The John Maclay

by John Maclay

  * * * *

  Alice brought me through it, of course. Your wife always does. She’s better than you are; even if she finds out everything about your male weaknesses, if she’s any good, she forgives. That six months in the mental hospital—otherwise known as “Bonnie Brae,” fully paid for by the company—was bad. They smiled at me—they were always smiling—as if I could so easily get over my horror. I tried to smile back, convince them I was all right, so I could get out of that soft but unreal place and back to my nine-to-five life. But in the middle of all that smiling, I had the feeling there was a lot more.

  It came on a sunny day, while I sat in the lounge with Alice, when the phone rang on the table between us. My wife had been acting strange that visit—I’d caught her talking secretly with the doctors—as if something had been planned. I’d had a bad night, too, with one of those nightmares where someone’s coming at you with a knife, you grab the blade, and you feel it cut through your fingers. So while I was trying to look normal, it was hard.

  Alice picked up the phone, mumbled a few words, then put her hand over the receiver. “He’s calling a little early,” she smiled nervously.

  I nodded, played along. “Who?” I thought.

  “It’s just that—she paused—I wanted to ask you something…first.”

  I told her to go ahead.

  “Didn’t you ever think it was…odd…that there weren’t any police, any…questions?”

  I thought for a moment. Then putting on my best mental patient’s face, I said I hadn’t; I’d assumed I’d been spared all that.

  My wife’s sad eyes met mine. Almost impulsively now, she reached over, put the phone in my hand, and I lifted it to my ear.

  “Well, Joe!” the voice came hearty as ever, except for that tone you take with the sick. “Been a dog’s age!”

  That’s when I almost went over for good.

  * * * *

  The doctors had been right, of course, to do what they did. In the next couple of weeks, even though I spent most of them in a strait-jacket, I got well. I remember screaming, crying, about how I’d seen Jeb die. They smiled and said yes, I had, then. I screamed again about how I’d heard him on the phone. They said yes, my friend was alive. And when I’d finally quieted down, they told me about it.

  I’d been working too hard, they said. And I’d been having an inner, biological crisis besides. So I’d been ready for unreality. That had been supplied by the always-crazy New York night, and the fact that Jeb had been so strangely different. Actually, they told me, he’d done some drugs at a party the night before, not like my friend at all.

  I’d been ready for guilt, too. There had been the whole thing about other women, my unnaturally leading that night where before I’d only gone along, the powerful suggestion of the knife—as punishment—in the elevator. And as a good guy, the doctors concluded, at some instant in that dark bedroom I’d made the ultimate guilt real—of having that punishment happen to my friend.

  Who’d found me the next morning, long after the hookers had gone, lying there, unable to speak or move.

  * * * *

  So now I’m Joe Morrison, the guy the younger fellows at the office look at as conservative, unadventurous, maybe half-dead. They know, everyone does, that I never go to New York—company policy. I know I’ll never change that—I’ll never be ready “to take ’er on again.”

  But on days like today, when it all comes back, I wonder. Why the doctors never did let me see Jeb Ewell, my big, warm friend, again, or talk with him except that one time in the hospital. Why his name’s never mentioned around the office—nor by my wife. Sometimes I allow myself what I call the thoughts: that it had been real, that the voice on the phone was only an actor, arranged to bring me to a crisis, quiet my guilt, restore my sanity. That I’m being “spared”…everything.

  And sometimes, there’s the one thought—that the strangely different man I’d been with, seen killed that night, hadn’t, somehow, been Jeb at all…

  But I guess, deep down, I don’t want to know. That I’d rather go back to my reality—of digging in the garden, and watching Alice, all the woman I’ll ever need, as she hangs up the sheets to air under the trees, in the spring sun.

  A YOUNGER WOMAN

  He was going to do it; this time he was really going to do it. The realization sent a thrill through Jack’s forty-two-year-old body as he pulled the Audi convertible into the driveway of the Baltimore apartment building, on a spring evening too beautiful for words. Before, when he’d dreamed about it during the long nights at home with Meg, there had been a pocket of fear underneath. And on the two occasions when he’d stormed out of the house, suitcase in hand, after one of her mads or stony silences, he’d only spent the night in a hotel, to crawl back the next day after work. But now the fear was gone, and the dream was firmly and forever in place.

  The Audi and the evening hour confirmed it. Before, in case the car be spotted or Meg grow suspicious of his being out late, Jack had never driven to Marcia’s apartment and never visited in other than daytime. Instead, he’d arrived by bus or cab, by some circuitous route he and his lover had laughed at, as well as the excuses they’d given for being out of their offices. Their hour of stolen passion, that of a married, middle-aged man and a twenty-two-year-old single woman, had been sweet, at first even more sweet for being stolen. Marcia had even bought black curtains so they could pretend it was all night. Yet gradually, the dream they created with their bodies had grown, had stretched beyond the boundaries of that hour and that bedroom. And they’d come to know they had to take it there in reality.

  Jack sat behind the steering wheel for a moment, going over it once more in his mind. His wife entering menopause, growing nervous, negative, interruptive…old, while he was feeling younger than ever. His having come to rely on Meg over the years, but that slowly changing to a feeling of being dominated, having his manhood threatened, despite his position as a successful attorney. The felt need, during those long nights at home and though there was still sex, to be free again, coupled with the sudden, little-boy fear of being so. And the caring almost too much: “What will Meg do? Totally unfair!” Yet the inner voice: “It’s nature. I don’t make the rules.”

  At first, there had been no focus for his feelings—but then there had. An innocent walk, one day three months ago, to a rival law firm to drop off some papers. The secretary who took them from him—and the way their eyes met. Marcia was tall, almost his height, and was dressed in a blue and white striped blouse and gray skirt which showed off a beautiful figure. She had a wide, open face, short, feathery blonde hair, and a broad smile with pink lips and perfect teeth. Her voice was small, weak, almost a giggle—but, judging by her position with the firm, she was smart enough. And the chemistry, the way her pale eyes met his…

  The inner voice, Jack’s true one, had spoken; it was almost as if he were listening to himself. He’d asked Marcia out for a quick drink after work, and she’d accepted. Then there’d been another one, the next day. Then lunch—and, as they both obeyed an unspoken need, separate cabs to her apartment. Where he’d really found out what was happening: their first embrace, his body feeling at last the power of his years, while he sucked hungrily at the fountain of youth of her lips…their clothes falling away, she breathing in his ear about his maturity, his mastery, while his eyes and hands marveled at the flawless smoothness of her flesh…her body, big, perfectly-formed, sexually powerful, breasts high and round like a picture, blonde hair below like a fantasy, yet above all, young, young…and their first time, which took him into a new or forgotten world. And after which, when he cried into her shoulder, he’d had to explain why.

  But now, as he sat in the Audi, Marcia was coming out of the Baltimore apartment building, in a white spring dress, toward him. The dream was going to be real now, all the time, and just as good for being so. Jack leaped out of the car, took her suitcase from her young h
and, tossed it into the back. Grasped her smooth, sleeveless shoulders, kissed her sweet lips, at last thinking of the future, not the past. Opened the door, eyes feasting on her graceful figure as she got in, became his forever. Got back behind the wheel, and drove off into the sunset, west.

  They stopped for dinner on the other side of Frederick, at an old stone inn. And knowing the romance would be strong enough, they became lawyer and secretary again, talked lightly of practical things.

  “Did you…tell her?” Marcia asked, her eyes clear in the candlelight. “Tell…Meg?”

  “No,” Jack replied. “She’d never have understood. And that might have made her…too strong.” He smiled. “But I did leave it so that she’ll have more than enough.”

  Marcia nodded. “And we’ll be okay? I packed just the suitcase, like you said, and sold the rest, but it only came to a couple thousand dollars.”

  He took her hands across the table, forced a laugh—then found he didn’t feel guilty at all. “Remember, I explained that? Some time ago, when I started my…dream, I began hiding away some money. ‘Fuck you’ money, some people call it.”

  Her young eyes—God, so wonderfully blue—questioned.

  “So you can say that, to what you don’t like, have to get out of. Or”—he had a sudden, happier thought—“in this case, my love, so that I can…fuck you!”

  She giggled, getting his drift.

  And in Pittsburgh, in an expensive hotel room, they did it, all over the king-size bed; free for the first time, just the two of them, without any other commitments. Again, Marcia seemed to hide herself in his older mastery, praised his strong chest and legs, while Jack reveled in her smooth white flesh, her wonderful tightness below. They seemed the perfect combination of maturity and youth.

  It was the next morning, as they drove leisurely through Ohio, that the first, mild problem occurred.

  They had fallen silent—no problem, Jack thought; just dreaming together—and he reached over and turned on the Audi’s radio. Out came a Sixties song, something by the Mamas and the Papas. He smiled, sighed, and started to drum his fingers on the dash in time with the music. They’d never listened to the radio together before.

  Marcia smiled over at him, blonde hair ruffling beautifully in the top down wind, breasts swelling the T-shirt she wore. But said, “Do we…have to have that old stuff?”

  He frowned, told her the name of the group, said the song had been a big hit. “And besides, Mama Cass was from Baltimore.”

  “Well, okay,” she replied. And she good-naturedly began to beat time too, trying to sing along.

  But he wondered why she agreed so easily.

  By nightfall they were in Indianapolis, in another big room, big playpen, continuing to carry their sexual odyssey cross country. And the next day, after a big breakfast to replenish their strength, they were back on the road again, the morning sun at their backs.

  That was when, as he looked over at Marcia, Jack felt another, little twinge. It might have been the light, but…there seemed to be tiny wrinkles beside her blue eyes, the kind an…older woman might have.

  “Are we pushing it too hard?” he asked her, reaching over to put his hand on her thigh, which still seemed firm enough. “After all, we have the rest of our lives.”

  “No.” She smiled back. “Just a bit tense, maybe—getting used to all this. But it’s wonderful, lover!”

  So to help her relax, he flipped on the radio again. Pressed the scanner, wound up with a Fifties rock station.

  “You should like this. Doesn’t ‘your generation’ have a nostalgia thing for the early rock?”

  “Well…yeah,” she replied. And her fingers drummed on the dash.

  Near Kansas City, after a long pull, they stopped for the night at Jack’s cousin’s. The man was his age, and they’d been close, having grown up in Baltimore together; he was one of the few people he’d told about Marcia and his decision to break from Meg and escape with her. And after a much appreciated steak dinner, prepared by the cousin’s wife, who’d reluctantly come around to the situation, the two men sat on the dark front porch, drank beer, and talked about it.

  “Sometimes I think of doing what you did,” the cousin said. “Yet there’s something that tells me not to. Sure, I haven’t been a hundred percent faithful; most men aren’t. But when I strayed, with a younger woman, it was more like a dream, an escape.”

  “Well,” Jack replied expansively, “if the inner voice gets strong enough, you just have to follow it, have to make that dream real. It’s not our fault that men and women age differently. And there’s nothing wrong with a woman being older; it’s just not for me. I’ve felt bad, yes—but it was nothing like I was going through at home. Or what I would have, for the rest of my life, if I hadn’t acted. And now I have no regrets at all—I feel great. There’s even something…American about it, you know? Going for youth, newness; even going west?”

  His cousin leaned back in his porch chair. “Just tell me one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why didn’t you pick a…really younger woman?”

  And Jack suddenly had a sinking sensation, in the pit of his stomach, as if the bottom had dropped out of his whole day.

  He said a hasty good night to his cousin and went upstairs to the guest room, where Marcia lay dozing in bed. In the light of the night table lamp, which was still on, he looked at her…closely. And saw, not only the crow’s feet he’d thought he noticed the day before, but a few wrinkles on her brow, a puffiness in her cheeks, a general coarseness, even on her exposed shoulders and arms, to her smooth, white flesh…

  God, he thought, the light, or your imagination, can do strange things.

  The next morning they got up very early, planning to share the driving all the way to Denver, said goodbye to their hosts, and pulled the Audi out into the dawn.

  “Why are you…looking at me funny?” Marcia said after a while.

  Jack had hoped she hadn’t noticed his scrutiny. “Oh…nothing. Probably just drinking in your beauty, lover.”

  And as they sped past endless fields of Kansas wheat greening in the sun, he had to admit that she did look good, young enough, dressed as she was, surely for him, in a revealing pink halter top and silk jogging shorts. In fact, when they made rest stops, other men looked at her, making him proud.

  So he flipped on the radio again. And the scanner turned up a St. Louis station, broadcasting nonstop jazz.

  “This is before both our times,” he said, smiling over at her. “But I’ve always sort of liked it. How about you?”

  “Oh, I love it!” Marcia replied. “Sitting in some dark, smoky club in the Forties, watching the band…”

  “Well,” he said happily, “no ‘generation gap’ here. Maybe you can teach me!”

  But when they made Denver, in the small hours of the morning, Jack’s sinking feeling had returned, and his doubts were deep. Maybe it was the hypnotic effect of the long drive, but the night, the whole trip, suddenly seemed unreal. And the way Marcia, on the way to the plush motel suite he’d hopefully reserved, got stiffly out of the car, not speaking, and walked heavily after him across the parking lot…

  It’s as if, he thought, she was nearly as old as my wife, as myself, yesterday, when we listened to the fifties rock. And today…older? He thought further. Could she still have some regrets about our escape? Could I? Could they be making me feel old, not younger, and she…? But that’s ridiculous.

  Yet, as he put her to bed—they both were too tired for sex, especially she—two voices echoed in Jack’s mind.

  The first, Marcia’s, when she’d talked about jazz and the smoky club…almost as if she’d been there. Though the music had only been a sign.

  And the second, belonging to a big trucker at one of the rest stops, overheard: “Gee, what a sexy outfit. And she wears it well…for an old broad.”

/>   In the morning, when Marcia got out of bed, Jack watched her. It must be the strain of the trip—if not on her, on me, he thought again, as if grasping at a last, rational hope. My eyes, my mind must be tired, must be playing tricks on me. She can’t have…aged right before them…

  But it was true. He was able, trying hard, to conjure up a picture of his lover as she’d been on that first wonderful afternoon in her apartment, when they’d made it, and his dream had begun to become real. Now, as then, she was naked, moving about the room. Yet now…

  She was less tall, less statuesque; inches had been taken from her height, and where her curves had once been those of heartbreakingly beautiful shoulder, breast, hip, and thigh, now they were those of a body compressed, lessened, by age. And sagging: her breasts were flat, flaccid, her hips puckered and pendulous, her once firm, marble-like face and neck a mass of pouches. All of this, all of her, grown out of, yet concealing and grotesquely caricaturing, the perfect twenty-two-year-old she’d been.

  Where it had once been a dream, it was now a nightmare, Jack knew. He had never before believed in punishment, in poetically just retribution for the following of impulses, especially natural ones, but at this moment, he knew. His stomach churned, he instantly feared all creation; the bottom dropped out not only of his day, but of his whole life, of existence itself. And the worst of it—he too got out of bed, stole a look at himself in the mirror, saw no change at all—was what he, he indeed, out of some unknown, malevolent force operating inside him, had somehow done to her.

  He had tried to make, keep himself young by escaping with Marcia. But instead, far from even the possible punishment, for his middle-aged obsession, of himself continuing to age, he had made Marcia’s years turn practically to hours, her minutes to seconds. Made her lifetime trickle away in sickly perfect time with the miles they had spanned.

  Yet knowing that it was a nightmare, but real, was not enough. The worst of it, Jack realized as he dressed next to this heavy, sixtyish woman—who did not really know what had happened, as was apparent from her still-happy small talk—was that they had to go on.