“That’s what he says now.” Jeanne smiled. “You’re such a soft touch, Polly. You went to see Jacky Herbert full of perfectly natural suspicions, and you came home sorry for him. It sounds as if he completely snowed you.”
Polly didn’t want to be sidetracked into another discussion of whether she was in danger of being “seduced” by the men she had to interview. “My instinct is, Jacky’s telling me more of the truth,” she said. “But where’s the proof? Mrs. Skelly sounded so sincere, and she gave me a great tea, smoked-salmon sandwiches and the most amazing brandied fruitcake. But somehow I didn’t believe a word she said.”
“If you know what you think already, why ask me?” Jeanne said teasingly, spooning home-ground coffee into a paper filter.
“I don’t know, though. I’ve been worrying about it all morning.”
“I can see that.” Jeanne smiled. “But you really mustn’t let yourself become obsessive about this project.” She scuffed across the kitchen in the runover black ballet slippers she still wore in tribute to early ambitions as a dancer. Even now she continually took up and dropped classes in aerobics, “dancercise,” “expressive movement,” and yoga. “It’s only a book, after all.”
“I’m not obsessive; it’s just that I want it to be absolutely first-rate,” Polly said.
“And I’m sure it will be.” Jeanne sifted instant oatmeal into a pan of boiling water. “Now, what do you plan to do today? I’ve got to occupy myself somehow, or I’ll just sit and brood about what’s happening in that house in Brooklyn Heights.”
“Today’s the day, then?”
“That’s right.” Jeanne laughed nervously. Betsy’s showdown with her husband had already been put off twice, first because of his bad cold, and then because of a crisis at the computer company where he worked. The idea had come to Polly that Betsy was stalling, but she hadn’t said this to Jeanne. “I promised not to call, but I’m meeting her for supper at six; it should be all over by then.”
“That’s good.”
“Anyhow, don’t wait up for me.” Jeanne smiled as if in anticipation, then frowned slightly. “At least I hope it will be all over. Of course I know Betsy hasn’t any more feeling for that creep, apart from a sort of distant pity. But I still can’t bear the idea that she’s living in the same house with him. I’m a very jealous person, you know,” she added rather proudly.
“Really?” Polly asked, doubting this.
“I’ve been that way since I was tiny,” Jeanne continued from the stove, where the kettle was boiling. “More coffee?”
“Okay, sure.”
“I remember in fourth grade I was in love with a little girl named Eileen,” Jeanne went on. “She had maple-brown hair, just as shiny as if it had been varnished, and huge golden-green eyes. The awful thing was, Eileen didn’t love me. She liked me all right, but I just wasn’t important to her, and I knew it. I was in agony.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, I got her to agree that we should be best friends; I begged and insisted. But I was still jealous. I knew that if I had to stay home sick for two days Eileen would let someone else be her best friend; all they’d have to do was ask.” Jeanne put two bowls of oatmeal with cream and raisins on the table and sat down opposite Polly. “We used to play this game at recess, out behind the school,” she said. “We’d join hands in a circle, and one girl would stand in the center, and the rest or us would dance around her, and we would sing:
Sally, Sally Waters,
Sitting in a saucer,
Rise, Sally, rise.
Bow to the east,
Bow to the west,
Kiss the one you love the best.”
Jeanne’s voice rose in the tune, thin but pure. “Then the girl in the center would choose someone else to be It next. Of course I always chose Eileen. You were supposed to kiss them on the cheek, but I’d get as close to her mouth as I dared, even partly on it, pretending it was sort of a mistake. When anyone else picked Eileen I’d watch them furiously. If I thought they gave her a real kiss, I wanted to kill them. I imagined doing it in different ways; or sometimes I imagined a truck running over them in the parochial school driveway, and their blood being squeezed out over the blacktop, like an oil slick.”
“Really?” Polly said, adding brown sugar to her oatmeal. “Kids’ imaginations are violent, aren’t they?”
“I didn’t know what it all meant then. I couldn’t have explained that I was in love. That’s one of the dreadful things about being a child: you feel everything just as strongly, but you don’t have a name for it.”
“I know what you mean,” Polly said. “It can be awful.” What she saw was not a playground, but a booth in a coffee shop in Mamaroneck, and her father’s face turned away from her toward friends who had just joined them.
“You always understand.” Jeanne smiled, then sighed. “Well, anyhow. I thought after breakfast we might walk across the park, it seems to be a nice morning. And I told Ida and Cathy we might stop in. Then of course there’s that new film in the Women Directors series downtown at two. What do you think?”
“You go, if you like,” Polly said. “I have to transcribe two more interviews.” She stood up.
“Not on Sunday, surely?”
“I do, though. I’ve got to review them before I go to Wellfleet tomorrow; they could be important.” Polly sat down at her desk and turned on the tape. “There are a lot of assholes and climbers in the art world,” it said in a self-assertive female voice, hardly proving Polly’s point.
“But it’s only ten thirty. You have all the time in the world.”
“Nobody has all the time in the world,” Polly said stubbornly. She swung her chair around and typed the sentence they had just heard.
“Good heavens. You know that’s simply a manner of speaking. What’s the matter with you today?”
“Nothing’s the matter with me,” Polly protested, wondering why she was so out of humor. “I’m concerned about my book, that’s all.” She heard how pompous this sounded, and added: “I’ll tell you what. You go and see Ida and Cathy this morning, and I’ll meet you all afterward at the film.”
“Don’t you want to see Ida and Cathy?” Jeanne asked.
“Sure I do,” Polly said, though in fact she was sometimes uncomfortable when she was with Jeanne’s friends and noticed that everyone else present was gay. “I just haven’t got the time today.”
“But they invited you, too. If you don’t come, they’ll think it’s, well, rather strange.”
“They’ll think I’m working, that’s all.”
“Well, maybe.” Jeanne’s mild, caressing manner had begun to fray slightly. “But they’ll think you’re working, you know, on purpose. They’re already not sure you really like them.”
“I like them all right,” Polly said; in fact she cared less for Ida and Cathy than for Jeanne’s other friends.
“They feel you as a rather hostile presence, you know. Ida especially.”
“Why should they feel that, for God’s sake?” Polly shoved the typewriter back and set her elbows square on the desk. “I’ve always been perfectly nice to them. I’m not a hostile presence.”
“I know. But that’s how they feel.”
Polly almost groaned. “If they think I’m hostile, they should be glad I’m not coming.”
“Yes, but if you came, they wouldn’t —”
“Anyhow, the question is academic,” Polly interrupted, remembering too late that Jeanne was an academic. “I’m not leaving this room till I get these interviews typed. I keep having this fantasy of Lorin Jones, how she’s waiting for me to start writing.”
“Really?” Now Jeanne smiled indulgently; she was in favor of all sorts of visionary experience.
“Yes. I imagine her standing somewhere up to her knees in moving gray and white clouds, like one of her own pictures, with all her long dark hair blowing around, looking down at me, wondering why I’m not getting on with it faster. Sometimes she gives me a little wave.”