Carnovsky's Retreat Read online

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was seeing that woman, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes of course it was. I’m sorry.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “No, no, not a bit. How could I know her. I don’t know a soul around here except the little boy in One-B.”

  “Oscar—”

  “It’s the truth. What do you suppose, that I know all the ladies in New York just because one of them forgot to lower her shade tonight?”

  “No of course you don’t. I was just upset, that’s all.”

  “I understand. And I’m sorry. Maybe later.”

  “It’s late already, though. Remember, it’s not Saturday. I have to be at work in the morning.”

  “Oh yes? At what school again? Is this near your apartment-house? What about the phone number there—” (Trying to cheer her up with the Inquisition, a big joke between us these days.)

  “Oscar—”

  “Come on, give. Small studio apartment? A mansion on the hill? Cave inside the rocks? Tell me the details—is it true you grew up among the wolves?”

  “She was awfully well-built, wasn’t she?”

  “I didn’t get a good look, I’m afraid.”

  “She was a lot better built than I am.”

  “Don’t get crazy. She was just a stranger, without a head.”

  “I thought you didn’t see her.”

  “I saw she had no head.”

  “Then you saw what she had two of as well!”

  “Big deal.”

  “I’ll say it was.”

  “Linda, get ready, because I am changing the subject. Ready? Now. It’s changed.”

  “What’s the new subject.”

  “You are. We are going to talk about you. You are going to talk, to me, about you. Go.”

  “You know all about me.” (I have got her smiling by now.)

  “From eight to three I know a little. I hear about the schoolchildren, and the evil principal Gannon, and the nice friend Betty Robinson who teaches First Grade, and the lunches that are inedible, and the coffeemaker in the Teacher’s Room that produces mud, silt. What else do I know, let me see—”

  “Oscar—”

  “You see? I make a speech, I raise a little hell, and all you say is Oscar. You always say Oscar. Tell me instead your telephone, right now.”

  “464-6111.” (Or something.)

  “What, really? You made it up, it’s your license plate.”

  “Oscar I’m late, let me get dressed. I’ll tell you my phone number next time. Promise. I’ll tell you anything you want. Maybe.”

  This part is okay. We are having a little fun, maybe moreso than usual as a matter of fact. My nerves are settled, my bare girl is gone, and we have let go of our inhibitions for a change. All for the best. And now in the dark (where she is not so self-conscious) Linda bends down to pick up her things, and I find myself with an unusual view. Her head, upside down, framed between two haunches—a funny beautiful sight, a waterfall of hair, that makes me laugh. And she’s straight up, hands on hips.

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “Not at all. You are lovely to see.”

  “You were laughing. What was so funny?”

  She approaches the bed and starts poking me in the belly, tickles me, and slugs me with a pillow. There only is one, so I must disarm her to go on the attack and as we wrestle over the pillow something happens that very soon we are wrestling with each other instead, and I am back in business. She’s on, like a cowgirl whooping it up at the rodeo, and soon her little squeals are heard, and nothing could go smoother, or feel nicer to us.

  All fixed up, no more disaster, no guilt, jealousy, nothing. Where did it all go? Beats me. I only know some funny events took place here and we shared them, and that put us at our ease. For a historical first, she stayed the night, which meant no sleep for me. It’s a small bunk plus she got the pillow. And I was also nervous that Jimmy might duck in early, before school, as he does occasionally if there is something to report. The big news of the day sometimes comes out of his cereal box in the a.m.

  No further incident, however. “Continental Breakfast” here (bagel and coffee, instant) after which she took the tunnel to Jersey and I put my face in the pillow for an hour.

  Tuesday. Hauled in my biggest bundle of mail to date. Two magazines, two advertisements for more magazines, one contest, a reply from Gross at The Post to my inquiry about Benny Leonard, and a letter from my girlfriend. Some haul! I took it along to the diner with me and ate the fish breakfast for an hour, poking my important pile of mail.

  It’s not a letter so much as a note from Linda. These few words—“Oscar, you are completely right. I will tell all. Much love, Linda.”

  Too bad. It was only last evening I decided it best to go along with her. I stopped wanting to know. A displaced person can’t hold down a job in a school, so I was wrong to peg her for a Walkaway. And so what then but a married woman (very obvious to anyone except myself?) who likes to play around, but on a tight schedule. The husband is busy with his business, goes on trips—and maybe he plays around too. People do things this way, you hear about it every week. So she slips off the ring and slides on a wig—not Linda but some others I’m sure—and goes after a little hanky-pank. Then of course the big rush back home, into the apron, on with the ring, before the bubble breaks.

  Not only is she therefore not a Walkaway, she is the exact reverse: one who is staying. (On her terms.) I could verify this, every bit, by putting my detective’s hat on my head and trailing her to Fort Lee, or wherever she really goes. But I do not want to know. I decided, why force this girl to talk? She was right, it’s better left unknown. I don’t love this person and so I don’t care if she has a husband in the bushes. I don’t need any sad stories, nor do I fancy gazing upon the snapshots of husband and little children if any.

  Leave me in the dark, I concluded—just last night—so of course she drops me a line this morning to announce she is ready to spill.

  Wednesday. With Linda it is exactly what it might have been with Giselle. A game, and nobody’s heart is breaking. It’s something nice with nothing nasty. There would be no one making waves and no one worrying about the weather from one minute to the next, the way it goes in real love. An attractive girl, make no mistake—to like but not to love.

  I don’t know much but I do know the difference. I had the other kind, the genuine article, where every ten seconds you perk up and ask, What’s up, something the matter? Tell me, please, I detect a slight change in your face—

  Tanya, of course. 1931, summer, Coney Island. That was love. She came with me, to Feltman’s, Effie’s TeaRoom, yes even out to Jamaica Racetrack and I came with her too, to that folk dancing of hers—Carnovsky, with two cement blocks for feet. My head was spinning for years!

  She was a beauty, universal knowledge on Grand Avenue in Brooklyn and she knew it too. That was the thing. She put a little english on every move she made, to let the world know she was perfectly aware. Arrogant. She made you love her, she squeezed your heart, and believe it I was not the only one.

  Friday Night. We got a nice break today in the weather. Bright blue skies and the temperature shot up to forty so I made an all-day job of it, clear up to Central Park and back, using hot pretzels for fuel.

  Lovely in the park. Ice-skaters, pretty mothers talking among themselves, babies bundled up like a fragile package with just the eyes showing. Two dogs tree a squirrel. All the trees had a skim coat of ice that catches the sun and makes a glitter—a rock-candy world.

  I took it in from a comfortable bench and worked my way through a couple of Rafael Gonzales Coronas, indulging the life of leisure while trying my best not to worry about my state of impending poverty. Most of my worrying I prefer to get done at night, when there’s nothing else to do.

  Do my money worries show on my sleeve? Last night Linda foots the bill! Says, Why should you always pay. It isn’t like I have a big family to support, I have money too.
And so forth.

  Did she peek in my cookie-jar or merely read my mind? I didn’t ask questions (in keeping with my new policy), I just accepted. The truth is I can eat for the week on what I saved last night, what with the two bottles of vino and all. That’s where the cost comes in, getting into bed with a lush. Not with a talker, however—The Serious Talk, as she calls it, must be postponed. Tonight we will have our fun, she announces, and on Wednesday (after work, no less) she will trot over here to spill the beans.

  So now I cannot be so sure of my theory. The way she said about having no family to support, she wasn’t lying to me. Yet if there is no husband, there must yet be something else. One possibility, she is a sleeparound. She likes it in bed and is ashamed to like it so much, only not so ashamed she’ll miss out. So she takes it on the sly, here and there, keeping a few different men on ice around town and keeping them apart from her true life, which remains the teaching of kids.

  I don’t believe this new explanation, I don’t get it from her—even if once or twice she talked a sailor’s talk in bed—I am only bound to take it into account.

  Likewise I must take into account the possibility that it is all very simple. She got herself a Jew and can’t show him to her friends. I don’t credit this one either, however. For one thing, this is a good girl in my opinion and for another, if it was anti-semitism she would not be coming here to confess on Wednesday. That’s a crime no one confesses to anymore.

  To better address the problem of my financial worries, I took a longshot at Hialeah with Kramer. With two bullet works since a good fourth, and dropping down five hundred, I figured this horse was worth a twenty dollar investment (against profits of 250 if he should happen to get home).

  A gamble, a longshot who ate dust for seven furlongs and then made a late move—back to the barn. Not for nothing did they make Hubba Bubba 11–1. A horse must be hungry to win, says my colleague Hearn, however I don’t think he means hungry for lunch.

  When I am on, I feel like a genius. I can see between the lines, even from a thousand miles to the north. When I’m not hitting I feel like every other jerk in the grandstand, sticking pins in dolls, working the voodoo shift. Every instinct I have is wrong, until by magic it snaps back lucky.

  No such luck with my friend Hubba Bubba.

  Tonight Linda comes to “tell the truth.” Last night I had a shock already from my other one, Our Lady of the Rear Window. I was only half-attending the show, the other half asleep, when suddenly it grew very bright over there—as though someone threw on a spotlight—and she did the amazing deed. Pulled off her panties. Yanked them down and put her round backside up on the windowsill for me.

  And there it sat like a pair of soft white melons for a long time and finally she turned around and showed me her face too, which was enormous, the size of a hot-air balloon and just as smooth. No eyes or nose, only a tongue sticking out at me.

  I froze on the guilty seat and could find no way to escape. My muscles would not budge to flee, so I had to sweat it out while she let me have it. Caught at last and my face felt red as a radish. It never crossed my mind this could be a dream because it never can when you are dreaming. That’s what makes it rough, that within a dream there can be nowhere to hide. So I gazed upon this terrible face, a balloon filling up the window-frame, and I was positive it was her, it was real.

  To tell the truth I still think so, I think I really saw the bottom half of her. If she did it tonight, dropped her drawers and sat like Humpty Dumpty on the ledge, wouldn’t it look exactly as it looked in my dream? There it was, after all, and what else could it look like?

  Linda sets up shop as The Answer Man. Ask me anything you want, she says, and I will give the answer. So naturally question number one from me was,

  “Why are you going to answer whatever I want to ask?”

  “Good question. Cause I want to. I like you and I want to be fair with you.”

  “Tell me your phone number.”

  “That isn’t a question, it’s a command. I like you, Oscar, but I won’t obey your commands.”

  “Fair is fair. So please then, madam, just for my records, what might your telephone be?”

  “WI 4-1517.”

  “Bingo.”

  “You aren’t writing it down.”

  “I can remember. So what made it a secret—that the wrong person might pick up?”

  “Correct. Two wrong persons, my mom and dad.”

  “Your folks?”

  “I live with my parents in a six-room house in Fort Lee. I’ve lived there since I was eleven, except for a few years in my early twenties. My brother moved out at eighteen like a normal human being.”

  “What’s normal. You must get along with them nicely.”

  “Of course, I love them very much. And it makes life very affordable for all of us. But it is not The American Way, Oscar, not for a thirty-one-year-old woman.”

  “I’m forty-eight.”

  “You are not living with your parents.”

  “A good thing, where they are—underground.”

  “So you’re not appalled. That’s nice. I knew if anyone wouldn’t laugh at me it would be you, Oscar. You really are a nice man.”

  “Thank you. And you are a nice lady. So that’s it? That’s the big secret?”

  “Hardly. The worst is yet to come.”

  “You robbed a bank. Took a traffic ticket. What?”

  “I seduced you.”

  “That I’m aware. I notice such things sometimes.”

  “I mean I seduced you on purpose, it was premeditated. It was—oh Oscar it was such a big mess I don’t even know how to explain it to you.”

  “You did already, remember? It was my snoring that got to you.”

  “It really was, in a way. This is so awful! I know you think I’m attractive, maybe even a little sexy? Would you believe that in my entire life I have been out on about six dates? Or that for the last four years I never went out once?”

  “No I wouldn’t believe it unless you told me so. Why shouldn’t you be popular with the men?”

  “I never was, that’s all. And now there aren’t any men. In the past there were lots, they just never saw me. But now I only see two men besides my father: Bill Gannon, the principal, who is both horrible and married, and Mr. Ahearn, a nice man who drinks whiskey in the boiler-room—he’s the school super—and who has snakes and lobsters tattoed on both arms.”

  “Lobsters?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “All right then, lobsters it is. So you were lonely. That’s no crime, Linda, and it’s no crime to try and change it.”

  “Six months ago I went in for a check-up with our family doctor, who presented me with a clean bill of health and a free lecture. Or not a lecture, a bit of fatherly advice that no father would give.”

  “Seduce?”

  “You guessed it. He said, You’re over thirty, your life is going along, and you are a virgin. And he said I might wish to remain a virgin but that it was his opinion as a physician that a love affair would be very good for me, for my health mind you. No need to marry anybody, just go to bed with a man, he said.”

  “He had himself in mind?”

  “Oh no, nothing like that. He really believed in the idea. Of course I didn’t have a man to go to bed with. I didn’t even have one to go to a movie with, except Dad. So Doctor Barnhill said, I know that, go find yourself one. Half the people in the world are men. Make a conscious effort, join groups, take a course, go out hunting. So I went out hunting, like a leopard stalking her prey. I went to parties without an invitation, I joined an acting class, I took a boat ride last August on the Great Lakes—spent a lot of time and money, looking for a man to seduce! And then, as you know dear Oscar, I went to a hockey game in Quebec.”

  “I am surprised you didn’t find one sooner. On the boat? Did they all hide from you again?”

  “Beats me. I was looking. But when I saw you asleep on the bus, snoring like an old dog in the sun, I kn
ew you were the man for me.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m perfectly serious, though. I could see it with you. I wasn’t afraid of you—you were nice and it showed. And you were handsome—”

  “For an old dog in the sun.”

  “Well maybe a little at first, I thought that. But I chose you, hunted you down, and even then I had to drink myself under the bed to come down the hall after you. You were no help.”

  “Linda I never dreamed. I wouldn’t have presumed—”

  “So you said, literally. So I did presume. And so I still do. But it has been such a nasty trick on you.”

  “Have you been hearing complaints?”

  “You didn’t know the truth. How could you know how arbitrary it was, that it might have been someone else, any face in the crowd.”

  “I disagree with you. You found no one at the parties or on the Great Lakes, so it was not so arbitrary as you think. More arbitrary in a way for me—you knocked and I let you in.”

  “Well we both were ready, I guess.”

  “That’s it. Plus we both were lucky. Believe it, I could go twenty years without the courage to fill that prescription he gave you. You did better.”

  “But you have to mind. Being Doctor Barnhill’s pills—for medicinal purposes only. Don’t you think we have to stop now that you know it’s once-a-week Spinster Therapy we are having?”

  It was at this juncture in our discussion that I came close to uttering a lie. I was close to telling her, No it’s more than that, what we have now. I bit my tongue in time, however, and I’m glad. Maybe this does end us, and maybe it just ends her taking too much wine to get herself primed on Saturday. Who knows, maybe changes nothing at all.

  But we both should know what it is and what it isn’t. Sex therapy, for each, not only for her. (Once a week, like with Tanya as a matter of fact, and in between times we go about our business.) I’m happy I let the truth stand, as that was the purpose of this special Wednesday night talk, the truth. All I said was,