Living Room (4 page)

At the next stop, a couple got in. Would they come to her aid? Would anyone in New York see or hear?

Shirley moved to the other end of the car, next to the couple, engrossed with each other. The man gave her a look: What kind of oddball girl, all those empty seats in the train, was she looking for a three-way deal?

“Look, kid,” said the man, “why don’t you go back to where you were sitting before?”

Shirley started to point to the bum and saw that he was stretched out now, asleep, the paper bag with the wine bottle nestled beside his cheek. Embarrassed, she left the train at the next stop.

The empty station was frightening.

It was Harry’s fault. When she said aboriginal, she was being descriptive. Knocking on her father’s bedroom door and going in, that was her fault. Being alive was a fault. Her mother, dead, was blameless. Or was it all her mother’s fault for having deserted the living?
Wanted dead or alive
the poster had said,
as if it didn’t matter.
If that thing of hers could be sewn shut, would that be a defense?

A train roared into the station.

Was standing up safer? She sat down. The conductor shook her awake in the Bronx because they were nearing the end of the line and he thought she might miss her stop.

It was almost two in the morning when she let herself into the apartment, ablaze with lights. Philip Hartman jumped up from his chair. Behind him came Mrs. Bialek, and a policeman holding a notebook and pencil. With one swift movement, Hartman slapped his daughter’s face, then put his arms around her, and as a startled policeman watched these Jews whom he didn’t understand, Philip Hartman and his daughter cried in each other’s arms.

*

Three weeks later Shirley answered the telephone in the apartment, expecting this or that person to remind her father about paying a bill, and heard instead Harry’s voice saying could he have a date.

Her vocabulary tumbled through her head, retorts, questions that answered instead of asked, sharp-tongued, sarcastic, needling things. She closed her eyes and said only “Yes.”

“What would you like to do?”

“Most?”

“Most.”

“Can you teach me to drive a car?”

“Do you have a learner’s permit? How about the movies?” What Harry had in mind, as it turned out, was not a movie, but what he called a get-acquainted walk in the park, during which he held her hand, and then led her, acquiescent, to the apartment his parents had abandoned
for
the evening. As soon as they were inside the door, he kissed her on the lips the way some people shake hands, firmly without feeling.
Tenderly,
she wanted to say,
softly.
He would take advice badly. She said nothing, but thought of Caroline’s tenderness and wondered whether women were naturally more tender or was there something wrong with her?

“Want a beer?” Harry asked her.

“Sure,” she said. She had tasted beer once and thought it dreadful.

He brought in two bottles and she wanted to say that it would be pleasanter to have it in glasses, but held her tongue. Then he said, “I’d like to show you something.”

She thought he was about to unzip his fly. Instead he went to the bookshelf and from behind some large volumes on the highest shelf he took down a book. She yearned for discussion, all action being fraught with danger. Would it be history he was taking down from the shelf, or something more contemporary, about politics, since he had now succeeded Charlie Bryans as school president? Should she tell him that she understood his interest in power, that she herself was seriously tempted if only she could contrive to let her tongue say what charmed people instead of letting it chatter along on its own?

Harry sat by her side and opened the book to a predetermined page. She looked down. It was a two-page photograph of a man with a tattoo on his arm fornicating with a girl who was wearing only stockings.

“What do you think of that?” asked Harry.

What she thought of, in truth, was her father in bed with Mrs. Bialek, and wondering whether the whole embarrassing idea of sex would quiet down in her mind if she actually did it once.

Just once.

But they said that if you did it once, you couldn’t stop doing it again. Besides—she looked at Harry, his question still unanswered—and wondered if he was really the right one, or did it matter?”

“I said—” Harry began.

“I heard you.”
Don’t let your mouth get you into trouble,
she thought. What she said, pointing to the book, was, “What I’m more interested in is what do you think I think of that?”

“Does it bother, you know, offend you?”

“Nothing human offends me,” she said.

Harry seemed excited.

“But,” she continued, “I wish he didn’t have a tattoo.”
Oh my God,
she thought,
he’ll accuse me of being a mob.

“Well,” he said, “it’s probably hard to get normal people to pose
for
pictures like that.”

“You think a tattoo isn’t normal?”

He shook his head.

“I’m glad we agree,” she said. “You never see women with tattoos except in the circus.”

“That’s a good observation,” Harry said, turning the page. The left-hand side was text. The photograph on the right-hand side was a bit difficult to make out at first. Then Shirley realized it was a close-up of a penis entering a vagina.

“What do you think of that one?” asked Harry.

“The photographer must have needed a lot of light for that close-up. It’s a wonder the man was able to keep his thing up.”

“He must have been pretty interested in what he was doing.”

“He couldn’t have been terribly interested in the girl. I mean to let themselves be photographed like that. I think people in love prefer to be alone with each other.”

“You’re right,” he said, but he remembered the several occasions on which he and two of his friends had spent time together with Rhoda, the most promiscuous girl in the neighborhood, and the lack of privacy itself had been exciting. He thought that since Shirley was not like Rhoda, he ought to kiss her again. This time, as he put his arm around her, Shirley held the sides of his head, so that when he thrust his mouth at her, she checked him.

“Tenderly,” she said.

It offended Harry to be instructed by a girl. But here they were, and he didn’t want the opportunity to go to waste. He smiled at her in a way that had won him votes from boys and girls and that inspired adult compliments.

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” said Harry, wondering what she looked like without her clothes.

Shirley, who had not trained herself to respond with comments that were expected of her, reflected on friendship. A friend, she thought, was someone you could depend on. Perhaps she had no friends. Her father? Harry was not someone she could count on. Nor could he count on her. Shirley realized that he was pulling down the zipper on the back of her dress.

“Would you like some help?” she asked, immediately sorry. Perhaps Harry would interpret her offer of help as an insult. Actually, what Harry was thinking as Shirley pulled her dress over her head was that she was sure a lot faster than he had thought.

Harry stared at her breasts.

As she removed her garter belt and rolled her stockings down, she said, “Do you want to go into the bedroom?”

“My room,” he said, his voice snarled in the traffic of his nerves.

She gathered her things, and summoning resolve, followed him. Shirley was standing in front
of the dresser mirror and he could
see her front and back at the same time.

“Aren’t you going to get undressed?” Shirley asked.

“Jesus,” he said, suddenly remembering the book left lying open in the living room. He retrieved it. When he returned to his room, Shirley was lying on the narrow bed, up on one elbow like an odalisque she had seen in an illustration.

“Just in case the folks come home. Don’t want this lying out there,” he said.

He got undressed. Shirley thought he was built well, as she had expected, but looked strange standing there nude except for his socks. He noticed the direction of her gaze, and blushing, took his socks off.

“You got a diaphragm?” he asked.

“Sure,” Shirley lied.

“You look terrific,” he said.

“You don’t look so bad yourself.” Was he really to be the first?

Harry looked down at himself as if he was unfamiliar with his own body.

She held her arms out to him, hoping they weren’t shaking. He clambered onto the bed awkwardly. Shirley wished her mind wasn’t whirring. Harry’s body felt warm. She looked down at the most visible part of his excitement. It looked different from the pictures in the hygiene book, redder, bigger.

“You know,” she said, “this is illegal.”

“Yeah, makes it more exciting. Come on,” said Harry, anxious to get on with it.

“I think you should wear one of those things,” she said.

Harry’s hand fell from her breast. “I don’t have any.” Then, “I thought you said you had a diaphragm.”

“Sure,” she said, “but I don’t want you to catch V.D.”

Harry, who hated even the chance of catching a cold from kissing, remembered that he had kissed her, and now had almost… He dressed with speed, wordlessly motioning for Shirley to get her clothes back on. He walked her downstairs in silence.

In the street she said, “Maybe another time, Harry.”

Harry said nothing. He let his virgin date go home alone. She didn’t mind. She had learned there was a lot more to sex than she had imagined; what a vast area of human skin each person had, how pleasant it might all feel being made love to.

Not this time. She suspected that people were given their sexuality so that they might more easily learn who their friends and enemies were. Harry was no enemy, but he was not someone she could depend on. Someone else would have to teach her to drive a car.

CHAPTER THREE

ONE SUNDAY MORNING when Shirley was fifteen, Philip Hartman persuaded her to put a place marker in
Sense and Sensibility
and take a walk with him in the park.

He had always thought of May as the ideal month. On the thickest oak trees, the newborn leaves uncurled like sleepers waking, their delicate forms a fragile green against the strong brown trunk. To Hartman, they portended hope, just as in late autumn, when the same leaves, the size of a large man’s hand, yellowed and browned, dropped in the wind, they presaged to Hartman a sad time of year, a winter to be humped like a load on the back.

But it now being another May God had let him live to see, he walked with the stride of a younger man, his eyes ravenous for the daffodils and the early tulips and the grass green and level from the first cutting, and it occurred to him that he ought to have the talk with Shirley that he had been having off and on in his own head.

“Shirley, it’s a beautiful day. I hope you’re not going to get angry at me.”

He felt disarmed by her laughter. Maybe another time?

Finding courage he said, “When you were born, I wanted you to be a boy.” He waited for an adverse reaction. None came. “You understand,” he continued, “I come from a former time. For a person like me, to wish for a boy is natural.”

“Yes, Pop.”

“I want you to be what you want to be. I don’t want to interfere.”

“What are you trying to say, Pop?”

“Oh,” he sighed, “when you write papers for school, you say things in just the right way. For me, even talk is so hard to be exact in.”

“Try.”

He looked into her face. “I’m
glad
you’re a girl.”

She waited.

“You’re too pretty to be a boy.”

Shirley laughed.

“In my day girls grew up mainly to get married as fast as possible. I don’t want you to feel that is what you should do to please me. Of course I would be happier, especially God forbid I should die, to know that you had someone to take care of you.”

“Like you?”

“No, no, better. I didn’t do too good a job, a father, alone.”

“Pop,” she said, taking his hands, “you did fine. I can take care of myself.”

“You mean you’re not going to get married?!”

“Pop, I want to find myself before I find someone else, if you know what I mean.”

“Would you like me to buy you an ice cream?”

“Pop, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“How is an ice cream upset?”

“When you get nervous about me, you always buy me an ice cream.”

“I swear on your mother’s grave I’m not upset. Believe me, I want to see things from your way. But please try a minute to see things from mine.” He clasped his own hands hard. “I’m past fifty. My own mother and father were dead by fifty. I have responsibilities. If I should die—”

“Pop, is it possible for a Jew to think ‘If I should live’ instead of ‘If I should die’?”