Making Love (11 page)

She looked up into his sweet docile eyes and broken face and kissed him. She felt confident and protected in the arms of the unknown, the undefined.
 

“You're a pretty kid, Jane. Really nice, I mean it. But I got to tell you I'm not lookin' to get tagged again.”
 

She embraced his honesty, then opened the car door.
 

“Lookit, how do I get in touch with you, Jane? You won't have a phone yet, will you?”
 

“Why don't I call you when I get back?”
 

“Fine.” He searched his pocket for a pencil, then gave up the pursuit. “Have you got somethin' to write with?”
 

An eyebrow pencil was located in her bag and handed to him. His address and phone number in various smudges were put on the small border below the price of the
News
.
 

“Can you read it?”
 

“Two hundred and fifty Riverside Drive.”
 

“That's on Ninety-eighth Street.”
 

“I can drop you off,” she said.
 

“I wouldn't think of takin' you out of your way. A girl in my neighborhood on her own this late isn't a good combination.”
 

He waved, then moved suddenly, shifting from side to side, swiveling his hips with the grace of a natural broken-field runner as if in pursuit of a last perfect touchdown. The cab passed him by, but another seeing his plight stopped. Good fortune, always a little late for Sonny Jackson, nevertheless offered him a fleeting smirk. Jane waved back and said to herself: “Sonny, you're beautiful.
 

The sky was beginning to lighten as she drove cross-town. The city was as close to deserted as she'd ever seen it, but for the first time that day she felt better, a sense of release, an easing of spiritual breath, and she knew that her problem wasn't quite so serious as she'd imagined.
 

She was pregnant, a rabbit had died on her behalf. She neither pitied the rabbit nor herself. There were several candidates for father over the past few months, Alan Sawyer the most likely and possibly the least lovable.
 

She still hadn't quite made up her mind whether to have the baby or an abortion. In control of the situation, she realized that the time for handwringing, tears, and sentimentality was over. In fact, she smiled, chewed two Gelusil pellets to combat the bacon taste in her throat, and repeated the little rhyme her mother had made up for her when she was a child:
 

Jane, Jane, Jane,
 

Don't you know that it will rain,
 

And you wilt cry in vain...
 

Jane, Jane, Jane.

 

 

 

The Line of Scrimmage

 

 

Look at me, I'm alive, I'm yours
, Jane wanted to tell her mother in the crowded confines of Lafayette; but of course she didn't. In fact, after a while Jane got the impression that Nancy hadn't wanted to see her at all but needed a reason to come into the city. She had lost most of her friends and was slow to acquire new ones. Ever conscious of her body, her clothes, Nancy was in the forefront with a midi skirt, but returning from the ladies room, she moved like someone afraid to reveal a wound, a drunken horsewoman. The squire's lady banished to the small attic room at the top of the house where she could scream her head off, and polite, believable excuses could be made to explain her absence.
 

“My bladder is shot to hell,” she explained, sliding back into the booth. She peered around the room to see if anyone new had come in. The possibility of being picked up, a recurring but tantalizing prospect, had eluded her once again; and she'd return to Connecticut, arms filled with packages that she'd never unwrap, sinking into oblivion before she reached home. She worked the trains over the years, although the chauffeur stood by expectantly. Even among loaded commuters she was an old number whom they preferred to pass over; a sinister insult in view of the fact that they had only their wives stationed at the other end. No one it seemed could tolerate a drunken woman, no matter what the reward. On Saturday there would only be shoppers like herself, but someone might invite her over for cocktails and dinner. Nancy had stopped giving parties years before. She could raise the dead but not enough guests.
 

“Do you want to order?” Jane asked.
 

“I haven't seen you for ages and you're rushing.”
 

Another request for a vodka martini kept the waiter at bay.
 

“Did you bring Dad's address?”
 

“Yes, the Buccaneer Motel in Napa. Sounds like your father, doesn't it? If you happen to run into him, would you mention that I'd like to see him.”
 

“Why don't you get a divorce? People do it all the time. It's not as though there's going to be a custody fight over me.”
 

“That's between the two of us. We came to an agreement a long time ago.”
 

“Is that what it's called?”
 

Nancy cupped her chin in the palm of her hand to steady herself, but her elbow swayed, another broken crutch.
 

“You don't like me very much.”
 

“I thought it was the other way around,” Jane said. “But I never held it against you.”
 

“Walk right over me, everyone else does.”
 

Her mother's self-pity never failed to remove the big guns of reason and common sense. The reversal of positions always amazed Jane. An emotional conjuring trick that parents employed instinctively, leaving the child sadder but not wiser. Jane at that moment despised the strength of her mother's weakness.
 

“How you always reduce me to a driveling twelve-year-old, I'll never know.”
 

Concerned with cause, Jane only observed effect.
 

“I'm a stupid, willful, drunken woman who happens to be your mother. I can't change that or myself. I'm a damn wreck, Jane.”
 

“Okay, what do you want me to do?” Jane offered, but Nancy was still on the same track, and although Jane thought she was immune to this form of maudlin self-accusation, having seen this late movie many times, she nonetheless felt her veins being opened.
 

“I married a skirt chaser and he got a drunk, but God, honey, we are what we are. We've lived for ourselves and don't deserve anything from you.”
 

Sweetbreads arrived from nowhere. Jane hadn't remembered ordering them, but since Nancy was eating, she did nothing to upset a rare moment of silence. The wine went untouched, as Nancy preferred to stay on vodka.
 

“I want him back, Jane.”
 

“Who?” she asked.
 

“Your father.”
 

Jane had a moment of indignation but managed to suppress it.
 

“I've just run out of people. The last”—she stopped herself, courageously looking into Jane's eyes, so there could be no question of hedging—“you're old enough. My last friend was the best of them ... and the worst.”
 

“I don't think I want to hear about it.”
 

“No one ever does. I have a sex life.”
 

“I don't doubt it.”
 

The combination of sweetbreads and confession made her nauseous, and she swallowed some ice water, chewed on a piece of roll, and controlled herself.
 

“Living alone doesn't do anything for your chastity.”
 

“Oh, Mother, do you have to? Can't you talk this over with a psychiatrist?”
 

“I gave ten years to those bastards, and got a lot of noncommittal advice and two proposals of marriage. I guess my bank balance overcame weak stomachs.”
 

“I don't want to be your go-between.”
 

Nancy sipped her drink reflectively. With an open bar, she retained her confidence.
 

“The last one was somebody called Charles Luckmunn, not a psychiatrist....” She turned Jane's face to her. “Don't look away, honey. We're both women.”
 

“You want it both ways. One minute we're equals and the next I'm your child.”
 

“Okay. We're women now. Luckmunn decided he'd had enough. Enough, do you understand?” Nancy was crying now, upset, outraged, hurt, but her anguish, to Jane's horror, made her coherent. “I'm pretty desperate to be talking to you about these things, so listen now.”
 

Jane stared at the burnished silverware and nodded.
 

“I had ... Luckmunn knew what to do to make me feel, Jane. For years I thought there was something wrong with me. Why couldn't I have an orgasm?”
 

“Mother...” the room began to spin and Jane started to laugh. “Do you know Tub Feeney, Mother? I found out yesterday that he was a homosexual.”
 

“Jane, that isn't relevant.”
 

“It's relevant to me.”
 

“The Feeney boy,” she asked rhetorically. “Who cares one way or the other?”
 

“I do, Mother. He laid me. He was the first one. I had a good feeling about it.”
 

“Why didn't you tell me about it?”
 

“You were always recuperating.”
 

“I'm sorry,” Nancy said. She picked up Jane's drink, not knowing, not caring, what it was, and gulped it down.
 

“And I'm sorry about Luckmunn and your orgasms but...”
 

It came with explosive suddenness, Jane's retching. No one it appeared had ever before vomited at Lafayette, and everyone was distressed as Jane, assisted by her mother, rushed to the ladies room. Nancy saw herself being closed out of yet another restaurant, having to corrupt yet another maître d', so that she could get the right table in the right place. She wet a towel with cold water and rubbed Jane's forehead.
 

“Most of it went on the table. You missed your dress, luckily.”
 

“I really feel terrifically lucky about that.”
 

“Oh, God, Jane, I don't know what I'm saying.”
 

“It's a familiar pattern. You should be sympathetic.”
 

“Maybe God in His infinite mercy won't make you like me,” Nancy said, looking at the floral wallpaper.
 

“Don't give me the Gods now. I need more than that, I'm pregnant.”
 

Other people's disasters always pulled Nancy together, and after six martinis she didn't look any the worse.
 

“Why didn't you say so?”
 

“I tried to. Yesterday on the phone. But you were otherwise occupied.”
 

“I'm sorry.”
 

“Will you stop saying that?”
 

“Do you feel any better?”
 

“Yes, wonderful, happy, thrilled out of my mind.”
 

“Let's leave, honey.”
 

Eyed coldly by the staff and sympathetically by the few people who noticed their difficulty. Nancy suffered the supreme contempt: she was not given a check. They strolled slowly in the direction of Third Avenue in bright crisp air. New York was perfectly marvelous in its indifference to suffering, the ideal place, short of hell, to hide.
 

“What do you want to do, Jane?”
 

“I'm not sure.”
 

“Going to California to see your father won't solve anything.”
 

“I'd like to try.”
 

“Why?” Nancy asked, genuinely puzzled.
 

“Just to tell him.”
 

They reached the car and Jane opened the door. “Can I drop you somewhere?”
 

“No, I'll walk for a while,” she said listlessly. She made an effort to embrace Jane, who snapped her head away. “I want to help. Believe me.”
 

Jane started the engine and looked into the rear-view mirror. She saw an attractive woman in a black diamond mink coat railing against the air and crying bitterly. She opened the window to say something, but Nancy was looking in the other direction, shouting: “I stink, I really do...”
 

On the United flight to San Francisco, Jane sat gloomily looking out of the window at the sea of dirty clouds the plane skipped over. The sky seemed like some enormous pus-filled sewer illuminated by a flashlight with rundown batteries. She thought of Nancy. They'd touched, and Jane had walked away luckily with no infection. But the point of contact had turned Jane's stomach, another of Nancy's sexual bridges that led nowhere but forced an expensive toll on the passenger. Nancy always on the other side, hand out, waiting to collect. Some mysteries, Jane believed, were worth preserving. Yet she was overcome by an emotion more potent than sexual desire—compassion for the dreadful, whining drunk who was her mother. They had come together for once, their femininity closer than their biological tie, in the wilderness of sexual waste. Why the secretion of glands, logically a bodily function could pull them together, Jane could not understand. At best an unwilling parent to her child mother, she resented the promotion thrust upon her. Nancy needed a monitor, not a daughter, but human demolition seemed to Jane an intolerable condition.
 

Luckmunn. She spat the name out. Luckmunn, the heroic orgasm engineer, had abandoned his patron. Probably with good reason, but she despised him from a distance, more for his choice of partner than anything personal. Nancy could not keep a lover. It made Jane more secure, increased her detachment, when she thought of Nancy as Nancy, a woman, rather than Mother. She'd have to remember that substitution.