by Rhoda Lerman
“Only if he’s governor.”
“I’m serious.”
It was a surprise shot and I had no return except not to take him seriously and so I laughed. The whipped cream dribbled from the corner of my mouth. I wiped it, blushing. Somewhere, I’d overheard men joking about making love to shiksas. When they come, creamed chipped beef dribbles out of the corner of their mouths.
I was suddenly uncomfortably aware of how unlike Richard I was. He was wiping the side of my mouth with his large napkin. As he leaned toward me he saw someone he knew and stood to talk to him, dropping the napkin on the table. I sipped my coffee. The power had shifted to him. And I had to recoup. He began to talk above me, animated, behind me, about ward politics. It was absolutely fascinating and he made great sense. I closed my eyes. I could imagine him on a podium; he became FDR waving from the open car; he became Jack Kennedy. He became Adlai, and I loved him. I stood beside him smiling to applause, shaking hands at street rallies. I had a breast removed. I changed my mind. He sat down and picked up his napkin.
“Unless it’s an advantage to the woman, I don’t believe in introductions,” he explained impressively.
I sipped my coffee coolly now, knowing he was a mistake and quite relieved with my decision.
He sipped his coffee coolly also. I wondered if he’d made a decision. “Stephanie,” he broke our summit silence, “tell me something.”
“Mmmm.”
“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone before in your life. Tell me your secret.” How did he know I had secrets?
“Why?”
“Because we have to start someplace and life is too short to wait.”
“And you’re a busy man.”
“You’re not being fair.”
“I don’t know you. I have no reason to trust you or not to trust you.” I had made an error. I had let him sniff the faint spoor of hostility. I hadn’t meant to. With me and with men like Richard the faint spoor of hostility worked better than musk.
“Listen,” his hand covered mine. He was leaning forward. “You and I have to believe in something. That’s the kind of people we are. We can start believing in each other.”
“Oh, Richard . . .” I don’t know what I meant.
“We can, can’t we?”
He was so sincere that day. He meant everything he said. Then. They always do as they’re saying it. I removed my hand from under his. I had time either to recoup or to take my vote and leave the hall. His eyes swam before me. You have to trust someone, sometime. It might have been the time. I decided it was the time. There had been other times that hadn’t been the time. And I did so like the interaction.
Girlishly, I smoothed my well-cut hair from the sides of my well-born face. Girlishly, I pulled at a lovely earlobe. Girlishly, I looked into my bowl of whipped cream as if it held tea leaves. Girlishly and sincerely, I said at last, “Well, I’ve always wanted to be a dancer.” Girlishly, I sighed. Victoriously, he smiled. Little did he know. I never had quite defined integrity. I had just assumed it among midwestern WASPs.
He took my hand again.
“You know,” I continued. “Free, floating.”
Sometimes that secret worked but sometimes it didn’t work. It was, though, my truth. I thought perhaps this time it might work because Richard seemed like the kind of man it might work on. They all seemed like the kind of man it would work on and I had never given up the hope that if they weren’t, I could change them into the kind of man it would work on: a man to share my dreams.
I think it must have worked. He held my hand between both of his and said huskily, “Yo te amo, Stephanie.” I nodded. The waiters, who were probably going to imitate him in the kitchen later, had to move away from the table. “That’s what we have to believe in.” How had the waiters managed not to laugh?
God, the lines were wonderful. He was pure cliché and yet I liked to hear him except I hoped that if he were going to leave out the tilde his professionals would put him in Dutchess County and not the South Bronx. His hands were warm and silky. I preferred the jaded to the fumbling.
But before I could respond or not respond with something terrific and jaded like “mi casa es su casa what are you doing this afternoon,” he had motioned a waiter, flashed his gold American Express card, which I tried to read upside down, flourished his signature as if it were the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and then we were leaving, his elbow steering me very firmly between the tables as he nodded and greeted a lot of men eating the usual. He seemed known, quite known. Maybe the usual was really the usual. The power was exciting, the potential of his power even more so, but I would have to keep the two separate. Perhaps that’s what kept ringing in my ears—the charges of power he was giving out. Maybe I could help him with his accent. Maybe I could be his transformer. Maybe that was the lure. At the checkroom, he lifted my hair to help me on with my raincoat and as he did, he blew hot breath against the back of my neck. “I want you. I want to love you. Very much,” he said as he smoothed my shoulders under my coat. “I want to feel you come.” I shuddered involuntarily. I was so damned suggestible. Hypnotists were always after me too.
Although I had strong doubts about him as a. governor, b. husband, c. trustworthy, d. sharer of secrets, I had no doubts about sharing my shuddering with his jaded propensities.
“I wish,” he whispered as he guided me past the palms, “I wish you didn’t have to go back to work this afternoon, Stephanie. We could get close somewhere.”
“I don’t have to,” I said softly. He opened the doors to the street. I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. On the sidewalk he closed my eyelids with his fingers and explored my face. I could feel my eyelids quivering like moth wings.
“So?” he said or asked. “Are you ready, Stephanie?”
I didn’t know what he meant. But I knew what Mona Lisa was up to. You just smile. You don’t expect to understand them. He hailed a cab as I stood smiling beatifically, as I told him my address. He told the cabbie. All the women the masters did were whores anyway. A palmist told me once you can tell by their hands. I smiled. I climbed into the cab. And then he closed the door. He was on the street. He smiled.
I had no time to heal my face. I pressed it against the window as he motioned me to roll the window down. I did so while he looked at his watch.
“Stephanie, darling, not this time. Not this time. This time I don’t want to make any mistakes.” And then he patted the cab and it drove off. I went home because I couldn’t have faced work anyway. I didn’t scream until I was home. I had, for all my manipulative girlishlies, deserved exactly what I got. And I still didn’t know his last name.
3
THE NEXT DAY, AT WORK, MY DESK PILED WITH SHIPPING NOTICES, BILLS OF lading, scale drawings of Celtic crosses, wires from the Board Failte and catalogues from Trinity at Dublin, I shoved the pile aside, flattened his slip of notepaper in the empty space and dialed Richard’s number. I was, I considered, almost thirty, a grown-up. I was on loan to the Cloisters to arrange purchase and display of a score of marvelous Celtic crosses from the British Isles to be placed in the gardens here. Eventually my exhibit, shipped, catalogued, landscaped, would be a tremendous contribution and terrific for my career. But Richard’s slip was on my desk. A receptionist answered with an impossible list of names, partners I imagined in a mushrooming law firm. I could not say, “Which one is Richard?”
I said lightly instead, “Let me talk to Dick.”
“Just one minute, Madam.”
And then I was connected to another woman who asked me if she could help.
“I’d like to speak to Dick? Richard?” My cheeks burned. My fingers itched to tear the bills of lading into tiny pieces. I controlled them.
“Is this a personal call, Madam?”
“No, uh, yes, as a matter of fact,” I stammered.
“Mr. Richard Grossberger is not taking personal calls this morning. Mr. Richard Slentz is not taking personal calls this morning and will be in court this afternoon a
nd Mr. Richard Braithwaite is out of town. I will be happy to take your name and number, however.”
I pressed with an icy forefinger the ugly final buttons of the phone rest. I felt weak and burned with shame. I dialed Miriam’s number at the Jewish Memorial. “Help. I’ve got yogurt.”
And in that quiet perfect sanctuary over the sound of bubbling fountains and Gregorian chants and the distant hoots of boats along the Hudson far below, I was prepared to scream and rush through the Cloisters tearing tapestries with my long fingernails, tearing until I reached the essence of the Unicorn and asked him my question, which I will ask Miriam at lunch. “Unicorn, Miriam, what the hell is it with men?”
“Sissy,” I shouted at my secretary in the room beyond, unnecessarily and sharply, “I’m going out. I’m not taking any personal calls.”
“Which?” she called back. She was a few years younger than I. I thought she was the Cloisters’ spy in residence. She also wanted my job. When Sissy’s mornings were filled with personal calls from a vast amorphous network of Lesbians and/or lovers, I ground my teeth. When she worked she was invaluable. Once I said to her that she would find her days easier if she kept her social life out of the office. “So would you,” she rejoindered and went away daubing at her tears until after noon at which time she handed me a neatly printed note of calls which included two ex-boyfriends, my mother, and Miriam, twice.
“Both!” I snapped as I walked past her desk.
“Is anything wrong? Did I do something wrong?”
I tore my coat from the closet and left the office. Sissy sniffled loud and juicy behind me.
The problem was, I think, although I only harbored the suspicion, which Miriam had planted, that Sissy was attracted to me. Miriam was as many years older than I, as I was older than Sissy. It is still so. But I listened to Miriam and Sissy didn’t listen to me. She imitated me faultlessly as a role model until I was driven mad by my own inadequacies, in vitro, behind our glass dividers. I knew she smiled crookedly and inwardly at my . . . what she calls . . . “problems with men,” as if that were a disease common to unenlightened women who had not yet surrendered to the true love of another woman.
I’d never mentioned any of this to Sissy of course. The subject repelled and frightened me. I sensed a lascivious thrill when I watched Sissy examine my women visitors and I tried not to imagine what she was thinking. But her eyes always met mine since I, fascinated, was watching hers. And oddly enough, often, as if she were trying to save me, she would indicate to me: “She’s one, at least latent. She’d be good.” I was also richly delighted when she fought with her roommate.
Outside, as I walked to my hiding place, I could see through the arched windows that the city swelled with late spring, ripe for summer. The George Washington Bridge rose and lifted against a periwinkle blue sky, cloudless and perfect. Rich purple clematis climbed the arches and crab grass poked through the cobblestone paths. On the south slope the flowering crabs were a lush ready magenta. Inside the sun shone, dappling the red tiles of the walks and throwing strong shadows over the worn flat stones of the old chapels and the deep carvings of their doors. Fountains bubbled among crocus gardens and the jasmine overwhelmed everything with its wild sweet spoor. We were all waiting to unfold, caught between promise and blossom, blossom and fruit. I would have been happy crying softly anyplace in the Cloisters . . . a simple announcement, not of sorrow, but that I was connected to every molecule of it. Pippa Passes and all’s right with the world, morning’s at seven et cetera.
The rooms I love at the Cloisters are filled with arcane symbols, rooted, waiting as I am for someone to unfold their histories. Grotesque and laughing acrobats support beamed roofs, snakes entwine column shafts, lions devoured themselves above doorways, spirals, triangles, the magic lines of the Pythagoreans and the musky mysteries of Sheba and Solomon, all of them rebuilt, woven in the supports of early Christendom and carried to Upper Manhattan by the Rockefellers.
Down the road, below Fort Tryon, poor Mother Cabrini, our first American saint, lies in a Cinderella coffin, wax-faced and decorated with plastic roses. I have tried to love her wax head and hands, but she doesn’t offer me the kind of peace that would allow me to cry before her. For me, most corners in the Cloisters, unlike poor Mother Cabrini’s nouveau arches in the cathedral, are so privileged with silence and beauty that my soul opens as a bloom on their signals.
So I walked through the jasmine, through the Cuxa Cloister, and thought of men I’d loved and men I wanted to love. The guard turned on the sound system for me and taped Gregorian chants filled the rooms gently, distantly, from another time, following me to my rare and special place. Another guard nodded and walked away.
Enveloped by streaming sunshine through stained glass, surrounded by stone coffins, I stood before the peaceful statues of Doña Dulcia and Armengol, lying above their sarcophagi in the tiny chapel. The guidebook explained that Doña Dulcia and Armengol were Spanish nobility of different generations but still history, fortune and oil had placed them together as husband and wife, her stone coffin resting below his, with peace carved on the planes of their broad and elegant faces. It was the same peace I sought. The same belonging. I sniffled a bit and dug for the Kleenex I never remember to bring with me.
An angel held the pillow under Doña Dulcia’s head. A dog lay below Armengol’s feet. The guidebook said the dog represents fidelity and domesticity. Not a lion for bravery in battle. But a pleasant dog. That’s all I wanted. I didn’t want a hero. I wanted a man who wasn’t crazy. I wanted a man who wouldn’t drive me mad. Someone to keep my bed warm. Someone to bring me aspirins. Someone I would bring aspirins. Someone who cared. Someone who was my . . . friend? Perhaps it was time to do something permanent, rock solid and lasting. To make my imprint on the world with something more than Celtic crosses at the Cloisters. Perhaps I wanted to have a child who would build me a chapel and worship my effigy and remember my words. No, I didn’t even want that. I wanted something meaningful in my life.
In another corner of the sun-dappled chapel a young Armengol lay inside his sarcophagus with, the guidebook explained, a note pinned to the 500-year-old linens covering his bones: “His spirit sought the stars in 1299.” That’s what I wanted. Something meaningful in my life so when my spirit sought the stars, my face would have the same peace, the repose of a life led simply, kindly, decently, sanely. Of a life led having loved and been loved. The faith in that: the body has dissolved, the oriental silks are dust, the parchment of the note yellowed, but know forever that the man inside has gone to seek the stars. Better than plastic roses. Better than sainthood. That faith. Would Richard pin a note to my breast when I died? He was the first man I had met who I thought might really share my dreams. But it was spring and the oak branches waved at me through the leaded glass window of the chapel and it might have been only that it was spring and my goddamn sap was running. Like the centaur in the Bestiary: half man, half horse, of superior intelligence but ruled by animal passion.
All I really wanted was a nice safe rational relationship. I didn’t want pornysex. I didn’t want sportscars and country weekends or a man who wears his jeans with his Guccis. I didn’t want status or hysteria. I lived on my own fine line. My worst, my last, my really serious relationship was with a compact, curly-headed psycholinguist who lived in the Village and chewed on a pipe, constantly.
The last time I saw him, almost a year ago, I took his compact shoulders in his wide-wale corduroy suit, this man whom I thought I would love forever, for whom I squeezed fresh orange juice because I wanted to and ironed his shirts because I enjoyed it, I took that man and shook him and shook him and shook him. He was a psycholinguist. He was psycho but never spoke. Just sucked on his pipe. “Tell me what you’re thinking. That’s all I ask. For once, tell me what you’re thinking.”
He removed his pipe, answered very softly and calmly, “Nothing.”
I watched as he placed the pipe between his teeth again and I shook him and shook him and s
hook him. He stood still, unshaken. I never even dislodged the pipe. I screamed, I shrieked. I told him there were thirty-five women to every man in madhouses and thirty-five men to every woman in jails. He nodded.
“What do you think of that?”
He said nothing. I tore down every drape in the living room and the den. He left as I ripped the kitchen curtains into rags.
And there had been Michael who was my teacher at Wellesley, who taught Bible history, with whom I grew up, who was fifty-five to my twenty, with a wild pornographic streak that matched my willing, somewhat virginal experiences. He yelled at me and I adored him for a summer on the Cape. He died in the fall suddenly and there had been no way to go to his funeral without his wife and children and academics knowing who I was. The last thing he’d said to me was “I was reading Hegel before you had hair on your pussy.” That line, long after he died, always turned me on. I had mourned for Michael in the little Chapel, half sorrowful, half excited, not for my loss really, but for his happiness. Which I had given him. He had died happily and I too would simply like to live normally and die happily. Mother Cabrini’s bells tolled noon and I wrapped my coat around me, thanked Doña Dulcia for the moments of silence, wondered if Richard knew Hegel, and left to meet Miriam in the park.
Sissy yelled at me as I walked down the steps to the cobblestone drive.
“Mrs. Slentz called.” Sissy flew down the stairs and reached me. “I’m so glad it wasn’t Grossberger. But Braithwaite would’ve been nicer.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t listen to my conversations. I do not listen to yours.”
“Yours are so much better than mine.”
I slammed the enormous twelfth-century doors in her face and left. I too would have preferred Richard Braithwaite. My heart paused. Mrs. Slentz? It must be a coincidence. One thing I knew about Richard was that he wasn’t married. But with Sissy there is no coincidence; there is only fate.
