Necessity

The face, absent the phony glasses and with the wet hair matted down, looks fragile and vulnerable—all eyes and bones and angles as if she’d posed for one of those child-girls on black velvet. Ironic that she looks so young: she is thinking, I don’t feel a day over ninety-three.

There is a hint of haggard gauntness in that image. With a detachment that feels almost academic she wonders how long you can go on living on your nerve endings before you begin to disintegrate.

In the mirror the unmade-up lips are definitely too thin and wide; no rosebud here. She’s always had trouble with the look of her mouth; it took years of experiment to find a proper way to paint it for modeling. It is a big mouth made for smiling; it doesn’t take naturally to the expression that photographers seem to want: distant chill with a contradictory hint of seductiveness. That is one of the reasons (there are others, God knows) why she never became a top model—she only came as near as perhaps the upper section of the second class.

She studies herself with dispassion. What else wants changing?

There’s the gap between the two upper front teeth. He said it was sexy, didn’t he. He didn’t want you to fix it.

Tomorrow she’ll find a dentist and have them bonded to fill in the space.

She leans forward with belligerent challenge and speaks aloud:

“All right. Now who are you?”

20 The young woman in the phone company store has frizzy red hair and brown eyebrows, plump cheeks and a Spanish accent.

“You never had a telephone before?”

“It was in my ex-husband’s name.”

“But if your ex-husband still has a phone—”

“I don’t use his name any more. I want to build up a credit rating on my own.”

“You know, I can sympathize with that. Honestly.

These laws and red tape just step all over a woman, especially that’s, like, gone through a divorce or maybe she’s been widowed or, you know.”

The telephone woman gives her a smile that is startling for its ope

She writes out a check for a whopping payment, still startled by the way the sales clerk keeps calling her Je

She thinks, At least it’s getting me used to being called, you know, like, Je

It reminds her how Bert always insisted on calling her Madeleine. Never a nickname, never the diminutive Matty. Madeleine in full—and he treated you as if you were a fragile porcelain art work.

It’s so easy now to recognize all the clues he left strewn about—how is it possible to have been so unaware for so long?

Something to do with what you’re looking for, she supposes; something to do with what you want from the world.

When she married Bert that was the life she thought she wanted. Fast lane: the designer milieu, the tony friends, the money. Put it crudely then: Bert was on a power trip and you were callow enough to enjoy the ride.

It would have taken a saintly kind of wisdom to turn it down.

Face it, Matty-Madeleine-Je

For sure you weren’t going anyplace else important at the time.

You started with plenty of advantages, didn’t you. A beautiful child with a brain. Parents loving and just—but of the old school. Sometimes painfully embarrassing: remember when you were fourteen and Dad was assigned to cadre at Fort Ord. He’d taken you and Mom down to the Monterey beach that Sunday morning and you’d had lunch in Carmel and cruised some of the art galleries. You were in the eighth grade having trouble with plane geometry and still getting used to wearing a bra and interested in horses more than boys. On the way home that afternoon Dad was telling you about Appaloosa horses and how the Nez Perce Indians in Idaho had developed the breed—he knew a great deal about native Americans and he was convinced there was Indian blood in the family, somewhere vaguely back four or five generations.

Caught up in his Appaloosa discourse he didn’t spot the Highway Patrol cruiser in time.

He made a face and pulled over. She heard the dying cry of the siren. The trooper walked forward with a hand on his holster and stooped to peer into the car. Dad kept both hands on the wheel. When the trooper saw the major’s pips on the shoulders of Dad’s uniform he drew back deferentially and began to put his citation book away but Dad glared sternly at him and said too loudly, “Absolutely right, officer. I had my mind on something else and I was going over the limit. You’ve got me fair and square. Go ahead and write out the ticket. It’ll remind me to keep my eye on the speedometer.”

Painfully obvious that all this was for your benefit. An act to impress you with the importance of honest confession and respect for the law. It was almost comical. Later you and Mom had a laugh over it.

But his performances and his lectures worked, didn’t they. Growing up you had values. You paid attention in all those schools you went to, trailing around to Dad’s stationings in Germany and South Korea and Alaska. You could figure out the square root of a four-figure number; you could dissect a frog; you could recognize a Rembrandt—or an O’Keeffe—and you could hum Bach melodies on key; and there was a time when you could recite Shelley from memory: “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Of course you had to rebel against all that. Why must we all behave with such hackneyed predictability? You came to New York determined to put that staid middle-American goody-two-shoes personality as far behind you as you could leave it: you came determined to kick up your heels like some rustic rube farm girl coming to the big city in the flapper era and discovering speakeasies for the first time. You came in search of excitement and you found it; you came in search of a glamorous career and you found one.

It turned out to be not all that glamorous, really. But don’t they all.

After all, you didn’t abandon your upbringing entirely. You weren’t enough of a rebel; not then. A year or two of mindless diversions—then you found yourself on a date in the Whitney and soon you were going to the ballet at Lincoln Center, listening to good music, reading books again—no longer because it was what you were supposed to do but now because it was what gave you pleasure.

You made friends easily enough. Both men and women. Most of the men were attached or gay. The eligibles were hard to find; some of them were frightened off by your beauty—others by your wit. Mostly they just seemed terribly immature and dull.

There was Sylvan, of course—forty-six and distinguished, a cultivated marvelous man—it was Sylvan who took you to the Whitney—but he was married and not inclined to get a divorce and you couldn’t bring yourself to rationalize being a kept woman.

There was Richard and then there was Chris. Several years apart. The memories now are jumbled: moving in, mingling the furniture—later the break-ups, the bleak sad search for another lonely apartment. And the quest begi