by Rhoda Lerman
“Well, Stephanie, if I’m going to keep my promise and buy you a cup of coffee, you are going to have to come home with me. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Well, Richard,” I answered lightly, with a touch of mimicry also unintended, “it was rather what I expected.” I’d lost track of the promises.
“Oh?”
“Does that bother you?” I had been too clever. He didn’t like it.
“I like to surprise people. I like to be surprised. The only thing we should ever expect of one another is the unexpected. That way we can always keep our relationship exciting and stimulating.”
“So, don’t take me there. Take me someplace else.”
“Actually, I really want to take you there because I want to show you my fish tank. I was rapping with a friend tonight . . . when I called you . . . and in the middle of everything . . . I hit my forehead with my hand and said ‘My God, Stephanie hasn’t seen the fish tank yet!’ So I called you.” Rapping was not his word: it was a close friend.
“Didn’t your friend mind?” I remembered the giggle.
“I suppose so. But if she were really a friend, like you, she wouldn’t mind.”
“So then she isn’t really your friend?”
“Of course not! You are.”
“Richard, it may take me a while to really understand you.”
“You are such a naturally understanding woman. I’m not worried at all. I don’t live far from here. Do you mind walking?” Richard offered me his arm. It was warm and strong. Not answering was becoming comfortable. “We should have some rules, shouldn’t we? What kind of rules should Richard and Stephanie have?”
He whistled again. I said the words to myself. The girl that I marry will have to be as soft and as pink as a nursery. The girl I call my own will wear satins and laces and smell of cologne. The girl would have to do something about her apartment. The girl would have to do something about her nails will be polished and in her hair she’ll wear a gardenia and slipcovers and curtains, and plants and a real tablecloth and a new toothbrush and towels, great velvety bath towels and flowers. What in God’s name was I thinking?
“Richard, I’m not the right girl, not yet. Let’s not disillusion ourselves. If I am the right girl it’s going to take a little more than a first sighting to know.”
“I understand that, Stephanie. I respect that. I have difficulty with commitment myself. Let’s look at it this way: will you just for tonight be the right girl? Can you accept that much?”
It didn’t seem at the time so pernicious a compromise. “Listen, as far as tonight is concerned, I better be the right girl.” I thought I was being amusing.
He was still serious. “One night at a time, darling. That’s all I ask. That’s all I can ask of you now, Stephanie.” He pressed his cheek against mine. His cheek was very smooth and his breath was chocolatey. “Believe me, darling, I don’t want to press you. My intentions are honorable. I really mean that.”
He had meant that. I just didn’t know that honorable referred to his honor and not mine. He certainly was going overboard, I thought, to get me into bed. We began to walk again. He was very thoughtful. I was very curious. He came to a decision. About the rules.
“Tonight’s rule is that we have to give each other something so precious, something you’d never dream of giving away, something someone you loved gave to you. Stephanie, you do love me, don’t you?”
He didn’t lose a pace. “I don’t think I’ve ever really been in love,” I answered, sincerely, very sincerely. It wasn’t the time to play games. I wasn’t the girl.
He stopped and faced me, staring at me as if I had forgotten his birthday or his last name. Then he pressed his forefinger into my forehead. “How can we be friends if you aren’t in love with me?”
I should never have skipped that chapter. “Okay.” I spread my hands. I didn’t know what to say.
“Good!” He clapped his hands together at my eyes. “Then we are loving friends and I will give you my chicken stone. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Okay, Stephanie, I thought. Just for tonight, you are going to his apartment at half past midnight. You have on new Pucci underwear and your armpits are very very wet and you want to go to bed with him and you will. So enjoy it. But I had heard stories about rats in laboratories before. I had heard the one about rats given a choice of food or a shot of electric pleasure and they starved to death but loaded up with pleasure. I thought the situation with Richard was analogous. I really thought so. I would remember these moments nostalgically. I could almost step out of them and look back upon them already. How his nose just turned up slightly at the end, the good soft gentle lips, the fall of his hair on the collar of his raincoat. I was really mad for him under the streetlight, slightly misty, and, given the choice, I was willing to face the rat’s agony as long as I could get the pleasure. Which I supposed I was about to get. I was sure he would be wonderful in bed. I just had to remember not to talk too much. That’s what they all wanted. Someone pretty who didn’t talk too much. I had never been on a longer walk. I had never looked so dutifully into so many store windows. I looked at my reflection in the glass. I was pretty. I was, in fact, radiant. That was what this man did for me. He made me happy. I kept my mouth shut.
“You know, Stephanie, just after I met you I had a very important dream about you.”
“Do you dream a lot?”
“Mmmmm.”
“Tell me. I adore dreams. Was I in it?”
“No. No, you weren’t. But in the dream I broke through to a new level.”
“Really? Of what?”
“Oh, well, I’m not sure . . . you know, of consciousness, getting rid of the old hang-ups.”
“You don’t seem awfully hung-up, Richard.” Here we go, Miriam. I’m taking notes, baby.
“The usual, you know, insecurity, afraid to feel . . . but I knew when I woke up that you were going to play a very important part in my life.”
“Richard, don’t overinterpret,” I warned myself.
“Stephanie, I know I’m not overinterpreting because with you I’m not afraid to feel.”
If ever there were a classic Richard remark that was a classic Richard remark. I was busy thinking about whether he felt anything about the other woman. What I should have been thinking about was whether he meant he would feel something about me or that he wasn’t afraid because with me he wasn’t worried about feeling. I always got trapped with Richard on the easy responses, as in the nots, while he was levels beyond me. I did know enough to note insecurity for Miriam, realizing that if I were to get involved, it would be useful information and I remembered thinking then that I wasn’t hooked because I was able to consider critically and objectively the fact that when we walked into his apartment, WRVR was going off the air for the night and the last glorious rousing strains of a jazzed-up “Star-Spangled Banner” greeted us. Richard stopped, placed his hand over his breast and moved his lips silently. I think he was practicing for a conditioned response as in bandstand, podium, inauguration. Finally a distant voice chattered through the wavelength and Richard looked at me as if we’d just taken communion together.
“God, Richard.” I took off my coat. “That’s how I started to masturbate. Sixth grade, you know, with my hot little hand over my hot little breast. I couldn’t wait for the pledge. I never passed a flag. . . .” Either I was offending the Governor or boring Richard because he took my coat to the closet and as I was about to tell him that I keep a flag over my bed just to turn me on which was an exaggeration but I thought amusing, he disappeared into the kitchen. I let my voice trail off and wandered into the living room. In a very few minutes, long enough for the blush to fade, Richard carried in a Plexiglas tray of brie, sardines, crackers, coffee in a MOMA glass pot and a clear bowl of fresh whipped sweet cream.
“Whipped cream? Are you somebody’s pussycat?”
“Oh, people feed me,” he answered vaguely, setting the tray down on the coffee table before me
and returning to slide closed the double doors to the rest of the apartment.
I stuck my finger in the bowl and licked it, hoping he would explain. But he did not.
“You know I think you can really understand my goal, Stephanie. Whoops, forgot something. Meet my family. I’ll be back in a minute.” He indicated either a continuous bank of gleaming fish tanks or, above them, a blown-up gallery of relatives, and then, opening the closed double doors quite softly, he left me alone to decide what he meant.
“Do you like them?” he will ask me. And he will touch my hand, tapping it as he taps me, and will say solemnly: “I want you to like them.” And I really won’t know if he is referring to his fish or his family because I had learned from Richard in these few days that his messages were two-pronged and either prong, although I was free to choose, could stick me good. I wished he would hurry back. I moved around his room, trespassing on the thick lawn of unbleached wool, feeling very large and very conspicuous. A toilet flushed twice. I heard water running. Was it in this apartment or the next? Perhaps he was washing or changing into something contrived and dreadful like silk pajamas and maroon mules, as terribly civilized as his apartment which included all the items New York eclectic decorating is expected to include. Except the awful fish tanks and the blown-up relatives. I liked neither.
The tanks themselves were filled with crystal objects as if someone had dumped an entire display shelf from Baccarat into each of them. I heard voices, a man and a woman close to me, muted, muffled. I strained my ears but the siphons and filters of the many tanks drowned the other noises. At last, the doors slid open. Whatever it was he had forgotten, he had apparently not remembered because he came back, unchanged, empty-handed, and again closed the doors softly.
“You’ll have to meet them all, Stephanie. Except my father.” He touched a jug-eared man under a beach umbrella and sighed. “Four years now and my mother has never been the same.”
Recklessly, I looked up into the enlarged faces of his relatives, gray and white spotted specters who may somehow know my future but clearly not my past. Why are you doing this, Richard? I came at midnight to make love, to sleep with you. Why are you doing this?
“And my mother. Do you love your mother, Stephanie?”
“Mmm.”
“I don’t feel anything toward my parents. Maybe that’s why I tend to compartmentalize my relationships.”
His mother, young, was wide-hipped, sweet-faced, dark-haired on the beach in a pleat-skirted bathing suit with his father’s thin arms encircling her waist from behind and his face, squint-eyed, jug-eared, over her plump shoulder. She didn’t look crazy at all. “What do you mean compartmentalize?”
“I mean one person for one thing, one for another.” We moved to the next picture. “This is just after his first heart attack.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” The father, still squint-eyed and jug-eared, gray-haired now, on a wicker-chaired porch with pine boughs dipping in the corner. Richard, I am not interested in your father’s coronary. Not yet. I’m not even interested in the future yet. I have to go to work tomorrow. His father frightened me. He looked like the kind of man who makes the women around him grow old and mad, while he grows healthier and meaner. I wondered how the mother outlasted him.
“And Richard as Dickie-boy. I didn’t become Richard until my bar mitzvah and soon after that I was The Governor.’ ” My heart turned over. Richard at three or four with masses of light curling hair, pouting lips, dancing eyes. The phone began to ring somewhere beyond the closed doors. It rang many times. He didn’t seem to notice. If the call were from the woman he was involved with, he wasn’t too involved. “And this is Blossom, my sister. She’s older. She and her friends always teamed up to make me cry.” Who calls Richard at one in the morning? Who does he ignore who might be crying her eyes out and going mad because he wasn’t answering? Will it ever be me?
“I guess I better answer it. No one else is going to. I’m sorry, sweetheart. This is so special. I’ll be right back.” The doors closed again. It was simply a remark. Who else would answer it? He was being amusing. I looked back at his baby picture. I loved him. Blossom was beautiful. Her eyes were straight and honest. She didn’t look crazy either. I found her pushing Richard in a pram on a boardwalk, his chin barely reaching the side of the pram, sweet and fat and drooly. He was a funny baby. Blossom was better looking, with an antique enamel face, like a doll, and rosebud lips. Farther down the wall, I found her standing on a pedestal, glowing with her own beauty and pride, a trumpet-hemmed wedding gown twisting around the pedestal, making her eight feet tall. Then Richard at six or seven, slump-chested, bandy-legged, hipless, jug-eared with a pail and shovel and knobby knees. Beach umbrella with wide stripes, soda bottles stuck in the sand around an old blanket, middle-class, earnest people on the beach. My life had been inland, PX’s and Officer’s Club pools, separate from relatives, army brats on concrete shores, always shifting. A life apart. But I was certain, somehow, different as I was, that when Richard with his knobby knees knelt to get a sandwich from the A&P bag leaning against the wooden pole of the beach umbrella, I was certain it was an egg-salad sandwich with a slice of tomato and when he bit down, he hit sand in the egg-salad. I was certain of that although I’d never known his life and I really wanted to ask him. Goddammit, who was he talking to out there beyond the doors? I could feel his life somehow, wonderfully, as I stood before the pictures. I wanted my own place up there on the wall. I didn’t know then what it would cost to hang there, in a middle-class, East Coast, jug-eared Jewish family, closed to outsiders, but it had the same sense then to me, although far removed, as the Armengols’ Gothic Chapel and the peace of their tombs and I wished to belong.
Which could have been a death wish. I tore papers, I knew, because I avoid tearing at myself. What kind of man has his ears flattened? Why would anyone go through all that pain and shame and bandages so he wouldn’t look like his family and still hang all of them on his walls? I didn’t know if I would be part of Richard’s life or part of this joke before me. And he’d still come up with a little jug-eared, dancing-eyed baby anyway. I would knit lots of funny hats with pompons until he was old enough to have his ears flattened too if he wanted that.
“Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.” The doors opened; the doors closed. “My mother. She has a pain. She always has a pain when I haven’t called her for three days. And who is dear Stephanie smiling at? Do you think we’re all funny looking?”
I was smiling, thinking of his jug-eared baby and smiling because I had felt Richard’s eyes as he came into the living room, shining, like warm fires, within me. I had a deep and sweet internal sense of him without looking at him. Just as I had known about the egg salad.
“Richard, was there sand in the egg-salad sandwiches?”
“Of course. I must have been out of college by the time I found out they don’t necessarily come with sand.”
And then, because of the sandwich and because he was standing just in front of me, his back to me, I slid my arms around his waist as his father had his arms around his mother’s waist. “Richard, why didn’t you tell me it was your mother?” Richard stiffened perceptibly as I asked my question. “I thought it was another woman at the Cloisters.” He slipped away like a piece of dental floss, leaving me with a pair of extra arms which could find no place on my body to rest comfortably and humiliation burning my cheeks into ashes. Either my question or my touching him was a tactical error. Or both. I used my hands to smooth my hair. Richard adjusted a screw on a siphon tube running into the tank.
“My mother wanted to meet you after I told her you were in the top three.”
“Top three what?”
“An expression. I told her you were fantastic and she found out from Terry—Terry’s my sister’s friend—where you worked. I didn’t send her, Stephanie. I didn’t tell her what to do. But she tried to meet you and you were rude.”
“Rude?” My voice peeled into something belligerent which I couldn�
�t cover. “How should I know who she was? I didn’t even know your last name. I didn’t even know why she had come.”
Richard grinned and wagged his finger at me. “Hostile, hostile. You called my office so you must have known my last name.”
Richard, what are you doing? I am here to hold you and kiss you and stay in your arms. What is happening? We’ll be fighting in a minute and I don’t know how to draw out of the morass you’ve led me into. “Is that an accusation?” I asked as softly as I was able.
“You are hostile, Stephanie.”
“You gave me your phone number. I didn’t know your last name.” I spoke with my back to him. I examined the ugly black fish.
He continued calmly, ignoring my increasing anger and anguish. “My secretary said you were rude also. I told her you didn’t strike me as rude. I think you are really sweet.”
“Oh, Richard,” I turned to him, almost pleading. “I’m not a rude person.”
“I know you aren’t. Here, come sit down and have our coffee.” He patted the sofa and sat down, waiting for me. “Now, tell me what’s bothering you.”
“Is your mother crazy, Richard?”
“My mother’s invested a great deal in my career, Stephanie.” It wasn’t the question I should have asked. The question I should have asked was “What do you want from me?”
Instead I continued, “I’m not rude, Richard. You have arranged situations for me which leave me no alternatives. I don’t know how to act. I didn’t mean to offend her. I don’t know what to expect.” I remained at the fish tanks. He waited at the sofa.
“Ah, when we begin to expect something of each other, the excitement is over . . . you see? I can’t handle expectations. Don’t expect anything and I won’t expect anything from you and whatever I receive I’ll be grateful for. You know, Stephanie, I think probably, Stephanie, that you are a romantic person, that you are not rude at all and if you do hurt people, it is unintentional.”
