This Is Not for You (26 page)

After that, I could speak of Joyce naturally enough, quote her views on the relationship between private and public agencies dealing with foreign aid, talk about a couple of good restaurants we’d discovered, explain her official entertainment schedule. I tried not to notice that I did not mention her husband, that I did not correct Andrew when he made a comment which assumed that she was not married. After we got to the apartment, the subject was dropped.

Monk greeted us with a list of the things Lissa had eaten or tried to eat that day: the soap in the bathroom, the kitten’s catnip mouse, Andrew’s mail.

“She’s more like a dog than a human being,” Monk complained. “She even barks.”

Lissa, on all fours in the hall, barked to demonstrate. The kitten stayed well under the couch.

“What time’s the babysitter due?” Andrew asked.

“Why don’t you make a drink first and then let me tell you about it?” Monk suggested with a melodramatically bright smile.

“Why?”

“I don’t want to be beaten in front of Kate. It’s so embarrassing for her.”

“She can’t come,” Andrew said.

“No,” Monk admitted. “She’s got the flu or something.”

“Why didn’t you find someone else? In all of New York City—”

“I tried, Andy. I can’t get anyone we know. But I can stay home. I called the gallery just after you left, and Dan says he has a friend who would take my ticket.”

“I’ll stay home,” Andrew said, but it was not a kindly offer; it was a threat.

It was no time for me to make a third offer. I took a small, cloth book out of my purse and gave it to Lissa, who immediately put it on her head and made a number of inquiring and assertive noises which were extremely useful.

“You can get up off the floor now, Kate,” Monk said. “Andy and I have decided to be pleasant to each other until later. You know, you look marvelous.”

Monk looked all eyeteeth and eyelashes, an ironic commercial for young motherhood. The apartment showed more signs of her industry and talent, two tall, handsome string lamp shades which dominated one now nearly bare wall, strongly patterned drapes, an invented, hanging bookshelf. When I admired these things, she looked uncertain.

“It’s a bit too ‘homey’ for Andy. He says we need Granny in the corner, so I took back a rocking chair I was going to refinish. I’m not being so domestic these days. I’m writing a play.”

“Which is why,” Andrew said, coming back into the room with drinks, “you should go tonight and I should stay home,” this time quite pleasantly.

“But, if I could finish the third scene tonight, maybe I could show it to Kate while she’s here.”

“Then I think you should stay home,” I said, knowing the decision was already made.

“I can’t seem to make Ramona understand how important it is for us both to go out, to be seen at things, to meet people,” Andrew said as we were on our way to the theater. “This babysitter thing is ridiculous. I bet this happens twice a week.”

Monk explained later what hadn’t been hard for me to guess. Andrew wanted to go out at least four times a week, sometimes to a show opening or cocktail party that cost no more than the babysitter and transportation at the time but put them in professional and social debt that Andrew would determinedly and generously repay, sometimes out to dinner or the theater with friends.

“There isn’t any money,” Monk said. “I know it’s a crude thing to say, but people who don’t have it have to talk about it now and then. Not Andy. No, that’s inaccurate. He’ll talk about thousands of dollars. What he can’t deal with is not having cash for the babysitter. Dan sold my ticket last night so that I could pay her for last week. But the trouble with Dan is that he understands very well about babysitter money and doesn’t have a clue about business money. They can’t last another two months. Andy won’t face it, and Dan doesn’t understand it. Kate, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I made the terrible mistake of suggesting to Andy that I get a job, just to help us along while the gallery got started. He was gone for nearly a week. But somebody has to do something.”

“I wonder if I could talk to him.”

“He’s not talkable to. You know, he was angry when you wrote about investing in the gallery. When I said maybe you thought it was a good thing financially, he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ You see, he does know. But then he begins talking about one good show, one good sale.”

“Could I lend you some money?”

“I couldn’t explain where I’d got it. I suppose we’re just going to have to face ruin before he’ll face ruin.”

“Couldn’t I—?”

Monk began to cry.

“I’m going to talk to him,” I said. “This is simply ridiculous.”

“Don’t, Kate, please. He couldn’t stand it. He’d leave. He’ll leave anyway.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said.

“We’d better read my play. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. When he comes back with Lissa you’ll be expected to make all sorts of intelligent remarks. Of course, that might be easier if you hadn’t read it.”

“I want to,” I said, dreading it.

But the play was oddly good. There was a distance between the characters’ and the author’s perceptions so that their cliché-ridden circumstances were presented as cliché-ridden circumstances, so that their elaborate rationalizations were meant to be ponderous. It would have been depressing if there hadn’t been a curious, garish humor that controlled the tone.

“Just a little Freudian fairy tale,” Monk said nervously.

“But it works, Monk.”

“Do you think so?”

“I do. What are you going to do with it?”

“Oh, I thought I’d get Andy to finance it at some good, small place off Broadway.”

“Do you know anyone to show it to?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Do you really think it’s good enough?”

“Yes.”

“I’d thought of TV. It’s that sort of length…” But her tone suggested that she had none of Andrew’s desperate confidence in pipe dreams. She smiled suddenly “There’s no point in being sane about solutions. I might as well join the madmen.”

I bought a painting called
Loon Spaces
by the Canadian Andrew was interested in. I would have bought two or three if Andrew hadn’t been suspicious of my motives. I like to complain now because recently a Canadian gallery bought another painting of that period for nearly five times as much, and I don’t admit that I was investing not so much in a painting as in Andrew. It’s a good painting. Andrew’s profit was no more than babysitting money, though I doubt that he spent it that way. There was nothing more I could do.

When I got back to Washington, the first of your cathedral cards had arrived. The message read, “Mother likes Italy,” which meant, obviously, that you didn’t. Or you were recovering your sense of security enough to find your mother’s company increasingly difficult. I didn’t envy her what I remembered of your sulking exhaustion in the heat of southern Europe.

The heat in Washington was more intolerable. I don’t know why a laboring furnace is not as hard on the nerves as the endless exhaling hum of an air conditioner. I don’t know why being nearly cold inside and soaked with heat outside is more uncomfortable and more unhealthy than more extreme changes of temperature in the winter, but everyone in the office was limp with lasting summer colds, irritable and inaccurate. Joyce, because of one important meeting, had not been able to take her vacation with her husband, who went alone to the New England coast. I might have suspected her of arranging the conflict if she hadn’t seemed so genuinely disappointed. There was, of course, no question of our taking a vacation together later. Joyce would never have risked so much. I talked of going to England for a couple of weeks. That disappointed her, too.

“I suppose you’ll meet Esther,” she said.

“I might, if she’s there. I’m going to see Doris and Frank—if I go.”

“You’ve got to turn on the air conditioner again, Kate. It’s just unbearable in here. Why don’t we go to a movie? Why don’t we do something?”

There wasn’t a movie either of us wanted to see.

“Why do we stay in town?” Joyce asked. “Why don’t you come home with me?”

I had been to Joyce’s house several times when her husband was there. I had even once spent the night in the guest room. He was always very pleasant, but he found things to occupy himself, work in the garden, an errand, and he always went to bed very early. I tried not to think about him, which was not as easy at their house as it was at my apartment; so I went as seldom as I could. There was, while he was away, no reason to refuse. And for Joyce it was more comfortable. She had her own entertainments, her own space. And perhaps a perverse sexual excitement, too.

“What household god are we going to offend today?” I got used to asking, feeling her restless, inventive moods.

“I like you reluctant, and you know it, don’t you?”

“I get tired.”

“No you don’t. You get moral.”

“That’s right. The heat makes me moral.”

“Well, you don’t have to do anything. Just relax.”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“I read about it. I read, too, you know. Sex can get as dull as conversation if you don’t keep yourself informed.”

“Yourself?”

“You’re an absolutely standard type, you know—the crude prude. You need to be shocked.”

“Joyce—”

“Shut up now, darling. I want to concentrate. I’ll do the talking. You listen.”

I listened to a great deal, demonstrated narratives from novels, reenactments of scenes with other women, pure fantasy, but in all that sexual storytelling there was never a reference to Joyce’s husband or to any man. The world might have been one sex. I never asked. I didn’t think about it. But I was glad when his vacation was nearly over and I could move back into town. I was tired.

You were sending French cathedrals now with such messages as, “What about the Catholic Church?” and “If I’m baptized in the Anglican Church, will you be my godmother?” There were fortunately never return addresses. I wasn’t expected to answer any of these questions, not at once, anyway. Plotting your course, I asked for my vacation for the first two weeks in October. It was a miscalculation which might have looked to you deliberate. You and your mother boarded the
Queen Elizabeth
the day before I left Washington.

“Why didn’t you come while Esther was here?” Doris asked.

“I tried. She doesn’t bother with small details like dates,” I said. “How is she?”

“Mother- and travel-weary and absolutely drugged with God.”

“Even at the breakfast table,” Frank offered wryly.

“Did they stay here?”

“Yes,” Doris said. “Don’t ask me why. I had a lapse of memory. Most parents really ought to be killed at birth, except the delightful ones like Frank and me.”

“Don’t count on testimonials from our children,” Frank said.

“In fact, the house needs more using than it gets,” Doris admitted.

“Well, Mrs. Woolf must have taken up a number of rooms,” I said.

“Yes. I did feel sorry for her, in a way. She’s awful to Esther, but she’s inaccurate. Her blows don’t often really land. Esther’s do, particularly the Jewish ones—religion as positive choice rather than negative identity. The odd thing is that her mother almost encourages her.”

“Not odd,” I said. “Did either Esther or Mrs. Woolf say anything about Esther’s experience in jail?”

“Not a word,” Frank said. “What’s that?”

It wasn’t as easy to tell the story to Frank and Doris as it had been to invent for Joyce. They were more concerned and made some effort to understand.

“And I complain that young Frank gives me ulcers!” Frank said. “I can quite see that Mrs. Woolf would think Esther was best off as a nun, but what about the nunnery? A very superior mother superior it would take, don’t you think?”

“Is E. talking about that?” I asked.

“Not really,” Doris said. “She hasn’t even joined yet. She’s still got godmothers rather than mother superiors on her mind.”

“Oh, and wasn’t that a discussion!” Frank said. “Did you know that Esther wants you to be her godmother?”

“Yes,” I said. “She sent me a postcard about it.”

“How like her,” Doris said. “What did it say?”

“Just that, with a picture of a cathedral, I forget which one.”

“Have you refused?”

“There wasn’t any return address,” I said. “I will.”

“We should find an appropriate postcard,” Frank suggested.

Later, when the nervous hilarity died down a bit, we talked more seriously.

“I’m just not sure that the Church lends itself to any safer living than the existentialists,” Doris said.

“Dear, that’s not fair, safer surely, even if no more truly moral.”

“What on earth is being truly moral?” I asked.

“That’s a question worthy of Esther herself,” Frank said.

“Trying to be truly moral is what got her into trouble in the first place,” Doris said. “My point is that the Church is no sanctuary from that.”

“No,” I said. “I agree. In that sense, stealing from the collection plate is safer than contributing to it.”

“Only daughters of a minister could talk like that,” Frank said. “Of course there’s a lot of rationalizing in the Church. Still, the values it represents—”

“Rationalizing isn’t the point,” I said. “E.’s never rationalized like that for her own comfort or pleasure or justification. She thinks up the act to demonstrate the idea, not the other way around. She didn’t really want those saddle shoes, after all. She took them because she thought she should.”

“What about Charlie?” Frank answered.

“Same thing.”

“And now,” Doris said, “she’ll go around looking for things to give up.”

“Because she wants to,” Frank said.

“Well, yes,” I said, “but ‘wants’ only in the sense that she wants to carry out an idea.”

“I want to think she’s safer,” Frank protested. “Don’t disabuse me. I don’t know how to worry about it.”

I didn’t either. And like Frank I wanted to be reassured, but Doris wouldn’t let the subject go. Over morning coffee at Fortnum’s, she dealt with it again.

“Aren’t you going to try to discourage her, Kate? After all, you’ve left the Church.”