Silence, as I’d expected. Then: “Okay, do you have a good gynecologist?”
My silence. “Of course. What for?”
“Brooke, listen.” She was suddenly singing. “I have never ever been so happy in my life—I think I’m pregnant.”
“What?” I was predictably stunned, but less by that possibility than by her confiding in me. “How the hell did you get pregnant?”
“Oh,” she said, giggling, “probably from a toilet seat.”
“Bridget. For God’s sake, have you gone mad? I mean, how can you possibly be twenty-one years old and reasonably, one hopes, reasonably intelligent and not have been to a—”
“Brooke, listen.” She was positively frenzied with elation. “Listen, it’s entirely possible that I want to get married, I’m so in love. Do you hear me? Married!”
This conversation was moving just out of my reach, like a smoke ring. All I could say was “Yes. I see what you mean about breakfast—yes, indeed. Might one ask who the expectant father is? No, never mind.”
“Ten o’clock tomorrow. What’s he like, is he nice, does he hurt?” I knew she meant the gynecologist.
“Yes, no, never mind. Actually he’s from India—nice blend of exotic and imperturbable. Forget it, go to sleep.”
“Okay, see you in the morning. Farewell.” Farewell. Nobody but Bridget ever said goodbye to me like that; all her beginnings and endings where I was concerned were unpredictable, and most of the dialogue in between was enigmatic, a foreign language to any outsider. But for my benefit she talked in her own private shorthand, and what farewell meant was that she wanted me to button up my overcoat and take good care of myself until ten in the morning, because she would miss me in a way that would take far too much sentimental effort to express. I knew what she meant. Often I missed her while we were in the same room together.
I contemplated the phone for some time. Never had I heard her so oddly gay and forthright; as a matter of fact, we hadn’t discussed sex since adolescence. Her entire inner life was secretive and mysterious, and no one dared violate it. She sent out powerful “No Trespassing” signals and I had learned to honor them. It crossed my mind that my sister was drunk.
Still, the next morning—a warm October day in 1960—I stood outside her apartment door, nonplussed by the stack of mail and the furled New York Times propped up against it. The door itself was slowly getting on my nerves. It didn’t open when I rang the doorbell for the fifth or sixth time. It didn’t have a crack underneath big enough for a worthwhile view of the interior, although idiotically I’d got down on my hands and knees and looked anyway. Nor did I have a key to unlock it. Even if she had been drunk the night before, which was unlikely—besides, I prided myself on being able to interpret at least her external behavior—she would have been incapable of losing track of her invitation; she was a creature of infuriating compulsion, particularly in matters of time and place, always fussing about my lack of regard for either. Ever since she’d moved from her one-room, third-floor apartment (to which I had possessed a key, much used) to the comparative luxury of an apartment one floor higher with an actual separate bedroom and view (of the building across the street), I’d felt vaguely displaced and surly. For the last year, I’d thought of that little one-room apartment as mine, an irrational attachment, since I was not exactly homeless. Until a month before, I’d been living not only in a commodious house in Greenwich, Connecticut, but also, during the week, in a pied-à-terre on East Seventy-second Street. My marriage to Michael Thomas, art historian and budding investment banker, so blithely undertaken during undergraduate days at Vassar and Yale, had, when removed from the insular academic atmosphere of New Haven, fallen apart. We were no longer wrapped in cotton wool; I was no longer a child bride. Now that our divorce was final, I’d moved our two small children into New York and into my own spacious apartment on Central Park West. I continued, however, to drop by Bridget’s whenever I had five minutes between modeling jobs and interviews. “Just checking out my make-up,” I’d announce breezily, or, “Gotta use your phone.” The idea of telling my sister I’d really come to see her would never have crossed my mind.
Her new quarters did have certain advantages: twice the closet space for her warehouses of clothes and shoes, and a fully mirrored bathroom, very handy for looking at oneself from all angles while sitting on the cosmetics-crammed counter and conversing with Bridget submerged in the tub as she tested some new bubble bath. But I had never acquired the same proprietary feelings about this setup. It just didn’t have the smell and cozy inconvenience of the old. And now I cursed myself for neglecting to collect the duplicate key she’d had made for me weeks ago. Becoming more and more exasperated with both of us, I rang fiercely four times in a row. Actually I felt like kicking the door. Then I thought I heard a sound from where the bedroom ought to be. Of course, it was possible that she might still be asleep. Or, more interesting, asleep with an as yet undisclosed lover. But wouldn’t she have left a characteristically humorous note to that effect, right where the bills from Con Ed and Jax were now lying? I began to punch the doorbell to the rhythm of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” During countless enforced afternoon naps when we were young, we’d invented out of boredom what we thought was this highly original game, whereby we would take turns tapping out an unidentified song with our fingernails on the wooden headboards of our twin beds; the object was to determine who was better at guessing it or tapping it, or even
