No answer.
“Well, let’s just finish this,” Coco said thoughtfully.
“Finish it! That’s a whole day’s work right there. What is this? I’ve got to try a case next Wednesday, and I’ve got a shitload of work to get ready.”
CALL DIANA TO FIND OUT GLENDA’S ADDRESS
GET LAWNMOWER FIXED AT HARDWARE ON COLUMBIA ROAD—GAVIN
MAIL SUBSCRIPTION BLANK To New York Review of Books—GAVIN
RSVP TO THE BRADLEYS
MAIL THE BILLS—GAVIN
BUY BOOKS OF AIRMAILS AT POST OFFICE—GAVIN
CHECK FOR BATHING-SUIT SALES
She looked at yesterday’s things-to-do list and incorporated the leftovers into her new one.
TAKE N’S TRICYCLE TO BE FIXED—GAVIN
GET MAIL FROM A.U. OFFICE—GAVIN
Then, cupping her hand in a don’t-let-your-desk-mate-copy-your-answers style, Coco wrote:
START THE NOVEL!
Carefully she replaced the cap of the pen, clipped in onto the notebook, and tucked both back inside the secret-center compartment of her purse before she rolled over onto her side to face Gavin.
“What time is it?”
He looked at the alarm clock. “Twenty to eight.”
“The children will wake up soon,” she said in a sweet, maternal way. “But we still have enough time.”
“For what?”
“For you to tell me.”
“Tell you what?” His voice was guarded and suspicious.
“Who she is.”
Silence.
“I have to know, Gavin. I’ll have a nervous breakdown if you don’t tell me. I mean it. You heard me, I was crying while I was sleeping. This isn’t a put-on. This isn’t any sixties schtick. You better believe me, Gavin. I’m very upset. I mean, I’m really very upset. I’m sick. I’m mentally ill from all this. I feel worse now than when I first went to see Dr. Finkelstein, and you know how I was then. I mean, how would you feel if I had an affair with you while I was married to another man and then left him to marry you and then started having another affair twelve years and four kids later? Wouldn’t you think history was repeating itself? I mean, wouldn’t that make you nervous?”
“Well, I did tell you,” Gavin said defensively.
Coco cast off the covers and began to moan quietly so as not to wake the children. “I’m so hot,” she whimpered. “It’s so hot in here.”
“It’s not hot, Coco. Just calm down, honey. You’re okay. If you just calm down a little, we can talk things over.”
“I feel sick,” she moaned tragically. “I can’t think straight.” She began to shake her head back and forth like her mother did when she heard there were Jewish passengers aboard an airplane that had been skyjacked.
Gavin got up and hurried around the foot of the bed toward her.
“What’s happening?” she mumbled, twisting from her back onto her stomach.
“Coco. What’s the matter? Please don’t get hysterical again, honey. That doesn’t help anything. Don’t start thrashing around, sweetheart. You know I love you.”
Coco saw fear imprint itself on his face, so she rolled sideways several more times and clawed at the sheets with crazed, unfamiliar-looking hands.
“Where is she?”
Gavin kept moving back and forth as she assumed different positions on the bed.
“Where is she?” Coco groaned again.
“Who? Who are you looking for, Coco?”
“You know. Her. Her.”
“Stop it, Coco. I don’t want anymore of this. The kids are going to hear you.”
Agreeably, Coco decided to decrease the noise to conserve their privacy. She sat straight up on the bed and crossed her legs in a fashion that made her nightgown hunch up around her waist. “Your girlfriend. Where is she? Is she here in the house?”
“What are you talking about?” Gavin asked wildly. “The kids are going to wake up in a minute. Why are you acting so crazy, Coco?”
“Call the doctor, Gavin. You’d better call the doctor.” Her voice predicted an immediate disaster.
“Honey, which doctor? What doctor do you want?”
Coco flattened out again suddenly, rolled over to bury her face in the double layer of pillows, and began to cry. “The doctor I need doesn’t make house calls, Gavin. I should probably be in a hospital. I need attendants. I should have known you’d leave me. You kept me when I was young and beautiful. You used me up. You took my good years, and now you’re going to leave me here to rot in this house with all your kids.”
“Coco, I’m not leaving you. You were going to leave me. Don’t you remember?”
“How could you do it? How could you?” Then she sat up straight again, stiff and rigid. “Well, you’d better tell me who she is, mister!” Coco’s voice changed dramatically. “You goddamn well better tell me who the hell she is. And if you don’t tell me in the next two minutes, I’m going to jump out of that window.”
Gavin ran his hand across his face, rumpling his nose and upsetting his glasses. “Look, Coco. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I want to die. I shouldn’t have said anything. I really didn’t think it would bother you. You always told me that what I needed was a mistress, so I’d be more sexually stimulated.”
Coco looked at him contemptuously while thinking about the imminent invasion of children. “Please, Gavin, will you take the kids downstairs this morning without letting them come in here? I don’t want them to see me like this.”
“Sure, Coco.”
“And please make the lunches for Mike and Jessica. You can give both of them peanut-butter-and-jellies. The lunch bags are on top of the bread-box. And put potato chips in a Baggie for each of them, and give Mike one of those little grape juices in a plastic bottle. There’s a box of them underneath where I keep the beer. But you have to put in a straw. There’s a box of them in the cupboard where the cups and saucers are. Oh, fuck it. You’ll never find everything.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Coco,” Gavin said in a provocative voice that suggested the duties which destroyed women were only self-deceptions, “I’ll take care of it.”
Coco’s throat tightened in rage. “And I also don’t think I should pick up the car pool this afternoon. I’m too shaky to drive seven kids in the car.”
“Okay, so, I’ll do it.”
Coco waited several seconds. “Well, don’t you even want to know where they live so you can take them to the right houses?”
“I’ll find out, Coco. There’s seven hours left for me to find out before I have to do it.”
“Well, you’d better call your office and say you won’t be in today.”
“I’m going to do that, too, Coco.” Gavin wanted to be out of the bedroom very badly.
“Shit,” Coco moaned, feeling guilty about keeping Gavin home from work. She was already weary of his passive accommodation, and her own nervous power. “Well, it won’t kill you, since you haven’t taken off one day this whole fucking year.”
“Go back to sleep,” Gavin said. He slammed the door shut behind him as he left the room.
Coco lay in bed and listened to the sounds of her children waking up—crying, laughing, yelling, slamming drawers, dressing, and fighting. Although she heard the toilet flush three times, there was little audible action from the sink faucets. After a while she heard Gavin, obviously weighted down by the baby, clumping heavily on the stairs, followed by the other three children. Then Coco went into the bathroom, checked out how many toothbrushes had been carelessly left in the sink, and got into the shower, squirming as the prickly stream of water hit the tender spots on the back of her head. Running naked back to her bedroom, she lay down on the disheveled bed and surrendered herself to the enormous and real pains that were now flowing through her system, penetrating every part of her body until even the joints of her fingers ached with the knowledge of Gavin’s betrayal.
Oh, no, she swore silently to herself, clenching her fists, I will not help him make the lunche
s. I will not put Mike’s books in a pile with the biggest one on the bottom so he won’t drop the little ones. I will not wait at the front door to make sure the pool driver car stops on our side of the street so the kids don’t have to cross. I will not remind Jessica to take a sweater. I will not hold the baby while he drinks his bottle. I will not play with Nicky until Mrs. Marshall gets here.
LET GAVIN DO IT.
Nervously Coco got up and poured the last swig of cold coffee into her cup. She was craving the distraction of the morning paper but didn’t dare start trouble by asking one of the kids to bring it upstairs. She began to pace around the bedroom, looking up in time to catch her naked body stalk past the closet mirror, and considered the dislocating, diminishing, devastating idea that Gavin no longer found her totally sufficient, that he no longer believed Coco’s failures preferable to the positive attributes of another woman who wasn’t Coco. The notion that she was no longer indispensable, unexpandable, or uninterchangeable—which had been the basic premise of their marriage—was terrifying.
At 8:52 Coco opened her calendar notebook and looked up Dr. Finkelstein’s telephone number. She had some difficulty fitting her shaking index finger into the dialing holes and unexpectedly had to clear her throat when she first heard Dr. Finkelstein’s Brooklyn voice thunder across the wires.
“Dr. Finkelstein?”
“Yes?”
“This is Coco Burman.”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if I could possibly make an appointment to see you.”
“Why not?”
“Actually I was wondering if it could be … today?”
“Well, let me see. Hmmm. Yes, you’re very fortunate, Mrs. Burman. I have a cancellation at three this afternoon. Could you come in then?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll be there. At three. Thank you, Dr. Finkelstein.” Coco hung up the receiver, half-comforted and half-distressed at the thought of seeing Isadore Finkelstein’s face again.
Then she sat down at her dressing table, put the big hair-blowing cap over her head to blow away any curls that might result from her shower, and left out one ear while she direct-dialed Chicago.
“Hello, Mother?”
“Yes. What’s the matter, Coco? Are the children all right? How come you’re calling in the middle of the morning? Is something wrong?”
“No, Mother. Everybody’s okay. I just felt like talking to you.”
“Well, for goodness’ sake, you certainly scared me. Why didn’t you wait until after six o’clock?”
“Because I felt like talking to you now, Mother.”
“So what’s all that noise?”
“I’ve got the hair dryer on.”
“And there’s nothing else the matter, then?”
“No, Mother.”, Coco realized that she had embarked upon a long conversation, so she took the wallet out of her purse and began to clean it. One by one, she unfolded all the little registered-mail receipts, old prescription labels from used-up bottles, several two-cent postage stamps left over from a book of eights, a laundry ticket, the refund receipt for a merchandise pickup from Woodward & Lathrop’s for $19.95, and several scraps of paper with phony telephone credit-card numbers, which she used only in pay-phone booths.
“What were you doing, Mother?”
“Oh … I was just straightening up the apartment. I’ve got to get dressed early and go over to the club for lunch. You know, I play Maj on Fridays.”
“Oh, right, I forgot.” Coco flipped through her seventeen credit cards and turned them around so they all faced in the same direction. Then she looked through her checkbook and tried to remember the amounts of checks she had cashed but forgotten to record.
“Are you all right, Coco?”
“Well, I don’t’ know,” Coco said ominously, staring at the photograph on her driver’s license. After a few seconds she decided that municipal mediocrity made her nose look bigger than it actually was. Quickly she added up the points on her license for illegal turns and then replaced it, along with her car-registration, library, and social-security cards, behind the section in the wallet where she kept her checkbook.
“You don’t sound too good,” Coco’s mother persisted.
“Well, actually, Mother, Gavin and I had a fight.”
“So?”
“I don’t know. I was sort of wondering if maybe I should go away for a while.”
“Go away? What are you talking about, Coco?”
Inside the pull-out plastic photograph carrier, Coco found a pediatrician’s routine-checkup appointment card for Joshua that she had completely forgotten. Thoughtfully she transferred it to the dollar-bill section to statistically increase her odds for noticing it again.
“Actually, to tell you the truth, Mother, there’s a woman here in Washington who’s a terrible homewrecker, and she’s been absolutely pursuing Gavin.”
“Coco, I don’t understand what you’re saying. What do you mean? I simply couldn’t believe that Gavin would ever do anything that might hurt you or the children. Do you mean he’s involved with this woman in some … way? Are you saying that he’s been seeing this other woman?”
“Well, I’m not saying that for sure, Mother. But there is that possibility. And that’s why I’ve been thinking of going away for a little while.” Coco began to scrape bobby pins, paper clips, Kleenex balls, pencils, earrings, receipts, safety pins, chewing-gum wrappers, coins, and Clorets out from the bottom of her purse. Everything was covered with crumbs and disintegrated aspirin.
“But this is exactly the time in a marriage when a wife simply cannot leave. Not for a minute, darling. You have to stay right there, Coco. I mean, we do know that Gavin has a tendency … well, he did get carried away about you when he was married the last time. And women who chase after married men—not you, Coco, darling, but other women—who chase after men who are fathers … not just husbands … why, women like that would simply move right in if you even so much as went out to the beauty shop. I know what those women are like, Coco, and what they’re after is your home. So you’ve got to stay there to defend your rights and your property.”
“But I’m so upset, Mother.” Coco sniffed a few times to indicate emotional pain and tried to unbend a creased snapshot of her children dangling their feet in the stream at Rock Creek Park. “And besides, I haven’t got anyone to talk it over with, either. Glenda went to South America with her husband for six weeks.”
“Ah, that’s nice. On business?”
“Yah.”
“But, honey! You can always call me. Collect. Just call me collect. Even in the daytime. Or I’ll come to Washington, Coco. Let’s see …”
“Oh, no, Mother.” Coco left off cleaning now to concentrate. The long-distance line to Chicago was a narrow tightrope wire. If she didn’t adequately establish the fact of crisis, her mother would simply tell her to stop whining, but if she went too far, Mrs. Silverman could appear within two hours at National Airport. “It would be awful if Gavin found out you knew about it, Mother. That would embarrass him so much he might do anything.”
“Oh, the poor children!” Mrs. Silverman had begun to cry.
“I think I should probably go see a psychiatrist, Mother.” Coco launched her offensive so prematurely that she caught herself off guard. “I mean, just enough times to find out the best way to handle this situation so it won’t disturb the children.”
“A psychiatrist!” Now Mrs. Silverman’s voice was strained by shock. “Oh, now I’m sure you’re not telling me everything, Coco. I’ve been feeling that right along.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Coco unzipped her plastic cosmetic bag and looked inside. The cap from her tube of eye-shadow had come off, and everything was stuck together with smears and globs of Midnight Forest Green. She plucked several tissues out of her sateen-covered purse-size Kleenex holder and began cleaning. “You really are terribly provincial about psychiatrists, Mother. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you if you go to one. It’s just a way to avoid
getting sick. It’s like a psychological DPT. For God’s sake, Mother, it’s a form of preventive medicine nowadays.”
Because she had emptied out her entire cosmetic bag, Coco was rewarded by finding a new eyelash-curler rubber refill she had forgotten. Instantly she located her slant-edged tweezer and began extracting the old rubber cushion from the curler so that she could insert a fresh new one, which would produce a much stronger crease in her lashes.
“I just can’t believe any of that’s necessary,” Mrs. Silverman said.
“Mother. Do you realize how I feel? I’m so humiliated I could die. Don’t you know anything about mental health? About preventive mental health?”
“But it’s very expensive, Coco. How can you afford it?”
“Well, that’s one of the things I’m calling about, Don’t I have any of my old Israeli war bonds left?”
“Oh, Coco. You know you used them all up before you got married.”
Coco made a little crying noise while she tried using a nail file to squeeze the buoyant rubber refill into the curved ridge where it technically belonged.
“Otherwise I think maybe I should just get a divorce, Mother.”
“Oh, now you’re talking crazy hysterical talk,” Mrs. Silverman said hysterically. “I’m going to hang up and call Daddy at the office and have him call you right back. No marriage is easy, Coco. The best thing is to stay married to your first husband, because a second one is just as bad. And listen. If Daddy’s out playing golf, he’ll call you early tonight. Just don’t do anything until we talk to you again. I told you not to marry a divorced man. They’re like alcoholics.”
Coco expelled another sob and then hung up the receiver feeling very hopeful about receiving some financial assistance. When she finally finished fixing her eyelash curler, she wiped off her lipstick, Lash-on, Blush-on, and mascara, turned off the hair dryer, and began to hang up the week’s accumulation of clothing heaped around the bedroom. When most of the surfaces were relatively clean, Coco tiptoed down to the second floor to retrieve her briefcase and rushed back to her room to begin grading the first of the 107 blue books. At two o’clock she got dressed, gathered up the furnishings that belonged in her purse, tiptoed out of the house, and walked downtown to her psychiatrist’s office.
Loose Ends Page 4
