This Is Not for You (30 page)

“Oh, I think so,” I said, trying not to sound uneasy. “If Andy gets his money problems straightened out now—”

“They’re straightened. The will was very generous.”

“So—”

“What does money cure?” you demanded. “I mean, really?”

“I hope a lot, but let’s not get back to that. Why don’t we have a game of chess or listen to records or something?”

I was sorry not to be able to talk about God, but I simply couldn’t. You weren’t really interested in doctrine or history. You were reading the lives of the mystics and martyrs, and you had collected a vocabulary and imagery which were embarrassingly sentimental. I hadn’t been raised in a hard faith. I don’t suppose any Episcopalian is, but my father treated ritual with more intelligence than emotion. Being in love with God, the only relationship you considered, made me uncomfortable. I was suspicious. I’d been free to be suspicious of all your other enthusiasms. This unnatural respect, inhibition, made real talking impossible. I couldn’t settle to critical gossip about Monk and Andrew, either. I was still too rawly involved and ashamed. As for John, I felt required to support him, but I hadn’t met him. And, though nothing you told me about him gave me any real opportunity to be critical of him, I still kept coming up to responses I knew I should not make. Embarrassed, I hid in chess, in music, until by the time I left for Washington on Sunday, we were nearly shy with each other and sorry about it. There was still no word from John.

I spent that Christmas alone in Washington. I could have hurried my packing and been with you, but I hadn’t the courage to go through your first Christian Christmas, which would be literal with love. I preferred to remember the tree full of pagan promise, on which birth was still represented with Easter eggs and from which no shadow of the cross was cast. In any case, John was with you.

He had accepted first your mother’s apology and then her invitation. Meanwhile he wrote to you, as careful as a lawyer in his phrasing, releasing you but not himself from the commitment of the engagement. He did not mention his mother.

By the time I arrived on January, John had gone back to Louisville to pack up his belongings. He had decided to accept an offer of partnership in a practice in Boston, the money for which was an early wedding present from your mother. The wedding itself had been postponed until June.

“He said he needed to get settled,” you explained, “but I suppose he hopes that maybe, given a little time, his mother may be resigned enough to come. Anyway, there’s no reason to rush. As John says, we aren’t exactly eager teenagers.”

“And your mother is resigned.”

“Oh yes. Once he said he had decided to practice in Boston, she was fine. She could pay for it. That was hard on him. He wanted to borrow the money from her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She told him accepting it would prove that he’d forgiven her. So he did. He can’t practice anywhere but Louisville without money. It doesn’t really make any difference. Once we’re married, Mother’s going to turn over all my money from my father to me anyway, so this really meant just having some of it sooner. John’s pretty solemn about money. It’s a good thing one of us is. And it’s nice that, for once, it’s going to be useful.”

Why did I listen, suspicious? John Kerry was a man with a profession. He was obviously not like Christopher Marlowe Smith or Charlie or any of the others who had never had any intention of supporting themselves, much less anyone else. If he asked for money, it was to make a world that would be possible for you to live in, free of the social capital he had depended on. He was willing to borrow it. He was willing to desert his mother and his world. He was in no great hurry. Maybe, in John Kerry’s position, I would have been in a hurry. But he was being protective of you, careful. And surely I should be able to understand that.

“A happier time for us all,” your mother said, greeting me warmly.

“It is all right, is it?”

“I think so, Katherine. And what mother can really resist a June wedding? I started dreaming about Esther’s before I stopped dreaming about my own. I’ve had a very rude, very dear note from Andrew Belshaw saying that he intends to pay for the bridesmaids’ dresses.”

“Are they back then?”

“Yes, they’ve been back in town since two days after Christmas. Didn’t Esther tell you? They’re coming for dinner tomorrow night.”

Andrew’s partner, Dan Karno, had also been invited. You were sorry that John couldn’t be there, suggested seriously, until both your mother and I laughed at you, that we set a place for him anyway, but were finally comforted by the promise of another dinner party particularly for him when he got back to New York.

There is comfort and protection in formality, whatever else it stifles. I was glad of an evening dress, of the maid who helped me into it, of my mother’s sapphires. I was glad to be a guest of the household so that I could move forward to greet Monk and Andrew and Dan when they arrived with ritual kissing and handshaking, determined by the length rather than the intimacy of relationship. I knew it would take more than an evening like this for Andrew and me to reestablish ourselves in customary friendship, but it was a beginning.

Monk, who might have been shy of a party less declaredly costume, could burlesque this occasion with real, if slightly hectic, success.

“One should never dine with friends in street clothes,” she announced to us all, then confided to me in a whisper that raised the butler’s lapels but carefully not his eyebrows, “I even bought a Maidenform bra. Isn’t it grand to be rich?”

Andrew smiled at her, not with the young indulgence he once had, but more easily. He looked very tired, but he did not seem so. He and Dan together divided their attention among the four women with such ease that we must certainly have been a pleasure to them. Dan was particularly protective of you, as if he sensed your new, engaged vulnerability. Andrew, who had found the right balance of impudence and flattery with your mother, talked with her about the gallery, letting Monk describe their discovery of new Canadian painters when they went through Vancouver. And I found myself on Dan’s other hand, postponed a little perhaps, but not ignored. We were all enjoying being well behaved because, with the exception of Monk, it was a thing we knew how to do and weren’t often enough so encouraged.

At dinner Mrs. Woolf directed our attention to topics obviously already chosen. Monk and Andrew were asked to tell us about their trip to California to visit the Ridleys, a subject which allowed them to entertain us with a plan they had made to marry off Andrew’s sisters to Monk’s brothers in an orgy of mismatching that was sometimes diabolically inventive. Once we had sketches of each of the characters, it was a game we could all play There was one sister left over, which led us to choose a brother deserving of two wives until Dan offered himself, subject to discussions of dowry as a solution. Before we had strained or exhausted that kind of good humor, Mrs. Woolf shifted our attention to several shows in New York.

“I wish someone could explain to me all these twisted pipes and engines and wrecked cars,” she said.

Dan had some trouble with them himself. Andrew talked about the problem of innovation, the influence of professional speculators. You spoke with too much defensive energy about the right of the artist to choose his own raw materials. I tried to suggest, less personally, that economics might have something to do with it. Traditional materials were so expensive that perhaps the dump was the only source for some sculptors.

“But you all seem to be agreeing that you don’t really like it,” Monk said suddenly “Lissa loves the dump. I don’t mean I take her there on purpose for an outing, but in California where you feed the ducks is next to the town dump. Lissa was much more interested in the bits of glass and bottle tops and old bumpers than she was in the ducks. She kept saying, ‘Pretty, pretty’ And I looked at it again and thought, ‘Well, maybe it is.’ It’s just that all of us feel guilty about the waste and the mess—”

“But the artists aren’t telling us it’s pretty,” I said. “This kind of thing is social satire, surely, a comment on planned obsolescence. We’re not supposed to like it, are we?”

“Some of it doesn’t seem to be satirical,” Andrew said. “That’s what troubles me. It’s all right for Lissa to think a Coke bottle top is pretty, but once you know what a Coca-Cola culture means, you ought to be satirical.”

“Why?” Monk demanded without belligerence but with a kind of bravery to challenge Andrew that I hadn’t seen before. “Being critical isn’t the only way to live in the world.”

“Like the crucifixion,” you said. “It’s one of the ugliest acts in history, but in painting and sculpture it’s often not just tragic but beautiful.”

“Do you think we’re getting religious insight into smashed cars?” Andrew asked.

“I like that,” Monk said. “I’m sure it’s time we did. After all, it’s the way a lot of us are going to die.”

“There’s a lot of talk,” Dan said, “about the significance of destruction, the aesthetics of destruction.”

“I don’t like the nihilism of it,” I said. “It frightens me.”

“Understanding destruction doesn’t have to be nihilistic,” you said. “That’s what you’ve never understood. It can be part of the cycle. How can you be reborn until you know what it is to die?”

“Some kinds of knowledge I don’t risk,” I said.

“But it’s not all dark, it’s not all destruction,” Monk insisted. “We’ve been taught to be suspicious of every bright object. I like the lights of the city. I like the colors in the supermarket. What’s so dreadful about Coca-Cola?”

“Well,” Andrew said, smiling, “you’ll keep us all from being comfortably reactionary, but that’s sociologically all wrong. Young mothers are supposed to be the conservative force, not the avant-garde.”

“Come on, Andy,” you said, “motherhood has nothing to do with it.”

“It certainly does,” Monk said, refusing your support. “I’m talking about what Lissa knows about the dump.”

It was a conversation that went on nearly all evening. Mrs. Woolf commented only occasionally, but she listened with real interest, with a kind of proprietary pleasure. She was offering the evening to you as proof of her ability to produce it. Perhaps she knew, too, that art was the one subject that could keep you from talking too much about religion, a subject about which the rest of us shared her nervousness.

I got not much more sense of Dan that evening than I had the first time I met him. I simply knew that I liked him, not only because he liked all of us, but that was important. When he heard that I was looking for an apartment, he suggested one in his own building that he knew was going to be available and offered to find out about it for me.

“It would be a good location for you,” he said, “and it would be nice for me.”

It turned out to be nice for both of us in those months I spent in New York. We got into the habit of having dinner together about once a week. I went to show openings with him and to the theater. We were more than socially convenient for each other and our paired friends. We were really companionable, for, though we rarely talked very personally, there was an assumed knowledge that made our friendship possible. We knew how to be discreet with each other without explanations.

Before Dan and I were accustomed enough to each other to admit shared reactions, I met John Kerry, the man who believed in himself. He was a good-looking man, but he was not attractive. He was too spare, his features economical, his body in size and strength utilitarian. And, as he was made, so he behaved with never a wasteful gesture or word, never an emotional extravagance. Yet none of these details which were characteristic of him made him seem either dull or ungenerous because the one imbalance in his nature, his nerves, sang in the wires of his voice, splintered the light in his eyes, and made his stillness of body a demanding tension in the room. I have never met anyone who gave so strong an impression of being under control. My own willfulness next to his was almost comically insignificant, but we recognized each other, refused to react, and withdrew to our assigned roles.

Never let it be said that a southern gentleman, for whom the southern lady is an idiot goddess, doesn’t know how to deal with an emancipated woman from the West or the North. He treats her exactly the way he treats his southern lady, and she loves it, not aware that the gentle deference is designed to turn her into an idiot goddess gradually; protection and admiration are habit-forming drugs. I was, of course, in no real danger. You, I could see, had already succumbed. I couldn’t resent it. It was too becoming. But how could John Kerry see you so absolutely open to him, so full of desire, and be in no hurry? Will. He wanted it that way. I had to teach myself all over again to be in the same room with you.

That is, I think, the sense I had of John when I first met him, which had, as I look back on it, more to do with you than with him. Perhaps my view of him was always unnaturally colored by your response to him. When you talked about him, you spoke of no more than the spare, practical, confident man he was, but, when you were with him, you were so physically tuned to his tension, so desiring of his will, that I assigned him a sexual power I did not feel. Once I tried to explain my reaction to Sandy.

“And why should you have expected to feel it, anyway? You’re not attracted to men,” she said, by way of comforting me.

“Not exactly true,” I said. “I’m attracted. How I choose to react is another matter.”

“You’ll always insist on the myth of bisexuality, even when it’s not to your advantage,” Sandy said with resigned good humor. “I only saw her at the wedding, and, if that was any example of how she’d been for months, I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with it. I don’t even remember what he looked like.”

In any case, after the first evening I spent with you and John, your marriage to him seemed to me inevitable and therefore right. When later I had moments of violent reaction against him, it wasn’t difficult to explain them away as pure sexual jealousy. For one thing, I admired him. If he sometimes seemed frighteningly rational, cold in his judgments, he was always sound and never belligerent or ungenerous in an argument. Compared to Andrew, for instance, who could make such extravagant speeches, John seemed so much more trustworthy, so much more responsible. But he was never condescending to Andrew, and he often gave in to an almost boyish laughter when Andrew had taken a point beyond sane debate.