by Rhoda Lerman
I had no expectations. I had expected him to provide for me and come home in time for dinner at least four times a week. Rather than find fault with the generalities, with the whole man—was he or was he not meeting his potential, was he or was he not an underachiever—I had found fault with the particulars. All those snide comments about shoelaces, the dandruff in his eyelashes, unflushed toilets, the not-so-terrific tie. It would be years before Richard would notice how many of his capillaries were punctured. Innocent Marie, terribly invested in him, was fighting in a very different way. Her kind of honesty went straight for the jugular. She was fighting to keep him. He must hate her because, unconsciously, she knows him too well. He looks at her and, though she doesn’t understand it, by her responses to him he can see his own faults and he feels inadequate. He knows she believes in him and he really knows she’s wrong. I didn’t believe in anything more than what stood before me.
In one of those conversations when Richard was saying nothing and I sat on the couch knowing that the woman on the phone was going berserk, I realized it could just as well be me going berserk. She thought, as I did, that she and Richard had a special relationship, that she was a special woman because he told her his stories. She knew his stories. We all knew his stories. But she didn’t know him. She didn’t understand that this was his character, unflinching, unchanging, telling the stories because he told stories, not because he wanted to be understood. Richard simply left parts of his emotional life lying around like so many pieces of dog shit on the curbstones. And Richard would always be shocked that the women in his life didn’t run after him with enormous gleaming Sheffield Sterling Pooper Scoopers to clean up after him. Actually, at that moment Innocent Marie was shocking him by threatening to rub his nose in it. It aided my case. Up until now she had most likely felt that she knew him completely just by sniffing at the last curbstone. But the stories he’d left around hadn’t been by any means a commitment or an unfolding of his soul. They were just something Richard did. What she didn’t understand was that Richard had the totally evolved capacity to be a killer. What she still didn’t know was that this man with whom she had shared so many intimate hours, whipped so much cream, Windexed so many fish tanks, that this man she thought she knew so well, could turn on her.
It was with these realizations that the other woman was going berserk, that it could have been me going berserk, that she was too stupid to save herself, that I had been misanthropic enough to allow another woman to go off the wall, that Richard with his furtively darting eyes was also out of control and that I, as if all the officers were dead on the battlefield and the lowest recruit were to rise to the heroic moment, I, finally my father’s daughter, knew precisely where to strike. I took the phone from Richard, hung it up, took it off the hook and slipped my arms around my man. It was at that moment, in every sense of the word, that I mated Richard.
“Darling,” I breathed into his ear. “You know it’s that she still has expectations. She still expects. You see, darling, it would only be kind, in all fairness to her, so that she doesn’t suffer unduly from her terrible expectations she has obviously led herself to believe, that we make it easy for her and just get married as quickly as possible so she knows it’s over. I mean, we’ll make a clean break for her sake. She’s young. She’ll get over it. It’s only fair to her, darling, so she doesn’t end up as a hysterical woman. We don’t want to do that to her. I, for one, couldn’t live with myself.”
A further realization at the moment was that the phrase hysterical woman might indeed be a redundancy for all of us. I gave it little consideration at the time, for Richard was so relieved to be led out of his guilt and his impasse that he softened inside my arms. Slumped might have been a more accurate word. I had saved him. I could hear him saying to Innocent Marie: “Believe me, Innocent Marie, it’s only for your own good. We’re getting married to help you, sweetheart. You’ll feel so much better once it’s over. And you can be grateful to Stephanie. No matter what you think of her, it was her idea. She even agreed to store-bought invitations just to hurry things along. She stayed up all night writing them out for my mother. She was so concerned about your emotional problems.” Richard would never understand why Innocent Marie would begin to scream again. I would.
Richard agreed with me. He asked if he could stay the night and I said he could but we would honor our original agreement not to touch each other before we were married. We could sleep next to each other of course. We took his temperature two more times. He told me within a two-hour framework of a girl named Audrey who had blond hair, a trick knee, green eyes, and a maddeningly fascinating habit of sucking her upper lip when they laid out the copy of the yearbook at Syracuse and how she had a deft right hand and never let him touch her. Just as he reached the part of describing the virginal night he once spent in her bed, and I was putting the phone back on the hook and making up the sofa and turning out the lights, the phone rang. This time Richard told Innocent Marie very firmly in my words that we were getting married the week after next and the invitations would be out in a week and it was all over and there was no turning back and then he laid the phone into its cradle, switched out the lamp above the sofa and went into the bedroom. That simple.
23
LOOKING BACK, I THINK IT WAS RICHARD’S FIRMNESS WHICH CARRIED ME through those two weeks preparing for the wedding. Convinced that marrying me would make Innocent Marie, his mother, his sister and myself stop screaming, he worked diligently toward that solution. No one could ever say anything to him again about commitment. No one could ever say anything to him about not doing things right. Somehow, the invitations were printed, the matchbooks stamped with our names in gold, a “connection” made with the Times so my picture would be on the Society Page. He was so competent and so secure. He must have been very relieved to find a way to keep everyone around him quiet. After a while, even I began to think that the whole thing had been his idea.
Nothing ruffled Richard. He was a rock. He hadn’t even shown annoyance when my invitation list included only my parents and one spastic cousin who lived in Seattle and couldn’t fly. And when we called my folks in Munich, Richard slowly, serenely, spelled out his name three times, very slowly so my mother could pick up the Semitic nuances. I knew my mother. Richard could guess what she wanted to know. Is he Protestant? Is he rich? Is he sane? Nor did Richard display annoyance when my mother gave me the choice of whether they would come to the States to attend the wedding and I said, “Don’t bother.” Richard didn’t even flinch. It was only when we had the Times Travel Section spread out before us in the living room one afternoon, that Richard finally flinched.
He had assigned me my pages. I had rattled through them, commenting rather acerbically on the honeymoon specials. Maybe it was the fish tanks already installed in my living room. Maybe it was the blow-up pictures already hanging on my walls. I was itching for a fight. Richard, following lines with his forefinger, was quite oblivious to my itch. “ ‘Make your dreams come true. Visit Liberty, New York, and find the Good Life in Sullivan County.’ Richard, let’s go to Grossinger’s and find the Good Life. Say, how about Brittany? That would be divine. Oh, Richard, let’s go to Brittany.”
“Are you skipping pages?”
“Yes, I got bored with Sullivan County.”
“Listen, stop dreaming. Let’s get this over with. The courts are lousy at Grossinger’s.”
“A honeymoon is supposed to be a dream,” I lamented quite childishly. I didn’t like my assignment. “I want to make my dreams come true.”
Between his teeth, very nastily, Richard replied, “I told you not to read those pages, didn’t I?” He folded his paper in long strips, like a commuter on the Long Island, carefully making knife-sharp edges in the Travel Section and holding up for my benefit the section on the Islands. “How about Bermuda?”
I pouted, enjoying it. “Bermuda is boring.”
“All right.” He crossed his quarters into eighths and I was faced with a column on
St. Thomas. “Is St. Thomas boring?”
“Yes, St. Thomas is boring and so is Aruba. Xanadu is simply bad taste.”
“Have you considered the possibility that your boredom is internal?”
I had considered the possibility and I knew it was external and that its name was Richard. Our eyes met like two major electrical storms crossing each other in the night sky. “You know what I feel like, Richard? Like we’re at an Interfaith Dance with Jewish Lesbians and the Male Nazi Homosexual League.”
“All of this must be terribly boring for you. It is, isn’t it?”
I so wanted to fling a lively arc of lightning at him. He asked again when I didn’t answer. “It is, isn’t it?” But then he lost interest in the answer and returned to reading the ads.
I remembered the first night he’d looked at me as if I were the other half of his Bermuda ad. I didn’t mind it then. Now the thought made me ill. I don’t think it was because I disliked Bermuda. I’d enjoyed it whenever I had to go there, basically because my father liked the golf course. I’ve never been picky about where I got my sun and sand. But Bermuda, but Richard, but the whole shmeer of having the Times spread out before us as if we were a couple of secretaries with two weeks’ vacation, the whole shmeer was so stereotypically dull, not even like a Salem ad, like a Bing Crosby Minute Maid orange juice ad. Actually, looking back, the truth was that anyplace I went with Richard would have been stereotypically dull.
I thumbed laconically through the tabooed pages. He was up to taking notes. “Crete,” I read aloud, murmuring, tormenting. He’d already told me that we had to stay on this side of the ocean because what if someone should die and we couldn’t get back. I hadn’t confronted the logic. I should have.
“I know Greece is perfect now . . . Lesbos, Corfu, around the islands on a steamer.” Half needling, half daydreaming. “Lord, and Ireland in early fall, rent a Gypsy wagon and just get lost on the west coast. It’s wild. It’s gorgeous on the west coast.”
From somewhere deep within the folds of his Travel Section Richard advised me that the Irish had stoned the last two Jews out of Limerick three years before.
“So?”
He finally looked up at me.
“Oh.”
“I suppose you think that’s paranoid of me.”
“I’m just playing, Richard. You know.” I shrugged. I was feeling little-kid mean. “I’ve been to Ireland six times in the last two years. I have no desire to go back.”
“You’re not fooling me, Stephanie. I know you want to go back to Ireland because that’s all you ever talked about when we met. Ireland, Ireland, Ireland.”
Well, I had won his attention. “Don’t bait me, Richard. I don’t like being baited.”
“Look, I told you to read those pages, not those. Get serious and stop daydreaming. I don’t have all day and I don’t want to go anyplace kooky where I have to eat hair in my coleslaw.”
“Jesus,” I couldn’t help responding, “maybe they have a travel bureau at Bloomingdale’s.”
“Cute. Very cute. Let’s not get started. Because I could really get started with a girl like you. You’re really . . . okay, I’m not getting started. How about telling me what’s wrong with Bermuda?”
“I’m really what?”
“Skip it. Tell me about Bermuda. What are your objections to Bermuda?”
“It’s boring. Four fun-filled nights and five sun-filled days and all the Wedgwood you can eat on the back of a bicycle built for two in colorful and shop in our Free Port.”
“Stephanie,” Richard tapped his automatic pencil on the sheets of the Islands pages. Then he folded the paper up. The deliberate precision of his activity was directly traceable in style and intent to my father’s taking away my toys. “There is a certain lack of emotional validity on your part that I find particularly and increasingly offensive.”
“At last, something interesting. That’s a new expression, isn’t it? Whatever do you mean by that new expression?”
Richard stood up, left the Travel Section somewhere and returned from the same somewhere with his new Yamaha tennis racket and a roll of tape. He sat on the sofa and squeezed the racket, testing the grip, backhand, forehand, full serve, net chop. He spoke at last. I was supposed to have been suffering during the interim. “You can really be a nag. I didn’t expect you to be a nag.” If Richard were surprised to discover just then I was nagging, the surprise didn’t seem to break up his serve.
“What’s that? The Bloomingdale’s Bon Mot of the Month? What do we get next month? A choice between ‘Why Don’t You Grow Up and Face Responsibility’ and ‘Don’t You Women Ever Stop Talking?’ ” I wondered for a fleeting moment what Miriam would have said to all this. And then stopped thinking about Miriam. Miriam had nothing to do with any of this anymore.
“You’re all the same. I swear to God.” He added tape to the Yamaha. “It’s amazing.” And then ran through his backhand, forehand and serve again with the new grip.
“That’s for sure, Richard. We are, Richard. All the women are the same because you make us that way. You want us that way. Just remember that. You make us what we are. The Richards of the world make us what we are.”
“Look, I don’t do well with women who manipulate words so don’t waste your highly articulate time being clever with me.”
“Oh? That’s right. I am wasting my time. That’s entirely correct. But it’s not the words, Richard. It’s the real feelings. You who talk so facilely about my emotional validity while you caress your tennis racket, you know absolutely nothing about real feelings. But I do, Richard. I am in touch. And I know you. And I know you can’t wait to marry a nag because that’s what you have always wanted. You want to be punished because you feel guilty about your lust. You’re a masochist, Richard, and you’re looking for a sadist and you won’t be happy until I become one. You need me to be a nag.”
“Oh, come off it.” He stood to try a full serve, tossing up an imaginary ball.
“The only way,” I continued, unhampered by his inattention, “the only way I could get you to marry me was to be a nag, a liar, a stupid dummy, not to ask questions, not to . . . do you think I want to end up screaming like your mother? You think I want to end up in this goddamn set for Death of a Salesman? You think what I want from life is two weeks in Bermuda and a house in Scarsdale and a slot in the Jewish Couples Bowling League and fresh gefilte fish and a wacko family and a charge account in Loehmann’s?”
Richard maneuvered a backhand, aborted before the follow-through, and returned to his tape and scissors. “Loehmann’s only takes cash, sweetie, or a check.”
“I don’t think it’s asking too much of the man I’m going to marry to listen to me, do you?”
“I am listening. I’m all ears.” Net return.
“Yes, I’ve seen your pictures.”
“Bitchy, aren’t we?”
“It’s a matter of goals, Richard. My goal is not to marry a nut who wants to marry his mother so he can really get even with women. My goal is not to live without love and die in a hide-a-bed someplace in a lousy Leisure Village apartment. My goal is not to make polite faces at dinner parties and look good in church until I crawl into my hide-a-bed or you get a heart attack in the Lincoln Tunnel. Do you think those are my goals, Richard?”
“So shoot me. What am I supposed to do?” Obviously the tape had accomplished his goals. He had the proper grip. He swung his Yamaha happily, left the room, returned with his Adidas and a package of new shoelaces and began to restring them. He had so many projects. I think he saved them up for memorable moments such as I was offering.
“Is that your emotionally valid response, Richard? ‘So shoot me’? Because if it is, I just want to know so I can recognize it if I ever come across it again. But you shouldn’t overdo. It might drain you. A man only has so much.”
“Temple.” He couldn’t get the laces quite even. He pulled one out and began again. “Not church. Temple.”
“Oh, you are so parano
id.”
Richard looked at his laces, slightly cross-eyed, trying to even them up. He began to string them once more, very patiently. “Do you need to fight, Stephanie? What do you want?”
“I want . . . look, church or temple isn’t important to either of us. So don’t play games with me. What is important is that you’re telling me what to read. That you’re telling me not to dream. That’s what’s important. That you think you can tell me not to dream. If I want to dream about . . . about the Golan Heights, I’ll dream about the Golan Heights. What I want is that you just stay out of my head. You don’t belong in my head, Richard. Get me?”
“Who wants to get into your head?” He was examining with crossed eyes the second shoelace, dividing it in half before his nose. It was minutely off. “Getting into your head would be like falling into a cement mixer.” And he laughed, quite pleased with his line. I would hear it again, I knew. Often.
“Terrific, Richard. Is that the Bonus Bon Mot for joining before September fifteenth?”
He didn’t answer. While I talked, Richard finished lacing his sneakers, pulling the laces into very tight, perfect x’s.
“Well, Richard, I am going to be your mother. Because you made me into your mother. You have to marry me so you can kill me because you’ve always wanted to cut your mother to pieces. But you’re not going to kill me. Somehow I’m going to get a life out of this. Even though I sold out. It’s true. I sold out for you.”
“A cement mixer. That’s funny. Don’t you think that’s funny?” Richard tucked his sneakers cozily next to each other at the bottom of the sofa and patted his Yamaha in place next to his sneakers. As he walked past me toward the bathroom, I told him my Sabbatai Zevi story. I thought it was quite fitting. He apparently didn’t know the reference or care or both.
