girl often on the head. Too often. And then she burst into “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No,” which he picked up on the keyboard as if they had rehearsed before the party. I had never wished to be younger or to sing badly in church-choir soprano or to be in love with a man who plays a bad piano and knows only show tunes. Nevertheless I considered shoving her off the piano bench. I felt a challenge and a surge of jealousy so rare in my life that I welcomed with surprise the richness of the emotion although I knew even then it was too soon to feel it.

  Actually though, I thought in the cab home, I was much better looking than the girl at the piano. I did look like an aging Pepsi ad but that only indicated I was reaching the age when I could sell Lincoln Continentals and oven cleaners. Flash of white tooth, Sassoon-cut hair, a little flat-chested but leaner, longer, cleaner, athletic. I wouldn’t, for instance, look out of place with a pair of afghans. Wholesome. I liked being wholesome. I had integrity, inside and out. Men like Richard always like me, and I’m attracted to them because they play games. I also know if you get hooked on their game as real, or their secret as truth, or their dream as possible, or their potential as hero, then it’s suicide and you’re stuck with the prize. Sometimes my lesser self, although it might be my higher self, says yes to the Richards just to see how far along into the game I can go and still survive. And even if the Richards aren’t as interesting as I think they are, their interest in me always kindles my interest in them. This Richard was interested. With some kind of psychic economy, this Richard fit right into my movie.

  He didn’t call on Sunday at two. The phone rang at ten-thirty that night, after I had cleaned the entire apartment, washed my hair, slipped into new Pucci bikinis, blue and seascape silk, which I had been saving for an occasion, and read Campbell’s Myths to Live By. It didn’t quite have the scenario for my movie. After an aesthetic supper of yogurt, maple sugar, and wheat germ, I had given up waiting, that catlike awareness, and I was outraged at myself for having waited. Which of course was when the phone rang and as I waited for it to ring itself out, I answered from the couch the last intelligent words of a good-looking gentile from the Midw
est with a Ph D in art history and the beginning of a good collection of Sumerian fragments: “Can’t dance. Don’t ask me.” On the eleventh ring I lifted the receiver.

  “Can’t talk,” my nemesis said. “Just wanted you to know I haven’t forgotten. I love you. Catch you later.”

  I love you? Catch you later? I didn’t know what either meant. Calmly and rhythmically I tore a package of dinner napkins into feathery shreds. And then, because I couldn’t decide on an emotional response appropriate to an intelligent good-looking et cetera, I cleaned out my refrigerator. There were a good half dozen salad dressings, four kinds of relish, a terrible relic of mozzarella, my soybean collection for Lent, what had been a natural-food raisin kelp loaf, smoked brook trout from Zabar’s, instant tea, white-appliquéd brie, and gray Carnation milk. I threw everything out. Thinking back, it was an odd response. He had one hell of a nerve to keep me hanging. And I was pretty stupid to keep hanging. On Monday I would call him and tell him to throw out my phone number. That’s integrity.

  My friends, who all live on commuter routes in Connecticut, have four-wheel drives and reversible fur-lined canvas coats, admire my integrity. My friends have all sold out. They come into the city dressed alike, their fur-lined storm coats canvas side out, their canvas-lined storm coats fur side out, jersey snoods, jewelry. They made those decisions: which side should I wear out. And they tell me, I who slip in and out of gray and black and beige things that I know are mine because the cleaner in my building has put my name inside them, that I always look so city.

  They admire me because, they say, I could be what I wanted to be. I always wanted to be a dancer, I would say silently because they would be very disappointed in me to hear that. Am I still on vegetables? Who am I sleeping with? What happened to Harry Hardhat? Where do I get my energy? Are men really more interested in anal sex these days? Would I recommend the pecan pie from Amanda’s? Isn’t it overpriced? Do you know your vegetables are fresher in Gristedes than they are in New Canaan? Where am I getting my hair cut? Does he have a good brush? Should we get tickets for . . . is it any good? Should we make reservations at . . . is it any good? What’s your next trip, Stephanie? God, if I could only get away like you and live.

  “She really lives,” they tell each other about me.

  “You only live once,” they answer each other.

  “What do you mean?” I would ask them.

  “For one thing you get to sleep with lots of men.”

  “And you’re free,” they add, knowing the first answer won’t suffice.

  Nor will the second. “Terrific,” I answer. They need me to be what I am more than I need to be what I am. Whatever that is. I have no idea what I am. If tomorrow I were no longer an art historian at the Cloisters, I would have a serious problem. I would be free, but I would have a serious problem.

  They at least have made a choice. They chose Pound Ridge, Ridgefield, New Canaan. They chose four-wheel drives, birch trees, reversible coats and stone fences. I have wandered along amiably making no choice at all except not to choose.

  That’s fairly avant-garde as a statement but sometimes it can be worth a double session. “That’s very avant-garde,” my best friend Miriam would assure me. “And it’s definitely worth a double session. Bring yogurt and your wheat germ and meet me in the park.”

  My family doesn’t believe in shrinks, the New Deal, or God. I didn’t have a shrink to help me figure out what Richard’s “catch you later” meant. It meant Wednesday. I never did figure out what his “I love you” meant.

  2

  HE CALLED WEDNESDAY FOR LUNCH THURSDAY. HE TOLD ME HE’D BEEN up to his neck in the wards and at lunch I asked him if he were a psychiatrist.

  “A lawyer.”

  “What are the wards?”

  “Se hable espanol?” he asked. He didn’t pronounce the tilde.

  I offered him an un poco. I should have offered him a Spanish lesson. He said, “When the right girl comes along, the right girl comes along.” I was impressed by his ability to make a decision but not with the decision. We were at the Four Seasons and nine out of the ten waiters listening to us and watching us eat spoke Spanish with tildes. It wasn’t an unusual gift.

  Richard was a wee ipso facto for me and in response I shoved velvet chocolate cake into my pretty little mouth. Actually it was a large slice of chocolate icing. I don’t remember what else we had for lunch because I didn’t know what we had for lunch. The chains were moving across the windows and something was awry in the wiring or the overhead lighting so that there was a severe ringing in my ears every few minutes. Our ten waiters didn’t seem to hear it. I toyed with the idea of asking Richard if he heard it also but decided not to just in case it was psychosomatic. No one else around me was holding their ears. In fact, as I examined the room, except for the waiters, everyone around me looked like Richard.

  “That’s why I’m so busy. I’m being ‘groomed.’ You’ll meet my mother. It’s very funny. She calls me ‘The Governor.’ ”

  “Is that what you’re being groomed for? Governor?”

  “Well, ultimately, but you never know what happens. Let’s say I’m in the bullpen, right office, right backing. I leave the big decisions to the professionals.”

  I never eat dessert but I spooned whipped cream onto the chocolate icing, a nice self-destructive act. I heard a waiter say, “Thank you, Mr. Doubleday” to a man with a blue plaid suit, a blue plaid tie and blue plaid eyes who was probably the best tennis player in Sneden’s Landing. Richard didn’t yet seem to have a last name although the waiters acknowledged his presence. Everyone looked as if he were being groomed or had been groomed for something.

  The waiter had said to Richard, “Yes, Sir?”

  And Richard had answered: “The usual.”

  And the waiter brought the usual in a covered dish. God knows if Richard had ever eaten there before. That’s what grooming is. And he was well-groomed. The one finger swishing through the martini I could have lived without. His tan was deeper than the blue plaid man’s tan but the blue plaid man was older and didn’t have to work so hard at being groomed. A Richard would have a limousine if he could. A blue plaid man would have his chauffeur-driven Land Rover. Richard ate the usual carefully. I, of course, had said, to be amusing, “Make it two.” Richard’s eyes kept moving beyond mine. He had jockeyed with me for the window seat. And since I had not been able to pull it away from the wall for him, he pulled a chair out for me so that I faced 52nd Street and he faced his constituency. Now his eyes lit up as he nodded at people passing us. The problem with men like Richard, in fact with Richard in particular, is whether I want to go to bed with him or to the Democratic National Convention. I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell if I were getting hooked on him or his potential. If he hadn’t taken me here, if he hadn’t swished his pinky around in his martini just once, if he hadn’t been so smooth and so bursting with possibility which I couldn’t read as sexual or political, I might decide what I wanted from him.

  Richard also knew how to slide his cream along the rim of his coffee cup. And he knew how to involve me with a swift expedience.

  “Stephanie, does there always have to be pain and suffering when people love?” He was equally solemn about the cream and the question.

  I allowed the question to float between us, trying not to laugh at him.

  “You see, Stephanie, I’m disillusioned.”

  Disillusioned means I want love. They usually say jaded when they want sex. I smiled Delphically.

  He smiled crookedly, attentively still. “You might say jaded.”

  Aah. It was delightfully pornographic. I licked my lips over the cream. He licked his lips over the cream. I tasted the promise of him as he was watching me. You don’t get to walk arm-in-arm into the Executive Mansion together and lick lips. You never get both. I was pleased to consider the licking of lips but I had a strong feeling then as I would later that if he had sat facing the window he would be watching himself and not my lips. I should hav
e known then I was buying into the Democratic National Convention.

  “I’ve even considered . . .” He looked at me seriously. I couldn’t fill in the blank. “Well, let’s talk about you.”

  “What are you grooming for, Richard, at present?”

  “Councilman, probably, next election. But these things are years away. Right now I’m grooming for you.”

  I lifted my coffee cup and murmured, “Sweet.” Delphi was empty. I truly could not read Richard. “Well, I’m the wrong girl, Spanish-speaking or not. My family’s midwestern Republican, they tend toward reactionary. They send money to the Liberty League and the only reason my mother quit the Birchers was because she thought some of the little ladies were Lesbian.”

  “Really?” He was casually interested. I couldn’t offend him.

  “No. Not really. They don’t even vote. My father thinks politics is too pushy. He’s a general—minor, but heavy career. I mean he is Army.”

  Richard laughed. “Do you think he’d let his daughter marry a Jewish Democrat?”