Nope. No luck. No luck that time, either. And almost the worst part of these things now was that he’d run out of apologies: he didn’t know what to say to her.
But once again they went on trying far into the night.
“… Baby, do you think you could sort of tickle me? With your fingers?”
“Here, you mean? Like this?”
“No, I meant up here. Both sides. Both hands. There, that’s it. Not quite so hard. Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s good. That’s good.…”
“Does it feel – are you getting – am I doing this right?”
“Well, never mind now, dear; it’s gone. I lost it again.…”
At last she said “Oh, I think it’s my fault. It must be my fault.”
“No, come on, Mary, that’s dumb; don’t say that.”
“I think it’s true, though. I think you sort of basically despise me for being here instead of with Bob, and maybe I sort of despise myself.”
“That’s crazy,” he told her. “I think it’s tremendous that you’re here. I love your being here. You’d never dream of despising yourself if I could – you know – if I could make it with you; and I will.”
And they discussed those two points of view at some length, getting nowhere, until Mary said she would have to sleep because there were a lot of things to do tomorrow.
She spent the morning uptown, shopping for clothes and other wedding necessities; when she got back she changed into a new dress and went out again to see about her old apartment.
He was left alone so much that day that he had plenty of time to think in unprofitable, circling ways about impotence. Did other men go through it? If so, why was it so seldom discussed except in jokes? Did girls laugh and tattle about it among themselves, and did they think of it privately with revulsion and disdain? Was it something that a word or a glance or a drink could fix, at the right moment, or were you supposed to spend years in psychoanalysis trying to get to the root of it?
It was after she’d come back that afternoon, while they sat having a drink together, that Michael felt himself giving in to a reckless new idea: if some imponderably dumb failure of sex had caused all this trouble, an infusion of love might help.
And so he began to tell Mary Fontana that he loved her, that he’d been helplessly in love since the first night he’d met her at Bob’s place, that he’d thought of her all the time and had scarcely been able to bear the idea of her marriage because he wanted her so badly for his own. “So do you see, Mary?” he concluded. “Will you try to understand? I love you, that’s all. Love you.”
And she was clearly embarrassed, blushing attractively as she looked down into her drink, but he could tell she was pleased, too. If nothing else, there might now be no further question of despising herself. She could easily shy away from making any declaration of love in return – that would take a lot more than she’d bargained for, after all, when she’d showed up at his door the other day – and even so, there could be a new romantic tenderness in their every maneuver from now on.
But the best part was that Michael had salvaged something important for himself. Even if revulsion and disdain were appropriate feelings to have about a man who couldn’t get it up, they couldn’t very readily be applied to a man in love.
“Oh, listen, Mary,” he said, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you; I just think it’s better for both of us if you know the truth. I’d have been lying if I hadn’t told you.” And he thought he could detect a quiet new authority in his voice: the desperation was gone. Love had made a difference.
They had another drink as if in celebration, with currents of love running as strong in the air as the whiskey in their veins; then soon they were naked in bed and eagerly determined to make everything new. As always before he began by stroking her thoroughly, as if to find out how she was made; then he brought her nipples out, one in his fingers and the other in his mouth, and fondled them until her hips began to move in the familiar rhythm of their own accord. For a while he tried to make her come with his hand, working two fingers in the warmth and moisture at the core of her and saying he loved her over and over again; then he went through the ritual rearrangement of both their bodies in order to have her with his mouth. But he’d known all along, since their first afternoon, that Mary didn’t care for preliminary climaxes unless she could tell they would promise the big one later, the real one at the end. If you lingered too long over trying to bring her off with your hand or mouth she could always sense your trouble; then she’d unwittingly lose interest and her hips would stop. And if you timed things well enough to make your move before that happened – if you mounted her in the hope of a miracle, as Michael did today – it was like trying to push a length of rope: nobody can push a rope. Love may have helped, but it hadn’t helped enough.
On the day she had arranged to have tea at the Plaza with Bob’s mother she said she couldn’t go through with it. She had never met any of Bob’s family but they were all rich and Anglo-Saxon and that whole side of the thing had been preying on her mind for months and months. Oh, God, how could she possibly face the woman now?
“Well, baby,” he counseled as he fastened her into the expensive, elegant dress she had bought for the occasion, “I don’t know why you can’t just go up there and charm the hell out of her. She’ll love you. Besides, it isn’t as if you had anything to – you know – anything to reproach yourself with.”
And Mary turned to him with a small, surprisingly cynical smile and said she guessed he was right.
When she got back from her meeting, a little exhilarated because it had gone pretty well after all – better than she’d expected – she arranged herself demurely in a chair to accept the drink Michael fixed for her. Then she glanced around the room and up into his face and down again: she seemed almost to be asking who he was and how she’d come to know him, and what she was doing in this funny apartment in the first place. He was reminded of the way Jane Pringle had looked around on coming back from her thirteen parties, and he knew it was time to start saying he loved her again.
“See?” he said. “I told you there was nothing to worry about. I knew she’d be crazy about you; anybody can tell you’re an exceptional girl. You kind of make your own rules, but that’s what all exceptional people do. Know something? I haven’t heard you say a single cliché the whole time you’ve been here. Oh, I guess when you talk about your analyst you’ve come close to it once or twice, but that’s because analysts teach people to speak in clichés. That’s what they’re in business for. I imagine you may have started going to that asshole because you felt a little out of the ordinary, but I’m not worried: he can’t do you any harm because you are out of the ordinary, in ways he’ll never be able to touch. You remind me a little of a girl I’ve admired for years and never even gotten close to. Girl named Diana; she’s married now to some guy in Philadelphia. She told me once she liked a poem of mine called ‘Coming Clean,’ and I remember thinking Okay, that’s it. If Diana Maitland likes ‘Coming Clean’ I don’t care if anybody else in the whole fucking world likes it or not. I’ve always been partial to out-of-the-ordinary girls, you see. Girls who know who they are and make up their own minds for their own reasons.…”
Listening to the rise and fall of his voice as he watched her face, he wondered how many cool, reserved girls he had tried to win over with this kind of flattering talk, going all the way back to certain girls around the air base in England, and he wondered if they’d all thought it was bullshit. Besides, there probably wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about Mary Fontana: she was just a girl who’d wanted to get laid with a stranger before she got married. But he couldn’t stop talking: he seemed to be afraid that if he stopped she might get up and leave, or that she might evaporate right there in her chair.
“Michael?” she said as soon as he gave her a chance to speak. “Let’s take off our clothes and just be together in bed for a while, okay? I don’t care if all we do is lie there.”
And she apparently did
n’t care if all they did was lie there for however few days and nights were left until their time ran out. Michael didn’t know what to make of that, but he had to admit it was a relief.
During the several hours that remained to be whiled away in the White Horse they were like an old married couple, or like a boy and girl who hadn’t been out together before and didn’t feel like starting anything sexy yet, exchanging agreeable remarks for no other purpose than to keep silence from closing in. Once, as he made his way up to the bar for another round and hoped she was watching his back, he found he was enjoying himself – feeling pretty good – and that knowledge was deeply frightening: If you could make a romance out of impotence, you must be crazy.
Then it was their last night. Tomorrow afternoon Mary Fontana would take a train to Redding, Connecticut, and the following day, after her parents and sisters and friends had arrived on another train, she would be married in a “charming” Episcopalian chapel.
For a while all they did was lie there, between fresh sheets – he had changed the sheets three times this week because it would have been terrible to have them stale and sour through all this failure – and they talked a little but couldn’t think of much to say.
When he began to stroke her with his hands he wondered if his hands would ever know any girl as well as they’d come to know this one. Then came the nipples, the moving hips, the flow of moisture, and the hazardous question of timing.
But the remarkable thing tonight was that he did manage to work himself inside her: it wasn’t very solid but he was in there, and he knew she could feel him.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Oh, I’m your woman.”
He would remember thinking it was awfully nice of her to say a thing like that, but then he’d always known she was a nice girl. The trouble was that he could tell she was faking it; she’d said it only because of all the times he’d told her he loved her. She felt sorry for him; she wanted to give him something to keep on this last night – and in the very few seconds it took him to understand all that he shriveled and fell out of her. Afterwards, there was nothing more between them than there had ever been.
She had to pick up a few more things at Lord and Taylor’s, she explained the next day, but that wouldn’t take long, and her train didn’t leave until five – and so they arranged to meet at the Biltmore at four, to have a couple of drinks and say goodbye.
“Well, but wait,” he said. “Let’s make it three-thirty, so we’ll have more time.”
“Okay.”
When she’d left he began to make meticulous plans for how things would go at the Biltmore. There would be no sad, defeated, self-pitying looks across that cocktail table: he would be jaunty and witty for her, wearing his best clothes; it might even turn out to be as brave and bright a goodbye as a girl ever had on the day before her wedding.
But when the phone rang at three o’clock he knew it would be Mary, calling it off, and it was.
“Listen, I don’t think the Biltmore’s a very good idea after all,” she said. “I think I’d rather just go to Grand Central by myself and – you know – get on the train.”
“Oh. Well, okay.” He wanted to say, Don’t forget me, or, I’ll never forget you, or, I love you, but none of those things would have sounded right, so all he said was “Okay, Mary.”
And for a long time after they’d hung up he sat with his head in his hands, scratching every part of his scalp with all ten fingernails.
Mary would almost certainly tell Bob Osborne where she’d spent this week – she was too nice a girl not to do that, and soon – but she would almost certainly tell him, too, that nothing had “happened”; and the more Bob pressed for further information and details, the more and more she would tell. In the end, there would be nothing left of Michael Davenport at all.
He was useless to himself for many days. He was sick; he lost weight; he couldn’t even begin to work. He knew this must be better than dying, but there were hours when he wasn’t entirely sure of it.
Still, not even chagrin can last forever: the thing to do was lie low and wait for some unexpected renewal. And one morning later in the summer there was a brief, terse phone call from his agent that seemed faintly promising: an adaptation of one of his old one-act plays would soon be produced on Canadian television, at a “minor” studio in Montreal.
The money he would earn from it was barely enough to cover a trip to Montreal and back, but he decided at once that there could be no better way to spend it. Whatever kind of botch they might make of his play, the cast of it would have to include one or two pretty girls.
At first he considered asking Bill Brock to go along with him, but Brock might make too strident a traveling companion; then he got a better idea: he called up Tom Nelson.
“… I mean we’d have to use your car, of course,” he said after he’d explained the thing, “but I’d buy the gas and we could take turns with the driving.”
And Tom was quick to comply. Any excuse for a trip, he said, was good enough for him.
They set out together on a clear, pleasingly warm day, and Tom looked trim and peppy when he took the wheel. He wore a khaki Army shirt with shoulder tabs, the kind only officers were supposed to have, and he was full of wry little jokes.
But they hadn’t even reached Albany before Michael began to wonder if Bill Brock might have been a better choice after all – or, better still, if it wouldn’t have been smarter to have made the trip alone, on the train or the bus.
“Still got that English girl?” Tom inquired.
“Well, no, we kind of went our separate ways after a while. Had her for about five months, though.”
“Good. And how about since then? Been getting much?”
“Oh, I’ve kept pretty busy.”
“Good. And I’m beginning to get the picture on this Montreal business, too. You figure there’ll be some nice girl in the show, and she’ll come up to you with big eyes and say ‘You mean you’re the author?’ ”
“That’s it,” Michael said. “You got it. Kind of like the little museum girls who come up and say ‘You mean you’re Thomas Nelson?’ ”
And Nelson glanced away from the road with a smile that contained too much mockery to be engaging. “So are you prepared?” he asked. “You bring your rubbers?”
There was a package of them riding in Michael’s pocket, but he was damned if he’d confirm or deny it.
“Don’t worry, little soldier,” he said. “There’ll be enough for both of us.”
They got lost several times in Montreal before finding the television studio, but they weren’t late. A nervous young director said he hoped Michael would like the production; he gave him a mimeographed copy of the script, and Michael read enough of it to know the play had been badly tampered with: the dialogue was bloated to soap-opera proportions, the pacing was lost beyond hope, and the ending would probably be wreckage.
“Excuse me; are you Mr. Davenport?” And a young girl was looking hopefully into his eyes. She said her name was Susan Compton and she’d be playing the lead tonight; she said she was awfully glad to meet him; she said she knew the television version was “awful” because she’d read the original when it came in and found it “beautiful”; she said she was afraid she’d have to go now but hoped they could get together later because she’d “love” to talk to him. And as Michael watched her move gracefully away into a cluster of other actors, he knew he couldn’t have found a better reason for coming all the way up here.
Then he and Tom Nelson were seated in a glass booth high in the back of the studio, near the sound engineer, watching the play on a “monitor” screen that hung at the level of their eyes. Except for repeated nudges and frowns there was no way for Michael to explain to Nelson that this wasn’t his own play at all, but after a while he decided it didn’t matter. A girl would be waiting when the messy thing was over – a girl whose every turn and move were nice to watch in the medium shots, and whose face, in the close-ups, was very pretty indeed.
/> The ending was almost as much of a sellout as he’d feared, but as soon as the studio lights came up he found his way down to the set and made straight for Susan Compton and told her she’d been wonderful; then he asked if he could buy her a drink.
“Well, I’d love to,” she said, “but the thing is we’re all going out together. It’s sort of a cast party, you see, though of course you and your friend must come along with us.”
Soon they were in some big, bright Montreal restaurant where the waiters had neatly shoved a number of tables together for the party. Susan Compton sat at one end, in the place of honor, with the director on one side of her and the leading man on the other; then came the other actors and a few technicians, two by two, with Tom Nelson and Michael hunched at the far end as unexpected guests.
For a while Michael considered saying, Look, Tom: I think I might get somewhere with this Compton girl, so maybe you’d better take a hotel room and go on home alone tomorrow, okay? But the longer he watched her up there, talking and laughing and making little gestures in the air with her brandy snifter as if it were the very symbol of her triumph tonight, the longer he hesitated. When the party was over she might easily give him a quick, brandy-scented kiss, out on the sidewalk, and disappear into Montreal with some actor’s arm around her waist, while Tom Nelson stood watching – and if that happened, Nelson’s teasing would be merciless all the way back to New York.
No, getting rid of Nelson could wait: the first thing to do was get the girl. As soon as he had the chance he would go up and ask if he could take her home. If she said yes, the problem of Nelson would resolve itself: a few quick, amiable words would take care of it – or maybe only a significant wink, if Nelson was ready to be agreeable. Then the author of the original play would be free to find a taxicab for the girl and himself, and the rest of the night would be rich with promise.
And his plan almost worked: he had to shoulder his way through any number of smiling television people as they rose and turned away from the table at last, but he got the girl – or at least he got within speaking distance.