This Is Not for You (7 page)

“Are you Andy… the Andy of Spanish fame?” she asked at once.

“I’m afraid so.”

He and Robin shook hands, Robin at an awkwardly balanced disadvantage behind the table, while Monk and I measured them against each other. I let myself enjoy the advantage for the moment I had it. I was no more competition for Monk than Robin was for Andrew.

“I was going to ask you to join us, but if this is a real lovers’ reunion—”

I protested while Andrew and Robin reached for extra chairs. Without ignoring Monk, in fact making it seem a subtle compliment, Andrew turned at once to Robin with questions which would give Robin authority in the conversation.

“What I know is out of a course in sociology, but you’ve been there, and you know really…”

But he did not let either Monk or me relax into listening.

“I wonder if you’d say, Monk” or “Kate, what about the church and social work? Do ministers know enough to get involved with drug cases?”

We talked about morality and the law, church and state, freedom and the imagination, earnestly at first but no conversation in which Monk is involved is unleavened for long. Andrew did not strain to match her humor, more pleasantly enjoyed it. I had not seen him in so entirely social a role before. That he should be as graceful as he was handsome seemed almost unfair.

“But I like the unfairly endowed,” I said at a point when the remark was not out of keeping with the discussion.

Andrew did not miss the compliment or the implication that I knew very well what he was doing. Even my comrade’s smile of encouragement didn’t rattle him. I did not intend it to really, though it occurred to me that Monk’s life was complicated enough without Andrew.

“I hate to break this up,” Monk said finally, “but I’ve got to get back to a rehearsal. Are you going to be around a while, Andy? Maybe we could do this again.”

“If Kate really won’t elope to Mexico with me, I’ll probably be around until the end of next week.”

“Doesn’t he say the sweetest things, Kate?” Monk asked, turning to me with one of her brilliant burlesques of a smile. “Are you tempted?”

“I haven’t checked on what Whitehead would say about it yet,” I answered. “Do you know where Esther is tonight?”

“She’s gone beer-drinking with Sandy.”

“Seriously?”

“Well, I hope not, but she doesn’t have much sense of humor, does she?”

“Why did you let her go?”

“I’m not her mother,” Monk answered sweetly “I leave that sort of thing to you.”

Robin and Andrew were standing patiently. Monk turned again to Andrew to say good night, and they were gone.

“Who’s Sandy?” Andrew asked, as he sat down and poured the last of the wine into our glasses.

I shrugged.

“Do you mother Esther too much?”

“Probably,” I said. “And then I’m not around or, if I am, I walk off.”

“She’s safer than you know,” he said. “I should know.”

When you dropped in the next day just before lunch, I waited for you to mention your evening with Sandy. But your nervousness, which always took form in objects made of matchbooks, bits of paper, anything at hand, apparently had another source. When the table by your chair had been turned into a zoo of mythical animals and we had exhausted complaints about work and college gossip, you fell silent with whatever it was you were about to say. I waited.

“Would you like me to spend the day with Andy tomorrow?” you asked finally.

“What do you mean, ‘Would I like it?’ ”

“Well, you care about him, and so I suppose I should try to get to know him better… if you’d like me to.”

“I should think you already know him better than I do. If you don’t want to go, don’t.”

“But I’d like to like him, Kate, if you do.”

“Why?”

“Because, if he matters to you, I’ve obviously not been fair about him. We had a bad kind of disagreement this summer, but it was probably a misunderstanding all round. I guess I will go.”

“Don’t do it for me, E. I do like Andy well enough, but that doesn’t mean you have to.”

“No. I want to. Anyway, I can’t work yet. I’d like to go to the ocean.”

It was about the same time on Wednesday that there was another, unfamiliar knock on my door. I was not really surprised when Sandra Mentchen came in.

“I’ve practiced myself into blood blisters,” she said. “Are you in a mood to drive out for lunch?”

“Sure… just one more paragraph, and I’d love a break.”

“Good. Can I just wait for you here?”

“Sit down,” I said, turning back to my typewriter.

My chess game isn’t really good with an audience. Neither is my cooking. Still I am ambivalent about showing off because what I lose in concentration I gain in energy I finished a difficult transitional paragraph with odd confidence.

“I wish I could write that quickly,” she said, as I finished.

“So do I,” I said. “We aren’t going anywhere that needs a skirt, are we?”

“No, I just want to pick up a hamburger and eat it on top of a hill somewhere. I had a lesson this morning,” she added, explaining her own clothes.

Sandra Mentchen always dressed well, whether for the concert stage or for tennis. She chose what you called “no-colors”—beige, stone, or very pale, muddy greens or black. She had the fair skin of a redhead, which she was not, brows and lashes pale, a thin, triangular face that would strengthen as it aged. She was all texture rather than color: leather, raw silk, roughly woven wool, linen. That day she had on an Irish sweater with leather buttons which I coveted.

She drove a sports car which most people coveted, pale in color, elegant in line, powerful. Everything matched. And she drove with the same hard, accurate skill that she used on the concert stage, like a man. It is what the reviews still say of her: a masculine strength. They usually add a phrase about feminine sensibility or, more negatively, lack of masculine intelligence. “Not bright but sometimes brilliant,” was her teacher’s evaluation of her. She had and has the force of discipline. These things are enough.

“On top of a hill somewhere” was obviously a vague reference to a specific place. There was nothing happenstance about the rock-shadowed parking place, then the small meadow we walked down to, protected from the road by the steep incline, lined with trees to the north and south, open only to the view in the west so that, as we ate, we could watch the city, clear in a sea wind, white.

“I don’t think Esther’s a sculptor, do you?” Sandy asked abruptly.

“I don’t know,” I said, quick to be irritated by the arrogance of tone. “It’s not something like music that you do know early.”

“Oh, I don’t mean talent. She’s probably got lots of that. But she doesn’t think of it as a life. She’s full of a lot of nonsense about fulfilling herself as a woman and serving God, as if they were something else again.”

“Maybe for her they are.”

“Then she’s not a sculptor, and she never will be.”

“What will she be?”

“Somebody’s wife,” Sandy said.

“Perhaps.”

“You aren’t sure?”

“How could I be?”

“Very easily. All you’d have to do is ask her.”

“Ask her what?”

“Don’t put me off, Kate. Do you want her or don’t you? Because if you don’t, I do. I wouldn’t even bother to ask if I couldn’t see how she feels about you. I want you to take her or let her go. At the moment, she’s just going to waste.”

“And you’re looking for ‘a wife’?”

“That’s right,” she said, and then she turned to me, “aren’t you?”

“No… I don’t even like the vocabulary.”

“Who said anything about liking it? What are you going to do—join her in a nunnery in your old age?”

“Leave her alone, Sandy.”

“Why? Give me one good reason.”

“Esther.”

“Do you want me to feel sorry for you, Kate?”

“No,” I said. “There’s no reason to. It’s just not her world, not her sort of thing.”

Sandy was silent for a while then. Finally she said, “How do you stand it?”

“I don’t even find it very difficult,” I said, but the tightening of her face made me regret it. “I don’t know. I go away. In the winter—this winter—I don’t know.”

“This is where I always come,” she said, “with a new one every week. But not Esther, you say.”

“No.”

“Then you,” she said simply.

“Are you bargaining?”

“In a way,” she said.

“Now?”

“You
are
girlish.”

“And you’re bloody childish,” I said, sounding to myself like Doris. “Come on. I have to get back to work.”

I sat at my desk all afternoon, trying to contemplate gifts acceptable and unacceptable to God. “Where is your brother?” Well, where was God? Whose keeper is He? Are all the rest of us meant simply to serve the chosen few, those beloved? And if that is true, should I have bargained? No. It would not have been for you. I wanted her. It was no bargain.

The transitional paragraph was glib. What followed was turning into an obscure private joke. Before dinner I tore it all up. After dinner I began again. At midnight Sandy, in a velvet shirt and linen trousers, did not bother to knock.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s awfully late.”

“Please.”

“Aren’t any of your friends around?”

“Esther’s just gone to bed.”

“This is an odd sort of blackmail.”

“It’s not blackmail.”

I was surprised by her body, surprised by its ignorance of itself and therefore of mine. She must always before have done all the teaching of the very little she knew, physically too shy to be curious, simply needy I would like to have been relieved, but I was disappointed. We lay in the dark, silent. Then Sandy got up.

“I can’t stand much more of this,” she said.

“Oh? I’d heard you were determined to make everyone in the graduating class.”

“Don’t, Kate. Help me.”

How? In the dark, particularly, words are important, as graphic and repetitive as the body’s rhythm, but anticipating it so that nothing is uncertain or clumsy. While touch is gentle, exploring, let words invade, startle so that crude touch does not. Then speak gently so that breasts do not forget what thighs open for now. Talk to desire, call to it, make it come to you all together. Now.

“There,” I said. “That’s something worth feeling guilty about, anyway.”

“You’re incredible.”

Not bad for a girl, I wanted to say, or it’s nothing really, or all I’m after is a credible performance; but I didn’t say anything. After a moment, I turned on the light to find a cigarette. “Don’t hide. You’ve got a lovely body.”

“Aren’t you ever afraid?”

“Of this? No.”

Now get out, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. We talked awkwardly for a little while before she finally dressed and left. It was three in the morning.

That was a different kind of bad day for you, too, wasn’t it? And, though Andy was the villain, I don’t suppose he enjoyed it, either. Years later he said to me, “Why did I feel I had to have her? Why did she make me so angry?” Because he wouldn’t actually force you, he had to commit some other violence.

“You and your purity! The only thing that keeps you a virgin is your stupidity. You think I was brutal to Pete, and you don’t even know what you do to Kate. You didn’t even know why she left you.”

“I haven’t come to ask you if it’s true, Kate. I just have to tell you what he told me. Otherwise I would feel I’d betrayed you.”

“It’s true and it’s not true,” I said. “I’ve never minded your not knowing, and I don’t mind your knowing now.”

“Did you… want me?”

“No,” I said, “not ever.”

“It sounds so crude to ask… why not?”

“Because I don’t want to want you. It’s as simple as that.”

“Oh,” you said. “Well, one thing is true. I am stupid.”

Before I could say anything more, you had left.

Andrew did telephone before he left town. Neither of us said anything about you, but he didn’t burden me with reasons for his change of plans.

“Maybe I’ll see you in the fall, in London.”

I gave him Frank’s and Doris’ address. I didn’t want to be angry, but the control I thought of as a virtue might have been fear. I could not afford to feel frightened.

I went back to my desk to write the final paragraph of the sermon. “We are the betrayer and the betrayed. We are Cain and Abel.”

Monk announced her engagement to Robin Clark at the party after the opening performance of her play. Her parents were not there, and, because you were as surprised as everyone else, I decided that it was an impromptu gesture, its motives despair over the obvious failure of the play and perhaps revenge against Richard Dick, who was there with his wife. The party was very like the play, sad and silly and confused, everyone with ponderously intelligent lines dealing with true confession circumstances. Yet the only difference between that very bad play and Monk’s recently very good ones is that she is now conscious of her view of the world.

“Do you think we could leave?” you asked before I did think so, but I agreed at once.

“When did she decide to do that?” I asked as we walked back to the dormitory.

“She didn’t. And she won’t be able to make it stick. Her father will never let her go through with it.”

“If one kind of performance fails, try another.”

“I think so,” you said. “What’s going to happen to Monk?”

“She’s going to be a rich man’s wife,” I said, and then I remembered what Sandy had said about you. “Or not.”

“But she does have talent, Kate. She just doesn’t know yet who she is.”

I began to laugh, not being able to help it.

“What?” you asked, still urgently serious.

“Oh, I don’t know, little dog. Do you know who you are yet?”

“Well, I know this much—that right at the bottom of me there’s one strong word, ‘yes.’ ”

And at the bottom of me an even stronger one, “no,” but the sweetness of your confidence did touch me. I did not want to mock you, ever.

“Is your show just about ready?” I asked.

“No. I’m never ready until the day after things are due, but I still have three weeks. So much of the old stuff is junk, Kate—swollen heads and fallen tits. I wish I had enough to show only what I’ve done since I got back. I had a good title for it all, ‘Holey, Wholly, Holy’ but I can’t use it.”