The Girl That He Marries

by Rhoda Lerman

  His anger was gone. His hurt was gone. He seemed passionately, alertly, curiously involved.

  “In the better stores?”

  “Yes, go on, darling.”

  “He picks them out.”

  “Well, there’s your answer.”

  “Do you mean . . . ? Then it doesn’t matter what kind of tie I wear, it will always look like a Jewish tie? Is that what you’re trying to say? . . . Or do you mean they pick out ‘J.’ ties for me because I look Jewish?”

  “Dammit, Richard,” now I hissed. “This is the stupidest conversation. Why are you so hysterical about being Jewish? Such terrible self-hatred. I mean you’re the only one who cares. I think it’s very nice that you are a Hebrew because we know you make good fathers and wonderful husbands and excellent providers. We have absolutely no objection to whatever it is you believe in or what ties you wear and so on and so on.” I had really lost my train of thought.

  He turned toward me with that certain violence I found appealing. “We who?”

  “Darling, this discussion is simply not worthy of us, is it?”

  “Aah, Stephanie.” He took my hand. He actually took my hand and kissed the center of it and then all my little fingers. B&D? S&M? He had found his sadist. “Come with me and help me buy ties. I’ll take the afternoon off.”

  “Oh, no, Richard. I’m setting up the first section of my crosses. I have to supervise the construction of the platforms and . . . well, I could never do that to a man. Perhaps after . . . well, it’s something a wife does, you know, and I’m just not ready to commit myself to playing that role yet.” I sighed prettily. “You know.” He sucked on my palm and I was about to slide off the chair.

  “Of course. I understand, sweetheart.” He continued working the center of my hand which seemed, like acupuncture, directly connected to other vital centers of my system. “Someday.”

  We sat still for a while, touching knees, heat climbing through my body and I knew through his. This man was a very possible man. Afterward, long after the check arrived, the restaurant almost empty, he asked, breathing hotly into my ear, “Stephanie, when I wear a tie like this do you mean people like yourself look at it and say that man must be Jewish?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You did.”

  I shrugged. “You forced me to that conclusion.”

  “All right, what would they think?”

  “Do you mean these people here for instance who know you? The various ones you spoke to as they came in?”

  “Yes, and others, juries, judges, clients.”

  “Probably, and this is only a probe because I can’t speak beyond my own experience, of course, probably they’d think, if they stopped to think, there goes a Jewish tie.”

  I might have overdone it. On the way out into the sunny afternoon, Richard buttoned his raincoat up to his neck.

  14

  HE CALLED ME THAT NIGHT. HE SAID NOTHING ABOUT TIES. INSTEAD HE asked me to hold as he turned up a record, blasting music into my ears. I held and listened. It was “The Emperor.” I never liked it.

  “Is that gorgeous?” He at last removed the music. “Isn’t that the most moving, most brilliant? That passage is the finest.”

  “It’s a fine performance. Who’s doing it?”

  “Do you know what it reminds me of? Listen to this. It reminds me of . . . the way I see it? Two primeval creatures like Prometheus with new worlds rising volcanically above them, fighting the last fight. Water, fire, streams of lava, red sky and the last fight is meaningless, because it’s all coming to an end. But . . . but . . . no one is sure if the world is really coming to an end and the fighting is useless or if the last fight is in reality producing the new world. Don’t you see it that way?” He was very excited.

  “Not bad.” It really wasn’t. I thought I would listen to it myself someday and then discuss it with him. I felt a recognition. If one could talk about new worlds, one might talk about God and the perfectability of man. I was very happy and was about to bring up that very subject when he perforated the faint connection we had made.

  “God, it’s late. As FDR used to say, gotta run. Catch you later.”

  Click. But I had really expected no more this time.

  Those two weeks of dating were grim. The calendar hung like a lodestone around my neck. I had just a little more than two months before he took the girl at the piano to the Hamptons, before he discovered that she was really the right girl. On another level, though, I enjoyed the two weeks, enjoyed being with Richard for all those lunches and early dinners. I liked being seen with him. I liked the way other men looked at me. He liked the way other men looked at me. I often caught him searching for an authentic face, trying to find someone he might someday look like, someone he might become, someone who seemed content. I would see him from moment to moment, pensive, staring through windows, distracted by a distant troubling thought and then he would turn and smile his utterly charming smile for me. He was playing games also but not as well as I was. There were other factors operating during those weeks. His shirts were wrinkled, buttons occasionally crushed and hanging awry. I had seen a fluff of Platypus’s orange hair on Richard’s well-styled locks and knew he’d slept at least one night on the couch. And, as if he weren’t eating fresh strawberries and whipped cream any longer, his face was touched, just touched, with a gray cast. I knew he was in conflict. I knew my public presence helped him. He constantly measured other people’s reactions to us as a couple. And as lightly and as pleasantly as I greeted him for our dates and conversed entertainingly, looking like a girl, acting like a lady, thinking like Machiavelli, I worked like a dog to find his openings, to find some soft painful spot where I could dig in and dislodge the virgin before my time was up. Privately, my presence ate him up alive. I knew, because he began to seek advice from me quite desperately. Advice for her. As the problems worsened, he made less and less attempt to cover himself and finally began talking directly about her. And I got mean.

  At odd hours from odd places, Richard began to call me. Bars, drugstores, street corners. I always asked where he was and he always told me at his place. Buses and trucks ran through his place, cash registers rang often and short order cooks called out in Chinese from his kitchen. Nevertheless he called me and I couldn’t complain. We discussed moral issues. We discussed the problems of “my friend” or “an acquaintance of mine” or “someone I know.”

  “I want to try something out on you, Steph,” he would begin. I was becoming an authority on Richard’s someones, which boiled down to, I was certain, that one girl at the piano. And as I grew to know Richard more or less—I was never sure which—the someone seemed to have greater and deeper problems each time Richard called me. The most rewarding call came after a lunch date at which he had yawned a great deal and eaten ravenously. I had suggested that perhaps he had had a fight with his friend and that he’d had a bad supper/night/breakfast. He reminded me that we had promised each other not to ask questions. I told him it was a statement. He told me not to expect a response, be it question or statement.

  And late that night he called. Very late.

  “Where are you, darling?”

  “At my place.”

  A cash register rang behind him. “Steph, you’re a mature woman. Let me try this one out on you. Do you think if a woman loves passionately and deeply, that she has to give up the possibility of reaching a higher level of truth? I was just talking to a friend and the question came up. I said I knew exactly who’d have an answer.”

  “It’s after two in the morning, Richard.”

  “Just off the top of your head, huh, honey?”

  Sure I know the answer, Richard. I know my Antigone. But I’m not supposed to be bright. “Not for me was the marriage hymn, nor will anyone start the song at a wedding of mine.” Prefer honor. What was happening over there? He was downstairs in a phone booth. She was upstairs crying over her honor, trying to choose between motherhood and morality? And he came downstairs for some p
astoral counseling from the other woman so he could run back upstairs and climb into her bed against her body and relieve himself into her and think of me fleetingly or perhaps even imagine she was me just to bring a little extra joy into the bed. Jesus, I’ll never really get her out of his head. He is so worried tonight. What is this? Marriage versus career?

  “Dearest Richard, you are so philosophical and I’m feeling so horny and I just want to think happy horny thoughts.”

  “Try, Stephanie.”

  “Is it awfully important?”

  “Awfully. Yes. Well, she thinks it is.”

  Terrific. Just terrific, Richard. “Offhand, she sounds like my gay secretary. Guilty about screwing. Hasn’t got her man/woman thing worked out yet. Is your friend a little latent?”

  “I never thought about it.”

  I knew those lines too, from Sissy: she fucks like crazy and the semen flies all over the apartment. “Tell your friend when you see her that a woman who already is mature doesn’t have to make those choices. She is better able to integrate passionate love and morality, truth, honor. She doesn’t have to worry about growing up. Will that help?”

  “Well, would you say another way to say it is it just takes time?”

  “Yes.” June, July, August, September, October. “Yes, that’s very good. Lots of time. Months and years before a woman is really mature enough, knows enough, for marriage. Tell her to be very patient.”

  “Thank you, Stephanie.”

  He couldn’t wait to hang up, to dash upstairs and hold her in his arms and stick my knife into her. And he wouldn’t even realize how he had hurt her. How deeply. Just keep whistling, Richard, and drive right through. I felt sorry for the girl. Sort of. I felt sorrier for myself. I felt very little for him at that moment and that, considering how shattered I would have felt if I loved him as deeply as she did, was a relief. Thank God I don’t love him too much. I have to remember that I can’t. The answer to that question he’d asked me weeks ago . . . I have the answer. Yes, Richard, there has to be pain and suffering. For you. For her. Not me. He needed to get married. I just wanted to.

  And, like a wound, he couldn’t stop examining his conflict. He called very late that night. He talked softly. He called me darling. “Darling, do you ever feel that I strangle you? That I suffocate you? Do you feel that with me?”

  “Not at all, Richard. Not one teensy little bit.” God, what a way for a grown woman to talk.

  “I’ve been accused of that. That’s not me, is it? Don’t you feel I have the ability to commit myself? Haven’t I committed myself with you?”

  “That argument, Richard, dear, is not going to impress her.”

  “Who?”

  “Whomever it is you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about us.”

  “Oh, well, I’ve never accused you of that.”

  “I know. But you remember, before, there were women who have accused me of not committing and I just thought . . . I hope this isn’t what my dear Stephanie sees in me.”

  “I don’t. You are kind, wonderful, sweet, charming, committed. My heart is full. I love you.”

  “You don’t like the way I drive.”

  “I never said that.”

  “I can tell. But that’s incidental. Listen, do you think I’m hostile?”

  “You? How?” This would be an endless conversation. I couldn’t recall if he’d had an analyst or not. He had now. Me.

  “I’ve been accused of limiting someone’s chances at a higher level of truth because I loved her.”

  “That’s not hostility, Richard.”

  “Oh, no, but just out of curiosity, do I strike you as hostile?”

  “I really don’t like the way you drive.”

  “Say hello to Platypus.”

  “Hello, Platypus.”

  “You’re the first one ever to mention my driving. Nobody has ever accused me of hostile driving before.”

  “Because I care. I’m the first one who has cared enough to risk hurting you in order to help you. And I’m probably the first one who cared enough to tell you that your earlobes didn’t come out evenly. And if any woman says she loves you and then isn’t honest with you, then you are both indulging in the luxury of an emotion raised by a false belief.” I had no idea where my phrases came from. But they were very sound and wonderful. He hung on them.

  “Maybe she never noticed my ears.”

  I didn’t answer immediately. I sighed as if another awful truth were forcing itself to emerge to the surface. “If only I could be with you and hold you while I tell you these things. We need to grow together, Richard. You were put in my path and I in yours and I must help you as you must help me to become what it is we must become.”

  “Yes?”

  “Richard, what are you eating?”

  “Hershey kisses.”

  Richard deserved everything he got. “What God wants us to become. Richard, I realize you are the victim of your own myth. I understand that. I know what it means to feel you must be hostile, you must be aggressive, you must be a man and . . . and . . . forgive me, darling . . . and strut.”

  “I don’t strut.”

  I continued without acknowledging his response. “Your personality is warped because you are corrupted by your unearned victories and ascendancies. You are your own victim, darling, but you can relax with me. You can trust me. I understand you.”

  “What do you understand? I don’t understand what you understand.”

  Oh, God. I didn’t understand either. “That you are a man and as a man your primary purpose of manhood is defending and maintaining your manhood.”

  “How do you know what my primary purpose in life is?”

  “Isn’t it to be happy?”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s really all I want.”

  “And that is all you ask of life.”

  “Yes.”

  I sighed. “Progressive education. It is the fault of progressive education. Everyone loves you and you do what you want. An entire generation brought up on stimulation and motivation. Spoiled. And you are simply adrift, still looking for pleasure. New stimulation, new motivation. And that’s why so many men like you . . . do you know, last year I asked all my girl friends what their lovers most wanted from them and they said anal sex. Anal sex is the living end. And then I asked all their lovers what they thought about anal sex and they couldn’t even admit they thought about it. That’s this generation of men. Torn between decency and funk. The typical New York man, Richard, is an expert in natural foods and unnatural acts. Do you think about anal sex, Richard?”

  “Christ, Stephanie, I don’t even care if I eat processed cheese.” So she was into the strawberries and cream.

  “You ought to care about the sugar in those kisses . . . too toxic. But that’s what I mean, leaping from one funky motivation to one kinky stimulation when life should be based on value and tradition and continuance. And you are sadly adrift, aren’t you? That is what I understand. But at one point you will have to nail yourself into history, into commitment, values, marriage. At one point, you will have to give up your dalliance and become a grown man.”

  “Stephanie, I didn’t call you to hear that!”

  “Hang up, Richard, if you need to. If it’s part of your myth. I’ll know if you’re a man or not in other ways. So if you need to hang up because I am telling you the truth, I’ll understand. If you need to hang up because you have to show me your manhood, I’ll understand. I’ll really understand because I care.”

  “You’ve been very understanding, Stephanie. And I appreciate that. Only an intelligent woman like you could be so understanding.”

  “I try, Richard. I try.” And I am so very good.

  “I love you, Stephanie. Love you because you are enormously generous and good-natured and you are really my friend. I know you’ll be a very important influence in my life. A real help. Stephanie, you’re kidding about the ear lobes, aren’t you?”

  “She never told you?”
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  “She once told me my nostrils were crooked. Look, let me try this one out on you. I finally convince her that it’ll feel better if she gets on top of me and she gets on top of me and she looks up and says, ‘Gee whiz, Richard, I never knew your nostrils were crooked.’ ”

  “Good night, Richard.”

  “I . . . I’m sorry. I just . . . you’re so understanding. I’ll call you tomorrow. I’ll call you at eight sharp in the morning. Before you go to work.”

  “Good night, Richard.”

  “Eight sharp. And I’m really sorry, darling.”

  “It’s all right, Richard, I understand. It’s just that you are sometimes so inappropriate.” And I hate you a lot.

  He called at 7:45 the next morning. It had helped to tell him he was inappropriate. The nastier I became on the phone, the more often he called me.

  And then, it was June and I knew he and the girl were having trouble, and we were off to Westport under a promising sun and blue skies and I was satisfyingly optimistic about Richard and myself as we wove our fateful skein through the traffic to Connecticut, disregarding all the signals, certain that if we were to sleep together, the agony, the self-searching, the grimness would fall away and release the old shining Unicorn magic. All of this heaviness was simply pre-pubic agony. We’d both be getting pimples soon. I knew he had to feel about my body as I felt about his. And I wanted him. I was certain he wanted me. I’d seen him looking at me.

  Those hopeful thoughts may have been why I did that awful thing at Westport. Sissy, in a way, although I can’t blame her, had suggested it. Late Friday afternoon, Sissy came into the office. She walked very straight and had improved her whole being. She had grown since I’d become so dysfunctionally in love or whatever it was I was in. I went so easily from optimism to grim determinism, I wasn’t certain any longer.