Superior Women (12 page)

Already Phil is pushing for an early marriage, but Cathy just isn’t sure, for many reasons.

In some dim corner of her mind, and perhaps her heart, she does not believe that this is true love. She does not believe that she and Phil will marry.

Simon is stroking Megan’s back, his hand firm on her shoulder blades, pressing in at her waist, back and forth, caressing her buttocks. It is late on a Thursday afternoon. In an idle way he then says, “Ah Megan, the loveliest skin in town. Why can’t I take you down to New York with me?”

And Megan, who tends to take people more or less at their word, answers him, “Well, why not? Sometime.”

Simon removes his hand too quickly. Then, as though to make up for the abruptness of the gesture, he pulls up the sheet, covering naked Megan. He tucks it in around her neck, and he announces, “In some ways I really feel like a shit.”

Something cold within her suddenly and inexplicably makes Megan think of George Wharton, all that old pain. In a forced, light way she asks Simon, “Why? What do you mean?” She has turned and propped herself up, the sheet still shielding her breasts; she and Simon face each other.

He says, “Well, I guess I should have said this before, but it
never seemed important. But in New York, you see, there’s this woman that I’m engaged to. Uh, she goes to Barnard. Her name is Phyllis. I see her on weekends.”

“You do?”

“I know, I should have mentioned it, but it really didn’t seem to have anything to do with us,” Simon repeats.

Megan instantly sees the logic of his not mentioning his fiancée, in a way; she can even agree that his New York life has nothing to do with them. Phyllis. She supposes that if she were smarter about such things she would have worked it out for herself already; certainly Lavinia would have known that a young man who spent every weekend in New York surely “had someone” there; he would not just be going down to see his parents, not a sexy, handsome young man like Simon, at his age. Well, how dumb of her.

“You look upset,” Simon is saying. “I don’t blame you. I’ve been a shit.” (Is he taking some pride in this, this shittiness?) “But being with you, making love to you is the greatest thing, you are the greatest woman—”

“You and Phyllis don’t make love?” Megan has a quick, intuitive flash that this would be the case; perhaps at last she is catching on to how things are?

“Oh no.”

“You just neck?”

“Well, yes. You could put it like that.” Poor guilty Simon blushes, and now he seems to feel an obligation to tell her everything. “I’ve always known Phyllis,” he explains. “Our families moved from Brooklyn to West End Avenue at about the same time, and my parents, God, they’d die if I didn’t marry a nice Jewish girl. From their point of view Phyllis is ideal. And she really is okay, in a way. She’s bright.”

“It’s so funny,” Megan muses. “I know someone, a girl, who’s Jewish, and she wants to marry this boy, who’s Irish, and his mother hates her.” She is not sure why she thought the story of Janet and Adam would be helpful; in truth, she does not really want to talk to Simon anymore, that day. In fact she has a deep conviction
of total wrongness, somewhere; the equations of sex and love and marriage are coming out all wrong, at least as far as she is concerned. Which is not at all to say that she would like to marry Simon, she would not; and probably in the long run she would not want to marry George Wharton either.
Still.

“Megan, I can’t tell you how awful I feel,” Simon is saying. “I could kill myself.”

It is not necessary that he tell her how awful he feels; Megan can see him, a dark young man, overwhelmed with guilt and confusion. In a comforting way she says, “Really, it’s okay. You’re right, it doesn’t have anything to do with us, really. I guess I’m just, uh, surprised. Although probably I shouldn’t be.”

“God, I can certainly see how you’d be surprised. Oh, Megan, I do feel terrible. You probably won’t even want to see me, after this.”

“Oh, Simon. I didn’t say that. But I would like to go back to the dorm now. Okay?”

“Oh,
sure.
”

They both rush through what has sometimes been a languorous ritual of getting dressed, often interrupted by passages of love—but not today. Dressed, they hurry out to Simon’s car, and he drives her back over the hills of Cambridge, to her dorm, driving much faster than usual. As though to excuse their haste, at some point Megan remarks, “I’ve got this hour exam tomorrow. I almost forgot.”

At the door Simon asks her, “You will see me again?” (He has made a clear effort not to plead.)

“Oh, Simon, don’t be silly. Of course I will. Sometime.”

Megan gives this episode considerably less thought and less emotion than she might have been expected to—than, in fact, she might have expected of herself. Perhaps, she thinks (she hopes) that she was inoculated against certain emotions by the experience of George Wharton.

And then she stops thinking of such things altogether, for the moment, and she decides that she wants to go out for honors;
maybe she could make Junior Phi Bete? As long as she’s here she might as well learn all that she possibly can, mightn’t she?

None of Megan’s friends, at that moment, that May of 1944, share in her (at least temporarily) high-minded preoccupation with work. Cathy is always out somewhere with Phil-Flash; when she comes in late at night she is often a little drunk, her makeup all smeared; she is vague and exhausted and exhilarated and, for Megan, in a conversational way quite out of reach. Although, over late night cigarettes, they sometimes try to talk.

Lavinia is usually out with Potter, and Janet Cohen is either writing to Adam or talking about him—or off to some chem lab. Even Peg seems mysteriously preoccupied; she is known to have had several more dates with Cameron Sinclair, but she does not look happy.

Preoccupation with these various men thus isolates the four young women from each other—an accepted, even expected state of affairs at that time, but Megan feels it keenly. I sometimes have no one to talk to, is what she thinks.

If Megan has not been thinking of Simon, he seems to have thought of her a great deal, however; he telephones and asks her how she has been, and then, before she can get out more than a couple of words, he asks, “How about coming down to New York with me next weekend? I’m serious, I’ve got it all worked out. Where we’ll stay, and everything. This great hotel, on Eighth Street. The Marlton.”

It is odd, the way you get things you used to want, is what Megan is thinking. But she also thinks, New York, how terrific, if only I could. Lack of money has kept her in Cambridge and Boston, so far, and this week is no better than any others, financially.

“We’ll take the train down,” Simon says. “Go down Saturday night, if that’s okay with you. Have dinner, maybe hit some spots on Fifty-second Street. Then Sunday we’ll have all day, I’ll just put in a quick appearance at my parents’.”

And a quick spot of necking with Phyllis? Megan wonders; but that is unfair, she knows, unfair and ungrateful to kind, on-the-whole fastidious Simon.

She then wonders about train tickets: how much do they cost, and is she supposed to pay for hers? These worries make her tentative, as she says, “Well, that sounds really nice—”

“Megan, come on, it’ll be terrific, and it’s all arranged. I got our train tickets and I called the Marlton. You’ll love it, and we have a suite.”

“A suite?”

He laughs. “A couple of rooms, with a kitchen we won’t use. And you’d laugh if you knew how much it costs. How little, I mean.”

Megan does laugh, from sheer relief, and pleasure at the prospect of New York.

The train trip, the five hours from South Station, Boston, down to Grand Central, is all new to Megan, exhilarating: the lovely New England countryside, the fields and woods of Rhode Island, Connecticut, the vistas of sea and seashore, lined here and there with clusters of gray battleships. And the shirt-sleeve summer dusk of industrial cities, all revved up for war.

Megan is headily aware of possibilities, as on the verge of love. Cambridge recedes, now as invisible to her as California is, and she thinks, New York!

In the train’s jolting club car they drink old-fashioneds, and then they have another in the dark bar of the Hotel Commodore, in the lower reaches of Grand Central—in the glamorous wartime atmosphere of reunions, dramatically heightened moments just prior to perhaps-final partings.

Megan watches everything, intensely feeling it all, drinking everything in with her strong sweet fruity cocktail.

From Grand Central they take a cab down Fifth Avenue to the Marlton, on Fifth and 8th Street. As the cab hurries downtown
Megan never turns from its window; she is dizzy with the excitement of those moments, breathing an air that is absolutely new to her: the thick hot New York June night air, an element entirely unlike that of San Francisco on summer nights, with its foggy gusts and salt hints of the sea. Unlike Palo Alto (very), unlike even Boston, or Cambridge. The white or colored neon lights are more brilliant here than anywhere else, more violent. The people on the sidewalks walk much faster.

Megan for the first time in her life is aware of being in a city.

The Marlton: big shabby rooms, a small kitchen which, as Simon predicted, they will never use. A high, wide, lumpy-looking bed.

They do not, however, linger in the room; Megan’s impatience carries them both outside. “Can’t we just walk on the street—I mean avenue, Fifth Avenue?”

“Sure, and I have a great idea. Where we’ll have dinner. It’s right
on
Fifth Avenue.”

They go outside, and he leads her up a few blocks, and across the street to a terrace that is sheltered by an awning, and surrounded by low boxwoods. The Brevoort. That night, a Saturday, it is crowded with uniforms, ribbons and decorations, braid; and with women both beautiful and chic beyond the dreams of San Francisco, the capacities of Boston.

Dimly, fleetingly, Megan wishes that her white linen dress were black; she feels, though, that she is an invisible observer, and thus a participant in all those vivid lives around her.

The men on that terrace who are not in actual uniform wear a uniform of their own: dark blue blazers, white shirts, and dark striped ties, Simon like all the rest. Very much at home in that expensive atmosphere, he achieves a corner table with a view of both the terrace and the throbbing adjacent sidewalk, the traffic of the street. He asks Megan what she would like to eat, and at her look of utter confusion, smiling solicitous Simon competently orders vichysoisse and lobster salad.

If, at just that moment, he had told Megan that he could not, after all, possibly marry Phyllis, and if he had asked her, Megan,
to marry him, then and there, that night (as in many ways he would strongly like to do), Megan would have said yes; she would like to marry New York—she would have said yes, at that moment, to anything at all.

After dinner, another taxi takes them up Fifth Avenue, through thicker, faster crowds, sounds of horns and music from car radios, blaring from the wide-open doors of bars, and clubs. Shouts, and the loud murmur of a thousand cars, all driving all over the city.

Fifty-second Street. They go down a few steps, into a narrow, black, and entirely packed room, what looks to be a hundred people, all crammed around tiny tables, in the din, the smoke, and the wild hot crazy sound of a trombone solo. The man out in front, playing in the spotlight, is so tall and lithe, swaying, dancing as he plays, thrusting out his long silver horn into the black smoky air—air smelling of gardenias and bad Scotch and mingled perfumes and sweat. The man thrusts and raises up his bright trombone, blasting out his passionate sounds.

Just as Megan and Simon are being seated, then, their two small chairs jammed together at a table already occupied by six other people, strangers, just then that man, the trombone player, puts down his horn, and he comes over to the mike to sing. He is still swaying, dancing; the movement is all over his body, even his hands move, dancingly. When he sings his voice is somewhat high, and husky—a seductive voice, its range insinuating. “I want you, baby, You the one for me, baby—”

Fully visible now, in the spotlight, he has brownish-yellow skin and wide-apart dark slightly drooping eyes, eyes that look directly at Megan, she feels—into and all over her. “I know you, baby, You are meant for me, baby—,” he sings, directly to her. He stops and smiles—at Megan, a wide flashing grin that goes pointedly to her, eyes washing over her, saying more than any words she has ever heard. And then very slowly, gracefully, he moves offstage, to the sound of frantic applause; Megan is clapping until both her hands and her wrists are sore.

When it is possible to speak she asks Simon, “Who is that?”

“That’s Jackson Clay. He’s really good, isn’t he. He used to play with Lunceford, and then Goodman for a while, I think.”

Megan is transfixed, wholly concentrated on waiting for him to come back—Jackson Clay; she is almost holding her breath.

She would not, even then, have called that seizure falling in love; this is not like looking up to the sight of George Wharton, in the Stanford Bookstore, and realizing that George is going to speak to her. This is an excitement and a compulsion of quite a different order; if fewer imaginative emotions are involved, her eyes and ears, her breath and her breasts, her arms and her legs and her place all yearn toward his absence.

Suddenly, then, she sees him, sees Jackson Clay, not on the stage but just standing there in a doorway, lounging; is he staring in her direction, looking for her? The doorway in which he leans leads to a staircase, up which there is (there must be) the ladies’ room. And so that is where Megan says she is going. “I’ll be right back,” she tells Simon.

She pushes through tables, past knees and elbows, past waiters and an ugly, pushy flower vendor, to where he is standing, as though in wait for her. “I think you’re wonderful,” Megan says, with what is almost her last breath, and she hears her own high strained voice.

“You do, now? That’s real nice.” Jackson Clay’s dark look takes her all in, his white smile dazzles her, as he reaches for her arm. They start up the stairs together, he guiding, propelling her, until he turns her toward a door, which he opens. An empty room—lockers, chests, suitcases. He closes the door. Pulls her body to his, their entire lengths touching, merging, melting. His mouth and his tongue incredible—all
new.
Jackson Clay.