A Bigamist's Daughter (6 page)

“Have you ever had this problem before?” he asks. “An author without an ending?”

She shrugs a little. “I’ve had them with bad endings,” she says, rather world-weary. “But never without an ending at all.”

He laughs. “I guess you do see a lot of bad stuff. There are so many people who think they can write.”

“True.”

He sips his soup and looks at her over his spoon. “Do you come here with all your authors?” he asks.

She feels her stomach drop, as if the entire restaurant has just gone over a sharp hill.

“It depends,” she says.

He laughs a little, spooning his soup. She wonders if she’s blushing, squirming. “This is a loaded question,” he says, studying the soup, “but I’m curious. I’m curious about women in power, I guess. How they handle it. Maybe you should think of me as Henry James doing research when I ask you this.”

“What is it?” she says, perhaps a little impatiently.

He looks up at her. “Well, what if an author you’re working with comes on to you? Do you think”—he makes a stupid, almost cross-eyed face and she wonders if it’s supposed to be hers—“ ‘God, he just wants me to publish his book,’ or do
you give him the benefit of the doubt? I mean, you
are
a very attractive woman and you do have a certain amount of power. Do the two things sometimes give you problems?”

The waiter clears their plates. “Not really,” she says over his arms. “It’s easy enough to separate the two.”

“That’s good,” he says. “After all, men do it all the time, don’t they? Separate the two, I mean. Home and office, work and play.”

“Yes,” she says, “that’s true.”

They were in his office that was all oak and leather and rich browns. Even the light from the one lamp seemed beige, golden brown.

The waiter brings them their lunches. Cold smoked chicken, asparagus salad, tomato aspic.

“Sometimes,” Tupper Daniels says, “I think I may be missing something, never having had a nine-to-five job, an office, power, regular lunch hours.”

Before the office, they’d had dinner here, at a table farther back, where he could still watch the door. A married man’s oldest habit, he’d said, watch out for it whenever you meet someone new. He was publishing a book of poetry, under the pen name Conrad Sikes. She’d only been working a few months and had not yet been trusted with an expense account, so when he asked to buy her dinner, she saw it as the job’s first fringe benefit. And she’d pitied him. Mid-sixties, somewhat wealthy, probably once handsome but now simply a nice dresser with a permanent tan, a round, old belly. Most of his poems were about his sixteen-year-old son, his only child, who was severely retarded, living in an expensive school near Philadelphia. The one poem she’d read all the way through told how hard he found it to praise the boy for writing his name on a piece of lined paper, in large, gross letters, at a time when his friends’ sons were being praised for making the football team
and the National Honor Society. How he sometimes prayed that the boy would die.

They drank cocktails, two kinds of wine, brandy. The waiters nearly bowed to him. Whenever he mentioned his son, he would duck his head and say, “But you don’t want to hear about my troubles,” and then, minutes later, bring him up again. He wanted to discuss poetry, but he knew far more than she.

“I decided to be a writer while I was at Vanderbilt,” Tupper Daniels is saying. “And when I graduated, my parents gave me an office in one of our guest bedrooms and a weekly salary. They said the Daniels family had not yet produced a writer.”

She smiles at him, nods.

It was December. The wind from the river was bitter and she had four long blocks to walk to the subway. His car, a silver-gray Cadillac, was right there. And did she mind, he asked as they drove smoothly up Eighth Avenue, if he stopped at his office for a minute? It was on the way.

She tries to remember: Was she playing innocent? Was she truly naive, drunk?

“My first novel was awful, I began it at Vanderbilt. It was, I’m ashamed to say, terribly
macho.
Hunting and fishing and violent intercourse.”

She laughs. “Really?”

He had his own keys to the building. The walls of the lobby were gold, the floor a beige marble. He took her arm as they walked toward the elevator; her heels clicked and echoed.

“Actually, it was like
Deliverance
,” Tupper Daniels says. “Lots of action. But totally heterosexual.”

Upstairs, the silence was frightening, exciting. To their right there was a glass wall and a set of glass doors with gold lettering. Everything behind it was black, and as he opened the glass door with another set of keys she stood by the elevator, wondering what she would do if he told her to step into that
blackness. She decided she would run, but wasn’t sure if it would be forward or backward, into whatever he was planning or away from it.

When he got the door open he said, over his shoulder, “Just wait here a minute.” She was strangely disappointed. Her reflection in the glass embarrassed her. Her long hair was tangled, her raincoat was wrinkled along its hem. She was standing in a bare hallway, alone, left out, denied entrance.

“The two main characters were trappers, you see. Handsome, virile. But they had been Rhodes scholars too, so when they started trapping, they noticed that there was a kind of organized crime controlling the fur business from start to finish.”

Finally, a soft light went on behind the glass. He was standing by a big round desk, and he waved for her to come in.

“Sorry,” he said as she entered. “I couldn’t find the switch.”

The light was under a large blue-and-green oil painting that nearly covered the far wall. It left the rest of the room in light shadow. The carpeting was a sea green, the four round chairs and two round couches were blue and green, set in two semicircles opposite the green reception desk. She felt she was underwater, submerged in a goldfish bowl. She was finding it difficult to breathe.

“They only trapped for sport, and enough money to support themselves. One was a painter, the other an aspiring writer.”

He took her arm again and led her down a dim corridor. It smelled of paper, aftershave, ink. She heard herself chattering, sounding more drunk than she was. Her legs ached.

He opened a final door. Turned on a light. The brown office. Leather, shining oak, the softest browns. Large ferns by the heavy brown drapes.

He went to the huge desk at the far end of the room. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said.

“The climax was a wolf hunt where they became the ones being hunted.”

She stood by the door. The only light was from a tall lamp beside the leather couch. The light was beige, golden brown.

He turned from the desk, some kind of portfolio under his arm. He smiled. “That’s all,” he said. “We can go.”

He walked toward her and she turned to let him open the door. She noticed the gold tie tack in his red-and-blue silk tie, saw his long, tanned fingers reach for the doorknob. Then he turned a little more, slipped the portfolio onto the table behind him. He put his hands on the lapels of her coat and the touch made her stomach flinch, as if it had been kicked from the inside.

“I would like so much to see you,” he said, his voice soft, suddenly hoarse. She smiled a little, politely.

“My son, my wife. There’s not much beauty in my life. I promise I won’t touch you. I’d just like to look at you.”

She knew it was not the type of thing she would do. He worked intently on the buttons of her blouse, biting his lip childishly. She pushed his hands aside and undid them herself. He knelt before her as he took off her shoes and stockings and she could see his skull just under the thin hairs; it seemed soft, painfully bare. She told herself she pitied him.

When he looked up at her, his eyes were filled with tears. “I won’t touch you,” he assured her again. He stood up and went to his desk, sat stiffly behind it. “Just let me look,” he said. “I just want to look at you.”

She stepped over her clothes and into the middle of the floor. The carpet was beautifully soft against her feet. She moved around the room, looked at some books on a shelf, brushed her hand along a wall. She felt beautiful. Beautifully white, pure white, bright. She stretched out on the leather couch. It
was soft glove leather, wonderfully cool. The golden light was all over her skin.

Later she felt that the incident had been some strangely erotic dream. Perhaps even the beginning of a strange affair. But from then on he had his secretary sign all his letters and make all his phone calls to her. She didn’t speak to him again and she saw him only once, when he’d come to the office after his book was published. He pretended not to notice her.

Tupper Daniels orders coffee as the waiter clears their plates. “Too
macho
for today’s market,” he is saying. “You really have to appeal to women these days.” She drains her last bit of wine and he glances at his watch. “Which brings us back to my book,” he says. “I guess I’ve avoided working on it with you after all.”

She smiles at him. “Are you busy tonight?”

He smiles, slyly, it seems to her. “Nothing that can’t be canceled if I say I have to see my editor.”

“Well, why don’t you come over to my apartment tonight, say eight or nine or so? We can talk about the book then.” Some part of her is wondering what she’s doing. Other parts seem to know perfectly well.

He nods. “Sounds fine,” he says, his voice low. “I can see why you have no problem with power.”

She shrugs and picks up the check, hands it to him. “Then don’t ask to arm wrestle for the bill.” She can see he likes that: Kate Hepburn to John Wayne.

She wonders how many poses this “relationship” can inspire.

It was the
Playboy
fantasy, although not from the playboy’s point of view. It was the fantasy she had foreseen as a child, sharing a stolen copy of the magazine with her girlfriends, seeing the women—pretty women they thought, beautiful princesses and Miss Americas and Cinderellas—draped over leather
couches and dark beds, glowing white and beautiful in the leather and oak and deep brown nests of men.

Young as they were (eight? twelve? sixteen?) they studied those pictures, compared their own bodies to them, lifting their blouses, examining one another and later, standing alone before their mirrors, naked, posing, puckering their lips, mussing their hair, smiling. Alone.

They were always photographed alone, those women: beautiful and naked and unafraid in a world where everything was masculine, where the men were kept behind the camera, in the next room, in some shadow.

It was not pity alone that had made her do it. It was because he didn’t touch her that night as she stretched out on the couch and felt her own golden skin. It was because he stayed behind his desk, in shadow, admiring her, while she alone was in the light. Because it was a perfect moment of selfishness, self-love, a moment she’d been taught all her life to long for.

That’s why she undressed for him that night, why she enjoyed it so.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Maybe, she thinks, she’s only making excuses. Maybe she is merely perverse, maybe the night was merely sick, her own problem, her own weakness.

It all sounds so much like an excuse: I did it because I’m a woman, because I’m a repressed Catholic, because my father was never home.

Maybe she is simply sleazy and would, given the opportunity, take her clothes off for every old man, in every office. Maybe she was simply afraid to say no, too lazy to say no.

Maybe, she thinks, it was just me, my fault, and any other interpretation is merely an excuse.

Ann is standing in her doorway, smiling. “How was your Tupperware party?” she asks.

“Fine,” Elizabeth says.

Ann moves into the office. Her matching skirt and blouse, navy blue and white, billows.

“Why is it,” Elizabeth asks her, “that as soon as I figure out why something I’ve done shouldn’t make me feel guilty, I feel guilty for making up excuses?”

She frowns down at her, her green eyes puzzled. “You mean like working here?” she asks.

Elizabeth returns her look.

“You know,” Ann explains, “we tell each other, ‘Look, we’re not robbing these people, we’re giving them what they want and getting paid for it. If we didn’t publish their lousy books and take their lousy money, somebody else would.’ Which is true, of course, but sounds an awful lot like an excuse for robbing people.”

Elizabeth shakes her head, not pleased with the analogy. “I was thinking more of women,” she says. “We’re really not responsible for so many of our attitudes about ourselves, but”—she slaps her desk—“Jesus, even a statement like that sounds like an excuse. Of course we’re responsible.”

“Okay,” Ann says, nodding. “I’m beginning to get your point. Like last weekend, when I met that guy Ray, remember? The one who was so nice and so good-looking and he bought me a drink and we talked for a while and then he said, ‘So, you want to go someplace and fuck?’ Remember I told you?”

She laughs. “I remember.”

“So, when I asked him if that was all he was interested in and he said, ‘You’re fat, what else is a guy going to be interested in? Showing you off to his friends?’ That was his problem, right? He was a rude moron, right?”

“Of course.”

She puts her hands on her hips. “So why did I starve myself for the next two days?” She pinches her rear. “I’m all hips and breasts, I know that. It’s the way I’m built. But I watch what I eat and I exercise and I like the way I look. At least, I thought I did. But then some jerk in a bar tells me I’m fat, and I starve myself for two days. I kept telling myself he was an asshole, but something else kept telling me that I was using that as an excuse for my lousy shape. That it was really
my
fault—like if I were skinny he wouldn’t be a jerk.”

Her voice is high now, shrill. Her eyes are sparkling. They both begin to laugh.

“I mean it,” Ann says. “I ate nothing all weekend but a grapefruit and a bowl of soup. I kept thinking, ‘If you weren’t fat, you wouldn’t think he was such an asshole—you’d be out with him tonight, he’d be showing you off.’ Isn’t that crazy?”