Looking for Mr. Goodbar (18 page)

After school they would leave the building together for safety (their minds told them they were not in any real danger from the others but the venom, the invective, the threats were frightening) and often, not wanting to be alone, several of them would go to one person’s apartment, most often Rose’s, on Eighth Street. There they would talk about the children and how they were being affected by the strike, about what they would all do when it was over,
and so on. They felt the strength of virtue and respected themselves and each other for what they were doing. One of the people in the group was Tom Lerner, the gentle soul who taught music and was himself a classical guitarist. Sometimes after the larger group broke up, Tom and Evelyn and Theresa would have dinner together, in the neighborhood or down in Chinatown. Once or twice they went to a movie afterward and then Tom and Theresa would drop off Evelyn at her house, then walk up to Theresa’s together. At the door to her house they would stand for a while and chat, and it was obvious that Tom wanted her to invite him up, but she never did. There didn’t seem to be any point to it. She didn’t really go for him; sooner or later it would have to end and then how would they face each other in school?

When the strike was over the group gradually came apart as naturally as it had come together. Tom never joined her and Evelyn when they went in for a Coke after school, and a while later she heard from someone that he’d moved in with a girl.

Her father was operated
on for a massive tumor in his intestine. Brigid called to tell her. Brigid was leaving the children with a neighbor and staying at the hospital most of the time with their mother. (Theresa felt a combination of jealousy and relief. Brigid, who, when they were younger, had only wanted a different family, had managed to remain closer to her own than she or even Katherine, now in India with Nick, who’d taken a sabbatical. Brigid had done the right thing, it was that simple. Brigid had gotten married, had babies, stayed in the neighborhood. Brigid had a real life.)

Theresa didn’t ask Brigid for any of the details; she wouldn’t have even known what to ask. She never asked questions about things like that. She was never sick herself and moved away if the teachers in the lunchroom started discussing their health. She had never been to a doctor in her adult life, including a gynecologist.
She used no contraceptives and didn’t consider using them; she knew, as surely as she’d ever known anything, that she would not become pregnant.

She went up to
see her father two evenings after the day of the operation, finding herself short of breath as she walked the distance from the train station at Westchester Square to the hospital. Realizing as she walked that it wasn’t the exercise that was making it hard to breathe, but the fear of entering a hospital for the first time in years and years.

In the lobby, her mother’s sisters cried, while upstairs her father’s mother sat at the foot of her father’s bed, anxious but dry-eyed. Brigid was gone; she would have been there all day and gone home to take care of the children so Patrick could come. Patrick smiled his usual shy, nervous smile. Her mother. Then, as she came further into the room . . .

They hadn’t prepared her. Or maybe she hadn’t known what to ask. At first she couldn’t even see the person lying under the white hospital blankets, she could only see the tubes and the equipment. Tubes stuck into his nostrils, taped onto him. Tube taped to his arm. On one side of the bed a bottle of liquid suspended high up, feeding the tube to his arm. On the other side of the bed a piece of machinery that looked more like part of the space program than anything to do with medicine. And then there he was. Small under the blankets, and terribly pale.

“Daddy.”

She was embarrassed. Her throat ached. She never called him Daddy. She called him Dad or avoided calling him anything. She wanted to kiss him but she didn’t know whether it would be all right with all the tubes there. She put her hand on his foot. He smiled at her.

“Are you okay?” she asked, and then thought that of all the dumb questions she might have asked that was surely the worst.

“Fine, except they’ve got me all rigged up here with these silly tubes. I feel like a TV set.”

He sounded like himself, thank God. Just a little weaker.

There was a change of people around them. Patrick and her mother left, some of the others came in. She just stood there with her hand on his foot, watching him. Not talking. She wanted desperately to do something—to bring him something he needed, to make him laugh the way Katherine would if she were there. He asked her if things had calmed down again now that the strike was over; she said they had. He had been on the other side, she knew, but he had never tried to persuade her.

She went every night for the week that he was in the hospital and was there when her uncle Sal drove him home on the following Saturday.

“What a shame,” her father said to her, smiling, in a moment when he was settled in his room and no one else was there with them, “I had to get sick for my daughter Theresa to get so friendly.”

She stared at him. “I always thought,” she said, “you didn’t care that much. I always knew Katherine was your favorite.”

He looked at her as though he didn’t know whether to be more grieved or puzzled. She ran out of the room and wasn’t alone with him again for the rest of the visit.

The next day, when
she walked into the lunchroom, Rose looked at her and said, “Theresa! What’s wrong?” and Terry burst into tears. Mortified, she went into the teachers’ bathroom but Rose followed her in.

“I feel so ridiculous,” Terry moaned through her tears.

“Because you’re a human?” Rose asked.

That made her cry more.

“Come,” Rose said when she’d finished, “let’s go into my room.”

Terry shook her head. “Not necessary.”

“Nonsense,” Rose said. “From the look on your face when I saw you I wanted to take you home right then and there.” She led Theresa into her room, the kindergarten, locking the door behind them and pulling the shade across the window. They both sat at one of the small tables. Terry smiled.

“It feels funny, sitting here,” she said. She never sat in those chairs except to work with a child.

Rose nodded. “I had a long discussion with them last week about growing up. What it means, and so on. I sat down in one of the chairs, you know, as if I was a kid. Working at the table. Some of them thought it was hysterically funny, they couldn’t stop laughing. But a few were really upset by it.”

Theresa smiled. “Probably the ones from strict Catholic families.”

“So,” Rose said after a moment. “Tell me.”

“Oh, there’s no point,” she said. “It’s a bunch of things.”

“Boyfriend?”

She nodded, wondering why she was lying. “But not just that. My father’s been ill.”

“Serious?”

“I don’t think so. He had a tumor in his intestine but it was removed.”

“It wasn’t malignant.”

“Malignant?” She knew that meant cancer. Nobody had said anything about cancer. She shook her head.

“But it’s hard anyway,” Rose said. “Right on top of the thing with your boyfriend.”

Theresa nodded.

“What you probably need is just to get back out into the world. Into circulation.”

Theresa nodded. Rose gave her a tissue and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

“There’s someone I’ve been thinking for a long time I’d like you to meet,” Rose said.

Theresa stared at her incredulously.

“I’m not kidding,” Rose said. “The only reason I haven’t said something before is . . . it’s usually very hard to approach you, Theresa. I know it’s just that you’re shy, not unfriendly, but . . . anyway . . .”

She invited Theresa to come to dinner that Friday night. Theresa said she couldn’t, she had to go up to the Bronx to see her father, which wasn’t particularly true. The idea of being fixed up was humiliating to her. The idea that everyone knew she couldn’t find someone on her own. She refused two more times until finally one day Rose asked her to come to dinner without mentioning James Morrisey, as his name was, and she accepted.

He was there anyway,
though, and she sat stiff and tongue-tied on the sofa, able only to nod when Morris offered her a whiskey sour, his specialty.

Rose and Morris had no children, but the poodles jumped all over Terry as soon as Morris opened the door. And then she saw him. James Morrisey. Every Irish mother’s favorite son. Pink, smooth-faced, well behaved. Hairless. Neat as a pin.

He was shy and his shyness was excruciating to Theresa, who remained stiff with discomfort until well into her second drink.

He was a young lawyer in Morris’s office. From the coincidence of their names had sprung the office line.
There go Morris and Morrisey,
which Morris obviously relished. There were a lot of Jewish bits from Morris. Rose brought out chopped liver and Morris said this was Exercise I in teaching the
goyim
how to live. Theresa smiled and Morris said, “Aha, she’s not as innocent as she looks!” Morrisey looked as though he was choking but said it was delicious.

Rose took Theresa into the kitchen on some pretext of needing help and then whispered nice things about James to her. He was a wonderful boy. His father had died when he was in his teens but
he’d managed to get a full scholarship to Fordham University and worked full time while he went to college, then law school. Two years through law school he’d found the burden more than he could stand and he’d given up school and sold law books for a couple of years. Then in the course of his selling he’d met Morris, who had talked with him, lunched with him, persuaded him to finish school and take the Bar exam. After which Morris had convinced his partners that they needed a little ethnic balance in the firm. James still lived with his mother in the Bronx. It was almost embarrassing to think about.

Theresa loosened up after a couple of whiskey sours; they all did. Still she barely looked at him. Her eyes would flicker past him when they were laughing at one of Morris’s jokes, and she would be aware that he, James, was watching her, and her eyes would bounce away.

James Morrisey obviously liked her, which was funny because he didn’t appeal to her at all. At eleven thirty she yawned and said she’d better be getting home and James immediately asked if he could take her. She shrugged and said okay. They thanked Rose and Morris, who beamed at them as though they were going for blood tests.

Eighth Street was jammed
with people.

“In my neighborhood,” James said, “there’s nothing open at this hour but the bar.”

“I couldn’t stand it,” she said. “Living out there in the boondocks.”

“Did you grow up around here?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Way out in the Bronx. Way past Parkchester, even.” Parkchester was where he lived with his mother.

“What made you move here?” he asked.

“It just seemed like . . . My first apartment was in a house my sister and her husband owned. In the East Village. Then when I wanted to move, this seemed like a good place.”

James was taking it all in like a tourist. The Saturday nighters from New Jersey; the strung-out kids; the panhandlers. Old winos and young dopers. Two boys with their hair down to their backsides and dark glasses asked if he could spare the fifty-cent toll for the George Washington Bridge; James was about to give it to them because he was amused by the line. She said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” One of them said, “Motherfucker cunt.” James changed his mind. He asked if she wouldn’t rather take a cab home and she said no, she preferred to walk. As a matter of fact she’d just as leave roam around for a while (partly because she didn’t want to ask him in when she got to her house). That was fine with him. They zigzagged around the Village, James stopping to look in all the windows, most particularly the head shops. She felt impatient when he stopped but she knew this was totally unfair and didn’t say anything. He was interested in all of it. Being with him she lost that pleasant feeling it had taken her so long to acquire, of being a native. Of belonging there. On Sixth Avenue they passed a girl wearing jeans and a beautiful diaphanous Indian shirt so sheer that in the light of the street lamp her nipples were clearly visible.

“So what do you think, tourist?” she asked him.

“I think,” he said calmly, “that there’s less here than meets the eye.”

She laughed, not just because it was good but because it was unexpected. Not that she was about to tell him that.

“Oh,” she said, “so you’re one of these people who can judge everyone right off.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I thought you asked me right off.”

“True,” she said, flushing. “But I only asked because you were gaping.” Why was she being like this? She didn’t even
know
him, he was just this person who didn’t interest her particularly.

“Actually,” he said, “I’ve been taxed with being the sort of person who doesn’t gape even when he’s gaping.”

“Who’ve you been taxed by?” she asked nastily. Not about to give in. “The federal government?”

“More the local one.”

“Fordham must be a Jesuit college.”

“Peace.”

But he didn’t mind her quarreling; he was smiling.

“This is where I live,” she said without warning when they reached her block.

“Do you mind,” he asked, “if I have a glass of water before I’m on my way?”

“Of course not,” she said.

In the apartment she turned on the light and looked around with dissatisfaction. She’d never made this one as pretty as the other but hadn’t thought much about it until now. He’d probably think she was a slob. Well, that was fine. She took off her coat, kicked off her shoes and went to the kitchen sink for the water. When she returned with it he was standing in front of the clownfish picture.

“That’s very interesting,” he said. “What do you make of it?”

“I don’t make anything of it,” she said airily. “It’s just this print some—it’s just this print I picked up.” She’d been about to say this print someone gave me but had changed to the truth at the last moment. Why had she to deny its interest, though? He wasn’t aggressive; why was she defensive? She went for her cigarettes. None of them smoked, not James or Morris or Rose, and she’d experienced her smoking all night as an act of defiance. She lighted another one now, half expecting him to ask her why she smoked. Instead he asked if he might see her again and she almost asked why.