Timothy Culver - Power Play

And now they were in the restaurant, giving their drink orders, sitting around the table of Marie’s choice. The three other members of the party consisted, one and two, of a couple Marie knew because she’d gone to Bryn Mawr with the wife, and three, of a man from George’s office who’d recently been divorced. The man was painful to be around, partly because the divorce had obviously not been his idea and partly because he didn’t give a damn about Evelyn but clearly felt he should go to bed with her in order to prove to his ex-wife he could get along on his own.

Evelyn found it impossible to retain the names of any of these people in her head, but it didn’t really seem to matter. They knew who she was, and that was all that counted. Marie had announced at the beginning of the evening that Poorevelyn was in town because her grandfather was in the hospital for a few days for a check-up, and of course Poorevelyn’s grandfather was Youknowwho. (He was George’s grandfather too, naturally, but George was a known quantity and therefore to be discounted; besides, Poorevelyn actually lived with The Great Man.)

The couple, Marie’s friends, were ravenous for anecdotes they could retail to other people on other occasions, and the man from George’s office tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to convert his self-pity into the appearance of concern for Evelyn, the result being that he kept talking as though Bradford were at death’s door, an implication that didn’t help Evelyn at all.

Evelyn never liked to be rude, but there were times when it was physically impossible to be anything else, and her only defense at the restaurant was to answer the couple in monosyllables and the pseudo-sympathetic man not at all. It still took them far too long, though, to begin to leave her alone.

But they finally did, not so much because of Evelyn’s lack of cooperation as because Marie got bored with the conversation and switched it to other channels. It turned out that she and the other wife were involved together in a broad array of charitable concerns, mostly taking place in what they called “disadvantaged” parts of Brooklyn and Queens, and their efforts with “these people” had produced an inexhaustible fund of condescending anecdotes, at each of which the three men dutifully laughed, and all of which served to reinforce the notion that “these people” were charming in their outlandish way but desperately needed discipline. Evelyn picked at her food and waited for it all to be over.

The maneuverings after dinner were unsubtle to the point of caricature, and ended with George and Marie going off by themselves, leaving Evelyn to be taken home by the other man. In the cab, his desperate search for subject matter led him into further doleful sympathizing about Bradford, Evelyn finally having to rescue them both by asking him about his work, about which she cared nothing. She knew that her brother worked for a company that made film for television, mostly documentaries, plus commercials, and that his title there was Producer, which seemed to mean that he decided whether or not other people would do such-and-such. He himself appeared to do nothing, but only to make decisions about the activities of others. The whole movie/television world that George had drifted into made Evelyn nervous, at least partly because vague gentle George seemed too ill-equipped to survive in it, and she wanted to know no more about it than was absolutely necessary.

But more premature condolences about Bradford were even worse, so in the cab Evelyn steered the conversation to work, and happily the man took the bait. Men forced to talk with women they feel they should seduce but don’t really want to usually wind up talking about their jobs anyway — probably because they wish they were doing them at the moment — so it was a relief to both of them to have him earnestly explaining to her the difference between above-the-line and below-the-line costs.

He insisted on riding up in the elevator with her, full of pseudo-gallantry and a kind of forlorn desperation, and his attempt to kiss her outside George’s apartment door was clumsy and ill-timed. Evelyn fended him off, but then he became blindly determined, his expression nothing but grim as they grappled in the small vestibule outside the apartment door. His patent lack of interest in her made him more determined to feign or create interest, and he became more difficult to get rid of than someone who honestly lusted after her. She finally had to ring for the elevator herself and tell him she would ask the operator — an elderly Puerto Rican with steel-framed spectacles — for assistance if he didn’t stop.

He shifted at once to contrition, and then to explanation, his apologies blending into the beginning of a long meandering hopeless story about his ex-wife. The arrival of the elevator at last cut the story off without any sort of point having been reached, and he asked if he might call her. Knowing it was safe to say yes, that he wouldn’t call her ever, she told him he might, and he backed aboard the elevator with a complex rueful embarrassed smile and was taken away.

It was now shortly after two, and the people at the hospital had told her she could visit Bradford at ten, so she set her small travel alarm for nine and went straight to bed, where she lay sleepless a long while, thinking of death and Bradford and her parents killed together in a plane crash and her war-killed husband Fred and how the options narrow when all around one the important people keep dying off. And now Bradford was in the hospital, and the suggestion of life without him too was out in the open and had to be looked at. It was true that Uncle Joe had assured her this hospitalization was for the check-up only, but it was nevertheless also true that Evelyn was twenty-six and Bradford was seventy, and some day he would die and she would go on living.

She heard George and Marie tip-toe noisily in at three-thirty, and not long after that she fell asleep at last, and when the alarm shrilled at nine o’clock she struggled up out of sleep as though from a drug, her mind confused and uncertain, her body heavy and sluggish and unwilling to obey her commands.

Dressing and washing took longer than usual, it remained very difficult to focus her attention or make her body move with any speed. It was quarter to ten when she was at last ready, and she went through the apartment to find no one else about. George was off to work, of course, but where was Marie?

Still in bed. Evelyn pushed their bedroom door open a foot or two, and there she was, sprawled on her back across the king-size bed she shared with George. She was only partly covered by the sheet and blanket, and she was sleeping in the nude, her rather small breasts both exposed.

What was there about the room, or the air, or the posture of the sleeping woman, that cried out the fact of recent intercourse? Whatever it was, there was no doubt in Evelyn’s mind that Marie and George had finished their evening with sex, nor that Marie had found it exciting and satisfying. It seemed strange to think of her gawky brother stretched out atop that long slender body, but he must perform acceptably. George and Marie would be married four years next month, and whatever their problems — Marie tended to bring them up with witnesses present — sexual incompatibility didn’t seem to be among them.

Abruptly, Evelyn felt such a violent envy of Marie and such an urgent impersonal sexual craving that her hand trembled on the doorknob and she teetered on the brink of losing her balance and falling forward onto the pale green bedroom carpet. She clutched at the doorjamb, and stood blinking and swaying a few seconds, until her equilibrium returned. Then she shut the door again, quickly and silently, and moved away to lean against the wall and give herself up to the trembling, which all at once became tears.