Away from Home Page 6

  “Oh, no! I meant … have you ever made love to those twenty-five-year-old girls?”

  Neil laughed. “Of course.”

  Of course, he was twenty-five, he was a man, she had not thought he would be celibate. And yet, when he actually admitted he had had affairs, the first picture that came to Margie’s mind was not Neil naked in this bed with a girl but the face of the girl as it must have looked the next morning, saying goodbye.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “What? You look as if you had appendicitis.”

  “I do? I do not.”

  “Yes you do,” he said, smiling. He put his arm around her. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m wondering … what do these girls think? What do they say to you? Are they terribly in love with you? Do they suffer?”

  Neil laughed. “I hope they don’t suffer. They never look to me as if they’re suffering.”

  “Oh, you think I’m an idiot!”

  “No,” he said, quite serious then. “No, I don’t. I think you’re a wonderful person.”

  It was the first time he had actually expressed any feeling for her, and Margie looked up at him, startled. A wonderful person. It made a glow start through her. What a beautiful thing to say.

  “And I have wanted to make love to you,” he went on. “In case you’re wondering that too.” He kissed her hand and the inside of her wrist and then her mouth. They kissed for a long time without breathing much. Margie began to feel lightheaded. She listened to her heart beating and she kept her eyes closed, recognizing the light waves of feeling she always had when she had kissed for several minutes. She waited for the waves of feeling as if her entire body were a landscape and she were the observer, in it and yet not of it. She sensed the feeling then and she kept herself very still, trying to keep it, grateful and wary at the same time.

  She thought at first he was stroking the nape of her neck and then she realized that his hand was reaching for the zipper at the back of her dress. The movement distracted her. She opened her eyes and she saw, over his shoulder, that the brown and beige and gray lithograph on the wall was hanging slightly crooked. Suddenly that seemed much more important than anything else. The feeling had gone. She felt cool air on her back as Neil slid down the zipper of her dress, and she pulled away from him.

  “No, really,” she said, trying to reach her zipper with both hands.

  “I’m not going to do anything,” he whispered.

  “Of course you are.” But she said it distractedly, straining to reach the zipper, not upset at all. She was not afraid of her own passions with him, so why should she be afraid of his? This was Neil Davidow, who liked her, whom she liked, and she was not afraid. She only felt, inexplicably, very lonely and sad.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I was.” He reached around and pulled up her zipper. “Would you like another drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “All right, then I’ll start the steaks. We might as well eat; it’s seven-thirty. And after dinner I’ll teach you how to play chess.”

  “Chess?” Margie said, rather stupidly. Her feeling of loneliness was vanishing under Neil’s matter-of-fact warmth.

  “Chess,” he repeated. “If you’re going to be my girl you’re going to have to know how to play chess.”

  “Your … girl?”

  “You know,” he said. “Girl friend. Steady. Engaged to be engaged.”

  “Oh,” she breathed. “Oh. Yes!”

  When Margie and Neil became engaged after going out together for five months everyone said they made an ideal couple. They had everything in common. They had a similar family background, they both loved music and theater and chess, and his maturity would make a good balance for a girl who had just turned twenty. He was then twenty-six, but he looked and acted older. He was a college graduate, employed by an excellent brokerage firm, and they could even live in his apartment for a while until they needed something bigger. Margie’s parents gave a large engagement party to announce the happy news. Her mother confided to Margie afterward that she was secretly very proud that she and Neil had enough dignity to refrain from nuzzling each other in public the way cousin Joan and her fiancé had. Margie’s mother also thought that there should be a very short engagement. She did not believe in long-drawn-out engagement periods. The young couple would be too apt to give way to their animal instincts if they were kept waiting so long. After all, they were both young and healthy and in love. No, a short engagement was the best idea for young people. So four weeks after her engagement party Margie and Neil were married. She had been so busy rushing around to shop for her trousseau and planning for their formal wedding that in the whole four weeks she saw Neil only ten times, and on those evenings she was so tired that all she could do was go to a movie with him and say good night very tenderly at the door at eleven o’clock.

  The wedding was held in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. For years the Plaza had seemed to Margie to be the epitome of East Side Gentile elegance. The chauffeured Rolls Royces waiting outside for old ladies who were rich enough not to care that they were wearing styles that might be forty years old, the chic women in flowered hats who sipped cocktails among the potted palms and chirped like tame birds, the people who had been living there in the same suite for twenty years and went every summer to Europe with their own maids—all of this had seemed a part of a glamorous adult world that had nothing to do with her wholesome and boring life on Central Park West. But now her wedding was to be held there, and this suite had been reserved for her and her bridesmaids to use as a dressing room. When Margie looked around the luxurious suite it seemed to have a sterile, disappointing look, because no one was going to sleep there that night and there were no personal articles laid out on the dresser, nor books, nor flowers, nor any of the clutter that people leave wherever they live. Her new, monogrammed suitcases were lined up in the corner. Only the overnight case was still open, for last-minute make-up. There was a large straw hat to wear on the beach in St. Thomas. It was too big to fit into any of the suitcases so she would have to carry it in her hand on the plane. Her mother had taken Margie’s new going-away suit out of its tissue-paper nest and box and hung it in the closet. It was the only thing in the closet except for her mother’s mink stole (which her mother would later wear) and a dozen empty hangers that swayed together, emitting a ghostly sound, like little skeletons, when you touched them.

  For bridesmaids Margie had her two closest friends from the Birch Wathen School, who were both pretty and the same height, which had made choosing dresses for them easy, and a rather unattractive young cousin of Neil’s, whom Margie had invited to be polite. Since Neil had no sisters it seemed a nice gesture to ask one of his relatives to be in the wedding procession. Neil’s cousin had red hair and a pinkish complexion, which was even pinker now with excitement. Because of her they couldn’t have pink bridesmaid’s dresses, which Margie would have preferred, so they had pale blue. The matron of honor was Margie’s married friend Sue. The bridesmaids were milling about, trying to tilt their flowered tiaras to the most becoming angle, squealing over Margie’s hand-embroidered French underwear, and her shoes, which were appliquéd with the same lace as the dress, and finally the dress itself. The crinoline for the wedding dress was so stiff and enormous that it had to be stood up in the bathtub until she was ready to put it on. It was the only thing in the bathroom that seemed to have any relationship to her and her life; the rest was immaculate, white, and cold. Here she was, in the place she had always thought about with stars in her eyes, and it was nothing but a hotel room that she would be in and out of in a minute, leaving not a trace of herself behind, nor of this most important day of her life.

  The affectionate noise of the girls disturbed her, and her mother trying to be helpful made her nervous. Her father had been banished to the living room of the suite, where he smoked a cigarette. Margie stood as stiff as a doll with her arms above her head while
her heavy wedding dress was slipped carefully over her head, carefully so as not to disarrange her hair or her make-up. Her matron of honor did up the hooks in the back, and her mother delicately smoothed Margie’s hair, which had been coiffeured that morning and had luckily not been disarranged by the dress at all. Margie put on her veil, attached to a Juliet cap of real orange blossoms that gave off a faint sweet smell that belonged to a warm, faraway land. She looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror, and through the veil she seemed to herself to be a beautiful stranger, a bride doll on a wedding cake, a model in a bridal magazine. Margie could not see the expression in her own eyes through the misty white veil, and so she seemed to herself for that instant to be all brides on their wedding day, one of an endless procession, reflected and re-reflected in that mirror on and on until eternity, a life force; girls on the threshold of womanhood going to be united with their loved mates, billions of tremulous important brides, each as tiny and unimportant in the eyes of the universe as the tiny stars that make up the bridal carpet of the Milky Way, and yet at the same instant more of an individual than she had ever been in her life.

  For a moment Margie, standing before the mirror, was breathless with the realization of how important she was, and of how unimportant she was. It was as if she could see the whole meaning of life revealed. For that moment the chatter of the bridesmaids seemed as hushed as the whisper of their taffeta skirts. There was no one in the room for her except herself, and her reflected strange self, and those billions of brides with veiled eyes, taking measured steps into the heart of the measureless universe.

  Her father was standing at the doorway of the room looking at her, and there were tears in his eyes. Margie ran to him and put her arms around his neck. “Look out for the veil!” her mother cried, and then it was all over; she was Margie preparing for her wedding and these were her parents and friends, and there were still many little things to be done before the ceremony, like being sure that the right person had the ring, and the plane tickets, and that Great-Aunt Fanny would be given a seat down front because her hearing was not what it used to be.

  They went to the Virgin Islands for their honeymoon, for two weeks in a luxury hotel. It was the beginning of May and the weather in the Caribbean was bright and hot. Margie and Neil lay on the beach under the sun, putting suntan oil on each other, went skin diving with masks around the coral reefs under the transparent sapphire water, and strolled through the narrow old streets of the town, hand in hand. It was on her honeymoon that Margie Davidow fell in love with her husband for the first time. The feeling was so new and so unexpected (because she had thought she loved him all along) that it came to her as a shock. She had never felt this depth of tenderness and admiration for anybody. She had never before been alone with one person for so long a time, and with Neil she was never bored. Being with him all day, every day, gave her a dependence on him she had never known before. She almost could not bear to have him out of her sight, and since they did not know anyone else in St. Thomas he never was out of her sight for more than half an hour. The only thing that was strange, the only moments when she was completely and frighteningly alone, were the nights when they were the most together.

  She had expected the act of love to hurt her at first, and it did, but for longer than had ever been written in her pristine books. It was mainly because she was tense, and the more she tried to hide this from Neil the worse everything became. Many girls Margie’s age come to their marriage technical virgins, but Margie was completely one, body and mind. She was pleased and embarrassed that everyone in the hotel knew they were a honeymoon couple. Her pretty new clothes, her self-concious pretense at casual worldliness, gave her away. The hotel manager even sent them a bottle of champagne the first night. Margie saved the cork, in her suitcase. On picture post cards, which she sent to her friends in New York, she wrote her married name with a flourish, and then looked at it, not quite believing all this was really her.

  It was in St. Thomas that Margie discovered banana daiquiris, that they were sweet and deceptively mild, that they did not taste like liquor (which she detested), and that if she drank three before going upstairs to bed she could feel a pleasant numbness and the stirrings of desire. It was easy to fool Neil about the banana daiquiris because he could not drink more than one, claiming they were too sweet and a girl’s drink. To him they seemed a minor vice, like chocolates. Fortified by the banana daiquiris, Margie lay in her husband’s arms, stroked his face, and thought how wonderful it was to be cherished. She liked to be near him, and at those moments if she had known what reactions to pretend to be having she would have gladly done so. She would have given anything to be able to make him think he was giving her pleasure. But it was impossible to imitate a pleasure she had never known.

  When they returned from their honeymoon and moved into Neil’s apartment Margie purchased a blender to make the banana daiquiris and furtively bought a book about the art of married love. She bought the book on Forty-second Street and Broadway, terrified that someone she knew might come upon her and discover the shameful purchase which as much as admitted that things were not going as they should. The book, a modern one, told her that woman’s delight was overrated in other books and that it was not necessary to enjoy love-making every time. Every time! Margie thought. There were no stage directions for imitation. It was about this time that she began to look carefully into the eyes of her married girlfriends when they lunched at Schraffts, trying to find out their secret, certain that she was alone with hers. Sometimes, ripping at the paper doily delicately with her fingertips, she almost asked a question that might give her away, and then stopped in time.

  One day she had lunch with her matron of honor, Sue, who had been married for a year. Sue had accomplished what they call “marrying well,” and she looked it in her new, expensive dress and alligator handbag. It was also a love match, and Sue was much envied among her friends.

  “We’re trying to have a baby,” Sue said. “You know, I’ve been making up names for imaginary children for years. I’m dying to have one.”

  “You’ll probably be a wonderful mother,” Margie said.

  Sue sighed and stirred her soda with the straws. “I’m getting so tired of trying,” she said quietly.

  For a moment the significance of what her friend was saying did not quite get through to Margie, and then suddenly it hit her with the force of a physical blow. Tired of trying! But what you did when you were “trying” was supposed to be that wonderful lost trip away from the world. Margie opened her lips, almost ready to confide, to pour out all the bewilderment and fear of loneliness, and then she closed her mouth so tightly that she gritted her teeth. She would die rather than confess a failure that would point disgrace to Neil, imply disloyalty to him and their bond together. She scooped up the bits of paper doily she had torn and deposited them in the ashtray. “I hate doilies,” she said vehemently. “They’re so messy.”

  It was at the beginning of her second year of marriage that Margie began to have strange, disturbing sensations, a burning and fluttering, a shortness of breath. She first noticed it in the spring, when she and Neil went to the Memorial Day dance at the country club. She was dancing with the husband of one of her friends, a young doctor who had been away in Ohio doing his internship in a hospital there, and had just returned with his wife and child to set up his practice in New York. He was a little older than Neil, but he looked younger, almost collegiate. Margie had seen him only once before, at her friend’s wedding, and now she realized for the first time that he was a very attractive man. There was a kind of intimacy and joy in the way he danced with her, nothing actually forward and yet there was a complete awareness of her as a pretty woman. A few brave couples were dancing on the terrace, although the late May night was chilly, and Margie and her partner were among them. It was dark, and she could hear the sound of the wind in the trees and the soft shuffling of feet on cement above the music that came out through the opened French doors.


  “Cold?” he whispered, smiling down at her.

  “No.”

  Suddenly Margie felt a weird fluttering constricting her heart. Her lips seemed to swell, to burn, to fill with the pulsing of her warm blood. For a moment she had the wild impulse to reach up and kiss this man full on the mouth. She pulled away from him with a violent physical effort and shivered.

  “You are cold,” he said. “Come on, we’ll go inside. Some doctor I am, making you catch pneumonia.”

  That night when Neil wanted to leave the dance early Margie immediately agreed, although usually she tried to linger. All the way home beside Neil in the car she held on to the feeling she had struggled with on the terrace, ecstatically and guiltily; nursing it, holding it inside her like a great, stirring, growing flower. At home, he made love to her. And in the middle of it she looked up at his face in the semidarkness, the face of the man she respected and loved, and she thought how ridiculous and grotesque their posture was, like two people in battle trying to kill each other. She wished that he would hurry, get it over with, finish. And waiting for the telltale sigh that showed he was through, Margie for the first time hated herself and wondered in terror and guilt why the feeling of being a woman never arose to the touch of this man who deserved it more than any man in the world.

  After they had been married for two years Neil had the opportunity to go to Brazil to represent the South American branch of his firm. He discussed it with Margie and she agreed quickly. She wanted to get away. Perhaps in a strange and tropical place, away from all the memories of her childhood, she might find her real self. Perhaps she could have a new life. At any rate, it was what Neil wanted, and she wanted whatever might make him happy, for she knew that this new restlessness in him was mainly the fault of something in her which he was only now dimly beginning to perceive.

  CHAPTER 3