Authors: Marjorie Lee
Marc yawned.
"All right," I announced, standing up. "We'll get some sleep and talk tomorrow."
"Thank you," said Marc, with a stiff mock bow.
I left the den first, shutting the door behind me. When I got upstairs I closed the door of my room. But the straight, open stairwell was a channel for sound; and I could have sworn, some ten minutes later, that I heard Frannie crying: brokenly, unceasingly
—like someone who had lost her mind.
* * *
In the morning Marc left with the kids at about ten thirty. I was awakened by a succession of bangs as they went through the screen door; and by the running of Frannie's bath water into the tub. I got up and took one too. When I was dressed I heard her moving around in Blair's room where we'd piled the unpacked bags the night before. I went in. She had nothing on. It was true about the sun-tan: she had it all over; and in the sunlight it was even more striking than it had been in the dark: there were parts of it that shone like bronze where she was still wet from her bath.
"Oh," I said inanely.
"Oh," she said, just as inanely, crossing her arms over her breasts. Then she brushed past me quickly and wet into her own room to get dressed.
I fried us some eggs, reheated the coffee Marc had left and carried it all into the den. When she came down handed her a plate.
"Look at that Rouault," she said, leaning towards over the liquor cabinet. "God, how I've missed that Rouault. If we ever went broke and had to sell it I think I'd
—"
"Aren't you going to eat your eggs?"
"I'm not hungry. Do you want them?"
"Go on, eat them. Protein."
"Here." She brought the plate over to me and slid the eggs off it onto mine.
"I don't want to sound like your mother," I said, "but if you don't start eating like a normal human being you're going to starve to death."
"Death by any cause frightens me not at all," she intoned grimly, slinging the empty plate across the cabinet. "Starvation, in fact, would seem tidier than most
—if a bit on the slow side."
I put my plate down. "What is it?" I asked. "What's on your mind?"
She walked back to the couch.
The draperies were still drawn from the night before, and the sun seeping through them held us both in a soft orange light.
She didn't answer me. Her silence lasted whole minutes; and, as happens in the midst of most waiting-silences, I became aware of the trivial sounds surrounding it: the splash of a hose on a neighbor's lawn; the grind of a tree-saw down the road; two dogs barking at each other, and the motors of three passing cars.
"Listen, Jo," she broke through at last.
"I'm listening."
"I'm tired to death of all this."
"Of what?"
She looked up at me. Then she shook her head slowly. "When are you going to stop that?" she asked.
"Stop
what?"
"Stop asking
what?
Stop pretending you don't
know
anything! Stop living your life as if it were a dream or something
—as if all you have to do is wake up to make it all go away and not matter anymore!"
"Oh, Christ," I said, "don't tell me you're about to sermonize! Really, Frannie, if there's one thing about you that
does
drive me wild it's that
moralistic
thing you do. Half the time you're some crazy, rootless hoyden shouting Freedom from the hilltops; and then when you get people over to your side so they trust you and go along with it
—you turn around and hit them over the head with a Bible! I swear, if you start Holy-Rollering me about Gordon, I'll scream!"
She leaned forward, shocked out of hesitance. "Not Gordon, Jo," she said with a quiet anger that annihilated the force of my own.
"Me."
“You?"
"Listen to me, Jo. I've just come back from a four-week nightmare. That I had the guts to come back at all amazes hell out of me. It would have been so simple the other way: one dive off that villainous cliff into the rocks; one big wave
—and finished. But I couldn't do it. I had to come home. I had to get it
said.
That's the thing about people like us: we keep having to
say
things. One day we're going to talk ourselves right out of existence. There isn't going to be anything left of us to prove to the world that we were ever in it
—except some God damned echo of a million words! And you know what's even worse? When they get it all taped and try to decode it, they aren't going to be able to. They'll chalk it up to the wind, or the rain, or a trick of the elements. They'll never understand it. They'll try for all of eternity—but they'll never understand it. And you know why? Because
we
didn't understand it
ourselves!"
"That's beautiful," I said, "but what does it mean?"
She got up and went over to the cabinet. "What time is it? I lost my watch a while back..."
"Yes. I know."
"Is it too early for a drink?"
I got us some ice cubes and mixed two gins and soda. We were about a third down on them before she spoke again. "Listen," she began, seemingly fortified. "I sat on those cliffs like a sun-crazed lizard, trying to think of a way not to say it. I figured if there were just some way to keep quiet, just some way to go on as we've been going, without putting it into words
—then maybe I could work it out the way
you
work things out: turn it all into some sort of bad dream that would vanish in the morning. But I couldn't. I just couldn't
—"
"For someone who has to say everything," I put in, "you're certainly doing a good job of saying nothing."
She set her glass down and bent towards me, seeming to brace herself against the thing that was about to break over us. "All right," she said. "Stop
—seducing me."
I sat there staring, not believing I had heard her.
"You see, Jo," she went on, "there isn't any need to anymore. You've
—got it made."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying what I had to say," she answered. "That I can't stand fooling around anymore. You've
—got me."
I was speechless.
"It might have gone on for a while longer," she said, "if only I hadn't been down there alone. I kept praying Marc would come back and, in some magical way, make it untrue. But he couldn't come. The only thing that came and came and came and came were those letters!"
"I was letting you know about Gordon," I broke in.
"You
wanted
to know! You
know
you did! I was writing to you because you were my friend. I was giving you news!"
"You were giving me
yourself,"
she said. Can’t you see that, Jo? Gordon was just some sort of vehicle you used to get
yourself
across to
me."
"You're out of your mind."
"Am I? Tell me honestly, Jo: have you ever heard of a woman who could make love with a man as rapturously, as
completely
as you said you did with Gordon and then, three minutes after it was over, dash to a typewriter and send it all to some girl she knew? And I do mean
all.
Why would she do a thing like that, do you think?"
"Frannie," I said, fighting to keep the quaver out of my voice. "Frannie, you've gone mad!"
"Maybe. But not the way you think I have. I can stand it, that it's happened. I've known for a long while anyway. I've been living with it day after day
—like you'd live with one eye, or an atrophied arm. You can get used to things like that—if people will let you.
That's
the big thing: if people will let you. Maybe I
have
gone mad
—but not because of a dirty name. I've gone mad because—you're turning tail. And I'm in too deep now to get out alone!"
I flung my hand across the end-table by my chair and my drink went over. Neither of us moved to wipe it up. "What do you want me to do?" I asked through my teeth. "Marry you to make an honest woman of you?"
Her face began to give way. "I want to cry," she said. "I want to cry so badly."
"Well, cry," I told her. "I'd cry like hell if I were you!"
"I can't. It won't come."
I couldn't stand seeing her that way. What comfort could one give or take from anger? I got up from the chair and went towards her, as I had gone to Gordon the night of the window, as I would have gone, and would still go, to anyone or anything alone and stricken. "You've got to get some help, Frannie," I said, laying my hand on her shoulder. "You've made up this whole thing in your mind. You know that, don't you?"
"No!" she shouted, striking my hand away. "I didn't!" Then she folded on the couch, head buried in a cushion.
"You've got to get some help," I repeated.
"Look, Jo," she said a minute later, facing me again, "can't you see how it's been for a year now? The thing with Brad? Can't you see how strange that was?"
"Yes," I answered, going back to my chair. "You, my best friend, took him right out from under me.
Strange
is putting it mildly."
"I did," she said, "and that's where
I
went off. But what about you, Jo? What about the wife who does everything she can to make it easy?"
"I? Make it easy?"
"Didn't you? Wasn't it you who sent me out for soda? Wasn't it you who wanted me to go upstairs and wake him? Didn't you hand him over on a platter every chance you got? When you
knew,
finally, what was going on, did you try to stop it? Did you write me off for the bitch I was? Did you break up the friendship? Did you even so much as get
angry?
No. And when the whole thing blew up in your face what did you do? You moved in here
—with
me!"
"That's ridiculous. That's
—"
"Hold it, Jo, and listen: there's more. After you got here, what happened? Do you remember? You cooked, you cleaned, you took over the kids. There was Blair
—"
"You're going to drag Blair into this?"
"Yes
—Blair.
I
knew how you felt about little girls. I knew how much you'd always wanted one of your own, and how you felt you couldn't
—because of Brad. I saw the way you looked at her when she came into a room, and heard the tone of your voice when you spoke to her. One night I woke up and went in to see her. She wasn't there. I went into the boys' room, and she wasn't there either. Then there was a sound behind your door. You were saying something softly, and I heard you use her name. I knew: she was in there—with you. Do you know what all that did to me? You're going to laugh. You're going to roll on the floor. I began to have a fantasy; the God damnedest fantasy in the world:
She wants my little girl,
I thought;
she needs my little girl. How sad, how heart-breaking; Jo who is so dear to me can't have the thing she wants most of all! How can I help her? What can I do?
And then I knew:
I'll give her one,
I dreamed.
I'll hope and pray and wish and believe; and in some strange and supernatural way, the miracle will come to pass: I will give Jo a baby girl; a real one; one that will grow inside of her and be born and be her own!"
"That's fantastic, Frannie, and you know it!"
"Yes, I know it. I said it was a fantasy. But there were other things that weren't fantasies; they were real. Marc
—"
"Marc?"
"The cooking, the cleaning, the caring for the children: what were you doing when you did all those things? You were showing
me
up as child; proving me, in front of Marc, unworthy of a man. In that way, and in many others, you tried to separate us."
"That's a lie!"
"Oh, is it? What about that sweet, motherly advice you gave me while I was down there on my cliff, going crazy: that kind and generous suggestion about filling my need with the guys at the military bases? And the thing about Marc the night you had dinner with him: how you had the feeling he was ready to have it with you; how you wanted to ask him in for a drink, but felt it
safer
not to? I told him about that, last night in the car on our way back. You know what he said? He said he'd like to break your God damned neck!"
"Don't give me that, Frannie," I said. "You can trap the whole world with that clever tongue of yours, but I'm not buying a nickel's worth! You're sick. You're sick as a dog. I used to think you were neurotic. You're not. You're insane."
"I'm sick," she said quietly. "But I know it. And that makes me a hell of a lot less sick than you."
I looked to the window. The drapery across it seemed a barrier between us and reality. I yanked the cord and opened it. The sun poured in so fiercely I had to shut my eyes. When I could see again, she was sitting on the floor beside the couch with her knees drawn up, cradling her head. With a pang of something I couldn't understand I saw that her glasses were off, lying near her on the floor. They became alive to me; and somehow lost and suffering. I wanted to walk over to them; pick them up; put them back on Frannie where they belonged.
I did love her. I knew it then. But not the way she thought I did; and not the way she loved me. It wasn't I who had the dream confused with reality; it was she. Why had I let myself be snared by her sad delusions? Why had I responded so deeply to an illness that wasn't mine?
"Look, Frannie," I said calmly, "call up your Paige woman. Maybe she can do something. Call her, will you?"
"I don't want Paige," she answered. "Can't you understand? It's true about you: I don't know how it is, or what it is, or why it is
—but everything I've said about you is true. You're wrong; you're so wrong. You're wrong about a thousand things: you don't see it; you don't know it; you never have; and maybe you never will. And that kills me; that kills me more than anything. I want to tell you, and teach you, and make you be right. It's funny: I'm righter than you are; but I don't
want
to be! I'd gladly be wrong any day if it could make
you
right. So don't tell me to call Paige. Who is Paige to me? I don't love Paige; I love you. I don't want Paige. I'm sorry, Jo. I can't help it. I want you."