Marjorie Morningstar (9 page)

Sandy invited them to come along for a foursome.

“We don’t play golf,” Marjorie said.

“I’m always willing to learn,” said Mrs. Morgenstern. “It would take us a little while
to register and change, but—”

“Mom, I do not want to learn to play golf just now,” said Marjorie, making the words
separate and distinct as pistol shots.

“Maybe we can have lunch together,” Mrs. Morgenstern said to Sandy’s mother. “What
table are you sitting at?”

Mrs. Goldstone smiled. “I’m afraid we won’t be back for lunch. We’re having a bite
at the clubhouse. But I’m sure we’ll see a lot of you. Goodbye.”

While Mrs. Morgenstern registered, and while they rode up in the elevator, Marjorie
held the flesh of her lower lip between her teeth. Mrs. Morgenstern wore an innocent
happy smile.

Marjorie slammed the door of their room behind her, and stood with her back to it.
“Mother, we’re going straight home.”

“What? Are you crazy?” said the mother mildly, taking off her hat at the mirror. “We
just got here.”

“How could you, Mom? How could you?”

“How could I what? Can I help it if the Goldstones like the Prado? Does that mean
we’re not allowed to come here? It’s still a free country, even if Sandy is at the
Prado.”

Two bellboys in gold-braided scarlet suits wheeled in the trunks. Marjorie strode
to the window and stood in a silent rage while Mrs. Morgenstern cheerfully directed
the bellboys in placing and opening the luggage, including Marjorie’s trunks. As soon
as they were gone Marjorie whirled on her. “I said I was going. What’s the point of
opening everything up?”

“You want to clean up and have a swim, don’t you? There’s no sense going back into
that furnace today.”

“I want to leave right now.”

Mrs. Morgenstern pulled her dress over her head. “Well, I’m not stopping you. I’m
going to have a swim before lunch, myself.” She took her bathing suit into the bathroom,
dropping Marjorie’s new suit on the bed. “Personally, I think you’re being very foolish.
What’s so wrong about having a boy you know at the hotel? It’ll be more fun—”

“Good heavens, Mom, how thick is your skin? Didn’t you see how his mother looked at
us?”

“Mary Goldstone’s a lovely person. She looks at everybody that way. She’s a little
nearsighted.”

“She thinks you’re sharpening your teeth for Sandy. And that’s just what you’re doing,
and I won’t be a party to such—”

“Listen, Marjorie, you can’t fool me. You like the boy.”

“And what if that’s so? This is the very worst thing to do about it—going chasing
after him to a hotel—”

“You weren’t doing too well by not chasing him, dear.”

“Mom…
Mom
, that is nobody’s business but my own. When will you ever understand that?”

Mrs. Morgenstern came out of the bathroom in flapping slippers and bathing suit, with
a towel around her neck. “Sometimes one little push makes all the difference.—Coming
for a swim?”

“No, I am not.”

Mrs. Morgenstern opened the door. “See you at lunch, then—unless you take the train
home, of course. If you do, give my love to Papa.”

Marjorie paced the room, fuming. The sun beat straight into the room, white and hot.
She was wet through with perspiration. Below the window was the pool, crowded with
hilarious young people. There were some especially good-looking boys, she observed,
their hair black and disorderly from the water. She stopped in her pacing and fingered
her new swim suit. It was the latest style: flesh-colored rubber, perfectly decent,
yet at twenty feet giving one the look of total nakedness. The room was really unbearably
hot.

There was dancing after dinner on the terrace overlooking the sea. She danced for
hours with Sandy. They went for a stroll on the beach in the moonlight afterward;
and when they had rounded a bend that hid them from the hotel they sat and talked
idly in the gloom, looking at the stars and streaming sand through their fingers,
while the white surf at their feet tumbled and roared. After a while Marjorie hesitantly
ran her finger across the back of Sandy’s hand. The effect was explosive. When they
walked back to the hotel half an hour later their relationship was advanced about
to the high point that Marjorie had reached with George Drobes. She and Sandy were
both dizzy, confused, uncertain, exhilarated, and extremely pleased with themselves.

Sandy’s tan Pontiac convertible was quite a change from Penelope: red leather seats,
gleaming chrome knobs, and a motor that at sixty miles an hour made less noise than
the murmuring tires or the radio pouring clear jazz. The car was his own, not his
father’s. He drove it as though he owned it, too; negligently, with one arm resting
on the window ledge. George always sat up straight, driving like a motorman.

“How do you feel this morning?” Sandy said.

Marjorie, tying a pink kerchief over her tossing hair, said, “Just wonderful. How
about you?” She wore a pink cotton frock and tiny gold sandals, with a bathing suit
underneath. They were going to swim in a deserted cove some ten miles down the highway
from the Prado.

“I’m puzzled,” Sandy said. “I can’t make you out.”

She stared at the long-jawed profile partly masked by sunglasses. His mouth was straight
and serious. “You can’t make
me
out? Seems to me I’ve made myself a little too plain for comfort.”

“Yes? What was all that, last night?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. The moonlight, maybe. Or maybe it’s just that I like you a
bit more than I should,” she said rather sharply.

Grinning, he dropped a strong hand on her knee and gave it a brief squeeze. “That
would be nice to believe.” She wanted to object to the squeeze, but the hand was gone.
She curled in the far corner of the front seat, out of easy reach of him.

If he was puzzled, so was she; extremely puzzled. She had been puzzling, since she
woke, over what had happened the night before. Fixed ideas of hers had been shattered.
She had thought an instinct of feminine honor prevented a girl from necking with one
man when she loved another. George Drobes, even if he no longer filled the world from
pole to pole, was still her accepted lover. Evidently no such instinct existed. She
had also believed that a surrender to necking marked a dramatic turn in one’s emotions.
But this morning her attitude toward Sandy remained the same: undefined, but friendly
and curious rather than passionate. He seemed more familiar, that was all. It was
her own self that was less familiar. Marjorie had surprised herself, and she was waiting
with oddly pleasant nervousness to see what strange thing she would do next.

They turned off the highway and went bumping down a lonely dirt road through thick
pines. Marjorie’s nervousness increased. She was an addict of lending-library novels.
Girls were always getting seduced in these books when they went off to a lonely place
with a young man to swim; it was almost standard procedure. Sandy Goldstone, big,
brown, and powerful, driving in silence with a shadow of a smile around his mouth,
looked not unlike the seducers of fiction. Marjorie enjoyed reading about these ravishings,
of course, and often dwelled on the vague paragraphs describing the ecstatic feelings
of the girls, wondering what sex was really like. But the real thing close at hand
wore an aspect of gritty discomfort. Sandy seemed too docile a sort to ravish her,
but she rather wished they had stayed at the Prado to swim.

At the beach she slipped behind the car to step out of her frock. The act of taking
it off, she thought, might inflame Sandy. She delayed and dawdled behind the car,
combing her hair and fixing her makeup. When she came out she saw him lying face down
on the sand near the broken remains of an old rowboat, stripped to his bathing trunks,
with his head under a ragged yellow newspaper. The sun was blazing, but there was
a cool breeze. The cove was about a mile across, fringed by white-gold sand and tangled
brush. Marjorie stood by the car for a while, savoring the peaceful silence, the splash
of the surf, the smell of pine on the breeze; she was watching him cautiously. He
made no move. She went to Sandy and sat beside him, but he did not look up. The sun
was almost hot enough to burn her bare skin. Sandy was perspiring in little rivulets.

“Sandy?” She noticed that his breathing was remarkably easy and regular. “Sandy—Sandy
Goldstone, damn your hide, have you fallen asleep on me?”

Thoroughly vexed, she kicked him in the ribs; there was such a thing as being too
safe from rape. He jerked, grunted, rolled over, and sat up with a guilty grin, rubbing
his eyes. “Doggone. Damn near fell asleep, didn’t I? Sun always does that to me.”
He jumped to his feet. “Let’s go.”

Marjorie knew only public-beach bathing, with its crowds, trash cans, frankfurters,
lifeguards, and squalling children. It was all different to walk to the flat clean
edge of the land and plunge into the empty sea. They splashed and dived and swam.
When she was exhausted she sat on the sand and watched Sandy cavort and snort joyously
in the water for another quarter of an hour.

“Do you really want to be a doctor?” she said when he reclined dripping beside her.

“Sure.”

“What medical schools have you applied to?”

“Well, I don’t know if I will apply, Marge. With my grades it’s just about hopeless.
I have a high C average.”

“But—” She stared at him. “Then you’re not going to be a doctor.”

“Looks that way.”

“Then
what
will you do?”

“Doggone, you sounded just like my father then.”

“No, really, Sandy—”

“Know what I’d like to be, more than anything? A forest ranger. No, don’t laugh, I
mean it. Ever been to Arizona? It’s heaven on earth in those national parks. Sky,
stones, cactus, desert, the sun and the stars—nothing else. Know what a forest ranger
makes? About thirty-five a week. That’s all I’d want, for the rest of my life, if
I could be a ranger in Arizona.”

“That’s—well, it’s an original ambition, anyway.”

“I put in an application last summer. I didn’t even want to finish college. My father
stopped that. Said I was going to finish college even if I spent the rest of my life
digging ditches.”

“What’s your father like, Sandy?”

“Oh, quite a guy. Quite a dynamo.” Sandy sat up, brushing sand from his thick legs.
“Slightly disappointed that I’m not the same type. Only son, too. I feel kind of sorry
for him sometimes.”

“Don’t you like the idea of—you know, running Lamm’s some day?”

“Sure, I like it—or I would like it, the way you say it. Think it’s that simple? I’ve
been in charge of the men’s hats section this summer. That’s all, just men’s hats.
He’s let me make all the mistakes. He’s checked everything in that section every night
down to the cash register receipts. Then at dinner he’s been climbing all over me.
Last week I came to his office and said maybe I’d better quit for a little vacation
before going back to school. ‘Quit?’ he says. ‘Didn’t you open your mail this morning?
You’re fired. You’re a failure, a complete failure—’ Sure enough, I got my mail and
he’d written me a three-page memo, in his own handwriting, telling me the store couldn’t
afford to keep me around any more this summer at the rate I was making mistakes. Then
he carefully listed every mistake I’d made since I’d been there. And he ended up with
this—I remember every word—‘If you don’t improve I promise you I’ll give this store
to a charity foundation rather than leave it in the hands of such a fool.’ ” Sandy
scooped up a fistful of sand and scattered it in the wind. “Oh, he’s a wonderful guy.
He’s right, you know. You’ve got to be tough to run a big store. You’ve got to be
right on the ball every second.” He took her wrists and pulled her to her feet. “Come
on, another dip? Let’s go up to the point. It’s deep enough to dive off that rock.”

They were sitting on the rock, panting after a lively swim, when a squat brown fishing
boat went wallowing by, leaving a smudgy trail of smoke across the water. “There’s
something I’d like to do,” said Sandy, “run one of those tuna boats out of San Diego
down around Lower California. They make fortunes. I can navigate—What’s the matter?”

She was shaking her head and laughing at him. “You’re like a nine-year-old kid.”

“Oh?” he said, and with an easy sweep of a long bony arm he was holding her and kissing
her.

But it was an outdoors, hearty kind of kiss with no menace, so Marjorie yielded to
it. While she was kissing Sandy she tried hard to remember how it felt to kiss George,
so as to determine which one she really loved. Marjorie believed that the kisses of
true love had a unique taste, a vibration which one could never mistake. But the fact
was that while Sandy’s mouth and manner differed from George’s she apparently enjoyed
kissing one just about as much as the other. Sandy soon took her by the shoulders
and held her a little away from him. “What the devil are you thinking about?”

“Who—me?” she said, blinking. “Why, why dear, I’m not thinking at all, I guess.”

“You give me the strangest feeling.” He looked at her with his head cocked sidewise.
“As though you’re adding figures in your head, or something.”

“You’re crazy. How dare you say such a thing?” She pulled away from him and perched
at a distance on the rock. “I shouldn’t be kissing you at all. Anyhow, if you expect
the kind of kissing you get from Vera Cashman, I’m sorry. I lack her practice.”

Sandy scratched his head. “Let’s go back to the hotel. I’m dying for a beer.”

“Just a moment. How about Vera Cashman, now that the subject has come up?”

“Has it come up?” Sandy said. “How did that ever happen?”

“I just don’t understand your pawing me and all the way you do, when you’ve got a
girl.”

“Vera’s moved to California.”

After a moment Marjorie said lightly, “Oh? When did this happen?”

“Couple of weeks ago. Her father went broke, and—Margie, don’t look so damned skeptical,
it’s the truth. He’s a Long Island builder. A big development of his went smash. He
got out of the state about one jump ahead of the sheriff, my father says.”