Shining Through (14 page)

“Do you like me?” he asked, and he wasn’t asking if I thought he was a nice guy.

“Yes.”

“Let me see you, then.”

“I can’t.”

“Come on, Linda.”

I almost fainted, him calling me Linda for the first time ever, and so handsome he was beyond handsome; he was beautiful.

And while I was concentrating on not getting the shakes, he put his arms around me.

I raised my head for another kiss, and he gave me one, but SHINING THROUGH / 97

his real business was unbuttoning the back of my dress. I kept kissing him, though, concentrating on him, on his smell of Scotch and sweat, the manliest smell, letting myself get so intoxicated from it that I hardly felt my dress dropping to the floor, my slip being pulled over my head. Suddenly it seemed the most natural thing, getting rid of all those tight clothes.

He took off my brassiere and touched me till I was dizzy.

Then he dropped to his knees and unhooked my garters. My fingers played with his hair. He put his arms around me, pressing his cheek to my midriff before he stood up again and kissed me.

“Take off the rest,” he ordered.

I pulled off my girdle, my underpants, my stockings. He watched. When I was as naked as he was, he pulled me to him again. I was thirty-one years old, and this was the first time I was alive.

Then he led me to the bed. He yanked away the covers and pushed me down.

“Do you know how beautiful you are?” he asked as he lay down beside me. Tell me how beautiful, I thought.

Then I remembered something I’d heard: When men were drunk, something happened to them in the bedroom. But I was too shaky to remember. It took longer? Shorter? They couldn’t do it at all? They could, and better?

John could. Better. He ran his fingers from my neck down to my stomach, and below. Then he kissed me, his lips following the same path as his hand. “So beautiful.” He wasn’t talking about my face. He worked his way up again, “Linda.” I was so beside myself that when we started to kiss again I had tears in my eyes. “I always thought you must be something,” he said,

“but not like this.”

He’d thought of me before! I wanted to think about that, savor it, but when two bodies are that close and that hot, brains stop.

There were no more words.

Magic. That’s what happened between John and me. From his first kiss I knew all my imaginings were right. And I knew he’d brought me home because, in that ugly little bar, 98 / SUSAN ISAACS

drunk, lonely, tired, his defenses down, he’d somehow understood there was magic too.

But neither of us realized how powerful the magic was until it happened. It was as if everything else we had done in our lives wasn’t worth a thing.
This
was what each of us had been created for, to be half of something greater than any other two people in the world.

In that messed-up, sweaty bed, John Berringer and Linda Voss became a miracle.

7

T
hey never touched this one in business etiquette. Not one teacher at Grover Cleveland ever told us: After you do everything in the book with your employer, including some things you’d heard about but didn’t believe people really did, the correct behavior is to—how best to put it, girls?—get up, put on your girdle and say, Will that be all, sir?

So I was at a loss, and it’s terrible to be at a loss and naked.

Just minutes before, the two of us had been the perfect pair. And now, the perfect mistake. Lying beside John, no longer touching, but still close enough to feel the heat rising from his skin, I agonized, trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t make him groan to himself, How the hell am I going to get out of this nightmare?

But as it turned out, all my agonizing was wasted; John’s breathing grew slow, low, slower, and then very loud. He hadn’t been going crazy over how to ditch me; he’d fallen into a drunken sleep.

At least I knew all about that. What he was to international commercial law, I was to boozers. And John was a doozy: stretched out flat on his back, one arm hanging limp over the edge of the mattress while the other gently cradled his pillow, his hand now and then moving as if he was still doing it, stroking the pillow or cupping a feather-filled corner.

Slowly, I slid off the bed and tippytoed over to my clothes.

But no, I didn’t have to be careful. I could have belted out “The Star-Spangled Banner”; it would have taken a ton of TNT to blow John out of bed.

99

100 / SUSAN ISAACS

I got dressed slowly, as if he was watching me—arching my foot like a ballerina when I put on my stockings, then lifting my leg up real high. When I hooked my brassiere, I turned my back to him, but then I peeked back over my shoulder: so coy. I said to myself, You must look like a soon-to-be has-been starlet in the back pages of
Photoplay
. But then I realized I was just copying any sexy gesture I could, because I’d never really felt that the part of me from the neck down was so…so useful. I touched—caressed, really—the skin on my shoulder and then turned around to look straight at John.

But then I couldn’t stand to leave. What was there in Ridgewood—in all the rest of the world—that could beat this? I sat on the edge of the mattress, right beside him, like a wife. When I combed back his hair with my fingers, he didn’t stir.

He was so wonderful to watch. Everything. The curlicues of hair on his stomach made little
c
’s and
o
’s. Finally he rolled away from me, over onto his side. His back was graceful, wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted and strong, as if he spent his days on parallel bars instead of practicing law. At last I stood, covered him with the sheet and left the room.

But when it came to leaving the apartment…Well, I couldn’t.

Not only did I want to know more about him; I wanted a detailed map of his life. I wanted every question answered. I moved around, poking into drawers and closets. I went through every room like a sleazy detective. Down on my knees to see if there was anything interesting under the pale living room couch. (Just beige carpet.) I opened the linen closet, to check the color of the towels: beige again, with Nan’s monogram in white. I even examined the dishes in the sink: white.

If John and Nan’s apartment meant anything, it meant good taste was the opposite of what I liked.
Nothing
there had any color, not even the food; all that was in the refrigerator was a bottle of milk that smelled as if Nan had bought it right before she caught the 8:02 to Reno (to prevent John, starving to death a day or two later, from committing some SHINING THROUGH / 101

atrocious crime, like bringing orange juice or red meat or green beans into the apartment).

Only the few paintings she’d left had color. There were four or five empty picture hooks. But you’d have to be a big smear fan to appreciate the art she’d left. Yellow globs and black brush strokes in the hall. In the living room, one with skinny blue lines, like a close-up of varicose veins.

Suddenly, I felt so tired. I turned my back on the blue lines and walked over to the window. I opened it a crack, leaned my forehead against the cool glass and looked down at the street.

Silent, except for one “Come on, stupid!” of a man walking his wife’s toy poodle. Even from six stories up, you could see the rhinestone collar on the dog’s neck. What kind of a man would let a woman make him walk a dog with a rhinestone collar?

My eyes closed. Oh, how I wanted to sleep. But one thing I knew: Either I got out right away and made the long subway trip back to Queens, or I’d be drawn back into the bedroom.

What got me going was the picture of John’s horrified face as he woke in the morning—to me.

I left, and fast.

I invented whooping cough, imagined the mumps. I even created old Grossvater Oskar, who had a fatal attack, and—Listen, um, Mr. Berringer, I’m real sorry—the funeral arrangements had been left to me. But in the end, I was at my desk the next morning. I waited. Nine, nine-fifteen, ten, ten forty-five. John hadn’t called. He hadn’t come in.

I’d once read in an article in the
Brooklyn Eagle
that when you’re afraid, you’re supposed to force yourself to think of the most awful thing. Then, whatever finally happens will be a breeze. But that turned out to be crummy advice. I thought of all the worst things—how could I help it?—and by eleven o’clock my stomach was killing me. It wasn’t a normal bellyache, like after an iffy piece of Boston cream pie. This was agony, so that every breath, every involuntary movement, was like being ripped open by a knife.

One fourth of a sloe gin fizz was no excuse for what I’d 102 / SUSAN ISAACS

done the night before. At least John was drunk. I hadn’t considered the consequences for even two seconds and the consequences were frightening. I could get fired.

The pain was so bad. Just losing my job would be a picnic. I could get tossed out on my ear without a recommendation. Up and down the street, every employment agency saying, Sorry, Miss Voss, but without a letter from your former employer…Going home to concoct some story for my mother, having to take charity handouts.

John could call me into his office, call me names. A guy’s drunk and you don’t even have the decency to push him off.

Slut. (Or whatever happens could be better. Ha-ha. He could burst into the office with one of those long white boxes they put roses in and announce—real loud—Linda, I love you. Talk about daydreams. But at least my stomach felt soothed for that minute.) He finally came in, a few minutes after eleven. He nodded but didn’t look at me, walked straight into his office and closed the door. I couldn’t look at him, either, but out of the corner of my eye I caught the shadow of his dark suit.

It was keep busy or go nuts. I said to myself, No matter how terrible the pain is, you’ve got to move. I made myself squat down and spent a half hour straightening out file folders in the bottom drawer that were already as straight as a company in Rommel’s Seventh. That was the German in me: neat, precise.

Like my Grandma Olga’s icebox, where the cheese had marched behind the milk, where the carrots almost stood at attention and the chicken wings practically saluted.

But I hadn’t been so German the night before. I don’t know what I’d been, but the scratch marks I’d seen on his back were not made by a controlled person. But then, neither of us had been exactly under control. I had the marks his teeth made along the soft underpart of my arm. When I thought about them, they throbbed, like a pulse.

“Miss Voss.”

I hadn’t heard the door open, but there he was, standing, waiting for me. I got up slowly. I walked into his office and SHINING THROUGH / 103

closed the door, but then my heel caught on one of the tiny gray-brown nubs in the rug. It was a miracle I didn’t fall splat on my face, although it took some fancy footwork—step, jump, step—not to go sprawling across his desk; for a second I must have looked like I was doing some dopey dance, trying to be cute. So when I sat down, I made my expression doubly serious, to show him this secretary was no silly, dancing fool. This was the ever-efficient Miss Voss.

He sat at his desk, hands clasped, looking at me, serious, lawyerly. Just let it be quick, I began to bargain silently. No “I’m sure you comprehend what an awkward situation this is, Miss Voss, and much as I wish we might avoid…” Oh, God, my stomach.

“Do you have your pad?” he asked.

“What?”

“Your pad,” he said. “I have a few letters, and then I have some calls to make.”

Nothing showed in his deep blue eyes. He wore the face of a man who had spent the night before at a Bar Association meeting instead of rolling around in his bed, naked, drunk, crazy.

“Is this a good time for you, Miss Voss?” A slight smile, about what he would give the guy at the newsstand, or a men’s room attendant.

“Yes, Mr. Berringer.”

I left to get my pad. So this was how he wanted it: It never happened. I could get all worked up and think about standing on a breadline, but in the real world, how many bilingual legal secretaries were there who took shorthand at one hundred twenty words a minute? In the real world, real men need real stenographers, so they pretend real things never happened.

But then I thought: Is it possible he could have forgotten?

Could he have blacked out, blanked out, and not remembered what had gone on between us? I returned to his office, and even as I sat down he was saying, “To Gunther Hoff-mann. Do you have his address in the files?”

“Yes, Mr. Berringer.”

104 / SUSAN ISAACS

He wanted to forget. Or he couldn’t remember. I would never know which.

I turned a corner in the hall and ran smack into Edward Leland. “Whoops!” It just slipped out, and when I said, “I’m sorry,”

I sounded too loud, too emotional. I lowered my head in embarrassment, but since he didn’t move, I looked up again. He looked different, and for a second I couldn’t figure out why. “Excuse me, Mr. Leland.” That sounded better, although he just stood there, looking through me with those black, spooky eyes. But then, before I had time to become a basket case, I did a silent Aha! Mr. Leland
was
different: darker, healthier-looking. If he was in a movie, he’d adjust his tie in a mirror and say, I
do
feel fit.

But what he actually said was: “I’m glad I ran into you. Could you spare some time for me tomorrow, Miss Voss?”

“Yes, Mr. Leland.”

He’d definitely been in the sun. His nose was peeling. It was easy to see his nose because he wasn’t very tall. I realized I’d never seen him standing before and had assumed a giant was behind that desk. But he was only a few inches taller than I was.

Big, though, with too-broad shoulders, as if his mother had snuck out on his father and had a fast one with a prizefighter.

The tops of his cheeks were peeling too. But when you looked harder, it wasn’t the tan rich lawyers get sitting on one of their rich beaches. His skin was red beneath the brown—the kind of burn you get from wind as well as sun. That time I’d been in his office, looked in his valise at his heavy snowflake sweater and—crazily—imagined him on some spy mission in Scandinavia. Could it actually have happened? Could Edward Leland have—