After Claude (17 page)

“You’re too much.” He released my hand and smiled his damaged smile.

I carefully placed my hand in my lap, afraid to leave it on its own. It seemed to be rebelling. Left to its own devices, my hand threatened to crawl back to Roger and make a separate peace. My heart closed with a disappointed thud, and I felt my body shake me.

“You’re not angry at me?” I said, seized by this idiotic impulse to apologize.

“Angry?” he answered in astonishment, as if that word had no place in our shared vocabulary. “Baby, I’m impressed with you. I could tell that you had a special sense of yourself, a private brand of self-preservation. It’s a miracle to come across a girl like you alone in this hotel. You are alone, aren’t you?”

I nodded quickly, so as not to interrupt the outpourings of his bottled-up feelings.

“I ask myself, why would a beautiful girl like you be alone? There’s only one possibility. You haven’t given in. You haven’t compromised because you can’t compromise.”

“Why can’t I compromise?” I breathlessly asked.

“There are no compromises for your kind, baby. You’re in a life-and-death struggle; When you open up to someone, you open all the way. You hold nothing back. You need a strong man, not the weaklings, the uptight specimens this society calls men. And I doubt if you’ve found him yet. Once you find him, it will be for always. You’ll pour your life into him. You’ll be two loving bodies serving one mind. You can’t risk pouring that river of love into the wrong man. For a woman of your intensity to open herself to an ordinary man would be worse than suicide or murder. You haven’t murdered anyone, have you?” he jested with me.

“No.” I laughed. “But I’ve been tempted.”

“I’m hip,” he said, pulling in the reins of his excitement. I waited for him to continue, but he just sat there sternly, lost in his own complex thoughts.

“I’ve tried to compromise,” I timidly admitted. “Frequently.”

He unconsciously placed his hands on the back of my neck under my hair and kneaded my shoulders. I felt my face flush, and an uncontrollable shudder shook my head.

“It’s awful, awful. The terrible isolation of integrity.”

“No, sweet baby,” he put his mouth against my ear. “I’m not angry at you.”

His hand went up my neck, his strong fingers massaging the base of my skull, and incredibly, my throat and chest became choked with a scream. It was as though he had found the hidden spring that opened the Chinese box.

“Let go,” he urged me, but I didn’t dare and strangled the sound. Only now I knew, as though I had heard it, the solid mass of sound that was lodged inside of me. I didn’t feel frightened of Roger, who couldn’t imagine the effects of what he was doing, but of myself. I wanted desperately to feel normal again. No sooner had I wished the wish than I noticed I was paralyzed from the waist down.

“I can’t walk,” I cried, which was a strange announcement to make, considering I was sitting in a chair.

“Christ.” Roger pulled away from me. “Look at you. You’re tied up like the Man of Rubber. Here.” He straightened my legs, which were braided under my full weight, and briskly rubbed the rigor mortis out of them. He laid my legs across his lap, my bare feet dangling out of my bell-bottoms. I lit another cigarette to avoid having to look at Roger.

“Comfortable?” he asked, absentmindedly playing with the soles of my feet.

“That tickles,” I lied, because why tell him it felt as though buckets of warm water were pouring down the insides of my thighs?

“You’re just a bundle of beautiful nerves,” he told me. “Beautiful, starved nerves.”

“How come you know so much about me?” I shyly asked, since I was becoming increasingly aware of his perfect batting average.

“Maybe it’s because I’ve been studying you all my life,” he answered with a tight-lipped smile, which was my favorite smile thus far.

“That’s silly. We just met, remember?”

“Did we, or have we met over and over again in the wrong places at the wrong time? Haven’t we met but not been ready for each other?”

I personally feel I was born ready, but you can’t keep correcting genuine effort.

He wove his fingers between my toes as if he were clasping a beloved hand. “Haven’t we worked to perfect ourselves for this meeting?”

“I don’t know,” I said stupidly, since I suddenly found myself doing my thinking in my toes.

“You’re right,” he corrected himself with his uncanny precision. “Women are more complete than men. You’re born with perfect knowledge. Men are given the keys, but women contain the treasures. For men to become truly men, we must first attain the female side of our nature. Then we can hope to reach your treasures. Men must work while women wait.”

“That’s more like it,” I agreed.

“But how many women despair? How many countless women try to do the work men must do for themselves and, in the end, bury their treasures?”

“Most, I would say.”

“But those few who haven’t, those isolated few.” He pressed my foot between his hands as if in prayer, gallantly refraining from naming names. “Those few survivors wait, in perfect patience.”

“I’ve occasionally become impatient,” I confessed.

“Not really, or you wouldn’t be the person I see in front of me, a miraculously untouched woman.”

I took Roger far too seriously to come sailing into his life under false colors.

“You know, until yesterday I was living with a man. A French movie director. I left him.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. A highly regarded director. He had all the trappings of a real man, wealth, refinement, good looks.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if that sniveling rat Claude would ever describe me in such generous terms.

“It was terrible. He loved me, or at least he thought he loved me. I suppose these men who haven’t, as you say, done their homework are capable of some degree of love. But such a tyrannical love, words fail me. If I went shopping, he imagined the grocer was panting after me in the streets. If we went to a lousy movie, he thought everyone in the audience was watching me, not the screen. Did you by any chance see an Italian movie about Christ and his fag cronies?”

Roger, his attention unashamedly riveted on me, said no.

“Oh well, it doesn’t really matter. You saved yourself a buck. It got to a point where my boy friend became jealous of me even talking to a woman, if you can imagine. I was expected to sit next to him in restaurants like the Sphinx. He finally dragged one of these women home, and believe me she was your typical buried treasure. Dragged her into our home that I personally cooked and cleaned in, to prove that one: she was after him not me, which I strongly doubt, key or no key, and two: I’d better pay undivided attention to his selfish sexual proclivities. My God, when I think of his sexual peculiarities! I began to feel more like an industry than a woman.”

Roger sat so gravely, I was afraid he might be measuring his own worth against that of the debonair lover I had inadvertently described. But was I expected to conceal my true identity forever? In a way you couldn’t imagine Roger in a restaurant, no less behind a megaphone ordering stars around. Maybe in a shirt and tie or a turtleneck sweater, but not with that bare, sparsely haired, gleaming white chest. I impulsively put my hand on Roger’s soft chest and stroked him, as if I would stroke his pain away.

He grabbed my hand and held it pressed against him. “Oh, you touched me.”

I wanted to assure him that I’d touched much worse, but on the heels of my painful confessions, that smacked of cold comfort.

What I did say was, “Roger, I promise you if Claude broke into this room this instant and fell down on his knees in front of me …” But that was a promise I was not obliged to finish. Speak of coincidences. No sooner were those prophetic words out of my mouth than we all heard a tapping on the door.

“Who the hell is that?” Roger pulled my hand off his chest as if it were a branding iron.

“Oh, Roger,” Clarissa’s voice drifted over from the TV party, “it must be Libby. Remember, Daddy, you sent for her?”

“Right. I forgot all about her. Make sure it’s her, Clarissa, before you open up.”

Roger jabbed a finger at me. “You keep your mouth shut. Not a word, understand? You’re an Albanian. You don’t speak American. Dig?”

“Sure, Roger,” I said, calculating the penance he’d have to undergo for using such an abusive tone of voice.

“Okay, let them in. I want everyone to cool it. Aaron, no more bongos. Turn the sound down, Henny Penny.”

On second thought Roger did have the makings of a movie director. His final touch in setting the scene was to switch on the tape recorder.

I
N SPITE
of the Albanian ban placed on me, it felt sweet to be on the inside. Clarissa ushered a couple into the room. They stood close together, hands clasped, like Hansel and Gretel facing the wicked witch.

“Hi,” Roger greeted them. “I was afraid you wouldn’t make it. Henny Penny, round up some chairs.”

Henny Penny bustled about, chattering gaily as she dragged chairs to the table. “Hello, Libby. Roger and I came to New York especially to see you.

“Oh, Christ,” Libby said. “You’ve still got that burned-out handmaiden in tow.”

Roger, seated, reached behind him for the bottle of wine Henny Penny was holding. “Now, Libby, let’s not start off on the wrong foot. This is a friendly get-together.”

Henny Penny, no doubt encouraged by Roger’s saintly patience, babbled on: “Victor has a new rule at the Institute. None of the girls is allowed to ask questions, not even to say how are you or what’s new. It’s so hard not to ask questions, especially when you’re being punished and you want to know the reason.” She giggled. “But it’s so much fun. Victor says we mustn’t even think questions, and I never do. Roger,” she said studiously, “since Libby isn’t at the Institute any more, could I ask her a question? Oh,” she covered her mouth, “I asked a question. See what I mean, Libby? Oh,” she squealed, “I did it again.”

“Get back on the bed, Henny Penny, and be quiet. Don’t bother Libby.”

God knows what, if anything, her babbling was about. Roger, with his exquisite tact, made no further reference to what had to be a social embarrassment. “How come so late? I’ve been here all day.”

“I waited till Bryant got home,” Libby answered in a small voice.

“What are you up to, Bryant?”

“I’m pushing a cab,” the boy answered, with a narrow-shouldered shrug. “It’s not a bad gig.”

Clarissa sidled up to the conference table and poured herself a glass of wine.

“Thanks for giving Roger our address,” Libby said with a quiet bitterness. “It saved us the trouble of writing to him.”

Clarissa lifted her glass in a welcoming toast. “It was nothing. I knew you’d be totally dragged if Roger passed through town and you missed him. Why, when he called and said he was dying to see you, I insisted that we have the grand reunion here.”

My first horrible realization that I was squatting on Clarissa’s property hit me like an injection of horror serum. It was not Roger’s room, it was hers. My chin went haywire. The idea of dashing over to borrow a cup of sugar from the shrew, or stopping in for a convivial television night, or most remote of all, having a philosophical exchange such as I had been enjoying with Roger was so grotesque that I shot out of her rickety recliner and spilled the sour wine all over my white jeans.

“Who’s she?” Libby rudely demanded, turning her charity poster eyes on me. The couple, adorned in his-and-her, cut-down, faded dungarees and Elvis Presley sweat shirts, both extremely thin and dark and fatigued, looked as if they had stepped out of a CARE commercial. GIVE, they seemed to shout, HELP. They were a fund raiser’s dream come true.

Roger tried gallantly to shield me. “Oh, she’s nobody, Libby. She’s a chick from across the hall. Doesn’t speak a word of English.”

“I bet,” she said and gave me the typical hostile stare that welfare cases bestow on potential benefactors. I myself did not wish to contribute to her cause.

“I happen to be an Albanian refugee!”

“Sit down, stupid,” Roger snapped, and since everyone else was seated, I had to assume the incredible reference was to myself.

“A new candidate for the Institute? Where do you find them, Roger?”

Clarissa, who persisted in this loathsome tendency to answer for Roger, stuck her two cents in. “This one found him, I swear. She swam to the door like a lemming.”

No, dear neighbor, I meditated, friendship is not in the books for us.

Roger slumped down in his chair, his hands folded behind his head.

“Funny, I was just thinking of the day you came to the door of the Institute, begging to be admitted. Remember, Libby? You were freaking out. Suicide threats galore if Victor didn’t take you in. How you begged him. How you promised to love, honor, and obey. You were beautiful. Remember, Bryant? And Victor, who has never failed you, who loves you, found a place for you at his table. Didn’t he, Libby?”

“I guess so,” she said faintly, and then with more energy, “But I was crazy.”

“Victor was aware of that. Everyone was, with the possible exception of Bryant here, who sees only what he wants to see. The Institute never could turn you into a man, Bryant, but that’s cool. Society needs its cab drivers. If a man has the soul of a flunky, then there’s really no place for him in the Institute.”

They took his insult quietly. Only Clarissa broke in, laughing her snide laugh. “You’re such a terrible snob, Roger.”

“That’s right. Victor taught me to put a high price on my time and on my company.”

“Victor,” Clarissa said with disdain. “I knew him when he landed in town, trotting around, carrying anyone’s guitar case. Of course, that was before he discovered he was God.”

At long last Roger had it with the harpy. “Shut up, Clarissa. We all know you’re old.”

“But Victor is God,” Henny Penny protested. “Once I saw him float. Oh, it looked like so much fun.”

“Did I tell you to be quiet!” I suddenly had this vision of poor Roger in a cage filled with snarling females. He flicked the whip at Libby.

“Did Victor turn you away for being crazy? Or did he take you into his heart and into his family?”