Snow White and Rose Red

3

The phone was ringing when I got home that night.

I let myself into the kitchen through the door that opened from the garage, and yanked the receiver from the wall behind the counter.

“Hello?” I said.

“Mr. Hope?”

A woman’s voice.

“Yes?”

“Or can I call you Matthew?”

“Who’s this, please?” I said.

“Terry,” she said.

For a moment the name didn’t ring a bell.

“We met earlier today,” she said. “In Lieutenant—”

“Oh yes. Yes.”

There was a long silence on the line.

“You didn’t call,” she said.

“Well, I—”

“So I’m calling you instead,” she said.

Another silence.

“Have you had dinner yet?” she asked.

“No, not yet.”

“Good. I fried some chicken, I’ll bring it right over. You’re not married or anything, are you? I forgot to ask you this morning.”

“No, I’m not married.”

“How about the anything?”

“Or anything,” I said.

“Does it bother you, my calling?” Terry said.

“Well, no, but—”

“That’s okay, I’m liberated,” she said. “This address in the phone book — it’s still good, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but—”

“See you in about a half hour,” she said. “I’ll bring all the trimmings, all you have to do is chill a bottle of white wine.”

“Terry—”

“See you,” she said, and hung up.

I looked at the phone receiver. I put it back on the cradle. I looked at the clock. It was twenty minutes past six. What I really wanted to look at was myself; maybe I had turned into a movie star overnight. There was no mirror in the kitchen. I walked through the living room and into the bedroom and then into the bathroom. I looked in the mirror. It was the same old me. I raised one eyebrow, the way I had practiced it interminably when I was sixteen years old. The left eyebrow. When I was sixteen, movie stars always raised the left eyebrow. And curled the lip a little. Even with the curled lip and the raised left eyebrow, it was still the same old me. I shrugged and went out into the small alcove I had furnished and equipped as an at-home office area. I turned on the answering machine.

There had been three calls while I was gone.

The third one was from my daughter. In tears.

“Daddy, it’s Joanna,” she sobbed. “Please call me back, please!”

I should explain that I’m divorced and that my former wife has custody of our only child, who is now fourteen years old. That was why Joanna was calling me at the house I was renting instead of being in the house itself, where I could take her in my arms and find out why the hell she was crying. I dialed Susan’s number at once. Susan is my former wife. Susan’s number used to be our number, but not only did she get custody of our daughter, she also got the house and the Mercedes-Benz and $24,000 a year in alimony. Joanna answered the phone.

“What is it?” I said.

“Oh, Daddy, thank God!” she said.

“What’s the matter, Joanna?”

“Mommy wants to send me away,” she said.

“Away? What do you mean, away?”

“To school. In the fall. She wants to send me away to school.”

“What?” I said. “Where? Why?”

“Simms Academy,” she said.

“Where’s that?”

“In Massachusetts.”

“What? Why?”

“She says it’ll be good for me. She says St. Mark’s is getting run-down. She says... you won’t like this, Daddy.”

“Tell me.”

“She says too many black kids are infiltrating the school. That was the word she used. Infil—”

“Put her on the phone.”

“She isn’t here,” Joanna said. “That’s why I called, so I could talk to you in—”

“Where is she?”

“Out to dinner. With Oscar the Bald.”

Oscar the Bald was Oscar Untermeyer, Susan’s most recent flame.

“When will she be back?”

“Late, she said.”

“Tell her to call me the minute she gets in. Whatever time it is, tell her to call me.”

“Dad?”

“Yes, honey?”

“Do I really have to go to school in Massachusetts?”

“Over my dead body,” I said.

“I’ll tell her to call you,” Joanna said. “I love you, Dad.”

“Love you, too, honey.”

“I love you lots,” she said, and hung up.

I put the receiver back on the cradle. The desk clock read six-thirty. I did not feel like entertaining either Terry Belmont or her fried chicken, with or without all the trimmings. I felt like getting into my car and driving to every restaurant in the city of Calusa until I found my goddamn ex-wife and—

I told myself to calm down.

This was just another of Susan’s passing whims. Like the time she’d threatened to put Joanna in a nunnery if she didn’t stop hanging around with “the class slut.” She knew damn well she couldn’t send Joanna away to school. Or could she? She had custody. All I did was pay the bills. I didn’t mind paying the bills. The tuition at St. Mark’s was astronomical, and it couldn’t be any worse at Simms, wherever the hell in Massachusetts that was, but if Joanna was getting a good education, who the hell cared?

Unless a kid was lucky enough to get into Bedloe, Calusa’s exclusive public high school “for the gifted,” or rich enough to afford one of the area’s two private preparatory schools — St. Mark’s in Calusa itself, or the Redding Academy in nearby Manakawa — the secondary-school educational choices were limited to three schools, and the selection was further limited by that part of the city in which the student happened to live. It would be nice to report that white parents in Calusa dance joyously in the streets when faced with the possibility of their children attending Arthur Cozlitt High, which has an unusually high percentage of black students. This, alas, is not the case. I have had at least a dozen irate parents trotting into my office in the past several years, asking if there was not some sort of legal action they might take to effect a transfer from Cozlitt to either Jefferson or Tate, each with a more normally balanced ratio of black to white students.

Calusa is a city of a hundred and fifty thousand people, a third of them black, a tiny smattering of them Cubans who have drifted over to the West Coast from Miami. There used to be a restaurant called Cuban Mike’s on Main Street, and it made the best sandwiches in town, but it closed last August when someone firebombed the place. The whites blamed the blacks; the blacks blamed the rednecks; and the handful of Cubans in town kept their mouths shut lest fiery crosses appear on their lawns one dark night. One of these days Calusa is going to have a racial conflagration that will blow the town sky-high; it is long overdue. In the meantime everyone here pretends that this is still the year 1844; I think my partner Frank and I may be the only people in all of Calusa who notice that at any performance given at the Helen Gottlieb, only half a dozen people in the audience will be black — in an auditorium that seats two thousand.

The phone rang again.

“Hello?” I said.

“Daddy?”

Joanna again.

“What Mom said, actually — about the infiltration — what she said was ‘niggers.’ Two black kids’ve been admitted to the school.”

“Terrific,” I said. My former wife from Chicago, Illinois, was turning into a Florida redneck. “You tell her to call me the minute she gets in that house.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“And don’t you worry,” I said.

“I won’t, Daddy.”

“Love you, honey.”

“Me, too,” she said, and hung up.

My partner Frank says that women know how to manipulate me.

I went out into the living room, turned on the light against the encroaching dusk, mixed myself a very strong, very dry martini, and then carried it back into the bathroom with me. I took two long swallows before I got into the shower, and drained the glass the minute I turned off the water. I was mixing myself another martini, a wet towel around my waist, when the front doorbell rang. I looked across the kitchen counter at the clock on the wall. A few minutes after seven. Terry Belmont.

“Just a second,” I said.

I went to the door and opened it.

“Oh my,” Terry said.

“I just got out of the shower,” I said. “I’ll get dressed, the bar’s—”

“don’t go to any trouble on my part,” she said.

“won’t take me a minute,” I said. “The bar’s right there, help yourself.”

“Where can I put this stuff?” she asked.

Her arms were laden with brown paper bags.

“Kitchen’s over there,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

“I showered, too,” she said, and smiled.

I went into the bedroom, put on clean underwear, white ducks, a blue shirt I’d had tailor-made in Mexico for three dollars, and a pair of loafers. I went into the bathroom, combed my hair, and looked at myself in the mirror again. I still wasn’t a movie star. Terry was standing at the bar when I came back into the living room.

“What’s Stolichnaya?” she asked.

“Vodka,” I said. “Russian vodka.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, “it says so right here on the bottle.”

“Would you like some?”

“No, I don’t like vodka.”

“Well, what can I get you?”

“What are you drinking?”

“A martini.”

“Yeah, that sounds good,” she said.

I started mixing the martini.

“Yell when You’re hungry,” she said. “All I have to do is heat it up.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you want an olive in this or an onion?”

“What are you having?”

“A twist.”

“I’ll have a twist, too,” she said.

I cut a narrow slice of lemon peel, rubbed it around the rim of the glass, and dropped it in. I handed the glass to her.

“Thanks,” she said. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

We drank.

“Good,” she said. “I usually don’t drink martinis because they make me do funny things,” she said. “But what the hell.” She sipped at the drink again. “This is really very good,” she said. “You make a good martini.”

“Thank you.”

“So,” she said, “were you surprised that I called?”

“I was.”

“I don’t believe in standing on ceremony. But, boy, was I afraid some woman would answer the phone. I had it all figured out I would say I had the wrong number or something. You’ll notice I’m wearing green,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Remember I told you this morning that green—”

“Yes, I remember.”

“This is one of my favorite dresses, in fact,” she said. “Though my mother tells me it’s too tight. My mother’s a pain in the ass when it comes to telling me how I should dress, you’d think I was still ten years old or something. Did I tell you how old I am?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-seven, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“And You’re thirty-eight, right?”

“Right.”

“Eleven years,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“The difference in our ages.”

“Right.”

“I got this dress up at Lucy’s Circle,” she said. “A place called Kitty Corner, do you know it?”

I knew it.

“Yes,” I said.

“They have sexy clothes there. Do you think it’s sexy? The dress, I mean.”

I looked at the dress more closely. It was fashioned of something that appeared to be silk but was probably a synthetic fabric. It was cut low over the breasts and slit to the thigh on the right leg. Her mother was right; it did seem a bit tight. Or at least a bit too clingy.

“it’s very sexy, yes,” I said.

“I like sexy clothes,” she said. “I mean, what the hell, if You’re a woman you should dress like one, don’t you think?”

“I would expect so.”

“I like the way you talk,” she said. “Am I too outspoken?”

“No.”

“I say What’s on my mind. That’s a bad failing, I guess.”

“Not necessarily.”

“That’s what I mean. About the way you talk. Somebody else would’ve said something else. Instead of ‘not necessarily.’ I don’t know what they would’ve said, somebody else, but it wouldn’t’ve been ‘not necessarily.’ Do you like chicken?”

“Yes.”

“I fried it myself. I hate what they give you at these take-out places. I made this myself, with my own two little hands — not that they’re what you’d call dainty or anything, my hands. Do you think I’m too big?”

“Big?”

“Yeah, you know. Big.”

“Well... no, you look fine,” I said.

“Oh, I know I look fine,” she said, “but am I too big?”

“How do you mean?”

“Guess how tall I am?”

“Five-nine.”

“Five-eleven,” she said, shaking her head.

“That’s tall.”

“Oh sure. Guess what I weigh?”

“I have no idea.”

“A hundred and thirty. Does that sound fat to you?”

“No.”

“My mother says I’m too fat. She means here, I think,” she said, and glanced down at her breasts. “I give a big impression all over, I guess. Lieutenant Hanscomb says I should join the force. As a cop, he means. In the office I’m civil service, a civilian employee, you know? He says I could knock any cheap thief on his ass in a minute, is what he thinks. He’s wrong, though. I’m not really very strong, I’m just big. How tall are you?”

“An even six feet,” I said.

“Uh-oh,” she said. “I shouldn’t’ve worn heels, right? You notice the shoes match the dress? But maybe I’ll be too tall for you with heels on. Come over here a minute,” she said, and stood up.

I walked to where she was standing.

“A little closer,” she said. “I won’t bite you.”

We stood facing each other.

“Yep, just a little bit too tall,” she said, looking into my eyes. “That’s ’cause the heels add three inches — well, what can you do, I like very high heels. Did you ever notice when a girl is wearing heels it lifts everything? I mean everything. Your breasts, your ass, they all get lifted when You’re wearing heels. Also, heels make you suck in your tummy, I don’t know why that is. Should I take them off? Does it make you feel uncomfortable or anything, my being a little bit taller than you with the heels on?”

“No, I don’t mind at all.”

“’Cause I’d rather leave them on, if you don’t mind,” she said. “Even later. I’d like to leave them on later, if That’s okay with you.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I like looking sexy,” she said, and smiled. “Are you getting hungry? Shall I heat up the chicken and stuff? Just say the word.”

“I think I’d like another drink first,” I said.

“Yes, me, too, please,” she said.

I mixed the drinks. I carried hers to where she was sitting.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Cheers,” I said.

“Cheers,” she said. “Mm, just as good as the first one.”

We drank in silence for several moments.

“I’ll tell you why I called,” she said.

I waited.

“I find you very attractive,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Do you find me attractive?”

“I do.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

“It would’ve been stupid, wouldn’t it?”

“What would’ve?”

“You being alone here tonight, having your dinner alone here, and me being alone having my dinner alone when instead we could be together when we find each other attractive, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Which is why I called.”

“I see.”

“Have you ever wondered how many people in the world would be together instead of alone on any given night in the universe if only they would pick up the telephone? Or if they would go up to each other on the street and say to each other, ‘Hey, I find you attractive, let’s get to know each other.’ ”

“They’d get arrested,” I said.

“Yeah, That’s the shame of it, That’s exactly what I mean. But you can’t get arrested for picking up the telephone, can you?”

“Unless you breathe heavily into it,” I said.

“That’s another thing I find attractive about you,” she said. “You have a good sense of humor. I love to laugh, don’t you love to laugh?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I also love to eat,” she said, “and I am getting hungry, really, ’cause all I had for lunch was a little salad. I get fat as a horse, my mother’s right, if I don’t watch it.” She got to her feet, put down her glass, smoothed her dress over her hips, and said, “What I’ll do, I’ll get it started, and we can just sit and drink till it heats up, okay?” She started for the kitchen. “This is a nice place you’ve got here,” she said. “Do you own it?”

“I’m renting,” I said.

“it’s nice anyway,” she said. “Where’s the light switch?”

“To your left.”

She snapped on the kitchen lights and looked around appraisingly.

“I’ll bet a woman designed this kitchen,” she said, but did not amplify. “Okay, let’s see. I guess I can heat the chicken and french fries in the same oven, and I’ll need a pot to put the veggies in. Where do you keep your pots?”

“Cabinet on the left of the stove,” I said.

“Cabinet on the left of the stove,” she said, kneeling. “Right. Did you chill some wine?”

“I think there’s a bottle in the fridge,” I said.

“White wine, right?”

“Right.”

“With chicken,” she said.

She was bustling about the kitchen now, pouring peas into a small pot from the plastic container in which she’d brought them, putting the fried chicken into a shallow pan, the potatoes into another, fiddling with the dials on the oven and the range. “Bring my drink in here, why don’t you,” she said, “so I can keep an eye on this. And come give me a kiss.”

I picked up her drink and went into the kitchen.

I handed her the drink.

“don’t forget the kiss,” she said.

I took her in my arms.

“I’m too tall, right?” she said.

“Wrong,” I said.

“This’ll be our first kiss,” she said.

“I know.”

“But it doesn’t have to be a great one, okay? Just a little smooch. We’ll save all the great ones for later, okay?”

“Okay.”

I kissed her gently.

“Nice,” she said, and smiled. “I knew I was right about you.” She sipped at the martini. “Oh, this is going to be lovely,” she said.

I listened to her, fascinated, all through dinner.

I didn’t know whether she was very stupid or very smart. Listening to her was like listening to an out-loud stream-of-consciousness monologue. She said everything that came to her mind whenever it occurred to her. She held back nothing. There was no prior censorship. Whatever was worthy of being thought was worthy of being spoken.

I had never met anyone like her in my life.

She told me that she was married when she was seventeen because she mistook her first sexual experience for love.

“Have you ever noticed,” she said, “that girls with good breasts like having them touched, whereas girls who aren’t so lucky in that department usually don’t get much of a thrill out of it? That’s because when a girl starts to develop, if she’s got good breasts they get touched — a lot, in fact. And it’s enjoyable, naturally, so you grow up liking it and it’s something that stays with you the rest of your life. Of course, he did a lot more than fool with my breasts, which is why I married him, because it was so thrilling and all.”

She told me that she was divorced by the time she was nineteen.

“Lucky thing he didn’t make me pregnant or anything, because then I wouldn’t have known what to do,” she said. “This way I was free to say, ‘Hey, listen, Charlie, this isn’t working, you know what I mean? So we’re both still young and there’s time to correct our mistake, so let’s do it, okay? let’s split.’ Actually, he wasn’t all that young, he was twenty-nine years old, ten years older than me, a cradle-snatcher, am I right? And his name wasn’t Charlie, either, That’s just an expression. His name was Abner Bramley, a real fuckin’ redneck — excuse me, I sometimes swear when I think of him — who when I told him I wanted a divorce he beat me up so bad I couldn’t walk. I told you that before, remember? I’m big, but I’m not very strong. Anyway, I couldn’t walk, literally. I crawled out of that place and I had the son of a bitch arrested — excuse me — and I filed for divorce the very next day.”

“Good,” I said.

“I wish I’da known you back then,” she said. “Do you handle divorce cases?”

“Occasionally.”

“I’da come straight to you,” she said, and smiled. “Would you have handled me?”

“I’d have handled you.”

“Mm, I’d have loved to be handled by you,” she said. “You want some more of this wine? This is really good wine. Or should we save some for later? For when we’re in bed? I love to sip wine when I’m making love, don’t you?”

I looked at her.

“I’m really too much of a bigmouth, I know,” she said. “I should learn to be more careful about what I say. I’m scaring you, right?”

“No,” I said. “And I wouldn’t call you a bigmouth.”

“No, huh? Then what would you?”

“Candid? Honest?”

“Well, That’s the best policy, isn’t it? Would you like to go to bed now, and I can clean up the dishes later?”

“If That’s what you’d like.”

“What would you like?”

“That’s what I’d like,” I said.

“Yeah, me, too,” she said, and smiled. “I’ll take off everything but my heels and panties. I’m wearing lacy green panties that match the dress.”

We were in bed together when the telephone rang.

The bedside clock read ten minutes past one.

“Shit,” Terry said.

I picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Matthew? I hope I’m not waking you.”

Susan. My former wife. Who was probably wishing she’d awakened me.

“What’s this about sending Joanna away to school?” I said.

“Oh, she told you, did she?”

“Of course she told me. I’m her father.”

“Yes,” Susan said.

It was amazing what she could do with the simple word yes. It hissed from between her lips, insinuated itself over the wires, emerged from the receiver as an amazing blend of doubt, suspicion, and outright accusation.

“So what about it?” I said.

“I applied to the school, yes,” Susan said.

“To this Simms Academy—”

“Yes.”

“—in Massachusetts.”

“Yes.”

Yes, yes, yes. Soft, gentle, patient. Like nuclear fallout.

“What is it?” I said. “A military school for girls?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Matthew.”

“Any place calling itself a goddamn academy—”

“It happens to be one of the finest all-girl schools in New England.”

“She’s already going to a fine school in Florida.”

“St. Mark’s is coeducational,” Susan said.

“What’s wrong with coeducational all of a sudden?”

“I don’t choose to go into that with you,” Susan said.

“You were coeducating with Oscar the Bald tonight, weren’t you?”

“If You’re referring to Oscar Untermeyer—”

“I believe that’s the gentleman’s—”

“—what he and I share together is none of your fucking business.”

“Ah,” I said. “Nice talk on the lady.”

“I believe it was you, Matthew, who not so long ago told me to keep my various and sordid affairs to myself, if I’m quoting correctly—”

“You’re not.”

“—so I’d appreciate it if you followed your own advice.”

“Susan,” I said, “Joanna is not going to school in Massachusetts or anywhere else outside the state of Florida.”

“I have every reason to believe she’ll be accepted,” Susan said.

“If you send her out of the state, You’ll be violating our separation agreement”

“Oh?”

Susan was marvelous with the word oh, too. She could wring wonderful nuances of meaning out of any monosyllabic word in the language.

“How?” she said.

“The agreement calls for visitation.”

“No one’s abrogating your visitation rights.”

she’d already talked to a lawyer. Abrogate was not a word she normally used, not when there were so many simpler words around.

“How can she spend every other weekend with me if she’s in Massachusetts?” I asked.

“Neither would she be spending every other weekend with me,” Susan said.

“Are you trying to get rid of her, is that it?”

“I am trying to make sure she gets the education to which she’s entitled. At a school that isn’t being overrun by—”

She suddenly stopped talking.

“By what, Susan?”

“Inferior students,” she said.

“By ‘inferior,’ do you mean ‘C’ students? ‘D’ students? ‘F’ students?”

“I mean—”

“Black students?”

Silence.

“I wonder how a judge would react to that, Susan.”

“To what, Matthew?”

“To the fact that you want to take Joanna out of St. Mark’s because two black kids have been admitted. I just wonder what his reaction to that will be.”

“we’re in Florida,” Susan said. “Not that I’m in any way prejudiced.”

“I’m writing to this academy in the morning,” I said. “To tell them Joanna’s father objects to her admission there.”

“The school knows I have custody of the child,” Susan said.

“Damn it, Joanna doesn’t want to go there!”

“Children don’t always know What’s best for them.”

“Why are you doing this?” I said.

Silence again.

“You really are trying to keep me away from her, aren’t you?”

“I’m very sleepy, Matthew. Would you mind if we ended this?”

“I won’t let you do it,” I said.

“Good night, Matthew,” she said, and hung up.

I put the receiver back on the cradle.

“Wow,” Terry said.

I sighed heavily.

“Your ex, huh?”

I nodded.

“They can be real pains in the asses, can’t they?” she said.

I nodded again.

“Do you want me to go home?” she asked.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“’Cause there’s a game we could play, if you think you’d like to. What it does, it makes the second time around a little more interesting. And maybe it’ll take your mind off your wife, your ex-wife. If you’d like to.”

“You know something?” I said.

“What?”

I wanted to tell her that honesty was a tough thing to stumble across these days, and to find it in anyone was nothing short of a miracle. I wanted to tell her that the time we’d spent together tonight had been as valuable to me as diamonds and gold. I wanted to tell her that she was the most refreshing thing that had happened to me in as long as I could remember.

“You’re a very nice person,” I said.

And perhaps that was enough.

She smiled and said, “Yeah, you, too. Now here’s how this game goes, if You’re interested. What you do is you tease me, I’ll show you how in a minute, until you think I’m right on the brink — That’s what the game’s called, Brink — and then you stop, you just take your hand away or whatever, and then I start teasing you, and then I stop, and it goes on like that forever until we’re so crazy we can’t stand it anymore and we just have to do it or die. Brink. Do you think you’d like to play it?”

“I think You’re wonderful,” I said, and kissed her.

“Do you really?” she said.

Her voice was suddenly very soft, childlike. She looked up at me expectantly.

“I do,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

I kissed her again.

She smiled up at me.

“So do you think you’d like to try it?” she asked.