“Don’t lie, damn you! Don’t hide! Who was I?”
She closed her eyes. Her lips moved. “Daddy.”
“Who were you?”
“I was… me. And I was Gretchen too. All in one.”
“How did you feel?”
“… Aching. Empty. Wanting. As if something secret and delicious was starting to grow, something that could grow and burst, over and over. Then everything went dark and dead.”
“Poor chick,” I said. “It’s all bottled up. It’s all twisted and strange. So that everything he did was a denial of you the way you denied him. Janice Stanyard. Gloria. For about twelve fantastic seconds you started to break through. And you lost it. But it proves you could.”
“No!”
“You want to enjoy your hang-up? You want to live a half-life in a half-world?”
She rolled her head from side to side and her hand tightened on mine. “No, but…”
“But…”
“It’s no use. Gadge tried everything. Drinks, pills, different ways. It was just nightmare. Just all that terrible poking and jostling. So ugly.” Her voice trailed off. “So stupid and degrading and… vile.”
“Heidi, in that hallway shock turned your mind off, and your body came alive, and your body knew what it wanted.”
“I don’t want to be turned into an animal.”
“Like Gretchen? You damm fool, do you know why that girl in there triggered it? Because she looks like her mother did eighteen years ago. She’s your half-sister.”
She stiffened, yanked her hand away, sat up and stared down into my face. “Oh… my… God!… Oh… my… GOD!”
“You sensed it, didn’t you?”
“I could feel… something strange. Like an echo, like a memory I never had.”
I moved up onto the couch beside her and took hold of both her hands. She looked at me, solemn and troubled, and extraordinarily lovely and alive. “And that girl in there is an animal?” I asked.
“No. No, of course not. She’s a good person.”
“So is Gloria. So is Janice Stanyard. So was your father. All this priss-prim condemnation act of yours is a by-product of what happened to you when you walked into that room at the wrong time, at the wrong time in your life and in your father’s eighteen years ago.”
She frowned. “It could be. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Want to find out?”
“What do you mean?”
“After this is all over. After I’m through here, I’m going to find a place where the sun is hot and lasts all day. Come along with me. I’m the world’s worst setup for screwed-up broads. I hate waste. You’re worth special effort.”
She bit her lip. “All that again? No.”
“You responded to me once.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“You must have some strong motivation to break out in some kind of direction or you wouldn’t have let your pretty partner, Mark Avanyan, buddy you up with his musician friend-VanSomething.”
She gave a delicate little shudder. “Anna VanMaller. She finally started to arouse me. It was creepy and terrible. I kicked her and I ran and threw up. She was furious. I’d rather be… the way I am, even.”
“Even?”
She tilted her head, then blushed deeply and looked down and away, but she didn’t pull her hands away. “I guess that was a little too significant, Travis. Okay, I’m aware of the deficit. It’s probably lousy, but I don’t know how lousy because I don’t know what it could be like.”
“Just one rule. If you say yes, you can’t call it off. You endure it, until I give up.”
“Gadge gave up.”
“I’m not Gadge. You’re twenty-five. You are a beautiful woman, Heidi. What if this is the last chance?”
She pulled her hands away, shook herself as if returning to reality, and stared at me with a little curl of contempt on her lips.
“So you’ll make this terrible sacrifice, huh? Wow! I’m impressed. If you’re the great lover who finds out how to turn me on, it gives you an ego as big as the Tribune Tower. And I can learn a wet smile, pose for a centerfold, and become a happy bunny. And if you try and try and I never make it, then you’ve had the loan of what I’m told is very superior equipment for God knows how long, and you can trudge away shaking your head and feeling sorry for the poor frigid woman. Tails you win, tails I lose, buddy. If foul-ups are your hobby, go find a different kind. I’m too bright to buy that line of crap, my friend. I’m not a volunteer playmate.”
I got up and ambled around the semi-darkened room, scrubbing at my jaw with a thoughtful knuckle. She took very dead aim. She got inside. She made it sting. I will not fault my talent to kid myself.
I wandered, making bleak appraisals, and ended up standing behind the couch talking down at the top of her bowed blonde head.
“The first step has to be absolute honesty Heidi. Okay. You are flat right, and you are flat wrong. Here’s how you are right. I’ve got a plain simple old elemental urge to tumble you into the sack on any terms. You have that cool remote princessly look in total contrast with a very exciting body and exciting way of moving and handling yourself. It intrigues. Man wants to possess. He wants to storm the castle, bust down the gates, and take over. But I think-I’m not really sure-but I think that if that was my total motive, I’m enough of a grown-up not to try to get to you by sneaking up on your blind side. Grabbing something because it looks great is kind of irresponsible. Life is not a candy store.
“Likewise, dear girl, life is not a playground full of playmates where all good men are supposed to come to the aid of old Hooo the Hef and dedicate themselves sincerely and with a sense of responsibility and mission to liberating the maximum number of receptive lassies from the chains and burdens of our Puritan heritage.
“I think my shtick Heidi, is that I enjoy all the aspects of a woman. I like the way their minds work. I like the sometimes wonderful and sometimes nutty ways they figure things out and relate themselves to reality. I like the arguments, the laughs, the quarrels, the competitions, the making up. A nearby girl makes the sky bluer, the drinks better, the food tastier. She gives the days more texture, and you know it is happening to her in the same way.
“How this relates to Heidi Geis Trumbill is that I have the feeling it is a damned shame you stand outside the gates with a kind of wistful curiosity about what it’s like inside. I want to be sort of a guide, showing off new and pretty country to the tourist. Life is so damned valuable and so totally miraculous, and they give you such a stingy little hunk of it from womb to tomb, you ought to use all the parts of it there are. I guess I would say that I want to be friends. A friend wants to help a friend. I want to peel away that suspicion and contention because I don’t think it’s really what you’re like. If we can get friendship going, then maybe we can get a good physical intimacy going, and from that we can fall into a kind of love or fall into an affection close to love. If it happens, it adds up to more than the sum of the two people, and it is that extra part out of nowhere that has made all the songs and the poetry and the art.
“So it wouldn’t be a performance. No great-lover syndrome. No erotic tricks, no Mother McGee’s home-cooked aphrodisiacs. The only trick would be, I guess, to get you to like yourself a little. Then the rest would come.
“So you know what’s wrong with the whole statement, just as 1 do. Why doesn’t he get his own true permanent forever girl? Maybe it is some kind of emotional immaturity. Somehow I don’t think so. I have a theory I can’t prove. I know this. If I became one woman’s permanent emotional stability and security, there would be a moral obligation on my part to change the way I live, because I’d have no right to ask her to buy a piece of my risk-taking: Yet risk is so essential to me-for reasons I can only guess at-giving it up would make me a different kind of man. I don’t think I’d like him. I don’t think she would. I don’t know if all this is excuse, explanation, sales talk or what. I really don’t know. It’s what I think I think.”