“What’s the matter, kitten?”
“I don’t know.”
“How was school?”
“Fine.”
“You’re happy there? Because you can always transfer, you know.”
“Daddy.”
He looked at her, and for a moment her face was twelve years old again.
“Go on, kitten.”
“I just don’t know,” she said, miserably.
“Anyway you want.”
“I can’t decide whether to be nice or honest.”
“Which would you rather someone were to you?”
“Honest, but it might not be the same if I was a parent.”
“I was a kid once.”
“You were, weren’t you?” She patted her pockets, asked for a cigarette. He gave her one and lit it for her. Two years ago he had seen her smoking for the first time, and she had acted as if she had been puffing cigarettes all her life.
She said, “I had it all worked out in my mind. I would come down here and be Little Mary Sunshine for a couple of days and everything would be cool, but I don’t want to play games with you. I can put on an act with Mother and Gregory because I’ve been doing it for years, but not with you.”
“You don’t have to, kitten.”
“I know I don’t, but do I have to lay a whole trip on you? That’s the question.” She worked on the cigarette in silence. Then she said, “I didn’t do too well in school.”
“Exams didn’t go very well?”
“Next week is exam week, Daddy.”
“I see. Of course you’ve decided not to go back.”
“I couldn’t pass them anyway. No, you might as well have the whole thing. Then we can play out some shitty scene and I’ll get on a bus in the morning. I dropped out of school—I don’t know, three months ago? Something like that. Sometime after the start of the semester. I had just had it with that place.”
“But you weren’t in New York all that time. Unless you had mail forwarded—”
“No,. I was in Evanston.”
“They let you stay in the dorm?”
“I wasn’t in the dorm.”
“Oh.”
“I was in this sort of commune off campus. Not exactly a commune, we called it that but it wasn’t a real commune. Just a house in town that somebody rented and a bunch of us were living there.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, I think so. You dropped out and you were shacking up with a guy and experimenting with drugs and you want to feed me this a spoonful at a time because you’re afraid it will shock me.”
“Just grass, if you call that a drug. There were other things around but we stayed away from them.”
“I’m just as glad to hear that.”
“And I wasn’t exactly living with a guy. We weren’t into a monogamy thing. So you could say I was shacking up with four guys, if you wanted to use that term.”
“Well, one term’s as good as the next.”
“I suppose so. You are shocked, aren’t you?”
He made a fresh drink. Before answering the question aloud he tried to answer it in his own mind. He said, “I am, but probably not in precisely the way you think. I wonder how I can explain it. When I called to you and you looked at me with your face beaming I held out my arms to you. I don’t know if you noticed. And I realize now that I expected you to fly across the gravel and throw yourself into my arms the way you did years ago. But of course you didn’t because you’re—I was going to say a woman, and I’m not sure that’s accurate. It doesn’t matter. You’re an older girl than the one who would run crazily and leap at me. I’m your father, Karen, and that means for the rest of my life I’ll always tend to remember you as a child and I’ll always tend to think of you as younger than you actually are. So I am shocked, but not because I disapprove of anything you’ve done. I may disapprove of it and I may not but that’s beside the point. I’m shocked because you’ve changed and of course it would be infinitely worse if you hadn’t changed, but nevertheless it takes getting used to. Did you follow any of that?”
“I think so.”
“I can’t judge you, kitten. I only see you on special occasions. Perhaps your mother can judge you, and I’m by no means sure of that, but I can’t.”
“I wouldn’t have told her any of this.”
“That’s something else again.”
“I went to New York for an abortion. No, I’m all right, there was nothing to it. I was pregnant and I had the money and I took care of it, and I’m fine. I didn’t| feel bad about the abortion. All I feel bad about is getting pregnant in the first place.”
“There are ways to avoid it, you know.”
“I know, but the Pill only works if you remember to take it.” She grinned suddenly. “From now on I’ll remember.”
“That’s a good idea. All right, if there’s any more to the confessional period I might as well hear it now. You dropped out of school and you’re not a virgin, and you had an abortion and what else? You’ve got ‘Property of Hell’s Angels’ tattooed on your behind.”
“Who told you?”
“Oh, it was in all the papers. Hey.”
“What?”
“I missed you. And you look good. From what you said it doesn’t sound as though you should, but you do.”
“So do you.”
“What are your plans? Assuming you have any.”
“I don’t exactly.”
“What are your inexact plans? Back to Evanston?”
“No, there’s nothing there for me. I thought I would go back to New York.”
“What’s there in that rotten town?”
“I know some people there, sort of.”
“You could spend the summer here, you know.”
“That’s what I was hoping. That’s why I came here to begin with, hoping I could stay here awhile. The only thing is I don’t know if I can.”
“Of course you can.”
“Can I?” Her eyes challenged him. “What you said. I’m not a little kid. I’m used to living a certain way, having a certain amount of freedom.”
“There are no bars on the windows, Karen.”
“I might, you know, stay out all night.”
“I think I could live with that.”
“I might even want to bring someone home with me.
“Well, I occasionally bring someone home myself. I won’t get upset if you don’t.”
“Do you really mean it?”
“I think so, yes. You have the right to live your own life, Karen. I can’t think why you shouldn’t have the right inside this house as well as out of it. What’s so funny?”
“I was picturing the four of us at breakfast. You and someone and me and someone. Do you have someone in particular?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Well, whoever she is, remind her to take her pill. You mean it, don’t you? I can stay here?”
“Oh, baby,” he said.
SEVEN
Sully closed the bar a little earlier than usual. The crowd was light, and on such nights he rarely remained open until the legal closing hour. While the few remaining customers finished their drinks he approached one of the waitresses and told her to stick around afterward, he wanted to talk to her. He spoke in a low voice and talked out of the side of his mouth.
“I don’t know,” she said, but he was already walking away and gave no sign of having heard her.
When everyone else had gone he took her in his arms and kissed her. She did not exactly resist but he felt the stiffness of her shoulders. She was a big South Philadelphia girl with high Slavic cheekbones and a flat forehead. He put a hand on her back between her shoulder blades and ran it slowly down to her buttocks. He drew her toward him, kissing her mouth again, and the lower part of her body first moved against him, then pushed stubbornly back against his hand.
He released her. “C’mon,” he said.
“I don’t know about this.”
/> He ignored her and she followed him to his office. It was a small room that contained a heavy Mosler safe, a small maple kneehole desk with matching chair, three other straight chairs, and a long, deep sofa upholstered in dark-red plush. The walls were bare except for two calendars from liquor distributors and a few dozen eight-by-ten glossy photos. Periodically a minor celebrity would present Sully with an autographed photo. He always responded with effusive thanks and a drink on the house, and later he pinned the unframed photo to his office wall and forgot about it.
He closed and locked the office door and spread a towel on the couch. The girl watched him do this, her face stolid and expressionless. “I don’t know,” she said again.
He straightened up from the couch and grinned at her. “What do you have to know? You want a drink?”
“No.” “C’mere.”
“Just like that.”
“Look, don’t stay if you don’t want to.”
“And find some place else to work, huh.”
“Did I ever say that? What the hell’s the matter with you tonight?”
“Maybe I got my monthly.”
“Not you. Your forehead breaks out when you get your period.” She flushed. “Give me credit, I notice things. You want to go, the door’s over there. But don’t give me maybe you got your monthly.”
He went over and embraced her again. When he touched her breast she began to respond and was on the point of letting herself go. Then she went rigid and he let go of her and looked at her. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“You enjoyed yourself the other times,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“So what’s different now?”
“What’s different is I been seeing this person.”
“So?”
“So he wouldn’t like it.”
“Tell you what. I won’t tell him if you don’t.”
“I’m seeing him later tonight. You probably know who it is.”
“I probably do, and his shift don’t end until four so you got the time.”
“That’s him.”
“Listen, he’s married himself. You think he’s saving it all for you? Because why kid yourself?”
“I don’t know. Going from you to him.”
“You even got time for a shower in between, kid.” He reached for her confidently, put one hand on her shoulder and the other between her legs. Her eyes closed and the muscles in her jaw went slack. “Just tell me this don’t do a thing for you,” he said, “and you can walk right out the door.”
“Oh, shit,” she said. “Who am I kidding?” He let her go, and she began unbuttoning her uniform.
He dropped her at her rooming house in Lambertville and drove back across the river to his own house. The lights were on in the living room and bedroom. When he put the car in the garage he saw that her little red. Alfa-Romeo was missing. He went directly to the bedroom and looked immediately in the closet. Her dresses were still there. That meant she would be back.
He switched on the television set and sat down on the bed to watch it. There was a remote-control unit, and he switched from channel to channel for fifteen minutes but couldn’t pay attention to any of it. He went downstairs and poured some applejack and sat in the living room in front of the picture window, sipping applejack and waiting.
At three o’clock he went upstairs and got into bed. When he gave up and put on the light it was not quite three thirty. He’d thought it was much later. He got up and put on pajamas and a robe and went downstairs, but after a few minutes he felt uncomfortable dressed that way and went upstairs to change back into the clothes he had worn earlier. Then he returned to the living room to wait for her.
A few nights ago he had come home to an unlit house. He had undressed silently in the darkness and got in bed beside her. He was almost asleep when she spoke his name.
He said, “Hell, I tried not to wake you.”
“I was awake.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“No, I didn’t.” She put on the bedside lamp, “We have to talk.”
“In the morning, huh?”
“I was thinking you should see a doctor.” ‘
“Come on, don’t give me all that in the middle of the night. I break my back all day—”
“Well, it’s either you or me, and you say it isn’t me, so who does that leave? So maybe you see a doctor, and he gives you a shot of something and it’s all right again.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Look, are you a doctor? How do you know?”
“I don’t have to see a doctor. It’s a temporary thing, it happens to everybody. Look, Melanie, you get satisfaction, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but you don’t.”
“So maybe that’s my problem.”
“And it’s not my problem knowing I can’t do a thing for my own husband? That’s not my problem?”
“Jesus, how many times do I have to tell you—”
“Have you had this problem before, Sully?”
He hesitated, but only briefly. “Well, of course I have. After a certain age it happens to everybody from time to time. A youngster in his twenties, that’s all he thinks about. You get older and other things get on your mind, business and taxes and one thing or another, and on top of working hard you can’t unwind and for a while, you got a problem. That’s all there is to it. Now can we get some sleep?”
They left it at that, but he got little sleep that night. There were more questions that she had not asked but would not forget. And now he sat in the darkened living room waiting for her and wondering what he would say to her when she came home. The sky was light when her little sports car turned into the driveway, and he was still sitting there and still had thought of nothing to say.
He met her at the door. She told him he shouldn’t have waited up for her.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said.
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
“What should I ask? All right, I’m asking.”
“Well, you already know the answer. You know what I did, you just don’t know who with.”
“Who was it?”
“I’m not going to tell you that. It doesn’t matter anyway, does it?”
“No, I don’t suppose it does,” he said. He walked away from her and sat down on the living-room couch with his hands cupped over his knees. She followed him and sat in a chair across from him. He said, “I hope you enjoyed yourself.”
“Sure, I enjoyed myself.”
“That’s good.”
“He wasn’t as good as you, but I enjoyed myself. And he enjoyed himself, and I needed that.”
“Yeah, I suppose you did.”
“So now you got an excuse,” she said. He looked al her. “To divorce me. I went out like a tramp and got screwed all night and now you got an excuse to divorce me. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“No. No, that’s not what I wanted.”
“I’m not so sure of that.”
“Is that what you want? A divorce?”
“What I want is for you to want to screw me, and you won’t, so let’s not talk about what I want.”
“I told you—”
“I know what you told me. You told me a lot of shit about business and taxes. All your headaches, but you only get those headaches at home. Those headaches don’t get in the way when you’re with one of your other girls.”
“I don’t have any other girls.”
“I know I’m stupid, Sully, but you can’t think I’m stupid enough to believe that. Don’t you think I know you better than that? You’ll fuck anything that’s warm. You’ve had your girls since we were married. I always knew about it.”
“And it didn’t bother you?”
“Just at the beginning, but I got over it right away. I knew what you were like before I married you. And I thought why the hell should it bother me when you and I had such a good thing going. You always had it for me, so if you had some left over for the rest of the worl
d that was your business. Wait a minute. Jesus, I’m stupid, all right.”
“What?”
“This always happens, doesn’t it? With your other three wives. The same thing. All of a sudden they don’t turn you on anymore. It’s not you trading them in when you’re bored. It’s you not being able to do anything and then the whole thing goes to hell from that point. Tell me if I’m wrong.”
He had closed his eyes and he kept them closed now. “You’re not wrong.”
“Something else I just realized, and I’ll bet I’m right. You never wanted a divorce. You don’t want to divorce me and you didn’t want to divorce them. It was their idea.”
He nodded.
“Tell me something else. You never had this conversation with any of them, did you?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“It is? Why?”
“I’m not sure but it is. I’m gonna make some coffee. You want a cup? I’ll just make instant.”
“If you’re having some.”
When she brought the coffee she sat beside him on the couch. After awhile she said, “There’s doctors for kind of thing, too. You know. Psychiatrists.”
“They don’t do any good.”
“You tried?”
“With my first wife I would of tried anything. The guy kept asking me all this crap about my childhood. Things I couldn’t remember if my life depended on it. Finally he told me the one sensible thing he ever said, which was that I should try it with another girl and see if it was the same. By that time I had already figured that out for myself and I tried it and I was my usual self. So I decided that it had to be her, something gone wrong between us.”
“And when it happened the second time? With your second wife, I mean.”
“Then I had to face facts, that it was me.”
She put her cup down and turned to him. “This is very interesting,” she said. “I’m glad we’re talking. You ever have trouble with other girls?”
“Never.”
“It always works. They don’t have to do anything special or anything.”
“All they have to do is be there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Same as it used to be with us.”
She looked at him thoughtfully for a long moment, then turned away and sipped coffee. Without looking at him she said, “Truth time. Do you want a divorce?”