Lion House,The (5 page)

He was watching me now. "You're looking pensive," he said. "What's on your mind?"

"Nothing. I was just wondering whether or not to whip up a dessert. Frannie could use a couple of extra pounds."

He had finished the celery and was rifling through the vegetable bin. "Optical illusion," he said, coming up with a carrot. "She isn't nearly as frail as you think she is. Got a scraper?"

I handed him one and took hold of his wrist to look at his watch. "I didn't know how late it was!" I said. "Where are they?"

"Getting soda, you told me."

"Yes, but that was an hour ago. The store is just down the road; ten minutes at most."

As I said it the door bashed open and Brad staggered in under the weight of the case.

"Where were you?" I asked. "I was beginning to worry."

"What about?" he gasped, lowering the case with a clumsy crash.

"Your driving, darling, leaves something to be desired."

"Castrator!" he shouted merrily. "Isn't that the correct term, Mrs. Freud?"

Frannie smiled. Then she peeled off her cashmere polo coat and dropped it in a soft heap on the floor.

"Pick that up," Marc said. "A hundred and fifty bucks and God knows what for the upkeep."

"A hundred and forty-nine ninety-five," she emended, "and the upkeep is negligible. I rarely get it cleaned. It looks
chic-er
dirty."

"Pick it up," he said again, firmly.

Obediently she bent to retrieve it and carried it out to the hall closet.

"Hey," I called as she went through the door. "Your shirt's out in back." And did the falter in my voice get past my throat as clearly as I felt it within? Did anyone know, or notice? Frannie must have. For a second she stopped dead in her tracks. Then: "Oh, is it?" she asked offhandedly; and went on.

When she returned, it was neatly tucked in.

The chicken took ages, which mattered only because it gave Brad too much time to tank up. I was afraid we'd lose him to his usual alcoholic miasma; but he hung on for Marc's and Frannie's sake.

After dinner Frannie, seeming intuitively aware of my conversation with Marc in her absence, made a large show of domesticity by washing all the dishes. Brad had, I suppose, expected me to tackle the clean-up by myself so that he could impress both Brownes in the livingroom with a recitation of slightly misquoted poetry. Obviously put out by Frannie's preference of K.P. he went upstairs for a nap, asking us to wake him when we were finished.

We forgot him entirely until Frannie began browsing through the bookcase and found an old set of anagrams. She was delighted. A few years before she and Marc had spent three and four nights a week playing with a brilliant couple named Weinrick in Meade's Manor. The four of them had created a handbook of complicated and brain-busting rules and had wound up doing it for money. Within a year no less than several hundred dollars had changed hands.

"Let's try it," I said, intrigued with the idea of clashing with experts.

"Okay," Marc agreed. "But I warn you: I've had it with the Weinricks. At the first sign of bloodshed, I quit"

"Pacifist!" she flung at him, proceeding to turn the letters face-down on the bridge table. "What's wrong with a little harmless expression of hostility? There are lots worse ways of fighting your dearly beloveds. Go on, Jo
—get Brad."

But I was already on my way back to the kitchen for the ice-bucket. "You get him," I said. "I'm going to need a drink to cut the tension!"

"No
—you," she said. "I'm not exactly practiced at arousing him from slumber."

"A piercing shriek or a splash of cold water might do it," I told her.

So she went up for him; and once again I became aware of the passage of time and felt that maybe I should have gone myself. Not that I had expected him to leap from bed at her first nudge. He was one of those people who awakened hard, if at all. Seven or eight minutes was not, then, an untoward interim. And anyhow, what was I so concerned about? The thing with the shirt? Ridiculous. Shirts do come untucked in the normal course moving about. And suspicion, piled up over the years, could become a disease. Besides, Frannie was too smart for him. Her aesthetic eye might well be caught by that lovely face of his; but, much as I hated to admit it, a girl would have to be pretty stupid to get tied up with Brad the way he was these days. I was
—but then I had known him when he was young. He'd wanted a good many things in those years: dreamed about jobs abroad, South America, the Orient; life in villas and chateaux and pagodas. He'd had drive then: read a lot, thought a lot; held people spellbound when he talked. It was only later, I told myself, that things went flat on him somehow; that he lost the spark and slipped into weary, bleary mediocrity.

Oh, no: Brad was not for Frannie. For all her wanting to break the shackles of a middle-class background she'd never in a million years mess up the good thing she had with Marc for a crazy fling with a man like Henry Bradford.

But instead of warming to the safety of that thought, it annoyed me. Maybe he was a flop; but he was my flop. He was a liar; but he was my liar. He was nothing; but he was my nothing. And Frannie's rejection of him was a rejection of me.

It was quite an evening. Brad was surprisingly awake when they came downstairs together; none of the sullen, rubbery ineffectuality with which he usually got up. His eyes seemed positively lit from within. He was so relaxed he even had his sleeves rolled up. Brad never wore his sleeves rolled up: no swimming trunks on beaches with his top bare; no sport shirts in the hottest heat of summer. And the secret?: his right forearm. Centered between the wrist and the elbow
—a garish tattoo in blue and red of the Washington Monument, acquired impulsively during the early Sonya era. He was mortally ashamed of it. You never saw it, not ever, unless you knew him very, very well.

We played for two or three hours, timing our forty-five-second moves on an old stop-watch of Brad's. I knew inside of the first fifteen minutes that none of us stood a chance against Frannie. Even Marc fell into a pretty lagging second place behind her. Of course he didn't try as hard; he was playing for the fun of it. Frannie went at it like a convict filing the cell-bars. I could see now what the game with the Weinricks must have been like. Her skill would have been interesting to watch and vie with if that had been all there was to it. It was her dead-earnest adherence to technicalities, empowered by the bludgeon of her drive, that made you want to kill her.

"... And the Weinricks were even worse than she," Marc said. "So you can see why I finally called a halt. Actually, I liked tonight. Tonight was tame. She's embarrassed about letting you have it full force because you're new at it. With old hands, she's a fiend..."

"Fiend..."
mused Frannie. "All you need is two
I's
and an L-T-Y and you've got
infidelity..."

They left at about three a.m.: Marc red-eyed with fatigue, Brad and I staggering, and Frannie brightly elated as a sprite at dawn
—due, she said, to the
therapeutic release of repressed aggressivity.

Brad didn't kiss her goodnight, probably because Marc was there; but in a whoosh of admiration and affection, I did. In return she brushed my cheek briefly and stepped back. It was such a funny hit-and-miss little peck that I burst out laughing. She seemed puzzled by my amusement and about to ask me why; but then Marc called to her and she got into the car.

We didn't see the Brownes the following weekend. We had the Finches down. Helene was an old sorority sister of mine who had married Dick Finch, a town boy, and settled near the university after graduation. With all our endless migrating we hadn't seen them for years. It had taken months of correspondence to arrange for this visit and now that we were about to have our reunion. I felt, for old time's sake, that we'd do better alone. We picked them up on a Friday evening at Grand Central and, having taken Marc's offer of the loan of his membership card, had dinner at the Juniper Club.

Dick hadn't changed a bit: he was still the blue-eyed baby-faced boy he'd been the day he gave Helene his fraternity pin. And Helene, in tweed topcoat and Shetland sweater, showed little to betray the span of time but a few more laughing lines around her mouth. I felt, with my mouse-brown, pinned-back mane, that I had aged as badly as the beautiful girl of Shangri-la once she had overstepped the boundaries of that magic land. "One of these days," I remarked at dinner, "I'm going to prostrate myself before Elizabeth Arden and emerge with the russet tresses of my youth."

"The hell you are," Brad said.

"Brad loves me this way," I explained lightly. "The more moth-eaten the better. If he had it to do all over again he'd marry Whistler's Mother."

"No, he's right," Helene said. "Severe hair-dos can be perfect for certain types of women, and you're one of them, Jo. It's
—dignified."

"Thanks," I told her, "but don't tout dignity with
my
ass."

She blushed. I had forgotten for the moment that while we were close friends she had never been quite able to accept my language; nor several of my more "colorful" ideas. At college the lurid tales of my journeys through the male mill had left her awed but disapproving. During the course of innumerable all-night bull-sessions, sitting cross-legged on my bed, she had tried again and again to steer me up the Straight and Narrow. "It's only because I'm so fond of you, Jo," she would say. There were times when this fondness of hers became oppressive; but I in turn was fond of her, and so put up with it. I had found, in fact, a kind of demonic pleasure in shocking her. While telling her of my nocturnal escapades I had always been sure to include the most graphic details, undoubtedly more than half aware that the mental images she must then cart about secretly would be bound to plague her.

Seated now across a table from her, so many years later, I saw again the flicker of discomfort in her face brought on by my remark about dignity, and wanted in the same demonic way to go on with my profanity. I didn't
—because of the hovering head waiter and my concern with Marc's reputation at the Juniper.

The next morning we got up rather late and Helene and I prepared a brunch for kings. Things might have gone off charmingly if Brad hadn't spiked a two-quart pitcher of orange juice with half a bottle of gin, and then insisted on consuming it single-handed.

I liked to believe, the basic concepts of Sigmund Freud to the contrary, that if it hadn't been for that single act of imprudence on his part I might have been able to live out the rest of my life in its accustomed rut of apathy; float happily along on my personal raft of rationalization and delusion; and that the all-hell which was soon to break loose might, without the existence of that one pitcher of polluted orange juice, have been averted. This of course is sheer idiocy: no one punch is ever totally responsible for the ultimate knock-out; but, as I say: I like to believe.

When brunch was over I suggested a ride over to Wingo to show the Finches the situs of my new career. Brad frowned a boozed and petulant frown. "I've had enough of that place to last for eternity," he said. "Wingo Day School, nothing! With Jo it's the Wingo Day and Night School!" So we went alone, leaving him behind to do the kitchen.

It was fun; yet, the pleasure I took in showing them around made me conscious of how much a part of me Wingo had become: how deeply I relied on it as a haven of escape from the insecurity and sense of displacement in the other areas of my life; and how possessive I had grown about its students. In presenting the artistic and mechanical creations of their young hands I was as peacock-proud as any mother might have been; in a way, more so. And it was with a painful deliberateness that I had to bring myself back to the reality that they were not, after all, my own children, but merely strangers who, while entering through my acceptance at the bottom, would one day graduate, pass the top, and be forever lost to me.

"Really, Jo," Dick said unwittingly, "you ought to see yourself. You'd make the world's best Momma, you know that?" And I answered, "Can't fight fate,"
— lightly, casually, not wanting to let him know how far his remark had plunged within me; how impossible it would have been for Brad and me to have a child.
Wait’ll next year,
he had kept saying, as next year came and went;
wait’ll I land a job I like; wait’ll we have more money.
And then, finally:
Give it up, Jo; please give it up. I couldn't really stand it. I need you all for me...

How could I, with any conscience, have a baby? How could I trap an infant with a father who had himself never grown beyond the emotional slats of his own play-pen?

We got home at about four-thirty to find the kitchen in the same chaotic state we'd left it; but Brad, if bleary, was still awake, so I forgave him.

"Just in time for the cocktail hour," he said, swinging a Shaker of martinis above his head. "Look, I even put the glasses in the icebox so they'd be cold."

It was chilly out so I lighted the first fire of the season and we clustered around it. Brad pulled a cushion off a chair and lay back on it, martini in one hand, the other up behind his head. "Tell me," he murmured drowsily, "how did you like the Garden of Allah?"

"Wingo? It's marvelous," Helene answered.

"You mean miraculous," Brad said. "Miraculous in the Divine sense, that is. Did you know? It's Jo's religion."

"Oh, cut it out," I sighed. "So I've got myself an Interest. What's so terrible about a person's having an Interest?"

"Interest, my foot," he droned. "You've got a ten-ton case of Mother Surrogateship. Or isn't that the accepted terminology? Call Frannie; she'll know."

I realized with a peculiar little pang: it was the first time her name had come up since the Finches had arrived.

"Who's Frannie?" Helene wanted to know.

Brad was silent. Then he laughed a soft, low laugh.

I looked at him. His face by firelight seemed richly bronze. The tightly drawn skin of his chin and cheekbones caught the reflected glow and shone. The two white temple-wings in his still-black hair slanted over his ears as sharply and perfectly as if they had been painted there. In his eyes there was a veiled thing, a half-closedness, something belonging to memory or even dream; a film lowered against a hidden place within him; a place that was no one's but his. For a minute I loved him. For just a minute it seemed that I had never loved anyone as much as him. But it was the childlike love that grows of inaccessibility.