Mister Sandman (20 page)

She’s on shaky ground here, thinking about the theatre. It
has always hurt and mystified her why she never got a foot in the door. Why didn’t she? She had what it took—moxie, she could do any accent. And she wasn’t bad looking in those days, either. How long ago was it? Nineteen thirty-seven. So twenty-eight, twenty-eight years ago.

She was nineteen, working in the typing pool at Nesbitt Insurance. A good job for a girl during the Depression. For another girl. In her last year of high school Doris had brought down the house playing Eliza Doolittle in
Pygmalion.
Standing ovations. Flowers at her feet. Her drama teacher, Mr. Waldorf, had urged her to go to London, England, and pursue his theatre connections. As if he had any, she thought, but this was years later. At the time she had said, hopelessly, “My parents could never afford to send me.” Which, of course, he would have known.

“Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t waste your life in some dreary office.”

Words that echoed.

Back then there was a magazine called
Centre Stage
that listed where auditions were being held across the province and just south of the border. When a part sounded promising Doris pretended to get a blinding headache so that she could leave work and go to the try-out. (Her boss, who really did get blinding headaches, would become almost hysterically sympathetic.) Some days Doris rode the train as far as Buffalo and back.

She told nobody about these trips, not even her parents. When she finally won a role, then she’d tell them, knock their socks off. The typing pool already thought she led a shockingly glamorous life. She had bought a tiny picture frame for the photograph it held of a handsome, curly-haired man wearing glasses, and she carried the photo around in a locket, saying that the man was her beau.

“He’s a famous playwright,” she said. “Dean Lowell.” (Her mother’s brother’s name.) “You might have heard of him.”

Some of the girls in the typing pool said they thought they had.

“He’s very tall,” Doris said, opening the locket. “I call him Lean Dean.”

The girls oohed. They said how smart he looked.

“He’s a genius!” Doris said. “He writes entire plays in his head. Of course, he’s very absent-minded. He’s always bumping into things and breaking his glasses. You see there?” She pointed to the arm of his glasses where there was a spot on the photo. “That’s cellotape. He can’t be bothered to go to an optician and have them properly fixed. He hasn’t time for the everyday things.” She kissed the photo. “He knows all of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart. The first thing he said to me when we met was, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.’”

One of the girls waggled her ring finger. “So when’s he going to pop the question?”

“Oh, he doesn’t believe in marriage. We’ll probably live in sin.”

The girls shrieked.

It gave Doris a charge, scandalizing them. Some mornings she pretended to be hung-over from a wild night out with Dean and his actor friends. “I’m blotto,” she’d groan. “Stay back, kids.” She made up stories about these friends. Their dire love affairs, a suicide. She said that a local actress (“I’m not naming names”) went to New York for an abortion. “And the next day she was still bleeding so badly she had to sit on phone books. I brought her ours from home and she bled through to the S’s.”

The typists ate it up. There was nothing Doris told them that they didn’t believe. In fact, the more unbelievable she was the more devoutly they believed her. It was unbelievable. Growing up she’d had a horror of lying. Now she lied all the time, without guilt, without ever weaving a tangled web. There were tricks to lying, she realized. Or not tricks so much
as rules. Look people in the eye, remember your lies, stick to your lies, never back down from a lie, salt your lies with the truth, respect lies, know that there is no such thing as a simple lie.

Very quickly she had all this down pat and working for her.

So it isn’t exactly true to say that she didn’t get a foot in the door, because she could talk her way into any audition. It was talking her way into a
part
that she somehow loused up. That silence as her last line died in the rafters like an electrocuted bird, and then, from a back row, that English-accented “Thank you, Miss Gayler,” which meant she’d blown as much as a dollar on train fare … it was not an experience she ever got used to or entirely over.

Afterwards, instead of going straight home from Union Station she usually consoled herself with tea and a chocolate éclair at Fleming’s on King Street. The set-up of the restaurant was in the form of a daisy, five petal-like counters surrounding a central preparation area, and at one of these petals she sat across from a young man who looked so much like the man in her locket that she opened it to check.

No, it wasn’t him. The mouth was wrong. And the chin. Dean’s had a cleft, this fellow’s didn’t. Still! He was tall, very tall and lean. And the right arm of his glasses was held on with tape!
Masking
tape, but that’s splitting hairs.
And
he was reading
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
! The same edition that Doris owned! The sonnets were at the end of that edition, and he was concentrating on a page somewhere near the end, looking up every few seconds and then down again, as if committing the words to memory.

Several times he glanced at her. Finally he said, pleasantly, “May I help you?”

“Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” she said. “Am I right?”

He smiled. “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.”

“You don’t say. Well, I would have tried ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ next.
Then
‘When in disgrace.’”

“You’re an actress.”

Were she not already in love with this man from having more or less invented him and therefore knowing all his dear, irreplaceable quirks, she’d be head over heels now. (So much for Ed Metzer.) “Give the man a cigar,” she said. “First guess.”

(Ed Metzer had been her high-school sweetheart. He had called her Pancake and kissed her for hours without going further. A fine young man, he joined the British navy, he always said he would. The night before he set sail he took her to his aunt’s empty house and they lay fully dressed on a bed and kissed while he panted like a dog and slapped her all over, not too hard but almost. “Wait for me, Pancake,” he said. “I will,” she said, half believing she would, half thinking, “Fat chance.”)

She continued auditioning for parts she never got while spinning Gordon the line that she was taking a vacation from her exhausting stage career. A few weeks before their wedding she announced (and she wasn’t kidding) that she was giving up the theatre for good. Because they would never see each other otherwise, she said. Because the pay stunk. Because she was tired of lying to her parents about it. And so on. The real reasons were: there’s a limit to how much rejection a person can take, and the cost of train fare.

“I’ve had it with the limelight,” she said, and Gordon kissed her as passionately as a man whose hands don’t stray can.

Like Ed before him, Gordon respected her virtue. To her relief, to her disappointment. She was the type of young woman who had been raised to take baths in the dark. On faith she accepted that she must have been seen naked in her life but when she imagined her mother changing her diapers she imagined a photographer changing film—using a box, doing it
by feel. Added to which Ed’s idea of romantic bliss had hardly toppled the walls. When she and Gordon kissed, her body yearned. When she thought about what her body was yearning for, she cringed. Yearning and cringing, her seizured rumba to the altar. Which turned out to be the flower stand in her parents’ living room. Her father hadn’t worked steadily since the start of the Depression, so it was only a small family ceremony in the living room.

Afterwards, after the cold cuts, sandwich squares and lemonade punch, Doris and Gordon drove through pelting rain to the waterfront and drank half the bottle of bootleg whisky that was the best man’s wedding gift. Doris had never been inebriated before. She had assumed it would relax her, but it made her so jumpy she screamed at every clap of thunder.

She screamed when Gordon picked her up and staggered over the threshold of the decrepit Victorian apartment house that was their new home. He carried her up the three flights of stairs. She covered her mouth so as not to scream and wake the other tenants. He put her down to open the door, then picked her up again and carried her into their little furnished loft. Earlier in the day she and her mother had cleaned it, you could still smell the Murphy’s soap. He kicked the door shut behind him, wove over to the bed and dropped her. She let out a pure, high, steam-kettle scream, and was applauded it sounded like, but it was the rain pattering into the room. Around the bed was a canopy of drips. He fell down beside her. “I can’t see,” he said. Her response was to remove his glasses, a liberty she had never before taken.

She carefully put them on the bedside table. She felt very calm now. More than calm, she felt a cold formalness, a peculiar expertise, as if her job were to dismantle this very long man feature by feature, limb by limb, and spread him on the bed for the sake of science. In her head a German-accented voice sang, Ze
shin hone’s connected to ze ankle hone, ze ankle hone’s connected
to ze foot hone, now hear za verd of za Lord.
She was all set to undo his tie when he turned toward her and began to pull out pins that held the soggy garland of pink roses in her hair.

With her help he succeeded. He patted her head and murmured, “The bride.” He kissed her. Still kissing her, his hand slid down her hair to the front of her neck and then lower, to her collarbone, and she demolished into the flesh that surrounded her breasts, she was all breasts on a pillow of flesh, but his hand lifted, and where it landed next was stretched along her waist. “Small,” he said, giving her occasion to appreciate the yardage of his fingers. Then he rolled onto his back and closed his eyes.

“Sweetie?” She shook him. Shook him harder. “Sweetie.” Gave up. Let’s face it, for all her brave readiness she was mostly relieved.

The next evening was the first time. It wasn’t her plan but she ended up wearing the Saturday-night nightgown her mother had sewn and wrapped in a Weston’s bread bag and left under her pillow two days before the wedding. Thick flannelette, high-collared, floor-length, a pattern of tiny strawberries … a flap, midway down the front, that you unbuttoned. Doris knew what it was, what it was for. How many Sunday mornings had she seen her mother’s plain white Saturday-night nightgown laundered and drying on the basement clothesline? (Never the outside line.) The strawberries, now those were a surprise. Risqué for her mother. Would Doris wear it? Her reaction when she opened the bag was an embarrassed, insulted snort. Crumpling it up and stuffing it back into the bag.

But she packed it with her trousseau, didn’t she? And that second night, when Gordon set the tone by emerging from the bathroom in grey cotton pyjamas
and
a housecoat, all her nerve slithered off and she made her entrance in “the contraption,” as they would eventually call it. She caught him squinting at the flap as she climbed into bed. “Don’t laugh,” she said.

“I’m not laughing,” he said and switched off the light.

Eight months went by before she had the nerve to touch him down there. It was February. She remembers, because earlier in the day Ed’s sister had telephoned to say that Ed’s ship,
HM
s
Exmouth,
had been lost at sea and that Ed “had gone down defending the Empire against the Nazis.”

“Oh, don’t tell me,” Doris said, although somehow the news seemed like old headlines. She pictured Ed slapping the waves as he sunk.

“You were almost a war widow!” the distraught sister gloated, as if by dumping Ed, Doris had thrown away her one shot at glory.

When, hours later, Doris wrapped her fingers around Gordon’s penis, the impulse was to have something to hold on to in the world. And to verify that being the receiver of this thing was all the glory she or any woman needed. That wasn’t verified, not overwhelmingly or lastingly, but the sense she’d had for months that his penis was no carrot was.

She wasn’t completely innocent, she’d heard that a man’s thing was supposed to feel hard, not be so droopy. His
worked
perfectly fine, he ejaculated, it was just that it took a lot out of him. Sweat so torrential she sometimes held out a hand to see if it wasn’t the roof leaking. His feeble heart banging away. When he paused for a breather she could never tell whether it was that, or he was having heart attack, or he was through.

That night as on every other night she awaited the warm drool between her legs. She was the one who cried out then, she was so happy for him, so happy for herself, her drawn-out pleasure. As usual her climax had happened way back from all his fiddling around trying to get himself erect and inserted.

In other words his penis was no disappointment. Far from it. The other payoff was that intercourse was painless. Nice and easy, for her it was anyway. At her end it was rather luxurious
while being so driven at his end that it was, really, a heartwarming event. Most women have to be pregnant before they experience that rush of protective love that a blind little invader of their body is capable of arousing.

By the time she
was
pregnant she was so moved by his penis—its helpless pluck—that she was pitching in: rubbing it on her bare breasts (“the contraption” had long since been torn up for rags) and planting little kisses on its German-helmet-like head. Somehow she wasn’t surprised that her lips had what it took to make him erect. Which is not to say that her feelings weren’t hurt. He found her private parts unsavoury—this was the conclusion she drew—and she started washing them in a vinegar solution that seared her numb and within a few days lent an orange tinge to her pubic hair. For a while after that she wouldn’t touch him, but eventually she couldn’t resist. Back to the rubbing and squeezing. The little kisses.