The Unwitting (6 page)

“What kind of a country do we live in?” I demanded.

He went on reading over my shoulder. “One where the governor
of the state called out the National Guard to stop the rioting. How many places in the world do you think that would happen?”

Charlie’s patriotism always surprised me. It was the chink in his armor of cynicism.

And sometimes we quarreled for no reason at all, or maybe only because we were uneasy in our unexpected happiness. It was my twist on my mother’s favorite warning that if I sang before breakfast, I’d be sure to end up crying before supper.

Three

A
BOUT THE TIME
Charlie went to work for
Compass
, a year before our marriage, the magazine moved from Greenwich Village to a building on the corner of Broadway and Forty-Third Street. The location was louche for a magazine of culture, ideas, and politics, and the office was down-at-the-heels, but the grant that enabled it to go from a quarterly to a monthly, and to hire Charlie, came from the Drinkwater Foundation, and the Drinkwater family owned the building. Charlie insisted that he didn’t mind the location. Every time he looked out the window at the hustlers and sailors and tourists elbowing their way beneath the conflagration of neon signs howling
KINSEY BLENDED WHISKEY, MAKE MINE RUPPERT
, and
AUTOMAT
, he thought again how lucky he was to be there and not riding on horseback in the Chicago stockyards.

He was working with writers whose names were sacred, at least to us, writers who had shaped our minds and our taste. And he was discovering new writers, or at least one new writer. About eight months after he began working there, as he was slogging through the slush pile, he came across a short story by a young man who worked as an auto mechanic in Maine. The story was a gem and made up for all the overheated prose and unintelligible poetry he’d had to wade through since he’d started at
Compass
. The discovery made him feel, he said, like a real editor. He also commissioned Frank Tucker, an
old friend from his Columbia days, to write a piece on the supposedly bloodless communist coup in Czechoslovakia.

When he stayed past midnight, or one, or two, to put the magazine to bed, he came home drunk on a blend of exhaustion, accomplishment, and the scotch or bourbon the staff broke out to celebrate. When the magazine arrived from the printer with the heady, inky hot-off-the-press smell, he’d bring home a copy and hand it to me as reverently as if it were a first edition of Joyce or Eliot.

He even liked the motley staff: Gus, the managing editor, who was too polite and bookish to hound any of them about deadlines, though that was his job; Wally, who wore big round black-rimmed glasses and a floppy hat, and invariably began spouting long unintelligible passages of
Finnegans Wake
halfway through his third martini; Sonia, the secretary, who had a magna cum laude degree from Vassar, an aversion to using uppercase letters because, she explained, this was an avant-garde magazine, and a body that looked as if it had stepped off the nose of a B-29 bomber. Charlie didn’t tell me that, his old friend from Columbia, Frank Tucker, did. He did not even mind Belle, the dour copy editor whose sole pleasure in life was pointing out other people’s mistakes. But most of all, he liked and admired Gideon Abel.

Abel, a big, rawboned man with a mane of white hair, had founded
Compass
before the war, though it was a different magazine in those days, and not merely because it came out only four times a year. Abel had never actually joined the Communist Party, but in the twenties and thirties, he’d been among the most vocal and ardent fellow travelers who toed the party line. These days he was a virulent left-wing anti-Stalinist. The conversion, or perhaps evolution, was not unusual. Many people had traveled the same bumpy road to disillusionment. Even Charlie and I had, though I had been a kid, and no one had taken me seriously, or at least not as seriously as I’d taken myself. I had dreamed of a better world, been heartbroken at the Hitler-Stalin pact, and forgiven all when the Soviet Union became
our ally against Nazi Germany. Only after the war did we, and Gideon Abel, and so many like us, begin to realize that the totalitarianism of the left was not so far from that of the right. All isms seemed to end in murder.

Abel’s conversion, however, had been especially precipitous. Some saw it as an indication of his open-mindedness, others as proof that he was a frivolous gadfly. The fact that he was on his fourth wife, or third, depending on how you counted, because the fourth had also been the second, did not make him appear any more steadfast. He was also rumored to have had affairs with Mary McCarthy, Dawn Powell, and Jean Stafford, among others. In literary and intellectual circles, adultery was not only rampant, it was incestuous. A few years later, when I began doing research on Richard Wright for a series of articles, I would discover that while Wright was compulsively unfaithful, his wife, Ellen, was having an affair with Nelson Algren, who was having an affair with Ellen’s friend Simone de Beauvoir, who had an ongoing relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, who was having affairs with most of his students.

Sometimes political allegiances upped the sexual ante. One of the women Wright was sleeping with frequently went to bed with a man who Wright was sure was spying on him for the CIA. I don’t suppose our friends and acquaintances were much different, though if there were CIA operatives among us, I wasn’t aware of them. Casual infidelity and literary feuds were the two favorite pastimes. Those who didn’t take their adultery lightly got into even more trouble. The unfaithful spouse invariably insisted on dignifying the affair by running off with the new lover. Recriminations, divorces, and bitter custody battles followed like the tin cans and old shoes tied to the bumpers of less intellectual newlyweds.

According to Charlie, when Gideon Abel invited men to his parties, he said, “Bring a pretty girl.” Occasionally, he varied the invitation. “Bring a leggy girl,” he might say. One afternoon, about six months after we were married, Gideon told Charlie to “bring that
pretty, leggy girl you’re married to.” I said Gideon had probably forgotten my name, but I was pleased. I was vain about my legs. Girls without breasts frequently are. I also knew the way the world worked. At Gideon Abel’s parties, girls were window dressing. Men talked; girls listened. Men quipped; girls laughed. Men flirted; girls were flattered. Men made passes; girls made decisions to or not to go along. I wasn’t complaining. I was determined to fight injustice, but I knew I couldn’t change human nature.

There was another aspect of Gideon’s parties I was under no illusion about. They weren’t as dazzling as people imagined. Jokes flew. Wit sparked. Intellects sparred. But at all the parties I went to over the years, I don’t think I ever heard a truly original thought. Those who had one saved it for a book or magazine piece.

Let me make one thing clear before I tell the story of what happened the night Gideon told Charlie to bring that pretty, leggy girl he was married to. I was not shocked or outraged or even terribly surprised. I wasn’t a child. I knew what went on at those parties. From this vantage point, I can even see the humorous or at least the ludicrous side of it. The only troubling aspect was that I couldn’t tell Charlie.

I should not have gone to the party in the first place. My throat was scratchy, my eyes burned, and I probably had a low-grade fever. The sensible thing would have been to call Charlie at his office and tell him to go to Gideon’s without me, especially since a flurry of big wet snowflakes had begun to fall as I’d walked home from the subway. But the point of Gideon Abel’s parties was not to be sensible. Clever, amusing, provocative, flirtatious, but never sensible. So instead of getting into an old flannel shirt of Charlie’s that I’d appropriated and crawling into bed, I put on the new black jersey dress that Charlie loved—body-hugging sheaths were beginning to give the crinoline-stiffened skirts of the New Look a run for the money—and my second-best pumps—I was sensible enough not to want to
ruin my best pair, but not wise enough to put galoshes over them—and headed crosstown.

Gideon’s parties took place in his Park Avenue duplex, which floated above the city like the elusive dream that sucked the hopeful and adventurous out of every corner of the country and kept natives like us in place. It belonged to his second and fourth wife, who was heir to one of those improbable American fortunes built on an invention so simple that anyone could have dreamed it up, but only her grandfather had. By the time I arrived, the apartment was crowded, and my throat felt as if someone had gone over it with sandpaper. I gave my coat to the maid who opened the door and started for the living room. Frank Tucker intercepted me, held out a martini with one hand, and cupped my behind with the other. I took the drink and pushed his other hand away.

“If you don’t want the merchandise touched,” he said, “don’t put it on display.”

There was something wrong with his logic, but the room was too crowded and I felt too awful to sort it out. I took a hefty swallow of the drink and, balancing it carefully, threaded my way through the crowd to Charlie. I could feel the gin beginning to work as I did, soothing my throat, putting out the fire behind my eyes, kneading the aches in my body. I joined Charlie and his group, pasted a look on my face that said I was following every word of the conversation, finished my drink, and snared another from a passing tray. A poet was telling a story I’d heard before—it occurred to me that I’d heard a lot of the stories before—about two men at another party who were complaining about their former wives, only to discover that their former wives were the same woman. It was a good story, but I suspected it was apocryphal. People tended to keep track of the marriages and even the affairs of their former spouses.

Within twenty minutes I was drunk. That’s why I blame myself for what happened. Not, as I said, that anything did happen. No
marriage splintered, no friendship came undone, no drink or punch was thrown, all of which had been known to occur, more than once, at Gideon’s parties.

Halfway through my third martini, I decided that a nap upstairs in one of the guest rooms was the best course of action. I did not pass out. I even remembered to slip off my shoes before I stretched out on the bedspread. The room swam for a moment. I closed my eyes. The world went quiet.

At first I didn’t know what had awakened me. Gradually, I realized someone was talking. I couldn’t make out the words. I couldn’t even recognize the voice, though it seemed vaguely familiar. Slowly the words began to filter through. Something about my mouth. The voice was whispering that I should put something in my mouth.

Dreamily, my lips began to part. I swam up from sleep and opened my eyes.

Frank Tucker was standing beside the bed, holding his penis in his hand. It dangled over my face, red, reptilian, and menacing.

“Open your mouth,” he whispered.

I did as I was told and let out a scream. He dropped his penis and clamped his hand over my mouth. It was clammy with sweat and smelled sour.

“For Christ’s sake, Nell.”

I pried his hand off my mouth and rolled away from him.

He stood looking down at me for a moment. Then he put his penis back in his trousers, zipped his fly, and rearranged his face in a smirk.

“Ain’t it something? One look at my cock, and you gals start howling with delight.”

He laughed at his wit and was gone.

I sat up and swung my feet over the side of the bed. The worst part of it was that I had screamed. A simple no would have done the trick. I went on sitting on the side of the bed, trying to sort it out. The more I thought about it, the more foolish I appeared. Frank
Tucker had only been behaving according to type. I had clearly overreacted.

“You disappeared.”

I looked up. Charlie was standing in the doorway.

He took a step into the room. “Are you okay?”

No, I am not okay. Your good friend Frank Tucker just tried to stick his cock in my mouth
.

The words would leave him no choice. You couldn’t let another man, even a friend—especially a friend—go around forcing your wife into fellatio. You had to call him on it, one way or another. And that would be only the beginning. Word would spread. The story would get better with each telling. I had lured Frank up here, then changed my mind. I hadn’t changed my mind, but someone had walked in, so I had pretended he was forcing himself on me. If things got really out of hand, someone might use the word
rape
, though the idea of being raped by a friend in a Park Avenue duplex was stretching it. My imagination spun out the stories, but, even drunk, I knew one thing for sure. Whatever happened, it would not only cause a rift between Charlie and Frank and their various friends, who would have to take sides; it would also end up being my fault. What’s all the fuss about? people would snicker. Everyone makes passes. That’s what these parties are about. Why else does Gideon say to bring a pretty girl? And the pretty girls say either thanks, I’d like to, or no thanks, I’m not interested. Any schoolgirl knows the drill.