Looking for Mr. Goodbar (23 page)

He groaned. “What’d you say that for?”

One way or the other she would have responsibility for this illness.

He stood up, clutching his side.

“Are you sure you want to go?” If he wasn’t sick she wanted him to make love to her, and if he was, being on the train would make it worse.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

He didn’t call for the rest of the week and she was really nasty to James on Saturday night.

Tuesday Tony called.

“Hi,” she said, trying to sound casual. To conceal her relief that he hadn’t disappeared forever. “Were you sick?”

“Huh?” he said. “Oh. Yeah. But I’m okay.”

“Good,” she said. “When you coming down?”

“I dunno,” he said. “I’m working late this week. The guy who usually has the hours is out sick.”

“Mmmm. The bug’s passing around.” The peanut-butter bug.

“Listen,” he said. “Keep a week from Sunday open.”

“Okay,” she said. “What for?”

“Because I told you to.”

“I know that. But you never told me anything this far in advance and then suddenly you call and say keep open the Sunday after this.”

There was a long silence. As though he were overwhelmed by her genius in picking up the discrepancy. Then he said maybe he’d see her next Monday, he wouldn’t be working late any more by then. She said okay. But that was a week off and she was already so horny she was climbing the walls.

Into her mind came the time when she had gone month in and month out without sex. When she hadn’t even known the need was there. Maybe that was the whole thing. She wondered if Tony really had to work. Probably. He didn’t feel any obligation to her that would make him lie to avoid hurting her feelings.

Stop, Theresa.

She could go mad trying to figure out what was happening. She might go mad anyway. Just looking at the walls of the apartment. No. She wouldn’t do it. Already the decision was made. She started to get dressed, reminding herself that she’d meant to
start working on some drapery material she’d bought the week before. She’d never felt about this apartment the way she had about the first one. It wasn’t that she didn’t want it to look nice; she just couldn’t get absorbed enough in the whole thing to
do
it. Even her schoolwork was often difficult to focus on these days. Partly it was the restlessness that grew each year when spring came in teachers and students alike. But beyond that was some undefinable change in her own attitude toward the school as a place, a home, that had occurred since the bitter days of the strike. And on top of this brew was the perpetual tension over Tony and—no, it wasn’t, couldn’t be, about James. There was no tension at all connected with James. Just this vague uneasiness about his liking her too much. Not that it was so awful having someone like you. The problem was that she’d come to sort of enjoy having him around to talk to, and she was afraid he would get too serious and then the whole thing would have to come to an end.

Whatever the reason, it had become more difficult for her to concentrate on her work or anything else.

She made up with more care than usual, put on jeans and the black turtleneck sweater, which she’d come to think of as her cruising outfit. It was a fairly warm evening and she would be warm until she got to the cool air-conditioned interior of—where would it be? Mr. Goodbar. It was a comfortable place with old gum-ball machines for table lamps and one wall covered entirely with a shellacked montage of candy wrappers.

In Mr. Goodbar she
met a man named Victor who had something to do with advertising for General Motors. He had a wife and five children and lived in the poor section of Grosse Pointe, or so he said with a laugh. He looked like Rock Hudson, except older (he had gray hair), and stammered so badly before he got totally tanked up that it was difficult to see how he could carry
on normal business sober. He was rather charming, once you got past the stammer, which he helped you to do by joking about it. Telling you he never stammered in bed, and so on. She went back with him to his room at the Americana and stayed there until Friday morning, calling in sick on Wednesday and Thursday, not without some misgivings.

He bought her a beautiful black nightgown from Bonwit Teller as well as lavender soap and Chanel bath oil. He also brought her magazines to read while he was out doing business, in case she didn’t feel like sleeping or watching color TV the whole time. They ate mostly from room service; he had proposed that she be his voluntary prisoner in the Americana until he left New York on Friday. She could leave the room if she wanted to, but not the building. If she wanted anything from the outside she need only ask for it. Did she want some clothes to wear on the rare occasions when they went down to the coffee shop? No, she didn’t at all mind wearing the same sweater and jeans. It wasn’t as though she were in them the whole time. In the cool half-darkness of the room, with the blinds always more than half closed against the noise and ugliness of midtown Manhattan, she wore the nightgown or her bikini pants. He giggled when she said it wasn’t as though she wore them all the time. They giggled together a lot. When he discovered her habit of ordering different drinks all the time and her particular fondness for sweet ones, he took to showing up in the room—late morning, afternoon or evening, with a different kind of liqueur. They drank arak from waxed-paper cups and discovered the strong licoricey stuff had peeled the wax off the inside so the clear liquid was flecked with tiny wax flakes. They drank it anyway, and when they made love later he swore that the wax was now coating her inside and making her more slippery than usual. Sometimes they drank instead of eating.

He told her that he actually didn’t do a great deal of this kind of thing, that he was actually a rather straight-and-narrow soul. He asked if she believed him and when she said that she did, he
seemed relieved. After that he talked about his family, as though he could trust her because she understood that he was telling the truth. When he talked about them he stammered worse than he had at any time before.

His wife was in a sanitarium in Michigan and had been there most of the time for several years. His children were cared for by the help when he was away. The younger ones, anyway. The oldest had just gone off to college this past year. The next was sixteen. She was the one Terry reminded him of a little. Not just that they both had green eyes; it was something in her expression. Gwendolyn. Gwennie. You could never tell what she was thinking except that once in a while, from somewhere, would come this deeply penetrating, mischievous look, and you knew she knew you were just a lovable fraud and she’d been making fun of you all along. Theresa couldn’t recall any moment when she might have been looking at him with anything like that in mind, but it didn’t seem to matter. It was his scenario and it didn’t have to jibe with hers.

As a matter of fact, she didn’t really have one; the fantasy element in the basic situation was strong enough to sustain her interest. That and her pleasure in the idea that if Tony changed his mind and called her, she wouldn’t be there. That when James called she wouldn’t be there. Not then nor the next night. . . . James would be worried, she suspected. He might even check with Rose and then Rose would tell him that she’d called in sick. He would tell Rose then that it was strange there’d been no answer at her apartment for three nights. Terry would have to make up a story to cover.

Family illness. She hadn’t wanted to go into it over the phone but it wasn’t actually she who’d been ill, it was her mother. She’d had to stay in the Bronx for a few days. As a matter of fact, that was what she really should do this weekend—visit her parents. She hadn’t seen her father since a month or more earlier, when he’d still shown the exhausting effects of his illness.

At eight o’clock Friday morning she and Victor had their last coffees in the room at the Americana and left it together. He hailed
a cab for her, kissed her good-bye, opened the door, closed it and handed the cabdriver a five-dollar bill. Then he went back to tell the bellhop he was ready to have his own bag put in a cab.

Rose was the first
person she saw. Terry could tell that Rose knew she hadn’t been home sick but was too polite to say so.

“I wasn’t really sick,” she said. “I was at my parents’. My mother was sick.”

Rose said, “I hope it was nothing serious.”

Terry shook her head. “It was just flu. Medium case. But my mother’s not used to being sick so it was like the end of the world.”

Rose smiled. “You know who was very concerned about you?”

“Evelyn?”

Rose smiled. “James, Theresa. He really likes you, you know.”

Terry smiled. “He’s a sweet boy.”

Rose raised her eyebrows. “The way you say it, it doesn’t sound good.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Terry said hastily. “I’m tired and I’m . . . I’m really glad you introduced him to me, Rose.” She probably never actually said that until now and Rose would want to hear it. She’d been inconsiderate. “I really like
him,
too.”

“He’s not such a boy, either,” Rose said. “Supporting a paralyzed mother and a sister since he was eighteen years old.”

Theresa stopped short and stared wildly at her. “He never told me.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“What is she paralyzed from?”

“A stroke. After his father died.”

“I don’t know why he never mentioned it.”

“He wouldn’t,” Rose said. “Unless you asked.”

No. She wouldn’t have asked. In two days at the Americana Hotel with a man she hadn’t seen before and wouldn’t see again she’d asked more about his family and talked more of her own
than she had with James Morrisey in the more than two months that she’d known him.

She felt as unreal as the days she’d just left. Dizzy. Frightened. Not because what she’d done made no sense to her but because it made perfect sense. It was precisely that fact, that she hadn’t seen him and wouldn’t, that she didn’t know him and couldn’t, that had enabled her to relax and open up to him.
And that was what was frightening!
It made her feel . . . as though she were standing in shifting sands. She thought now of an early childhood event she hadn’t remembered in years—her only memory from before she’d had polio. She had been perhaps two or three years old. It had been a very happy occasion, some grand family picnic with cousins on the Jersey shore, the kind of thing they seldom did after Brigid was born . . . after she herself had gotten sick . . . once her brother had died . . . once all the bad things had happened . . . once the sun had gone down and her hair didn’t shine golden any more. . . . It was early evening and the sun was low. They’d cooked steaks and corn and everyone was gathered around the fire and two-year-old Theresa had wandered off by herself down the shoreline a way, watching thoughtfully as the tide, which was going out, briefly pretended to come back in. It nearly knocked her off her feet but she kept her balance by rooting her feet more deeply in the wet sand. Except that suddenly the very sand in which she’d buried her feet for safety began moving fast beneath her, and for seconds that seemed like forever, she thought that she was losing the world. Then her father called her name and came toward her and the spell of fear was broken.

Now she remembered how, writing an essay about that day for Martin Engle years before, she had made the whole incident take place at a later time in her life.

“Theresa?”

“Mmm?”

“Maybe you should think twice before you sign in. Maybe you should call in sick one more day and go home and get some sleep.”

“I’m okay,” she said. “I really got plenty of sleep.”

“Sure?”

“Sure. Anyway, remember the last time I didn’t call in early enough to get a sub? I can take a nap as soon as I get home this afternoon.”

She told the children,
because she knew it was what they’d been told, that she’d been ill but was feeling better. They questioned her rather closely and she was uneasy as she answered, wondering if they would catch her on the fact that she’d been out for only two days and she had no symptoms now. But the time had been immeasurable to them—a few were prepared to swear that she hadn’t been in on Monday or Tuesday, either—and most of them accepted her explanation fairly easily, although one or two were suspicious.

The day dragged on. She was tired, having rested a great deal but slept almost not at all during her time with Victor. She was looking forward to her nap after school.

But when she came
out of school in the afternoon, talking to Evelyn, Tony was across the street, leaning against the corner building, watching her. Panic. Evelyn was saying she and some friends might rent a house at Fire Island this summer. Would Theresa be interested in a share? It wasn’t going to be an up-against-the-meat-rack kind of summer; most of the women were in her group. They were strong and intelligent and had lives of their own and weren’t into that other scene.

Theresa stopped short. She didn’t really want Evelyn to meet Tony, not only because she was afraid he would like Evelyn (or would flirt with her whether he liked her or not) but because she was afraid he might humiliate her in front of her friend.

“What’s the matter?” Evelyn asked.

“Mmm,” Terry asked. “Someone I don’t want to see right now.”

“Do you want to walk the other way?” Evelyn asked.

“No,” she said, “he knows I saw him. That would make it worse.”

Together they crossed the street.

“Hi, Tony,” she said in what she hoped was a casual way. “This is Evelyn.”

“Where the fuck you been for three days?” he asked without acknowledging Evelyn’s existence in any way.

“I was away.”

“Where?”

“I guess I’d better say good-bye, Evelyn.”

“You sure?” Evelyn asked with obvious concern.

Terry laughed. “Don’t worry,” she said, turning away so that her words would be lost on him, “his bark is worse than his bite.”

Evelyn left. Theresa looked at Tony, who still stood motionless against the brick wall.

“What are we doing next Sunday?” she asked, which turned out to be an inspiration because it distracted him.