Stolen Pleasures (15 page)

She was frightened, called upon to listen with her mother's alertness and comprehension, called upon to reply with Alice's sweet, analytical voice. Why wasn't her mother here, somewhere in the empty apartment, to consider his apology and reply to it? She, the daughter, had no ability to ease him. As long ago as she could recall, she had been honored by her mother with listening privileges; she had been allowed to listen to conversations. Now she was expected to act as an adult and all she could do was complain for herself. “Joe, I don't feel well.”

“It's no wonder,” he said. “No food.”

He tucked in her feet, felt her forehead and discovered a slight fever. He brought her a cup of hot bouillon, a rye and ham sandwich, and a heart of celery, and sat on the sofa by her feet, smiling over the paradox of her eating well and dropping tears into her food. And she felt that she had clumsily, yet deftly, helped him.

“If you don't want to live with your Aunt Vera, don't then,” he told her. “What's her husband, a wholesale auto dealer? Sounds stimulating.”

“I don't want to leave yet,” she said.

“No, I imagine not,” he agreed. “Anyway, a guest house might turn out to be rather disappointing. Sometimes, you know, the test of maturity isn't how well we mingle but how we handle solitude. If you get lonesome here, you can ask a friend to come and stay with you.”

“And will you keep an eye on us, Joe?”

“Honey, honey,” he said, squeezing her blanketed foot. “Do you need to ask me that?”

 

A MONTH WENT by before she asked a friend to stay with her. She preferred in that time to return alone to the still air of the little apartment, to live alone among the articles made by her mother's nimble fingers—the needlepoint cushions, the hooked rugs. On Friday evenings Joe took her to supper and to a concert or an exhibit, and he was all the company she could handle, for her attempt to be the comforting companion that her mother would have urged her to be proved exhausting, and ineffectual. He had sunk into a bitter mood, recalling in detail the times that he might have been more considerate of Alice. When, early in the fifth week, he came by to tell her he could not keep their appointment, she invited Carol to supper for that Friday and during the evening, listening to records, it was always on the tip of her tongue to ask this neat, this darkeyed girl to live with her; but to invite her was to betray Alice and Joe. The following Monday, sitting by Carol in their French class, she extended the invitation out of the clear sky, and on Saturday Carol moved her things in a taxi from the small room she rented in a family house, and Ruth transferred her belongings to her mother's small, sacred bedroom, giving the larger, airier room to her friend.

That evening Joe brought up a delicatessen spread to honor the girl he was to meet, and he complimented Ruth on her choice of a roommate. Carol was reciprocally impressed with him. Her curiosity camouflaged by her wit, she learned that he was an attorney and a scholar, and she engaged him in an evaluation of some of the modern American poets.

Everything—the conversation, the spiced meats and black pumpernickel, the bottle of vin rosé, and the two girls yearning toward him—reminded Ruth of the time when her mother had been
well. Yet somewhere in the midst of it Carol grew quiet and began to watch her. The girl had leaned her elbows on the kitchen table and cupped her flushed face in her hands in order to watch her better, and Ruth was caught as by a camera in an attitude of feverish animation, her thin arms widespread in a fancy gesture.

“Is he a relative?” Carol asked when he was gone.

“Of a sort,” Ruth said.

“Oh?” said Carol, clearing away the plates and glasses.

“He wanted to marry my mother.”

“Why didn't he?”

“He's already married.” She felt pressured by Carol's silence. “His wife and he, they grew apart. I mean, she's a shallow sort of person, likes clothes, likes to compete. But she's dependent upon him, she says she loves him more than life and that she'll kill herself if he leaves her.” But she had never met Joe's wife, and conjuring up an image of her from Joe's complaints made her feel unfair. She had not felt unfair just listening and accepting.

“Was your mother a scholar?”

“A scholar? Well, in a way. But she was sweet!” She had never delineated, never evaluated her mother. The task had never been necessary, even the thought of it, and now at this prompting, it seemed sacrilegious. She had nothing to begin the task with, nothing but her love. “When she used to get dressed up, there wasn't anybody who had more class. She liked nice things. . . .”

“But so does his wife!” Carol said, sparing no one's feelings in her pursuit of logic.

“But my mother didn't care about things like that.”

The elation was gone, it had departed with Joe. They tidied the kitchen, and each went to her own room. Ruth was dismayed by the girl's bright blindness. When, in bed, she opened the French grammar to recite the day's vocabulary, she could not speak aloud. Her voice was gone and it seemed to have left her that moment she had found Carol's inquiring face absorbing and rejecting her. She wondered if she had erred in asking the girl to live with her. Had she brought someone into the house who was smugly, stubbornly ignorant of life? La vie d'amour?

Sunday evening Joe returned, and his anticipation of the girls' attentions softened his mouth, imparted a dancer's aplomb to his heavy body. He brought a bottle of Benedictine, and they carried their glasses to the living room and listened to him describe a day in court. Carol had lost yesterday's enamored air; she listened courteously, for, having accepted the liqueur, she owed him in return an appreciation of his wit. When he left, Ruth accompanied him down in the elevator and walked the block to his car, hanging to his arm.

At the car he said, “Well, I guess you won't be so lonesome anymore.”

“Carol's nice,” she said. “Except a little stuffy.”

“She'll grow up,” he assured her, smiling a narrow, nostalgic smile. He patted her head, resting his hand in her pale curls so that the weight of his hand was the weight of their shared sorrow. After he got into his car, she walked along the sidewalk toward the apartment while he drove slowly along beside her. She could not see him very well in the dark of the big Buick, only his hand waving, and she shivered with wisdom, hugging her arms to her breast.

It was only for a few minutes following his visits that she felt under stress with Carol. After all, why should she expect Carol to be enlivened by his presence to the same degree that she was and her mother had been? At all other times the girls got along well together, and finally, one evening, when Carol commented just after Joe had left, “You know, Ruthie, you're like a century plant? You bloom only when Joe comes by, and then so extravagantly?” the loyalty that bound the girls together, compounded of experiences in which he did not figure, allowed them to laugh together.

 

IN JUNE SHE went with Carol to spend the summer at her friend's house, on a hill below Mount Tamalpais, not quite an hour's drive from the city. They wandered into the eucalyptus grove where the warm air was saturated with the oily fragrance, and they climbed into the dense woods where they picked miner's lettuce and watched hawks soaring in the static sky. But lying on her cot at night, lying in a house her mother had never entered, under the same roof with a family her mother had never met, she had to cough into her pillow to relieve the fear of her separate existence. Not until now was the fact made clear to her that she had been left to her own devices. And sitting at the table with Carol's parents—the slight, gray-haired father who was a postal clerk and the tall, dark-hair mother who was a teacher; with the three young brothers, always fidgeting as if from a tickling to the soles of their feet; and with Carol, wearing her oldest brother's T-shirt, Ruth would remember her mother in the small apartment, and she would be confused by the number of persons around her at the table. They all had the same face, they all had the same name. If Carol had to love so many, was it possible that
the girl had never loved anyone wholeheartedly? Joe and Alice and herself, they knew it was love because they had only one another.

Yearning for him, she lost weight, and she would have returned to the city if he had been there, but he and his wife had left several weeks earlier than the girls and intended to be away until September. She told no one about her eighteenth birthday coming up, but the Sunday after her birthday, Vera and her husband and the two little girls drove up to visit her, bringing gifts. They sat on the veranda with Carol's parents, and someone said that there would be no holding her now that she was eighteen, and she knew they were laughing because the wild mare implication did not fit her at all, a thin, child-size girl in shorts and bra and sneakers, sitting dutifully on a bench to receive her guests, the tan on her skin put there forcibly like a prison pallor.

 

WHEN JOE CAME up to the apartment early in September, a few days after the girls had returned to the city, she reached out her hands to his in an attempt at that almost casual devotion with which fast friends greet each other after a separation, but before she reached him she broke into tears. He walked her over to the sofa and sat beside her, stroking her arm and laughing a little with embarrassment, commenting to Carol, standing by, that this really wasn't the way he had expected a girl of eighteen to act.

He slipped her birthday gift onto her wrist—a heavy silver and turquoise bracelet from Taos—and he unwrapped from the tissue paper two pairs of beaded white moccasins, gave a pair to Carol and placed the other pair in Ruth's lap. She quieted after a time and was able to look at him. His navy blue suit and his tanned skin
made him appear thinner; he was fragrant with some spicy lotion that was the distillation of all the languid, heady pleasures of his summer; and his shirt was white as snow. But her reception of him was dispelling the healthy, end-of-summer equilibrium that he had entered with. He said that in spite of the beauties of New Mexico, in spite of the good living on his friend's ranch, something was missing from his summer, and she saw that his hands were fussing with the tissue paper in his lap. Her upset was contagious.

She glanced at Carol, who was leaning back in her chair with the moccasins on her feet, and their eyes met in spontaneous shame. This reception she was giving Joe, this deluge, was a disparagement, Ruth realized, of Carol's family, of the whole summer spent in the house among the eucalyptus trees. No one, nothing, had taken the edge off her longing to see Joe.

On Friday Joe took her to dinner, as before. Over the veal scallopini he said that his wife had bought herself a “parlor organ” and that he thought it was the silliest cure she had ever tried and entirely at odds with her character. “A piano, she could have taken up piano,” he said. “But something has been nagging at her for an organ. Maybe she's getting pious in her forties, maybe she's atoning for the sin of flimsiness.” He gazed at Ruth.

It seemed to Ruth an admirable thing, learning to play an instrument; she remembered that when she was nine her mother had persuaded her to take up the violin, but after a few lessons she had to give up because she couldn't remember anything, her fingers gripped the instrument with a kind of paralysis. “Isn't it all right, an organ? If she wants one?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, and she saw that he was irritated by her inability to perceive his wife's motives. Any motives.

They ate in silence, his satisfaction with the food and his dissatisfaction with her answer mingling in his face.

“Carol doesn't like me, does she?” he asked.

“She likes you, Joe.”

He snorted softly. Lifting his eyes, portentously large and dark, he said, “Ruthie, you're just like your mother. She was so loyal it broke your heart. If you think I'm hanging around too much, tell me to stay away. If I'm boring you girls by trying to extend the past, please don't coddle me.” Then soothingly he was saying, “All right, no more. I always get self-pitying after a good meal. It keeps my weight down.” And she knew that her eyes were the color of hysteria. He began to talk of the decorations in the restaurant, of the girl cashier. And the rest of the evening, spent wandering about the Museum of Modern Art, he commented on everything, persuading her with his chatter and his constant cupping of her elbow that he was entirely reassured, that he knew she was glad to be with him because he was so lively and so erudite and so dear.

He began visiting, after that, as frequently as he had visited her mother, and she felt that in this effort of his to make amends for the hurt he had dealt her that evening, he was finding release from his mocking self that even her mother had been unable to exorcise.

One evening late in October, he paused in the lobby with her as she was seeing him to his car. “All set for the holidays?” he asked.

Aunt Vera, she said, had invited her and Carol to Thanksgiving Day dinner, and at Christmas she thought she would go up to
Carol's family and make her apologies for being such an unhappy guest in the summer.

“That's fine,” he said. “You don't feel neglected, I bet.” And they flashed smiles at each other. But he paused again out in the entrance where the slick, heavy leaves of the potted plants were bobbing in the moving mist. “Well, that's it,” he said resignedly. “Sigrid's going to New York to spend Christmas with her sister, who's just returned from Europe. I'd been thinking . . . well, this is the first Christmas since Alice left and she'd probably like us to carry on in the old way just once more. We could ask her friends in the next apartment to help decorate the tree and I'd make eggnog for everybody, and then on Christmas Day I'd roast a duckling for us and bake a mince pie. You remember? The only reason I'm thinking this way is that I've made a New Year's resolution already. After the first of the year you won't be seeing so much of me anymore. It's time I snapped out of it, it's time I left. I think that you and Carol ought to move to a sorority house or a dormitory. You need to get away from the place, too.”