143580.fb2 The Family Fortune - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 29

The Family Fortune - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 29

Chapter 26 Men in briefs

The evening of my speech, I met the dean of the Wellesley College English Department, Lydia McKay, in her office and together we walked across the frozen campus. Dean Lydia was young, in her forties, and she hadn’t been at Wellesley when I was there.

I thought Dean Lydia was taking me to an ordinary classroom in one of the Gothic-style buildings I had loved so much when I was a student. Instead, she led me to one of the large auditoriums on campus that were meant to accommodate an audience of several hundred. These types of lectures were rare here (or at least they had been in my time). I was daunted by the size of the room and asked Lydia if this was the only room she could get. Wouldn’t a smaller one be more appropriate?

She scratched the side of her nose, pushed up her glasses, and looked at me as if I were a puzzle she couldn’t quite figure out.

“Appropriate, Jane? I don’t know what you mean.”

“I just think this room is a little big, but that’s okay, we can have everyone sit up front so it won’t seem so cavernous.”

“But I chose this room because I think we’re going to need all of these seats. We announced your talk in the Boston Globe.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. The idea of several hundred people showing up on a Thursday night in late January to see me was not only frightening but also preposterous.

I was wearing my green suit and I’d gone to Mr. Marco so he could trim and tint my hair. My index cards were in my left pocket and I must have looked like someone competent, but I felt like a puddle.

“Anyway,” Dean McKay said, “I wanted you to see the venue. We’re early so we can grab a cup of coffee in the student union.”

We walked back across campus. I poured myself a decaf from one of the huge urns I remembered so well from the all-nighters of my college days. The dean waved me past the cashier and wouldn’t let me pay.

As we walked to the only open table we could find at that hour, girls called out to “Dean Lydia.” A girl with tortoiseshell glasses and blue-tipped hair approached us. She had a stack of Euphemia Reviews in her arms.

“Miss Fortune, I’m a huge fan of yours. You’re one of the reasons I came to Wellesley. I’d like to be an editor someday. Could you sign these?”

“Jane, this is Sarah Mulcaster,” Dean Lydia said, “your biggest fan.” I smiled at her. “Sarah, Miss Fortune will be signing after her talk. You can speak to her then.”

“Signing?” I asked.

“Some people want you to sign the Review,” she said. “So we’ve set up a table in the lobby.”

“But I didn’t write any of the work in the Review. I really shouldn’t sign it.”

“Why not? It’s your Review.”

“And Evan Bentley’s.”

“Yes, of course,” she said.

When we entered the hall it was almost full and people were still pouring in. I was appalled. I thought I was going to be speaking to a group of about twenty-five girls, not to men and women from God-only-knows-where.

My pile of index cards felt weightless and I had to touch them to make sure they were still in my pocket. Was there a way I could get out of this—feign sickness—or maybe death?

Just as I was beginning to feel like I might vomit (thereby making feigning sickness unnecessary), I looked up and saw Tad sitting in the front row. He smiled and waved. I jumped off the stage to greet him.

“I can’t believe you came,” I said.

“Wouldn’t have missed it,” he said. “Even for a hockey game, which, I might add, I had tickets to. You look very nice.”

“That’s high praise coming from you,” I said.

“You ready?”

“For this? I don’t think so. I thought I’d be in a little classroom talking to a few girls.”

“Oh, Jane, you just don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“All these girls want to be like you.”

“I doubt that very much. Little girls say that they want to be princesses, nurses, sometimes doctors and lawyers, but they hardly ever say that ‘when I grow up I want to be a desiccated old maid.’”

“That’s only because they don’t know what desiccated means.”

Dean Lydia beckoned to me and I got back onto the stage by way of the stairs. She indicated a chair for me to sit on while I was being introduced, and as I was about to sit down, I was both surprised and delighted to see Bentley and Melody come through the door. It warmed my heart to think that they would show up just for me. They must have seen the notice in the Globe.

Finally, Dean Lydia went to the podium. She tapped the microphone, unable to get it to work at first. Wasn’t this always the case? It took a student well versed in audiovisual equipment to mount the stage and press the right buttons to get the thing going. Lydia’s voice went from a whisper to a bellow and I thought about how I’d have to modulate my voice to keep from sounding too overwrought.

Just as Lydia was saying, “Generally known as one of the best things to happen to the short story in the last twenty years,” the door opened and a man came in. I looked up, registered mild appreciation, as you sometimes do with excessive beauty. Then, as he came closer, I realized it was Guy Callow. What on earth was he doing here? I didn’t know he had an interest in literature. “And so I introduce one of our most accomplished alumnae, Jane Fortune.”

I couldn’t feel my legs, but somehow I got to the lectern. I tapped the microphone as Lydia had done, which made a big popping sound like a gunshot, and everyone broke into nervous laughter.

“Thank you, Dean McKay,” I said. “I am Jane Fortune.” They knew that already. I took my cards from my pocket and they slipped out of my hand and fluttered to the floor. I stooped to pick them up. Now they’d be out of order. I felt sweat under my arms, between my shoulder blades, and even on my forehead. Okay, Jane. Pull yourself together. I stood up and gripped the podium.

“First, I want to tell you about Euphemia Fortune, after whom the Review is named. She was my great-grandmother. How many of you have heard of Isabella Stewart Gardner?” I asked. About nine-tenths of the room raised their hands. In a different audience it would have been fewer, but we were at Wellesley College. These people were bound to know about Isabella. “Well,” I said, “my great-grandmother hated her.” I paused for the laughter that came pouring toward me. This feeling of making a room laugh was a new one. I took the cards from the podium and tossed them into the audience. “I don’t need these,” I said. This elicited another terrific response.

I knew the story I wanted to tell. I told about Euphemia’s frustration with Isabella, how Euphemia would have liked to be more like her, but short of that, she wanted to create, like Isabella, a monument to her own good taste.

“When I took over the foundation and read Euphemia’s journals, I tried to do what she had done. Euphemia had established a fellowship, a place and time for a writer to work. That had fallen by the wayside by the time I took over, so the first thing I did was reestablish it.”

I talked until I looked at the clock and my time was almost up. I ended by thanking Tad and Bentley and making them stand and take a bow. I hardly knew what I had said, but whatever it was earned me a standing ovation.

I turned to sit down, but Dean Lydia got up, moved me back to the podium, and said it was time for questions.

The first was from the girl Sarah. She had looked so respectful in the student union, despite her blue hair, but when she stood her voice boomed out with a snide confidence.

“I read somewhere”—she pulled on her tweed skirt and tossed her hair—“that you and Max Wellman were like together at one point.”

“The question?” Dean Lydia was obviously annoyed. The girl behind the wholesome sweater set and granny glasses had ambushed us—or me. That whole incident still embarrassed me somewhat in that I’d gone on to make such a success of the Review and the fellowship, yet falling for the first recipient—especially since it hadn’t worked out—made me look like a dilettante even now, just as I’d been afraid it would.

“Is it true?”

“It was a long time ago,” I said. I felt like my dignity was draining through a crack in my voice.

“And what’s your relationship now?” she asked.

“Friends,” I said.

I thought of him holding my hand at the hospital, his face pale and moist.

“Anyone have a more literary question?” Dean Lydia asked.

After the speech and after I had reluctantly signed some copies of the Review, Tad, Bentley, and Melody said that we had to celebrate. So long as eating was involved, I was fine with that. I hadn’t eaten anything before the talk for fear it would make me sick.

Guy Callow approached and tried to hug me, but I put him off by holding out my hand. He shook it and told me I was marvelous, and frankly, for the first time in a long time, I felt marvelous.

Bentley invited Guy to join us at the Figtree Café down the street, and the four of us walked through the stone gates of the college and out onto Central Street. The Figtree was a generic type of suburban restaurant—not high end, not low end, sort of Italian, sort of nothing. It had large paintings of fruit hanging on its brick walls and the tables were a plain blond wood.

Guy looked good enough to dip in chocolate. Still, there was something about him I didn’t trust. As soon as we sat down, Guy, though he could in no way be considered the host of the party, ordered several bottles of expensive wine. We also ordered three large gourmet pizzas, and I was so relieved that my talk hadn’t been a complete disaster, I drank and ate with the enthusiasm of eight hungry truck drivers.

“You were so terrific, Jane. So smooth, so funny. But you must be used to public speaking by now,” Guy said.

“Used to it? I never do it.”

“You could never have guessed,” Tad said. “You were awesome.” There was that word again—a word more appropriate to a sunset or the birth of a baby than to Jane Fortune standing on a stage at Wellesley College.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to me,” Bentley said. “I was always the public guy—because you didn’t want to be. But you are far more entertaining than I ever was. Even when I was flirting with my students, I couldn’t hold their attention like that.” Melody punched him on the arm. “Of course, that was in the past,” he added.

By the time we were finished eating, I was tipsy. Guy picked up the check for all of us and I thought this gallant of him, especially since this was a legitimate foundation expense and I would have been happy to pay for dinner. No one, though, not Bentley, Melody, or even Tad, was willing to have me pay on my special night.

Bentley, Guy, and Tad all offered to drive me home. There were two problems with that—one was that I didn’t have a home, and the second was that I was staying at the Wellesley Inn right down the street.

“I don’t have a home,” I said. Everyone but Guy, who didn’t really understand the import of the statement, looked at me as if I were the saddest case in the world. Even Tad had a home, even if it was a dorm room at Harvard. “Oh, stop with the doleful looks,” I said. They all looked like Basil Funk. “I am treating myself to a room at the Wellesley Inn. That way I can walk over and pick up my car in the morning. Now, if someone would be so kind as to drive me that short distance, I would be most appreciative.” I was proud of my drunken aplomb.

Guy insisted on being the one to take me.

Guy found a parking spot on the street outside the inn, then turned to me and leaned in close. I knew what was coming and I didn’t think I could avoid it: I didn’t really want to avoid it. He snaked his hand behind my neck and pulled me in for a kiss. It wasn’t unpleasant. I hadn’t been kissed in so long. The only thing I really found wrong with it was that it looked like, if I wasn’t careful, he might swallow my head. He was that kind of kisser, the type that acts as if they are trying to ingest you. I pictured myself disappearing headfirst into the winding tracts of Guy’s large intestine. It wasn’t a pretty picture and didn’t help me feel sexy. Still, I was drunk, and he was warm, and it was cold outside. I tried to leave the car, but that wasn’t his plan. He pulled and tugged at me and kissed and kissed at me, my neck, my fingertips, my earlobe, my elbow—my elbow? It was his constantly taking an unnecessary and unwelcome last step—the tonsillectomy when a gentle probe is sufficient, the elbow when most men would stop at the earlobe—pushing the envelope of love, that kept me in my head, even though I was drunk, and lonely and inclined to be amorous.

Guy asked if he could come in, but I didn’t think it was a good idea. The Wellesley Inn wasn’t that sort of place. That’s what I was thinking, conveniently forgetting that the two of us weren’t teenagers sneaking around; we were adults old enough to have teenage children of our own. It was highly unlikely that the night clerk would even look at us as we walked through the lobby.

I stopped Guy with a hand on his sternum and looked into his eyes.

“Let’s just catch our breath for a minute,” I said. His eyes were shining with the look of a man whose little brain has already taken over. Even with my dearth of experience, I’d seen the little brain take over before.

“Please, Jane,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to be with you ever since the first moment I saw you on the mountain.”

I found that hard to believe. People don’t look their best in goggles. His enthusiasm eventually swayed me and I told him he could come in if he behaved himself in the lobby so we wouldn’t look suspicious.

Inside, Guy kept his hands at his sides as we walked toward the stairs. For all anyone could tell, we were a tired married couple ready to go upstairs to twin beds.

I thought about my sister Miranda and whether I should be doing this at all. She claimed to be over Guy and I believed her, but I felt that people who are really in love never do get over it, not completely.

I unlocked the door of my room and turned on the light.

“Were you in love with Miranda?” I asked Guy.

Guy sat on the four-poster bed.

“You sure know how to deflate a guy,” he said.

I wasn’t sure whether he meant physically or mentally. Either way, it probably wasn’t a good thing.

“No, I was never in love with her,” he said.

“But you acted like you were.”

“You weren’t there. She read too much into it.”

I went into the bathroom and got us both a glass of tepid water from the tap. We sat on the edge of the bed. I looked at Guy’s profile. As beautiful as Guy was, there was something about him that did not appeal to me and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Who knows what makes people attractive to each other? It could be something as simple as smell. Guy’s cologne was strong and sickly sweet.

He put his glass down on a side table, then took mine from my hand and put it down beside his. He pushed my shoulder until I was half lying, half sitting, and he started to unbutton my blouse. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend he was someone else, someone I liked more. I closed my eyes, but when I opened them, he was scrambling out of his pants as if his feet were on fire. He wore jockey shorts and I think men in briefs look a little vulnerable, more boy than man.

His penis was purplish and rather enormous. Max wasn’t what you’d call diminutive, but Guy was the stuff of which porn stars are made, not that I’ve seen many porn stars, or any really—but I could imagine. Then I thought of Miranda again, and if I’d had a penis myself it would have collapsed like an empty balloon. I think maybe it was Guy’s unbridled delight in the whole process that made me wince. He was like the character Peter Sellers played in the Pink Panther movies. There was something so ridiculous in the poses he struck, something so creepy in the amorous glances he threw my way.

Still, I didn’t stop him. It was as if I was fascinated into shock, and it wasn’t until he was on top of me and his penis was knocking about in an attempt to find the right door that I decided I’d had enough.

I pushed him away. This, at first, had no impact. The mini-brain is so far from the large one that the ears can’t easily send it signals. I understood this with a sort of clinical patience.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. His voice was husky, almost a second voice, like a science fiction character with an alien living inside him.

“I want to stop,” I said. We learned this at Wellesley in our Health and Feminism class. “I want to stop” were magic words, known the world over to mean that if you continue, you do so at the peril of a criminal record.

Guy stalked into the bathroom, closed the door, and in a minute came out with a towel wrapped around his waist. He hadn’t lost his tumescence and his penis entered the room before he did.

I had put on my bathrobe, a new one, not the pink terry cloth. This one was black silk, and I don’t know why I bought it if not for a moment like this—whatever this moment was. This wasn’t going to be a moment of passion. It was more like a moment of passion denied, and you hardly needed black silk for that.

“I’m embarrassed,” I said. “Completely embarrassed.” And I was, partly because I was ridiculous enough to let this begin and then stop it—what thirty-eight-year-old did that? And the other more compelling reason for my shame was that he had seen me naked. Except for a few extra pounds, I wasn’t any more or less lumpy than your average thirty-eight-year-old. It wasn’t my body I was ashamed of, it was that I’d allowed him to come so close. The problem was that I didn’t want anyone, any man at all, to get that close to me unless I loved him. That was the embarrassing thing. I was a complete failure at promiscuity. It didn’t matter how drunk I was or how attractive Guy was. At that moment, I was constitutionally incapable of having sex with someone I didn’t love. Only hours ago I hadn’t even wanted him to hug me, and now here we were.

I tried to explain it to him—to somehow paint myself out of the picture of prude extraordinaire and into something more along the lines of a woman of great discrimination and dignity. This was made harder by the fact that we had already rubbed around naked.

“You think it’s too fast?” he asked. He sat beside me on the bed and massaged my neck. It felt so good I almost reconsidered, but then I thought about the next morning—waking up with him, drinking coffee with him, trying to pretend we were more to each other than we were just because we’d performed a biological function in the night. It was better to stop now. What I didn’t know then was that Guy’s plans were long term, and his desires, as far as I was concerned, weren’t going to be satisfied by a hasty night of sex. “I like you, Jane. I think you’re smart, attractive, talented…and tonight I found out you were funny.”

“You think this is funny?” I asked. He laughed as if I’d just delivered a punch line.

“Not this. Not us, right now. You were funny at the college. You’re full of all kinds of wonderful things, and the problem is, you don’t seem to know it.”

That was a problem, and because I knew he had read me correctly, my heart flipped over. There is something enticing about a man who professes to know you better than you know yourself.

I had to get away.

When I told Priscilla that I’d be leaving for the Vineyard the next day, she tried to talk me out of it.

“Why would you do that? The Vineyard is horrible in winter. I thought you’d stay here until at least May. I was looking forward to it.”

She seemed to have forgotten that in the five nights I had been staying with her, she’d been occupied with Jason for four of them.

Still, it’s hard to remain angry with someone who likes you well enough to want you to stay with them for four months. Someone who is willing to provide you with a safe haven is as good as family (and in the case of mine, better).

“It’s silly. You don’t need to go to the Vineyard so early. Let me show you my new outfit,” Priscilla said. She was trying to distract me, but she knew me well enough to know that clothes were a bad way to get my attention.

I used to like how Priscilla dressed, but I saw her now with a different eye. Her obsession with Talbots looked less like good taste and more like a lack of imagination.

“Very nice,” I said about the outfit, “but I’m still going to the Vineyard.”

“I’ll see less of Jason. Would that work?”

“I need my own home, even if it’s a little box in the wind.”

“You’ll be very alone there, Greta Garbo, that’s for sure.”

“There’s my friend Isabelle. I’ve already called her.”

“Who?”

“Isabelle from college. The one with the long wavy hair.”

“Didn’t she leave before graduation?”

“Yes.”

“Because she was pregnant.”

“You do remember,” I said. Priscilla’s lack of memory was a ruse. Everyone remembered Isabelle. It was because she had been so promising. She came from a first-generation Portuguese family in Bridgewater. Her father had a bakery and made the best sourdough bread in Massachusetts, but they didn’t have much money. Still, Isabelle had won a full scholarship to Wellesley, then, right before graduation, she got pregnant, left school, moved to the Vineyard, and opened her own bakery.

Jimmy, Isabelle’s son, was almost seventeen now. He was looking at colleges himself. I saw them often when I was on the island and I suppose you could say that next to Priscilla, Isabelle was my closest friend. I often wished I’d asked Isabelle, instead of Priscilla, what I should have done that summer with Max. Isabelle wouldn’t have wanted me to move to California, but she never would have tried to keep me here. In the end, I never told her anything about it. It was silly to be so closemouthed. Maybe if I had talked to a friend about it, I would have gotten it out of my system—or maybe I would have had the courage to track Max down and tell him I had changed my mind.

I kept Priscilla and the rest of the family separate from Isabelle. She was the type of person who would be of no consequence to the Fortunes, and they would end up treating her that way even if they weren’t aware of it. I didn’t want Isabelle to have to deal with that. They knew about her, but they never asked me to invite her over, and I thought that was reason enough not to.

“I don’t know why you’d want to go down and shiver in the cold when you could stay here. We can go to museums, lectures, concerts. We can have a wonderful winter,” Priscilla said.

Of course Boston would be cold, too, but in Priscilla’s world the winter was one warm fire after another in many different venues. Whether she was visiting a friend, drinking at the Ritz, or rolling with Jason under a down comforter, her winters were sedentary and comfortable. Besides, winter is a wonderful season for a knitter. Wool feels so much better between your fingers when it’s cold outside.

All the things Pris offered, the things I had enjoyed all my life, no longer appealed to me. I wanted a windswept shore and my own company. Besides, I needed to get out of town before Guy tracked me down. I didn’t want to get into another weird situation. A woman my age should know her own mind, and until I did, I thought it best to stay away from him.