Marjorie Morningstar (65 page)

“Noel, whatever happened to that Hits theory of yours? Did you ever write it up?”

“If you love me, Margie, no more of that. Every man’s entitled to his fantasies, especially
when he’s fighting off nervous collapse.” He typed for a while, rapidly and smoothly,
then glanced at her. “I want to tell you, though, that while it lasted, I really thought
I’d stumbled on the greatest thing since the Sermon on the Mount…. Sit down, for heaven’s
sake, stop pacing. You give me the willies.”

“I’m just looking at your suite. It’s lovely.”

“Made for sinning in, isn’t it? A pity you’re so virtuous and I’m so busy.” He resumed
his swift rattling at the machine.

When he paused again she said, “I half expect to see Imogene pop out of a closet.”

An extremely startled look passed over his face. He stared at her, ripped the sheet
out of the typewriter and rolled in another, frowning blackly.

“What on earth’s the matter?” Marjorie said.

“You surprise me a bit, that’s all.” His voice was very flat.

“For heaven’s sake, you’re always saying the most outrageous things to me. What makes
you so sensitive, suddenly? All I said—”

“It’s a question of taste, I guess. Forget it, please.” He typed for a few moments,
then turned to her. “It just occurs to me—is it possible you don’t know about Imogene?”

“What about her?”

“Why, it was smeared all over the papers. This was way back in July. Imogene is dead.”

“
Dead!
”

“How is it possible you don’t know? She got involved with some wretched son of a bitch
of a model’s agent, named Weedie, something like that—man in his fifties, with a wife
and four kids in New Rochelle, if you please. She jumped out of a window.”

“My God…”

“It’s true. It was a drunk scene in a hotel room, tears and threats and gallons of
booze, three o’clock in the morning, and Imogene finally went and did what the girls
are always saying they’ll do. Opened the window and dived. This fellow told the cops
he sat in an armchair looking at her, not believing his eyes. Just sat and watched
her disappear.—Imogene, the carefree cow, to whom sex meant no more than a highball.”
He put a hand over his eyes. “You know, I’ve never really thought about it—I mean
as a real thing, Margie—until this second? That poor dumb girl fluttering down past
one window after another, all legs and arms and flapping skirts—” He slammed the typewriter
shut. “I’ll pack later. For God’s sake let’s go down and get a drink and have some
food.”

Neither of them wanted more champagne. They had martinis, and Noel ordered the dinner.
For a while they sat without talking, in a far dim corner of the spacious dining room,
watching well-dressed couples dancing to the sedate Waldorf music. “Tell me something,”
Noel said. “Is the date this evening with Dr. Shapiro?” She paused so long that he
turned and looked at her, nodding. “I see. He isn’t a myth, then. I half thought he
might be. An obscure joke, or a feminine needle, or whatever.”

“Morris is no myth.”

“Do you mind telling me about him? I grant you it’s none of my business.”

Marjorie hesitated. The Imogene story had thrown a pall over her. Noel seemed less
menacing and his charm dimmer; their bygone romance was trivial rather than tragic.
She gave him a matter-of-fact account of Morris Shapiro.

Noel said, staring at his martini, twisting the stem in his long brown fingers, “Sounds
like quite a fellow. Makes me seem a bit lightweight, no doubt, a bit lacking in specific
gravity.”

“Well, you’re as different as day and night, I’ll say that.”

“You sound as though you could fall in love with him, but haven’t yet.”

“You’re getting slightly personal.”

“What’s the difference? How long will any of us live? It’s amazing, Margie, how unimportant
all our hot little maneuvers are. Let’s you and me make a pact. Let’s always speak
truthfully with each other, if our paths do cross once every ten years or so. It’ll
be something to look forward to.”

“I haven’t known Morris too long. One thing’s sure, he’s helped me get over our—our
mess faster than I ever thought I would. I’m not the least bit angry with you any
more.” The martini was loosening her nerves. “If it doesn’t offend you, the fact is
you seem like a friend of college days at this point—dashing, and good-looking, and
all that, but it’s perfectly okay, if you know what I mean.”

“Indeed I do. Clipped claws and drawn fangs.”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“Well, darling, the tubby señoritas in Mexico didn’t do as much for me, I’m sorry
to report. But I don’t mind. You and I did the only sensible thing. Sentimental regret’s
a pleasant enough mood. Wouldn’t you like to dance?”

She said, after they had moved silently among the couples on the floor, “I’d forgotten
how well you dance.”

“It helps to feel you’re holding a flower in your arms, not a girl.”

She sensed a blush rise from her neck to her cheeks. She glanced at her watch. “Don’t
you think we’d better eat our dinner?”

“I’d rather finish the dance and skip a course or the whole damned dinner, if it doesn’t
make too much difference to you.”

“Suit yourself, Noel. It’s your little party.”

He held her hand, walking back to the table when the music ended. “Do you know something?
You’re still Marjorie, for my money. I’m relieved. It does me good to know that last
spring I wasn’t in some queer state over an ordinary West End Avenue prig.”

“You have an unfortunate way of putting things, Noel. ‘An ordinary West End Avenue
prig’…”

“But that’s just what you’re not. You’re a dryad who’s assumed that disguise for some
evil reason. Probably to destroy me.”

The waiter served duck and wild rice, and a red wine. She looked at her watch again.
“What’s happened to the time? It’s after eight. You can’t eat. Your plane’s at nine
and you still haven’t packed. You have to run this minute.”

“I can gobble down a few bites.” He picked up his knife and fork, unhurried.

“Noel, you’ll get indigestion, and you’ll miss your plane.”

He grinned. “Well, time to confess, no doubt. My plane leaves at midnight.”

After the moment of astonishment she didn’t know whether to laugh or get angry. “You
hound, is there a truthful bone in your body?
Are
you taking a plane at all? Are you going to Hollywood?”

“I’m going to Hollywood, all right. And at midnight. Margie, stop beetling your lovely
brows. You’re getting to an age where you have to start thinking about the lines in
your face. Hell’s bells, you looked like such a scared rabbit when I first got into
the cab with you, I thought it would reassure you to say I was leaving town at nine.
It wasn’t a lie. I was shading the truth by three hours. Isn’t it better this way?
We can take our time.” He sipped the wine. “Try your burgundy. It’s superb.”

Marjorie said, “At exactly twenty minutes to nine I am getting up and leaving this
table. Just remember that.”

As they ate, he told her about restaurants in Mexico City; about palatial hotels in
primitive mountain country, which served vintage wines and the choicest food. He set
her giggling and shivering with stories of a maniacal multimillionaire from Oklahoma,
with whom he and the sculptor had roared around the countryside in a black Cadillac
limousine for a week, living like princes.

The musicians took their places again, and began to play
Old Moon Face
. Marjorie and Noel looked at each other; Marjorie pointed to her watch. “Too late.
Twenty-three to nine.”

Noel said, “Woman, you practically wrote this song. Your spirit guided my hand.”

“I don’t see myself getting any royalties.”

“Dance with me, and I’ll split them with you.”

She laughed.

The song had been giving Marjorie chills for months. Now, dancing to it with Noel,
there was only a pleasant floating languor. The light in the room was a strange dusty
pink. She closed her eyes. The music modulated to
It’s Raining Kisses
. “That’s getting to be the standard arrangement,” he said. “The Airman medley.”

After a moment Marjorie murmured, “Thank God they don’t know the
South Wind Waltz
too.”

“Margie, it was all fun, wasn’t it? Even South Wind?”

“It was fun, Noel.”

“There always has to be an admission price, you know. Except you pay when you get
out, the way they do on the Mexican busses. I think we got out cheap.”

“I’m not complaining.”

“Marge, I hope you’ll be the happiest woman in New York, or the suburbs, or wherever.
I won’t forget you. I have no regrets, except that I’m made a bit too crooked for
you. And that’s an old story.”

To break the welling of tears to her eyes she said, “I must leave.”

It was seven minutes of nine when he kissed her cheek and put her in the cab. “Have
fun in Hollywood,” she managed to say as the cab drove off.

Not thinking clearly, she went home and changed her clothes. Then she had trouble
getting another cab; she had to walk to Broadway. Then the cab scraped fenders with
a truck, halfway to the hospital, and ten more minutes elapsed while the drivers argued
and exchanged license numbers. It was five minutes to ten when she arrived at the
hospital. She met Morris Shapiro in the lobby; he was walking out in his overcoat,
and the gray hat which always looked too round and too big. His shoulders were stooped.
“Morris!”

He glanced at her. “Oh, hello.”

“Good Lord, were you leaving here without me? Standing me up?”

“I thought something had happened and you weren’t coming. It was quite all right,
but—”

“Morris, I phoned two hours ago. Didn’t you get my message?”

“What message? No. No message. What’s the difference? I was going to a movie. Want
to come? Or do something else?”

“I swear to God I telephoned, Morris. That new idiot on the switchboard—I’ll strangle
her—I left a message—”

He said very little in the cab. He answered her questions about the party pleasantly
and he brushed aside her apologies. They went to a garish Hawaiian-decorated grill
near the Waldorf. After they had danced a couple of lifeless dances and were sitting
and smoking at the table, Morris said, “Marjorie, were you with Noel, by any chance?”

Stunned, she nodded.

He smiled wearily. “Talk about your extrasensory perception. I thought so, somehow.
It’s perfectly all right.”

Then she explained: the unexpected meeting, the miscalculations of time, the taxi
accident. He kept nodding. “Morris, it did me good, meeting him. I’d never have planned
it, you know that. I’d have hung up if he’d telephoned. But it did me good. I realized
for the first time how cured I really am.”

“That’s nice. You’re tired though, aren’t you? You seem tired.”

“Well, a bit. But I’m having fun.”

“Well, so am I. We’ll have another drink and a dance before we go.”

She tried to put more zest into her dancing. But he really was a dull dancer, and
as luck would have it the orchestra played a long set of rumbas, at which he was especially
clumsy.

So Dr. Shapiro took Marjorie home early that night.

She quit her hospital job a couple of weeks later, having saved nearly a hundred dollars.
Dr. Shapiro had not asked her to lunch or called her since the night of the party;
and while she was rather humiliated by this, she was also rather relieved. He was
cordial when he happened to meet her in the corridors; and, encountering her as she
was leaving the admitting office for the last time, he said goodbye cordially.

The engagements and marriages of her college friends, girl cousins, and temple acquaintances
went on and on. The attractive ones were nearly all married, and now the less attractive
ones were going. Several of the girls had babies. A few like Rosalind Boehm had two;
Rosalind herself was pregnant with a third. Rosalind seemed as remote in time and
in attitude now, when Marjorie accidentally met her waddling bulkily in a shop or
on the street, as a grandparent. Rosalind had a little smile of secret amusement in
these encounters which greatly annoyed Marjorie. Since when, she thought, was a pretty
girl not much past twenty-one a pitiable freak? Rosalind, barely twenty-three, was
the freak, with her big stomach, big behind, sagging bosom, and busy contented air
of a woman of forty, as she juggled bundles.

The arrival of each engraved invitation touched off a fresh dirge by Mrs. Morgenstern
over Morris Shapiro. Marjorie endured a bitter siege. She couldn’t say that she had
lost any hope of falling in love with the doctor, and that he had been wise enough
to sense it and to drop her. There were no words for conveying this kind of information
from a daughter to a mother. She was quite willing to concede that she was unworthy
of Morris Shapiro, that he was better than a thousand Noel Airmans, that she should
consider herself lucky to polish the shoes and mend the shirts of such a wonderful
man. It was all true. What did it matter? Her heart had closed.

She had a multitude of dates, mostly to avoid evenings at home. She kept herself busy
by taking roles with non-paying theatre groups. She even went back to her old friends,
the Vagabond Players at the YMHA, and scored a real hit as Nora in
A Doll’s House
; but the experience was rather depressing than otherwise, even when she was bowing
to the loud applause. The auditorium, the stage, the very curtain seemed to have shrunk,
like a scene of her childhood. Romances bloomed and aborted all winter, as she rehearsed
with one set of young actors or another. More than once she cold-bloodedly thought
about having an affair. The handsome young drifters of the theatre fringe kept assuring
her that no woman who was a virgin could possibly portray true emotion on the stage.
She half believed it. But none of these fellows really tempted her; they seemed hollow
toy men, after Morris Shapiro. In vain they lured her to their shabby little apartments,
gave her cheap rye whiskey, dimmed the lights, read poetry aloud, and played slushy
music on the phonograph. Marjorie fended them off, yawning.