Looking for Mr. Goodbar (33 page)

She woke up and turned on every light in the apartment, then was upset by the glare and turned off most of them.

Maybe she should go to a shrink. Not the kind who really messed with your head but the kind Katherine had been seeing for years, who helped you understand some of your real motives. Katherine was exactly the same person she’d been years ago but she seemed to have much more understanding—a whole set of satisfying explanations to prove how different things were this time around.

In her next dream she was trying to get home to her apartment on St. Marks Place. She was crawling, on her knees. It was hard to find the apartment because the whole street was covered with some kind of dark material that turned it into a tunnel so you couldn’t see the sky. And the sidewalks were covered with jive-ass spades with knives, hustling everyone, except they didn’t see her because she was on her knees. Just as she was finally getting close to her house a huge red Checker cab chased her right up onto the sidewalk and out of the dream, but not quite into consciousness.

In a later dream she was telling a shrink about the first dream. She was sitting facing him but he had no face. Just a pair of glasses resting on a sharp nose on what was otherwise a blob of pink skin. They were in a store on St. Marks Place—on the same block as the Circus—except that the front of the store had been torn away, maybe by a bomb or some kind of explosion, so you could see the whole street. Except it didn’t look like St. Marks Place. There was a river and some dark woods and the BMT subway was running through and there were trapezes in some of the trees. She started to tell the shrink about the first dream, about the tunnel and the people with knives, but as she talked she realized that the shrink was getting bigger and bigger and was now easily twice her size. She began to laugh because it struck her as very funny that a
shrink
should be getting
bigger and bigger
instead of
shrinking.
And then the next thing she knew she was lying strapped down to his couch, and a voice that wasn’t a human voice (because he didn’t have a mouth) but came from some mechanical device inside him, was saying, “We’re going to straighten you out, Theresa. We’re going to have to straighten you out.”

She awakened, struggling against the straps that were binding her. Crying. At first she wasn’t certain she was out of the dream but even when she was sure that she was awake, her anguish remained and she cried and cried. Her pillow was soaked with tears and still she couldn’t stop crying. It was four o’clock in the morning. She put on a sweater and jeans and her winter coat, took keys and money and left the apartment.

There was no one at all on Sixth Avenue; at first she thought she was the only person awake in the world, although here and there an apartment light was on. But then she saw a few people—men, mostly. Staggering along. Curled up in doorways. One throwing up in a wastebasket. Creeps. So bad even the Statue of Liberty
wouldn’t let them huddle under her robes. A very young queen, his arm around an elderly dwarf, smiled at her as they passed. A dwarf out of the circus. The mention of the circus stirred some memory but she couldn’t place it.

Fourteenth Street, devoid of its shoppers, its hangers-out, its cheap wares spilling out of large brown cartons on the sidewalk, was unbelievably ugly. The garbage stood out on the street as though some maniacal artist had gone around outlining it with a black crayon. She returned to Sixth Avenue and headed uptown. Two small, thin, bleary-eyed Puerto Ricans made their clucking, sucking noises at her, obviously too spaced out to care if she responded. A cabdriver slowed down to ask her if she was crazy, walking around the streets like this at this hour. She shook her head. He said she should get in the cab, if she didn’t have money he would take her where she was going. She told him she didn’t know where she was going. He was reluctant to drive off and leave her.

“I’m all right,” she said. And thought of James. She wished James were with her right now. Not even talking. Just walking, with his arm around her. She couldn’t think of anyone else it would be pleasant to be with right now. The taxi drove off. Somewhere a police siren wailed. She was beginning to feel cold.

She didn’t see another person walking between Eighteenth Street and Thirty-second.

At Herald Square she dropped onto a bench and closed her eyes. She was cold but she didn’t care that she was cold. She didn’t want to go home yet. She wanted to walk so far and so long that when she got home and fell into bed she would be too tired to dream.

She was there for a long time before she realized that two benches down a man, or the body of a man, lay curled against the slats. She stared at him, or it, wondering if he was dead or alive. At some point a police car went by, its siren at a low wail, and it occurred to her that she should tell them about the man, so if he were alive . . . if he were alive, what? They would wake him out of what might be a not-too-bad sleep and take him to a jail or a hospital and
he would be no better off than he was now. He would feel the cold for the first time. The thought of the hospital brought back, for the first time, the dream, memory, whatever it was she’d had of herself on her knees . . . in the cast . . . during . . . or before . . . when?
The operation on her spine.
At the split second that it hit her, she rose from the bench and moved swiftly across the enclosed park area, climbing over the benches on the other side, half walking, half running across the street, until she was in front of Gimbels. Where to now? Downtown? Across?

Suddenly it occurred to her that for much of her life she had been running away from that table. From the helplessness and the humiliation. She could see herself walking . . . on Rhinelander Avenue, on Pelham Parkway, on Convent Avenue, on St. Marks Place, on Eighth Street. Once her mother had called the doctor to see if Theresa wasn’t hurting herself with all this walking, and the doctor had said that if it hurt her, she probably wouldn’t be doing it. But that wasn’t actually true. Sometimes it hurt and she did it anyway because the need to move far outweighed the pain. The need to know that she
could
move. That she wasn’t being held down. She was free. Freedom was no vague philosophical concept; it was movement, pure and simple.

She admitted her tiredness to herself for the first time but she wasn’t ready to give in to the extent of taking one of the cabs that still zipped by, probably on their way to Brooklyn. It was almost five in the morning. Slowly she started walking downtown.

Maybe the idea she’d had earlier and then forgotten wasn’t such a bad idea. She would go to a shrink. If she didn’t do that she would have to do something else drastic. Take a leave and travel. Something. Or go back to school. Or take a job abroad. A shrink was probably the best idea. What she needed now was to come to a better understanding of some of the events of her childhood that had affected her life so strongly without her realizing it. She’d never thought in terms of a cause-and-effect relationship—this had been done to you and therefore you did that—so that it had been unsettling,
fascinating, though, to suddenly
feel
that very distinct relation between being confined in a cast and needing to move. It would be quite an extravagance, of course, seeing a shrink. Particularly for something that probably wouldn’t really change her life in any way. On the other hand, she could stop any time she was feeling a little better . . . or if she didn’t like the way it was going . . . or if she liked it but it was going too fast, if her money was going too fast.

By the time she’d reached home and climbed the two flights of stairs to her apartment she was exhausted almost beyond belief and thought she would fall asleep instantly. But as her head hit the pillow, the thought
I can’t ask Katherine and how else will I find someone?
jolted her awake, so that while the exhaustion was still there, she couldn’t sleep, but lay awake trying to think of different people, aside from Katherine, whom she might ask about a shrink. Finally it occurred to her that she might, once school began, ask not only Evelyn but also Rose. The more she thought about it, the better an idea this seemed. Not only because Rose was basically sympathetic, however distant she’d been out of concern for James, or because she and Morris were Jewish and most shrinks were Jewish, but also because it would be a way of acknowledging to Rose that her failure with James was at least partly her failure, not all his. Rose would appreciate that; it might make her feel more friendly toward Theresa again. Theresa felt she could use a friend like Rose.

As the sky began to lighten she fell into a sleep punctuated by dreams that were frightening enough to make her want to wake up, which her body wouldn’t allow her to do, so that she would struggle almost to the surface and fall back into blackness again.

Tony called and asked
what she was doing New Year’s Eve. She said she thought she was going to a party with James but she wasn’t sure. He said he’d call her that night and check her out. She told
him she didn’t believe him because he hadn’t called the last time he said he would. He said he couldn’t help that, he’d had to go out of town on a business deal.

“For the garage?” she asked sarcastically.

No, he said, he wasn’t working at the garage any more. He was into something big, he’d tell her about it when he saw her. She told him he should come up right now and tell her or forget about it.

“Whatsa matter, love?” Tony said. “Ain’t James giving you what you need?”

She hung up, sorry she’d even asked him to come. She wasn’t even horny. Hadn’t been for a while. Maybe it was the depression; her juices weren’t flowing.

She stayed up all
night and slept during the day, in her mind marking off the days until the end of Christmas vacation the way a prisoner marks off the days to his release. She felt totally alone.

James called late in
the afternoon of December 30th, awakening her from a strange dream in which she had found a beautiful new apartment on the Upper West Side, signed a lease, painted and decorated the rooms, then moved uptown to find herself back in the same old place. She picked up the phone without being fully awake and said hello without thinking of who it might be.

“Hello, Theresa. It’s James.”

“James,” she said, her voice and mind hazy, “James, I—”

“Is this a bad time for you?”

“No,” she said. “I was asleep.”

“Shall I call back later?”

“No,” she said. “I’m all right.”

Shoot.

“I’ve been thinking a great deal,” he said. “As you might imagine.” His voice was almost the same as usual—perhaps just a tiny
bit more reserved. “I spent a good deal of time, at first,” he went on, “trying to see this thing from your point of view, an independent woman who always had a great deal of freedom, and so on. Trying, well, as I said, to see it your way. But after a couple of days I realized that what I was doing was futile. Not that understanding and compassion are futile, but that in the long run, no matter how well I understand your feelings, I have to act from mine, so that the only thing I could really do was to understand exactly how I feel about our—about you and me—and act on
that,
and that you would act upon your own feelings.”

I love you so much, James.
She kissed the receiver.
I wish you were my brother. I wish Thomas were alive. Why did you have to die, Thomas?
She stared at the receiver in astonishment, as though it were responsible for her suddenly thinking of Thomas.

“You know that I love you, Theresa. And that I want to marry you.”

Even now, James? I love you. I despise you for loving me even now.

“I’m not quite certain . . . I feel that you’re fond of me . . .” He seemed to be waiting for her to interrupt. After a moment he went on. “I can’t tell . . . I’m not sure whether your reluctance to get married is a general reluctance . . . or you simply don’t want to commit yourself to me . . . or it’s that—a couple of times you gave me the impression that it was children that were the problem. That you didn’t want to have children. The thing I want to say about that . . . is that I can live with that, with not having children. I had sort of looked forward to having children but it’s not the deepest desire of my life. I can give it up, if it’s a question of having you or not having you.”

James! I don’t know what to say! I don’t know what to do!

“Theresa?”

“I’m here, James. I’m listening.”

“All right.” She could hear him draw in his breath. “What I can’t live with . . . I’m not going to apologize for this, it’s the way I am and it barely matters whether it’s archaic or foolish or anything
else you might think of . . . I can’t live with knowing you’re with another man . . . men, whatever. I’m not even talking about being married, now, I mean even as we are. It has nothing to do with morality, immorality, anything. That phone conversation was like a knife in my heart.”

And she had twisted it.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

“I was a shit.”

“You were honest. I think I needed that. I was being somewhat unrealistic.”

Silence.

“In any event, this is what I’ve decided to do.” He laughed uncertainly. “I seem to be making a rather long speech . . . a summation to the jury, or some such thing, but there doesn’t seem to be any getting around it.”

“I don’t mind it,” she said.
I like hearing the sound of your voice. Later I’ll try to remember the words.

“In a month, at the end of January, I’m going to take a vacation. My overdue vacation. I’m going to go to Ireland. I would like the trip to be . . . I would like you to marry me before then and come with me. I’m making it that far away to give you time to think. The reservations I’ve made are for two people but I told the agent I might be changing it to one. I will go one way or another. I . . .” But he had run out of things to say.

Will we go to the New Year’s Party, James? Or will I be alone?
New Year’s was a very significant time. On other nights you might be alone out of choice, but if you were alone then, it was because no one in the whole world wanted you.