The Bell Jar Part 9

"Her first diamond."

"Give it to her, Marco."

Marco bowed and deposited the stickpin in my palm.

It dazzled and danced with light like a heavenly ice cube. I slipped it quickly into my imitation jet bead evening bag and looked around. The faces were empty as plates, and n.o.body seemed to be breathing.

"Fortunately," a dry, hard hand encircled my upper arm, "I am escorting the lady for the rest of the evening. Perhaps," the spark in Marco's eyes extinguished, and they went black, "I shall perform some small service..."

Somebody laughed.

"...worthy of a diamond."

The hand round my arm tightened.

"Ouch!"

Marco removed his hand. I looked down at my arm. A thumbprint purpled into view. Marco watched me. Then he pointed to the underside of my arm. "Look there."

I looked, and saw four, faint matching prints.

"You see, I am quite serious."

Marco's small, flickering smile reminded me of a snake I'd teased in the Bronx Zoo. When I tapped my finger on the stout cage gla.s.s the snake had opened its clockwork jaws and seemed to smile. Then it struck and struck and struck at the invisible pane till I moved off.

I had never met a woman-hater before.

I could tell Marco was a woman-hater, because in spite of all the models and TV starlets in the room that night he paid attention to n.o.body but me. Not out of kindness or even curiosity, but because I'd happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards.

A man in the country club band stepped up to the mike and started shaking those seedpod rattles that mean South American music.

Marco reached for my hand, but I hung on to my fourth daiquiri and stayed put. I'd never had a daiquiri before. The reason I had a daiquiri was because Marco ordered it for me, and I felt so grateful he hadn't asked what sort of drink I wanted that I didn't say a word, I just drank one daiquiri after another.

Marco looked at me.

"No," I said.

"What do you mean, no?"

"I can't dance to that kind of music."

"Don't be stupid."

"I want to sit here and finish my drink."

Marco bent toward me with a tight smile, and in one scoop my drink took wing and landed in a potted palm. Then Marco gripped my hand in such a way I had to choose between following him on to the floor or having my arm torn off.

"It's a tango." Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. "I love tangoes."

"I can't dance."

"You don't have to dance. I'll do the dancing."

Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, "Pretend you are drowning."

I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted to him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, "It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one," and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind.

"What did I tell you?" Marco's breath scorched my ear. "You're a perfectly respectable dancer."

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like G.o.ds: invulnerable and chockfull of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

After the South American music there was an interval.

Marco led me through the French doors into the garden. Lights and voices spilled from the ballroom window, but a few yards beyond the darkness drew up its barricade and sealed them off. In the infinitesimal glow of the stars, the trees and flowers were strewing their cool odors. There was no moon.

The box hedges shut behind us. A deserted golf course stretched away toward a few hilly clumps of trees, and I felt the whole desolate familiarity of the scene--the country club and the dance and the lawn with its single cricket.

I didn't know where I was, but it was somewhere in the wealthy suburbs of New York.

Marco produced a slim cigar and a silver lighter in the shape of a bullet. He set the cigar between his lips and bent over the small flare. His face, with its exaggerated shadows and planes of light, looked alien and pained, like a refugee's.

I watched him.

"Who are you in love with?" I said then.

For a minute Marco didn't say anything, he simply opened his mouth and breathed out a blue, vaporous ring.

"Perfect!" he laughed.

The ring widened and blurred, ghost-pale on the dark air.

Then he said, "I am in love with my cousin."

I felt no surprise.

"Why don't you marry her?"

"Impossible."

"Why?"

Marco shrugged. "She's my first cousin. She's going to be a nun."

"Is she beautiful?"

"There's no one to touch her."

"Does she know you love her?"

"Of course."

I paused. the obstacle seemed unreal to me.

"If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday."

Marco dashed his cigar underfoot.

The ground soared and struck me with a soft shock. Mud squirmed through my fingers. Marco waited until I half rose. Then he put both hands on my shoulders and flung me back.

"My dress..."

"Your dress!" The mud oozed and adjusted itself to my shoulder blades. "Your dress!" Marco's face lowered cloudily over mine. A few drops of spit struck my lips. "Your dress is black and the dirt is black as well."

Then he threw himself face down as if he would grind his body through me and into the mud.

"It's happening," I thought. "It's happening. If I just lie here and do nothing it Will happen."

Marco set his teeth to the strap at my shoulder and tore my sheath to the waist. I saw the glimmer of bare skin, like a pale veil separating two b.l.o.o.d.y-minded adversaries.

"s.l.u.t!"

The word hissed by my ear.

"s.l.u.t!"

The dust cleared, and I had a full view of the battle.

I began to writhe and bite.

Marco weighed me to the earth.

"s.l.u.t!"

I gouged at his leg with the sharp heel of my shoe. He turned, fumbling for the hurt: Then I fisted my fingers together and smashed them at his nose. It was like hitting the steel plate of a battles.h.i.+p. Marco sat up. I began to cry.

Marco pulled out a white handkerchief and dabbed his nose. Blackness, like ink, spread over the pale cloth.

I sucked at my salty knuckles.

"I want Doreen."

Marco stared off across the golf links.

"I want Doreen. I want to go home."

"s.l.u.ts, all s.l.u.ts." Marco seemed to be talking to himself. "Yes or no, it is all the same."

I poked Marco's shoulder.

"Where's Doreen?"

Marco snorted. "Go to the parking lot. Look in the backs of all the cars."

Then he spun around.

"My diamond."

I got up and retrieved my stole from the darkness. I started to walk off. Marco sprang to his feet and blocked my path. Then, deliberately, he wiped his finger under his b.l.o.o.d.y nose and with two strokes stained my cheeks. "I have earned my diamond with this blood. Give it to me."

"I don't know where it is."

Now I knew perfectly well that the diamond was in my evening bag and that when Marco knocked me down my evening bag had soared, like a night bird, into the enveloping darkness. I began to think I would lead him away and then return on my own and hunt for it.

I had no idea what a diamond that size would buy, but whatever it was, I knew it would be a lot.

Marco took my shoulders in both hands.

"Tell me," he said, giving each word equal emphasis. "Tell me, or I'll break your neck."

Suddenly I didn't care.

"It's in my imitation jet bead evening bag," I said. "Somewhere in the muck."

I left Marco on his hands and knees, scrabbling in the darkness for another, smaller darkness that hid the light of his diamond from his furious eyes.

Doreen was not in the ballroom nor in the parking lot.

I kept to the fringe of the shadows so n.o.body would notice the gra.s.s plastered to my dress and shoes, and with my black stole I covered my shoulders and bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Luckily for me, the dance was nearly over, and groups of people were leaving and coming out to the parked cars. I asked at one car after another until finally I found a car that had room and would drop me in the middle of Manhattan.

At that vague hour between dark and dawn, the sunroof of the Amazon was deserted.

Quiet as a burglar in my cornflower-sprigged bathrobe, I crept to the edge of the parapet. The parapet reached almost to my shoulders, so I dragged a folding chair from the stack against the wall, opened it, and climbed onto the precarious seat.

A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.

It was my last night.

I grasped the bundle I carried and pulled at a pale tail. A strapless elasticized slip which, in the course of wear, had lost its elasticity, slumped into my hand. I waved it, like a flag of truce, once, twice....The breeze caught it, and I let go.

A white flake floated out into the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street or rooftop it would come to rest.

I tugged at the bundle again.

The wind made an effort, but failed, and a batlike shadow sank toward the roof garden of the penthouse opposite.

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray sc.r.a.ps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.