Free Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner Page A

I was little.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “When I was four. It was a mild case. I got better, it just left . . . a weakness on one side. Nobody noticed when it began to happen . . . it was very slow.”
    “Didn’t your parents pay any attention to you?”
    She nodded. “But when it was happening, when you could see it . . . my older brother died and they were very depressed.”
    “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Come over here, Theresa.”
    She moved over on the floor next to him and he put his arm around her. She rested her head on his shoulder, continuing to talk because she knew that was what he wanted her to do.
    “By the time we got to the doctor, it was too late for just a cast, so they used a cast, but then I had the operation, and then I had to be in the cast again.”
    He kissed her forehead, rocked her gently with him on the floor.
    “It didn’t hurt most of the time,” she said. “Honestly. Or if it did, I don’t remember. I remember I thought God was punishing me for my sins. Later I found out other people had committed some pretty bad sins and nothing like that had happened to them. I suppose that’s when I stopped believing in God. Or maybe it was earlier. I don’t know.” The last time she remembered believing in God was when she’d stood in the wet sand with the tide going out and her father had come looking for her. “When I tell you I don’t remember being sick when I was little, I’m not lying to you. I don’t remember any of it.” Except that my grandmother stopped coming to the hospital.
    No! She sat up suddenly. She couldn’t be remembering—everyone knew she didn’t remember anything from that time! She looked at Martin, panic-stricken.
    “What, Theresa?”
    “My grandmother,” she said. Once there’d been someone she really loved, who visited her every day and sang to her in Italian and smoothed the hair from her forehead with hands that were cool and papery. That was her mother’s mother, Grandmother Theresa Maria, who was very old and thin and wore long skirts and suddenly one day had stopped coming to the hospital and disappeared forever. And when Theresa had asked where she was they’d told her Grandmother Theresa Maria had gone to live in California. “I can’t believe I’m remembering it now,” she said. Because you’re leaving me, Martin. “My grandmother died while I was in the hospital when I was four. For years after that every time a TV announcer said a show was coming to us live from California I’d strain for a glimpse of my grandmother.”
    Martin smiled, brought her back in the circle of his arms.There was a buzzer sound and she started. There was a system between his wife’s office and the various rooms of the apartment, but it had never sounded in his study in all the time that Theresa had been coming. He reached up to the desk, just managing to touch the buzzer that signaled he was there without releasing Theresa.
    “Ja wohl,” he said.
    A calm woman’s voice said that there was a crisis, a child had just been brought in who had to be treated and Lulu was nowhere to be found and Jed had to be picked up at school at twelve and could Martin do it before he went up to City? He said that he would.
    “Thanks, darling,” the woman’s voice said, and went off.
    “So now you know the truth, Theresa,” he said solemnly. “I am a married man.”
    She giggled. “I knew that all along.”
    “Ah, you see? And I thought I’d deceived you.”
    “Married men are much more interesting,” she said, trying to remember in which of the paperback novels she regularly devoured she had come across the line. “They’ve done their learning somewhere else.” She kissed his neck.
    “Hmm,” he said. “A woman of the world. Why haven’t you dealt with any of your real life in your essays?”
    “I was afraid of shocking you.” She giggled again.
    “What’s gotten you giggly all of a sudden?”
    “Don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you gave me