CHAPTER FOUR

Of all the women I had ever known (or ever will, I would think) Frannie was the most articulate about sex. Having thought in those first few months of our friendship that the subject would interest her little if at all it came as rather a surprise when during one of her daytime visits after school I happened casually and without purpose to toss the sexual ball into our conversation and found that she was quite willing to pick it up and run with it.

We were talking, I recall, about college. She was telling me that her four years at the exclusive and progressive X—had been entirely serious; that she had been completely infatuated with new ideas and the processes of original thinking. I admitted that I could make no such educational claims; that my own four years at Y—had been one long trek from frat house to frat house; and that before my third, during which I met Brad, I had broken all records with the significant score of seventeen affairs.

She told me then about a boy she'd been in love with in her Junior and Senior years: a Yale man and brother of a classmate of hers. "We had our first date in New York—blind," she said. "When I put him on the train he asked me up for the following weekend and I knew immediately and without the slightest question that that would be it."

"How did you do?"

"Not at all like they write it in the novels," she answered. "It's such a complicated, delicately-put-together thing, that first time. Why do writers always have to go and wreathe it with a ton of God damned orchids? Why not daisies or dandelions—you know what I mean?"

I remembered my first: in the back seat of a car. And I remembered my description of it to the girls in the sorority. I told it the way Frannie had just said the writers did: full of hot purple orchids; no daisies or dandelions at all... I looked over at her, sitting in the armchair, her legs curled up under her; and she looked back at me, putting me on the spot. "I know what you mean," I said; but then, unwilling to give up my stand for hers, I added, "On the other hand, it would depend on the individual. After all, we aren't all─"

"The honesty of the individual," she cut in. "Look, Jo—it's a big thing to become a woman, isn't it? A whole woman, that is. It doesn't just simply happen one day because you go to bed with a guy. Sex does, yes. But not true sexuality. That takes growing; and you can spend your whole life growing. You make such a thing of it, Jo. It's as if you keep trying to prove something all the time..."

It was one of those moments when I wanted to drag her up and shake her like a rag doll. But then Brad walked in. He looked especially well that day and his mood was high as a bird's. "Knew you were here, Franni-o!" he said with a happy breathlessness. "Saw your car outside!" Passing the couch he bent to kiss me a brief but sweet hello. "You too," he said to Frannie, crossing the room. "Mmmmmm," he murmured as she lifted her face shyly. "Now let's have a drink!"

"Just used the last of the soda," I said. "Drive over and get a case, will you?"

"Sure. Who’ll come with me?"

"Frannie will," I said. "She's been sermonizing for two hours. She needs a breath of fresh air."

"You go, Jo," she said. "I have to get home."

"Oh, no!" Brad groaned. "The party's just beginning! Stay for dinner. Call Marc and tell him to come here from the office."

"You forget: I'm the mother of three hungry children. Though come to think of it, Connie cleaned today. Maybe she'd feed them and sit tonight."

So she called, and Connie agreed. Then she got Marc and he was game too; a few minor finish-ups and he'd be up in an hour.

"Get that soda," I told Brad. "If they aren't closed now they will be any minute."

He held out his hand to Frannie. "Come on, Mrs. Browne darling."

Pausing with one arm in the sleeve of her coat she turned to look back at me. "Let's all three of us go," she suggested.

"Can't," I said. "I'm the cook."

I got a chicken out and filled it with an easy apple stuffing. Then I began tossing us a big raw vegetable salad. But all the while I had this funny feeling about being alone. It wasn't resentment, exactly; I didn't need any help with dinner and Frannie was zero in a kitchen anyway. But somehow I wished she hadn't gone. Realizing then that I had been the one to send her I felt even odder. After all, it was kind of silly to give Brad the chance to go off with anyone considering the messes he'd got into in the past; and another thing: that little talk with Frannie had ended on a slightly irksome note. What had she been trying to say? That I was lacking in some way that she wasn't?"

I nicked my finger on the paring knife and yelped. When I heard the car brake outside I thought it must be they. But it was Marc. I was pleased. In all the months we'd known them I'd never been alone with him; never had the opportunity, really, to talk to him. Of the four of us he seemed the most remote. I don't mean that he wasn't friendly; he was. It was just that Frannie, Brad, and I had built an intensity into the relationship to which Marc seemed immune. I wondered about it. Did he display this hands-off quality with all people, or was it only with us? Then there was his relationship with Frannie; I wondered about that too. While I often sensed an easy warmth between them, their outward behavior with each other was undemonstrative. I had never seen them kiss or touch or speak even the semblance of an endearment. At times they struck me as two close but casual siblings; at other times I got the feeling that Marc played Stabilizing Father to Frannie's complex and precocious Little Girl. I had recently read de Beauvoir: there was something called the infantile woman. Could that be Frannie's cubby hole? No; I was constantly having to remind myself that appearances were too often misleading. What of the sudden adultness; the unexpected femininity; the peculiarly disturbing insights which, even when unspoken but only glanced or smiled, could pierce the sheath of my own maturity and cast me headlong to the level of a child?

As Marc stood beside me in the kitchen there were a hundred questions I wanted to ask him: about her, about him, about them; but wanting to, I was afraid; and, too, I didn't know how or where to begin. "They're getting soda," I told him. "They ought to be back any minute now."

A shadow of annoyance crossed his face. "What's the matter?" I asked.

"She knew I was coming, didn't she? She could have been here."

"Well, they'll be back soon. We ran out of soda, and─"

"So you said." He took the bowl in which I'd made the stuffing and began washing it.

"Don't," I said. "I'll clean up later."

"Force of habit," he explained. "Have you ever seen our kitchen after Frannie's boiled an egg? The Augean Stables."

"You can't have everything," I said. "Marry a writer and bask in the pride of bylines. It's worth it, isn't it?"

"Completely invalid," he answered. "That's her theory; but the truth is: it's just an alibi for ducking the dirty work." He was taking pot-shots at her. I'd never heard him do that before.

"Complaint Department?"

He looked up. "Not really," he said, leaning against the sink, nibbling a heart of celery. "If she changed I'd have to adjust all over again. It was hard enough the first time."

* * *

We were getting nowhere; though where I wanted to get I wasn't quite sure. No; that's not true. I knew what I wanted to know: I wanted to know about Frannie. I wanted to know what she was like: all of what she was like—when she was home alone with him; when she wasn't playing to the gallery. But why? Was my curiosity strange, uncalled-for? I doubt it. Writers seem always to be objects of interest; maybe because somehow we've all come to assume they have an inside track to Love. Well then, did Frannie? Surely she had written of it; written of it well enough to sell. But that was merely a matter of words on paper. What happened when this same emotion belonged not to a cast of literary characters, but to Frannie herself? What words would she choose then for its expression? What look? What everything? But it wasn't the sort of question you went around asking people's husbands; least of all husbands like Marc. He was smart and deep and sensitive all right; but unlike Frannie who, once unblocked, could pour like Niagara, he kept his thoughts to himself.

He was watching me now. "You're looking pensive," he said. "What's on your mind?"

"Nothing. I was just wondering whether or not to whip up a dessert. Frannie could use a couple of extra pounds."

He had finished the celery and was rifling through the vegetable bin. "Optical illusion," he said, coming up with a carrot. "She isn't nearly as frail as you think she is. Got a scraper?"

I handed him one and took hold of his wrist to look at his watch. "I didn't know how late it was!" I said. "Where are they?"

"Getting soda, you told me."

"Yes, but that was an hour ago. The store is just down the road; ten minutes at most."

As I said it the door bashed open and Brad staggered in under the weight of the case.

"Where were you?" I asked. "I was beginning to worry."

"What about?" he gasped, lowering the case with a clumsy crash.

"Your driving, darling, leaves something to be desired."

"Castrator!" he shouted merrily. "Isn't that the correct term, Mrs. Freud?"

Frannie smiled. Then she peeled off her cashmere polo coat and dropped it in a soft heap on the floor.

"Pick that up," Marc said. "A hundred and fifty bucks and God knows what for the upkeep."

"A hundred and forty-nine ninety-five," she emended, "and the upkeep is negligible. I rarely get it cleaned. It looks chic-er dirty."

"Pick it up," he said again, firmly.

Obediently she bent to retrieve it and carried it out to the hall closet.

"Hey," I called as she went through the door. "Your shirt's out in back." And did the falter in my voice get past my throat as clearly as I felt it within? Did anyone know, or notice? Frannie must have. For a second she stopped dead in her tracks. Then: "Oh, is it?" she asked offhandedly; and went on.

When she returned, it was neatly tucked in.

The chicken took ages, which mattered only because it gave Brad too much time to tank up. I was afraid we'd lose him to his usual alcoholic miasma; but he hung on for Marc's and Frannie's sake.

After dinner Frannie, seeming intuitively aware of my conversation with Marc in her absence, made a large show of domesticity by washing all the dishes. Brad had, I suppose, expected me to tackle the clean-up by myself so that he could impress both Brownes in the livingroom with a recitation of slightly misquoted poetry. Obviously put out by Frannie's preference of K.P. he went upstairs for a nap, asking us to wake him when we were finished.

We forgot him entirely until Frannie began browsing through the bookcase and found an old set of anagrams. She was delighted. A few years before she and Marc had spent three and four nights a week playing with a brilliant couple named Weinrick in Meade's Manor. The four of them had created a handbook of complicated and brain-busting rules and had wound up doing it for money. Within a year no less than several hundred dollars had changed hands.

"Let's try it," I said, intrigued with the idea of clashing with experts.

"Okay," Marc agreed. "But I warn you: I've had it with the Weinricks. At the first sign of bloodshed, I quit"

"Pacifist!" she flung at him, proceeding to turn the letters face-down on the bridge table. "What's wrong with a little harmless expression of hostility? There are lots worse ways of fighting your dearly beloveds. Go on, Jo—get Brad."

But I was already on my way back to the kitchen for the ice-bucket. "You get him," I said. "I'm going to need a drink to cut the tension!"

"No—you," she said. "I'm not exactly practiced at arousing him from slumber."

"A piercing shriek or a splash of cold water might do it," I told her.

So she went up for him; and once again I became aware of the passage of time and felt that maybe I should have gone myself. Not that I had expected him to leap from bed at her first nudge. He was one of those people who awakened hard, if at all. Seven or eight minutes was not, then, an untoward interim. And anyhow, what was I so concerned about? The thing with the shirt? Ridiculous. Shirts do come untucked in the normal course moving about. And suspicion, piled up over the years, could become a disease. Besides, Frannie was too smart for him. Her aesthetic eye might well be caught by that lovely face of his; but, much as I hated to admit it, a girl would have to be pretty stupid to get tied up with Brad the way he was these days. I was—but then I had known him when he was young. He'd wanted a good many things in those years: dreamed about jobs abroad, South America, the Orient; life in villas and chateaux and pagodas. He'd had drive then: read a lot, thought a lot; held people spellbound when he talked. It was only later, I told myself, that things went flat on him somehow; that he lost the spark and slipped into weary, bleary mediocrity.

Oh, no: Brad was not for Frannie. For all her wanting to break the shackles of a middle-class background she'd never in a million years mess up the good thing she had with Marc for a crazy fling with a man like Henry Bradford.

But instead of warming to the safety of that thought, it annoyed me. Maybe he was a flop; but he was my flop. He was a liar; but he was my liar. He was nothing; but he was my nothing. And Frannie's rejection of him was a rejection of me.

It was quite an evening. Brad was surprisingly awake when they came downstairs together; none of the sullen, rubbery ineffectuality with which he usually got up. His eyes seemed positively lit from within. He was so relaxed he even had his sleeves rolled up. Brad never wore his sleeves rolled up: no swimming trunks on beaches with his top bare; no sport shirts in the hottest heat of summer. And the secret?: his right forearm. Centered between the wrist and the elbow—a garish tattoo in blue and red of the Washington Monument, acquired impulsively during the early Sonya era. He was mortally ashamed of it. You never saw it, not ever, unless you knew him very, very well.

We played for two or three hours, timing our forty-five-second moves on an old stop-watch of Brad's. I knew inside of the first fifteen minutes that none of us stood a chance against Frannie. Even Marc fell into a pretty lagging second place behind her. Of course he didn't try as hard; he was playing for the fun of it. Frannie went at it like a convict filing the cell-bars. I could see now what the game with the Weinricks must have been like. Her skill would have been interesting to watch and vie with if that had been all there was to it. It was her dead-earnest adherence to technicalities, empowered by the bludgeon of her drive, that made you want to kill her.

"... And the Weinricks were even worse than she," Marc said. "So you can see why I finally called a halt. Actually, I liked tonight. Tonight was tame. She's embarrassed about letting you have it full force because you're new at it. With old hands, she's a fiend..."

"Fiend..." mused Frannie. "All you need is two I's and an L-T-Y and you've got infidelity..."

They left at about three a.m.: Marc red-eyed with fatigue, Brad and I staggering, and Frannie brightly elated as a sprite at dawn—due, she said, to the therapeutic release of repressed aggressivity.

Brad didn't kiss her goodnight, probably because Marc was there; but in a whoosh of admiration and affection, I did. In return she brushed my cheek briefly and stepped back. It was such a funny hit-and-miss little peck that I burst out laughing. She seemed puzzled by my amusement and about to ask me why; but then Marc called to her and she got into the car.