A Week as Andrea Benstock

I’m sorry, she thought. But I really am just a dumb Jewish housewife from Buffalo.

How would her friends have handled the matter? It was instantly tempting to say that they never would have walked into the Modern in the first place, but that was not really altogether fair. Barbara Singer would have moved mountains to get to the museum if only someone had told her it was a cultural must. And Eileen Fradin would have gone if a good friend — Andrea, for instance — told her she was likely to enjoy it. And some of her other friends—

But concentrate on those two, Barb and Eileen. How would they have handled the Post-Impressionist Romeo?

Barb would have flirted, she decided. She would have kept it entirely in hand, but she would have taken unbridled delight in it, perhaps accepting the drink, or else refusing it in such a manner as to convince the man that it broke her heart to leave him. Yes, she would have flirted, and she would have been damned good at it, and yet there would have been something curiously innocent about the entire performance, perhaps because its resolution was predestined from the onset; Barb would go home to her husband virtue intact, and Jerry Singer would reap the benefit that night of passion inspired by another man.

And Eileen? Andrea narrowed her eyes in concentration. She knew Eileen better than she knew anyone else, certainly better than she knew Barb Singer, yet it was more difficult for her to predict Eileen’s reaction. The girl was a curious mix of naiveté and intuitive shrewdness. There were, she decided, any number of ways Eileen might have handled the man. She might have chopped off the conversation at the beginning, never giving him the opportunity to make the overtures to a pass. She might have mentioned her husband and children eight times in the first two minutes, so stressing her marital status as to put the man utterly off stride. Or she might have managed, with perhaps unconscious subtlety, to drain the entire incident of its sexual implications.

And could either of the two have followed through? Could Barb or Eileen, in some fantasy whirl, have accepted the drink and then taken a further drink at the man’s apartment?

A hard image for Andrea to entertain, even in fantasy. Barb had evidently had some experience before she married Jerry Singer, and she was so flirtatious as to become occasionally aggravating, but it was quite inconceivable that she might spend an afternoon in amorous dalliance with a stranger. And Eileen had slept with no one before she met Roger Fradin, and surely no one but him since, and was quite likely to go through life never knowing the touch of any man but her husband.

Yet if she had to pick one of the two for a casual encounter, it would be Eileen. Why, for heaven’s sake? Simply because she knew her better?

“Another of those?”

She looked up, startled. Had she suddenly become herself a magnet for lecherous males? But it was only the bartender, doing his job. She shook her head and asked him for the check.

She rode the bus all the way down Fifth Avenue and got off at Washington Square. She stood at the arch for a moment, smoking a cigarette. Then she walked diagonally through the park, still pretending with at least a portion of her mind that she was bound for no specific destination. It was, certainly, a pleasant day for a walk, with Millay’s April babbling and strewing flowers.

The Village, certainly, was as good a place to walk as any.

The park had a different air to it, and she wondered if it had actually changed or if she was simply viewing it through altered eyes, older eyes. She was undeniably older than when she had been here last, but even allowing for the few years which had passed, it still seemed to her that the people sitting on benches or lying loose-limbed on the ground were impossibly young.

They were certainly shabbier, and the boys had longer hair. And the girls — was it just her impression, or were they all nothing but echoes of the same girl, identical impressions stamped out interminably with a cookie cutter? They all had the same absolutely straight long hair. They all wore granny glasses over utterly empty eyes. They all beamed with vacant smiles of inner peace, a peace no doubt chemically induced. They were also all quite beautiful, but it hardly seemed to matter.

And there were far more blacks in the park. More in number, and more willing to make their presence felt. Or was that, too, a change in her own vision? Was she more aware of blacks now that she lived in a clean white suburb?

She quickened her step, walked past the old men playing chess and checkers. She crossed the street and headed west. She knew where she was going and it really was not possible to pretend otherwise.