The Group (19 page)

“Finally,” she continued hoarsely, “I faced the truth. I went to the Public Library. They’ve got a Viennese woman there in Information—very
gemütlich
. She drew me up a reading list on impotence, a lot of it in German; quite a bibliography. There are different types: organic and functional. Put’s is functional. He’s got a mother-tie; his mother’s a widow. Some men are incapable of erection altogether, and some are incapable except in certain circumstances. Put’s capable of full erection, but only with whores and fallen women.” She gave her short laugh. “But you didn’t find all that out in the library,” objected Helena; she had heard her mother declare that it was possible to get a “university education in our great public-library system,” but there was a limit to everything. “No,” said Norine. “Only the over-all picture. After I’d read up on the subject, Put and I were able to talk. He’d had all his early sex experience with whores and factory girls in Pittsfield, it turned out. They’d pull up their skirts, in an alley or a doorway, and he’d ejaculate, sometimes at the first contact, before he got his penis all the way in. He’d never made love to a good woman and never seen a woman naked. I’m a good woman; that’s why he can’t make it with me. He feels he’s fornicating with his mother. That’s what the Freudians think; the Behaviorists would claim that it was a conditioned reflex. But of course he couldn’t know any of that ahead of time. It’s been an awful blow to him. I excite him but I can’t satisfy him. His penis just wilts at the approach to intercourse. Lately, I’ve been bunking in the living room”—a jerk of her head indicated the couch—“because he has a horror of contact with a good woman’s crotch in his sleep. Though we both wore pajamas, he had insomnia. Now at least I can sleep raw.” She stretched.

“Have you tried a doctor?” Norine laughed darkly. “Two. Put wouldn’t go, so I went. The first one asked me whether I wanted to have children. He was an old-fashioned neurologist that my mother knew about. When I said no, I didn’t, he practically booted me out of the office. He told me I should consider myself lucky that my husband
didn’t
want intercourse. Sex wasn’t necessary for a woman, he said.” “Good Heavens!” said Helena. “Yes!” nodded Norine. “The second one was a G.P. with a few more modern ideas. Put’s partner, Bill Nickum, sent me to him. He was pretty much of a Behaviorist. When I explained Put’s sexual history, he advised me to buy some black chiffon underwear and long black silk stockings and some cheap perfume. So that Put would associate me with a whore. And to try to get him to take me that way, with all my clothes on, in the afternoon, when he got home from work.” “Mercy!” said Helena. “What happened?” “It was almost a success. I went to Bloomingdale’s and got the underwear and the stockings.” She pulled up her sweat shirt, and Helena had a glimpse of a black chiffon “shimmy” with lace inserts. “Then I thought of that polar-bear rug. My mother had it in storage; it used to belong to my grandmother Schmittlapp, who was a rich old aristocrat. ‘Venus in Furs’—Sacher-Masoch. I arranged so that Put would find me on the rug when he got home from the office.” Helena smiled and made a noise like a whistle. “Put ejaculated prematurely,” said Norine somberly. “Then we had a fight about how much I’d spent at Bloomingdale’s. Put’s an ascetic about money. That’s why he won’t consider psychoanalysis, though Bill Nickum thinks he should.” Helena’s eyebrows arched; she decided not to ask how “Bill Nickum” came to know of Put’s “trouble.” Instead, she put another question. “Are you
very
broke, Norine?” Norine shook her head. “Put has a trust fund, and my father gives me an allowance. But we put that into household expenses. Put and Bill sink most of their own dough in Common Causes.” “‘Common Causes’?” repeated Helena, mystified. “That’s the name of their outfit. Of course, they draw salaries, and the rest of the staff is volunteer. But their mailing and printing costs are pretty staggering. And then we have to entertain labor people and celebrities and rich do-gooders and some of the working press. We use this place as sort of a cross between a salon and a café.” Helena looked around her and said nothing.

“Bill says it would take the strain off our marriage if Put could go to a brothel. Or find a taxi-dance girl. Though they’re likely to be infected. But he could learn to use a prophylactic kit. Have you ever seen one? It’s as simple as brushing your teeth. Put’s offered me a divorce, but I don’t want that. That’s what the older generation would have done. The generation that ran away from everything. My mother and father are divorced. If Put were a drunkard or beat me up, that would be different. But sex isn’t the only thing in marriage. Take the average couple. They have intercourse once a week, on Saturday night. Let’s say that’s five minutes a week, not counting the preliminaries. Five minutes out of 10,080. I figured it out in percentages—less than .05 of one per cent. Supposing Put were to spend five minutes a week with a whore—the time it takes him to shave? Why should I mind? Especially when I knew it didn’t mean anything to him emotionally?” A dismayed expression had come over Helena’s face as Norine jerked out these figures; she was fighting off the certainty that she had to go to the toilet. She had traveled all over Europe scoffing at a fear of germs, drinking the water, making use of a Spanish peasant’s outhouse or of the simple drain in the floor provided as a urinal by an Italian
osteria
, but she shrank from the thought of Norine’s bathroom. The need to relieve her bladder heightened the sense of unreality produced by Norine’s statistical calculations and by the steady barking of the dog outside and the drip-drip of water in the sink; she felt she had slipped into eternity. Yet when she finally did ask for the john, it was a long time before she could urinate, though she put paper down on the toilet seat, which Put had left flipped up, like a morbid reminder of himself; in the end, she had to run the water in the basin to prime the pump.

When she returned to the living room, Norine suddenly came to the point. “I guess Harald had become a sort of male potency symbol for me,” she said in her uninflected voice, blowing smoke with a careless air, but behind the smoke screen her narrowed topaz eyes were watching Helena as if to measure her reaction. As Norine went on talking, in her rapid-fire, memo-pad style, Helena lit a cigarette herself and settled down to listen critically, taking mental notes and arranging them under headings, just as though she were at a lecture or a meeting.

The reasons, she noted, for Harald’s becoming “a male potency symbol” to the deprived Norine were as follows: (A) The Group. Norine had always envied them their “sexual superiority.” (B) Kay’s role as a neutral, “passing between both camps.”
I.e.
, Norine had sat next to Kay senior year in Miss Washburn’s Abnormal Psychology and found her “a good scout.” (C) Envy of Kay for “having the best of both worlds.”
I.e.
, she had lost her virginity and stayed at Harald’s place weekends without becoming “
déclassée
.” Norine’s situation was the obverse. (D) Proximity. Norine had met Kay on the street the day she and Put came back from their honeymoon. They found they were neighbors and the two couples had started playing bridge together in the evenings. (E) Harald was a better bridge player than Put.
Ergo
, Harald had come to figure in Norine’s mind as an “erect phallus” just out of her reach, like the Tower group. Which was why Helena had found the two of them kissing in the kitchen and why it did not “mean anything.”

Helena wrinkled her forehead. It seemed to her on the contrary that, if you accepted Norine’s chain of reasoning, it meant a great deal. If Harald was to be treated as a phallic symbol, instead of as Kay’s husband, it made their kisses “meaningful” in just the sense that would appeal to Norine. She had been yielding to the Force of Logic, which poor Kay herself had set in motion.

“If it didn’t mean anything, why dwell on it?” said Helena. “To make you understand,” replied Norine. “We both know you’re intelligent and we don’t want you to feel you have to tell Kay.” Something in Helena sat up at the sound of those “we”s, but she puffed at her cigarette nonchalantly. What made them think she would tell Kay? That embrace, in her books, did not amount to a row of pins, so long as things stopped there; Harald, after all, had been drinking, as Norine ought to know for herself.

“I wouldn’t want to wreck her marriage,” mused Norine. “Then don’t,” said Helena, in a voice that sounded like her father’s. “Forget about Harald. There’re other fish in the sea. Don’t feel you have to finish something just because you’ve started it.” She grinned candidly at her hostess, believing she had read her psychology.

Norine hesitated. Idly, she picked up the curling iron. “It’s not that simple,” she threw out. “Harald and I have been lovers quite a while.” Helena bit her lip; this was what, underneath, she had been afraid of hearing. She made a grimace. The simple word “lovers” had a terrible and unexpected effect on her.

Put was out all day, Norine went on to explain, and Kay was out all day too. “It undercuts Harald that she works to support him. He has to assert his masculinity. You saw what happened last night—when he burned his play. That was a sort of immolation rite, to propitiate her; he was making a burnt offering of his seed, the offspring of his mind and balls. …” At these words Helena’s normal droll self assumed command again. “Oh, Norine!” she protested. “Do come down to brass tacks.” “‘The Brass Tack,’” Norine said, frowning. “Wasn’t that your name for a literary magazine at college?” Helena agreed that it was. Norine flicked on the curling iron. “What is it,” she wondered, eying Helena, “that makes you want to puke at the imponderables? Do you mind if I curl my hair?” As the curling iron heated, she continued with her narrative. Harald, it seemed, left alone all day, had started dropping in, afternoons, for a cup of tea or a bottle of beer at Norine’s place. Sometimes, he brought a book and read aloud to her; his favorite poet was Robinson Jeffers. “
Roan Stallion
,” supplied Helena. Norine nodded. “How did you know?” “I guessed,” said Helena. She well remembered the fatal weekend that Harald had read
Roan Stallion
to Kay. “One day,” Norine said, “I told him about Put. …” “Enough said,” dryly remarked Helena. Norine flushed. “My first
affaire
—before Harald—started the same way,” she admitted. “It was a man I met in the Public Library, a progressive-school teacher with a wife and six children.” She gave an unwilling laugh. “He was curious about the stuff I was reading. We used to sit in Bryant Park, and I told him about Put. He took me to a hotel and deflowered me. But he was afraid his wife would find out.” “And Harald?” asked Helena. “Underneath his bravado, I guess he’s afraid too. Married men are funny; they all draw a line between the wife and the concubine.” She commenced to curl her hair. Soon the smell of singed hair was added to the smell of cigarette smoke, of dog, pipe tobacco, and of a soured dishcloth in the sink. Watching her, Helena granted Norine a certain animal vitality, and “earthiness” that was underscored, as if deliberately, by the dirt and squalor of the apartment. Bedding with her, Helena imagined, must be like rolling in a rich moldy compost of autumn leaves, crackling on the surface, like her voice, and underneath warm and sultry from the chemical processes of decay. It came back to her that Norine had written a famous rubbishy paper for Miss Beckwith’s Folk Lore, on Ge, the Earth Mother, and the steamy chthonian cults, that had been turned down by the
Journal of Undergraduate Studies
, on the ground of “fuzzy thinking,” a favorite faculty phrase. Helena chuckled inwardly. She felt she could write a fine paper herself this morning, in the manner of Miss Caroline Spurgeon, on the chthonic imagery of Norine’s apartment, which, if not exactly a cellar, as Kay insisted on calling it, was black as a coalhole and heated by the furnace of the hostess’ unslaked desires, burning like quicklime and giving off, Helena said to herself sharply, a good deal of hot air. Drolly, she considered the “bitch in heat upstairs,” surely a totem or familiar, the Fallopian tubes of the landlady (a root system?), the Cerberus in the back yard. “Oh queen of hell,” she said to herself, “where does your Corn Mother mourn?” On lower Park Avenue, she discovered, somewhat later in the conversation. Norine’s mother lived on alimony from her father, who had remarried; Norine went to dinner with her at Schrafft’s every other Wednesday.

“I’m not the first,” Norine jerked out now, while the curling iron sizzled. “Harald tells me stuff he doesn’t tell Kay. He had a long
affaire
with a show girl he met last fall; she wanted to marry him. She had a rich husband and a house in Connecticut, where he and Kay still go sometimes for weekends. But Harald won’t sleep with her any more, though she begs him to. He has a horror of messy relationships. Before he and I went to bed, for instance, we both had to agree that we wouldn’t let it affect our marriages.”

“Isn’t that easier said than done?” demanded Helena. “Not for Harald,” said Norine. “He’s a very disciplined person. And I’m fond of Put. Sometimes I get a bit jealous of Kay since I know Harald sleeps with her sometimes, though he doesn’t talk about it. But I tell myself that every experience is unique; what he does with her can’t alter what he does with me. And vice versa. I’m not taking anything away from her. Most married men perform better with their wives if they have a mistress. In other societies, that’s taken for granted.”

“Still,” said Helena, “you’d rather Kay didn’t find out. Or Put, I gather. And you must admit, you had a close call last night. What if Kay had marched in, instead of me?” Norine nodded somberly. “Check,” she said. Then she laughed. “God!” she confided, “we had another close call the other day. …” Helena raised an eyebrow. “Do you want to hear?” said Norine. “All right,” said Helena. “It happened right here,” said Norine. “One afternoon. About ten days ago. We were fornicating there”—she indicated the couch—“when there was an awful banging on the door and a voice yelled, ‘Open up there!’”

Helena shuddered. As she listened to her classmate, her imagination soberly reconstructed the scene, disrobing Norine and Harald and placing them, affrighted in the midst of their ‘transports,’ on the couch. What could the knocking mean? Harald, it seemed, did not wait to find out; he seized his trousers from the collapsible chair she was now sitting on and raced into the bedroom. Norine sat up and wrapped herself in the couch cover as the banging continued. She was sure it was the police—the Red Squad—after Putnam’s files. It sounded as though they would break the door down any minute; they must have heard her and Harald whispering. “Answer it!” hissed Harald from the bedroom. Clutching the black couch cover around her, in her bare feet, Norine opened the door a crack. Two men in plain clothes and a woman burst into the room. “That’s her!” cried the strange woman, a middle-aged type, in jewels and a fur coat, pointing to Norine. “Where’s my husband?” Before Norine could stop them, the plain-clothes men pushed open the door into the bedroom, where they found Harald buttoning his fly. “Here he is, ma’am!” they yelled. “Partially disrobed. In his undershirt. Trousers unbuttoned.” The woman went in to see too. “But that’s not my husband,” she exclaimed. “I never saw this man before. Who is he?” And she turned angrily to Norine.