by Rhoda Lerman
There wasn’t any time now to worry about what I thought or didn’t think, what I believed or didn’t believe, what Richard really wanted and what Richard was really getting. The Unicorn was disappearing fast and when I stood up my lap would be gone too. But right now, with his head in my lap, his nose against my belly button, the road straight and the windshield wipers steady, I was going to hear the secret I had promised never to ask about: Steve. And perhaps, if I were lucky, I would hear about the chickenstone.
“Who’s Steve?”
The question roused him considerably. “You’re kidding! I can’t believe I never told you about Steve!” I’m kidding?
And then I heard about Steve. When Richard was through I didn’t even bother asking about the chicken-stone.
“Steve was the guy who turned me on to Adolf Berle. He was a poet. And we had some rapport. Roommates in grad school. He was beautiful. Not that we were into homosexuality, although I’ve always thought we should have tried it just for the experience. Well, I would have given Steve anything he asked for. We shared clothes, girls, ideas. Hell, we would stay up all night just arguing for the sake of arguing. The Welfare State, The Hero, The New Deal. It didn’t matter. And then the next night we’d change sides and stay up again. One day he got a poem into the Atlantic. Biggest moment of his life. We took out a couple of girls to celebrate and I made a crack about his date. Not even a crack. I just said I didn’t pick up anything on her. And he said, ‘You miss a lot of stuff, buddy,’ and moved out, moved in with the girl who he had just met and married her. Never saw or heard from him again. Is that something?”
“Wow.”
“I wasn’t wise enough then to know I should have said something about the poem. But I thought the poem was lousy and I figured if he really loved me, it wouldn’t matter what I said, but I wasn’t that sure, so I said nothing. He just couldn’t let it alone. He couldn’t let me be honest or even dishonest by omission. He loved anyone who would believe his own lies. He was a lousy poet. And that wasn’t my fault, was it?”
Odd that Richard could understand all this and yet he didn’t allow himself to understand what I was doing. Sooner or later he would have to. But like myself, he didn’t want to face me head on. Too much reality. We both needed the lies.
It was about that point in the drive home that I realized I knew all I really wanted to know about Richard Slentz. End of the rainbow. No gold. On close inspection, here in my lap, no longer mysterious, elusive, charming. No longer an object of love. Just boring. The mate that fate had me created for . . . that old black magic. I had the songs too. You get an empty poke when you trade with the devil for your dreams. Not even a pig in it. And the worst sin is being boring. I had cast him as Jesus and now, stage right, enter the thin, shorter-than-I-remembered, weaker-chinned-than-I-remembered, higher-voiced-than-I-remembered, boils-on-his-tailbone, simple man. Not bad. Bright, hypochondriac, presentable, not handsome. Nothing deep inside, no great secrets, no key. Boring. No wonder men have to go after power externally. They have so little internally. So the Richards cloak themselves in mystery and wrap themselves in illusion and we expect to find in them the depths we know in ourselves. And they, Richard, this man, they just don’t have it. It isn’t his fault. It isn’t theirs. Richard had begun to chat about Adolf Berle.
I passed our turn and had to pull over. When the traffic opened slightly, although I couldn’t see well in the rain, I backed up. We were nearly Totaled, Crunched, and Cheerioed. Horns blasted, shocked faces passing us as I reversed slowly toward the turnoff. Richard lost track of Berle’s encounters with Rex Tugwell. I don’t know why I didn’t begin a chain reaction on the highway except that I had my own disaster to contend with. I finally backed up enough to cut over the grass median and take the turn. My hands were wet with fear.
Richard shifted again to how free he felt with me. I was an above-average woman. He asked me if I didn’t think women were more interesting when they were dressed. “Last week I saw a woman on the beach at Montauk in a long print dress. I couldn’t make out one line of her body but I was absolutely turned on so I followed her . . . and . . . well, you want to hear this?”
Had it been a suicide attempt, backing up on the highway? Make me jealous, Richard. At least it’s interesting to be jealous. As I ran down the collection of long gowns I owned, I considered that for an above-average, highly centered mature woman who was in touch with life I sure was quick to compete with any woman and on the worst levels. Just challenge me and I’m on. I did want to hear it and I didn’t want to hear it.
“We went out for dinner and she was really very attractive except this time she had much less on and all I could think of was you. Well, I carried on the most amusing conversation with you while I was with her and I literally had to restrain myself so I wouldn’t laugh out loud or call her Stephanie. How I missed you. God, I wished you could have been there.”
Maybe the boil was the beginning of a tail, like my Cornwall man. Maybe I had really done a Faustian bit and bought into evil and Richard was growing a tail and Richard was the devil. Sold out to the devil and it would be bad luck all the way from here on. The boil began to swell symbolically for me. I’d known a man whose mother died of dehydration and he found coat hangers all over her house, bent into the form of sea horses with tiny bags of sea water tied at the throats of the coat hangers. The mother lost one hundred pounds in six months and the doctors could find nothing wrong with her. He never goes near a coat hanger unless it’s really a straight, untouched coat hanger. I don’t blame him. I should stay away from boils and tails and wrong turns. Once you open yourself up, you’re vulnerable.
21
WE SHOULDN’T HAVE TAKEN THE TURN. SOMEHOW I WAS DRIVING THROUGH Hempstead where there should have been a Howard Johnson’s because there was so long ago when my parents had taken me there. Twenty-five years? Odd I should remember it. I couldn’t find the Howard Johnson’s any longer. The Unicorn in my lap was being very stupid, very sentimental, with no sentiment, no awareness that he was hurting me. I wanted an ice cream cone. Richard was a modern Cyrano calling me at midnight: “I just want you to know . . . and I just found out . . . that you are still the best lay in the whole fucking city.” And meaning it. That’s the sad part. The Richards mean it. “Richard, you know what Miriam says . . . ?” I tried, but he sat up and interrupted.
“Please don’t tell me about Miriam.”
“Okay, you don’t tell me about Adolf Berle.”
“Adolf Berle is not a problem in my life the way Miriam is a problem in my life.”
“Miriam? You don’t even know her.”
“I know social workers. I know Jewish mothers.”
“Look, Richard, I’ve been around almost thirty years and there are parts of my life which are still viable. Miriam isn’t like another man. She isn’t in competition with you.”
“That’s what you think. ‘Stephanie, you don’t let a man do that sort of thing. I wouldn’t take it from him.’ ”
“Christ, Richard, are you paranoid.”
“Even paranoids can be plotted against. ‘What? He hasn’t given you a Trashmasher yet? What kind of husband makes you live without a Trashmasher? What? He wants to name his baby after his dead father? Of course you should name it after Nijinsky if you want to.’ ”
“Richard.”
“ ‘It’s your right to go out every Saturday night. It’s his duty to take you out. Does he expect you to stay home? What kind of husband keeps his wife home after she’s suffered for four hours in a beauty parlor all Friday afternoon?’ Stephanie, I don’t want her interfering with my marriage.”
Richard was not altogether wrong. “Our marriage.”
“I don’t want you calling her up with would you believe what Richard did to me last night every morning. I certainly don’t want her as a social friend or as a professional friend. What more can I say, Stephanie?”
“I couldn’t begin to explain it to her. We’re best friends.”
“You seem to have forgotten something rather basic to our relationship. I’m your best friend.”
“Oh, God.”
“Really? Is that your response? ‘Oh, God?’ Oh, God, what?”
Now or never, Stephanie. “Oh, God, I forgot to call my mother and tell her. Lord knows what time it is in Munich. Do you know?” How many more now or nevers would there be?
I turned on the radio and almost switched it off at the unmistakable strains of “The Emperor” but Richard was faster and blasted it. “That’s the passage!”
“What passage?” Had he really forgotten we’d been through it already?
“You know how I see this? Two primeval creatures like Prometheus with new worlds rising volcanically above them, fighting the last fight. Water, fire, hailstones, red sky and . . .”
“Oh, yes, Richard, and the last fight is meaningless because it’s all coming to an end.”
“That’s right, darling. God, it is so exciting to have a woman to think with. Because, because the last fight in reality is producing the new world. Right?”
“Right.” I think he’d added the hailstones. I stopped for gas. I stopped for coffee. I stopped for more coffee. I stopped for a hot dog. Richard stayed in the car. I wasn’t certain that he was aware I had ever left the car. He was so like the kind of people you find in the audience at a Madame Blavatsky lecture. He ate half my hot dog and went from Rex Tugwell to Harold Ickes laughing wildly at one point about something FDR had said to Ick about dams, bouncing the springs in the rich seat of the Lincoln. I laughed also, marking the vast difference between the prepositions with and at and trying to remember if I was supposed to like Harry Hopkins or Harold Ickes and who did what. I’ve often wondered since if the plastic surgeon hadn’t made an error when he fixed Richard’s ears so that Richard couldn’t listen when he talked.
How I wished he would stop talking so that I might daydream about my mythic Richard, so that when I seduced him in the apartment, so that then I would at least have built up some amount of anticipation. So that. I’d much rather have daydreamed about him than have been with him. Sooner or later I knew I’d have to forfeit my daydreams and it might be too soon. Too soon, too, he might realize what I am like instead of feeding narcissistically off me for his own image. Locked in the car with him for three hours, we’d already bypassed the easy excitement of the first time in bed and, with a little more of his childhood or Rex Tugwell versus Adolf Berle or “The Emperor,” we’d miss on the second and third time also. He thinks, I realized, that I’ve already gone to bed with him anyway. Who is “honey”? Why should he call me honey? I didn’t really care. I was abysmally bored. Also he had said he didn’t want a hot dog and ate half of mine and I was still hungry.
“Listen, we could have a party. You know, Steve used to crack me up by wrapping candy wrappers around his teeth, blacking them out? You know the little papers you get in boxes of chocolate? I can do it. Really a riot. Always cracked me up. You’ve got to see it. We could have an engagement party, couldn’t we?”
“Don’t forget,” Miriam had said. “Don’t forget,” Jack had said. “Once you catch him, you’re stuck with him.” I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to invite to a party with Richard putting candy wrappers around his teeth and I couldn’t think of anything worse than being locked in a car for three hot stuffy hours listening to Richard while he talked about the New Deal and I couldn’t think of anything worse except more of the same. Forever. Richard thought of something worse. “We could get one of those recording devices . . . answering things? When the person calls, he hears ‘The Emperor.’ Just a very few bars, but the right ones.” Richard hummed the right bars, over and over, waving his arms for a good mile. I was truly ready to run us both into a ditch.
How he knew at that moment as I eyed a ditch with concrete retainers to say what he did, I shall never know. As I was actually and seriously considering dropping him, simply slipping the potato masher into his pocket and saying, “I’m sorry, it won’t work,” Richard rolled over and said, “Don’t let me forget. I have to call Innocent Marie as soon as I get back.” And then he lifted his head from my lap and put his mouth around my nipple, pulling at it. And then let his head drop back and grinned up at me. If just to rid myself of that curiosity, I really did want to make love. Though the grin was intriguing—a little child who had done something awfully naughty—I hoped he made love more seriously. Grin or not, he had weakened the coils in my springs and somehow he kept quiet, perhaps even slept, and we were what I could safely refer to as “home.”
When the car stopped, he woke and looked at me quite directly. Like Mark. He looked at me startled as if he were really seeing the stranger I was and our whole future in one awful naked kaleidoscopic moment. I could only imagine what he saw. I knew what I saw and just as I had refused to look so many times, he let the moment pass, closed his eyes, took my hand and pressed it against his forehead once again.
“Poor baby,” I whispered softly not wishing to wake him fully. “Let me take you upstairs and take care of you.”
Murmuring, he rolled his head against me and nuzzled. “Mmmm.”
“Come up.”
“Mmmm.”
And we went up and he didn’t speak. Luckily he didn’t speak except to ask me in the elevator what floor I wanted. Later I’d lock the car up and bring his things up so when he woke up, he’d be all moved in. This time I was going to do it right. Perhaps the only thing any of us have to share is our own emptiness. But dammit, he was more empty than I was. Except, of course, there were still interesting physical areas to explore with him and that could keep us going for a while. We’d have to adjust for the boils.
22
WHILE I KISSED HIS NECK AND RUBBED HIS BACK AND RUBBED HIS shoulders, he swiveled his head around and around, entirely preoccupied with the apartment and then, finally, simply slid away from me and walked through the rooms.
“Christ, what a great place. It’s so big.”
He ran his hands along things while I told him not to touch them. But, happily distracted, he didn’t notice my nagging. “Oh, yes. Oh, hey, yes,” touching his father’s hospital bed thoughtfully as if he were visiting the graveyard. “Big bed. Big, big bed. Look at this. My mother’s chifforobe.” The bed wasn’t big at all.
“Look at this.” He opened drawers. “God, this is great. I’ve always wanted this piece. All my clothes. I mean, my new clothes. Isn’t this something? Did she get me a towel warmer? She always promised me a towel warmer if I got married.”
I took him to the bathroom to see his electric chromium-plated 98-dollar towel warmer. He kissed my head. I reached up to him for more kissing but he was on his way again. Loving him really didn’t work. No matter how I needed to love him, no matter how he needed to love me, it didn’t work. And so, as he kicked off his shoes and rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger, settling into the very soft, down-pillowed sofa, I told him, “Your feet don’t smell very good, Richard.”
He put his shoes back on and then lay down on the sofa and began to talk.
It was perhaps three hours later. Richard had continued talking. I had learned in agonizing detail of his difficulties at P.S. 104 in Edgemere, Long Island. I had learned about the year his mother was hysterical and how she had never recovered from his father’s death and how Richard was sure that somehow she felt he was responsible and how she had suffered ever since even though she stopped complaining and how everyone said he was nuts to put up with her but he felt he owed it to her for the pain. It was exactly ten P.M. and twenty-six minutes into a story about how Richard cheated in seventh-grade Social Studies by sending hand signals to Doug Billington for the answers to the multiple choice questions Mrs. Terrero wrote on the blackboard every day, when Richard remembered, as if an icicle had dropped on his head, that he had to call Innocent Marie. Actually, I was relieved. I had had trouble following the hand signals for a, b, c, d, none of the above, and all of the above. I didn’t even question how Richard knew where
to call her.
From Richard’s face, I could tell how very deeply troubled he was. Most of his responses were a series of “now looks” and “but sweethearts” strung together like so many transparent fish eggs dropping into the silt of his depression. The basic emotion, I was certain from his darting eyes, was one of unremitting guilt. Richard was caught between two women, both of whom had the capacity to scream, both of whom had the capacity to make him feel guilty. I could almost hear her saying, “Where are you? Where are you right now?” And Richard didn’t have the magic or the brains to pass through Scylla and Charybdis with one deft stroke of an oar. It never occurred to him there was a way out. He felt he deserved to have his head dashed against one of the rocks. His face dropped farther and farther, the corners of his mouth turning down, his eyes darting faster, left and right, and looking for an escape. Often they landed on me but bounced off very very quickly. I heard him say, Tin at a friend’s house.”
It must have taken her exactly four seconds to figure out which friend because from the new look on his face, I could tell she had started to cry. With the sureness of the killer’s touch, the way he went directly for my scar the first time we met, he said, “Don’t make me feel guilty, Innocent Marie. You want me to be honest? I’m warning you, you won’t like it.”
Long pause. I knew she was screaming already and I knew by his face that he was happier with a screaming woman than with a sobbing woman because then he knew what to do. Nothing. He was a master at building sentences which would give her absolutely nothing. Neither hope nor solace, neither meaning nor closure. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow, cutie. It’s a little awkward now.”
And he barely had time to hang up the phone when it started to ring. And she called and she called and she called. And he talked and he talked and he talked. Still he said nothing. In between the phone calls he told me he couldn’t understand how their relationship had deteriorated to that point. He couldn’t understand what he had done to make her think in the way she was thinking. And in between the phone calls, I came to understand the whole relationship between Innocent Marie and Richard. He really did care for her. She reflected back the parts of himself he liked best. She had taken what he had described as his potential and believed in it as his reality. And he both loved her for the belief and hated her for her expectations of him.
