Small Changes (15 page)

Now don’t give me the eyebrow. You think it could have been anyone, could have been you. Why not? I’ll tell you why. Sure, you’d have noticed her sailing in. But you would have stood there in a deep study contemplating her, you would have considered her carefully and classified her and analyzed her from across the room. You would have considered the whys and why nots and the ins and the outs and the pros and cons and the whys and wherefores, the economic implications and the eugenic ramifications. You’d have scratched your head and your chest and your left testicle for half an hour. Then by the time you got it together and came sauntering like a hobbled camel across the room, she would have been long gone back to Flatbush on the subway shrugging and reading Henry Miller for kicks. But I am always ready to embrace the possibility—put that in your clay pipe and smoke on it. So if fifty-one in a row are dogs, I have got at last into my long and interesting hands a princess.… Sexually, Jackson, consider it coolly for one moment, if you can leave off drooling. You’re still getting it from the bag in 4B, right? Sexually, a tabula rasa. No experience, no traumas, no shadows, no one has been there before, but also no inhibitions. All that lovely equipment ready to function when you plug in. And she’s mine, Jackson, to mold into a fit companion for one whom J. Singleton Proxmire has called the most promising lyric poet of his age.… All right, the most promising
young
lyric poet. Did you ever
hear of a promising middle-aged poet? Put that in your crapper: The finest slightly senile lyric poet of his generation will speak tonight at the local Y … No, you cannot, you shall not meet her. Not this trip. By and by, amigo, by and by.…

She could not fit together her memories of his apartment that afternoon with what it was like on later visits, when she actually looked around. Her images of that afternoon were too vivid to correct with observation. So forever the walls that afternoon were a pale gold, although on all other visits they were white. She did not look around or pick up the books lying on the coffee table or look at the records by the phonograph. She looked at him. His eyes were the sea. Ultramarine, aquamarine, cold and breaking light, startling against the tan of his face. No one in her family had blue eyes. They seemed to her unnatural set in the flesh, but beautiful. They were changeable too, now blue, now green, glinting like metal. There was texture in his face, gold wires of stubble, old shaving nicks, a scar at the hairline where his falling hair hid it. He said it was from a fight.

The worst moment was when he went to kiss her and she realized he would figure out she was not as experienced as she was pretending to be. She was also afraid he would think she was plain incompetent. So she decided to confess right away, before he decided she was an idiot. She was astonished then to realize he did not believe her.

“Why would I make that up? You confuse me.”

“Oh, to make it special.”

“But how could it not be special to me? I’m not proud of never having anything to do with men. I have to start somewhere.”

“Pigeon, pigeon.” He put his arms around her again. “You’ve picked the right place to start, believe me.”

It was not as complicated as she would have thought, holding and touching, as it would have looked watching the coil of bodies from across the room. She was soon as excited as when she made up the vague but passionate stories, and soon more excited than she had ever been. The nuisance was the clothing, which made it hard to touch, and though it occurred to her quickly that it would be better to take off her clothes, she kept quiet and waited with what patience she
could muster for him to undress her. He did that finally, stopping to kiss her as he uncovered her, and she felt that he seemed pleased. She asked him about contraception and he said he had a condom. Everything seemed to go smoothly until he was lying on her and pushing against her. He tried for a while and he stopped and explored more carefully with his finger.

“You really are a virgin.”

She sat up, exasperated. “I warned you! You can’t just give up now!”

“I’ve lost it,” he said. It took her awhile to understand he meant that his penis was no longer erect. “Oh, my incredible great baby,” he moaned, “You’re so beautiful! I can’t make it, I just can’t stand it!” He laughed and wept at once. Tears rolled out of his eyes as she held him against her breasts. Understanding that he still was not displeased with her, she held him and rocked him and stroked his skin. It was wonderful that she was allowed to touch him, that she was given this male body to hold. He was nowhere as pasty white as her breasts and loins but had a coating of tan every place, though his arms and back and chest and face were bronzed. In height they were exactly matched, so that their bodies fit together face to face, or face to back. His buttocks were small and hard compared to hers, and hair grew abundantly on his chest and belly. He was muttering words she could not make out into her breasts. Cautiously her fingers trailed over the limp little organ drooping against him. “Touch me,” he murmured. He took her hand and closed it over his and showed her how to caress him. Slowly the little worm began to fatten but still it curved and hung on itself until she learned how to take it in her mouth.

She had read a great many stories about women losing their virginities, and she had expected to be somewhat frightened. There seemed always an element of brutality, being torn, thrust open, rent apart. But it became clear to her that her defloration would not be even slightly scary. She was more in charge of it than was Philip. He taught her what to do with her hands and her mouth, but it cost considerable effort and patience to get him to the size and hardness required to enter her. Eventually, however, she heaved and he pushed and they battered their way into penetration. By that time
Phil no longer had a condom, so he withdrew to put it on and promptly lost his erection again.

“Look, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig, darling. Let’s call it off for the day. Tomorrow we’ll continue your lessons, same time, same place. You’re a darling, you’re a real find, you’re a rare and living beauty, Miriam. Will you come back to me tomorrow, from Flatbush and Dreary Farther Brooklyn?”

“I will, I will.” She threw her arms around his neck and they embraced, kneeling on the bed smeared with her blood in a large comma. Phil seemed happy. He put on a record and without deciding to, she got up and began to dance. After watching a moment he came and danced with her. It was new, dancing with another person instead of alone. She enjoyed the dancing more than she had the sex. They danced roles and attitudes, they danced flirtation and fight, they made faces and picked up props to embroider their attitudes—a pillow, a feather, a vase.

“I can play with you!” She held his face between her hands. “We can play together. I’ve never played with anyone.”

“We’ll play a great many games, pigeon, wait and see. I’m as full of games as Santa’s bag.”

He walked her to the subway and, standing outside the turnstyle as she went through to the Seventh Avenue express, he said with sudden gravity, “You will come back? You won’t turn chicken?”

“Oh! No! I tell you, if there were a subway strike tomorrow, I’d walk, I’d roller-skate. But I’ll come back.”

She was born to herself. She had become beautiful and a woman and the Queen of Sheba and Merciful Mary and Holy Aphrodite. The dancing remained good and the sex improved. The last of her pimples vanished. She felt herself walking differently, moving with the joy she had always felt in her secret dancing.

Phil worked evenings tending bar, but they had the days together. Every day during the week when she was supposed to be looking for work, she got up early and went into Manhattan with the paper. She went directly to his apartment and let herself in and climbed into bed with Phil, who would wake up gradually and hug her and cuddle and make up nonsense. Donald, whose apartment Phil was staying in, was at work by
the time she came and did not know she had a key. By the time he came home from work she was gone. Phil’s bed was a studio couch in the living room but sometimes they used Donald’s big bed. He never seemed to notice. In the mornings they made love and talked and told stories.

In the afternoons they went out to play in the city. Never again would she love New York as she did that summer, never would it seem so like a stage setting painted in with bold luminous strokes, such a fair that burned all day and all night with booths of all conceivable games and pleasures. Never before had she lied to her family, though she had always been secretive out of a fear of being mocked, especially by Lionel. But she understood she must protect her relationship with Phil from their scrutiny. Some days she announced she was going to the library to study. In August a friend who made films came through and Phil went off to spend a week with him and someone named Jackson out on the Island. He wanted her to come but instead she got a temporary typing job, to prove to her parents she was looking.

Going to him on the subway, she felt lucid in her joy. He was the right man at the right time. In September she would return to school and probably when she came back to New York he would be gone or he would have another woman. She sensed a lightness in him: he might as easily drift off as stay. He had started school, then he had been drafted and sent to Vietnam. Now he was studying again at N.Y.U. She tried to be quite matter-of-fact about the likelihood of losing him when she left.

They touched on so many changes in each other. She grew with him. He must be shielded from her mother, who would ask immediately what were his prospects. She would wail he was not Jewish, she would point out how unfit he was to be her husband. They would not understand that she did not want a good gray husband with a pay check. She wanted Phil, who made her open wide to sights and sounds and tastes and the feel of things, who made her sensual and beautiful, who made her mind spin and made her laugh and made her adventurous and daring, as before only in fantasy. It was the right time and the right man. Summer was all too short, like fireworks.

“You have no idea how to dress, pigeon. You’re a slob. You dress like a Brooklyn high school social studies teacher,
just like your mother, right? Your idea of getting dressed up is to attach a few rhinestones and put on uncomfortable shoes. Princess, only a poet could have perceived the woman through your Flatbush army uniform. You look so much better when you take your clothes off, it’s ridiculous. However, until the fuzz develop a more enlightened attitude toward beauty naked, we’ll have to put clothes over you in public.”

It was drizzling and drab, a head cold of the air, but they did not mind. Donald had started out for work before the sky clouded over and left his fancy English umbrella that opened by touching a button in the leather handle. “Instant erection,” Phil said. “Machine over man.” He had also left his English raincoat, which would not fit Phil but looked elegant draped over his shoulder or held over his arm carelessly, with the label showing. Phil took her to a boutique, instructing her en route on general strategy and communications.

He found the right dress at once and had her try it on for him. Attended by a saleswoman, he slumped in a chair. “Well, the style is pleasant but the color is dreadful on you.”

The saleswoman tried to assure him that Miriam looked devastating in that dull dark yellow.

“If you care for red Indians,” he said, fixing her with a stare.

Miriam tried on five more dresses. She liked all of them, but she could tell from his eyes that he did not. However, he selected one to try again and to pretend he was deeply considering. In the meantime that yellow dress had been returned to the rack and removed from the rack to his side, under the raincoat. He got up abruptly. “Get dressed, Cecily. That blue number is the only possibility. How late are you open? … We’ll likely be back.”

“Do you want me to put it aside for you?”

“Yes, why don’t you do that?”

The yellow dress was almost backless and made her tan glow. She walked back and forth in the apartment in it. She could not wear a brassiere with it because it would have shown, but somehow it worked anyhow. “I can’t take it home, you know.”

“ ‘You know’ is what I say. Do not pick up my mannerisms. It cloys.”

“Phil, your mannerisms are sticky. Besides, I’m sure you picked up some of them yourself. Don’t be such a thorny prick.”

He laughed. “I can’t push you around. Why not? Why don’t you quail at my frown?”

“I’m too heavy to push around. You can’t lift me either.”

“You’re so sure of me, sometimes I want to kick the shit out of you.”

“Listen to me. I can’t take this dress home.”

“Indeed, I’m sure modeling it for your parents would be a waste of your time. So park it here. Other wonders of the Western world will join it.”

He taught her to wear funky colors and bold colors and cloth with an interesting texture. He taught her to look first at how the cloth lay against her body: how it lay when she stood, when she sat, when she moved. Walking wrapped in his long arm she would catch a glimpse of herself in a store window and be startled. She could have been any age. She looked as she probably would for years, matured and wearing her full body like a flag.

Through Labor Day weekend and early September, a veining of sadness tinted the days. Sonia was putting pressure on her to spend more time at home. She could no longer pretend to be job hunting. Allegra was back in high school and Lionel was teaching full time, but Sonia was home and wanted her there. Sonia was not teaching this year. She was into her psychosomatic illnesses again. She
kretchzed
all day long of fatigue and stomach aches. Kept home by guilt, by pressure, Miriam quarreled with her. Why should Sonia want her around when all they did was fight?

“Let me cut your hair,” Sonia would croon in that husky voice that wanted to wheedle her back to a pliable child again. “At least put it up! But you
should
want to go with us to Winkleman’s, he’s a nice boy. What’s wrong, you’re too stuck up to meet a nice boy? Running out of the house, running down the street like a wild wind, you’re just trying to get away from me!”