Braided Lives (70 page)

He quickens in me, totally alive. Febrile mumbles. Whorls of damp hair, flushed eyelids. A dark bloom throbs around him. I let my arms loosen in gentle laxness and then close them again above his broad back. “Oh … I love you …” hardly realizing in its truthfulness and familiarity that the saying of it is new, until he rolls to one side looking past me with lines back on his forehead, that seam of worry already habitual.

In a deliberately mocking voice, he asks, “How? Like you loved Peter? Like you love a good steak? We can’t use those words.”

I am too naked. I pull the sheet over my breasts. “Why can’t we use those words?”

He digs his chin into his chest, pushing back with his shoulders against the wall. He frowns as he pinches the skin of his abdomen into folds. “No, you don’t.”

“Is it supposed to give me a nice protective coat of dignity to pretend I don’t? You can stuff that. I didn’t mean to say it, but it’s true. It’s been true for months, at least.”

He shakes his head no, leaning back with his hands braced behind his neck. “You don’t need a protective coat and you don’t need me.”

“If we lived together for a year, I’d need you.”

“No. You’d be used to me. You’d never need me.”

I hug myself in exasperation. “Babies need, but anybody can live without love. It’s bitter and mean but you make do. If you can’t love me, why argue about need?”

“Oh, I used to put it on for you. Years ago. I used to stand on my head to impress you that I was a regular solid gold genius. You were the only girl who’d paid attention to me and I was scared silly of offending you, you were so abstract and high-tempered. The name-dropping I did of books you hadn’t read.” He grins. “You made me sweat.”

He was so calm and flatly argumentative, that fat kid, I hate to believe behind his yawns and theorems he cared for the impression he was making. It is time I guessed other people are human too. I take him by the shoulders. “A long way from the boneyard, kid.”

He folds the sheet around him, sealing me off. “When you say love, you mean that we have a good time in bed—”

“You think fucking like this grows on trees? Yes, I value it, you, what happens between us.”

“It wasn’t that way with the others?”

“Nothing like. That’s bare truth.”

“Anyhow, you just mean sex and some pity, loneliness. If it depends on that, it can go away overnight.”

“Anything human can wear out. I get the feeling you want me to present you with myself like some bill you can pay.”

“I don’t see what you want me for. Do you see me, this slob? Once you figure out who I really am, you’ll get disgusted just as you did with Mike.”

I sit forward, glaring. “What are you doing to yourself? This business of going to medical school. You don’t want to be a doctor.”

“I’ve taken my bobishe’s money. I can’t back out now.”

“Why not? She’s had her life. Why give her yours too?”

“What she’s paying for, she’ll get: a doctor in the family.”

“Howie, you can’t go around with a load of guilt from childhood. You have to do what you want.”

“What’s to want? I should follow my nose and end up in physics like your old boyfriend? Physicists do such a lot of good in the world. Scientists are truly noble people—you only have to ask one of them. Pursuing truth and government grants. If I crave to work for the Department of Defense, I’ll join the army. Doctors are out for money and everybody knows it. But at least you only kill people one at a time, and you aren’t trying to do that.”

“Don’t do anything, then. Be a bum. I’d like you as a bum.”

He turns on me, his face blanched. “I can give my bobishe what she wants, don’t you see? She doesn’t want me. She just wants a doctor, any doctor. Okay. My mother too.”

“All this feeling guilty. I swear if I complain about the weather, you apologize. What use is it? You aren’t that important, my love. It snows whether you want it to or not. We are in this, all three of us, because we want each other. You aren’t getting away with anything. If we don’t want you, we are each free to depart by the many available exits.”

“I ought to choose. I know it. This isn’t any good.”

“I don’t think it’s so bad,” I say truthfully. “Half of you is worth two Peters and then some. But if you want to choose, choose, it’s your right. Even if you choose her, I affirm your right to want and each of our rights to want.” I bang my fist on the mattress. Not satisfactory. “Want! Demand! Choose! Choose everybody. But don’t sit there between us probing old guilt like a bad tooth.”

“Is that what you want, what you really want?” He takes hold of my shoulders in a bruising grip.

“I want you to do what you want. Because I sure do what I want.”

He stares a moment longer, then lets go, falling back again with his hands behind his neck. “For a person who hates to cause pain, I’m always getting into corners where the only way out is stepping on somebody’s head.”

The first daffodils of florist’s spring are artfully arranged in a cobalt vase on Alberta’s seldom-used television, which is on to the Channel 11 news. Alberta and I eat the chicken cacciatore I cooked in her kitchen in which I know better than she does where the garlic press and the clam knife are stored.

She grumbles, “Do we have to watch this?”

“Yes. We’re waiting…. Look, ay ay ay, it’s her!”

Alberta squints. “Don’t be absurd.”

“Yes. That’s Donna in the tutu.”

“It isn’t really a tutu.”

“Whether skies are blue or grey, we’re bringing you the weather today,” Donna murmurs in a breathy treble. “Tomorrow, folks, we can look forward to a nice sunny day, a little foretaste of spring and pleasant things to come. The high is expected to be in the mid-forties, with temperatures dropping into the low thirties in the nighttime. We can expect breezes of ten to fifteen miles an hour from the southeast. There’ll be a few wispy clouds but mostly the old sun will shine on us all day.” Her manner suggests this information is sexually exciting. She wears a low-cut blouse in which somehow they have produced excellent cleavage. Her skirt is not exactly a tutu but it is not exactly anything else. She wears stiletto heels and a lot of dark eye makeup. Her eyes look enormous.

I shut off the set. “Well, it’s better than sitting in a box in East Setauket,” I say. “Isn’t it?”

“I suppose so…. If she can move over into covering news …”

Alberta and I chew glumly on. Alberta is offended by the vulgarity of the costume and the performance, I by what I have to see as a total waste of Donna’s intelligence.

We are walking down a street in midtown, Donna and I, fresh from window-shopping and a pushcart lunch when I see us framed in a mirrored window. Donna is dressed like the mannequins: pencil skirt, wasp waist, gloves, matching hat, belt and purse, a matronly armored style hard as the carapace of a beetle, but too lacquered to bear wind or water while it proclaims that the woman within is immutable as marble. Beside her I look childish, wearing my student uniform of plaid skirt, sweater and loafers with dancer’s black tights. To be an adult woman means to be in pain, for that clothing hurts. When I see the Fifth Avenue bus and start to run for it, I have to stop, remembering Donna cannot run.

Donna’s clothing is part of being married and part of going to work at a television station, even though when she goes before the camera she puts on her absurd outfit. When I go to work in offices, I have to pin my hair up into a bun, for loose long hair seems immoral to people. Only Brigitte Bardot looks like that, rumpled, hair wild. I go in my student clothes or a wool flannel princess jumper out of a thrift shop. At home I have only to let my hair tumble down and I am no longer respectable. If we dip into Bonwit’s or Henri Bendel’s because Donna must have a new pair of gloves to reach halfway up her arms, the salesladies ask her at once what she wants. They never voluntarily speak to me. They look at me and glance away. The clothing they share speaks an extreme fear of the body, of flesh, of mortality, of desire. To be “well-groomed” is virtue itself. The clothing says a woman has nothing to do but maintain herself like a perfect white living room for company. The clothing says she is a lady: she doesn’t labor or sweat.

“Phooey,” Donna says in my living room, her crossed leg vibrating annoyance. “I’m damned lucky to get the job. Without Emil, my analyst, I’d never have gotten my foot in the door. Really! You and Alberta are naive. Are you under the illusion I could walk in and say, I’d like to try out for John Cameron Swayze’s job? Not only am I doing the Weather Girl slots Monday through Friday, but I’m working on the kiddie show at five.”

“In the same costume?”

“No, a long blond ringlet wig and a lot of white gauze. I’m the good fairy Tintoretto.”

“Tintoretto?”

“You imagine no one has a sense of humor around there.” Donna gives me her old crooked grin. “Look, it beats any other job I’ve had. Would you believe I get fan mail?”

“Your analyst got you the job?” I wish I could remember when he went from being Dr. Evans to plain Emil.

“Just the interview. I won the job myself. He has dozens of patients in the media. The Weather Girl before me was an actress and she got the lead in a road company production of
Kiss Me Kate.”

“So how come Peter finally let you take a job?”

She grins again. “We’re three thousand in debt.”

I whistle. “How did that happen?”

“Partly because his old man faked him out and persuaded him to reinvest the income on the trust fund automatically. Which I think is pretty dumb, but nobody asked me. Partly because I let it happen. It was easy.”

“Are you saying you did it intentionally?”

“Not exactly and not on the record.” She kicks off her spike heels to massage the bottoms of her feet sensuously. “But I didn’t kill myself to keep it from happening. He’s used to spending money, face it. We can’t live on his salary in any kind of comfort. I just let him find that out without trying too hard to put off the inevitable.”

I can’t believe they have trouble on Peter’s salary. I am paid a dollar fifty an hour, more when I pose, and work an average of twenty-four hours a week. I don’t save much but after the rigors of putting myself through college, I feel I live quite comfortably. I have privacy, time to write, sex, food, even some pretty dresses. “What costs so much?”

“Everything! Our analysts. He’ll eat hamburger once every couple of weeks if I barbecue it. But basically he believes in steak and prime ribs. And I went through the gourmet fantasy and out the other side. You spend two hours shopping, six hours cooking and it’s all over twenty minutes after you put it out…. Both cars cost a hundred dollars whenever a mechanic does a laying on of hands. Insurance. Scotch. Decent clothes.”

I shake my hands limberly. “Didn’t take you long to get used to Peter’s standard of living.”

“Damned right. About five minutes, I think.”

“But you’re working for the freedom, not the money.”

“The money means something. A lot in fact. And they like me at the studio, they really do. My producer Guy says they’ve had very good response to me. I have high viewer recognition already. Jill, Monday for the first time, a boy recognized me on the street. I was trying to hail a taxi to get down to Emil’s from the studio in between my five o’clock and my seven o’clock, and I was running late as usual.”

“To tell you the truth, I think you’re doing okay. It’s just so exotic, as a job.”

“Nonsense.” She paces. Her energy level has risen to what it was at eighteen. She has burned off fifteen pounds to leave her slight frame bone-thin. While she is in my apartment this afternoon, the phone rings for her twice. She speaks in that breathless seductive voice. “Yes, this is a perfect place to call me. You can always leave a message here for me, angel. It’s my old roommate from college.”

She could at least have said cousin. She does not want to claim me fully. Yet I don’t think she is talking to a lover. Her calls have to do with internal maneuvering for place and position. Her job has given her a microcosm she finds more vibrant than that of her marriage. If I guess that so readily, Peter will guess it too.

“What does he think of all this?”

“I try to keep it out of the house.” She grimaces. With her nose screwed up, she is a rebellious awkward child. “I try not to take my calls there. I don’t talk about the studio—I pretend to think it’s silly and only good for the money.”

“But you don’t think that.”

“No, Jill. In our little bohemian enclave, maybe people don’t adore the tube, but everybody else does. It touches people’s lives like nothing else. I mean to make a career in television. For once my face has got me something besides laid. I’m told I look vulnerable.”

“Hey, Donna. Eh, where does the seven o’clock cleavage come from?”

“Tape. Besides, everybody looks fatter on television.” She eyes herself critically, probing with a hard middle finger at her midriff. She refuses my offer of supper or even cheese. Tea with lemon is all she takes. “That and white wine. I drink only white wine. It’s non-fattening.”

One night I go with Alberta to a reading of beat poetry, mostly because we heard through our civil liberties group about the attempt to ban
Howl
in San Francisco. We have seen enough parodies of beat poetry to give us a simulacrum of familiarity. We think we know it because we have read about it in
Time.
Bolognese is scornful and uninterested. If it were not that Sarah Altweiler is in jail in Georgia and thus cannot address the Young Progressives Forum, we would not be sitting in this large audience. I have attended many poetry readings at the university where a hundred people was a good crowd. Eight was a small crowd. Here we have six hundred people, some of whom are as overdressed as if going to the opera.