Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  But no, that was not enough for John. Not only did he want to see me standing, as naked as the day I was born, but he insisted that I not look uncomfortable. He plopped a large chocolate bon bon into my mouth, the juices running down my chin as he lifted up my camisole, and pushed down my slip, and cupped my buttocks in his hands, and drew up next to me—and no, conveniently, he was not undressed yet, he was not yet exposed, he was not being judged or measured, even if I could see the lump in the front of his trousers—and I don’t quite recall what happened next, but I disappointed him. There was an argument. And at the end of it I sat in a huff, top layers still off, chin propped in my hand, breasts hanging down like some African bush dweller’s in a National Geographic magazine, back hunched, unexcited nipples plump and unattended areolas pale, utterly bored with the entire situation. I lit up a cigarette and took a deep, soothing puff, and he looked around and said, “Now, that’s better,” and came closer. And I slapped him. Hard.

  But I said I wouldn’t dwell on those kinds of details.

  We drove back toward the lab in silence, John in the passenger seat as I gripped the wheel of my beloved Bearcat.

  “You like driving that machine,” he said after a while.

  “I adore driving it.”

  “You really know how to steer it.”

  “Of course I do,” I said, gripping the wheel even more tightly. I may have pumped the accelerator, just to show off.

  “I don’t want to go back to the lab just yet,” he said after a half mile. “I’ve been a little tense. I’m sorry, Rar.”

  When a sign came up for a northbound road, one that I knew led away from city streets and suddenly into farmlands, I took it without decelerating, and John, anxious, gripped my thigh, and with the other hand held the door handle as we took the curve.

  I pulled alongside a farm—the green of spring plantings just beginning to thrust through the red-brown mounds, the smell of manure and clover in the air, the buzzing of insects audible as soon as I cut our speed—and then nestled the car along two ruts that ran behind a big, red barn.

  “Take down your trousers,” I said, as soon as I’d set the brake.

  And there, behind a barn, in my beautiful yellow Bearcat, I straddled the lap of Dr. John Broadus Watson (yes, there would be private jokes between us about his middle name after that day), and we demonstrated together that it is in fact possible to perform coitus without fully reclining and without every last layer of clothing removed. It was not easy; it was not, that first time, completely pain free. But it was a memorable success, for both of us. John appreciated motor cars even more after that moment, even though he still refused to drive his own, and I’m sure we both thought we’d been the first to make use of a motor car’s mobile seclusion in that way—that we’d discovered, like the equally deluded Columbus, a new and untouched continent. Like most explorers, we were more proud of our audacity than apprehensive about any consequences—including the biological ones. But we weren’t the first lovers to be so selectively aware.

  When it was over, John leaned his head back against the seat, sweat trickling down the subtly graying threads of his thick hair, down his strong jaw, and across my throat, where he nuzzled against my perspiring skin and said, “For a beginner, you’re terribly gifted. I should listen to you more often, Miss Rosalie Rayner.”

  And I threw back my head, panting, and said, “Yes. Yes, you should.”

  Chapter 14

  But it wasn’t all fun, and he didn’t always let me steer.

  The rest of the month was still stop-and-go, stop-and-go: hints that Mary was furious and knew something, hints that Mary knew nothing at all, or didn’t care. During March, she saw my parents socially every other day, it seemed, as if we’d found a long-lost aunt or cousin, the telephone ringing at all hours, and every single weekend marked as something involving Mary: a luncheon or dinner, a shopping excursion with Mother, a drive with Father off to some place he was thinking of developing. (“And you must go along!” I kept reminding Mother, who didn’t seem to have a jealous bone in her body. “She’ll feel awkward, otherwise. You really all must go together.”)

  Mary was frantically befriending my parents, and John and I were feverishly having intercourse. I said I preferred to avoid the lab, but that wasn’t entirely possible. Our moods were up and down, signals crossing, spirits high but just as often clashing. The search for affordable privacy consumed both of us, when we weren’t actively fixated on a scientific problem. I haven’t mentioned many Vassar friends, except for Mary. I wasn’t particularly close to any one of them. But there were a few with whom I still kept in contact, and with whom I shared more in common as we all escaped the influence of our families and our alma mater, and as our circumstances sorted us into narrower niches—those who had not married, those who worked, and those who liked to go out dancing and date all kinds of men, not batting an eye at bawdy jokes or morally suspect situations.

  Hilda had her heart set on an acting career, which put her in contact with all sorts of people and situations, some more bizarre than mine and John’s. I’d let slip just once that we couldn’t find a place to be alone, and she immediately volunteered her city apartment as a trysting spot, which we took advantage of several times, making the long drive into New York, sometimes for just a few hours before driving back, always inventing excuses for our absences from the lab and from each of our homes. Though we saw each other daily, John continued to write me letters, pining for the next love-nest rendezvous. “Everything will be lovely and we ought to play safe. Still, play we will.”

  Only occasionally did I crave an escape from the pulsing demands of our passion, the demands also of lying and remembering which lies had been told, and of learning to look into the faces of friends and family without blinking when they asked why my hours had been so long on Tuesday night, where I had been on Saturday morning when Annie or Mother came knocking at my door early, why I wasn’t in the lab when my father stopped by unannounced one day to invite me to lunch. Sometimes, and only sometimes, I wanted a break from it all: from the lab and from the lying—just a chance to disappear into a play or a music concert or some other form of entertainment. John didn’t care for the arts or many leisure activities.

  One day at lunch, eating a sandwich at my desk, I was reading a new book that had just appeared fresh in the bookstore—the first novel I’d found time to open in over six months—and John came galloping in and whisked it, playfully, from my hands.

  “Never heard of him” he said, reading the name, F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the cover. He was a new novelist, author of This Side of Paradise. John read aloud the first sentence: “Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait . . .”

  John promptly walked across the room and ceremoniously dunked the book into the trash.

  “Inherited every trait. On the first page. That’s what we’re up against,” he said, grinning maniacally. “That’s the sort of ignorance that will set this entire nation back a hundred years.”

  “But it’s just a novel,” I started to say . . . and gave up. Because he was right, I thought at the time. The ignorance was overwhelming. And there were so many new novels and new flickers showing at the cinema, new ways of spreading outdated ideas, that we were outnumbered in trying to combat it.

  It’s always good to have a cause, an enemy, somewhere to refocus your energies after you pull up your trousers and make use of a handkerchief or powder your face, trying to look merely sleep-deprived instead of sex-mad. Mary Ickes Watson would do, as would F. Scott Fitzgerald, as would quite a few psychologists who were publishing comments that didn’t fully support John’s behaviorism, as would any person at the hospital who seemed to raise his or her eyebrows as I passed.

  Sometime late that month—Mary had already been over at the house three times—my mother approached me in the hallway and said, “I’m not sure about that red lipstick. When did you start wearing tha
t?”

  It’s hard to imagine now, especially with the images we have in our minds of the 1920s, but up until the moment full makeup burst out into popularity and respectability, it teetered along a fine edge. In December, my mother had felt free to opine that I should wear no color at all on my face. Only three months later, and I may have gotten away with something subtle. Clearly, this wasn’t subtle enough.

  “Mary Watson wears nearly the exact same shade,” I said, pulling away before Mother wiped my lips with her own bare hand.

  “But you’re so much younger, dear,” she said.

  “And it looks good on her.”

  “Well, practically everything looks good on her. She has that film-star face. I only meant to say . . .” Seeing my dismayed expression, she hesitated. “If it’s because you want to look good for men, they don’t even know what they want, half the time. And you must believe me, what they don’t want is war paint.”

  “That may be what they say, Mother,” I said, wanting to tell her everything, able to tell her nothing. “They say they like fresh-faced girls. But what they want is a girl who looks fresh and young, only because she has carefully applied makeup, and wears the right sort of undergarments, and the right sorts of shoes, that give her just the right sort of walk.”

  Mother frowned. “Well, that may be true. It’s a brave new world, isn’t it?”

  I went away the last weekend in March. The previous weeks had been exciting, draining, and confusing. An old college friend, Bee, asked me to visit her in New York City, to enjoy an early taste of spring in the Big Apple. John expected that this would be another rendezvous—a convenient alternative to Hilda’s, particularly important because Hilda was planning to go west soon, to try her luck in Hollywood. And perhaps it could have been. But for once, I didn’t want him to come along. I sensed a rope being thrown, and I grabbed it. Bee was a fun girl—enviable figure, perfect strawberry-blonde hair, her face ruined only by a horsey set of teeth she tried to obscure with one hand—who had landed a dream job working at Vogue magazine. She would have lots of stories, a tiny but stylish apartment shared with two other girls who had their own interesting single-girl lives, and the inside scoop on where to shop and dine. I didn’t want her pull-down Murphy bed for an hour while she went and had her nails done. I wanted her, a distant, easygoing, no-strings friend: another woman, and preferably one who did not want to discuss either married men or experimental psychology.

  By chance, John’s wife, Mary, had her own trip planned that weekend, which left John at home, deprived of all female company, except his fourteen-year-old daughter’s. He thought I should stay behind and make use of the liberated weekend with him. I thought he should spend it by himself, to get a reminder that Mary and I weren’t alternating courtesans, at his beck and call. Not one for being alone, John invited a good friend, Leslie, a fellow psych researcher from another university, to stay over at his house and keep him company. Leslie was unmarried, and an odd duck in his own way, which in certain, sometimes unpredictable cases, didn’t seem to bother John despite his deep distaste for homosexuality—perhaps because it took another unconventional man to refrain from judging John. Whatever John had said or done, chances were that a man like Leslie might have done something just as frowned upon by the Victorian moral overlords.

  What happened was reported to me only on Monday, back at work in the lab. I walked into John’s office and saw him at his desk, head in his hands.

  “Shut the door,” he said, as soon as he saw me. “Polly had a sort of breakdown over the weekend.”

  “What?” I hurried to sit down across from him.

  “Leslie slept over, and Little John was away with Mary, so we took his room with the twin beds. And we had a few drinks and then we stayed up all night—in the beds, you know, as if we were at sleepaway camp—just talking. I told him everything. I guess I was rather emphatic and descriptive. I probably enthused about some of our trysts, in detail. And the walls were thin.”

  “Oh, John.”

  “Like an imbecile, I talked about my plan to send Mary and the children to Switzerland for a couple of years, to get her out of my hair and enjoy the high life, if that’s how she pictures it. And then sue her for abandonment.”

  “Oh, oh, John.”

  Polly didn’t come out for breakfast, John told me. And when he checked on her, her eyes were so swollen and her face was so pink that it was as if someone had punched her over and over, through the night. “She’d just curled up in bed crying, listening to me talk about her mother and our busted-up sham of a marriage, and . . .”

  He couldn’t go on. He was sick about it. Mad at himself for being so indiscreet, mad at the situation most of all, since he’d never wanted to marry his wife in the first place, as he frequently reminded me.

  “Is Polly going to tell?”

  “She says she isn’t. But then again, she’s awfully protective of her mother.”

  With a sickening feeling, I thought of my own mother, and my own parents’ marriage, and how I’d grown up securely never questioning that they would always remain together, that they’d never hurt each other.

  John continued, “On the other hand, I think she’s just old enough to know it would hurt her mother more than help her.” He sighed. “So that’s one good thing, anyway.”

  Maybe. But I wasn’t so sure it was a good thing, imagining this young girl trying to hold in such a big secret.

  “How did she seem today?”

  “She wouldn’t eat Sunday night supper. She didn’t eat Monday breakfast. Didn’t want to go to school. Says her stomach hurts.”

  Chances are, Mary already knew. But then again, if she knew, why had she gone hat shopping with Mother last Tuesday, and why had she knocked on the door Thursday with a Bundt cake, and why was she already set to come to Sunday dinner? You’d think the woman had no friends or family, the way she practically lived at our house. She’d hinted that she’d like to come to dinner Saturday, but there, Mother drew the line. Friday and Saturday nights were the Passover Seder. In fact, our entire house would be turned inside out this week in preparation, because Passover was the biggest cleaning any Jewish household—even a fairly secular one—does at any time of the year, with the search for chametz, any kind of breadcrumbs, the impetus to scrub every last drawer and closet, inside and out. I hoped my mother would use the ritual cleaning to throw away the set of dishes that now only reminded me of Mary’s first inappropriate gift.

  But there—my irritation at Mary had made me forget about Polly again. And the moment I thought of Polly—loyalties strained, eyes swollen—my own stomach hurt.

  Tuesday was our final testing day with Albert, the epilogue to an experiment begun in December. We knew his mother’s plans: she was definitely leaving Johns Hopkins. In fact, she’d just informed us she was leaving a few days earlier than previously announced.

  We’d already started writing up the Albert paper to hurry into publication in the journal John helped run—the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the first issue of volume 3, already a month behind publication schedule, for lack of sufficient articles and staff. (“Do you see how hard this is, trying to improve the world?” John had said that morning, striding down the hallway several paces ahead of me, not even turning around as he spoke, mulling over a critical note he’d received from his boss, Meyer.)

  I wasn’t as observant as I should have been at the final test, still thinking of Polly, imagining John and Leslie gabbing away without any sense, and seeing, curled up on the other side of a thin bedroom wall, Polly alternately trying to block out the stories, the unweaving of her world, laced with erotic details equally puzzling. I could picture her putting a pillow over her head, not wanting to hear, and then taking it off again, pressing her ear to the wall, wanting to store up what she should tell her mother, and then hating herself for going against her father, whom she adored.

  I
n the lab, there was more than the usual amount of pushing things at Albert, rather than just letting him look and reach. He was forced to touch the Santa Claus mask against his will (crying); he was forced into contact with the rat, which was placed on his arm and on his chest (crying); he was forced into close contact with the rabbit (hesitant curiosity, pushing away with feet, withdrawal and crying); and he was made to stay close to the very active dog. Several times throughout, Albert seemed to be fighting his fear—seemed curious, in fact, and wanting to touch. He would reach out for objects like the rabbit and the sealskin coat, in contradiction to everything we’d been trying to demonstrate. But with enough pushing of animals and objects into his face, he ended up in tears, hands over his eyes. The responses, John announced at the end with a sound of celebration in his voice, were likely to “persist indefinitely.”

  Would we decondition him, as I’d heard mentioned often back in December? Weren’t we responsible for the consequences of what our experiment had done?

  There wasn’t time. The mother was ready to go, and that was that, John said. He would greatly appreciate the opportunity to study Albert for many more months, to see how the long the conditioning lasted.

  “And to decondition him, you mean.”

  “Well of course. In time. But there just isn’t time. Didn’t I already explain this, Rosalie?”

  John, who barely tolerated Freud’s basic beliefs and despised the entire Freud mania that had infected the country for ten years (stylish young girls with ever rising skirts were eager to tell anyone their dreams), made a tasteless joke at the end of that session.