Chez Cordelia (20 page)

Though I admired her, I didn't like her at first—her crazy devotion to Archie, her note taking, her questions, the silliness of her project got to me. But we became friends. She used to wait on me when I ate dinner at my corner table, and when things were slow she'd come and talk to me. At first I thought she just wanted information, the inside dope on salad making (her article had expanded from waitressing to the whole operation), but instead she got me talking about Juliet and Alan and my life in general, and she talked about Archie.

“I'm a slave to that man,” she told me, tossing back her flaming hair and looking dreamily off into the distance. “I'm a slave to his talent. I feel it's my duty to mankind to bring him out. Do you know, he won't play for anyone but a few friends? I'm trying to help him.”

I still hadn't heard Archie play, still thought of him as a defective kitchen appliance. “Then you're in love with his piano playing?” I asked Nina, trying to understand.

Nina blushed. “It's not only that. I'm a prisoner of sex. Archie is so …” She rolled her eyes, and then closed them briefly, and then got up to go take an order.

It was harder to think of Archie as a sex object than as a musical genius, but if someone like Nina was enslaved and imprisoned by him, there must, I supposed, be something in it.

Becoming friends with Nina was like a passport to the social life of the Grand'mère crowd. Once in a while on Mondays, when the restaurant was closed, Humph would invite Archie and Nina and some of the rest of us to his place. The invitation, it was understood, was an honor. Humph would cook up something good, there would be wine, and the happy atmosphere of the restaurant kitchen would be there in Humph's cluttered rooms as if he concocted it on his stove. And once or twice, when I was there, Archie was persuaded to play Humph's battered old upright piano. I expected him to become a different person at the keyboard, but he looked exactly the same: half asleep, the cigarette behind his ear, and his fingers flashing over the beige and broken keys the way they moved up and down his pantlegs. But the music was gorgeous, lush and brightly colored, more like Nina than Archie. It awed me, the way it suggested the bottomlessness of people, their secret depths and delights, and it made me believe in Archie's sexual prowess. I envied Nina her passion—her enslavement and imprisonment.

I must admit I was desperately frustrated by the absence of any sex life at all. I was surrounded by couples. I'd never noticed how paired-off the world was—Nina and Archie, Juliet and Alan, Humph and Cynthia, Crystal and Anne with nice (I had no doubt they were nice) husbands at home, and all the happy couples surrounding me while I ate my Grand'mère dinners—a regular Noah's ark, and I was left behind, alone, drowning.

But I was happier than I'd been since Danny left. I liked having Nina to pal around with. Archie spent long hours practicing, and Nina worked erratically, sometimes swamped with assignments, sometimes idle for days. “I'm on retainer for the
Nickel,
” she explained with pride. This meant they paid her regularly whether they had a job for her that week or not, and it was, for a journalist, a sign of success.

Nina and I used to sit around her maniacally messy apartment talking and drinking coffee in the evenings. Living with Juliet and Alan, where after my first torrential outpourings I had become mostly silent, I needed talk the way I needed meat, and Nina was an ideal listener. She was sympathetic and, better yet, truly interested, and not because she wanted to reform me. She just wanted to hear it.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Because you're my friend, Delia!” she replied, and I almost wept.

In between my confessions, she told me her own life story. She was older than I, and had been a radical in the late sixties. She was thinner then, she told me, in better shape for dodging billy clubs. “I was at Columbia,” she said. “I was in Chicago. I stuck daffodils into police rifles. I marched in New York and Washington. I lit matches for draft-card burners in Boston. I threw a rotten tomato at Nixon in Hartford.”

Danny and I had probably seen her on television, those long, lovely evenings in the living room above Hector's.

“I was looking for a cause,” Nina said. I remember exactly how she sat, barefoot, on her old corduroy sofa as she said this, because it impressed me so much. She held a coffee cup in one hand, and with the other she dug the dirt from between her fat toes. “And now I've found it. Archie.”

The envy poured out of me in waves. I could almost see it, a dull, leaden green. It wasn't Archie I envied her, it was the simplicity of a life that had a purpose controlling it.

“What about your work?” I asked her.

“Oh—my work,” she said absently, dismissing it, thinking of Archie. But I was impressed by her articles. After her piece on the restaurant business and Grand'mère (“FEET: Soft Shoes for a Hard Job,” and a photograph of my very own feet in my slippers), Humph personally sawed down the legs on my wooden stool so I could sit and chop instead of standing, and he was considering some sort of wheeled contraption so I could scoot back and forth to the refrigerator without getting up.

It was wonderful to have a friend. Until I met Nina, I had had to consider Juliet my confidante, and it made me uneasy to be forced into cahoots with a member of my family. And then, Juliet had gone from welcoming sisterliness, to her old criticisms, to lethargy and withdrawal, as if she were in pursuit of some goal invisible to the naked eye and unintelligible to anyone except, possibly, Alan.

Sometimes, if only to escape Juliet and Alan's place, I went with Nina on her assignments for the
Nickel Bag
, which is how I happened to go to the street fair where my life took another turn.

Nina was covering the fair for the
Nickel
, which meant, I discovered, that she wandered around looking dazed, an experience from which she later would write a lively, funny, and precisely accurate reconstruction of the event, complete with quotes from participants—though she often made those up. “People aren't authentic enough,” she said. “And they hardly ever talk in sentences.”

We drove there in her aged blue MGB convertible with its
IM NINA
license plate and
GOD IS MY CO-PILOT
bumper sticker (Nina's talisman against accidents, of which she had a morbid fear). She explained her journalistic methods to me on the way, and asked me if I'd mind if we separated for a while when we got there; otherwise she'd get talking and be distracted.

“I'll meet you at ten by the chili-dog booth,” she said as we parted. “And if you overhear anything good, try to remember it, even if you have to make it up.” I pondered this as I watched her go toward the Ferris wheel, head high and nose up, the better to sniff it in.

I wandered, not much pleased—though I didn't tell Nina—to be by myself. I was sick of being alone, and I had little heart for the ring toss or the candy apples. I half thought I might meet some nice man who would win me a turquoise-blue stuffed bear, and in fact, twice men approached me, one of them quite nice-looking, but—as always in these encounters—it was like my old shoplifting compulsion: I was waiting for someone to touch me at some secret level deep in my bones—like the collie dog on the trivet. I wanted someone I couldn't possibly live without. So I always smiled and turned away, waiting for just the right face.

I bought myself a slab of pizza and ate it on the Ferris wheel. The Ferris wheel was full of couples, mostly necking, and my seat creaked, and I couldn't wait to get off. As I did, a tall skinny person with a red beard and long, scraggly hair put his hand on my arm. I expected him to say, “Any spare change?” but he said, “Delia. Delia, honey. I've found you.”

It was Danny. He was eating an orange ice, in a paper cone, and he sucked at it, expressionless but for a faint grin, while I gaped. What stunned me most was not seeing him, so suddenly and after so long, but his appearance. He looked sick—every kind of sick: physical, mental, sick at heart, sick unto death. He looked like he needed a bath, a bed, a nurse, and about a million brewer's yeast tablets. He kept his free hand around my arm; it was like a claw, and his fingernails were long, longer than mine, and yellow, and dirty. And there was a little parade of pimples across his cheeks. And he wore a filthy old rag of a sweatshirt that read
PUNK
across the front.

I said, “Danny,” and found it was all I could say. I had known him since I was in first grade. I had fed his cat and eaten his cookies and coveted his life and baited his hooks and told him my dreams and made love with him and packed his lunch, but he was a complete stranger to me, and I could think of nothing to say to him.

And there was nothing I wanted to say to him—not to this dirty, scrawny man with the long hair and the (it seemed to me) wild eyes. There was something dangerous and desperate about his eyes. He just ate his ice and watched me and I looked back at him. Neither of us spoke again until he'd sucked all the orange from the ice and thrown the rest of it on the ground. Then he said, “Let's have a ride.”

We got on the Ferris wheel when it stopped, and he took my hand and smiled at me, and it was—just for that little second—the old Danny.

When he began to talk, the new Danny took over. The new Danny was brasher, aggressive, domineering. My Danny had been, above all, gentle—too gentle to hurt a worm with a hook, too gentle to fight in a war. And he had let me boss him; I never realized that until I saw how he'd changed. There would be no bossing this Danny—no controlling him at all. I looked into his wild eyes and saw what you might expect to see in the eyes of those horses who run wild on the western plains: desperation, a touch of craziness, and a powerful determination not to be broken to the saddle.

That's not what he said, though. He held my hand and talked, talked, talked. He was sorry he'd left me, he wanted us to be back together, he wanted to settle down, he was ready now, he'd had his little time—that was how he put it: “I've had my little time, Delia, but it's over now, I'm back, and I want to start again.”

I made him answer my questions, though in a way I no longer wanted to know those answers, having pondered them so long. He told me everything readily.

“What was in the paper bag?”

He had to think, then he remembered. “My lunch, of course.” The lunch I'd packed for him to take to work. I'd never thought of that, and I felt silly that it had been so unmysterious, and that I'd thought bombs, cash, a gun, dope.

The rest of his explanations were equally reasonable. He'd left in his pajamas because he didn't want to wake me by getting dressed. That had been the main thing on his mind, to leave without disturbing me, without having to face me and explain. He was half crazy, he said (and now he's the other half, I thought to myself), he had to get away, he had to go off and think and pull his life together. His parents' betrayal had unhinged him, he said, and I—I hadn't helped. It was I who'd pushed him into that groove, I who'd forced the idea of Hector's on him when he knew as well as his father did that the place had gone stale. It was I who'd kept him from getting ahead at the factory, who wouldn't let him work nights, wouldn't let him commit himself, wouldn't let him give up the dream of owning the store, wouldn't help him pull out from under his parents' thumbs …

I listened, stunned, while he made his flat explanations, analyzing himself and me and our marriage with the glibness of an Alan with a grudge. I kept wondering where he got it all—from some dropout therapist somewhere, some nut with a mission to bring psychotherapy to the downtrodden. The Ferris wheel carried us creakily up over the fair and down again and up. The sun was setting off in the distance behind West Rock, and the sky was orange and pink and purple, blazing. Down below I saw one of the men who'd offered to buy me a beer, the nice-looking one, with another girl. I saw Nina stop in her spacey wandering and scribble in her notebook. I took all this in, I felt my mind turn toward the scene—sun, sky, crowd, Nina—and away from the new Danny and his awful words. For—new and strange though he might be—the words, I saw, had truth in them. I'd forced him into that car that October morning. It was because of me that he wore this old sweat shirt, and let his hair get long and greasy, and had the look of a wild horse in his eyes.

Later—days and weeks later—I thought over what he said to me and rejected it—or, at least, amended it (why had he
let
me run him? why hadn't he talked to me about it? and what about our happiness? that wasn't something I'd bossed him into, and it was real). But up on the Ferris wheel, with Danny's grip on my hand and the seat swaying and squeaking, and the sun setting behind West Rock, and his voice going on and on and on, I drowned in the truth of it. His side of the story—like Juliet's at the dinner table—rose up and grabbed me and pulled me under. The immensity of things scared me (crowds, sky, words), and I gasped out, as if the details were what mattered, “But who was driving the car?”

Danny chuckled. “Oh, that was May.”

“May?”

“May Wyeth. You know. Ray Royal's old girlfriend.”

“
May?
”

“Sure. May. I knew she was planning to split, so I asked her if I could hitch a ride to Texas.”

“
Texas?
”

“I figured Texas was about as far away as I could get.”

Of course: Texas, where the wild horses were. And I had pictured Danny in, maybe, Meriden or Hartford. The Ferris wheel slowed and stopped. Danny bought us two more tickets and we went up again.

“Ray never told me,” I said, remembering my instinctive distrust of him.

“Why should he?” asked the new Danny.

“Did Ray know you went with her?”

“Are you kidding? Besides, I didn't go
with
her. I just hitched a ride. She went with a guy named Whit.”