The Right Thing to Do Read online

  Had she been thirteen, fourteen? It was already hard to place the moment he began to turn away from her. He had encouraged her to be strong, tough, independent, unafraid of getting hurt, and then he betrayed it all. His stroke only seemed to have intensified his need to close in. He had had an easy time at first, forcing her into a confused silence. She had withdrawn into her room, turning it into half refuge, half escape, so that it looked like nothing else in the tiny, dim apartment. It was dark, facing an alley; sun never shone into it, not even as a reflection bouncing off the windows of the building that loomed behind the alley wall. She knew every crack, every fissure, every gradation of gray in that wall.

  She had painted her room a warm ivory. She had picked out a low bookcase, a corner piece, and two end pieces in unfinished pine; the whole unit looked built-in. The space of thirty inches that was left between the bookcase and her closet had a small teak desk she had placed at right angles to the wall. Over the desk was a print of Modigliani’s Seated Girl in warm flesh tones with rusts and browns and golds. Opposite the bookshelves was a bed. She had thrown out the ruffled bedspread Laura had bought her, and fitted it out as a daybed with pillows in rust, gold, and ivory. In front of it, against the wall between the bed and the door to the room, was an old dresser with a huge mirror over it. Next to it, on a hook near the door, hung a fishnet drawstring bag that held a Speedo bathing suit and cap. The dresser top was messy with eyeliners, eye shadows, lipsticks, glosses, and blushers, which Nino referred to as junk. Nino had tolerated it all, even the hours spent hunched before the mirror, staring alternately at Vogue and at her face, following directions for achieving special effects.

  “What are you doing,” Nino would ask, half joking, from the doorway. “Putting on makeup or a Halloween mask? Who are you trying to be?” He would pick up the magazine and browse through. “You look better than this, anyway,” he would say pleasantly. “This one looks like she hasn’t eaten for months, a famine victim who got mugged. Look at the bruises around her eyes.” He would point to the carefully darkened lids. “Is this the style? Just make sure you wash it off before you go out,” he would say, walking off. “Makeup is ridiculous on a girl your age.”

  He had treated her like a kid dressing up in her mother’s clothes. Except that Laura never wore makeup, nothing but lipstick. It was, she guessed, part of trying on other lives, other faces, faces that said different things, made whatever sexual statements can be made with blue eyelids, or smoky sinuous lines that widened the eyes and made them seem almond-shaped, oriental, exotic.

  He had had a sense of humor about it all. Next to the back issues of Mademoiselle, Glamour, and Vogue, she kept stacks of used paperbacks. “Do you buy these by the pound?” he had joked, picking up and replacing one after the other. He saw that she had made a special place for the books he had given her. She had kept them well, he thought. A good thing, the reading habit. And what trouble could she get into, alone in her room?

  She had watched him turn over everything on her shelves with such deepening concern that she came to regard every attempt to come into her room as a kind of trespass. The books, the makeup, and the reading were all part of something she suspected he hadn’t grasped. Nino, you idiot, she thought, watching him quizzically thumbing through her things, you don’t get it at all. It’s all the same thing, all part of the trip out. She had found escapes in the other lives she read about, lives that gave full weight to the fear and joy she felt, the quick plunges from elation to depression. There was truth in their violence, their rebellion, the long praise of adventure, the belief that everything could be survived, the thirst for life at the edge. Even the books he had given her, even the Odyssey had it. True, the adventures were less spectacular after that.

  But the aversion to boredom was always there. It was there in the latest stories of men on the run from age, pregnant wives, and responsibility. Nino would probably have nothing but contempt for these men. But she had always agreed with them. Look what a deadening misery it was, this business of family ties, wives, children, hanging on to your neck. Laura had been a wonderful wife and mother, and where had it gotten her? She encouraged Gina to go to school as much as she did to get married. It was clear she didn’t want Gina to follow in her footsteps. Who wouldn’t want to feel that life could be all highs with nothing to drag you down? It had never occurred to her that the infatuations with freedom she had read about were celebrations of maleness until she began to pay attention to Nino’s conversations with Vinnie, until the two of them made it clear she wasn’t welcome, until it was unmistakable that they saw the crucial thing about her was her sex.

  It was one thing to recognize that there was a double standard, that men were different, but it was quite another to know what to do about it. It went beyond the practical. Most of the women she had known had always worked. Laura had worked and worked; the sight of her in the steaming shop, hunched over a sewing machine, never failed to make Gina’s heart sink. She didn’t make a lot, but she had her own money, and she had an independent mind, even if she didn’t show much of it to Nino. She showed it to me, Gina thought, in all the times she had made clear she wanted me to live a different kind of life. Laura and her covert rebellion. She had run the house, done the cooking and laundry, raised her, and worked besides. Nino never lent a hand. He had Laura’s number and wouldn’t give an inch. That was the way it seemed to be: people who had privileges weren’t about to give them up just because they were unfair. It was easier to find excuses for the way things were. Maybe there were men who were different, but Nino—who was, after all, no fool—didn’t think so. His one sexual lesson to her was simple and succinct: Never trust a man.

  It was a problem. Poor Nino. He had put himself in a terrible spot, she was beginning to realize. He liked women, but didn’t respect them because he thought they were spineless, easily swayed, subject to force. He had wanted her as an ally, an alter ego. She smiled grimly. So, Nino, you got one. Your lectures on perseverance, beginning when I was four (you called it stick-to-it-iveness), your determination to make me take any humiliation or trouble you dished out without flinching—you had called it building character. It paid off, Nino, she whispered to the shut door, you succeeded. Now I’m not afraid of anything you can dish out. She winced at her own words. It was a pep talk, but still there was truth in it.

  There was no exit from this. Already his watchfulness had narrowed her life. She had spent too much time avoiding open fights, forced into the covert way Laura dealt with him. Already she could see she might fall into a passive inwardness, drifting along, numbing herself and not taking charge of her life, not making a stand. There had been too many escape fantasies and no escape.

  The train seemed to be going incredibly fast, veering from side to side, its lurching force knocking her around without her noticing it. She was through escaping into books, into her obsessions with diets, makeup, dates with boys Nino had raked over. Things had to be different now. Alex was so much sharper, so much more sophisticated than anyone she had ever known. So far she had kept him from knowing all the bad parts. It was true he was as much of a guru as Nino, but at least, she thought, what he wants to teach me, I want to know. I picked this one myself.

  Now Nino was throwing his shadow across what she wanted. He was dimming everything. She knew there was something in her that Nino wanted; he wouldn’t let up until he got it. As though he had given her a gift and was trying to steal it back. What was it? It had to do with the radiance she felt, the discovery of another way of feeling, of an elation that grew in her like a longed-for child. She could sense it had a purpose, this mood, a meaning, but she couldn’t yet say what it was. If Nino killed it now, there might not be another, not one that glowed with so much promise. Give it up, Nino, she murmured. You don’t have to do this. But she knew that it was useless to hope.

  It worked both ways. Nino can follow, but I can hide. It’s vulgar to hide, she thought. No, it isn’t. It’s just the price you have to pay for being alive a
round him. If he can lie to fix up Maria’s death, I can lie to fix up my life. He wouldn’t follow me if he really knew anything. It’s up to me, Nino, to make sure you never find out anything at all. You always said, “You have to protect what you have!”

  The train lurched to a stop at Fifty-ninth and Lexington. Nino got out behind her, at first cautious, then less so because she never looked back. He could see her smiling as she reached the top of the stairs to the street. He hung back. How could she climb so fast? From the top of the stairs he saw her through a small mob of people clustered near the entrance to the train. A young man with a yellow beard had his arm around her. She had given him the bag. He was smiling into it. He hugged her. By the time Nino decided to confront them, they had begun to walk off together. How quickly they walked! His filmy eyes raked over the crowd on Third Avenue. But they were gone.

  He shuffled a block in each direction, hoping to glimpse them. Exhausted, he leaned against Bloomingdale’s window. Mannequins in shorts, in dresses with plunging necklines and bare backs, stood behind him with legs raised like the Rockettes. The smell of exhaust fumes fulminating in the heat suddenly hit him.

  When boys got into trouble, they had problems you could understand. With girls it was always the same thing. But not my daughter, he thought, gripping his cane and beating it against the sidewalk. A creep with a beard. A yellow beard. It was so hard to believe. He heaved himself onto his cane, unable to stop looking. But there were so many people, so many movies. They could have gone anywhere. The possibilities were dizzying; some of them made him gasp. The fumes and heat seared his throat. So he let himself drift with the crowds, dropping from the blistering sun into the subway darkness.

  They hadn’t gone anywhere near the places Nino searched. They had wandered for a mile until it became clear where they wanted to go.

  “What a cave,” Gina said when they got there. “You live in a white cave,” she repeated, pulling a cushion under her head to see better. The walls were freshly painted white over plaster that had been laid on so lumpily it looked like painted rock, something miraculously hacked out of a mountain on Avenue D and Third Street. There was a door facing her, bolted shut, a heavy metal door not well concealed by the streaked paint that covered it. On either side shelves had been hung on which books stood, neatly arranged in alphabetical order. On the right was a closet with a white sheet attached to a curtain rod as a door. It held a blazer, a poplin jacket, a heavy woolen suit, and three pairs of white jeans, hung like expensive slacks. On the left wall was the entrance, and right next to it, a white metal shower stall and a door leading to a toilet. To reach the apartment, they had walked through the entrance to one tenement and out the back door to an alley where still another building had been placed. To get to Avenue D you had to go through another alley and tenement. He lives in a tenement sandwich, she thought, watching him.

  Alex was talking, pacing around looking for something, but she couldn’t concentrate enough to hear what he was saying. His body, in the rays of late sunlight that came through the small high window, glowed. He was covered with reddish gold hair. It made him gleam; it felt rough or velvety, depending on where you touched. His thick golden hair and beard, trimmed and clipped with obvious care, shone so that his face seemed lit up. The muscles of his stomach and hips formed an amazing, curving U. After weeks of talking, walking, embracing in the park, nothing about him should seem strange. But the silence of his place after the raucous street, and his beauty, seemed like a tremendous surprise. They had both been giddy since they came in, shedding their clothes for a shower. They had never been alone like this before, and the solitude, after coffee shops and walks down crowded streets, was shocking. He had become remote after being so passionate in doorways. But the day seemed to stretch out far enough to encompass everything. He had chosen a cassette and put it in the tape deck. The music seemed to relax him.

  Alex crawled into bed with her, pulling the sheet over them and pressing his face into her breasts. She touched his face, tracing the line between his cheek and beard. He murmured, “Are you disappointed that I didn’t jump on you in the shower?”

  “What a question,” she said. But she didn’t really know the answer. “It’s so strange, just to be alone with you. I feel as though I don’t know you.” She reached back under the pillow. “That’s so lovely,” she breathed.

  “You like the tape,” he said approvingly.

  “I meant the way you feel.”

  “You have,” he began gravely, “a way of saying what you know I want to hear in a way that also makes fun of me.” He took her wrists and suddenly pinned each hand to the bed, climbing on top of her. “Don’t you know you shouldn’t make fun of me,” he said.

  “I’m not . . .” she began to protest, not sure if he was kidding or not.

  He began licking her face, her eyes, her neck. At first she laughed, then she thought it was unpleasant, then she began to dream into it, waiting for what would come next. He stretched her arms, pulling her hands up under the pillows and leaving them there while his body pinned her back. On the smooth sheet under the pillow, there was something hard. Her fingertips reached it and closed around it automatically. It was a piece of metal, a solid pipe, a crowbar. She twisted under him as sharply as she could, forcing him to roll off as she stood and moved away from the bed. She was still holding the crowbar. “What’s this?” she said.

  Alex looked at her. “Are you going to attack me?” he said, amused.

  “What’s it doing under your pillow?” she asked, feeling disconcerted by his amusement.

  “You trust me, I think,” he said. “But you’re not really sure what I am or what I’ll do next. Is that right?”

  She nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “It can be rough down here. I keep it handy, in case someone breaks in. If I’d known we were coming here I would have taken it away this morning.”

  Gina threw the bar into the corner and sat next to him. His kiss was tender and searching, his tongue somehow able to stir her hunger. She folded herself around him, luxuriating in his skin, his weight, his feel. Suddenly he was gone; he straddled her, bending down to kiss her.

  “Come back,” she whispered. “Please.”

  “Not yet.” He smiled. “You’ll have to wait for what you want.”

  He looked at her for long moments and then, embracing her until she felt she glowed, rocked her into orgasm. He moaned as he came, curling down on her.

  “You are not a virgin,” he said quietly. “I was so careful with you. I thought you were.”

  Excuses, explanations didn’t come up easily through the dreaminess, the utter fullness of her mood. An accident with her cousin’s bike? A bumpy horse on a merry-go-round? What kind of question was that to ask, anyway?

  “No,” she said, “I’m not.” What possible difference could that make? She was tired of lying.

  “There is an old French romance about a man who goes looking for a virgin. He searches all through Rouen, beginning with girls of fifteen, and he works on down until, to find one, he has to try five-year-olds.”

  “Very touching,” she said. “Also very disgusting.”

  “Let’s have supper,” he said, getting up. He walked to the refrigerator and took some Polish ham from the center shelf. He put up water to boil for tea. She watched him from the bed. He was irritated and grumpy. He was, she realized, very complicated. Why had he tried so hard to please her just to spoil it? The question proclaimed itself like a billboard somewhere outside her. She floated above his irritation. There are some gifts, she thought, that you can’t take back.

  “There’s a roach in the sugar,” Alex said moodily, peering into the box. “I guess I’ll have to get another box. There’s a store across the street. I’ll be right back.” He pulled on his slacks and sandals.

  While he was gone she dressed and wandered around the room. She switched the tape off, watching the lights flicker as the system stopped. She was looking idly at the bol
ted door, wondering where it led, when the telephone rang. Without thinking, she answered it.

  “Hello, Alex? Is Alex there?” a woman asked.

  “No,” Gina said, “he isn’t.”

  “Just tell him Ronnie called,” the woman said.

  “Will you leave your number?” Gina asked stiffly.

  “675–7462,” she said, hanging up.

  Gina checked the telephone. The number was the same. Maybe it was just a mistake; the woman was surprised to hear her answer.

  Coming through the doorway, Alex motioned to the shower. “See . . . we can talk while you drink your tea.”

  “Very sociable shower,” Gina said. Somehow it was hard to talk. He had complained about her silences, and that made them last longer.

  “Someone called while you were out. Ronnie. When I asked for her number, she left yours.”

  “She just moved out,” Alex said casually.

  “How soon is ‘just’?”

  “Last week,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Gina, taking it in. So that’s how all those romantic walks with me ended.

  “But as soon as she left I became innocent as a baby again.” He sliced some ham and dropped it on her plate.

  “Here’s to Baby Alex,” she said, raising her iced tea.

  He took her in appreciatively. “Look, I felt bruised before, but it’s OK now.” He reached across the table and touched her face. “I want you to meet my friends. I want you to meet my father. He’s fantastic. He’d love you.”