My Dearest Friend

by Nancy Thayer

  Later, in the car, on the way home, Daphne said, “You were so unresponsive, Joe, so unkind.”

  “I didn’t mean to be unkind,” he said wearily. “I just didn’t know what to say. I can’t change things. It seems to me that Laura’s going to have to realize that sooner or later.”

  “But you could have given her a little more sympathy,” Daphne said. When Joe didn’t reply, she went on, “She is a wonderful person, don’t you think, Joe? She’s beautiful and a fabulous mother and homemaker. Do you think she has any flaws that would drive a man away?”

  “No. Of course not. But marriages all have secrets. I honestly don’t think it’s my place to judge Otto.”

  “You, you are so dispassionate!” Daphne said.

  “Yes, exactly. That’s what I’m trying to be. I am not on Otto’s side, nor on Laura’s.”

  “But Otto doesn’t need help, and Laura does!”

  “Then you help her. There is nothing I can do.”

  “You are retreating more and more into your mind, do you know that?” Daphne said, turning on Joe in a sudden fury. Cynthia, asleep in her arms, stirred at Daphne’s raised voice, and automatically Daphne jiggled the baby back to sleep. She lowered her voice but kept the anger in it as she spoke. “It is all books for you, and college committee meetings and exams and student essays and articles and lessons, words on paper, words on paper, all words on paper! You don’t feel anymore. You don’t feel for me or for Cynthia or for poor Laura! You are pretending to be a flesh-and-blood man with a family, but you are becoming J. Alfred Prufrock. You are measuring out your life with coffee spoons. You are so contained! How can anyone reach you?”

  They had pulled into the driveway of their house and Joe had let the motor run so the car heater would warm them against the strangely chilly late-August night. He sat very quietly staring straight ahead of him while Daphne raged. When she was finally quiet, he turned to look at her. “That’s not true, Daphne,” he said. He reached out and pulled her to him, and kissed her on the mouth for a long time, the two of them leaning into each other over the baby, who for once, miraculously, slept. And who continued to sleep after they went into the house and she was laid gently in her crib while Joe and Daphne tiptoed to their own room, where Joe made passionate love to Daphne in their wide married bed. It was the first time since Cynthia’s birth that Joe had been so amorous with Daphne, and her body responded to his, it was like a homecoming. As Joe lay on top of her, his naked skin sliding against her naked skin, she cried in sexual ecstasy and then in happiness—her body had come back to her.

  Later, when Joe had rolled over and she lay against his chest, sheltered by his arm, Daphne cried again. “Oh, poor Laura,” she said. “She doesn’t have this and we do. We are so lucky. Poor Laura.” She looked up at Joe and saw irritation settle across his face. It was not wise of her, she thought, to speak of Laura when she was lying with her husband. It was like bringing an irrelevant and annoying element into the warm intimacy of their bed, a piece of sand, a ringing phone, a bad dream.

  The weather turned warm again and September and October were golden months, but then it began to rain, then snow, and it seemed that year that a great cloud, as bleak and cold as cinders, settled over New England. In April, when everyone was longing desperately for spring, it rained and rained and rained, battering down the daffodils.

  Cynthia had almost continuous colds, earaches, ear infections, and had to go through a series of visits to the medical clinic. The doctors spoke of surgery to put drains in Cynthia’s ears. The furnace faltered and failed and the repairman told Daphne it would be a waste of their money to keep fixing it; it had to be replaced. That was an unexpected and unwelcome expense—they had been hoping to take some kind of vacation over the Christmas holidays or spring break, to go somewhere warm and sunny, but now of course they couldn’t. The new furnace and Cynthia’s medical bills took all their money.

  Things got worse and worse for Laura too. Otto went through with the divorce. More horribly, he showed up everywhere with his Sonya, who was not at all what Daphne had expected. She saw Sonya at a large faculty party—although she did not speak to her and would not speak to Otto. Sonya was young, younger than Laura, but much larger, a great strapping blond milkmaid type with a wide stupid face. Yet she was a doctor and was setting up practice in town. And faculty wives started going to her—Sonya was a gynecologist—and singing her praises. How gentle she was, how sympathetic, how intelligent.

  Predictably, people began to invite Otto and Sonya to their dinners and parties and to avoid Laura. Otto, after all, had the tenure, not Laura. Laura saw her lawyer, the therapist she had begun consulting at Daphne’s suggestion, the mothers of little Hanno’s friends, Mrs. Kraft, and Daphne. It drove Daphne crazy that now, when she, Daphne, thought Laura should be out getting a job, or working on a degree, or going to art openings or concerts at the college, or, hell, even sitting in bars flirting with strangers, anything to expand her life past its little core of misery, Laura spent almost all her time at home, keeping house for Mrs. Kraft and Hanno.

  Finally, in May, the sun blossomed in the sky, and flowers and flowering trees and bushes of every imaginable color bobbed and dipped against fences and houses, above the streets. Trees leafed out, dappling the lawns beneath them with shadows, staining the roads with shade. Cynthia, eleven months old, crawled off the blanket Daphne had spread in the backyard, and, intent on catching a bird pecking away in the tall grass by the hedge, pushed herself up with her fat pink hands and ran. Her first steps. She didn’t get very far, not on those fat untested legs, but she did run. A wobbling, bobbling run, but still a run. Daphne called everyone she knew to report: Cynthia had not walked when she took her first steps, but had run.

  With the warmth, Cynthia’s colds and ear infections disappeared, and although she went through life at a hellish pace in the day, she began to sleep through the night, and also to take long afternoon naps. Daphne’s energy returned. She planted petunias, geraniums, nuzzling her nose into the spicy green leaves; she planted impatiens and hung baskets of fuchsias, dug in the earth to plant hollyhocks and morning-glory seeds. She joined an exercise club at the Y, left Cynthia in the playroom with the babysitter and other children, and did aerobics three times a week. It was as if her life had been given back to her.

  One late-May evening Joe came home from the college to find his two girls, as he had come to call them, reclining in the backyard. Cynthia had fallen asleep, wearing only her diaper, in the playpen Daphne had set out in the shade. Daphne was wearing a swimsuit, trying to tan her very white and slightly sleeker body, and she was reading a delicious romantic novel. A pork roast was on the charcoal grill, filling the air with its rich meaty scent, and she had set out an ice bucket and tonic and vodka and crackers and cheese on the patio table.

  “How are you?” Joe asked, fixing himself a drink.

  “I’m fine. I’m in heaven, actually,” Daphne said, stretching. “This is heaven.”

  “Yes, I can believe it, looking at you,” Joe said. He sat down on the chaise next to her.

  “Look. I’m getting tanned,” Daphne said, and pulled her suit down at her hipbone to expose the tanning line.

  “Yes. You are.” To Daphne’s surprise, Joe bent and kissed her on the belly, light but intense kisses, from her belly button down past the tan line, down to her pubic hair.

  It was so sudden a thing for Joe to do, and so erotic. Daphne placed her hand in Joe’s thick hair and leaned back on the chaise, closing her eyes. She felt her thighs go lax. She could smell the sun on her hot skin. The neighbors, she thought, but unless they were peering out of their second-story windows, they couldn’t see. Cynthia, she thought, but the baby slept on.

  “Joe,” she whispered huskily.

  “You smell like the sun,” he murmured, burrowing his face into her.

  “Joe,” she said. “We should go inside.”

  He didn’t answer. Or rather, not in words; he responded by reaching up t
o put one hand over her mouth, gently, while with the other he peeled her suit away from her crotch and thrust her legs apart with his head. Daphne took Joe’s fingers in her mouth for a moment, then felt all control slipping away. She dissolved onto the chaise, turning her head toward the shade, raising one hand to cover her face, and then, after a while, biting the inside of her arm to keep from crying out and alarming the baby.

  Later, when Joe and Daphne were eating their pork roast and baked potatoes and fresh tomatoes at the patio table, with Cynthia scooting around in the garden in her little round green walker, Daphne said, “You’ve never done anything like that before.”

  Joe looked sheepish. He grinned. “You know, I’ll be absolutely honest with you. I think it was a real instinctive male-domination thing. When I came out and saw you so fat and happy, so completely smug, as if you were enjoying every pleasure the universe had to offer, I couldn’t stand it. I wanted you to remember you need me for pleasure too.”

  “Joe,” Daphne said, amazed. “How could you ever think I didn’t always remember that?”

  “I’m just telling you how I felt,” he said. “You’re always asking me to tell you how I feel, so I’m telling you.”

  And even later, when they had put Cynthia to bed and were sitting together on lawn chairs in the backyard, watching the blue fade out of the brilliant sky into a deep gray, Daphne rose and knelt before her husband. She ran her hands over his shoulders and down his chest and abdomen. She unbuttoned his pants, and began to unzip them.

  “No,” Joe said. “Not out here.”

  “But I—”

  Joe pushed Daphne away, almost roughly. “Not here, Daphne. I just can’t.”

  She rose and pulled at his hands. “Then come inside,” she said. And they went inside and made a ferocious, very animal love, but Daphne would always think about that night and wonder what it meant: what sort of woman was she, who could be ravished under the sun while the baby lay nearby and who-knew-who was looking out of the windows, or what kind of man was Joe, always to need the dark?

  9

  For the nine months of the school year, the year that Daphne in her mind called “The Year of the Divorce,” Otto went every Sunday to the house where his son and mother and almost-ex-wife lived. Daphne of course was never witness to these occasions, but according to Laura, she and Mrs. Kraft served Otto slices of his favorite tortes, and coffee, and brandy. Otto asked his mother how her health was, and what she was doing with herself, and what the news was from home, and what she thought of the New England weather. Then he took Hanno by the hand and led him off to an afternoon of museums, or movies, or ice skating, or swimming in the college pool, and then a snack of pizza. When he brought Hanno home, he knocked on the door and waited for Laura to reclaim their son. He did not go in, but left immediately.

  Those Sunday meetings were the focus points for Laura’s conversations with Daphne. She would come to Daphne’s on Monday for coffee and spend the morning repeating every word the fugitive Otto had said, trying to discover in his words some sign of dissatisfaction with Sonya, some hidden need to return to her.

  “His collars are frayed!” Laura would say to Daphne, leaning across the kitchen table, terribly earnest. “Before, Otto would never go out with the slightest thing wrong with his clothes. No spots on his tie, no buttons missing, no threads hanging, and here he is with his shirt collars frayed. She is not taking care of him!”

  Daphne sometimes thought these conversations would drive her mad. She loved Laura and wanted to help her through this terrible time in her life, but Laura seemed so stuck. She shied away from any talk about the future, about her life after the divorce. If Otto said by chance, “You’re looking very nice today, Mother. It must be spring. You too, Laura,” Laura spent the next week like a mad alchemist trying to extract the magical out of the banal. “He complimented me! He has not complimented me for weeks. What do you think this means? Perhaps he is coming around!”

  By Friday, when Otto’s past visit had been squeezed dry of any real hope and Laura had heard about some dinner party where he cuddled with Sonya or a trip the two took over Christmas or spring vacation to Cozumel or Montreal, Laura would plunge into a dreadful depression. Fridays were miserable days. Laura would weep and weep.

  No matter what Daphne said, no matter how brilliant a plan she put forth for Laura’s future, the Friday sessions always ended the same way.

  “Well!” Laura would say finally, lifting her head and tossing her hair and lighting a cigarette. “This Sunday will be different! This Sunday I will—” And she would list what she would do: wear a dress with a slit in the side to show off her great legs, or short shorts; make Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte, Otto’s favorite cake; let Mrs. Kraft answer the door and stay out of the room for a while—then make a dramatic entrance.

  When Daphne tried to talk to Joe about Laura, he grew impatient. He rolled his eyes. “What’s the matter with the woman?” he said. After a few months, it got to be a private joke with Daphne and Joe:

  “Laura still suicidal?” Joe would ask over dinner.

  “Yes.”

  “What a surprise.”

  “Well, do you think she should move back to Germany?”

  “Not if she prefers living in the States.”

  “Do you think she could get a job?”

  “Of course she can get a job. Any idiot can get a job.”

  “Maybe a job would take her mind off Otto.”

  “What will take your mind off Laura?”

  Daphne learned not to talk much about Laura. It made them both seem so dull, she knew, like a scratched record, the same things repeated ad nauseam.

  But in May, when the world was luxuriant and luscious with flowers and fragrance and warmth, Daphne had an idea. The Millers were eating on the patio again; she had grilled hamburgers and they had turned out perfectly, thick and juicy on their onion-seed buns. She had crumbled some of the hamburger meat into little bits and put them, along with crumbs of cheese and slices of banana, on Cynthia’s high-chair tray. Cynthia loved catching the food between her fingers, feeding herself, then sucking her fingers. Birds sang around them, and flowers bloomed: it was bliss. Daphne and Joe had found each other again sexually, too—that was part of the idyll.

  “I’ve had an idea!” Daphne said. “I’m so unimaginably stupid. How could I have gone through this terrible winter without thinking of it? Joe, we have to have a cocktail party. Or a dinner party. Just a few married couples, so it isn’t too obvious, and Laura, and every single man at the college.”

  Joe groaned.

  “Really, now!” Daphne said. “Really, Joe, come on. This is exactly what Laura needs. She’s just going to curl up in a ball mourning that gross Otto the rest of her life unless we help her. She’ll come to our party, and when those bachelors get a good look at her …! Think of it! She’ll never be lonely again.”

  Joe groaned again. Then he reached across the table and stroked Daphne’s cheek. “You are an incurable romantic. You are Mitzi Gaynor singing ‘A Cockeyed Optimist.’ But we should have a party. We owe a lot of people. And it’s a good time of year. All right. Let’s do it.”

  “Oh, God, Joe, I’m so excited!” Daphne said.

  The next few weeks Daphne’s head was filled with visions. It was the same fantasy with variations. Laura meeting a young professor: their eyes would connect across the crowded room, they would walk toward each other, talk, smile, and leave the party early to go make mad passionate love. Or: Laura meeting an older professor, one with some elegance and savoir faire, who would appreciate her European charm. He would woo her with compliments and make a date to take her to the best restaurant in the area. Or … The possibilities, the fantasies, were endless.

  The night of the party could not have been more conducive to romance. It was a cocktail party so that more people could be invited, but Daphne had put a pink paper tablecloth on the redwood picnic table and laden the table with food: a huge ham, sliced thin, with interesting
mustards and breads and pickles; cheeses; meatballs simmering in chafing dishes; deviled eggs stuffed with caviar; vegetables and dips for the dieters; stuffed mushrooms; a silver platter piled high with seedless green grapes, strawberries, apple slices, and plums. The round glass-and-metal table they used for outdoor dining was large enough to hold the ice bucket and glasses and bottles of liquor and soft drinks. Daphne hung brightly colored Japanese paper lanterns from the trees and the sides of the house and put short fat candles inside colorful paper bags on the lawn. The backyard glimmered like a fairyland. It looked magical—something wonderful could happen here!

  Daphne wore a low-cut summer dress and tied her hair up with a scarf. Finally she had lost the weight of pregnancy and birth. The classes at the Y had gotten her back into shape, an even better shape, very hourglass. Joe was attentive; whenever he was near her, he put his hand on her arm or waist affectionately; proprietorially.

  Laura looked wonderful. These were the days when hippies influenced fashion, and she wore a paisley minidress with a matching paisley headband and dangling earrings. Daphne heard one of the faculty wives say to Laura, “Darling, your legs are a sin.” “They are?” Laura exclaimed, alarmed. “No, no, you’re taking me wrong,” the woman said. “I mean they inspire lust in all our husbands. And envy in all the wives.”

  Daphne watched Cynthia at one moment (was the babysitter really keeping the baby away from the burning candles?) and her friend at the next. Laura was approached by many men. Of course, they had not invited Otto and his Sonya, so Laura was, Daphne thought, as free to flirt as a teenager at her first dance. But where were Laura’s expansiveness, vibrancy, wonderful low laugh? Every time Daphne watched Laura, Laura looked stiff and somber.

  So when the party was finally over and all the guests had gone, Laura, instead of going off to dinner with one of the men, or going off for another drink, or taking someone back to her house, or any variation on the themes Daphne had envisioned, remained behind, alone. She helped Daphne and Joe clean up, then sat at the kitchen table with them while they had a makeshift dinner of party leftovers. It was late. The party had gone on forever. The babysitter had put Cynthia to bed and gone home.