Looking for Mr. Goodbar (13 page)

“Dig that, Car,” Brooks said. “It’s the first nice thing I ever heard her say to a man.”

“Here,” Carter said. “Take them. They’re yours.”

He held them across the table and she took them, examining them. Self-conscious but not embarrassed. It was funny but it was all right. At his part of the table Brooks was rolling joints and she was aware of this while being engrossed in Carter’s hands. Brooks passed her a new joint which she dragged on, then passed to one of Carter’s hands by placing it between his fingers. Carter tapped Katherine’s arm to wake her up and give it to her, Katherine dragged on it, ate another Mallomar and went back to sleep. Theresa gently blew the smoke in her lungs onto Carter’s hand, then traced it over the fine ridges formed by his veins and tendons.

“Wait a minute,” Carter said, “I’m getting jealous of my hand.” He moved around the table so that he was closer to her.

“You took the best,” Brooks began singing against the music from the player, “so why not take the rest?”

“Sssh,” Theresa said. “The music is sooooo beautiful.” The sitar was still playing but now there was another instrument in with it. She could hear them both together and/or separately. Whichever she chose. Either way the music was quite remarkably beautiful.

“Your eyes,” Carter said, “are more beautiful than my hands.”

Theresa smiled. “If I was a fortune-teller,” she said, “I’d tell your fortune from this side. Not your palm.”

“Go ahead.”

“Hmmmm. It says you’re going to be a lawyer when you grow up.”

They all laughed as though it were the funniest thing anyone had ever said. Even Katherine smiled in her sleep. Or half-sleep, as it turned out.

“How about me, Tessie?” Katherine asked. “Will I finish school? Will I have lots of babies?”

Babies. Katherine was asking about babies. “I can’t tell about babies from hands,” she said. “I have to see your feet.”

They all laughed again.

She took some ladyfingers and Oreos and began sticking them upright in the spaces between the fingers of Carter’s right hand. Then she took them out and put Mallomars in instead, which was what she’d really wanted to do all along.

“Now let us watch the Mallomars melt between Carter’s fingers,” she said solemnly.

“He’s going to be all dirty when he goes home,” Brooks said.

“No,” Theresa said, “I will lick him clean.”

Brooks whistled.

“Like a mother cat,” Theresa said.

“Anyway,” Carter said, “I just won’t go home. Then no one will know that I’m dirty.”

Katherine seemed to have gone into a real sleep.

Carter was watching Theresa very seriously. He was really quite beautiful. She wanted to put Mallomars on his eyes and eat them off. She giggled because she had a picture of Carter with chocolate circles around his eyes where the Mallomars had been. He was lying very still on his back now with his arms on his chest. Like a dead person. Except the unpleasant feelings you would normally associate with such a thought were absent. It was a beautiful picture. There were flowers all around. At first they were mostly banks of flowers, roses and gladiolus, but then they stretched out into paths and lanes, hundreds of thousands of different flowers, like an English garden, lush but still geometrical. The flowers moved gently toward her until it was time for the next set. Then they weren’t just in the garden but everyplace. Her whole body
felt strange and marvelous. She wanted to gather all the flowers into herself. If she opened her eyes they went away but they came back when she closed her eyes again. She could change them into anything she wanted—blobs of color or brightly colored chiffon veils or bouquets at a wedding. Or on a hearse. It wasn’t an ugly black hearse, though. It was white and graceful, more like a bird than a car. It stood next to a lake. The lake where the funeral was being held. The lake was very beautiful, with water like in advertising pictures for the Caribbean, crystal-clear green and blue with darkness way down. Without opening her eyes she crawled into the space between the sofa and the coffee table and curled up on her side.

“Hey,” Carter whispered into her ear, sending a thrill through her body, “you left me holding the Mallomars.”

She turned onto her back and opened her eyes. The hand holding the Mallomars was suspended over her head. She reached up and took out the first Mallomar and ate it; the others she dropped one by one on the table. From far away someplace Brooks would say, “Bang,” or “Crash,” or “Thud,” each time one landed.

“Poor hand,” Carter said when she was finished. “Look at you.”

“Poor old hand,” Theresa echoed. “I knew you when you were young and beautiful.” Tenderly she took the hand in hers and began licking the places where the palm met the fingers, then each finger, from the bottom to the tip. Only when she was finished did she let her eyes meet Carter’s. He leaned over and kissed her.

He asked, “Do you live far from here?”

She smiled. “Not very far.”

He said, “I’ll walk you home and I’ll wash my hands.”

Slowly she got to her feet. Katherine was asleep but Brooks was just off someplace with his eyes wide open. He ignored them. Carter got his jacket and they left.

“Hey,” Carter said when they got to the bottom of the stairs, “where’s your coat?”

“I didn’t wear one,” she said.

“You don’t get cold,” he said. “Are you a mermaid?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m going to swim home. Gurgle gurgle.” She led him to her door, which she hadn’t even locked.

“I don’t believe it,” Carter said. “It’s too beautiful.”

“Welcome,” she said, “to my watery cave.” She lit a candle because she was afraid the overhead light would ruin their mood.

“I don’t believe the length of time this stuff is lasting,” Carter said.

She yawned and sat down on the bed. “The sink’s in there.”

“They’re not all that dirty,” he said. “You did a pretty good job.” He took off his shoes. “How’d you find this place?” he asked.

“They found me,” she said.

“Oh,” Carter said, “you knew them before.”

“In my other life,” she said. “They knew me in my other life.”

Carter stretched out on the bed and signaled to her to stretch out beside him.

“Tell me about your other life.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“If I told you it wouldn’t be my other life, it would be my this life.”

“Oh, wow.”

Her mouth and lips were very dry; she ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, licked her lips. Carter leaned forward and licked her lips. They kissed. They moved back so that they were against the pillows, in each other’s arms. They started to make love, stopped to get undressed, made love with exquisite pleasure. She came, understood that was what had happened to her but not what was important about it. He came and rested in her. She saw the dictionary page with
orgasm
on it in illustrated script. She smiled. They came apart. She got cold and went under the covers. He got under the covers and they made love again and she came again. She drifted into a perfectly peaceful sleep from which she awakened, confused because she didn’t know why
she was up. Then she became aware of a tiny insistent buzzing noise close by. Over on the desk the candle was burning very low. Carter stirred in his sleep, lifted his arm. It was his wristwatch. She stared at it. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Go back to sleep, love.”

Obediently she closed her eyes. When she opened them again it was morning.

She never saw him again.

“How’s Carter?” she asked
Brooks a few days later in what she hoped was a casual way.

Brooks rumpled her hair. “Don’t invest anything in that one, love,” he said. Love. Everyone called you “love.” “He’s a straight, married, settled—”

“I know that,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to see him again.”

“Listen to me, Theresa,” Brooks said. “Forget it. Not forget it exactly, but you have to say to yourself, I had a nice night, that night, I got stoned and I spent some time with this nice guy, wish I could remember his name, this suburban Wasp, a nice guy but just passing through. Both of us. We were just passing through.”

“You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying,” she said. “I don’t
care
if he’s married, if he stays married, I just—”

“No, sweetheart,” Brooks said. “
You
don’t understand what
I’m
saying. Forget it.”

A few nights later Katherine came down to say she was having an abortion.

“Oh, no,” Theresa said.

“It doesn’t help much when you make such a big deal out of it,” Katherine said.

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t even know the worst of it,” Katherine said forlornly. She was looking ghastly, Theresa realized for the first time. Haggard
and pale. Dressed all in black. “I’m in my fourth month. It’s much more complicated to do it now than earlier.”

“How does Brooks feel?” Theresa asked, unable to cope with this frightening news.

“He doesn’t mind one way or the other. He says it’s okay with him whatever I decide.”

Poor Brooks. She ached for him in this situation, thought it nearly saintly of him to be willing for Katherine to have the baby even if it might not be his. Then she was confused by her own sympathies. In the abstract it was very clear that the man was at least equally responsible, that no man had the right to make a woman have an abortion, that both Brooks and Katherine had been leading the kind of life that . . . yet her sympathies . . . sometimes she felt certain that Katherine had led Brooks into it all. That he would have been quite contented to just lead a normal married life if Katherine had. That . . . anyway, when she thought about Brooks and Katherine, she felt mixed sympathies at best for Katherine, but nothing but love and affection for Brooks.

Katherine went to Puerto Rico for Thanksgiving week. Brooks and Theresa went up to see her parents for Thanksgiving. The explanation was that Katherine was down with what might be flu. It was very pleasant, actually, although a shadow would cross her mind every time she thought of Katherine in Puerto Rico. Brigid and Patrick were there with baby John and Kimberley, who was now fourteen months old and walking. The conversation was mostly by the men and mostly about football until Patrick announced, with a combination of embarrassment and pride, that Brigid was pregnant again. Brigid was flushed with pride, as though in the latter half of the twentieth century she had not only the right but some particularly good reason to be a Catholic baby-making machine. Theresa thought of Katherine in Puerto Rico and for the first time her heart really went out to her sister.

But Katherine looked beautiful when she finally came back the following Sunday. She had a deep tan and she’d gained a little
weight and looked not at all the way one would expect someone to look who’d been raised a strict Catholic and just had her second abortion.

She claimed in the next weeks to be feeling absolutely marvelous and to be capable now of buckling down to schoolwork in a way she hadn’t been able to for months. She was particularly excited by the psych course she was taking, not because the material was so great, it was all pretty basic stuff and could’ve been dull, but the teacher was
incredible.
He took, she explained, the best from each of the schools of thought and added a lot on his own. She had pretty well decided she was going to be a psych major. Dr. Chapman had promised her that he would get her into one of his electives the following year. He’d said there was no sense in someone with her intelligence going through a lot of crap courses without a glimpse of the real thing for another year or two. It was so nice, Katherine said, to be appreciated for her
mind
for a change.

Two months later, when
the holiday season had passed, Katherine told Theresa that she and Brooks were going to separate.

“Oh, no!” Terry wailed, thinking they had been looking so much more loving lately. They’d all gone to a New Year’s party where Katherine and Brooks hadn’t wanted to break their midnight kiss when someone was tapping Brooks on the shoulder, like a joke, cutting in on his kiss. “Why? I don’t understand. . . . You’re doing it,” she said after a moment when Katherine didn’t answer. “Brooks wouldn’t do it.”

“Oh, Terry,” Katherine sighed. “What difference does it really make?”

“Plenty.” She was nearly crying with her anger at Katherine and the pain she felt for Brooks. “He loves you.”

“
Loves
me,” Katherine said with more than a touch of scorn. “He doesn’t even
know
me.”

“What does that mean?” Terry demanded.

“It means we don’t have very much in common, Terry. He’s a nice man and I’ll always be fond of him, but we’re into entirely different things.”

“Into,” Terry repeated. “What does that mean, ‘into things’?”

“I don’t mean entirely,” Katherine said, “I mean, we’re both into music and dope and all . . . but who isn’t now? But past that . . . Brooks, well, Brooks hasn’t really changed at all since I met him, you know, Terry? He’s given up Scarsdale and his teased-blonde wife and all but he’s still really very suburban. Law and order. The whole thing. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“No,” Terry said bitterly. Katherine had found the most wonderful man in the world and now she was throwing him away. It was ironic that only women who could do things like that got men like Brooks. She was more convinced than ever that she didn’t want to get married, but if she had, someone just like him was whom she’d want.

“The psychology thing isn’t just a thing, you know,” Katherine said.

“The thing isn’t a thing,” Terry repeated sardonically.

Katherine looked hurt. Good. She deserved it.

“I mean I’m really into—I’m really
involved
with it.” She was very earnest. She looked very young and earnest. She was thirty years old already but probably the people in her classes thought she was just one of the kids. “I’m going to stick with it. I love the field and I love the people who’re in it.”

“What does that mean, you love the people?”

What was in her mind when she asked was that you didn’t go into a field because you loved the people, you had to love what you were
doing.
That was the only safe thing because people could change . . . or go away. . . . But Katherine flushed and then Terry realized she’d hit on something.