The Three Sirens (14 page)

Yes, he would be on time, especially tonight when there was so much to celebrate, and she must be ready.

One last tug and she had her newly purchased dark bottle-green silk cocktail dress on straight, and now, working the zipper up her spiny back, and fumbling for the hooks and loops, she walked over to the window. From the height of her apartment on the hill, she could make out the great claws of fog, animated gray against black night and yellow lights, creeping across the city below. Soon, all of San Francisco would be obscured, and only the girders of the Golden Gate Bridge, like distant detached bars in the sky, would remain visible.

She knew that Walter detested the fog, and although he had spoken of a night on the town, she suspected that they would get no further than the restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf. After the drinks and meal, if the old pattern prevailed, they would return directly to the comfort and warmth of this one room and the wide daybed that Walter would help her prepare for them. She did not mind. It made her happy to see him—with all his outside reputation, wealth, connections, power (and now high position)—reduced to equality by her flesh, which was that of an uncomplicated sensuous animal. This talent to so disarm him of worldly prides, to diminish him to his unadorned, essential self (the best part of him, she thought), was her ace in the hole and her greatest hope.

From the window, she had gone to the dresser to find, in the cheap scuffed jewel box, some becoming combination with which to ornament herself. She tried to match several pairs of costume earrings with several costume necklaces—inexplicably, her men always gave her large art books or small liqueur glasses (she did have one theory that she would not accept because she believed it: that, in common, her fiances felt jewelry would be wasted on her)—and settled, at last, on the plainest pearl earrings and necklace because they would be the least obtrusive.

Harriet Bleaska did not look in the mirror above the dresser to see if the costume jewelry enhanced her appearance. She knew very well that it did not, and had no wish to be reminded of Nature’s heartlessness. If she had any self-esteem, and she had considerable, it gained support neither from her countenance nor, indeed, from any visible attraction of her body. Like one born a cripple, Harriet had learned early that her appearance automatically barred her from certain satisfactions of life.

Now, breaking her rule, her eyes did meet her reflection in the mirror, only to be sure that her make-up was still fresh. The familiar face in the glass—The Mask, she secretly had named this face, for it hid from everyone her true beauty and virtue—stared solemnly back at her. If the predicament had only been one of plainness, of being unbeautiful, or anything neutral, it would not have been so bad. This was not the predicament at all. For almost forever, meaning all her twenty-six years, Harriet had lived with the fact that she was outstandingly homely. Her features seemed to drive males away from her path like a foghorn. Even the best of her features, which was her hair, would have been the worst feature on any pretty woman. Harriet’s hair was shoulder-length and stringy, and the color of a cinnamon mouse. It was hopelessly straight. In an effort to achieve some style, she wore the front in stiff bangs. From the hair down, everything worsened. Her eyes were too small and too close together. Her nose was pugged to an extremity beyond cuteness. Her mouth was a vast gash, almost devoid of upper lip and overabundant of lower. Her chin was long and sharp. She imagined that people said she had the physiognomy of a Belgian mare.

The rest of her person offered no alleviating compensations. Her neck had the grace of a plumbing fixture; her shoulders seemed fitted with football pads; her breasts did not fill size “A” cups; her hips and ankles were as thick as those of a prize Percheron, or so they seemed to her. In short, as Harriet had once thought, when God had made women, he had used the scraps and bits that didn’t fit for the creation of Harriet Bleaska.

With a shrug of resignation—she was too sensible and practical ever to be bitter—Harriet turned from the dresser, found a filtered cigarette, lighted it with the silver-plated lighter in the shape of a galleon (which Walter had given her), and returned the lighter to its place on the large and glossy art book (which Walter had given her). There were still twelve empty minutes, and no way to fill them. She determined to fill them by counting her blessings.

Smoking steadily, as she paced the room, she decided that she had not done too badly for an ugly duckling. Certainly, based on their personal research, a handful of handsome gentlemen in the land would testify, in unison, that no female on earth was more beautiful than Harriet Bleaska—in bed.

Thank God for this blessing, she thought, and weep for all her sisters who were emotionally homely, deformed and wanting below the waist.

Still, her pleasure in this major superiority of hers was clouded by the harsh facts of life. In the marketplace of her time, men bought beautiful facades. What lay behind the facades was less important, at least at the outset. A whole age of males was oriented by poetry, romantic fiction, radio, television, motion pictures, billboards, theater, and magazine and newspaper advertising, into believing that if a girl’s face was lovely, her bust prodigious, her figure otherwise well proportioned, her manner in some way provocative (lips parted, voice husky, walk undulating), she would automatically make the best bed partner and life partner in the world. When a girl had this exterior, she had her choice of buyers—the handsome, the aristocratic, the wealthy, the renowned. The second-best exteriors attracted lesser buyers, and so it went on downward, spiraling downward, toward the lonely place where you reached Harriet Bleaska.

The idiocy of it, while not embittering, made her sometimes want to scream sense at the stupid males. Couldn’t they see, realize, understand, that beauty is only skin-deep? Couldn’t they see that too often, behind the beautiful facades, lay selfishness, coldness, psychoses? Couldn’t they see that other qualities gave better guarantees of marital happiness in the living room, kitchen, and bedroom? No, they could not see, they were raised not to see, and that was Harriet’s Cross.

Men equated The Mask—her unattractiveness—with an unattractive marriage and unattractive sex life. Rarely, they would give her a chance to prove that she was more; and when, infrequently, they did, it was still not enough. For, in this society, marrying beauty, even when it was known to be wrong, was right because it was part of the public success symbol. Conversely, marrying ugliness, even when it was known to be right, was wrong because it was part of the failure symbol. Men were fools, and life was foolish, and yet there had been times when both held more promise.

She had been born in Dayton, Ohio, of decent, simple, outgoing, loving Lithuanian parents of the laboring lower middle class. She had not known that she was different in her early years, because she had received such lavish attention and praise from her parents and their extensive family. She grew to puberty feeling important and special and wanted.

Not until her father, employed in a printing firm, followed a promotion to Cleveland, and she entered Cleveland Heights High School there, did she have her first inkling of what stood between her and the normal social life. It was The Mask. Her homeliness had reached its maturity. She was a cactus among camellias. Her friends were many, but mainly of her own sex. Girls liked her because of an unconscious motive. She was a perfect foil to set off, contrastingly, their own endowments. And, the first semester, boys liked her, in the corridors, in intramural activities, as they might like another boy. To exploit and retain even this limited acceptance from them, she became, for several ensuing semesters, more tomboyish.

With the advent of her upper junior year at Cleveland Heights, the tomboyish act palled on her. The boys were older now, and they did not like other boys. They wanted girls. Dismayed, Harriet scrambled back to maidenhood. Since she could not give the boys what the other girls could, she decided to give them more. Her female friends were as conservative as their parents had been, in all matters, and the Cleveland boys of the crowd were made to understand boundaries very early. Kissing was agreeable, even French kissing. Petting could be engaged in excessively, but only above the waist. Dancing could be body to body, with considerable stimulation induced by contact and movement, but that was the end of it. Harriet, because of her handicap and the license of her upbringing, because of her need and her outgoing spirit, but mostly because of her handicap—creating the necessity to go twice as far to get half as much—was the first to break the unwritten rule.

One late afternoon, after school hours, in the dark back row of the balcony of the empty auditorium, Harriet permitted a pimply, clever boy who had recently transferred from University Heights to reach under her skirt. When she offered no resistance, only a closed-eyed murmur of anticipation, he was almost too overwhelmed to continue. But continue he did, and when her convulsive response to his manual love excited him beyond restraint, she quite naturally repaid him in kind. The exchange had been brief, hot, mindless, and it served Harriet well. It gave her status as a girl, at last.

In her senior year in high school, Harriet progressed to the ultimate form of mutual excitation. The boys considered her a sport; the girls considered her cheap. Harriet was satisfied by the acceptance from those she regarded as her better halves. Also, in her occasional acrobatics—she did not go all the way all the time; she had her standards—she found a release for her warm, embracing, loving nature. She found it a deep source of satisfaction to please. In those embryonic grapplings, inexperienced on both sides, she was never called upon to please in depth. Her mere capitulation was the high point. It was enough. Her partners could not dream of her hidden dimension. All in all, Harriet’s last year and a half in high school was a period still cherished in her memory. Only one enigma had puzzled her at the time. Despite her nocturnal popularity, her balcony and back-seat and in-the-bushes popularity, she sat home alone the nights of the Junior Prom and the Senior Graduation Dance. On the eve of each public occasion, her vast following of energetic males had abandoned her completely.

The mass abandonment became clear only two years later, in New York, when Harriet was in training at Bellevue Hospital to become a registered nurse. The decision to become a nurse had been as natural as a choice between living or dying. She wanted an outlet for her warm, sympathetic nature, a respectable profession where the offer of kindness was welcomed and applauded, a way of life where The Mask would no longer hide her real inner beauty.

While most of her five hundred fellow students in the nurses’ residence at Bellevue groaned and grumbled under the relentless pressures of class work, Harriet flourished with the joy of it. She was proud of her striped blue and white uniform, and black stockings and shoes, and pleased that she was actually being paid 240 dollars a year to learn a profession. She quickly felt possessive about the dining room overlooking the East River, and the snack kitchen which she often frequented, and the bowling alley which she attended with other female trainees. She looked forward to the traditional capping ceremony, with its ritual of candle-lighting, that would climax her first year. And she envied the seniors, who were allowed to wear white stockings and shoes, and who had stepped up from the grind of textbooks to instruction in surgery and the wards.

The only sad times were the weekends, when the other trainees dated, and Harriet had not only her private room but the whole dormitory almost to herself. Her solitude ended midway in her first year. A husky senior student, a future male nurse, who was myopic and made passes at any skirt that moved (it was said), found her alone in a vacant classroom. He absently kissed the back of her neck, and then found her in his arms responding fervently. So passionate w;is her response, that the male nurse, for whom her face was little more than a blur, was inspired to invite her to a friend’s nearby walk-up apartment to learn if she was merely one more tease. He learned, even before the lights were turned down, that she was not. Soon, he learned more. In the evening and night and dawn hours that followed, he was transported to a new and hitherto unknown dimension in lust. He did not know if Harriet was the repository of all history’s love techniques. He knew only that never, in his numerous and erratic seductions, had he found a partner who mated with such unreserved giving. His instinct, after the first night, was to broadcast the news of his incredible find to all of Bellevue and the wide world. But, difficult as it was, he held his tongue. He wanted this prodigy to himself. The affair, rarely vertical, lasted four months. Toward the end, Harriet began to believe that she had found her life’s mate. As his graduation approached, she spoke to him of “their future.” Thereafter, he called upon her less and less often, and after graduation he disappeared altogether.

The legacy that the male nurse left her was twofold: first, before departure, he spread the lurid story of his virility and her remarkable skill to half the male population of Bellevue; second, he told a friend, who told a friend, who repeated it to her in a moment of pique after she had pushed his hands away, that “she’s a great kid, the most sensational piece alive on earth, she starts where all other dames stop, but what the hell, what the hell, how can you marry and drag around a girl who you’d have to show with a sack over her head unless maybe you only took her out on Halloween.”

Realistic enough to accept his appraisal, Harriet was not shattered, but she was hurt. Thereafter, almost all of the male nurses, interns, male clerks, even several faculty members and physicians competed for Harriet’s companionship. She was suspicious of all, and withdrawn, and only five more times in her three years at Bellevue did she make believe that her suitors wanted her for her essential self and accept them wholly—hoping, hoping, as she submitted to them. Except for the suitor struck down fatally in a car accident (she would never know if he might have proposed), the rest behaved as one. They would offer Harriet sweet words and copulation, and she would enjoy the pleasure of their bodies and their compliments. They would escort her to dark and crowded places, Radio City and Madison Square Garden, and they would take her to out-of-the way restaurants and dungeon nightclubs, but they would never escort her to dress affairs, house parties, relative gatherings, important dinners. And when Harriet challenged them, so tentatively, so nicely, they evaporated into thin air. My Judge Craters, she called them, to herself, wryly and unsurprised.