Ordinary People by Judith Guest
He yawns at swim practice, and Salan, the coach, catches him. “Maybe I oughta start a bed check on you guys again.” He stares pointedly at him, calls him over after practice.
“Jarrett, you having fun out there?”
“Fun?”
“Yeah. You oughta be, you know.” He sits, hands on his thighs, one thick ham hooked across the corner of the table. “The point is lost, if it’s not fun any more.” He inclines his head, wanting an answer. “Right?”
“I guess.”
“You guess.”
Salan wears a threadbare T-shirt and khakis, rolled above his ankles. He does not look like a man to be feared. Conrad, sick with fright, stands mutely, waiting for the ax to fall. Doesn’t matter doesn’t matter I didn’t really want to swim, breathing in the heavy moisture-laden air, while behind him he can feel the steam rising lazily from the blue-glass surface of the pool.
“You on medication, Jarrett? Tranquilizers? Anything?”
“No.”
Salan removes the stopwatch from around his neck. “Did I ask you before if they gave you shock out there?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
“Yeah, you asked me before,” he says. “Yeah, they did.”
Salan shakes his head; clicks his tongue in disapproval. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m no doctor, but I don’t think I’d let them mess around with my head like that.”
Conrad says nothing, does not look at Salan directly, looks instead at the low, brick wall behind the table. It wasn’t exactly an orgy of pleasure for me you dumb prick. Salan is shaking his head.
“Your timing is lousy.”
“I know.”
“Look, I don’t want to be—I’m not being too rough on you, am I? But I’m wondering if it’s gonna be too much for you.” He leans back, one arm around an upraised knee. “This is a team effort, Jarrett. I’ve got room for guys who are willing to work at it. Thing is, I can’t figure out any more—if that’s you or not.”
He lets out his breath at last, but slowly, slowly Keep it neutral don’t beg. “I’ll work,” he says. “I want to work.”
“Okay, then. Better plan to stay after. We’ll see if we, can get your timing back. No, not today—” as he starts for the pool “—start tomorrow. Go take a shower now. And get to bed at a decent hour, will you? You kids stay up till all hours and don’t take care of your bodies....” His tongue clicks again, this time in dismissal, and Conrad heads for the locker room. He is shivering Never hit it off with the guy not even before he is too brusque too all-knowing there is only one way to do everything only one main street.
In the car on the way home, Lazenby says, “Salan’s a damn, picky bastard. He drives me nuts.”
“Everything drives you nuts,” Stillman says. “The day is not complete without Lazenby telling everybody what a fucked-up state the world’s in, right?” He turns around. “What d’you think, Jarrett? Danoff and Edge look pretty good, huh?”
Danoff and Edge are sophomores. They swim the free style. They have beaten him in practice every day for two weeks. There is a sudden, electrical silence. Lazenby says, “They’re not that good, Kev.”
“No? They look pretty damn good to me.”
Lazenby drops him off and he lets himself in with his key. The house is dark. Silent and empty. He hangs his jacket carefully in the front closet and goes upstairs to his room. He sets his books down on his desk and stands, looking out the window from his tower of safety. Idly, he opens the desk drawer, sifting through a pile of papers: old stuff, schedules, letters, scraps of notes written long ago. Funny she has never cleaned out this drawer. He should do it, maybe sometime he will. Fingers ruffling, touching suddenly the glossy and slick surface of a photograph. He pulls it out looking quickly along the bottom of it in white letters FIRST PLACE MEDLEY RELAY TEAM. Lazenby. Buck. Himself in the middle. Arms around each other, grinning at the camera, all confidence On the main street: He snaps the drawer closed. It is like the hole in your mouth where a tooth was and you cannot keep your tongue from playing with it.
He goes out into the hall, just as his mother reaches the top of the stairs. She jumps, drawing in her breath sharply.
“Sorry,” he says.
“I didn’t think you were home yet.”
“I just got in,” he says. “How was your golf game?”
“Fine. Cold.” Her hair is loose about her face. She lifts it in, back, rubbing her neck. “Your father called. He’ll be late. We’re not eating until seven.”
“Okay.”
She heads toward her room. “I have an awful headache. I’m going to lie down awhile.”
“Okay.”
She is almost to her door and he calls after her, “I swam pretty well today. Salan wants me to stay later and work out. I might be starting in the fifty.”
“Good.” The door closes behind her, and he stands a moment in the hall, then goes back into his room. He shuts his door and leans against it, trembling. A dull, roaring sound in his ears as he doubles over, arms crossed, pressed against his waist. His stomach tightens, as if to ward off a blow.
4
The restaurant is dark; it has a heavy Mediterranean décor that Cal finds oppressive. It is not the kind of place he normally frequents. There is a lawyers’ hangout, the Quik-Lunch, around the corner from the Plaza, but that would not suit Beth. This place is better for her. She had called him this morning; asked him to meet her here, her voice light, full of excitement and Good News. Well, great, we can all use some of that, can’t we? And she looks like good news, seated across from him in a sleeveless knit suit, the color of straw, a V-neck bordered in orange, a thin gold chain around her neck. All elegance and self-possession. So beautiful in every detail that men and women both like to look at her. He has watched her enter enough rooms to know that, walking humbly and proudly behind her, a modest smile on his lips, Yes, it’s true, twenty-one years next spring we have been married. He grins at the bar-tender, the envious customers. His description is accurate. Self-possessed is what she is; he emphatically does not own her, nor does he have control over her, nor can he understand or even predict with reliability her moods, her attitudes. She is a marvelous mystery to him; as complex, as interesting as she appeared to him on that first day he met her some twenty-two years ago on the tennis courts at the Beverly Racquet Club. Ray’s father had a membership, and he was with Ray that day, working off the tensions of a hideous law exam. She was a good tennis player even then. She liked to play with men because the competition was better, she had told Ray, approaching him first. She had a friend who was good, also. Would they like to play doubles? Ray was all for it, he read possibilities into it; who cared if she could play at all? But she was good, and her friend was good, and the friend and Cal beat Beth and Ray easily, and afterward, he was never sure how it was arranged, Beth and Cal were paired off together, and Ray got the friend. They went out to dinner at the Chatterbox Café. God, what a storehouse of trivia he kept up there. The Chatterbox Café. It was an evening of unprecedented events. He had had a date with someone else that night. Midway through dinner he had excused himself, gone to the telephone, broken the date. He never had another with any girl except Beth.
“I was afraid if I had left early,” he confessed to her later, “I wouldn’t have made enough of an impression, and you wouldn’t see me again.”
“I was afraid, too,” she said. “I thought you might be engaged or married and Lord, what a job it was going to be, getting you away from her. I knew when you aced Rayon that first serve I was going to marry you and that was all there was to it.”
He laughs out loud, thinking about it, and Beth, sipping her drink, snaps her fingers at him.
“Where are you?”
“Nowhere. Right here. Just thinking. What have you got there?”
She has pulled an envelope from her purse, and the folded sheets of slick paper are suddenly before him: Athens, Rome, London, Dubrovnik. “They said it’s late, but t
“Let them know what?”
“I remember last year you said Yugoslavia, but, Cal, don’t you think London would be fun? Like something out of Dickens. We’ve never done that. Christmas in London—”
“Listen,” he says, “I don’t think we should plan to go away for Christmas this year.”
She looks at him over the rim of her glass. “We go away for Christmas every year.”
Carefully he folds the sheets; places them in the center of the table. “I know. But not this year. The timing just isn’t right.”
“The timing isn’t right,” she says. “What does that mean?”
“You know what it means.”
“Yes.” She turns her head slightly away from him. Wearing her hair differently today; the sharp white line of her part at the side, wings of hair swept back and clipped at the top of her head. “Well. They said it would be better to leave in the middle of December and book a flight back after the first week in January.”
“We can’t go in the middle of December. He’d have to miss a week of school. And another week in January would be two weeks—”
“He could meet us there when school got out. He could fly back by himself. Mother and Dad would—”
“No!”
They sit in silence for a moment.
“I think you’re wrong, Cal,” she says. “I think it would be good for us all to go.”
“No. Just—no.”
The waiter appears with the menus.
“Never mind,” she says, “I know what I want. The fish chowder and a green salad, Italian dressing. And some of your special bread. Coffee, too, please.”
Cal orders a roast-beef sandwich and coffee. Leaning back in the chair, he tries to make out the dimensions of the room; he imagines it in the harsh, full light of day. Square and ugly. Better to keep it dark.
“Why don’t you ask him if he wants to go? I think he will. Why wouldn’t he?”
“I think,” he says, “that was our mistake. Going to Florida last Christmas. If we hadn’t done that—”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference, you know that. Dr. Brandt told us—”
“Dr. Brandt told us he was depressed. Dr. Brandt is a G.P. What the hell did he know?” He sets his glass down, rapping it smartly against the table. He hasn’t meant to. The sound is, loud and it makes her jump.
“Are you blaming him, now? He gave him the physical, just as you asked. What more was he supposed to do?”
“I’m not blaming Brandt. I’m not blaming anyone. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, I know that.”
“You don’t believe that,” she says. “You say it, but you don’t believe it.”
“I believe it,” he says. “I’m not even talking about blame, I’m talking about being available. We were busy down there. Every goddamned minute. There wasn’t time to talk.”
“What was there to say? What do you think would have been said? Do you even think he knew at that point? And, if he did know, do you think he would have told us?”
“I don’t know.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think he would have told us.”
The waiter brings their lunches, and they sit, silently, watching him serve. When he leaves the table, she looks down at her lap.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to blame ourselves for what happened, Cal.”
“Fine,” he says curtly. “Don’t, then. If that means a damn thing.”
Her head sinks lower. She busies herself, buttering the piece of bread in her hand.
“Beth,” he says, “I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry.”
She looks up. “What’s the matter?” she whispers. “Is something the matter?”
“No! Nothing’s the matter.”
“Then, why can’t we go?” She leans toward him. “You know how good it feels to get away. All the wonderful places we’ve been, Spain, Portugal, Hawaii—I know it’s a lot to ask, Cal, I know we have expenses—”
“It’s not the money.”
“—but I need it! I need to go! I need you to go with me.
“I want to go with you,” he says. “We can go in the spring, maybe, any place you want.”
She sits back, then, hands in her lap. “No.” Her voice is flat. “If we don’t go now, we won’t go in the spring, either.”
“That’s silly,” he says. “We will. I just think that now we should—this time we might try handling things differently.”
“This time?”
He is upsetting her; upsetting himself, too. And he shouldn’t drink at lunch, shouldn’t have had two mar tinis, he is keyed up, now; nervous. This afternoon he will sit at his desk in a half-stupor, surrounded by a confusion of papers.
“Then, are we going to live like this? With it always hanging over our heads?”
There is a determined set to her chin that moves him, even when she uses it against him, even when it seems irrational and dangerous, accompanied by ideas he does not agree with. Thus, as she argued stubbornly with Ray over dinner that night that the Michigan Daily had no right to meddle in the financial affairs of campus sororities (her stand was based on rights of privacy, as he remembered it), he had fallen abruptly and thoroughly in love with her. It was, on looking back, as good a reason as a tennis ace.
“Nothing is hanging over our heads,” he says, as much to himself as to her. “Don’t worry. Everything is all right.”
She looks at him, reaching out to gather the colored sheets of paper into a neat pile, slipping them into the envelope. “Then, I don’t understand you at all,” she says.
He sits at his desk, working on the papers Ray has left there for him. At three-thirty he has a meeting with Sandlin. They will discuss a new angle on their annuities. A germ, Ray calls it. His ideas are always referred to as “germs”; his figure estimates are “in the ball park.” Cliches. They jump out at you from everywhere, but you never see your own. Howard called again today, to talk about the Mercedes dealership opening up in Evanston. “Things are looking up, Cal. Light at the end of the tunnel. People buying expensive foreign cars again. Hell of a good sign, wouldn’t you say?”
Yes, he had agreed with this spot analysis of U.S. economy, his mind automatically registering the old favorites. Where was Out of the woods? It was missing today.
He gets up to stretch and look out the window at the North Shore Channel; the fringes of Northwestern’s campus; down below, Evanston proper. The offices of Hanley and Jarrett, Attorneys at Law, on the eighth floor of the State National Bank Plaza, overlook the whole of southwest Evanston. He has always wished they were on the eastern side of the building, preferring to look out on frozen cliffs of water in winter, rather than dirty streets, dirtier cars; it is not a pleasant corner in the midst of the gray Chicago winter. Other than that, it is a good location. The atmosphere on the eighth floor seems cleaner; steadier. Years ago, when they were getting started, their one-room Chicago office was hot and crowded; their look-alike, cramped apartments on the near north side were hotter and more crowded, yet. No more. Now Ray and Nancy live in Glencoe, and he takes the train in from his English Tudor castle, walking to the Plaza from the station. He tells Cal he is crazy to drive. The train is the only way, he says. But Cal prefers his car. It gives him control over his schedule, and, besides, riding the train has always made him nervous. He can’t work, as he has seen some men do; he can barely read the paper. Riding the train gives him too much time to think, he has decided. Too much thinking can ruin you.
Ray knocks on the open door; sticks his head inside. “Got a minute to run this around before the meeting?”
“Sure. C’mon in.”
“I just want to clue you in about Sandlin. Christ, I tell him twice a week he ought to go to law school. He thinks I’m kidding. I swear, he thinks he’s the only account we have.”
“You got the annuities straightened out?”
“Yeah, I think so. Have a look.”
“Looks okay to me. What’s his problem?”
“No problem,. really. He fancies himself this big wheeler-dealer and it frosts hell out of him that his transactions are not unique, that they have actually been performed many times before in the history of tax law.”
“So what are we seeing him for?”
“Hell, I don’t know—so he can tell his partners at lunch that he pointed out a few loopholes to those hotshot lawyers up on eight. Do me a favor, will you? Get him to stop calling every day. You’re good at that. Closing doors politely. If I tell him, he’s going to get offended, but it’s the goddamn, pathetic truth, if I had a buck for every time he calls me about junk, just niggling items, you know?”
“Okay, I’ll try. Hey, listen, we can hold off on the Naylor account. I heard from them today. No tax court until January.”
“Great.” Ray sits back, puts his feet up on Cal’s desk. “Beth looks terrific,” he says. “God, she’s tan. Must be playing a lot of golf, huh?”
“Yeah, she is.”
“You two have a nice lunch?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“Hey, we ought to have lunch sometime, partner. How about tomorrow?”
“Sure. I’ll meet you at the Quik-Lunch about eleven-thirty. How’s that?”
Ray laughs. “I meant you ought to take me to lunch.”
“I know what you meant.”
“Say, I heard you on the phone with Howard. Is Connie swimming this year?”
“Yeah, he is.”
“You think that’s a good idea? I mean, letting him get into all that stuff again? I don’t know, if it were my kid—”
They look at each other, and Ray says, “Forget it. That was stupid. Forget it.”