Bodies and Souls

by Nancy Thayer

  For Suzanna it was not so simple. She had first of all to worry about the children, to explain the divorce to them, to wrap her energies around them protectively, to remain alert to any signs of trauma. Tom saw Seth and Priscilla only on Tuesday nights, when he took them out to dinner at Howard Johnson’s, where he was almost certainly joined by some other family who found the trio brave and sweet. He gave Suzanna the house when they divorced, and enough child support to make them moderately comfortable, but he was, as he was the first to admit with charming honesty, just not very good at dealing with little kids, and Suzanna was left with the burden of emotional care. When she drove them, each morning at seven-thirty, to the local day-care center so that she could go on to her job at the elementary school, she would often pass Tom as he flashed by in his new peacock-blue warmup suit. He had taken up jogging, and did calisthenics and laps at the college gym and pool each day, getting back in shape. Suzanna would watch him go by, a handsome, newly lean man, and then she would look at herself in the rearview mirror of the car. She was beginning to have gray streaks in her hair, and she did not foresee the time when she would ever have the energy to teach, take care of her children as she wanted, and exercise her body back into a youthful shape.

  For a few months she was depressed—despairing. She had to leave a large spring-break party because Tom had appeared with a marvelous-looking very young girl at his side; she could not bear it. But her children remained healthy, and Suzanna’s friends rallied around, and then men began to ask her out, and her life began to take on that tingling feeling of a limb that has been long asleep now coming back awake. There were not many men to date—it wasn’t like college had been—because there simply were not many single men in Londonton. Still, she felt those old gambling joys returning. Once more when she went to a concert or party or restaurant or even to the post office, she felt the possibilities of the event—she might meet someone.

  She decided to work on her master’s degree in order to raise herself up on the school pay scale. The college in Londonton did not offer graduate courses, so she had to go to the state university thirty miles away in Southmark. But she decided that was fine. She would like the quiet lonely drive which gave her time to think, and the sense of going off to someplace new, where there would be ideas—and people—she had not encountered before. The class met on Saturday afternoons. Suzanna wrote this schedule on her kitchen wall calendar, and it seemed that the calendar and her life took on a new weight of importance.

  The first day of class, however, she was as much frightened as excited. She walked from the parking lot to the large stone building that housed her class, oblivious to the natural beauty of the rolling countryside around the college and to the brisk fall air. She was aware only of the young lithe students who passed her on the walk, and she realized how much of her recent life had been spent in the company of little children or their parents. The people at the college were exotic to her by virtue of their age, and she shrank a bit to see them, feeling by contrast old, plump, and pale. And when she entered the building, the old first-day fears returned full-force: she was afraid she would be late, or early, or that someone would see her studying the classroom numbers so seriously, and snicker at her.

  When she thought she had found the right room, she plunged in and took a seat in the first row. To her relief, she spotted a woman much like herself seated next to her.

  “Is this Introduction to Interpersonal Psychology?” Suzanna asked.

  “God, I hope so,” the woman said. “I feel as insecure as one of my second-graders.”

  They laughed and struck up a conversation, and Suzanna began to relax. Looking about her, she saw there was a mix of students—young and old, male and female, bored and nervous. It was going to be okay. Suzanna took a deep breath and prepared herself to concentrate now on the subject matter.

  Dr. Madeline Meade taught the psychology course. When she entered the room, the class stopped talking and came to a casual but focused attention.

  How beautiful she is, Suzanna thought.

  She was tall, long-legged, slim. She was wearing loose cotton khaki trousers, a white cotton shirt, a navy blazer, small gold earrings, several gold bracelets and rings. Her light brown hair was held back from her face with two tortoiseshell combs. She wore no makeup. Her eyes were blue and striking, her cheekbones high and prominent, her smile dazzling. She moved about the front of the room, introducing herself and the course, writing on the blackboard, leaning on the desk, and Suzanna, watching, felt a physical thump in her lower abdomen, as if she had been hit. Her body went still, and alert.

  It happened very fast. Suzanna Blair, who until that moment had never entertained the idea of loving a woman, fell in love with Madeline Meade that day. Of course she did not realize it at first. She only noticed what exquisitely long and slender hands the professor had, and how lean and graceful her body was; but then Suzanna had grown up in the practice of noticing other women’s bodies and comparing them to her own, continually surveying the competition. She did not think that she had fallen in love—she did not think at all. She was just so completely alive in the present moment, and completely happy to be able to look at this woman, to hear her voice, to see her gestures. The two hours ended so suddenly; Suzanna felt dismayed. She wanted to approach the instructor as some of the other students were doing, ask a question—any question—but she could think of nothing to say, and so she gathered up her books and notebooks and left.

  After that, an amazing thing happened: her life took on the floating, inconsequential quality of a dream. Nothing could affect her. She was not furious when her children fought or angry when a neighbor’s dog ruined the last of her garden. She was not tired or hungry or anything at all except an automaton who moved through the necessities of each day until she saw Madeline Meade again. Then the world became clear and real. Everything in her daily life was equal in value except the need to be in class: that was primary. So she seemed serene, because she was always waiting.

  She studied furiously and worked on her course paper as if it were a document with the powers of saving or costing her life. Still she did not articulate to herself just what it was she felt. She moved through a life now that was marked by the time of the next class.

  She could not sleep, but she didn’t jump out of bed to bustle around accomplishing tasks; she just lay there. More remarkably, she could not eat. It was not a matter of choice, of dieting; she could not swallow. Her throat closed as tight as a fist against food. She did not stop to wonder what was going on. She just kept moving forward. She was always thinking: three more days, six more hours, two more hours, until I will be in class. For that was the way she thought of it: in class. The class seemed to be the important thing, as if the room and all the people in it were magnetic and charmed.

  But one evening toward the end of the course, Dr. Meade entered the classroom, leaned on the desk, smiled at her students, and told them that the following week she had to be gone for several days to deliver a paper in San Francisco. Dr. Hower would be substituting for her. When Suzanna heard this, something plunged inside her; she felt bleak, bereft. She did not know how she would summon up the energy to get out of her chair and out of the room and to her car. Madeline Meade’s announcement forced a discovery that brought despair: the time would come when this course would end and Suzanna would no longer be able to schedule her happiness according to the days of attending class.

  So it was not, in fact, the class or knowledge that she loved. Nor was it the novelty of being a student once again, nor being in the company of interesting adults. She could have all those things with her next class, the one she was scheduled to take on new techniques in elementary education.

  That day broke her dream-life open. Suzanna walked out to her car holding herself tightly as if she had been wounded. More than anything, she needed and craved privacy so that she could admit to herself just what it was she felt. She was a normal woman, used to discovering the secrets of her soul throug
h conversations with friends. This was different: she had to do it on her own. There was no precedent for a secret as threatening as this. She drove home, paid the babysitter, talked to her children, moved through the house normally, but as she stood in her kitchen cutting up bananas and apples for her children’s snack, she was in a fury of fear and delight as the seditious knowledge began to spread through her. She gave her children their snacks, sent them to their rooms to rest, and told them she was going to take a bath.

  She went into the bathroom, shut and locked the door, and began running the bath water. Then she turned and looked into the mirror.

  For a long time she studied her face, not in the superficial way she checked her face before going out in public or in the critical way she searched the superficialities of her face for stray eyebrows or dry skin. She looked into her own eyes and let herself acknowledge the truth: she had fallen in love with a woman.

  But after all, what could be done about it? It was silly, once she admitted it. Love a woman? What a humorous idea.

  Suzanna mocked herself in the mirror. She pulled her mouth to one side in derision. She turned away from the mirror and stepped into the tub and forced her body down into water that was so hot it seemed to purify. She lay back, stretched out full, with mounds of white bubbles covering her like an iridescent blanket. She stared at the blue bathroom tiles, at the sedative white ceiling, and thought.

  She had heard the words: lesbian, homosexual, gay. They had meant nothing to her, they were just words used to describe people so far beyond the pale of her life that they had no relevance to her whatsoever, no real existence at all.

  Yet now she could remember a scene from her childhood. She had been about fourteen, and her father had taken her with him on a day trip into Boston. It was one of those almost miraculously rare times when both her brother and sister were invited somewhere else and she had her father to herself. They rode together in the family car comfortably, talking. Suzanna read a book in the reception room while her father conducted his business in an inner office, and then they drove back home. It was a two-hour drive, and a hot day. On the way home, they stopped at a roadside café. Her father ordered coffee and Suzanna a hot-fudge sundae.

  Sitting at the counter was a strange creature: a woman with hair chopped short as a man’s, wearing gray trousers and a shirt, with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the left sleeve of the shirt, exposing a very muscular arm. The woman was fat and homely and sinister in appearance. “Yaaaah,” she was saying to the man sitting next to her, “they’re all turds, every one of them.” Suzanna had stared at the woman—she looked so freakish, and most horrible of all, she wore a pair of men’s wing-tipped shoes.

  Finally Suzanna’s father noticed the direction of her gaze. “Don’t look at her,” he said. He was embarrassed, so embarrassed that Suzanna sensed that something sexual was involved here. “That woman’s sick. She thinks she’s a man. She’s—a homosexual. She loves women.”

  So that was it. Women who loved women were sick; they were unattractive to men, disgusting, and one should look away.

  But then another image surfaced. Suzanna remembered it from a text on the modern novel which she had studied in an undergraduate course. Virginia Woolf. She had been in love with a woman named Vita Sackville-West; they had been lovers. Virginia Woolf had not been ugly or dumb or unable to attract the love of men. In fact, she was beautiful and brilliant and married to a man who adored her. On the other hand, she had not been exactly a model of sanity and the normal life.

  What kind of woman loved a woman? Suzanna wondered, and as the bubbles from her bath began to dissolve, she saw her body pink and real beneath the water and her thoughts raced. What kind of woman loved a woman, what did it mean to love a woman—how did one love a woman? Did she want to touch Madeline Meade?

  Oh, yes, she did. She did. Very much.

  Suzanna rose from her bath shaking and frightened. She wanted to touch Madeline Meade, and she wanted Madeline Meade to touch her with her long, elegant hands.

  That night, Suzanna could not sleep, but fell in and out of dreams of Madeline’s hands. When she rose on Sunday morning, she was dizzy from lack of sleep, but strangely refreshed and eager; it was as if some reservoir of energy had suddenly cracked open inside her. She went to church, but did not hear the sermon. Instead she sat staring up at the minister as if entranced: she was trying to decide whether or not God played tricks in love.

  She made it through the day by doing laundry, housecleaning, baking, all her weekend chores, but once again she found she could not sleep at night. She was exhausted, but alert, she could not rest, her mind was vivid with dreams of Madeline Meade’s hands and face and voice. When she awoke on Monday morning, she did not know how she would make it through the day, she was so tired, yet so tense, but as she stirred her coffee in the kitchen, she considered her calendar and saw that that afternoon, after school, both Priscilla and Seth were invited to a birthday party. They would be gone for two and a half hours. She smiled a mad smile at the kitchen door where the calendar hung, and a lovely desperate daring drove her into the day. She taught. She dressed her children in party clothes and dropped them at her friend’s house. Then she drove to Southmark very carefully, but very fast.

  The college, as she approached it, looked larger and brighter to her than usual; it seemed to beckon and shine. Desire had now possessed her completely, and it also made her dull. She had no thoughts except that she must speak to Madeline Meade. She did not worry about her children, her parents, her friends, her God; she was intent on one thing only. She did not even stop to wonder whether or not she, Suzanna, was lovable. She only knew she had to see this woman, to present her with the knowledge of her love, and to see where life would take her then.

  Madeline was in her office, seated at her desk, talking on the phone. She was laughing. Suzanna stood with mute appeal in the doorway until Madeline looked up, noticed her, smiled, and mouthed, “Come in.” Madeline pointed to a chair, and Suzanna sank down into it. The actual presence of this woman she loved did not frighten or calm her; it only made her feel more strongly the need to get this thing done and said before the hidden knowledge broke her apart.

  When Madeline hung up the phone, Suzanna said, “I need to talk with you. May I close the door?”

  “Of course,” Madeline said.

  Suzanna shut the door, sank back into the chair, then faced her professor and said, “I think I am in love with you.”

  Madeline’s expression did not change. Finally she sighed. Then: “That’s very flattering. I’m not sure how to respond. This sort of thing happens, you know, between students and professors, or patients and therapists. I think what you mean is that you admire me, because I am a professor, because I teach—”

  “No,” Suzanna said. “Please give me more credit than that. This is not a schoolgirl’s crush. I do admire you. But I love you. I want to touch you.”

  Madeline hesitated. “Well, then,” she said. And she stretched out her hand across the desk, her long slim hand with fingers wearing two thin silver rings, her wrist dangling gold and silver bracelets, her arm elegant and easy in its gesture.

  Suzanna gently placed the palm of her hand against the palm of Madeline’s hand, and with that most delicate pressure, her entire body went warm and wet; her mouth filled with saliva.

  Suzanna held Madeline’s hand—their flesh touched. “I love you,” Suzanna said. She did not feel courageous or frightened; she felt completely alive.

  “You know,” Madeline said, smiling, “this could get complicated. I think we should go get some coffee, and walk together, and talk.” She withdrew her hand.

  “I’ve horrified you, haven’t I?” Suzanna said. “But I can’t apologize.”

  “No, you haven’t horrified me,” Madeline said. She rose from the desk and crossed the room and opened the door. She looked sad. “Please. Let’s go get some coffee.”

  They said nothing as they walked over to the student union; th
ey did not speak until they were seated in a booth with their coffee cups in front of them.

  “Now,” Madeline said, “listen to me. I do not take what you’re saying lightly. But it’s all a little bit crazy, you know. I don’t know you very well, even though I’ve enjoyed having you in class. You’re a good student. You’re smart. You’ve got good instincts. Still—Suzanna, you’re a mother. You’re part of a community. You teach little children. You need to think of all these things.”