Small Changes (53 page)

“Gonna get married again?” he asked her.

She shook her head no. “I didn’t like marriage, Jim. I don’t like keeping house for someone.”

“What’d you do? Go back and live with those women?”

“Yes. There are five of us now and two kids.”

“And no men?”

She smiled. “One little boy aged four.”

“You ought to make him into a real sissy,” Jim said, without much edge. “I figure you’ll marry one of those professors if
you hang around the colleges there. Besides, where did you say you were working?”

“A computer company.” She saw something then. Something leapt in her head and she sat up straight. She saw something hurting in him that she must stop, because the hurting was mistaken. “Jim, I didn’t leave you because … I mean, I wasn’t trying to turn you in on … a professional. I think you think … that what I want is a man with a college degree.”

“Sure. You always were smart. Better than me in school. You always went in for books. That’s the way it goes.”

“No, listen, that’s not it. I see what you think—that I don’t want a man who works in a garage. I must want a man who works in an office. Who makes more money and comes home with his hands clean. But that’s not it. Really.”

“You think I don’t get sick trying to get ahead? I don’t want to be stuck like my old man doing the same job on the line for forty years until I drop dead. But they make it hard. They make it hard to get a start.”

“I’m in the same place, Jim. I can’t get a good job. The thing I have I got through a woman friend. I don’t want any husband. I don’t want to live in a family. I like living in a commune. I want to live my own life and do the things I want to.”

“You think I’m such a dope I can’t understand. But I can see the world’s changing. But you see how far you get, how much you can really get away with.” He ate his steak for a while. Then he got into a fantasy trip about how he was going to start his own garage. He was going to set up a high class garage and repair foreign cars, sports cars. That’s where the money was, those guys with cars that had to be tuned all the time. He went on about how his uncle was going to finance him.

But her life must seem as much a fantasy to him, her ambitions as tenuous. Maybe he’d get his garage. That was likelier than that this society would let her live as she wanted and find real work to do and a permanent commune. It was blind to feel superior to Jim’s daydreams when her own were so fragile.

When they were leaving, he touched her more than necessary, helping her on with her coat. His hands fell on her shoulders. Again she could read his feeling, that he was wanting her a bit, wistfully, wishfully, nostalgically. He was
wanting her to come back with him wherever he was living. He said he’d given up the old apartment. Briefly she felt it with her body. She was no longer afraid of him and she remembered now when she had loved him, she could let herself remember it with more than her head again. But she did not love him. She did not want to lie with her body. She did not want to borrow him to prove to herself that she was capable of sexual response her world called normal.

Instead as they came out onto the street and she waved to a passing cab, she waited till the cab had stopped. Then quickly she put her hands on his shoulders and rose up to kiss him. “Take good care of yourself,” she said, still hugging him, and then hopped into the cab and shut the door.

21

I’m Good and I’ll Prove It

Miriam was making black bean soup on a turkey-carcass base. The big old kitchen was steamy with good smells. The turkey had been roasted for Neil’s parents on the weekend. She could not persuade herself that she liked them, but they could be worse. They lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the trip was too long for them to make often, as they had not the habit of flying. His father was an optometrist, Sherwin Stone; his mother, Emily, kept house. There had been four boys and his mother often confused them in her memories and in conversation: would call Neil Simon, his next older brother. Neil was the youngest and his mother made a big show of doting on him. Yet she was always saying, “But you used to love lima beans,” and he was always correcting her, “No, that’s Si, Mother. I never ate lima beans.” Whatever it was Emily doted on so loudly, so sentimentally, it wasn’t the man she was married to. Whenever Emily made such a mistake, she would be flustered and upset, while Neil would say in his calm voice that she should not worry. Sometimes a muscle in his cheek would kick.

With his father Neil had long conversations about the computer business, especially about Logical. His father thought being director of a company was serious business. He was always trying to impress upon Neil that being a director was a burden under which he should stoop at least a little: appear to ruminate decisions. Always his father would ask him eagerly when the stock would go public. Neil had some stock from the beginning and some from options he had exercised since. She could not see why he bothered buying pieces of paper with no value, but that seemed part of the charade of being a corporation, along with having a lawyer write up directors’ meetings that never occurred and keeping a corporate seal in Efi’s drawer. Always Neil would answer that the corporation was operating on a shoestring, in debt to the bank, and if for some mad reason they ever did go public, he certainly would not advise his father to invest in them. His father, thin and gray—gray in skin and gray in hair—would take off his glasses, of which he always had at least one spare in his vest pocket, and polish them carefully, frowning.

Neil talked little about his family. He told her he remembered mainly trivia from his childhood except that it had been, he thought, normal and relatively happy. She had a grudge. She felt his long years of finding it hard to relate to others off the technical level, the training in being out of touch with his own feelings and not knowing them till they knocked him down—meeting his own emotions suddenly like a car bearing down on him in the street—was the fault of some powerful and pervasive atmosphere of repression in his family. Obviously there was a steady unremitting pressure to succeed.

Emily was pleased that she was Jewish and almost a Ph.D. Almost, almost. Neil’s project had had a plausible relationship to her thesis, now moidering. Lucky she was working for a company and not a university. Nepotism rules would have forced her out of her own department immediately. At least in Logical she could remain in the company. Still Emily could not see why she should bother to get her degree, now that she was married.… She would work again on it, she would find time in the summer, when things were slower at Logical with people going off on vacation and taking off early and sneaking long weekends. She would use that ebb to steal the time to finish her thesis.

Yet she felt oppressed by Emily. Little jokes that offended her. Little references to the coming grandson to carry on the name. As if “Stone” were a name anybody had carried very long or very far. Miriam Stone, that should finish those awful old jabs about Venus Berg forever. But of course nobody around her even knew about that. Except Beth. But Beth ran over things like that, a clear stream that stayed clear.

Mother by surrogate, suggesting similar pressures from her mother yet not her mother, not her face, her voice, her hands. Touched that old wound. But she
had
been good, playing her role all weekend. Neil seemed pleased. He knew the amenities came hard for her. He did not require that she want to please his parents but only that she do it. She walked through the empty conversations and the necessary vacuous hours of all sitting uncomfortably trying to think of something to say and she walked through them all without bumping too hard into anything, while her head ached and her eyes burned with boredom. At last it all ended and they were once again alone together and everything returned to being simple.

The soup steamed and lazily she toweled her hair dry, shook it back on her shoulders, stretched, and stirred the pot. Saturday afternoon. Neil was off playing tennis with Dick, as usual. Neil thought it important to keep in shape. His slender neat compact body. A good body, under control and responsive. They made love a lot. That had been a pleasant surprise. When she began to feel attracted to Neil, she had felt that was because he was a good man, a man who might be loyal to her and kind and gentle, a man who would value her. She had talked a great deal with her therapist about exactly why she was interested in Neil, as opposed to the qualities that had drawn her to Phil and Jackson and dozens of others. They were good values this time, rational values.

After the first few times in bed, somewhat awkward and patchy, they had got into a good thing sexually. They made love frequently. She felt secure enough about their loving to admit that he was not as experienced in pleasing a woman, in exciting her, as she was used to. But what did that matter, by comparison with the lack of tension? Sex was not a battleground or a proving ground. It was just their way of loving. It was simple and frequent, and if he did not always seem to sense that she needed more time than he to come, the frequency
of the sex made it less frustrating on the occasions when she was left hanging.

Once when she had talked with her therapist, Dr. Bachman, about her strong reaction to Jackson, that sense of being sexually out of control with him, he had suggested that her strong response was based on masochism, based on her satisfying with him a deep need to punish herself. At once she had felt a strong shock of denial, almost a desire to laugh, an absolute physical sense that he was wrong. But slowly she had forced herself to an acceptance of what Dr. Bachman said, because the phenomena of resistance had become familiar by that time. Now that blind sexual spasm was a thing of the past: her mature sexuality was calmer and sunnier.

When she heard a sound at the front door, she immediately hoped it was Neil home early: then they would make love this afternoon. She liked best to make love in the afternoon, when she had her full energy. Walking to the door, she rejoiced in her body. Still smiling, she realized by the knocking it could hardly be Neil, but her joy remained, though muted. “Jaime. How elegant you look.” She presumed on her leeway as a married lady and kissed him. Jaime was so touchable-looking, more than once a brief urge to get him into bed had passed through her. Clearly, however, she saw his nervous virginity. He was worse than Beth, really, who had passed through sex like a patch of briars. She would make a bet Jaime had never ventured in. Besides, mature love was faithful love, as Dr. Bachman had led her to see.

But Jaime liked to be caressed, now that she was safely married. He kissed her back, tangling his hand in her still faintly damp hair, curling as it dried. “What smells delicious?”

She swept him back to the kitchen with her. “Black bean soup. Yes, you can stay to supper.”

Jaime peered into the pot, slender, faunish, with yellow curls trailing on his thin shoulders. “You see through me. What are those vegetables floating around, then?”

“It’s pureed at the end. Come sit and talk with me.”

Jaime bowed his head in mock submission. “Why does Neil play tennis with Dick? Dick’s such a clod. How can Neil tolerate him? Brain the size of a microdot.”

“Neil doesn’t like to judge anyone. When he suspects he dislikes somebody he works with, he feels guilty. Remember, he’s known Dick for years. Maybe Dick was less of a clod then.”

“Neil is so much more … sympathetic, cultured. I’d think Dick would drive him to tears.”

Miriam shrugged. Dick never ceased to rasp on her nerves. “Neil is a creature of habit. Habit frees him from the necessity of making small decisions all day long, every day. That freedom matters to him. He’ll eat lunch every day at Orzato’s, though the food is rotten, because it’s less effort to go eat that rotten food than to search out new food probably as rotten. Playing tennis with Dick is what Neil does Saturday afternoons, weather permitting. Not to do so would require a decision and he would have to convey that decision to Dick. That might cause pain. Neil would rather walk on coals than cause pain. Which is one reason I married him, I think.”

Jaime adored Neil. Jaime had enjoyed working with her, he responded with excitement to her ideas, they had never spent outside time together until she married Neu. Jaime had few friends. He had no way to make connections with people, locked into his work and his ego. But he could spend time in the house and slowly he began to talk a little. Idly she remembered that Jackson had used to boast that the Pearl Street apartment was a web, a net, a halfway house. Well, it had been a damned cold one: witness how they had treated Dorine. She was making a warm place here. Always lots of good food, always space and comfort.

Fortunately Dick had a date and did not stay to supper. If he had Jaime would probably have left and she preferred Jaime’s company. After supper Neil and Jaime played chess. She wondered why she didn’t. She had not played since that time with Jackson. The game remained invested with suspicion. Perhaps she guessed that if she brushed up a bit she might beat Neil and that would not do. Her therapist had always been suggesting that her need to compete with men was a product of her resentment of her brother and his superior position. Well, maybe, but it was hard enough to justify to everybody with all those notions about what women shouldn’t do and be her scientific work. Work was what counted. So beyond that initial affront, she sought now to play women’s roles.

After all, she need not be shut out from happiness and fulfillment just because she had a certain kind of brain. Just because she could think well about systems design did not mean she was doomed not to be loving, nurturing, and warm. Her life had hurt her, she had felt herself defeated till
pain sang in her. Despair and dead ends and broken connections. Now she was through into her sun, but she was careful.

Learning to please Neil who had rescued her, she found she could please others too, in casual ways. It was a dance to bring food out and arrange it and serve it. How easy to do a small thing like asking people to supper. Neil enjoyed having the company without himself having to seek it beyond inviting somebody home. He was proud of the meals she set before guests and tickled at the compliments. “Do you eat like this every night?” Neil always answered with great innocence, “But of course.”