Looking for Mr. Goodbar (25 page)

“It’s
totally
unlike me to say something like that.”

He nodded.

“Now the question is why the fuck I said it.”

He flinched.

Well, of course he’d flinched. That was why she’d said it, wasn’t it? To make him flinch? To drive him back from the space he was trying to occupy? Into her mind flashed a picture of her father saying some friend of Katherine’s had a mouth like a truck driver and wasn’t to enter the house. She smiled.

Ban me from your house, James.

“I don’t know if that’s the question,” James said. “Not in my mind, anyway. You voiced it because you were feeling it at the moment.”

“Nonsense,” she said angrily. “I was feeling perfectly fine.”

“I don’t mean you were actively despairing,” he said. “It seemed like a more general expression of—”

“Stop it,” she said. “I can’t stand it.”

She stood up and began collecting the dishes. He started to help her but she told him she didn’t want him to help, that she’d have another accident if he helped her. An indefensible piece of nasty nonsense. She brought the dishes into the kitchen where, just before she reached the sink, she dropped the whole armload.
One dish broke; the other rolled on its edge to the cabinet wall and stood there without visible means of support. The pan had dropped upright so its contents didn’t fall out, only the drippings spattered over the floor, but the salad and spaghetti both overturned.

She wasn’t going to cry again. She
refused
to cry again. This was ridiculous. She felt him in the doorway without seeing him.

“Go away.”

“I thought maybe now that the worst had happened anyway, you’d let me help.”

She glanced at him. Just the hint of a mischievous smile.

“No. Go away. You’ll get dirty.”

“I’ve been dirty before.”

“You don’t look it,” she said spitefully. “You look as if you’ve never gotten dirty or messy or wrinkled or . . .” She hesitated, half wanting some restraining hand to clap itself over her mouth and stop her from being such a shit. Such a
bad girl.
“. . . or laid.” She looked at him, looked away quickly so his expression couldn’t make her stop. Picked up the strands of spaghetti on the floor and put them in the pot. “You look like a virgin! Of everything! Not just sex, everything!” She took paper towels and mopped and scraped the remaining goo off the floor, adding as an afterthought, as though she were afraid she hadn’t been quite shitty enough, “But especially of sex.”

When she looked at the doorway again he was gone. Maybe he was gone altogether. She suddenly remembered how the evening had begun, how she’d felt
contrite
about her behavior toward him . . . about his mother. She ran to the hallway door and opened it, looking down toward the elevator. But the hallway was empty. She came back in and saw him sitting in the far corner in the armchair. In near darkness.

“I thought you were gone.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m such a bitch. I wouldn’t blame you.”
As a matter of fact I’d probably like you better if you could walk out on me. Or at least smack my face.

“I don’t see how one can afford to walk out every time someone he likes calls him a name. Especially if it’s ‘virgin.’ There are worse things, after all, that you can call someone.”

She laughed. “Like what?”

“Liar. Thief.”

He meant it, of course. In the year 1969 a twenty-eight-year-old man sat telling her he’d rather be called a virgin than a liar or a thief.

“My God,” she said suddenly, “you’re not really a virgin. Tell me you’re not really a virgin.”

“Why do you care?”

“I’m curious. I don’t know if I care, I’m curious.”

“I don’t like to be a curiosity.”

“I thought you were so big on being honest.”

He smiled. “I seldom lie but I’m often evasive. I’m a lawyer, after all.”

“And a Jesuit.”

“And a Jesuit in training.” A funny expression passed over his face, and since his face so seldom gave away even the lightest secrets, she was intrigued.

“Why did you get that funny look just now?”

“Did I get a funny look?”

“You’re stalling.”

He laughed. “Not stalling, exactly. I was trying to decide whether to talk or . . .”

“You never talk about yourself,” she said petulantly, thinking of Tony saying the same thing to her. “As though you don’t trust me.”

“You’ve never expressed interest.”

“Well, now I’m expressing interest. I’m interested in whether you’re a virgin.”

“Because?”

“Because if you are I’ll tease you to death. And I’m interested
in why your expression got funny when I said something about the Jesuits.”

“All right,” he said finally. “I have never made love to a woman. When I was at Fordham I had a homosexual affair with a Jesuit priest who was my adviser there. He was the person who really taught me how to think, and in that context, saying I was a Jesuit brought up some very clear and painful memories.”

“Why painful?” she asked, almost automatically. A resistance to thinking about the rest of it, which was unexpected and confusing and upsetting.

He thought. He always thought about what he said. As though it mattered to her. No, it went further back than her. As though the truth mattered. God would know. She’d once had that illusion herself.

“Painful,” he said, “because it gave me a great deal, then it came to an end. I brought it to an end, and I inflicted pain, which it hurt me to do. I felt, well, it was the end of my incubation, so to speak. Time to go into the real world. Come out from under my protector’s wing. However you want to put it. Also . . .” He hesitated. “I . . . sexually it wasn’t particularly . . . I’m not sure that I was ever really sexually interested in him. I think I needed, as I say, his guidance and protection. His warmth. He was like a father to me. I went along . . . with the rest . . . in a sense, I suppose, because it was what I could give him in return. It was important to him.”

“How come you’ve never had sex since then?” she asked, unable to say anything about the rest of it.

He smiled. “Have sex. You make it sound as simple as having a drink or having dinner.”

“So?”

“Sex for me isn’t . . . it’s not the first thing I think about when I look at a woman. I know that makes me something of an oddity in this day and age, but the thought of having, of getting into bed with someone I don’t love is foreign to me. Unappealing.”

“More than the thought of sleeping alone year in and year out?”

He nodded.

His whole confession was extraordinary to her. She didn’t know how to react to him. She felt very distant—as though she were looking at him under glass—but also very close.

“It’s not really a question of making a choice, a lot of the time,” he said. “It’s the way it’s happened. For a long time I didn’t even miss anything. I seldom went out. I was totally occupied, working and going to school and taking care of things at home, once my sister got married. I didn’t really have the time or energy for anything else. It’s only in the past year or two that I’ve begun to feel a lack . . . the desire to . . .”

“Mmmmmmmmmm?”

“You’re teasing me, Theresa.”

“I just wanted to know how you’d finish.”

“All right. It’s only in the past year or two that I’ve thought about getting married.”

She stared at him incredulously.

He laughed. “I wish you could see the expression on your face, Theresa.”

“Why do you call me Theresa? Everyone else calls me Terry, practically.”

“I prefer Theresa. Now, since we’re studying each other’s expressions tonight, tell me why you looked like that.”

“Like what?” She couldn’t for the life of her remember what they’d just been talking about.

“You looked aghast,” he said. “You looked as though I’d said I was considering rape and murder.”

When what he’d really said was . . . married. He wanted to get married. She laughed because she knew it was funny to have reacted that way although she didn’t experience it as being funny. She felt acutely uncomfortable.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I don’t think about marriage
very much. I guess I’m surprised if someone else does. I mean, I know people get married . . . both of my sisters are married, my older one’s been married three times. It’s just something she does every time she sees someone she thinks is a little better. But I . . .”
I what?
“I guess I don’t think about it because it’s not something I want to do. I can’t see any reason to get married unless you want to have children and I can’t stand children.” Thinking of Brigid’s children and how she adored them.

“It’s funny to hear you say that when you love your work so much and you have children every day.”

“Not when they’re sick, I don’t.” As quickly and easily as though it were something she’d thought out years ago and said to herself aloud in front of the mirror every morning since.

“Ah,” he said, “is that it, then?”

She didn’t know what the
that
was, but she was overwhelmed by the recognition that she’d said something very important about herself to him and to herself. Something she might have been happier to have both of them not know.

I won’t cry again.

No one had ever made her cry in her life as much as James Morrisey did. Except that he didn’t do anything to make her cry, it just happened to her when he was there.

“Was someone ill in your family?”

She nodded.

“Who?”

“Me.”

“You’re kidding!” he exclaimed. “I find it hard to associate you with any kind of illness, you’re so—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“All right.”

“I had polio.”

He was silent.

“And then it went away but later on I developed scoliosis from it.”

He nodded. “My cousin had that, but a much worse case, apparently. She has a very unbalanced walk.”

“Do I limp?”

“No. At least I hadn’t thought of it that way. I noticed you had a nice sort of lilt to your walk.”

“I was in the hospital for a year.”

“That must have been ghastly.”

She shrugged. “I guess. I don’t remember too much of it. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m talking about it.”

He was silent.

“I never should have been there in the first place,” she went on compulsively. “If they’d caught it in time I would’ve had maybe a brace for a while. But my older brother was killed in the service . . . my mother was in a . . . she was depressed . . . they were both depressed and . . . preoccupied. Nobody noticed what was happening.”

Oh, God, it was like yesterday! Fifteen years and she was flooded with it. With wanting to tell them how badly it hurt and not being able to because they walked around the house with their eyes on the floor and she knew, anyway, that it was something she’d done that had brought this retribution on all of them. Not just on her. The pain was in some way directed even more at them; what would they do when they found out? So that every time she felt she finally must make them see her pain this other feeling got in the way and she would complain without ever making them
know.

She stood up. “This is ridiculous. I don’t want to get into all that shit. Maybe we should call it a night.”

He was startled. “I thought we were just beginning to really talk.”

“Beginning. It’s almost ten o’clock.”

He smiled. “Are you such an early-to-bed person?”

“No,” she admitted. And she wasn’t sleepy, either. But she couldn’t handle what was happening. She couldn’t stand always being on the verge of tears. “But I’m upset.”

“If you’re upset I certainly don’t want to leave you.”

“Oh, God,” she wailed, “don’t be such a Pollyanna! I can’t stand it when you’re so nice to me!” And burst into tears again. If she loved him it would have been all right but how could she accept what he offered when she knew she could never love him?

He guided her back to the armchair and they both sat a little sideways so they could fit, he with his arm around her, she weeping onto his white shirt and striped silk tie—he always wore a striped silk tie, as though he hadn’t heard of the sixties. She was doubtless ruining the tie forever. He smoothed back her hair, kissed her forehead when she briefly looked up at him.

“Don’t you understand that this isn’t me?” she said.

“No, I don’t understand that,” he said.

“I’m not
like
this. I’m usually very carefree, well, high, anyway, whatever you want to call it. I laugh a lot. Have fun. If I was like this, I’d—”
I’d what? Never go out?
He was the one she went out with on proper dates.
Get laid?
That was for sure. Surely there was no one of the men she’d slept with since Martin with whom she could imagine acting this way for five minutes and then ever seeing again. And that was fine with her! He had to realize that. She didn’t
want
to be this way! “There’s no
point
to this kind of talk,” she said. “You have the misery once and then if you talk about it again you have it again.”

“You don’t think you ease it with talking?”

“Do I look as if I feel better than I did before?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see your face.”

But she didn’t want to look up because she was afraid that if she looked up he would kiss her again, maybe on the mouth, and she would feel ill. What she wanted was for him to just hold her the way he was, and not kiss her or do anything sexual. Or talk. Just be there.

She liked him, really, that was the thing. He was such a good person. He’d never hurt anybody. She would like him always to be her friend.

“Can we be just friends?” she asked tentatively.

“I thought we
were
friends,” he said.

“You know what I mean.”

“I choose not to know what you mean.”

“How can you choose not to know what you know?” she asked sulkily.

“How can you choose not to talk about what you feel?”

“If I don’t talk about it, I don’t feel it.”

“Fine. Then let’s not talk about just being friends.”