Looking for Mr. Goodbar (6 page)

“And then get married and have six children.”

“Oh, no!” She was genuinely aghast.

He watched her thoughtfully. “Usually when young girls say that to me their voices are thick with hypocrisy.”

She was silent.

“You’re not going to have children and give them TV dinners and rush off to chair the PTA meeting?”

She shook her head.

“You just passed the acid test,” he said. “Usually when I say that the response is, ‘But if I ever did have children against my will I wouldn’t
ever
serve them TV dinners.’ ”

She smiled. “Do you have the same conversations over and over?”

“Absolutely.”

She was silent, upset not only by his admission but by his casual manner in making it.

Finally he said, “You want to be a teacher because you love children although you don’t wish to bear them.”

She nodded. Embarrassed because it was corny but true. She was earning a great deal of money these days baby-sitting. All the children adored her because she didn’t care if they never went to bed.

“And you want to go into the Peace Corps because you want to teach small African children a language they have no desire to learn. Or build grass huts.”

As usual when she was with him she felt dumb. He always said she was smart, but their conversations were a mined field in which at any moment she might make the wrong verbal move and find her ignorance exploding in her face.

“Or because you have some special affinity for Negroes.”

She glanced at him, trying to tell if he was serious or still making fun of her, because this was a subject she had wanted to talk on with someone. The truth was that she was afraid of colored people. Men, particularly, but women, too. When she saw colored men on the subway looking at her she was afraid they wanted to rape her or murder her, and she was terrified if she was alone with one of them at an underground station. With the women it was different—there was no question of rape, of course, and yet she always felt they would like to do her violence, that they hated her because she was white. Perhaps they would steal from her. When they were talking and laughing she often felt she might be the object of their laughter, but worse, when their big white teeth flashed in the middle of their dark-brown faces (her fear was in almost direct proportion to their darkness; the pales ones were not nearly
so bad), when they laughed and she saw their teeth, she sometimes had a
physical
memory of an old half-remembered dream in which a huge monster was about to devour her, and then a tremor would pass through her whole body, and when it had passed they were people again but still people to be wary of.

What would he think of her if she told him the truth?

“No,” she said. “Not really. I . . . my parents are very prejudiced. You know, typical lower-middle-class Roman Catholics.” She thought she sounded quite sophisticated. “I grew up with all that stuff, you know, the niggers are coming. They don’t even like
Martin Luther King!
”

He laughed with her.

“I know they’re—ignorant,” she said carefully. “I mean, they’re provincial—where I’m from in the Bronx it could be
Kansas
—and narrow-minded, and so on, and I want the Negroes to have equality . . . I know they’re equal . . . but I feel as if they’re different from me.” There. It was out. She waited for an expression of disgust.

“Which explains why you want to join the Peace Corps and go to Africa. Or South America.”

She flushed. Became aware for the first time that they were surrounded by small Spanish men of various colors. Said, in a low voice, “I want to learn.”

“How do you expect to learn why Negroes in America hate whites by building huts in a small village in Africa where no one’s ever heard of America?”

She was silent. If he hadn’t thought before that she was stupid he surely did now.

“I know it sounds dumb,” she said. “It’s not something I’ve really thought out at all, I just . . .”

He said she wasn’t dumb but innocent, and that amazed her, for the one quality in the world that she cherished and knew she did not possess was innocence. She wasn’t sure when she had lost hers, except that it had to be before the Church said she had. It had to do with things you saw that you weren’t supposed to see.

“You once told me I looked haunted,” she said.

“Mmmm.”

“How can you be haunted and innocent at the same time?”

“Why don’t
you
explain it to
me
since you’re the one who’s managed it.”

“Ohhhhhhhh.”

He laughed.

They fell into the habit of going to that little luncheonette every Wednesday, at first just for coffee, then after a while for lunch. In January he told her which one of his Comp II classes she should register for. It was held at four o’clock in the afternoon, and she was upset not just because it meant going home in the dark those days during winter but much more because it meant the end of their Wednesday lunches. Then it turned out he meant her to schedule her classes later in the day in general, rather than earlier, since his own classes were almost entirely in the afternoon and he thought she might like to work for him sometimes in the mornings. Did she type? No, it was a shame. She might learn over the summer while he was away. That would be a great help to him next year, when a book he was drafting now would be ready for typing. In the meantime, there were other jobs she could be helping him with, most particularly reading papers for his required classes and marking them for grammar and spelling in detail, since, as they both knew, the greater part of the student body of the college was not literate in English.

She had to hold her breath for fear of screaming, so intense were the two feelings that this little speech aroused in her—the pleasure that he had chosen her and the anxiety aroused by the very mention of the fact that at some point he would go away. This wasn’t a reality she was prepared to face—that there would be a time when she could not see him for two solid months.

He lived across the street from the Museum of Natural History so she would have no trouble finding it. She didn’t tell him she’d never been there. That she’d never been on Central Park West.
That in point of fact she’d seldom in her entire life been out of the Bronx before she began attending City, except to go to doctors and hospitals, and then her father drove her. It wasn’t until he gave her the apartment number—12B—that she ceased to picture the room where her richest fantasies occurred as being on the second floor of the mansion in
Gone With the Wind.

Where would his wife be while they were working?

She couldn’t tell how old he was but she thought if he had children they would be young.

They would have to be someplace quiet, the two of them, if they were going to get any work done. That was for sure.

She woke up at
four in the morning on the first day that she was to go, having dreamed that she was locked with him in a tiny closet while outside there were thunder and lightning. Other children were banging at the door, screaming to get in, and she said maybe they should open the door but he said that there just wasn’t room in that tiny space, even though the two of them were huddled close together under a blanket.

The dream was so delicious that she tried to get back into it but she was tense and excited and couldn’t fall asleep at all.

When she told the
elevator operator she wanted 12B he nodded and said, “Dr. Engle,” which didn’t strike her really until he let her off and the door facing her read “Helen Engle, M.D.” She turned to the elevator operator and stammered, “I—I—”

“Is it the professor you wanted?” he asked.

She nodded. Her lips were dry.

He took her back down and directed her to an elevator in the back explaining that this was the entrance the professor’s people used during the doctor’s office hours.

The professor’s people.

She was taken back up in a somewhat larger but less elegant elevator. She was nearly suffocating with tension.

He opened the door, yawning, looking barely awake. She wondered what the elevator operator thought. She mumbled “Thank you” to the operator without looking at him. Martin Engle was wearing a bathrobe.

“Come in,” he said, “but don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee.”

She walked into a large foyer, ahead of which was a living room—not elegant, as the lobby had been, but comfortable looking. Full of big overstuffed furniture and bookcases. He walked off into another hallway; she stood indecisively until he called, “Come, come, come,” at which she followed him into a messy kitchen. He began pouring water into a strange glass contraption on the stove.

“My wife is an otherwise perfect human being who cannot make a decent cup of coffee.”

She laughed nervously. The water that he was pouring into the top of the glass thing was dripping down to the bottom as coffee.

His wife was a doctor.
An otherwise perfect woman.

“You may sit down. You may even take off your coat and put down your books.”

She never took her eyes off him as he poured the coffee, fussed over it, brought cream and sugar, cups and spoons to the table, then did something with the glass coffeepot and brought that, too.

They drank their first cup in silence. (She had come to love coffee! When she drank it she was with him.) She began to relax, to feel at home, but then as that phrase,
at home,
entered her mind she felt uneasy again because it wasn’t her own home, although she had been feeling as though it were. Somewhere within a few hundred yards of her, separated by maybe two or three walls, was a lady named Mrs. Engle who was a perfect human being except that she couldn’t make a decent cup of coffee. What did that mean, anyway? She couldn’t really be perfect, and when you thought
about it it was the kind of thing you could say about someone without actually liking her. It made her sound formidable. And she was a doctor. That helped considerably, remembering that it wasn’t Mrs. Engle but Doctor Engle.

“What kind of doctor is your wife?” she asked without thinking.

He looked up and smiled. “A pediatrician.”

The words swam around in her head for a minute with a lot of other doctors’ labels until she could identify it, fairly certainly, as a baby doctor.

“How’s that?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t like doctors.” She blushed. It had just popped out, like her question, and it didn’t sound right. She never even
thought
about doctors, except once or twice a year when she had to see one, and of course that was never an experience you would look forward to, but now here she was . . . Sometimes she felt she could never just simply and easily say the right thing with him. Not that she could with other people, but with other people she didn’t
care.
When she wrote an essay for him she scribbled it over five or ten times before it was good enough. Then he read it and thought it was natural to her. She was a fraud. Not even really intelligent, particularly. Certainly she would never have been a doctor. You had to be very smart to even get into medical school.

“Why?” he asked. “A lot of people would die without them.”

“A lot of people die with them.”

“Did you have a bad experience with a doctor?”

“No, not particularly.”

“Why do you limp?”

She gasped. The sudden movement of her body made her coffee spill over the side of the cup as she held it. One hand got wet from it but she barely noticed; she was overwhelmed by a sense of unreality. He wasn’t real; she wasn’t real; they weren’t here; he hadn’t asked that question. He couldn’t have. She didn’t limp.

“I don’t limp,” she finally said, except that her voice came out in a whisper.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “That may have been too extreme a word to use. You have a slight sway, imbalance, whatever you want to call it, to your walk. It’s not unattractive. If I weren’t aware of such things I might never have noticed.”

No one, not her parents, not relatives, not anyone she ever knew had ever said anything about a limp. For a long time she’d had to wear one shoe with a platform in it, and then she’d started wearing regular shoes as though she’d always worn them. No one had ever said anything about the way she walked!

She had a wild desire to escape and stood up, about to walk away from him, from this place, when suddenly it occurred to her that as she went, he would see her limping. She sat down again. Staring at him. Frozen in the moment. Unable to make it pass.

“Theresa.” He put his hands over hers. “I’m sorry I’ve upset you.”

“You haven’t upset me.”

“Yes I have.”

Silence.

“Come,” he said. “Let’s go someplace where we can talk. It’s not very comfortable in here.” He waited. She said nothing. “We’ll go into my study. We’ll have our coffee there, it’s much pleasanter.” He put the coffee things on a small tray and held out his free hand to her. She stood up but she didn’t take his hand. The frozen moment was passing and now she had to fight tears. He put his arm around her and they passed gingerly through the kitchen, down the hallway, into a room behind a closed door. His study. It was strange. Totally unlike the rest of the house, with nothing out of place, and maybe quite beautiful, although she couldn’t tell yet, she wasn’t familiar with this kind of room. In front of one window was a huge table with many plants and a couple of piles of papers. At an angle to it stood a typewriter on a stand. In front of another
window was a big soft chair. Then there was a studio bed covered with an elegant embroidered spread and dozens of pillows. On the floor was an Oriental rug. The walls were covered with Chinese prints and wooden carvings, most of which also looked Oriental to her.

He put the tray down on the big table-desk.

“Sit where you’ll be most comfortable, Theresa.”

She sat down on the edge of the studio bed because she was closest to that and now she was self-conscious about his seeing her walk. He sat down and put his arm around her; she grew rigid.

“I am not attempting to seduce you,” he said. “I am attempting to comfort you because I see that I’ve hurt you.”