by Rhoda Lerman
“Did he get any on the fish?” his grandmother kindly inquired.
“Mother!” Blossom felt Mark’s head for fever.
“It’s not so kosher, vomit. I’d have to go back and buy another fish.”
“Don’t make him feel guilty, for God’s sake.”
Mark started to cry. The women fought most of the way down until they stopped speaking with each other altogether. I managed not to listen, smell, or think.
When I was finally back in my own apartment I was inordinately happy to be rid of them all: the Slentzes, the horrible fish, the kid, the vomit, the whining, the insanity, and, amazingly, Richard. I didn’t want to think about any of them. His mother called me often during the next few days. I was polite and noncommittal. She told me about wedding dinners and invitations and getting a setup and mints and nuts and matchbooks with our names on them and then his sister called me and told me not to listen to her mother and then his mother called me and told me not to listen to her daughter and then Uncle Myron called and told me I should apologize to both Blossom and Mrs. Slentz for making so much trouble between them. I didn’t call any of them. And Richard didn’t call me for a month—although nobody actually lost touch.
The more I heard from his family, the more I turned off. The more I turned off, the happier I became. I had forgotten how happy I had been without Richard. I felt now like a kid who, trapped and twisted and strangled in her flannel nightgown, suddenly rips it off and sleeps naked. The days were good—hot, pure, cleansing August. Richard, his mother told me, was in the Hamptons and, she added gleefully, it was raining and he was having trouble with his boils. I really didn’t care. It was like losing forty pounds.
I threw myself into my work. The exhibition was nearly ready, becoming itself, somehow, in spite of my dysfunctioning. I began functioning again. I took directions from a now very competent Sissy. I prepared the brochure, featuring the Cornwall tailed man on the cover as I had wished. I loved my work and I loved myself and I was not alone. I didn’t bite my lip over sad songs about parting lovers nor did I peer wistfully into the windows of the Russian Tea Room where we had once been happy together. We had never been happy together. We had never even been to the Russian Tea Room.
And now I was happy. I met a Lladislaw who taught sculpture at the New School and I loved him for a weekend and a Monday and then forgot him. I adored a grinning smooth investment counselor Uncle Myron brought over to my apartment to discuss my trust funds. I could actually enjoy myself again.
The only flaw in my happiness those days was that I had to move from my apartment to the one Uncle Myron had found for me and which Mrs. Slentz had furnished, obviously with one phone call to Bloomingdale’s. “I want everything and everything should match.” It was a great, light, sunny apartment but the Bloomingdale’s stuff was god-awful. The toilet paper matched the towels matched the shower curtain matched the dishes matched the aprons matched the sheets matched the dust ruffle matched the dinner napkins. Everything was sprinkled with flowers. I shoved as much of it as I could into the cupboards and the closets, which were very deep. I had always wanted very deep closets.
But I loved the apartment and I decided, the hell with it. It was worth the agony I’d gone through and I was rid of Richard and I knew what it felt like to be free and uncommitted without Richard loading up my heart and gut with his elusiveness and his charm and his shit. Someday I’d decide what to do with Bloomingdale’s and what to do about the apartment but in the meantime I had a great place to entertain. Jack, Jim, Barry, Robert Redford, anybody. Whomever I wanted. A lot of sexy, willing, amusing, profound men who didn’t want to get married. And there were plenty around.
The bed, which horrified me at first—a note was on it assuring me that the bed was temporary and I’d have another one as soon as the warehouse found it—was a hospital bed. An honest-to-God crank-up hospital bed. The upper half and the lower half went up and down. It was most likely the one in which Richard’s father had died. It cranked up something vicious in me. I could be evil in that bed. I wrote imaginary ads for the Barb: “W/f w. hosp. bed fulfill yr. adult fantasies.” Romantic love was death anyway, wasn’t it? Good-bye the Armengols. Good-bye the Gothic Chapel and the tears. Good-bye illusions. I would get even with romantic love and get even with the concept of marriage and family and the entire strangling mess Richard had almost led me into. I could even think, with no animosity, of sending all the matching loot to Innocent Marie after she returned from her vacation with Richard. She deserved it. The two of them could eat in the bathroom or crap in the kitchen and still match in good middle-class taste. I was relieved to be free of it all. And I would really decide what to do about the apartment but I didn’t have to make any decisions yet, nor did I have to manipulate anything, anyone, any longer. I could just lie back and crank up and enjoy life. Let Innocent Marie suffer. That’s what she wanted anyway. That’s what they both wanted. Let her be in love. Thank God I wasn’t in love anymore. The thicket of the Unicorn is thorny. I was free.
I called Jack. Jack came up. We laughed a great deal. He called me a bitch. I agreed with him and then bit into his shoulder and I realized he was no longer in love with me either and we could have a very good time together. We did. I didn’t have to hold my breath anymore until the phone rang. I didn’t have to die with every word Richard said or every silence between his words. I could go out to dinner and actually digest. I could spend hours chasing a man around the hospital bed. I was no longer obsessed with marriage. I vowed never again to be obsessed by a man. Never again to be in love. Never again to be trapped by romantic love. All done.
It lasted until the engagement ring arrived in the mail. It could have been the potato masher, it was so big and ugly and Cedarhurst. I was wildly angry with Richard for knowing that I had turned off. That fuck, to figure I had turned off and try to manipulate me this way with the engagement ring. I don’t know why I didn’t try to reach him in the Hamptons. I simply picked up the phone and dialed his number in the city, quivering with the anticipation of telling him what to do with the ring, when the girl answered.
“Richard?” she questioned, softly, trembling.
“I thought you were with him.”
“Oh. I thought . . .”
“Yes . . .?”
I placed the phone in the cradle. I knew what she was doing there. She was hanging around in case Richard called, in case Richard came home. She would be there to rub his back or take his temperature or whatever had to be taken, given, shared. Clever little lady she was. I knew what she was into because I knew what I would have done. She’d be there for him by accident, sincere, straight, sweet and sorrowful. And that was her winning way. Innocent Marie was no better or worse than I was. She too had a vested interest in winning Richard in her way. And I had a vested interest in winning him in my way. Her way wasn’t any less moral than mine. Her vested interest was in being sincere because being sincere had probably worked for her in the past. And my way was to manipulate. That was the way I trusted. I knew exactly what the dance was between us. Her sincerity was just as manipulative as my manipulation. It wasn’t even Richard anymore. It was who would win the prize. She was just as convinced that sweetness and innocence would win as I was that manipulation would. If either of us were to back up, start again in a different way, we couldn’t. Right or wrong.
I had no idea if I’d chosen the wrong way. It seemed to be working better than her way. People might like Innocent Marie a lot better than they’d like me, but in the long run, it might make her sick, all that sincerity, all that peeling nakedness of soul so she can get what she wants from other people, using innocence as a weapon. She probably made up her own name when she met Richard. My way wouldn’t win me any popularity contests. But in the long run, for me, what did it matter? After all, what really matters in life is that you get what you want and I’d be damned, goddamned, if this girl with her sincere little tricks and her innocent breathlessness was going to be a better woman than I. Or
if Richard, with his stinking manipulation of me—that ring!—would win. I would win. She was over there thinking right now that she had the magic, that only she could really handle Richard, that only she could really love Richard. I was thinking exactly the same thing: that I was more woman than she’d ever be, that I was the only woman who knew how to make Richard happy. Dumb little Natalie Nurse. At least I was smarter than she was. I’d show her.
I called Blossom. She shrieked at the same pitch as a new Miss America. I took the first train to Westport. Blossom, as in an Olympic race, handed me the keys to the Continental at the train station and I roared off toward the Hamptons. When I stopped for gas, I called Richard. “Don’t move. Don’t move, darling. I have your ring and I love it and I love you and I’m on my way. Stay right there.”
“Stephanie, would you pick up a thermometer? Rectal?”
“Of course, darling.” I hated to break my momentum but I stopped at a drugstore and, in the manner of the Slentzes, bought a half dozen matching. I was back into the obsession. The potato masher though was gleaming like a torch on my finger, the Continental purring and speeding toward Richard, and the radio was playing the kind of waltzes one dances with princes. I kept expecting to see Innocent Marie in a VW somehow trying to pass me and get to Richard first. Every time I saw a VW, in fact, I sped up. I should have known then that I wasn’t merely breaking the law of the highway, I was denouncing everything civilized within me and responding to my most primitive instincts. Not sexual. Worse. My smile when I greeted Richard was a thoroughly atavistic baring of teeth. Nevertheless he seemed happy to see me and grateful for the many thermometers. I wanted to throw my arms above my head and clench my hands and shout all over the beach: The Winner! Instead I hugged and kissed Richard who allowed me, warning me first that he might have a fever.
Richard and I threw everything from his cottage into black plastic leaf bags, tossed the leaf bags into the back seat of the Lincoln and headed toward the city. Neither of us mentioned exactly where we were going. We were just getting out of the Hamptons and back to the city. My intentions of course were that both of us end up in my apartment. Later, I calculated that I had spent approximately seven minutes kissing Richard and forty-five or more packing his things.
20
“TELL ME WHEN WE PASS THE WINDMILL,” RICHARD REQUESTED.
Richard indeed had a boil on his tailbone. He offered to show it to me. I passed. But it was painful for him to sit up and so he curled up, put his head in my lap, drew his knees into a fetal position and I drove. When I announced the windmill at Bridgehampton, Richard announced that he had a deep attachment to windmills and sang “Dream the Impossible Dream.” Aah, I thought, today it would be Man from La Mancha for our theme. We’d been through enough Annie Get Your Gun and I could live happily ever after without ever hearing “The Girl That I Marry” again. Little did I know Finian’s Rainbow was on the bill.
I had to smile to myself. The Unicorn lay in my lap after all. And the Unicorn ready to share his wisdom with me began finally to reveal himself. Reveal, reveal, reveal. Knowledge is power. Information is energy. I had never known Richard and I was fascinated with all that he was that day and all that he had ever been. Unfortunately there was also to be revealed that day all he would ever be.
We were driving through a rainstorm on the flat road along the ocean although we could see no ocean. Fruit, steaks, baskets, potato fields, Harvey Bellringer Real Estate. I pointed the name out to Richard. He apparently wasn’t amused. He didn’t respond. Instead he informed me that the tailbone boil was my fault. It was systemic, he insisted. Three times he told me it was systemic because I had altered his life. “In a way,” he said, “everything is coming to a head. Here I am with S. Boxwell and we are going to get married. And who is S. Boxwell?”
The boil wasn’t precisely my concept of a romantic analogy, but his question was precisely my question. And who is this man with his head in my lap whom I am about to join for life? And who was I that he would tell me his dreams and trust me with them? I wanted to hear his dreams. I prayed he wouldn’t get off on Adolf Berle, his regular lunchtime subject. As I had happily anticipated, Richard revealed his treasure, his little pot of gold that held the essential mystery of the man. It wasn’t quite what I had hoped for.
“Oh, listen, look at my elbow. Is there something on it? A slight eruption? Jesus, we forgot to take my temperature, didn’t we?” He took my hand from the wheel and placed it on his forehead.
“You’ll live until we get home.”
“Home.” He smiled, quite dreamily. Could it be so simple? I had seen Blossom consoling Mark. I hadn’t even thought when I’d said “home,” and yet, he had acquiesced without a tremble. “I’m ready to go home, Stephanie. I’m ready. I’ve done a lot of thinking while we were apart, S. Boxwell. And I meditated every morning at six A.M. You know what I concentrate on when I meditate?”
“Mmmm?” I of course wanted him to say me. Richard was not entirely altered however. “Love.”
“Oh. How lovely.” Well, so what. He was going home with me. I had expected my proposal to be a somewhat memorable cross between the sixth-grade Thanksgiving scene of Pocahontas and a little of the Pope washing the feet of the Cardinal or maybe the Queen of Spain telling Columbus to go ahead. But just a slip of the tongue?
“I’m ready for an equal relationship. That’s why I’m going home with you. You know why? You are centered. You know who S. Boxwell is and what she will be and what she means. That’s confidence, that’s integrity. It’s terrifically attractive, Stephanie. I’m very impressed with you. I’ve watched you for a long time.”
Aah, then the confusion and double meaning had simply been his version of Once Upon a Mattress, a little princess-and-pea game to drive me mad, the test of a good wife. Think Broadway, you’ll understand Richard.
It may have been the boil on his tailbone that kept him turned toward the dashboard. Although he seemed to be speaking to me as he developed, quite interestingly and with nice professional insights, his childhood and his coming into manhood, he was addressing a space on the dashboard, an invisible audience out there, a speech before a mirror. I was vitally interested at that point in his revelations of self and merely noted Richard had what Miriam would refer to as an oblique superego—eyes away at all times.
“There’s so much to tell you. Where to begin. A woman has been given to me and I can’t misuse her. She is like a precious flower or a beautiful shell. Too rough, too unthinking, I will crush her and lose her. I found that out about you. You are delicate, you feel. God, you feel. You respond to each breeze, to every change of light, like a flower.” Richard nuzzled his nose into my belly. “And you are my fine gift so I can free myself. So I can become a man.”
Ah so, a bit of Teahouse of the August Moon. And this business of my freeing him I’ve heard before. This man is going to feel so free and good about himself because I’ve freed him to become what he’s always wanted to be, because he can finally relate to a woman, so free that he’s going to make neurotically certain he can really relate to every woman in the world. Like a teenybopper going back to junior high with the new breasts she grew over the summer. Jesus. I wish I hadn’t freed him so much, whatever that meant. I’d prefer hearing about Adolf Berle, me, Richard as boy scout, anything, but I didn’t want to know how free and alive my friend was becoming.
“Well, I am jumping ahead. As a kid I never knew enough about anything the other kids knew enough about. I never memorized the records of the guys on the ball teams, or the list of birds in New Jersey. I liked fish. I never knew as much as the other guys in school seemed to know about girls. So I hated ball, hated boy scouts, avoided girls. I think that’s why I’m a lawyer today. I could only picture myself as a mediator between people who knew more about life but less about law than I did. Somehow, you know, moving above life, judging, looking into their windows. I’ll never forget when the captain of the high-school football team came to me to represent him. I was ju
st out of law school. To me, that was my reward, my justice. But I wasn’t at ease yet. I talked too much. Those first days in court I couldn’t shut up. I was terrified. You know if you take away the “e” and the “d,” terrified is pretty close to terrific. Well, I couldn’t stop talking. It was bright talk and impressive and the juries sat drinking it in, every word, but I couldn’t stop.”
“I understand.” I couldn’t resist.
He turned swiftly to read my face but he chose not to recognize the nastiness. The jury must have been on the dashboard, little elves from Finian’s Rainbow, the tiny little jurors all nodding their tiny little heads at Richard and clapping their tiny little hands for him. He turned back to them. How are things in Glocca Morra, Richard, and when do we get to the pot of gold that is your essence?
“Of course you can see that, darling. Because, you, Stephanie . . . I don’t have to talk to you. You just understand. I don’t feel I have to be “on,” prove anything to you. I can relax. I’ve thought a lot about this. You see, I’m stepping into a real relationship. You showed me that at the birthday party. You are life. You are in touch with life. You are womb and birth and life. . . .” He turned into my stomach again. Nuzzle, nuzzle, nuzzle. “And you will keep me alive.”
While his nose pressed quite warmly into my Eveready belly button, I thought about the fish in the plastic bag and Mark shrieking for his Froot Loops. The rain was heavier, the car steaming up and the rest of the world was going back to the city from the Hamptons. We were making no more than thirty or thirty-five miles per hour. It would be a long drive. The windshield wipers had difficulty keeping the window clear. I had difficulty believing Richard’s lines about relationships. I didn’t think men wanted equal relationships. I knew Richard didn’t want an equal relationship.
“Steve would really like you, Stephanie. He really would.”
