Lion's Share (6 page)

“Hopefully you'll get everything accomplished in plenty of time. It would be good to see you.”

It would be good to see you, too, Jana thought but didn't say, praying she could psyche herself up for it.

“I'll talk to you on Thursday night,” Ed said again.

Jana impulsively picked up all her stuffed animals and shoved them into the back of a closet. It was to be her last energetic act before leaving town. She packed absentmindedly, spent hours on end mooning around the gallery. Over the next week and a half, she often caught herself studying the relationships of just about everyone she came into contact with, trying to see where she and Ed might fit in this paired-off scheme of things. In one fantasy, they had already moved in together, and she was trying to find a way to break the news to her parents.

Thursday night Jana sat in her apartment, packed, waiting for Ed to call, fearing he wouldn't. Finally, a few minutes after nine, he called, and they decided to meet at her place. “It's 342 East 95th Street, Apartment Seven—second floor rear,” she said, not wanting to say something stupid like “it will be good to see you,” but feeling she had to say something. She hung up the phone and went right back to sitting and waiting. Then, when he walked in the door, the first thing he did was hug her. She stood on tiptoes to kiss him, and narrowly missed coming down on his foot. An elbow jabbed her waist. From that point on, the evening seemed to go straight downhill.

Since they were on the Upper East Side, Ed suggested they walk over to Elaine's for a drink—he'd heard it was a place many writers and artists hung out. Jana claimed it was too noisy. She was interested in producing art, not in being noticed around the art world, the way Ed suddenly seemed to be. She suggested a little cafe around the corner which had outside tables.

The place had only six tables outside, but people were leaving one. She ordered wine and Ed ordered a gin and tonic, only to be told they served nothing stronger than wine and beer. Making the best of it, he asked what they had on draft. They only had bottled beer. He settled for Heineken, insisting he didn't mind, his body tense, fidgeting. He fumbled around for a few minutes, tapping a cigarette on the ashtray, before he smiled and asked Jana where she'd gone to school.

“Does high school count? Woodrow Wilson High in Lakewood, New Jersey.” She tried her best to toss off her answer as if it was nothing important. She was improving: a few years ago she would have felt insecure about her credentials and made up some college. Tonight she didn't even bother to mention she'd studied with Francis Harriman at The New School when she'd first moved to New York. More than “studied with him”; for two years she'd been his prize student. Here was a guy who, others said, taught women with his prick, yet he'd taken her seriously as an artist.

“You're kidding,” Ed interrupted her thoughts. “You only went to high school?”

“I was lucky to make it that far. It was a terrible school, actually. They offered either a totally academic college-prep curriculum or secretarial training. I was painting already, and the only art courses I could take were pastel and charcoal classes once a week with an old woman who encouraged us to draw from nature, but hadn't bothered to look around her for at least thirty years. I used to envy the kids in New York who could go to the artistic high schools.”

“But they were extremely hard to get into. Just because a kid was interested in music, like I was, didn't mean he was good enough to get in. Academically, my grades were great, and going to Stuyvesant was what all my teachers recommended. When I look back on it, I realize I was much better suited for a traditional education—even if I'd been accepted by Music and Art or The High School of Performing Arts, it would have been a mistake to go there—but I spent that first year in high school pretty depressed about the rejection.”

“What instrument do you play?”

“Piano, of course—isn't that what all up-and-coming parents give their kids lessons in? I was interested in jazz, mostly. I didn't want to play the written notes, I thought I could improvise. But I'd abandoned those pipe dreams by the time I got to college.”

“What did you major in?”

“Economics, with a minor in English. I wanted to become a journalist, but I got sidetracked copy-editing textbooks, then business magazines, and here I am.” He made himself shut up, lit another cigarette, put his hand across his face to shield the match. “I'm impressed that you continued painting by yourself,” he said, anxious to make this a conversation and not a monologue. “You must have had a lot of confidence and commitment.”

Confidence? Commitment? Jana felt annoyed. It wasn't as if she'd had choices, she'd simply done what she had to do. She stared at the executive sitting across from her, this man who had wanted to go to Elaine's. All of a sudden she felt the need to justify everything she said. She bit her lower lip, said nothing. It grew later and later while Ed sat there asking mundane questions. What projects did she plan to work on? What were the studios at Yaddo like? Did she know who else would be there?

Jana could have rattled off twenty names—painters, writers, even a composer or two, people she'd met there other summers—but they probably wouldn't have meant anything to Ed, anyway. What he'd really been asking was: did she know what
men
would be there. Yes, there were going to be men at Yaddo too. They might be artists, but they were also men. Natalie had been right: she couldn't run away from men forever.

Ed glanced at his watch: half past twelve. He let his hand cover Jana's. “I wish you'd take a later bus,” he said. “I hate the thought of you getting up at seven o'clock tomorrow, missing all your beauty rest.” He kept stalling, thinking if it got late enough, if she had another drink, if she could just relax …

“I'll be fine.” Jana pulled her hand away and stared down at her wrist. She noticed specks of paint around her cuticles. “Work's more important to me than beauty,” she said, forcing a laugh. “I'm anxious to get to Yaddo and settle in.” She should have left yesterday. She should have avoided seeing Ed tonight. Besides being bored, she was more than likely screwing things up for The Paperworks Space. “I have to get up early,” she said for maybe the tenth time. She moved her chair back, picked up her pocketbook.

Ed smiled, patted her hand again. He insisted upon paying for their drinks and, Jana noted, left a much larger tip than necessary. He walked her slowly back to her apartment, hugged her once again, gave her a quick, amiable peck on the cheek. By this time she was so tired that she made no move to pull away.

She must have only been faking tiredness. The moment Ed was gone, she was feeling very much awake. She lay in the single bed, trying without success to focus her attention on the paintings she wanted to work on this summer. (“What do you need a double bed for?” Natalie had asked when she'd moved into this small but affordable apartment, pointing out that a single bed would give her more workspace. And at the time the decision seemed entirely logical.) Jana shuddered now to think what might have been going through Ed's mind when he'd seen this bed.

She kept thinking how she'd been anxiously looking forward to seeing him tonight, then how her desire faded as soon as he walked in the door. When she was six months old, she'd gotten very sick. The doctor finally diagnosed it as paratyphoid fever, but she got well before the diagnosis could be confirmed. Her parents must have told that story a hundred times during her childhood. Strange to think of that now, yet that experience seemed typical of her relationships with people: she'll pull all sorts of stunts till she can be sure a person cares about her, then once she's won them over she gets up and walks away from them.

You see, it's not only you, she wanted to reassure Ed. You see, it's not only Ed, she wanted to convince herself.

She turned over; half a turn was all she could manage in this bed, it was as bad as those cots they had at camp. So two people could have slept in it, after all—she and Ed, she and that doctor. But she'd been a child, she'd been ten years old and small for her age; in another five weeks she was to enter sixth grade. She closed her eyes and remembered his warmth against her.

DID SHE really think she could go off to Yaddo and immediately devote herself totally to work, the way she had other summers? Jana slept restlessly. The second night she had a nightmare:

She woke from the pain—there was an incredible, burning sensation in her lower stomach. She lay there, knees drawn up to her chest, rubbing, but it seemed to come from inside her stomach wall. She pressed one cold hand against her crotch and maneuvered her legs over the side of the bed. She managed to stand. Now if she could just find the light switch—she'd forgotten how dark nights were in the country. She found a lamp on the table, then almost knocked it over trying to turn it on. She made her way to the closet, wrapped her familiar flannel robe tightly around her, and rushed down the hall to the bathroom. There was too much pain to urinate. She gave up and walked slowly back to her room, groping the wall with one hand to steady herself.

No use going back to sleep now. Jana tossed in the high four-poster bed with its hooks on the sides that had once held a canopy, a reminder that Yaddo used to be a private mansion. Damn Ed and his stories about traveling along the coast of Maine, driving out to the islands. She hoped now he'd had to sleep on a lumpy mattress.

“It's not sex you're afraid of; it's intimacy, affection.” She couldn't get those words out of her mind. If Natalie had said them, she'd be able to brush them off as another catty comment. But it was Marilyn's voice she heard. Jana had called her from Yaddo the afternoon she'd arrived, still confused about her “evening out” with Ed.

“There's nothing unusual about your reaction,” Marilyn began. She went on to explain that many women became momentarily unresponsive whenever they were with a new man. For some women, she said, the tension passed quickly. But not everyone was able to become passionate and emotionally involved even during intercourse; many women kept themselves at a distance for years, lying there dissociated from their bodies. Frigid, Marilyn termed it.

Now Jana was even more confused. She'd been talking about
sitting
with Ed, not
sleeping
with him. Besides, she was emotional, constantly overreacting to little things; she couldn't seem to laugh at herself the way other people could. The prospect of frigidity seemed not only irrelevant, but inconceivable.

“What about the way you froze when he took your hand?” Marilyn asked. The phone went silent. Fragments of other conversations could be heard in the background. “The feeling will pass eventually,” Marilyn repeated, “but I don't want you to be frightened off by it. That's why I'm telling you this. If Ed understands what you're going through, he might be able to help you. But as it is now, he's probably incredibly confused—one minute you're responsive, then a minute later you withdraw. I think you ought to tell him you like him but that you've always had a problem getting close to men.”