She still hadn't quite made up her mind whether to have the baby or an abortion. In control of the situation, she realized that the time for handwringing, tears, and sentimentality was over. In fact, she smiled, chewed two Gelusil pellets to combat the bacon taste in her throat, and repeated the little rhyme her mother had made up for her when she was a child:
Jane, Jane, Jane,
Don't you know that it will rain,
And you wilt cry in vain...
Jane, Jane, Jane.
The Line of Scrimmage
Look at me, I'm alive, I'm yours, Jane wanted to tell her mother in the crowded confines of Lafayette; but of course she didn't. In fact, after a while Jane got the impression that Nancy hadn't wanted to see her at all but needed a reason to come into the city. She had lost most of her friends and was slow to acquire new ones. Ever conscious of her body, her clothes, Nancy was in the forefront with a midi skirt, but returning from the ladies room, she moved like someone afraid to reveal a wound, a drunken horsewoman. The squire's lady banished to the small attic room at the top of the house where she could scream her head off, and polite, believable excuses could be made to explain her absence.
“My bladder is shot to hell,” she explained, sliding back into the booth. She peered around the room to see if anyone new had come in. The possibility of being picked up, a recurring but tantalizing prospect, had eluded her once again; and she'd return to Connecticut, arms filled with packages that she'd never unwrap, sinking into oblivion before she reached home. She worked the trains over the years, although the chauffeur stood by expectantly. Even among loaded commuters she was an old number whom they preferred to pass over; a sinister insult in view of the fact that they had only their wives stationed at the other end. No one it seemed could tolerate a drunken woman, no matter what the reward. On Saturday there would only be shoppers like herself, but someone might invite her over for cocktails and dinner. Nancy had stopped giving parties years before. She could raise the dead but not enough guests.
“Do you want to order?” Jane asked.
“I haven't seen you for ages and you're rushing.”
Another request for a vodka martini kept the waiter at bay.
“Did you bring Dad's address?”
“Yes, the Buccaneer Motel in Napa. Sounds like your father, doesn't it? If you happen to run into him, would you mention that I'd like to see him.”
“Why don't you get a divorce? People do it all the time. It's not as though there's going to be a custody fight over me.”
“That's between the two of us. We came to an agreement a long time ago.”
“Is that what it's called?”
Nancy cupped her chin in the palm of her hand to steady herself, but her elbow swayed, another broken crutch.
“You don't like me very much.”
“I thought it was the other way around,” Jane said. “But I never held it against you.”
“Walk right over me, everyone else does.”
Her mother's self-pity never failed to remove the big guns of reason and common sense. The reversal of positions always amazed Jane. An emotional conjuring trick that parents employed instinctively, leaving the child sadder but not wiser. Jane at that moment despised the strength of her mother's weakness.
“How you always reduce me to a driveling twelve-year-old, I'll never know.”
Concerned with cause, Jane only observed effect.
“I'm a stupid, willful, drunken woman who happens to be your mother. I can't change that or myself. I'm a damn wreck, Jane.”
“Okay, what do you want me to do?” Jane offered, but Nancy was still on the same track, and although Jane thought she was immune to this form of maudlin self-accusation, having seen this late movie many times, she nonetheless felt her veins being opened.
“I married a skirt chaser and he got a drunk, but God, honey, we are what we are. We've lived for ourselves and don't deserve anything from you.”
Sweetbreads arrived from nowhere. Jane hadn't remembered ordering them, but since Nancy was eating, she did nothing to upset a rare moment of silence. The wine went untouched, as Nancy preferred to stay on vodka.
“I want him back, Jane.”
“Who?” she asked.
“Your father.”
Jane had a moment of indignation but managed to suppress it.
“I've just run out of people. The last”—she stopped herself, courageously looking into Jane's eyes, so there could be no question of hedging—“you're old enough. My last friend was the best of them ... and the worst.”
“I don't think I want to hear about it.”
“No one ever does. I have a sex life.”
“I don't doubt it.”
The combination of sweetbreads and confession made her nauseous, and she swallowed some ice water, chewed on a piece of roll, and controlled herself.
“Living alone doesn't do anything for your chastity.”
“Oh, Mother, do you have to? Can't you talk this over with a psychiatrist?”
“I gave ten years to those bastards, and got a lot of noncommittal advice and two proposals of marriage. I guess my bank balance overcame weak stomachs.”
“I don't want to be your go-between.”
Nancy sipped her drink reflectively. With an open bar, she retained her confidence.
“The last one was somebody called Charles Luckmunn, not a psychiatrist....” She turned Jane's face to her. “Don't look away, honey. We're both women.”
“You want it both ways. One minute we're equals and the next I'm your child.”
“Okay. We're women now. Luckmunn decided he'd had enough. Enough, do you understand?” Nancy was crying now, upset, outraged, hurt, but her anguish, to Jane's horror, made her coherent. “I'm pretty desperate to be talking to you about these things, so listen now.”
Jane stared at the burnished silverware and nodded.
“I had ... Luckmunn knew what to do to make me feel, Jane. For years I thought there was something wrong with me. Why couldn't I have an orgasm?”
“Mother...” the room began to spin and Jane started to laugh. “Do you know Tub Feeney, Mother? I found out yesterday that he was a homosexual.”
“Jane, that isn't relevant.”
“It's relevant to me.”
“The Feeney boy,” she asked rhetorically. “Who cares one way or the other?”
“I do, Mother. He laid me. He was the first one. I had a good feeling about it.”
“Why didn't you tell me about it?”
“You were always recuperating.”
“I'm sorry,” Nancy said. She picked up Jane's drink, not knowing, not caring, what it was, and gulped it down.
“And I'm sorry about Luckmunn and your orgasms but...”
It came with explosive suddenness, Jane's retching. No one it appeared had ever before vomited at Lafayette, and everyone was distressed as Jane, assisted by her mother, rushed to the ladies room. Nancy saw herself being closed out of yet another restaurant, having to corrupt yet another maître d', so that she could get the right table in the right place. She wet a towel with cold water and rubbed Jane's forehead.
“Most of it went on the table. You missed your dress, luckily.”
“I really feel terrifically lucky about that.”
“Oh, God, Jane, I don't know what I'm saying.”
“It's a familiar pattern. You should be sympathetic.”
“Maybe God in His infinite mercy won't make you like me,” Nancy said, looking at the floral wallpaper.
“Don't give me the Gods now. I need more than that, I'm pregnant.”
Other people's disasters always pulled Nancy together, and after six martinis she didn't look any the worse.
“Why didn't you say so?”
“I tried to. Yesterday on the phone. But you were otherwise occupied.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Will you stop saying that?”
“Do you feel any better?”
“Yes, wonderful, happy
, thrilled out of my mind.”
“Let's leave, honey.”
Eyed coldly by the staff and sympathetically by the few people who noticed their difficulty. Nancy suffered the supreme contempt: she was not given a check. They strolled slowly in the direction of Third Avenue in bright crisp air. New York was perfectly marvelous in its indifference to suffering, the ideal place, short of hell, to hide.
“What do you want to do, Jane?”
“I'm not sure.”
“Going to California to see your father won't solve anything.”
“I'd like to try.”
“Why?” Nancy asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Just to tell him.”
They reached the car and Jane opened the door. “Can I drop you somewhere?”
“No, I'll walk for a while,” she said listlessly. She made an effort to embrace Jane, who snapped her head away. “I want to help. Believe me.”
Jane started the engine and looked into the rear-view mirror. She saw an attractive woman in a black diamond mink coat railing against the air and crying bitterly. She opened the window to say something, but Nancy was looking in the other direction, shouting: “I stink, I really do...”
On the United flight to San Francisco, Jane sat gloomily looking out of the window at the sea of dirty clouds the plane skipped over. The sky seemed like some enormous pus-filled sewer illuminated by a flashlight with rundown batteries. She thought of Nancy. They'd touched, and Jane had walked away luckily with no infection. But the point of contact had turned Jane's stomach, another of Nancy's sexual bridges that led nowhere but forced an expensive toll on the passenger. Nancy always on the other side, hand out, waiting to collect. Some mysteries, Jane believed, were worth preserving. Yet she was overcome by an emotion more potent than sexual desire—compassion for the dreadful, whining drunk who was her mother. They had come together for once, their femininity closer than their biological tie, in the wilderness of sexual waste. Why the secretion of glands, logically a bodily function could pull them together, Jane could not understand. At best an unwilling parent to her child mother, she resented the promotion thrust upon her. Nancy needed a monitor, not a daughter, but human demolition seemed to Jane an intolerable condition.
Luckmunn. She spat the name out. Luckmunn, the heroic orgasm engineer, had abandoned his patron. Probably with good reason, but she despised him from a distance, more for his choice of partner than anything personal. Nancy could not keep a lover. It made Jane more secure, increased her detachment, when she thought of Nancy as Nancy, a woman, rather than Mother. She'd have to remember that substitution.
The airport festered in gray fog when she arrived; feeling sticky, her left ear numb, she waited patiently for the Avis girl to fill out the endless form and finally she was led to a fighting-fit Mustang with enough maps, motorist brochures, and recommended dining places to keep her behind the wheel forever. Freeway gave birth to freeway in the interminable stark highway that is California; and Napa, north of the crotch of San Pablo Bay, came into focus at about three o'clock Pacific Coast Time.
Signs mounted every few highway miles directed Jane to the Buccaneer Motel, a gerrymandering affair with a large neon triumphal arch. She couldn't believe the full notice, and ten dollars in the right hands proved her point. The clerk folded the bill neatly into eighths and fitted it into the small-change pocket under his belt.
She was hot, tired, and hungry. Her stomach was still in New York with the hotel's shirred eggs. A Mexican bellhop with a breath of fire and enough Old Spice on his person to qualify him for the Marines carried her bag to a third-floor room. The walls weren't thin, they were soluble, she discovered as she watched bits of ceiling plaster dissolve in the shower. Her stomach was still deceptively flat and she slapped it unselfconsciously in front of the bathroom mirror without getting a rise, slipped into a light, sleeveless micromini, and promised herself, after a two-week sex watcher's diet, Sonny Jackson on toast. She put on her dark glasses and wondered if her father would recognize her.
She went down to the front desk, where her operative touched his change pocket in a sign of recognition and informed her that James Harmon Siddley was on the course, playing a qualifying round, and would probably be clustered on the back nine with some local club pros who, to save face with their pupils, had to play a round from time to time, no matter how disgracefully, if only to demonstrate that hitting a golf ball was still one of nature's well-kept secrets.
The course was four miles away and the approach was crammed with the usual assortment of fanatics she'd seen at other such events. At the PGA desk a blazored official suggested that she might find Jim Harmon on the sixteenth or seventeenth tee.
“He had a real fine front nine. Thirty-four,” the official said.
There was little enough to be said for California north or south, she thought, but the weather here was clear, and crisp as a bakery roll. The Bermuda-shorts contingent followed the leading pros, and Jane knew that wherever the crowd wasn't, that's precisely where Jim Siddley would be, unless he happened to be paired with a declining name pro who had to suffer the indignity of qualifying but still had a few old-time fans. A pack of derelict housewives; the golf tours’ version of groupies, were trailing Nicklaus and Chi Chi Rodriguez, who were eating up the course.
On the seventeenth, a dogleg to the left, favoring a controlled draw, she saw her father. As a boy of nine, he had been tutored, cajoled, and ultimately brought to the point of obsession, until the game became his consuming passion. He discovered that golf didn't necessarily relieve his fits of depression, but that it possessed the twin virtues of being so trivial, so majestically pointless that it provided him with something to worry about. Having found his spiritual objective correlative, he proceeded to devote his life to its pursuit. In an age of casualness and jersey knits, Jim Siddley was a dandy, amateur golf's leading dresser. People were more inclined to ask what he was wearing than how he scored. There were about a dozen people watching his foursome, an attendance record, and be was wearing a cardinal-red version of the Hogan peaked cap, black checked plus fours, and a silky white see-through shirt. Jane stood behind a bush so that he wouldn't have any excuse for a poor tee shot.
Her father teed off last of the foursome, so he'd been high man on the sixteenth. There was a rustle of excitement when he lined up in the direction of the rough instead of the fairway. He was going to try to go over the trees, a foolhardy and desperate measure which carried the same odds as a double zero in roulette.
God, she'd watched that swing thousands of times—from their own front lawn, courses in nine countries, driving ranges from Maine to Miami; and there it was, still beautiful, the complete compact arc, a miracle of human geometry. He carried the trees and with any luck would be in position for an approach if he hadn't landed in the dense rough.
“We got somebody playing for an eagle,” one of the pros said.
A buxom Mexican girl clapped her hands and gave Jim a big wink which he returned. Jane followed at a distance, not wishing to disturb his concentration. He had everything required for the great golfer: the long game, zinging line drives with irons that conquered winds, fearlessness with a putter; a master of the wedge, he played out of sandtraps as if he'd been born in one. But he never won. Somewhere along the line he was missing the basic constituent element that makes a champion: desire. He wasn't hungry for the buck, he'd never been a caddy or fished for lost balls, and his sense of competition never extended beyond the confines of a country club bet at Bel Air or La Gorse. Hustling hustlers was the final extension of his ambition. He had the perfect nerves and composure of the golfer but he always lost in tournaments because nothing was at stake. He had earned twenty thousand dollars a week from his investments and had this monstrously disproportionate income since turning twenty-one. The only requirement to maintain the fortune was to keep away from the family company, Invictor, a dynasty now run by skilled technocrats and highly paid management who did have something at stake. James Harmon Siddl
ey, a director of the company in name only, kept his distance. He could live with the disapproval of society, and had done enough maid chasing to outrage even the jaded but generous sensibilities of his Connecticut neighbors. Contempt he could not survive, so he turned his back on it and played in golf tournaments which kept him occupied but not completely out of trouble.
He had cleared the rough. His ball was by the side of a fairway bunker about a hundred and fifty yards from the pin and he waited for the other three to hit their second shots. There was a momentary uncertainty about his club selection; he preferred a nine but settled for an eight; if he was short he'd land in the water trap in front of the green. He was a stroke ahead of the others because of his gamble and with hot dice in his hands had no intention of dropping them. He hit an easy eight with enough bite on it to hold the green, leaving him about a sixteen footer. This time he turned to the Mexican girl and kissed her on the cheek. Trust Jim to bring his own rabbit's foot, a living, breathing one, bursting out of her dress, Jane reflected.
He sank the putt, kept his cool, although she knew that he wanted to howl with delight; but this stratagem would probably unnerve the others even more. He birdied the eighteenth, did a small jig with the girl after totaling his score and handing it to an official.
“Best goddamn round I've had since Phoenix in ‘65!”
His score was posted, a sixty-nine, and that sweet little-boy rowdy in him emerged as he clapped backs and handed out balls to a group of caddies who applauded him. She hated to spoil his fun, moments of triumphs were few enough in anyone's life. His name was put up among the qualifiers. He had survived the cut and sauntered along to the locker room, a man destined for great heights and two more rounds of golf for prize money that he couldn't and wouldn't accept.
Jane turned into the clubhouse and made her way to the bar. He was bound to turn up after changing, spreading good cheer and scooping up bar tabs, indulgences for one and all. He was unhateable, and that's what made him hateful at times, as far as she was concerned, because he forced her to turn on herself. She hadn't seen him since June, almost six months now. Before that she had spent two days with him over Christmas at Aspen. She'd spoken to him three times, twice from Europe and once on her return. Six postcards had been sent, four by her, and two by him in which he stated that he was feeling great, taking a vacation in Buenos Aires, to rest up before resuming the tour, which had ended sadly for him with a seventy-nine at Firestone—"a real sonovabitch of a course.” Her maternal advice, an American mother to a heartbroken son—Dear Jim, re. Firestone, you can't win them all — was taken in the right spirit by Jim, whose sportsmanlike conduct was a model for any boy.
Making Love Page 8
