When We Argued All Night (18 page)

The man on the train platform looked at her with frank laughter, as if to say, Look at us, touching when we don't know each other! and Brenda was surprised too. She laughed back, feeling her mouth open wide and her big teeth protrude—Brenda was appalled at the size of her teeth—though her knee hurt and it was hard to walk. Her hands were dirty from landing on the platform.

Brenda had been in love four times, twice with teachers—both women—once with the man who supervised her work in the college bursar's office during her freshman year, and once with a boy in high school who didn't like her. She had never been touched by someone she was in love with except inadvertently. She'd dated and kissed boys in high school but didn't like it when they touched her. So she had little experience of the welcome, deliberate touch of a man's hand. This man said, Take your time, and Brenda felt something like an expanding balloon in her chest. Together, they started up the stairs to the street.

—Don't you have to go to work? she said.

—I work odd hours. His jacket was clean and somehow fragrant, even in the subway. My name is Douglas, he said. Where are you heading?

—A couple of blocks from here, Brenda said. The company she worked for supplied clothing manufacturers with buttons and hardware, such as hooks and eyes and snaps, but Brenda rarely saw the objects themselves except in storefronts in the neighborhood, where there were many such companies. She dealt with pieces of paper.

She thought she could manage on her own after a minute, but she liked climbing the grimy stairs with Douglas, in pain but not agony, looking down at chewing gum wrappers. He might be dangerous: he wasn't hurrying to work, and he used a full first name by itself. She thought a normal person would have said either
I'm Doug
or
I'm Douglas X
—but she was interested in putting herself in possible danger, figuring she'd escape just in time, waiting to watch herself do that.

When they reached the street, Douglas said she should rest her knee, and they went into a luncheonette and ordered coffee. Brenda watched herself curiously, as if she were watching a movie. He offered her a cigarette and she took it. He said, Are you a student?

Douglas said he tutored people applying for citizenship. I make it easier, he said. Papers. He didn't have a foreign accent, but his speech seemed slightly formal, and he said he'd come to this country from China as a baby. She began talking about her classes, and he asked intelligent questions. After an hour, he said, I think we should go to my apartment.

It was as if the decision was already made. The apartment was a block away, in the opposite direction from the office. Again, Douglas supported Brenda on the stairs. She followed his lead. Inside, without discussion, he removed her clothing, one piece at a time, led her to a clean bed, and kissed her cheek. He helped her onto the bed and began stroking and rubbing parts of her body vigorously, and then at last he undressed, turned aside to put something on his penis, and entered her. She had never done it before. She had tried to imagine it. How did the penis fit? The penis felt big. Brenda didn't go to work. Maybe she never would. In some tentative way, she was pleased with herself.

Douglas believed in good behavior, though she was pretty sure that whatever work he did involved illegalities. The second day, when they met in the same coffee shop, Douglas bought her coffee but then insisted she had to go to work.

—That's stupid, they'll fire me.

—Maybe not.

—Why not? I didn't even phone them yesterday, and now I'll be late.

—Tell them you got hurt. You were at the hospital all day.

—What about today?

—It will be better that you're late, he said, and gave his abrupt laugh again. They'll know you do things your own way. He had a light voice that rose and fell in pitch. She was disappointed, but she needed the money. He walked her to work, and Brenda went upstairs and was not fired. The people weren't interested enough to fire her. She was glad to be meeting Douglas later: he'd want to know what had happened. The woman in charge of her shrugged, and Brenda got back to work. She was not smart enough to be a math major, but she was a genius at Volkman Trimmings, and that was her only trait there: she was the girl who could add in her head.

She sat before the pile of bills—larger than it would have been yesterday and thus less boring. Her vagina was interestingly sore. She had been a virgin and now she wasn't one. She had allowed her clothes to be taken off in the apartment of a man she had known for an hour. He had not killed her, or seemed to dislike her thick, straight body. It saddened Brenda to recognize in herself something like a wish to be killed, something that had made this encounter possible. But she was pleased as well—eager to know what would happen next.

The boy she'd loved in high school was straightforward and pleasant, and they'd been in honors classes together term after term. When she realized she loved him, she made herself noticeable by starting arguments with him in class. Once she made a class laugh at him, correcting his misconception about the Egyptian seizure of the Suez Canal. She thought he might seek her out for more argument later, but he avoided her.

That day Douglas asked if she'd like to look at pornography with him. The magazine he showed her was stupid. In her fantasies, men asked her to do strange things, but nothing like what she saw in the magazines, which mostly concerned what women wore, tightness and fullness and hidden or exposed body parts. She planned what she'd say—how she'd get out of his apartment—if he asked her to wear something like that. They went to bed as before. He didn't ask. He didn't hold or hug her, and his kisses on her mouth were mild bites. But his firm touch was kind, and this time she felt pleasure.

Several weeks passed. Sometimes Brenda visited Douglas during her lunch hour, thinking she'd go back to work. His eyes lit up with humor. He often held his long, narrow hands up and out, as if to prove they were empty. Usually she didn't go back to work. When she left Douglas's apartment alive and unharmed (everything in her upbringing would have suggested this was unlikely), she found herself nodding briskly on the stairs, and she noted that she nodded the same way when, once again, she arrived at work after an unexplained absence and nobody cared, something else she'd been raised to think was impossible.

It was a hot summer, and in the dead air of the city Brenda was loose, adult. She held herself upright, straighter than usual, as if something inside might tip and spill. One afternoon she argued with Douglas. It was about a plant in his bedroom. She demanded to know why he didn't put it near a window, where it would get sunlight, though Brenda knew nothing about growing plants.

He took her to bed and said politely, Do you think you might like me to give you a little spanking, just because you are such a bad girl for arguing with me about the plant?

Brenda sat up quickly. I don't think so, she said. She was confused and troubled, partly because she thought she might indeed like Douglas to give her a little spanking, but she could never admit that that was so. She dressed and, when he apologized, assured him that she wasn't offended and would come the next day.

When she arrived at work the next morning, her supervisor said, Never mind, just go to the office and they'll pay you what they owe you. After that, Brenda had no reason to be in that neighborhood and, belatedly, she didn't want to be. She told her family the trimming company didn't need her anymore. Douglas had known her last name, but she hadn't told him her father's name or where they lived, so he couldn't look her up in the phone book unless he was prepared to speak to many Saltzmans and Salzmans.

W
ith three weeks until school was to begin, Brenda spent a few days at home, restless and bored, alone all day. Carol had a babysitting job. Now the city felt intolerable. She thought of the cabin in the Adirondacks, where she hadn't been for years. She knew she'd feel better if she could be somewhere where she could think, and she asked her father if he thought Harold would let her go to the cabin for a few days.

—All by yourself? he said. What do you know about a place like that? There are things you have to know. The stove.

—I might call him, she said.

—He has no time for us! Harold was busy, she knew that. The last time he'd been in the house, he'd explained the book he wanted to write. But she didn't need his time. It took a few days to work up the courage to phone him. She imagined herself telling him the story of Douglas, gratefully accepting his inevitable disapproval and careful advice—but she wouldn't do that.

Brenda felt worse about the breakup with Douglas than she expected to, better about her lost virginity and how little she had to give to lose it. He always used condoms, and she had just had a period, so that was all right. What seemed most remarkable was the size and unmanageability of the person she had discovered herself to be—her recklessness—as if she'd planned to be a dog or a cat and found that she'd become a rhinoceros.

She didn't know when she'd find Harold at home, and she didn't want to talk to Myra. At last, one evening, she went for a walk after supper and phoned his number from a pay phone. Harold answered, and she asked if she could use the cabin for a few days—if nobody else was there. Maybe there was some painting or cleaning he wanted done?

He paused. Nobody's there, he said slowly. My father-in-law was there, but he's gone. But how will you get there? Do you have your license?

She had her license, but her father would never lend her his car. She would take the bus to Schroon Lake, she said, buy groceries, and find someone she could pay to drive her to the cabin and come back for her when it was time to leave. I bet there's a taxi service, she said confidently.

—The phone in the cabin is connected, Harold said. If something goes wrong, call me. She realized he was hesitant not because he thought she'd harm the cabin but because she herself might come to harm, and she almost cried.

Brenda arrived in Schroon Lake late in the afternoon, and it took several hours to find someone who'd drive her to the cabin. Before inquiring, she'd bought groceries, so she walked up and down the main street several times, her suitcase in one hand and her bag of groceries in the other, before the man in the liquor store offered to drive her when he closed up shop. He wouldn't take money. By the time she arrived, it was dark and her bag of groceries was damp from her sweaty arm.

—You're sure the lights work? the man said. I'll wait while you try the lights. She knew where the key was hidden, in a crevice in the stone foundation, in a Band-Aid box. The lights worked, and she heard the man's car as he returned to the main road, the sound diminishing down the long driveway.

She put down what she was carrying and looked around. She hadn't been to the cabin for eight or nine years. There had been improvements, of which she disapproved. The old pine boards had been covered with highly varnished paneling, still smelling of newness. But she could still take in the real smell of the place: chill, mustiness, the woods. She heard the lake slap the shore. She crossed the screened porch, opened the door to the swirl of moths, and tried to make her way to the lake in the cold darkness. She returned for the flashlight, found it in its old place next to the sink, and succeeded. At the lake, she turned the light off. She was cold and hungry. She could scarcely believe she was there, and through her own efforts. She heard katydids: it was late summer, but they were still sounding three syllables. The solid arcs of the mountains were visible against the sky until the half moon went behind a cloud. She saw a few stars, but many clouds. She crouched on the damp shore.

Surrounded by mountains, she let herself know what she felt. In the dark, as she hugged her bare arms, her detailed and unready self took its place like a giant puppet in the air, hurrying into an adulthood for which she seemed to have had no preparation. Brenda had managed childhood, even the weeks when her father lost his job, by means of a slightly stupefied steadiness. She was intelligent, but her intelligence felt slow-moving, clumsy, easy to put aside. She did what was necessary, did not ask much of herself, taught herself not to notice the effect on others of what she did, and had told herself that was all right because she was a child. She understood, crouching—then sitting—on the damp ground, that she had believed there was only so much harm she could do to others or to herself, just
because
she was a child. She couldn't help her father but couldn't hurt him either.

Now she understood that she could do harm. Worse, part of her wanted to do harm, sought harm and punishment and shame, as if only those exercises could sufficiently explain or respond to events and people as they were. Thinking about the summer that had just passed, Brenda didn't sense in herself the capacity to choose, or even to know, whether she would do harm—to herself or to others—or not. She might have destroyed her parents' lives by being murdered in Douglas's bed. She might have insulted Harold when she phoned, turned him against her forever; it was as likely as the pleasant exchange that had taken place. For a long time she sat on the cold shore of the lake in the dark like an exile, growing colder and colder in her sleeveless city blouse, thinking the same series of thoughts about herself, hoping to come to a different end. She was immense: dangerous. It was exciting; it was terrible. At last her mind moved to another topic, and she stood awkwardly—that knee was still a little sore—and stumbled into the cabin to heat a can of soup, open a beer, smoke a cigarette.

5

H
arold had figured out that what Jews were good for was saying what others wouldn't say, and he continued to hold that view even though when Myra said she was in love, sitting on her canvas chair in her sunglasses, looking not at him but at the glittering lake—which took in all news and still looked serene—Harold quickly said, Well, that's not a conversation I feel like having! Gathering his belongings, he returned to the cabin, though he was the talkative Jew and she was not. He blustered through the rooms, making noise that caused Nelson—asleep on the living room couch—to stir. Then he went back outside and down to the shore, where the shimmer of heat was already dizzying. Is it Gus Maloney? he said.