Looking for Mr. Goodbar (8 page)

He heaved on top of her and then he was still. A moment later he withdrew from her body and lay down beside her on the bed. For a moment she couldn’t move—as though he’d cast her into a statue’s position and she was doomed to remain there—but then she forced her body to roll over on its side and after a moment she was able to slowly unlock her spine and stretch out. Her brassiere was tangled around her neck and arms and she took it off. She pulled up her pants. She turned to look at him; he was looking at his watch.

“Theresita,” he murmured, “when I tell you the time you will not believe me.”

Nor did she care. But it was different for him, of course. They both had classes at one and he couldn’t just cut his, although she couldn’t help wishing that he would, just this once.

It was twelve thirty.

“Quickly, quickly,” he said. “We must hie ourselves to yon campus.”

Obediently she got out of bed and put on her clothes. She felt sweaty and messy and was about to ask him if she could go to the bathroom when she realized it made no sense for her to have to ask. She took in her comb and after she’d washed herself, she combed her hair without ever actually looking at her face in the mirror. When she came back into the study he’d taken the sheets off the bed; only then did she realize that there must have been blood on them.

The next time she
came he asked her if she realized that the following week was the last week of school and that she was now marking the last of the papers. She said that she did. He said that she could come the following week, anyway, because he would be preparing to go to the country and there were things she could help him with. Besides, he wanted to talk to her and he didn’t see when else they would have time. It was as though nothing sexual had ever happened between them. She thought he must be holding back because of the work to be done, but when she got there the following Wednesday all he was doing was cleaning out some old file cabinets. He asked about her back and she said it hadn’t hurt her since that day. He made her promise that if it hurt her over the summer she would go to a doctor; this was a painful promise to make for the implication was that she would not see him before fall, and she’d vaguely hoped for some kind of reprieve. Perhaps their conversation today would be about how they could meet occasionally during vacation.

He sat on the floor in front of the file, handing her things either for the wastebasket or for another file.

“Now tell me why you called it scoliosis instead of curvature of the spine,” he said suddenly.

It was the part of their lovemaking she hadn’t thought about since. The way it had begun. His interest in her illness.

“It sounded more medical,” she said uneasily.

He’d asked his wife.

“In other words, you were obfuscating.”

She was silent.

“Why don’t you trust me?”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you.”

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t like to talk about all that,” she said.

“Oh, all right.” But what he seemed to mean was that she needn’t talk about it but he didn’t feel like talking about anything else. They worked in silence for perhaps an hour and then she could bear it no longer.

“Why do you want to know about it?”

“Because I want to know about
you.
Because I care about you. Because your telling me is an act of faith.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “What do you want me to tell you?”

“Was it congenital or did it develop from something else?”

He’d had the question all waiting! He’d known she was going to give in! If it had been possible for her to get angry at him she would have been furious at that moment. As it was she just felt hopeless; she might as well do as he wished and get it over with.

“From something else,” she said tonelessly. “I had polio when I was little.”

“Are you serious?”

“When I was four. It was a mild case. I got better, it just left . . . a weakness on one side. Nobody noticed when it began to happen . . . it was very slow.”

“Didn’t your parents pay any attention to you?”

She nodded. “But when it was happening, when you could see it . . . my older brother died and they were very depressed.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Come over here, Theresa.”

She moved over on the floor next to him and he put his arm around her. She rested her head on his shoulder, continuing to talk because she knew that was what he wanted her to do.

“By the time we got to the doctor, it was too late for just a cast, so they used a cast, but then I had the operation, and then I had to be in the cast again.”

He kissed her forehead, rocked her gently with him on the floor.

“It didn’t hurt most of the time,” she said. “Honestly. Or if it did, I don’t remember. I remember I thought God was punishing me for my sins. Later I found out other people had committed some pretty bad sins and nothing like that had happened to them. I suppose that’s when I stopped believing in God. Or maybe it was earlier. I don’t know.” The last time she remembered believing in God was when she’d stood in the wet sand with the tide going out and her father had come looking for her. “When I tell you I don’t remember being sick when I was little, I’m not lying to you. I don’t remember any of it.”
Except that my grandmother stopped coming to the hospital.

No!
She sat up suddenly. She couldn’t be remembering—everyone knew she didn’t remember anything from that time! She looked at Martin, panic-stricken.

“What, Theresa?”

“My grandmother,” she said. Once there’d been someone she really loved, who visited her every day and sang to her in Italian and smoothed the hair from her forehead with hands that were cool and papery. That was her mother’s mother, Grandmother Theresa Maria, who was very old and thin and wore long skirts and suddenly one day had stopped coming to the hospital and disappeared forever. And when Theresa had asked where she was they’d told her Grandmother Theresa Maria had gone to live in California. “I can’t believe I’m remembering it now,” she said.
Because you’re leaving me, Martin.
“My grandmother died while I was in the hospital when I was four. For years after that every time a TV announcer said a show was coming to us live from California I’d strain for a glimpse of my grandmother.”

Martin smiled, brought her back in the circle of his arms.
There was a buzzer sound and she started. There was a system between his wife’s office and the various rooms of the apartment, but it had never sounded in his study in all the time that Theresa had been coming. He reached up to the desk, just managing to touch the buzzer that signaled he was there without releasing Theresa.

“Ja wohl,”
he said.

A calm woman’s voice said that there was a crisis, a child had just been brought in who had to be treated and Lulu was nowhere to be found and Jed had to be picked up at school at twelve and could Martin do it before he went up to City? He said that he would.

“Thanks, darling,” the woman’s voice said, and went off.

“So now you know the truth, Theresa,” he said solemnly. “I am a married man.”

She giggled. “I knew that all along.”

“Ah, you see? And I thought I’d deceived you.”

“Married men are much more interesting,” she said, trying to remember in which of the paperback novels she regularly devoured she had come across the line. “They’ve done their learning somewhere else.” She kissed his neck.

“Hmm,” he said. “A woman of the world. Why haven’t you dealt with any of your real life in your essays?”

“I was afraid of shocking you.” She giggled again.

“What’s gotten you giggly all of a sudden?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you gave me some laughing gas.”

“What would you say if I told you that it’s almost eleven twenty and I should get ready to pick up my son?”

“I’d say make love to me first.” In her sudden giddiness it came out without warning and made her more giddy. Suddenly she got up and moved over so that she was sitting in his lap instead of next to him on the floor. She threw her arms around him and kissed him. He was thrown off balance and went down backward but
she continued to cling to him, kissing him, rubbing against him until finally he gave in to her and returned her warmth. She felt quite wild and out of control; she was on a tightrope but he was there with her and if she fell, he would fall too. She unzipped his fly, lying on top of him. He asked what on earth had gotten into her but he was laughing and having a good time, too. She kissed him—his face, his neck. Leaning slightly to one side she took his penis out of his pants and caressed it. He put both his hands under his head and lay absolutely still, watching her. She got off her underpants and straddled him as he’d straddled her last time except that she was sitting on his penis, which felt marvelous, and she moved around on it and bounced up and down on it with almost total abandonment to pleasure, only the tiniest corner of her mind telling her that she was crazy, that she was too far out someplace, that when you were having this much fun something terrible had to happen next, be careful, Theresa, something terrible has to happen but doesn’t it feel wonderful—oh, oh, oh—

He came when she could have gone on and on and on.

He opened his eyes. She smiled. He watched her without smiling. Suddenly she became self-conscious. A little frightened. She got off him. He looked at his watch. He stood up, fixed his pants. When he spoke his voice was neutral but she was convinced that he was looking at her with hatred.

“I have to get Jed. Slam the door on your way out, don’t bother about locking it.”

On Friday, the last
day she was to see him before vacation, a period she was not certain she would survive, he handed her an envelope and told her it contained her payment for the months that she’d worked for him.

She said that she’d thought he’d forgotten about that, that she had never wanted him to pay her. He said that was silly, her services had been invaluable to him, she had saved him countless
hours of tedium and stress, and besides, the money was not only tax deductible but was meaningless to him. Which, of course, was why she didn’t want it.

He kissed her cheek and told her she was a lovely girl and he was going to miss her. He said he was expecting her to be a marvelous typist by September and then they would begin work on his masterpiece.

In the envelope was a check for $216; in the bottom left-hand corner of the check, where there was a line for explanation, it read: Cler. Assist. 18wks/6 hrs/wk @$2/hr.

She was unutterably depressed.

She took the check home and hid it in a drawer (she’d never told her parents about him), thinking she would keep the check forever. Then she thought he would be angry with her if she did that, so she spent the first morning of her vacation finding the savings bank nearest his home and opening an account there with his check.

Brigid got married to
Patrick Kelly and began having babies.

Katherine was trying to get pregnant and couldn’t. With Brooks’s encouragement she was going back to school in the fall. She didn’t know just what she wanted to do with her schooling, she was just going to go to NYU and start working to get a B.A.

“Unless you get a B-A-B-Y,” Theresa said, meaning it as a casual joke, but Katherine burst into tears and ran out of the room.

“Theresa,” her mother said.

“I know you didn’t mean it to hurt,” said Brooks, on his way to find Katherine and comfort her. “But she’s very sensitive on this one, Terry.”

So would I be if I’d had an abortion.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Theresa,” her mother said, as though she didn’t believe Brooks’s statement that Terry had meant no harm. Theresa herself was surprised and upset. Joking
didn’t come naturally to her, she’d begun doing it for Martin’s approval, and it was hard for her to believe that she could hurt anyone when she was being playful. Although certainly Martin could hurt her badly with his jokes. Which was different. There was always a heavy element of sarcasm in his humor.

She looked at her father to see if he was angry, too, but he was absorbed in the baseball game. Or pretending to be. Sometimes she thought that the TV wasn’t so much an escape as a filter through which he saw and heard everything but was kept from being affected by it too much. Like the beer that went with it. She wanted to run to him and ask if he was angry with her, but of course she didn’t; she just glared at her mother and said that Katherine could take a joke better than
she
could. Usually.

Katherine and Brooks were seldom around, anyway. They’d rented a house at someplace called Fire Island and were spending most of the summer out there, except that Brooks came into Manhattan three or four days a week to work. They kept inviting Theresa out there to visit but aside from the fact that she hated the beach, her jobs and her typing class occupied her five days a week. The typing class was from six to seven thirty in the evening and she was still baby-sitting from eight on for two of her regular families—the two that had typewriters. She was determined that by the time of Martin’s return she would be a breathtakingly rapid and accurate typist. She was already by far the best in her class.

In the four years
that she was going to know him he would change and she would change, but their relationship would never change at all.

He would be pleased that she had become a good typist.

He would be lavish in his praise of her work and her intelligence. He would insist that if she were going to teach at all she must aim for university teaching. (It was the only way she would ever defy him. She kept her education courses down to a bare
minimum but was bound and determined to teach young children, no matter what else she might also choose to do.)

When she was ill or unhappy he would be tender and sympathetic.

When they made love he would become hostile.

In the period after
Kennedy’s assassination she needed to see more of him and instead she saw less, because his family also needed him more. Unexpectedly she found herself drawn into a circle consisting of Carol and Rhoda and Jules, whom she never saw in classes any more but ran across in the cafeteria on the day of the assassination. (She’d gone there because she was afraid to get onto the subway and go home.) She ended up traveling uptown with Jules, the only one of the three who lived in the Bronx. (Carol and Rhoda lived on West End Avenue; she was jealous of their proximity to Martin.) Jules was bright, not a little pompous but funny and fun to be with, and she was surprised and irritated when he asked her to go out with him after a few weeks. She felt he had spoiled something pleasant. She told him she couldn’t and he asked if she was having an affair with Martin Engle. She told him to drop dead and he snorted and said, “That’s an intelligent answer.”