Looking for Mr. Goodbar (11 page)

“So, you don’t let them—”

“Listen,” Theresa said, with an insincerity so palpable that she couldn’t believe Katherine wouldn’t see what she was doing. “I’m feeling a little better already, Katherine. I’m really glad we talked.”

Katherine was uncertain.

“I really . . . I’ll start eating. I’ll come out of it. You’ll see, as soon as I begin to feel better they’ll stop worrying.”

The next day she had some pretzels and the following day, dry cereal. Then tuna fish, then peanut-butter sandwiches. But it was a couple of weeks before she could eat meat again.

Meanwhile Katherine and Brooks went off to Fire Island for the summer. Katherine wanted Theresa to come with them. At first Theresa refused entirely, but Katherine kept saying she could change her mind at any time. Finally she told Theresa that Brooks’s children were going to be there in August and Theresa would really be a big help if she came. She could be like a mother’s helper. And if she didn’t like it, she could go home any time Brooks went into the city. At first Theresa said she thought not, but then she daydreamed of running into Martin, her new, svelte, peaceful-looking self, and although she didn’t believe in the possibilities of the daydream, she said she would maybe try a weekend or two in July with Brooks.

Driving out and ferrying
across to the Island turned out to be the best part of the weekends. Brooks was a great talker. Where
Martin’s conversation had been clever, his conversation a series of feints and jabs, Brooks was fluid and peaceful, his conversation punctuated only by laughter at himself or the world in general.

He was one of those men who’d awakened one day at the age of forty in his home in Scarsdale, turned to look at his wife, a still attractive but very typical Scarsdale wife-mother whose greatest problem in life was getting decent maids, thought about the appointments he had in his law office that day and suddenly said to himself, “Hey! What the hell am I doing here? I’m following someone else’s plan for my life!” And a year later, after a lot of bitterness and a lot of anguish over leaving his kids, he’d had a separation and then a divorce. He’d had absolutely no intention of ever getting married again. And then one day on an airplane he’d met this absolutely beautiful girl who had no more interest in marriage than he did. Who didn’t even care what he did for a living, for Christ’s sake. Who was perfectly happy to see him for dinner, a movie and a good lay without knowing that his father had one of the three biggest Jewish law firms in Boston and he himself was a partner in one of New York’s most prestigious firms and had published a law text that was used in half the law schools in the country. Who didn’t care if he could even afford the place he was living in.

She didn’t have to care, Brooks. If she met you on an airplane doing business, she could take some things for granted.

He had to admit he’d really gone for that, but he still didn’t think he’d have gone all the way if he’d never seen the place where Kitty lived.

Kitty. No one had ever called Katherine Kitty before. Theresa wished she had a special name. Not Tessie. Not a baby name.

A
shithouse!
He still laughed when he thought of it. Kitty had kicked out the guy she was living with and two stewardess friends had moved in. The whole place was pretty bad but Kitty’s room was unbelievable. He’d never seen anything like it even in his bachelor days (he had to admit he was pretty neat, himself). His ex-wife would have had a hemorrhage. Never mind his ex-wife,
the Collier Brothers wouldn’t have lived there! Three-month-old take-out Chinese food in the drawers! The only reason the place didn’t smell even worse was that she didn’t close the drawers and the hot apartment air seemed to be drying the stuff out faster than the bacteria could rot it! He remembered asking her where she kept the thousand-year eggs!

Theresa was fascinated by these glimpses of a Katherine she didn’t know, yet resentful of the way Brooks’s infatuation with Katherine made him view her as some kind of prize—her failures were her greatest successes! When he talked about her taking eighteen credits her first term because she was so terrified of going back to school that she had to plunge right in, Theresa had to sit on the impulse to say that was just plain idiotic. And what was all this business about Katherine being so scared of school when she was always first or second in her class? Brooks said it was true Kitty was a pretty smart kid, but a Catholic school in the Bronx wasn’t NYU. Not that NYU was one big think tank, either, but there wasn’t actually a college in the country where Kitty would have to worry about grades if she’d just focus her energy. Concentrate. Do her work.

On the beach they
talked politics—the war in Vietnam, mostly—and watched bodies. Theresa was the only one in their group who didn’t wear a bikini but then she wasn’t really in the group, anyway. She felt like a tourist in a land where everyone was dark and oily and sexy and spoke a language whose words she knew but which, when put together in sentences, had no impact on her. Nor had she experienced any sexual feeling since the loss of Martin. In the evenings they stayed home and smoked grass and played the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and danced (or went to one of the dancing bars). Sometimes they had what they called a party but it was hard to tell those nights from the others. Theresa would sit in the living room where everyone was, but mostly she
would stay curled up in one corner with a book, making believe that Martin had found out she was here and even now was looking for her.

Rafe and Marvella, who shared the house with Brooks and Katherine, were, along with them, the hub of the sexual activities—the dancing, whatever was going on. At first Theresa wasn’t sure. Both strikingly handsome, with dark hair and deep sunburns, looking like sister and brother, Marvella was a photographer and Rafe an artist. Or so it was said. You couldn’t have guessed from anything that happened out here. They smoked all the time and were the only ones in the group who used acid with any regularity. They made Theresa uncomfortable because there was nothing about them that she could latch onto as real. If she’d often had the sense of Katherine as a façade with little solid matter beneath, she knew this wasn’t really true, that somewhere beneath the gorgeous groovy surface of her older sister lay a human being with some substance, even if that substance was largely a sense of sin. While Rafe and Marvella seemed to have sprung full-blown from the mind of someone planning the second half of the twentieth century. They were never tense or wound up. They never sat around saying they really ought to be working. They bore no one malice, not even themselves. Their two children, Eamon and Tara, were the darlings of the group. Five and seven respectively, they were almost as cool as their parents, and never bothered anyone. They watched TV during the day when the other kids were on the beach. When Brooks’s kids finally came out with them in August it was understood that Eamon and Tara would be their friends, but Brooks’s kids always wanted to be out on the beach or making a hut or finding things to sell on a sidewalk stand. They wanted Eamon and Tara to join them but Eamon and Tara would watch them work for a while, then drift back to the house to see what was on TV.

Brooks’s children were delightful, too, although they didn’t fit with the grown-ups as easily as Eamon and Tara. But they were
quite independent, made friends with other kids on the beach and required little attention. Theresa had only seen them once or twice when they visited their father in New York and of course it had been different there. She was disappointed that they didn’t need her more.

When there were parties, if she’d had some wine and someone asked her to dance, she might do it. Otherwise she just read or watched. She refused to smoke. She’d lost the fear since little had happened when she’d smoked with Martin, but there was a great deal of joking about getting turned on by grass and she most definitely didn’t want to be turned on. Katherine laughed when she said that, that she didn’t want to like sex any more than she did, but it was no joking matter to her; the morning papers weren’t into women’s sexuality yet and to admit the need when there was no man to fill it seemed to be telling the world that you did forbidden things to yourself to gratify that need.

Katherine and Brooks kept urging her to mingle with a younger crowd, people who weren’t married, but she had no desire to do this. She was comfortable where she was, though she wasn’t happy. She couldn’t even remember how happiness felt.

When she woke up very early one morning on the floor behind the sofa, having fallen asleep during the party the night before while trying to finish a book, and saw four naked bodies lying loosely entwined on the rug in front of the sofa, her first thought was, Oh, so that’s what it looks like to be happy—and only later did a variety of other reactions set in.

They were all sound asleep. Katherine was lying in Rafe’s arms; Rafe’s head was on one of the huge embroidered pillows they kept on the floor. Brooks’s head lay not five inches from Rafe’s on the pillow, his body going in another direction. Marvella was curled up between them, her head on Brooks’s stomach. Not his stomach, really. Her face was touching his pubic hair. Her feet were under Rafe’s body.

Tiptoeing out of the room, guilty at having seen them, she
went upstairs and got into her own bed. The light was coming through her window and she didn’t want to get up again so she buried her head under the blankets, but when she closed her eyes she saw Marvella’s face next to Brooks’s penis, which jolted her more fully awake than she’d been the whole time until then. The picture drew her so strongly and repelled her so sharply once she got there that the two feelings tossed her between them and she didn’t fall asleep again until late morning, when the others had gotten up and were moving around the house.

When she came out to the beach that afternoon Brooks and Marvella were discussing a show some painter they all knew was having at a gallery in Cherry Grove. They were perfectly casual. You’d have thought they were two strangers who’d just met on the sand.

She was happy in
the classroom in a way that she’d never been in her life. She gave and took so much that she came home exhausted at the end of the day but she didn’t nap because if she slept then, she couldn’t fall asleep at night, and it was too depressing to lie in bed awake for hours when everyone else was sleeping. She still thought about Martin a great deal but it was from a greater distance, now. She still dreamed about running into him whenever she was in Manhattan but she could understand now, if only intellectually, that their affair had had to end. She also understood that she had idealized Martin somewhat. He was the first person she’d ever known who talked—who
was
—the way he was, and one of the effects of the summer, although she hadn’t realized it until she got home, had been to make her realize that at least
some
of Martin’s virtues, his clever way of speaking, his bored sophistication, were not unique. Not that she ever wanted to know anyone else like him. One per lifetime was enough. She didn’t believe she could survive another.

She was friendly in a remote, polite way with the women who taught with her. Once in a while she would leave the building for lunch with one of them. Occasionally one would suggest going to a movie or concert, but she never felt like it. (She had lunch every month or two on a Saturday with Carol; Rhoda was working for a publisher and terribly busy. Eventually she realized that the only reason she wanted to see Carol was to stroke her memories of Martin, so she stopped doing that.) If she hadn’t allowed herself to be drawn into the dope-colorful rock-loud lives of Katherine and Brooks, that life had left her with a casual disdain for the ones most of the people she knew were living. She baby-sat for Brigid at least once a week.

Her biggest problem in teaching was the knowledge that she would part from her children at the end of the year. She loved them—corny but true, as she said once to Carol—as though they were her own, even the difficult ones. She had chosen first grade because her most exciting school memory was of suddenly being able to look at a page and understand what was on it, and she had that sense of excitement with her children as they began to read. She was authoritative in some ways, loose in others. She led them into long, marvelous discussions stemming from chance questions or remarks they made. Once one of them asked what he could do that his shadow couldn’t do and they spent half an hour moving around the classroom in the sunlight to find out and another half an hour discussing the fine points (What could you really do that your shadow only seemed to be doing?). Another time, when they came in all soaked through on a snowy, slushy day, and found her in the front of the room, looking warm and dry, one of them asked her quite seriously if she was waterproof? From this flowed not only a lengthy discussion of who and what was waterproof, but various other experiments with the nature of water and wetness.

Katherine kept urging her to get a place of her own in Manhattan but it wasn’t until the middle of her second year of teaching that she began to feel restless enough at home to even consider
it. She sent out letters to a large number of schools in Manhattan just to see what would happen. Of the few that answered, one was on the Lower East Side, not far from Katherine and Brooks’s brownstone. Katherine urged her to take it but it wasn’t until the tenant in the bottom studio apartment of their house gave notice that this became a realistic likelihood. The tenant had been paying a hundred and fifty dollars a month but they would only take a hundred from her. She accepted the job in May and moved to the new apartment at the end of the school year.

In the back on the ground floor were two very domestic homosexuals who had a beautiful garden and cooked
cordon bleu
meals. Katherine and Brooks were on the main floor and the top floor was occupied by what turned out to be two males and one female, although it was hard to tell, for they were less sexually differentiated than the homosexuals downstairs, each having shoulder-length straight blond hair, blue jeans drawn tightly over no rear end to speak of, and that look that was just becoming commonplace on the streets of New York—of having been someplace that made them realize that Earth was a two-bit town.