CHAPTER TEN

A whole month went by before I reached the big blow-up with Henry Bradford.

It happened on a Sunday evening after dinner. We had nothing to do because the Brownes were at the Weinrick's, along with the Deitzes and Perloffs. "She's well enough physically," I was saying to Brad, "but she's so damned quiet most of the time. She hasn't mentioned that Church business again, but I think it's really eating into her. You never know with her: there's so much going on inside you can't even begin to sort it all out..."

"Who are you?" he asked. "Her psychoanalyst?"

"Her friend."

"If you're her friend, quit trying to dissect her. German measles—a kid's disease; and everybody acts like Hiroshima or something."

"German measles," I said, "but under the circumstances, a rather cruel blow of fate, I'd say."

"Yeah?" He let out a long sigh. "Well, maybe. But you know what? It's an ill fate that blows nobody good."

"What do you mean?"

He sighed again. "Jo, old girl," he said, "ever since the day I met you you've been making me feel like an A-One Nothing. But the fact is: you're stupider than anybody."

"That's not true," I argued. "I don't feel that way about you, and I can't see why you have to keep feeling that way about yourself! There have been times for us when—well, you know what times. Nobody's had it the way we've had it, Brad; just nobody. You know how it's—"

"Sex," he said nodding. "You do things great with sex, Jo; but even then—you're on top."

"Can the Male Chauvinism," I told him. "What difference does it make who's where and how as long as it works the way it does?"

"Ever hear of levels?" he asked. "You must've heard of levels before. Your little friend Frannie is very hot on what level a thing seems, or means, or is. Well, I think if a thing works all right, maybe that's one level, and it's fine. But you know something? I've got a feeling there're some other levels around, and those little levels may not be working at all..."

"Listen," I said, "please don't start giving me that bull. I get more than enough of it from Frannie."

"You think it's bull?"

"On a couch," I said, "where you're paying for it, with a trained person behind you who knows what it's all about? No: there it isn't bull. But with Frannie who'd part with her right arm before she'd learn it the real way? Yes: the kind of thing Frannie throws around free, for the fun of it—is bull!" I was expecting a debate: a Brad-type debate in which I'd wind up flailing at vague, bodiless clouds. But this time I didn't get one. This time he said, "Okay by me." And the silence, somehow, was harder to take than the noise.

We sat there for a while, trying to drink ourselves out of it. And then I thought of Frannie and the things she had tried to tell me in the hospital while she was still doped up and could barely get the words out. "What did you mean," I asked Brad suddenly, "about my being—stupid?"

"It was fate all right," he muttered. "That little job that doctor did on her might just have been the luckiest thing that ever happened."

"Why?"

He drained his glass. "Because," he said blurrily, "all things considered, and all things—well, considered—it might just've been—and mind you, I say might just've been—that we'd never have known... whose it was."

"You mean, then," I said, with a new, incredible, and terrible calm, "that it hasn't been 'all over' after all. You mean that in believing it would 'never happen again' I've been wrong. You mean also, too, along with that—it's not for peanuts anymore. Now, you mean to tell me, it is all and everything..."

"Once," he said. "Only once; and even then it was—well, there's no point in going into that..."

"Go into it," I told him.

"No," he said. "It's details. You always make me feel bad when I give you—details."

It's funny how it is when you decide a thing is finished. It’s funny how a decision isn't a decision all by itself, separate, or sudden; how now is always built on then; and how nothing ever exists without holding, right there inside of it, making it whole, the thousand other things which existed before it. So—why did I decide that night? I didn't. That night was simply the point in time when all those other times cohered and made the whole. And I was calm, because that too comes with decisions. It's only the piling-up and the moving-towards which causes all the clamor. The actual decision hardly makes a sound.

I didn't go to bed that night. I waited till Brad had; and then I went up and looked through everything I owned. Finally I packed a sweater and skirt; some blouses; a sequined dirndl and the top that went with it; a week's worth of underwear; and some other things—things I didn't really need but couldn't bear to leave behind: a clay turtle a little girl at Wingo had made for me; the white cigarette cup Frannie had given me for Christmas; and the framed snapshot of my father.

By the time I was finished the sun was out. Brad was still asleep and I was glad he was: I wouldn't have to talk to him; or listen to the protestations I'd heard so many times before; or see him cry; or cry myself. I could just stand beside the bed with its sheet and blanket kicked aside and look at him, sprawled out and smooth-skinned like something from the sea: not human, or even animal—but a giant sleeping plant which, with its beauty alone, could lure its victims to destruction.

"Goodbye," I whispered; and after all those years of hate and love, and hope and hate, and love and hate and hope again—it seemed that simple.