Away from Home (7 page)

Neil was up in an instant, trying to brush off the sparks, which really had done no harm. “You’re all right, aren’t you?” he asked worriedly.

“Oh, yes.”

“Have a drink. Would you like a martini?”

“Rye and ginger, please. Very, very weak.”

He occupied himself for a few minutes making the drinks, and Margie strolled about the large room looking at his paintings and books. She had never been in his apartment before, mainly because it had taken him a long time to acquire furniture. It was a typical bachelor apartment, with a television set facing the sofa bed, a desk serving as a room divider, and a coffee table in front of the sofa bed which doubled as a dining table. The bar was actually a collection of liquor bottles on the drainboard in the kitchenette. Everything in the room was expensive, modern, dark, and extremely stark. The walls were beige, and the rug was banker’s gray, and the tweed covering the chairs and the sofa bed all was black. To Margie it seemed very masculine and sophisticated, and somehow mysterious. She realized for the first time that men had secret lives of their own, as distinguished from fathers (who lived in frilly bedrooms with mothers) and little brothers (who lived in childlike rooms decorated by mothers and kept neat by maids). She wondered if Neil ever made love to girls on that sofa that could be transformed into a bed at a moment’s notice.

“How do you like the apartment?”

“It’s beautiful,” Margie said.

The very, very weak rye and ginger ale was not so weak as all that. Margie felt herself becoming less shy.

“Do you know how to cook?” Neil asked.

She shook her head. “Do you?”

“Very well. Despite what your mother thinks.” They both laughed. “At least, I can make good steak and salad, which is what I like best anyway.”

She thought of him living alone here and eating steak and salad every day in a Spartan way, in contrast to her mother’s overrich, well-balanced meals, and it made him seem very masculine. He went to the phonograph and put on a stack of classical records. Next to the phonograph there was a small table holding a chess set with the pieces arranged on the board to begin a game.

“I like Bach,” Margie said. “He’s my favorite.”

“Mine too.”

This time he sat down next to her on the sofa and a moment later he took her hand. “You have pretty hands,” he said. “So small.”

“The boy I’ll get engaged to is lucky,” Margie said. “He’ll only have to buy me a little diamond and it will look much bigger on me.” She smiled at him to show it was really a joke; and yet, was it so much of a joke? She looked down at her hand again, unable to speak.

“We’ve never been alone together like this,” Neil said. “Do you realize that?”

“We’ve been alone lots of times!”

“Oh, yes, in your apartment, with your parents breathing heavily in the next room. And in the theater, with people all around us. And in very dark restaurants, with waiters who have X-ray eyes. Six weeks, do you realize? We’ve never been alone.”

“I like it,” Margie said softly.

“I do too.”

Neither of them said anything for a moment. They were alone, and they had nothing to say. All the talking they had done had come easily, as if in the public places where they had talked to each other, conversation had been their only form of personal contact. Otherwise they would have been quite apart from each other. The curtain rises, the play begins, and each spectator is alone. Neil was not the kind of person who likes to hold hands in the theater; he had too much interest in the play. In restaurants he ate, he talked, he did not bump knees or clutch hands beneath the tablecloth so she would have to cut her meat with the side of her fork. In the bars where they had gone he always knew the bartender and usually had an extended conversation with him. At home there were always her parents. But now they were alone and intensely aware of it.

“I never went out with a girl as young as you before,” Neil said. “Except, of course, when
I
was nineteen. I usually go out with girls of twenty-five.”

“I guess you think I’m a baby.”

“No. No.”

“Well … I don’t mind telling you … sometimes you seem so much more grown up than I am that I’m actually afraid of you. You know so much.”

He seemed amused, and pleased. “The better to teach you, said the big bad wolf.”

“You’re not a wolf.”

“No?”

She withdrew from his touch then, slightly nervous, and reached for her drink. She did not know why she was nervous; actually she was not the least bit afraid of him. They had kissed many times on the sofa in her parents’ living room, but Neil had never tried to do anything farther. The drink was making her brave.

“Have you ever—no.”

“Have I ever what?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m terrible. Strike it from the record. I’m drunk.”

“You’re not drunk, and I won’t strike it from the record. Have I ever what? Wanted to make love to you?”

“Oh, no! I meant … have you ever made love to those twenty-five-year-old girls?”

Neil laughed. “Of course.”

Of course, he was twenty-five, he was a man, she had not thought he would be celibate. And yet, when he actually admitted he had had affairs, the first picture that came to Margie’s mind was not Neil naked in this bed with a girl but the face of the girl as it must have looked the next morning, saying goodbye.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“What? You look as if you had appendicitis.”

“I do? I do
not
.”

“Yes you do,” he said, smiling. He put his arm around her. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m wondering … what do these girls think? What do they say to you? Are they terribly in love with you? Do they suffer?”

Neil laughed. “I
hope
they don’t suffer. They never look to me as if they’re suffering.”

“Oh, you think I’m an idiot!”

“No,” he said, quite serious then. “No, I don’t. I think you’re a wonderful person.”

It was the first time he had actually expressed any feeling for her, and Margie looked up at him, startled.
A wonderful person
. It made a glow start through her. What a beautiful thing to say.

“And I
have
wanted to make love to you,” he went on. “In case you’re wondering that too.” He kissed her hand and the inside of her wrist and then her mouth. They kissed for a long time without breathing much. Margie began to feel lightheaded. She listened to her heart beating and she kept her eyes closed, recognizing the light waves of feeling she always had when she had kissed for several minutes. She waited for the waves of feeling as if her entire body were a landscape and she were the observer, in it and yet not of it. She sensed the feeling then and she kept herself very still, trying to keep it, grateful and wary at the same time.

She thought at first he was stroking the nape of her neck and then she realized that his hand was reaching for the zipper at the back of her dress. The movement distracted her. She opened her eyes and she saw, over his shoulder, that the brown and beige and gray lithograph on the wall was hanging slightly crooked. Suddenly that seemed much more important than anything else. The feeling had gone. She felt cool air on her back as Neil slid down the zipper of her dress, and she pulled away from him.

“No, really,” she said, trying to reach her zipper with both hands.

“I’m not going to do anything,” he whispered.

“Of course you are.” But she said it distractedly, straining to reach the zipper, not upset at all. She was not afraid of her own passions with him, so why should she be afraid of his? This was Neil Davidow, who liked her, whom she liked, and she was not afraid. She only felt, inexplicably, very lonely and sad.

“You’re right,” he said. “I was.” He reached around and pulled up her zipper. “Would you like another drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“All right, then I’ll start the steaks. We might as well eat; it’s seven-thirty. And after dinner I’ll teach you how to play chess.”

“Chess?” Margie said, rather stupidly. Her feeling of loneliness was vanishing under Neil’s matter-of-fact warmth.

“Chess,” he repeated. “If you’re going to be my girl you’re going to have to know how to play chess.”

“Your … girl?”

“You know,” he said. “Girl friend. Steady. Engaged to be engaged.”

“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh. Yes!”

When Margie and Neil became engaged after going out together for five months everyone said they made an ideal couple. They had everything in common. They had a similar family background, they both loved music and theater and chess, and his maturity would make a good balance for a girl who had just turned twenty. He was then twenty-six, but he looked and acted older. He was a college graduate, employed by an excellent brokerage firm, and they could even live in his apartment for a while until they needed something bigger. Margie’s parents gave a large engagement party to announce the happy news. Her mother confided to Margie afterward that she was secretly very proud that she and Neil had enough dignity to refrain from nuzzling each other in public the way cousin Joan and
her
fiancé had. Margie’s mother also thought that there should be a very short engagement. She did not believe in long-drawn-out engagement periods. The young couple would be too apt to give way to their animal instincts if they were kept waiting so long. After all, they were both young and healthy and in love. No, a short engagement was the best idea for young people. So four weeks after her engagement party Margie and Neil were married. She had been so busy rushing around to shop for her trousseau and planning for their formal wedding that in the whole four weeks she saw Neil only ten times, and on those evenings she was so tired that all she could do was go to a movie with him and say good night very tenderly at the door at eleven o’clock.

The wedding was held in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. For years the Plaza had seemed to Margie to be the epitome of East Side Gentile elegance. The chauffeured Rolls Royces waiting outside for old ladies who were rich enough not to care that they were wearing styles that might be forty years old, the chic women in flowered hats who sipped cocktails among the potted palms and chirped like tame birds, the people who had been living there in the same suite for twenty years and went every summer to Europe with their own maids—all of this had seemed a part of a glamorous adult world that had nothing to do with her wholesome and boring life on Central Park West. But now her wedding was to be held there, and this suite had been reserved for her and her bridesmaids to use as a dressing room. When Margie looked around the luxurious suite it seemed to have a sterile, disappointing look, because no one was going to sleep there that night and there were no personal articles laid out on the dresser, nor books, nor flowers, nor any of the clutter that people leave wherever they live. Her new, monogrammed suitcases were lined up in the corner. Only the overnight case was still open, for last-minute make-up. There was a large straw hat to wear on the beach in St. Thomas. It was too big to fit into any of the suitcases so she would have to carry it in her hand on the plane. Her mother had taken Margie’s new going-away suit out of its tissue-paper nest and box and hung it in the closet. It was the only thing in the closet except for her mother’s mink stole (which her mother would later wear) and a dozen empty hangers that swayed together, emitting a ghostly sound, like little skeletons, when you touched them.

For bridesmaids Margie had her two closest friends from the Birch Wathen School, who were both pretty and the same height, which had made choosing dresses for them easy, and a rather unattractive young cousin of Neil’s, whom Margie had invited to be polite. Since Neil had no sisters it seemed a nice gesture to ask one of his relatives to be in the wedding procession. Neil’s cousin had red hair and a pinkish complexion, which was even pinker now with excitement. Because of her they couldn’t have pink bridesmaid’s dresses, which Margie would have preferred, so they had pale blue. The matron of honor was Margie’s married friend Sue. The bridesmaids were milling about, trying to tilt their flowered tiaras to the most becoming angle, squealing over Margie’s hand-embroidered French underwear, and her shoes, which were appliquéd with the same lace as the dress, and finally the dress itself. The crinoline for the wedding dress was so stiff and enormous that it had to be stood up in the bathtub until she was ready to put it on. It was the only thing in the bathroom that seemed to have any relationship to her and her life; the rest was immaculate, white, and cold. Here she was, in the place she had always thought about with stars in her eyes, and it was nothing but a hotel room that she would be in and out of in a minute, leaving not a trace of herself behind, nor of this most important day of her life.

The affectionate noise of the girls disturbed her, and her mother trying to be helpful made her nervous. Her father had been banished to the living room of the suite, where he smoked a cigarette. Margie stood as stiff as a doll with her arms above her head while her heavy wedding dress was slipped carefully over her head, carefully so as not to disarrange her hair or her make-up. Her matron of honor did up the hooks in the back, and her mother delicately smoothed Margie’s hair, which had been coiffeured that morning and had luckily not been disarranged by the dress at all. Margie put on her veil, attached to a Juliet cap of real orange blossoms that gave off a faint sweet smell that belonged to a warm, faraway land. She looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror, and through the veil she seemed to herself to be a beautiful stranger, a bride doll on a wedding cake, a model in a bridal magazine. Margie could not see the expression in her own eyes through the misty white veil, and so she seemed to herself for that instant to be all brides on their wedding day, one of an endless procession, reflected and re-reflected in that mirror on and on until eternity, a life force; girls on the threshold of womanhood going to be united with their loved mates, billions of tremulous important brides, each as tiny and unimportant in the eyes of the universe as the tiny stars that make up the bridal carpet of the Milky Way, and yet at the same instant more of an individual than she had ever been in her life.