Making Love Page 2

“Give your mother my love if she's conscious,” Conlon said. She exchanged glances with a number of men who preferred studying her to the depressed stock market prices. “Maybe I ought to turn a few tricks on the way down. Won't kill me, will it?”

  “Here's fifty,” Jane handed her the money through the grimy window.

  “Why do I have to be solvent to keep my purity? You're fighting a losing battle, Jane.”

  “It's my nature.”

  “Sheldrake Hotel, don't forget,” Conlon called, as the train slowly thudded out of the station.

  * * * *

  Jane, a witness to many indiscretions, could not bring herself to the house to wait for her mother. She'd have to meet Luckmunn, suffer through pointless small talk. As it was she had played too many phony roles in the past simply to please Nancy, who had made a career out of the part of the wronged child. The two had become conspirators when Jane, aged nine, spent a long Easter holiday in Palm Beach with her parents. Jim had resumed an affair that had been broken only by three hours of travel, and Jane had learned of it in the simplest possible way. Nancy had told her. More than that, she had actually pointed out the woman, a small dark-haired lady with hooded brown eyes who seemed as frail as a miniature. Gibbie Corman.

  Nancy's unpaid private investigator shadowed the couple on beaches, on innocent shopping expeditions along Worth Avenue. The child developed an eye for paintings as she peered through gallery windows while elegantly dressed painters attempted to flog hack watercolors to the art lovers.

  Somehow it seemed impossible to Jane. Instinctively she knew that the act of love involved coupling of some description, and Gibbie would shatter into nothingness under Jim's great weight At that she assumed with undeniable logic that Nancy must be a liar, and without the least sense that she was committing an act of treason, she confided in her father.

  “What I don't understand is why Mommy would tell me such a story.”

  “Did you see me do anything, Janey?”

  “No, just kissing Gibbie.”

  “I kiss everyone,” Jim said. She couldn't deny it.

  “Then why shouldn't Mommy know you kissed Gibbie?”

  “It would upset her.”

  “It upsets me. If you promise to stop, I won't say what I saw.”

  He was a big man and a coward, but he understood that a blackmailing child could be an invincible opponent. He gave his word graciously with the assurance and charm of the practiced liar. A fire in straw in Palm Beach would not be a pretty sight. He petted Jane's head, kissed her cheek and forehead. The little girl had a quiet beauty, restrained, like that of the oppressed, and therefore all the more sad. He bought her an ice cream there on Worth Avenue while furtively signaling to Gibbie, who lurked near the entrance of the Everglades Club. Jane spotted her, turned her back, and forced her father to forgo his afternoon rubdown (his excuse for being caught downtown), and she walked him to the toy store, keeping him nervously pacing as she refused to make up her mind.

  She might have taught him discipline if he were capable of learning it. What she saw on his face was the melancholy of a grown man, inhibited by a child.

  With the final image of her mother and Luckmunn in the hut darting perversely across the screen of her mind, Jane drove in a daze into New York City. They had everything, the Siddleys, that could possible inspire unhappiness—inherited money, good looks, health, freedom. And all they really wanted was to lose it.

  It was only the organized charivari of road construction on Bruckner Boulevard that cleared her head. At a light she counted her money: seventy-four dollars. Conlon would put her up. There were other friends of course who'd be glad to see her, but they'd ask a lot of questions and she wasn't in the mood to answer. She stopped off at a hamburger joint and called Conlon.

  “Fast visit,” Conlon said.

  “Long enough for me. Look, where can I meet you?”

  “I'll hop a cab and see you at Stark's on Madison.”

  “What's so special about Stark's?”

  “It's near Saint Laurent. Cheer up, Jane, will you? I'm going to bring soft things and romance to your life.”

  She smiled in spite of her depression. Everyone ought to have a Conlon in his life.

  What she objected to in Nancy wasn't so much her sexual laissez-faire, but that attitude of not really caring, the inability to make a commitment. Passion she could accept, even basically thoughtless reflexive desire, the sexual knee jerk; but what she failed to understand was the whore's detached sangfroid which didn't even have the justification of elementary commerce. But looking back on her relationship with Nancy, it should have been obvious that she'd always been this way. The only difference, Jane realized, was that she chose to deny it. She wasn't so much sorry for herself as angered by Nancy's stupidity.

  Jane wondered vaguely if Nancy had ever been anything more than an imaginary number, a fantasy mother whom she had created out of the void of childhood. Were Nancy Teller Siddley and James Harmon Siddley real, or were they moon people?

  Conlon, in a slightly dated Chanel knobbly-tweed suit, dark glasses, and medium-length ash-blond wig, had discovered the perfect method for complementing her wardrobe. In the absence of charge plates, she impersonated her mother.

  “I thought Bendel's was your place,” Jane said.

  “I'm wanted dead or alive there. My mother made me return the stuff last spring. The accounts department at Saint Laurent is a little screwed up—late bills, unconscious sales girls in a world they never made. My word against theirs.”

  “Why doesn't Mel give you some money?”

  Irritation showed on Conlon's face. Jane had touched on the unmentionable.

  “Why do you think?”

  “He's broke.”

  “Who said you had a low IQ?” She regrouped her forces and a ray of optimism broke through the reality of the situation.

  “Getting conned's not so bad,” Jane said, “as long as you know about it up front.”

  “That makes all the difference. Listen, let's steal something at Saint Laurent. That always makes me feel better.”

  “I'll pay,” Jane said.

  “The hell with that. You don't know how to enjoy life. I think I need a trouser suit to go with my thighs ... to stop them from spreading,” she added. “The minute I see Mel, he starts pulling my clothes off. Everything I've got is being invisibly mended. Some girls wind up with rings or Puerto Rico. All I've got to show for my affair is broken zippers. He's got this hang-up—every time we make it, he's playing a rape scene.”

  “You don't sound exactly miserable.”

  “To tell you the truth, Jane, he's got the perfect patsy because I always wanted to be raped. What do you think I did when I was growing up in Kew Gardens? I used to dream about some sweaty Irish laborer pulling me down in his ditch. I'm a country girl at heart. And look what happens. I wind up with a groovy married Jew who takes a shower after a bath. I mean when I first met him he used to put Fabergé on his balls. I soon put an end to that.”

  “How?”

  “I refused. Told him he stunk. I think he would have quit on his own. He started to break out. What works for ear lobes doesn't necessarily work elsewhere.”

  They walked up Madison Avenue and Jane had an odd sense of belonging to the life of the city. It wasn't until months later that she realized it was precisely at that moment on the way to Saint Laurent that she had made her decision to leave Saranac. But then, walking with Conlon, humming tunelessly, she merely had the dim awareness that she was more comfortable out of the cloistered environment of college. She had tried to explain it to Alan Sawyer but she invariably found herself intimidated by his logic.

  One of the blights which single male professors live under at Saranac is the strictly enforced rule that they may not date undergraduates. Failure to adhere to this law is punished by an immediate, referenceless dismissal, and such bright tacticians as Witt (English Department), Blake (Sociology), Mannheim (History), Carnevelli (Romance Languages, and the col
lege's most ambitious and intrepid crumpeteer), have found themselves banished to junior colleges in such romantic places as Santa Fe and Lander. Carnevelli, known affectionately by the class of ‘69 as “Fast Gun,” wound up in a position not unlike that of Joseph K's, and eventually surfaced in culturally enlightened Rapid City, South Dakota's Rome, at an educational extension school whose students were drawn from the élite of smokers who, when lighting their cigarettes, realized that they too could acquire a high school degree by carefully filling out the microscopic coupon attached to the matchbook.

  These Draconian measures had no effect on Alan Sawyer, PhD (Philosophy). A man who had written his doctoral thesis on Søren Kierkegaard was prepared to live dangerously. Despite the administration's kindly suggestion that bachelors seek their friends from the volunteer army of employees at the local Carrier air-conditioning plant, Alan Sawyer was not a man lightly to accept academic restrictions unless founded on Hegelian logic. He had been a waitress molester during his undergraduate days at Chapel Hill (no diner or barbecue pit was safe from his Quantrell-inspired lightning sorties), and now with a PhD (Columbia) behind him, he was prepared for better things. Living existentially, and with a permanent erection that never knew the grace of flaccidity, he stalked his quarries with all the thoroughness of Pathfinder. Enter Jane Teller Siddley, elective in Philosophy 108, or From Aristotle to Cioran.

  After the intellectual felicities of Spanish beachboys, Jane found Alan refreshing. He also possessed the virtue of scorning scented hair pomades, for which she had developed an uncontrollable allergy. After two sessions of The Poetics he invited her to his cubbyhole, suitably decorated with Buffet prints, for a student-adviser conference. It soon became evident that he was uncertain of his role. Was he being put down or providing low-key philosophical advice for her term paper?

  “I find you attractive, but....” She stopped, examined a latent run in her opaque panty hose. “Isn't there some kind of rule?”

  He'd already mentally ravaged Jane half a dozen times in class, frequently losing his trend of thought—which passed for profundity, since he could waffle on about current events, then deviously relate them to some unprovable philosophical speculation. Everyone attending college in the United States broke the rules. Why did assistant professors have to be penalized? If he got caught, he'd cause a strike. A sit-in with a hundred girls wasn't such a bad idea. He'd always been careful with female students in the past, girding his loins until the spring semester ended, so that he could give a few of his favorites an unofficial poke when they held temporary summer jobs.

  “When you consider that a set of illegal regulations governs your personal life....” he drifted off.

  “I know what you mean, Doctor Sawyer.”

  “Alan, at conferences.”

  “It's so stupid.”

  She also hankered for forbidden fruit, a faculty scalp. Despite the fact that a surly group of feminists had organized the school, and everyone agreed that was prejudice against women, no one but the minority butch contingent had anything against men. Winter travel—at best difficult, even with snow chains—conspired to make the student body irritable, lawless, aware of shortages. Smoking grass with twenty other girls had ceased to be amusing, and everyone was experimenting like mad, and the few flat-chested, hairy-legged girls were at a premium. All the girls were confronted with the same problem: how to get it regularly and within walking distance of the dorm. Elderly traffic cops and the college's private security force were reaping the benefit. But Jane had not reached that level of desperation.

  “Do you want to take a chance?” Jane asked, trying not to sound pushy.

  “The movies would be safest,” he suggested, without committing himself.

  She'd be there, by dog sled if necessary. The October snows had been brutal even for Saranac, and Alan did have a beautiful head, long curly blond hair, hazel eyes, and a straight though slightly turned-up nose, small ears, a flat stomach, an assortment of pastel-colored shirts from Bloomingdale's. It was the head of a Baroque composer. The only trouble with it was that it seemed the reproduction of something in a sculpture gallery.

  “I live across from Thornton Park, number eighty-five.” Buoyantly, he played his ace. “I've got a fireplace, too.”

  “It sounds like you mean business.”

  “Could you meet me there?”

  “How about outside?”

  “It might be snowing or something. What time can you make it?”

  “Seven-thirty. I'll be wearing a gray-squirrel fun fur and whistling ‘Dixie.'”

  He shuffled some papers on his desk professorially, one of them a letter from Carnevelli which he had not dared open in her presence, and he cleared his voice.

  “Now about your proposed subject for the term paper”—she held her breath, this was business—“I think it's an excellent idea. A contrast of Aquinas's absolute theological position and certainty with Sartre's disordered universe of the personality has a great deal of relevance.”

  “I intend to bring in the SDS situation at Columbia.”

  “Do you?” he said with a smile. “I was there at the time, so it'll be interesting to get your view.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Using the university facilities.”

  This was partially true. He had been in touch with the philosophy department, but more to the point, he had discovered that inflamed females were extremely compliant. Women with their men at war, and under the influence of fiery speeches and Acapulco Gold, formed a steady flow to his hotel room in Morningside Heights to discuss tactics, Marcuse, and roll joints in the presence of this sympathetic but spurious faculty member. The singular fact that emerged from all of those tempest-torn weeks of rioting was that few men were on the receiving end of more head than Alan Sawyer. Freud or Stekel might have seen a psychological connection, but the young philosopher simply lay back and enjoyed it, arriving at Saranac as though on a religious retreat from worldliness and the rigors of revolutionary pussy. He no longer regretted missing the Democratic convention in Chicago, the Spanish Civil War of his generation—especially as the rumor that there was a lot of clap floating around turned out to be true.

  “Men at war,” he said with a world-weary sigh.

  “So you were on the student's side,” she said with approval.

  “I may be an assistant professor of philosophy, but I'm not a fink.”

  He could see that she accepted his credentials. This was his sexual draft card and no one in his right mind would burn it.

  “I'll see you then—number eighty-five. Which floor?”

  “The ground floor,” he said, concealing his delight. He had clinched it, this was going to be indoors.

  A class bell broke the stately silence of the Hall of Languages and Philosophy.

  “I missed my coffee break,” she said, getting her books together.

  “I'll make it up to you.”

  She rose and he with her. Firm handshakes were exchanged, her hem length duly noted (barely covering the thighs), and the pleasant odor of Johnson and Johnson baby powder bespoke a sensible if not regressive attitude toward hygiene.

  He opened the letter from the previous sublessee of Apartment A, 85 Thornton Park. Carnevelli's unpremeditated flight had provided Alan with a place to live, and although the two had merely dined together once—scholar to scholar—the experience had been sufficiently stimulating for Alan to regard Carnevelli's hasty departure with something like regret. Defused and removed from the scene of temptation (his fettucini Alfredo was still spoken of with a real sense of loss on campus), Carnevelli had embarked on a career of epistolary obscenity, showering such innocents as Nasser, the periodical Kiss, and Ronald Reagan with abusive letters. In their final few minutes together, and as a parting gesture to a kindred spirit, Carnevelli had given Alan his recipe for fettucini Alfredo: “Freeze the cream cheese,” he cautioned the apprentice Escoffier.

  Dear Alan:

  When you stop believing
in magic, you're on the road to the graveyard.

  I've got two favors to ask.

  I've lost the address of Screw and would be grateful if you used the enclosed ten dollars to place this advertisement in their personal column.

  "Well hung, straight male specializing in labial exercises seeks interested female students of Romance languages. Spanish, Greek, Italian, and French methods employed. For New Jersey residents slightly higher rates. Speech defects cured, including lisps and stammers. No bull dikes.

  Photography also one of my callings. Hasselblad and twin male Pekineses with vocal cords removed assures seriousness of intentions. Box 295, Rapid City, S.D.”

  The second favor I trust won't really inconvenience you, either. I left a carton of emyl nitrates in the freezer. It is marked pistachio. Could you please pack it in some dry ice, attach an insulin label, and send it to my address. I find I can't do without them.

  The most important thing I've discovered in Rapid City is that we're all looking for John Wayne. The Duke personifies America and thank God we've still got him around to give us some sense of national purpose.

  By the way, fucking sheep isn't all it's cracked up to be, unless of course you're an Australian and don't know any better.

  Yours,

  Frank Carnevelli

  At a quarter to eight, Jane rang his doorbell. He held in his hand a small block of frozen Breakstone cream cheese, as stubborn as an iceberg.

  “Air traffic controllers on a go slow?” he asked.

  “No. I broke a heel and had to go back. What's that you're holding?”

  “It's a prop from 2001.”

  “Are you ready?”

  He twisted his Watch-plaid muffler around his neck and slid his free hand through her arm.

  Saranac, a weather forecasters’ delight, has nearly one hundred snow-free days a year, and tonight was one of them. A student of courtliness on first dates, Alan opened the car door for Jane, asked her if she required a blanket across her knees, explaining that the car's heating system had fits of temperament and might take some time to become activated. She accepted the blanket and he placed it over her thighs and lap with all the solicitude of the young heir ministering to the cranky founder of the fortune. Her lower area generated a surprising amount of heat and he gave himself a mental back-pat for paying attention to detail which doubtless would pay dividends later on.