Making Love (2 page)

With her large breasts but still firm hips, her mother reminded Jane of a rotting peach—golden, sun-smooth, the star of the fruit bowl, but for some reason not eaten and left to languish, perhaps because the season had been too bountiful and people had got sick of eating peaches.
 

Luckmunn made a move to rise, but Nancy's head was on his lap and with a strange dispassion, almost kindliness, he ran his hand through her long speckled blond hair.
 

“I've got the curse,” she explained. Her affairs were conducted with the arrogance of an imperialist, requiring new colonies to dump goods only a native would think of buying.
 

The simple statement served only to shock him. This was one prizegiving he wanted to miss.
 

“Christ! I think you're crazy,” he said.
 

“Don't tell me that you're a closet queen.”
 

“No, I'm not,” he said, beet-red; but he saw that anger would not alienate her. She had gone beyond social diligence and cocktail tactics. She had unzipped his fly.
 

“Luckmunn's got an Irish temper. Don't fidget.” Even in passion. Nancy provided instructions.
 

“For god's sake, Nancy, will you do me one favor,” he said, roughly pulling her head up and looking into the mad blue eyes once the color of lapis lazuli; they had that dim, bloodshot look of a permanent hangover, with their broken wormlike capillaries, immune to regeneration and life.
 

“What?”
 

Mortified, he gave in.
 

“Call me Charles ... please.”
 

“Of course, anything you like Luckmunn....”
 

As Jane walked away, she hated herself for disapproving.
After all she's a woman, and she needs it like everyone else from time to time
, she thought; then turned back to listen to sounds of laughter, tinkling like ice cubes. The raw sensuality of her parents would always be embarrassing, disgusting, unspeakable. Somehow her own promiscuity seemed innocent.
 

For the second time that morning Jane vomited. The first time had been at a gas station outside of Utica where she'd stopped to fill up. Her roommate, a tall redhead named Patricia Conlon but known as Conlon, had joined her on the illegal weekend down to New York. Except for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the regular breaks between semesters, nonscheduled flights from Saranac College were not condoned. Nor were diaphragms, the pill, pot, emmies, and other condiments, at least no officially.
 

Originally, Saranac had been part of that girdle of schools (Vassar, Radcliffe, and Smith) that moulded the svelte conscience and spirits of young American princesses. Favoring independence and exclusivity, the college's trustees had in the distant twenties arranged a bloodless divorce from the league. Once removed from entangling alliances, the school prided itself on developing an intelligent, freethinking élite who married the men who would run the country. The suffragette attitude still pervaded faculty ideals but lines had to be drawn. A nation had been shocked in those preriot days when Saranac boldly allowed dorm room visits by enterprising males; but the college had taken the wise precaution of training a corps of sharp-nosed, inquisitive dorm mothers into a team of autocratic proctors armed with extralegal credentials and walkie-talkies. Fucking was an inalienable right but due process had to be suspended. Dropouts were few, and pregnancies even fewer. An army knowing its enemy's position is prepared for a counteroffensive. Saranac girls were getting it regularly, but God, were they quiet about it.
 

Conlon was trying on a blue-black wig when Jane returned to the car. Conlon had spent her five-hundred-dollar clothes allowance on seven wigs and had returned to college with last year's wardrobe, which was out of keeping for a junior. The buckshot spray of freckles that nature had implanted on her face appeared strangely inconsistent with the Indian-braid affair twisted like snakes over her ear lobes.
 

“Well, what do you think?”
 

“It's revolting,” Jane said.
 

“Aren't you one of the all-time ego builders? You really know how to hurt a guy,” she added.
 

“It doesn't go with your color.”
 

“But a red-headed Indian isn't possible.”
 

“Ask Mel what he thinks.” A reference to Conlon's unhappily married Great Neck lover always evoked an erotic sigh.
 

“You're not going to believe this, Jane, but he loves my freckles. Even my shoulder and spinal ones. The last time I saw him, he tried to kiss every one of them.”
 

“Individually?”
 

“You've got the picture.”
 

“How'd he make out?”
 

“I fell asleep, but I think he quit on my hip.”
 

“That's a lot of kissing.”
 

“Sex isn't everything. There are things like affection.”
 

The pump jockey returned with Jane's change and Conlon leaned over and whispered, “Don't tip the bastard. He was looking under your dress when he had the air gauge on the tires.”
 

Jane held back the quarter she had intended.
 

“That's okay, girls,” the jockey said. “Any time and for nothing.”
 

“Have you got a telex address, so that we can wire you we're coming?” Conlon asked.
 

“I'll drop you off in Westport and you can catch the train down,” Jane said.
 

“Do you really have to see your mother?”
 

“I want to. It's almost a year. I'm going to try to talk to her.”
 

“When'd she get out?”
 

“Two weeks ago.”
 

“What do they do to you in those places? I mean what does drying out really consist of?”
 

“It consists of no liquor.”
 

“I don't know why anyone would want to drink in the first place. A dry white with lobster is great; champagne with caviar, fine; but hard stuff ruins your breath.”
 

At Westport, Jane had coffee on the platform, as Conlon waited for the train. The wig was packed on its dummy head while commuters stared with barely repressed horror. The train, bulging at the seams with attaché cases and men's hearty chuckles which concealed the omnipresent fear of how the month's mortgage payment was going to be met, pulled into the station.
 

“Give your mother my love if she's conscious,” Conlon said. She exchanged glances with a number of men who preferred studying her to the depressed stock market prices. “Maybe I ought to turn a few tricks on the way down. Won't kill me, will it?”
 

“Here's fifty,” Jane handed her the money through the grimy window.
 

“Why do I have to be solvent to keep my purity? You're fighting a losing battle, Jane.”
 

“It's my nature.”
 

“Sheldrake Hotel, don't forget,” Conlon called, as the train slowly thudded out of the station.
 

 

* * * *

 

Jane, a witness to many indiscretions, could not bring herself to the house to wait for her mother. She'd have to meet Luckmunn, suffer through pointless small talk. As it was she had played too many phony roles in the past simply to please Nancy, who had made a career out of the part of the wronged child. The two had become conspirators when Jane, aged nine, spent a long Easter holiday in Palm Beach with her parents. Jim had resumed an affair that had been broken only by three hours of travel, and Jane had learned of it in the simplest possible way. Nancy had told her. More than that, she had actually pointed out the woman, a small dark-haired lady with hooded brown eyes who seemed as frail as a miniature. Gibbie Corman.
 

Nancy's unpaid private investigator shadowed the couple on beaches, on innocent shopping expeditions along Worth Avenue. The child developed an eye for paintings as she peered through gallery windows while elegantly dressed painters attempted to flog hack watercolors to the art lovers.
 

Somehow it seemed impossible to Jane. Instinctively she knew that the act of love involved coupling of some description, and Gibbie would shatter into nothingness under Jim's great weight At that she assumed with undeniable logic that Nancy must be a liar, and without the least sense that she was committing an act of treason, she confided in her father.
 

“What I don't understand is why Mommy would tell me such a story.”
 

“Did you see me do anything, Janey?”
 

“No, just kissing Gibbie.”
 

“I kiss everyone,” Jim said. She couldn't deny it.
 

“Then why shouldn't Mommy know you kissed Gibbie?”
 

“It would upset her.”
 

“It upsets me. If you promise to stop, I won't say what I saw.”
 

He was a big man and a coward, but he understood that a blackmailing child could be an invincible opponent. He gave his word graciously with the assurance and charm of the practiced liar. A fire in straw in Palm Beach would not be a pretty sight. He petted Jane's head, kissed her cheek and forehead. The little girl had a quiet beauty, restrained, like that of the oppressed, and therefore all the more sad. He bought her an ice cream there on Worth Avenue while furtively signaling to Gibbie, who lurked near the entrance of the Everglades Club. Jane spotted her, turned her back, and forced her father to forgo his afternoon rubdown (his excuse for being caught downtown), and she walked him to the toy store, keeping him nervously pacing as she refused to make up her mind.
 

She might have taught him discipline if he were capable of learning it. What she saw on his face was the melancholy of a grown man, inhibited by a child.
 

With the final image of her mother and Luckmunn in the hut darting perversely across the screen of her mind, Jane drove in a daze into New York City. They had everything, the Siddleys, that could possible inspire unhappiness—inherited money, good looks, health, freedom. And all they really wanted was to lose it.
 

It was only the organized charivari of road construction on Bruckner Boulevard that cleared her head. At a light she counted her money: seventy-four dollars. Conlon would put her up. There were other friends of course who'd be glad to see her, but they'd ask a lot of questions and she wasn't in the mood to answer. She stopped off at a hamburger joint and called Conlon.
 

“Fast visit,” Conlon said.
 

“Long enough for me. Look, where can I meet you?”
 

“I'll hop a cab and see you at Stark's on Madison.”
 

“What's so special about Stark's?”
 

“It's near Saint Laurent. Cheer up, Jane, will you? I'm going to bring soft things and romance to your life.”
 

She smiled in spite of her depression. Everyone ought to have a Conlon in his life.
 

What she objected to in Nancy wasn't so much her sexual
laissez-faire
, but that attitude of not really caring, the inability to make a commitment. Passion she could accept, even basically thoughtless reflexive desire, the sexual knee jerk; but what she failed to understand was the whore's detached sangfroid which didn't even have the justification of elementary commerce. But looking back on her relationship with Nancy, it should have been obvious that she'd always been this way. The only difference, Jane realized, was that she chose to deny it. She wasn't so much sorry for herself as angered by Nancy's stupidity.
 

Jane wondered vaguely if Nancy had ever been anything more than an imaginary number, a fantasy mother whom she had created out of the void of childhood. Were Nancy Teller Siddley and James Harmon Siddley real, or were they moon people?
 

Conlon, in a slightly dated Chanel knobbly-tweed suit, dark glasses, and medium-length ash-blond wig, had discovered the perfect method for complementing her wardrobe. In the absence of charge plates, she impersonated her mother.
 

“I thought Bendel's was your place,” Jane said.
 

“I'm wanted dead or alive there. My mother made me return the stuff last spring. The accounts department at Saint Laurent is a little screwed up—late bills, unconscious sales girls in a world they never made. My word against theirs.”
 

“Why doesn't Mel give you some money?”
 

Irritation showed on Conlon's face. Jane had touched on the unmentionable.
 

“Why do you think?”
 

“He's broke.”
 

“Who said you had a low IQ?” She regrouped her forces and a ray of optimism broke through the reality of the situation.
 

“Getting conned's not so bad,” Jane said, “as long as you know about it up front.”
 

“That makes all the difference. Listen, let's steal something at Saint Laurent. That always makes me feel better.”
 

“I'll pay,” Jane said.
 

“The hell with that. You don't know how to enjoy life. I think I need a trouser suit to go with my thighs ... to stop them from spreading,” she added. “The minute I see Mel, he starts pulling my clothes off. Everything I've got is being invisibly mended. Some girls wind up with rings or Puerto Rico. All I've got to show for my affair is broken zippers. He's got this hang-up—every time we make it, he's playing a rape scene.”