“Clever,” he said, moving toward me, eyes atwinkle. Both eyes atwinkle. Both beady eyes atwinkle. “I like women with something in their heads, you know. I like clever women.”
“Do you really?”
“I’ve always admired you, Jan.”
Then he kissed me. I didn’t discourage this. Quite the reverse, I guess. I opened my mouth and wrapped my arms around him, and he, the cute little rascal, stuck his tongue in my mouth.
We clung like that for what I think was a rather long time, neither separating nor quite managing to spill ourselves onto the bed, where we could have had a choice of fucking on Marcie’s silver-blue mink or Lenore’s beaver. Instead we just clung, and he groped me a little, and then we broke apart, both of us a trifle breathless.
“Jan,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know, Edgar. Maybe we ought to go join the party.”
“We’re the party, doll.”
“I just don’t know about all this, Edgar.”
“I’m crazy about you, Jan.”
“Oh, and Marcie’s my friend and all—”
“Marcie doesn’t understand me. I’m really crazy about you, Jan.”
It was the talk that decided it. I just wasn’t stoned enough to handle that dialogue. He was crazy about me and his wife didn’t understand him. Bullshit, she explained. No, at that very moment Edgar made my decision for me. We were not going to have an affair.
But we did have a little genteel struggle. We did roll around on top of Marcie’s mink, and he did sort of lie on top of me and agitate his hips in a not unfamiliar motion, and I could feel his penis rubbing against me through his pants, and did, if the truth be known, handle it a little. It was large enough to impress me favorably, but not so monstrous as to be desirable in and of itself, separate and distinct from its owner.
And he did put a hand under my dress and a finger where one puts fingers, and we did rock and roll a bit in harmony, and ultimately he quivered and stiffened and said something actionable about loving me, and then relaxed, which I took to mean that he had come in his pants. So I guess we had what we in my lamented youth used to call a dry fuck. It wasn’t much fun now, but then it hadn’t been much fun then, either.
Edgar rolled off me, found his breath again, and put his hand back under my skirt and said something gallant about making me come. I said something about letting me go instead, which I guess was fine with him. I went to the bathroom and washed up, feeling a little like Lady Macbeth. All the perfumes of Arabia—
There were no kicks with Edgar. The kicks came back with the others, feeling a little soberer now but remedying that with a fresh drink, and fitting myself back again into the inane conversation, and looking around the room and thinking to myself that I had a secret from all these wonderful people. I know something you don’t know — do kids still chant that? Their parents do.
It felt good, having the secret. For about the same reasons it does when you’re a kid.
But then a thought came to me and almost knocked me over. Because, just as a little earlier I had wondered how many of my good friends and true had smoked pot at one time or another and now pretended it had never happened, well, I found myself wondering how many of the women had necked with Edgar. Or with Howard. And just who had slept with whom, and if anyone was currently sleeping with whom, and—
See? No major revelation. Just a new way of looking at things.
It seems as though I keep coming up with new ways of looking at things and I still have only the same old things to look at.
I don’t particularly remember the last half hour or so of the party. Neither did Howie. One of us drove us both home — probably him, because I think I was higher than he was for a change. And we went to sleep. The next day was Sunday, and instead of a football game there was a basketball game, and I called out for a pizza for dinner, and we watched some shows on television and went to sleep early.
Monday was today. Today, that is, is Monday. And it started with yet another snowstorm, which piled new snow on the old snow and new snow on the few places Howie had shoveled. We made the trip to the train station before too much of the white garbage came down but by late morning the driveway was socked in fairly solid again. Not that I had anyplace to go.
Quit stalling. Get to the point.
But this is the point, or part of it. I was sitting around thinking that I couldn’t go anywhere, and thinking that I had no place to go, and thinking, finally, that this was what it all added up to, that I was free and white, and twenty-nine and had no place to go. And that it was going to go on like this forever.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
I mean, I hadn’t originally planned a life of nothingness. It was never my idea. I don’t suppose it ever is, is it? Life has a strange way of happening to people. I don’t know many people who, at about this time of life, thirty or so, are doing what they originally set out to be doing. Doctors and lawyers, yes — but people who had vague ideas and who went to college and drifted through it and then got a job and quit it and got another. Or girls, in particular. We wanted so much not to be mere housewives that even now we join discussion groups and take evening courses and do all sorts of things to convince ourselves we are not mere housewives, and when all is said and done that’s precisely what we are, and the dumb little games we play only prove it.
I just went down the hall for some coffee. They have a row of machines, coffee and cigarettes and candy and soft drinks and ice. A person could stay here forever if she didn’t run out of quarters. I think I need the coffee.
He came to the door at a quarter after one. When I opened the door I looked at him and thought it was the bag-carrier from the Pathmark. Looked nothing like him on second glance, but even I can see the implications. You don’t need a psych degree. He was tall and rangy with a shock of once-combed black hair and the healthily stupid (or stupidly healthy) face that athletes have at Midwestern colleges. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. He was holding an aluminum snow shovel over his shoulder, so I should have been able to figure it out, but the old mind wasn’t working all that well.
He said, “Shovel your walk, ma’am?”
I absolutely hate being called ma’am. As must everyone.
“Oh,” I said, cleverly. “Oh, yes, that would be good.”
“Walk and driveway?”
“Yes.”
“And I guess the path to the front door?”
“Yes, fine.”
“Right,” he said. He was wearing a sheepskin jacket with the hood thrown back. No gloves. His hands were quite large. Designed for gripping a football or basketball. Or a breast.
“Well,” I said, and he turned to begin the job, and I started to close the door. Then something occurred to me. I had forgotten to settle a price.
“It’s ten dollars,” he said.
“It’s that much?”
“That’s the going rate, ma’am.”
“Oh. Well, I guess that’s all right, then.” It seemed exorbitant, and none the less so because it was the going rate, but one learns to rely on order in an ever-changing world. I seemed to remember boys shoveling paths and walks and much longer driveways than ours for just a dollar. But everything else had gone up, and my memories were of longer ago than I cared to realize. I wonder, now that I think about it, how much he could have demanded without my objecting? Twenty dollars? A hundred? The keys to the car? What?
I went inside, I closed the door. And, between cups of instant coffee and half-smoked cigarettes, I kept finding myself sneaking to the window to watch him. At first I honestly didn’t realize what I was doing. Then I did, but that didn’t make it easier to stop it. Au contraire, mon cher.