Marjorie Morningstar (73 page)

“Oh well. You’re right. I can’t walk around forever afraid of a song. Play the damned
thing.”

She turned away, arms folded, and went to the window. The clouds were gone. It was
a glittering starry moonlit night. The buildings were all dark, save for a spot of
yellow window here and there. The moon on the Hudson was very like the moon on the
lake at South Wind. He was playing the waltz. The terrible night came back on her,
as real as the room: the smell of the dewy trees, the splash of the fountain, and
Samson-Aaron on the grass with his mouth open, trickling water from his Palm Beach
suit. She gritted her teeth, faced Noel, and laughed. “Surprisingly, I don’t mind
it after all. Nothing like getting these things out of your system. I believe I’ll
go home.”

He slid his fingers along the keyboard, came to her; he put his arm around her shoulders.
They looked out at the moonlight together. He stared at the sky, craning his neck,
and then pointed at the moon. “Yes, of course, I clean forgot. I think it’s starting.
There’s an eclipse of the moon tonight, the paper said. Look at the left side of that
moon, will you? Isn’t it getting sort of dark red and queer?”

“I thought the moon blacked out in an eclipse,” Marjorie said, peering in awe at the
discolored moon. “I’ve never seen an eclipse of the moon.”

Noel smiled. “It can’t black out. The earth’s air diffuses the sunlight. You just
get a dull red color.”

“Walking encyclopedia,” Marjorie said. “Well, this is the opportunity of a lifetime,
isn’t it? Perfect view, perfect night. Let’s watch the eclipse, by all means.”

“It takes a couple of hours, dear.”

Marjorie laughed. “How long before it’s total, d’you suppose?”

“I don’t know. Quarter, half hour, maybe.”

“Well, why don’t you just go and rewrite your duet? I’ll watch till it’s total, maybe.
If I get bored I’ll go home.”

Noel returned to the piano. For about ten minutes he played fragments of the melody
and scrawled on the pad. Marjorie sat on the arm of a chair, looking out at the eclipse.
The coppery color crawled very slowly across the face of the moon. Now and then she
glanced at Noel. Sometimes she found his eyes on her. She finished her drink and put
down the glass. He stood. “I’ll get you another.”

“Positively not. Eclipse is getting there, all right. I’ll have a cigarette, and then
I’ll go home. And you’re not taking me home, either. I’ll leave you to wrestle with
the muse.”

He brought her a cigarette, lit it, and embraced her waist with one arm. She leaned
against him. They looked at the dulling moon, his cheek against her hair. After a
while he said in a troubled voice, “Pretty slow kind of show, at that, an eclipse
of the moon.”

“It does lack something in the way of entertainment,” Marjorie said, her voice shaking
too.

He turned her around by the shoulders. It was a terrific release to kiss Noel. She
broke away from him long enough to murmur, “It’s been a very very long time, hasn’t
it?” They kissed again, with more passion.

Without a word he went to the hallway, and came back with her coat. “No doubt I’m
being an imbecile, I’m throwing you out. Here’s your coat. I love you. Good night.
See you soon.”

Marjorie slowly smiled, and shrugged. She started to put one arm into a sleeve. Then
the coat was on the floor, and Noel was straining her to him until only her toes touched
the floor. After kissing her furiously on the mouth, the eyes, the ears, the forehead,
he said, “You don’t exactly want me to work, do you?”

She said something, she didn’t know what. He was leading her by the hand to the sofa,
and she was following.

At one point, as they necked—she was quite defenseless against him, and quite without
desire to defend herself—she murmured, “What about the redheaded chorus girl? Isn’t
she all you want?”

He said, “If you mean a kid named Carol, I took her once to dinner with Marsha and
Lou. She’s not quite you, unfortunately. That’s always the trouble.”

Soon they sat up, straightening their disarranged clothes. He took her face in his
hands, kissed her on the mouth, and said huskily, “Well, now, Marjorie, my dear sweet
love, this isn’t what grown people do, is it? You’ve grown up, haven’t you, at long
last? I wonder. I think you have. Have you grown up?”

They stared at each other for a very long time. Marjorie’s gesture at last was not
even a nod; it was a slight, a very slight, ashamed dip of the head. It didn’t seem
to her she willed the movement; it happened. Then she tossed her head and laughed.
“If you really think it’s such a good idea.”

He said, his face flushed and eager, “God knows I’ve always thought so.”

“You devil. You’ve always known I would, too.”

He stood and pulled her up by a hand. When he took a step toward the bedroom she held
back; then she followed him.

Something happened at the bedroom door when he snapped on the light. It might have
been the sight of the bed piled with papers; or of the open bathroom door, with the
toilet beyond; it might have been that the overhead bedroom lights glared after the
indirect glow in the living room, and shocked her eyes. The mood broke. She stood
leaning in the doorway, while he agitatedly cleared away the books, scripts, and papers
on the bed. He seemed comical to her in his excitement, as other men usually did,
even though he was Noel; comical and boyish.

He tumbled the collected stuff in a heap in a chair, and turned to her. His arms dropped
to his sides. “What’s so funny, my love?”

She said, “You, my love.”

He smiled. “The snorting pawing male, eh? Yes, indeed. Well, come on.”

The smile faded from her face. She saw now something she had not noticed for a year
and a half. She saw that his left arm hung crookedly. He held out his arms and came
toward her. She said hurriedly, “Do you have a robe? Let me have it.”

He gave her a yellow-and-red silk robe. She went into the bathroom, and as she closed
the door she heard him kick off his shoes.

She looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door, in the white
glare of the bathroom, and wondered in a vague way whether this girl she saw before
her, Marjorie Morgenstern, this girl in the familiar blue dress with the gray trim,
was really about to take off that dress in a man’s apartment and lose her virginity.
She wondered whether it would hurt. She felt detached, cold, and amused. Her teeth
kept baring in a smile. She took off her shoes and then pulled off the dress over
her head, in the same way she always took it off before going to sleep. Habit was
so strong that she wanted to remove her smeared makeup—what was left of it, after
the necking. But this seemed too cool and methodical a thing to do; no doubt hotel
chambermaids were used to cosmetic smears on bed linen. She wondered how much of her
clothing it was proper to take off. She was quite sure she couldn’t go back naked
to Noel. The question was, what was decently indecent for a girl of twenty-one, doing
this for the first time? She took off her stockings and some of her underclothing.
She kept on her slip, and hugged the robe around her as she combed her hair with his
big black comb. Regretting that she hadn’t brought her purse in with her, she considered
dashing out and getting it, because she really needed powder and a touch of lipstick.
But she was sure Noel would be offended at her appearing and disappearing again. Obviously
she was to emerge, throw herself into his eager arms, and abandon all to love.

The trouble was that she hadn’t the faintest desire to do it. She was, she supposed,
scared; how scared, she wasn’t sure. Mainly she was out of the mood for sex. She couldn’t
have been less in the mood had she been in the middle of baking a cake. She thought
of taking a shower, pleading sudden fatigue, and going home. But in plain fact she
was too embarrassed at the idea of backing out. All her reasonable objections to sleeping
with Noel were gone. If she could have thought of a good argument against it, she
might have come out of the bathroom and argued with him, even at this point, and argued
herself inviolate back into her clothes and out of his apartment. She couldn’t think
of a reason. An appeal to morality was nonsense. She couldn’t say she didn’t love
him; not after her performance on the sofa. Nor could she demand a guarantee of marriage,
having started up with him again of her own accord, knowing full well how he felt,
and what he was.

She knew she shouldn’t have come to the dress rehearsal. She shouldn’t have come to
the hotel suite. She shouldn’t have lingered—this was fatal—after the others had left.
She shouldn’t have responded so readily to the first kiss in a year. She shouldn’t
have used the coy excuse of staying to watch the eclipse. She shouldn’t have gone
to the sofa with him. But she had done these things.

She pictured herself putting her clothes back on, emerging from the bathroom, and
announcing, “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind, dear. I’m going home. Please forgive me.”

It was a temptation. It was much more of a temptation, actually, than getting into
a bed with Noel Airman. She could have forgone that treat with the greatest ease.
But the thought of announcing a change of mind made her feel like a damned fool. She
could do it; but she feared she might actually forfeit Noel forever. He wouldn’t be
likely to forgive such childish inconsistency and whimsey, at this point. He had been
all too patient with her, too long. It might well be the end. She didn’t want an end
with Noel. She wanted him for her husband. The estrangement of a year seemed never
to have existed. Reality was only being with him, with Noel Airman, and life was most
real and most sweet and most true when this lean blond clever man was holding her
and kissing her. That was as certain as the night outside the windows. She had no
other certainty to cling to. All other certainties had faded or eroded away in growing
up; or she had been talked out of them; or she had read books that had disintegrated
them. The certainty that there was anything praiseworthy in virginity had long since
been ridiculed out of her. There was nothing to believe in, except that she loved
Noel and wanted him. If her only chance of getting him was to sleep with him—and Marsha
was right to that extent, things were at that stand between them, and had been for
a year—so be it! She would pass through this tunnel somehow and look for daylight
on the other side. Fighting it off longer was pointless.

She put her hand on the doorknob and saw herself in the mirror, barefoot, her hair
combed loosely to her shoulders, in the ludicrously big man’s robe through which the
pink of her slip peeked. She wrapped the robe close around her and tied the cord.
She stood and stared for a few seconds at the mirror.

She had a race of last thoughts. What had plunged her over the line so suddenly and
so finally? Marsha’s tirade? The theremin, which had given him an excuse to hold her
and hug her, and then to kidnap her from the wedding? The enchantment of
Princess Jones
, the knowledge that it probably would make him rich and well known?

It wasn’t one thing. She had been working toward this moment for two years. She had
been moving toward her first sex act, in this bedroom, in this hotel, with this man,
like an asteroid moving to collide with a comet.

What of her mother, her father? What of Seth? How would it feel after this to go home,
to sleep in a bed in a room in her family’s apartment?

She snapped off the light and opened the door.

At first she could see nothing but a glowing cigarette in the gloom. It made a red
arc in the darkness and went out, and Noel’s voice said, “Hi, darling. I was beginning
to think you’d found a fire escape.”

She went to the bed and sat on the edge. She could see him dimly now in the faint
light from the window. It startled her to see that he wore pajamas. She untied the
robe, threw it off, and got into the bed beside him. It was all very clumsy. Her movements
were hurried, his were uncertain. They poked each other with elbows and knees. They
kissed awkwardly and unsatisfactorily. Then somehow they settled down.

“You love me?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you suppose we’ll ever be married?”

“I don’t know, Marjorie. I just don’t know. If it has to happen, it will.”

“You love me more than you know. You’re going to marry me. You’ll be a wonderful wretch
of a husband, and we’ll be the two happiest people in the world.”

“You think so?”

“I know it.”

“Okay, darling. Maybe you can read fate. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.
That, I know.”

She wanted to kiss him then. For a while it was tender and sweet. There was something
peculiarly pleasant in the comfort and nearness of being undressed. It was not so
much exciting, as cosy and intimate.

Then all changed. It became rough and strange. She was powerless to stop it. She tried
to seem pleasant and loving, but she was very uncomfortable and unhappy. It became
rougher and more awkward. It became horrible. There were shocks, ugly uncoverings,
pain, incredible humiliation, shock, shock, and it was over.

So it was that Marjorie qualified at last to portray true emotion on the stage. Her
age was twenty-one years, four months, and seven days.

Noel said, “All right, darling?”

“Just fine,” she answered, trying not to sound sick.

“The cigarettes are there on the night table. Toss me one, honey.”

She groped on the table. There was a clinking and a crash. Instinctively she reached
for the lamp cord and pulled it. Blinking in the blaze of light, holding the blanket
to her bosom, she saw that she had knocked over a drinking glass. The pieces lay glittering
on the marble top of the table. “Well, that’s fine,” she said. “We’re supposed to
break a glass, aren’t we? Only you should have done it with your heel, I guess. Good
luck, darling.”

His lipstick-smeared face, white and tired, with the hair falling over his forehead,
took on a pained alarmed look. She said hurriedly, “Good Lord, sweetheart, that was
a joke. Smile, for heaven’s sake.”