Testimony and Demeanor (18 page)

She said, “Well, I just feel terrible. That’s all it is now. I feel like crying all the time. I don’t know anybody who’s nice. So I thought if I could just talk to you, because the last time we talked you were so nice to me.”

I was taken aback. I wondered if her memory was defective.

Miss Quist said, “You were really neat. I could change a lot if you just told me to.”

I couldn’t say anything for a moment.

“I know it sounds funny. But I can’t go out with anyone and I can’t go out anywhere. If I could just come out here and talk to you. You know, someone who isn’t …” She sighed with exasperation.

“What about your psychologist?”

“Well, she’s O.K. but she’s tough. Look—we don’t have to talk about me. I could read anything you said to and we could talk about that so it wouldn’t waste your time. It’s a new term now and I could sign up for independent study with you.”

I said no to the independent study project, but I agreed to invite her out. We arranged that she come out Wednesdays at five for two or three weeks.

She took out a notebook and pen. “Look,” she said, “I’ll
write down a book I should read and I’ll have to write down if I do it. Please.”

I agreed.

It wasn’t until her third visit that I understood what she
really
wanted. She wasn’t being sly—she also wanted what she said she did. Since she wasn’t going to class, I asked her to do her reading for her courses. She seemed smarter than I remembered. She was also diligent. She lost her puffy look. She showed me her chart in which she wrote down the miles she walked each day, the exercises she did, and even how many strokes she brushed her hair. She said that making herself report made her keep to her plan.

But what she most deeply wanted was magic.

She asked me if I heard from Honorée. I said I did.

“She really changed, didn’t she?” Miss Quist said.

I said I wasn’t sure.

“Oh, come on now. She really did.” Miss Quist thought a moment. “Tell me what it was. Was it just things you told her? I know it was something different—I mean, I know she wasn’t, you know, a girl friend. She didn’t really seem to need boyfriends. I couldn’t get over it. She jumped right over that whole business. She just skipped it, didn’t she?”

I asked Miss Quist what she meant by the “whole business” of boyfriends. This wasn’t a Socratic device. I wanted to know, and I had an odd sense of well-being talking to Miss Quist. I wasn’t oppressed by any sense of her goodness or beauty, nor had she any interest in me—apart from my corporal works of mercy and what she hoped might be my magical, or sacramental, office.

She answered in a way that made me impersonally sympathetic. The whole business of boyfriends had been as oppressive to her as my life in boarding school to me. The people who had the power of real life and whose company she needed in order to enter real life were inferior to her in every way but one. They had the power of real life. They had it corporately rather
than individually; she always felt at a loss toward the body at large. This swirl of fun, anxiety, and energy absorbed individuals and spewed them out. Most people she knew were unconscious of it.

I thought it was no wonder she’d wanted to be homecoming queen—or at least a princess in the court. She’d thought it was a formal incarnation of the “whole business” of boyfriends. Her disillusion must have felt awful. She had no sentimentality to cushion her feelings.

Now she thought that Honorée might have skipped over all that. She had to reexamine every word of her parody of Honorée’s life. The whirlagig of time was certainly bringing in its revenges.

The next week Miss Quist asked me, just to be sure, if Honorée had been kicked out for being in a nude scene. I said no. Miss Quist asked if Honorée had got pregnant. I said no. Miss Quist asked me what Honorée was doing. I said that she was seeking adventure, change, and general knowledge of the kind that Honorée admired in Miss Chetty.

“Is she having fun?”

I said, “I think she is. I think she’s happy.”

Miss Quist said, “You know what she told me when we were still rooming together? I was teasing her about her crush on you and she admitted it—but she said that it didn’t matter what you personally felt back because you were a connoisseur. I thought that was a real laugh—you know, Honorée trying out big words and not getting them right. I looked ‘connoisseur’ up in the dictionary the other day. What I want to know is what good it did her. What good could it have done her that”—Miss Quist looked at her pad—“that you were ‘one competent to pass critical judgments in the arts, especially the fine arts’?”

I smiled at that. It struck me at first as being so typically Honorée. I said, “I don’t think that’s it. I really don’t think there’s any secret we can uncover. Honorée is just terribly
nice.” I was then alarmed by something in Honorée’s remark. I said, “It’s odd—I thought she liked me better than that. I mean, it sounds as though she may have meant something not entirely complimentary.”

Miss Quist said, “Oh, come on. She really liked you.”

Miss Quist felt better for reassuring me.

Miss Quist felt much better in general. Miss Quist transferred to Drake University, because it offered a program in “commercial design.” Miss Quist wished to draw pictures for advertisements. She showed me her portfolio. I was able to say she had a knack.

I got a letter from Honorée. She was in Spain. She was traveling with a Swedish family, taking care of their children and teaching the children English. She thought that was amusing. She loved Spain in the spring, she loved the children. She didn’t know what she would do for the summer.

I moved to New York at the beginning of the summer. Elizabeth Mary and Bobby were married two weeks after I got back. The reception was in Antoinette’s apartment. Bobby had already rented another apartment two blocks farther south.

The ceremony was performed in a judge’s chambers—Antoinette, Mr. Morse, and I were the only others there. There hadn’t been a dinner the night before, so the guests with literary ambitions gave their toasts at the reception. This was an improvement: since the audience was on its feet and free to move about, the narrative impulse was diminished.

I was touched by Antoinette. She was very attentive to her father, who was clearly grateful. She gave a short toast, gallantly joking and punning. She produced some word play about her parents’ intercontinental marriage and her father’s cable address, and then referred to Bobby and Elizabeth Mary as “Am-Asian grace.”

Antoinette was the center of this interior tableau. Clothes
had just begun to become bright again. Neckties were once again extravagant, and this was the first season of very short skirts. It struck me that fashion had taken on an air of costume, even of burlesque, an air which produced an effect of silly intimacy. How could one feel anything but playful around this maypole?

Bobby and Elizabeth Mary left. Antoinette saw her father leave—sober and in the hands of old friends. The other guests swirled for some moments and then began to drain out. The couple who’d catered began to pack up their glasses and trays.

Antoinette looked at me and laughed. She said, “You don’t have to go, do you, Ollie? Ollie, Ollie in free.”

The caterers wheeled out their two carts. I asked Antoinette if she’d like to go out to eat. She said yes, but then sagged into an armchair. She said, “Why don’t you just fix us some eggs? Those ones you poach and then roll around a frying pan with all those herbs—you and Bobby used to do them.”

When I came in from the kitchen I saw that she’d been crying.

I said, “I liked your toast. It reminded me of those postcards you used to send Bobby. Or the way you talked to him before you did those pairs competitions. Do you still skate?”

“Just for fun once in a while. God, I used to worry about Bobby. There wasn’t any need. He was always calmer than I was. But when I was eighteen I didn’t think either of you knew
anything
. I thought Bobby would be destroyed.”

I said, “I still have the letter you wrote me—the one telling me not to worry about Josie. At first I was annoyed that Bobby told you about her and me. But then I loved it, it seemed such a French mode—advice to a raw youth from a clever beauty.”

“What did I say?”

“It was about how to distract one’s self from a broken heart. It was very funny. You signed yourself ‘Your Aunt Juanette.’ Would you like to see it? I could find it.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“Well, it was wonderful—even just to learn you had painful crushes. The stories you’d told Bobby and me had terrified me—you were so masterfully funny about the boys you went out with. I was sure I’d be even more ridiculous to the girls I knew. But of course it was nice to hear the official school heroes mocked.”

Antoinette sighed. “You make me think I was an awful bitch.”

I thought she only half meant that. I said, “No. You were very witty, but you weren’t ever seriously mean.”

“That’s because I wasn’t ever serious.”

“Oh, come on. You made Bobby’s life possible. And you kept your father from feeling guilty—you gave him the feeling that being nice was all that was expected of him. Even when I was sixteen I could tell that. Bobby was my best friend—and your father was one of the few grownups I ever talked with naturally. So I could see your effect on them.”

“And so I burned myself out from eighteen to twenty-two, building up two sweet, weak men.”

I was amazed—I’d never imagined Antoinette as self-pitying.

I said, “Actually, you’re more interesting now.”

“Oh, Popeye,” she said, “you’re so stro-ong.”

I thought that was mean. When I was a sixth former I monitored a study hall (all the prefects had something else to do that period). The lower formers used to call me Olive Oyl—derived from Oliver. Whenever I turned my back, one of them would laugh Popeye’s laugh and another, implicitly taking my part, would chant in falsetto, “Ohh, Popeye! You’re so stro-ong.”

I said, “That, Auntie Juanita, is a painful memory.”

But she didn’t know what I was talking about. I explained. She said, “Oh—I only meant—Never mind. You know what I mean. One of those helpless things: ‘What’s a poor girl to do?’ ‘Ma, he’s making eyes at me.’ I’ll bet you say that to all the
girls.’ ” Antoinette paused. “It’s odd—you remember everything, don’t you? For you, life is but an allusion.” She slapped her knee in a little parody of yukking it up. “But go on—tell me more about how I’m more interesting now.”

I said, “No. Let’s go to the movies instead.”

“Oliver! Are you asking me for a date? ‘Be still, my heart!’ ”

But through all her joking around I felt her wish for company. We saw a movie, took a walk, watched television, played Ping-Pong. I spent the night in Bobby’s old room.

While Bobby and Elizabeth Mary were away, Antoinette and I conducted a courtship—or rather a self-conscious parody of one.

At first the most serious question for her didn’t seem to be that of physical desire, but whether I could learn to converse in her style. It was like learning to play Ping-Pong, which, correlatively, I did.

But soon the effect of our conversation became more powerful. About our present thoughts and feelings, our talk was always indirect and joking. However, Antoinette loved learning about my past thoughts and feelings in straightforward detail. This thirst of hers for listening made my own history seem suddenly lighter. My experiences seemed to dislodge themselves in the telling; they seemed to float up and arrange themselves for our amusement. The lighting was set too bright for comedy. I felt relieved. The invisible ghosts of past embarrassments which used to brush my feelings unexpectedly were condensed into bright fluttering visible figures, as harmless and ornamental as butterflies.

This mood even had a reflection in my work. I no longer pondered everything. I was no longer learning, slow with worry. I could now rely on reflexes I’d been coiling up for years.

I was worried that when Bobby and Elizabeth Mary came back, they might cast a dimming shadow. But they barely noticed Antoinette and me. They were seriously happy in their own style. So we were all elated at our new connections—connections which for Antoinette and me disconnected us from dismal earnestness. All summer long I was amazed at her ingenuity, at our ingenuity.

In the fall, I liked the disconnectedness of my job—I rode a commuter train against the flow of traffic. Out of the city in the morning and into the city in the afternoon. The students were well-schooled
jeunes filles bien élevées
. Many of them knew Latin and French and had read a good deal. If they were losing their faith, they lost it discreetly. The flavor of emotion in the best students was subtle. Their secrets, I suspected, bloomed like mushrooms. In any case, these secrets were not as crucial to me as those other secrets had been in Iowa.

Antoinette and I saw Elizabeth Mary and Bobby once a week. Bobby was happy that Antoinette was having a good time. He could tell she was more relaxed because she allowed him to show an old movie of them skating. Until recently she’d balked at looking at pictures of herself taken before the accident. I was stirred by Antoinette at twenty—she and Bobby skating away from the camera, their tight perky rumps tilted up like sparrows’. Antoinette looked fragile, except for her surprisingly full skater’s thighs cased in brown, almost chocolate, nylons, much darker than her pale face.

Elizabeth Mary and I were all praise. Antoinette laughed, but allowed Bobby to show another reel. In the next short sequence I noticed what it was about Antoinette’s face that had changed. It was really only her jaw that had been slightly curved to one side; it was not true that her face had been significantly more beautiful. She had been very pretty according to the style of the time—a style in which flawless delicacy came first. It was a face whose picture in a yearbook could start schoolboy daydreams of gazing and shy kissing. But what had
been most appealing then was what was appealing now—the shy antagonism that kept her separate, that reserved to herself the last critical word on her performance. I understood why the physical accident, which now appeared physically less important, had undone her so.