Looking for Mr. Goodbar (12 page)

Katherine wanted to give her a lot of furniture but she wouldn’t take any of it except a double bed. She was apprehensive about moving into the same house as Katherine, determined to stave off any attempts to dominate her life. (In her mind this was a temporary move; she was afraid to move out entirely on her own.)

She spent the entire summer decorating her apartment and took enormous pleasure in doing it—in everything from the painting and plastering to the selection of each and every object she acquired.

It was basically one large room with two windows looking up to the street. In the back were a pullman kitchen and a small bathroom. She painted the walls yellow and the ceiling sky blue. Then she pasted star decals onto the ceiling in the patterns of Orion and Gemini and Capricorn and the Milky Way. They shone in the dark after you’d left the light on for a while, and at night she lay in
bed gazing up at them, as from the grass, enchanted. An imaginary lover lay beside her; they seldom spoke, they just made love or were together.

From a thrift shop on Second Avenue she had a blue velvet pillow. From a pile of discarded furniture on the next block she got a wooden bookcase which she sanded and antiqued so perfectly as to astonish herself. Thus encouraged she got an oak rolltop desk from a store on Third Avenue that was going out of business; it cost only two hundred dollars because it needed to be refinished. She bought a flowered armchair, new, out of the window of Sloane’s, because she happened to pass there one day and see the chair and love it. From Grand Street, which she discovered quite accidentally on a long walk one hot summer day when it was nearly deserted, she bought a blue bandanna-printed quilt that was half price because it was a second. It reminded her of one in Martin’s study. She bought a white pedestal table and two matching dining chairs.

She delighted in every object, from the blue drapes she made herself because she loved the fabric (she’d never sewn before) to the tiny wooden Swedish and Norwegian animals she got in the Village, to the old-fashioned print of a clownfish with its ornate frame and quaint caption:

One of the greatest enemies of small fish is the sea anemone, which looks like a flower but has long tentacles that are full of poison. For some reason the sea anemone does not harm the clownfish. When threatened by danger the clownfish swims in among the anemone’s tentacles where other fish will be afraid to follow.

“Fantastic,” Katherine said when she saw the apartment. “I love it. It’s unbelievable what you’ve done with it!”

She saw very little
of them although Katherine was always inviting her up, when they bumped into each other, for a cup of coffee or to share a pizza dinner. Aside from being genuinely busy and wanting to preserve her independence from her sister, being with them wasn’t the way it had been before. If Brooks had once been so adoring of Katherine that he annoyed Theresa, he was now irritated by those very qualities in Katherine—her sloppiness, her failure to cook for him—that had once charmed him so. Not that he complained a lot, but he was quiet and withdrawn and sometimes came out of it with a small burst of temper, which made Theresa uneasy. Katherine was less flighty-casual with him, more deferential, yet there was something going on underneath Katherine’s deference that contributed to Theresa’s unease. She didn’t think about it a lot but she avoided them.

Her situation at school was different, too, not so much with the students (she’d been relieved to discover that she enjoyed the black and Puerto Rican children as much as the others, and she was, as usual, comfortable and confident in the classroom) as with the staff. Where in the Bronx the staff had been almost entirely made up of middle-aged and older Jewish and Irish women who’d gone into teaching when it was the only decent job they could get and who hadn’t stopped at any point since to decide whether they actually liked doing it, the staff here was only half composed of women like that. The remainder were young and often enthusiastic, largely white but sometimes black, mostly female, but there were two men, one black and one white, both dreamy-eyed, both bearded. Their mood paralleled hers in a way she hadn’t felt before—idealism about the children and their possibilities, combined with a remote, dope-tempered cynicism about the schools, the government, the country.

Theresa had become much more radical in her ideas without ever getting involved with any group. Gradually she was becoming less frightened of black people—maybe because she wanted to so badly but also because she was seeing more of them than she’d
ever seen, close up, at any rate. Her new attitudes made it a little easier for her to be with people like the other young teachers because it relieved her of some of that specific social guilt she’d felt, right through her days at City College, over being a secret racist. Being really no better than her parents in her ideas.

One evening in November
Katherine said she felt like talking and invited Theresa to dinner. Theresa went because she hadn’t seen them in so long. Katherine poured wine for both of them without asking if Theresa wanted any. Only one small light was on in the living room but the dim light was pleasant; the apartment didn’t look quite as bad as in daylight.

“How’s school?” Katherine asked. She was very subdued.

“Great,” Terry said, but she volunteered no further information. It was very important to her that Katherine not be a part of her life in school.

Katherine said nothing. She looked depressed. She took a sip of wine and spilled it on herself.

“Oh, God,” she said, and burst into tears.

“What’s wrong?” Theresa asked.

“I’m pregnant.” Looking at Theresa, through the tears, as though she were sure Theresa had a whip and was going to use it on her.

A picture flashed into Theresa’s mind. Katherine and Brooks asleep on the rug with Rafe and Marvella. Rafe and Marvella had been back there this year, and God only knew who else.

“Mother of God,” Theresa said. “It’s the same thing you did last time.”

Katherine’s face was blank. She stopped crying.

“What do you mean?”

“Not knowing who the father was. Or have you been—?”

“I knew you knew,” Katherine said matter-of-factly. “Anyway, it’s not the same. It’s different.”

“How come you got so thin if you’re pregnant?”

“I can’t eat. I throw up.”

“Does Rafe know?” she asked after a while.

“Rafe? Why? Oh, you mean . . . It doesn’t matter.” Avoiding Theresa’s eyes. “He doesn’t . . . they weren’t the only ones.”

Of course.

Brooks called to say he was working late with someone on a brief; Katherine told him to bring the someone down because Theresa was there and they could all have dinner together.

“I know the whole thing must be hard for you to understand,” she said to Theresa. “I don’t even know how to explain it, it’s just something that happened. When I was working for Pan Am I knew there was a lot of sex around but I never did it. Slept around a lot, I mean. I was . . . maybe it sounds silly to you but when I had the two boyfriends, the one in L.A. and the one in New York, I was leading the cleanest, most careful life of anyone I knew. I used to get teased because I was like a nice married lady at both ends of the run.”

Theresa said nothing.

“Then we got married and for a while everything was fine. Not that it isn’t now, but I mean everything was very regular. Normal. We slept together and we were faithful to each other. . . . Anyhow, I don’t even know how all this—I mean, I sort of know. Not just that there was more grass around all of a sudden, people talking about it, doing it in the open instead of waiting for the last two or three couples to be left at the party. It was kind of nice, really. I felt like you were in on this really beautiful secret thing. You’d found this way to like your husband, not to be doing anything sneaky but have the extra . . . you know, the stuff that goes away when you’re married for a while. It never occurred to me that I’d . . .” She trailed off.

“What never occurred to you?” Terry asked, hearing her own voice and suddenly hating herself for it. The Grand Inquisitor. She knew that if one of her friends from school, Evelyn, say, had been in the same predicament, she’d have been much more sympathetic.
It was hard with Katherine, partly because she knew Katherine would always come out of it all right.

“Never mind,” Katherine said. “It wasn’t true, anyway. I was going to say I didn’t think I’d get pregnant because I hadn’t in all this time but the truth is . . . when I thought about it at all I thought, well, maybe if I can’t get pregnant by Brooks I can by someone else.” On the last words she broke into tears again and buried her head in the blankets.

She’s a friend, Theresa. Tell yourself she’s like a friend.

She went to Katherine and put one arm around her.

“I didn’t know it would work,” Katherine sobbed, “and I’d feel this way!”

She cried now as though her heart would break. She cried for so long that when she finally stopped and sat up her face was red and swollen and ugly.

A couple of minutes later Brooks and Carter Story were at the door.

“As you can see,”
Brooks said, gesturing around the apartment, “my wife has been working like a demon to get the place fixed up for us.” It was the kind of thing he’d said during the drives to Long Island but there was a cutting edge to it now.

Carter Story was handsome in an almost pretty way. Waspy. Smooth-faced. With fine straight brown hair that fell over one eye. They drank wine and Carter admired Brooks’s water pipe and said he hadn’t realized that any of the older men in the office smoked and Brooks repeated “older man” with a groan.

Katherine giggled.

Brooks said that as a matter of fact he had some rather fine stuff in the house right now and maybe he should roll some since his wife hadn’t in all likelihood even thought about dinner.

Katherine sat huddled in the chair, looking red and puffy and dejected.

“I’ll see what I can find,” Terry said.

In the kitchen she found crackers and cheese and fruit and brought them into the living room, where the others were smoking. Sitar music was playing. She arranged the food on the coffee table. Carter dragged on the joint and passed it to Theresa. Not wanting to be out of the group, she took one drag and went back to the kitchen for napkins and anything else she could find. When she returned they hadn’t touched the food yet but they were still smoking. She sat and dragged again. She felt quite nice. Contented. She hoped they would all sit around and have a nice time and the men would forget about their work.

“Mmm,” Katherine said. “This is fantastic grass.”

Brooks cut into the cheese, passed it around with the crackers.

“Mmmm,” Brooks said. “Fantastic cheese.”

“Marvelous,” Carter said. “A toast to the chef.”

They drank some more wine and smoked. Off in one side of her head she realized that she was getting stoned, but that it was all right. Carter was smiling. In the dim light his fine features might easily have been a girl’s, if he’d only had slightly more hair. Katherine’s eyes were closed. Her head rested on the part of the chair where she’d been sitting earlier.

“I have a funny feeling about that brief,” Brooks said.

Carter said he was setting his wrist alarm for four hours from now so that if they all got zonked they would wake up then and do it. Theresa giggled.

They smoked some more and ate some more.

“I want a cookie,” Katherine said. “Do we have any cookies?”

As though it were someone else’s house and that person should go look. Theresa thought that was rather
dear
of Katherine, to treat Theresa so much as though she lived there.

“I’ll see,” Theresa said. Happily she drifted into the kitchen, found Mallomars, Oreos and ladyfingers and brought them out in her arms . . . like a baby. She sat down again and slowly with great pleasure began arranging the cookies symmetrically on the
clear glass of the coffee table. A layer of Oreos at the bottom, then ladyfingers bridging them, then Mallomars stacked delicately on the ladyfingers.

“Mmm, Mallomars,” Katherine said, dreamily taking one.

“Mallomars and ladyfingers,” Theresa said happily to her friend Katherine. “Mallomars and ladyfingers and orleos.” She giggled because she didn’t know where that had come from.

“I knew an Oreo once,” Brooks said. “In Baltimore. She was a Baltimore Oreo.”

Carter chortled. “She couldn’t sing,” he said, “but she had some whistle.”

“She had lousy teeth,” Brooks said, grinning widely; they were all grinning. “But
some
fillings.”

“They glowed in the dark,” Carter said solemnly.

“Mmm,” Katherine said, licking the chocolate off the top of her Mallomar. “That’s why she had to keep a lid on them.”

Brooks guffawed. “That’s good, Kitty,” he said. The bad feeling between them was gone now, things were the way they’d once been. “That’s really good.”

“Good kitty,” Theresa said. “Good little pussycat. Meow. Me . . . ow.”

“Mmm,” Brooks said “Good pussy.”

“Good pussy,” Theresa repeated. “Pussyfingers and Baltimore Oreos.”

They all felt so wonderful now. It was wonderful to not only feel wonderful but to be with other people who felt wonderful. To feel wonderful all together. She smiled happily at Carter, who smiled back at her.

“I have an announcement to make,” Carter said. “I didn’t want to go home tonight. That’s why I made everything happen.”

He was beaming at them in general but it seemed to Theresa that he was particularly talking to her. He looked even more handsome now that he’d loosened up so. His features were fine and small and his hair was silky and his eyes were very very . . .
whatever color they were . . . and his hands looked as though Michelangelo had taken five years to chisel them for his chapel. Now his jacket and tie were off and he faced her across the round table, grinning broadly, and one of his beautiful hands rested on the table and she wanted very badly to touch it.

“You have beautiful hands,” she said, surprising herself but not unhappily.