Looking for Mr. Goodbar (15 page)

Terry felt her face flush but he didn’t notice. They were almost
at Twenty-third Street but he seemed oblivious to how far they were walking. She was fascinated, both by the story and his ability to tell it to her. A
total stranger.

She
hated
sex, Rachel did. Their sex life was a series of painful disasters which she allowed in spite of her obvious distaste and discomfort in order to fulfill her wifely obligation to him, primarily
to get pregnant!
Sometimes she pulled herself away so fast afterward that part of it missed and went onto the sheets, after which she would make him get up while she changed them.

Get it over with became his attitude as well as hers. Eventually he stopped believing he’d ever been missing something. When all the sex talk started in the early sixties—even before that, when there was talk, say, of Marilyn Monroe or one of the other sex goddesses—he would think to himself, But look what’s underneath! A fraud! The Emperor’s New Clothes! This beautiful stuff everyone praised while knowing nothing was really there. He’d forgotten what it had felt like to be horny; for a long time his sexual desires were so totally submerged that they were presumed dead. But then . . .

At Thirty-fourth Street, he steered her west across Second and they continued walking.

When had it begun to change? The truth was, it was when his older children began to grow past childhood. He had seen it in his children, that marvelous vitality, that interest in their own bodies. The seductiveness of his daughters when they looked at him, crawled all over him, begged him when their mother wasn’t around to let them take a shower with him.

Rachel had quashed every evidence of their sexuality—the boys’ even worse than the girls’. There were many incidents, but one he particularly remembered because it had evoked a long-buried childhood memory, except in this case it was his father who’d done it, not his mother. Found little Eli curled up on an old rug in a closet lying on his back, singing a song and playing with his prick. He’d been beaten within an inch of his life. Gerson
had been watching TV when Rachel found him doing it and sent him to his room without dinner. The more things changed the more they remained the same. What difference did the punishment make? It was the same message; your body is unclean, don’t touch, don’t enjoy, it’s not
supposed
to feel good.

He knew it was wrong. He knew it. Yet he had to admit, it had taken the sixties to convince him that he was right. He’d been so cut off, so out of it, that he hadn’t known what was happening all around him. Outside of his job, of New City. When Elana first asked him what marijuana was he wasn’t sure what she was asking about. He’d gone asking around his office and he’d heard a few things. He’d gotten curious. Started reading the
Village Voice
on the sly. If Rachel had seen it in the house she would have had a hemorrhage.

At Macy’s he turned her left and they started downtown toward the Village.

He began taking Elana into the city once in a while on one pretext or another. The Jewish Museum. Whatever. He would wander around and talk to people. Eventually he met people who invited him to a party and he smoked grass and from there on it was history. He hadn’t taken Elana in with him this time. He’d gone home that night with some girl and smoked some grass and then they’d balled and it was a revelation! All those feelings he’d been sitting on, so to speak, had come back, only this time they’d been satisfied. He’d thought he couldn’t get anything faintly resembling pleasure except from jacking off in the bathroom.

Terry felt herself grow weak at this. She had never in her entire life heard anyone confess to masturbating, not in all the sex talk in school, not in the casually intimate revelations between Katherine’s friends. Not even Martin Engle! Never!

And the girl had liked it, too, Ali said. Amazing! She made noises so he could tell she liked how it felt! Amazing! She was wet inside! Amazing!
Rachel’s
insides felt as though they were covered with
skin.
Could Terry imagine how he felt that night?

She said, her voice shaky, that she thought she could. They passed Twenty-third Street again. She was exhausted but didn’t want to tell him so.

When he went home he felt more like the bearer of good news than the guilty husband. Yes, Rachel, there is such a thing as pleasure and we, too, can have it. He was surprised at Rachel’s hysteria when he called her to say he’d been detained in the city, and only realized after he’d hung up that he’d never been away from her for a full night before. Before leaving, he talked to Mary Ann about his wife. Mary Ann went to these great therapy groups and thought his wife sounded like she needed groups. He told Mary Ann he didn’t think Rachel would go for the idea but he would try anything. First he was going to try just turning her on. He bought an ounce of grass from Mary Ann and she rolled a few to teach him how.

Theresa might not believe this, but he was unprepared for the scene that greeted him when he arrived. Rachel, distraught, hysterical, her hair uncombed, her face haggard and tear-streaked. Both his parents and her parents were there but the children weren’t; Gerson and his sister, who didn’t have school, had been sent to a neighbor for the morning so as not to be contaminated by events. At first he was amused—he was so high and happy, he wasn’t going to let them bring him down.

“Hi, wife,” he said cheerfully, kissing her cheek (she shrank from him). “Who’re all these nice people?”

They looked like strangers to him. No, not strangers, exactly, but people he remembered from his childhood. They were all looking at him as though he were quite mad, which was funny. He suggested the others go home so he and his wife could talk.

“Now,”
said Rachel’s father, the rabbi, “
now
he wants to talk.” As though some step had been taken that was so large and irrevocable as to make conversation superfluous. It was true in a way, of course, but he himself didn’t realize it yet.

“Yes,” he said, “I do want to talk. To my wife.” Not in his wildest,
most innocent dreams had he imagined for a moment that he could discuss a new life with his parents or Rachel’s.

“So, Eli,” said his own father, the rabbi for the defense—or if not the defending rabbi, at least the mediator, since Rachel’s father was obviously the prosecutor—“where were you?”

“Why?” Eli asked. “Could you just tell me why this is a matter for the whole family, not just my wife and me?”

“Oh, my God!” Rachel wailed. “Because I’m terrified, that’s why! Because you’re crazy!
Because you disappeared.
”

They were at Sheridan Square, now. Without a word Theresa sank onto one of the benches. He sat beside her and continued without interruption.

“All right,” he said to Rachel. “I’m really sorry about that. I’m sorry you were worried. I would’ve called only . . .” Only he hadn’t thought of it. He’d actually,
literally,
failed to think of it until morning. “All right, look, I tried to explain on the phone but you were hysterical.”

“Hysterical! I thought you were
dead,
God forbid, I thought—”

“I went to a party,” he said.

They stared at him as though he’d very casually announced his attendance at an orgy.

“I met some people,” he said. “At the Jewish Museum.” Feeling a little disappointed in himself. That he’d had to lend his enterprise a little bogus respectability. “Very nice Jewish people. We got into a conversation. They had some marvelous photographs of the Lower East Side in the old days. We got into a conversation and they invited me back to their place to talk.”

“So . . . you . . . just . . . went.” Rachel’s father. Wonderingly.
So you just picked up the ax and hacked your wife to bits.

“I tried to call you when I got there,” he said to Rachel, “but the line was busy. I tried to call two or three times.”

“So we’ll let that go for the moment,” Rachel’s father said. “So what were you doing there without your wife? So why did you stay?”

“I stayed because I had too much wine and I fell asleep on the couch.”

“Oh, my God!” Rachel moaned.

“Do they know your last name?” his father asked, as though falling asleep on someone’s couch was something they might blackmail you for later. He had to laugh but their expressions made him stop soon enough.

“Never mind that!” Rachel’s father thundered. “There’s still the crucial question.
Why were you with them in the first place?
How come a respectable man, a
father
, suddenly ups and goes into New York without his family? Something he apparently did before, his wife was too upset to even mention it to her parents until now?”

“I was restless,” Eli said.

“Restless!”

Nobody was ever restless! For thousands of years the Jews had wandered from land to land seeking a home and then they found not only Israel but New City! All this to get restless? Restlessness was anti-Semitic!

“Look,” he said, “I think you’d better go now so Rachel and I can talk alone.”

He didn’t want them to be angry but he was willing for them to be. That was very important. It had something to do with the idea of leaving home. He’d always been afraid to make anyone so angry that he would have to leave home. He’d never been absolutely certain there
was
any place but home. Home in the sense of a life. Yorktown Computer, New City, etc. The outside world had no reality for him. Now he had a new strength. He knew what they didn’t know, that there were real people and places out there. If he had to he could leave without stepping into a void. Not that he had any idea of leaving.

Something about the way he said it must have conveyed this new strength to the parents because they did leave, with promises to call Rachel in half an hour.

“Do you want to go back to my place for a while?” he asked
Theresa suddenly. “Talk? Have a smoke?” He was staying in someone’s loft until he could get himself together enough to find his own place. On Greene Street. It was fun. He was doing pottery. “I’ll show you my work.”

She wanted to go but felt she shouldn’t. “I don’t think so.”

“I promise I won’t rape you,” he said, smiling his shy, endearing smile—as though he’d just confessed he was a rapist but was promising not to do it to her.

“I didn’t think you would,” she said. “I’m just . . .”

“There’re other people there, if that makes you feel better. I mean, we won’t have to see them, they’re up in the front, but they’re there.”

“All right,” she agreed. “For a little while.”

He put his arm around her as they cut over toward Greene Street.

Knowing everything Theresa knew, he said, she still would not have believed the fear on Rachel’s face as the door closed behind them. Sheer terror. The neighborhood ax-murderer was confronting her in her home. He stood there and waited for her to relax a little.

“Rachel,” he finally said, “I want you to know that you’re the mother of my children and I love you.”

He wanted her to know that even if he was becoming a different person, starting a new life, he didn’t want to leave her out of it. He wanted her to come along and change, too.
He wanted to turn her on!

Rachel was staring at him as though he was speaking Sanskrit when they both knew it was only a written language.

“Listen to me, Rachel. I’m not your enemy. I want to share with you the things I’ve been . . . what’s been going on
inside
me. For a long time.”

Silence.

“You know we haven’t been happy. That’s one thing I’m sure you won’t dispute.”

She wouldn’t bother because it was irrelevant. Happiness?
Happiness was for the dumb
goyim
who didn’t know any better. Suffering is a privilege.

“All right. I’m going on the assumption that this is one thing we agree on, that there’s room for improvement. On both sides. It’s not your fault or my fault that we’ve been miserable. It’s just true that we have been.”

Silence.

“This has bothered me more and more as time goes by. What am I alive for? Just to do the right thing? Just to have children who’ll be as unhappy as I am and have just as little idea what it’s all about as I do? There’s got to be something good somewhere. Am I right, Rachel? . . . All right. Don’t answer. But if you want to argue, interrupt me. Interrupt me if I say something you don’t like.”

Because that was one funny thing. With all her misery, for all that she might be angry or upset, she never yelled at him or complained. She would never, for instance, tell him, “Don’t you dare do such and such,” or “No, I won’t,” or whatever—she would only wait until he’d done it and then at the most give him one of those looks that said, “You see? Anyone could’ve told you how it would turn out.”

He proceeded to tell Rachel that from the beginning she must have sensed, as he did, that something was terribly wrong with their lives. Particularly their sex lives. That when they’d felt those first youthful stirrings of desire they’d never anticipated being rushed prematurely—two horny, scared, ignorant kids—into permanent union with a virtual stranger. Not, he hastened to add, that he thought the marriage was a total disaster, they were both basically good people and must have a great deal in common, their wonderful children, for one thing, but . . . and here, he remembered, he had suddenly thought of a joke which he still thought was pretty good . . . but she had to admit, he’d said, that it was pretty weird in the latter half of the twentieth century, belonging to a group that not only made shotgun marriages but did it before the girl even got pregnant!

Theresa laughed both at the joke and at his renewed enjoyment of it.

“You think it’s funny, huh?” Ali said, suddenly not laughing any more. “Would you believe,” he asked, with relish, “that that joke would cause a grown woman to get whiter than a sheet, tremble violently and shout—except it came out in a whisper because she was choking. ‘Get out! You’re crazy! Get out before the children come home!’ ”

He should have known then, of course. He’d told other people this story in the months since he’d left Rachel and they could never understand why he didn’t give up immediately and leave. They didn’t know what it was like to have every part of your life wrapped up in a neat little parcel in which you were then enclosed. If he got out he would leave everything. He would be leaving not just his children’s lives but his own!