This Is Not for You (28 page)

“Her husband’s away for the weekend, but maybe you’ll meet him next week. A nice sort of guy.”

“Husband?”

“Take the next right,” I said. “It’s the white house down at the end of the road.”

Joyce was shy of Andrew at first. She made bright, uneasy conversation, her voice loud, her gestures exaggerated, but her nervousness was good for him. He liked that kind of requirement. As I watched his persistent approval and good humor, I remembered that he was a man with numerous sisters who must have been both competitive with him and in need of his good opinion. I wondered if they missed him, if they made any attempt to represent his cause with their father. But Mr. Belshaw didn’t sound the kind of man anyone would persuade. He could be indulgent, but he was dictatorial. Andrew was not really unlike him. He used the power of taste rather than the power of money to assert himself, indulged people more often than he agreed with them, and that, in most circumstances, is more flattering. Joyce knew he could not possibly approve of the wall plaques and hanging pots of ivy, the bowls in the shapes of nut shells and strawberries, the paperbacks and old school texts that mixed on the book shelf. That he chose to make himself feel at home anyway was a compliment to something rarer and more important than shared tastes. His good looks, perhaps even more than his educated sensibility, gave him a power to use generously with women, and more men than are willing to admit it care about having handsome friends. Andrew knew how to use that power. I never heard anyone accuse him of being vain. He looked at people rather than mirrors, and I could see Joyce now reflecting his handsomeness with the feeling that perhaps she was, after all, more attractive than she sometimes thought. But I make Andrew sound more calculating than he was. He wanted to please Joyce, to put her at ease; therefore he gave her his attention.

Just this talent in Andrew, which I loved and so often rested in, made you suspicious of him from the first. The peace you made with him did not so much include his good looks and good manners as ignore them, which left him only the currency of his mind, fortunately sound in any theoretical discussion. It was a good thing that you never saw him floundering in near idiocy with practical problems.

Joyce was uncritical and delighting. She didn’t suggest, or allow either of us to suggest, going to bed until well after midnight, and she and I didn’t spend the morning, as we always had before, being characters in her sexual fictions. We had finished breakfast by ten o’clock, and Joyce was looking for shoes and warm sweaters among her husband’s belongings so that we could take a long walk.

“Doesn’t he make that sweater look marvelous?” Joyce asked, when Andrew had climbed ahead of us to the top of a small hill. “Have you ever met any of his sisters?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said, smiling.

Andrew was calling to Joyce to ask her the name of a tree. He had discovered that she liked to name things, and he did her the further courtesy of remembering what she told him so that on the way home he could test his new vocabulary to please both Joyce and himself.

Sunday it rained. We spent the day, as children might have, playing games of various sorts. Andrew was good at Scrabble, bad at Monopoly. Searching through the game box with Joyce, rejecting anything for two, he found jigsaw puzzles.

“Stand back,” he said, delighted. “I’m an absolute genius with these.”

His eye for color and shape, for emerging pattern, did make him very quick, and the process, which seemed to me tedious, gave him real pleasure. Joyce involved herself with him. I withdrew a little, watching his face, less strained now, younger. I remembered building sand castles on a beach. He looked up suddenly and smiled.

“Where did you go?”

“I was remembering sand castles,” I said.

“Has Kate told you how we met, Joyce?” Andrew asked, careful that even so innocent a game for two be shifted.

We sat up until eleven, Andrew tending the fire and the drinks.

“Well, I don’t have to work tomorrow,” he said, standing up, “but I’ve got to see that my women do.”

He had gone to bed, and Joyce and I were emptying ashtrays when the back door suddenly opened, and Joyce’s husband called cheerfully from the kitchen. For a second Joyce did not respond. Then she answered his greeting as cheerfully.

“Isn’t it nice you’re home,” she said. “Kate’s just about to desert me, and I was longing for a nightcap.”

“I’m glad you could keep Joyce company,” he said to me, coming into the room. “Have you had a nice weekend?”

“Very,” I said.

“But don’t be polite now,” Joyce said. “You go on to bed, and I’ll do the explaining.”

I stood, uncertain what to do.

“Do you want to take Andy a nightcap to bed?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “Well, good night.”

“Good night.”

I stood outside the guest bedroom door for a moment, but I could hear Joyce and her husband getting ready to come upstairs. I knocked quietly.

“Come in,” Andy called. He was sitting up in bed reading. “What’s up?”

“Joyce’s husband’s home.”

“Oh.” He thought a moment. “Well, come on to bed then.”

“Andy, I’m terribly sorry I—”

“Just be grateful I’m here. At least nobody’s going to break your nose.”

There was another quick knock on the door, and Joyce was handing my suitcase to me.

“God! Aren’t we lucky?” she said and was gone.

Andrew had pulled the second pillow out from behind him and moved to one side of the bed. He went on reading while I undressed, but he’d put his book away when I got back from the bathroom.

“I always meant to ask you if you slept with your teeth in,” he said, grinning.

“Just for special occasions,” I said.

I got into bed, trying to be neither stiff nor intrusive. Andrew turned out the light, and we lay listening to the sounds of the house.

“Well,” Andrew said in a quiet, but very wakeful voice, “we’ve done everything else together.” He took my hand, waited, then turned toward me. “Why not this, Kate?”

I understood the offer. It was no more than that. One gesture of reluctance from me and he would have turned kindly away. I did not make it. And perhaps curiosity, as much as the sad ridiculousness of the circumstance, required me. It was not physically unpleasant. It was curiously simple. And afterwards our bodies were related enough for sleep. Andrew slept almost at once. I lay awake, refusing the moral and emotional complexities that threatened to make important what I was sure was not.

I was awake when Joyce got up at six-thirty. I tried not to disturb Andrew as I got out of bed, but he woke.

“Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’ll go in with Joyce. You can drive my car in later.”

“What about her husband?”

“No problem.”

“All right,” he said and turned over.

Joyce and I didn’t attempt conversation until we were in the car and on our way to work.

“Silly damned thing, leaving the men asleep while we go off to earn the bread,” she said. “I wonder if they’ll have breakfast together.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Andy must have been surprised.”

“Mmm.”

“Sorry to throw you at him that way, darling, but it was lucky, wasn’t it? Another half hour—”

“You didn’t know he was coming?”

“Of course not. He told me he probably wouldn’t be back until Tuesday.”

“Oh.”

“You’re not mad at me, are you, Kate?”

“No.”

“It was a good weekend, wasn’t it? Except for last night. I had such lovely plans for last night.”

Andrew was in no more cheerful and sociable a mood than I by the time I got home for dinner. For the first hour we simply tried not to get in each other’s way.

“Joyce’s husband is quite a nice guy,” Andrew said finally as we sat at the dinner table.

“I thought you’d like him,” I said.

“I did.”

The assertion lay between us for a moment before we both tried to pick it up at once. Andrew hesitated in automatic mannerliness. But I did, too.

“I think it’s sort of a mess, Kate. Not just that he’s a nice guy Not just that. Your job’s involved. Why Joyce, anyway?”

“I don’t explain and defend well at the same time. They’re two different activities.”

“But why do you always get yourself into a sexual mess?”

“You’re a great one to talk!”

“Well, you’re a friend of Ramona’s—or are supposed to be. Why did you let me do it?”

“Really, Andy, that’s one cliché too many.”

“A home truth,” Andrew said, “but you wouldn’t know much about that. You know how to use people and be used by them. Right out of the manual for social workers and humanitarians. It’s too bad there’s no course in being a human being. You’ve never cared enough about anybody to be really ugly or really beautiful. You’re too damned tidy to think you’ve betrayed Ramona because it never occurred to you that you ought to be loyal. And, of course, making love with me matters so little to you that being upset by it seems to you a cliché.”

“And what does it mean to you? Nothing humanitarian about it on your side? No small hope that you might have begun a conversion?”

“Thank God, girl, I don’t suffer from any fear of kindness. I didn’t want to do anything
for
you. I simply wanted you… for myself. That’s probably ugly, but it’s got some clean beauty to it, too. It’s at least part of what love’s all about. Have you ever wanted and taken somebody you also loved? No. You don’t love Joyce. So why should you feel guilty about her husband? You don’t love me, so why should you feel guilty about Ramona?”

“And you love me, and so you do feel guilty?”

“I love Ramona.”

“I see.”

“Why don’t you hit back, Kate? Or cry? Or be unreasonably angry? Don’t you really care at all?”

“For what?”

“For me. Am I really beneath your contempt?”

“Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps you are.”

“Why? Am I really so inferior to you?”

“No, Andy, you’re superior to me—born male, white, handsome, intelligent, and rich. Perhaps with so much, I would be as reckless… as loving… as ugly. My own sins are simply the ones I can afford. Maybe they don’t include either love or contempt. Except in very rare, extravagant moments with you.”

“You’re not poor, Kate. You’re stingy”

“I agree. Monk should have got something more for that bag of liver.”

We were too shocked to stop, too miserable to be very accurate, accusing each other at random. You got involved in it. So did Peter. And poor Monk was set above us like a martyred referee.

“This is just too stupid,” I finally protested in the tears he had accused me of being incapable of. “Tearing each other apart doesn’t help any.”

He stopped then and stared at nothing. “I don’t know,” he said finally “Maybe it does. We’re such shits, you and I, such real shits.”

The word from Andrew had power because he never used it. For that moment I shared his despair, never mind that it was too easy, a gagging comfort that the sickness was communal. The story, as I would have told it about all of us at that time, would have been even more unbecoming than it is now. Shits, the lot of us. So much for your “artists,” “scholars,” “young saints.”

We were listening to old Deller records when the phone rang. It was Monk.

“Dan had an idea that you might know where Andy is,” she said. “I’ve got to reach him. His father died this morning.”

“I do know where he is,” I said. “I’ll get in touch with him and have him call you back.”

Andrew would have had no defense against the news at any time, but at that moment he was so raw he reacted immediately. He wept. It was a hard weeping that went on a long time. I wondered if it was the kind of weeping Doris had done. When it was over, he telephoned Monk. I put him on a plane for Calgary at one in the morning.

I spent the rest of the night writing two letters to Joyce, one an official, the other a personal, resignation. She accepted the first with an official acknowledgment; she accepted the second with no comment at all. She was, perhaps, as relieved as I was.

T
HAT WAS AN HISTORIC
Thanksgiving, wasn’t it? I can’t recall that we had anything to be thankful for ourselves, which should have made it a truly religious festival for counting basic blessings, but we were not much in the mood. I never find it easy to identify with the Pilgrim fathers, and you were, just then, absolutely paranoid about them, one of their descendants having descended so recently and harshly on your household and heart. Perhaps I could have been thankful that the landing of the Pilgrim mother had taken place the day before I arrived, but I was so angry when I heard about it that I could only wish I’d been there with poison darts or whatever tokens of welcome my foremothers had on that occasion. (I am willfully ignorant about my half-heritage.)

Typically you hadn’t warned (should I say promised?) me what the occasion was meant to be. In the first confusion of explanation, I gathered that you and John Kerry had planned to announce your engagement at a party scheduled for Saturday evening. John Kerry’s mother had been invited. She arrived from Louisville on Wednesday afternoon. She departed on Wednesday evening, accompanied by a disbelieving but dazed son. By the time I arrived on Thursday, your mother had retired to her rooms, leaving her secretary to telephone canceled invitations.

“I just can’t believe it,” you said over and over again.

“But what happened?”

“It was all perfectly pleasant through cocktails and dinner. Oh, a bit stiff with Mother being impressive and Mrs. Kerry not being impressed, but John and I had expected that. Then over coffee and brandy in the living room, Mrs. Kerry started talking about the old families of America. At first I didn’t think anything about it. I mean, the Kerry family don’t have money. John’s father ran off with somebody else years ago. So his mother needs ancestors, and she’s got lots. So she was betting ancestors against affluence—okay. But she kept using the word ‘blood,’ and she was obviously getting excited. John tried to interrupt her a couple of times, not rudely, just making a light remark, but she wasn’t having any of that. Finally she said to him, ‘You let me handle this, John.’ Before anyone could say anything, she turned to me and said, ‘And don’t think you’ll fool anyone with Christian baptism or changing your name. You’re the sort of Jew even plastic surgery wouldn’t fix.’ I told her I wasn’t trying to fool anyone. I’d been baptized because I’d accepted Christ as my salvation. She said that Christ couldn’t save me, and, if there was anything more disgusting than a murderer of Christ, it was one who then tried to hide in the Church from the consequences. John tried to protest. So did Mother, but neither of them got more than two words into a sentence before she said to Mother, ‘And, looking at her, I wonder how many niggers there’ve been in the wood pile.’ That did it. Mother went right off her nut. She started calling John a gold digger, his mother poor white trash. She ordered them both out of the house, but not before Mrs. Kerry called me a mongrel and Mother a bitch.”