CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Shortly before D-Day (D for departure and depression) the agency woman called to say she thought I had the music school job. She had talked with the head man, a man named Desmond, and he wanted to see me.

The office squad at Wingo knocked off before the actual semester ended, so I was free, and would be from there on in. Much to the wailings of the Board, I had turned in my permanent resignation.

The music-school man, called Dez by his associates, struck me on first meeting as the world's Father. He was in his late sixties, big, white-haired, and shoulder-patting. The job was vague, he confessed, and it would be up to the person who took over to delineate its boundaries. While it all seemed a bit too undefined for comfort's sake, he patted away my trepidation with a large, warm hand and assured me that I would do excellently.

The salary would start at seventy a week, and I accepted willingly. I would begin on July fifth, with the opening of the summer school. And when I confided my immediate financial drought he offered a week's salary in advance.

That last day at Frannie's was a nightmare. Never having engineered a six-week vacation for two adults and three children I had to admire Frannie's serenity in the face of such confusion. Of course, there were assists which could not have been counted on by anyone but Frannie. For instance: the drugstore man made three separate trips in his own car to deliver items which she had failed to pick up during the week and had only remembered from time to time on the last day. And the laundry man had eased things up by promising to stop by after they'd left with a key she'd given him—to strip the beds and turn the mattresses back for airing.

My own departure problems were far less complicated. I had my three valises packed and waiting at the door by five p.m.

We weren't going to have that final dinner together. The Weinricks had asked Frannie and Marc over for a farewell buffet to save them the trouble of a messy kitchen. I thought they'd refuse because they had to feed the kids anyway; but they didn't.

"We'll be back early," she told me. "We have to leave here at seven in the morning and I'm not going to hang around there till all hours. Why don't you stay till we come home tonight?"

"No," I said. "I'll wait till you leave for the Weinricks', but you've got a sitter for tonight, and there's no point in—dragging it out."

The whole time they were upstairs dressing to go out I lay on the couch in the den, handing myself sermons: pull yourself together; you've got a cute apartment and a decent job; and then, there's no telling whom you'll meet or what will happen in six weeks...

Added to these emotional placebos was the thought of the letters we'd exchange: I'd always detested writing—but it would be different writing to Frannie, getting long, funny, complicated answers from her. I could probably be long and funny myself with her there at the other end, inspiring me...

When she came down to the den, ready to go, she was wearing a bright blue linen sheath and a string of pearls; and because I was lying stretched out she seemed unusually tall. Marc stood behind her in the doorway.

"'Bye, Jo," he said, smiling. "Come on, Fran—tear yourself away." He turned to go out to the car. "I may have to fly back on business for a couple of days," he added over his shoulder. "If I do I'll give you a ring for dinner—if you aren't dated."

"You look funny," Frannie said when he'd gone.

"Do I? I was just thinking about letters. You will write, won't you?"

"Of course. The minute I get there."

"I'll miss you."

"I'll miss you too."

"Okay," I said. "Go already, will you?" It was even worse than I'd thought it would be. There was a fist full of tears in my throat getting set to open up.

The car honked impatiently from the road.

"I'll be fine," I told her. "Just get the hell out of here."

She began to leave. Then, suddenly, she threw herself on me and dug her arms into the cushion behind my head. "Oh, don't, Jo," she begged, tasting, I knew, the tears on my face. "Please don't, Jo! Please, please don't..." And then, on the wetness, I felt her lips travel lightly, quickly, down the length of my scar.

"Get out of here!" I said harshly.

As she went through the door it all broke loose. It was insane, it was childish, it was shameful; but I couldn't help it. I don't know what it was: but seeing the back of her dress, watching her walk out, knowing that from now on I was going to be alone—those, and a thousand other things that might have been inside of me that I couldn't even know or feel, must have been what did it; and I began to sob.

You don't remember the exact words that come with sobbing; not really. But I know they were senseless and without meaning. And later, when the car had driven off, I felt so damned guilty. Because I should have been strong enough to wait till she had gone. I should have saved her the awfulness of having to hear me.

I hung around till the kids came up from TV and saw to it that they bathed and got to bed; and then the sitter arrived—one of the neighbors' boys from down the block. But still I didn't want to go. A drink, I thought; and then I'd better check the place for things I may have forgotten.

I found a few, too: there was a lipstick I'd left in the powder room, and a slip still hanging in my closet. And then I remembered my resume carbons. I figured it would be wise to keep them in case I had to go job-hunting again.

They weren't in the top drawer of the desk so I delved into the others: I went through all of them till I got to the bottom one which was divided by wooden slats to form a file. I recalled, then, having slipped them in there for safe-keeping. But when I drew them out the paper clip caught on to some other pages, and those came out too. They were headed: Notes for Novel—Episode: night of party—here.

It was the party Brad and I almost didn't get to; her own; the one she'd left with Jeff Deitz to come and pick us up: the night I'd driven back with Jeff and she with Brad—not getting there till midnight.

Once I started reading I couldn't stop. And when I finished I typed a copy of it to take with me. I don't know that it was just or right; the idea of ethics never entered my mind. I simply knew that I would have to read it again; and that in some indirect way it was, in actuality, partially mine.

It offered, among other things, the answer to the question I'd asked her the morning I burst in, fresh from leaving home; the question first put into my mind so casually, yet so viciously, by Brad. She'd pleaded with me then to believe her—about the baby; not to make me tell her how she knew, how she could be so sure, that it hadn't been his. Oddly, I had never brought it up again. I had taken her word, not asking for more, not wanting more—because, God only knew, I had had enough.

But there it was; and I have it with me now, stuck into the pack of letters she sent me from Bermuda, which, for some reason, I have not yet been able to discard:

* * *

Notes for Novel—Episode: night of party—here.

. . . So we walked out to the car, Jo with Jeff, Brad with me—holding my arm so I wouldn't trip on my heels in the rough-dirt driveway. Make sure you just cart her, Jo kidded. And I told her she ought to have her paranoids removed...

We got in then, Brad and I, and bumped out to the main road and just drove awhile, not saying anything.

I was so sure of myself, so sure I'd be strong and firm and sensible—all those honorable, high-flown things people flatter themselves into believing they are, promising themselves they will be, and then ruin deliberately, on the lowest levels.

I waited till we'd passed the town, had lost sight of Jo and Jeff in the car behind us, and were riding through the wooded spots that came along this other, long way home.

When will you stop? I wondered. When will you stop the way you used to and pull over to the side? And the thought of his stopping became the biggest thing in the world.

I can't go back, I pleaded silently. I can't go on with the evening and the small talk. Turn your head. Look at me. Put your hand out and touch me. Let me see what your mouth does, and your eyes. Give me something. Give me anything.

The car slowed down, nosed into the trees, and ground to a standstill.

I stopped thinking. It was all the body again, as it had always been before: a deep sigh because I couldn't breathe; an indrawing of muscles; the kind of thing that happens at the moment of Ordeal: a dependence on tightening: if I pull myself together, if all the parts of me are closed and hard—it will hurt less: the fall in the plane, the smash of the bullet, the dentist's drill.

"What are you going to do?" I asked, in a voice that wasn't my own.

"Do?" He turned; but his full face was even more impassive than its profile. "I'm not going to do anything."

"Oh."

And that should have ended it; that should have kept me sitting there, on my side, till he backed out and started for home again; just sitting there, not moving over. But I did move over.

I put my hand on him; and then I felt him coming out to meet me: the simplest shape, and yet the form of grandeur: the Obelisk; the Bird in Space; the flowerless stem; candles on an altar; the pipes of the organ in St. Patrick's at Eastertime.

Hands have no pride, no dignity. Once I touched a Breughel at the Metropolitan, and I'll never forget the astonishment and dismay in the voice of the guard as he came up behind me and said: Madame! What are you doing?

Or the dream, so many years ago, before the children: recurrent, insistent, frightening, but vaguely understood: each child of sleep brought forth in birth; fortunate, blessed, safe against its own desire—without hands!

I willed for him to have me then: not the half-way, mid-way, other-ways of all our secret, wrong-way lovings; but this time, and for the first time, everything. I willed it, not saying a word, as you will the weather, the spins of roulette wheels, and the ends of wars: if I care enough, if I want enough, then the Someone or the Something must let it be so.

He turned the key, snapped off the lights, and suddenly I was smothering in his arms. "Come on!" he said. "Come on!"

What am I? I wondered irrelevantly, remembering an old game of Impressions. Who is the person I have in mind? What shape is she? What time of day? What season? What music? What period of art? The music was a horn-blare; and the art an abstraction: patterned circles pierced by sharp protrusions; red, blue, yellow; blatant as a cry. What time of day? What time of night? What season of the year? The title of what book is she? The settings of what play...?

He was over me then, arms braced against the top of the seat behind me, stabbing without mind and direction. And as I tried to guide him he said Oh, Jesus—and it was over before it began.

"I'm sorry," I kept telling him. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"—though it didn't make sense: he should have been saying it to me!

"I've got a big day on Monday," he said, hands on the wheel and the motor purring. "I have to see some guy the firm is wooing. What's the best place for dinner?"

"Nedick's," I answered wearily.

When we got back to the party I passed Jo quickly, barely able to wave. I went straight through to the John and washed. A few people rattled on the knob, but I stood there, letting the water run. And I discovered then that somewhere in the car I had lost my watch...

It ended there. And even though it was Frannie's I copied it that last night in her house, folded it in half, and put it into my bag; because somehow—it was mine too.

Then I dragged the valises out and headed downtown.

It wasn't his, I kept thinking as I drove. She was telling me the truth. It wasn't his. It never could have been. He wasn't up to—even that...