Necessity

20

The young woman in the phone company store has frizzy red hair and brown eyebrows, plump cheeks and a Spanish accent.

“You never had a telephone before?”

“It was in my ex-husband’s name.”

“But if your ex-husband still has a phone-”

“I don’t use his name any more. I want to build up a credit rating on my own.”

“You know, I can sympathize with that. Honestly.

These laws and red tape just step all over a woman, especially that’s, like, gone through a divorce or maybe she’s been widowed or, you know.”

The telephone woman gives her a smile that is startling for its openness. “But I just don’t think you can get around it. I’m real, real sorry, Jennifer. I know exactly what you mean. Like, you’re not trying to buy the whole telephone company-you just want a phone, right? Honestly I wish I could, you know, do something about it. These deposits are just ridic’lous, Jennifer, I know what you mean. But I guess the company just gets ripped off so many times they just got to have these big, you know, deposits.”

She writes out a check for a whopping payment, still startled by the way the sales clerk keeps calling her Jennifer. She supposes she’ll have to get used to the creepy ersatz intimacy with which these Californians instantly take to calling total strangers by their first names.

She thinks, At least it’s getting me used to being called, you know, like, Jennifer.

It reminds her how Bert always insisted on calling her Madeleine. Never a nickname, never the diminutive Matty. Madeleine in full-and he treated you as if you were a fragile porcelain art work.

It’s so easy now to recognize all the clues he left strewn about-how is it possible to have been so unaware for so long?

Something to do with what you’re looking for, she supposes; something to do with what you want from the world.

When she married Bert that was the life she thought she wanted. Fast lane: the designer milieu, the tony friends, the money. Put it crudely then: Bert was on a power trip and you were callow enough to enjoy the ride.

It would have taken a saintly kind of wisdom to turn it down.

Face it, Matty-Madeleine-Jennifer, you were a young woman adrift and the shore was receding at a steady rate: you were happy to tie yourself to the towline that Bert offered.

For sure you weren’t going anyplace else important at the time.

You started with plenty of advantages, didn’t you. A beautiful child with a brain. Parents loving and just-but of the old school. Sometimes painfully embarrassing: remember when you were fourteen and Dad was assigned to cadre at Fort Ord. He’d taken you and Mom down to the Monterey beach that Sunday morning and you’d had lunch in Carmel and cruised some of the art galleries. You were in the eighth grade having trouble with plane geometry and still getting used to wearing a bra and interested in horses more than boys. On the way home that afternoon Dad was telling you about Appaloosa horses and how the Nez Perce Indians in Idaho had developed the breed-he knew a great deal about native Americans and he was convinced there was Indian blood in the family, somewhere vaguely back four or five generations.

Caught up in his Appaloosa discourse he didn’t spot the Highway Patrol cruiser in time.

He made a face and pulled over. She heard the dying cry of the siren. The trooper walked forward with a hand on his holster and stooped to peer into the car. Dad kept both hands on the wheel. When the trooper saw the major’s pips on the shoulders of Dad’s uniform he drew back deferentially and began to put his citation book away but Dad glared sternly at him and said too loudly, “Absolutely right, officer. I had my mind on something else and I was going over the limit. You’ve got me fair and square. Go ahead and write out the ticket. It’ll remind me to keep my eye on the speedometer.”

Painfully obvious that all this was for your benefit. An act to impress you with the importance of honest confession and respect for the law. It was almost comical. Later you and Mom had a laugh over it.

But his performances and his lectures worked, didn’t they. Growing up you had values. You paid attention in all those schools you went to, trailing around to Dad’s stationings in Germany and South Korea and Alaska. You could figure out the square root of a four-figure number; you could dissect a frog; you could recognize a Rembrandt-or an O’Keeffe-and you could hum Bach melodies on key; and there was a time when you could recite Shelley from memory: “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Of course you had to rebel against all that. Why must we all behave with such hackneyed predictability? You came to New York determined to put that staid middle-American goody-two-shoes personality as far behind you as you could leave it: you came determined to kick up your heels like some rustic rube farm girl coming to the big city in the flapper era and discovering speakeasies for the first time. You came in search of excitement and you found it; you came in search of a glamorous career and you found one.

It turned out to be not all that glamorous, really. But don’t they all.

After all, you didn’t abandon your upbringing entirely. You weren’t enough of a rebel; not then. A year or two of mindless diversions-then you found yourself on a date in the Whitney and soon you were going to the ballet at Lincoln Center, listening to good music, reading books again-no longer because it was what you were supposed to do but now because it was what gave you pleasure.

You made friends easily enough. Both men and women. Most of the men were attached or gay. The eligibles were hard to find; some of them were frightened off by your beauty-others by your wit. Mostly they just seemed terribly immature and dull.

There was Sylvan, of course-forty-six and distinguished, a cultivated marvelous man-it was Sylvan who took you to the Whitney-but he was married and not inclined to get a divorce and you couldn’t bring yourself to rationalize being a kept woman.

There was Richard and then there was Chris. Several years apart. The memories now are jumbled: moving in, mingling the furniture-later the break-ups, the bleak sad search for another lonely apartment. And the quest beginning over again: for passion or affection or just (settle for it) companionship.

All too suddenly you were pushing thirty and in the morning you’d look fearfully in the mirror expecting to find a new crease in the beautiful skin.

It began to occur to you that you couldn’t go on living this aimless life. You didn’t want to think about that but now and then you’d have a premonition: a vision of yourself at thirty-seven trying to get work posing for lingerie ads in cheap mail-order catalogs and accepting some tedious schlemiel’s marriage proposal out of desperation, knowing it would be good-at best-for four or five years of domestic boredom and financial security and another few years of alimony: you even saw yourself thereafter, midfortyish and fifteen pounds overweight, working as office manager for a chiropractor and making reservations for ten days at a Club Med: over the hill and desperate.

In that context Bert looked like more than a good bargain. He looked like a heaven-sent dream.

Remembering marrying him-remembering why she married him-she feels soiled.

Then of course the other question: Why did Bert marry me?

He professed nothing cornball; you couldn’t expect Bert to deliver himself of pronouncements of loving devotion. The nearest he ever came was that remark about wanting you to be the mother of his children. There probably was quite a bit of truth in that. He had his head full of pop theories about genes and heredity. More than once he brought out her album of family photographs (she remembers, with a pang, leaving it behind) and showed it to their friends and boasted, as if they were his own ancestors, about her handsome grandparents and tall regal Great Aunt Irma who’d lived healthily into her 102nd year. He’d exult: “Look at that bone structure!”

But there was another factor as well, one crucially important to the role he envisioned for himself. He was climbing to new strata and he wanted a wife: visible, presentable, cultivated, respectable.

He wanted you because you decorated his life.

Did I ever love him?

Yes, she thinks; let’s be honest; you did love him. You’d have done anything for him. You’d have given your life for him.