Thirty

  (I smoked in college. Didn’t everybody? Didn’t we all of us smoke a couple of sticks of pot in college? And now we all pretend it never happened, each of us shielding ourselves from each other and I don’t care about the grammar in that sentence, I couldn’t care less about it if you want to know the truth. I smoked one time, a boy named Eddie turned me on. It was no sex thing, my roommate and I turned on with him. It was supposed to be this great experience. It was nice. Maybe we didn’t have enough of it. I remember being involved in words, caught up in what people said, finding new levels of meaning in everything.)

  Nowadays I guess all the kids smoke. They all do everything these days. We were all born too soon. Five or ten years too soon. Everything is changing, completely turning inside out. Kids do all the things we sort of reached out for, and they do them easily and beautifully and without any guilt. And we live in Eastchester and drink too much and play with ourselves.

  I just went to the bathroom. I thought I was going to throw up but it seems not to have been in the cards. I think it’s probably better to throw up than to want to throw up and not be able to. I think I shouldn’t have brought the liquor here with me. I think I shouldn’t drink at all.

  I drank too much at the party.

  I necked with Edgar Hillman.

  The thing is that I had never thought of Edgar as attractive. He must be almost forty, and he’s lost about as much hair as he’s kept. The one attractive thing about him is that he has gone bald in front, his hairline receding more and more, and this doesn’t look so bad. It’s when a man has a bald spot in the middle of his head, an island of skin in a sea of hair, that I find it slightly ridiculous. But Edgar also has a spreading waist, and little eyes which are closer together than they might ideally be, and a nose with big pores in it. They told me that if I squeezed my pimples I would get enlarged pores. I squeezed any number of them and never got one.

  What must have rendered Edgar attractive, I guess, is that Marcie had already told me that Edgar fluttered like a bee from flower to flower. (More precisely, she said that he would screw a snake if someone would hold its head.) The knowledge that he’s out there screwing all those snakes evidently got to me. Perhaps it’s a case of being unable to trust my own taste. If all those other women find Edgar attractive enough to have affairs with, they must be right, and he must be attractive, and thus I must be attracted to him.

  There’s also the fact that I drank too much at the party.

  The drinking helped cast a fine haze over everything, both at the time and in memory. I don’t know how we got into the room where they kept the coats. The bedroom, that is to say. The coals were piled on the bed. But somehow it’s a good deal less compromising lo think of oneself being in the coatroom with one’s best friend’s husband than in the bedroom.

  “Jan, Jan, Jan,” he said. When people have nothing to say they repeat one’s name pointlessly. “Having a wonderful time, you wonderful girl?”

  “Well, it’s a party.”

  “It is indeed.”

  “And people always have wonderful times at parties.”

  “They do if they know what’s good for them.” He grinned owlishly, except that owls have their eyes spaced much farther apart. “You know,” he said, “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time now.”

  “Which one?”

  “Eh?”

  “Which eye have you had on me?”

  “Clever,” he said, moving toward me, eyes atwinkle. Both eyes atwinkle. Both beady eyes atwinkle. “I like women with something in their heads, you know. I like clever women.”

  “Do you really?”

  “I’ve always admired you, Jan.”

  Then he kissed me. I didn’t discourage this. Quite the reverse, I guess. I opened my mouth and wrapped my arms around him, and he, the cute little rascal, stuck his tongue in my mouth.

  We clung like that for what I think was a rather long time, neither separating nor quite managing to spill ourselves onto the bed, where we could have had a choice of fucking on Marcie’s silver-blue mink or Lenore’s beaver. Instead we just clung, and he groped me a little, and then we broke apart, both of us a trifle breathless.

  “Jan,” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Edgar. Maybe we ought to go join the party.”

  “We’re the party, doll.”

  “I just don’t know about all this, Edgar.”

  “I’m crazy about you, Jan.”

  “Oh, and Marcie’s my friend and all—”

  “Marcie doesn’t understand me. I’m really crazy about you, Jan.”

  It was the talk that decided it. I just wasn’t stoned enough to handle that dialogue. He was crazy about me and his wife didn’t understand him. Bullshit, she explained. No, at that very moment Edgar made my decision for me. We were not going to have an affair.

  But we did have a little genteel struggle. We did roll around on top of Marcie’s mink, and he did sort of lie on top of me and agitate his hips in a not unfamiliar motion, and I could feel his penis rubbing against me through his pants, and did, if the truth be known, handle it a little. It was large enough to impress me favorably, but not so monstrous as to be desirable in and of itself, separate and distinct from its owner.

  And he did put a hand under my dress and a finger where one puts fingers, and we did rock and roll a bit in harmony, and ultimately he quivered and stiffened and said something actionable about loving me, and then relaxed, which I took to mean that he had come in his pants. So I guess we had what we in my lamented youth used to call a dry fuck. It wasn’t much fun now, but then it hadn’t been much fun then, either.

  Edgar rolled off me, found his breath again, and put his hand back under my skirt and said something gallant about making me come. I said something about letting me go instead, which I guess was fine with him. I went to the bathroom and washed up, feeling a little like Lady Macbeth. All the perfumes of Arabia—

  There were no kicks with Edgar. The kicks came back with the others, feeling a little soberer now but remedying that with a fresh drink, and fitting myself back again into the inane conversation, and looking around the room and thinking to myself that I had a secret from all these wonderful people. I know something you don’t know—do kids still chant that? Their parents do.

  It felt good, having the secret. For about the same reasons it does when you’re a kid.

  But then a thought came to me and almost knocked me over. Because, just as a little earlier I had wondered how many of my good friends and true had smoked pot at one time or another and now pretended it had never happened, well, I found myself wondering how many of the women had necked with Edgar. Or with Howard. And just who had slept with whom, and if anyone was currently sleeping with whom, and—

  See? No major revelation. Just a new way of looking at things.

  It seems as though I keep coming up with new ways of looking at things and I still have only the same old things to look at.

  I don’t particularly remember the last half hour or so of the party. Neither did Howie. One of us drove us both home—probably him, because I think I was higher than he was for a change. And we went to sleep. The next day was Sunday, and instead of a football game there was a basketball game, and I called out for a pizza for dinner, and we watched some shows on television and went to sleep early.

  Monday was today. Today, that is, is Monday. And it started with yet another snowstorm, which piled new snow on the old snow and new snow on the few places Howie had shoveled. We made the trip to the train station before too much of the white garbage came down but by late morning the driveway was socked in fairly solid again. Not that I had anyplace to go.

  Quit stalling. Get to the point.

  But this is the point, or part of it. I was sitting around thinking that I couldn’t go anywhere, and thinking that I had no place to go, and thinking, finally, that this was what it all added up to, that I was free and white, and twenty-nine and had no place to go. And that it was going to go on like this forever. r />
  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  I mean, I hadn’t originally planned a life of nothingness. It was never my idea. I don’t suppose it ever is, is it? Life has a strange way of happening to people. I don’t know many people who, at about this time of life, thirty or so, are doing what they originally set out to be doing. Doctors and lawyers, yes—but people who had vague ideas and who went to college and drifted through it and then got a job and quit it and got another. Or girls, in particular. We wanted so much not to be mere housewives that even now we join discussion groups and take evening courses and do all sorts of things to convince ourselves we are not mere housewives, and when all is said and done that’s precisely what we are, and the dumb little games we play only prove it.

  I just went down the hall for some coffee. They have a row of machines, coffee and cigarettes and candy and soft drinks and ice. A person could stay here forever if she didn’t run out of quarters. I think I need the coffee.

  He came to the door at a quarter after one. When I opened the door I looked at him and thought it was the bag-carrier from the Pathmark. Looked nothing like him on second glance, but even I can see the implications. You don’t need a psych degree. He was tall and rangy with a shock of once-combed black hair and the healthily stupid (or stupidly healthy) face that athletes have at Midwestern colleges. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. He was holding an aluminum snow shovel over his shoulder, so I should have been able to figure it out, but the old mind wasn’t working all that well.

  He said, “Shovel your walk, ma’am?”

  I absolutely hate being called ma’am. As must everyone.

  “Oh,” I said, cleverly. “Oh, yes, that would be good.”

  “Walk and driveway?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I guess the path to the front door?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Right,” he said. He was wearing a sheepskin jacket with the hood thrown back. No gloves. His hands were quite large. Designed for gripping a football or basketball. Or a breast.

  “Well,” I said, and he turned to begin the job, and I started to close the door. Then something occurred to me. I had forgotten to settle a price.

  “It’s ten dollars,” he said.

  “It’s that much?”

  “That’s the going rate, ma’am.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess that’s all right, then.” It seemed exorbitant, and none the less so because it was the going rate, but one learns to rely on order in an ever-changing world. I seemed to remember boys shoveling paths and walks and much longer driveways than ours for just a dollar. But everything else had gone up, and my memories were of longer ago than I cared to realize. I wonder, now that I think about it, how much he could have demanded without my objecting? Twenty dollars? A hundred? The keys to the car? What?

  I went inside, I closed the door. And, between cups of instant coffee and half-smoked cigarettes, I kept finding myself sneaking to the window to watch him. At first I honestly didn’t realize what I was doing. Then I did, but that didn’t make it easier to stop it. Au contraire, mon cher.

  I spilled a cup of coffee on the table. I mopped it up with a dish towel, which was slightly brainless. I stopped myself on the way to the window.

  I felt—I don’t know how to describe it. Drunk? Maybe. It was a little like being drunk, like occasional states of drunkenness in which you can almost feel another mind taking control of your head. I was still me, but somehow it was a different kind of me, and the everyday me was still in there, watching, taking it all in, but not able to do much about anything.

  Is that schizophrenic? I don’t know, I’ve never been out with one.

  (This coffee is terrible.)

  I went to the bathroom and stood under the shower for a while, letting the hot spray hit me on the back of the neck. This is usually better than a tranquilizer, and it sort of worked; I could feel the tension literally draining from my flesh. I got out, I dried off. I shaved my legs and armpits (I love that word, it’s so wonderfully crude), and fantasied shaving my pubic area. I have never done this but have often wanted to. To recapture youth? I don’t think so. I think it conjures up visions of Oriental cathouses or something. If I did it, I wonder how long it would be before Howie noticed.

  I didn’t shave it. But I did put a little cologne on it, and some more between the breasts and under the arms and behind the ears. And did all this still thinking in at least one part of my mind that I wasn’t actually going to do anything, that this was just playacting, a costume for a role I would not perform.

  I put on a terrycloth robe. Nothing under it. Except, she said vampishly, me. Then I went to the bedroom and put on my diaphragm. I had stopped taking the pill when Howie and I decided that we had to have children to go with the house and the station wagon. I didn’t want to have children, but if I was going to have them it seemed only fair to let Howie father them.

  I watched him finish shoveling the path. The walk and driveway were already done. I checked myself in the mirror, looking to see if there was a gleam in my eye, a telltale gleam in my eye. I checked both eyes and saw no gleam, but I did seem to look younger and fresher than I had lately. Imagination? Wish father to the thought?

  He came to the door. So did I, from its other side, and opened it. If he noticed that I had changed from sweater and slacks to bathrobe he chose to ignore it.

  “All done,” he said.

  “You did a good job.”

  “Be no trouble getting the car out now.”

  “You must be tired.”

  “Well, it’s pretty hard work, but I don’t mind.”

  “Why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee?”

  “Well, uh, thanks, but I don’t really care for coffee.”

  I think groaned inwardly is what I did then. It seemed vital to get him inside. What could I offer him? Milk and cookies? Did we even have any in the house?

  “How about a beer?”

  “Well—” A tough decision for him. He didn’t want to come in but he really wanted the beer. The beer won.

  We sat at the kitchen table. There was just one goddamned bottle of beer left in the refrigerator. Howie drinks it when he watches ball games, never otherwise. I guess it fits his self-image then. He also is apt to take his shoes off and pick his feet. One trouble with marriage is that when people are truly relaxed in one another’s company they let down their defenses and become genuinely disgusting.

  I gave him the beer and made another cup of coffee for myself. We talked. The conversation went something like this:

  ME: Do you go to school?

  HIM: Over at East Central.

  ME: I suppose they closed the schools today.

  HIM: No, I cut when there’s a lot of snow. See, I can make thirty or forty bucks in a day. My old man gives me a note that I was sick.

  ME: And you just go door to door looking for work?

  HIM: That’s right.

  ME: You must meet a lot of interesting people that way.

  HIM: Well, just people, you know.

  ME: A lot of lonely women.

  HIM: Well, see, all I do is I shovel their snow, see, so I don’t really get to know too much about them.

  ME: Oh, I’m sure a lot of them make a play for you.

  HIM: I wouldn’t say that. And you know, most of them are pretty old, see, and there’s usually kids around the house or something.

  ME: As old as me, for instance?

  HIM: You’re not old.

  ME: How old do you think I am?

  HIM: Oh, I don’t know. I’m terrible at guessing ages. But to me a person is old or they’re not, see, and I would say that you’re not.

  ME: Do you think I’m attractive?

  HIM: You know, I’m getting funny feelings from this conversation. Like a little lost, if you know what I mean.

  ME: Aren’t you going to answer my question?

  HIM: I think you’re very attractive.

  ME: (opening her robe): Do you real
ly think so?

  HIM: Jesus Christ.

  If there seem to be parallels between this and The Graduate rest assured that I was painfully aware of them at the time. But if I was less adept at this than Mrs. Robinson, he was neither as sensitive nor as reluctant as Benjamin, which made things somewhat easier. We went to the bedroom (I almost wrote upstairs) after a couple of urgent kisses in the kitchen and another in the hallway. He was in a fantastic hurry and seemed hard put to decide whether to undress or to have me as soon as possible. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes and socks, then his pants, then his shirt. He had his underpants on still. I got out of the robe and kicked off my slippers. He was staring at my breasts almost as intently as I was staring at the bulge in his underpants.

  I said, “You’re wearing too many clothes.”

  He looked down at his underpants and blushed.

  And took them off.

  His penis was good sized and oddly shaped. At least it looked unusual to me. I haven’t seen that many cocks. Howie’s, three boys in college, and a few pictures and statues, but the pictures and statues were never of erect ones. I suppose they must show erect ones in the little pornography shops around Times Square. I suppose there are some women who are ballsy enough to go into one of those shops and buy a magazine with pictures of men’s cocks. I am not one of those women.

  This particular cock was sort of cone-shaped, much thicker at the base than at the tip, sort of like an inverted ice-cream cone.

  I got on my knees in front of him and kissed the tip of it and then took its head in my mouth.