Marjorie said, “I believe I will have another beer, thank you.” She watched the guests at their gambols while Noel went to the bar. “You know what all this reminds me of?” she said when he handed her the tall foaming glass. “A set of French postcards some idiot once brought out at a fraternity dance. They were colored pictures, you know, and perfectly harmless to look at—even pretty—just people dancing, and walking in the park, and what not. But then he gave you some red glasses to look at them with, and you suddenly saw the most disgusting obscenities. That’s what I’ve been feeling like, here at South Wind, this last week or two. I feel as though I’d put on the red glasses.”
Noel said with a grin, as she drank deeply of the frosty beer, “The red glasses are your Mosaic morality. What you’re looking at is everyday life.”
Marjorie said, brushing foam from her lips, “You know what? I think everything you say about sex is a lot of glib lies. You say it because you enjoy amazing me, and because it’s a game for you to turn my ideas inside out.”
Noel’s expression was frankly mocking. “Of course that is what you’d prefer to believe.”
“Otherwise you’re trying to seduce me, after all.”
He puffed his cigarette, narrowing his eyes at her through the smoke. “Well, you keep growing up right under my eyes. I’m beginning to think it might be very good for you.”
“I hope you’ll let me decide that.”
“By all means.”
She shook her head, looking at him with wonder. “Your conceit—or your frankness, I’m not sure which—passes all bounds. I don’t know how to talk to you.”
“You’re not doing badly.”
“I sometimes think you’re the devil himself.”
“That’s your red glasses again. I’m just a fellow you happen to find attractive. You’re supplying the horns and the tail.”
“I wonder,” she said softly. After a pause she said, “Noel, what’s going to become of us?”
“Who knows? Who cares? Summer romances are queer things. Like shipboard romances. Just enjoy it while it lasts. Have fun, and don’t get yourself into knots of Jewish conscience. Either of us may fall for someone else next Tuesday, and that’ll be that.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. They looked into each other’s eyes, both smiling, yet with expressions half-hostile.
She did not know how long Wally Wronken had been watching them when she finally became aware of his gaze. He was perched on the rustic rail of the porch, his big head slumped below his narrow, wanly tanned shoulders, smoking and staring at them. His expression was masked by the glitter of his glasses in the sunlight. She waved, miserably embarrassed, feeling that she and Noel had been gawking at each other with silly lovesick grins. “Hi, Wally. Got a cigarette?”
He came off the rail. “Just a Kool.”
“Thanks.” He held a match for her. The cold roll of menthol across her tongue brought back the day at the Cloisters, the lilacs in the rain. “Long time since I’ve had one of these, Wally. They’re nice for a change.”
“Any time you want a change, just ask me.”
Noel said, “How’d the sketch go?”
“Pretty good. I’m going to run them through it again a few times.”
Marjorie said, “Do you enjoy directing, Wally?”
“Well, I think it’s worth learning, like most everything else. I’m learning and learning.” He flipped his cigarette over the fence and went into the social hall.
After a pause, the menthol strong in her nostrils, Marjorie said, “What does one do about things like that?”
Noel said, “Nothing. All freshmen must get paddled. That’s the law. Let’s swim.”
Since her fifteenth year Marjorie had believed firmly that sex was the most important and perilous concern of her life; that she would be a damned fool to lose her virginity before her wedding night; and that a serious affair before marriage would be the worst catastrophe that could happen to her. Now, for the first time in her life, her certainty on these points began to break down.
Compared to Noel, both George and Sandy had been mere furtive boys about sex; ready and eager, like all boys, to take any favor she would grant. Noel’s scathing frank humor about sex was something new. He really didn’t want to neck; she precipitated it, like as not, when it happened, and it was he who stopped it with a swift joke and the offer of a cigarette. He seemed to want to protect her from her worse self, from her maddening infatuation with him, instead of taking advantage of it as she imagined any other living man or boy would do. She could not help admiring him for this. Therefore, when he said, in his light way but with apparent sincerity, that it might be a good idea for her to have an affair with him, she was shaken.
She had to press him in several talks to tell her why he thought an affair would be good for her; he kept putting her off with jokes.
At last he said, “Well, all right. It would give you a yardstick, that’s all, an emotional measuring rod that would last you a lifetime. We really love each other. From everything you’ve told me it’s the real thing for the first time, for you. It isn’t for me, darling—and don’t bare your teeth at me, I can’t help being twenty-nine—well, you see, I know what I’m experiencing. But you, you’re as ignorant as a codfish. In your present state of heavy book learning and Mosaic prejudice and emotional illiteracy you’re apt to take off and marry heaven knows what kind of horrible yahoo for all the wrong reasons. Like my sister. Honestly, I sometimes think of you as Monica, given a second chance.”
“Would you rather have seen your sister have an affair with a man who’d leave her flat—as you would me?”
“A thousand times yes, if it would have taught her enough about love to prevent her marrying that lump of pig fat she calls a husband.”
The environment made Noel’s ideas all the more plausible. At South Wind there seemed to be no other sensible way of looking at life. The guests at their everlasting coy game—the flirtatious Shirleys, the eager-eyed bachelors, the pigs hovering on the sidelines for garbage scraps of desire—Noel had made them figures of fun, quaint people with quaint customs, almost like the Japanese. Yet a few months earlier her ways and her values had not much differed from theirs. Now it was the people of the staff who seemed wise and normal, the dancers, singers, musicians, actors, with their free-and-easy morals, their tolerant joking about all the solemn things of life. The married couples among them were no more staid than the rest. There were half a dozen flourishing adulteries Marjorie knew about and several others that were generally suspected. Among the unmarried ones, the drift in and out of random affairs was rapid and apparently almost painless.
Though Marjorie had been accepted among them, traces still remained of reticence and amusement in their attitude toward her. It was a running joke that certain subjects must be avoided so as not to shock poor Marjorie. Playing at anagrams, for instance, the women took delight in forming obscene words and covering them from Marjorie’s sight with winks and giggles. This kind of good-humored teasing was not without its effect. Marjorie was the stodgy one, the outsider, the bumpkin; naturally she wanted to be more acceptable to the inner circle, more like them. In these theatrical folk Marjorie had found for the first time people who really talked and acted somewhat like the characters in lending-library novels. This added to their smartness, glamor, and authority. She submitted to their joking with the best grace she could, and day by day grew more used to the premise on which it rested—that she was warped by a ludicrous out-of-date upbringing.
One of her old ideas was crumbling more swiftly than the rest—the notion that an illicit love affair ruined a girl’s life. She had always pictured the effect as no less damaging, obvious, and permanent than that of being thrown through a windshield. When she had learned last summer of Marsha’s affair with Carlos Ringel, she had seemed to see horrid scars and scabs all over the fat girl. But this was clearly nonsense. There wasn’t a virgin on the staff, to Marjorie’s best knowledge, except herself. Most of the
dancers and actresses talked frankly of past and present affairs. They were normal in appearance, polite in their ways, and not one of them was insane with grief or prostrate with shame. On the whole they didn’t differ much from the virgins of Hunter and the West Side, except in being more shopworn. They had all stooped to folly and found too late that men betray, but they hadn’t died; here they were, alive, tanned, laughing, and like as not in some new intrigue with a waiter or a musician. If they were coarsened and tough, if their new affairs seemed to be a grasping for cheap pleasures, if their lives were on the whole quite unenviable, it still remained a fact that they weren’t fallen women—not if the phrase retained any meaning. Either women didn’t fall any more nowadays, or it took a lot more than an illicit love affair or two to constitute a fall.
But the strongest assault on her old convictions came from a most unexpected quarter: her own body. It was becoming impossible to allow herself to be alone with Noel. More than once he had had to shake her roughly by the shoulders and put a cigarette between her lips; she would wake as though out of hypnosis with her hair in wild disorder and her face hot and sweating, with almost no memory of what had been happening, but with a sense of shame and a black terror at this utter loss of self that could come over her. It was like insanity.
And it was a wholly new kind of conduct for Marjorie. It had nothing to do with her personal preferences, her tastes, her ideas, her inclinations. It was like another identity, a strange will that proceeded outward from the fleshly recesses of her body. It was a more insidious arguer than Noel. It was taking on more and more the sound of her normal inner voice, the familiar vigilant friend of a lifetime whose job it was to suggest that it was time to eat, or that the yellow dress would be more becoming than the green, or that she had better freshen her lipstick. In the same comradely tones this new voice kept suggesting ways and means of being alone with Noel. At eleven o’clock at night, when she was undressing for bed, she would suddenly think that she would love to read a new novel. It would then occur to her that she had seen the latest best seller in Noel’s room. She would have to fight with herself, exactly as with another person, to keep herself from going to visit him.
She was getting used to the thought of having an affair. It no longer was something that couldn’t possibly happen to Marjorie Morgenstern, like becoming a drug fiend, or killing herself. She pictured what it would be like. She imagined her frame of mind afterward.
She was in a distracted and highly nervous state. Twice she packed her bags late at night, only to unpack them sheepishly in the morning. She sought out Samson-Aaron and spent long evenings with him reminiscing about her childhood, trying to make her slipping anchor catch and hold in the old realities. Marjorie had long ago told everybody that Sam the dishwasher was her uncle, having become thoroughly ashamed of her first hostile reaction to finding him at South Wind. Nobody thought the less of her for it. The Uncle was, in fact, rather popular as a “character,” a legendary eater and spicy Yiddish philosopher. Often she thought she would confess her heart to Samson-Aaron. But the gulf of years and language and background was too wide; he was only the Uncle, after all, coarse and comical, fat and old. There was something too humiliating in appealing to the dishwasher for help in her love affair. She couldn’t do it.
Samson-Aaron seemed to sense trouble. He was very patient and tactful with her. Only once did he try in a clumsy way to open the subject. “So, vot is vit Mr. Airman? Maybe ve have a vedding yet? All the time you are together, no?” Marjorie laughed and said she was just having fun with Noel; he wasn’t the marrying kind. “Dot’s vot I think, Marjorie. A gentleman, I think he is. A serious fella, I don’t think he is. You’re a good girl, you know vot you’re doing, so vot’s the difference? So long you know vot’s vot, so have fun. Listen to me, giving advice to a college girl.”
“There are some things they don’t teach us at college, Uncle.”
“Your mama writes is Modgerie got a steady fella? I answer nothing. I say is good veather in South Vind. I say I catch plenty fish on my day off.”
“You’re a sweetheart.”
“Vot do I know? I’m in the kitchen vashing dishes.—So, but next veek Mama and Papa come here, no? Then vot?”
“Well, let them come.”
Marjorie had been thrusting the impending visit of her parents out of her mind. They were going to arrive Saturday evening and leave Sunday afternoon to drive on to Seth’s camp, a hundred miles farther north in the Adirondacks. Somehow, she thought, she would slide and stumble and dodge through those twenty-odd hours, and hide from her parents what was happening.
Chapter 17. THE ROWBOAT
The night her parents were watching the show Marjorie stumbled and fell, dancing out on the stage with the chorus. It was the first time it had ever happened to her. Before the laughter in the audience could spread she was on her feet again, kicking nimbly and smiling. When she came prancing off into the wing Noel was there, lounging with a hand on the curtain rope. “Are you all right? You must have scared your folks.”
“Oh, I’m fine. My big feet suddenly got all tangled up, that’s all.”
He smiled. “Not according to Papa Freud. That fall was heavy with meaning.”
“No doubt. Why don’t you write a book about it? Excuse me, I’ve got to change.”
As the show went along she was embarrassed at the spate of sex and bathroom jokes. It had not seemed to her at rehearsals that the show was particularly coarse. But tonight Puddles Podell’s skits made her blush, and it struck her that Wally’s lyrics and sketches were especially vulgar. The hit of the evening was Wally’s number in which three actors representing Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, wearing nurses’ uniforms and carrying prop babies, sang of the methods they were using to increase the birth rate. She had laughed till the tears came the first time she heard it at rehearsal; but now she realized how dirty the jokes were.
She removed her makeup and dressed in great haste after the show, oddly eager to talk to her parents. She found them sitting on the sideline of the dance floor on folding chairs, watching the couples. They looked old, after a month of not seeing them. The father was almost all gray, and Mrs. Morgenstern had deep wrinkles that her daughter had never before been aware of, her neck in particular showing the corded look of age. Of course, they were both past fifty, Marjorie reflected. She couldn’t expect them to go on looking forever as they had in her childhood.
The father said, “I never knew till now what a beautiful daughter I had. You looked better on that stage than any movie star I ever saw. All the fellows here must be in love with you.”
Marjorie laughed. “They’re committing suicide right and left, Papa.”
“Did you hurt yourself when you fell?” said Mrs. Morgenstern.
“No. That stage is hollow, makes a big boom. It was nothing. Hot night, isn’t it? How about something to drink?”
They settled in a small booth of the bar. She saw her parents exchange a look when she ordered ale. Her father asked for the same. Mrs. Morgenstern hemmed and hesitated and at last ordered lemonade. They exchanged another look when she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. “Ale, cigarettes,” said the mother. “All grown up, aren’t you?”
“We may as well face it, Mom, I’ve gone to the dogs, just as you predicted.” Marjorie blew a smoke ring, and was annoyed that it came out ragged. She blew another one, a smooth one.
“That’s not what the Uncle tells us,” Mrs. Morgenstern said. “He says everyone thinks you’re the only good girl on the social staff.”
“Oh well, Mom, I put up a good front. I’m an actress, you know.”
“You’re our daughter, so you’re good, that’s all,” said the father. “It doesn’t surprise me, and don’t be ashamed of it. People may make fun of you, but they’ll respect you.”
The drinks came, and Marjorie drank off half her ale at once, glad to observe that this startled her mother. “Ah! Could anything be better on a hot night?” She dragged at her cig
arette, squinting like a man.
The father said, “Tell me, Margie, don’t you feel a little—I don’t know, a little funny—acting in such a show? I mean, I’m not so fussy, I’ve heard a lot of dirty jokes in my time, but—”
“What do you expect in Sodom?” the mother said. “Hamlet? That’s what the crowd wants, so they give it to them.”
“Mom’s right, Dad. I think tonight it was a little worse than usual, but after all, with this crowd—Hello, Noel, come over and meet my folks.” He was walking past with a highball, wearing a rust-colored corduroy jacket over the black turtle-neck sweater, and she was glad to see that he was freshly shaved and his hair well groomed. On Saturday night he often looked like a skinny tired tramp. Noel said, with a faint lift of the eyebrows, “Hi! Sure, Margie, love to.”
“Mother—Dad—this is the social director—you know, he writes the shows and puts them on—Noel Airman.”
Noel was gracious and easy in the exchange of greetings. “I hope you weren’t scared when Marjorie fell. That wasn’t part of the dance, she thought of it herself.”
“We enjoyed your show,” said the father. “A little bit on the rough side, but naturally you expect that here.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Do you think our daughter has any talent, Mr. Airman?” said the father.
Noel looked down at her and smiled. “That’s hard to say, Mr. Morgenstern. Frankly, when an actress is as attractive as Marjorie, the question of talent isn’t easy to decide. Good looks are a camouflage. But I think she has talent.”
“Why, thank you, dear.” Marjorie patted his arm and smiled at her parents. “Well, I’m glad you came. That’s the first time he’s been forced out into the open on the subject. Ordinarily he won’t pay me a compliment to save his soul.”
“It’s a compliment to say you’re attractive,” said Mrs. Morgenstern, sipping her lemonade and regarding Noel over the rim of the glass.
“Not when I’m trying to find out if I can act, Mom. It’s like saying a doctor is attractive when you want to know if he can take out an appendix.”