A Bigamist's Daughter (14 page)

“Breaking up is hard to do,” she said, watching her own bagel.

“Just wait until he rolls over some night and says, ‘What’s this about my galleys being delayed by monsoons?’ ” They both laughed. One of Vista’s typesetters is in India, where the cost of labor and paper are low, but where monsoons occasionally delay the mails. “You could have some very tacky bedroom scenes,” Ann said.

Elizabeth nodded. “Yes we could.”

“So don’t see him again,” she went on. “He’s served his purpose.”

“But he hasn’t signed a contract.”

Ann looked at her through half-closed eyes, assessing, and then shrugging. “Okay,” leaning forward to dip the end of her bagel into a small container of purple jelly. “Here’s what you do: You tell him you were just swept off your feet Friday night but now that you’ve had time to think about it”—she licked her finger—“you’ve decided it would be better business if you didn’t sleep with him again. For his own good. Nothing personal.”

“And then?”

“And then,” she went on, chewing, “darling Tupperware will be so flattered that you succumbed to his charms in the first place, against your own better judgment, that he’ll sign the contract out of pure conceit and, to save you from yourself, never make a pass at you again.”

Elizabeth chewed her own bagel, considering. She knew it was a role that would suit him, and her—forswearing sex for the sake of business, for the higher good of his manuscript. “That’s almost brilliant,” she said.

Ann nodded. “It’s a variation on the line Brian used to use on all his little chickies in the typing pool. That’s why he always went for the ambitious ones, they’d rather lose him than their jobs.” She grinned. “Who said my marriage didn’t teach me anything?”

Elizabeth stared at her, deadpan. “You just talked me out of it,” she said. And Ann laughed. “I thought I would.”

Just then the door slowly opened, and Bonnie slowly poked her head into the office, her eyes going immediately to the breakfast on the desk and then snapping away, as if she had looked down somebody’s dress. A toothpick pierced the corner of her mouth and a single pink barrette pulled her hair back from her pimply forehead. “Mr. Owens just came in,” she announced. “He’s in his office. You told me to tell you.”

Elizabeth thanked her and began to clear the desk. Ann moved on to point number three.

“You have to be careful you don’t make too much of him,” she said. “You might, after your long dry spell. I’ve seen the most sensible women fall madly in love, get married and everything, after a heavy dose of celibacy—as if marriage ever cured celibacy.” She crumpled a brown-paper bag with small punches. “You’d better be careful.”

Elizabeth tossed her hair, blithely. “No problem,” she said.

It’s the sexual part that’s always puzzled her about marriage. Regular pleasure seems somehow a contradiction in terms. Passing that same freckle, kissing that same thigh, the same fine hairs on the same legs, the same slow movements of the same mouths: Ah, there’s the way he blushes again, here’s the way I like to turn; there’s his cry, here’s mine. Just like yesterday, last week, last year.

She’s been told it puts sex in the proper perspective: regularity, monogamy, marriage. But it seems to her that proper perspective often verges on boredom, indifference; a way of disassembling all those angled and sloping and sharp-edged spirals of feeling that get in the way, slow you down. A way of making everything equally smooth, equally flat, as colorless as a desert, so the same shrug, the same laughter, can roll easily over it all.

She has her authors and all their sorry little books in the proper perspective. She has Jesus there, too. And her parents, perhaps.

She wonders if some things should remain without any perspective at all.

At least with Bill, she was never sure how she’d find him.

She gets up on her elbow, looks at him, at the blush fading from his chest. “Shall we go eat crepes now? Just like last time?”

But he pulls her to him, holds her tightly. Without the excuse of passion, she feels awkward in his arms. She thinks of how both their chests are bare.

“I’ve missed you,” he says into her hair.

Uncertain, she whispers, “Thank you.”

“Did you miss me?”

“Yes,” she says, improvising. It’s as if the man in the projector room has put on the third reel before the second. She can only guess where they are now: friends? lovers? sex maniacs?

“I thought so much about you,” he says, stroking her hair,
then her back. She rolls away from him, leaving her hand on his stomach so he won’t ask why.

“Have you been away?” This is like an amnesia victim who’s afraid she should know the answer.

“No,” he says, putting his hand over hers.

“Working on the book?”

He shakes his head, turns to look at her. “But I’ve been thinking about it, though. I’ve got an idea for the ending.”

“Good,” she says. She decided in the cab that she’d take Ann’s first piece of advice: sleep with him only until the book is finished and the contract signed, and then say good-by forever.

Already the decision is lending their relationship a sweetly fatal air, like
Love Story
the second time you read it.

“Do you want to tell me your idea?” she asks him.

He frowns. “I said all pleasure.”

“I don’t mind.” She turns onto her stomach, tucking the pillow under her, cool side up. “Tell me.” She is being very gallant.

He clears his throat. “Well, looking the book over, I realized there’s not much in the way of background. Mostly because nobody where I grew up knew anything about Bailey’s background either. He really did show up one day—just the way I have it in the book.”

He pauses, and at first she thinks it’s one of the many pauses that pepper his slow speech. But it lasts longer that most and so she says, “Go on.”

“Well,” he clears his throat again. “I thought maybe I could do something with that.”

She looks at his profile. His neat, blond sideburn is oddly geometrical, a fine, square fuzz. “With what?”

“His past.”

“But you just said you didn’t know anything about his past.”

He turns to face her. “I know,” he says sadly.

He stares at the ceiling, she at the back of the couch, her headboard. Outside, a young boy’s shrill voice cries
“Asshole!”
Another laughs.

“And don’t you usually tell the past in the beginning?” she says slowly, watching the white threads of the couch moving in and out of one another, blurring into a whole. “Not at the end?”

“You think so?” His voice is humble. It reminds her that she’s the expert. That she has no idea.

She wonders if she’s trying to put off the inevitable. Only until he finishes his book, until the stroke of midnight, until Jenny gets leukemia.

“Well,” she says, conceding to fate, “I suppose you could end with the past.”

He rolls onto his side, faces her. “That’s what I was thinking,” he says, enthused. “It could really be different. Like suddenly you see his past and you understand the whole book. Almost a touch of, oh, I don’t know, Agatha Christie.”

“Like Rosebud” she says, startling them both.

“What do you mean?” He looks at her keenly; they’re brainstorming now.

She feels a little foolish but goes on. “I don’t know if it applies, really,” she says, “because I don’t remember the movie that well, but wasn’t it at the end of
Citizen Kane,
when they show you the sled burning, that you see it’s named Rosebud? And that’s how you know the way his past affected him?” She’s sorry she mentioned it.

He shakes his head. “No,” he says slowly, not wanting to offend her. “I don’t think that’s the same thing. I don’t think this has ever been done before.”

She turns to look at the couch again. None of them ever think it’s been done before: coming of age during World War II
as it’s never been done before, the sexual liberation of a suburban housewife as it’s never been done before, the Book of Revelation …

“All right,” she says, feeling like a straight man. “What happened in his past that will make us understand the whole book? Why did he become a bigamist?” She realizes she’s talking about
him
as if he were a real person.

He lies flat again, looks up at the ceiling. “That’s what I don’t know yet,” he says. “That’s where you have to help me.”

“I see.” She knows he is going to ask about her father again. Where did he go? What did he do? And, as if she knew all the answers, she smiles slyly. This time she will not get touchy. Maybe she will even tell him, “My mother had theories.” Watch his eyes shine.

But he merely turns to her, those nice blue eyes, the smooth skin. “Will you help me?” he asks, leaning to kiss her arm, her shoulder, her neck.

She smiles, puts her hand to his hair. “Of course I’ll help you,” she says slowly, Dorothy to the Tin Man, promising Oz and a heart. But all the while planning her own trip home. “I want to get this book finished too, don’t I?”

On Tuesday of last week, Ann had come into her office to say, “You should probably get the Career Woman of the Year Award.”

She looked up from yet another how-to-get-rich-quick manuscript. “Thank you. Why?”

“Well, the big problem for the working woman is how to combine a life at home and a life in the office. You know, a sex life and a professional life, right?”

“I guess so.”

She folded her arms before her. “Well, you’ve managed to
do both—beautifully!” She leaned forward, eyes bright. “You’re screwing Tupper Daniels at home, and screwing him again when he comes in here. The perfect solution!” She laughed her laugh and Elizabeth smiled.

“I’ll have to remember that,” she said.

After dinner, Elizabeth insists there be a “decent interval” before they return to her apartment and her bed. He tells her she sounds like a reluctant nun, and as they walk toward the river he begins to recite every Catholic joke he knows. They’re terrible jokes (What kind of meat do priests eat on Friday? Nun.), but she laughs at each of them—no hang-ups.

“That
is
my heritage you’re talking about,” she says as they reach East End Avenue and he runs out of jokes. “I should be offended.”

He shakes his head. “It’s not your heritage,” he says. “You’re English.”

“And Irish.”

He takes her arm, whispers in her ear. “That’s a misfortune we needn’t mention. And besides,” getting louder, “I was under the impression you’d left all that mackerel-snatching stuff behind you.”

“I have.” She wonders if she’s told him this or he’s only presumed it. Presumed that a modern, sexually liberated young woman such as herself would be without religion. She wonders if the apostate isn’t as easy to pick out as the preacher, and as much a cliché.

She steers him into the tiny dead-end street that leads to the promenade. “This is what I wanted to show you,” she says. “It looks right over the river.”

As they climb the steps and begin to stroll along the walk, she mentions all the movies that have been filmed here. He
hasn’t seen any of them and it somehow disappoints her, as if the significance of the place was suddenly lost, or there for her alone. Like watching a sunset with an atheist. She thinks of telling him this, but fears the tangle of logic behind it; fears it’s an expression she learned from the nuns.

They pause to sit on one of the benches. The wind is getting stronger, colder. Without a word, he takes both her hands and puts them under his sweater, puts his hand over them. He pulls her close, until she has to bend her neck awkwardly to watch the tiny white and yellow lights of Roosevelt Island and the bridges.

“I’m beginning to love New York,” he says. “The excitement, the glamour, the constant pace. Everyone’s just so much more alive here than in the South.” He lifts his hand off hers and points across the river. “Each one of those lights out there could be a person who lives in New York. Their lives glow just like that.”

She wonders if he’s being poetic and feels a little embarrassed for him. “That’s Queens,” she says, smiling, but he doesn’t hear the contradiction.

“Look at you,” he goes on. “If you lived in the South, you’d either be married by now with six kids or stuck in some boring job in an insurance office. I mean, I probably know a hundred, two hundred women back home, and not one of them has a job anywhere near as exciting as yours.”

She sinks down on the bench, where she can only see the river from between the black bars of the railing. One hundred? Two hundred? “Don’t you know any women who live in big cities, like Atlanta?”

He lets out a breath and she looks up at him. At the dark-blue silhouette of his jaw and nose. How many belles are waiting back home, waiting for this New York excursion to end, for Scott to return to his Zelda?

“Atlanta’s not the same,” he says, shaking his head. “No other city is the same. I guess you don’t see it, having grown up here.”

“On Long Island,” she corrects him. But he is silent and she slowly leans her head against him, her ear against his soft sweater. She listens to the sound of his heart beating, thinking vaguely of all the movies that have been filmed here, all the movies that show the silhouette of a couple on a bench in a park, leaning together, looking at a river. She wonders if she is still playing the lover or becoming her.

He pulls away a little, squinting to see her in the darkness. “That must be weird,” he whispers, “growing up in New York. Having it be your hometown. I don’t think I’d like it. The city’s so big. And it changes so much. I think I’d always wonder.”

She frowns. “Wonder about what?”

“About the past, I guess.” He pulls her closer. “If I grew up in the city, and my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents grew up here, I think I’d always wonder, whenever I saw a new building going up or an old one coming down, if it had anything to do with my own past. You know, I’d wonder if this was the place where my grandfather once stood, if this was the same street he walked down when he was young. If this was where my great-grandparents’ house used to be. Things change so quickly, it would be hard to have landmarks. I think I’d always wonder. Do you know what I mean?”