Looking for Mr. Goodbar (32 page)

“Theresa,” he exclaimed, “what happened?”

“I thought you weren’t coming back,” she said with what she hoped came off as nonchalance.

“Are you serious?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t I?” he asked.

“Because you were disgusted with me,” she said. Flip. Now that she knew he was here.

“Disgusted?”

“Deeeeesgusted.”

He shook his head. He couldn’t imagine how she would think that. He never got disgusted with people he loved.

He held up a paper bag. “I had to go to Fourteenth Street for the hot dogs,” he said.

“You’re a love,” she said.

“That makes it all worthwhile,” he said with a grin.

She got some grass.
He didn’t seem particularly surprised when she offered him a joint, but he didn’t want to try it, either. She smoked one by herself and experienced mild pleasure instead of total anesthesia. She got into the habit of smoking a joint just before they went to bed. He asked why and she said it improved sex. She asked teasingly if he didn’t want to try it; he said that sex was quite good enough already, thank you. She said, “Don’t mention it,” and they both laughed.

For Christmas he gave her a ring. Not a diamond ring, he was too smart for that, but a thin gold band with a small ruby surrounded by seed pearls in an old-fashioned setting. It had never occurred to her that it would be a ring, not even when she saw the little box—a jewelry box, was what she’d said to herself. She was overwhelmed. She felt everyone watching her and she looked up and blushed.

They were at Patricia’s. The kids had gotten all their presents and were occupied with them except for the oldest, Eileen, who was almost a teenager and was developing an interest in romance. She was watching. Involuntarily Theresa’s eyes went to James’s mother, who sat, half asleep, half smiling in her wheelchair.

She said, “Thank you,” in an almost inaudible voice. There were tears in her eyes and she pretended to be looking at the ring so no one would see them.

“Do you think you can get her to try it on, Jim?” Frank asked.

Everyone laughed.

She started to say she couldn’t just now, but somehow the laughter at the idea of her not putting it on had made that impossible. She took it out of the box and very slowly (she was having that same difficulty breathing, as though she were putting something around her neck instead of her finger) slipped it down on the fourth finger of her right hand.

“Wrong hand,” Patricia said.

“Ssshh,” James said. “She can wear it wherever she likes.”

It seemed to just fit and yet it felt strange. She’d never worn a ring before, she’d seldom worn any jewelry, but most particularly not rings. She kissed James’s cheek. He looked very pleased—proud, even.

She had bought him a rather wild but quite beautiful batik tie which she thought he would never wear. He immediately put it on over his turtleneck sweater.

She kept slipping the ring off and then putting it on again. It didn’t seem tight and yet it squeezed her finger, made it itch when it was on for any length of time.

They went for a
while to her parents’, then back to her apartment. It was well past midnight. She put the ring in the top drawer of the dresser. It briefly crossed her mind that maybe her apartment would get broken into and the ring would be stolen (there was little else of value) and she wouldn’t have to wear it any more.

The phone rang. The first thing that entered her mind was that something had happened to her father. He’d been visibly tired, more so than her mother, for the first time since she’d known of his illness.

“Hello?”

“Merry Christmas,” said a voice. “Where the hell you been?”

Tony.

James was looking at her. She avoided meeting his eyes.

“Out.”

“You busy now?”

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You can call me.”

“Okay, love,’ he said. He made a long, low, suggestive noise in her ear, a sort of sucking-inhaling noise, to which her mind reacted with irritation and her body with a thrill that left her momentarily weak. She hung up. She went into the bathroom to take off her clothes. That was what she often did before going to bed with James, no matter how often they’d seen each other naked. She went into the bathroom to strip and put on a robe. There was something very yich about it. They might as well be married, some farty old married couple, for all the real sexuality and romance in their—what?—friendship?

James was sitting in the armchair, fully clothed, pretending to be absorbed in a magazine. She put on the radio but there was nothing but Christmas music, which irritated her for some reason, and she turned it off. She would have to get a record player. She had never owned one and suddenly that seemed ridiculous. Not ridiculous, pathetic, really—a symbol of so many things she’d never had that she still wanted. If James started with her again about marriage she would ask him how she could possibly get married when she’d never even had a record player. He wasn’t looking at her.

She took off her robe and got under the covers, leaning on one elbow.

“What are you sulking about?”

“I wouldn’t call it sulking,” he said. “I confess to feeling jealous of anyone who feels free to call you at this hour.”

“He feels free to call anyone at any hour. That’s the way he is.”

A pause. James was having great difficulty. “Do you like him?” he finally asked.

She shrugged. “He’s a good lay.”

He blanched, if you could say that of anyone who was so pale to begin with. He regarded her gravely.

Gravely. Because I just buried myself.

The hell with him! If he doesn’t like me he can go and take his ring with him!

“Have you been . . . sleeping with him all along?”

“I feel free to.” Not wanting to admit that she hadn’t. Needing to make the point of her freedom.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I feel free not to answer your question. And you can take your ring back if you don’t like it.”

“This has nothing to do with the ring, Theresa. The ring was a gift. Because I love you.”

“Love,” she said bitterly. “Is that what love is? Thinking you own someone?”

“It’s not a question of ownership.”

“It’s not a question of this or that,” she mimicked. “Or the other thing. What is the question exactly?”

“When you love someone,” he said, very slowly, his voice trembling, “it is very painful to think of her making love with someone else.”

“Well, then,” she said, softly now, because there were tears in his eyes and she was already regretting what she was about to say, “maybe you’d better forget about me. Maybe it’ll be much less painful if you fall back out of love.”

He lowered his eyes so that she couldn’t see the tears in them, which now welled in her own throat. He was still wearing the batik tie, neatly knotted over the white turtleneck. He looked very dear and she wanted to run to him, sit on his lap, press his face to her bosom, but she knew she couldn’t do that because he would misunderstand.

Time went by. Ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Neither of them moved. It was good that Tony had called. That this happened. It had to happen sooner or later, better to get it over with.

James stood up. Slowly. He looked very tired. His body. His face. He had aged many years since he lowered his eyes from hers.

“I think I’d best go home, Theresa,” he said. “I need to be by myself for a while. Think.”

I really love you, James, I just
—She was confused by the unbidden thought. But that was silly, she understood what she’d meant by it. She did love him, in a way. Just not the way he wanted her to.

She nodded.

He put on his coat. It was a very well-tailored camel’s-hair coat. It was always clean. At the moment that didn’t seem so ludicrous as it sometimes had.

“I’ll call you,” he said. “I’ll call in a few days.”

She lay where she was, staring at the door motionless, for a couple of hours. Sometimes she was thinking but sometimes her mind was totally blank. Often, after a blank period, Rose’s face would suddenly come into view. During the few chats they’d had since the school year began, Rose had been cold to her. Not cold, exactly, but—as though she’d given up on Theresa. She wanted to tell Rose not to give up on her. She wanted to tell Rose that there was hope. That she was, after all, only twenty-seven years old, and she hadn’t even
tried
to change. Her throat ached a little as she thought of how unfair Rose was being, to view her with such skepticism. As though, if James wasn’t what Theresa wanted, there couldn’t possibly be
anything
she wanted.

What
did
she want, anyway? She tried to think of some specific thing she wanted, in the present or in the future. She’d never really thought in those terms and it was a problem for her to do so now. When she tried to focus on what she wanted, her mind bounced away to things she ought to do during the Christmas vacation, like take her winter coat to the cleaner’s and pay some bills. Of course there were things anyone would like to have, that went without saying. A fur coat. A warm body beside you in the bed. But as for the future . . . realistically, how could you know what you’d want in the future? You could only know who you were and what you wanted
now.
How could you be so sure you would exist in a year, much less that you would want what one year back in time you’d thought you would want?

The phrase “controlling your own destiny,” which Evelyn had used more than once, had a delightful ring to it, but there were huge limits, after all. You couldn’t control which men you met, or which ones liked you. You could make sure you didn’t have a baby, if you worried about that sort of thing, but you couldn’t make sure you
did.
(How many years had Katherine been trying, on and off, to get pregnant, and she could never do it at the right time?) If you drove a car you could make fairly sure that you wouldn’t smash into something else, but you could never control whether someone smashed into you.

Controlling your own destiny.

Actually she was sorry she hadn’t continued to go to Evelyn’s consciousness-raising group. The same thing would have happened with James, but she would have felt much better about it. They would have supported her. They all supported each other in their determination to become more independent, less subservient to men. She could use the group’s support now. She had no illusions that James would come back to her and she missed him already. She wished he hadn’t said he would call; it would have been preferable to know for once and for all that they were finished. If she knew for sure, then she could make plans. Sally and Arthur were having a New Year’s Eve party, to which she and James had planned to go. Now she probably wouldn’t be going. Evelyn was also having a party; they’d thought maybe they would go there first.

Maybe she would call Evelyn in the morning and ask if she could still join the group. She’d responded to so many different points, really, at that first session, it had been foolish not to go back. Just sitting there listening to each woman discuss what was wrong with her own body had been a revelation. One of them had felt as self-conscious, as deformed by an appendix scar, as she herself did about the scar that ran down her back. The other woman’s scar wasn’t comparable, but
still, it was interesting. She would definitely call Evelyn in the morning. If she didn’t do something like that she might spend the entire Christmas vacation just lying here in this helpless way.

So much of her life she had felt strapped down.

She looked at the
light fixture in the ceiling. Of the three bulbs, one had burned out months earlier and a second had died recently. She would change it during the vacation. Better yet, she would move.

That appealed to her. She had never loved this place as she had the first one. Even the way she’d decorated showed that. So little thought. Her old possessions were there and she still loved them. But the things she’d added—the flokati rug, the fur pillows, the thirties mirror with the blond wood frame and the frosted designs on each side—they didn’t look as though they belonged in the same apartment with the other stuff. As though two people with different tastes and personalities had pooled their belongings in one room. A bad marriage. When she moved she would get someplace with a separate bedroom with four walls and a door. And a living room. She needed more space. She didn’t know how she’d survived this long with barely space to breathe. She would spend tomorrow looking for an apartment. Maybe on the Upper West Side, this time. That was someplace she knew nothing about. It would be an interesting change. She would spend all day tramping around looking for an apartment. That way she would be too tired, by nighttime, to pace around the apartment waiting anxiously for Tony to make up his mind to pick up the phone and call.

He didn’t.

She’d called Evelyn. Evelyn
wasn’t sure how the group would feel about having someone new come in at this stage, but she’d ask
next week. She hoped Terry would be at the New Year’s party. Terry said she wasn’t sure but she’d try.

She’d looked at apartments all day but seen nothing remotely reasonable. She looked again the next day. But she had trouble sleeping at night, which sapped her energy during the day. She took aspirin but they didn’t help. She called Katherine because Katherine always had storehouses of tranquilizers in the apartment. She’d forgotten that Katherine and Nick had gone to Aspen. Maybe she’d try to find a doctor who would give her a prescription for tranquilizers. The trouble was, she’d never gone to a doctor in the whole time since she’d left home, and she was afraid to start now. (She always had the sense that if she was ill and she went to a doctor he would find more things than she’d ever suspected were wrong—a veritable Pandora’s box of secret ailments that would cost a fortune to correct.)

She dreamed that
she was on her knees in a cold, dark place. Her chin was resting on something padded. She couldn’t move. Things were being done to her but she didn’t know what they were because she could almost but not quite feel them.