She laughed uncomfortably. “He hasn’t even asked me,” she said.
“Will you marry me?”
he asked when they got home.
“No,” she said.
“Can I hope for the future?” he asked.
“There’s no one I’d rather marry than you, James,” she said. “I just don’t want to get married.”
“I hope I can change your mind,” he said.
She smiled and knew she was a coward, that she would never marry him. That she didn’t tell him so because she was afraid that if he knew the truth, he would leave her. And she didn’t want him to do that. Not leave altogether, forever.
She finally went to
a meeting of Evelyn’s consciousness-raising group.
“I need to talk about my mother,” one of the women said. Her name was Susan. She was blond, very pretty, a stockbroker. Her mother was dying of cancer. “I have this horrible feeling of never having even known her. All my life, my father . . . was like a god to me. I worshipped him. I couldn’t understand why he ever married my mother. He was so special and she’s just . . . I always thought she was just this ordinary, everyday . . . I had no sense of her dignity, her nobility, really. She raised five kids and kept a house and gave him the support he needed and totally subjugated herself to him, to all of us, really, to our needs, and now when I think . . . She’s even dying with dignity. She doesn’t confess to being in pain, the most she’ll admit is that she’s tired. But . . . have you ever seen anyone die of cancer?”
“No,” Theresa said, because Susan seemed to be looking at her.
“She’s actually a very intelligent woman,” Susan went on after
a moment, as though the question had been rhetorical. “She only went through eighth grade; after that she went to work. She got married when she was sixteen. But when I think of it now, whenever we had homework, any of us, she was the one who helped us with it. Not my father, he was hardly ever there when we needed him. And she knew the stuff. Or she knew how to find the answers.” Susan burst into tears. “I just realized I’m talking about her in the past tense.” One of the other women put her arm around Susan and Susan cried on her shoulder.
Terry was at once moved and discomfited.
She went up to
see her parents; she hadn’t been there since summer. Her father looked the same but her mother looked ravaged. She thought of Susan.
“You must be exhausted,” she said to her mother. “If you ever just want to get away for a couple of days, I could come up and stay with Dad.”
Her mother looked at her with what she was sure was suspicion. “I’m fine,” her mother said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. You want to come up and visit, come up and visit.”
Her mother was making
Thanksgiving dinner, as usual. So was Patricia making it, for James’s family. They were both invited to both dinners.
James suggested, half jokingly, that the families combine.
“Ha ha,” Theresa said.
They decided to have dinner with Theresa’s family, then go to Patricia’s for the evening. Theresa asked James if his mother wouldn’t mind this terribly. He said he’d thought about this; he felt she would mind, but not terribly. That she would have Patricia’s family with her, and other members of their family as well,
and that in recent months she’d gotten accustomed to having him around less than before.
“She doesn’t like it, though,” Theresa said.
“I think she cares more for my happiness than her own,” James said.
“Doesn’t that make you feel guilty?” Theresa asked.
“No,” James said, “strangely enough, it doesn’t. Patricia’s the one who feels guilty toward my mother.”
“That’s because you’ve done so much more.”
And maybe because she knows she doesn’t really want to have her living there.
“Maybe,” James said. “But after all, Patricia’s always been there when she was needed.”
Brigid and her family
came, of course. And Katherine—without Nick. They’d had an argument. It didn’t matter, Katherine said, what the argument was about. It would pass. Basically everything was perfect between them. Everyone knew by now that it was the couples who didn’t fight who were really in trouble. Katherine paid a great deal of attention to James, and seemed fascinated by everything he said.
“Don’t you think my sister is gorgeous?” she asked when Katherine went into the kitchen to help.
“She’s an attractive woman,” James said.
“She’s also more intelligent than I am,” Theresa said.
“Oh?” James said. “How can you tell?”
Brigid’s children also seemed quite taken with James. At first Theresa suspected that they gravitated toward him in very much the way children always gravitated toward the one object in a room that wasn’t supposed to be touched, soiled or broken. Then she realized that as usual she was being unfair to him, that neither he nor any of the children was the least bit concerned over his white sweater and well-tailored gray flannel pants, that
they simply liked him because he didn’t press them but waited for them to come to him and then gave them his full attention when they did. James and Patrick and her father talked a great deal about football and seemed to enjoy themselves. Brigid’s due date was just a few weeks away and she sat, mountainously contented, on the sofa, never moving except to the table for dinner, and then back at the end. As they sat at the dinner table, laughing gaily and eating, all of them, like some scene out of a Dickens novel, Theresa found it increasingly difficult to breathe. She hadn’t eaten all day but she barely ate now because the breathing difficulty made her feel that she would choke as the food went down. When Katherine commented that she was barely touching her food, she said that she had a huge, rich dinner the night before and was feeling a little sick now. Only after she’d said it did she begin to feel that she wanted to throw up. But when she went into the bathroom to vomit, almost nothing came up because she hadn’t eaten all day. As she sipped at her coffee in the living room, her hand trembled so that she had to be careful not to spill the hot liquid, and the breathing difficulty continued until she told James that she thought she might be ill and she wanted to go. He insisted on calling for a cab.
“I don’t want you to take me home,” she said, although she was in a cold sweat and her hands were trembling. “I can get home by myself. You go to Patricia’s.”
“I’ll take you home and then, if you’re all right, I’ll go to Patricia’s.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said, “once I get home.”
They were silent in
the cab, he with his arm around her, concerned; she, sick and upset. In the apartment he helped her off with her coat, pulled back the covers so she could lie down on the bed.
“I’ll be all right,” she said. She was chilled and she pulled the covers up over herself.
“I’m sure you will.” He pulled over a chair and sat down next to her bed.
“Patricia and the others are going to wonder about you.”
“You’re right.” He went to the phone, dialed, told whoever answered that Theresa had gotten ill and he might be up by himself later.
“You can go
now,
” she said, her teeth chattering. “I’ll be okay.”
“I liked your family,” James said. “Particularly your father.”
“He’s going to die,” she said. “He has cancer.” And began crying.
James came to the bed, sat down, took her hands.
“Theresa,” he said, “I . . . did you just find out?”
“No,” she said through the tears. “I’ve known for months.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t talk about it.”
“Is that what . . . did it sort of well up on you today?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure what happened. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.”
“Can you breathe now?”
“Yes. I’m just cold.”
He got under the covers, stopping only to take off his shoes, and held her. Gradually she stopped shivering.
“You’re going to wreck your clothes,” she said, although she was still in hers.
“Don’t do that,” he said shortly.
She squirmed around under the covers so that she was facing him.
“I’m sorry.”
He smiled. “I accept your apology. Under the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“Whatever circumstances.”
She wanted to take off her dress but she didn’t want this to be an invitation to him. After a while, though, he got up and took off his jacket, then his pants.
“You’ll never get up to your mother’s,” she said. “I mean Patricia’s.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “I want to stay here with you.”
“I don’t need you to, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I want to.”
She got out of bed and went into the bathroom to put on her flannel granny gown. She washed and got back into bed, sitting propped up against the wall. He sat at the foot of the bed in his neat white underwear and his dark blue socks that clung wrinkleless to his legs.
“Theresa,” he said, “why did you never tell me about your father?”
I don’t know. I didn’t want you to pity me. To sense a weak spot.
“Why did you never tell me about your mother?” she countered.
“I would have. I hardly knew you, then.”
“I don’t feel as if I know you well, now.”
Pain and astonishment played on his face. “Do you mean that?”
She nodded. “I don’t mean that I’m not fond of you, James,” she said, “because I am.”
He smiled wryly. “Well, that’s something.”
“But
knowing
you. That’s something different. I don’t understand you. I don’t sense your dark side.”
If you have one. If you don’t, well that’s worse.
“You mean you think I’m all sweetness and light? What a lovely thought.”
“You’ve never gotten really angry at me even though sometimes I’m a perfect shit.”
If you could give me a good beating when I acted like that, I would like you better for it. I might even be able to enjoy sex.
“I don’t get angry at people I love. At most I suppose I get a little irritated. Or hurt . . . It hurts me that you didn’t tell me about your father.”
“I didn’t tell anyone.”
“I would assume”—he was choosing his words particularly carefully—“that I was . . . closer to you than most people.”
“You mean because we sleep together?”
“In a way. Except that’s a bit simplified . . . or backwards, even. We sleep together because we became very close.”
“I’ve slept with men I hardly knew.”
“Is that true, or are you saying it to shock me, the way you sometimes do?”
“It’s true.”
His face was expressionless. She got scared. Then angry.
Who the hell was he to pass judgment on her?
She’d had more fun in one night in bed with some of those men than in all the months with him. Then scared again.
“You don’t like that.”
“No. To me it implies . . . a lack of self-regard, I suppose. Not valuing yourself enough to—”
“Jesus Fucking Christ!” she exploded, seeing the flinch she’d once enjoyed so much. “You sound like something right out of the nineteenth century!”
“Maybe,” he said. “Actually when I read novels about the nineteenth century, the eighteenth, even, it doesn’t seem to me that people were really so different from the way they are now, that is—”
“Maybe
you’re
not,” she retorted. “Plenty of people are.”
“In behavior. That’s true. But deeper down—”
“Deeper down,” she repeated. “Screw deeper down.”
He was silent. She’d really turned him off, now. Well, if that was the way it had to be, then it was. He’d have had to know sooner or later. In a moment he would put on his pants and jacket and go home. She would never see him again and that was sad, in a way, but also a relief. If he left right now maybe she’d drop down to Mr. Goodbar and see what was doing. Or maybe go out and get something to eat. That was what she really wanted, as a matter of fact. She was
starved.
“I’m hungry,” she announced, without premeditation. “I’ve got to get something to eat.”
“Shall I take you out?” He seemed almost relieved.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I feel like getting dressed again.”
She looked in the refrigerator but there was nothing but some white bread and a pitcher of orange juice.
“Yich,” she called in from the kitchen. “Nothing here!” She was high now but not at all in a good way; she felt in danger of falling off whatever she was on and breaking her neck.
“Why don’t I run down and pick something up and bring it back?” he called in.
“Are you serious?” She couldn’t believe he would do that now.
“Of course. That way you won’t have to get dressed.”
“But
you
will.”
In a moment he’d slipped into his pants and jacket.
He smiled. “No problem. What would you like?”
“Mmmm.” She thought about it, dancing around the room because she couldn’t stay still, she was too tense, too high. “Let me think.” She turned on the radio but didn’t even note whether it was talking or music that was on. “I know, hot dogs. Three hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut, and some French fries. And Doctor Pepper.”
He was smiling at her. He was an idiot. He was a love. He was crazy. It was music. She danced. What did she care if he was crazy? That was his business.
But as the door closed behind him she had a moment of overwhelming fear: He was leaving. He’d used the food as an excuse to get out and never come back. He was gone. She was alone again. Alone. She would be alone for the rest of her life.
Now you’re the one who’s being crazy, Theresa.
James would never do that. If James didn’t want to see her again, he would say, in that calm, precise way of his, “I’m leaving you now, Theresa. I love you but I can’t cope with your being a
whore.” No. Prostitute. No. What was the right word for someone who did it just for fun, not money?
She giggled.
Still, it wouldn’t be funny if he didn’t come back. She looked at the clock; it was just past seven thirty. She went into the bathroom and looked searchingly at her face—as though trying to see in it the answer to whether James would come back to her. She looked ghastly. If it were
she
coming back, she wouldn’t. That wouldn’t really help to find out what James would do, though, since he thought she was beautiful. The idiot. The crazy idiot. She put on some makeup. At twenty to eight she admitted to herself that if James disappeared from her life he would leave an enormous gap that couldn’t easily be filled, something she could not honestly say about any of the others. A cocksman could always be replaced, even if not immediately with one of the same quality. But James was something else. She felt a surge of almost sexual feeling toward him. If James came back, if she ever saw him again, she would try much harder to . . . to what? She would be nice. She would be reasonable. She would try to . . . she would make a real effort to like sex with him. Maybe she should try to turn him on. Or at least turn herself on. She’d hardly had grass in the months that she’d been seeing only James. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? She was an idiot. Except it wasn’t going to matter because he wasn’t coming back. At a quarter to eight she started getting dressed and at ten to eight she went downstairs, wearing a jacket over her sweater and jeans, carrying only her keys. She met him in the lobby.