Authors: Francine Pascal
David knows. We’ve talked it into the ground for the last four years, but nothing changes. I love making love to him. It’s glorious, and if it’s incomplete the loss is small compared to the fullness I feel being loved by him.
We lie together on the smooth sheets with the blanket kicked to the floor and the air conditioner blowing cool air across the tops of our bodies. David turns toward me, his head propped up on one hand, his elbow dimpling the pillow. He traces the outlines of my breasts lightly with his fingertips, running them down over my hip, stopping on my thigh to write something that has to be, “I love you.” I push him down off his elbow and write a big ME TOO all across his chest and down his stomach with the last O circling his flaccid penis which instantly begins to come to life.
“Uh, uh.” I talk directly to the culprit. “No way unless you know how to prepare dinner for eight.”
“I know he can handle six,” David says, smiling and pulling me up to him. I reach over him to turn the clock back facing us. It’s past five-thirty, and suddenly I have too much to do.
“Let’s move it, David, I haven’t even put up the guinea hens yet.”
“Instant action,” he says and in one leap bolts upright and onto the floor. “To the showers!”
Showering together after sex can be invigorating, rejuvenating, and wonderfully romantic, except if you live in a seventy-five-year-old building and the shower is a skinny rail of a pipe attached to a huge old tub crouched on giant claw feet. The shower was probably added some time in the thirties and never was your bracing needle spray to begin with and, after forty years of trying, is down to a lot of coughs, some spits, and a pee. It’s still better than cleaning the bathtub. And then it’s just nice to be together.
“You have the worst shower I have ever seen,” David says. “Can’t they fix it?”
“I guess so.”
“What’s the problem?”
“No problem. All you have to do is catch the super when he’s sober, my love,” I tell my love. “Consider that your first project after you move in.”
“Consider it done,” he says, and then with a very pleased smile, “It’s not so far off, is it?”
David and I have decided that he’s going to move into my apartment after the wedding. For one thing, it’s bigger than his, and, though it’s not a giveaway, the rent is realistic. But the real clincher is that David’s apartment is located deep into the singles’ jungle of East Eighty-third Street, while mine is on Central Park West and Sixty-fifth, an easy walk to midtown.
“Eleven weeks.”
“Nervous?” He starts soaping my back.
“Maybe a little.”
“Don’t be. It’s only me.”
“I’m OK until I start thinking about that monster wedding.”
“What are you talking about, it’s only a small celebration.”
“That’s what you say. And that’s what it really should have been, just a small party with a few close relatives and friends.”
Now I’m soaping
his
back, and some of the old irritation about the wedding starts to come back.
“Hey, easy with that brush.”
“Sorry. . . .”
“Johanna,” David says, putting gentle hands on my shoulders, “it gives my parents pleasure, and they have the perfect place for it, and besides, seventy people isn’t exactly a monster wedding. Most people have twice that.”
“I appreciate what your parents are doing, and the penthouse is beautiful, but I just think it would have been easier . . .”
“Easier?”
“Well, less complicated. Oh, David, I don’t know why I’m rehashing this whole thing again. Pay no attention to me. It’s prenuptial panic, that’s all. It’s going to be lovely, and I’ll probably have the best time of all. Or the worst.”
David kisses my brave smile, and by now we’re both so lathered with soap that I have to fill the Water Pik holder at the sink to get the suds off. We’re happily drying off when David asks, “Have you told your sister yet?”
I’ve been dreading this conversation. “Not yet,” I tell him, “but I’m planning to write her this week.”
“We should probably invite your nephews, at least the two older ones. What do you think?”
David’s so family-minded that it’s hard for him to understand my relationship with my sister, but Sephra is almost twelve years older than I, and besides, she’s only a half sister, and—I don’t know—we’re just not close. “Leave it to me, David. OK?”
“Are you upset?”
Like drunks, people who are upset always deny their condition. And now I say, “No, no. Not at all,” and David looks at me and shrugs his shoulders.
“We have time to worry about that later,” he says, trying to pass it off. But I want to deal with it now.
“There’s nothing to talk about. I just think it would be a better idea not to burden them with such a big expensive trip. That’s all.”
“But they’re your only family. Don’t you want them to come?”
“Of course I do,” I tell him, but I don’t. It’s never been much good with Sephra and me. Something soured her a long time ago, spoiling any chance we had to be close and keeping a cold distance between us. And in that gaping space, there’s something that’s not right. I’ve felt that way as far back as I can remember. I don’t know what it is and she swears it doesn’t exist, but I don’t believe her. It has nothing to do with the way she’s treated me. She’s been exceptional, practically raising me after our parents died. I was only four and she was sixteen when they were killed in an auto accident on the Jersey Turnpike. For a couple of years after that we lived in a foster home with the Winstons, very kind, sweet people but quite old, even then. He died right after we moved out, and I kept in touch with Mrs. Winston until she died eight years ago.
Sephra was barely eighteen when she married Wes, and as soon as they got their own apartment, they took me in with them. She’s always done all the right things for me, but I never felt comfortable. And it wasn’t Wes. He was terrific. I don’t know, maybe it was something simple like her resentment at having to be a mother to me so young, or maybe it had something to do with my mother who was her stepmother. I have no memory of their relationship toward each other. In fact, I know very little about either of my parents, and Sephra hasn’t helped. Anytime I’ve asked her about some distant memory I have, she closes right up. I’ve learned it’s a subject you just don’t discuss with her. And there’s no one else to ask.
The little I do remember is more in the form of an impression than an event, and it’s only about my mother. I have always felt that she was very unhappy, but I don’t know why. My memory of my father is nearly a complete blank. He was a Lutheran minister and quite possibly very involved with his congregation and not around home much, but there’s one thing I’m certain of—Sephra didn’t like him. Nothing could darken Sephra’s face quite so much as any reference to our father, even from Wes, who doesn’t seem to know any more than I do.
I lived with Sephra and Wes until I went off to college. I was lucky. I got a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence just as Wes’s job moved them all to California. After college I came straight to New York. In the beginning, I went out to California a few times for Christmas, but one year they went away for the holidays, and the next year I went skiing in Vermont, and then I went out there once more just before I met David about five years ago, and I haven’t seen them since. We talk or email occasionally, but that’s all.
I can’t explain any of these things to David because they’re really not defined enough in my own mind, so I reach around for some sort of ordinary reason, something that will stop the questions.
“It’s just not easy for Sephra to pick up and go completely across the country for a wedding. And it’s probably not fair to ask her because then she’d feel obligated, and the truth is it’s hard for Wes to get the time off, and she’s got that house and all those kids. Besides, the idea of bringing even two of them is out of the question. It simply costs too much. I would feel horribly guilty allowing them to do all that for something as unimportant as a party—God, David, it’s only a wedding.”
One look at his face and I want to bite my tongue.
“Is it?” he says, standing in the middle of my bedroom in his undershorts, obviously offended and trying for more dignity than his attire will allow him. It touches me. I go over to him and put my arms around his waist. He doesn’t respond.
“I didn’t mean that it wasn’t important. To us it’s crucial, but I feel selfish shoving my priorities down anyone else’s throat, even if it is my own sister.”
He puts his arms around me. He’s such a pushover. I love him for that.
“You’re right. Sometimes I forget we’re not holding NATO talks. We’ll send her lots of pictures.”
“Oh, great! Here, Sephra honey, here are some pictures of that wedding you weren’t invited to. As you can see, everybody else was there.”
David laughs.
“Well, I guess I’ll just have to put off meeting the elusive Sephra for a little longer.”
Much longer than he knows.
It’s hard for David to appreciate my situation because his family is so very close. I enjoy his family as I could never enjoy mine. I’m even beginning to feel part of them. As for my sister, I’m satisfied knowing that she’s well and happy out there. I don’t have to see for myself. And it seems pointless for David to meet them all. How much can you get to know people when you see them once for a couple of days? Besides, I am who I am to him, and I want to keep it that way. It’s clean and simple. I stand or fall on my own identity, and it’s not muddied up with someone else’s ideas of who I am.
The more I think about it the more certain I am that I don’t want Sephra here at all. Ever. My life is what I’ve made it, and I don’t want any baggage from any other time being dragged in and complicating things. I haven’t needed any of them for years. I’ve outgrown them, and it makes me almost angry that I could be made to feel guilty for feeling the way I do.
“Hey, Johanna.” David comes up behind me, and I see his sweet reflection in the mirror along with my own scowling face. I rarely allow myself to dwell on my relationship with my sister, but this time I got carried away. “Something wrong?” he wants to know.
I give him a big smile that relieves his concern, smudges my mascara, and makes me feel very happy to love someone as sensitive and caring as David.
“Are you making the tart for tonight?” I ask him.
“Absolutely, did you get the peaches?”
“Three pounds, and most of them are very ripe.”
We head into the kitchen. It’s almost six o’clock. A couple of days ago when David was here he made the dough in the Cuisinart and stored it in the fridge, so it’s ready for rolling. I love the fact that he’s so involved in the kitchen. I’m a fairly good cook, but baking has always eluded me. Maybe I’m too impatient and careless. But David’s come such a long way for a late starter. In fact, I think he’s truly amazing.
When our relationship first began, sometimes he would surprise me with breakfast, and it really was a surprise. The eggs were all right, but the kitchen looked like the invasion of a dozen seasick monkeys. It’s been a long, hard process, but he’s so smart and anxious to learn anything that he mastered baking of all kinds brilliantly, pastries, breads, pies, cakes, anything. Nothing scares him. Even the monkeys have been tamed, and now he leaves the place cleaner than when he found it. In fact, he cleans up as he works. David baking a cake is the most unnerving, precarious spectacle I’ve ever witnessed. It’s a series of leaps from stove to sink, a grabbing, shoving, dropping, dripping, and wiping up that I can’t bear to watch. Amazingly enough, the end product is excellent and often beautiful to look at. Unless he’s got Miss Grimble hidden up his sleeve or the monkeys are smarter than I thought, he’s made it.
“The dough is on the second shelf in the fridge,” I tell him, “and the peaches are in the fruit drawer. I’ll be inside doing some last-minute things to the table. Call me if you need anything.” And I flee.
I take my time, and I hear him singing in the kitchen. We’re going to be very happy together. I know it.
Exactly as I expected, Claudia is the first to arrive at eight sharp. Dear, prompt Claudia Romanelli, my agent, confidante, and old high-school chum. Claudia always had it all, even way back then. Exceptionally pretty from childhood, a raging success in high school—blond, perfect figure, wonderful dancer, cheerleader—the kind who reaches her zenith early and fizzles out immediately on graduation, as all the rest of us adolescent cripples have to believe. Only Claudia didn’t.
At first she tried acting, and we knew we had our perfect fizzle, just another beautiful blonde in a market glutted with delicious young women. But Claudia always looked a little different. Her brown eyes shone a little warmer, a little brighter and softer, and the faint West Virginia accent and the sweetness of her smile charmed everyone; and they all remembered her and liked her, especially women. And she was a good actress.
It looked as though nothing would stop her, but something did. She got married, then married, then married, and so on; Romanelli was the third from her last husband, and I always get him confused with the second one who sold stolen Hondas. Romanelli was a bookie; Mark Wallace was the first, a no-place boxer; the Honda dealer was second; next came Tony Wanda, the dancer; then Romanelli. Somehow a George Wakefield, a perfectly legitimate stockbroker, slipped in briefly. The latest is a lout named Donald, a flimflam man who lies abed soaking up color TV rays and beer-dreaming up the perfect sting. Somewhere along the line Claudia moved from acting into the agenting business, and it turned out she was a natural there too. She started off as a theatrical agent for William Morris, was successful, and within five years opened her own agency in partnership with Neil Waxman, a literary agent. Neil represents the writers, and Claudia handles the theatrical end. Business is booming for them.
Soon she’ll leave Donald (actually she puts them out because it’s her apartment) and move on to another winner. We, her friends, have come to accept whomever Claudia brings home and hope we can keep the names straight.
Claudia comes in, and I hold the door open for what’s-his-face, but she’s alone.
“You look beautiful,” I tell her, and she truly does. Her blond hair is piled casually on the top of her head with a few runaway ringlets framing her face. Her clothes are always easy and relaxed-looking. She wears scarves and accessories as they should be worn, a trick more difficult than she makes it look, which is, of course, the real trick.
“Hi, Joey.” She still uses my high-school nickname. “I love your pants. Where did you get them?”
“Bendel’s. On sale. There’s a little pull in the back you can’t even see.” We kiss. I don’t kiss any of my other female friends, but you can’t not kiss Claudia. It’s unnatural.
“They’re great. Hi, David, I didn’t even see you hiding back there.” At six foot two David can hardly hide behind anyone, but Claudia can make anyone feel adorable.
David heads into the kitchen to make Claudia a drink. She follows him, already deep into an involved tale of Broadway’s latest ménàge a trois, cinq, or however many are fashionable this season.
Meanwhile, my other right-on-time guests, Mary Gail and her husband, Laurence Gordon, arrive. Mary Gail, with huge olive eyes that dominate a delicate face surrounded by a haze of brown curls that give her beauty a slightly out-of-focus softness. She’s a brilliant cook, a talented photographer, a dreamer, and so totally abstract as to come closer to theory than to living reality. Ordinary expectations will never work out for Mary Gail, though unfortunately her husband and all her caring friends will never stop trying to foist them on her. Me included. Though I swear I know better, still I fall into the trap of trying to put a concept in harness. Happily, it’s impossible.
Larry Gordon is in advertising, a nice solid guy you can lean on, providing something pretty doesn’t pass by.
Next to ring the doorbell is our pigeon, Roger Warren, who looks more like a capon with his short round figure, thinning white-blond hair and matching eyebrows and eyelashes all growing out of pale, nearly translucent skin. He’s not a terrible poker player, knows all the right odds, but his macho mentality always defeats him in the end. He’ll go down to disaster with eights against queens just to prove he’s a killer. I love to play with him. Sometimes I worry that he won’t want to come back, but macho will win over sanity every time.
And the last of my guests will always arrive last, even though he has only to walk two doors down the hall. Late, last, messy, careless, as if conspired against by all things physical, Louis is a man whose clothes tear on rounded corners, on whose lapels dripless candles devilishly cascade their streams of hot wax; dog droppings mysteriously gather under his shoes, and yards of perfectly empty floors trip him. As unkind as the physical world is to this dear, gentle brilliant friend, just so powerfully does the spiritual world love him, for he is endowed with a faith worthy of the saints.
Louis Proctor is a social worker nine to five weekdays, specializing in disturbed adolescents, and a servant of his Episcopal God on the weekends. These pursuits are undertaken with completely disheveled organization and keep him overlapping constantly. Still, overinvolved as he is, he will drop everything anytime you need him. And with that miracle of faith and all its attendant virtues, he can be surprisingly helpful. In fact, we’ve helped each other over some very rough terrain in our eight-year friendship.
Louis is in his middle thirties with curly brown hair and boyish features set in a round, dimpled, almost plump face that belies his tall, nearly skinny frame. He is most comfortable formally attired in a serious black, Sunday-go-to-meeting suit from too many years ago. At his casual best he will wear the pants to another such suit and a white shirt that’s too old and frayed even to pray in. Louis is knowledgeable, concerned, and gay. Unfortunately for him, he looks only knowledgeable and concerned. This flaw dents his social life badly, and occasionally he’s reduced to taking in questionable companions. Nobody’s perfect.
Tonight is no different from any other night for Louis, and it’s certain that he will either arrive one half hour late or I’ll have to go down the hall to get him.
By eight-thirty Louis has arrived, and everyone is well into their second drink. The conversation is moving along with spirit. There’s shoptalk and politics and gossip and—now that Louis has arrived—religion. Some of it is
New York Times
repeats, but a lot is original thinking, and it moves along with the ease of good friends with much in common, with the exception of Roger who presents a small problem in this area. He’s always rabid to get on to the poker game, and he can’t bear to waste time on anything in which he can’t lose his money. He’s a casino owner’s dream, someone who needs some kind of action all the time. Roger is married, with children and dogs and a country house, even a boat, and it all works because, from what I understand, he makes a pile of money in the mail-order business that pretty much runs by itself. His wife handles everything else, which leaves him plenty of time to chase down the action.
The dinner moves along nicely. My baked clams are always a success. They’re lightly breaded with a combination of the usual spices plus fresh parsley, garlic, herbs of Provence, and crushed hot peppers all blended with oil and breadcrumbs and—my secret—allowed to marinate raw in the fridge for most of the day. Baked quickly, browned lightly, and sprayed with lemon, they’re served sizzling.
After the clams come Simone Beck’s squab, made instead with guinea hens, a fresh salad, and we’re ready for the star of the evening, David’s peach tart, champagne, and our announcements.
The first announcement—about our marriage on August 21—is greeted with applause, enthusiasm, and real affection.
“To the bride and groom!” Laurence raises his glass, and we all do a minute of touch tapping to make sure everyone clinks his glass for good luck.
Claudia makes a loving toast, wishing us good fortune and hoping marriage doesn’t cut into our sex lives too badly. Louis gets God to give us his best and there’s more toasting and tapping. David opens another bottle of champagne and Mary Gail quotes some obscure gem from a nineteenth-century feminist. Nobody understands but we all drink to it anyway. There’s more glass clinking, and then Roger rises, glass on high.
“And,” he says, “for the final toast [the bastard is only anxious to move onto the poker game] I propose we drink to the poker group. May we survive the marriage as well as we did the courtship!”
“Skoal!” says David, and we all drink up.
“Shall we take the pie to the poker table?” Roger asks, standing and grabbing his tart.
“Number one, Roger, that magnificent item wasted on you is a
tarte aux pêches,
not a pie, and number two, I have another announcement.”
“Ugh,” Claudia moans, “a baby . . .”
“Jesus, Claudia,” Laurence says, “people are eating.”
“Just take it easy, smart alecks,” I tell both of them. “It’s not a baby, not yet, at least. Though it is a birth of sorts. It’s my first novel. I’ve decided to retire from the magazine field in favor of fiction. I’m writing a novel.”
As I say the words I turn to David, and he gives me the reaction I’d hoped for. My gift is well received. His face lights up with love and pride and great pleasure, reaffirming once more that this sensational person is all the family I will ever need.
Now the rest of the reactions come in, starting with Mary Gail. “Sensational!” she says and lifts her glass.
“What’s it about?” Laurence asks.
“Mind control,” I tell him, “evil, charisma, religion and its possession of people . . .”
“Avrum Maheely again?” David’s voice cuts in above mine. I stop talking and look at him. There’s a sudden quiet at the table.
“Yes,” I say, and his joy of a moment ago vanishes. In its place there’s a more serious reaction, not quite anger, something deeper and more permanent. Damn it! I was dumb to pretend this wouldn’t happen.
In the four years of our love, like everyone else, we’ve had some important problems. But we’ve always been able to deal with them, solving the ones that could be solved and at least understanding and trying to accept the others. But the problem of Avrum Maheely was never really resolved. We just took the easy way out and let it fade with time. Of course, it did just that. The series was over, and as far as David was concerned Avrum was out of our lives. And yet he wasn’t. I knew I was going to do this book almost from that first interview over a year ago, but I never told David. From the beginning, when I first got the assignment, something was strange about his reaction, and it made me uncomfortable and confused. This was my first
New Yorker
profile, and Neil had gotten me a thousand more than I had anticipated. Naturally I was ecstatic and expected David to be his normal supportive, enthusiastic self, but he wasn’t; he was almost sullen, completely out of character for him. He explained his reaction by saying that cults just turned him off. He had no curiosity at all about Manson, Jones, or the Moonies, or the whys and hows of any of their followers. He said he never even read more than the initial accounts in the newspapers and didn’t believe it was a subject that would have much public interest beyond the hard facts. Of course, I said I thought he was being very narrow-minded, and we batted it back and forth for a while, but I could see that the subject actually revolted him and that I would never convince him otherwise, so I let up. It was the first thing I’ve done that I couldn’t discuss fully with David. We barely talked about it, but I know he resented the time I spent working on the Maheely profile, particularly my time with Avrum. It was almost as if he thought they were going to contaminate me. It got very bad when I received some threatening letters from fringe cult people and other nuts. Finally David had something tangible to rest his case on. Now, he claimed, I was in danger, which was ludicrous because writers always get letters from crazies. You can always spot them too. They’re scribbled in pencil on lined paper torn from old school notebooks. Most of the time I don’t even read them, but this time I thought I might get some insights. My mistake was letting David see them. For Valentine Day he bought me two beautiful presents, iron gates for my fire escape and a Fox lock for the front door. When it came to Avrum Maheely, that was probably our lightest moment.
Under no circumstances will I be fool enough to show him the letter I got a couple of days ago from one of Avrum’s followers now in prison, Alice Rheinlander, better known as Swat. Most of the women in the cult seemed surprisingly malleable—hysterical but controllable—with the exception of Swat. My only contact with her so far has been watching her testify at the trial. I remember a face cemented in anger. I could see the open hostility in the way she moved her body. Her very walk was a challenge, her voice coarse with fury. A tall woman with large bony hands and hard angles of elbows and knees that jutted through her clothes, she was an extremely ugly person for whom no one seemed to feel sympathy, which was probably the most sympathetic thing about her. Recently I wrote letters to both her and Imogene Winters about the book and the possibility of an interview. Swat answered for both of them. It was a long three-page harangue, searing in its condemnation of me and my article, but still giving me permission to visit her. She called me a cunt, accused me of wanting, in her words, only to fuck Avrum, and then came a whole ranting, raving section about how jealous I was because Avrum loved her and how she was a part of him and that I’d better never try to get him or she’d find some way to get out of prison and kill me. I’ll admit when I first got the letter I said to myself, forget it, I’m not going to deal with that lunatic. But then I thought more about it, and the truth is these two women are the linchpins of my entire project, and if I don’t see and talk to them at far greater length, I’ll have to forget the whole idea. Then I comforted myself by saying that Swat was safely in prison and not due out for a lot of years. Besides, if all her anger rests on my making a play for Avrum Maheely, then there’s certainly nothing to worry about. I would love to have thrown the letter out, but I know I’m going to need it, so I stuffed it in my files. No question about it, it was an unnerving experience; still is, a bit. But it would be ten times worse if David knew about it. Poor David. I feel like such a rat, but this book is a natural. Even Neil, who’s a very tough agent, agrees with me. He thinks I could have a big winner if I can carry it off. I know I can, and I know I have to try.