Looking for Mr. Goodbar (28 page)

Since I met you I have found you to be a delightful and interesting person.

She smiled to herself, and James, apparently deep in a conversation with Frank about the price of replacement parts for the van, turned to whisper in her ear, “Share your joke with me.”

She shook her head. “I can’t now.”

“I’ll remind you later.”

The wedding was bearable,
the bride feigning shyness and the groom feigning the lack of it. The reception was in a large
hall. There was a small band and plenty of liquor and once she’d had a few drinks she found she was having a good time. James turned out to be an excellent traditional dancer, and confessed to her that at some point he’d taken lessons. She was briefly self-conscious when she realized how good he was, but he led her well and strongly and she began to really enjoy herself. Once in a while James went out of his way to introduce her to someone and it finally occurred to her that there was an element of pride in his bringing her to meet people. Naturally. She was such a beautiful, charming, delightful person.

“There’s that smile again,” James said as they danced away from a cousin who’d said that Theresa and James must come out some Sunday afternoon for a barbecue. “Now you have to tell me what it’s about.”

“Or else?” she teased.

“Or else I’ll do something outrageous.”

“Such as?”

“Oh . . . such as asking you to marry me.”

“That’s not very funny,” she said, knowing that it sort of was but being not at all amused by it. Being, in fact, so disconcerted that for a moment she lost track of the step and stood in confusion on the dance floor.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I meant it to be. At least in this context.”

“What I was thinking that made me smile,” she said suddenly, “is that I was surprised you described your family so well when you have such a distorted view of me.”

Now it was his turn to be confused. “I do?”

“When you say things about me I never recognize myself.”

“What, for example?”

“Forget it,” she said irritably.

“But I can’t,” he said. “I can’t forget it if I’ve hurt your feelings.”

“It’s not that you’ve hurt my feelings,” she said. “It’s the opposite! You make up these crazy—you make me sound like some kind of ridiculous fairy-tale princess. Beautiful, fascinating, charming—”
She stopped because he looked torn between astonishment and laughter and she felt torn between anger and tears. Compounded by a feeling that she was the one who was being absolutely ridiculous in spite of the fact that everything she said was right and true.

People danced around them, occasionally joking about their standing still in the middle of the dance floor.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “I see that you’re serious.”

She looked down so he wouldn’t see that her eyes were filling with tears after all. He tried to lift her chin but she resisted him.

“You understand that I mean what I say about you. You must. Because you haven’t accused me of lying, just of having a—a sort of glorified view of you.”

She nodded. Her jaw was trembling with the effort not to cry.

“Well,” he said, very lawyerish, “it seems to me there are two possibilities. One is that my view of you is simply accurate. Much closer to reality than your own. The other is that I have a somewhat rosy picture because I’m in love with you.”

Oh, my God. How had they gotten into this whole conversation, anyway? Why had she come to this stupid-ass wedding?

“Actually, now that I think of it, there’s a third possibility. That what I see is true but I see it more readily because I’m in love with you.”

She turned and plunged through the dancing couples and ran out of the hall into the parking lot. He followed her. It was raining lightly. He’d been wrong, she thought with a minor twinge of satisfaction.

She ran through the parking lot toward the van, thinking she would just lock herself into it and wait until the others finished. She got in but James followed her, wedged into the seat next to her until she got up and moved over to the driver’s seat.

“Theresa.”

“Leave me alone.” She was crying.

“It’s so hard for me to understand you.”

“Then don’t.”

“I’m not demanding anything of you. I’m just telling you how I—the way I feel slips out, I don’t even mean to say it, much less to . . . I can wait. I don’t want to press you. I know we’ve only known each other for a few months.”

It didn’t seem like a few months; it seemed she’d known him all her life. She hated him.

“But you react as though I were threatening your life. As though I were demanding that you marry me instantly or else.”

“Don’t you ever make grammatical errors?” she asked bitterly.

“I won’t dignify that with an answer,” he said.

“Love!” she burst out. “I hate that word. I don’t even know what it is.”

“Maybe you just haven’t experienced it yet.”

“Maybe nobody has, including you.”

He shook his head. “Not true.”

“I think it
is
true. I’ll tell you what I think. I think you made up your mind a little while ago you were going to fall in love and you better find someone to do it with, and I was just the first person that came along that—”

“You weren’t the first,” he said quietly. “I’d been out with quite a few women.”

“What was wrong with them?” she demanded.

“It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with them.”

“Then what’s so special about me?”

He was silent for a long time. “It seems to me,” he finally said, “that there’s something a little ridiculous about my sitting here defending myself against the terrible charge of having fallen in love with you. You are special to me. I’m not sure if I know all the reasons. That is to say, I know the qualities I—like, enjoy, whatever, about you. But I don’t particularly know why they add up to being in love with you—or even if they’re the same as the reasons I’m in love with you. I can only tell you that you’re not being fair to me or to yourself when you assume that you just happened to sort of—”

“All right. I wasn’t being fair. I’m not a fair person.”

He smiled. “Here we go again. Theresa telling me what a bad person Theresa really is.”

“It’s true,” she said, but she smiled a little in spite of herself.

“Maybe. It’s irrelevant, in any case.”

Silence. She stared through the front window. The rain had gotten heavier and there was no way they could get back to the hall now without getting soaked and being horribly conspicuous.

Maybe somewhere there was humor in her having avoided most of her own family’s social gatherings since she was an adolescent and now having two disasters in a row at other people’s. Nor was it a coincidence, she knew, that it was around their families that the bad scenes with Tony and James had occurred. Families brought out the worst in everyone. She had noticed about herself that she could go for weeks, even months, without thinking of, say, Katherine, but as soon as they were together she was flooded by the old feelings of suspicion and dislike for Katherine, of distaste for herself. (Brigid’s having children had somehow changed that relationship for the better; where she’d often pretended Brigid didn’t exist, the children now absorbed her attention to an extent where it was unnecessary to pretend.)

“I think my sister’s pregnant again,” she said, startling both him and herself. She was flustered. She laughed. “That was the end of a chain of thought.”

He nodded. “Katherine.”

She shook her head. “My other sister.”

“You’ve never mentioned another sister.”

“That’s impossible. Brigid. She’s married—she has three children already.” She took her wallet from her bag and showed him the pictures of Brigid’s three children as though this alone disproved his claim to not having heard of Brigid. He smiled at the picture of the three of them, sitting like angels in front of the Christmas tree.

“You adore them.”

She shrugged. “I don’t see them very much. They live too far away.” She’d said it in all seriousness but now she realized it was weird and she’d better cover with a joke. “The Bronx. That’s another country. Or maybe you’ve noticed.”

“Fortunately there seems to be considerable overlap in the language.”

He, too, was relieved that they’d managed to get to a lighter plane.

“I wonder if it’s raining in the Bronx now,” she said.

“Most likely,” he said.

“I guess we’re stuck here for the duration,” she said.

“Unless we want to make a run for it or it dies down. It’s a shame I don’t have the keys, I could move the van close to the entrance.”

She yawned. “And we don’t even have the Sunday papers.”

“Actually,” he said, “there’s a
News
in the back.”

“You’re kidding. Where?”

“I’ll get it.”

He stooped to go between the seats and around to the back. On impulse she followed him. Behind the back seat the floor of the van was covered with indoor-outdoor carpeting, except for a track where the wheelchair came in and was secured. On the other side was a stack of something which turned out to be slabs of foam rubber, covered by a green vinyl tarp. James had mentioned that Patricia and Frank took their kids camping in the summer. The windows had curtains, which were pushed aside. On the floor the Sunday
News
lay untouched except for the comics, which had been read and refolded on top.

“Mmm,” she said, sliding down against the stack of foam rubber so that she was sitting on the carpeted floor. “How cozy.”

He stood bending over in the van. Waiting.

“What’s this? Foam rubber? Can I have a piece?”

He pulled over the tarp in such a way that she wouldn’t have to move and took down a piece of foam rubber for her. She stretched
out on it, leaned up on her elbow and looked at him provocatively. She almost thought she might let him make love to her now.

“Mmm,” she said, “this is delicious. I may go to sleep instead of reading the papers.”

“Would you like me to close the curtains?”

“Mmm.”

He closed them. She lay curled . . . coiled . . . on her side. Teasing. Waiting. Challenging him.
Okay, James, you finally got me in the mood. Let’s see what you do about it.
He sat on the edge of the back seat, watching her. She glanced quickly at the magazine section, put it aside, yawned.

“I think I’ll take a nap.”

“I suppose I’d better get back.”

“Is that what you suppose?” Naughtily.

“Do you mind if I leave you?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“What would you like me to do?” he asked.

“I would like you to come down here,” she said, patting the foam rubber, “and keep me company. Or sing me to sleep. Or something.”

He came down to the foam rubber and sat on the edge of it—somewhat gingerly. He stroked her hair.

“Are you afraid of messing up your good suit?”

“Yes.”

She let her free hand rest on his thigh. Beneath the hand his muscles tensed. She stroked his leg lightly.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“It gets me too excited,” he said after a moment.

“Why don’t you want to get excited?”

“Because it’s not the appropriate time or place.”

“Appropriate time or place,” she mimicked. “Life must be so easy when you know all the rules.”

“Do you think so?”

She sat up. “All right,” she said crossly. “Will you kiss me, at least?”

He laughed. “You said that as though you’ve been trying to seduce me for months and I’ve been cold and indifferent.”

“I’ve been trying to seduce you for five minutes and you’ve been cold and indifferent.”

He smiled again. He thought she was being charming.

“Neither cold nor indifferent. I just have certain limitations. I think you knew that when you set out to seduce me. In the back of an automobile. At my cousin’s wedding.”

“All right,” she pouted, scrambling to her feet too rapidly and banging her head on the ceiling of the van, “let’s go, then. I don’t care if I get wet.” But there were tears in her eyes from banging her head on the ceiling.

Ever since I’ve known you I’ve had tears in my eyes.

There were a couple
of jokes when they got back to the table because everyone had sat down to dinner and their absence had become conspicuous. But it was pleasant enough, chatting about school with Patricia and Frank (without looking at James’s mother as Patricia interrupted her own meal to help her eat). They knew that Theresa was a teacher and treated her with a certain deference, like the parents of the poorer children in school.

When they dropped her off that night James said good night to them as though he were going to come in with her but she told him she’d rather he didn’t; she was tired and she just wanted to go to bed.

On Monday morning she told Evelyn that if there was still a share available in the house at Ocean Beach she’d be interested. Evelyn said that all the shares had been taken but if someone put her share up for sale she would let Terry know. Theresa was depressed by this news because that house had been in the back of her mind as a sort of escape hatch. The place she could go to if the
situation with James became unbearable. The place she could go to if new men didn’t appear and she didn’t feel like hitting the bars. It was somehow the wrong season now for bars. When she took a walk now in the warm night air she didn’t want to close herself off into some dark, air-conditioned hole where she wouldn’t even be able to tell that summer was almost here. She called home and asked how her father was. Her mother, after a long pause, said that he was mostly tired. Theresa said she’d been thinking of coming up for a visit; maybe she’d come on Saturday and stay over. Her mother said that would be very nice.

When James called she said she couldn’t see him Saturday night because she was going away for the weekend but she would see him Friday.

On Friday night she
told him the only thing in the whole world she really felt like doing, aside from having Chinese food, was going to the Fillmore, although she didn’t even know who was there or whether tickets were available. Fortunately it was three groups neither she nor anyone else had ever heard of (or would remember a week later) and so they were able to get in and sit in the deafening noise for a couple of hours without any possibility of conversation.