Shining Through (18 page)

eyes were so bright, so alive, you could almost see the picture of her he had in his mind. “Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

“You know, you never ask that question in the office. You assume I understand everything: words—ideas, even. Why would I suddenly turn into a moron when I leave Wall Street?” Exhaling slowly, he made a big deal of showing me how patient he was being. “I happen to know exactly what you’re talking about, and you want to know something? I think you’re dead wrong. She’s not above
anyone
.”

“Then I’m sorry, but you don’t understand.” He turned over, away from me, so I got to look at his back. It was a magnificent back.

“Okay,” I said to it. “She went to fancy schools, so in that way she’s certainly above and beyond anyone you’d find punching a cash register at Woolworth’s. But she’s not God, not even close. Okay, so she’s brilliant. Terrific. I’m a big fan of brilliance.

And she’s pretty—”

The back stiffened. “Beautiful,” he muttered.

“Fine. But there have to be other brilliant, beautiful girls walking around. Who else goes to Smith College? Are they
all
above and beyond?”

“How do you know Nan went to Smith?”

“Does it take a Ph.D. to figure out why you’re sending a check to the Smith Alumnae Fund? I answer your mail. I balance your checkbook. I’m your jewel of a secretary. Remember?” He turned, reached over and poured more juice. “Is she really different? Was she born that way?” I honestly wanted to know. “Or is it just how she’s been brought up?”

“She’s different,” He turned onto his back. I couldn’t help glancing down. I knew it; he was ready for me (or someone) again, but he was too involved with Nan to realize it. “She has an extraordinary, analytical mind, almost a man’s mind—even though she’s the most feminine person I ever met.” Talking about her, John’s voice was almost reverent, as if he was in church.

“But Nan’s restless, terribly restless. All SHINING THROUGH / 129

that brilliance, all that beauty…She was too much for Smith.

Smith couldn’t hold her. She had to have more.”

Oh, God! It sounded like an advertisement for a bad Mae West movie:
She had to have more!
But I just nodded.

“It was the same when we were married. There’s something larger than life about her, even though she looks so incredibly delicate.”

“She had to have more?” I asked. John looked annoyed.

“Not in
that
way. Everything was fine.”

“As fine as with us?” I actually asked.

“No,” he said. “Does that make you happy? Is that what you want to hear?” Then his voice got all misty again. “She was my wife. But not a typical wife. There was nothing typical about her.” He paused, then abruptly announced: “Fidelity is a middle-class virtue.”

“So every upper-class person commits adultery?”

“Conventional rules don’t apply to Nan,” he said sharply.

I took a couple of sips of the juice. It was bitter, like drinking liquid tin. No wonder little Nannie preferred mimosas. I said,

“Conventional rules don’t apply to Adolf, either.”

John gave me his first real smile. “That’s really not an apt comparison.”

“Why not? Everybody has to obey the rules.”

“That’s too simplistic.”

“I don’t think so. Because if you say Edward Leland’s daughter or Edward Leland or Adolf Hitler has special rules, then why not Henry Morgenthau and Clark Gable? And who decides who gets special treatment? The person who wants special treatment?

Me? You?”

“I admire your…sense of fair play, your democratic spirit.

Really I do, Linda. But you have to understand, Nan is genuinely extraordinary: intellectually, emotionally—even socially.” He exhaled slowly. “I could only satisfy her”—he got tongue-tied for a second—“that way. And intellectually. Socially…Her mother was related to a President, and her father, well, Edward is one of the most powerful men in the 130 / SUSAN ISAACS

country. Nan spent her entire life in superior company. She went to the best schools, traveled abroad, had every possible cultural advantage.”

“What does culture have to do with it?”

“With what?”

“With cheating on your husband?”

“Please stop it.”

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

“Try to understand: Faithfulness is for people who don’t have the money or the imagination for pleasure.”

“So how come you were faithful? What were you missing?

Money? Or imagination?”

John pushed himself up and sat on the edge of the mattress.

His back was toward me again. He put his glass down on the table. “You really can’t comprehend the situation.”

“Try me. In English or German. I’m versatile.”

“But you can’t grasp the subtleties. You see, just because someone was graduated from an Ivy League college does not make him upper class.”

“What makes someone upper class? Money? Ancestors?”

“It’s extremely complex.”

“So what are you saying—in the whole history of the world there’s never been an upper-class wife who’s behaved honorably?

You know that’s baloney.”

“I wasn’t fun enough for her.”

“Fun? The new husband is fun? What does he do—Jack Benny imitations?”

“Look,” John said, “I’m not witty, I’m not particularly urbane.

What can I say to make you understand? I’m not one of them.

I can’t get drunk at the Plaza and take off my shoes and wade in the fountain and scream with laughter over Louisa Buchanan’s tasteless wedding invitations.”

I sat up beside him. I took his hand, and he didn’t pull it away. “Is that what you do for fun when you’re so brilliant you’re beyond rules? Get drunk in fountains and laugh screamingly about wedding invitations?”

John lowered his head. When he spoke, his voice was unnaturally slow, as if his throat had been numbed by the ice SHINING THROUGH / 131

in the juice. He could barely form the words. “I told you that you wouldn’t get it.”

Did it bother me that I’d left Gladys Slade to broil on a hot boardwalk? I hardly gave it a thought. We’d once agreed, since she had no phone, that if I ever didn’t show up, she’d wait one hour and then assume I’d had some emergency and wouldn’t be able to make it.

I sat in the subway as it hurtled back into Queens, and I tried to think up a good excuse for Gladys. But I couldn’t concentrate.

I looked up at an ad for Prince Albert Crimp Cut Pipe Tobacco, with its picture of a boringly handsome middle-aged man who looked the way lawyers were supposed to but never did (except John, who looked better), and worked on feeling bad that I was behaving so rottenly to a friend. But the only thought that came to mind was that an hour in the sun would do Gladys good.

Her skin was so white: not Scarlett O’Hara, southern magnolia white, but bloodless, like typing paper. Drenched in the dirty, humid night heat of the subway, I tried to feel guilty for not feeling guilty, but all I could think about was John.

Okay, even if we would never have a heart-to-heart about Rommel’s strategy, weren’t men supposed to sweet-talk their…?

I couldn’t figure out what I was to him. Definitely not his girlfriend. And not his mistress; as far as I could see, letting John foot the bill for my lamb chop didn’t constitute being a kept woman. Not his lover, either, because neither of us was a Greenwich Village bohemian type who had lovers, and also because I knew he didn’t love me; worse, I wasn’t even sure if he liked me. Was sex with me
that
good that he would put up with someone he didn’t care about just to get more?

Yes. It was that good. It was perfect.

But what about me? How long could I love a man who might never love me back? What kind of love is it that basically says, Sure, fine, I understand that you can’t be seen walking down the street with someone like me.

On that stifling summer night, as the subway screeched 132 / SUSAN ISAACS

under the East River, I said to myself, It doesn’t matter. You will love John Berringer forever. And he may learn to love you someday. Search, look for small signs, anything is possible. But even if he never learns, your love for him—and nothing else—is the central fact of the rest of your life.

I ran into Gladys at the newsstand in the lobby of the office building the next morning when I bought my weekly roll of Life Savers. She was handing over a dime for a tin of violet breath mints.

I hadn’t rehearsed my excuse, but I gave it everything I had.

“
Gladys
, am I glad to see you! I’m so sorry about yesterday.”

Then I noticed her tomato face. She looked absolutely awful. “I feel
terrible
. I was all set to leave, but all of a sudden my mother got so dizzy….” Gladys’s eyes, puffy from sunburn, narrowed, so I knew I had to shovel it on. “She actually
fainted!
If I hadn’t been there to catch her—”

Gladys simply did an about-face and marched toward the elevator.

“Look,” I said, rushing to her. “I can’t tell you how bad I feel, but that’s why we made those emergency plans.”

“For an emergency!” she spit out.

“But I told you, my mother actually fainted.”

We reached the bank of elevators. There was one ready; the elevator attendant waved us in, and a moment later, half of Wall Street followed, pressing in, almost flattening us against the wall.

Gladys stared straight ahead.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said softly.

Her eyes remained focused on the brass-grille door; she spoke between clenched teeth. “It so happens I called your house yesterday, after I’d waited for
two hours
in the burning-hot sun. I spoke to your mother. And do you know what she said?”
Oh,
no
, I thought. I kept quiet, hoping, I suppose, that silence was contagious. It wasn’t. “‘Lin’s not here, honey,’” Gladys mimicked.

“And so I said, ‘Well, Mrs. Voss, we had an appointment, and I’m a little concerned about her, not that I want to worry you.’

And do you know what she said?

SHINING THROUGH / 133

‘Listen, don’t
you
worry, sweetie. Linda’s probably kicking up her heels with her boyfriend. The one she’s with every night.

John Whatsisname. You know.’” Gladys turned and glared at me. “‘Her
boss
.’”

Someone in the conference room had eaten a sardine sandwich, and even though a thick, hot breeze came through the opened window and ruffled the paper napkins, you felt you were trapped inside an airless sardine can. Everyone sat around the table going through the motions of eating her lunch, but this day there was no fun, no gossip. In fact, the room had gotten so quiet you could hear the squish of pits plopping from Marian Mulligan’s watermelon chunks as she coaxed them out with her pointy Mango Orange fingernails.

Everybody knew something was up. Why else would Gladys Slade have pointedly taken her seat at the head of the conference table and then said—tittered, actually—to Verna Glover, a human slug with a personality one inch from dead, “Verna, come sit next to me.” Then Gladys graciously offered Verna the seat that had been mine for the last seven or eight years.

Helen Rogers sat beside me, but then was afraid to look my way because then she’d have to either talk to, smile at or snub me. Instead, she picked nervously at the caraway seeds from the rye bread that dotted the white polka dots on her blue blouse.

The chair on my other side was empty; the girls had caught on fast that something was wrong.

Gladys sat straight, like a school poster for good posture.

She’d tucked a napkin over the front of her dress to protect it from the drippy peach she was eating; the white of the napkin against her sunburn made her face look maroon. For at least the tenth time I tried to catch her eye, and, for the tenth time, I got looked through; it was as if I was invisible and she was examining the light switch on the wall behind my head.

What was she
doing?
In all my life, I’d never felt such anger.

What I’d done to Gladys was wrong, but we’d had all those years, all those Sundays. I didn’t deserve being cast 134 / SUSAN ISAACS

out like this, like I’d committed some horrifying crime. No one would look at me.

The room was completely stiff and still, like an old photograph, except for the tiny dust twinkles that danced in the lines of sunlight coming through the wooden slats of the venetian blinds. Breathing was hard.

Suddenly, Gladys turned to Anita Beane and said, in her most regal, pearly Queen of Lunch tones: “You haven’t spoken about your wedding plans in
days
. Tell me, have you chosen your tablecloth color yet?”

You could hear the great sigh of relief at the return to normal-ness: a chorus of ten or twelve voices exhaling together. And then, on and on, Gladys, Anita and the girls debated the pluses and minuses of daffodil versus goldenrod. But every once in a while, I’d get a look, a flash of wonder or curiosity—or down-right antagonism.

And that’s when I knew that if I didn’t stop Gladys, I was finished. One by one, all afternoon, they’d float through the halls, slip over to her desk, ask, What’s with Linda? and finally she’d say, I wish you hadn’t asked, but you know me. I have to tell the truth. I called Linda’s house Sunday and her mother said…

So right after lunch, when Gladys bolted for the door, I bolted too—and faster.

“Gladys,” I called loud enough for all the girls strolling back to their desks to hear, “I know we talked about not sitting together all the time, but you know something? I kind of missed you.”

I clutched her elbow as though I wanted a quick arm-in-arm promenade with my best friend, and hurried her down the hall.

From the relaxed murmur that rose behind us, I knew I’d subdued at least a couple of doubts.

“Let go of me!” Gladys tried to jerk away, squeezing her arms tight against her body as I rushed her along. Her elbow had red fingerprints where I’d grabbed it. “I want nothing to do with you,” she spit out. “Is that understood? You played me for a
fool
.”

“Please, let me explain—”

“You let me go on and on, all these months. Carrying on SHINING THROUGH / 135

with him, pretending you didn’t even
like
him, even when I said,