Lion House,The (18 page)

Gordon came back then and we left Wingo and drove into town. I told him about Brad: not all of it, of course, but simply that we had broken up. And he told me about his wife who wasn't his wife anymore. It just hadn't worked out, somehow; nobody ever found out why. Now there was this other woman
—the "thing," in fact, that he had on for tomorrow; but no—nothing like that; only a sort of
friend:
much older than he; very understanding. You could tell her everything. You could stretch out on your back and look up at the ceiling and say all your thoughts; she just sat there and listened.

"What is she?" I asked. "An analyst?"

He grimaced like a little boy at a spoonful of castor oil. "Christ, no!" he said. "I've had enough of
that!
Three years, almost; and
please
don't remind me of it! The bastard just sat there mentally counting his twenty-five-dollar bills and saying,
Hhhhhhmmmnnn!"

He
was
like Frannie: awfully.

When we got to town I made noises about driving him to Peggy's; but he said he was hungry, so I suggested that he come down to my apartment for a snack.

He was enchanted with the place; he was enchanted with the ham sandwich; he was enchanted in general; and, like so many people who are busy being enchanted, he was enchanting.

When he kissed me I knew how long it had been since I'd been kissed; how long since anything; how terrible it had been to live like that; how nothing mattered but that he stay; let me be the way I was; not question it; not make me explain; not make me apologize for my lack of control, lack of discretion, lack of dignity. There weren't any of those big, crazy divides with him:
men are this way, women are that way; this is done, that is not done;
or:
what am I doing?
—and:
I'll-hate-myself-in the morning.

It was only later, after it was over, when he got up and found a cigarette and sat down in the armchair, that he began to talk: began to let the world get in and tear him to pieces.

“It'll be hell before we're through," he said; and again I thought of Frannie; because the freedom was gone, and the heedlessness; and so quickly, so much the way it could happen to Frannie, he had become tangled in a hundred sudden webs of complexity.

"I don't know how to say it," he went on slowly, putting out the cigarette he had just lighted, "but I don't
—do anybody any
good."

I stretched a little, lying there on my chintzy spread, feeling sleepy with love. "You do
me
good," I said.

"Yes
—now. With this. But not later. This isn't enough of a way to do good to anybody. It doesn't last. Later—there has to be more."

"I don't want any more."

"You will, though. And I won't have it to give. Because this is the only thing I've got; it's the only thing I do well."

I laughed. "That's silly. You make remarkable pens! You just told me so a few hours ago."

He looked almost angry. "That's not what I mean," he said. "I'm not talking about pens. I'm talking about me. But you'll see. Later, you'll see. It's like one of those cliffs in Bermuda where your friend is. I've been there, and I know: there are these cliffs there, all along the ocean. They're big and strong and when you climb up and sit on them you feel you're safe because nothing can ever happen to change them. But every time the waves crash against them, a little more of them gets lost; and one day they won't even be there at all. That's what you'll find out about me: whatever happens, I keep becoming less; not more."

I got up and made us two drinks and handed him one. "You know Colette?" I asked. "There's this story she wrote, about a woman named Julie. And the rare thing about Julie is: after she's made love with a man she doesn't want or need to sit around talking about it. Right now
—that's me. You were so free before; so giving and taking; but now you're trying to pull it all apart. Can't you just leave it the way it was? You keep reminding me of Frannie. Frannie's like that. She gets hold of a thing, really gets hold of it, and it's whole and it's marvelous. But then she just can't seem to stand letting it alone. So she hacks it all to smithereens, and half the time you don't know what she's doing, or why."

(Again I heard her:
Please don't go to sleep! Stay up a minute, won't you? Tell me, Marc! I have to know! I have to know or I'll die!)

"You talk an awful lot about Frannie," Gordon said, pushing her voice from my mind.

"Do I? I don't! I've mentioned her name just three times, maybe, in the whole time I've known you! She's a friend of mine. Don't you ever talk about your friends?"

"It's not how many times. It's the
way
you talk about her. It's as if you never quite do anything, never quite
are
anything, except in some juxtaposition to Frannie."

"You're crazy," I said.

He got up and came towards me. "Again?"

"Yes, again. But this time take your glasses off!"

"No!" he cried, suddenly distraught. "I can't! I have to
see,
I have to
see!"

He stayed till about four a.m. Then he went back to Peggy's house. But he wasn't going to go to Philadelphia the next day after all. What's-her-name wouldn't mind: she was just a maiden-aunt surrogate, he said; just someone to weep with, and he didn't feel much like weeping now. He'd have breakfast at Peg's to make it look decent and then he'd come back to me and we could spend the whole day together.

Even though I knew I'd see him within a couple of hours it wasn't easy when he left. I couldn't sleep. So I dragged out the typewriter I'd borrowed from Clarke to type business notices in my spare time and began banging out a letter to Frannie.

Frannie darling,
I wrote
:

Get me off the Lovelorn List and page Polly Adler!
—His name is Gordon Potter. You know Peggy Potter Fredericks—well, her brother. At the Wingo Bazaar, of all places! Knowing Peg, you can't possibly picture Gordon. Can you compare a slender Spring rain with a small round tornado?

It's now after four
a.m.
and God only knows I should by now have transferred to the arms of Morpheus; but I'm just too excited to do anything but remember what it was like, and what it's going to be like in a few hours when he comes back. It's never been this way
—not for me, not for anyone. There is nothing the man won't do. Your beloved Edna returns to me with lines I never knew I knew:
drowned in love and weedily washed ashore...
What's the rest of that anyway?

As I looked at him, after
—he made me think of the lean, lithe harlequins in that Picasso portfolio you once showed me...

It rambled on like that for pages and pages, growing more and more graphic as I lost the inhibitions of writing and began to feel that Frannie was with me; that I was actually talking to her.

That morning when Gordon came back we set out in my car for a drive to the shore, stopping for lunch at a tavern along the way. We drank a lot, but there was an intenseness which kept us from getting crocked.

By one the sun had vanished and the sky turned gray; and when we reached the first beaches of Long Island they were practically deserted. We parked after a while and found a sheltered, hollowed-out place among the dunes. Neither of us had thought about bathing suits, but there was an old blanket in the baggage compartment of the car and it served to cover us respectably the few times during the afternoon when people came by. We even managed to make it to the water for swimming. It was beautiful being wet with love and the sea and the warm rain that had started. I thought of Frannie: she had told me how she and Marc had made love on the empty beaches of Bermuda in other summers; and it seemed almost as if her memory, shared with me, had brought me to a kind of reliving of something which had first been hers.

Dear, dear Frannie,
I thought, stretched out beside Gordon on the sand;
the following letter is a thank-you note...

"You're so soft," he said suddenly, breaking into my fantasy. "You're safe. You're not a person; you're a place. I can get lost in you."

I turned on my side and reached my arms around his neck, pulling his mouth against mine. "Get lost," I said.

". . . drowned in love,"
I mused, after we had swam again,
"and weedily washed ashore.
.. Do you know that? What comes next?"

"I don't know."

Suddenly I did:
There to be fretted by the drag and shove, at the tide's edge, I lie
—these things and more...

"Are you willing," Gordon asked, facing me on the blanket, "for all this not to work out?"

I yawned.

"You think you don't care now," he went on. "But later you'll care. Women can't, without caring sooner or later; and that's when it all goes to pieces."

"In August I'll be forty-seven," I told him, hating the sound of it, but needing to get it said. "I'm not a child anymore. I'm way past Love's Young Dream, and things
don't
work out. Accepting it is being grown up, isn't it? Stop worrying. Stop looking for trouble." I picked up a handful of sand and let it sift down onto his arm.

"You don't know me," he said. "That's the way it always is: everybody feels so sure about everything; except
—they don't know me; and then, later, they're let down."

He sat up and I sat up too and we began getting dressed.

"You know about my analysis?" he asked. "Do you know anything about it?"

"You mentioned it yesterday."

"No
—I mean do you know how it works; what it means to go through it?"

"A little."

"Well, do you know why I quit?"

"Why?"

"Because I got too scared to find out any more. He was a good guy: in Philly; Gromberg. He was really great. Personally, I couldn't stand him. But that was just part of
me,
and what's wrong with me. We spent over two years at it, and I was coming along wonderfully. But that was only the beginning. In the beginning it's easier. You have a million things to say and you talk your lungs out. But then one day you get to the end of the anecdotes and you can't say anything at all. And that's where the true beginning begins: when you reach the part you didn't know was there, because whatever it is has been too awful to be aware of. So then you gird up your emotional loins and go on to find out; or you don't. I didn't. I quit..."

"So you quit. What's so bad about that? You were all right, weren't you?"

"Oh, sure
—I was fine! I was so happy to get out of there I almost
liked
the bum that last day! I wanted to throw my arms around him! I wanted to kiss him! And then I walked out of the building and ran into a kid on a tricycle and broke my ankle! After it healed I wanted to go back to Gromberg and tell him about it...But I didn't.

"Peg thinks I ought to finish sometime," he went on in the car when we'd started for home. "She's really a bug on it. She was so mixed up she couldn't work for five years, so she went to somebody who fixed it for her, and now she must be earning thirty grand a year. Have you ever heard of Paige? A woman?"

"Yes. Frannie mentioned her once."

"Well, Peg thinks a lot of her; but they rarely take two people from the same family. Besides, I'd have to commute. And then, actually I'd hate to start again with somebody new. If I went anywhere it would be back to Gromberg
—if he'd have me. The truth is: he never liked me. I mean, I know they're not supposed to act like your bosom pal, but he seemed even more unfriendly than he had to be and I always had the feeling that he didn't—like me. I think he had a thing about being Jewish and he put up this big front about not giving a damn about you just to make sure you wouldn't hate him first. You know—like Jews do?"

"I don't think Jews do much that other human beings don't do," I said.

"You know something, Jo?" He laughed. "I love you. I love you more than I love anybody. But listen now
—don't ever
count
on it!"

I dropped him off at Peggy's. She was having a cocktail party and he felt he ought to get there in time to say hello. After that he was going back to Philadelphia.

"I'll come over on Friday," he said. "Straight to your apartment. Peg doesn't even have to know I'm in town."

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.