Too Soon Dead (23 page)

I had pictured many scenarios in my head of what it would be like, the first time. This was not one of them. “I like you,” I said. “Whatever happens, I like you. I would like to get to know you better. I would like to make love to you. I want more than anything else not to hurt you. I should warn you that I am amazingly inexperienced and I may not be very good at it.”

She sighed. “You’ll be wonderful,” she said. She kissed me. “I promise.”

I
shall, as the Victorian novelists say, draw a curtain over this tender scene to save the delicate sensibilities of my readers.

Or maybe it’s my delicate sensibilities I need to save. I will say that, as far as I could tell, each of us behaved in a manner befitting the occasion. I had never befat such an occasion before, but Elizabeth assured me that my befitting was as good as anyone else’s and better than most.

An hour later and Elizabeth and I were lying under the covers talking about unimportant things like life and death and love and beauty and wars and breadlines. We touched lightly on our recent coupling and what seemed to both of us to be an important newfound relationship. I discovered that I honestly did not mind all the men she had had in the past, but I could not predict how I would feel about each and every man she would have in the future who was not me. She told me that she did not mind my being a journalist, that we all make mistakes in our youth.

“My mother, that sweet little old lady back in Ohio, does not know that I work for a New York newspaper,” I told Elizabeth. “She thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.”

Elizabeth considered this. “I didn’t know you could play the piano,” she said, rolling over on her side and staring at me. “There is much about you that I must learn.”

“Like what?”

“Like who you are and where you came from and where you’re going and if you’ll take me with you.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the boys,” I said. It was flippant and thoughtless and I could have bit my tongue. She looked as though I’d just slapped her in the face.

“Oh my God,” she said. “If you think that—”

“No, no,” I said, grabbing her and holding her in my arms. “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry!”

“You’re different,” she said. “It’s true. I don’t know why, or how. I want to be with you, stay with you. Most of the time, with most guys, I feel—dirty afterward. I want to go and take a real hot shower and scrub myself clean and hope the guy is gone when I get back. But you… I don’t want to leave you. And I don’t feel dirty. I feel happy.”

She snuggled into my arms and I pulled the blanket back up over both of us. She didn’t seem to expect me to say anything, which was a good thing as I had no idea of what I could say. I was happy and content and pleased and maybe a little smug. I felt warm and protective toward this strange little girl. Somehow, despite my lack of experience and her excess of it, she had made me feel like I knew what I was doing and was even good at it. And not just about making love, but about life itself. I seldom feel that I know much about life or how it should be lived. Perhaps that’s why I want to be a novelist—an unconscious conviction that since I can’t do it very well, I might, as well write about it.

I stared at the ceiling without seeing the ceiling and thought deep thoughts about nothing at all, or perhaps about too many things at once for any of them to make sense.

There were footsteps in the room outside and, as I pulled, the blanket up to my nose and tried to become invisible, the door opened and a large man in a plaid suit stood in the doorway. I had time to notice that it was Senator Childers, and that his hair was slightly messed, before I pulled the blanket over my head.

“Bitsy!” the senator said in a calm and reasonable voice. “There you are.”

Elizabeth sat up, covering herself with the blanket, which pulled it away from me down to the knees. “Yes, Daddy,” she said.

I scrunched deeper into the blanket, trying desperately to disappear. It didn’t work. Large parts of me remained all too evident. I tried to think of something clever to say. Given the situation, “hello” seemed inept. Perhaps a literary allusion. Our revels now are over, I thought. Oh, that this too, too solid flesh could melt, I thought. Go not naked into the world, I thought. Everybody’s got to be somewhere, I thought. I crammed a corner of the blanket into my mouth to keep from giggling.

“You must come out and entertain our other guests,” the senator said. Except for his use of the word “other,” he showed by neither word nor deed that he was aware that I was there.

“Yes, Daddy,” Elizabeth said.

He turned and left the room, but a second later he reappeared in the doorway. “Don’t marry this one,” he said, and left again, slamming the door behind him with what I considered unnecessary violence.

Silence ensued.

I redistributed the blanket more equitably between us. “Senator Childers is your father,” I said cleverly.

She nodded. “I know,” she said.

“You didn’t tell me,” I said.

“Does it matter?” she asked.

I thought about it. “I guess not,” I told her. “I just feel kind of silly, thinking you were one of those chorus girls.”

She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Unfortunately I’m not,” she said. “And now you’re going to be awed by Daddy or used by Daddy or want something from Daddy; and if we ever make love again you’re going to be making love to Senator Childers’s daughter, and not to me. Or he’s going to want something from you, and then we’ll never get it sorted out.”

I didn’t understand the last part of that sentence, but I decided that now was not the time to question her semantics. She reached for her stockings on the bureau and slid one over her right foot. I searched around for my socks on the floor. A silence stretched between us, and I figured it was my turn to break it. I took a deep breath. “Listen,” I said. “This may blow our relationship to hell, which is a place I do not want it to go, but here it is. I am not a Republican. Usually I’m not even a Democrat. Perhaps I’m a Whig. I want nothing from your father. I don’t support your father’s policies. I don’t even like your father; I think he’s a stuffed shirt and a prig. And not only that, but every time I see him it reminds me of—ah—something I can’t tell you about, and it makes me want to giggle. To me he’s essentially a silly man.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Really.”

“Good,” she said. “But he isn’t silly. Trust me. Daddy is manipulative and narcissistic and self-important and wants to be president, and would happily walk right over you if you stood between him and the door. But he is not silly.” She fastened on her garter belt. I watched. An endlessly fascinating contraption, the garter belt.

I gathered my own clothing from various places about the room and dressed. “When will I see you again?” I asked her.

She pulled her skirt up about her waist, and tucked the blouse in. “I’ll call you,” she said. “At the
World.
When I get to the city sometime next week. I’ll ask for the piano player.”

I bent over to tie my shoes. “I’ll play an arpeggio just for you,” I told her, “whatever that is.” I stood up and wrapped my arms around her shoulders. “You will call?” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to whisper, it just came out that way.

She kissed me. “I will,” she said.

I left first, trotting toward the pavilion by instinct, my mind too busy to notice where my feet were taking me. My thoughts came fast, the new ones pushing out the ones that had arrived but a moment before. My emotions flipped from ecstasy to despair every few seconds. I was in love with Elizabeth the senator’s daughter. The senator’s beautiful, burnt sienna-haired daughter. The senator’s neurotic, nymphomaniac daughter. I remembered some of the stories I had heard about “Bitsy,” my Elizabeth. She went through men like a scythe through butter. She raised men up to the heights of passion, just to hear them bounce. She’d been married more times than the Isle de France.

My thoughts were not making sense, even to me. I stopped at the edge of the tennis courts and took several deep breaths. It didn’t help. I sat down on the grass and took several more. You may think this confusion of thoughts and emotions I describe is literary license, I being a fledgling novelist and all. But it is as accurate as I can reconstruct my feelings.

A pair of legs encased in white flannels approached from the near court. “You look like you need a touch of liquid succor,” a nasal voice drawled.

I looked up. W.C. Fields stood over me, white flannels, blue blazer, and a glass in each hand. “I happen to have acquired a spare glass of scotch whiskey,” he said, extending one of the glasses to me. “They seem to have an endless supply of quite excellent booze here, a theory I intend to put to the experiment.”

“Thank you,” I said, taking the glass.

“Not at all,” he said. “Always glad to do a service to my fellow man.” He gave me a semiformal salute and wandered off toward the pavilion.

I took a gulp of scotch and realized that scotch was not what I wanted. What I wanted was to know for sure that Elizabeth Childers, Bitsy, the senator’s daughter, was going to call me, was going to see me again. I put the glass down and stood up and brushed myself off. I was behaving, or at least thinking, like a lovesick adolescent, and for no good reason. She had said she would call, and why should I not believe her? We had been interrupted by her father, a not unheard of episode in the lives of young lovers. I would stop worrying. I would just go off somewhere and sit down and remember in detail the past two hours. There would be a silly smile on my face, and passersby would say…

My wallet was missing. I patted the pants pocket where it should have been, and reached in and felt nothing. I patted all my other pockets just in case. It wasn’t there.

Had Bitsy stolen my wallet? While we were in bed, with my pants draped over the corner of the dresser, had her hand snuck away from its task of love to reach into my pants pocket? I felt guilty for thinking such a thing even as I reviewed our mutual activities in my mind. It seemed improbable. What must have happened was that the wallet had fallen from the pocket, and even now awaited me at the foot of the bed.

I turned around and started back toward the pool cottage. My mind circled about the prickly hedge of thoughts about Elizabeth and her father and her habits and her professed feelings for me and my evident feelings for her and refused to settle. But I’d have to settle my mind, and probably my stomach, later. For now I would just retrieve my wallet.

As I reached the cottage door, I could hear voices inside. It was Elizabeth and her father, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. The senator’s voice sounded very positive and had the bark of command, as though he were planning to lead his daughter into battle. I paused. Entering at that moment did not seem like a good idea. I circled around to the side of the building to be out of sight when they left. Now I was beside the bedroom window and I could hear the voices more clearly.

“Daddy, just leave it be,” she was saying. “We’ve had this talk so many times we both know it by heart.”

“Talking doesn’t help, that’s for damn sure,” Daddy said. “I don’t know what to do. Sending you to alienists doesn’t do a damn bit of good. Every time I send you to a new shrink, you end up in bed with him!”

“That’s ’cause they’re all father figures,” she said.

There was the sound of a slap, and Elizabeth cried out.

“How dare you!” Daddy said, his voice vibrating with anger. “You’re blaming me for this—this—insatiable craving of yours. When did you ever listen to me about men, or about anything else?”

I could hear Elizabeth sobbing softly. “You know when I stopped listening to you,” she cried. “And you know why! I do what you ask. Why don’t you just leave me alone!”

“You know who that was you were in bed with?” Daddy demanded.

“A very nice boy who works for the
New York World.
I’m sorry he wasn’t a ward boss or a campaign contributor; I’ll try to do better next time!”

He slapped her again. I almost jumped up and climbed through the window, but there was no way that my appearance could make anything any better for any of us, so I stayed where I was. “He works for that son of a bitch Alexander Brass,” he said. “What did you tell him?”

“Tell him? Nothing. I didn’t tell him anything.”

“I hope that’s true. If I read anything about me in Brass’s column that he shouldn’t know, I’ll know where it came from.”

Elizabeth blew her nose. “I didn’t tell him anything, Daddy, honest.”

“Are you going to see him again?”

There was a pause that seemed to stretch on forever before I heard her say, “Yes.”

“Good!” the senator said. “Don’t tell him anything, particularly about me. If he tells you anything about Brass’s comings or goings, or any interest Brass has in me, let me know. You don’t have to go out of your way to pump him; your standard acrobatics seem to inspire confidence in your men friends.”

“Daddy!”

“Shocked, are you? Sure, you are. Now dry your face and go entertain my other guests!”

I heard footsteps and a door slam. After a minute I heard the door close again, and I peered around the corner and saw Elizabeth heading after her father. I waited until they were both far away, and then I went into the cottage and hunted for my wallet. It was under the bed.

I
walked around for a time after that, I’m not sure how long. The size of the estate made it easy to keep away from other people, and so I did. I looked at new grass and old trees and small rocks and large clouds and thought a jumble of thoughts, one tumbling after the other unbidden into my brain and promptly out again. A heavy mist spread over the grounds, which suited my mood. I wandered, through the mist. When it turned into a steady rain I was in the ornamental garden in back of the main house. Damp is romantic; drenched is dumb. I headed for one of the row of French double doors leading into a ballroom larger than most train stations. Many of the other guests had managed to come in out of the rain before me, and groups of damp people were clumped loosely about the great room.