Superior Women (32 page)

They have more drinks; they decide to have dinner in the Inn’s dining room, not many yards away.

In the candlelight, at their small window table, Cathy looks even worse, so that at last Megan is unable not to say, “Cathy, you just don’t look awfully well. You’re okay?”

Cathy gulps at her wine, then quite deliberately she puts down the glass. She does not quite look at Megan as she says, “It’s a slight case of being pregnant, I’m afraid.”

“
Oh.
” Megan in her turn gulps down some more wine. The baked potato on her plate looks suddenly unsightly, all packed with sour cream and chives—and the rare beef looks painted, something unnatural.

“And, as a Catholic,” continues Cathy, in her high, thin voice, “I can’t even consider an abortion. Besides, it’s too late.”

Much more wine will make her drunk, Megan knows, if she doesn’t eat; on the other hand, why not get drunk? She asks, “Do you know what you’re going to do?”

They are sitting next to what has been the same view of meadow and river, the sea, that they saw from their cabin, but now the dark has blotted everything out. If the horses still are there they are invisible. But through the night air, through the just-opened window there comes a heavy sound of waves, pounding the sand. Megan shivers, thinking of so much water, the sea, the cold.

“I’m, uh, going to a place in Colorado, when it’s time,” says Cathy. “People who, uh, place them.”

“Oh, Cathy. Jesus.”

“Precisely.” A wan smile.

Megan then asks, “The friend who gave you the Irish, uh, you still see him?”

“Oh
yes.
”

That emphatic word says almost everything to Megan; saying it, Cathy has looked almost happy.

And so Megan is compelled to ask, “But Cathy, couldn’t you somehow get married, or live together? All of you? Almost everyone can get a divorce these days, somehow.” Tears of earnestness well up in her eyes; she is getting drunk.

Cathy looks at her. “You haven’t guessed what’s wrong?”

“He’s married, I guess. His wife is sick, or crazy? Mrs. Rochester, locked up?”

Oh, if it were only that, is what Cathy’s faint smile implies, as in a high dry voice what she actually says is, “He’s a priest.”

In all her thirty-year life, this is the single most shocking sentence (so far) that Megan has ever heard; her mind balks at it, her imagination stops. She closes her eyes, sees long black skirts, naked male legs. A
priest.

Cathy is saying. “I thought you would have figured that out.”

“No, I would never have thought of a priest. Everything else, but not that. For one thing, I’ve never even met a priest.”

For some reason this last remark strikes both of them, Cathy and Megan, as being extremely funny. In a soft, hysterical way they begin to giggle; they laugh until tears run down their faces.

And that is the sum of the conversation that weekend, between Megan and Cathy on the subject of Cathy’s “friend.” The priest.

By 1960, Megan has been associated with Barbara Blumenthal for just over three years, and she is earning well over five times what she did at the publishing house. She is sometimes dizzy with all the money that she now has; having so much within her reach, such a lot of choices, makes her even greedier, she finds. She
considers the proverbial greed of the very rich, and believes it to be true, even if the
riche
is very
nouveau,
as in her case, and by most standards not really rich at all.

Taking Barbara’s advice, she has put a lot of money into Xerox, but that money only earns more money, giving Megan more choices, more possibilities.

She would like to send money to her parents. She hinted at this, and was roundly, almost angrily, turned down by Florence. And so instead she sends them “things,” coats and dresses for her mother (does Florence wear them? She never says). A stereo.

Megan has discovered, though, one source of financial pleasure so intense that it troubles her, which is the pleasure she derives from handling her bankbooks. She keeps that information meticulously up to date, immaculately accurate: her checking and savings accounts, records of stock transactions. She even keeps track of her cash on hand, the amounts of money in her purse, in two separate drawers in her bedroom. All that adding and counting takes up a lot of time, which Megan
enjoys,
terrifically enjoys, and that enjoyment strikes her as highly suspect. If she heard it described as a habit, a secret pleasure of someone else’s, she would find it repugnant. Obscene.

But on the whole it has worked out extremely well, the association between Megan and Barbara Blumenthal. As never-married Megan has sometimes thought, they are rather like a good marriage; they complement each other, in the way of some married couples. Barbara, although basically a very kind person, tends to be brusque; she can’t help it, she is simply not “good with people.” She is perhaps good only with her husband; she has been married to Norman, a corporation lawyer, since high school, and they seem to get along well. Barbara is at her best with contracts, figures, percentages, whereas Megan can handle money only in a private way.

Megan, on the other hand,
is
good with people, she finds. She is tactful, she manages to make both writers and editors feel sufficiently important and admired. Everyone likes her, which
makes Megan almost as dizzy as being rich does, so unaccustomed is she to anything like large-scale popularity.

“
You
talk to her,” Barbara will say, clutching at her straw-dry blond, uncontrollable hair, gulping smoke from her cigarette: the secretary, paper-thin Leslie DuVal, has just announced that Jane Anne Johns is on the phone, and Jane Anne is
upset.

Soothingly, but with a sound of honesty, Megan will come on the line. “Jane Anne, you’re absolutely right, they did say they’d get back to us this week. I’ll call them the minute we hang up. No, I’m not at all worried that they won’t like it. If they don’t it only means we can go somewhere else with it, and in the long run I’m sure you’ll be much happier.”

And Jane Anne Johns, a Gothic novelist, calms down. She loves to talk to Megan. She is a very nice, now very old woman, with blue rinsed hair and a French château in Miami. She is given to diamonds and orchids and white mink coats. She is a great success. Her novels are consummate trash, a fact Megan tries not to think about; she is thankful that she does not have to read them, she only sells them, serialized, to magazines. Barbara handles the book and movie and TV contracts, and presumably she has read the books, although Megan seriously doubts that she bothers anymore.

“Ah Megan, you’re great,” sighs overweight Barbara, as Megan hangs up the phone—smiling Megan, successful (again) with Jane Anne. “Let’s face it,” Barbara goes on, “how could we pay the rent without Jane Anne? Megan, if you run off and get married I’ll shoot myself,” and she laughs, in her hoarse, barking way.

This is an old joke between them, Barbara’s joke, actually, and Megan has worked it out that Barbara would not make the joke if she, Barbara, thought there were even a chance that Megan would leave her to get married. And, Megan has further concluded, Barbara herself is quite unconscious of her own certainty as to Megan’s matrimonial prospects; she is just making a tired joke and at the same time telling the truth, that she does not want Megan to leave.

But, although there is certainly no one whom Megan wants to marry, Barbara’s assumption is a small needling irritation to Megan;
is she so clearly unmarriageable? She knows better, of course, than to make the old connection between unmarriageable and unattractive. Still. And then it occurs to her that perhaps she is perceived as unmarriageable for the simple reason that she does not wish to marry? She would like to think that this is true, and it sounds quite true, to her.

Leslie, the secretary, does not seem to share Barbara’s cloistered view of Megan, though. She announces phone calls for Megan, when they are from men, with a thin, derisive smile, as though to say, Of course I know what you’re up to, with your friends, even if you never confide in me. Leslie is given to long conversations about her own life. Megan believes that Leslie sees her, Megan, as an essentially nonserious person. And very likely Leslie, who is ambitious, hopes that Megan
will
leave, married or not. In any case, it is with particular derision that Leslie announces, one August afternoon, that a George Wharton is on the line, for Megan.

Incredibly enough, as she later thinks of it, for a moment Megan is not entirely sure who that is. Then, largely from sheer surprise, she gasps into the phone, “Oh,
George,
” in what must have sounded very much like her old tone, with him. She has undoubtedly given an impression of much warmer enthusiasm than in fact she feels, both to George and to her audience, Barbara and Leslie.

She then hears an embarrassed laugh from George, on the other end of the line, and she realizes that it would have been better if she had told the truth: For a minute I didn’t know who you were.

“You sound so, uh, like yourself,” he tells her. “I, uh, got your number from Lavinia.”

“Oh, of course.” And of course it was Lavinia who told Megan a few years back that George’s wife Connie had left him, and that she, Connie, had a crush on Henry Stuyvesant. And Lavinia had further said that George had moved from Mass. General Hospital to Columbia-Presbyterian. And how natural, Megan now thinks, that George should be a friend of Lavinia and Potter’s. Rich people always seem to know each other.

“I don’t suppose, could you possibly, uh, be free for dinner?” George asks.

“Oh, I’d love that. Terrific.” Megan hears her own voice, sounding as she must have sounded fifteen years or so ago, when she so warmly, eagerly rushed out to him; whereas now, as she thinks of it, she would actually much rather stay at home and read manuscripts, as she had planned to do. As she usually does, these days.

“You look a little rattled,” is Barbara’s comment, as Megan leaves the phone.

“Well, it’s just an old friend. Whom I’m not sure I especially want to see. But when I was sixteen I was out of my mind about him. He changed my whole life.”

Barbara laughs, and coughs. “You must have changed quite a lot. That doesn’t even sound like you. Out of your mind, my sane old Meg?”

“I have changed a lot.”

Instead of moving uptown, which with a job in the East Fifties might have seemed more logical, newly prosperous Megan has simply moved downstairs, to a fairly large apartment in her same old building on West 12th Street. She now occupies a long narrow space; “Procrustean, it must be,” Biff has remarked. “It’s making you so thin!” Her living room faces the street; she has a small, rarely used dining room, a kitchen, bath, rear bedroom. The bedroom has of course the view that she has always had, more or less, when she lived upstairs, and partly for that reason, perhaps, she tends to spend most of her time there. Her bedroom is where she works or reads, looking out to the same old fire escape, same trees.

She likes her living room least; it is overcrowded and cluttered, and always a mess. Her fault, of course, but she cannot seem to clear it up, nor can she somehow bring herself to hire someone, a maid, to clean up her messiness. Tonight, though, as she surveys the disordered room in which she will soon receive George Wharton, she feels an annoyance with herself for that foolish scruple: she is
busy, she needs a cleaning person, other people need jobs. Too late, in a frantic way she begins to pile the coffee table’s books and magazines into tidy stacks, to put her records back into their jackets, on their shelf; but it is hopeless.

Hopeless, too, is a decision what to wear. A wool dress, or velvet pants? Her closets now bulge with clothes, shelves of sweaters, rows of shoes. However, standing there in her bedroom after her bath, towel-wrapped, expensively scented, Megan recognizes that she is suddenly no longer a successful working woman. She has been transformed back into a fat young girl from the provinces with all the wrong clothes, and a violent mania for a young man who will never introduce her to his parents, or teach her to sail, or to “clam.”

In an angry, impatient way she snaps herself into some heavy black lace; she pulls up red velvet pants, a red silk shirt, as she thinks, But I look like a flag. A red flag.

The doorbell rings on time, and Megan opens the door to a tall thin gray person, who frowns slightly as he says to her, “Is Megan—?” in a quickly familiar, flat New England voice. He then grins and says, “By God! I wouldn’t have recognized you, you’ve got so, so—”

“Thin?” Megan helps him out. But perhaps he had not meant simply thin? Had he, conceivably, meant beautiful, or rich? Very likely not—just thin.

“Yes, thin,” George tells her. “But you look, uh,
great.
”

In an awkward way they grasp at each other’s arms; their faces bump together in what was probably intended as a kiss.

Stepping back Megan asks, “Well, won’t you have a drink? What can I get you?” Should she have remembered what he drank?

“Uh, how are you fixed for beer?”

Beer is the one thing that Megan does not have. She thinks it is fattening, and also she does not know anyone who drinks beer, certainly not Biff, who is the person most often there for drinks.

But of course, beer is what George always drank, and she along with him, in those Oxford Grill days, although she never really liked it much. Megan would have assumed that beer was a taste that most grown-ups got over; surely George might have taken to
Scotch, or gin? “I’m really sorry,” she lies. “Would you settle for champagne?” That was supposed to be funny, but as she says it she realizes that it was not.

“Actually I never touch the stuff. Could I have a Scotch, if that’s easy?”

“Oh, of course.” Going off for the Scotch, Megan is thinking several things at once: one, that really rich people often don’t like champagne—it’s the originally poor, like herself and Biff, who think it’s a wonderful drink. Or people in B movies. She is also thinking that it is going to be a very difficult evening.

She is more than right about the difficulty of the evening. Over drinks, his Scotch and her sugarless old-fashioned, they first discuss his work at Columbia-Presbyterian. He tells her a couple of grisly medical jokes. Of his colleagues there he says, “A really great bunch of guys.” He tells her about his recent trip to Scotland, with some of those great guys, for salmon fishing and golf; there seems to have been a medical meeting thrown in, somehow. His summer plans include all the weekends he can arrange for on the Cape, where his parents still live, and thrive. “They’re pretty old-timers now but in great shape, and really game. Dad can still outsail me. You met them, didn’t you, uh, back then?”