by Nancy Thayer
“Snowman! Mama, there’s a snowman!” Hanno yelled, pointing.
The women turned back to smile. “Yes, snowman!” Laura said.
“I don’t understand,” Daphne said. “What do you mean?”
“I mean while Otto was in Berlin, he met a woman. A young woman, of course. A young blonde. How these aging professors love their young blondes. He has been fucking her for the past four months! The entire time of his sabbatical. When he came back home to visit this fall, he slept with me and did not tell me. He thought it was only infatuation, you know, a middle-age obsession. But now he tells me it is serious.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, oh, God,” Daphne said. “Oh, Laura, I’m so sorry. What can you do?”
“What can I do? I think there’s nothing I can do. Believe me, I have thought of nothing else for days. Daphne, there is nothing I can do!” She spoke the words slowly, like instructions from a manual in a foreign language, as if only now grasping the meaning. “He tells me he loves her. Sonya. He tells me he has tried to stop loving her, he has tried to stay away from her, but he cannot live without her.”
“Oh, Laura,” Daphne said again. She was weighted down with sorrow for her friend.
They had arrived at the playground, and Laura arranged her son safely on the sled, then gave a push that launched him down the hill. No one else was there. The two women watched a moment as the little boy, as gleaming in his snowsuit as a cardinal, slid down the snowy hill that swept away from them in a long and gentle descent. His wild laughter rose back up at them, a reverse avalanche, as bright as the sparkling air. At the bottom of the hill he threw himself from the sled and tumbled and rolled as far as he could go, screaming with delight. Then he stopped and looked back up the hill at his mother.
“I want to go again!” he called.
“You must come back up, then!” she called back. “Grab your sled and pull it up the hill.”
Hanno looked at her suspiciously for a second, perhaps remembering winters before, when she or Otto had made the climb up the hill with him seated on the sled.
“Come on!” Laura called, clapping her hands together. Tears were streaking her cheeks, glistening in the bright sun—Hanno was too far away to see. The little boy grabbed the rope and began to pull his sled up the hill.
Laura waited until Hanno was launched downward again before going on. “He met her at the university. She is a doctor. And listen to this. He wants to get the university there to offer him a job. A full-time and lucrative and prestigious job. He could go back to Germany and live with this new woman. Have a new wife, a new life, somewhere with no one who remembers me to frown at him.”
“I just can’t believe this,” Daphne said. She was beginning to cry too.
“I know, I know,” Laura said. “I can’t believe it myself. But this is what I have been hearing for days. Everything. Every detail. He is angry at me because he is hurting me, and so he punishes me for making him feel guilty. So he tells me what they do together. She likes it like a dog. Like a boy. Even in the ass—”
“Stop it,” Daphne said. Her breath had caught in a snarl at the base of her throat. She was gagging on her breath.
“He tells me she is everything to him, his man and his woman. I never was comfortable with such things. She loves it.”
“Stop it!” Daphne shouted. She grabbed Laura and turned her to face her. “You must leave him. This is too awful for anyone to bear. Laura, he should not tell you these things. You should not listen. You should not let him tell you such things.”
“Oh, do you think I like it? Do you think I like to hear and envision such things?” Laura was shouting at Daphne, and she put her hands on Daphne’s arms, while Daphne’s hands were still on Laura’s shoulders, so that the two women were almost in an adversarial embrace, and they nearly shook one another in their rage. They were both weeping. Then Laura let out a low harsh howl and collapsed into Daphne’s arms. She wept on Daphne’s shoulder, and Daphne wrapped her arms around her friend and held her and rocked her, or rather, the two women swayed together as they stood in the cold and burning snow.
“Mama?” Hanno asked. He had reached the top of the hill and stood, sled rope in his hand, puzzled at the sight of his mother and her friend.
Laura pulled away from Daphne. She bent, her face red and wet, picked up her son, and set him down firmly on the sled. She set the sled in the right direction. The obliviousness of childhood was an amazing sight to Daphne, and she told herself she must remember this when she had a child of her own. For Hanno was shrieking with anticipation of the next downhill run and did not notice his mother’s face. Daphne reminded herself that to a four-year-old everything adults did must seem bizarre and unexplainable—so why should he question this? What he needed was being done. Laura pulled him to the edge of the hill, gave the sled a push, and off he went, laughing.
“When we return home, we must be normal,” Laura said. “Otto does not want me to talk to anyone about this. Not even you.”
“Well, my God, who cares what Otto wants at this point!” Daphne shouted. “What rights does he deserve to have?”
“Look, Daphne, I must try to save my marriage,” Laura said. She had pulled a paisley silk scarf from her pocket and was drying her soaked sunglasses with it.
“Why?” Daphne yelled. “Why on earth would you want to?”
Laura looked at Daphne. “Wouldn’t you?”
“No! No, I would not! If Joe did to me what Otto is doing to you, I would make him move out of the house, I would see a lawyer, I would divorce him right away!”
“How very American of you,” Laura said dryly. “Disposable husbands. Like disposable diapers.”
“I would never share my husband,” Daphne said.
“No? Not if your pride cost you everything? You wait until that baby in your tummy is a real child and see how you think then. You will want his father in the house. You will want his father in his life. You will want to stay home and take care of the child. You will not want to be forced to go out to work. When you have a child, everything changes. I’m telling you, Daphne, you become a tigress, and life is all about protecting your child.”
“Never,” Daphne said. “Never just that.”
“You wait.” Laura glared at Daphne, and Daphne glared back.
Hanno was there again, then, needing his mittens readjusted and snow removed from the neck of his suit. Laura retied his bright muffler and pushed him off down the hill.
“In Europe, it is common for a man to have a mistress,” Laura said. She was catching her breath and calming down. She seemed almost ironic now. “My father-in-law did. My father did. No man who has worked hard all his life wants just a fat old wife to have sex with. In my heart I knew someday Otto would have an affair. I just did not expect it quite so soon. Or that it would be so serious to him—that he would call it love.”
“I would never stay with Joe if he had an affair,” Daphne said. “Especially not if he spoke to me about it the way Otto is speaking to you.”
“How pure the world is for you, Daphne,” Laura said. “I predict that it will not always remain so uncomplicated.”
“Still—” Daphne began.
“Who knows?” Laura interrupted. She seemed at once angry and somehow amused, as if she knew secrets Daphne did not. “Perhaps in your marriage it will be you who has an affair. Who lusts after someone else. Who sleeps with someone else.”
The two women stared at each other. Hanno came whining back up the hill, his face frosty, his nose running. Other families were arriving at the hill, whooping and calling.
“One more time, then we go home for hot chocolate,” Laura said to her son.
“So you really do know what you’re going to do,” Daphne said. “You’re going to hang on. You’re going to wait this … Sonya out.”
“Yes,” Laura said. “That is what I am going to do. That is what I can do.”
When they got back to the house, Laura made them all hot chocolate with marshmal
lows, then put Hanno down for a rest time with his new books. She worked in the kitchen, stuffing the goose and roasting it, preparing the rest of the Christmas feast. Daphne, helpless in her pregnancy, fell asleep in front of the fire. When she awoke, the men were home, and Laura had done something to her face so that there was no sign of her tears, no sign at all of her grief, except for a slight puffiness around her eyes. The Christmas dinner was very gay, with much champagne and delicious food and laughter. Daphne could scarcely look at Otto, she despised him so; but she tried to act normally toward him so he would not guess that Laura had told her of their secret. Daphne did not want to betray her friend in any way.
Jack kept busy the first three days after Christmas. He worked furiously on his essay from morning till late afternoon. Then he forced himself out into the cold silver air and walked along ice-clotted country roads for an hour—it was too icy to jog. In the evenings he read novels while eating heated-up canned stew, and drank so much beer to ward off not only despair that he hadn’t written one of those novels but also envy of the men who had, that he felt bloated. He told himself he was getting a lot done.
But the fourth morning, when he awoke, the silence of his house made him lonely. The windows were white with empty winter air, and the wind howled. He felt sexy and wanted to make love. He wanted to cuddle his daughter, to hear his wife’s voice. At least he could call her on the phone. He needed the caress of her voice to take the ache from this long vacant day. Shoving all the pillows up behind his back, he sat up and dialed Carey Ann’s parents’ number in Kansas City.
His mother-in-law answered the phone. “Jack? What’s the matter?” she asked immediately, alarm in her voice.
“Nothing’s the matter.” Jack laughed.
“But it’s prime time! Why are you calling?” Her voice was stern. Maternal. Protective. Sensible.
Jack felt his mother-in-law’s voice reduce his love to the impulses of a horny adolescent.
“I just wanted to talk with Carey Ann,” he said. “And with Alexandra. I, um, have appointments all day and just wanted to see how she is.”
“Well, she’s asleep,” his mother-in-law said. “She was up late last night with her old high-school friends. They had such a good time, it was like old times. She didn’t get to bed till after two, I’m sure. I’d hate to wake her up now. Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”
Frustration welled up in Jack. He was not a violent person, but now he felt a strong urge to punch something. If there had been a button at hand, courtesy of the Twilight Zone, that would have disposed of his mother-in-law forever, he would have pushed it.
“No, no, nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Don’t wake her. Just tell her I called. Hey, what about Lexi? Surely she’s up by now.”
“Oh, Beulah has her. She’s already dressed her and taken her out for a walk. So Carey Ann can have her sleep.”
“Well, tell Alexandra hello for me too,” Jack said. He wanted to say “give her a kiss for me,” but was afraid it would make him sound … what? … weak? … in his mother-in-law’s ever-mistrusting judgment.
Determined not to be gloomy, Jack jumped from his bed, did twenty deep knee bends and twenty sit-ups, then took a long invigorating shower. He cooked himself a mammoth breakfast with Prince’s Purple Rain album playing at full volume on the stereo. The stand-up cutout of Prince and his motorcycle was in his study closet, the only place in the house Jack could find for it. After breakfast he took it out and brought it into the living room. He placed it next to the fireplace, right by a chair, so that he could sit on the sofa and look at the fire and have someone to talk to. Prince, savage, untamable, all purple and black, seemed to glare with disgust at Jack.
“Man,” Jack said aloud, Prince speaking to Jack, “you should be ashamed of yourself. What are you, pussy-whipped? You are pathetic, man. You are boring! Get out and live!”
“Look,” he said to the Prince cutout, “I love my wife. I love my daughter. I don’t really want to be wild. I want to be happily married, bourgeois, faithful. I’m the man all those women in Newsweek and Ms. are looking for. Phil Donahue isn’t any better than I am. And where’s my wife? Where’s my child?”
Prince didn’t answer, so Jack went off into his study and sat down at his desk and tried to concentrate on his essay. He had gotten a good start; it should have been easy to get back into. But his mind kept going back to Carey Ann.
Now he knew what men meant with their jokes about women always changing their minds. They weren’t talking about the frivolous things that men joked about—women changing their dresses at the last moment, or their hair or the restaurant they wanted to go to. Carey Ann’s changes were major. Jack was sure that in the few years he had been with her, before marriage and after, he had remained basically the same person. He had always told her the truth about what he wanted in life, and he had stuck by that. But now here they were beginning just their fourth year of marriage, and Carey Ann had already changed three times. At least. Major changes. First she had wanted—she had passionately affirmed that she really wanted—to be a wife and mother. She had loved Jack before their marriage and in the early months with a passion that made Jack certain that no one else on earth had or ever would have any love better than theirs. Then the baby had come and she had changed. She had gotten all mopey. She had gotten emotional, strung-out, extreme, weak, and weepy. She had been depressed about everything, and then, what was worse, she had been brave about their life together. She had been a martyr, leaving her home and family and friends so that he could teach. Now she had changed again, all of a sudden, into this person who wanted seriously to pursue a degree in childhood education, who didn’t even want to take time to put up a Christmas tree. What next? What would she change into next?
It wasn’t fair. Jack shoved his desk chair back and stalked from the room. Prince was still standing against the fireplace wall, looking cool.
“It really isn’t fair, you know?” he said to Prince. “I’m keeping my end of the bargain, I’ve always kept my end. I haven’t changed. I’m the same person she married. I haven’t decided to … oh, go to medical school or drop out and smoke dope.”
Prince stared at Jack from his purple motorcycle. His gaze said clearly: I always knew you were a fool.
Well, this was certainly the way to go mad. Stand around in the morning talking to a cardboard figure. Jack pulled on his parka and gloves and slammed out of the house. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he would do something.
He drove into Westhampton, which was as quiet as a stage set. As beautiful, too, with its sloping snow-covered lawns and quadrangle, the old stone buildings decorated with icicles. There was some action on the main street, cars and people passing now and then, but the students were gone, and that was what made everything seem so bare. Jack took the stairs to the third floor English/History offices three at a time. The heat was on, and a few lights here and there, but most of the offices were dark and no one else was around. It was spooky and depressing. He sat in his office with the door open in case someone passed by, and did some paper shuffling. He looked out his window at the campus spread in all its winter glory beneath him. Everything was as lonely and cold as the moon.
He locked his office and walked over to the student union, which was open for the faculty and staff today, and ate a cheeseburger and french fries while pretending to read a book that had come in the mail, a new study of the works of Jonathan Swift. It was so boring he read the same paragraph three times. What an awful mood he was in! Usually he would relish this peace, usually he begged for it; he needed this kind of solitude in order to get his work done. But something had turned against him now. Or gone sour.
Crumpling his paper napkin, Jack finished his gloomy cheeseburger and dutifully rose to dump his garbage in the bin and put his tray on the used stack. From behind his back came the sound of familiar laughter, and he turned to see Daphne walking into the cafeteria with Pauline White. Jack thought: Snow White—for Daphne’s short thick
hair was as black as a raven’s wing, her skin was as white as snow, and her lips and cheeks were as red as blood. And there was about Daphne a resonance, a glow, a vitality, that was almost mythological. She always seemed to mean more than she was, at least to Jack, or she brought a dimension to his life that expanded the way he saw and felt about the world. He felt drawn toward her. It was amazing to him that she was always laughing, always with other people, her friends. He felt shy.
But he approached the table where Pauline and Daphne were seating themselves, busy now taking off their winter paraphernalia and piling coats, mittens, mufflers, purses, on the chairs beside them.
“Oh, hi!” Daphne said, looking up and seeing Jack. “How nice to see you! How are you?”
“Oh, fine,” he said. “Carey Ann and Alexandra are gone, you know. For two weeks.” He turned to address Pauline, a tenured member of his department, and also a very nice woman. “Visiting her parents,” he explained. “In Kansas City.”
“So,” Pauline replied, “are you relishing your solitude or hating it?”
“Both,” Jack said, and everyone laughed.
“Well, join us for lunch,” Daphne told him, gesturing at a chair next to her, and for one flash of a moment Jack almost did. He almost pretended that he hadn’t eaten yet (but what if the old broad in the cafeteria line made some crack about his having two lunches within thirty minutes?); but then he shrugged.
“I’ve already eaten,” he said. “Just finished. And I should get back to work.”
“Well, sit down a minute and have a cup of coffee with us. I want to know how your Christmas was. Lexi must have been in heaven.”
“Yeah, well, all right, I will have a cup of coffee,” Jack said.
As they went through the line and settled down at the table and talked about the Christmas just past, Jack became uncomfortably aware of powerful and bizarre sensations tumbling around inside him. He kept looking at Pauline, addressing his remarks to her, because he was terrified that the two women might notice how he felt when he looked at Daphne. There could no longer be any doubt about it: he had a crush on her, a violent, irrational, fierce adolescent crush. She was wearing a pair of gray flannel slacks, a white shirt, and a long red cardigan, hardly an outfit to drive a man wild with desire, but he was wild with desire. The red of her sweater and earrings was as bright as apples or cherries; he was hungry, he wanted to bite into her; and everything about her was so bright, so intense. Her eyes really sparkled. Daphne’s breasts were so large they swelled outward like a shelf, and when she moved, the neckline of her button-down shirt shifted, revealing pale freckled skin.
