Going Down Fast (7 page)

“God, it's morning,” she had interrupted. “I have to go,
now
. I have no idea what I'm going to tell Asher.”

In answer his face went somber, heavy. She thought she had angered him. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. When she drew free the rim of the sky was lighter, and she knew with a fierce pleasurable terror that she wanted him. She was shocked and gratified. Standing she gave him her hand, and he took her home. She did not expect to see him again unless she ran into him with Asher.

Asher was asleep, and she made her bed on the couch. In the morning when she told him she had gone out for coffee with Rowley, they had one of their bad arguments. She had felt no guilt that morning, only a sense of delight she was hard put not to try to share with Asher. She could not keep from telling him she had been with Rowley not only because truth was her habit but because saying his name was a sharp pleasure. Somehow she expected Asher to understand: a walk with Rowley in the spring was not to be disparaged. As if she had been on vacation, she perceived in herself new readiness to try to fulfill Asher's ideas of wifehood. She longed for a chance to demonstrate her strengthened patience, promptness and fortitude. She got it.

Three days later Asher had gathered data on Rowley. He reported it with obvious distaste for the resemblance of this transfer of information to gossip. She listened in squashed fury. She had to question the night and ask if he had been simply on the make. His words and gestures began to haunt her. All of the time like a steady lowpitched hum she found herself thinking of him. She felt raw and sore, she wanted to call him to account, she wanted to justify him. The next time she saw him, by accident in the Loop, she had formed defenses.

Not, to be sure, sufficient. Her marriage just might have been salvageable had she not seen him at all, but she could not let go feeling alive. Each time she saw him she resolved to give nothing, to take nothing. Each time he met her believing she would break off. That tension had perhaps never died.

She opened her eyes and watched a gull maneuver and dive over water blue and soft as morning glories. A pity they could not be friends because there was no one like him. She was glad to have come through the pain of breaking and out the other side without resorting to hatred. She was heartily glad.

The afternoon was turning chilly when Leon found her.

She walked with him to the car. “How did it go with your mother?”

“Okay, okay.” He scratched his head in annoyance, his voice surly. “Fern gave me a lecture, but she gave me some money too.”

“Does she do that often?”

“Not often enough. Think I'm ashamed? They have more than they know what to do with.” He snorted. “Not that
he
ever hands any over. Fern does it on the sly.”

She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the backseat was filled with packages. Frozen sirloin and porterhouse steaks and lambchops they loaded directly into the freezer. The bag Leon toted in with care held a pot of stuffed cabbage. “Put that on, heat it up for supper. Fern's stuffed cabbage is the greatest.”

She would make her stuffed cabbage for him. She would not be outdone by anybody's mother. Out of another bag came two sportshirts with pins still in them, a Scottish sweater with a mothhole, a bottle of good men's aftershave used perhaps twice, recent issues of
Commentary
and a pair of ice-skates. Another bag held Chinook salmon, kosher soups, sardines, asparagus, fancy mixed Chinese vegetables, water biscuits and red caviar.

The kitchen table was hidden by a grove of empty pop bottles, forcing them to eat in the livingroom. “Film's expensive,” he mumbled as he ate. “Those damn foundations swimming in money, you'd think they'd give a little but they wait till you've made it halfway, and then who needs them? Scared of being caught wrong. Fern can't see my stuff for shit but she tries, anyhow.”

“You're closer to her than to your father, right?”

“At least she's a human being, or she used to be. Sheldon sounds like a vulture, he acts like a vulture, he thinks like a vulture. He even smells like one. Fern married him for security, and I bet she's sorry. They stayed married for the children's sake, my poor ball-less brother Sidney and me.” He had turned up cranky but now he was relaxed. She did not set out to adapt to his moods or shape them, but she could not help taking on a certain amount of protective emotional coloration from a man. He was old to be wrapped up in his family, but perhaps seeing his mother stirred up a swarm of annoyances from the past. He was still talking about his father, a passionate bitterness thickening his voice. “Sheldon's in love with the dirty work he's doing for the University—facilitating renewal. Like pulling strings and putting the pressure on where it hurts. He thinks the University is pure and that makes him pure. He's always been self-righteous, but now he's impossible, he's leading a damn holy crusade against the lowdown and the unworthy.”

“Tell your father he's forcing you—and incidentally me—out of our snug homes.”

Leon laughed: the teeth of a saw catching one by one on his larynx. “That's the idea, gang. Sheldon believes in the good, the true, and the beautiful. He wants to be where the good people are—only heaven is here and the points are bread and status. He's prepared to sacrifice for his ideals. Like old Abraham he's all set to knife his son. Anyhow, he has another.” He got up abruptly. “Let's get our asses out of here. Let's wash all this rot down with some beer.”

She should not have let him talk so long about his family. On her side of the rusty Buick she curled up. Leon was likable once you came to know him: prickly and stubborn but loyal. He always had some project afoot to get a friend something he thought they needed, a job, a woman, away from home, back into school, into analysis. Coming near him she stepped into a palpable field of interest. The converse was an equally strong pull for sympathy, a tugging at the breast she suspected him unaware of. She did not mind that pull for nothing came more cheaply than empathy with a man. He had only to capture her attention.

“When Joye and I got married he offered us a thousand bucks if we'd swear to keep a kosher kitchen. Ace, I told him to shove it. You don't give presents with clauses. He's such a barefaced hypo. You know, when I was getting bar-mitzvahed, I got hooked on Hebrew and serious about the stuff and I was even thinking about being a rabbi, dig that. He made me feel like a worm. You don't take that shit seriously, he let me know, it's bad manners, it's only poor
schlumps
like your mother's family who really let it get in the way.”

Woody's bar was jammed. Once in the door they were brought to a halt. In the lead he forced a slow way, squeezing between the tables and the crowd along the bar. As he inched forward gouts of words came over his shoulder in the uproar. “Always got to be right … bigoted old bastard … got me thrown out of school … tell you some time.” Then he turned. “There's your friend,” he hissed.

She followed the direction of his gaze and ran against Rowley's table. A hot wave of confusion flooded her. All in green Caroline leaned toward him, the fingers of one hand just grazing his. Outstretched graceful hand of possession. She snagged almost at once on his eyes. She caught her breath, shocked at the anger in his frowning stare, shocked that he had not, did not greet her. Blood knocked in her temples and throat.

“It's crowded, it's too crowded. Let's go!”

Leon turned, looked her full in the face, and then took her arm and led her out.

Leon brought out a bottle of scotch that they attacked in the island of light on the couch set in his dark lofty apartment.

“What did you expect? You annoy him. It's damned inconvenient of you to turn up in his world.”

“But I don't hate him! Why should he hate me?”

“You will. You have to. He rejected you.”

“But we loved each other.”

“Rowley never loved anyone but Rowley.”

“You don't know!”

“Nobody has ever loved you.” He chuckled dryly. “If someone had loved you, you'd never have left him.”

“How could he not speak to me? How could he do that to me in front of another woman?”

“Why not? You'll cut him dead next time.”

“Now I want to. I want to march past him with fourteen other men.”

“You couldn't make him jealous. Seeing you with another man probably relieves his conscience.”

“My, you're cheering me up.”

“You want lies or reality?”

Scotch and shock were breeding a sponginess in her brain, but through it she studied him. He was trying to tear from her what she considered her history and he considered illusion. He was strange and dangerous and this peculiar struggle was not healthy: but it was absorbing. She was not confident she was fit for anything better than to sit with Leon late at night over the wreckage of her own and other lives.

“You keep saying he didn't love me. All right, he doesn't give a shit now—granted, after tonight, granted! But he did care. You don't know how well we got on. Just simple things like eating together …”

“Sure, he's easygoing, long as he has his way. So why didn't you get married?”

He buffeted her with questions from retreat to retreat. “Why should you care?”

“I believe in caring.” He lay back plunking his feet on the abused and stained teak table. “When we die we're meat, and in the meantime nothing's worth bothering about but people. Not words, actions. Anybody can say
love, love, love
, but will he cross the street to do you something? First he has to find out what you need. Who you are. Right?”

Yes. The slow warmth of recognition. He talked on and her murmurs of agreement rounded his sentences.

“What matters is handling others not like things but setting up a connection. A live circuit. You have to keep trying to get through. When you give up, you're dead: walled in.”

He told her a story. “Once upon a time there was a woman came to a man and said, Baby, love me. He said, Ech, you? A plain dumpy broad like yourself? Go on. She said, Baby, love me and I'll be anybody you want me to be, please. Man said, How about Cleopatra. So the woman turned into Cleopatra, and the next morning, man said, That wasn't half bad. So they got married. After a while, man got tired of all the snakes in the bathroom and he had her turn into Marilyn for a while, and then he had Harlow and Garbo and Lucretia Borgia. Everything went fine till one morning he woke up first and there she was too pooped to play her role. Who the hell are
you
, said the man, and where's my gorgeous wife? I am your wife whom you love, said the woman, but he kicked her out of bed. Women are ever deceitful, he said, and went to bed with his officeboy. The woman went to a fortuneteller to ask, Why did he stop loving me?”

She was lying on the couch. She rose on one elbow to look at him through narrowed eyes. “You're clearly not talking about Rowley now.”

“Or how about this one? A man got himself a pretty bright-colored bird because he liked the way it sang. He took it home and put it in a cage, but it wouldn't sing where it couldn't fly around. Every day the bird got smaller and smaller, it wouldn't eat and drink, and finally it got so small it flew out like a mosquito through the wire mesh. That goes to show you, the man said, I should've invested in a better cage.”

“Or a better behaved bird.” She was sitting up. “So you knew Asher?”

He laughed like a kid. “I saw you with him. That's all.”

She shook her head wonderingly. “I don't remember meeting you.”

“I'm an old girlwatcher. You know. But I was just figuring the odds. I'll tell you one thing. That whole year with Rowley was just a game. The problems you have to solve were the ones bound up with your marriage.”

She lay back on the couch. She had kicked off her shoes and slowly she flexed her toes. “Sometimes I feel as if I killed some small, pretty, fluffy but vicious animal—like a rabbit with fangs—and I go around with it hung in my hair wondering why I smell something bad and what hurts.”

“Kid, we're topnotch rabbit buriers around here,” Leon rasped, “but you'd be surprised how many people can't walk upright if they don't have something heavy in their hair.”

Hard to believe in a world beyond this island of light caulked by darkness. The brown couch was low and scarred with cigarette burns through which foamrubber showed. His baby's sweater lay on the table, growing dirtier. Looking at the film of grime and ash, she decided she would have to clean.

Wednesday–Sunday, October 29–November 2

Wednesday:
Anna learned that Rand Grooper of ISS had got a grant from the housing administration to do an objective study of democratic participation in the processes of urban renewal planning in the area. He had farmed out a piece to Miss Clay in return for her name on the proposal. Miss Clay enjoyed a reputation in Washington since she had run a monumental study on re-enlistment among WACs. Anna had handled the volumes of the report, full of mathematical tables demonstrating among the sample of five thousand WACs that the desire to have offspring negatively correlated with re-enlistment intentions; favorable attitudes toward authority systems, on the other hand, demonstrated positive correlation. The project had caused a stir in military and governmental circles, and her services were in demand.

The ISS board of directors interlocked with the University. Grooper was an ambitious young man. One arm of the University was preparing the renewal plan. Anna was reminded of her foray into market research, when she had worked briefly for a consumers' testing organization that specialized in producing tests for companies who wished to demonstrate the superiority of their products.

Thursday:
Her friend Marcia called her. “Meet me for lunch, no excuses. I won't have you hiding in a sulk.”