The Girl That He Marries

by Rhoda Lerman

  “I stripped myself, Richard, like all those people waiting for the Messiah. Except I stripped myself of decency and honesty and integrity and I climbed into my white robes and up into my tree and waited for the Messiah. And waited. I thought that’s what I was getting. But, thank God, I didn’t sell out all the way. There’s a little of me left. Enough to get me out of the tree and see you for what you really are. I see you and I know you. Too well.”

  From his face as he passed me on the way to the bathroom, I could imagine him either cleaning himself or committing suicide. He had a good rigid grip on his face, very much like the young soldier in the war movie pulling the grenade pin with his teeth. We were both on the edge of real violence and I was fascinated. Or maybe real truth. I wanted one or the other very much. Richard slammed the bathroom door. I heard the shower turn on full force and I waited. And finally, drawn inexorably, as if the bathroom were Plato’s cave, I flung the door open.

  Steam filled the room. Richard’s monogrammed deep fleecy bath towel was warming itself on his electrically heated chromium-plated 98-dollar towel stand. “Close the door, honey. It’s cold.” What happened to the violence? I still had mine and I was gasping the most intoxicating air I had breathed since I met Richard. I tore apart the shower curtain. “I dream about you, Richard. A lot.”

  He grinned at me, supposing the attack to be sexual. “Louder, it’s hard to hear.” And turned, handing me the soap to do his back. I know he had me confused with Innocent Marie or all the other women who had done his back. Or not even confused. Nevertheless, I did his back, methodically, harshly, because he stood still and listened.

  “Do you know what I dream about? I dream about both of us lying in that horrible bed like your mother and father, with cobwebs hanging from us. I dream about that every night, Richard.”

  “I know the scene: Great Expectations. Not so hard, honey.”

  “And when we die, Richard, your mother comes and carries out the bed with us still in it. Every night. And some nights I visit you in a hospital room. You aren’t a prince in shining armor anymore. You have a white uniform on all right but it’s a hospital robe and you’re lying on a shining operating table and there’s a marble floor but it has messy organic things on it but no waltzes, no music, no waltzes at all. You are only head and feet. No body. And I reach to touch your hand and you know what the doctor says? He says, ‘Mrs. Slentz, don’t squeeze his hand. His asshole is under his thumbnail.’ ”

  Richard held out his hand for the soap. “That’s funny. You are funny today. That’s almost as good as my cement mixer.” Then he began to scrub his testicles vigorously and lovingly. The soap had a decal on it which matched the wallpaper. I hoped it would transfer itself to his balls.

  “That’s how I spend my nights with you, Richard. I wanted to marry you and love you and I found I couldn’t have it both ways. There’s no way to have it both ways. Remember that song? You gave me that song to believe in. ‘The Girl That I Marry.’ And I tried to be that girl. It was a lie. You . . . you are treacherous.”

  “Really? Me?” He hummed a few bars. “And I thought you liked my singing. You have been dishonest with me.” He then burst forth in full song and I hated finally—him, myself, the song. It was like watching my own death scene. I was immobilized by my hate and mesmerized by his insensitivity. “And in her hair, she’ll wear a gardenia, and I’ll be there, ‘stead of flittin’ I’ll be sittin’—Next to her and she’ll purr like a kitten.” At one point, he paused and remarked again, “Odd, isn’t it, how everyone blames me for their disillusionments? Tell me, Stephanie, does your mother scream?”

  “No.”

  “And why doesn’t your mother scream?”

  “Because she’s screamed out. Because she had a song, too. Do you know ‘One Alone,’ Richard? That’s my mother’s song.”

  Richard answered me by beginning “The Girl That I Marry” again. I started to yell over his noise and the shower’s noise. “Sing, Richard, sing. That’s terrific!” Actually I was screaming but I considered it an entirely justifiable exchange. Anyway, I couldn’t help it. “My daughter isn’t going to know radios exist. She’s not going to hear the songs. My mother sold out to the first kid with hair on his lip for One Alone.’ One alone, Richard.”

  Richard was doing his hair now, bubbling with shampoo, quite happily haloed. I’m sure he could hear me. His eyes were closed. He was making believe that he couldn’t hear me.

  “Because she was in love with the song. You must know the words. You and all the Richards in the world must have written the words. One alone,’ ” I screamed, “ ‘to know my caresses. Yours to be eternally . . .’ ”

  He opened one eye. He shut it and wiped the burning soap away with the corner of the towel. “Stephanie,” he warned me quite passively, as if he had caught me picking my nose, “don’t scream.”

  “Then turn off the shower so you can hear me.”

  “I don’t want to hear you. I’m washing my hair.”

  So I screamed. “ ‘Yours to be eternally the one my worshipping heart caresses.’ That’s the key word, Richard. Worship.” Richard began to sing very loudly again.

  “Her nails will be polished and in her hair . . .”

  “That’s romantic love for you, Richard. It’s anti-God, Richard. There’s no such thing as love, Richard. It’s all a lie, Richard. There’s no such thing as the right girl or soul mates. It’s the devil’s lie. And I made a deal with the devil to get my fantasy, like Faust, and you were my fantasy, Richard, my God-help-me dream man, and I made a deal with the devil for my soul to get you, because you were illusion. And I sold out and you aren’t even real. The bag was empty when I got home and looked inside.”

  We ended together on the same note. He with “marry will be.” Me with “looked inside.” He smiled. “That’s pretty good, Miss MacDonald.”

  I pushed him against his chest. It wasn’t exactly a blow. I had hoped my Nelson Eddy would slip into the abyss under the avalanche. Richard did lose his balance but caught himself on the soap holder. As he recovered himself he smiled crookedly and arrogantly as if he had discovered not only that Jeanette MacDonald picked her nose, but ate of her find and rubbed the rest in King’s fur. Very assiduously, Nelson Eddy scrubbed the spoiled spot which I had touched with his bar of decaled soap until the spot was vividly pink. I think he planned to show it to his mother. And all the while he scrubbed and soaped and rinsed and inspected for stray bits of infection, he offered me an incredible overture of the best of Broadway, just lines, significant lines, indicating quite clearly that Richard knew damn well how to use love for his own purposes. He was no innocent. “You’re the prize that heaven sent for me. The shadow of your smile. You are love, here in my heart, where you belong, here you will stay. Why do I love you? Why do you love me? How can there be two happy as we? Only make believe I love you. Only make believe you love me too. And if you asked me for the world, I would get it. If I had to sell my soul, I wouldn’t regret it. It’s just impossible. I’m just a girl who can’t say no.”

  And all the while I screamed because I wanted him to scream, to forget the words, to feel, to hurt. I was beginning then to understand fully what it was I felt: a terrible, irrevocable loss. “Trade off the worship of God for the worship of man and what do you get? You get a jug-eared neurotic, a fake, an illusion, a cheat. Tell Plato his stupid cave’s empty. Because now, now, I have nothing to believe in. I believe in nothing and it’s your fault, Richard. Your fault.”

  Richard was just completing “Like the heroes bold in the books I’ve read.” He scratched his scalp, massaging it. “Odd,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Awfully odd how everyone blames me. Hell,” still scratching his scalp in country boy confusion, but I knew he wasn’t confused, that he’d never been confused, “I never told you I was God, did I?”

  Then coyly, quite coyly, he pulled the shower curtain around his head, miming someone. He had swung from Robert Goulet to Nelson Eddy to Will Rogers. I was having di
fficulty following his impersonations. “It’s just me. Richard. Just plain Richard.” He grinned that crooked grin, like the Cheshire cat, the floating face, the rotten grin.

  I turned away, ashamed, everything in me igniting, things which had lain turgid since childhood rising like bile, threatening to choke me, and, as I turned my back on him, Richard grabbed me by the shoulder with one hand, and with the other lifted his testicles rather appealingly to demonstrate, I supposed, his simplicity. “I am but a simple man, Stephanie. Just a plain pair of clean pink balls. That’s all. Who the hell are you to tell me I’m no good because I’m not God? The Virgin Mary? Woman, let me advise you,” he began, with his balls sitting round and pink and small in his hand, “life will be a lot more pleasant for us if you don’t scream at me and a lot more bearable for you if you get rid of your illusions and stop dreaming. I am what I am. It is what it is. Face up to reality.”

  There is no reality as penultimately disillusioning as a handful of pink scrubbed balls or a man who calls you Woman. I don’t know if I was more deeply offended by the ugliness of the balls or the arrogance of the word Woman. I wanted to kill Richard. I felt how good it would feel to kill him, to core his head like a head of lettuce, to hull him from the belly button like an overripe strawberry, to literally strangle him in the shower with his warm towel or electrocute him on his electric chromium-plated towel warmer or squash him against the tiles with his Yamaha. Or all at once everything at the same time. And let him drift down the drain into the New York sewer system and meet all the monster alligators that grandmas had sent from Miami Beach and mamas had flushed down toilets. And yet I stood there.

  Richard dried himself happily and conscientiously with his warmed towel, whistling his overture of the tunes he’d already presented me with, then dragged the clear Lucite wastebasket over to the side of the tub, unzipped his new Gucci dop kit from Blossom, sat on the edge of the tub with his nail scissors and clipped his fingernails into the wastebasket between his legs.

  My anger and pain had focused within me. I knew what it meant. I no longer had to scream. Sanity and quietude washed over me and I could speak softly. “I don’t think I can marry a man like you, Richard.”

  I watched the fingernails drop into the clear Lucite wastebasket and lie there, quite cut off.

  “Well.” One hadn’t been cut deeply enough. He measured and snipped. “Listen, like everything else, it’s a challenge. But we can meet it. Together. Just like doubles. You have to get rid of that old ego if you’re going to play a good game. Hey, turn off the towel heater like a good girl, will you? I think it gets too hot. Maybe you ought to call the store.”

  “Richard, you don’t seem to understand me. I don’t want to marry you.”

  “You’re afraid of the challenge. That’s all. Perfectly normal.” He found his cuticle scissors in his new Gucci dop kit and concentrated with absolute worshipful intensity on his cuticles. I watched the cuticles drift in on top of the fingernails. They fell exactly. None misbehaved. Richard must have felt good about his clear Lucite wastebasket, his new Gucci dop kit, his richly warmed bath towel, his good aim, and his new grip.

  “The only challenge in marriage, Richard, is how not to make a man feel inadequate. The rest is easy.”

  He looked up. I think I had communicated because a cuticle fell unobserved beyond the confines of the wastebasket. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to marry you.”

  And then he examined the spaces between all of his toes for athlete’s foot, found his toenail clippers in his new Gucci dop kit and proceeded to manicure his toes. “I do this once a week. It’s a good habit. Do you do it often?”

  “No, I rip them out with my teeth. Richard, you aren’t listening to me. I’m telling you I don’t want to marry you.”

  I watched Richard clip his toenails. I watched the toenails drop neatly into his clear Lucite wastebasket on top of the fingernails and the cuticles. When he had ten even clippings of toenails in a pile in his clear Lucite wastebasket and he had washed the scissors with hot soapy water, dried them, and put them back into his new Gucci dop kit, zipped up his new Gucci dop kit, rubbed Keri lotion on his cuticles, held them a few inches before my eyes for inspection, slipped into his new monogrammed fleecy LeRon robe, let me follow him to the sofa, tried a few more backhands, forehands, and short net serves with his Yamaha and laid it gently on the sofa, when he had done all that, he turned to me, with a look of true helplessness, and said to me what I realized, looking back, was probably what I would have said to him: “The invitations are out already. It’s too late.”

  What still surprises me is that I never cried.

  Much later, I heard him laughing out loud from the bedroom. “What’s so fucking funny, Richard?” I yelled at him from the sofa.

  “Cement mixer.”

  “Richard, do you know what the elephant said to the alligator after the alligator bit off his trunk?”

  “No, what?” he called.

  I held my nose. “Very funny. Very funny.”

  “Good night, Stephanie.”

  “Good night, Richard.”

  “Momza! Momza! Am I gonna get you.” That had to be Mrs. Slentz. I knew I was dreaming but I couldn’t wake up. I was standing in the hallway of Richard’s old apartment, right where I had heard the girl singing. The door to the apartment was open. Up and down the hall thin cracks of light showed through discreetly ajar doors. Now Blossom screamed. She was magnificently Wagnerian. “For Christ’s sake, Mother, open the drain! Let the fucking blood out. It’s the blood that’s driving him crazy.”

  “Newton’s nervous, Mama. Gramma, don’t do that to Newton. Let’s buy filled fish. Gramma, please leave Newton be. Oh, please, Gramma!”

  “She’s beating him on the head.” Innocent Marie sat red-eyed among the warehouse furniture in the living room. She held a dying asparagus plant between her knees.

  “Get me more fish. I’ll show you, Newton.”

  We both listened to the noises from the bathroom. God help me, I had walked in at the moment of execution. I brought Mark an ice cream sundae filled with Richard’s strawberries. He took it without looking at me from his seat on the toilet and then, without shifting focus from the bathtub, found his mark and shoveled the ice cream in. Newton was mangled and bloody but very much alive. Mrs. Slentz swung a rolling pin, not well. Blossom came back in with a Maxwell Coffee tin filled with the fish from the fish tanks. She poured them into Newton’s blood-red bath with the wonderful manic haughtiness of a Lady Macbeth.

  “There, Newton, now you get busy and concentrate on those fish. Shhhh. Everybody quiet. As soon as he forgets.” There was a wild thrashing. “Momza! Momza! Get me the tennis racket.”

  “Mama, why should Newton die? Why can’t we just buy filled fish in a bottle?”

  “Somebody’s got to die to fill the bottle. This way, honey, it’s fresher. My grandmother and your father’s grandmother always did it this way.”

  “Did you meet Innocent Marie?” Blossom asked me.

  “Yes. She wants to know where the cat is.”

  “Shhh, Newton’s concentrating.”

  “Aunt Stephanie, they told her Uncle Richard is in Venezuela.”

  I left the bathroom. Innocent Marie was still on the couch, holding the very dry plant, shaking as the plant shook and lost its leaves. I wanted to sit with her.

  “They packed my uniforms and my checkbook and all my things. I know Richard isn’t in Venezuela. I just wish I knew where Platypus was. He said I shouldn’t stay here. He wanted to save me from this. But I told him I would’ve stayed as long as it was with him. I didn’t mind.”

  Blossom weaved between the furniture toward the fish tanks and then passed us again with her Maxwell can. “Newton’s not stupid,” she explained.

  “I guess I’m lucky getting out of this. Richard’s not like them. He is sweet and wonderful and sensitive. He’s a very sensitive person . . .” Innocent Marie drifted off, lips trembling.
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  “Zeezagut! There’s the cat!” Mrs. Slentz howled.

  “Get a shoe box someone. Innocent Marie, do you have a shoe box?”

  “I got him! Got him! Look at that.”

  “Mother, for God’s sake, open the drain.”

  “Totsela, Mark, get Gramma a nice big knife.”

  “Bubby, don’t kill Newton. Mama, don’t let her kill Newton!”

  “He’s just sleeping. He won’t feel anything. Just hurry.”

  Blossom came out with a dripping shoe box. Some of the matching flowered towels were tucked into and around the body of the dead cat. “I’m sorry. We tried to get him to stay away from the fish. He wouldn’t. He really wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, you mustn’t tell Richard. It would break his heart.” Innocent Marie peeked into the shoe box. “How many times did I tell you not to play with fish. Poor Puss. Oh, poor poor Puss.”

  “Bubby, don’t do it. Oh, Newton, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Newton.”

  As Innocent Marie lifted the shoe box and swung the asparagus plant under one arm, about to leave, Richard burst in through the door. I truly had no place to go except to stand under the doorframe to the living room and watch them. Seeing him at a distance, I was shocked to notice how thin and dry he had become. “Sweetheart,” he told her. “Are you all right?”

  “It isn’t right. It just isn’t right, Richard. It’s not right.” She clutched the shoe box to her breast.

  Blossom started to shout from the bathroom. “Richard, come quick. Mama’s fainted.”

  “It isn’t fair, Richard. Richard, I’m not trying to hurt you, Richard. I would never hurt you.” Innocent Marie’s voice was clear, bell-like through the insanity and the shouting, steady and sane and loving and comforting and I could understand how Richard loved her and needed her. I wished somewhere there would be a voice like that for me. “It’s not going to work anymore. I would hurt you more if I stayed.”