Authors: Marjorie Lee
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?"