Looking for Mr. Goodbar (7 page)

But of course that was why she’d gone rigid. With an enormous effort of will she turned to him and with a voice as steady as possible said, “But I’d rather be seduced than comforted.”

He laughed and stood up. “That’s marvelous,” he said. “I think I’ll have it embroidered and made into a wall hanging—no, a pillow cover.”

She watched him steadily. She felt in some way that she’d gotten her own back. He gave her coffee, settled with his own in the swivel desk chair, facing her. One of the reasons she loved him was that she’d understood since she first heard him talk that all those sly or hostile or outrageous thoughts that had cropped up in her mind for years and remained unsaid because they would shock or upset or alienate the people she knew would be perfectly all right with him. If she could ever get herself to say them. He finished his coffee and poured another cup without offering her more. She wanted to get more but she wasn’t yet sure that was all right.

“This is where we’ll work,” he said. “You may sit wherever you like, at the desk, wherever. I’m going to give you the papers before I look at them myself. You will scan them carefully and red-ink every grammatical or spelling error. Hopefully I will then be less distracted by their illiteracy and will be able to simply read them quickly and make some appropriate comment. Very quickly, I
should say.” He smiled. “At a glance. I have too much work of my own this year to be bothered with this nonsense.”

“Poetry?” she asked, shy again.

“And a scholarly work that I’m doing, not out of any interest at all in my subject but in the interest of getting a promotion.”

She smiled.

“You are amused.”

“It sounds funny. Like going from seventh grade to eighth grade.”

“Quite so.”

He was friendly but businesslike. There would be four sets of papers a week because he had four required courses. Later on, if he were feeling really self-indulgent, he might get her to do the same for his elective papers, which shouldn’t need that sort of thing but usually did. It would probably be best if no one in her class understood that it was she making the red marks; God’s words always carried more weight than those of the apostles, even if they were the same words. She nodded; she never would have dreamed of telling anyone.

“What would you consider a reasonable rate of pay for this work?” he asked.

She stared at him. It had never entered her mind that he would pay her; she was working for the privilege of working for him.

She shrugged.

“You must have thought about it.”

She shook her head. She didn’t want him to pay her because it made the work seem less personal.

“Have you ever worked?”

“Just baby-sitting.”

“And how much do you make as a baby-sitter?”

“A dollar an hour.”

“All right,” he said. “We’ll start you at a dollar an hour. Slave wages. And if you are really good and fast we’ll raise it from there. Unless you prefer to remain my slave.”

I prefer to remain your slave. I prefer you not to pay me but to love me.

She was arrested by the sound of a baby crying someplace.

He smiled. “My wife’s office is on the other side of that wall.”

The wall the studio bed was against. His wife.

She stood up.

“Do you want me to begin today?”

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “You’re here and I have some papers.”

She went twice a
week for the rest of the term, marking two sets of papers each morning. After a month or so he began to rely on her more completely. He told her to start making a lightly penciled estimate of the quality of each paper on the top. Before long he was just erasing the penciled words and writing a brief version of the same thing in his own hand. “I liked this,” or “Dull,” or “The opinions don’t seem honest, though I’m not sure why.” He was pleased to find that she, too, reacted when someone was trying to please rather than to express; to adopt an opinion not his own; to omit some essential part of an experience in the interest of self-protection. He always worked in the room while she was there, sometimes on his poetry (by hand on legal pads), sometimes on his scholarly manuscript (on the typewriter), sometimes, it seemed, just fussing with the papers she’d done or some other odds and ends. She would work in the big chair, watching him surreptitiously when she was supposed to be concentrating on the papers. Sometimes he just pulled dry leaves off his plants or stared out the window. He told her he didn’t know how he had ever managed without her. Occasionally she asked him a question about some paper and then he might lean over to her to see what she was talking about. Once in the spring she looked up as he was doing that and he kissed her mouth. Then he walked away. The next time she asked him a question he stayed in his chair and told her to read it aloud to him.

“You know that I
love you, don’t you, Theresa?”

“Ssshhh. She’s going to hear us.”

“The hell with her, let her hear us. Let her divorce me.”

“She’s the mother of four of your children, Martin.”

“As a matter of fact, they’re not my children at all. They happen to be her children by a previous marriage.”

She dreaded the summer, when they would go to their home in Connecticut. (His wife would commute in July but stay there in August.)

She was going to take both typing and steno in the adult education program at Columbus High School in the evenings and work full time baby-sitting during the day. She talked about baby-sitting and kept hoping he would tell her to forget about the typing and come be their sitter for the summer, but when she told him her plans, he simply nodded in approval.

In the middle of May she started getting headaches. She would be sitting in the big chair, marking papers, and the words would blur in front of her eyes. When she forced herself to focus on them, the headaches would begin. She didn’t tell him, but then a short while later the backaches began. Not backaches, exactly. As she sat working, the lower part of her neck would feel cramped and uncomfortable; when she moved from her original position, she would feel a sharp pain, as though she’d been locked in and had forced the lock. Then she would have to get up and stretch. Or go to the bathroom. He’d never again asked her about her walk. Until now that first morning had been pushed to the back of her consciousness, but now it forced its way back every time she stood up and feared that he would see how hard it was for her to stand straight. It became a game to see if she could bear to wait until a moment when she knew for sure he couldn’t see her. At the end of the second week of this she waited so long one morning that by the time she got up, the lock was too strong to break and she staggered.
She almost fell to the floor but just in time reached out to the studio bed, leaned on it, then sat.

He swiveled in his chair and faced her.

“I don’t dare ask what’s been bothering you for the last few weeks,” he said coldly, “for fear that you’ll jump out of the window. Or turn into a block of ice again, then melt away until there’s no Theresa left to do my papers next year.”

Tears welled in her eyes. Her whole body wanted to cry. She was an idiot. She didn’t blame him for being angry with her. For hating her. She hated herself. Her back ached; she wanted very badly to lie down.

“But I hope that if you can’t trust me enough to tell me what’s going on, at least you’re seeing a doctor.”

“It’s my back,” she said weakly. “Can I lie down?”

“Of course you can lie down. What do you take me for?”

Ashamed but relieved, she stretched out on the studio bed, looking up at the ceiling, still badly wanting to cry. He probably wouldn’t want her to come back after this. He’d find someone else who could do the same work and wasn’t sick-crazy.

He came over to her and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“What about your back?” he asked, more softly, now.

“There’s nothing wrong with it, really,” she began, but then he seemed about to get up and walk away so she said quickly, “I’m not lying to you, I had—when I was a kid I had trouble with it, but it hasn’t hurt me in years.”

He relaxed. “What trouble did you have with it when you were a child?”

“It’s called scoliosis. Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“It’s something wrong with the spine. I had an operation for it and it was all taken care of. I see the doctor a couple of times a year just to make sure, and it’s perfectly okay now.”

“Except that you’ve been in pain for a couple of weeks.”

“Only here.” It came out without thinking. “I mean,” she said
quickly, “only when I sit in the same position for a long time. I think I strained it a couple of weeks ago.” She cast around in her mind frantically. “I was moving some heavy furniture. In my room. I think I just strained it.”

“I think you should see a doctor.”

“I just went a couple of months ago.” But he was tender now, and her fear was going away. “You don’t know how my parents are about . . . if I just tell them something’s hurting me they’ll have a . . .”

“Then perhaps,” he said after a moment, “my wife should have a look at you.”

“Oh, no!” She bolted up. “I’ll go to the family doctor. I promise.” He gently pushed her back on the bed.

“How old were you when all this happened?”

“Eleven, twelve,” she said.

“Which?”

“I was eleven when I had the operation.”

“How long were you in the hospital?”

She looked at him tearfully. Wanting to lie but afraid to. His wife was a doctor, anyway. He could find out. There was no point to lying.

“A year.”

He stared at her. He was obviously shocked. His shock stirred up something buried way down inside her, that sense of her illness as a badge of shame. In knowing that she had been in the hospital for a year, he knew something about her against which little could be balanced. She closed her eyes. A moment later she felt his cool hand on her forehead, stroking it softly, brushing back the wispy hairs. She wanted to open her eyes and look at him but she was afraid if she did he would take away his hand so she kept them closed. She held her breath as he bent over her, kissed her forehead, her eyes, her nose, her mouth. She couldn’t believe how tender he was being with her. Not at all as though he’d been repelled by her confession—almost the opposite.

“Move over,” he whispered.

Her eyes still closed she made room for him on the bed and he lay down beside her, on his side, stroking her hair, kissing her cheek.

“Poor little fishie,” he murmured softly.

She opened her eyes and turned on her side to face him.

“Why did you call me that?”

“I don’t know. Do you mind it?”

“No.” Because he had sounded as though he loved her when he said it.

“Then it doesn’t matter.”

She smiled.

“Such a sad smile you have, Theresa.”

She stopped smiling.

“And such beautiful green eyes. Or are they beautiful gray eyes?”

She shrugged. Their faces were so close—if only he would really kiss her. She moved toward him just a tiny bit. The room was very quiet; there were sounds from the other side of the wall but no crying. Maybe a radio was on.

“Were you in a great deal of pain?” he asked.

It took her a moment to realize that he was asking her about the operation.

“I don’t remember,” she said. “The only thing I remember is the scar itching afterward. The whole thing, itching.” The plaster cast. She’d gotten some kind of rash from it.

“Do you still have the scar?”

“A little, I guess.”

“Let me see it.”

She was dumbfounded. At first she thought he must be joking, but then she saw that he was perfectly serious. She didn’t know what to do.

“It’s just down my back.”

He nodded. He was waiting.

She was wearing a navy cotton shirtdress. (Katherine was trying to get her to wear brighter colors; Katherine said she dressed as though she were still going to Catholic school.) She could turn over and just pull it up from the bottom but somehow that image . . . of herself, with her back to him, pulling up her dress over her cotton pants and . . . she couldn’t do it that way. She would have to take off the dress. Or at least open it and partly take it off. She began undoing the buttons that ran the length of the front. Her cheeks were burning. She was excited. And ashamed. She looked down at the buttons as she undid them, squeezing them tightly to control the trembling of her hands. She ended up undoing all the buttons because she didn’t know what to do when she was finished. Finally she sat up and got her arms out of the sleeves, letting the dress fall in back of her, looking down to see what he saw. Pale, freckled skin. A plain white nylon bra. Katherine wore flowered bikini sets of lingerie. At that moment she wished—ached—to have had lingerie like Katherine’s. Without meaning to she looked up at him. And met his eyes, because he was watching her face, not her body. Quickly she turned over and lay face down on the bed, her face buried in her arms. In this position she felt her back again for the first time since she’d stretched out on the bed, but it wasn’t unbearable, just a dull ache. She was holding her breath; she forced herself to exhale slowly.

He undid her brassiere although it wasn’t necessary to see the scar, which began some inches below it. With one finger he began at the top of the scar and traced a line down it; when he got to her underpants he slowly pulled them down over her buttocks, reaching around her front when necessary to get them down. Then he went back to the beginning of the scar and traced slowly down again all the way. Then he touched the half-moon.

“What’s this?”

“It’s from the same operation.”

He leaned over her and kissed the half-moon, then the long scar, from the bottom to the top. Fondling her buttocks, her back,
her shoulders. She wanted desperately to turn over and embrace him but she knew he didn’t want her to do this. Now he was doing something else—getting undressed?—she dared not turn to look for fear of displeasing him, and now he was climbing over her, straddling her, half-sitting on her, but without pressure. He wasn’t wearing his pants. He was leaning over her, kissing her—Oh, God, Martin, let me turn over, it’s hurting me! He was holding her buttocks now, raising them; if she arched her back it didn’t hurt as much but that was difficult. Now he was rubbing his penis between her legs, feeling for her opening, and then he was pushing into her, hurting her because she was dry and tight, slowly pushing in anyway until he was all the way in. Hurting. Feeling as though he were piercing some solid wall deep inside—maybe he would come right through her! Just when she thought she would scream out because the pain was unbearable, it lessened, and pleasure began to mingle with it, and then the pain inside disappeared and as the pleasure increased she forgot about her back and it got so good that it was hard not to moan, but she forced herself to hold in all sounds for fear of being heard on the other side of the wall.