by Meg Wolitzer
“It’s the waterbugs, am I right?” she asked, her voice rising. “Or maybe you saw a bat. A waterbug won’t kill you, neither will a bat. Bats may look ugly as heck with those ears and pointy teeth, but they’re perfectly harmless.”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Moyles,” said the girl. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You can’t have your money back,” said Hope. “You just can’t. We have an agreement. It’s all legal. I can’t just rent the house to someone else at this late date. I’m down here with my sister until Labor Day. I’m sorry; I can’t give you back your money.”
There was silence, and then the girl quietly said good-bye, and Hope returned to her drink. She drank throughout the hot afternoon, and at some point she began wondering uneasily if perhaps it might be true about that car accident after all, but she didn’t do anything about it. Those kids had the house until Labor Day, and nothing would change that.
MADDY AND Peter went out to the beach early the following Monday morning, hoping that the sunlight might make them feel partly human again. Maddy sat quietly and rubbed lotion into Peter’s back; he never used actual sun block like you were supposed to, just some sweet-smelling, unprotective cream. As a result, he tanned beautifully, and by Labor Day he would always return to the city with dark skin and a head of golden hair, and the female teachers at his school and even some of the students would flirt with him openly.
His wife was moving her hands in concentric circles across his back, and he felt safe with her hands on him. He had always felt safe around a certain kind of woman. When he had first met Maddy at Wesleyan, she lived off-campus in a feminist cooperative often referred to as “Dyke House,” and so he assumed she was not interested in men. But then, one night at a party, it seemed to him that she was flirting, being provocative, fingering the sleeve of his shirt and saying she needed to buy a Christmas present for her father, and where had he bought this shirt? The next day he took her to the sad, faded men’s store in Middletown where he had bought it. She wasn’t a lesbian at all, had never even dabbled with a female friend to the late-night strains of k.d. lang during the stress of final exams. She was a feminist who volunteered at the local rape hotline, and clearly she was interested in men. In him. So they went back to Dyke House together later that day, walking past the authentic lesbians who sat playing poker and reading Jacques Derrida in the living room, and they went upstairs to Maddy’s room, where she removed her onyx earrings and placed them on a square of cotton in a little box like tiny dolls being put to sleep, then she climbed into bed. The removal of the earrings made Peter think of the ways in which women were so tender, so heartbreaking, and why men needed them so badly. A woman would remove her earrings for you, and she would spread suntan lotion across your back in tiny, feathery circles for the rest of your life.
They had gotten married in a small suburban ceremony when they were twenty-five. They were the first to go, the first to formalize their love. It was a shocking betrayal to their friends, like suddenly becoming Republicans after years of leftist leafleting and vocal contempt for the rich white men who ran the country. They were saying good-bye to the group rituals of nights spent in a bare-bones club in the East Village, and listening to Peter’s over-amplified band, Disgruntled Postal Workers, and to the drunken sing-alongs around Adam’s piano, and, most of all, to the mix-and-match aspect of sex that gave it spontaneity and surprise.
These days, you could wait as long as you liked to get married, and no one thought you were peculiar; you didn’t even have to get married at all. But they wanted to, Maddy and Peter, partially out of love, partially out of a shared terror of the world and all its dangers. The world was dangerous, Peter now knew, thinking of Sara. He sat with his wife’s hands painting circles on his bare back, and his thoughts turned to Sara, and to their long and complicated friendship. Peter could never understand why a girl as beautiful as Sara would spend so much of her time with a gay man. But a lot of women did; maybe it was safe for them, safer than the despicable charms of so many straight men. Women were always telling stories of how certain men had left them ragged and lifeless; the litany of complaints had the quality of a country-and-western song. Adam Langer had no interest in hurting women, and he truly seemed to sympathize with them. Yet Peter had always secretly felt irritated that Adam was gay and couldn’t love Sara sexually, the way she needed to be loved. Peter twisted the circumstances around until he had almost convinced himself that Adam could have been straight if he’d really wanted to. He could have loved Sara if he’d been less selfish, less involved with theater, less in love with his own sensitive childhood, which had taken place in the franchise-studded wilds of Long Island, but which, over years of telling anecdotes about it, he had turned into something out of Truffaut: the misunderstood schoolboy with short pants and a phallic baguette under his arm and a sweet, pouting face.
If Peter could have loved Sara, he would have. Had he been free, had he not met Maddy at such a young age and sealed his fate, he might have pursued Sara strenuously, the way he had pursued very few women in his life. He had never actually needed to pursue Maddy at all; early on it became clear how approachable and willing she was. They liked the same kind of books and movies, they enjoyed each other’s company; even their parents enjoyed each others’ company. So, much to their friends’ shock and displeasure, they settled into a facsimile of married life well before they actually got married.
But after they were officially hitched, Peter still thought of Sara from time to time, imagining her as his lover. He never actually cheated on Maddy in these images, but simply cast her as the one who had broken up with him, leaving him for another man. In his daydreams he pictured himself as the eternally wronged party, the sad loser who wandered lonely as a cloud for months, until one day Sara consoled him with mulled cider in front of a fire (Whose fire? No one he knew had a fireplace. But this was the nature of fantasies) until they both became so aroused that they reached for each other at the same moment, mouths colliding and clothes unfurling.
The reality, when it actually happened, was very different. He and Maddy had been married for a year, and she went off to London for six weeks as part of an exchange program her law firm ran with a solicitor’s office. Maddy’s friends took turns asking him to dinner, as though a man left to fend for himself would shrivel up and die of malnutrition.
One night it was Sara’s turn to feed and nourish him. She invited him to her gloomy apartment on the periphery of the Columbia campus, where, as in his fantasies, a benign conversation on a couch led right to a kiss, which astonished both of them equally. He thought of Maddy in London; it was the middle of the night across the Atlantic, and she was certainly sleeping, her contact lenses taken out and floating in tiny pools of saline, leaving her pinkly hamster-eyed and almost blind, lying in bed in some dowdy nightshirt, the kind of asexual item she enjoyed wearing when Peter wasn’t around: football jerseys or oversized shirts advertising a beer or rock band. Maddy slept with her mouth slightly open, scenting the air with middle-of-the-night breath, the kind of breath only a lover could love. He did love her, but when he thought of her in London, vulnerable in sleep to the perils of dowdiness—she who during waking hours was certainly pretty—he felt indifferent to her sexually, almost cold.
Sara, however, made him almost scream in sexual delight, and when he first kissed her he felt himself becoming twined to her in ropes of excitement and horror. Hands slipped easily under clothes. She reached down and began to open his button-fly jeans, then lowered his shorts and opened and lowered her own pants, pressing him against her. He was poised at the edge, his penis resting inside her. He shifted position, rocking toward and away from her, and he had an orgasm so quickly that it was like adolescence all over again, a time in his life when he couldn’t control himself, and when managing sex seemed beyond him, like trying to catch an orb of mercury as it changed shape and slid away. But Sara herself came quickly, with an abbreviated scream. He lay with her full-length
on the sofa, and the heat began to come in through the heavy antique radiator near their heads. As the steam pushed into the room, it served as a vapor that made them both unbearably frightened at what they had just done.
“I want you to know that I can’t do this again,” Sara said, looking up at him. “I’d never be able to live with it. I mean, I love Maddy. I’d have to kill myself. I’d have to commit seppuku, like Mishima did.”
“I can’t do it either,” said Peter. He looked away and discreetly slipped out of her. “At least we’re in agreement,” he added, rearranging himself in his clothes.
“I know this doesn’t excuse it, but I’ve just been so incredibly lonely,” said Sara, and suddenly she was in tears. “You have no idea of what it’s like, being a graduate student and spending all your nights in a university library trying to read Japanese. The Japanese letters are so tiny,” she said. “I’m going blind looking at them, and the librarian hates me, she thinks I hog the Xerox machine. And it’s not as though the Japanese are exactly a welcoming bunch; I mean, you probably have this image of bonsai trees and beautiful tea ceremonies and haiku, but really, it’s usually not like that. Did you know that some of the women in Japan read comic books about how wonderful it is to be raped? I swear, you can see secretaries on the subway totally engrossed in them. They’ve been oppressed by men for so long that they’ve eroticized the oppression. There’s actually a popular comic book out there called Penetrate Me with Violence, Stranger! And another one is called I Deserve to Be Beaten Like a Mangy Cur. And the men in Japan, a lot of them are these type-A technocrats and almost nobody cares about literature. I have no future at all.” She paused, then added, “I deserve to be beaten like a mangy cur.”
“Oh, it can’t be that bad, can it?” he asked her, his arm clumsily patting her back.
“Sometimes,” said Sara, “when I see you and Maddy together, I actually feel angry, and as though something must be wrong with me. I want to know why I can’t have something like you have. Why I have to waste my time with these different men who never make me happy, and never will. But each time I meet one, I act like maybe this time I might feel contented, maybe this time it just might work. But it doesn’t, of course—duh—and I have to wonder: Is it because I’m too close to Adam, like my mother says I am, and it scares straight men away, or is it maybe because I’m too close to my crazy mother?”
“Your mother’s not really crazy, is she?” asked Peter. “I thought you two were close.”
“Well, we are and we aren’t,” said Sara. “I’ve let it drag on, this whole suffocating mother-daughter thing. You know, ‘Surrender, Dorothy,’ and telling each other every intimate detail from each waking hour. I’m sick of it, actually, and I wish there were a few more boundaries, you know? But it’s not so easy. For a long time, it was just the two of us. And now she’s all alone.” Sara paused, then added, “And I guess I am, too. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be married, to have this intense intimacy only with the person you’re married to. Right now, half the time it’s like I’m married to my mother, and the other half it’s like I’m married to Adam.”
“Real marriage is extremely complicated,” Peter said, attempting to add an extra layer to what he had in his marriage, to spread some darkness between himself and his wife in order to justify the fact that he had been poking around under Sara Swerdlow’s clothing, and even, briefly, inside her.
“Complicated how?” asked Sara. “I understand the concept only in an abstract way.”
He stalled for a moment. “All marriages take infinite patience and hours of labor,” said Peter, winging it. “It’s not as though you can just say, ‘Okay, we’re married, bingo,’ and have it all be terrific. It takes maintenance, sometimes high maintenance. When you’re married, you wonder if the other person is actually right for you, and if maybe, in some other place on the globe—in an igloo in Alaska, maybe—there’s not someone who’d make you happier.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Sara, “you and the Eskimo girls would really have a lot to talk about. You could discuss the three hundred different words for snow. Come on, Peter, admit it. You know you and Maddy are right for each other. You made a good choice, both of you.”
And he had to sigh and admit that in fact they were well-matched. Even after this brief moment of adultery, he could not find anything critical to say about his wife. She took care of him and was intelligent and pretty, and she gave him back rubs of infinite duration; she loved him more than any Eskimo girl ever would. He left Sara’s apartment soon after; she had spent half the afternoon preparing a Japanese dinner for them, complete with hand-rolled maki and a delicate broth that smelled uncannily like his mother’s Obsession perfume, but neither of them wanted to eat. They wanted to be away from each other and to turn this event into something that just hadn’t happened. He shuffled out of her apartment with his collar up, his head bent down against the wind, like a married man leaving the house of his lover—which she barely was. Nothing profound had happened today, Peter insisted to himself as he walked south on Broadway; he had dipped into Sara Swerdlow for a moment, and it really didn’t count for much.
Still, he continued to experience a persistent reflex of guilt. When Maddy returned from London, Peter behaved strangely at first. He was distant and mumbling with her, and blamed it on the weeks they had been apart, saying something about how they’d have to get used to each other again. He and Sara never spoke of their “incident.” A short time later, Sara was planted on their living room couch with her feet up, laughing and drinking seltzer with his wife. He came into the room cautiously. The two women had a friendship that went back so far into the past; it was much more stirring and meaningful than what had happened between Peter and Sara.
So his relationship with Sara became one of cordiality and all-round wariness, and sometimes Maddy complained that he and Sara seemed to dislike each other, a fact that made her unhappy, so he worked on lifting the wariness and taking the weight of it elsewhere. He laughed when he was with Sara, trying to enjoy her graduate school and bad-men anecdotes, her humor, but his response was always forced. And in time, all the images from their moment together began to recede—the heat of her skin under his cool, big hands, his breath coming heavy, her hair smelling of some assertively female shampoo—and once again she became simply his wife’s best friend.
And there she stayed, fixed in that safe place until her death. Now, after a long, uninterrupted time of willed amnesia, it all suddenly returned to him with a vengeance, and he wanted Sara back and mourned her in some fierce, possessive way, as though he had loved her all these years.
5
The Visitor
The two women emerged from the car, blinking in the shock of light and heat. They had traveled all the way from New Jersey with the air conditioner on high, and here they were, standing in front of a surprisingly shabby mustard-colored house in the middle of a summer vacation enclave. They made their approach side by side, carrying sacks of junk-food groceries, and heard strains of cacophonous music coming from behind the door with its ill-fitting screen.
“Yoo-hoo!” called Carol.
Maddy came to the door in a sundress, squinting through the screen. “Mrs. Swerdlow?” she said, astonished. “Oh my God, come in!” The women hugged in a bony, clumsy way, then both began to cry, as they had done once over the telephone since Sara died, and had continued to do separately since then. Right behind Maddy appeared Peter, and then Adam, and soon all of them were in an embrace, muttering and crying and attached to one another like some ungainly organism.
“Well, kids,” said Natalie finally, pulling back slightly and attempting a trembling, breaking smile, “I was in the neighborhood.” She held out one of the bags from the supermarket. “And I brought you a few things.”
AT NIGHT, when the beach emptied except for a few people with the same unoriginal childhood memories of twilight campfires and fat potatoes roasted in tinfoil, Adam and Natalie sat on beach chairs at the top o
f a small dune. He sat peeling the cellophane off a Frooty Roller. The candy was so sweet it hurt his jaw, and although he would never have eaten such an item under any other circumstances, it would have been rude to refuse Natalie’s offerings. Besides, the more he ate, the more he felt that, in some peculiar way, he required this influx of sugar; it was like those people who ate handfuls of sand or dirt or paint chips, because their bodies seemed to require the minerals contained obscurely within.
He didn’t know what to say to Sara’s mother; he had never particularly liked her, and had always understood that she disapproved of his friendship with Sara. Adam and Natalie had always been cordial, but never at ease. And now he and Sara’s mother discussed the death scene, blow by blow. At least Sara had been driving and not him, Adam thought, because otherwise Natalie would hate him forever. He had talked to her about the accident on the telephone, his voice halting and breathless, but now, in person, she wanted an unabridged version.
“I just want to hear it again,” she said. “From the start.”
So he told her again about the Fro-Z-Cone stand, and the car that had obliviously backed out into the road, crashing into the driver’s side of their car—Sara’s side. Natalie nodded and cried, and the way she cried reminded him of the way Sara used to cry, with a kind of intensity and implicit violence buried under the civilized exterior. He wondered suddenly if Natalie might hit him, the way women sometimes hit men in movies when they were upset, pummeling them with a fusillade of fists, the men passively receiving the blows. He had always been intimidated by Sara’s mother; she was formidable, with her tight body and constantly appraising eyes. Or maybe he was just intimidated by overtly sexual women in general. In high school, he had done a perfunctory amount of kissing with a girl in his homeroom named Steffi, but he had barely touched her breasts; instead he had simply grazed them in frozen acknowledgment.
