Close Relations (18 page)

When we reached our stop, Jerry exited first, not even checking to see if I was behind him. I was, though, scurrying to keep after him as he strode to the first flight of stairs as if he had an urgent appointment. But on the staircase he slowed, climbing them wearily, pausing before putting a foot down on each new step, leaning heavily on the railing.

“Jerry.” I just called his name. I had no idea about what to say to him. How was your day? would have been pointless; it had obviously been as awful as the previous one.

“Yes?” We stood before the second flight of steps that led up to the street. He was eyeing it as if it were too much for him to manage, although it was plain he was not out of breath.

I asked him the same question I had been asking him. “Jerry, can I do anything?”

“You’re trying to push me, Marcia. You’re trying to get me to lean on you so I’ll be a cripple without you. I told you once, you’ve got to give me room.”

“I’m not trying to crowd you, Jerry. I swear. I just want—”

“Why don’t you find yourself some new doctor or something and quit bugging my ass?”

I rushed away from him. Where else would I go? To bask in the warmth of my friends? I had two: Eileen, who spoke of privacy with religious reverence; Barbara, with a husband, two sons, five servants, three cars, and four charities.

Back to my mother? To one of the men who wouldn’t even remember whether he had just propositioned me or actually slept with me?

Or maybe out on my own? I could find a cheap walkup on the West Side and spend my nights sniffling into damp tissues and listening to cockroaches walk across the floor. I sensed that Jerry was giving me all I could ever get. I had been alone for a long time after Barry. I was not a woman who valued her independence.

Jerry caught up with me. His arm slid around my shoulder. “Okay, you can come upstate.”

“What?” My throat dried, then tightened up.

“You can take Friday afternoon off and be back late Sunday.”

“Oh. Of course. Sure.”

“Listen, who knows, I may be in a decent mood by then. We could even have some fun.”

He met me Friday evening at the bus depot in a town called Liberty. He waited in front, leaning against a car and waving, looking like one of the local boys in a dark green army parka. I saw him mouth “hi.” He had acclimated himself to the town in the thirty-six hours he’d been there; if he hadn’t been meeting me, he probably would have played a few hands of poker at the firehouse or met a couple of new pals for a few beers.

“Hi,” I said, climbing off the bus. April in Liberty could never inspire a song; it was bitterly cold, and I pushed my hands into my pockets. It kept them warm and kept my approach casual. “Where did you get that parka? You look like a USO ad for our boys in Korea.”

“How are you?” he asked, and bent over to kiss my lips.

“Wanna dance, sarge?”

“No. Listen, I’m sorry if I was a shit this week.”

“That’s okay.”

“You’re not mad at me?” I shook my head. “Look at me and tell me you’re not mad at me.”

I looked. His cheeks were burnished by the icy air. The cold had brought tears to his eyes, and a few of the tears rested on his lashes, which glistened a deep, solid black. The white light from the street-lamp illuminated only the upper part of his face, so the bottom was in shadows, emphasizing the pouty fullness of his lower lip, deepening the cleft in his chin. “Of course I’m not mad at you.”

Jerry led me across the street to the rented Chevrolet he was driving and held the door open for me. “See how mannerly I am?” he demanded.

“Wonderful. Do you chew with your mouth closed too?”

“Most of the time. Listen, call your mother and tell her I’m very well bred, very refined.”

“Of course. She’ll be so pleased. Listen, maybe we could invite her to spend the weekend with us. Giver her her own room, her own six-pack.”

“I’d like that, Marcia.”

He drove carefully along a well-paved but very narrow mountain road. The car smelled of years of stale cigarettes; its heater didn’t work. “Do you think the car can make it up the mountain?” I asked him.

“No.”

But we arrived alive at the Pineview Inn. It was an ordinary cheap motel, with nailed-to-the-wall pictures of kittens and a mouse-trap baited with a petrified piece of yellow cheese shoved between the toilet and the sink. The Pineview Inn was notable only because it offered just a bed and bath in an area of resorts where, minimally, guests were given the choice between indoor or alfresco swimming, matjes or Bismarck herring as a breakfast appetizer. The Pineview aspired to nothing.

“I’m just curious,” I said, still in my coat. “How come you picked this place?” The room was a mite warmer than the car but did not offer sufficient comfort for me to even take my hands from my pockets.

“Because it has a kind of raunchy, illicit atmosphere. I thought that would appeal to you.” Having hung his jacket over a metal pipe, Jerry flashed me a practiced smile and began unbuttoning my coat.

“Really?” I asked. “Does it have any of those X-rated movies?”

“No, but for an extra five bucks the owner will throw in his nubile twin daughters. Actually, I picked this place because it was sort of anonymous. I mean, I know maybe ten, fifteen people up here, and the way my luck is going, I’d run into the one or two who shouldn’t know I’m up here poking around.”

“What have you found out?” Jerry threw my coat beside his jacket. Then he sat on the yellowed white bedspread and motioned me over.

“Appel’s running. He’ll probably announce the end of the week after next.”

“What else?” He unzipped my jeans slowly, so I would have time enough to contemplate what was going to happen. He inched them off, together with my underpants, easing them over my hips, kissing me along the way.

“Want to hear about Appel’s media director?” he whispered.

“No.” I left my pants in a mound on the floor and lay on the bedspread, feeling its stiff cotton bumps press into the small of my back. Jerry spread my legs apart and sat between them. Then he leaned over, using his tongue first, then his mouth. Only there did my body heat match his. He kept it up for more than an hour, lifting me up on pillows, taking the pillows away, sometimes blowing cool air on me softly, sometimes pressing roughly with his fingers. I was so satisfied I could have spent the rest of my life on the bedspread, lying on my back, lowing stupidly, like a cow. “Oh, Jerry.”

“Happy, sweetheart?”

We got out of bed the next day only because the owner’s wife knocked on the door, whimpering that her husband would kill her if she didn’t make up the room. “We’ll go for a hike in the woods,” Jerry announced, as I pulled on a heavy sweater.

“In the woods? Are you kidding? Didn’t you ever read ‘Hansel and Gretel’?”

The day was cold but full of beaming sunshine. We walked, pausing to examine the branches of trees: their tight little buds, a few weeks away from splitting open and putting out, seemed ungenerous. I gave Jerry a big, wet, open-mouthed kiss.

But I felt a little uncomfortable. My kind of nature was controlled. Like Central Park, it had perimeters. I demanded to know what would happen if a hunter thought I was a deer. I confessed to being afraid of getting lost and suggested we mark our path with my dental floss. Jerry shook his head, promising no harm could come if we stuck to the trail. And no harm came. After a half hour, we found a clearing, a nearly perfect circle of pale new grass surrounded by a ring of dark evergreens.

Jerry lay down, letting his body ease out onto the cold earth, as comfortable in the Catskill forest as on the East Side of Manhattan.

“It smells nice here. Like room deodorant,” I said.

We spent the afternoon there, splitting a jar of peanut butter we had bought in a general store across from the motel; the proprietor was neither friendly nor homespun but sat hunched on a stool behind the counter, his legs crossed, reading a magazine that displayed a lot of unnaturally pink female genitalia. But Jerry and I were quite friendly and, if not homespun, at least warm and cuddly. We rubbed noses. We played Name That Tune. As usual, I stumped Jerry. “It’s ‘Long Before I Knew You’ from
Bells Are Ringing.
You really didn’t know that?”

“No. Never heard it.”

I bellowed the entire song. “Now do you recognize it?”

“No, but maybe somebody three mountains away will. You are
loud.”

“I am not. I’m subdued and elegant.”

“Come here. I’ll show you what I do to elegant ladies.”

We had pizza and chianti. We saw a monster movie. We made love. We read the Sunday paper together in bed. We could have been featured in a
Newsweek
cover story on The Great Middle-Class Weekend.

“Have a good trip home.” We stood before the window of Katz’s bakery, watching cheese danish, waiting for the bus to pull into Liberty. “I’ll call you during the week.”

“Jerry?”

“What?”

“Do you know when you’ll come back to the city?”

“Soon. I’ll spend another couple of days pretending to be busy and then I’ll be home.” His voice seemed to get clearer and louder. Saint Agnes had sent him for elocution lessons, then acting lessons. Jerry was her baby Barrymore. He gave me his self-assured public smile. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.”

“You are. But it will be all right, I promise you, Marcia. I’m in control of this thing.” Again the smile. “What can happen?”

M
y new office at campaign headquarters did not make me happy. The William Paterno for Governor Committee had rented the fourth floor of a medium-sized midtown hotel that had stumbled over the brink from shabby gentility into seediness. Mildew perfumed the corridors. The elevator creaked as it rose, and when the wind blew across the air shaft it made long low noises, like the moans of the ghosts of dead guests.

Normally, the beginning of a campaign was like the arrival of a perfect spring. Vigor and joy welled up. People smiled. I’d feel clean and bright and capable of writing speeches so brilliant that millions of fingers would twitch in anticipation of pulling my candidate’s lever. With each new campaign, I became a virgin again. Hope abounded.

But not this time. Everything looked ugly. My office had an ominous dark-red stain on the carpet. And it was right across the hall from Lyle LoBello’s office, so two or three times a day I had to endure his greeting; he’d say “hi” and wink simultaneously and then let his eyes gaze below my waist while he added, “How’re you doing?” If my pubis could have talked, it would have answered, Not very well.

I couldn’t sleep with Jerry away. He was a pacifier. Each night I would curl myself around him and be lulled by his smell and his warmth. Without him, cars crashed, women screamed in the streets, bottles smashed down onto the pavement.

Even though we rarely had sex more than three times a week, I felt the need for him every night and every morning. I didn’t like walking around in a state of unfulfilled desire; I was afraid strange men would sniff it out, the way a dog can scent fear.

Instead of coming home from Sullivan County, Jerry had been ordered even farther upstate. Paterno declared that Jerry’s information on Appel had been so valuable that he needed Jerry to dig up dirt on his chief opponent, Governor Parker. “Any smart college kid could find out this stuff,” Jerry fumed. He called me collect at the office each day, to hear what was happening at headquarters. We’d talk for at least an hour; the phone bills were certain to annoy Paterno.

“What did you find out?” I asked when he called from Buffalo. Parker had been born there, attended law school there at night, and then had made a routine climb up the ladder of the city’s elective offices. “Anything extraordinary about him?”

“No, of course not. He’s a decent, ordinary hack,” Jerry reported. In the first days of exile, Jerry’s voice had weakened; he talked with difficulty, as though he had emphysema. But then it had grown icy with control. “He heard that Gresham wanted an upstate Catholic on the ticket, so every time he had a free minute he genuflected like crazy and Gresham picked him. No big deal. Parker’s plan seems to have been to take it easy for four years in Albany, then go back to Buffalo and open up a hotshot law practice. He saw the lieutenant governorship as his pinnacle of success. If he had thought anything would happen to Gresham, he probably would have stayed in Buffalo.”

“But he’s going to run now?”

“Sure. He’s a politician, isn’t he?”

“But he’s so unqualified. Isn’t he afraid people will—”

“Marcia, he’s a politician. He thinks he can win, the jerk.”

“But do you think—”

“I don’t think. I don’t give a shit what happens.”

“Jerry, that doesn’t sound like you.”

“Are you starting again, Marcia?”

“No. Really I’m not.”

“Just leave me alone. Everything’s fine.”

It wasn’t. It was terrible, and of course Jerry knew it. But he seemed unable or afraid to come back down to the city and confront Paterno.

Jerry might have won. Paterno was nervous and guilty. Instead of his usual three-minute warm-up chitchat with me before each new project, he’d grab a handful of notes and say, “Okay, let’s get the show on the road.” He didn’t look at me. Because he was a direct man—for a politician—and because he had a conscience, his treatment of Jerry made him jittery. He seemed to be waiting for retribution. As I would begin to outline my ideas, Paterno’s small hands would clench a little, as though he were expecting a verbal attack or a punch in the mouth.

Once, in the midst of preparing a speech on agriculture he would be making in Ithaca, he looked at me over a page of notes on recycling animal waste into fertilizer and murmured, “I bet you miss your friend. Morrissey, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“Well, he’ll be back soon. Boy, I could really use him around here.”

I asked whether we could use the term “feces” just to break the monotony or if we should stick to “waste” throughout the speech.

“I hope you’re not angry at me about this. I mean, it’s just a routine administrative detail. He’ll be back soon.”