“Holy shit,” said Verrie. I pressed a hand over my mouth and kept it there.
Far away Gerard was joking with the bartender about something, putting away his wallet. A tiny waitress, all spritely flirtatiousness, came up and placed a hand on the small of Gerard’s back, up and down the sweater, and asked him something. Gerard smiled and nodded and picked up the four whiskeys and began making his way slowly back to the table.
Maple continued quickly. “He’s all Hobbesian hobbledy-hoy one day and the next it’s something else. Gerard is really one of the most wonderful and one of the most unlucky people I know.”
Gerard arrived and expertly placed four glasses down on the table. We all reached for our wallets. A hundred years had gone by.
“No, this is all on me,” said Gerard. He pulled out the largest glass in the quartet and placed it in front of me. “And this is for you. Old freedom-at-any-price.” It was a double. He slid Maple and Verrie theirs and sat down across from me.
“Thank you,” I murmured. I looked down at the drink.
“You’re welcome,” he murmured back.
Gerard and I never really became lovers, though we almost did. A few weeks after the night at The Smokey Fern we ran into each other at the Fitchville public library, standing in line to have our library cards cybernetically transmutated. The library was switching over to a computer system which involved a final Fitchville disbanding of Dewey Decimals. It made me sad. As a kid I had loved simply the sound of the name: Dewey Decimals. It sounded like cartoons. It wasn’t Library of Congress, slick and federal.
“It’s the end of an era,” I said to Gerard.
“You’ve had an earache?” he asked. “Me, too.”
After we got our new computerized library cards, we walked out the door together, then stood on the granite steps, exchanging perfunctory information about how our lives were going. It was cold and we were shivering.
“Do you have time to have coffee?” he asked.
That was our first coffee together at Hank’s. We exchanged phone numbers, and later in the week he called and asked me out to dinner and I said yes, although it wasn’t without some apprehension: This was a man unlucky in restaurants. We went, however, to a small Greek one, ate souvlaki in peace and drank house wine. We smoked too many cigarettes. “The liter and the pack,” quipped Gerard, and I laughed loudly because I had drunk a lot and because, despite everything, I liked him much. He leaned over the table, touched my hair, and kissed me. Life is sad, I thought. Here is someone.
We ended up in my bed together, sort of, spastic and looped, doomed for failure, like two senile inventors in an upstairs room, lonely as spoons. The whole business finally seemed less an expression of mutual attraction than a soft, noodly act of existentialism.
After a long parade of kisses and other things, Gerard rolled over, blitzed with wine, and collapsed. “Impudence is very common,” I said to him in the dark, hoping he would smile. I didn’t want to pat his hand and say, “It’s okay,” the way they do in television movies. “Sorry,” he murmured into the ribbony edge of the blanket, and we kept on drinking—cheap cream ale in cans. We talked about childhood, and he told me how when he was little he thought he had Superman hearing, how he thought he could hear for miles. Then he got up and went home.
Miraculously, we became the best of friends, moving on to other romantic flailings, but having regular breakfasts at Hank’s, comparing sordid life-notes, having dinner, going disco-dancing for the exercise. (Although Gerard usually tries to meet women, his recent success rate hasn’t been wonderful and he has taken to greeting attractive disco women with the opener “Why have I never seen you before, and why will I never see you again?”) Often I go hear him play at one of the local cocktail places. I love Gerard, even if he is a lounge act.
The walls of The Grounded Star, the only disco in Fitchville, beat like a migraine. It is packed, even on a Thursday night. The music hurts my eyes for some reason, and I wonder if I’m getting old, somebody’s great-aunt at a disco. Perhaps soon I’ll have dyed hair and cheap black underwear you can see the shadow of through tight, peach-tone pants. I saw a woman like that yesterday. George was with me. “If you ever notice me starting to wear things like that,” I told her, “you have permission to send me away forever on a bus.” I am getting the thunder thighs of my Aunt Ivy. The lumpy oatmeal buttocks. When Georgianne is fourteen she will be embarrassed to be seen with me in public places like hosiery aisles and church. She will stand in the doorway of the bathroom, while I’m getting ready to go out, and will cluck her tongue and groan, “Oh, god, Mother” and then show me how to wear make-up, hauling out her own slick tubes, unrecognizable gels, sneering at my dusty compacts, my fuddy-duddy wands.
The strobe-light show over the dance floor looks like something that could bring on epilepsy.
“Hey. Exercise. Good for you,” I grunt at the door, Tonto to Gerard’s masked stranger: He has put on silvery New Wave sunglasses. “You’re very cool,” I reassure him.
“You either have it, Benna, or you don’t,” he says.
We pay the five-dollar cover, take our two wooden nickels over to the bar and get two “free,” fancy German beers, which we glug theatrically from their bottles, our heads back, hands jammed into ass pockets, like juvenile delinquents. Before we are quite finished, Gerard puts his beer down on the bar, and for no reason but comedy, says “Excuse me” to the bewildered person next to him, grabs my arm and together we poke and strut our way out to the dance floor, which we locate mostly by noticing where the carpet underfoot gives way to wood. It is that crowded. We dance with our knees and elbows, all angles from the joints. We are warm and spinning in place, imitating each other’s movements: fake boxing, fake karate, fake roller derby. I look at Gerard: We are in charge; we are the best people here, whether we really are or not.
I accidentally step on someone’s foot and she turns around shrieking, “A cripple, you’ve made me into a cripple!”
“Sorry,” I call over the music.
The next song is a slow, hug-your-honey number. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” I shout at Gerard. He nods.
In the bathroom someone has written I WANT TO BE FUCKED.
Beneath it someone else has added, in a red, searing scrawl, YOU ARE FUCKED.
At the bar with Gerard, I glug more beer, warm, unfizzled, sweet. The room is pounding and airless. “You could die of White Shoulders poisoning in here,” says Gerard, absently gazing at a group of women by the dance floor, all pretty, all young. I look off in some other direction, but think I see someone I know smiling at me. I look away; it’s probably a student—I dread seeing students. I look back and someone else, a handsome black man in a white silk shirt, is standing next to me. It is Darrel, sans army greens.
“Darrel,” I say. “Hi.”
“Dr. Carpenter,” he says. Why do students do that? Add the oppressive and unprophetic Dr.
“Benna. Please. It’s Benna. Call me Benna. This is my friend Gerard. Gerard-Darrel, Darrel-Gerard.”
Gerard proffers a hand and shakes more warmly than he usually manages with strangers. Sometimes when new people enter the picture, he growls inside himself. Like a groundhog seeing his shadow, or like a thief, you see all of his features abscond, close, a window shade pulled down behind his face.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” says Darrel, turning toward me, “but would you like to dance?”
It’s another hug-your-honey number.
“Gee, I’m not sure.” I look at Gerard for advice. He nudges me gently, is probably winking at me behind his glasses.
“Go on,” he says quietly. “Go on, go on, go on.”
“All right, already.” I like saying that. It’s something I picked up in New York City, when I lived there. Like a sinus condition, or something on sale. I follow Darrel out onto the floor. It’s less crowded now, the lighting dimmed to a television blue, couples pressed close as toast. Darrel smiles, very tall, very much at ease he
re, lightly taking my waist and my right hand and moving me surefootedly around the small corner of floor that is, apparently, ours. Where are Darrel’s sneakers? He is wearing what my brother Louis used to call “hard shoes”—leather shoes. And a slick shirt, slippery and nice. It has a dry, sweet smell, like bubblegum and cedar.
Whenever I have danced this way with Gerard, it’s always been sort of a joke: I lead and he pretends to swoon. With Darrel, there’s no joking. I try to catch Gerard’s eye every 360 degrees. To be reassured? Encouraged? Gerard lifts his glasses up onto his head and flutters his eyelids at me. His eyebrows wriggle up and down, crazed and wooly. Maple has turned up here and the two of them are leaning lazily against the wood lip of the bar and talking. A couple to one side of them are watching Darrel and me dance. I turn back, look up at Darrel, and feel my heart fluttering. It’s a Tennessee Williams heart. A bad Tennessee Williams heart. I don’t know what to say. The music urges love on you like food. I say, “Well, waddya know. Here we are.” I shout it. I’m out of breath. My feet are like turtles, my armpits ponds.
Darrel grins, listening to the music, not saying anything. He spins me around, pulls me close, then steps back, then moves close again. What is this jazz? I grew up in the country, in a trailer. We did things like stand far apart and ripple our stomachs in and out.
When the song ends, moving subtly into a faster one, we let go and I wipe my palms on my jeans and say, “Well, Darrel, thanks for the dance.” I thrust my hand at him and he shakes it, warm and dry. I follow him off the dance floor. When he turns around to say good-bye, I gaze up at his sad laughlines, the lashes, the perfect keyboard of his teeth, and I say, “Let’s have dinner this week.”
“Absolutely,” says Darrel.
“He has a kind face,” I say to Gerard, riding home in his Datsun.
Gerard shrugs and then there is silence, the dark sky pricked with stars, dotted lines in the headlights pulled under and to the left of us, the black of trees running footlessly by. Gerard is speeding.
Finally he asks, “Why do you always sleep with your students?”
My vision leaves me for a minute, my brain grinds against my skull. I turn and glare at Gerard’s profile. “Fuck off, Gerard! I don’t always sleep with my students.” Gerard doesn’t say anything. We are approaching a stoplight. “Once. Once before, that’s all.” And only as I say it do I realize I’ve said “before.” “Goddamn it, Gerard. What are you trying to make me out to be? You know how many people I’ve slept with in my whole life? Six! Up until a year ago I could count them on one hand. I’ve had six lovers and I’m thirty-three years old, and I still send all of them Christmas cards and birthday cards. Still! And that’s even counting my husband and you, Gerard, which I think is rather generous of me.” Meanness flies around my brain like a spluttering balloon. “I don’t always sleep with my students.”
Gerard doesn’t say anything.
I slept with one of my students about a year ago. His name was Scott Hayden, a thin, pale, insensitive blond, and he stayed at my house twice and ate all the shredded wheat in the morning. Georgianne didn’t like him; she is into cereal monogamy—like me—and was annoyed about the shredded wheat. Eleanor, too, thought I was crazy. Verrie, in a postcard from Palo Alto, a colorful aerial view of strips and strips of motels and car dealerships, had simply written, “Honey, do what you want.” When I suggested to Scott that we stop seeing one another, he stopped coming to my class. I gave him an Incomplete for the course and in June sent him a card for his birthday. At the end of August I saw him in the grocery store near campus and said, “Hey, you’ve got an outstanding Incomplete still, you know,” and he looked at me and said, “Oh, Benna, it’s not that good,” and charged up the soup aisle, turned left, and disappeared.
“Whatever you say,” chimes Gerard, all false conciliation, turning the corner onto my street.
“Gerard, why are you being such a bastard? You know I don’t sleep around. In fact”—I punch him in the arm—“you know what they called me in high school? Do you know what they called me in high school?”
“What did they call you in high school?” Gerard sighs, drags one palm down across his face, puts the car into park.
“The Nun of That. That’s what they call me. The Nun of—”
“You’re repeating yourself.”
“—That. Do you honestly think six men is a lot to have slept with in your whole life?”
Gerard tries not to smile. “Of course I don’t. But you do. That’s why you send them all cards.” We’ve stopped; we’re at my house. “And I’m not talking about numbers,” he continues. “That’s your weird little department. I’m just talking about the fact that you’re a teacher.”
“Leave me alone, Gerard.” I get out, slam the door. I’ll have to take Mrs. Kimball home myself. “Get the hell out of here.” The car hesitates, hiccups backward then lurches forward, whirrs away, past bushes and streetlamps, into the night, his VIRGINITY IS FOR LOVERS bumper sticker lit up like a fiery Band-Aid.
“Georgianne was crying a little there,” says Mrs. Kimball, all orange crinkle. “But she wouldn’t say why. She wanted to wait up for you.”
“Could be her fever,” I say, helping Mrs. Kimball on with her all-weather coat.
“She’s a sweet girl,” smiles Mrs. Kimball. I give her five dollars and drive her home, though it’s only six houses away, as she chats about her sister’s children, how day in day out they just listen to that noise.
When I get back home, George is standing at the top of the stairs in her nightgown. “Mommy?” she calls. I stand at the foot of the stairs, in the dark. To me, she is like an angel, a beautiful child ghost, looking down at me, for me, scared but hopeful, creamy with tears and sleep. I turn the front porch light off, lock the door, and go upstairs to be with her. I take her hand and walk her to her bed.
“How do you feel, honey?”
She presses suddenly against me, puts her arms around my waist, and crumples into inexplicable sobs. “We need to have some more babies in this house,” she cries. “Will you have another baby?” I lift her, and her arms circle my neck, her legs clamp around me. When I put her into bed, I climb in next to her, the covers over both of us, the nightstand lamps on low.
I have done this before. Sometimes I do this.
Sometimes as I’m drifting toward sleep, in the beginnings of that dissolution, I wonder where I am, when this is, and realize that at these moments I could be anywhere, anytime, for all I know: eight and napping in the trailer, my broken arm in a cast, or thirteen at night clutching a pillow to my neck, or twenty in the arms of my boyfriend, or twenty-seven in the arms of my husband, or thirty-three next to my imaginary daughter; at every place in the whole spinning shape that is my life, when I am falling asleep, I am the same person, the identical awareness, the same fuzzball of mind, the same muck of nerves, all along the line. I forage through my life and everywhere—there, there, and there—it is only me in it, the very same me, the same harmless lump, the same soggy weirdo, the same sleeping, breathing bun. Georgianne, too, perhaps, even when she’s old, will be the same flanneled muffin as now, this snoring puff, this snoozy breath and heart always.
“Humans are the voice boxes of life,” the teacher told her classes that Friday. “They are protein’s means of speaking about itself. We owe the dumb, the inarticulate—the grass, the snails—that much.” What rot, she thought. What could be more articulate than a blade of grass, a lovely blade of grass scaled by an ant, what could be more superfluous than words, ghoulish and life-eating, for a snail, for a tree, for a wise man in a robe in a cave in Tibet? “I want you guys to keep notebooks. Record anything you want in them, any word or phrase or poem, but write! The difference between a poet and a non-poet is that a non-poet believes he will remember everything the next day without getting up, switching on the light, and writing it down.”
The weekend appeared before her like a lovely hammock slung between two wide weeks. The teacher had coffee alone and
went home.
Saturday mornings in Fitchville the college radio station from eight-thirty to eleven plays only songs from Broadway musicals. I usually make it out of bed by nine, pull down the shredded wheat for Georgianne, then head back upstairs, turn on the shower, and scrub my back to something by Cole Porter, shampoo to Jerome Kern, rinse off to something snappy by Sondheim or Bernstein. I like to bee in Amhaireekha. I clap and stomp and try not to slip in the tub. There have been times when Georgie has abandoned her cereal, pulled off her pajamas and joined me to jiggle around under the shower spray. She has come to know lots of the words and does the complete “I’m Getting Married in the Morning,” in a cockney bellow impossible not to admire.
This morning the program is devoting a full hour to the music of Kiss Me Kate, and George and I, in the shower, act out parts from it, contriving gestures for all the words, something we call the Eensy-Weensy Spider School of Singing. On “I Hate Men” we soap each other’s shoulder blades and scowl. (“If they can send one man to the moon,” Eleanor’s always saying, “why can’t they send them all?”) On “Why Can’t You Behave” I shake my finger like a good, offended mother-slash-lover, and on “Too Darn Hot” Georgie giggles and stands behind the angle of the water and fiddles with the faucets and the temperature, which is when I say, “Yikes, this is where I get out,” push aside the curtain and drip out onto the bathmat. Georgie is in a giggle fit, like a little girl who hasn’t laughed for a long time. When she, too, finally steps out, she puts her hands on my hips and says, “You’re getting fat, Mom. You’re turning into a hippie!” and she giggles some more and I say, “Gee thanks,” and her eyes are wet with laughing, her skin pink from steam and heat, her tiny nipples like two thin slices of hot dog, and we powder each other’s backs with a blue-gingham powder mitt, which was on sale last week at Woolworth’s, wrap our heads and bodies in red, clean towels, and return to the shredded wheat downstairs in the kitchen, bring bowls out into the living room, turn on the TV, and watch cartoons.