Her Last Words

by Jo Barney

  When her customary symphony partner called ill the next week, Joan had an excuse to call Brian and ask him to fill in. Afterwards, he bought her a drink, and they hummed the da da da dah of the Fifth and told each other of the places and times they had first fallen in love with Beethoven. Joan decided to tell the truth. “Sunday morning radio symphony,” she said. “Cleaning the house so Mom could sleep.” Brian’s chuckle had been reassuring. At her doorstep, though, she was left unkissed once again. “This has been good,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

  He didn’t. A month later, she dropped him a note and invited him to come to supper and an evening walk through Golden Gate Park. “The oleander blossoms are out,” she promised. Perhaps another time, he answered; he would be out of town on a buying trip. She was out of practice, but she couldn’t be mistaken about the lack of remorse in his voice as he said no, could she? Then he called to say he had two tickets to La Boheme. Would she like to join him? She would. She wore the patchwork jacket that night for luck, and he brought a small offering of spring tulips to her door. Their seats were excellent. The death of Mimi brought tears, as it always did, and Brian handed her his handkerchief. It smelled of something citric and earthy, and she wondered if she were falling in love. Under pale glow of the entry light, she hesitated and then asked him in for a drink. “I need to thank you for your handkerchief,” she said.

  He touched her chin with the tips of his fingers. “Sorry, I can’t.” He waited as she let herself in. Inside, she set the locks, pressed her forehead against the door and wept, quietly, so that, if for some reason, he still stood outside, he would not hear her. Perhaps he took her offer for more than a drink. Perhaps, she thought, it was.

  The next day she understood that despite the very secure, hard-won port she had so carefully built for herself, moored in the safest of waters, the flashing images of his eyes, his hands, his perfect teeth, his good-natured laugh lines, were scuttling her.

  She needed to take control of her ship. On a Friday night, Bartok playing, good sense prevailing, Joan, convinced that not even the youthful, silly rushes of adrenaline at the sound of his voice were worth this interior storm, with a shaking hand, her best stationery, and a glass of cabernet, wrote him. She felt they had not been honest with each other, she explained, that perhaps she had wanted more than he from their friendship and that such expectations would become terribly painful when they were not met. She thanked him for reminding her of what love might be like and instructed him to forget her as she would him. She was pleased with the reasonable tone of her words.

  * * *

  Brian knocked at her door two days later, a bobbing bouquet of lilies and snapdragons preceding his earnest voice. “May I explain?” he asked through the screen door, and Joan let him in and buried her nose in the blossoms, glad for a moment to calm her breathing. They sat that night at opposite ends of her sofa, the fire flickering bits of light through their wine glasses, and they talked. At the end of the evening, they both understood that they were about to step into an arrangement between two people who needed each other about as much as any two ever did.

  Later, when she thought about that evening, she would remember the warm breeze of secrets that flowed between them, a connectedness that she had seldom felt with any other person. Nothing either of them said could disrupt it, even when he confessed that his first marriage had been a fraud based more on his need for his father-in-law’s money than on love, even when he described the infidelities and sexual wanderings that finally forced him, in shame, to end his marriage, even when his eyes moistened and he told her he was scared to death of ever trying to really love someone like her. Joan listened and felt her heart open to him.

  Then, it was her turn, the first time she put into words the truth of her subversive role in Tim’s alcoholism, her condescension, her coldness, her purposeful alienation of her sons, her determined escape from her past. Brian did not turn his green gaze away from her.

  Neither attempted to analyze what might have been behind the behaviors that killed their marriages. Confession seemed enough. It seemed like the beginning of love. When Brian finally reached for her, she was surprised to discover that his hand was the same size as hers, that their fingers wrapped perfectly, enclosed warm compatible palms.

  The first several years of their marriage were good ones. They laughed and talked and held matching hands. They traveled and went to the symphony and theatre. Together, they renovated her flat to allow for his art, and she served lovely meals to friends alfresco under green umbrellas on the terrace or in the new dining room with its Tibetan rugs and marbled side table. Once in a while, they came close to that first evening’s intimacy as one or the other dug deep in order to come to terms with parts of him or herself, and such revelations served to support the infrastructure of their marriage. Brian seemed to have put aside the shroud of guilt he had worn for years, stored it away somewhere. So had she.

  She enjoyed their life, her life. She reveled in the days filled with music, laughter, bright lights, and impressive dinner partners. She looked forward to the fashion shows and fashion talk that Brian introduced to her. She loved her new neck, a concession to his still smooth cheeks and youthful gaze. She liked the fact that she could still hit a solid shot with a tennis racket and had the time and the place to do it in, since she had cut back on her practice to only a few clients. She loved the season tickets they shared to the opera, to the American Conservatory Theatre, and she thought of her mother as she ordered them each year.

  If clouds appeared on the horizon, she and Brian would talk them away over a bottle of good wine. Sometimes, though, the clouds didn’t disappear but instead slid behind the mountains of activities cluttering her days. When she lay unable to sleep, too much coffee too late, she would become aware of them. Why had she needed to question his itinerary for a buying trip last month? Why hadn’t she, in fact, been invited? And, after he explained in his thorough way, why had she found herself looking through his Palm Pilot? For what? And why did he call unexpectedly some evenings to let her know he wouldn’t be home for dinner, a client or a customer needing attention? What client? What customer? Late into the night?

  When she told him of her sense of distrust and blamed herself for her insecurity, she waited to hear him reassure her that she was wrong to doubt him. That he loved her more than ever. And he listened, held her against his sweet-smelling chest, and told her just that.

  Then, on that yellow spring day, she found the green bag.

  * * *

  As usual, Brian brings in the mail and sorts it on the dining room table. “Here’s something interesting.” He slides a blue envelope toward her and continues to go through the pile in front of him.

  Joan recognizes the return address and reaches for the letter. “Must be from Madge. Oregon.” She slips a fingernail along the flap and pulls out the note. Yes, Madge. “Another reunion. This month.”

  Brian looks up at her. “At the coast? The same group as last time?” He returns to his pile of letters. “Must be three years since you four got together, isn’t it?”

  Almost five years, actually. They, four college friends, had come together every few years once they were finished with children, other people’s laundry, several first husbands, their calendars their own, finally. At the first gathering, a slumber party at Madge’s big house, when they were all about fifty, all but Lou single again, they had looked around the table and had marveled at themselves. Looking good— but definitely not living the life that any one of them had predicted for herself as she scrambled for space behind the Gamma Psi bushes and caught her man.

  “How could we have been so…dumb?” Jackie asked. “All I dreamed of was a ranch house with a daylight basement and someone to pay for it.”

  “And kids. We all wanted four kids.”

  “I turned down a chance at grad school because I wouldn’t need a Masters to join the PTA.” Lou frowned. “Come to think of it, I turned down PTA also.”

  �
��We still have time to wise up.” Madge’s comment led them into a familiar late-night session, minus the cigarette smoke but with the addition of clinking wine glasses, They were still able to pull up knees and feet into the cushions of her soft leather sofas, curl up in pajamas, and share recent discoveries about their bodies, the satisfying use of several openings to it, and the clever items to be found in sex stores.

  “You must invest in good underwear.” First rule, they agreed, inspired by Jackie’s painter-revelations. “Is it front to back or back to front?” Lou asked one more time. No one could remember. For the three single women, life’s blank pages existed to be written on with a free-flowing script. Lou, though, was quiet as the evening wound down, and Madge put her arm around her as they made their ways upstairs to their beds.

  The next time they came together, in a B & B in Napa, the women’s intimacies, inspired by mud baths and massages, swirled with sunspots and cancer and facelifts and the trouble each had opening jars.

  “Damn!” Jackie had complained. “Look at me. See? I’m still having hot flashes. It’s plain embarrassing when you’re with someone and…”

  “Serves you right, friend. Being with someone.” The others laughed, and Joan realized later that this was about as close to talking about sex as they had gotten that weekend. And when it was her turn to have her friends stay at her house, a year later, she kept them running from galleries to theatres to great restaurants. Over breakfast lattes, they spoke of distant daughters-in-law and troubled grandchildren, of sons’ addictions, daughters’ marriage troubles—other people’s seas, not their own, as if they were drifting becalmed in a midlife horse latitude.

  So it was surprising that when they met at Madge’s beach house to celebrate their sixtieth birthdays, Joan and Jackie had married, and Madge had found a lover. Lou, reversing the trend, had left her husband of thirty-five years. In spite of these changes, the solarium topic was not new lingerie, reawakened libidos. Late that first night, over wine, in their night clothes, the fire waning, Jackie said, “We’re crones, you know. Wise women.”

  “And old,” Lou amended. The collected response was not laughter, but a kind of knell. They acknowledged their cronehoods with blue candles and brave ideas.

  As she re-reads the invitation in her hand, Joan wonders what a reunion of sixty six-year-olds will bring.

  “Better mark the calendar. We’re getting booked up fast for the summer.” Brian turns to hang up his coat, and Joan watches his still-trim body make its way down the hall. Maybe not so booked up, she thinks.

  Their best time to talk is just after dinner as they finish a bottle of wine and relax into the quiet of the candlelit table. This evening Joan finds it difficult to swallow and when he notices her half-eaten meal, Brian asks if she feels well. “That cold again?” he suggests, and she takes a deep breath.

  “I found something of yours,” she answers. “A green bag holding a pile of video cassettes.” She watches his face as curiosity shifts to understanding. He blows a little gust of air from tight lips and lowers his eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to find it.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you did. It was well hidden. I looked at one of the tapes on our VCR.”

  He looks up at her. “That was a long time ago. Before us. I should have destroyed them. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

  “You’ve collected an assortment of experiences. I also played one of the small cassettes on our digital video camera. You seem to enjoy women with large areolas—a passion developed as a young child, perhaps. The rest of their bodies probably a taste acquired a little later on. You had me believing you are a restrained, thoughtful lover. You’ve never nuzzled me with such gusto. Too exhausted?”

  “Joan, I told you before we were married, I lived a life I am not proud of. I thought you understood. These things are from another time, an insane time. I am so sorry you’ve had to see me like that.”

  “I am too. Why did you keep them?”

  “Maybe I needed them to remind me how desperately lost I had been, how much I need you. Will always need you.”

  “But you watch them? Masturbate to them? Show them to other people?”

  He shakes his head then hesitates. “Not to other people. Only sometimes when I…need them.”

  Then Joan understands. How stupid she has been. “You fake it with me, don’t you?”

  “Joan.”

  “You don’t feel anything with me. Your gasps and little shrieks only mean you’re tired of pretending and would I hurry up, please.”

  “Joan. Don’t. ”

  Joan pushes her chair back, pulls the green bag from under her chair. The plastic cases rattle as it lands on the table. “We promised to be honest, to not have the kinds of secrets that eroded our lives once before. A bag slipped under a heap of old clothes in the back of a closet is not honest. It oozes shame, is a harbinger of something more to come. Like this.” She reaches into the bag, takes out a small cassette, holds it out to him. “I gave you the camera that produced this tape two years ago.”

  Brian does not come home for dinner for a week. He sleeps in the guest room. Abject in his remorse, he has asked for a cooling off time, a time when he can make sense of his behavior, and they can begin to rebuild trust. He will see someone. Perhaps she needs to, also, to work through her anger. “You are my life,” he says. They speak in harmless platitudes at the breakfast table, from behind sections of the newspaper, waiting, in limbo.

  Despite her profession, Joan’s solace is not in therapy, but in the hot baths she has begun to enjoy at the end of the day. This evening, the warm water lulls her into a mindlessness that deepens as she slips lower into the water and allows her ears to be filled and her hair to float gently above her. One of her hands, weightless, moves across her hips, folds comfortingly around the warm mound of flesh, fingers curled under but not moving, just holding.

  A mantra, one she has not used or remembered for years, since the bad times with Tim, floats across her consciousness. “I am still I,” it sings. “I am still I,” and a cascade of images slide past her closed eyelids: a teenager trembling at the debate podium, eager to prove herself a scholar, a college girl living on cigarettes and black coffee as she types her way through tens of papers long after her housemates have retreated to the sleeping porch, a young woman choosing a dream instead of a man. The magazines, the book club, the candlelit dinners inserted like shock absorbers between days and years of babies and a husband, no longer her hero but a disappointed person on the verge of becoming a tyrant. Then, finally, a life, lovely and full of love. Almost as she had dreamed it.

  When the water cools, she steps out of the tub and wraps herself in a towel. If I weren’t married to Brian, I wouldn’t have a warming rack for my towels, she thinks. She slips into bed and dims the light. I am still I, no matter what, she reminds herself.

  Dawn is filtering through the blinds when she awakes to the sound of Brian showering in the guest bathroom. At first, she wonders if it were really he, and she squints at the clock on her table, 4:15. Unusual, even for their new routine. And a shower at this hour? Minutes later, she feels him look in on her, and she turns away, forcing her eyelids to remain quiet and closed.

  “So, is it next week you are going off with the crones?” he asks, over his newspaper the next morning.

  “Crones are post-menopausal women, entering a new wise phase of their lives,” she answers. “That was at least five, ten years ago. We are post-crones. What would you call us at sixty-five?”

  “Too far gone to be women of a certain age,” he agrees. “How about something like solrisanal women?

  She looks at him, catching his bright eyes crinkled in thought. “Why?”

  “Menopausal means moon stop. The crone bit seems a little dark, like the hours of morning after the moon sets.” He is trying out his clever charming self on her. “Sol, sun, risan, rise. aA new word for the time women are freed up to do whatever they want. A new sun rising f
or them…for you.”

  “Solrisanal.” With no warning from her throat or her brain, tears flood onto a cheek, a corner of nose. “I believe I am being solrisanal right now.” She tries to laugh as she covers her eyes with her napkin. “You and your damned bad timing.” Then she is crying in earnest.

  Brian moves his chair to her side. His arm on her shoulder feels oppressive, and she shakes it off. “I know, Brian,” she manages to say.

  He sits back and waits for her to continue. “Tell me.”

  “Why you were late last night. Why you slipped into the house so quietly. Why you showered in the early morning.”

  “Why did I do all that?” he asks.

  “Don’t make me say it.”

  “You think I was with someone last night?”

  She looks at him, feels herself retreat as he leans towards her, I am still I a wall between his words and her body. “Yes.”

  He does not try to explain. “I’m sorry you believe that,” he says, and he gets up from the table and disappears, his shoulders rounded, she thinks, like an old man’s.

  Later, as she plays the scene over in the quiet of her office, she realizes that he hasn’t denied her suspicions. And before, when she found the green bag, he did not say he had stopped having his secret liaisons, much less recording them. Each time his response was an earnest statement of sorrow at having caused her pain. But that was all.

  * * *

  The drive over the Santa Cruz mountains, top down on the Mercedes, her hair flying from under her scarf, is a practice runaway. As long as she focuses on the narrow road ahead of her, she doesn’t have to think about what she is running away from. She pulls into the parking space at the trailhead and considers not stopping, of going wherever that road takes her until she runs out of gas. Then she laughs aloud because the thought pleases her, “That is exactly what I’m doing. Going along until I run out of gas.” However, a person could detour or turn onto a different path with a new destination in mind. “Or she could turn back,” she says as she stoops to look more closely at the yellow wildflowers at the trail’s edge. “Decide that a destination in hand is worth two in the bush.”