Superior Women (36 page)

These one-acts were produced off-Broadway, and were variously received. Bloodthirsty, trivial, warmongering, passé, obscure, and blatant: those were among the words used by his negative critics, in addition to the old staples of Marr criticism: violent, obscene, sensational. Other, younger critics, and a few old leftists, found the new plays powerful, eloquent, brilliant. “At last Adam Marr has found a subject matter commensurate with his formidable talent,” said one young critic, in the venerable
Partisan Review.

Megan is generally in agreement with the latter group, and she thinks his new plays are by far the best work that Adam has ever done.

But somehow she and Adam have not seen each other for several
years. For one thing, her life is as intensely private as his is public. Following the example set by Barbara Blumenthal, and also her own inclinations, Megan never goes to the places considered “in,” she is never seen at P. J. Clarke’s or the Russian Tea Room or Elaine’s; she does not even go to the Algonquin, or the Oak Room, at the Plaza. All of which are favorite haunts of Adam’s; he has seemed especially fond of the Oak Room (curious, to anyone not knowing him as well as Megan does); he is even careful to behave well on those premises.

However, after seeing the second of his new plays, the soccer match, Megan is so moved, so really overwhelmed, that she goes home and writes a note to Adam.

To which he responds with a phone call, and an invitation to lunch. “Your note was exceptionally kind,” he says to her over the phone, in a formal, quite unfamiliar tone, and then, more recognizably, “I’ve missed you, you silly old bitch.”

She is to meet him in the Oak Room at one on the following day.

Early September; it is Labor Day weekend, in fact.

And there he is. Megan spots him standing at the bar, the moment she shyly enters that large, dark, and crowded, rather intimidating room: Adam in dark gray flannels, blue button-down shirt, and black knit tie (his Oak Room costume?), the too curly hair slicked down. Adam, coming toward her with his broad twisted smile, and a drink in his hand that turns out to be sherry.

“My God, you’re so thin,” is his greeting, after their classic non-kiss; but he looks at her approvingly, so that Megan decides that she has after all worn the right dress. (Dressing, she remembered harsh words from Adam to Janet on that subject: “You dumb cunt, you still dress like a college girl.”)

He leads her to a small window table that he has evidently reserved.

“Thin,
” he says again, and grins, as they sit down. “But actually you look terrific.” That last in his most Harvard voice.

Away from Adam, Megan has tended to see him at his worst,
which is surely his most conspicuous side: his drunken or even sober arrogance, his racist obsessions (all the crazy talk about Jews, sometimes blacks); his compulsive obscenity (she does not like, has never liked being called a cunt—does anyone?). His real cruelty to Janet. And, recalling all that, Megan has wondered at what she has to recognize in herself as unshakable vestiges of fondness for him. How can she even think of liking Adam Marr? she has often wondered.

However, face to face with Adam, across the small table, Megan is very much aware that she does like him, and not for the first time she wonders if what she feels for Adam is sexual, after all? Certainly it does not seem so. Emphatically, she does not want to go to bed with him (but would she, if she had not first encountered him attached to Janet, so to speak? She still thinks not).

What it seems to be is simply affection, the affection of old friends who sometimes fight. Maybe this is how women feel about their brothers? Not having had one, Megan cannot precisely know.

All through that lunch, though, Adam is at his interested, kindly, noncombative best, so that Megan realizes that she had forgotten just those most appealing qualities of his. He can, for instance, be more genuinely “interested” than anyone; his curiosity is infinite, and real—as when he asks Megan about her literary agent life, in detail, perceptively.

She explains, as he listens carefully, and then he says, “I get an impression that that’s
all
you’re doing, though. Which is not a criticism. I’m just remarking that you’re not in love.”

“Oh. Well, no.” It is possible that Megan is blushing; she can’t tell.

Adam stares out the window, half frowning at the green rises of Central Park, as Megan wonders apprehensively what is to come.

Returned to her, Adam speaks much more hesitantly than usual. “You superior women have a real problem for yourselves, don’t you. Just any old guy won’t do. You wouldn’t like him, and even if you did your strength would scare him, even make him mad. You know, that’s actually one reason I had to dump Janet, though I can’t say I knew it at the time. I began to have some
black suspicion that she was stronger than I was. So I dumped her for that dumb dinge. Poor Sheila was dumber and more cowardly than anyone. What you need”—Adam is visibly winding up this remarkable set of admissions—“what you need is a hero.”

Megan is silenced, suffering from a variety of shock. Not seeing herself as “superior,” or as especially “strong,” she is intrigued by Adam’s view, though at the same time she wonders: is he simply inventing her, as though she were a woman in one of his plays? She recognizes the probability of this.

But for Adam to say that he left Janet because of a perception of her strength is extraordinary, fantastic. In fact it is so fantastic that Megan is convinced that, should she ever remind him of this view (which she never will), he would deny it, as being
her
fantasy.

Adam suddenly laughs. And, as though continuing with his last thoughts on Megan’s need for a hero, he snorts, “But you seem to go in for antiheroes. Very fashionable, Miss Greene. That silly little French queer, Danny. Whatever led you to him, I wonder?”

This has been a serious question, and so, very much liking him at that moment, Megan tries to answer. “I’m not sure,” she says. “Partly pity, I guess. He was so thin, and so broke. I guess you could call it maternal. Besides, we were just friends. And I think it’s harder to have good judgment in another country. You suspend all your usual standards, or something.”

“Your old pal Henry James did pretty well with that idea. Dining out on it, so to speak.”

Slightly surprised at even this degree of awareness of James on Adam’s part, Megan half agrees. “I suppose.” And then she asks, “Do you still see Danny? Isn’t it odd that he’s never called me here?”

“He’s a coward. I told you, inferior men are afraid of you, Megan. Anyway, he’s gone back to Paris. I couldn’t make an actor out of him. God knows I tried. And maybe all I sensed in him was that basic dishonesty. His playing a role. Acting male.”

“What’s terrible is that I can hardly remember him at all.”

“He didn’t really touch you,” Adam speculates, but his voice is vague; he has lost interest in Danny. Then he scowls, “Did you know about Aron?”

“Uh, what?”

“He’s a fucking queer. A Jewish fag.”

“How do you know that?” Megan has simply asked the first question that came to mind.

“Janet told me. And do you know how she knew? He fucking told her. Can you imagine that, a boy telling his own mother that he’s queer?”

“Well, it might be better than not telling her?”

“Aaaah.” Adam makes his well-known sound of disgust. “Don’t give me that psycho claptrap.” But, are there tears in his eyes?

“Well, whatever he is,” Megan tells Adam gently, “he’s awfully nice. And really bright.”

“You’re a nice woman. Most of the time.” Adam has regained control, and some cheerfulness. “Even if you are a little too big for your britches, as my sainted mother liked to say.” He grins, so that Megan wonders if he really
has
suffered over Aron’s being “queer”; she believes that he has, and she wonders why Janet told him. Janet had already told Megan about Aron: Janet, new and cool, saying, “Adam will have a fit, but I actually think it has more to do with genes.”

Perhaps fortunately, at that moment Adam and Megan are interrupted; someone, a man, has come up to their table. Tall, extremely tall and thin, and dark, with large dark nearsighted eyes. Henry Stuyvesant. Of course, and with a surge of warm liking, Megan remembers meeting him at Adam and Janet’s White Plains house, all those years ago.

Adam stands, the two men shake hands, they make hearty sounds of greeting, as Adam asks, “Do you know Megan Greene?”

Henry and Megan reach toward each other to shake hands, at the same moment they both say, “But we met—” and they laugh. As Megan thinks: he liked me too?

“You never sent me the Lincoln Brigade book,” Henry then reminds her. “You said you would, and all these years I’ve been waiting. You’d just published it, remember?”

“Oh, I know I meant to. Maybe I could find it.” She did not send it, Megan now remembers, out of sheer shyness; she was so afraid that he had not really wanted the book, that he had been
merely polite about it, and would misinterpret her gesture of sending him the book.

“That’s a splendid tan, old man,” Adam intervenes. “Good summer at the Vineyard?”

“Uh, no. Actually I’m just back from Georgia.” Henry smiles, curiously apologetic, or embarrassed, and then he turns back to Megan. “Funny, I met a friend of yours down there. Peg Sinclair. We mentioned you; I mean I told her I remembered meeting you,” and he smiles. “She’s so nice,” he adds. “I really liked her.”

“Oh, Peg—how strange. I’d heard from Lavinia that she’d gone there. But how is she?”

“Well, she’s okay. We got to be quite pals, down there. And then funnily enough, it turns out that we’re distant cousins.”

“All rich Eastern Protestants are distant cousins,” Adam intones, and then he laughs, as though this was a joke.

Still looking at Henry, Megan thinks, Suppose I call him tomorrow and say that I have that book, which I can probably get, and to please come over for a drink? Please make love to me?

“You’re probably quite right,” Henry is saying, to Adam. “Although if I were really rich I don’t think I’d be staying at the Gramercy Park.” And then, “Well, I’m awfully glad to have met you again, Megan Greene. I hope it won’t be so long before the next time.”

They exchange a smile, a look; then he is gone.

As though Henry’s presence had in some way been constraining, Adam in his absence becomes very garrulous. Gossipy. He asks Megan if she knew that Price and Lucy Christopher had just had their fifth child. “Very curious,” he says. “Almost every one of their kids has been born exactly nine months after one of mine. He’s still competing with me, I swear he is. Or actually fucking me, through Lucy, poor woman. And I understand quite a lot of other ladies too. But he doesn’t really have the courage of all those erections. Price is a tease.”

Half listening, still thinking strongly of Henry—the puzzle of his extreme attractiveness, to her; is it simply that she hasn’t been with anyone for so long? is hard up?—in an idle, careless way Megan remarks that she didn’t realize Adam had five children.

“Well, of course I do. Janet didn’t tell you? Fusai is marvelous, the best one yet. Shit, I think I knocked her up the first night we met. And the kids are beautiful.”

Megan does not tell him that Fusai is a whole chapter of his life that she has missed, nor that she and Janet do not talk about him very much, anymore. When they do meet, which is rare, both being busy, they talk about their work. Janet is doing cancer research. Megan talks about her books and writers, her growing unrest with her professional life. Not Adam’s marriages and children.

Even the conversation about Aron’s homosexuality was unusual, for Megan and Janet; it only took place because Janet’s conversation with Adam had been the night before.

“In fact the Nip is a great woman,” Adam continues (as Megan wonders: does she know you call her that?). “Sometimes I think she could be my final wife, but then I start to fantasize about number six, or
seven.
”

Adam grins his corrupt-priest grin, which is very appealing, and Megan laughs. Seeing Henry Stuyvesant has made her light in the heart somehow.

After lunch Megan and Adam separate, near the fountain in front of the Plaza; he gets into a cab, going off fast, and Megan in a leisurely way starts walking down Fifth Avenue, toward her office.

The day has turned very warm; most people look uncomfortable, the businessmen in their suits, the women in from the suburbs in silk dresses and light wool coats. But there on the corner of Fifth and 57th is a group of hippies, in their ruffles and rags, bare arms and feet. Several of them have bad skin and vacant stoned eyes, hollow smiles. But Megan notices that one of them, a boy who seems to be their leader, looks clean and alert, and happy, not just doped. He is tall and dark and nearsighted, in rimless glasses, but he looks, astonishingly, very much like Henry Stuyvesant. He is carrying a sign that says
MAKE LOVE NOT WAR,
of course. As Megan goes by, he gives her a friendly, sexy wink, to which she finds herself responding, and smiling, smiling.

•     •     •

That hippie boy is the start of a curious phenomenon, in Megan’s life, one that persists for several days: she sees men who might be, who almost are, Henry Stuyvesant, everywhere. This is especially strange in that Henry’s face and his stance, his way of walking, are all quite unusual: how is it possible that she sees that many men who are that tall, dark, wide-eyed,
serious,
with strong wide mouths? But the delusion is so strong that Megan begins to fear that she well might see the real Henry and dismiss him, not speaking, as one more figment of her seemingly deranged imagination.

Idling in Barbara’s office, one day after lunch in early October, Megan asks, “If you saw the same face and body, on a great many different people who actually have other faces, what would you do—would you go to a shrink?” (This is odd: in her own tight voice Megan has heard an echo of Cathy’s voice.)

Barbara laughs, then coughs. “I assume somehow you mean a man’s face? Someone you know?”

“Well, yes. But not very well.”