“What are you crying for? “Walt said. “What’s the matter?”
Tony bit her lip, tried to stop. Then she shook her head and sobbed.
“Look, I’m happy you’re a virgin. I am. There’s no reason to cry.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. Just stop.”
Tony hid her face behind her hands.
“Want me to get you something? A washrag?”
“I’ll be O.K.” She took a deep breath. Another. Finally, she dropped her hands. “There. See? Done.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. Forget it.” She glanced toward the window. “Maybe it was the rain.”
Walt watched it come down.
“It won’t happen again. I swear. Sometimes it just does and then I get so disappointed in myself. I’m not a baby. Don’t ever disappoint me, Walt.”
“I won’t.”
Tony shook her head. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “Sometimes my life, it’s like a Genet play. Here I am, naked and crying, and there you are, in my nightgown. Take it off. Please.”
Walt took it off.
“I’m tired, Walt. Are you tired?”
“Dead.”
“Let’s go to sleep then, huh?”
“Let’s.”
They walked into the bedroom.
“No promises this time,” Tony said. “You don’t have to promise a thing. I’m too tired to fight you off. But you said you loved me—”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you love me, you won’t touch me.”
“I love you.”
“Then don’t disappoint me. I’m yours, Walt, but if you love me you’ll leave me alone.”
“Ordinarily I’d ravage you, but I’m probably too tired to do a good job.”
“Just remember, I didn’t make you promise anything. We’ve passed that stage, you and I.”
“Yes.”
They got into bed, turned out the light.
“I don’t ever think I’ve been this tired,” Tony said.
He kissed her lightly. “Sleep.”
“Yes.”
“ ’Night.”
“Walt?”
“What?”
“One thing? You hurt me. Something you said. When you called me a castrator. I’m not. You see that now, don’t you?”
“I was mad. Sometimes you say crazy things when you get that way. I’m sorry. I am.”
“Walt?” Her voice was very soft.
“What?”
“Can I sleep in your arms?”
He reached out, held her gently, kissed her forehead. In a moment she was asleep, her naked body warm against his. Walt looked at her. Then he smiled and closed his eyes. Soon he was breathing deeply. Hey, he thought just before he slept. Hey, I won. What do you know about that?
XX
“CHARLEY’S SLEEPING WITH HIS secretary,” Betty Jane said to Penny Whitsell. They were sitting in the bedroom of Penny’s apartment in Peter Cooper Village. It was two weeks before Christmas and Betty Jane had been shopping, successfully for her son and husband, not so for her baby daughter, now six months old.
Penny sighed, picking up her tweezers and her magnifying mirror, zeroing in on the bridge of her nose. “Obviously,” she said.
Betty Jane looked at her for a long time. Then, very softly she said, “Will you please stop playing with the bridge of your nose and explain?”
“You know very well I am compulsive about the fact that my eyebrows almost meet and Charley has all the symptoms. Remember last winter you were preg and it was snowing and I was out to your place and you three all frolicked in the snow like gazelles? Well, whenever Ferd that bastard cheated on me, the next time we’d sleep together he’d always bite me to prove his passion. I began feeling like a midnight snack. Ferd’s biting, Charley’s frolicking: same thing. Dammy!” She pulled a hair from the bridge of her nose.
“Penny, Charley’s having—”
“Swing. Have one too. Listen, when Ferd first started, I almost fell apart. Then I realized: what’s so great about a junior executive at Gimbels? Plenty of fish, right? Well, after that, whenever Ferd screwed around, little Penny went fishing. Smartest thing I ever did. Try it.”
“But you got divorced.” She could not keep her hands still.
“Yeah, but that was basically because we disliked each other. We were too competitive; promiscuity had nothing to do with it.”
“I love Charley.”
“Prove it.”
“I love him, I love him, please, please, I do,” and she turned away, starting to rise, starting to cry.
Penny reached out for her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “B.J. B.J. I didn’t want you to get upset. You know how it upsets me when you get upset and I figured if I played it cool you might too. Sit down, B.J. Please.”
Betty Jane sat silently down on the bed.
“Here.” Penny held out a handkerchief.
Betty Jane shook her head, stopped crying. “I just don’t know,” she said then. “I just feel so bad.”
“Is she cute?”
“Built is the word, I think.”
“How long have you known?”
“Year. More maybe.”
Penny whistled.
“I didn’t know exactly. I just knew something. He was working late and ...” She shrugged.
“And what have you done?”
“Nothing.”
“Why?”
Betty Jane shrugged again. “What could I do?”
“Kill him, kill her, leave him, threaten to leave him—”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“I’d be afraid to.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Charley might let me go. I’m not right for him. I don’t really make him happy, you know that.”
“Oh, B.J.—”
“I’m too stupid for Charley.”
“Oh, crap.” I am.
Penny lit a cigarette, then put it out. “You’re not stupid. That’s a game you and Charley play. You say you’re stupid and he says you’re not, but he says it in such a way as to make you think he thinks you are. It’s easier to blame it on stupidity than on the truth.” Penny smiled. “Oh, baby, you’re not stupid. I couldn’t love you if you were. Stupid men, yes, but I loathe stupid women. Stupidity, that’s just an excuse you two use. Every marriage needs an excuse in case things don’t go well. You remember that afternoon in Schrafft’s, when we first met Charley?”
“Of course I remember it. What about it?”
“You smiled at him.”
“I did not either smile.” Betty Jane held the Schrafft’s menu in front of her face.
“You did too smile, Betty Jane Bunnel.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
“Not.”
“Too—look out, look out, he’s coming over.” Penny brought her own Schrafft’s menu up in front of her face. “We’re gonna get in trouble and it’s all your fault because you smiled at him.”
“Hush,” Betty Jane whispered. “He’s terribly nice-looking.”
The terribly nice-looking man stopped in front of their table. “Are you rich?” he said.
Betty Jane stared straight at the menu.
“You smiled at me,” the man said.
“You smiled at me first,” Betty Jane said.
“In either case,” the man said, “are you rich?”
“I’m well off,” Betty Jane answered. “My parents are.”
“Don’t talk to him he might have escaped from someplace,” Penny whispered.
“Just so you’re not rich. My name is Charley Fiske and I am drunk.”
“I’m Betty Jane Bunnel.” She put the menu down.
“You told him,” Penny said.
Betty Jane kicked her.
“You kicked me,” Penny said.
“I just broke a very expensive vase,” Charley said. “I was having br
unch on a terrace looking at the East River. There were many drinks. If I were sober, would you see me?”
Betty Jane looked at him. “Yes.”
“I think you both just escaped from someplace,” Penny said.
“You’re very pretty, aren’t you?” Charley said.
Betty Jane shrugged. “I guess so. If you say I am.”
“I have never seen anyone as pretty as you. Tonight would you see me?”
Betty Jane nodded, looking at him.
“Well, why don’t you both hit the sack right here?” Penny said.
“Shut up,” Betty Jane said.
Charley smiled. “Six o’clock? You’ll be alone?”
“I promise.”
“And we’ll just walk? I have no money.”
“We’ll walk.”
“I’ll meet you here. Don’t change your mind.”
“Don’t even think that. Why are you smiling?”
“Because I met you and I’m happy,” Charley said. “And because I don’t do things like this.”
“Neither do I,” Betty Jane said. She watched him walk away. When he was gone she slumped back in her chair and looked at Penny. “That’s the most romantic thing. Ever. In all my life. Don’t you think?”
“Romantic with a capital R,” Penny said, squinting at her magnifying mirror, plucking with her tweezers at the bridge of her nose. “But do you know what I hoped, that night when I left you alone to meet him at a few minutes before six? And a few weeks later, when I watched you all in white walking down the aisle?”
“What did you hope?”
“That you’d neither of you ever have to go to the bathroom,” Penny said.
Betty Jane hesitated a moment, the jar of cold cream in her hands. Then she said to Charley, “I was thinking.”
Charley looked at her from the bed. “What about?”
“Going to night school. They have these marvelous night-school courses. Do you think I ought to go to night school?”
“I don’t know, honey; what for?”
“Oh, no reason. But it isn’t expensive or anything. It’s not really actually a formal night school I’m talking about. What it is is a bunch of the wives get together and they pay some expert to lecture to them once a week on whatever they want to learn about. You can take a course in art or music or even sculpture, if you want. The teachers are very good so they say. Real experts—graduate students from Princeton, or some of them come all the way from New York. I was thinking I might take a literature. Books and like that. Novels.”
“Are you going to put on that cold cream or aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. I was just trying to make up my mind.”
“Well, hurry up and make it; I’m tired.”
Betty Jane started putting on her cold cream. “I can take any kind of literature course I want, practically. I think I’d learn a lot. Everybody says about how much you learn.”
“Well, if you feel it’s important.”
“Oh, I don’t care really; it’s just an idea. I mean, I’ve never been to night school or anything since junior college.”
“Do what you want, honey.”
“There’s no telling what I might do,” Betty Jane said.
Shivering in the January night, Betty Jane sat in her car and watched the other ladies arrive. She had got to the grammar school early, which was silly of her, and so she sat, waiting as the other cars drove into the teachers’ parking lot, and the other ladies got out and entered the school. Betty Jane lit a cigarette. She was, she knew, terribly nervous, and she hoped the teacher would let her alone on this, her first night in class, and not ask her anything. She remembered how, when she was a child, she had averted her eyes whenever the teachers asked a question, whether she knew the answer or not. I feel like I’m back in school again, Betty Jane thought, and then she realized how silly she was, because she was back in school again, night school now. If I can only do well, she thought. She had always liked books, so there wasn’t any reason for her not to do well, and, besides, having Charley to help her was almost like having a teacher in your very own home.
But of course she couldn’t ask him to help her. That would be bad. She must do it all herself, master the books, and then Charley would be proud, and if she became a really marvelous reader, maybe she could even help him out sometime when his work load got too heavy. Maybe she might even take a manuscript without his knowing and read it and then tell him what she thought of it and maybe he would agree with her and then afterward, maybe, he might even give her one or two manuscripts to read when he felt he needed help.
It was possible. But don’t you count on it, she told herself. Don’t you go and ruin everything by counting on it. Betty Jane got out of the car, hoping she didn’t have a run in her stockings. Runs rattled her; she was never at her best when her stockings ran, so she checked and double checked and they were both just as straight and perfect as you could want, so she nodded and pressed down the eight crevices between her gloved fingers and marched into grammar school. The novel class met in room 121. Betty Jane said it aloud.
“One twenty-one.”
Moving in the proper direction, she gave her stockings another check, removed her gloves, stuffed them quickly into her purse, reached the room. Taking off her coat, Betty Jane straightened her skirt and walked in.
Eleven ladies sat in little desks with arm rests. All eleven turned to look at her and she smiled and scurried to the farthest back seat in the corner.
“Move up, please.”
Betty Jane looked at the teacher. He was tall and kind of handsome in a youngish sort of way.
“My throat isn’t all it might be tonight. Come down front, Miss ...”
“Fiske, Mrs.”
“Sanders, Mr.”
Betty Jane heard the class laughing as she moved down to the front of the room, being very careful not to run her stockings.
“That was a laugh at your expense, Mrs. Fiske; I’m sorry.”
Mr. Sanders opened a book and leaned against the blackboard. “All right, ladies; now I’m sure we’ve all read The Sound and the Fury.”
Oh dear, oh dear, Betty Jane thought; I’ve always meant to read that book. If only I had. If only I had.
“Why is it called The Sound and the Fury, Mrs. Lauderdale?”
“Why is it called The Sound and the Fury?” Mrs. Lauderdale said.
“Mrs. Lauderdale, in the future would you please try not to repeat all of my questions back to me?”
“That’s a habit of mine,” Mrs. Lauderdale explained. “It gives me a little extra time to think.”
“That’s certainly very canny of you, Mrs. Lauderdale. Well?”
“I don’t know why it’s called The Sound and the Fury.”
“I do,” another lady said.
“Wonderful, Mrs. Bond. Why?”
“It’s a quotation.”
“And the source?”
Mrs. Bond snapped her fingers softly several times. “I knew it a minute ago.”
“You tell us, Mrs. Fiske.”
“I don’t know,” Betty Jane said.
“I’ll give you a hint. Whenever anyone asks the source of a quotation, answer either Shakespeare or the Bible and you’ll do fine.”
“The Bible,” Betty Jane said.
“Tsk, tsk, Mrs. Fiske,” Mr. Sanders said, and the class laughed at the rhyme. “I apologize again.”
“That’s all right,” Betty Jane said, but she could have killed him.
“Note this, ladies: the quote is from Macbeth, and the gist of it is that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Oh, I knew that, Betty Jane thought. What’s the matter with me?
“What did you think of the book, Mrs. Fiske?”
“I didn’t read it.”
“Why?”
“This is my first time here.”
“All right, Mrs. Oliver. What did you think?”
“It was crazy. I read the sta
rt and it was crazy. That Faulkner writes like a moron if you ask me and besides I don’t like Southern writers, they’re all the time so pessimistic and dirty.”
“It was written by a moron, Mrs. Oliver, Benjy is a moron. Remember the quote? A tale told by an idiot? Apt?”
“I couldn’t say. I didn’t read it.”
“Who did read it?” Mr. Sanders wondered.
“I meant to,” Mrs. Bond said.
“Close only counts in horseshoes, Mrs. Bond. None of you read it, I see. Ladies, I’m miffed. Shame on you all. Mrs. Fiske has an excuse, but the rest of you ...” He shook his head.
“I want to talk about J. D. Salinger,” Mrs. Lauderdale said. “My husband and I had a big fight about J. D. Salinger.”
“Your husband said she was pregnant and you said she wasn’t,” Mr. Sanders said.
Mrs. Lauderdale looked at him. “That’s absolutely right.”
Mr. Sanders sighed.
“Who’s pregnant?” Betty Jane asked.
“Branny,” Mr. Sanders said.
Oh, now, I meant to read that too, Betty Jane thought.
“Do you like Salinger, Mrs. Fiske?”
You shouldn’t ask me questions, Betty Jane thought. This is my first time and it isn’t fair. “I don’t know ... I guess ... yes—well, not so much. If you ask me everybody sounds the same.”
“Many critics feel he writes the best dialogue since Hemingway but you say all his characters sound the same, is that right?”
Betty Jane stared at the desk top where someone had scratched “Peter is a Fink!” and she heard the class laughing at her and she almost said “They all do talk the same my husband says so too and he’s smarter than all of you put together.” But she didn’t.
What was it she had thought a few minutes ago? Something about mastering the class on her own? How silly. She was stupid and that was all there was to it and what was she doing anyway, sitting in a room talking about books? The only apt thing was the school child’s desk and she opened her purse, feeling around for her nail file, and when the point of it found her fingertip, quick tears came to her eyes. Or maybe the tears were there already, what did it matter? Sneaking the file out, Betty Jane stared up at the teacher, who was busy now, in animated conversation with the other ladies, talking all about was Franny pregnant. Betty Jane kept her eyes on the teacher, and she began scratching her initials in the desk top.