Marjorie Morningstar (32 page)

From that night onward, she was accepted by the staff people as one of them. The sarcastic
nickname she had been tagged with, “Sweetness and Light,” fell into disuse. The redheaded
singer Adele, with whom Marjorie shared her bungalow, dropped her patronizing air,
offered her scotch from the bottle in her suitcase, and began confiding to her all
the daily twists and turns in her affair with a waiter. The office-girl actresses,
now that she was sleeping with Noel (as they thought), talked more freely about their
love problems in her presence, as well as about the romances of other staff members.
Marjorie was astounded at the scope and complication of South Wind sex activity thus
uncovered, and dismayed to think how blind she had been.

Her eyes thus opened, she began to notice among the guests, too, the clues that indicated
affairs—a good-looking man continuously with a mousy or ugly girl; a woman guest dancing
night after night with the same waiter or caddy; a middle-aged man and a young woman
in steady company, both looking composed and making no effort to amuse each other.
She pointed these things out to Noel.

“Well, goodbye to your innocence,” he said. “It was charming while it lasted. Of course
you’re not really good at this yet. Eventually you can tell by the way a man’s paddling
a canoe while the girl lounges, or by the way two people play a hand of bridge, or
by the way they dance, or how they act on a golf course or a tennis court, or how
a girl’s lipstick looks at breakfast time. I could win fortunes if anybody would bet
me on such things.”

“Why, this place is alive with sex,” Marjorie said. “It seethes with it. It crawls
with it. It pullulates with it. It’s horrible. It’s like Dante’s Inferno. A lot of
nasty squirming writhing naked bodies.”

“Oh, come,” said Noel. They were on the porch of the social hall, sunning themselves
in deck chairs. “Have another beer.”

“I mean it. My mother calls it Sodom. She’s right.”

“You’re reacting too violently, dear. There isn’t nearly as much sex here as you think.
Among the staff, I grant you, being cooped up together all summer, it does get to
be a bit of a barnyard. But the guests are entirely different.” He gestured at the
crowds frisking on the lawn and the bathing beach, the girls in vivid swim suits,
the men in brief trunks, all tanned, smiling, making a lot of noise. “The fellows
do come here, of course, with the usual bachelor’s dream of seducing a pretty girl,
in between tennis, golf, and sunbathing. But they don’t have much luck. The nice girls,
the Shirleys, come with their tight bathing suits and bright flimsy dresses, intent
on trapping a husband, and not inclined to settle for less. It’s the pigs who mainly
benefit by the tension that ensues. Their hopes are low and humble. They only want
some attention, and they’ll pay with their messy bodies for it. A few of the men really
do break down and get interested in some nice girl. A few more, the less fussy ones,
end up coupling with the pigs. That’s about it.”

“You’re much too callous and contemptuous about the whole thing.”

“Look, Margie, there’s one fact you’d better face. Sex exists. People not only eat,
drink, and breathe, they mate. That’s how it happens that there are always more people
when the old ones die off. Your viewpoint—evidently you got it from your parents—is
as queer today as an Australian bushman’s. The wonder is not that there’s so much
sex at South Wind, but that there’s so little of it. Most of these people get nothing
more in the way of sex than a few fumbled kisses and hugs, and the handful who do
go farther with it skulk and crawl in the dark as though they were committing a crime.
That’s Moses for you. At a remove of forty centuries he still has these poor young
Jews under control. It’s absolutely incredible.”

“What do you advocate?” Marjorie said. “Complete promiscuity?”

“I don’t advocate anything, my dear. I just go along, living my way, and not trying
to make generalizations. I have a very good time. There are certain girls, Marjorie,
easygoing heathens like myself, to whom sex is as simple and accessible a pleasure
as a highball. They ask only that it be good, and enjoyed in good company. You’ll
never understand that state of mind, so don’t try.”

After a silence she said, “I don’t know anything about your gay heathens. I don’t
think a girl can go to bed with a man and forget about it. It’s against human nature—”

“It’s against your nature, Marjorie. Don’t generalize. The Eskimos exchange wives
as a matter of course. A Polynesian girl your age—”

“Oh, sure enough, the Eskimos and the Polynesians,” Marjorie said. “That was bound
to come up, wasn’t it? Well, you don’t live in an igloo and I’m not wearing a grass
skirt, and we’re not discussing people who do, but people like ourselves.”

“Try to be consistent, old girl. Though I appreciate that it’s an effort. You said
human nature. They’re human.”

Marjorie said, “I believe I will have another beer, thank you.” She watched the guests
at their gambols while Noel went to the bar. “You know what all this reminds me of?”
she said when he handed her the tall foaming glass. “A set of French postcards some
idiot once brought out at a fraternity dance. They were colored pictures, you know,
and perfectly harmless to look at—even pretty—just people dancing, and walking in
the park, and what not. But then he gave you some red glasses to look at them with,
and you suddenly saw the most disgusting obscenities. That’s what I’ve been feeling
like, here at South Wind, this last week or two. I feel as though I’d put on the red
glasses.”

Noel said with a grin, as she drank deeply of the frosty beer, “The red glasses are
your Mosaic morality. What you’re looking at is everyday life.”

Marjorie said, brushing foam from her lips, “You know what? I think everything you
say about sex is a lot of glib lies. You say it because you enjoy amazing me, and
because it’s a game for you to turn my ideas inside out.”

Noel’s expression was frankly mocking. “Of course that is what you’d prefer to believe.”

“Otherwise you’re trying to seduce me, after all.”

He puffed his cigarette, narrowing his eyes at her through the smoke. “Well, you keep
growing up right under my eyes. I’m beginning to think it might be very good for you.”

“I hope you’ll let me decide that.”

“By all means.”

She shook her head, looking at him with wonder. “Your conceit—or your frankness, I’m
not sure which—passes all bounds. I don’t know how to talk to you.”

“You’re not doing badly.”

“I sometimes think you’re the devil himself.”

“That’s your red glasses again. I’m just a fellow you happen to find attractive. You’re
supplying the horns and the tail.”

“I wonder,” she said softly. After a pause she said, “Noel, what’s going to become
of us?”

“Who knows? Who cares? Summer romances are queer things. Like shipboard romances.
Just enjoy it while it lasts. Have fun, and don’t get yourself into knots of Jewish
conscience. Either of us may fall for someone else next Tuesday, and that’ll be that.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. They looked into each other’s eyes, both smiling, yet with expressions
half-hostile.

She did not know how long Wally Wronken had been watching them when she finally became
aware of his gaze. He was perched on the rustic rail of the porch, his big head slumped
below his narrow, wanly tanned shoulders, smoking and staring at them. His expression
was masked by the glitter of his glasses in the sunlight. She waved, miserably embarrassed,
feeling that she and Noel had been gawking at each other with silly lovesick grins.
“Hi, Wally. Got a cigarette?”

He came off the rail. “Just a Kool.”

“Thanks.” He held a match for her. The cold roll of menthol across her tongue brought
back the day at the Cloisters, the lilacs in the rain. “Long time since I’ve had one
of these, Wally. They’re nice for a change.”

“Any time you want a change, just ask me.”

Noel said, “How’d the sketch go?”

“Pretty good. I’m going to run them through it again a few times.”

Marjorie said, “Do you enjoy directing, Wally?”

“Well, I think it’s worth learning, like most everything else. I’m learning and learning.”
He flipped his cigarette over the fence and went into the social hall.

After a pause, the menthol strong in her nostrils, Marjorie said, “What does one do
about things like that?”

Noel said, “Nothing. All freshmen must get paddled. That’s the law. Let’s swim.”

Since her fifteenth year Marjorie had believed firmly that sex was the most important
and perilous concern of her life; that she would be a damned fool to lose her virginity
before her wedding night; and that a serious affair before marriage would be the worst
catastrophe that could happen to her. Now, for the first time in her life, her certainty
on these points began to break down.

Compared to Noel, both George and Sandy had been mere furtive boys about sex; ready
and eager, like all boys, to take any favor she would grant. Noel’s scathing frank
humor about sex was something new. He really didn’t want to neck; she precipitated
it, like as not, when it happened, and it was he who stopped it with a swift joke
and the offer of a cigarette. He seemed to want to protect her from her worse self,
from her maddening infatuation with him, instead of taking advantage of it as she
imagined any other living man or boy would do. She could not help admiring him for
this. Therefore, when he said, in his light way but with apparent sincerity, that
it might be a good idea for her to have an affair with him, she was shaken.

She had to press him in several talks to tell her why he thought an affair would be
good for her; he kept putting her off with jokes.

At last he said, “Well, all right. It would give you a yardstick, that’s all, an emotional
measuring rod that would last you a lifetime. We really love each other. From everything
you’ve told me it’s the real thing for the first time, for you. It isn’t for me, darling—and
don’t bare your teeth at me, I can’t help being twenty-nine—well, you see, I know
what I’m experiencing. But you, you’re as ignorant as a codfish. In your present state
of heavy book learning and Mosaic prejudice and emotional illiteracy you’re apt to
take off and marry heaven knows what kind of horrible yahoo for all the wrong reasons.
Like my sister. Honestly, I sometimes think of you as Monica, given a second chance.”

“Would you rather have seen your sister have an affair with a man who’d leave her
flat—as you would me?”

“A thousand times yes, if it would have taught her enough about love to prevent her
marrying that lump of pig fat she calls a husband.”

The environment made Noel’s ideas all the more plausible. At South Wind there seemed
to be no other sensible way of looking at life. The guests at their everlasting coy
game—the flirtatious Shirleys, the eager-eyed bachelors, the pigs hovering on the
sidelines for garbage scraps of desire—Noel had made them figures of fun, quaint people
with quaint customs, almost like the Japanese. Yet a few months earlier her ways and
her values had not much differed from theirs. Now it was the people of the staff who
seemed wise and normal, the dancers, singers, musicians, actors, with their free-and-easy
morals, their tolerant joking about all the solemn things of life. The married couples
among them were no more staid than the rest. There were half a dozen flourishing adulteries
Marjorie knew about and several others that were generally suspected. Among the unmarried
ones, the drift in and out of random affairs was rapid and apparently almost painless.

Though Marjorie had been accepted among them, traces still remained of reticence and
amusement in their attitude toward her. It was a running joke that certain subjects
must be avoided so as not to shock poor Marjorie. Playing at anagrams, for instance,
the women took delight in forming obscene words and covering them from Marjorie’s
sight with winks and giggles. This kind of good-humored teasing was not without its
effect. Marjorie was the stodgy one, the outsider, the bumpkin; naturally she wanted
to be more acceptable to the inner circle, more like them. In these theatrical folk
Marjorie had found for the first time people who really talked and acted somewhat
like the characters in lending-library novels. This added to their smartness, glamor,
and authority. She submitted to their joking with the best grace she could, and day
by day grew more used to the premise on which it rested—that she was warped by a ludicrous
out-of-date upbringing.

One of her old ideas was crumbling more swiftly than the rest—the notion that an illicit
love affair ruined a girl’s life. She had always pictured the effect as no less damaging,
obvious, and permanent than that of being thrown through a windshield. When she had
learned last summer of Marsha’s affair with Carlos Ringel, she had seemed to see horrid
scars and scabs all over the fat girl. But this was clearly nonsense. There wasn’t
a virgin on the staff, to Marjorie’s best knowledge, except herself. Most of the dancers
and actresses talked frankly of past and present affairs. They were normal in appearance,
polite in their ways, and not one of them was insane with grief or prostrate with
shame. On the whole they didn’t differ much from the virgins of Hunter and the West
Side, except in being more shopworn. They had all stooped to folly and found too late
that men betray, but they hadn’t died; here they were, alive, tanned, laughing, and
like as not in some new intrigue with a waiter or a musician. If they were coarsened
and tough, if their new affairs seemed to be a grasping for cheap pleasures, if their
lives were on the whole quite unenviable, it still remained a fact that they weren’t
fallen women—not if the phrase retained any meaning. Either women didn’t fall any
more nowadays, or it took a lot more than an illicit love affair or two to constitute
a fall.

But the strongest assault on her old convictions came from a most unexpected quarter:
her own body. It was becoming impossible to allow herself to be alone with Noel. More
than once he had had to shake her roughly by the shoulders and put a cigarette between
her lips; she would wake as though out of hypnosis with her hair in wild disorder
and her face hot and sweating, with almost no memory of what had been happening, but
with a sense of shame and a black terror at this utter loss of self that could come
over her. It was like insanity.