Families and Survivors (12 page)

In her tight black dress that Caroline had sent for Christmas, perfumed and smelling of booze, she comes to King, all out of breath. “I couldn’t stand it without seeing you, not another minute.”

“Christ, you’re great,” he says. “I couldn’t have stood the night if you didn’t come.”

Then they make love frenziedly, not removing many clothes; they spend longer over their farewells, their lingering
(fictional) lovers’ good nights, than they did in the act of love.

“You were lovely to come. Dream of me.”

“Yes, I love you.”

This is how lovers behave, they believe—passionate lovers. But is that what they are doing, acting out love?

And then he tells her that he despises her.

He criticizes the way she has an orgasm. “Most women I’ve known”—and of course he means Bobbie—“most women, it’s like they’ve been struck by lightning. But you—I can hardly tell.”

How can she say to him that she hardly ever comes with him? She pretends to, and she doesn’t want or dare to overact. She has to be as sexy, as womanly, as Bobbie. And more so.

“Fucking you is like fucking someone black,” he says, his voice full of anger and despair.

This makes sense to Louisa. I have a black woman’s cunt, is what she thinks.

Sometimes she sneaks home to Michael, aroused and unfulfilled, and she manages to arouse him. To come. The smallest twitch.

She is loathsome to herself.

The thought of her daughter is unbearable to her. Maude cries a lot. She doesn’t like other children. In the sandbox at the playground she used to throw sand and fight
over toys; she was unable to “share.” Nowadays she is listless, watching television all afternoon. No friends.

And the worst of it is that Maude will have to grow up, grow into being a woman, needing men. She will fall in love with men, over and over. Falling.

Louisa thinks that it would have been much better if she had had a son. God, she could have loved a son!

Some innate fastidiousness prevents Louisa from talking in detail to King about Michael (“that fat Jew you married”), but King somehow intuits Michael through her. “I’ll bet he spends a lot of time in the can, doesn’t he?” This is a thing she would never have mentioned.

She blushes.

“Ah, you’re blushing. You know, you’re really pretty when you blush.”

She thinks about Michael as little as possible, even when they are together. Then she is thinking about King.

She does not think about the rest of her life.

Once, only once, she breaks down with King; she cries out to him, “I can’t stand my life! I live in a nightmare, I despise Michael. It’s killing me. I’m killing Maude.”

He eyes her evilly. “Don’t you look at me, baby,” he says. “I can’t help you, not at all. I’ve got my own brown skin to save.”

She wonders if he is right, that she was asking him to save her. Very likely, but she isn’t sure.

“How about giving me a little blow before you go?”

She does.

…

A check from her mother, from Caroline. For her birthday. The bottom of her life. She wonders if she could possibly tell Caroline how she feels; would Caroline send her money if she got a divorce and a part-time job? But she doesn’t know how to type.

She goes to Magnin’s; she buys a pale blue cashmere sweater, a matching tweed skirt, and a rope of pearls. Driving to King’s basement, she has a curious sense of impersonation; she is dressed up to be someone else. And then of course it comes to her: at an intersection where she watches a pretty young blond girl cross the street. (Is that Bobbie? She is always looking for Bobbie, as she imagines that King is always looking.) At that moment she understands she is wearing the clothes that King said he bought for Bobbie (that, even to please him, Bobbie refused to wear). The sick complexity of this weighs her down, so that by the time she gets to King she is not a pretty young woman in pretty, expensive new clothes; she is a terrified anxiety-filled young-old person, perhaps a woman.

Of course he notices. “That’s a new style of dress for you, now, isn’t it? But I’m not sure you’re really the type for it. I like those classic clothes on a body that’s a little more—voluptuous—”

Whatever King says has a special ironic undertone; he is almost never direct. Considering this, Louisa is dimly reminded of someone else, someone who also speaks in a stilted way, as though always kidding, which he is not. Who says mean things as though they were a joke.

And then it comes to her: Jack Calloway, her father.

Jesus
Christ.

…

They only see each other in King’s basement. They have given up the art class, King because he decided it was no good (“What do those mothers know?”), and Louisa because she can use the time to see King, pretending to continue with the class.

The city outside, lovely San Francisco, might not exist at all; they could be in St. Louis, or Iowa Falls. Along Grant Avenue the beatniks are slowly vanishing; it is never clear where they have gone, and their hangouts slowly die: Miss Smith’s Tea Room, the Bagel Shop, The Place. King and Louisa have never been in a bar together, or walked along a street. The city’s skyline is still gentle, more Mediterranean than Manhattan in its aspect—no greedy Mafia-shadowed mayor yet, no greedy builders. Alex Magowan and the other engineers are just starting out. It is the end of the fifties, in a reasonably quiet city.

Curiously, King always praises the small sketches that Louisa does; he encourages her to draw. “You’ve got one delicate Southern touch,” he tells her. “And class. Style. You’re a real Southern lady artist.”

This is praise; she knows that her Southernness is what (if anything) he likes in her, although he often taunts her: “I don’t reckon your folks would be too happy for me to come by for a little visit, now, would they?”

For some reason, which at first Louisa does not understand, King asks her repeatedly about Kate. Their friendship. She has told him about the naked swimming—the night of sex appeal, and how they laughed. He keeps going back to that night.

“You just laughed and fell in the water and then got out and dressed?”

“Well, yes.”

He makes a sound of disbelief as he looks at her curiously.

Embarrassed, and not sure why (but sure that she is failing him again), Louisa limply says, “Really. That’s all.”

Softly: “Really?”

She understands that he is (of course) suggesting a lesbian scene—and it is not an accusation. It is something he wants very much; he would like to watch her with Kate. And she has a queasy memory of something that Michael once said: “Homosexual … you and Kate.”

It even, for a moment, occurs to her to improvise, to make up such a scene, as a present for him.

But then, “Really, that was all,” she says, in total defeat. “Nothing happened.”

One November morning, in her pretty cashmere clothes, Louisa goes downtown; she has nothing else to wear, and she has to buy a birthday present for Michael. Dispiritedly she enters Brooks Brothers.

Gazing unhappily at the neat stacks of regimental striped ties at her elbow, she suddenly hears, “Louisa—Lou, it’s really you—terrific!”

And there is Andrew Chapin, dark handsome Andrew, old friend and former neighbor. Andrew with his heavy crooked eyebrows and his grin. (It is several minutes before she remembers that humiliating party scene; at first she is simply glad to see him.)

They don’t embrace, possibly because they are in Brooks Brothers, and alone. They make enthusiastic embracing
gestures at each other. How marvelous to see you, they both say.

Andrew says, “Louisa, you’re so pretty. Really, you look great.” And then he says, “Say, I don’t suppose you’re free for lunch.”

Lunch. She’s free for anything, really.

He takes her to an elegant, New York-style restaurant (the one to which he also took Kate), a place that in years to come will be leveled to make way for a towering Hyatt House.

Across from each other at the small table, in the dim subdued room where ladies are wearing beautiful large hats, Louisa and Andrew smile foolishly at each other in embarrassed pleasure and surprise.

“Well,” they say simultaneously, “how is—” and they both laugh.

“You first,” Andrew tells her. “Michael—and Maude?”

This is depressing. “Michael’s fine,” she says quickly. “You know he got his degree finally? But his parents—” She instantly decides not to say anthing about Michael’s parents, those appalling monstrous monoliths, and in that instant she realizes how difficult it is to say anything about Michael without mentioning his parents. King, an orphan, was raised by an aunt, whom he never talks about. And Andrew never talks about his famous father.

“And Maude? I’d really like to see her.”

“She’s fine. She’s funny—she writes poems all the time. Sometimes limericks. You want to hear one? You wouldn’t mind?”

“No, really.”

And Louisa recites:

“She wrote that? But that’s terrific.”

“Well, I know it’s awful to quote your kids.” She laughs. “Michael thinks it’s anti-Semitic.” Of course this is untrue; she is trying to be funny, and it works. Andrew laughs hard, his quirky eyebrows raised. “How are Sally and the boys?”

Everyone is fine; no one seems to have changed at all. Why do they no longer see each other? This question lies between them, insufficiently answered by the fact that Michael and Louisa have moved up to San Francisco.

They have drinks, but it is being with Andrew that makes Louisa high; she is elated, she feels herself transformed. And later, remembering that lunch, it becomes an almost holy event. “Andrew sort of saved my life, that day,” she tells John Jeffreys, whom many years later she loves, and marries. “I’d lost track of who I was.”

Wanting to know everything (really everything about Andrew), Louisa even asks about the Magowans.

“They’ve had a lot of trouble with Allison—that’s the middle kid,” says Andrew, and Louisa remembers a shy and too thin little girl, with scabs always on her bony knees (who couldn’t think where to hide Easter eggs, until her wonderful mother, Grace, told her where).

“She’s really sick,” says Andrew. “Sally says she won’t eat and she throws up all the time.”

“Anorexia,” Louisa mechanically says. Michael has explained that it is the opposite of (“and of course that makes it related to”) her colitis.

“What’s weird is that Grace makes it sound like a bad cold, and Alex never mentions it at all. It makes it hard to be with them.”

“I’ll bet. ‘Denial’ is what Michael would say they’re doing.”

But Louisa is too happy to talk about the Magowans, or Michael; she has already forgotten what Andrew has just told her about them.

What would Andrew say, she wonders at some point, if she told him that she was in love with a Negro, committing adultery with a Negro man? (Screwing and getting screwed by one.) But she is not, not now, in love with King. She despises him; she wishes he were dead.

She asks, “And, Andrew, what about you? Are you writing a lot?”

A sad smile. “Not really. I seem to spend all my time winding up to write, and then not. And you know, Sally and the boys—not that it’s their fault that I don’t write,” he says ambiguously.

And then he says, “Louisa, Lou—I don’t know how to say this, but I’d give five years of my life to go back to that time—that time with you. Jesus, what a stuffy ass I was.”

He takes her hand, very gently.

Louisa feels her face heating, her blood race. It is impossible to look at Andrew.

“If only—don’t you think we could?” he says softly (and too vaguely). He has no clear plan. He is not saying: “Let’s walk out to the lobby and take a room in the hotel upstairs.”

And so she has to say no (and besides her slip is torn and pinned together). She says, “Andrew, I’m afraid I have to get home—Maude—” (And she is fastidious, in her way: she is seeing King that night.)

“Of course. But may I call you sometime?”

“Sure.” (But he does not.)

Beyond her slip and Andrew’s uncertainty, the truth is that at this time Louisa does not feel that she “deserves” Andrew—she does not deserve an extremely bright and attractive man. (Just as, years back, she would not have felt that she deserved John Jeffreys. He was for attractive Kate, and she was grateful for Richard.)

“Well,” Andrew now says, “care for dessert, or coffee?”

“I guess not. No—no thanks.”

It has become embarrassingly important to get away from each other; suddenly there is nothing more to say. The waiter takes an inordinate amount of time with the check, it seems (and they both privately wonder if he is misinterpreting their haste).

Their cars are in separate garages, Louisa’s under Union Square, Andrew’s in a smaller (more expensive) garage off Kearny Street. And so at the entrance to Louisa’s garage they exchange hurried goodbyes.

Louisa gets her car with unusual speed, and even in the moment of driving out onto Geary Street she is beset with a total change of mind (or instinct or heart). Why
shouldn’t
she and Andrew make love? Why not, this afternoon? She loves Andrew (in a way); she always has. What would he care about a pin in her slip? Everyone does that sometimes; certainly Sally does. She could turn right, turn right again on Post Street, and go down to Kearny. Easy to find Andrew there waiting for his car—in a gay way to say, “Guess what, I’ve changed my mind. Where shall we go?”

But the lights are with her; she hurries along Geary Street, never turning right, until she reaches Van Ness Avenue, by which time it would be too late—probably.

Instead she spends a miserable afternoon (cross with Maude) of self-recrimination and regret.

As Andrew does. Speeding down the Bayshore (Michael’s idea of hell, and at this moment Andrew would agree), he wonders why (
WHY
?) he didn’t say: “Look, you have coffee and I’ll go and register at the hotel. I’ll say you’re joining me in ten or fifteen minutes. Lou—okay?”