Looking for Mr. Goodbar (9 page)

That year the Engles
rented their house in Connecticut to year-round tenants and took a beach house at Fire Island for the summer. Yes, she’d heard of Fire Island; her sister went there. As soon as it was out she was sorry.

“Your sister?”

She nodded.

“Theresa, I have known you for two years and you have never mentioned a sister.”

“I have two.”

He laughed. “Are you sure that’s all?”

“They don’t live at home,” she said. “They’re both married. I hardly ever see them.” Brigid had just had her first baby in April. She saw more of Brigid now than she ever had, for the new baby, Kimberley, was adorable, and she loved her.

He asked how old her sisters were and she told him. He asked their names, which she refused to tell him. He asked why she didn’t want to tell him and she told him, truthfully, that she didn’t know. He asked where her older sister went on Fire Island and she told him, untruthfully, that she’d forgotten. The Engles would be going to Seaview; did that sound familiar? No, it didn’t. (Katherine and Brooks had gone to Ocean Beach and were going back there this year.)

When he returned in
September he was different, although at first she didn’t understand why. He was no longer interested in working on the manuscript they had slaved over months before; he said they could take their full professorship and stick it. There were more important things in life than professorships, and if he’d ever had any interest at all in the Jewish-Canadian-Socialist-intellectual circle in Montreal in the early twentieth century, he didn’t have it any longer. As a matter of fact, what he was considering doing was the lyrics for a musical show. He’d met a very interesting guy out there, a composer, who said that what Broadway needed was a few decent lyricists, and an idea for a musical had immediately popped into his head. He had always smoked a pipe but now he smoked what he called his “home-rolled” and between that and a few articles in copies of the
Village Voice
that Rhoda was always carrying around, Theresa finally realized that Martin Engle was smoking marijuana.

“You must think I’m pretty dumb,” she said to Martin, the first time she saw him after that. “Do you think I haven’t known all along what you’re smoking?”

He smiled. He had grown more consistently benevolent with her. Less likely to be irritated if things weren’t exactly right. He offered her a drag and she refused; Rhoda had described the experience—the colors, the dreaminess, the pictures, the not caring—in a way that made Theresa think of going under ether, of losing consciousness against her will, which terrified her.

“Why don’t you want to share with me, Theresa?” he asked. She was sitting in the big chair; he was at the desk but he’d just been sitting there, staring.

“It’s not that I don’t want to share with you,” she said. “It’s that I have no interest in trying it at all with anyone.”

“It’s marvelous for sex,” he said. “You might even have an orgasm.”

She looked at him helplessly. She’d seen the word once or twice but she really didn’t know what it meant; nor had she known she was lacking something. She’d thought the only thing wrong with their sex life was that he made love to her so infrequently. Although lately he had shown a little more inclination to let her lead him into sex. If he was just sitting at his desk, smoking or staring, and she hugged him, or teased him, or sat on his lap, he would come back to the bed with her. But she’d begun to feel that there was something wrong with this. She was
begging.
She grew self-conscious and couldn’t summon the abandon she’d once had in seducing him. She would sit in the chair, or sometimes even stretch out on the studio bed in what she hoped was a seductive position, but he would ignore her. Maybe the trouble with her was that she didn’t have orgasms. Whatever they were.

ORGASM
(F. orgasme, fr. Gr. orgasmos) Physiol. Eager or immoderate excitement or action; esp. the culmination of coition.—orgastic, adj.

The next time she
saw him she took a couple of drags on his joint, coughing and choking. He got her water, laughing. She took
a couple more drags, went over to the studio bed and went to sleep. When she woke up he was grinning down at her, telling her it was time to go to school. He didn’t offer it to her again.

Katherine admitted, when Theresa asked, that she and Brooks used it all the time, that she’d first had it as an airline stewardess. She’d even had acid a couple of times—Theresa would never breathe a word of this would she? No, of course Theresa wouldn’t. To whom would she breathe it?

By a year later everyone who wasn’t totally involved in conspiracy theories of the assassination (Jules belonged to a group that met two afternoons a week to discuss them) was talking about grass and acid. She and Martin never made love any more. He got calls all the time but not on the intercom. Katherine and Brooks were renovating a brownstone on St. Marks Place and Brigid was pregnant with her second baby.

In a month she
would graduate. Martin had never said a word to her about what would happen when she graduated after a conversation the previous fall in which he’d shouted that she would be just throwing away her mind if she went into public school teaching. She knew he was going back to Fire Island this summer, that he would have the children with him, that his wife was planning to be there less than she had the previous summer. He would have a mother’s helper living there with him. For a couple of weeks she had been trying to broach to him the subject of hiring her to be the mother’s helper. Then she wouldn’t have to once again wait out the summer to see him. Not that she could fool herself any longer that he minded their separations. But with her graduation it was going to be so much more difficult to see him; she might have to work for him in the evening. How would he feel about that? She knew relatively little of what his life was like. She knew other girls pursued him; yet after four years she was still here with him. His wife was still there; he had never said anything
about her except that she was perfect; yet once when Theresa had asked him after sex why he was angry with her, he’d said he always disliked women after fucking them. She’d blanched because she had never thought of what they did as just fucking. Now she wondered if he fucked his wife at all, and if so, whether he disliked her afterward.

She had learned to use—imitate—a certain ironic tone in bringing up difficult questions. It wore off if he challenged her, yet with other people she could maintain it consistently; in some of her classes now, particularly her Ed classes, she was thought to be a somewhat sophisticated and terribly ironic person.

Now, throwing her legs over the sides of the chair, curling a lock of her hair around one finger and looking at him with a wry and totally artificial smile, she drawled, “I have an idea. How would you like to have a very intelligent, literate mother’s helper who can type this summer?”

“It sounds like an abominable idea,” he drawled back. “Why do you ask?”

Tears came to her eyes and she couldn’t answer him for fear of crying outright.

She got up, thinking she would just go to the bathroom and cry and wait until it didn’t show any more that she’d been crying. But he caught her wrist as she went past him toward the door and pulled her toward him. Making her sit down on his lap. He put down his pipe. (He didn’t smoke grass in the morning any more, claiming that it interfered with his work.)

“What is it, Theresita?” he asked gently. “Have you been seeing yourself as my mother’s helper—father’s helper, we should say?”

She nodded, looking down at the buttons on his shirt.

“Scrubbing the floors, emptying out the ashes?”

“Very funny.”

“Cooking the meals? Spending endless hours with my children on the beach, which you hate?”

“I don’t even know if I really hate it,” she said. “I never go there so how can I know?”

“July second of this year wouldn’t be a very good time to find out. Aside from anything else, the sun out there is pretty brutal.”

“If you were there,” she said, still not looking at him, “I would like it.”

“You are very sweet, Theresa,” he said. “But I would be doing you a disservice if I let you do it.”

She got up but he came with her, his arms around her, push-walking her gently to the bed and down onto it. Then he made love to her, tenderly, for the first time in so long that she really couldn’t remember just when the last time had been.

“I love you so much, Martin,” she said.

“Ah, yes,” Martin said. “Love.”

It left her uneasy. But now they began spending the May mornings in bed instead of at work, and then giggling like naughty children because she would have to take home papers to get them done in time. Once or twice he told her not to worry about them but she said she wasn’t worried, she just wanted to do them. Things were better between them than they’d been in the whole time they’d been together and she didn’t understand why she was anxious, unless it was that he never talked about what would happen the following year. She was afraid to disturb this lovely interlude by asking.

Then, as they were leaving the apartment house on the Friday before the last week, a girl with long blond hair walked into the building and made a high sign to Martin, and when she asked who the girl was he said that she was a teenager who lived in the building. When she asked what the sign meant he said it meant only two more weeks until they went to Fire Island, that she was their mother’s helper for the summer.

“Teenager,” Theresa said. “She doesn’t look any younger than me.”

“That may be,” he said. “But in point of fact she’s barely seventeen.”

“I’m too young to be obsolete,” she said, quite seriously.

He laughed. “The one thing you will always have me to thank for is developing a sense of humor behind those sad green eyes.”

She said nothing but her anxiety had turned into dread. She was approaching, from too great a distance to know as yet where she was heading, the knowledge that her future did not contain him.

On the following Wednesday, the first day of their last week together for the term, she asked him what his plans were for the following year. He said that he had no plans at all for the following year; that he would doubtless continue at CCNY (which of course she hadn’t questioned) although he felt rather strongly inclined to join a couple of young friends of his who were going to set up house in Katmandu; that he might do another musical (the first one had been dropped after almost getting financed for off-Broadway); that he would continue exploring his head for new colors; that he might divorce his wife, since all his friends were doing it, just to see how it felt to have that particular peak experience. Except that this would impose upon him a financial burden which would make it necessary for him to finish his manuscript and get his promotion.

He might divorce his wife just for the experience.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Are things really as simple as all that?”

“No, of course not. Half the members of the Department can’t stand me; that’s why I don’t get my promotion.”

She was sure he was willfully misunderstanding her.

“Anyway, the manuscript has no particular appeal to me right now. Maybe because it deals with a group of intellectuals whose only medium was words, and I have no great interest in words at the moment. Or perhaps you’ve noticed.”

She had noticed him paying less and less attention to his classes; to his papers; to what she wrote on them. Or rather, she’d
seen without noticing. He never even bothered to change anything she’d written now.

“You haven’t . . .” She had to word it carefully, however little interest words had for him now. She was stepping in water that looked calm but was rumored to have fatal currents. “What are your plans . . . for me . . . for next year?”

“My plans for you for next year,” he said. “Hm. Well, my plans for you next year, love, are that you shall begin teaching, that you shall go forth from the cloistered world of City College, that you shall live a little and learn a little and get high.”

Her body acknowledged what he was saying before her mind did. She began trembling.

“What about working for you?”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Yes I do.”

“Then you’re a foolish girl and I haven’t taught you as much as I thought I had.”

“When will I see you if I don’t work for you?”

“Ah, Theresa, you’re making this very difficult.”

Then it was true. She could no longer conceal from herself what he was saying. She sank back into her seat and stared at him. He was looking at her. His eyes bored a hole in her and the hole was her whole self. She was an empty whole. For a while she had been attached to something else and a hole attached to something else wasn’t a hole any more, or at least it didn’t feel its emptiness, but now the something was floating away from her and she was going to be empty again.

“What did I do?” she managed to croak out.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, you haven’t done anything, love-child, it’s just time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What is there to understand?”

“Why I’m not going to see you any more.”

“Theresa,” he said. Very kind and patient. She wanted to kiss
him. “You know the Bible . . . For everything there is a season”? He began singing softly, “For everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” He paused. “Do you hear what I’m saying, Theresa?” He had never been so kind, now that he was sending her away forever. “You are a lovely girl and we have had a long and good friendship. And now it’s time for us both to move on.”

“Will you get someone else?” Licking her lips because they were so dry she could barely speak.

“Of course I’ll get someone else,” he snapped out. Irritably. Then he caught himself. He became kind again. “I always have someone else, Theresa. It’s not that I’m replacing you. I’m not even leaving you. You’re leaving me. Because it’s time.”

She was leaving him. She stood up, gathered two or three books and walked out of the apartment. She said good-bye to the elevator man and walked out to Central Park West. The sun was so bright it was nearly blinding.