Dry Your Smile (29 page)

“No, thank you. I'm the sedentary type who thinks a football is something you hit a home run with, remember? I may be the only forty-year-old woman you will ever meet in this culture who doesn't know how to ride a bicycle.”

“Well, that's because of your kooky childhood, Julian. Otherwise, you survived it fairly sane.”

“Yeah … and a lot of that, like it or not, is due to Larry. All the other kid actors I knew wound up addicts of one sort or another, or on their fifth marriage, or in the funny farm, or having attempted suicide. Nothing so dramatic for me. I wanted art. And revolution. I got Larry and the women's movement. Pretty good.”

“Julian, my dear. That you survived your childhood is due not to Larry but to your plucky self. I remember when I first met you. I thought, ‘Yoicks! That's ex-little Julian Travis, whom I used to watch every week as I was growing up.' You were my idol. I wanted to
be
you. So I was positive you must have become some kind of twitching flake as an adult, I mean having all that adulation as a kid.”

Julian obligingly began to twitch.

“No, but that's the point,” Charlotte laughed, “you were … normal. Well, a little ‘intellekshul' and snobbish about books and politics, maybe. But a human being. With a sense of humor, yet.”

“Thanks, Charlotte. The older I get, the more I value a sense of irony and a sense of humor. Maybe they're two sides of the same coin. I swear I don't know how people without a sense of humor survive. I mean, what do they
do?
”

“They turn into Larry or Zach.”

They both burst out laughing again. Charlotte wiped her eyes and read out her fortune in a sonorous voice.

“‘To respect the mother is to enter the heavens.' Zack's kids should've got this. What a crock of shit.”

“You think that's the Chinese influence or the Orthodox Jewish?”

“Jewish first part, but ‘the heavens' plural is decidedly Chinese.”

“Well, mine is more mundane, but just as preachy: ‘Talent is not Wisdom.' As if I needed to be told.”

“Whatever happened to the good old days when fortune cookies prophesied things like fame, wealth, and a gorgeous stranger?” Charlotte made a face and then signaled for the check. “How
is
your mother these days, speaking of entering the heavens—or shouldn't I ask?”

“No, it's okay, you can ask. I can't answer, that's all. I haven't seen her in, oh, almost eight months now. Last September. She still won't see me, ever since she flew at me the last time she was in the hospital. Slams down the phone on me, had the locks to her apartment changed. At first I kept track of her indirectly via her broker, her doctor, and two women—old friends of hers from way back. But then about three months ago she apparently stopped speaking to them, too. And changed doctors and brokerage houses. So my observation routes have dried up. I still call about twice a week, thinking it might change, but no. The minute I say hello, bang down goes the telephone. At first it drove me up the wall with worry, but then at least I learned from Mrs. Dudinsky—she's the woman who used to come in to bring groceries and make an attempt to stir the dustballs around—that even though she was fired, too, Hope has hired a part-time companion. Somebody Mrs. Dudinsky just happened to know, from the same agency. It seems this woman comes in less often than Mrs. D. used to—only about three times a week—but gets on all right with Hope. So at least I know somebody's looking in on her.”

“Christ, you go sort of gray when you talk about it.”

Julian shrugged as they gathered up their things.

“What can I do, Charlotte? She won't let me in—not in any way. I don't know if it's the medication that's made her so damned paranoid or if it's just exacerbated all her old feelings of betrayal from when I first left the business, then left her, then married Larry. I don't even know for sure that she's
taking
the medication … All I do know is, once in a while, I'm able to get through a day without obsessing about her. And then, too,” Julian added drily, “life is so charitable. It gives you respite from one wretchedness groove by scratching your brain over onto another with screechy regularity. Of late, the marriage misery has taken precedence, I confess.” Julian started to rise from the table, but Charlotte stopped her, laying a hand on her sleeve.

“Not been the best of years, has it, Jule?” she asked quietly.

“No, not the best. I tell myself, you just put one foot in front of the other and keep on. But sometimes it gets … just very … tiring.”

“Have you tried writing about it? Hope, I mean.”

“I can't see any way to do it, Charlotte. I've tried. Thanks for being an intrepid editor at heart, though.”

“A little nudge never hurt now and then. I'd be willing to look at whatever you'd like, at any stage, if it would help. Maybe it would be just the thing to get it—”

“—out of my system? Thanks, but this isn't ‘flu, it's more like malaria. Recurrent bouts, lifelong. I've tried to exorcise it—in poems, nonfiction ‘political analyses,' short stories. Besides, ‘catharsis' in art is deadly. Forget it.” She rose again, and this time Charlotte followed her, still trying, as they made their way out of the restaurant.

“What about a play?”

“A
play?
Are you nuts, Charlotte? Has Zach finally driven you round the bend?”

“No, I'm serious. Maybe that way—”

“I can see it now: ‘Enter the Mother, the Daughter/Wife, the Husband—from stage left, stage right, and upstage center, respectively. Each is armed with lethal weapons. They proceed to massacre one another. No dialogue except screams and groans. It's a pantomime. Curtain.' Short play, Charlotte. Very avant-garde. Just the thing to make me the rage on the so-far-off-Broadway circuit I'll be the toast of Peoria.”

“Well, not a theater play, then. What about a television script? I mean, the medium you know best, the one that's probably in your blood? Just using that
form
as a way to—”

“Oh, even better! ‘
Will
Laurence and Julian find their way to happiness?
Will
Hope answer her daughter's phone calls? Tune in tomorrow and find out!' Maybe I can sell the idea to Paola Luchino as a soap opera—but set in the Riviera for lush visuals.” They emerged into the street. “Look, love, thanks anyway, I'm afraid it's not even worth a try. Oh,” she changed the subject, “it's starting to drizzle.
Just
for
us
. Because you and I came outside, Charlotte. Targets. Make no mistake.” They embraced. Some atavistic training rose in Julian. Always leave 'em laughing—and wanting more.

“Oh Charlotte,” she brightened, pulling back from what felt to her like pity, “so you won't think my life is too much Perils of Pauline, I have two new feminist jokes for you. Picked them up last month after a speech in D.C.”

“D.C.? They can't be very funny, then.”

“No, really. Nice nasty man-hating jokes.”

“What are you waiting for? Tell!”

“All right: What is 250,000 men at the bottom of the ocean?”

“Uh … I give up, what?”

“Not enough.”

Charlotte smiled. “And the other one?”

“How many men does it take to tile a bathroom floor?”

“Um … none, unless they're paid more than any woman?”

“No. Only two—if you slice them
very
thin.”

“A little hostile, aren't they, these jokes?”

Bombed, Julian thought. On her way back toward the office, Charlotte was already donning her Athena sensibility.

“Oh, I don't know. Even if they are hostile, don't we deserve some recompense for all these centuries of farmer's daughter and mother-in-law and dumb-blonde jokes men tell?”

“Well. Anyway, Julian, I hope it gets better for you. And for Larry, too. And with your mother and everything. It was good to see you.”

The best move now would be as graceful an exit as could be managed.

“Thanks for everything, Charlotte. It was good to see you, too. And I hope we won't have to stay in the TGIM club for too long. Give my regards to Zach—if you're still speaking to him, that is.”

“I will. And mine to Larry.”

It was like the married women's reassurance ritual: All Will Be Well. Commiseration Now Closed. Business as Usual.

“And thanks for lunch, too.”

“Quite welcome,” Charlotte called, starting off in the opposite direction. “Take care, now!”

Julian watched her disappear, swallowed up among the black-coated men swarming the streets. Then she turned toward the bus stop to go home.

It seemed to her these days that every motion required an act of will. From the big ones: keeping her forced exile from Hope in perspective, holding on to the love for Larry, trying to find a moment of time for writing anything of her own in between political articles, traveling, speeches, free-lance editing. To the tiny ones: remember to confirm air ticket for Wisconsin next week. Missed the bank today, go first thing in the morning and deposit the new royalty check and ask for immediate credit no delay please. We're almost out of toilet paper. Call Mrs. D. in case she has any update passed on from Hope's companion. Soon as check has cleared go with Larry to buy him two new pairs of slacks. We need milk. Check-in calls to Scribner's and Knopf, any new free-lance stuff available? Fix alarm clock or buy cheap new one. Remind Larry he needs a haircut. When at bank get quarters for laundromat. Soon as check has cleared—remember to nag that college in Oregon where
is
check?—pay urgent gas and electric bill. Remember to draft press statement for Welfare Women's Coalition press conference and get it to Renée Fitzpatrick before Wednesday. Take boots to shoemaker for resoling … She thought of the famous tombstone epigraph of a witty suicide:
All this endless buttoning and unbuttoning
. She didn't want to go home. But where else was there to go?

She zipped up her windbreaker and hunched under a building overhang nearest the bus stop. An April downpour had begun in earnest, rapid needles of rain seeming to perforate the asphalt as if it were a black satin pincushion.

Sometimes the will cracked, but before it could break outright, exhaustion rushed in. She could summon the energy or, if necessary, project a façade of serenity when around other people. But not with Larry. And not when alone with herself. Fatigue at the bone, at the brain, in the pores. Fatigue beyond depression, and certainly beyond the anger depression was said to conceal. Truth tyranny! Lying about finding that odious Preston manuscript tolerable. Opportunist. Manipulator. Put one foot. To what bloody goddamned purpose? Then the other foot. For the approval of Hope? (That's my baby trooper!”) For the approval of Larry? (“I'll say this for you, Jule, you've got staying power.”) For the approval of the movement? (“You give me courage” … “How can you be married and call yourself a feminist” … “I know this is crazy, but weren't you the little girl who” …) For the approval of herself? An approval from which she lived in eternal exile?

A bus loomed along the rainslick avenue. Julian boarded with the other waiting would-be passengers, becoming entangled in the aisle with a Puerto Rican woman attempting to juggle two large shopping bags and two small children who whined continuously in Spanish at their mother. Mothers and children and exiles, Julian thought, and you carp that
you
have it bad, you self-indulgent turd? Think about Iliana, for that matter. Christ, she's been an actual exile for most of her life. Try that one on, Julian. A rebel against
her
mother, too, against her entire family—refused to marry, rejected the Church, defied the sexual codes by daring to sleep with anybody she chose, man or woman. Defied the social codes by becoming an art photographer when that was unheard of—in Argentina, yet. Defied a totalitarian political system, first by her incendiary photographs, then by her open anti-government activism, finally by going into exile. At age nineteen, for god's sake, Julian. When you were all atwitter with the major cosmic crisis of trying to “find yourself.” Then roamed the world: New York, Paris, Madrid, then back to New York, the early CR group—then Europe again. And always the necklaces of cameras, always adorned by the precious lenses through which she saw the world in her unique way, always registering that, capturing it on prints that now hung framed along the best gallery exhibition walls. Inventing and reinventing the world through her own eyes. By sheer will. And you talk about will, Julian? Game-player. Better self-disgust than self-pity.

Very well, she confessed to herself, so it is a game, this trying to get through each day. A gambit. A technique not only to survive but to teach oneself some meaning in this otherwise distasteful process called daily life. You learned all over again to improvise, the skill an actor needed as much as—no, more than—the ability to memorize.

The Game was like a dare. Seeing how long you could let the exhaustion prey on you, how remote you could let the will become before catching it again, pulling it thread by thread like a spider would out of some place in you that you still trusted could secrete it.

She dismounted the bus at her stop and started the two-block walk to the loft. The rain had stopped. Maybe Larry would feel like talking? Maybe she could secrete from herself the will to talk, too. Maybe there was hope beyond Hope. Because if the Game was still a shake of the adolescent fist, Prometheus against the gods, it had also become Job refusing to curse God and die. The Game was more than to suffer and survive. The Game was also to find or forge some moment of beauty, of grace, at least once a day. Say “Thank you” to the harassed bus driver and he might light up with a smile of surprise. Praise something. The shape of a rainwashed nectarine in a street fruit-stand, its self-contained sunburst colors. The way an ailanthus tree flourished up through a subway grate. A moment of laughter with Charlotte, however much the two women misunderstood that they understood one another. The brief freshness of city streets after a thunderstorm. Praise
some
thing. Vignettes of a York Mystery Play inserted into this Samuel Beckett life.