Oliver's Story

  “Where we going?” I inquired. “Pennsylvania?”

  “Somewhere cozier,” she said. And squeezed my arm.

  Some moments later we were in the library. A fireplace was glowing. And our drinks were waiting.

  “A toast?” she asked.

  “To Marcie’s ass,” I said, my goblet in the air.

  “No,” Marcie disapproved.

  I then proposed, “To Marcie’s tits.”

  “Come on,” she vetoed.

  “All right, to Marcie’s mind—”

  “That’s better.”

  “—as full of loveliness as Marcie’s tits and ass.”

  “You’re crude,” she said.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” I apologized profoundly. “I will henceforth totally desist.”

  “Please, Oliver,” she said, “do not. I love it.”

  And so we drank to that.

  Several glasses later, I was loose enough to comment on the nature of her homestead.

  “Hey, Marcie, how can someone who’s as alive as you stand living in a mausoleum? I mean my family house was big, but I had lawns to play on. All you have is rooms. Ancient musty rooms.”

  She shrugged.

  “Where did you and Michael live?” I asked.

  “A duplex on Park Avenue.”

  “Which he now owns?”

  She nodded yes, then added, “Though I got my track shoes back.”

  “Very generous,” I said, “but then you moved back in with Daddy?”

  “Sorry, Doctor, I am not that freaky. After the divorce, my father wisely sent me on a tour of duty to the distant branches. And I worked like hell. It was a kind of therapy-apprenticeship. He died suddenly. I came back for the funeral and stayed here. Temporarily, I told myself. I knew I should’ve closed the house. But since each morning I was sitting at what used to be my father’s desk, some atavistic reflex made me feel I had to come . . . back home.”

  “Be it ever so unhumble,” I appended. Then I rose, went over to her chair and placed my hand upon a lovely part of her anatomy.

  No sooner had I touched her than a ghost appeared!

  At least an ancient crone dressed all in black, except for a white lace collar and an apron.

  It spoke.

  “I knocked,” it said.

  “Yes, Mildred?” Marcie answered casually, as I attempted to retract my fingers up my sleeve.

  “Dinner’s ready,” said the beldam, and evaporated. Marcie smiled at me.

  And I smiled back.

  For despite the odd surroundings, I was strangely happy. If for no other reason than the nearness of . . . another individual. I’d forgotten what the mere proximity to someone else’s heartbeat could evoke.

  “Are you hungry, Oliver?”

  “I’m sure I will be by the time we reach the cafeteria.” And so we went. Down yet another gallery, across the soon-to-be-constructed tennis court, to the mahogany-and-crystal dining room.

  “Lest you be misled,” said Marcie as we sat at the enormous table, “dinner was designed by me, but executed by a surrogate.”

  “You mean a cook.”

  “I do. I’m not domestic, Oliver.”

  “Marcie, have no fear. My recent diet has been more or less like Alpo dog food.”

  Dinner was unlike the night before in every way.

  The food, of course, was better, but the conversation infinitely worse.

  “Gee, delicious vichyssoise . . . beef Wellington . . . ah, Château Margaux fifty-nine . . . this soufflé is fantastic.”

  So much for my effusions. Otherwise I simply ate.

  “Oliver, you seem a little quiet.”

  “I’m just speechless at these gastronomic wonders,” I replied.

  She sensed my irony.

  “I overdid it, huh?” she said.

  “Marce, you didn’t have to make a fuss. I don’t care what we eat. It only matters that we’re eating with each other.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  But I could see she thought that I was criticizing her. I guess I was. But not intending to cause any grief. I hoped I hadn’t made her feel upset.

  Anyway, I tried to reassure her.

  “Hey—it doesn’t mean that I don’t like this, Marcie. Really. It reminds me of my home.”

  “Which you despised.”

  “Who said so?”

  “You did. Yesterday.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  I guess I’d let it all hang out at HoJo’s. (Was it only one short day ago?)

  “Hey, look,” I said. “I’m sorry if you were offended. Somehow when my parents eat like this, it seems arthritic. On the other hand, with you it’s . . . elegant.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  This one called for some diplomacy.

  “No,” I said, sincerely.

  “My feelings aren’t hurt,” she said, her feelings obviously hurt. “I wanted to impress you. I don’t eat this way too often.”

  That was a relief to learn.

  “Well, how often?”

  “Twice,” she said.

  “A week?”

  “Twice since Father died.” (Which was six years ago.)

  I felt bastardly for asking.

  “Shall we have coffee elsewhere?” asked the hostess.

  “Can I pick the room?” I asked, abrim with innuendo.

  “No,” said Marcie. “In my bailiwick you follow me.”

  I did. Back to the library. Where coffee waited and some hidden speakers wafted Mozart.

  “Have you really only entertained here twice?” I asked.

  She nodded yes. “Both times for business.”

  “How about your social life?” I asked, attempting to be delicate.

  “It’s gotten better lately,” she replied.

  “No, seriously, Marce, what would you normally do upon a New York evening?”

  “Well,” she said, “it’s truly fascinating. I come home and jog if it’s still light outside. Then back to work. My office here has got extensions from the switchboard, so I take the California calls. . . .”

  “Till after twelve, I’ll bet.”

  “Not always.”

  “Then what happens afterward?”

  “I stop and socialize.”

  “Aha. Which means . . . ?”

  “Oh, ginger ale and sandwiches with Johnny.”

  “Johnny?” (I’m incapable of masking jealousy.)

  “Carson. He makes witty dinner conversation.”

  “Oh,” I said. Relieved, I shifted back to offense.

  “Don’t you do anything but work?”

  “Marshall McLuhan says, ‘Where the whole man is involved there is no work.’ ”

  “He’s full of shit and so are you. No, Marce. You tell yourself you’re so involved, but actually you’re just attempting to make ‘work’ anesthetize your loneliness.”

  “Jesus, Oliver,” she said, somewhat surprised. “How can you know so much about a person that you’ve barely met?”

  “I can’t,” I answered. “I was talking of myself.”

  Curious. We both knew what we wanted next, yet neither dared disrupt the conversation. Finally, I had to broach some trivial realities.

  “Hey, Marcie, it’s eleven-thirty.”

  “Do you have a curfew, Oliver?”

  “Oh, no. I also don’t have other things. Like clothes, for instance.”

  “Was I coy or vague?” she asked.

  “Let’s say you weren’t crystal clear,” I said, “and I was not about to show up with my little canvas overnight bag.”

  Marcie smiled.

  “That was deliberate,” she confessed.

  “Why?”

  She stood and offered me her hand.

  Across the bed were strewn no fewer than a dozen shirts of silk. My size.

  “Suppose I want to stay a year?” I asked.

  “This may sound somewhat odd, my friend, but if you’ve got the inclination, I’ve got all the shirts.”

>   “Marcie?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve got a lot of . . . inclination.”

  Then we made love as if the night before had only been the dress rehearsal.

  Morning came too soon. It seemed like only 5 A.M. and yet the buzzer from the clock on Marcie’s side was sounding reveille.

  “What time is it?” I snorted.

  “Five A.M.,” said Marcie. “Rise and shine.” She kissed my forehead.

  “Are you berserk?”

  “You know the court’s reserved for six.”

  “Come on, no court’s in session—” Then I wakened to her meaning. “You have tennis planned?”

  “It’s booked from six to eight. Seems a shame to waste it. . . .”

  “Hey, I’ve got a better notion of what we could do.”

  “What?” Marcie ingénued, though I had started touching her already. “Volleyball?”

  “Yes, if that’s what you would like to call it.”

  Anyway, whatever it was called, she was amenable to playing.

  The difference was the bathroom.

  As I showered, I was meditating on what elements distinguished Walter Binnendale’s abode from Dover House, my parents’ joint in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

  Not the art. For we had masterpieces too. Although, befitting our more ancient fortune, of a prior century. The furnishings were vaguely similar. To me antique means old; I don’t appreciate the vintages of bric-a-brac.

  But the bathrooms! Here the Barretts proved themselves inextricably bound to Puritan tradition: rooms functional and basic. White-tile, simple—Spartan, one might even say. Surely nothing one might linger in. But not the Binnendales. Their baths were worthy of a Roman emperor. Or more precisely of the modern Roman principe who had created them. The mere notion of “designing” such a room would have outraged the liberalest of Barretts.

  In the mirror through the slightly opened portal I could see the bedroom.

  Where a wagon entered.

  Pushed by Mildred.

  Cargo: breakfast.

  By the time I’d wiped my face off, Marcie was at table—in a garment she did not intend to wear to work (I hope). I sat down clad in merely towel.

  “Coffee, bacon, eggs?”

  “Jesus, it’s a damn hotel!”

  “Are you still complaining, Mr. Barrett?”

  “No, it was fun,” I answered, buttering a muffin, “and I’d like to come again ’cause it was silly.” Then I paused. And told her, “In, like, thirty years.”

  She looked perplexed.

  “Marce,” I said, “this place is strictly for the paleologists. It’s full of sleeping dinosaurs.”

  She looked at me.

  “This isn’t what you really want,” I said.

  Her face seemed sort of moved.

  “I want to be with you,” she answered.

  She wasn’t coy. Or full of metaphor, as I had been.

  “Okay,” I said. To give me time to think of what to say.

  “When would you like to go?” she asked.

  “Today,” I answered.

  Marcie wasn’t fazed.

  “Just tell me when and where.”

  “Let’s meet at five o’clock in Central Park. The East Side entrance to the reservoir.”

  “What should I bring?” she asked.

  “Your track shoes,” I replied.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I fell thirty thousand feet and hit the ground. I was incredibly depressed.

  “It’s unbearable,” I told the doctor. “Couldn’t you have warned me?”

  Earlier that afternoon, my wild euphoria had started to dissolve into a sadness beyond words.

  “But nothing’s wrong—” I started. Then I realized how ridiculous it sounded. “I mean things are going well with Marcie. It’s just me. I’ve clutched. I can’t go through with it.”

  There was a pause. I hadn’t specified what I could not go through with.

  I knew. But it was difficult to say:

  “Taking her to my place. Do you understand?”

  Once again I’d acted rashly. Why the haste in making Marcie leave her house? Why do I precipitate these gestures of . . . commitment?

  “Maybe I’m just using Marcie selfishly . . . to fill the void.” I thought about my own hypothesis.

  “Or maybe it’s still Jenny. I mean almost two years later I could maybe have a fling and justify it. But my house! To have somebody in my house and in my bed. Sure, realistically the house is different and the bed is different. Logic says it shouldn’t bother me. But damn, it does.”

  “Home,” you see, is still a place I live with Jenny.

  Paradox: They say that husbands all have fantasies of being single. I’m a weirdo. I lapse into daydreams that I’m married.

  And it helps to have a place that is inviolate. A pad that no one comes to. I mean nothing breaks the comforting illusion that I’m sharing all I have with someone.

  Now and then a piece of mail is forwarded, addressed to both of us. And Radcliffe regularly sends her letters coaxing contributions. This is my dividend for not announcing Jenny’s death except to friends.

  The only other toothbrush in the bathroom has belonged to Philip Cavilleri.

  So you see, it’s either a dishonest act to one girl . . .

  Or betrayal of another.

  Dr. London spoke.

  “In either case, that puts you in the wrong.”

  He understood. But unexpectedly his understanding made it even worse.

  “Must it be only either/or?” he queried with a Kierkegaardian allusion. “Could there be no other explanation for your conflict?”

  “What?” I really didn’t know.

  A pause.

  “You like her,” Dr. London quietly suggested.

  I considered it.

  “Which one?” I asked. “You didn’t say a name.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Marcie had to be postponed.

  By a strange coincidence I’d set our rendezvous for 5 P.M. Which happened, as I realized in the office, to conflict directly with my psychiatric session. So I called to make adjustments.

  “What’s the matter—chickening, my friend?” This time there was no meeting in her office. She could tease me.

  “I’ll only be an hour late. Sixty minutes.”

  “Can I trust you?” Marcie asked.

  “That’s your problem, isn’t it?”

  Anyway, we had to run in semidarkness. Which can be lovely when the reservoir reflects the city lights.

  Seeing her again, I felt some day-long qualms diminish. She was beautiful. I had forgotten quite how much. We kissed and then began to jog.

  “How was your day?” I asked.

  “Oh, the usual catastrophes, the overstock positions, understock positions, minor transportation snags, suicidal panic in the corridors. But mostly thoughts of you.”

  I fabricated things to say a stride ahead of saying them. And yet, incapable of superficial running conversation, I inevitably focused on the point. I had demanded. She had come. We both were here. What was she feeling?

  “Did you wonder where we would be going?”

  “I thought you had the compass, friend.”

  “Bring any clothes?”

  “We can’t eat dinner in our track suits, can we?”

  I was curious to know how much she’d packed.

  “Where’s your stuff?”

  “My car.” She gestured toward Fifth Avenue. “Just an airline bag. The kind you carry on and carry off. It’s very practical.”

  “For quick departures.”

  “Right,” she said, pretending not to know what I was thinking. We ran another lap.

  “I thought we’d go to my place,” I said casually.

  “Okay.”

  “It isn’t very big . . .”

  “That’s fine.”

  “. . . and just make dinner. By ourselves. The staff is you and me. I’ll do the goddamn dishes. . . .” r />
  “Fine,” she answered. When we’d jogged another hundred yards, she interrupted our athletic reverie.

  “But, Oliver,” she said, a trifle plaintively, “who’ll do the goddamn cooking?”

  I looked at her.

  “Something in my stomach says you aren’t being jocular.”

  She wasn’t. On our final lap she told me of her culinary training. It was nil. She once had wanted to enroll in Cordon Bleu, but Mike objected. One can always get the teacher to come cook for one. I was sort of pleased. I had mastered pasta, scrambled eggs and half a dozen other tricky dishes. This made me the expert who could introduce her to the kitchen.

  On the way to my place—which takes longer if you drive than if you jog—we stopped for take-out Chinese food. I had enormous difficulty finalizing my selection.

  “Problems?” Marcie asked, observing my exhaustive study of the menu.

  “Yeah. I can’t make up my mind.”

  “It’s only dinner,” Marcie said. And what she may have meant—or understood—I’ll never know.

  I am sitting in my living room, trying to read last week’s Sunday Times and pretending that a lady in my bathroom showering is nothing extraordinary.

  “Hey,” I heard her call, “the towels here are sort of . . . rancid.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you have clean ones?”

  “No,” I said.

  There was a pause.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said.

  The bathroom was suffused with smells of femininity. I thought my shower would be quick (I only had one lousy nozzle, after all), and yet the perfume made me stay. Or was I afraid to leave the reassuring flow of warmth?

  I was emotional, all right. And hypersensitive. But strange to say, at this point in the evening with a woman out there waiting to play house with me according to my oddball rules, I couldn’t tell if I was happy or if I was sad.

  I only knew that I was feeling.

  Marcie Binnendale was in the kitchenette, pretending she could light a stove.

  “You need matches, Marce,” I coughed, while quickly opening the window. “I’ll show you.”

  “Sorry, friend,” she said, extremely ill at ease. “I’m lost in here.”

  I warmed the Chinese food, took out some beer and poured an orange juice. Marcie set the (coffee) table.