Ordinary People by Judith Guest
“I can’t believe she said that. She never even talks to me—”
“She’s shy. She has a terrific inferiority complex.”
“Tell her to join the club.”
“You tell her.”
He snorts. “That is not my style.”
“Oh? And what is your style?”
He grins at her. “Well, on Friday nights, I perform bakery B and E’s and babysit with some twerpy eleven-year-old and his sister.”
“That’s a joke, isn’t it? You performing a B and E, I mean. You, who couldn’t even say hello in the hall, unless I said it first.”
“Hey, that’s not true. There were always guys around you, what was I supposed to do?”
“Oh, sure. Well, at least they were friendly, they paid some attention.”
“I paid attention,” he says. “I paid a lot of attention in my mind. I used to sneak looks all the time in choir. I like to look at you.” To illustrate, he pulls the cowboy hat lower over his eyes. They sit, side by side, he playing and she notating, until he is tired of it, and stretches his arm back over his head to drop the guitar on the couch.
“Enough.”
“If you don’t write them down, you’ll forget them.”
“If I forget ’em, they weren’t worth writing down anyway.”
“That isn’t true. You certainly don’t have a very clear idea of what you do well,” she says, “and what you don’t do well.”
“I don’t?” He tilts the hat back to look at her. “What don’t I do well?”
She laughs. “I knew you’d say that. Okay. You don’t accept compliments gracefully. Like, when I told you how much my mother likes you—”
“I’m just waiting for the rest of it, that’s all. My mother likes you, my brother likes you, thanks for everything and I’ll see you around.”
“Oh, you’re hopeless, you really are.”
But she is not laughing. Instead she is looking at him with a solemn, wide open expression. His mouth is suddenly dry, his head feels queerly light. A highway is moving toward him and he is on it, traveling with such force and speed, all his senses open again. He turns toward her, puts his arms around her gently. Her mouth opens under his, her breath is sweet-smelling, like apples, her eyes closed. The eyelids are small, delicate curves that he touches with his lips, his fingertips. Her tongue in his mouth, exploring. He cannot concentrate any more, gathers her against him tightly as his groin hardens, spreads warmth through his whole body. His face in the hollow of her neck, he rocks her slowly, gently in his arms.
They lie drugged and submerged, facing each other on the bed. Conrad’s head is on his arm, one hand curved around her breast, eyes closed, shielding himself from the shining look of her; smooth, pale peach skin glowing in the light from the hall. His heart floats inside his chest. His skin feels branded everywhere that she has touched him, with fingers as light as bird wings. Comfortably and perfectly tired, yet his mind is engaged, recording bits and pieces. Data for assimilation, but later, later. She moves, drawing closer to him, drawing her arms inside his, her hands against his chest. He opens his eyes to look at her.
“Cold?” he whispers.
She nods and he reaches down to the foot of the bed to pull the blankets over them. Gently he asks her, because now he is her protector against the world, “Did I hurt you?” and, with his fingertips caresses again the rounded curve of her breast.
“No.” She shifts her body slightly, and her knees bump against his. “I want to tell you something, Con. I’m not—you know—a virgin.”
“Okay.” His hand travels over her back; soft angles of shoulder blades, a hollow between.
“Do you care?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to tell you?”
“You want to?”
“Maybe. I think I would feel better. It’s no one I knew here. It was a boy in Akron. We did things—” Her voice sinks to a whisper and he must stop his hand moving on her shoulder in order to hear her.
“After my father moved out. I felt so awful, like it was me who was losing everyone. It was happening to me. Not to them. My father tried to talk to me about it, but I made up excuses, reasons for not listening to him, I didn’t want to get involved, I didn’t want to take sides. But I had already taken sides against them both. And I wouldn’t talk about it, so finally everybody just left me alone, and that hurt, too. Only I just pretended that I didn’t care a damn, not about them or anything else. That’s when it happened.”
She stops to take a breath and he strokes her gently, again. “Don’t be too nice to me, okay?” she whispers.
“Okay,” he says. “Why?”
“Because. It’s not nice, the rest of it.”
“Don’t tell me, if you don’t want to. You don’t have to, Jen.”
“No, I want to. I started hanging around. You know, with kids my parents were afraid of. They were wild, I guess. Only not really, they were just stupid. And I was stupid. And I started doing a lot of stupid things with them.” She sighs, her voice tired and flat. “Nothing interesting. Nothing even unusual, just the same old stuff. We smoked, we took pills, we junked around. Sometimes we needed money and kids stole stuff. I had enough money. My dad felt so bad about me by then he was keeping me well supplied, but I would go with them and steal, just for kicks. And then one time we got caught. The manager of the store was going to prosecute. He was furious, he’d had it. He called our parents, got them down to the store—and. Con, he knew my father. It was awful. My father talked and talked to him, and finally he talked him out of taking us to court. I don’t know how he did it. The man said he thought that he might be making a mistake, letting us off, but he was doing it anyway, and we were to stay the hell out of his store, period. And my father cried—” She stops, suddenly, her hand over her face. He holds her tenderly against him.
“Anyway,” she says, “at first I was just so relieved to have gotten out of it that I didn’t think about anything else. But then I started to feel sick about myself. About what I was doing to myself. Not my mom, or my dad, but me. I did it. Why? Why did I want to hurt myself like that? So stupid, so stupid. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Why not?”
“Because. What you must think.”
“I don’t think anything,” he says.
“I’m so ashamed, I’m still so ashamed. That’s why we moved here, you know. My mother thought it was Akron. But it wasn’t Akron, it was me.”
He shifts his position slightly, to ease the pressure of her body across his arm. He kisses her hair, her eyelids, tastes salt, wetness. It makes him want her again, but it is too soon, too feeble. He doesn’t want to dilute that first powerful moment, wants to lie still, thinking about it. As if she reads his mind, she whispers, “Let’s just talk, okay?”
And they sit up, then, with the sheet pulled up, their backs against the headboard of her bed, holding hands. She turns his arm up. The fingertips of her other hand brush lightly against the scar on his wrist.
“Did it hurt?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember.”
“Would you rather not talk about it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never talked about it. To doctors, but not to anyone else.”
Her fingers on the scar send out strange vibrations from nerve endings that are not completely healed. He wonders if they will ever be. “Why did you do it?”
“I don’t know. It was like falling into a hole and it keeps getting bigger and bigger, you can’t get out. And then all of a sudden it’s inside you, it is you, and you’re trapped, and it’s all over.”
“I know,” she says, “I know that feeling.” She holds his hand lightly. “It seems right at the time. What is it that makes hurting yourself seem like the right thing to do?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t even know why I don’t feel that way any more.”
“Listen,” she says, “I was counting on you for some answers.”
“Can’t help you, sorry.” Leaning away from her, he reaches down beside the bed, fumbling for the cowboy hat he has dropped there. He squeezes its soft crown; presses the hat low over his eyes. “These same questions I ask myself, over and over,” he drawls. “And then I answer myself. I say, ‘How the fuck do I know?’ ”
She laughs. “Why won’t you take anything seriously?”
He lies down flat, the hat over his face. “No sense taking the questions seriously, if there aren’t any answers.”
“Con. Do you believe people are punished for the things they do?”
“Punished? You mean by God?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe in God,” he says.
She lifts the hat up off his face. “Not at all?”
“It isn’t a question of degree, I don’t think. Either you do or you don’t.”
They are silent for a moment. “I believe in God,” she says.
“Okay.”
She turns toward him, and the ends of her hair fall lightly against his chest. “What do you believe in?”
“Oh, tennis courts, wallpaper,” he says, “Florsheim shoes, Miami Beach—”
“Liar,” she says, her arms sliding around his neck.
“—you,” he says, kissing her.
“Liar again, but that’s nice.”
And he squeezes her tightly, feeling the sense of calm, of peace slowly gathering, spreading itself within him. He is in touch for good, with hope, with himself, no matter what. Berger is right, the body never lies.
31
She left the telling of it up to him.
“You’re the expert in human relations. You handle it.”
Said calmly, as she was packing. He had felt the accusation behind it. When they talk now it is to hurl accusation and contradiction at each other. Rebuke. Revelation. But it all falls between them. No bridges are formed. The water gets muddier. Solutions do not surface.
“I don’t understand why you’re leaving!” he says.
“Because I can’t stand the way you look at me. I can’t stand that ‘Poor Beth, poor old you’ expression on your face.”
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that’s it. I’m not looking at you any differently—”
“When you suggested a counselor,” she says, “that’s when I knew.”
“Counseling! I said counseling, for both of us.”
“No! You’re the one who isn’t happy any more, can’t you see that? You haven’t been for a long time, Cal. You go and see a counselor, if you want. You do what you need to do.”
“What I need,” he says, “is for us to talk to each other! I want to talk to you, Beth, but when I try you freeze me out.”
“Well, what do you expect from an emotional cripple?” she blazes. “That’s what you’ve been trying to tell me, isn’t it? That’s what you really think of me. I won’t have it, Cal. I won’t have you wringing your hands over me, the way you have over him.”
And there are too many rooms to which he has no access; too much that he doesn’t understand any more. If he could know what he used to know! But what did he really know? There is addiction here: to secrecy; to a private core within herself that is so much deeper than he ever imagined it to be. He has no such core; at least, he cannot find it, if it is there. Is it fair to deny her the right to keep it, because he hasn’t this space? This need?
Nightly they argue. Daily she gets up, spending hours at Onwentsia, organizing, supervising, putting plans into operation for the nationally advertised tennis tournament the club is sponsoring. Over there, they think of her as a marvelous miracle.
“That wife of yours!” Sara Murray said to him. “I don’t know how she does it! Everything organized, down to the last detail. It’s marvelous, really!”
Marvelous miracle, his wife, and they have come this far, this far, and no further. In spite of love. He knows there is love, but what good is it? It cannot help them any more. He had grabbed her roughly in an argument, wanting to hit her, to knock the stubbornness out of her; him! The Clark Kent of Samuel Mumford High School, the model of gentleness as he had courted her, he would never even presume to lay an indecorous hand on her breast in those days (Ah, innocence! Ah, ignorance!), and now, what was he trying to do? Brutalize her, violate her thoughts, interject, by force if necessary, his own notions of what was right, what was practical. For he sees something else here: that her outer life is deceiving; that she gives the appearance of orderliness, of a cash-register practicality about herself; but inside, what he has glimpsed is not order, but chaos; not practicality at all, but stubborn, incredible impulse.
The night he had grabbed her, he had shouted in her face, “Do you love me, Beth?”
“Stop it!” she said.
“Tell me! I want to know!”
“I feel the same way about you,” she said, “that I have always felt! You are the one! You are the one who’s changed!”
Howard and Ellen are thunderstruck, bewildered. And Ray said flatly, “I can’t believe it, Cal. I mean, Christ, that’s a fairy-tale marriage. Nancy’s been holding you two up as a goddamn example for years!” So, that is the mystery of it, as others see it. Two intelligent people, why can’t they understand each other? Why can’t they work out their differences?
The point is that it has nothing to do with intelligence. Or understanding.
He sits this morning across the breakfast table from his son, who has made breakfast for them both, while outside the sun is shining thinly. Spring is slow in gaining strength this year. The middle of May already. The mornings are still chilly, like fall.
“Want to go outside?” Conrad asks.
“Sure.” Although he really doesn’t want to, shivers in the thin pullover sweater as he sits, his hands around his coffee cup, on the stone steps of the patio. Conrad, in Levi’s and a T-shirt, remarks about how warm it is. Also remarks that the lilacs are in bloom, and isn’t this the time they usually fertilize the lawn? Not that he is looking for a job, he would much rather play tennis, but he was just curious.
A good opportunity. Start slow; start with the house. They will not be fertilizing this year; they are planning to sell the house, it is too big for them, that’s obvious.
“It’s always been too big, hasn’t it?” Conrad asks.
Right. Only now there are other things to spend money on—college expenses next year, some investments he and Ray have been contemplating. The trip that Beth is taking.
“What trip?”
“Your mother’s going away for a while.”
“What d’you mean? You mean, not with you?”
“No. I can’t get away right now—”
“Right now?”
“She’s been wanting to go for some time.”
“I don’t get it. Who’s she going with?”
“No one,” he says. “She’s going to your Uncle Ward’s for a week or so, and then leaving for Europe. She wants to go to Greece. Maybe to Italy.”
“What is this, Dad?” he asks abruptly. “Has something happened?”
“No.” Nothing has. There is nothing definite, no talk of divorce, and to say the words could make it so, could force something into existence, isn’t that true? Absurd. Whatever is happening has already happened, maybe years ago, the seeds planted in their separate natures, their backgrounds, because all you can do is, finally and simply, what you can do.
“I’ve rented a house. In Evanston. Down by Centennial Park, near the lake.”
“What does she think about that? That doesn’t sound like anything she’d even like.”
There is an uncomfortable pause. “The thing is, this trip could last for a while. I’m not sure how long she’ll be gone.” Beautiful. Beautiful story. Just a couple of holes in it so big you could put your fist through them.
“What’re you saying?” he asks. “What’s the deal? When is she planning on leaving?”
“She’s left,” he says. Stupid, stupid idea. He should not
“Why did she do that? Was she in such a damn hurry she couldn’t even say good-by?” His voice is bitter. “Never mind. I know why.”
“No, you don’t—”
“Yeah, I do. And I see your problem, too. You can’t just come out with it, can you? First you have to check around, make sure there aren’t any razor blades—”
“That’s not funny! You think that’s funny?”
An ugly silence, while they look at each other. Then Conrad looks away. “No,” he says, “I’m sorry.”
“You want the truth? I don’t know why she left. And neither do you, because a lot of things happen in this—this world, goddamn it!—and people don’t always know the answers! I’m no authority on her! You’re no authority, either!”
Conrad stares at him, stricken.
In despair, he hears himself go on: “You’re no authority, period. You just think you are. You make the judgments, don’t you? But nobody’s supposed to make a judgment on you! Do you think that’s fair?”
“No,” he whispers, his eyes fixed on Cal’s face.
“I don’t want you to say anything like that to me again,” Cal says. “I don’t like jokes about it.”
“Dad, I’m sorry. I really am. I mean it.”
And abruptly the anger recedes, swept away in the familiar, paternal desire to blanket and protect; when he was small, and he felt that he had been wrongly accused, he would go to the hall and stand on his head at the top of the stairs: “I didn‘t! I didn’t!” and Buck would holler, “Dad, he’s gonna do it, he’s gonna stand on his head on the stairs again, make him quit it!” Maybe he should do it now. Such a funny, weird little kid he was—
There is movement in the grass. He can almost feel the diamond-shafts of green pushing upward, displacing the wet, trampled earth.
“No. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m yelling at you for.”
“No,” Conrad says. “That’s right. You were right. You ought to do that more often.”
He gives a short laugh. “Oh, yeah?”