A Bigamist's Daughter (10 page)

When he comes out, his hair is neatly combed (her comb?), making him look surprisingly boyish, fresh out of prep school. He kisses her again (her toothbrush?) and she feels that slight turning at the base of her spine.

Outside, it is the same cool night that she had walked home in earlier, but it seems darker now, or the lights seem brighter. He takes her hand and his feels warm and wide. They smile at each other. They pass an old woman who lives in her building and she smiles, eyeing Tupper. She is a wide, male-faced woman with bow legs and yellow hair. She has never smiled at Elizabeth before.

Another couple passes them and then a group of young men, neatly dressed. One of them looks at her and smiles a little, then glances briefly at Tupper. He and his friends turn into a small bar crowded with young people.

Friday night on the Upper East Side, and the streets are filled with illustrations for every tense of the verb “to fuck.” She tells Tupper this and he laughs, labeling others as they pass. A tall, attractive woman in a gray suit “has fucked,” two women just a little younger than Elizabeth “will fuck,” a plain-looking couple holding hands are simply “fucked.”

She puts aside all thoughts of closeness and distance. This walking together, being silly, holding hands, feeling truly hungry and washed clean, is all part of what she’s missed this near-year of celibacy. She will simply enjoy it and let Monday be as it may.

The restaurant is one of those small, glassed-in places on a corner. On the menu, they call it a sidewalk café. It’s all yellow candlelight and green plants and the piano player softly plays show tunes.

“Well, here we are again,” Tupper Daniels says. “Across a candlelit table. Twice in one day.”

She smiles, nothing to say.

“So, maybe while we’re here, I can get you to answer the question you didn’t answer this afternoon.”

“What’s that?” she says softly, playing the lover.

“What are your suggestions for my book? For the ending?”

The piano, she thinks, should have struck a sour note. “Shop talk?” she says.

He shrugs. “Just briefly. So I won’t spend all night trying to second-guess you. Like I did all day.”

She shakes her head, hesitates.

“Do you think I should end it in a trial scene? You know, Bailey’s trial. You looked a little unhappy today when I said I didn’t want to do that.”

She wonders what he’s talking about.

“Or”—he shifts a little in his seat, puts both elbows on the table—“and this occurred to me today, after we had lunch: How about if I end it with a chapter about Bailey himself? You know, maybe even pull a John Fowles, do the self-conscious ending, say there can be no ending because Bailey is still alive. Or do a total point-of-view switch and tell how one of the boys who used to watch him grew up and moved away. And then say I wrote a book about him. The little boy, I mean, not me.”

Despite herself, she says, “Why don’t you make something up?”

He looks at her, taken aback, she thinks. “What do you mean?”

She should say fine, any of those ideas is fine. Why don’t you write them, any one of them, get it finished, sign the contract? “I mean, why do you have to find out what really happened to Bailey or talk about what happened to the little boy? The guy in the book is named Beale, isn’t he? Why don’t you just stick with him, have something happen to him. You know, make something up.”

He rests his cheek on his knuckles, watching her. If she
likes anything about him, she decides, she would have to say it’s his eyes. Although his chest is smooth and hard and his arms somewhat appealing, crossed with thick veins. His legs.

“Make something up, huh?” he says. She wonders if he’s patronizing her. “Okay, like what?”

She doesn’t want to talk about this.

She shrugs. “I don’t know. You’re the writer. Have him decide to mend his ways. Maybe he could fall permanently in love with the fat wife.”

He grimaces. “And they live happily ever after?”

“Why not? Or maybe he can meet someone else, say a lady bigamist.
Are
there lady bigamists?”

He smiles at her; the smile seems to say, Oh, I get it, you’re being cute. “I’ve never heard of a lady bigamist,” he says.

“Well, then. There you go. Make one up.”

He sits back, straightens the napkin on his lap. “You don’t want to talk about this, do you?” he asks.

“Tupper, I leave work at five o’clock.”

He looks up at her, reaches across the table, takes her hand. “I hope,” he begins, then pauses, pursing his lips. “What just happened, it didn’t have anything to do with my book. I mean, I’m not trying to get you to help me more than you should by going to bed with you. You know that, don’t you?”

The waitress arrives with their crepes so she answers a quick, “Yes, of course.” She’s beginning to see that she will soon remember this night as a lesson learned: Do not mix your play-pretend occupation with what appears to be your real life.

“It’s just that I talk about this stuff all day,” she tells him. “I like to leave it alone every once in a while.”

“I understand,” he says. He looks away, his face sad, struggling, it seems, with some frustration, some desperate tragedy.

It occurs to her that he thinks she’s lying to him; that he thinks she’s convinced he is interested only in her
power.
He
believes she will never know that his motives for being with her are anything but selfish, she will never trust his good intentions.

It’s rather a sad, romantic fantasy and she decides not to bother to refute it. Instead, she imagines a scene in which, some day, she turns bitterly to him (they are in her apartment, or in a restaurant having lunch, or, better yet, in a cab at night, returning from the opera or the ballet or even from a carriage ride around Central Park) and says, angry tears in her eyes, her voice a steady hiss: You never loved me. It was only your book that you cared about. You only wanted my ideas, you only wanted to steal my ideas, rob my mind.

She recalls Ann’s “It sure sounds like an excuse for robbing people,” and marvels at how she has imagined herself into the victim; how she has just turned her schemes to use Tupper Daniels into his to use her.

“Okay,” he says, facing her again. “I’m sorry I brought it up.” He smiles at her, an ingratiating smile. “So let’s talk more about you. I know where you’ve lived and where you went to school. What about your parents. Where are they from?”

“Well, my mother was born in Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn?” he says. “God, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was really from Brooklyn.”

“Your loss,” she says coolly. “And my father was born and raised in England.”

This he is impressed by. “Really?” he says. “How did he end up with a girl from Brooklyn?”

He says Brooklyn as if he meant Uganda. She marvels at the rude ignorance of inbred WASPs.

“My father came to New York when he was about fifteen or so. He lived out on Long Island with an aunt, but he had friends in the city and he met my mother at a party.”

“So you’re English and Brooklynish,” he says.

“Irish,” she tells him.

He laughs, waves his hand. “Same difference. And what did your father do while you lived on Long Island?”

She pauses, flips through her stories like a pack of cards. Government, traveling salesman, actor, on the lecture circuit.

She laughs. “He was a bigamist,” she says. And there is the word, pointing at him. She doesn’t like it.

Tupper Daniels’ eyes grow wide. Light up, she would say. “You’re kidding.”

She doesn’t like it. Her parents loved each other. Her father was a good man. “Yes, I’m kidding. He worked for the government.”

He seems disappointed. “What did he do?”

“He traveled a lot. Some kind of intelligence.” She decides to put an end to this line of questioning. “He died when I was fourteen.”

“Oh, gee,” he says. “I’m sorry. What did he die of?”

She turns her glass. “Car accident.”

“Was anybody else hurt?”

She looks up at him. “No, he was alone.”

“Gosh,” he says, shaking his head, “that’s too bad. It must have been hard on you.”

She shrugs. “He wasn’t around much anyway.” She stares down at her glass. She feels him watching her, feels him questioning the hidden depths of her despair, her sense of abandonment. God, she thinks, he’s a romantic. Or at least she’s imagining him to be.

“Why did you say he was a bigamist?” he asks. A whisper.

She shakes her hair away, smiling. “Just kidding,” she says. “I thought maybe it would get you thinking about the end of your book.”

His voice is dry. “I’m always thinking about the end of my book. But I thought you stopped work at five o’clock.”

She laughs. “I guess I never really leave. Do you want to go?”

He straightens up, calls for the check.

As they walk back to her apartment, she wonders where she should turn him away. At the corner where he can grab a cab, at the entrance to her building, at the door to her apartment?

He puts his arm around her as they walk. It is heavy, makes walking difficult. He comments on the cold and she realizes for the first time that he is not wearing his blazer. Clever trick.

“Did you leave your jacket in my apartment?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says. “I forgot how cold it was getting.”

“Oh,” she says. “As long as you didn’t leave it in the restaurant.”

He laughs. “We Southern boys aren’t used to these Yankee autumns,” he says.

Rehearsed, she thinks. Oh, clever.

And so they are back in her apartment and yes, there is plenty of wine, but no, she says, she really is very tired. And although she doesn’t want to end up in bed again, she doesn’t want to be left alone in her apartment at eleven o’clock on a Friday night either, and so: All right, she says, a back rub sounds nice and yes, one more glass of wine. And his hands are strong enough and there is just enough pain in the way he grips her shoulders and her neck and kneads her back and sides. So it is another reversal—the literal back rub now feeling like making love, but now, with him fully clothed and her only clinically undressed, only her blouse off, her front hidden against the mattress, the back rub is somehow more desirable, exciting.

And so she turns, feels his soft sweater against her, his face, the almost imperceptible beard. Then the slow undressing. This will be the last time, she tells herself, the kiss good-by, the graduation drunk, the bachelor party, Fat Tuesday.

“Where in England was your father born?”

“London, I think.”

“You think?”

“Well, I wasn’t there. But, yes, I’m sure it was London.”

“And he came over here when he was fifteen?”

“About that.”

“And he lived with an aunt?”

“Yes.”

“What was her name?”

“I don’t know. Betty, I think.”

“How can you not know?”

“She died before I was born.”

“Didn’t he ever talk about her?”

“A little. Not much. Anyway, he always called her his aunt.”

He gets up, shaking his head. Goes into the kitchen. “There
is
more wine,” he yells. Comes back with the open bottle. Her bottle. The one she’d bought on the way home. To seduce him with, maybe.

He pours two glasses, puts the bottle on the end table. Sits cross-legged, opposite her. His body is all primary colors: white, red, blue—no muted shades. Especially his feet, which could be sketches from a medical book, an encyclopedia. White from the ankles to toes, red around the side, blue veins crossing through it all. The hair on his pale legs seems blond enough to be transparent, his genitals are red, almost an angry red, veined in blue; his hairless chest is pure white without even a freckle or a beauty mark to contradict what seems to have been chosen as his color scheme. Surely, she thinks, even a medical illustrator would have added a brown freckle or two.

“Was she married?” he asks. “Aunt what’s-her-name?”

“Yes. That’s why she lived out there, on Long Island. It’s where her husband was from.”

“Was she born in England too?”

“No. Ireland, I think.”

“How can you say, ‘I think’? She’s only one generation away. Gosh, I can name all my relatives back four or five generations.”

“Probably because you’ve got huge oil paintings of every one of them hanging all over your mansion. I bet you’ve got headless ghosts in gray uniforms, too.”

“I don’t live in a mansion,” he says. “And all our ghosts wear heads and frock coats.”

“Even the lady ghosts?”

He nods. “The Daniels women,” he says, in an exaggerated Southern accent, “were never above perversity. Some of our loveliest belles are transvestites in the hereafter. We all have our own idea of heaven.”

She laughs and he looks at her severely, “What’s yours?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Typical Baltimore catechism stuff. God with a long white beard and a dove on His shoulders, angels with curly blond hair and blue wings instead of bodies. Lots of clouds.”

“And where do you fit in?”

She looks down at herself, lounging so casually against her pillow, naked, her legs outstretched, spending an intimate evening with someone she hardly cares about and barely knows. With an author, of all things.

“I guess I’m in the crowd just under God’s feet, right below the clouds, reaching up.”

“Hell?”

She smiles. “No, purgatory. Not quite bad enough for hell, not quite good enough for heaven. Just kind of mediocre. I have a feeling everybody I know will be there too.”

“Your father?”

She looks at him, slightly amazed that he would ask such a tactless question. But he is looking at her seriously, as if it were important to him.

“My father,” she says, “could be anywhere. Heaven, hell, purgatory. Wisconsin.”

He smiles a little. “What did he look like, your father?”

She brushes back her hair. “Dark hair, like mine. Blue eyes, like mine. My nose exactly, I’m told. But his face was thinner and he had a mustache. A small one, like Clark Gable’s.”

“Was he tall?”

“Yes,” she says. “And thin. Why are you so interested?”

He shrugs, rests his glass on his stomach. “I don’t know; you get kind of defensive when you talk about him. I don’t think you liked him.”