Superior Women (37 page)

“I’d call him and take him out to lunch. Or invite him to dinner. I think maidenly modesty is going out of style. Thank God.” She coughs again. “Is that what you wanted me to say?”

In a happy way, Megan laughs.

But first she makes a call to Biff, who is still at the publishing house near Union Square. Biff is now plump and sleek with success, terrifically busy, in a professional way, but he always has time for a chat. His voice, along with his girth and his worldly success, has grown; it is not so much larger as deeper, more resonant. And his laugh too is richer and deeper.

After some preliminary bookish gossip, Megan asks if he remembers a book they published in the early fifties, on the Lincoln Brigade.

“But of course I do. Its total sale was something under six hundred copies. How could I forget a sales figure like that?”

“Well, the point is, I really need a copy. Do you think there is one, somewhere around?”

“One can only look.”

“The thing is, I’d like it as soon as possible.”

“Well, I wouldn’t dare ask why. I only remark that it’s a curious book for which to develop a sudden raging need.”

Megan laughs. As she often does, she is thinking how much she likes Biff.

“However,” Biff continues, “by an odd chance I have a necessary party to go to, in your neighborhood. If you could give me a drink quite promptly at six, I would come by with the book.
If
I find it. Shall I call you?”

“No, of course not. Come anyway. I haven’t seen you forever.”

“Perfect.
”

Knowing Biff, Megan knows that “promptly at six” will mean sometime near seven, with luck; nevertheless, herself a prompt person, she begins to wait at six. And she nervously plans the phone call to Henry, in case Biff does not bring the book, has not found it, or has possibly forgotten all about it. Biff is well-intentioned, at least in her direction, but often overcommitted, a little scattered.

And without the book, just what will she say to Henry Stuyvesant? She knows that a simple invitation to dinner is what she should do, that would be “correct,” and liberated. But still. She then comforts herself with the thought that she may not even be able to get in touch with Henry; he was staying at the Gramercy Park that day, he said, but she believes that he usually lives somewhere in the South, is teaching there. And she
will not
call Adam to find out Henry’s whereabouts.

However Biff does arrive at six fifteen; a record, of sorts. And he brings the book. Biff, pink-faced and puffing, in a splendid new-looking checked gray suit. “Darling, your stairs are more and more too much for me,” he wheezes. “Either you must move or I must
lose some weight. Perhaps both? You don’t see yourself in something really smart, uptown? With an elevator, for the dear Lord’s sake? For my sake, for that matter.”

“You’re an angel to bring the book. Let me get you a drink.”

“You note how wonderfully I do not ask why you wanted it.” Biff’s large blue eyes blink soulfully at Megan.

“You are wonderful, I always say so,” she counters, and she goes off into the kitchen.

Henry Stuyvesant is immediately reached at the Gramercy Park.

“Uh, Henry? This is Megan Greene. We, uh, met with Adam Marr—”

“Megan! of course, it’s really good to hear from you. And odd that you should call at just this moment: I got in ten minutes ago, I’m up here for some meetings.”

She tries to laugh. “Well, I know it’s several years late, but I did get the book for you. The Lincoln Brigade one.”

“Oh, that’s really good of you. I’d almost forgotten, but you’re kind.”

Naturally enough, Henry has sounded a little surprised, Megan thinks—both at hearing from her, she assumes, and at her bothering to get him a book which he cannot really have wanted very much, ever. And so it is hard for her to continue with her plan; she has to force herself to plunge ahead. “How about your coming for dinner, here?” she asks abruptly, and then begins to explain, “I haven’t cooked for a while, and you get so tired of going out, and that way I could give you the book. And where I live is very easy to get to. It’s just off Fifth. As a matter of fact when I used to work near where you are, I always walked.” At the end of all this she is out of breath.

“That sounds really swell. No one has asked me to dinner for ever so long.” A pause. “But I do hope you mean very soon? I have to get back down to North Carolina in a couple of days.”

They settle on the following night, at seven.

•     •     •

Megan spends an inordinate amount of time planning and changing menus, and planning and changing her plans for her clothes, for that projected evening. She finally forces herself to desist from both preoccupations, and she tells herself that any good dinner will do, or any dress (but: short dress or long? or velvet pants? silk shirt or sweater?).

It is the hottest October on record. What summer leaves are left on the city’s trees go limp; in the narrow concrete-floored garden behind the building where Megan lives, in the Village, the big ferns droop dustily to the paving, in their death throes. On such a night, eight or ten years back, she would have sat out on the fire escape, two floors up from where she lives now; she would have sat there praying for a breeze, and envying rich people who will sit out the heat in air-conditioned restaurants or hotel rooms. Now she herself has an air-conditioned bedroom, to which she has repaired from time to time, that day, between frenetic intervals of food preparation, of polishing wine glasses and silver. Of killing time.

Henry is mercifully prompt, for which he gracefully, laughingly apologizes: “I’m sorry, I can never manage to be late,” he tells her, at the door. “Always boringly on the nose.” And he adds, “You won’t mind my state of undress.” He is so tall, entering her room, just slightly stooped. He carries his coat, a striped seersucker. He is also carrying a brown paper bag: white wine that turns out to be miraculously still cold.

Greeting him, taking the wine—“Oh, lovely, thanks!”—what Megan most clearly reacts to is his face: she sees that she was wrong in imagining that anyone else could look like Henry Stuyvesant. His is the strongest, the most original and interesting face that she has ever seen. Its planes are as balanced as chords, its black eyebrows authoritative, mouth wide and firm. His expression is intent, highly serious. He is just now seriously concentrated on her, Megan feels.

And now, she thinks, we will go through an evening of silly
conversation; it will be hours before I can even think of touching his mouth.

She takes the wine into the kitchen and stands there for a minute, catching her breath, as she continues to think about the evening that stretches ahead, on this hottest and heaviest of nights. And quite suddenly, although she likes Henry very much, it all seems unbearably depressing: the drinks she is about to make, the obligatory talk about mutual friends, it having been established that Henry knows both Peg and Lavinia, and Adam and Janet—quite possibly there will be quite a lot of Adam. They will talk about some books, and his summer in Georgia. And, being both more intelligent and more polite than most men are, and more truly fond of women, Megan senses, he will ask her about her work, and she will say what she has just begun to think: that she doesn’t like it, much.

And maybe, at the end of the evening, after too much to drink, there will be some exhausted, half-drunken exchange of love. That is how it goes, these days, when you ask a man to your apartment for dinner. It is what you both expect. Whereas Megan would give anything in the world for some permission,
now,
simply to trace the shape of Henry’s wide mouth with one forefinger. Just to touch his mouth, right away.

She returns to the living room with the requisite tall cold glasses, gin and tonic; she hands one to Henry and she sits down near him, on her broad smartly and newly upholstered sofa. And then she smiles; she can feel the smile involving her whole face, her mouth and eyes. She looks at Henry. What she has just thought is, Why do I need permission though? Why not just touch him?

Henry smiles too, of course. He sips at his drink, though, before he says, “I insist that you tell me what you just thought, to make you smile like that.”

Megan puts down her glass. She reaches toward him, and with one chilled wet finger, very slowly she traces the outer line of his mouth, that small firm ridge, as delicate and sensitive as a vein. As lovely to her touch as she knew it would be. “There,” she says. “That’s what I just thought of doing.”

He reaches then and does the same to her, touching her mouth as slowly, as lingeringly. His finger also cold.

A little later, after kissing, Megan murmurs, “My bedroom’s air-conditioned, actually,” and then she laughs, very quietly, as he does.

They get up, and Megan starts toward the hall, her bedroom, but Henry stops her for a moment, holding her arm. “You make me so happy,” he tells her. “The way you are. Already. You really do.”

That promising mood, of a rich and happy leisurely time, remains with them all night, in Megan’s big cool room, her wide bed; her room seems an island, remote, in the surrounding sea of heat, the thick black night.

“The way you come to me,” Henry tells her, at some point. “It’s just extraordinary.”

“Well, it is for me.” She is shy, pleased.

“And your breasts. I never met such a generous woman.”

In that chilly room sweat cools on their wet, slick bodies. In an interval of rest Megan pulls up a sheet and the nearest light blanket, covering them both. Some weird half-light from the pre-dawn city beyond her delicate curtains has made Henry just visible to her, but only his face, and already she misses that long strong pale body.

Somewhat later, simultaneously awake, they both look at their watches; it is almost five, on the following morning.

“Lord, no wonder I’m starved.” It is Henry who says this, but it could as easily have been Megan; she is suddenly awake, and she has never been so hungry.

Foolishly, she says, “What a hostess I am. Now you’ll never come again for dinner.”

“Oh, will I not.”

They laugh.

Megan offers, “I’ll bring things in. You stay here.” For a moment she has liked the notion of serving him in bed.

“No, don’t be foolish. We’ll forage, rustle it up together, okay? I’m a handy man in the kitchen.”

Megan likes this even better.

In an amazingly familiar way, for comparative strangers, they get up. They go into Megan’s kitchen, they set about making huge sandwiches from her carefully prepared dinner. Greed and sexual exhaustion combine to make them dismissive of nonessentials, like tidiness.

At Megan’s round pine table they sit drinking wine, eating messy chicken and cheese and avocado. An unreal pale light comes in from the street, making paler their drained, pale faces.

Very solemnly Henry says to her, “I think maybe this is the favorite night of my life.”

Not considering what she is going to say, Megan answers him seriously. “Do you realize that in less than two years I’ll be forty?”

In some stupid movie that Lavinia and Potter once saw together, a man prefaced his advances to a lady (although they were already in bed) by saying, “My dear, would you consent to do me the greatest honor—”

It was fairly funny at the time, Lavinia thought, but to Potter that line was hilarious, excruciating, hysterical, to a degree that he repeats it
all the time.
In bed with Lavinia, fumbling at her nightgown, Potter will stage-whisper, “My dear, would you consent—” Fumbling, reaching with his dull, hot, unarousing fingers.

No,
she has wanted to scream at him; no, don’t touch me, I have the curse, I’m bleeding a lot, my head aches, I hate you. You never make me come. She does not say any of these things, of course not, not even the ones that are true.

Even, most of the time she still thinks of herself and Potter as “happily married”; they almost never fight, never yell at each other, and they look wonderful together, still—she is sure of that. And they are very popular, invited out everywhere, all the time. It is just that she cannot bear for him to touch her. “My dear, would you consent—”
Jesus:
no—no—no—

Is she in fact frigid? Is that what has happened to her, along with almost reaching forty? And, would it be worse to be frigid in an absolute sense, or only frigid with your husband? Logical Lavinia cannot quite work that one out, not yet.

In the old days with Henry Stuyvesant, though, she came every time, or almost, and so quickly; they both would be trying to slow themselves down, postponing, in those long sultry nights in the river house, near Fredericksburg, in smells of rain and honeysuckle, wet grass and earth-wafting river smells. Or anywhere, hotel rooms in New York, making love with Henry she would come again and again—although now she does not even like Henry, and they never see each other. Everyone says he is a Communist, and he has no money.

Nevertheless, ten years or so ago she was wildly in love with him; she cannot pretend otherwise to herself. Which should have given her some clue as to his character, Lavinia recognizes, with an inward smile of pure irony. It is clear by now that she only falls in love with shits. Harvey the crippled crook, and then terrible Gordon Shaughnessey (thank God he died), and then Henry. Whereas, with Potter Cobb, her nice husband, with whom she was never, never “wildly in love” at any moment, she is sexually bored, she is frigid.

Is it simply that Potter is so exceptionally nice, is not a shit—or would she at this point, at this age be frigid with anyone?

Oh, if only some friend were around to talk all this over with, Lavinia sighs to herself—in her yellow silk bedroom, just redone. What fun we could have if old Kitty were around, instead of dead, her liver ruined, at thirty-eight. “Well, in that case you’d just better find yourself some other rotten guy,” is what Kitty would say, probably—with her yelping, coughing laugh.

Or even Peg. Although of course with Peg the tone would have
to be serious; she could only hint at the nature of her problem, using words like “exciting” instead of “sexy,” and of course “respond” for “come.” In the old days, good old Peg would have reminded Lavinia of the essential goodness of good old Potter, her lovely little daughter, and her several lovely large houses. But now, with Peg, who knows? On his last visit to New York Cameron Sinclair (who is terribly nice, both Lavinia and Potter have decided: does this make Peg frigid with him?)—anyway, Cameron told Lavinia and Potter that Peg spends absolutely all her time with some friend she met in Georgia, a Mexican girl, from Los Angeles, “even if she’s really rather pretty.” Cameron said. At this point Lavinia cannot imagine any conversation with Peg, who never writes, much less a womanly talk about sex. (But did Peg ever, uh, go to bed with a black person, down there in Georgia? This thought is so shocking, so
wild,
that Lavinia actually cringes, and then giggles, silently, furtively.)