Lion House,The (12 page)

"Jo gave us them," Petey said, crumbs spilling to the floor.

"You know you're not supposed to eat sweets before dinner. It's one of the few-and-far-between rules around here!"

"Jo gave us them," he repeated.

"Listen!" she told him, as the others stood by looking apologetic, but continuing to munch. "When you crayoned on the walls did I stop you? When you took my records over to Bootsy Shea's house and their baby vomited all over them did I punish you? Did I give you hell when you melted five pounds of modeling wax in the oven without a pan? No! Why? You were expressing yourselves! Where else can you get freedom like that?
But you can't ruin your appetite before dinner.
When
I
do the cooking, I'm not going to end up throwing everything into the garbage can!"

"She's sore," Petey explained to me.

"Yes. I'm sore!"

"Jo's not sore," he said quietly.

She squared her shoulders and glowered at me. "Look," she said, "I know they don't stress food at that Cannibals' Kindergarten you work for; but around
this
place nobody ruins their appetite before dinner. Get it?" She paused. "I mean
—nobody ruins
his
appetite," she added.

I sat with them through dinner. Marc hacked away at the steak for a while and then gave up. "I told you not to put it in so early," he said.

Frannie looked up stonily. "For ten years you've been yelling because I'm always late. So now I do something early and that's no good either!"

"Oh, Jesus," he sighed. "What has putting a steak in the oven at the right time got to do with getting to theatre in the middle of the second act? Or missing planes, for God's sake?"

"A lot," she told him. "It's
precisely
the same kind of thing in the unconscious, and you're just being negative. You're
resisting
me! Why do you have the need to
resist
me?"

"Face it," he said. "There are times when you're totally resistable."

"It was my fault," I told Frannie as we did the dishes. "If I'd called you wouldn't have waited and the steak would have been fine. Why didn't I tell him that? It was my fault."

"Yeah," she said. "You tell him. Go tell Christ Judas was innocent!"

"Oh, stop it. You're madly in love with the guy!"

"Well, of course I am!" She looked up, aghast at my naiveté.

"You
have
to be madly in love with him to be in love with him at
all!"

I thought about that later, and I decided that she had it the wrong way around. It was far more likely Frannie herself with whom you had to be madly in love to even put up with her. And yet, so many people did. It wasn't just people like Jeri either
—who kept Frannie's phone busier than a switchboard inviting her to things, asking for opinions, pouring, pouring, pouring into a willing ear; or like Marian, pledged by some strange and vengeful umbilical vow to keep coming back for more. It was others: like that marvelous milkman, for instance, who rearranged the icebox every time he came so that the new milk would be in the back and the older milk up front. And the delivery boy from the butcher's who put the meat into the basement freezer. And the man from the diaper service. I never saw him because he belonged to another era; but I heard about him. One day he changed Petey's diaper to get it into the outgoing load while Frannie played him a record of
Summertime,
which was his favorite song...

Well, maybe I'm wrong about their having been in love with her. Maybe it was just the funny feeling she gave you that made you want to take care of her.

And of course it wasn't that way with everyone. There were people in Meade's Manor who had their reservations about her; and those others I mentioned earlier who had met her through Wingo and written her off as America's Number One Oddball. To say nothing of Marian, bondages notwithstanding, who, if she'd ever found Frannie burning in Hell, would have tossed her a can of kerosene to keep things going.

"How are you?" she asked me that same evening of the steak fight, when Marc had left us in the den and gone upstairs. It was a question I was getting used to.

"Fine."

"You're not too
—lonely?"

"Don't be silly."

She pulled a bottle out of the cabinet and I got the ice and soda. When the drinks were mixed she stretched out on the couch. I took the big beige chair, kicked off my shoes, and drew my knees up. It was one of Frannie's poses; but it belonged to a mood rather than to an age.

"It's important to you," she said.

"What is?"

"Oh, you know. It isn't going to be easy for you without
—a
man.
Some women don't care, but with women like us
—"

"I'll manage."

"Will you?"

"Of course."

"Do you know anybody? Some nice, sweet guy floating around loose anywhere?"

"My God, Fran!" I said. "Give me a little time! The body isn't even cold yet!"

"There's Bill Brecker," she went on. "That doctor you met at the Sondheims'. You know
—I told you: we were friends when we were kids in Chicago, He's really a love, and Jeri told me she heard he's getting a divorce."

"What's wrong?"

"Who knows? His wife wasn't there that night. I guess they were already separated."

"Do you know her?"

"Briefly. Quite attractive
—but a Food Chain heiress, and it couldn't have been too easy for a twelve-grand-a-year researcher to handle a set-up like that. Altruistic M.D.s don't look too hot driving around in Cadillac convertibles their wives have paid for. But listen: he's
so
nice, and you know it takes a certain amount of guts to give up the plush life for a one-room apartment and an Idea. I could call him up and ask him over for dinner!"

Her impatience to get me bedded down struck me as slightly overemphasized, if generous. I lowered my knees and crossed my legs. "Look," I said firmly, "just drop the whole subject. It's my problem and I'll take care of it. Why do
you
have to come to my rescue?"

She drained her glass and set it down on the floor. Then she lay back on the couch again and closed her eyes. "Because it was I," she answered slowly, "who did it to you."

"That's ridiculous!" I exploded. "You did
nothing
to me!
He
did it to
you!
I told you a long while ago, didn't I? You're Number Twenty-Five! He had it all worked out in his head the minute he laid eyes on you that first night at Wingo! You had about as much chance of beating that gun as a sitting duck! Stop blaming yourself!"

"I'm responsible," she said.

"You're not!"

"Oh, yes: I am."

And then the door opened and Marc stood in it, clutching an old bathrobe about him. "What are you two going to do?" he asked. "Flap your gums all
night!"

"We're not flapping our gums," Frannie answered. "We're
talking."

"You're talking all right. Don't you ever let up?"

"Number Three on the Cliche Docket," she sighed. "One: women wear silly hats. Two: women are lousy drivers. Three: women talk too much."

"It's past midnight."

"So it's past midnight. What am I
—still
growing
or something?"

"Well, I'm going to sleep."

"I thought you had."

"I was reading."

She put her cigarette out. "All right," she said. "Go on. I'll be up in a minute." But after he left she stayed down a good while longer, and we got around to one of her favorite topics: Psychoanalysis for the Masses. Wars, she believed, were the direct outcome, magnified a million-fold, of the individual neurosis; hostility could not be quelled on an international scale while it continued to fester unconsciously in the separate self. She was just starting to tell me about an analyst named Helen Paige whom she'd heard at a lecture some years before when the phone rang.

"Who could be calling at this hour?" she asked; and then, brightening considerably. "Hey! Do you think maybe my mother died?"

"It's probably Brad," I said.

"Don't answer it!"

But she had already lifted the receiver and said hello.

"It
is!"
she whispered with a stricken look. "He wants to know if you're here!"

"Hang up."

"No. Here
—you take it."

"Hang up!"

She began to, but stopped. "I can't, Jo!" she said, pushing the mouthpiece into a couch cushion. "I just can't. He's got to know where you are sooner or later, doesn't he?"

I got up and took the receiver from her and smashed it into its cradle.

"He'll think
I
did it!" she cried out. "What did you have to go and do a thing like that for? He'll think I did it!"

"What of it?"

"I just can't hang up on anybody, Jo! It makes me sick to my stomach! I used to have to do it to my father..."

"Your father?"

"I was seven then, and they'd just gotten the divorce. So he was supposed to send alimony every week
—or anyway,
give
it to me in an envelope when I went to meet him on Sundays with my nurse. Well, he gave it for a couple of weeks, and then he began to forget it; or maybe he just didn't care. I don't know. He didn't have much, really; he was real big on tennis, but pretty low on making money; I guess he figured it didn't matter because my mother's parents were loaded. So anyhow, when he stopped handing it over, my mother got sore as hell and wouldn't let him see me. So then he started calling me up instead. But she was furious and she kept making me hang up on him! Well, now it's years later and the guy's even
dead,
but I swear, Jo
—I can actually vomit at the thought of cracking a phone down on anyone!"

"Honest to Christ," I said, "if you don't knock off with that Freud crap, I'll go mad!"

She calmed. "You
are
mad," she said flatly. "That's why you're so
afraid
of Freud."

I groaned. And then suddenly I felt terribly tired. "I'm sorry," I muttered, not caring any more what I said or how I said it. "Forgive me: I shouldn't have tried to implicate an Innocent Bystander..."

It hit her squarely, and she left.

When she was gone I sat around a bit and had another drink. Then I browsed through the bookcases for something to take upstairs with me. But I had already read most of the stuff she collected because she had wanted me to: the Capote, the McCullers; the Cheever and Salinger; the Stafford and McCarthy; the Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Colette; the light verse and the sonnets and the love songs; and the First Novels of the young and the sensitive and the brilliant and the miserable.

Turning away I saw an old magazine lying on her desk. I picked it up and thumbed through it. And of course, as surely I must have expected to, I found a poem by Frannie:

My soul is an open wound washed with rain;
and even the brush of sparrow wings brings me pain.
Chartreuse April
and mornings slow with sleep
and robinsong and your sweet touch
make me weep.
Love me! Love me!
the little green voices cry.
Oh, I shall love you, love you, Love!
And even of this I die.

It didn't help my mood any. In fact, it helped to push me even lower. When I went up to my room, empty-handed, I stopped to look in at Blair. She was all spread out on top of the sheet like a human hieroglyphic. I bent to touch her; and when I did, something made me lift her up into my arms. She didn't fully waken; just murmured a little sleeping sound. I kissed her cheek. The sun had already darkened her skin and streaked more blonde through her pony tail.

I carried her into my room and put her gently into my bed: far on the side so that I wouldn't disturb her when I got in. But after we'd lain there for a while she turned towards me unconsciously and inched her way over.

I fell asleep with my mouth against her hair.

It was on the Saturday of that first week that Frannie became incredibly ambitious and drove the children down to the Central Park zoo. Arising at an hour which to her must surely have seemed the crack of dawn, she shoved everyone into denim shorts and raced them indigestibly through my beautiful breakfast of apple fritters.

"Who wants to go anyway?" Stu scowled. "We've been there forty hundred times!"

"It's educational!" Frannie answered sternly. "Maybe you'll learn something!"

"We learn enough in school," Blair said.

"It's Spring," Frannie insisted. "The mating season is on."

"But we
know
about mating!" Stu argued.

"All you know about is
people!"
Frannie stormed. "About the birds and bees you know absolutely nothing!"

Petey was more tractable than the others; but he made it quite clear that he had no intention of spending the whole day in
there,
looking at
them.

"Who's
them?"
I asked.

"My thing," she answered. "You know: lions."

I was alone in the house. I spent a good while typing some more resumes for agencies; I even called that nice woman who had been so encouraging a few days before. She hadn't been able to get me placed yet, but she was still hopeful.

Marc came back from the office early because it was Saturday and we fixed a couple of drinks. Among the fourteen boxes of Jello on Frannie's kitchen shelf (her mother, I had heard, during one of her rare visits had announced to Jeri Perloff that anyone who had more than six boxes of Jello at one time was possessed of a Warped Mind) I found an unlikely jar of whole-grain Russian caviar. So Marc and I toasted some bread in small triangles and had ourselves a creditable feast.

I'd never been alone with him for that length of time before and I was looking forward to a nice old heart-to-heart through which, in some way, we might reach each other. But if I thought a few Scotches, caviar, and an empty house would enable me to pass through the gates of that quiet reserve, I was wrong.

"What thoughts?" I asked unwisely, when the conversation had stumbled into silence for the third time.

"No thoughts, doctor," he answered with an enigmatic smile.