Read A Round-Heeled Woman Online

Authors: Jane Juska

Tags: #Fiction

A Round-Heeled Woman (21 page)

BOOK: A Round-Heeled Woman
11.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Well, here goes. Feigned insouciance was all I had and, hopeful that my Shirley Temple dimples would finally disarm him, I said, “I am a longtime fan of Trollope, Anthony”—I was going to get it right—“and understand the Berg Collection might possibly have a manuscript and I would really, really like to go there because . . .”

Ties number 1 and number 2 looked at each other and smiled, almost. They shook their heads at each other as if to say, Can you believe this woman?

“I've come all the way from California,” I said, three thousand miles having counted for something at the Metropolitan Opera, which gave me a seat to a sold-out Der Rosenkavalier ; and the Metropolitan Museum, which provided me an escort who took me into the Sargent wing when it was closed. Herringbone number 1 spoke: “I'm afraid the argument you present is simply not adequate.” They smiled at each other openly now with utter disregard for what New York might think of such bald-faced jollity. They shook their heads in concert. No.

Goddamnit. “Gee,” I said, “I guess I should have lied.”

Number 2, showing his colors at last, said, “Too late for that, isn't it?” They performed an open-mouth smile, awash in hilarity, united in misogyny.

You sonsabitches. I said, “Let me add to what I have told you.” My dimples were no more. I leaned forward and began to lie. “I teach at the University of California at Berkeley, a course in writing. My interest in Trollope has to do with emendation, that is, to what extent did he make use of revision, what might a manuscript show that might impress, or not, the efficacy of revision upon my students at the university in terms of their own work. As writers. As scholars.” By the end of my eloquent falsehood, I was very close to, you might say in the face of, number 1. It was clear that I would not be moved. Number 1 looked down the table at number 2. They bowed their heads in silence, raised them, looked unblinkingly and profoundly into the eyes of the other, and nodded. Yes. Number 1 pushed across the table an application form. At the bottom, I was directed to write two university contacts who would verify my need to know. After borrowing a pencil, I filled in the form and wrote the names of friends who just had to be at the university, they used to be, surely they still were and would be sitting by the phone to take the call from this two-headed Cerberus. Number 2 handed me a card that read “Good for one day, 21 Jan. 00, unless revoked.” I signed my name on the line at the bottom of the page, swearing that every item I had entered on the application was true. I tottered off to the Berg.

By now, my bibliographical notations were no longer pasty, they were pulp; however, I showed the little wad to the man inside the Berg, who let me in after I flashed my permit. This was not the same man I had seen earlier; in fact, it gradually dawned on me that I had not seen a woman in this library at all anywhere over the four hours of my visit. This man was very, very tall and big all over. This man, you just knew, could fit only one job in the entire city of New York and this was it. He looked like Lenny in
Of Mice and Men,
except this Lenny, Lenny de Berg, I think of him, didn't talk at all. He pointed to my bibliography, then to the card catalog. I deduced that I was to match the mess in my hands to call numbers in the catalog and give him the numbers and on and on, jesus h. christ, sweat was streaming down my back. I said to him, “Look. All I really want to see is an original manuscript. Couldn't you just see if you have one and . . . ?” He pointed at the card catalog, and said, “You get four.” “But I've already got four, here they . . .” I was talking to his back. Sigh. I found a listing in the card catalog that looked as if it might be a manuscript, wrote the numbers down on a sheet of paper I borrowed from Lenny with a pencil I picked up off the floor, and handed the paper over. He disappeared. I sat down and put my forehead on the cool surface of the table. The time was drawing nigh. The Holy Grail would be mine or it wouldn't be. My entire life would have been wasted or not. My worth as a human being, diminished as it already was by lying and cheating right down the hall, would be restored or not. I would leave the Berg Collection triumphant or . . .

Here came Lenny. He was carrying something book-size and red. He placed it on the table in front of me and disappeared once again. Whatever he had found was in this red leather case with a gold clasp. I lifted the clasp gently and opened the lid of the box to find red silk covering whatever lay beneath. I parted the layers of silk—like stage curtains, they were—and there it was: the original manuscript of Miss MacKenzie. It was the most beautiful thing I will ever see. I began to cry. My snuffling—of course, it was loud, I had no Kleenex, no handkerchief, no pockets—interrupted the concentration of the scholars bent over the other tables and I was made to shush. Wiping my nose on my sweater, which would now have to go to the cleaners for sure, I read Miss MacKenzie, marveling at the legibility of Trollope's hand, the fineness of it, and the fact that there were almost no emendations, perhaps one or two crossed-out words on a page. Page after page, perhaps eight hundred pages in all, this is what makes a book, this is where genius goes, what he does, what a privilege to be in his presence, to touch, to see, to read him as he writes. I wished I had a class to share this with, or Dr. V, because here on this very page, in Trollope's own hand, was Miss MacKenzie her own self sighing into the mirror over her advancing age, then moving forward to kiss her very own reflection. It would not do, would not do at all, for tears to stain these pages, so I wiped my eyes on my sleeve, yucky by now, and bowed my head over the words as I turned page after page upon page. There are churches of all kinds; this was mine.

After a long time, Lenny reappeared. Flush with wonder, I looked up at him, smiled (what the hell, it might work this time), and said, “I would give anything for a photocopy of just one page of Mr. Trollope's manuscript.” He pointed to a sign on his desk: PHOTOCOPIES FIFTY CENTS. “I'll be right back,” I said. “My money's down on the first floor in my locker and it won't take but a minute and . . .”

Lenny spoke. “Which page?”

“Huh?”

“Which page you want copied?”

“Oh, any page, any page at all.”

“Which one?”

I turned to any page at all and pointed. “This one.”

He took the manuscript and disappeared. Back he came, in his hand a page copied from the manuscript. He held it out to me.

“Oh, thank you, thank you, I'll just go down and get my . . .”

“Here,” he said, and placed the copy in my hand. “It's a present.”

Some things in New York are free. I cried all the way to the bus.

BACK HOME IN Berkeley, I photocopied Lenny de Berg's gift, page 247 of Miss MacKenzie, and sent it off to Matt along with my gratitude. Our phone calls became more intimate, more frequent, and more drunken. They came sometimes from me, more often from him, sometimes in the early evening, more often in the late hours of the night. Sometimes Matt was stoned, sometimes he wasn't. But if he wasn't and I wasn't, we would be before we ended our conversation, which ranged from the questionable dramaturgy of Ionesco to where we liked our orgasms to come from. I fueled myself with wine, Matt with what I came to call his M & M's, martinis and marijuana. Neither of us passed out, at least not while we were on the phone, not while Matt contested the desirability of having sex with another person, such as a woman, asserting over and over that his daily jerk-off was just fine with him, that women in northern Wisconsin were too fat to bother with and usually too dumb. “I'm not fat [very],” I said, “and I'm not dumb. Come here and have sex with me or I will come there and have sex with you.” This seemed a reasonable next step given the growing frequency and deepening intimacy of our phone calls. I liked him a lot. “Meet me in New York,” I urged. “We would have such fun.” Yes, he agreed, we would. But we never did. Always, he was somewhere else. Always he was shooting in Vancouver or seeing an agent in Chicago or visiting his daughters in Missouri. And never closer to me. “Matt,” I asked, round about one midnight, “when did you last have sex with a woman?” “About twelve years ago,” he answered. I could hear him sucking on his joint, sipping his martini. “I met this woman in the hotel bar in New York. When she left, she dropped her keys in my lap and I used them.” “How was it?” “Good,” he said, “very good, actually.” Jeeze, another Cheever story. “Let's meet in a hotel bar in New York,” I offered, “and I'll drop my keys wherever you say.” Matt was getting like the Berg Collection, not open to just anyone, just for the asking. But he was still on my list, near the top, and I had no intention of giving up. God, he was fun. He knew so much poetry, so much theater, he was funny, he was sexy. “But Jane,” he would protest, “you're so old!” Matt was sixty-two and here I was, all of sixty-six, very soon to be sixty-seven, and he was a man I liked and wanted to have sex with. It didn't matter to me if I was older; actually, it didn't matter to him except as an amusing way to avoid the actuality of me.

I would put a stop to this. On a lovely day in June, I flew to Madison, in Wisconsin, where I would live if I didn't live in Berkeley. Like Berkeley, Madison is full of Democrats and a couple of Republicans who are also smart. My longtime friends live in Madison and so I went to visit. “I'm coming to Madison, ” I told Matt. “I will come visit you.” That was a short conversation.

From Madison, I called Matt. “I will rent a car and be up this weekend. Is there a place to stay you would recommend?” I wanted him to say “Stay with me”; it was just logical, for crissake.

“Why are you coming?” he asked.

“To meet you!” I was astonished at the coolness of his voice, though it was morning, too early for an M & M.

“Guess I can't stop you. There are motels outside of town.”

“You are not welcoming.”

“We have no business to conduct, no conversation that can't be carried on over the phone.”

“Do you have all your arms and legs?” I asked. “Is there something you haven't told me? Are you living with a woman or a man or a dog or in a place you want to keep secret from me?”

He went into a tear. “Goddamnit, I don't see why the hell you can't be satisified with just talking.” His voice shed every dulcet tone it ever had. “You're going to spoil the whole fucking thing with your pushiness.” He was out-and-out yelling. “You've got to have your way. Just leave it alone. Just leave me alone!”

“I'm coming anyway.”

Click.

I don't have a lot of money, you can tell by now; but I have a lot of determination. I get stubborn, especially when I get curious. And I was angry. People don't swear at me, not since 1962, teaching high school, first period, when George Swinton told me to go to hell and I kicked him out of class, something a teacher could do then with impunity more or less. Here was Matt, this three-quarters wonderful man going off on nothing. Well, we would set things straight. He would see me for the unthreatening, accepting, wonderful woman I could make myself into. “We don't have to sleep together, you know,” I told him over the phone. “We can have coffee or a martini and I can just turn around and leave if we decide that's best.” How could he resist me? But he had. No longer. So, in my Madison guest room I packed my bag, checked my map, and set the alarm for seven, which would get me to where Matt lived by noon. Five short hours, by god, the sun was coming up, the trail was getting warm. Head 'em up; move 'em out.

The alarm rang at seven and so did my head. What had happened during the night? Thick goop had invaded my sinuses and fired cannon volleys into my frontal lobes, the ones necessary for driving. I struggled for the clock, turned off the alarm, and pushed myself out of bed. I would be fine, no matter what the symptoms, what dire prognostications they spoke. In the shower, I practiced my greeting to Matt: “Hi, how are you,” I wanted to say. Nothing came out. I was laryngitical. I was voiceless. I was psychosomatic. My throat burned.

On the phone, Matt was sympathetic and clearly relieved. “Another time,” he said. “Take care of yourself.” I went back to bed all alone and happy to be so.

I gave up. I flew back to Berkeley and missed Matt. He had become a friend, a sort of soul mate, an intellectual companion, a funny, real person the Midwest had coughed up and looked after, a person I recognized from my time, from my part of the country, without the lousy parts that had bedeviled me in my childhood. He had become a person with whom I felt safe.

A few weeks later, at nine P.M., the phone rang. It was Matt. “Are you healed?” The tinkling of ice from his end signaled the coming of fun. I was healed and so we played, we laughed, we argued about Arthur Miller and Edward Albee and about Eric Rohmer and Peter Bogdanovich and about sex in the shower and on the floor, and then he said, “What do you think would happen if we met?” and I said, “I don't know, I'm kind of nervous now, you sort of frightened me . . .” He went into a tear. “Goddamnit, don't be one of those women who back away from the slightest remark that isn't exactly what they want to hear.” And I said, “I'm not one of those women, I'm this woman, and I am more cautious of you than I was . . .” And he said, “What is your fucking problem, lady, that we can't have a reasonable conversation, goddamnit, listen to me, don't you dare hang up on me, don't you dare.” So I did.

He got away. Not all my determination, not all the charm I could muster, not my willingness to travel great distances or to meet his plane, his train, his automobile, could convince him of—what? What do you suppose he needed convincing of? What caused him to go into a rage, to become so violent in his words, so explosively angry that I held the phone away from my ear and shuddered at the change in him? It was not me, at least not just me. But I never got a chance to find out. Even now, sometimes when it's nine P.M. in California and eleven in Wisconsin, I look at the phone and hope it will ring. It doesn't. Probably better that way. He gave me Trollope at the Berg, though, and for that I will always be grateful.

BOOK: A Round-Heeled Woman
11.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Released Souls by Karice Bolton
Galactic Diplomat by Keith Laumer
Bladesinger by Strohm, Keith Francis
I Want to Kill the Dog by Cohen, Richard M.
Where Have You Been? by Michael Hofmann