Looking for Mr. Goodbar (22 page)

“And how did you feel yesterday morning when you came in and I wasn’t here the way I always am?”

“I was mad at you,” Elsie said, and burst into tears.

Theresa had gone over to Elsie and brought the little girl back to her chair and held her in her lap for the remainder of the discussion. Not only to comfort Elsie but to encourage the others to express how they felt by showing that Elsie was being comforted, not punished, for her honesty. Sure enough, one by one, most of them had admitted varying degrees of anger, fear and confusion at her not being there. Then she’d explained to them that she’d been so tired that for the first time in all the
time that she’d been teaching she had fallen asleep without setting the alarm and slept right through the night and the morning. She’d told them she was sorry she’d disappointed them, and promised she would do her best to never let it happen again. But if it did happen they’d know it was something she hadn’t been able to help.

They’d put back their chairs and been angelic for the rest of the day.

They were halfway across Fourteenth Street, by now, heading toward Lüchow’s.

“That’s a beautiful story,” James said. “You sound like a marvelous teacher.”

“I love teaching,” she said with a fervor that astounded her. “I’m never happier than when I’m teaching.” This was true but it surprised her that she could say it to him. She had times of pleasure outside the classroom, in sex, for example, but happiness was quite genuinely there only when she was with the children.

Talking about it, though. She had never done that with
anyone
outside of school, except Evelyn or Rose, who were already part of school. Mentioning that she was a teacher in her bar pickups (all except Tony) had been a way of saying that she wasn’t just some dumb, broke broad hanging around to get a drink or get laid. A status thing. But the thought of sharing with anyone her teaching experiences . . . Still, she had to admit it felt good to hear him say that. He was intelligent, and even if she didn’t really like him, it was pleasant to have him recognize her worth when she hadn’t even been parading it for him, but only making conversation.

“Until I got to high school, the sisters were the only teachers I ever had,” he said.

She wrinkled up her nose to show distaste, though of course it was true of her, too.

“They weren’t all that bad, actually,” he said. “Although I have to admit I didn’t have trouble with even the worst of them.” He smiled. “I was a goody-goody.”

She returned his smile. He was pretty likable, in a way. It wasn’t that she even disliked him, actually; it was that she wasn’t attracted to him. She couldn’t see ever having sex with him. She could put aside his Irish choirboy face for long enough to talk to him, but she was sure she could never even kiss him and she didn’t know how she would handle the situation if he should try.

In Lüchow’s they were finally led to seats which James refused because they were so close to the band that you had to shout to be heard. Another table farther back was found and they ordered drinks, Scotch and soda for him, a martini for her. It wasn’t very cool to drink any more, but at least a martini was the most sophisticated drink. She had to stop herself from making a face when she tasted the first sip.

“Actually,” he said, “I had at least one extraordinary woman as a teacher. She didn’t possess the kind of emotional understanding you do but she was extremely intelligent, as I think many nuns actually are. She read voraciously and thought about what she read. Not like most Catholics, who put their minds in straitjackets at an early age.”

“Aren’t you still a Catholic?”

“More or less, but I don’t like to think of myself as that sort of one.”

She was silent.

“Anyway, Sister Francine went to Fordham and then out to work in a prison in Illinois someplace. Someone should write about her. Within the strictures of the Church, and certainly they were considerable, before the whole radical Catholic movement had even been heard of very much, she was a tough, brilliant, determined, independent woman.”

“You sound like a eulogy. Or an essay. My Kind of Woman by James Morrisey.”

“I don’t know that I have any
kind
of woman.”

The waiter came to check their drinks. James said they would order and asked what she wanted. He did have a certain social
grace; it was probably recently acquired. She ordered shrimp and James asked for lamb chops.

“You like strong women,” she said.

Something there was that couldn’t really be interested in a man who liked powerful, intelligent women. Something there was that wanted a man from Marlboro Country. Smart only in the way he subordinated his girls. Swaggering, suave. With a dick so long that you rode it as though it were a horse. A rocky horse.

He said that a woman’s movement seemed to be developing and asked if she wasn’t sympathetic to it. She said sure, why not, which wasn’t exactly a lie but it was the closest thing to a lie she’d told him. (She wasn’t prepared to really think about that one.) The truth was that the new woman’s movement made her uncomfortable. The equal pay demand seemed all right but she had that, anyway, and she was upset by the stridency of much of it. The demands. It seemed that men must surely dislike women who were so demanding. Evelyn had begun to talk about a group of women she met with once a week and had invited Theresa more than once to join them, but she’d always made some excuse.

“I don’t really belong to it,” she said. “I’m not comfortable in groups.”

“It’s funny,” he mused. “I’m most comfortable in a group. Choral group, lawyers’ group, church group, whatever you might think of.”

She went out with
him six times before he kissed her good night. She became almost eager for him to do it, not because she wanted to kiss him but to get it over with. His kiss was light on her lips, as she would have expected. She was unmoved by it. As she would have expected.

She smiled naughtily. “Now you’re not a virgin any more.”

“Ah, Theresa,” he said. “You’re so cruel to me. Why?”

Because you like me too much,
was what came into her head. But of course that was ridiculous. It wasn’t that simple.

She refused to see him during the week, telling him that it was impossible for her to go out and get up for school in the morning. The real reason was that Tony worked weekends at the garage, while she never knew just when he was going to show up during the week.

Often one of them was there when the other called. She suspected that if this wasn’t particularly a factor in James’s interest in her, it was definitely helping to maintain Tony’s. For this reason she would force herself to talk to James when Tony was there even if she didn’t feel like it. Tony, who might have been complaining of muscle pains, or watching some garbage on TV (with the radio on) would then come over to where she lay stretched out on the bed, pretending to be absorbed in her conversation with James, and start kissing her neck or undoing her blouse or rubbing her thighs. Once he tickled the bottom of her feet and she let out a whoop and told James she had to get off the phone. Then she began pummeling Tony as though she really cared that she’d been given away. He liked that. He especially liked that she’d hung up the phone because of him.

James started calling her earlier in the evening, correctly sensing that she was more likely to be alone then.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Tony asked when there was no call.

She laughed. “He calls earlier now.”

“He doesn’t want me here, huh?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“Well, that’s tough,” he said. “I got as much right to be here as he does.”

He sounded like a little kid staking out territory.

“How come you’re not saying anything?” he asked.

“What am I supposed to say?”

“He’s not paying for this joint, is he?” Tony asked suddenly.

“No, Tony,” she said patiently. “He’s not paying for it.”

“Who is?”

“I am.”

“With what?”

“With my salary.”

“How much it cost you?” He was not only suspicious, he was righteous; if he’d been a grown-up she would have gotten angry with him.

“Two hundred dollars a month.”

“It ain’t worth half that.”

She laughed. “To me it is.”

“This is a lousy neighborhood. Full of junkies. You oughta live in Queens.”

“Queens! Why would I live in Queens? I’ve never even been there in my whole life.”

“That’s impossible,” he said flatly.

She was silent. This time she couldn’t laugh.

“Queens is beautiful,” he said. “Nothing like this. My old lady lives in Queens.”

“I thought you lived in Brooklyn.”

“
I
live in Brooklyn. That don’t mean she . . . she kicked me out.”

“How come?”

“She said it was on account of dope but that’s bullshit, she never wanted me there. She didn’t want any of her boyfriends to see she had a kid as old as me. Forty-four years old and she’s still . . . the cunt.”

“What’d you expect her to do?”

“Forget it,” he said moodily.

She tried to jolly him out of it but he wasn’t having any. She wanted to ask him more questions about his family but his mood got worse when she tried, so she changed the subject to horses. Off guard, he began to talk about horses, about the race track. He had an uncle who was a jockey who’d brought him there all the time when he was a kid, that for him was the best place in the world, the
only
place, from the time he was five years old.
He told her that he’d prayed when he was a kid not to grow over five feet four inches because he didn’t want to get too big to be a jockey, and when praying didn’t work he’d aimed for trainer. She asked him about the dope charges and his license but he got sullen again.

“
You
never tell
me
nothin’,” he said.

“What do you want to know?”

“What’s his name?” he asked quickly, like a machine gun firing.

“Who?” she asked, totally unprepared. “Oh, you mean James.”

“James what?”

“Uh uh. No fair.”

He looked at her as though to say he’d known all along she wouldn’t tell him anything.

“Would you like it if I talked to him about you?”

“Sure. Why not?” He was sitting propped up against the pillows, drumming on the night table. The TV was off but the radio was still on. She kissed him, tried playing with him a little. He shrugged her off.

“You feel like taking a walk?” she asked.

“You’re not getting me outa here,” he said.

“I meant I’d go with you, dopey.”

“Don’t call me dopey!”
He raised his hand as though he were going to strike her but held it in mid-air; he was red with rage. She was scared, although she didn’t believe he’d hit her.

“If I really thought you were dopey,” she said, “I’d be afraid to say it.”

He lowered his hand, slightly mollified.

It was a lie, of course. His dumbness was one of his endearing qualities and set him apart nicely from James in her mind. The contrast between them was so perfect that she was beginning to enjoy the arrangement. She could see it continuing indefinitely like this, sex with Tony, dinner and conversation with James.

“Now,” she said, hearing herself, very much the teacher trying
to bring an errant child back into the fold, “if you feel like taking a walk with me, that’s fine. If not, that’s fine, too.”

“I hate walking.”

“Is there anything else you want to do?” Coming onto him, rubbing his thigh, kissing his ear, playing with the lock of hair that had fallen just under the rim of his glasses. Pushing it back, curling it around her finger.

“If you work,” he said, “where do you work?”

“On Second Avenue.”

“Where?”

Not without some misgivings, she told him.

“What kinda office is that?” he asked scornfully.

“It’s not an office,” she said. “It’s a school. I’m a teacher.”

He stared at her openmouthed for a full minute before he said, “You’re kidding me.”

“No.”

“Whaddya teach, for Christ’s sake?”

“Little kids,” she said.

He stared at her with a mixture of awe and suspicion.

She laughed uneasily. “What’s the big deal?”

“No big deal.” But he continued staring as though he hadn’t seen her before.

She stood up, went into the bathroom, combed her hair, came back out.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Want something to eat?”

“What the hell you doin’ fucking around in bars if you’re a teacher?”

“Mother of God,” she murmured, “I’m hearing it and I don’t believe I’m hearing it.” But she understood exactly what he was talking about, of course.

He said nothing. His expression was changing but she couldn’t read the new one yet. Less belligerent, maybe. More thoughtful. He was considering. Finally he smiled.

“If that doesn’t beat all.”

“I’m
getting something to eat,” she said. “I didn’t have dinner.”

“You got any hot dogs?”

She didn’t because she had them so often for lunch from the Sabrett’s cart that she never wanted them for dinner.

“What I could really use,” he said, “is a steak and some spaghetti.”

She only had spaghetti in a can. He gave her a look of disgust and they both ended up eating peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches although he kept asking her if she called this a dinner. She wanted to point out that there were a dozen places in the neighborhood where they could pick up real food but he seemed determined that neither of them should go out. He ate six peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and then said he felt sick. He clutched his stomach and rolled his eyes, and when she asked what she could do, he said he’d better go home to his mother’s.

“To Queens?”

“I toldja that’s where she lives, didn’t I?” Grimacing with a pain that didn’t quite come off as pain.

“Yes. But you also told me you didn’t live there.”

“But wherever my mother lives is my home, right?” It was obviously a rhetorical question as far as he was concerned. “And home is where you go when you’re sick, right?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It seems to me if I got sick in someone’s house I’d lie down and see if it passed. Or throw up, maybe, if I had to.”