Love, the Healer

A funny thing happened to me on the night I probably decided to get married to the girl I wanted to get married to. Her name was Sylvia. I forgot about her later, but that night I think I wanted to marry her.

She was going home alone by airplane in a time when this fact alone made love inevitable. I took my father's car and brought her to the airport and got out and locked her baggage in the back seat. Conniving, we had allowed ourselves an hour of the fading July evening to go for a walk along the runways and watch the takeoffs and make philosophy about (continued on page 50) Love, the Healer (continued from page 41) the lights of the city.

We necked and we necked and we necked.

Nothing more to do about it now with the close schedule of getting back to summer school. However, she was perspiring in a way nice girls didn't, and when there was a Capitol flight lumbering down the field I felt the propeller's wash like an icy wind on my own wet face.

"Oh, Daniel," she said.

"Your one eye is larger than the other, did anyone tell you? Left one. Your skin is so thin the blue comes through. What makes hair like yours change color in the sunset? Your tongue is longer and more slender than other tongues. Tawniness! Cat's grace! I dreamed you existed and didn't believe in you, so it couldn't be, but," — and so on, and so on. I didn't say all these things at once, but they were the sort of thing I had been saying to girls ever since I found out how clever it is to be poetic.

There was a silence. Then she said, "Oh, Daniel."

"What?"

"We're going to be late. They just announced my flight."

We ran. She clattered along on loose sandals, a fine-haired, slender-waisted, teasing specimen of suburban girlishness, valedictorian and doomed to Phi Beta Kappa. All that but no glasses pleased me. Whoever thought that a pretty girl would run and giggle with me?

At the automobile, parked among thousands, we saw her luggage on the back seat. We also saw the keys in the ignition. The doors were locked, locked. I was a dope.

It is very hard to be a dope before a girl with whom one has been necking and pronouncing poetry for a whole weekend. I could at least be a desperate, poetic, heroic dope. I would force the wind vent at the driver's seat.

"No, you'll hurt yourself," she said.

"Hurt myself! Hurt myself!" I was Humphrey Bogart and didn't care. I began to press with my fingers. The ventilator window, secured by a thin clip, bent promisingly.

"You'll hurt yourself?" she asked, not really worrying about me anymore, because really it would be silly of her to miss the airplane now. She had already gone past the end of her visit.

It bent.

It suddenly cracked in my hands.

I was holding the broken glass in my pressed fingers, together with a mess of ripped skin from which the blood swelled, purple in the evening twilight.

"Daniel! No! Oh!" She was bawling. She was worried. She cared.

"It's nothing," I said. (It was nothing — superficial cuts and abrasions.)

"Oh Daniel you hurt yourself for me just for me!"

"It's not very much," I said.

Tied with a handkerchief, dragging her suitcases, I forgot to make jokes about all the clothes she had brought for the days in Cleveland. She had mostly worn a swimsuit which folded up into a pocket, anyway. We got to the airplane just before they rolled the stairway off.

"Take care of it. Iodine. Alcohol. Write to me. You write first." Between these words she was kissing with her mouth open. All this mothering and all this overheated sex were enough to keep the gash open for the rest of my life.

She wrote to me cutely about the drop of blood on her stocking.

• • •

What a relief! I didn't ask her to marry me. It would have been a four-year engagement anyway. She went off to her college and I went off to mine, and except for writing to her every day I forgot her.

I was a freshman at Columbia College, where I learned about life. A Cuban, who studied by running naked down the dormitory halls reciting the Contemporary Civilizations outline, tried to seduce me. He didn't succeed. A girl who wanted to give me a Rorshach test tried to seduce me and succeeded. She put her footprints on the wall of her room and wrote my name on the big toe. The same success that she had was had by a Broadway dancer who studied philosophy in the University extension. My contempt for Will Durant so titillated her that she taught me something which she had learned in an effort to keep from divorcing her last husband. It did not save their marriage, but it made him so grateful and tuckered out that he agreed to all her demands for alimony. The same success that she had was also had by a girl who liked me because I was not a dentist. (Her last husband was.) The Cuban chap went out for track and left me alone.

And so I graduated from college, interrupted only by three years in the Army and a season as publicity writer for a hack politician. When next we meet me I am older, wiser, with my pimples all healed and hardened ambitions.

Here I am again. I am now in the 1949 equivalent of the jobless, dreary, lazy, Marxist, coffee-drinking, chain-smoking, family-hating, post-college generation of the Thirties. That is, I have a fine job in an advertising agency, a car, my own apartment, books and music and bottles of the best drinkables; I am politically clever and anesthetic, speak with a fondness of the old folks in Cleveland, and am thinking about opening a margin account at Merrill Lynch. Of course, I had long ago stopped writing to Sylvia, for whose baggage I had cut my hand. It was okay for a freshman and for keeping up the morale of the homefront while I was in the Army, but after that I'm only human. Last I had heard she was in California.

• • •

Now one of those things that just happen, like rain: a party. Who is engaged to some nice fellow? Sylvia, of course. She has become prettier and a little less girlish in California. She is as pretty as ever, but she is content with this and pleased by men, so that she looks still better and also dangerous. I was shy. Let's say she had a furry head now, like one of those Italian movie stars, but light in complexion and intention.

"Well, well, you," I said.

"Been breaking the window to any lady's luggage lately?" she asked.

"You remember."

"Of course, Dan. You're unique in my life. Let me see your hand."

Standing three feet away, I extended my hand over which she ran her fingers. "It stopped bleeding years ago," I said. "I rubbed salt into it, but there's not much of a scar."

She obviously didn't enjoy the conversation. "I'd like you to meet," she began. I didn't enjoy the conversation either, but I liked to have her touch my hand. "I'd like you to meet my fiancé, Doctor Wheelock."

"A dentist?" I asked hopefully.

"No, resident in obstetrics," he said. "Just call me Fred."

It was easy enough to get rid of him at a big party, but more difficult to make it permanent. I whispered to her in a corner. "Didn't you get all my letters? I've been writing every day, and it's been five years since you replied. Maybe I used the wrong address."

She gave me that laughter which I remembered. "Maybe the wrong name, too."

"I love you love you love you, Sylvia."

She touched my arm. "You used to be so poetic, Dan," she said. "You'd never say anything like that unless you meant it."

"I'll cry if you don't stop that," I said.

She finally consented to sneak out of the party and have spaghetti with me. I told her it was the only thing that could prevent me from weeping with nostalgia and causing a scandal. She probably imagined some romantic Village restaurant, red-checked tablecloths and Italian opera on the jukebox, but I took her to Bickford's on the next block. This was only because love for her made me lose my appetite for food and I knew it would have the same effect on her, so why waste money on fancy cooking?

We told each other our life stories since that night at the airport. Mine seemed sad in the telling, which surprised me, because I hadn't thought of it as so bad while it was happening. A sweet-lipped listener can do that to a life story.

"Do you like spaghetti?" she asked.

"Do I? Do I! And I like you, too."

She sat up straight and touched my hand across the table. It's odd how a girl changes between eighteen and twenty-five. She becomes so much prettier in America, where the breasts and the rest remain firm and high, but the eyes soften — the rich play of laugh-lines (continued on page 66) Love, the Healer (continued from page 50) fraying them — and the mouth begins to have some wit to it — just as kissable, however — and the assurance of the body speaks for pride in its loveliness and its caring. In a pretty girl like Sylvia, anyway. In a smart girl like Sylvia.

"I will cook you a spaghetti dinner at my place," she announced.

"You have an apartment by yourself?"

She blushed. "I have a good job, you know. They like me where I work."

"And your fiancé, as you call him?" There's a small amount of brutality in me. Just enough to get ahead in the world.

"You're an old friend, Dan. You're the only man who ripped up his hand for me."

"I was a mere boy."

"Was!"

"Park him, the resident in obstetrics," I said. "He's not for you."

She smiled, and those laughter lines flashed into the soft flesh at her eyes.

• • •

What a meal! It began with Martinis, dry enough to condense a man to his basic elements — grit, itch, appeal. They hardly reduced me in size, but they made me even more alert to Sylvia's presence as she moved about her studio on Central Park West. There was evidence that she had recently had a roommate, an ashtray she didn't like, books with another girl's name written in them, and so on. She told me, besides. I was flattered. Maybe it was only because she had a raise in pay that she lived alone now, or maybe she didn't like the girl, or maybe because of me. Deep considerations of this sort went with the Martinis.

"Let me see your hand in the light." I gave it. She looked.

"What's my fortune?"

"No, about the scars from my luggage." She found two little white lines which were all that was left. "I'm so glad you didn't get hurt in the war."

I catalogued my war injuries. "Poison ivy on maneuvers in North Carolina. Bloody nose from a fight with a parachutist. He thought I was somebody else. Seasickness. Overeating. Loneliness. The Army was like a home to me, Syl."

"Shall we sit down?"

"Aren't we sitting?"

"At the table."

We sat. It was a real, genuine, Italian-type, checked-tablecloth meal. Antipasto rich and oily with small-eyed fish. Chianti from a Chianti bottle. Candlesticks and napkins for dabbing. The spaghetti was to be eaten. It was especially pungent, with a bitterness hidden someplace within the soul of the sauce, but so churning within was I with love of Sylvia that I hardly noticed and ate it greedily. She went more slowly. I was devouring her across the table with my eyes, in which I must have put a rather successful devouring expression, because she looked softer and softer and softer until I couldn't see her anymore.

"What's the matter?" she cried.

The reason that I couldn't see her was that I had fallen off the chair onto the floor.

"I must have gotten up to go someplace. I think I went away." I said.

"Dan, you look awful— —"

"Oh Sylvia, I can't help it, I'm sick."

The pain in my belly was terrible. She helped me up and I writhed on the couch. She wanted to call a doctor, but I wouldn't let her. I just told her to cover all the mirrors in the house to keep my soul from getting out. It was a deep churning green sickness in the left side of my belly. She told me that I looked green and other colors and that she would call a doctor. I told her that green and other colors are the colors of all growing things in the springtime and just hold my hand. She also held my hand to the bathroom once or twice, and there she also held my forehead. We were really getting to know each other now.

I fell asleep and then woke up and felt better. She was sitting on the couch with tears running down her face — passion and sorrow deepen a woman's character — and watching me while I slept.

"What's the matter, Syl? I didn't die."

"Boo-hoo, boo-hoo," she said.

"Now, now. Is it that you're disillusioned in me? My character is good even though my stomach was unbalanced."

"No, Dan, but but …" And she could hardly be consoled. The tears ran so thick that I could not see my reflection in her eyes. I felt somewhat peaked, but I tried to console her. First I took a shower, then I tried seriously to console her. She was still crying when I came out of the bathroom.

"What hurts you?" I said, both peevish and peaked now, having hoped that the image of me all dripping and hairy and naked and a man in her shower would stop the tears.

"My conscience, Dan. I looked in the spaghetti sauce and it was all my fault. I left the bay leaves in. You must have eaten one."

"You didn't have to tell me."

"I wanted this to be a wonderful evening!"

For that she didn't have to complain. I took her in my arms with that wonderful conscience of the man who is absolutely clean, without even having dressed after a shower. I must have looked silly in her dressing gown, but only for a few minutes, because then the lights were oil and we were on.

• • •

Later I discovered that this attack of indigestion had ruptured my appendix and I should have died, but the infection had become encapsulated and produced merely a sort of fibrous tumor. The first doctor to whom I complained about the continued pain in my belly took a bloodtest and other tests and then told me to forget about it. When I went back because the pain continued, he asked me psychologically, "Arc you the type who has a lot of trouble?"

"Maybe less than you do. Doctor."

"Hmm. I've had a hard life, son." He bit his lips. "I don't mean to say you're a hypochondriac," he added, "but a change of job, change of scene, some new friends, a new outlook — that'll fix you up."

When I told Sylvia about this conversation, she offered to kill him for me.

"No," I said, "just make him a spaghetti dinner."

When I finally took a burning fever again and was rushed to the hospital for the emergency operation, I felt relieved. Even if I died, I died not a hypochondriac. I lived, and Sylvia visited me every day. She got skinny from creeping up the back stairways after visiting hours. We were very close.

As soon as I recovered, we resumed our friendship on the old level, but without the bay leaves. As an excellent ice skater, I decided to teach her this gentle sport on the pool at Rockefeller Center. She has a natural grace and learned almost at once. Demonstrating a burst of speed, I caught my skate on a bit of wet ice, turned a somersault while leaving my ankle behind, and was in a cast for six weeks.

Hurrying to meet her on the day they took the plaster off my foot, I cut myself shaving and bled all over my tie. I had only one thing to say when I saw her: "Marry me before I'm a basket case."

"What?" she asked. "Haven't I nursed you back to health?"

(concluded overleaf) Love, the Healer (continued from page 67) "I'll live for you," I explained.

She would for me, too. We took out a license for us both and an insurance policy for me. We got married very carefully.

The funny thing about all this, several years and two children later, is that I haven't had a sick day or an injury since our marriage. We're very happy together. My wife is still more beautiful than she was, but it doesn't seem to hurt me.

"It's nothing," I said.