Consenting Adult (15 page)

The cab was stopping in front of the theater.

“Just look at the mob,” Sue said. “Oh, Jeff, thanks for asking me.

In the theater he helped settle her into her seat, reaching around to pull her coat off her shoulders as he had seen other men do when they were with girls. It gave him that sophisticated feeling again, almost courtly and protective. He felt good, relieved and good. My God, almost happy.

All through the play, through the intermissions, afterward, walking over to Eighth Avenue to Antonio’s, his mind kept racing with that feeling that it was
almost
true. He really was having a good time, like any other guy, wasn’t pushing for it, like having a doctor’s prescription filled because you had to. He would date Sue every time he came down from school.

At Antonio’s, as they ordered, Sue made a face at her watch and said, “I can’t be too late. They still think I’m about thirteen.”

“What a drag. Parents sure know how to bug you.”

“Do yours? I mean, are they a drag?”

“Not my mother so much.”

“She’s the one you get along with?”

“Not all the way, but so-so.” He grinned.

“But better than with your father. It always seems to go that way.”

“With you too?”

“I meant, the boys I know.”

“I think it’s because mothers are—” He paused. He had been about to say that it might be because most mothers were more emotional and therefore more understanding, but Pete’s mother was a shrew, and as cold as ice. “I think it’s because my mother is—” Again he paused. He had been about to say that his mother might be more emotional because she was Jewish, and it surprised him that he had even thought of tying the two together. He usually got it said about himself, about being half Jewish, somewhere in the beginning of any new friendship, just to get it on the record right off and to hell with them if they didn’t like it, but never had he considered it as his own reason for liking his mother better than his father, and it shook him up that the idea had hit him now. It had popped up so vividly though, so clear and bright, the way his sudden feeling that Nate was important had popped up last night Nate was Jewish too. He hadn’t thought of that either.

“Because your mother is what?” Sue prompted.

“I just got hit by this idea,” he said, sounding pleased, “that maybe it’s easier to get along with my mother because she’s Jewish, and harder with my father because he isn’t. Maybe being Jewish helps you dig other people’s hang-ups more.”

“I didn’t know she was Jewish.”

“And you’re wondering if she’s one of those Jewish mothers with the chicken soup.”

“I am not. I’ve met her, remember. She’s awfully good-looking.”

“I guess she is.”

“And my dad says she’s awfully good at her job.”

“I guess she’s that too.”

He suddenly looked upset, Sue thought, and wondered if she had hurt his feelings in some way. She didn’t want anything to go wrong with this wonderful date; it was too important. She had liked Jeff the first time they had ever met, but he had scarcely noticed her, she being young for her age then when she was thirteen. Even now at sixteen, she wasn’t much of a swinger, the way you were supposed to be if you wanted to get anywhere with boys, especially boys like Jeff Lynn, who would make varsity at any college he went to and be a big man on campus all over again, the way he was at Placquette. Maybe sometime he would ask her up for some college weekend; she had never been away to a boys’ school for a party or a prom, and it was heaven to think it might happen someday with somebody like Jeff. If she didn’t say things that suddenly upset him.

“Go on about what you were saying, Jeff,” she said anxiously.

It sounded as if she were asking a favor and Jeff liked that. There was an earnest, searching look in her eyes, as if what he said mattered a lot, and he liked that too. It was hard to get back exactly to what he had been saying because he had gone off on a tangent in his thoughts, suddenly realizing that he had never before compared his father and his mother as if they were two separate things that you could consider one apart from the other and decide, This one is better, that one is worse. Before tonight he had always thought of them together, joined, but now he felt this terrific need to pry them apart, like two halves of a tight shell.

“I was thinking,” he answered at last, “about the different ways you can react to people in your family, something like that. My mother has a temper, the way I do, and we have awful rows, but they’re fast and furious and ‘gee, I’m sorry.’ My father sort of gets me teed off—he goes awfully polite and silent and yet you just know he’s all Thumbs Down.” He looked away as if he were suddenly embarrassed. “That’s enough about me. What about you?”

She was slated for Sarah Lawrence next year, and couldn’t wait to get there, and live on campus. “I don’t have too many hassles at home or anything,” she said. “But I can’t stand having to say where I’m going, when I’ll be back, who else is going along—yech-h-h.” She looked at her watch again and said, “Eleven-thirty!”

He stood up. “Let’s not have any hassles at your house, not yet awhile.” That sounded right, but he thought, I’ll have to kiss her good night. He had thought about it beforehand, but now it was suddenly rushing at him, and he felt the nip of panic. Kissing a girl wasn’t something you could get set for in advance, like buying a pack of cigarettes. If he messed it up, he would die.

They were both rather silent in the taxi but by the time they got to her door, she began again to thank him for the show and Antonio’s and the whole wonderful evening. He watched her open her purse, scrabble around in it for her keys, and somehow the easy feeling came back, controlled and sure, as if nothing could ever go wrong. He leaned over her and kissed her. Not a kiss in the air somewhere or on her cheek, the way you kissed mothers or sisters, but a kiss right on the mouth, kind of slow, and waiting while she kissed him.

Nothing happened to him, but nothing went wrong either. He kissed her once more and then went off a moment later, striding along the street as if he had just won something.

W
E LIVE IN A
world of monosyllables, Tessa thought one night “Yes,” Ken had just said. Before that it had been “No,” and immediately prior to that, “Please!” with the verbal exclamation point a streak of stress in the air between them.

It was a February night, snowing gently, the world outside their windows hushed and white, the city’s traffic muted as it always was under falling snow. In the fireplace a log tumbled; the room was bright and warm. But for her the chill of a growing dismay dimmed the brightness and diluted the warmth. Monosyllables, she thought again, half-finished phrases, unfinished sentences. A fine thing for two people who live by paragraphs and chapters and completed books. Invisibly in the last few months the barriers of their basic characters had raised themselves higher between them, and by now she had all but abandoned further attempts to achieve what had once seemed so unremarkable, a real conversation with Ken, an ordinary free-flowing conversation. If she so much as said, “Jeff,” or mentioned his school or Dr. Dudley, the barrier went up and there was no crossing it. They could still talk about politics, or manuscripts, about the spring list or some special bit of publishing gossip; for a few minutes, their talk would grow normal again, flow smoothly, even contain an amusing line or two. But let it turn toward their son, their own son, their one still-dependent child, and everything halted as abruptly as if they had come suddenly to the edge of a cliff below which was only empty air.

Every week made it worse, she admitted to herself, made it less possible to think of it as if they were in this
with
Jeff, and with each other. It was as if Ken unconsciously had to act as if it weren’t there any more, like a paragraph deleted from a manuscript. For a while you could feel that paragraph missing from the flow of the narrative, see the chunk of type crossed out by slashing pencil lines, or see the x’s going through the separate words of the killed passage. Then you began to forget what had been there, you lost it for good as if it had never been there, as if it had never existed at all.

“It” no longer meant homosexuality exclusively; it included any aspect of Jeff’s life or plans, any letter or phone call, any holiday or weekend at home. Christmas had been a dimmer replay of Thanksgiving, but instead of four days there were fourteen. Apart from the excitement and joy they all shared in the birth of Margie’s baby girl on the twentieth, it had been their first sad Christmas. She could feel Ken trying to keep it from being that, could feel him trying to seem casual and easy, with Jeff and with her, and she was grateful to him. But there was all the time the underlying sense of trying and that in itself had destroyed any spontaneity. She couldn’t, in any fairness, blame him for it. She too was trying; her trying also showed. Again and again she was caught in a passion of yearning that they could be, if not happy as they went through all the dear familiarities of the tree and the gifts and Christmas morning, at least able to achieve the old family closeness again.

But closeness, as an idea, as a possibility of living, was slipping away from all of them. One night before Jeff’s vacation, there was a tap on her door and Ken’s voice saying, “Are you awake, Tessa?” It was past one but she was still reading, and she called out, ‘Yes, come in, dear,” and found herself astonished at his coming to her room at all. It had been so long, this onetime need of his, of coming to her late at night in an impulse to be close, to make love. He did need closeness, for he got into bed and took her into his arms; she scarcely knew whether he was comforting her or seeking comfort; unexpectedly she was passionate and eager. That too had been so long gone from the current of life, she was surprised, delighted and surprised. But moment followed moment in a kind of passive waiting, and then Ken was sitting up beside her, his head bowed as in some portrait of an old man saying grace at the table, his eyes closed, his lips moving. She said nothing to prompt him to say it aloud, whatever he was thinking. Her readiness died, her throat ached.

“If I so much as think of sex,” Ken said at last, his voice hoarse with the effort to speak, “I think of two men and that kills it off for good.”

“Why should it, darling, why?” But immediately she added, “Most of the time, that happens to me too.”

“Does it?”

“I can’t bear it, it seems so compulsive.”

“But there it is.” This he said with such finality that her heart shook for him. It was true that since Jeff’s revelation, they had no heart for their own problems of sex and making love. Instinctively they had avoided any test; instinctively their own needs had ceased as if they had agreed in a dread collusion that they might shatter whatever there was left for them, unless they remained aloof now.

“Maybe if we could talk to each other more freely about it,” she said tentatively a few moments later.

“I keep wishing I could,” he said, looking at her for corroboration, as if she alone could attest to his wishing. “But I’ve never been able to—you know it simply was left out of my nature, a nice easy exchange of talk.”

She did know, and more than ever she tried to remain content with the knowing. But saintly patience was not her special gift and at times she wanted to cry out in protest, especially while Jeff was there. Saintly patience was not Jeff’s special gift either and when, two days before Christmas, she had said, “We all might try for tact at least, as if Christmas were a family enterprise,” he had looked at her with a kind of disdain.

“If Dad won’t talk to me, I can’t talk to him. I’m not a kid any more that thinks Daddy’s the best daddy in the world.”

“Another moratorium?” Ken had asked wearily when she repeated her suggestion to him. “Tessa, can’t we just let it go on as best it can?”

She had let it go on, but as the days inched by, she felt that something was going to happen to them all, something climactic and dire, irreversible. One evening the TV news showed a bomb explosion in a foreign embassy, and she began to think of an explosive planted in their midst, waiting, ticking off the minutes. When it detonated, it would blow their lives into a thousand pieces, never to be sweet and whole again.

On New Year’s Eve she and Ken had gone to a party at the Brannicks’, an annual affair as insistent as a command performance. All the firm’s editors were there, all its executives, many of its authors, and only the rapid early rounds of trays bearing good champagne could unfrost the formality that seemed to seize all these people who were so congenial in office surroundings and so ill at ease in evening clothes on an occasion of enforced merrymaking. As 1961 arrived, and husbands and wives kissed each other, all saying their habitual “Happy New Year, darling,” Tessa had whispered to Ken, “Maybe it can be. Let’s think it can be.”

“I wish it could be.”

But he said it with so little conviction that fear streamed through her like pale ribbons. Many times since that night, the flutter of apprehension returned at unpredictable intervals. It’s going to break us completely, she thought now, staring at the bright fire, either Ken or I is going to crack in some awful way. Maybe I’m the one—I’ve got to get some advice from somebody, maybe from Dr. Dudley, maybe from Mark Waldo, but somewhere. Recently I’ve been acting as if it’s only Ken’s silence that’s making this into a disaster, but if we had heart-to-heart talks every day it still would be disaster. From the first minute it’s been disaster.

For no reason she suddenly saw again the happy look on Jeff’s face the night he had come in, whistling, from his date with Sue at the theater.

“How was it, Jeff?”

“Great.”

“Did Sue like it too?”

“Yeah, loads.”

“I’m glad.”

That had been it. He had gone to his room then, and that had been it, then and forever. The curtness was nothing new; Don and Margie had been the same; most teen-agers were the same. Once they reached adolescence and their new estate of separation from mothers and fathers, they all regarded that chasm as more inviolable than the separation of Church and State.