Superior Women (13 page)

When at last they break apart he is out of breath too; he can barely say to her, “You are some beautiful girl, you know that? Say, when can I see you, you ever free?”

“Well—” Megan gets out. “Tomorrow—”

He grins; in that darkness she can see the white shine of his teeth, just tasted. “Well, tomorrow, that is the greatest. Tomorrow is my night off, Sunday night. How about you meet me here? Out front, say, nine o’clock?”

They kiss again. Prolonged.

At the head of the stairs at last they separate, touching hands. They both whisper, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And Megan sees that there is indeed a ladies’ room, where she goes to rearrange her disordered face. She is quite oblivious of anyone else who might be in the room.

Simon asks her, “Want to stay for another set?”

Sharply torn—she is dying to see and hear him again, hear him sing and play, to
her
—Megan at the same time feels that that would be dangerous, and so she asks, “Couldn’t we walk home, down Fifth?”

And that is what they do; they walk all those brilliant hot early summer blocks, late Saturday night, down to 8th Street, to the Marlton.

The long walk, though, has done nothing to exhaust what Megan feels, to quiet her blood. In the high wide lumpy bed she and Simon fall upon each other, almost impersonal in their furious need. If Jackson Clay is present in Megan’s wild state of arousal, it is also possible that Phyllis exists, at these moments, somewhere in Simon’s consciousness.

“There’s too much—I don’t know what to show you,” Simon tells Megan at breakfast the next day, Sunday, at Schraffts’, on Fifth Avenue and 14th Street.

“But I want to see everything!”

He laughs at her; then suggests, “In that case the boat around the island?”

“Oh, wonderful!”

Jackson Clay of course has no intention of coming to meet her, Megan tells herself, on the deck of the excursion boat—at the railing, as fresh salt winds and spray lash her face and flatten down her hair, as she stares and
stares
at the kaleidoscope of skyline and wharves, traffic, trains, cars, boats. The brown river, and lost dipping
sea gulls. She was just a dumb girl with big breasts, a hick from out of town, whom Jackson Clay kissed just because she was there.

“That’s New Jersey,” Simon tells her, pointing to rocky white cliffs. “The Palisades.”

Megan has, however, invented a California friend who she will see, she says, after dinner tonight, when Simon has to go up to see his parents. She has even said that he might as well spend the night “at home.” “I mean, won’t they think it’s sort of funny if you don’t?” Aware of extreme disingenuousness, Megan widened her blue eyes very consciously, saying this.

“Well, actually they would. It’s nice of you. We’ll meet at Grand Central in the morning, then?”

But Jackson has no intention of meeting her at nine, on 52d Street, in front of the club.

They have dinner in a Village restaurant called the Jumble Shop, where everyone looks—to Megan—“literary,” vaguely foreign, and all absorbed in conversations that she yearns to be a part of, or simply to overhear. “This is wonderful, I love it here,” she whispers to Simon, her eyes pursuing a tall man in a black beret, with a woman in a violet feather boa, just leaving.

But Megan can barely eat.

“Shall we, uh, share a cab partway uptown?” Simon asks rather tentatively, after dinner. Megan’s “California friends” are staying in a hotel near Times Square, the Woodstock—a name she picked from the phone book as she thought, What a waste, all this cleverness and ingenuity wasted on a man who won’t even be there.

But: “Oh no,” she says to Simon. “I think I’ll walk for a while. There’re lots of cabs,” she adds vaguely.

“Okay, then. Grand Central tomorrow, at ten, at the Information Booth.”

Both guilty, in separate ways, they kiss and separate.

Unsure how much a cab will cost—and then suppose she has to take another one, back to the Marlton, when he isn’t there?—
Megan does walk about ten blocks uptown, up breathtaking, dusky Fifth Avenue, with her heart at the top of her throat.

At a quarter to nine, at the corner of Fifth and 21st Street, she does hail a cab, and she gives the address on 52d Street—where Jackson Clay, who by now has forgotten that he ever saw, much less kissed her—where Jackson Clay surely will not be.

But he is! He is there, he is early, it is only five of nine when Megan’s cab arrives. Jackson, tall and wonderful in a long polo coat, standing there, looking around; he is waiting for
her.

He gets into her cab as they pull up—and among other things Megan thinks, Oh good, I won’t have to pay.

Jackson smiles. “You here! I was scared you’d forget, that you hadn’t meant about coming to meet me.”

He was scared. Megan smiles weakly, as he takes her hand and gives an address to the driver. And, as the cab rushes back up Fifth to the park, in the black night, winding, they begin to kiss. There has never been the slightest question of their intentions toward each other; this is not a date in the ordinary sense.

Jackson Clay lives in Spanish Harlem, 110th Street. The other side of the park.

His building has a small dim strange lobby, and the elevator is small and creaking. Jackson leads Megan down a hall, to a door. She is a little surprised, at first, by the nondescript dinginess of Jackson’s apartment, until she thinks, He must spend hardly any time here, none at all, it’s just a place to keep things.

He asks her, “You like a drink? You smoke?”

Okay, she would like a drink, Megan says.

As he leaves she sits down primly on a large, wide, fairly lumpy sofa; crossing her legs she senses heat there, and wet—oh, what will he think?

Coming back into the room, Jackson Clay puts their two drinks on the coffee table, he sits down and takes Megan wholly into his arms. She feels herself leaping against him, like a fish.

The most unusual feature of their actually making love, to Megan, is the way Jackson uses his tongue, his tongue all over her, beginning
with her hands. He kisses the sensitive palms and in between her fingers.

At some point, when she has cried out over a “kiss,” in a gentle way he says to her, “And I’d really like it if you’d kiss me too.” But surely that is what she has been doing?

In a few intervals of exhausted cessation they drink their drinks, and they talk, a little. Jackson is from Oklahoma, he tells her; he is half Indian, Cherokee. He grew up on a reservation. (Megan can imagine none of this, Indians, a reservation, but she listens with awe and total interest.) He has been married four times. “The last one, she really embarrassed me, the way she talked,” he says. “You talk so nice, like somebody English.” (As Megan thinks, Well, I must have changed, I have picked up a Harvard-Cambridge accent, without even noticing.)

Out of the 52d Street club Jackson himself speaks differently; now he uses a normal, somewhat Southern speech, whereas in the club, in the clowning asides between songs, he was heavily “Negro.”

They do not talk very much, but Megan receives a strong and certain sense of his niceness; Jackson is a genuinely kind, nice man, perhaps the nicest she has ever met. And she wonders: Maybe they should marry? (In 1944, there are not many alternatives available, to marriage, for nice young middle-class girls.)

Jackson has the same idea. As he takes her home, somewhere near dawn, Jackson says, “If you find out you pregnant, I’ll marry you, quick as a flash. But you know, I was real careful.” (She had not known that, actually; he did not use rubbers, as Simon carefully does.) Jackson says, “I’d like that, being married to you, I really would. But marriage with a musician is real tough on a woman. Always on tour. Out late. Women can get real restless.” He laughs, but in a kindly, sympathetic way.

By then too tired for further speech, as they part Megan breathes out, “I love you, Jackson.” “Me too, baby. I love you too, I surely do.”

•     •     •

Although she knows that she is not in love with Jackson Clay, back at college Megan gives a fair imitation of someone in love. She buys all his records, all the money from a birthday check from Florence (who seems to be getting rich!). She plays the records, she listens in a sort of swoon.

She writes him long letters; she plans and fantasizes about their next meeting; she sees herself walking into a club where he is playing, and his startled look of recognition.

But there is no urgency or anxiety in her obsession with Jackson Clay. It does not bother her that he does not answer her letters; she would not have expected him to. And it does not matter, to Megan, just when their dramatic reunion will take place; she sees it as simply (and wonderfully!) somewhere ahead.

Because of the war, at Radcliffe it is possible to stay in school all year round, several terms in a row, and thus graduate in a shorter time than the usual four years. This process is called Acceleration, and it is viewed with enthusiasm by most of the girls. The dean is against it; she has stated that four terms in a row is too much for anyone, and is quite possibly deleterious to young women’s health.

Megan and Lavinia, Cathy and Peg are among those who think that Acceleration (any acceleration, probably) is a very good idea. Although none of them could have said just why, they think that getting out of college in three years instead of four is wonderful—despite the fact that all four of them are enjoying their Cambridge lives, in one way or another.

Megan has the most (perhaps the only) practical explanation for this haste, which is quite simply that less time in college for her will mean less expense for her parents. She is also drawn to
acceleration because of the decreased time at home on vacations; these days she hates the very idea of California, most especially (if half-admittedly) she hates her mother’s job, hates seeing Florence as a carhop, in her perky uniform, looking not many years older than Megan does, and
thin,
and
blond.
Talking that way.

In any case, all four of them elect to spend the summer term in Cambridge, in school. The summer of 1944.

On a hot morning in July, Megan and Peg find themselves alone in Hood’s, having coffee. Theirs being the thinnest wire in that finely balanced four-way friendship, it is odd that this has came about; they are slightly awkward with each other. And it seems to Megan that Peg, who at best is not notably attractive, now looks quite terrible. Her skin, which is too pale but generally clear, is blotchy now, and her big blue eyes are dull. And instead of her usual hearty, blustering self, this morning Peg is very quiet, subdued, and somewhat unnecessarily polite, as though Megan were someone whose approval (or possibly advice?) she sought. Peg urges Megan to eat the bran muffins which she, Peg, has ordered and paid for, and she goes up to the counter to get more coffee for them both.

Megan’s response to all this strangeness on Peg’s part is a sort of sympathetic curiosity, and a revival of the guilt that she has always felt over her own negative reactions to Peg. Very possibly she has misjudged her all along? Peg, inwardly, could be as delicate, as vulnerable as anyone, or possibly more so?

Coming back with their coffee, setting it on the table and then lowering herself heavily into her chair, Peg looks even worse. She smiles faintly at Megan, to whom a wild thought has just come: Megan thinks, Peg is pregnant. And then she thinks, Oh no, that’s impossible. How could she be? Peg wouldn’t.

Just then in a violent way Peg belches, which seems to cause her real physical pain, so that Megan asks, “Peg, honestly, are you all right?”

Clearly not all right, Peg blinks back tears; in a strangled voice she says, “Well, not exactly. I seem to be—Megan, I think I’m pregnant.”

They stare at each other, as large tears roll slowly down Peg’s large face.

“Oh Peg. Jesus, do you really think so?”

“I’m next to sure,” Peg miserably gets out. “And Megan, I wanted to ask you, if you possibly know anyone, uh, anywhere—?”

It is a minute before Megan understands what is being asked of her, and another minute before her mind forms the word “abortion.” The next thing she thinks is, Why me? Why are you asking this of me? But in a heart-sinking way she knows; she knows just why Peg would choose her, why Peg has engineered this time together.

As though she had asked, Peg explains, “You’re the only one I could—and I thought maybe you might know. You might have heard of some, uh, doctor.” She reaches into her bag for Kleenex, and sniffles into it loudly. “Lavinia would never speak to me again, and Cathy, well, you know, a Catholic.”

“I honestly don’t know anyone,” says Megan, honestly. “But maybe I could ask.” Ask who? she wonders. Simon, whom she has been more or less refusing to see? Innocent Stanley Green, whom she is not seeing either? (It is hard for Megan to “see” anyone these days, Jackson Clay being so much on her mind.)

Anxiously Peg insists, “And you won’t tell? I just couldn’t stand—”

“No, of course. I won’t tell anyone.”

But why me? Alone, Megan in her mind renews this question; again she asks of Peg, But why me? Because you think, or assume, that I’m not a virgin either? That I’ve made love with two different people by now, and sometimes have worried that I was pregnant? And if you know all this about me, all of which is true, then
how
do you know it? And does everyone else know too?

Or is it just that I come from California, and you think all Californians have sexy lives, and lots of abortions?

Still, Megan feels herself burdened with Peg’s problem, her unimaginable pregnancy.

And the father must be that guy from Yale, son of parents’ friends.

  •  •  •

“Why do you come to me with this?” asks Janet Cohen. “Because I’m a Jew?”

“Oh, Janet, of course not. I just thought—well, I don’t honestly know why. Maybe because you’re from New York.”

“If you mean Brooklyn why don’t you say so.”

“I didn’t especially mean Brooklyn.”

Janet sniffs; she has said that Cambridge in the summer is bad for her allergies. She asks, “Are you trying to tell me that they don’t have abortionists in Washington, D.C., or wherever your other friends come from?”