Braided Lives (52 page)

Rosellen tagged along with Donna, whom Charlie, her boyfriend of last spring, has expropriated. They are all sitting on a plush couch with Donna in the middle. Charlie is doing an imitation of the sociology department chairman while the two women laugh wildly. Howie goes off to the kitchenette to open our wine.

“Hi, Jill. How’re you doing?” With a tremor of surprise I look into Lennie’s lean rabbinical face. He appears any age in a dark suit, his beard longer and more formal.

He backs away from my cry of welcome, his eyes suspicious. “This is my girlfriend.”

No name given. Clinging to his side she is dark and shy as the running shadow of a doe. An exchange of still greetings. Then with a squirm of shyness she draws his attention and they walk off. I look to see if Donna has noticed him, but she is shrieking with that steel mirth. Charlie is her necessary evil tonight. He watches her with pride and a daddy’s darling look; she does not glance at him, but looks around. They are all drinking screwdrivers from a pitcher Charlie mixed. Rosellen, not used to alcohol, has a belligerent uneasy gaze as if she felt something dangerous inside beginning to hurt. Myself, I am drinking whatever anyone offers me. I have had a glass of red wine from Bolognese, with whom I talk about
Being and Nothingness,
which we are both trudging through, a labor of love. The two of us, to the amusement and contempt of Dick and Howie, have taken to calling ourselves existentialists.

Then I have a glass of white camel’s urine offered by Dick. Then I have a Scotch from Grant Stone, who carries the only real flask I have ever seen, inlaid with silver. He leans into me. “Spore Press is always looking for … eager young writers.”

“To plant your spores in?” I ask, already too drunk to be polite. I don’t believe he’d publish me no matter what. If I believed for a moment he might, I would lack the courage to insult him.

I have been considered pretty too short a time not to relish the casual lust of men eyeing me. Like Stephanie, I can enjoy being looked at, for it is novel and makes me want to giggle as if I am getting away with something, knowing that it is really me under the coat of flesh. But sometimes I cannot handle the brute hostility that peeps out of the lust, that taint of despisal. I have a glass of purple passion punch (grapefruit juice, Mogen David wine and lab alcohol, a local specialty that mutates genes with each sip) offered by a vaguely familiar man who promptly tries to pinch my right breast and does not like being kicked in the shin. Howie is making his own way through the party, talking now intently to Bolognese who is permanently bent over the diminishing turkey. I appeal to Howie with my eyes to come, for I feel a little too vulnerable.

“Did you want to be rescued?” he asks, plowing through to me.

“Actually, yes.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Everything in its particulars.”

Immediately before us Roger leaps up from his wing-back chair. The newcomers are the tall ash-blond Dorothy Ardis and a local dentist Dr. Ashburnham, who grasps her elbow with clothespin fingers. She leans away from the dentist, smiling blandly at Roger, gazing about with large maple-walnut eyes. She surveys the room, touching her fur collar to her throat, strolling among the suddenly invisible guests from the navy plush couch to the Beardsleys. “Why, you have your auntie’s furniture out of storage. And so neat. When did you start being neat?”

“I cleaned it,” Stephanie mutters to me. “Did he invite her? I’ll kill him.”

“I’m surviving.” Roger walks on Dorothy’s free side, his chin grazing her collar. “I’ve learned to make spaghetti. But tell me, how do I keep the refrigerator from turning into an igloo?”

With a slow smile Howie looks after her stately strut of a crane, a long-necked and long-legged water bird. “She’s beautiful. Who is she?”

I answer, “His soon-to-be-ex-wife Dorothy.”

“He can’t do this to me. He’ll introduce me, or I’ll break his neck publicly. They’ll hose the pieces off the ceiling.” Putting on a glittery smile Stephanie marches after them into the kitchenette.

I have lost my glass, so Howie and I drink from the bottle in turns. He asks, “Is Roger trying to make his wife jealous? Or is he just being friendly in a friendly divorce?”

“Your guess is worth mud, like mine. He’s a bastard, I think.”

Dorothy has handed her coat to her escort and is peering into cupboards while Roger watches her like a dirty movie. The room is contracting, people stretching to the ceiling in poses of fun-house-mirror despair. Donna is pinned to the wall by a spidery man, all arms and legs, surrounding her with his outsized paunch rubbing against her breasts. She looks about to faint, while a cracked smile of immolation distorts her face. Charlie watches with bleak sadness past Rosellen, who lies half sprawled across him, crying.

“I shouldn’t drink. I shouldn’t go to parties. It unpeels my skin,” I tell Howie. That midnight moment has arrived when my skull is lifted off and on the wet grey convolutions of my brain are printed directly the misunderstandings and mismatings in this room. “It’s hopeless.”

He takes the bottle from me. “So stop.”

Stephanie is gallantly trailing the married couple, bringing up the rear with the dentist. Charlie has taken Donna by the hand but she pulls from him. “I’m just starting to have fun!” she whines. Her face is sharp with forced gaiety. Her eyes pass blindly over me. She will never listen.

“I don’t know why I feel so naked, looking at people.” I sway forward, bump Howie’s arm. Room, a funnel of wrong noises.

“You want to leave?”

“Yes … but… I feel sick.” I hate the room, the people with open sores jostling each other. I push blindly at him until he guides me into the hall, shutting the door of the apartment behind us. The sudden chill, the dimness of the stairway bulb suspended like a dying sun in limbo, the collapsing of roar into murmur, only increase my dizziness. He looks so familiar bending over me—“Are you sick, Jill? Do you want air?”—that I burst into tears. As he puts his arms around me, I burrow into his chest and cry harder against his sweater.

His chest is warm through the wool. Warm and broad. If I move forward half an inch, it will be a simple embrace. He is holding his breath. The tears dry on my face as I stand and desire rips at me as if I had walked into a giant cactus. “There, there,” he mumbles. Points of heat flare where we touch. If I raise my face, I could kiss his mouth. Want to. But like this? Sodden, stupid, like grabbing a hot-water bottle. Desperate as Donna grabbing at Charlie. I stand suspended in desire holding my breath till my fingers and breasts ache. I wince against his chest and step back.

“Sorry, Howie. I’m a sloppy drunk.”

He takes a step toward me, pauses. “I’ll get our coats. Are you really all right?”

I nod but do not get out of his way. I stand against the door. With every muscle I wish he would take hold of me. Maybe he is my rational choice, but I can’t make that choice for both of us. The door opens and I almost fall in. Stephanie pushes past me, slamming it.

“Jill! I’m glad you’re here. I thought you’d left.”

“We’re leaving now.”

“That dirty low-down rat!”

“What did he do?”

She wrings her hands with anger. “He wants me to pretend to go home and come back after. And clean up, I suppose! He’s playing a double game. I’m through!”

“Get your coats.” Howie steers us each by an elbow. “I’ll see you home.”

As we are putting on our wraps, Roger strolls up. “Leaving already? Things are just getting started.”

“I do have hours. I’ll run along with Jill and Howie.”

As he leans close to speak in her ear, she smiles through matted lashes. “Sure, honey. See you later.” As we walk down she twirls her scarf, laughing theatrically. “How long will he wait up? Not long enough. I hope Dorothy divorces him and marries her dentist. She strikes me as a cavity that could well be filled with gold.”

Through the quiet streets we compete in laughter. Alcohol simmers in my brain. At the door Howie and I have no moment for private leave-taking that might connect with what almost did or didn’t happen in the hall.

I lie on my bunk with questions circling and bobbing and pursuing like a race of carousel horses. If he is attracted to me, wouldn’t he have made a move? But I could not. I did not dare. If I let him know that I want him and he only likes me as a friend … I feel hollow. He could stop being my friend. I need him as a friend.

Stephanie climbs into the upper bunk. “I can see why you like that guy Howie. He has a good sense of humor.”

Will he laugh at me? I clutch the pillow as the bed swoops backward. I drink too much, I talk too much! Discipline. The bed rushes backward through the night like a crack express. Occasionally Stephanie sobs in the dark. I must think hard about him. Am I crazy, am I sick, am I corrupt suddenly to want him, after all these years? I don’t think I ever touched him before, except for holding his hand at his father’s funeral. Please bed, lie still. Oh, but I wish he had reached out, there in the hall.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

P
ROCRASTINATION
M
UST
B
E A
G
ENETIC
T
RAIT

M
ONDAY NIGHT OR rather 1:40
A.M
. Tuesday a week and a half later, the cheap alarm I have carried into the kitchen with me ticks like a headache. My thick lids swell. I am sodden with instant coffee tasting of burnt cork. Sleep weights my brain while I try to atone, my neglect of the eighteenth century. Tomorrow morning an exam yawns. What have I been doing? Writing a verse play—a proper bitter cud of two lovers and how they died to each other, couched in the Bluebeard myth. Instead of the course’s prescribed readings, I have consumed not a taste of Pepys but the whole diary, mounds of Rochester, Defoe, Pope … and now all night I must tread the dreary rounds of those dull worthies who will stock the examination. In the middle of Thomson’s
Winter
it is winter indeed. Shenstone, Warton, Pomfret… eating excelsior. My chin slides forward, coming to rest on
The Task.

“Sleeping in that position will give you backache.” Donna carries in a typewriter with books and erasable bond balanced on top.

“Procrastination must be a genetic trait.”

“I didn’t get any work done this weekend.”

“You met them? How did it go?”

She shrugs. Face scrubbed clean. The skin around her eyes is blue and papery with fatigue. “Can’t say yet. They didn’t poison me. I’m not what they want, but I may be what they’ll accept.” She yawns.

I yawn. We work in silence, facing over the kitchen table. When she rises in forty minutes to put on water for tea, she asks, yawning again, “Stephanie’s giving up on Roger Ardis?”

“With bells and banners.”

She nods. “Is she going out with your friend Howie, then?”

“Howie?” I am wide awake. “What makes you ask?”

“I saw her sit down with him in the Union yesterday. She was her … uh, animated self. Meaning she didn’t completely crawl across the table to sit on his lap but nearly.”

Could I ask him casually, What do you think of Stephanie? But suppose he hasn’t yet? Donna is waiting patiently, and I am glad of the bedrock empathy that brings her to me with the observation, just in case it’s relevant, and lets me say bluntly, “Thanks,” instead of having to pretend the news does not matter. Stephanie never mentioned meeting him. I have exams this week, a paper due, a summons home I will feel guilty if I ignore. Mother has been in terrible pain with her teeth, the same rotten set she passed on to me. Francis made an appointment for her at some clinic downtown on Saturday morning but he wants me to come in and accompany her. I have to take the bus into Detroit Friday evening. What do I want from Howie? What do I dare want with him? What can I have? I would like to hypnotize him into answering me before proceeding.

“What have you been doing with Howie? Waiting for him to grow up and get broken in? A dangerous business.”

“I can’t be sure what I want.” Loyalty to the cemetery afternoons, the dialectical fencing, the love that was all words. “You can’t just add sex to what you have with a friend and see how it flies.”

“Once you would have said, why not?”

“Meaning the taste of blood has made me a coward? But, Donna, I never said,
why not,
to you.”

“Why not?” She grins, looking years younger. “Sometimes I used to feel you were on the verge of asking or whatever.”

“Same reason as with Howie,” I say untruthfully, for Howie never put pressure on me to become sexually involved with other people. Howie may think I am out of character or out of line, but he will not judge me sick. Theo, as far as I know, is still behind bars for asking that question. Donna is flirting a little with me tonight. “Did your period start?”

“Not yet,” she answers with no surprise at my lack of transition. The subject is on her mind all of the time. “I’m supposed to get the results of the test tomorrow.”