Dry Your Smile (20 page)

Optimism ticked on in her like a timing device wired to dynamite. He rose abruptly and began to roll up his tatami mat.

“Actually, I loathe that phrase,” he muttered.

“What? What did I say?”

“I mean ‘survivors.' You hear it bandied about everywhere these days. By triple divorcés. By sell-outs. Born-again-Christian Watergate politicians. People who don't give a shit about asking ‘survival at what price?' There are some things one maybe shouldn't survive. I mean, unless one doesn't give a damn whose skin it comes out of.”

“All right, all right. I didn't mean it like that, and you know it.” She was calculating whether one more try was worth it, and he almost wished she'd give up and grant them both release. But the reflexes already had her tap-dancing before she reached a conscious decision. “What I did mean was, well, everybody's unhappy in one way or another. Whoever said relationships weren't the hardest work around? At least we're not the kind who just settle for … torpor. At least we're trying for something not yet invented.”

“You were the one who taught me the danger of ‘post-revolutionary thinking in a pre-revolutionary context.'”

She got to her feet and began rolling up her mat, too.

“Well, what the hell. Why not? The old evolutionary leap. Or a pretense of it. Pretending a virtue we don't have, like Polonius counseled. Maybe in time the virtue will become real.”

“Polonius, my dear wife, was a platitude-ridden deadly bore. Shakespeare intended him that way.”

“I
know
, but—”

“
I
know
you
know. Ad infinitum.” They stood facing one another in vain, mutually eclipsed. “Oh, Jule. I guess we go on because neither of us can conceive how not to. Maybe that's cowardice. Maybe it's an act of existential courage. Who the hell knows. Like that line in your poem. What was it? Oh yeah. ‘The pretense of pretending we needn't pretend is pretension.' Damned good line.”

“Thanks,” she mumbled, so low he couldn't tell whether in anger or hopelessness.

“You must be beat,” he said expectantly.

“Yeah, I am,” she sighed. “What's more, I have to go into Athena tomorrow, to pick up a manuscript job.”

“Editing or copy-editing?”

“I don't even know yet. But Charlotte wanted me to come get it on Tuesday, and I told her it would have to hold till I came back from California, that I'd just have to make up the time and work on it over the weekend to meet their deadline.”

“Can't you pass this one up? I mean with the money coming from the lecture date—”

“Larry. We're about three thousand dollars in debt again. I can't afford to pass anything up. And at least the books I get to work on from Athena Ltd. are remotely feminist. They don't make me feel as if I have a blue pencil lodged in my throat from trying to swallow some sentence about how ‘he swept her romantically into his crushing embrace and felt her heart heave at him through her ripped bodice.'”

They wound their way through the familiar rooms, shutting off lights as they went, darkness gathering its fullness behind them.

“Aren't you going to have your ritual soak?”

“I'd fall asleep in the tub and drown,” she called back over her shoulder. “My legendary energy. They raved about it when I was two feet high, reviewers admire it in my writing, lecture audiences now get infected with it the way they used to when I spoke lines other people had written for me. Fie on thee, I say to my fabulous energy.”

“Oh, it's still there, Jule. It must suffer a sea-change when you come home, though. Or get left on the doorstep.”

She undressed and quickly slid a nightgown over her head—before he might think about making love, Laurence suspected. How many millions of such symbolic acts passed as code between married people, he wondered. But loneliness or fear—or was it defiance?—drove him to deliberately ignore the code. He moved closer to her in their bed, seeking her under the blanket, the nightgown, sensing her body stiffen involuntarily at his touch. Then he felt her soundless sigh—as if something in her mind had shifted, tired of resisting, and was reconciling itself: why not? for the comfort of comforting him, at least; for the comfort of not having rejected him; for the comfort—whisper of the heart's innermost devil, though whether in her heart or his own he could not tell—the comfort of having paid one out, and being owed a night undisturbed in return.

And while he labored lovingly above her body, and while her body gave back perfectly the requisite motions in response—feeling nothing, concentrating on the effectiveness of the performance?—he tried to not think what happens to two people who still love one another but whose passion has become joyless. O murmur of the devil in the heart: Was it possible now to recall when it was
not
joyless? Had it
ever
been there?

Then, sudden and sharp as a blade, memory twisted in his ribs. The two of them, each brimming with their individual revelations, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge—what would somehow always be to him
their
bridge. Not all the violin strings in corny Hollywood movie scores could have cheapened us then, he thought, seeing once more the wind stream wild through her hair, hearing the river roar below.
The way we held one another. The glance she gave me then, before we kissed and after
. It
had
been there once.
Never disown it, Julian
, he prayed silently to her;
never forget or denounce it, Laurence
, he prayed to himself;
never let the years or the failures of nerve revise it conveniently away. If the tragedy is that by our very devotion we somehow diminished one another, why is that merely reactionary or neurotic, reducible to another brand name? Why can't that be like grace, laying waste to a profligate life in order to sanctify it?

He reached for her and clung hard. “Oh, Jule,” she heard him cry. But she mistook his sobs, and picking up her cue from that, quickened her own breathing. She vaguely understood that though he was now reconciled to not knowing what her body intended or pretended in their acts of love, he was grateful for the gesture, and he let it drive him into the doomed solipsism of his own coming, as if that were an act affirming hers affirming his, passing one another in the night again.

Afterward, lying in the dark, Julian spoke.

“It was that she lunged at me. Incredibly frail she is now. You've seen her, Larry. But something drove her up. Some … hatred of me, something absolutely primeval and malignant gave her strength. She sprang from that hospital bed—I couldn't believe my eyes, I was too paralyzed to budge—and it sounded as if she was babbling in Italian. ‘Avanti …'Impossible, she doesn't know a word of Italian. It must have been something else, but you couldn't understand her anyway, because the words were so slurred. But Larry, she flew at me—and she was massive with rage. A giant. All five feet of her somehow towering over me. Not since the night she threw the brass clock at me have I been physically afraid of her. She was totally mad. And
strong
. She went for my eyes, my throat. I kept putting my hands up in front of my face and I heard myself screaming ‘Momma, Momma, why are you doing this? It's
me
, Momma. It's Julian!' It took three nurses—one of them a man—to pull her off me. God, Larry, they put her in
restraints
. Before my eyes. And me crying and begging them not to, and her shouting ‘I know it's you! D'y' hear me, Julian? It's you who've done this to me! I never want to see you again as long as I live! Nurse!' she yelled, ‘keep her away from me, keep that demon away from me!' She
said
that.” Julian was trembling with the horror of telling it. Laurence waited. “Larry, Larry, I didn't say anything to set her off, honest. And I
know
about the medication making her paranoid and all that. But still … Christ, she must actually hate me for it to come out under the medication so intensely. What have I done to make her hate me like that? What have I
done?
I wanted my own life, you, us. Something real. But something must
be
real, and despicable, in her—and in me—for her to hate me like that.”

Laurence Millman knew when to be silent. For this too Julian had once loved him, even though his silences were now often turned against her. But this silence, punctuated only by the tightening of his grasp on her body, was turned outward against the world, against Hope, against everything that was battering fangs and claws at their walls and windows. She murmured as she began to fall asleep on his shoulder,

“She tried to sink her teeth into my cheek, but my arm went up, and she bit into my watch instead. Broke the crystal. Bit so hard she broke the crystal. Why, Larry, why …”

Julian slept on undisturbed when, a few hours later, Laurence woke drenched with sweat, crept softly out of bed, threw on a robe, and made his way back out onto the roof garden alone. The stars were clearer now. He could wait out the dawn in this safe place. There was no need to wake her. There was no need to tell her that now even her dreams were invading his, hardly a space left in which to breathe, hardly a self left with which to breathe.

There was no need to tell her how vivid it had been: him crying over and over, “Jule, Jule, if only they hadn't separated us like this!” Then he'd looked down at himself and seen that he was restrained in a straitjacket just as she was, each of them with their arms forcibly embracing only their own bodies. But suddenly he broke free of his restraints and was able to fling his arms wide. He grinned and began to dance toward her. “Fuck 'em all, that's what I say, Julian. You're still mine and I love you. Hell, I
raised
you, no wonder you turned out okay! My own baby revolutionary I'm so proud of. Come to me, Julian.” But she stared at him, stricken, then wheeled and ran desperately through what became a long hospital corridor. He pursued her, his cries echoing her footsteps, “Hey, Julian, wait up! Don't be scared. It's
me
, Jule. You know who I am.” A frantic creature, limbs pinioned, she fled him down the corridor, doors on each side slamming in her face as she tried to dodge into them, one after another, until at last the space widened between her body and his, until he saw her now distant figure hesitate for a second before the polished steel Exit door at the corridor's end. She spun around, her arms still bound, her face a mask of flesh stretched tight by fear, saw him coming closer, then wheeled again and flung her whole weight against the door. It gave, swung open, and slammed shut again after swallowing up her shape. But still Laurence ran after her, breath coming so short it seemed his lungs would burst with longing, pulse racing in exertion and panic at losing her. He reached the door. It was locked. “Julian!” he called through it. “Julian! Come out! Don't be afraid! It's just me, can't you see it's just me?”

Silence answered him. He beat helpless fists against the door. “Julian,” he sobbed, sagging against the polished steel, “I can't live without you. I don't know how to anymore. Come back to me, to the way we used to be.” From the corner of his eye he glimpsed his reflection in the shining metal. “Julian,” he whispered, turning slowly to look at himself, one hand coming up in confusion to touch the softening jawline, to brush back the forehead curls in wonder. “Julian,” he whispered again, “come back. Please? Come back to the one who loves you best.”

By that time, of course, he understood why she had fled him. By that time, it was too late. Seeing his reflection full-face, he knew. The last of the hoped-for and struggled-for transformations had been abandoned, and all the while this one had been growing to completion. Unexpected, irreversible, now it too was a perfected work. By that time, he learned from the locked door's gleaming surface, he was Her.

CHAPTER THREE

Winter, 1959–1960

This time I'll try to get it past the censor.

I doubt that Hope will ever look in the back of my history notebook. She's not very interested in my schoolwork, except in the A grades, of course. She thinks history is especially boring.

This could be a journal, the kind real writers keep. Training for observing, writing dialogue, practice of the craft, all that stuff. If she ever discovers it, I might as well step in front of an onrushing camera and end it all, there would be such hell to pay. But would I love it if these pages could be private, all my own.

Maybe then I could find out what it is I feel—if I feel anything real at all. I'm obsessed with that, with
ever
doing
any
thing so completely that I can escape myself observing myself doing it—and observing others observing how I do it. I go into churches lately. Catholic churches, Protestant, synagogues if they're open, even last week a Greek Orthodox church. It's a space to myself. I even pray. But it's as if I'm that poor bastard Claudius just not getting through. Except I'm worse: I keep on hoping Hamlet
is
spying on me from behind the arras or wherever. I can't concentrate. Partly that's because I don't believe in all that mumbo-jumbo. I remember thinking there was no god when I was quite little. There were only constellations and planets, the ocean and things growing up right out of the ground—and all that was pretty miraculous in itself. This was back when I was young, about six, when I wrote that spooky little jingle before my birthday: “Some like it hot, some like it cold. I'm afraid of seven years old.”

At any rate, if I didn't “believe” back then, I certainly don't now, at the ripe old has-been kid-star age of just-last-week-turned seventeen.
God
, if I can only
live
long enough to get out of the
teens!
At least I'm not Sweet Sixteen anymore, and if there
were
a god that would be something to thank him for. Now I can be Sardonic Seventeen all I want—in these pages, anyway.