CHAPTER NINETEEN

The week slid past. What with my job, and the typing of vast treatises to Frannie, I was kept busy night and day. The writing was becoming a real thing with me. Before this I had often stated that I was one of those people who couldn't construct a simple declarative sentence. Now I found myself able to go on for pages, loving, even with critical eye, every purple, prurient paragraph that came out of me.

On Thursday I got an answer to my Saturday-night one (there were two before that, but not in answer).

 

Dear Jo, it went:

Your manuscript arrived. I know you and I aren't particularly shackled to the dictates of Society, but I seem to recall something about a pretty fat fine, or even an honest-to-God jail sentence, for using the mails as a transport for pornography. Those last three pages might well have put Spillane out of business; to say nothing of where they have put me: on my cliff, to be exact—extending several yards into a crashing sea; just me, your letter, and a flock of hovering gulls who, thanks to Heaven's protective attitude towards dumb beings, can't read English: You're really giving, Mrs. Bradford! The trouble is: I can hardly, at the moment, think what to do with it!

Where the hell is Marc? Have you heard from him? I haven't: not one lousy word since he left. He's one of those glass-arm boys; but wouldn't you think he'd shoot the six bucks and call me?

Tonight I'm feeling insanely lonely. I can't use the phone here for overseas communication because you have to be the owner of the cottage to do that; but if he doesn't come through by tomorrow I'll bike into Hamilton and call him from the Telephone Company.

The kids have been fine, and fun; but after your letter, and the responses evoked by same, one finds it hard to consider children in the light of total Need Fillers.

Forgive the breast-beating. This is a time of great joy for you, and I'm happier than I can tell you that you're back on the market again. Gordon sounds incredible. In fact, if it weren't for the inescapably real and brilliant inclusion of physical detail, I would think him the product of some madly erotized fantasy.

As for the lines you quoted: they're from a sonnet in Fatal Interview. It goes: “Night is my sister, and how deep in love”... And it ends: Small chance, however, in a storm so black, A man will leave his friendly fire and snug For a drowned woman's sake, and bring her back To drip and scatter shells upon the rug. No one but Night, with tears on her dark face, Watches beside me in this windy place.

Just why that one, of all the other, certainly more appropriate ones, should enter your mind at a time like that, I have no idea. I imagine, though, that someone like that Helen Paige person might become self-supporting on that one issue alone.

I was sunning myself this afternoon and, for some reason, the bitch moved right in and took over. I haven't thought of her for years, barring a mention or two of her name. I heard her speak, ages ago, at one of the schools; and she struck me as the kind of dame I'd like to invite to a cocktail party (though, God knows, not to mine!)

 

I stopped reading at that point. Gordon had dropped Paige's name on Sunday. The subtle threads which seemed constantly to be connecting Gordon and Frannie were beginning to get me. I sat there feeling actually eerie. But then, that was the sort of psychological trap you always fell into with people like them. The Neurosis, I decided, was, in spite of the mystical auras haloed about its head by the Neurotics themselves, no less contagious than the common cold.

I picked up the letter again, finished reading it, and answered it promptly. Thanks for the Millay, I wrote; why I had thought of that one, I couldn't explain; but Paige seemed to be her dame, not mine—and would she kindly refrain from suggesting that I become her sole support!

As for Marc: I would call him, I promised, in the morning. Meanwhile, if things got too tough there were always Bermuda's American and British Military Bases which might offer a positive smorgasbord of male substitutes to tide her over.

And then I ended with a supplementary run-down on the previous Sunday at the beach with Gordon, which poured forth, to my delight, like something straight out of Hemingway.

For all the work I was able to do on Friday, Clarke might have hired an imbecile. I did call Marc, though. Due to the case he was on he would have to be in New York a while longer, so we made a dinner date for Monday night—at Veronica's.

Veronica's is a small dark hole in the Village, jammed nocturnally with a crowd of beautiful boys. Packed around the bar like silvery sardines, they sing, when the mood is high, enchantingly vulgar parodies of show tunes to the accompaniment of a really impressive male pianist.

The four of us, when there still were four of us, had stopped in for drinks several times that past year, after dinner at the Juniper. Frannie adored the joint. But Marc, not caring about that kind of music anyway, had always complained about the smoke in his eyes and dragged us home. I was surprised when he suggested it as a meeting-place; but perhaps he was making a remote-control gesture of love to Frannie in her absence.

Anyhow, we jotted it down on our memo pads for Monday night; which left me with the rest of Friday to wait to hear from Gordon. He hadn't said he'd phone, but I thought he might. I had dropped him at Peggy's rather abruptly and the plans for our forthcoming weekend had been made hurriedly.

But he didn't call all day, and by the time I got home from the office I had the agonizing premonition that he wasn't going to show up at all. The feeling became more justifiable as the hours went by. At about nine I broiled a couple of lamb chops; but I could barely nibble, so I began to drink instead.

By ten I was stewed on rye and misery. The room was stifling that night. I put the window up, but I had all my clothes off—so I had to keep the drapes closed, and they stopped the air completely. I started a letter to Frannie, but my new-found talent could not surmount the block of my despair; there were now no words with which to express my feelings, and I wound up tearing it to shreds.

I parted the drapes then, and turned the lamp off; but even the light coming from other windows across the courtyard seemed to add weight to the atmosphere. Lying on the bed, I watched the dim patterns it cast on the ceiling and thought a thousand fitful, hopeless thoughts.

When the phone rang I grabbed it. But it wasn't Gordon. It was Brad. Some friendly helper had given him my number. He was drunk as a loon, and crying. The sound of him tore into me like a saw, and I hung up.

I don't know when I first became aware of the noise outside the window. It started with a kind of scraping, like the claws of some small animal dragging along the iron slats of the fire escape. A cat, perhaps; the alleys were full of them; and this one might have climbed up in search of food.

But then it stopped, and for a few minutes there was complete silence.

When it began again it was louder: the kind of dull, thudding thump an arm or leg might make against a wall or railing. I felt a real twist of panic then. I got up from the bed and stood beside it, staring at the window.

"What is it?" I whispered, strangling with fear. "Who's there?"

When his leg came over the sill I screamed.

In seconds he was in the room and running for the lamp switch. "Shut up!" he hissed.

The sudden light blinded me. Then I saw him, and sat down on the bed and began to cry.

"Stop," he said softly. "Stop, stop, will you? I didn't mean to scare you, Jo; I swear I didn't!" He came over and sat down next to me and held my head against his chest. His arms were somehow reassuring, and I did stop, soon.

"I almost died," I said. "You can kill a person with fright; do you know that, Gordon?"

"I didn't mean to, Jo. Honestly, I didn't mean to."

I got up and put a bathrobe on and sat down again, away from him, in the chair.

"I'm sorry, Jo," he was saying. "I didn't think it would come out this way..."

"How long were you out there?" I asked.

"A while. A while I guess."

"Why? What were you doing?"

"Nothing. Please don't be sore." The expression in his eyes melted me and I went over to him and sat on the floor with my arms around his knees.

"What is it, Gordon?" I asked. "What's wrong?"

He slid down beside me and smiled. "I told you," he said, suddenly at ease, like a child who knows that whatever he has done will be forgiven. "There are things about me that are—unresolved. Anyway, it isn't serious."

"Have you done it before?"

"Oh, a few times. Not often."

"To be funny, or scare someone, or what?"

"Well, tonight I thought it was going to be funny. But I guess, basically, voyeurs aren't funny."

"Is that what you are?"

He laughed; and the elfin quality I had first seen in him at Wingo seemed to come over him again. "In the book," he said, "I think it says that you aren't a thing till you go and act it out, or become overt about it. Well, I've acted it out—on occasion; so I guess I rate the title."

I wanted to ask him when he had done it before; where; and with whom. Had they been strangers? Had he simply run into stray opportunities here and there—as anyone might? Or had he gone in search of them? There's a little of everything in all of us, isn't there? Scratch a human, and what do you find? The little girl, the little boy, the little thief, the little liar, the little murderer... What was I, standing in the hall that night, listening to the secret voice of Frannie? What was I, going through the desk, reading the words that were hers? What had I been as a child, sitting at the top of the stairs, watching the grownups in the livingroom, or crouching at my parents' bedroom door to hear my mother say stop, and to know my father's eternally-accepting and never-fighting silence?

I wanted to talk to Gordon about it; but I didn't. He was here now, with me. We had a whole weekend ahead, to be together; and I didn't ask him how he felt, or what he thought, or which part, or how much, of anything he was. I didn't ask him because I was tired of finding out things—things which, once found out, I couldn't really understand—but to which I ended up in some strange, compelling way, tied hand and heart myself. There was that pull in people like Gordon, and Frannie, and so many others I had somehow put myself among: an attractiveness, a charm, a sensitive thinking thing which conjured up, by its own power, a beautiful but insidious embrace from which there was no escape. While exposing their innermost beings, in a gesture of warmth and faith, they forced you, ultimately, to face the inner being of yourself. You didn't want to. You didn't want to at all. But when the time came for you to pick up your marbles and go home, it was too late: you already loved them.

"Come on," I said. "I don't care what you're called, or why. I don't care what's resolved, or what, in a world itself made up of dangling ends, can't ever be answered. You got here. I might have died if you hadn't. Try the transom next time; or the key hole; or the drain in the sink. Just appear. I don't care how!"

We spent two days and three nights locked up together beyond the reach of reality. We were never apart for a minute. We called a drugstore when we were hungry and had food sent in; on Saturday night we washed our clothes in the shower and hung them on the fire escape to dry; when it rained we shut the window and lived without air; when the bed was hot and tumbled we made love on the floor. The thing was: we didn't need anyone or anything but ourselves.

"Don't answer it," I said, when the phone rang on Sunday morning.

"Then you," he said. "You have to."

"Oh no, I don't. Just let it ring."

"You can't. They know you're here. They always know when you're here, and they keep on calling."

So I picked it up and it was Bill. He had met Jeri on the street, and she had known my address.

No, I told him; not this afternoon. I was busy. No, not tonight either. Next week? My plans were not yet made. The weekend? No; that was almost definitely filled.

"All right," he said, gently, but with a firm finality.

I knew he would never call again. The chance (for what?), the out (to where?) was closed. But who cared? Who ever cares when what she has is what she wants and the future seems a million years away? The world is filled with grasshoppers. I wasn't, and am not, the only one. When I left him at the station early Monday morning the break was one of those exquisite ones: the hurt doesn't matter because there's a part of you that wants to hurt, and proves you're alive. "Soon?" I asked.

"Yes. Very soon."

"When?"

"Soon."

I went to the office then, walking to it through the hot streets; loving the heat; loving a policeman on the corner; and a newspaper vendor; and a man inside a sandwich sign advertising the opening of a new coffee shop.

I thought of Frannie. Once I'd ask her how many men she'd really been in love with, and she'd answered, "Oh, hundreds. A guy named Rocky who used to park my car in town when I had to go in for vitamin B shots; when I told him I wasn't coming any more he said: I'll miss you. A truck driver who looked down from his truck into my convertible and said: That’s a pretty car, and it’s got a pretty owner. A man on the street who said he came from Ohio, and could I tell him where Washington Square was; I did, and he smiled, and said: You're very sweet. That diaper man who liked my Summertime record, and the laundry man who takes the sheets off the bed, and the milkman, and the grocery boy who puts the food away. Some guy who drove his car up alongside of mine on Fifth Avenue around the museum and rolled his window down and yelled: Hey, where'd you get that crazy sweater? I almost told that one I loved him, but something wouldn't let me say it, and then I lost him in the traffic and felt like crying. About thirty-four fellows who've slowed their cars down at the curb while I was walking, to give me that questioning look. And approximately eighty-one others standing in front of drugstores or pin-ball dives who whistled when I went by because I have nice legs.

"Those are the men I've really been in love with," she said. "Not because they married me, or supported me, or gave me children, or went to bed with me, or even knew my name; but just because they were men who saw a girl and responded to her without thinking about it; responded to her because they needed and wanted to; said to her: You are a girl—and made her feel good about being one."

When I got to the office I couldn't work, so I wrote a long letter to Frannie, telling her about Gordon, and our weekend together. As I wrote it, I relived it, all of it, exactly the way it happened, with nothing left out.

"You sick?" asked one of the instructors, leaning over my desk, peering into my face.

"No," I said. "I'm not sick."

After work I went home to get dressed and then went out to meet Marc at Veronica's. He was there ahead of me, waiting at a little table in the gloom. I kissed him hello, and he kissed me back; and we ordered martinis, and shrimps that were canned, and two of the worst steaks anyone ever tasted.

While we were eating, the piano player came out of one of the back rooms and stopped at our table. "Hi," he said. "It's been months. Where's the other pair?"

He didn't know which pair belonged to which pair, but it didn't matter, and I said, "We're not sure where he is; and she's in Bermuda."

"Oh, nice," he said. "Very nice. I bought a sun-lamp last week so I could get a tan. Then I went up to see my mother and she told me I looked magenta..."

We laughed.

"Funny?" he went on. "No. Tragic. But I guess it's better than just common old ordinary red... Well, what do you want me to play for you?"

"Anything you want," I said. "It's Frannie who has songs she can't live without; not us."

"Okay; let's play one for Frannie then." He stood there meditating a minute. "I remember," he said finally. "I remember what Frannie likes."

He went over to the piano and sat down and began playing it in that slow, effortless way of his; and one of the boys around the bar broke away from the crowd and walked up to lean against the table beside him and sing it. He was a beautiful boy with a black sleeveless sweater over his white shirt, and a dusty-blue tie. He was the kind of boy who should have gone to Princeton, but, for reasons of his own, had come to Veronica's instead. He sang the way Frannie wanted people to sing: not with a voice, but with an understanding. He sounded like Chet Baker.

Let me love you, came the words. Let me say that I do. If you'll lend me your ear, I'll make it clear—the way that I do...

When he was all through, Marc said, "Jesus."

"Ditto Jesus," I said. "But you picked the place."

"I thought you liked it."

Then I told him I'd heard from Frannie and asked him if he had.

"Oh, sure. Almost every day."

"Have you answered?"

"I'm lousy at letters. She knows that. She's the writer in the family, not me."

"What does she say?"

"Mostly funny stuff. You know Frannie. Funny. A thing last week about making a macaroni-and-cheese dish for the kids, called: Arsenic and Old Arsenic; plus a philosophical comment on how it was too bad Alice B. Toklas hadn't thought to name the Gertrude Stein Cookbook: A Roast Is a Roast Is a Roast."

We struggled with the steaks for a while. Then: "She mentioned she might call you. Did she?"

"Yes," he said. "Several days ago. We talked for six minutes."

"What did she say?"

He raised an eyebrow; then he smiled. "What's new with you?"

"When are you going back there?"

"Another week or so. It's an important case. If it pans out the way I hope, it could mean a lot to me. We'll see. Next week, maybe. What is new with you?"

I told him about Gordon and he seemed pleased.

"Of course, it can't work," I said.

"Why not?"

"If he ever does remarry, it'll be someone young. You know: the dewy look, the fresh approach. Me—I'm just a phase; just someone to work out a few things on." It took saying it aloud to Marc to make me see how true it was.

"I wish I knew somebody," he said. "A nice sane guy in his fifties; solid business; couple of teen-age kids, maybe; home every night at six; and not too beautiful!"

"I'd be bored to death."

"Yes," he said. "I'm sure you would be. Tell me: what is it with you and the misbegotten?"

"Just because you're so well adjusted doesn't mean everybody else has to be," I told him. "The misbegotten can be lovely, sensitive people... And why don't you write to Frannie?" I added. "How well adjusted can you be? Don't you miss her?"

And he said, "Yes. I miss her. I went to a party in Meade's Manor on Saturday night and got crocked to the ears so I wouldn't miss her so much. Then I went home, and started writing her a letter. I didn't finish it. Maybe I will, and maybe I won't. But I miss her."

It was a great deal, coming from Marc.

"You're really lonely, aren't you?" I said. And he nodded.

We left right after dinner and he walked me home. When we got to the door and I had my key out I thought of asking him in for a nightcap. But something told me not to. I'd been with lonely men before, and loneliness brought up too many other things. "Goodbye," I said. "Call me if you have a minute and tell me how your case comes out."

"Thanks," he said. "And good luck with Gordon."

It was still early and I wasn't tired, so I wrote to Frannie. I told her some more about Gordon and ended with a report on my dinner with Marc:

 

He misses you like crazy, I said. The poor tortured guy doesn't know what to do with himself without you. Believe it or not, I got the feeling he'd have even settled for me! I wouldn't let him come in for a drink. I'm trammeled with guilt over it because he looked as if he needed one. But I figured it was safer not to. He doesn't seem to know exactly when he can fly back to you...

 

There was another of hers on the following day. It was a long one, written in the form of a musical comedy outline; and weird as hell. The characters were a Blind Eye, a Deaf Ear, and a Mute Mouth. The sets were made up of staircases built over an ocean on which the cast could only walk down. The songs were parodies from Broadway shows: the finale was one from Annie Get Your Gun with a switch on the last line so that it read: I got found... but look what I lost! And the whole business as called: Best Foot Backward.

It was all terribly clever, I was sure; but when I tried to answer I found myself incapable of calling it anything but "interesting"... Of course, the fact that I didn't always understand all of Frannie all of the time was not surprising. To understand a mere part of a girl like that seemed sufficient in itself to feed the ordinary mortal's ego. Gordon came back that evening, just as I had finished my letter. It was a mid-week visit, much sooner than I had expected; and this time he came through the door. He stayed the night and I cut work the next day to be with him.

It wasn't until he was leaving that he told me he wasn't going to be able to see me for a while. There was a big office-supply outfit in Los Angeles and he had to go out there in person and sell them on the Potter Pen. He would live with friends in Beverly Hills and spend several nice fat deductible weeks doing the high spots. The thought of not seeing me for so long was tearing his guts to ribbons, he said; but business was business, and taking the extra time made sense because he had to travel so far to get there in the first place.

"What would you like?" he asked, standing at the door. "What can I send you?"

"Send me? Why should you send me anything?"

"I have to."

"You have to?"

"I don't mean I have to. I mean I—want to."

But he had put it the other way first; and the blood beat in my ears. It's strange about presents: you're supposed to love getting them—women, especially. But not, oh not, oh never, when they have to be given!

I thought of my father.

It had been my birthday. (How old was I then? Twelve? Thirteen? Fifteen?) The day had gone by and I hadn't seen him. And then he came home, quietly, tired, and late for dinner. Where have you been? asked my mother. Everything's cold. He didn't answer her. Here, he said, handing me a small brown package. I opened it on the table, beside his ruined supper, with my mother watching. It was Thoreau's Walden.

I tried to read it—then, and in later years; but I never could.

"Don't," I said to Gordon now. "There isn't anything I want or that you need to give me."

"Oh, just a little something. Just a—"

"Don't!" I blurted, almost crying. "Please, please don't!"

"Silly," he said, putting his arms around me. "What a silly, silly thing you are!"

His kiss was warm and reassuring. But when he left I felt as if I had been blasted full of holes.

That night I wrote to Frannie again. Then on the spur of the moment, another one—to my mother. Why, I'll never know. I told her about my split with Brad, without the details, of course: just that we had reached a point of incompatibility, and that now, finally, a parting of the ways seemed my only chance for happiness. It was hard, writing to her—but I forced it on for a page and a half. I had a good job, I told her; and a nice apartment; and everything was going to be fine. I ended by saying that I was thinking of her, and sent my best to Charles, her husband.

When, within mere days, I found her return envelope in my box, I clattered up the stairs to my armchair and a stiff drink before being able to open it.

It contained her Heart-felt Sympathy, a subtle hint of I-told-you-so, and a check for one hundred dollars.

I could have cried with anger, disappointment. What I had expected, I don't know. But I hadn't asked for money. She had given as she had always given before: the wrong thing, at the wrong time.

I could send it back to her. But as I looked at it lying on the table, I was struck with an idea:

 

Frannie dearest, I typed quickly.

A windfall of windfalls! One hundred smackers from my mother! Along with it, a rather cool and soul-crushing note, but nevertheless—a real, live check! And superimposed across it in pure gold script, I swear I see the lovely word: Bermuda!

Having charmed the seats off the higher-ups at Clarke, there's no reason to think I can't cadge a long weekend. If I left on a Thursday and came back on a Monday I could have three-plus days with you. Without Marc there you must surely have the extra space; and with Gordon gone for God knows how many weeks I'd like nothing better than a short stint of sunning, swimming, cliff-sitting, child-caring, bike-riding, and bull-throwing...

 

When her answer arrived, concise, sans salutation, sans sign-off, it rocked the wind out of me:

Blue sky, blue sea, blue funk... Your idea has Laboratory Merit, and I suggest you shove it up your test-tube. I can see you lolling there in blissful fantasy, wasting your mother's dough, lousing up your job at Clarke, and descending upon me with the naive thought that your presence will save me from suicide. My God, Jo! Remind me to write a book called: The Leisure of the Theory Classes. In a word, my dreamy dreamer: if you insist on coming you will force me to evacuate this delightful little cottage and take up residence among the reefs, in the unrewarding company of bi-valves...