by Rhoda Lerman
“Because he thinks he should be honest. That’s really stretching the intent of honesty, isn’t it? Rubbing your face in it?”
“Listen to this one. ‘Heal those gorgeous limbs, from Francine.’ Okay? I really thought I was honest. He said he’s never met anyone so honest. I was the most honest woman in the world, he told me. Before we were married. But you can’t be honest if you want to stay married. It doesn’t work. But I was—honest and open. I could do with a little less of his goddamn honesty. And a little less of his pishy pashy.”
“Do you care, Miriam?”
“Nope. But I’m plenty pissed because I get to stay home and bake and he keeps screaming about how she cares because she sends him a card. Mice with hats. Are you lucky you’re the other woman. Are you lucky!”
“I am?”
“Sweety, the whole thing is a damned Mexican standoff. You get hung up with the morality of who shoots first, what is fair, what is just, what is honest, you die. Okay. Don’t get hung-up like I did on being honest. Honesty isn’t exactly the coin of the realm when it comes to marriage.”
Miriam didn’t pause, couldn’t listen. She didn’t even need somebody on the other end of the phone.
“Listen, she’ll do him a lot of good. She’ll drop him for a sexy intern and he’ll come running home. No problem. I’ll let you go. I just had to tell you. Is that a scream? If I let him do this maybe he’ll stop thinking I tried to kill him.”
“And you must know just the intern.”
“Of course.” She laughed, but it was a different laugh. “I found one who looks most like Richard Chamberlain and told him that the girl in the audio-visual room was troubled because she liked to give blow jobs and her dates felt threatened.”
And wore straight-legged Levis. Christ, another one. “Miriam, I love you. I have to get to sleep. I’ll talk to you.” There was pain. When had she begun to love him?
I didn’t sleep. I lay in the dark wide-eyed with my cynical uncertainties. At that point I only thought Miriam and Sissy were crazy. Love seemed to be the problem. And if I were to love, I too might go off the wall. It took a phone call from Richard and lunch with Jack to complete the picture and turn my night thoughts into cynical certainties.
Sissy told me I was lucky I was programmed. Miriam told me I was lucky I was the other woman. Richard told me I was lucky I wasn’t in Atlanta. Had I had a choice? It was muggy in Atlanta. His voice was faint and distant as it had been when I woke him on Saturday. “Steph, darling? Can you talk? I’m so down. It’s so muggy in Atlanta.” It was four A.M.
There were certain responses to this immeasurable man which drew no blood and I had begun to rely on them. “What’s a friend for?” Come lay your head in my lap. I won’t hurt you.
“I’m so alone tonight, Stephanie. I feel so abandoned.”
“Oh, Richard,” was another of those responses. I added, “Darling.”
“I wish you were here.”
“Oh, Richard.” So far, so good. Why hadn’t he asked me before he left? Did he want me to think he’d asked me?
“I need to be with someone who’s my equal. That’s what I need.”
“Poor dear man, what’s the matter?”
“You don’t mind listening. It’s pretty personal, honey, but I have to talk to someone. Look, I’m in Atlanta, okay?”
“That’s nice.” I was noncommittal. Was that hostility I heard?
“And I took my friend with me, okay?” He was challenging me.
“I understand. I can’t help wishing I were with you.”
“I wish that too.” He was very quick. “But I took my friend because she was really looking forward to it and she’s been working her ass off.”
“I’m sure.” My God, he wanted my approval. Then he really was programmed? “Richard, we’re not committed to each other. Don’t worry.”
No response to that. The only person who had responded to me all week had been Sissy. He was going on. “Well, I had a conference and I was two steps ahead of the sheriff all week and busy as hell and she just sat in the hotel room and didn’t do anything but wait for me to finish with the conference. You know how conferences are.”
“Why didn’t you take her to the conference?”
“I didn’t feel like it. She would’ve been bored. Anyway there’s plenty to do in Atlanta.”
“I know, I’ve heard the Eastern ads.”
“Haven’t you ever been here? I’ll have to take you sometime. Anyway she sat in the hotel room all day waiting for me to call. And when I finally came in . . . it was after two in the morning . . . I even took my shoes off so I wouldn’t wake her up . . . she screamed at me. Is that fair? I think everyone in the hotel must have heard her. Is that fair?”
I was becoming increasingly aware that even though I was jealous I hadn’t gone to Atlanta, I was exulting in the trouble brewing down south. “Richard, did you call her to tell her you were going to be that late?”
“No, I guess I should have but by the time I realized it was so late I didn’t want to wake her up. I wasn’t with another woman or anything. I was just goddamned busy.”
“Didn’t you realize she’d be worried?”
He hesitated. “Funny, that’s just what she said. But that isn’t what she meant. She expected me to come back and take her places. But she had no reason to have expectations.”
He took her to Atlanta and he left her in the hotel. He dragged her a thousand miles and spent good money on her just to show her she shouldn’t have expectations? Richard was a sweetheart. “That’s true,” I said, echoing something he had once said, “when you have expectations the excitement is over.”
“And she left hopping mad. But not until everyone on the floor heard her. Colleagues, Stephanie, colleagues.”
“Oh, Richard.” I knew then I should be defending her, but he had pushed her out and called me. Richard simply wasn’t up to confrontation with her but he was looking for a way to break up—and she took the worm. Or I took the worm.
“She said some awful things to me, Stephanie. I’m very upset about some of the things she said. Can I talk to you?”
“Of course.”
“You’re a wonderful girl. I’m a lucky guy.”
And you must be a shit, Richard, to set her up like that. To take such pains. I would have torn you limb from limb if you tiptoed into my bedroom at two in the morning, skyline panorama, revolving restaurant, glass shaft elevator, Underground Atlanta or not. Carrying your shoes?
“She kept telling me I didn’t belong in politics. Now that hurts. And that I only like middle-class women anyway. And that when she first met me I was almost a Marxist, a Maoist, and then within weeks I had shifted to a Village Voice Uberai and now I’m a conservative; whatever way the wind blows, she said, because I have no center. But I have a center. I have integrity. She thinks my priorities are false and that because I treated her the way I did I could never deal honestly with human concepts.”
“Oh, Richard.”
“I’m very upset about this, Stephanie. She said that I’d never be governor, that if I got to be a mildly corrupt senator I’d be damned lucky.”
What was I supposed to say? I found myself nodding in agreement with the other woman.
“She must be very hurt, Richard. I’m sure she doesn’t mean all of that.”
“Hurt? I didn’t have to take her to Atlanta. Do you know how much a double at the Regency Hyatt costs? I don’t need to hear those things. I had to speak this morning and it was almost impossible I was so depressed.”
I think that may have been my authentic moment of clear certainty when the goal became more important than the truth. “Oh, she knows you have it, Richard. She’s just neurotic about you.”
“Do I, Stephanie? Do I really?”
It was so easy. “Of course.” Everything that woman said was true but I wasn’t going to be dumb enough to tell him the truth. Men don’t marry women who tell them the truth. That much I had already learned from Miriam.
How that girl must love Richard to be so painfully honest. Or she didn’t care. But she cared. I had seen their apartment. She left him though—at least for the time they were in Atlanta. So now if I wanted an opportunity to get him, it was mine.
“God,” he was saying, “I’m so glad to know you believe in me. You don’t know what it means to me. I’m so tired of angry women.” Richard continued talking in that thumb-in-the-mouth voice about all the women who had hurt him. All the questions they’d asked him: Is everything all right? Can I get you anything? What’s the matter? Why didn’t you call? Where were you? I was worried. These were the patterns Miriam meant. Too much love. All those women hunting him with love like the troops of huntsmen in the tapestry tracking down the magic beast. Giving, giving, giving. The girl wasn’t harmful. None of the women he mentioned seemed hostile. He really was searching for someone to blame his hostility on. Me? I’d always wondered how my Connecticut friends could pull off their dears and their darlings and now I knew. They didn’t feel. They had no illusions about their husbands. They had very little invested. I was ready to lie. I had lied. I was lying. And it was so easy. Why? Because I wanted the romance, the man, the big bed in the Regency Hyatt? No, I wanted the win. Well, maybe it was more than just the win. I really was scared of growing old alone. Even after I suspected the dream wasn’t quite as dreamy as I had hoped, even after that, I still wanted the dream. There is always that blinding egotism in us that says . . . with the love of a good woman. . . . Richard’s girl hurt him very badly and he loved her more than ever. He was dreadfully depressed. Obviously they had much invested in each other. My advantage was that I didn’t have very much invested, just a little illusion, just a little hope.
“I’ll be back in the city tomorrow, darling. And then Friday we’ll be together. I feel so much better now. You don’t know what it means to have someone who believes in you. What I’ll do is call you first thing Friday morning. I’ll send a messenger up to your office with my key and then you can wait at my place until I get there. But I’ll call and let you know exactly where we’re going after I make some phone calls Friday morning. Now, get a good night’s sleep and I’ll talk to you Friday for sure and see you about four-thirty, five? Okay? Hey, I love you.” He waited. “Aren’t you going to say anything? I said I love you.”
How could he think I believed in him? When had I begun to believe in him? Did I? “What, dear?” Christ, I wasn’t even from Connecticut. What was my next line?
“Don’t you love me?”
“Oh, Richard, of course. Yes, darling. Yes, I love you.”
My head was working like the electrical connections in a pinball machine. There was no way to call Miriam but the next day, fortunately, I thought at the time, I would have lunch with Jack who understood me so well that being with him was like thinking. He would help. I ran my head along all the tracks, all the buttons, switches, go-backs, tilts and free games, a maze with Unicorn at the end. Well, this was the game.
9
“YOU DON’T HAVE IT IN YOU TO PLAY THAT KIND OF GAME, STEPH.” JACK KEPT looking at his fingernails on one hand and stirring his Senegalese soup with the other, endlessly. I had told him about the phone calls. Jack is still a little in love with me and lunch always becomes pathos, bathos and tragedy because he orders great amounts of food, sets up conversations in which I am bound to reject him and then is too upset to eat, but keeps ordering food and trying to order food for me in quantities. “You’re not that kind of girl. You don’t have it in you. You’ll never catch him if that’s what he needs.”
“What do you mean, I don’t have it in me? Am I too stupid? Do you mean I’m not capable of playing the game?”
“I mean you shouldn’t sell out, Stephanie. You’re not that kind of girl.”
“You are so goddamn vague.”
“The soup is fine. Why don’t you order some.”
“I don’t want soup. I want to know what you’re talking about. Specifically.”
“Specifically you aren’t the kind of girl to tell anyone he’s full of shit. Not that you’re weak. You’re a nice, decent, kind girl. You aren’t a calculating female.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Considering the assholes you end up with, I don’t see how you’re such an authority on what I am and what I’m not, Jack.”
“Me? Oh. Good try. I’m not impressed. Has to be a direct attack.”
“Be honest with yourself. All the times you’ve come crying to me, how could I have picked a loser like that? Remember the girl you took to Turkey? I always thought you set it up so you could get a loser and then run off. Remember you used to say you’d pick the biggest ripest blackcap in the raspberry patch so when you reached in for it, you’d get trapped in the nettles? Every time? That’s you.”
“Okay, Stephanie, then learn from my mistakes. We know each other very very well. Is this man so terrific that you would change your behavior? Is he some kind of hotshot? What’s so special about him?”
“I don’t know, Jack.”
“Well, he’s got to have something.” Jack was asking to be hurt again and I would have to play Richard down, but then Richard really wasn’t terrific or a hotshot or handsome, or, beyond fantasy, any good in bed. Jack shifted his hands and examined his other set of fingernails. “So?”
“So. Ever see a Madison Avenue lawyer in a three-button-roll button-down, Brooks Brothers, stuck on a traffic island, holding his attaché case in one hand, his stainless steel tennis racket in the other and tapping his blue suede Adidas impatiently until the traffic lets him through to his tennis lesson at lunchtime?”
“They’re not buying Adidas anymore. They’re buying those high-rise brown ones from France.”
“Well, one of them is him. I mean, you wouldn’t notice him.”
“Corporation? Securities? Is he good in tennis, at least?”
“He had a book on municipal bonds in his place, with margin notes.”
“I don’t know anything about municipal bonds. I don’t care about municipal bonds and you don’t either. What firm is he with?”
“Don’t know. I don’t ever ask him questions.”
“Crazy. Sounds boring as hell.” Jack was a staffer for Time and everybody’s job was boring as hell.
“I know it’s crazy, Jack. I don’t understand it. I’ve been trying to figure it out all week. He’s got this magic. Like the stuff with the owl and the pussycat. He sort of steps into my fantasies. He’s got a little magic and he’s very elusive and he connects up with my dreams and he is very, very charming, sort of wild, shy, charming.”
“You know how long that lasts, the mystery? Until he farts.” Jack’s job wasn’t boring. Jack was boring. He knew it.
I saw him blink rapidly. “I’m sorry, Jack, this isn’t the most supportive subject for us.” He examined his fingernails and cut through a chicken breast laced with wine, cheese and ham.
It was a hot day, too early for summer heat. The food I had eaten was massing, heavily, in my stomach. Jack asked nonchalantly if I wouldn’t consider forgetting a bad risk and going to the Hamptons with him for the summer; at least I knew, he said, what I would be getting into.
“I don’t know what I’ll be doing this summer.” Again, he had set up the rejection. “You know, Jack, I’m just playing . . . I’m not committed or anything. Sure it has possibility, but I’m not making any decisions.”
“I say you’re out of control.”
“Oh, you know me, I like to edge. But I always pull back in time.”
“Yes and no. Yes and no, Stephanie. This guy, what does he talk about? Say you’re at lunch, what does he talk about?”
“Adolf Berle.”
“Are you interested in Berle?”
I shrugged. “You know, I’m interested in things . . . mostly how his mind works, so I listen.”
“You’re not interested . . .”
“It’s fascinating. It’s . . . oh, you know, Rexford Tug-well, that
era.”
“You know what your problem is, baby? All you museum types. You want to get saved. The guy’s gotta be into politics.”
“I’m not a museum type.” I didn’t respond to the politics.
“You’re leading to it—unmarried. Your clothes are getting blacker and blacker. Soon you’ll be into all black with one piece of heavy jewelry, locked in a room, labeling death, skin drying up, pale, pale, dandruff from your old flaky hair on your black sweater which is getting greener year after year, all the time waiting for someone to discover you, whisk you away to Hollywood, Washington, anyplace but the archives.”
“You’re really a bastard.”
“Also my dear girl, you haven’t mentioned sex at all. Something is really rotten.”
I shrugged. “I haven’t mentioned sex because we haven’t gone to bed yet. He doesn’t want to make any mistakes.”
Jack laughed and waved his fork. Bits of chicken flew from the sides of his mouth, he laughed so hard. He finally managed to ask, “How far wrong can you go? You screw, you screw. I’ll bet he’s Jewish.”
“Jesus, Jack! You are so goddamn twisted.”
“Makes sense, you used to love me too. He is, isn’t he? Don’t you know the myth that Jewish men are womanly? That they grow up thinking if they screw another woman, they’re betraying their mother and the only way to really break loose, to really betray your mother is to marry a . . .” He pointed his fork at me. “A shiksa. And then he never forgives her because she’s not like his mother. It’s wonderful as a racial failure, like sickle cell.”
“You are so jealous. You are so bigoted. You are so small.”
