Marcy February 8, 1986
When I think of Marcy, I think of the old Elton John song,
but instead of all the girls loving Alice, tender young Alice, they say, I hear,
“All the boys love Marcy, tender young Marcy,” because we did, and she was as
tender as all that.
She was the darling of Passaic for years, one of those
married women, who oozing some pheromone that drew horny men to her, driving
her insanely jealous husband even more insane.
Not that he was all that bright, a pompous, self-centered
violent man who like to lord it over other people, always accusing her of doing
things she didn’t do, only vaguely aware of just how appealing she was, how her
presence in a room affected every other man in it, and how each man vied with
every other man for her attention, right under her husband’s nose.
Of course, she was aware of our attraction, basking in it a
bit perhaps because of the abuse she took in those dark nights alone with her husband
over his imagined discretions, partly as revenge against him – she accepting
our sly smiles and our sly stares with gratitude.
A relatively tall woman, she had dark hair, dark eyes and a
slender frame, often wearing blouses that when she bent over to serve us a beer
or a soda, we glimpsed the fact she wore no bra.
The only one of us immune to her was Garrick, since Marcy
was his cousin, the daughter of our landlord in Passaic.
She hadn’t intended to marry the man when she did, but her
pregnancy in a catholic family forced her into it, as much of a shock at it was
to her mother and father, who disliked her husband, but could say nothing
against him.
As impulsive as Marcy was and rebellious, she was also conservative,
and once pushed into the marriage, she made up her mind to make it work, even
if it killed her – which more than once, it came close to doing.
She did her best to hide the bruises from the beatings her
husband gave her. But we all knew she had them, especially Garrick, who contemplated
murdering “the bastard,” stopping only when Marcy pleaded for him not to.
She had an amazing kind of beauty, one that made her seem
fresh and wholesome, and yet, utterly desirable.
I recall New Year’s Eve 1976-77 when five men gathered in
her kitchen to celebrate the incoming year, me, Cliff (my friend from work),
Pauly, her husband and his best friend, she passing among us like a wraith,
drawing our attention away from the card game we played, each of us careless to
how much we might lose as long as we got to look at her.
She seemed so precious then, so vulnerable, so in need of
someone, one of us, to rescue her, her soft smile greeting our stares when we
stared at her breasts, her vibrancy so potent some of us might even have dared
do what we knew we couldn’t, what would only disparage the very being we so
lusted after, all of us, forced to endure the heat of our own desire, unable to
act, unable to think, unable to do anything but sit and wait and watch, all
knowing she would eventually go up to bed with her husband, where he might – if
aware enough of anything we did too obviously – beat it out of her, she forced
to endure him when – in our perverted thinking – she dreamed of being with one
of us.
We, going home, alone, the New Year starting as the old one
did, with visions of grandeur in our heads, what we could have, what we should
have, what we knew we would never do.
Marcy.
When she disappeared later that year, we knew why, if not where
she went, each of us celebrating her final break from the man we had come to
hate and envy, and he, as clueless as to where she was as we, searching the neighborhood,
looking in every dive, accusing some of us of holding her hostage, showing up
one night in Garrick’s apartment dressed as an old man, as if that could fool a
woman who knew him from afar, who had him haunting her nightmares, who knew how
he moved, how he breathed and how he looked disguise or not.
He pleaded with us instead of threatened, begging us to
bring her back to him, assuming we did everything to her he believed every man
did to her that caused him to beat her, he eventually fading away, lost in some
dive uptown, unaware until much later of Marcy’s return, to pick up the piece
of her life, without him, and – tragically – without any of us either.
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