The Girl That He Marries

by Rhoda Lerman

  No-fault stopped. Apparently I had—at least one. His uncle’s eyes and his mother’s eyes, four little sharp shells, crackled at each other. Richard opened a plastic box of plastic cards with Boy in Blue and Girl in Pink and suggested a little canister (his word, not mine) if his mother would clear the table. She flushed. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m not what you call liberated.” I didn’t know if it was the tail or the Christian and felt awful that I had embarrassed her. Later she told me quietly that she had boxes of old things in storage and that her daughter Blossom only wanted new things that matched and if I didn’t mind she’d like to give me some. “Delft? Maybe Wedgwood?” She was the trader with the beads and bracelets. I was the Indian. If I gave her pictures, she’d fill my china closet. All I had to do was keep Richard happy. Which meant, of course—though only I understood—making him cry. I looked forward to meeting Blossom.

  “A piece, Myron?”

  “A piece thin.”

  We had more Sanka and piece thins of Baskin-Robbins ice cream pie and continued to play canasta. I thought about Richard through seventeen hands, through a vague steady heckling about what fathers do for livings, and I was still thinking about sleeping with Richard when I laid down three jokers and a deuce to announce my need for fresh air. He was not, as he demonstrated so succinctly on the sidewalk, of like mind. He had not been thinking at all of sleeping with me. I put my arms around him and drew my body into his under streetlights and trash cans, just like the first night, and he backed away quite nimbly, begging me, then and there, not to turn him on.

  “I think we’d better define terms, Richard.”

  “Aah,” he responded mellifluously. “Defining terms is a form of legislation. Every man becomes his own legislator. You can’t legislate a thing like this. It’s cosmic, darling, a higher law.”

  The girl that he marries shut her mouth rather than offer up her own logic about the inviolability of cosmic spaces and the insufficiency of his argument. Making love would of course be following a greater natural law. “Richard,” I said clearly and simply, “I want to sleep with you. I really want to sleep with you.” It was not unacceptable for a free spirit to speak that way.

  “Oh, God, I know, Stephanie. But the way I feel about you, if I were to take you to bed without knowing you, it would be jumping into the void.” He spoke so quickly I decided he had had the response ready in a brief somewhere in his pocket. Prepared by his secretary.

  “Richard, I need to sleep with you.”

  “Oh, honey, I want you terribly. I am very attracted to you. But you are a gift from God, Stephanie. I can’t misuse you. Look at the couples. Look at the divorce rate. God has given you to me, crossed our paths, and we can’t . . . we must try to do this right.”

  “Couldn’t we just go someplace and be alone?”

  “How would they feel if we left them, those poor old people?”

  “Richard!”

  I adored the way he looked under the streetlight. I had felt the strong full body he would offer me and I really hoped he was kidding. I tried again. “Richard, I don’t care about your mother terribly. I want to sleep with you. I want to make love with you. I want to go to bed with you.”

  “You don’t care about my mother?”

  “She’s a nice person, Richard, and your Uncle Myron is okay too. I care about you.”

  “So, that is precisely why we are going to do this right. We’re not going to clutch wildly at each other in a dirty bed. You understood, Stephanie, that there were rules.”

  Richard wasn’t kidding.

  “I never knew the rules,” I said with a great emptiness. And anger began to flow quickly into the emptiness. “Okay, Richard. Okay. I have to ask you some questions. Just what do you mean by doing it right?”

  “Don’t ask questions, Stephanie. It isn’t becoming.”

  “I have every right to ask questions. Every right.”

  “Why of course you do. Of course you do. But you see it annoys me.” Richard held my shoulders. Maybe he was kidding. “We’re not a couple of teenyboppers. I’m in love with you and I’m going to marry you. What more do you really need to know?”

  I have to make a phone call, I thought. “I have to make a phone call.” Electrical charges and synapses and nerve sheathes were tightening and shuddering toward hysteria. “Can we go in there to make a phone call?”

  I ran up the steps of the Harbor Village Spa. Faces, like ghosts, all fed on chemicals and pills, with open mouths, watched me from the bar. All layered like Richard’s mother, all polyestered and knit pantsuited and newly toothed, all long-nailed and polished and painted, like the lobsters in the case next to the phone booth, twitches and pulses and pacemakers, all waiting to catch somebody, something, long since gone, all afraid of dying alone, and I remembered the Armengols with the peace on their carved faces. Who would I call? My mother in Munich? And tell her I am in love with a man who wants to marry me but he doesn’t want to sleep with me until we’re married? “That’s lovely, darling, thank you for the good news. But we have guests right now. You’ll have to forgive me.” Jack? God, no. Dial-A-Prayer was busy. I called Miriam.

  “Miriam, he really isn’t going to sleep with me! Can you believe it?” My voice was too loud. The painted people at the bar swiveled en masse and studied me.

  “Christ, he really wants to marry a virgin.”

  “It’s not so easy to become a virgin overnight, Miriam. Even a week or two.”

  “It’s not so easy to get married either. Look, it’s a good sign. Just keep reminding yourself. It’s a good sign. He’s going to marry you. That’s why he isn’t sleeping with you. Okay?”

  “Call Terry, Miriam,” I whispered. “Find out what the girl is like.”

  “Terry?”

  “From the party.”

  “Oh, Terry.”

  “Please, Miriam.”

  “Okay, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that you’re meeting his family. He wants to marry you. I have to hit you over the head with that. Don’t get into rejection. You’re the right girl. He’s going to marry you. Anyone can sleep together.”

  “Miriam, don’t say that. That’s what he said.”

  “So he’s right. Now, look. I’ll call your Terry. You come here Monday night for supper. It’s our anniversary.”

  I hesitated. I had learned to hate Il Duce.

  “He’s very different now. Come after work.”

  “I’m a wreck, Miriam. Why doesn’t he want to sleep with me?” I didn’t mean to yell at her. “You sound like my mother. My mother told me if I was going to be an actress I shouldn’t believe men who told me that swallowing improves your voice.”

  “And your mother also probably told you to walk straight, smell good, answer politely. And wear a gardenia in your hair. I’ll dance at your wedding. See you Monday night. Be good.”

  Richard was whistling on the steps. I managed to look as if I’d twisted my ankle as I ran to him and he leaped to steady me as I came reeling down. He held me in his arms. It was what my mother taught me: deceit.

  “Sweetheart!” He carried me to the lowest step and sat down next to me. “Is it awful?” The gold chain around his neck danced in the mercury lights of the Harbor Spa. I didn’t like him.

  I rubbed my ankle and wished it to swell. He rubbed it. I laid my head on his shoulder. He stroked my hair. It wasn’t bad. As a game play, it had limited life, but it wasn’t bad. Except when you run out of limbs, the next moves have to become more degenerative. Four steps to herpes.

  “Let me try to carry you home. Can you put any pressure on it?”

  “I don’t think it’s broken or anything, Richard. Oh, Richard, how foolish of me.”

  “Foolish, silly girl, wonderful girl. Here.” He hoisted me into his arms and carried me for a while. I wondered why it was he preferred me broken. I’m not that small. Richard began to breathe badly. “We’re going to have to do something else. You’re getting heavy.”

&nbs
p; “I could take my clothes off. I’ll weigh less.”

  He carried me back, struggling bravely, to the steps of the Harbor Spa and promised to return for me with the car. He kissed the top of my head. He broke into a run. What if he didn’t come back? But I knew he would. Some of the painted people from inside walked by me down the steps. I considered breaking into a run in another direction away from the entire scene, finding a train and going home to my ficus tree. The ankle didn’t even look swollen. Pinching it murderously, I considered bending it back and forth to stretch a ligament or something believable. He was back, three steps at a time, carrying a single rose.

  “I prefer gardenias, Richard.”

  “God, I’m sorry. I stole this from someone’s garden.” And he carried me to the car. I tried to remember how I should act if I were in pain. Laying my head on his shoulder and sniffing the rose seemed appropriate. Commonplace, but comfortable.

  “Gardenias are really exotic. Roses are so Mother’s Day, you know.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  I received an Ace bandage, a cup of cocoa, a croissant with fake marmalade and my very own pillowcase embroidered “Hers” when we came back to the condo. Richard tucked me into bed. Then he tucked his mother into bed.

  Lying next to his mother that night on the Castro Convertible—she breathing fitfully but smelling nice—I thought seriously about the girl at the piano. It was so easy for Richard not to sleep with me. Bind my loins with an Ace bandage and tuck me in next to your mother, safe and sound. Damn. He’s perfectly satisfied. They fuck like crazy and I’m going to end up like this old snoring woman next to me on the Castro. Her career: shopping. Her goal: someday, someday her men would need her for something more than chambermaid. Waiting, preparing herself to be needed, one of each in the cupboard, two of each in the medicine cabinet. We both lie here bound against the sins of the dark. The temptations are for other women. The wives get loyalty, life insurance, birthday cards, a new outfit each season, the paycheck every week and wait forever for an emotional commitment. Anything but that. No matter what it costs in Gucci’s and Pucci’s, anything but that. That’s on reserve. The girl at the piano has it right now.

  We didn’t go to Westport. We had a late breakfast on Sunday. Uncle Myron brought his flyswatter to the table. Almost, and probably exactly, on signal, Uncle Myron and Richard’s mother left the table and retired to the corners of the room, like the trainers at a prizefight, and Richard took my hand. “Just tell me what your father does, Stephanie. They really want to know and it’s pretty rude the way you’ve been avoiding it all weekend.”

  “He works in Munich.” I shrugged. I’d told him once. But he hadn’t believed me. Or, more likely, hadn’t listened.

  “Stephanie, their coffee is going to get cold. Just tell me.”

  “I didn’t tell them to leave the table.” I wasn’t being the girl that he marries at all. As I defended myself from my corner, I remembered Mrs. Slentz’s scene with the crocus plants at the Cloisters and I was inspired with a wonderful thought. If I had only blushed, my work would have been without flaw. As it was, it wasn’t bad. I waved the mother and the uncle back and then hung my head in shame while Uncle Myron tapped the table with the dangerous end of the flyswatter and I told them so softly and so parenthetically that because my grandmother had been a Hebrew—the flyswatter hung in the air—my grandfather’s gun factory in New Haven and my father joining the army as a career officer had nearly driven her berserk and I thought, that is, I stuttered and stammered, wishing for a blush or a provocative tear, that they would be offended if they knew we had become rich from war and that my father was a general. Of course no one heard a word beyond “my grandmother had been a Hebrew.”

  “It is all right, isn’t it?” I ended with a fine quaver. The antique euphemism, in its Episcopalian inversion, was super. The word “Hebrew” plus the flyswatter hung over my lowered eyelids.

  And all the while I had woven my tale, I had delicately, infinitesimally tipped my coffee cup in order that the cloth in front of Richard overflowed finally into his lap. He hadn’t moved.

  The three of them were afraid to look at each other, incendiary as a shared glance could be at that moment. Over the fake marmalade buzzed a fly which ought also to have been fake. The fly and the steady drip of coffee from Richard’s lap to the floor were the only sounds until his mother broke the silence. “It’s okay. They should only look like you, sweetheart. See, Richard, her teeth. That’s what I mean by Connecticut teeth.”

  “And the ears,” added Uncle Myron. “If the kids have her ears, we’ll save a fortune.”

  I raised my eyes demurely to Richard whose temples were pulsing visibly. “Liar,” he mouthed at me.

  “Richard! Shah!” His mother slapped his hand lightly. Either she lip-read or she intuitively understood. I couldn’t tell then.

  “It’s the Eighth Army,” I added lightly. “I’ll show you pictures.”

  “About your grandmother,” he braved, “I find it particularly difficult to believe. Whatsoever.”

  I began to pat politely at his pants, delaying my napkin over his inner thigh and not responding to his challenge. The muscles twitched along his leg.

  As if it were Richard, Uncle Myron picked off the fly. The marmalade slid to the floor under the impact and I, in my still small voice, as I joined the family unit as a compatriot, spoke: “Surely, Richard, it isn’t important to you one way or the other, is it?”

  Uncle Myron laughed very loud. His mother covered her mouth. I allowed a smirk at the corners. Richard left the table.

  The only thing Richard said to me about my grandmother scene was on the way back to the city. Since he didn’t have to be home until seven, we were going to the Cloisters. I didn’t ask who was at home. I knew. “I have a friend,” he mused, almost quizzically, as if somehow I could convince him he didn’t. “This friend would die before she made a fool of me in front of my family. I know she would.”

  “Is she the one Uncle Myron wouldn’t give any money to?”

  “It’s not important. Just that she’s a very nice person.” His voice was dreamy. I didn’t want to see his face.

  “Richard, do you think your family liked me?”

  But when I looked at his face, it was changing from the look of love that was for her to the bright charm and false smile that were for me. “Dear girl, of course; they adored you. You are everything any of us wanted.”

  12

  WHILE I SAT ON A BENCH RESTING MY ANKLE BEFORE THE UNICORN, Richard wandered through the Cloisters whistling, rocking on his feet before exhibits, hands folded behind his back. I could hear his heels clicking on the stone floors. A very handsome, magnificently dressed woman sat next to me in something gray and soft. She had the same face as the Armengol woman in the tomb, great carved peaceful planes. She looked at my Ace bandage.

  “How did you do it?”

  “I’m faking it.”

  “Oh.” She waved to a man passing by who said he would be back in a minute.

  “Are you happy?” I asked her, astonished at my involuntary question. But she began to answer in an astonishing way.

  “Yes. Now. Once I had a husband. We used to go places together. On Saturday afternoons. But that wasn’t enough. So I got rid of my husband and took a lover. But then I never went any places on Saturday afternoons and I spent Saturday and Sunday waiting for him to call and take me someplace. We always slept together on Saturday night.”

  “Why didn’t you stay with your husband and keep the lover?”

  “My husband understood that he wasn’t capable of being both. But I didn’t understand no man was. Now, I don’t sleep with the men I go places with and I don’t go places with the men I sleep with and it isn’t bad. My date is going to call the girl he sleeps with for tonight. I’m not unhappy. I’m not happy. I just don’t have to stay home on Saturday afternoons and wait for somebody to take me someplace. I go a lot of places now. I’m very busy on weekends. Men just
aren’t capable of handling both kinds of relationships with the same woman.”

  “I thought it was because they’re bastards.”

  “Oh, not at all, poor babies. They can’t do both. It’s not their fault.” She put her hand on my knee. I kicked my bad ankle, again involuntarily. “Women can.”

  I really wanted to take her hand off my knee. There are too many battle-scarred bisexuals already. And I was still in there fighting.

  “Except you’ll die alone,” I told her. “That’s the problem.”

  “Yes,” she answered thoughtfully. “Yes, it is.” She took her hand away.

  Richard turned to me and smiled. Then he came over and offered me his arm and helped me limp out. “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did she have her hand on your knee? I don’t like that at all.”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Sorry,” he answered nastily.

  “Oh, Richard, I’m edgy with this pain. I’m sorry.” Actually I wanted to think about the woman’s words and remember them. I didn’t want to talk or listen to Richard. I had never recognized the duality. Richard is unable to do both things with the same woman. That’s what Miriam has been trying to say. That’s what Richard had been trying to say. “Anyone can make love. I want you to be my friend.” That’s precisely what he said and precisely what he meant. He needed me to be his friend. And I would be. With a vengeance.

  And as I discovered when we parked in front of my building, friends do indeed go many places, most of which are rated by New York magazine and transferred verbatim into Richard’s little Gucci notebook. Some dates in Richard’s notebook were already circled in pink marker. He did not use pink marker for my dates. “On Tuesday, can you meet me at Madrigal? And let’s go to the Saint Regis on Wednesday and Thursday or Friday—which is better for you?—La Toque Blanche. Then can you meet me next Monday after work at Bosphorus East? Do you like Armenian food?” I calculated how many hours a week I would lose going downtown for lunch. I told him I loved Armenian food. “And how about next Tuesday for lunch at La Grenouille? You’ll really like that. Thursday . . . why don’t you suggest something? Unless you want to go back to Madrigal. Maxwell’s Plum is always good on Thursdays. And that weekend, let’s see, it’s the first weekend in June, isn’t it? That weekend we ought to hit Westport. And after that . . .” I don’t know what the schedule will be. We’re pretty open until August when . . . he flipped through pages. His hands were shaking. “August fifteenth I go to the Hamptons and then I get back after Labor Day.”