This Is Not for You (23 page)

“For two months, Kate, I was first asking and then begging for a job, anything finally. I couldn’t even pay the rent. ‘Thirty-four years old? Never worked?’ I had to go to my father’s friends. I felt as if I were asking for charity, and that’s exactly what they’d been told to give me. Do you know, one of those bastards even suggested that I be a sort of gigolo for his daughter? ‘Take her to shows and things, my boy. Just the one to do it with all that travel and culture.’ ”

He had finally found a job in an advertising agency, but he was more or less an office boy, even sent out to get coffee for the twenty-five-year-old junior executives nearly fresh from M.A.’s in sociology at Columbia.

“And when I try to explain to Ramona that it’s just not possible, she talks about having to begin at the bottom. Do you know, she isn’t even ashamed of me. That’s what I can’t bear, Kate. That’s what I simply can’t bear.”

There had been no nurse when Monk came home from the hospital with Lissa, which for Andrew seemed as primitive as letting Monk drop her baby in a field. They had no money for new clothes, for theater tickets, for entertaining friends.

“What’s the point to living if you have to live like this? Ramona says lots of people do. Do you know what she says, Kate? Can you imagine? She says, ‘The honeymoon’s over.’ I’ve married Kathleen Norris in disguise! If only she’d bitch about it, if only she’d come out with one ordinary complaint… I sit there and disintegrate before her eyes. Look at me: hair and teeth falling out, bloated with drinking up my child’s piggy bank future. And Ramona says she really doesn’t mind doing her own hair. She doesn’t. And she looks marvelous. She doesn’t look old enough to have a child. People think I’m her father. And all the time that bastard sits up there gloating over my freedom, my dignity, my sanity. He doesn’t give a damn that I have a wife and child.”

“What are you going to do about it, Andy?” I was finally able to ask.

“Something,” he said. “I’m going to do something.”

“Don’t have another drink. Being alcoholic isn’t your style.”

“I’m learning to adjust.”

“A Lawrence father figure.”

“A New York City coal miner—at least that has flair to it. Let me tell you about the psychological principles of the irritating commercial.”

But he allowed himself to be taken home, which was a pleasant two-bedroom apartment north of the George Washington Bridge, sparsely but handsomely furnished, the walls crowded with Andrew’s extraordinary collection of paintings, two or three of which he’d sold to buy all the furniture they needed. Monk was not exactly prepared for us. The moment when she could have left the baby with a bottle and the dinner in the oven and greeted us serenely had passed some time ago. We walked in to Lissa’s howling and Monk’s frantic, last-minute preparations of a meal no sane, young mother would try to cook. I hoped her unreasonable gesture was more for Andrew than for me. I had not had enough married friends to feel comfortable about the hour and a half I had just spent listening to Andrew’s unhappiness, though his criticism of Monk was nothing but a complaint about her kindness and good humor. I am never good at being late. Andrew went to Monk first, who ordered him to deal with the baby, which he did, picking her up and bringing her to me. She was as appealing a combination of them both as I had imagined, the beginning wisps of her mother’s red hair, her father’s almost shocking blue eyes. She gave me an indignant look and turned her face away.

“Hey!” her father said, holding her out from him. “What’s that all about?”

She glared at him, grabbed his nose and squealed a primitive satisfaction.

“Try not to get her too excited,” Monk called from the kitchen.

A moment later she came in, and what Andrew had said about her was true. I could have thought that what the last four years had done to him had not marked her at all, except that an unaltered face is as much a defense as one too quickly eroding. And there was in her manner, as the evening passed, all the experience of her once theoretical doubts. She was uncertain not only with Andrew but with the baby, almost unfamiliar, as if she’d been called in that afternoon to play the part. They tried very hard not to disagree about what to do with Lissa, who woke and cried every hour. Andrew obviously thought she was old enough to be disciplined. Monk couldn’t bear the idea.

“Don’t you think it’s unfair of God to have arranged it this way?” she asked brightly “I mean, she’s so helpless in the hands of absolutely amateur parents.”

I don’t suppose Monk meant that they needed a nurse, but Andrew, convinced that they did, suffered such remarks with only superficial patience. That he was better than Monk with Lissa gave him no comfort and was certainly not reassuring for Monk. She was more in awe of him than I could understand, helplessly inept and eager in her attempts to please him. He did try to be pleased, but much of what she did he did not want to see his wife doing. Her “thrifty, witty” curtains, her delicious but inexpensive meals, her cleverly revised wardrobe all depressed him. Though it was easy to be furious with him, it was hard not to feel sorry, too.

“Maybe I should try to be unhappy,” Monk said when we were alone together. “I can be unhappy for him, but I never expected to live in a great house with servants. I wouldn’t even know how. And that’s what irritates him—I’m a good wife for the bad world he lives in.”

“It’s not really that, Monk,” I said, trying to reassure. “He’s frightened of being a failure.”

“Andy? He couldn’t be,” she said with energetic certainty “He’s just impatient because he has so much confidence. He thinks he can run a firm before six months is up. It’s not a bad job he’s got, you know, Kate. Robin never dreamed of making the salary Andy’s begun with. And we’re not exactly slum dwellers. It’s just that Andy goes into a major depression because he can’t buy a Jackson Pollock or go to Bermuda for the weekend. In five years’ time he’ll probably be able to. Then it will be my turn to be miserable. I don’t even want to be rich. The whole idea scares me.”

In the next room Lissa woke in an immediate rage.

“She’s got her father’s temper,” Monk said, hurrying off with a look of defeat even before she’d tried to cope with the baby.

Andrew came in with the shopping, took the baby from Monk and soon had her changed and eating contentedly. Monk put away the groceries with comments like, “Oh, how nice! Lobster,” and “Were we really out of caviar?” I would like to have thought it funny, but I had outgrown the gallows humor of adolescence. Life was burdensomely serious, even dangerous. I could only be afraid. That fear perversely pleased Andrew. He had found someone to take him seriously. He burdened nearly all the weekend conversations with psychological and economic statistics to indicate the inevitable destruction of the individual and therefore of art. Pompous and panicked, he lectured on the failure of Western Man while Monk blinked and yawned over knitting and I filled ashtrays and emptied glasses.

“It’s
your
crisis, Andy,” I finally said. “You just confuse the issue with generalities.”

He walked out, slamming the door. Monk went on knitting for the moment before Lissa began to cry. We took turns walking her until she fell asleep again on her mother’s shoulder.

“Well, you just can’t let him go on being an angry bore,” I said defensively. “He could make a habit of it.”

“The prince in his frog phase,” Monk explained, resigned. “You know, he’s always been a little like this. It’s just that he was always on his good behavior with you. He shouted about his thesis sometimes, and he can talk for hours about the failure of Cambridge, in fact the whole educational system in England.”

“How long will he stay out?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes he’s away for a day or two, but with you here he’ll just have a couple of drinks around the corner.”

“How do you stand it, Monk?”

“That’s not the problem. It’s Andy who can’t stand it. I get more and more afraid that he’ll simply leave—but let’s not talk about it. Isn’t there something a little sordid in your life that we could talk about for comic relief?”

“Not at the moment,” I said, “but Esther’s doing pretty well.”

I tried to entertain Monk at your expense, so grateful for a topic that I forgot to feel guilty.

“But that’s immoral, Kate, and it’s illegal as well. I can’t believe it. Is he attractive?”

“To some people, he must be. And I think he’s probably very talented.”

“We should rescue her,” Monk decided. “We should get her to come east.”

“To her mother?”

“Ah… I’d forgotten about her. A block. But she could live in Washington with you.”

“I think you could put Lissa down now,” I said.

Andrew came in while Monk was in the bedroom with Lissa and I in the kitchen getting myself another drink.

“I probably need a good psychiatrist,” he said to my back.

“Or wise, kinder friends,” I said, turning to him. He looked terribly tired. “Andy, it’s a bad time, that’s all. You’ll figure it out.”

He nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Monk as she came into the room to join us.

She kissed him tentatively, then stepped back to look at him. “Red and blue are my favorite colors, but I’m not as mad about pale green. Shouldn’t we go to bed?”

I listened to their brief love-making, which was no more reassuring than the faint sirens of New York. Petty, private disasters.

We talked once again before I went back to Washington about saving you, but none of us seriously considered it. The idea was simply an idiom for fond disapproval.

“We haven’t really heard anything about you at all,” Monk said as I was getting ready to leave.

“Nothing much to say. Aside from doing my work and being my boss’s social secretary, I build amplifiers.”

“But aren’t you meeting all sorts of important people?”

“Yes,” I said. “I helped Mrs. Roosevelt on with her coat. She wears the same powder Mother did.”

“And what’s she like?”

“Human.”

“Rare,” Andrew said.

“In a way. But I felt awfully hopeful, as if one really might finally grow up to be human.”

“Well, it’s a marvelous job for you,” Monk said. “You’re so good with old ladies and people like that.”

I made a face.

“But you are. You never say the wrong sort of thing. It’s no way to save the world, of course, but somebody’s got to be pleasant.”

“And being an Indian is such a political asset as well,” I said.

I said goodbye to Lissa with whom I had become intimate enough so that she was willing to pull my hair and chew at my watch band, but she was still indifferent to social customs. It was another year before she learned to call me Crow, the only appropriate nickname I’ve ever been given.

Andrew took me to my train, missing another half day’s work, but he was sober and gentle and apologetic.

“Being in the prime of life is a hell of a letdown after being young, but I’ll sort it out somehow. Meanwhile, keep on being brave and useful for us, won’t you?”

“Take care of your redheads.”

“Yes.”

He settled my suitcase on the rack, handed me a newspaper and a candy bar, kissed me and was gone. It wasn’t the candy bar that made me cry. I was terribly tired.

“Long weekends don’t seem to be your sort of hobby,” Joyce Lowe said to me the next morning when I went into her office to answer some questions about a report.

“Friends with a teething baby,” I said.

“Not the sort of friends to have.”

I shrugged agreeably. I liked Joyce Lowe. She worked hard and had a practical, but not cynical view of what could be accomplished. She had a quick temper about unimportant details, but she could be patient for months to make a real point. She had been patient with me while I learned. The occasional, sharp correction now and the slightly acid personal comments were signs of approval. I failed her only in never misinterpreting them and therefore never giving her the opportunity to be kind or confiding.

“We’re having lunch with private agencies on Thursday. Wear a hat.”

I nodded.

“And not the gray one if you don’t look any better than you do today.”

“I’d better take the agency folders home tonight,” I said.

“No. Get some rest or sex or something. I’ll do the talking.”

I took the folders home on Wednesday night, and Thursday morning I was in Joyce’s office when a telephone call came through for me from New York.

“Take it in here if you like,” Joyce said.

It was Mrs. Woolf, asking if I could have lunch with her.

“Today?”

Yes. She would be at the Washington airport at noon. She wanted me to meet her there.

“I can’t today,” I explained. “I have a business luncheon.”

She wanted to know how soon that would be over.

“I really don’t know, but I won’t be free until around six this evening.”

But she had to see me. It was urgent. She was leaving for California in the afternoon. Couldn’t I cancel the luncheon? Or anyway meet her by two o’clock? Her plane left Washington at three.

“I don’t see how I can,” I said. “Is there anything wrong, Mrs. Woolf?”

Yes, there certainly was. She couldn’t talk about it over the phone. That was the point, but she assured me that something was terribly wrong, and she had to see me before she left for the West. It was a matter of…

“Life and death?” I prompted when her voice faltered.

Yes.

“Could you hold on a minute?” I said, cupping my hand over the phone. “Joyce, this seems to be an emergency. I need to be at the airport at noon for a couple of hours.”

“Then go,” Joyce said.

“What’s the flight number?” I asked Mrs. Woolf. “I’ll meet the plane.”

Joyce was handing me a lighted cigarette when I hung up.

“I’m awfully sorry,” I said to her. “I couldn’t think what else to do.”

“Then there probably isn’t anything else to do. Can you be back at the office by three, or do you need the afternoon off?”

“Oh no, I’m sure I can be back by three.”

“That would help. But if not, just give me a ring. I’m not a matter of ‘life and death.’ ”

“Good,” I said.

“Is it bad, Kate?”