I knew then the trick would be sucking in his breath and holding it, afraid I might disown the action if he asked for more. I might say, ‘enough of that,’ or some other preemptory thing. It felt so good, all the more because it was out of his control and because I was not aroused. Perverse as it was, the trick often liked being the only one who enjoyed it. Maybe he felt relieved not having to please the woman, not having to worry about her orgasm for once. Underneath that, there was something both humiliating and at the same time exciting about it, succumbing to the all-powerful, remote mother of his infant dreams.
Even as I began to enjoy the power I had over these tricks in the bedroom, I did not like at all the feeling of helplessness I experienced waiting for them in the living room. Evelyn seemed to take it in stride; not me. More than anything, I had always hated waiting for men. But in the hooking profession in those days, only streetwalkers could escape it. Meanwhile, this is what had drawn me to the saloons, where I could come and go, where I could hunt men instead of the other way around. Now, even though I had chosen to outright reject the society I was born into, I found myself once more obliged to wait for the attention of men. I could barely stand the frustration. If it weren’t for the fact that I was also waiting for pretty good money, I might have hit the street.
When I was almost seven, my father, Rayfield, called. This was the first time I’d heard his voice in two years. He had come home from Korea with the Bronze Star. He wanted to see me. I couldn’t believe it. My father wanted to see me. It was like the president, or a famous actor, suddenly calling up and saying that he wanted to see me, so out-sized had my fantasy of him become. In the two years that he had been away, I had received one unsigned valentine. My mother had to tell me it was from him. The fact that he hadn’t bothered to sign it even, this drawing of a cavalier monkey in his funny, tilted cap, with only the printed words “Be My Funny Valentine” inside, broke my heart. Maggie patiently, emphatically explained that it was a Valentine’s Day custom, that my father was pretending to be a secret admirer.
“Couldn’t he have at least put ‘Love, Dad’ on it?” I kept asking. “Just ‘Love, Dad’?”
Anything would have been better than nothing. I was convinced that he was in a hurry, popped the card in the mailbox, and that was it. I figured he had forgotten about me, and I pined for him. I became seriously depressed. How I did that, I remember, at the fickle age of five, was by vowing to be unhappy all the time. Not just some of the time when I felt like it. That was not serious enough. Grown-ups think you’re simply in a bad mood if you look sad, then ten minutes later start to laugh at something someone says. No, the trick was to stick with it, make them see you’re not just being a kid. It had to be full-time. I was going to be unhappy every waking minute if I could help it.
When I entered the first grade at an enchanted, strange little European school, where they cosseted neglected uptown kids like me, the depression gradually started to lift. I didn’t want it to, because I was afraid that I would forget my father, just as he had forgotten me, and then it would be as if we as a duo had never existed. To prevent this from happening, I turned my absent father into a love object and began to revel in the attenuated refinements of unrequited affection. I was determined that I would not forget. Singlehandedly, I would keep this thing we had alive. Before he left, he said to me, “Remember, darling, true love is like this rubber-band. You can stretch it, but it never breaks.”
So there. So it was true.
But then, after the initial call in September, we didn’t hear from him. I went into second grade. Thanksgiving passed with no word. Finally, he phoned again. He was settled now, with a job at the copy desk of the Tribune and a room somewhere I never had heard of, White Plains I think it was.
It was on a Saturday in early December at my grandparents’ penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and my father was coming. I see myself sitting on the window seat, my knees tucked up to my chin, the blue velvet skirt pulled taut over them, staring out the living room picture window at Central Park, twenty-two stories below. I liked to search out an empty space in the rambling apartment where I could pretend that I was living alone. The best way to do this was to enter a room after Bridget had finished cleaning it, preferably when Josephine had slipped off to an afternoon Mass (poor people were Catholics; rich people like my grandparents were nothing at all). Today Grandpa had gone out to his club, but he often took his nap then. My grandmother might try to get me to take a walk in the Park, but the old woman shuffled along on the sidewalk, going nowhere, until she hit a bench. I needed a destination, and I hated the pavement. Instead, I ran for the fields, the big rocks, the densest part of the woods, where you couldn’t even see the buildings.
Sometimes my grandfather took me there, the Ramble it’s called, deep inside the Park. That morning, the two of us—my round, bald grandfather and I—had skipped down the hill as far as the miniature boat pond. Grandpa bought a small plastic bag of salty peanuts, which he said were for the squirrels. Then, according to ritual, I ate them. At this point, the old man shook his head like his granddaughter was beyond hope and called me a “squirglar,” a thief who stole from the squirrels. I giggled. He had made that word up himself. Grandpa liked me wicked. Good children, he said, were hiding something. And they were dull.
Now that I was seven, he undertook to lecture me on a variety of subjects from literature to politics. On this particular morning, he had decided it was time to warn me about two phony writers from my father’s neck of the woods called Emerson and Thoreau. These men were muddled thinkers. It was self-evident in their prose, which was filled with parentheses inside of parentheses. Obviously confused. “Never use a ten-cent word when a two-cent word will do,” he told me.
I was thinking about Emerson and Thoreau and that word I couldn’t pronounce, “transcendentalism”—“a lot of hooey” was how my grandfather explained it to me. The two guys lived on a pond, or one of them did. Well, why not? But if I knew anything, it was that Grandfather was right. His warning tone implied the world was full of fools.
I was looking out the window at the far side of the big boat pond in the middle of the Park, where the woods grew thick, imagining those two men perched at the edge there rubbing sticks together to make a fire. I pretended I could see them under the trees. I also granted a short audience to Horatio (a clown of a sidekick I had been trying to banish, since everybody except Horatio himself knew and accepted that he did not exist).
Josephine came out from the back of the apartment, through the dining room, stopping at the staircase adjacent to the front door in the hallway. She looked at me across the wide-open space of connecting rooms and then looked at the door. Then my nurse sighed and started up the stairs. From where I sat, I could see her nylon uniform pull at the seams across her wide, rolling back. She stopped on the landing to breathe, a great demonstration of heaving in and out.
“C’mon, Janet, I’ll brush your hair again,” she called out to me.
I got up slowly and walked to the stairs. Josephine had already brushed and brushed my straight ash-blond hair that morning, and still it fell in strings around my head. I wished I had curly black hair like the second grade class leader, Betty. My ears poked out. My white nylon socks were slipping into my black patent leather shoes. I began climbing the stairs, grabbing the polished banister directly above me and pulling myself up one step at a time.
“Stop that,” Josephine said from the landing. “You’re not an old lady.”
We went into the big guest room, where we sometimes spent the night. It was furnished, draped, and carpeted in tones of beige. A few of my stuffed animals sat bright and incongruous on a pillow. Usually chatterboxes, always arguing among themselves, even they got quiet here.
“I see Bridget cleaned the room this morning. Isn’t that nice?” Josephine said.
“Bridget always cleans the room, every day,” I said.
The nurse sat down on a taut coverlet. “Not everyone has someone to clean up after them,” she said.
“Mother says when she was growing up everybody had a maid,” I said.
“If