Only Cold Gerry, deep inside, knew how austere and cool and disciplined was the life led between these walls, painted contrasting shades of chartreuse and dark green... beside the lucite coffee table with its gleaming copper, and the ivy which twined up the piece of driftwood Gerry had brought back from the Cape one summer.
The beige rug matched the two beige chairs and the deep, inviting sofa. And in Gerry’s small bedroom the fiercely feminine simplicity and delicacy of the lampshade beside her single bed would have warned any man of real sensitivity that Gerry was a devoted spinster and there was no Bachelor Girl in her anywhere.
“Cold Gerry” was her own term for herself in a self-protective mood. It had grown into an affectionate term. “Warm Gerry” was affectionate, too. Because that was the side the world knew and admired, and it was Warm Gerry who had the men clustered about her at office parties.
In all her experience, Gerry Massingham met only three men who did not have the typical reaction of pain, desperation, sulks and vanity-saving flippancy at the end. Their names were Clarke Trowbridge, Dr. Immanuel Fein and Joe McAllister.
Warm Gerry had felt drawn to Clarke first of all because of the way his damp, dust-colored hair fell over his forehead. He stammered slightly when he was excited or deeply moved and music could make him practically speechless. Holding Gerry’s hand at a concert he would quiver with intensity when the music swept into some intricacy which he, she knew from his feverish, long bursts of confidence, was always trying to reach in his own work.
“Maybe I’m too eager,” he said, sitting in the little cellar restaurant on the last night she ever went out with him. “But something in me says I’m licked before I get there. Look, Gerry — the themes are all around me. They pop out of nowhere. And I can hear the development of them. But when I get to staff paper... the flatness of it; the coldness of it... would you like another Martini, Gerry? I’d like one. Have another to keep me company, Gerry. Please do.”
Gerry had another Martini and her face in the candlelight kept its gentle little smile of sympathy; her eyes, which were a brilliant blue, now looked smoky grey in the yellow light of the candle.
Clarke swept his hair back from his eyes and drank down the Martini in a gulp.
“You’re going to get drunk, Clarke,” Gerry said, Warm Gerry speaking with the sweet, husky voice. She knew that candlelight threw the bones of her face into exquisite shadows and she knew that the darkness of her hair had golden highlights in it. She saw in the drawn face of Clarke Trowbridge how enchanting she seemed to him. And she felt guilty inside, for Cold Gerry reminded her that she was not enchanting, not at all in the way men wanted, not really, deep inside.
Cold Gerry often told Warm Gerry that she was a fraud. But there was little real animosity between the two Gerrys. One got her the eye-worship she needed to feel comfortable and the other defended her fortress of resolution and the life she had laid out for herself. Cold Gerry, that is, had laid it out years ago.
Clarke wiped his hair out of his eyes again. “Gerry — let’s get out of here. That sonata tonight — you see, that is sort of what I’m trying to do. And while Braunstein is playing I make believe that I’ve written it. And I can hear one of my own themes going in and out of it. Then the applause at the end comes for me, sort of. That’s how I pretend. Do you understand, Gerry?”
Her smile was warm.
When she opened the door of the apartment her gloved finger found the light switch and there it was, waiting for her, her fortress — the contrasting walls, the lucite table. And in the darkness of the bedroom was the chaste single bed and the lamp with its virginal, alabaster-like shade.
Clarke sank onto one end of the sofa and Gerry pulled up the big Venetian blind which hid the kitchenette side of the living room. She broke out ice cubes and silently poured gin and vermouth into the mixer, twirling it with a bar spoon. Clarke watched her. She was tall, with lovely shoulders and narrow hips, in her black skirt and snowy, low-cut blouse. She set the glass before him and poured. A small one for herself, said Cold Gerry, smiling deep inside.
She knew that Clarke was working up to demanding.
She took the chair with the high arms. Cold Gerry had chosen it, thinking, “They’ll try to scoop you out of it like a clam from its shell. Between its high arms you are safe, able to think and say the things you have to say at such times, Gerry. You’ll be able to block their selfishness in such a chair; it’s like a fortress around you.”
Now Clarke reached for the Martini mixer and filled his glass again. “Gerry...” They always begin with your name, in tormented tones. “Gerry... you must see, you must know... I’m so devilish clumsy with words. I mean, I need a catalyst. In my work, I mean. I know if you married me now you’d still have to work. For a while. But Gerry — I won’t go on teaching harmony to kids all my life. I’ll write stuff and get it performed. You’ll see. I need you, not just for my music, but... just for my life. I just... just need you. So bad.”
“Maybe what you really need is another Martini and then to go home and get a good night’s rest.” Gerry crushed the tiny olive against the roof of her mouth with her tongue. “I’ve told you, Clarke, that I’m not a marrying woman.”
“But you love me, Gerry. You wouldn’t see me so often if you didn’t.”
This was it. He was sitting on the floor now, rubbing his cheek against the fabric of her skirt where it was stretched tight over her thigh. He slid his hands between her and the high arms of the chair, clutching her. Gerry let her free hand float over his head and come to rest on the back of his neck. “I’m afraid I’ve given you the wrong ideas, Clarke,” Cold Gerry said, speaking still with Warm Gerry’s voice. “Really, I’m not such a nice person if you get to know me.”
Clarke’s mouth drew into the familiar lines of desperation. “Get to know you! Gerry — remember the time the stadium concert was rained out and we ducked into a doorway? Remember how you kissed me then? Gerry... have you forgotten that I’ve kissed you... touched you...?”
He scrambled awkwardly to his feet and gripped her hands. She lay back in the chair; his feet slipped as he tugged, drawing her to her feet. This time when his lips found hers the insistence of his mouth met the mouth of Cold Gerry, sweet, cool, remote, smiling a little at the corners.
She did not draw away from his hands. Instead, she stood like a statue of Diana, lovely and unattainable, and watched the sweat streak its way down his gaunt temple.
“Gerry — my God, don’t you realize what this does to a man?”
“You’d better go now, Clarke.” Cold Gerry spoke in her own voice, with no interference from that dazzling, melting, bitch-in-heat Warm Gerry. “No, Clarke, you mustn’t misunderstand me. There is no room in my life for sex. I decided long ago that I must go one way or the other. If I gave in I would end in the gutter. I have my own standards. And nothing you say or do can change me in the least.” She drew breath and went on more softly, “Please go now.”
The words sounded archaic, out of the past generation, as if they came from an old play.
He was on his knees now before her, pressing against her, and she found it necessary to disengage his hands and push him away abruptly. She was waiting for the sulks and then the face-saving attempt to be very Noel Coward, very sophisticated, very sporting. Instead he disintegrated. Cold Gerry stepped back in disgust. The thing on the beige rug was a sickening infant.
“Please leave, Clarke!” she said sharply.
Now he was sitting, his hands before his face, sitting with his long legs spread out like a child in a sand pile.