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Billy held onto the plate. “I haven’t finished my salad.” Deliberately, he cut a lettuce leaf into geometric forms with his fork.
He is asserting his personality, Gretchen made herself think, to keep from hitting him. It bodes well for his future.
Unable to bear watching his measured game with the lettuce, she got up and took a cup of Jello out of the refrigerator.
“Why’re you so nervous today?” Billy asked. “Jumping around.”
Children and their goddamn intuition, Gretchen thought. Not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of radar do we come. She put the Jello down on the table. “Eat your dessert,” she said, “it’s getting late.”
Billy folded his arms and leaned back. “I told you I don’t like Jello.”
She was tempted to say that he’d eat his Jello or he’d sit there all day. Then she had the dark suspicion that that was exactly what Billy wanted her to say. Was it possible that in that mysterious pool of emotion, love, hate, sensuality, greed, that lay within a child, somehow he knew what her errand uptown was going to be and that in his own instinctive way he was defending himself, defending his father, guarding the unity of the home in which he felt himself, with casual childish arrogance, the center?
“Okay,” she said. “No Jello. Let’s go.”
Billy was a good wi
She was hot and panting as she unlocked the door. She had practically run all the way from the school gates, after depositing Billy. The phone was ringing, but she let it ring as she hurried into the bathroom, stripping off her clothes. She took a warm shower, looked briefly and critically at her body in the long mirror as she stood there, glistening wetly, before she toweled herself off. I could have gone either way, she thought, plump or thin. Thank God I went thin. But not too. My body, the luring, damp house of my soul. She laughed and went naked into the bedroom and took out the diaphragm which she kept hidden under a pile of scarves. Oh, well-used device. She put it in carefully, si
As she touched herself, she remembered the curious flush of desire that had come over her the night before when she had finally gone to bed. The images of the fighters, white and black, that had sickened her while she was in the arena, suddenly became the inspirers of desire, the magnificent, harsh bodies tumbled around her. Sex for a woman was in a demonstrable way an intrusion, a profound invasion of privacy, as was a blow given by one man to another. In the uneasy, early-morning bed, after the disturbing night, the lines crossed, blows became caresses, caresses blows, and she turned, aroused, under the covers. If Willie had come into her bed she would have welcomed him ardently. But Willie was sleeping, on his back, snoring softly from time to time.
She had gotten up and taken a pill to sleep.
During the morning, she had put it all from her mind, the shame of the night covered with the i
She shook her head, opened a drawer full of panties and brassieres. When she thought about it, “panties” seemed a hypocritically i
The phone rang again, persistently, but she ignored it as she dressed. She stared for a moment at the clothes hanging in the closet, then chose a simple, severe blue suit. No advertising the mission. The emergent rosy body better appreciated later for having been concealed before. She brushed her dark hair, straight and long to her shoulders, the broad, low forehead clear, serene, unwrinkled, concealing all betrayals, all doubts.
She couldn’t find a taxi so she took the Eighth Avenue subway uptown, remembering to get on the Queens train that crossed over to the East Side on Fifty-third Street. Persephone, coming from the underground in the flower-time of love.
She got out at the Fifth Avenue exit and walked in the windy autumn sunshine, her demure navy-blue figure reflected in the glitter of shop windows. She wondered how many of the other women she passed were, like her, briefly parading the avenue, drifting cu
She turned east on Fifty-fifth Street, past the entrance of the St. Regis, remembered a wedding party on a summer evening, a white veil, a young lieutenant. There were only a certain number of streets in the city. One could not avoid them all. The echoes of urban geography.
She looked at her watch. Twenty to two. Five full minutes, in which to walk slowly, to arrive cool, controlled.
Colin Burke lived on Fifty-sixth between Madison and Park. Another echo. On that street there had once been a party from which she had turned away. When renting an apartment, a man could not be blamed for not picking through his future lover’s memories before putting down the first month’s rent.
She went into the familiar white vestibule, rang the bell. How many times, on how many afternoons, had she rung that bell? Twenty? Thirty? Sixty? Some day she would make the count.
The buzzer hummed at the doorlatch and she went in and took the small elevator up to the fourth floor.
He was standing at the door, in pajamas and a robe, his feet bare. They kissed briefly, no rush, no rush.
There were breakfast things on the coffee table in the big, disordered living room, and a half-finished cup of coffee, among piles of leatherette-bound scripts. He was a director in the theater and he kept theatrical hours, rarely going to bed before five in the morning.
“Can I give you a cup of coffee?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve just had lunch.”
“Ah, the orderly life,” he said. “So to be envied.” The irony was gentle.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “you can come down and feed Billy a lamb chop. Envy me later.”
Burke had never seen Billy, had never met her husband, or been to their home. She had met him at a luncheon with one of the editors of a magazine for which she did occasional pieces. The idea was that she was to do an article on him, because she had praised a play he had directed. At the luncheon she hadn’t liked him, had thought him cocky, theory ridden, too confident of himself. She hadn’t written the article, but three months later, after several scattered meetings, she had gone to bed with him, out of lust, revenge, boredom, hysteria, indifference, accident … She no longer probed her reasons.
He sipped at his coffee, standing up, watching her over the cup, his dark-gray, eyes tender under thunderous black eyebrows. He was thirty-five years old, a short man, shorter than she (Am I doomed all my life to small men?) but there was a thin intensity about his face, dark-stubbled with beard now, a strained intellectual rigor, an impression of directness and strength, that made one forget his size. In his profession he was used to ordering complex and difficult people about and the look of command was on him. He was moody and sometimes sharply spoken, even to her, tortured by failures in excellence in himself and others, easily scornful, given sometimes to disappearing without a word for weeks at a time. He was divorced and was reputed to be a ladies’ man and in the begi
She was talking about Burke when she had said last night to her brother that she wanted to sleep with one man, not ten. And in fact, since the begi