Authors: Marjorie Lee
"I am."
"What's the matter?"
"Oh, I got the curse last night and I wish I were dead." (Along with everything else, this too had happened.)
"That shows a problem," she said breezily. Lucy Freeman tells about it in her book about her analysis. There's no reason why women should have difficulty with a perfectly normal female function, except if they've got some unconscious problem about it; like, for instance, maybe they don't
like
being a woman; maybe they really want to be a
man..."
"Oh, shove it," I said. "I'm in no mood for humor."
"What's humorous?" she asked. "It's an honest-to-God science, and you can't just walk around denying the fact that people live on hidden levels, and
—"
My head was beginning to split. I wanted to hang up and go back to sleep. But in a way I was glad to hear from her, pseudo-psychiatry and all. When you're that much alone any voice sounds good no matter what it’s saying. Besides, I knew I'd have to tell her, and the faster the better. "Listen," I cut in. "Shut up for a minute and listen. I hate to give it to you this way, without any advance notice or anything, but
—" I felt for a second that I couldn't go on; but I had to. "Frannie ..." I tried again, "Brad's gone."
"What are you talking about?"
"Stop playing, Frannie," I said, quickly now, wanting to get it over with. "I know. I know the whole damned thing; about you and Brad..."
The phone seemed to go dead. I'd have thought we'd been disconnected, except for the hum of static in the background; and then, suddenly: the rhythm of her breathing. Knowing she was there, I waited for her to say something. Long seconds went by; and when she did speak, finally, it was only to say, "Oh, Jo..."
A couple of hours later her car drove up. I wasn't surprised. I knew she would come. "The Other Woman," I said with a bitter-edged laugh. She didn't smile; or speak. "Come on, Stanwyck, say something. You're wasting precious film."
Dropping into a chair she pulled one knee up, bunching her coat, and began chewing on her thumbnail. I walked over to her. I thought for a second she was going to cry. But she couldn't; not with me there. She had told me once: she hadn't even cried when she was little.
I
wouldn't give in to my mother,
she had said. I saw the ache in her eyes now; but there were no tears.
"Here," I said. "Have a cigarette."
She shook her head and then lowered it, chin to knees. The afternoon sun slanted through the window onto the blonde ends of her hair. Beneath them the darker roots showed through. It all looked soft and childlike. I wanted to touch it, ruffle it, do anything, anything to let her know that I was glad she had come. But I didn't: because along with that feeling there was another one
—of anger and frustration; and had I touched her at all, it would have been to thrash her. "Okay," I began. "Why are you here?"
"To talk, I guess."
"Well: talk."
"I don't understand it myself, Jo," she said. "It’s all mixed up. You know as well as I do: I don't go in for stuff like this. Before Marc, yes; but never since, and never at all, even before, with anyone who was married..."
"How valiant of you. What do you want
—a citation?" She leaned forward. "Honestly, Jo. You know—my mother got divorced. I was young; but I wasn't too young to watch, or
feel
what a smashed-up marriage meant. Did I ever tell you this? There wasn't one damned woman in
my
whole family who didn't eventually wind up without her man. None of them made it
—not ever. Well, sometimes things like that work out in patterns and keep getting repeated forever. But other times it can work in reverse—and I always thought the chain would be broken by me: I wanted mine to stick; no fooling around, no looking for trouble. Listen, Jo, you do know, don't you, that it wasn't really—well, that it wasn't really a—"
"You can skip the details," I told her. "I know what it was; at least the other night, and the time you went to get the soda."
"He spilled that too?"
"Yes. He spilled that too."
She stuck her fists against the sides of her head. "Oh hell, Jo," she groaned. "I told you: I don't know why it happened. It doesn't add up at all. It's crazy
—and it kills me—
"I should think it damned well would," I said, "what with all those lovely theories of yours about sex versus sexuality and Love and being Whole!" And then I thought for a minute. It couldn't be; but I had to ask her anyway: "Are you in love with him?"
She looked up, startled. "God, no."
My heart sank. Confusedly, incongruously, I had wanted her to say yes. Had she felt deeply for him there'd have been an excuse: something I could understand; forgive. And I wanted to forgive her; I wanted to, desperately. I had lost Brad; not yesterday, but years ago: a hundred times, over and over again. Was I now to lose Frannie too?
"In love with Brad?" she was saying. The idea seemed actually to amuse her. "Really, Jo
—how
could
I be?"
Once more I felt the stab of resentment: if she rejected him, she rejected me. "Well, if it isn't that, what is it?"
"It's that he's so
—" She tried to laugh, and then closed her eyes tightly against the embarrassment of what she felt to be ridiculous. "It's because he's so—beautiful." The hurt began to dissolve inside of me. It would be all right now. Her admission of his beauty as the cause of her vulnerability was, however shallow to the rest of the world, a peculiar backing for my own enslavement. If Frannie with all her stress on depth, with all her crackpot, hell-bound standards of intellectuality, could accept a man whose total vice of failure was mitigated solely by the virtue of his face, then I too might be redeemed.
It was like the books she had given me to read and the records she had made me listen to. Let anyone question or disagree: when Frannie laid the seal of her approval on a thing it was, for me, elevated to a level of importance and well worth my own embrace.
It was not merely forgiveness that I felt for her now; it was a sense of the sharing of frailty; but a frailty which, because she too had fallen prey, was sensitive and moving.
The Other Woman,
I thought; and smiled. Because, of all the Other Women in history, from the classics all the way to Hollywood, she was, without guile and glamour, by far the most endearing. And I, the Wronged Wife, seated before her confession, had, oddly, not the slightest wish for bare-clawed retribution. I wanted, almost, to laugh out loud: not derisively, but with love.
"You're a little girl," I said softly. "You're a little girl with a crush..."
"Am I...?" She lifted her foot to the chair and began pulling at the rip in her moccasin. For a minute there was no sound but the slap of the leather against her toes. "Where is he...?" she asked finally.
"Some dive in Trent Place."
"Call him."
"Like hell I will."
"You've got to, Jo."
"I haven't got to at all."
"Please."
"Please, nothing! I don't ever want to see him again. Nor do I feel like ever seeing you again either."
"You can't mean that," she said, stricken.
"Oh yes I can and do." But could I? It was a game I was playing now; and I knew it: a game of hurt-for-hurt's sake. But suddenly she seemed to know it too, and a sixth sense gave her back the advantage. "Can the Drama, Jo," she said. "It's all happened before, hasn't it? I'm merely Number Twenty-Five, remember? Why should it matter so much
this
time?"
"I don't know, I said, wavering. "I just don't know. But maybe it's because this time
—it's you."
"It isn't me
anymore,"
she insisted. "And it won't be, ever again. It's over. Believe me."
"If its over," I said, "why do you care if he comes back or not?"
"For you," she answered. "I care that you have him. In some funny way I kind of
need
for you to have him. And then
—for Marc. He doesn't know yet. But if you and Brad split up the whole thing will get around. Even now I think Jeri's caught on. She says when Brad's around I have that Look on my face. You know how it is with this gang: eventually everybody
always
knows..."
"I'll have to think it over," I said.
She got up then, to go. I walked her out to the driveway. The first snow was on the ground. The slush came up over the sides of her moccasins onto her bare feet. "You'll catch a cold," I told her. "Why can't you dress like a human being?"
She ignored me. "Call him, will you?" she pleaded. "Call him as soon as I've gone...?"
The sun fell on her hair the way it had before. I put my hand out and touched it. She stepped away from me, flushing. "Will you call him?" she asked quickly.
"I don't know. If I do, I'll let you know. But anyway, I'm glad you came." I moved towards her to kiss her goodbye; and, as she had on the night of anagrams, she stiffened and pecked me back like a bird. "You sure kiss funny," I commented. "You certainly kiss funnier than anyone I've ever known!"
She stepped away again and looked me in the eye. "That's the second time you've done that," she said.
"Done what?"
"Thought it was funny. The other time you didn't say it; but you laughed."
"Well, it
is
funny."
"You
—" She hesitated. "You sort of—puzzle me."
"You
puzzle
me,"
I retorted.
She lowered her eyes and dug her foot deeper into the snow. Then she looked up again. "Will you ask him to come back?"
"Probably."
She turned and went to the car. On her way she stopped. "Do it now, will you? Right
now?"
I sighed; and then I nodded.
The stiffness went out of her and she grinned. "Good!" she called. "And I'm sorry about that kiss," she added over her shoulder. "Next time I'll bring my violin!"
I called him. He was home within an hour. "I need you," he said.
In the next few months we saw the Brownes with the regularity of a metronome. While Marc usually left our Bacchanalian revelries for bed at reasonable hours, there were times when Frannie, Brad, and I hung on until dawn. What this routine did to Brad's chances of retention by Maclntyre was something none of us dared dwell upon.
There was one Saturday when we all piled into Marc's station wagon at nine in the morning and drove off for a spree in New York. After a mostly liquid lunch at "21" we did the art world. Fifty-Seventh Street had already begun spewing its treasures about the city and the walking distance between galleries was enough to wear our pumps down to sneakers.
Frannie looked marvelous. In black suede spike heels, a narrow gray skirt and matching cashmere sweater, she was an ad out of
Seventeen.
Slung casually over her shoulders was a nutria coat which seemed to embarrass her inordinately. "I've only got it," she explained carefully, "because my mother made me nag it out of Marc the year we were married. She said even a shop girl wouldn't be caught dead without a fur coat and that it was essential to teach husbands that wives don't Live Naked Like Fish!"
"It's stunning," I told her; and she, borrowing the punchline of the joke about the Negress in Bergdorf's, said,
"It’s stunning all right
—but do you think it makes me look Jewish?"
"I'm willing it to Marian Deitz," she added. "She needs Wordly Goods to substitute for Lack of Love. Not that nutria would do it. Marian would need wall-to-wall mink; and even then she'd say it wasn't laid right."
"Will it to me," I kidded.
"Do you lack love, Jo?" she asked, suddenly serious.
It was fun looking at contemporary pictures with Frannie and Marc. Marc had the combination of a good eye and a knowledge of history. He could spot a phony a mile away and was able to point out derivatives of earlier schools which failed because too little had been added.
What Frannie's pronouncements missed in soundness, they made up for in originality. "Pure art's gone," she intoned. "It gave up its own identity when it started playing Trilby to psychiatry. There aren't any
painting
painters anymore. They're all just a bunch of Free Associators stretched out on canvas couches...
And"
she finished proudly, "that's absolutely
mine.
I've never read it anywhere!"
"We believe you," Marc said.
Steeped to the ears in culture, we knocked off at four for drinks at the Weylin Bar. Cy Walter was there. He remembered Frannie from other times and played all the things she asked for. There was one she requested twice; and, in a low voice which carried feeling rather than tone, she sang it for us. There were four lines in it which often came (and I suppose always will come) back to me:
"Let me love you. Let me show that I do. Let me do a million impossible things
—So you'll know that I do..."
We had dinner at Nicholson's; and then we braved an icy wind to the Byline Room and listened to Mabel Mercer. Frannie's records, good as they were, had not prepared me for Mabel in person. It was one thing to hear her tears on plastic and another to have them drip on my arm. We had a table directly beneath the wooden platform on which she sat in a straight-backed chair, hands folded in her lap, singing of: the loneliness of ivory towers; the ends of love affairs; mornings of orange juice for One; lucky stars above, but not for her; telephones that ring (but who's to answer?); summer days that wither away too soon, too soon; plans that would have to be changed; farewells (sweet) and amens; and various other sobbing manifestations of the Universal Female Neurosis which seemed to be her stock in trade.
We stayed for the last show and then taxied back to the car. Brad, Marc, and I fell asleep and Frannie drove. What with a sudden fall of snow on the Henry Hudson Parkway and a staggering case of myopia, she landed us in Westchester at five forty-five on Sunday morning.
There was something else we owed to the Brownes: an invitation to a party in Meade's Manor given by a couple named Sondheim. The evening had been themed
A
Winter Picnic;
and, as picnics go, this was a memorable one. The absence of grassy leas by rippling rivulets or stretches of coral sand was more than made up for by two-inch pile broadloom, the expanse of which, from livingroom to diningroom to library, offered ample sitting-space for over eighty picnickers. After a siege of drinking ("Mother of God," Frannie reported, returning from the bar, "they've got a separate bartender for each brand!") every couple was given a small pink damask tablecloth to spread on the floor and two box suppers. These, it was said, had been imported from Chambord via refrigerated truck, and contained, among other homey-type victuals, a stuffed squab and half a lobster.