The Bell Jar (17 page)

               
I couldn’t take my eyes off that
stickpin.

               
A great white light seemed to
shoot out of it, illuminating the room. Then the light withdrew into itself,
leaving a dewdrop on a field of gold.

               
I put one foot in front of the
other.

               
“That’s a diamond,” somebody
said, and a lot of people burst out laughing.

               
My nail tapped a glassy facet.

               
“Her first diamond.”

               
“Give it to her, Marco.”

               
Marco bowed and deposited the
stickpin in my palm.

               
It dazzled and danced with light
like a heavenly ice cube. I slipped it quickly into my imitation jet bead
evening bag and looked around. The faces were empty as plates, and nobody
seemed to be breathing.

               
“Fortunately,” a dry, hard hand
encircled my upper arm, “I am escorting the lady for the rest of the evening.
Perhaps,” the spark in Marco’s eyes extinguished, and they went black, “I shall
perform some small service...”

               
Somebody laughed.

               
“...worthy of a diamond.”

               
The hand round my arm tightened.

               
“Ouch!”

               
Marco removed his hand. I looked
down at my arm. A thumbprint purpled into view. Marco watched me. Then he
pointed to the underside of my arm. “Look there.”

               
I looked, and saw four, faint
matching prints.

               
“You see, I am quite serious.”

               
Marco’s small, flickering smile
reminded me of a snake I’d teased in the Bronx Zoo. When I tapped my finger on
the stout cage glass the snake had opened its clockwork jaws and seemed to
smile. Then it struck and struck and struck at the invisible pane till I moved
off.

               
I had never met a woman-hater
before.

               
I could tell Marco was a
woman-hater, because in spite of all the models and TV starlets in the room
that night he paid attention to nobody but me. Not out of kindness or even
curiosity, but because I’d happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in
a pack of identical cards.

A
man in the country club band stepped up to the mike and started shaking those
seedpod rattles that mean South American music.

               
Marco reached for my hand, but I
hung on to my fourth daiquiri and stayed put. I’d never had a daiquiri before.
The reason I had a daiquiri was because Marco ordered it for me, and I felt so
grateful he hadn’t asked what sort of drink I wanted that I didn’t say a word,
I just drank one daiquiri after another.

               
Marco looked at me.

               
“No,” I said.

               
“What do you mean, no?”

               
“I can’t dance to that kind of
music.”

               
“Don’t be stupid.”

               
“I want to sit here and finish
my drink.”

               
Marco bent toward me with a
tight smile, and in one scoop my drink took wing and landed in a potted palm.
Then Marco gripped my hand in such a way I had to choose between following him
on to the floor or having my arm torn off.

               
“It’s a tango.” Marco maneuvered
me out among the dancers. “I love tangoes.”

               
“I can’t dance.”

               
“You don’t have to dance. I’ll
do the dancing.”

               
Marco hooked an arm around my
waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, “Pretend
you are drowning.”

               
I shut my eyes, and the music
broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco’s leg slid forward against mine and my
leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted to him, limb for limb, moving as he
moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought,
“It doesn’t take two to dance, it only takes one,” and I let myself blow and
bend like a tree in the wind.

               
“What did I tell you?” Marco’s
breath scorched my ear. “You’re a perfectly respectable dancer.”

               
I began to see why woman-haters
could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and
chockfull of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never
catch one.

               
After the South American music
there was an interval.

               
Marco led me through the French
doors into the garden. Lights and voices spilled from the ballroom window, but
a few yards beyond the darkness drew up its barricade and sealed them off. In
the infinitesimal glow of the stars, the trees and flowers were strewing their
cool odors. There was no moon.

               
The box hedges shut behind us. A
deserted golf course stretched away toward a few hilly clumps of trees, and I
felt the whole desolate familiarity of the scene--the country club and the
dance and the lawn with its single cricket.

               
I didn’t know where I was, but
it was somewhere in the wealthy suburbs of New York.

               
Marco produced a slim cigar and
a silver lighter in the shape of a bullet. He set the cigar between his lips
and bent over the small flare. His face, with its exaggerated shadows and
planes of light, looked alien and pained, like a refugee’s.

               
I watched him.

               
“Who are you in love with?” I
said then.

               
For a minute Marco didn’t say
anything, he simply opened his mouth and breathed out a blue, vaporous ring.

               
“Perfect!” he laughed.

               
The ring widened and blurred,
ghost-pale on the dark air.

               
Then he said, “I am in love with
my cousin.”

               
I felt no surprise.

               
“Why don’t you marry her?”

               
“Impossible.”

               
“Why?”

               
Marco shrugged. “She’s my first
cousin. She’s going to be a nun.”

               
“Is she beautiful?”

               
“There’s no one to touch her.”

               
“Does she know you love her?”

               
“Of course.”

               
I paused. the obstacle seemed
unreal to me.

               
“If you love her,” I said,
“you’ll love somebody else someday.”

               
Marco dashed his cigar
underfoot.

               
The ground soared and struck me
with a soft shock. Mud squirmed through my fingers. Marco waited until I half
rose. Then he put both hands on my shoulders and flung me back.

               
“My dress...”

               
“Your dress!” The mud oozed and
adjusted itself to my shoulder blades. “Your dress!” Marco’s face lowered
cloudily over mine. A few drops of spit struck my lips. “Your dress is black
and the dirt is black as well.”

               
Then he threw himself face down
as if he would grind his body through me and into the mud.

               
“It’s happening,” I thought.
“It’s happening. If I just lie here and do nothing it Will happen.”

               
Marco set his teeth to the strap
at my shoulder and tore my sheath to the waist. I saw the glimmer of bare skin,
like a pale veil separating two bloody-minded adversaries.

               
“Slut!”

               
The word hissed by my ear.

               
“Slut!”

               
The dust cleared, and I had a
full view of the battle.

               
I began to writhe and bite.

               
Marco weighed me to the earth.

               
“Slut!”

               
I gouged at his leg with the
sharp heel of my shoe. He turned, fumbling for the hurt:

               
Then I fisted my fingers
together and smashed them at his nose. It was like hitting the steel plate of a
battleship. Marco sat up. I began to cry.

               
Marco pulled out a white
handkerchief and dabbed his nose. Blackness, like ink, spread over the pale
cloth.

               
I sucked at my salty knuckles.

               
“I want Doreen.”

               
Marco stared off across the golf
links.

               
“I want Doreen. I want to go
home.”

               
“Sluts, all sluts.” Marco seemed
to be talking to himself. “Yes or no, it is all the same.”

               
I poked Marco’s shoulder.

               
“Where’s Doreen?”

               
Marco snorted. “Go to the
parking lot. Look in the backs of all the cars.”

               
Then he spun around.

               
“My diamond.”

               
I got up and retrieved my stole
from the darkness. I started to walk off. Marco sprang to his feet and blocked
my path. Then, deliberately, he wiped his finger under his bloody nose and with
two strokes stained my cheeks. “I have earned my diamond with this blood. Give
it to me.”

               
“I don’t know where it is.”

               
Now I knew perfectly well that
the diamond was in my evening bag and that when Marco knocked me down my
evening bag had soared, like a night bird, into the enveloping darkness. I
began to think I would lead him away and then return on my own and hunt for it.

               
I had no idea what a diamond
that size would buy, but whatever it was, I knew it would be a lot.

               
Marco took my shoulders in both
hands.

               
“Tell me,” he said, giving each
word equal emphasis. “Tell me, or I’ll break your neck.”

               
Suddenly I didn’t care.

               
“It’s in my imitation jet bead
evening bag,” I said. “Somewhere in the muck.”

               
I left Marco on his hands and
knees, scrabbling in the darkness for another, smaller darkness that hid the
light of his diamond from his furious eyes.

               
Doreen was not in the ballroom
nor in the parking lot.

               
I kept to the fringe of the
shadows so nobody would notice the grass plastered to my dress and shoes, and
with my black stole I covered my shoulders and bare breasts.

               
Luckily for me, the dance was
nearly over, and groups of people were leaving and coming out to the parked
cars. I asked at one car after another until finally I found a car that had
room and would drop me in the middle of Manhattan.

At
that vague hour between dark and dawn, the sunroof of the Amazon was deserted.

               
Quiet as a burglar in my
cornflower-sprigged bathrobe, I crept to the edge of the parapet. The parapet
reached almost to my shoulders, so I dragged a folding chair from the stack
against the wall, opened it, and climbed onto the precarious seat.

               
A stiff breeze lifted the hair
from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings
blackened, as if for a funeral.

               
It was my last night.

               
I grasped the bundle I carried
and pulled at a pale tail. A strapless elasticized slip which, in the course of
wear, had lost its elasticity, slumped into my hand. I waved it, like a flag of
truce, once, twice....The breeze caught it, and I let go.