by Nancy Thayer
“I can only think of you.”
“What makes you think that I could love a woman?”
Suzanna was stunned. “I—I didn’t think you could. I guess I didn’t consider that at all. I mean”—and she smiled—“that I’m a woman. I mean you know I’m a woman. I’m not making sense. I mean that I only thought that I love you, and that you are a woman, so this is—strange—for me to feel this way. But I don’t know, I didn’t think—could you love a woman? My God, I know so little about you. I’ve assumed from what little you’ve said about yourself in class that you’re not married, but—oh, God, are you in love with someone? Are you living with a man—someone?”
Madeline smiled. “I want to be so careful,” she said. “You must be so careful. If I tell you things about me, then we will be making some kind of relationship, and there’s real danger there. Please, listen to me. It does not matter whether I’m living with someone or whether I can love a woman. It does matter that you were married to a man, you have little children, you teach in public schools. Please stop and think of those things.”
“Oh, I do think of them. I love my children—I love my life. But I am divorced. And now I love you, and I can’t stop. Couldn’t we—couldn’t we have an affair?”
“I can’t answer that now. I think you should take some time to consider the implications of what you’re saying, and to imagine all the possible consequences. You must be aware that homosexual love is not acceptable in this society.”
“But—”
“It was once viewed as a disease, an illness. Now it is considered only a sordid aberration.”
“Please—”
“Do you want to be called a lesbian, a homosexual, a queer, a dyke? Do you want to be thought of as weird, an outcast? Do you want to have a judge take your children from you? Do you want your children called names by other children because of what you’ve done? Could you live with yourself? I’ll tell you, an affair is one thing, but a homosexual affair is something completely different. It can destroy your life forever.”
“But do you think you could love me?”
“Oh, Suzanna. I think you are beautiful. You seem good, intelligent, and full of grace. If I didn’t admire you and care for you a little already, I wouldn’t be so frightened for you. You should be frightened. You must be careful.”
“Then you are not saying that you could not love me.”
Madeline grinned. “You are persistent.”
Suzanna smiled back. “I am obsessed.”
The two women were quiet for a moment, caught up in a strong and mutual steady current of desire, and their smiles both widened slightly as they understood the fierce and subtle acknowledgment of their state.
Then Madeline turned her head aside and said softly, “Obsessions seldom cause people anything but grief.”
“I want to kiss you. I feel desperate. I long for you.”
“Suzanna, aren’t you frightened?”
“No. Yes, of course. But I can’t help this. I’m frightened, but I’m also so full of joy to be sitting here, looking at you, to be hearing your voice, to be telling you that I love you.”
“Have you loved a woman before?”
“God, no. I’ve never even thought of loving a woman before. No, this is strange for me, and yet it seems completely right. Have you ever loved a woman?”
“I think you should go home and think about all we’ve said.”
Madeline rose abruptly, tossed her Styrofoam coffee cup into the wastebasket, and walked from the room. Suzanna had no recourse but to follow.
“Go home now,” Madeline said.
“Please. I want to kiss you.”
Madeline stared at Suzanna a long moment. “All right, then,” she said. “Let’s go to my office. We’ll shut the door, and we’ll kiss, and then you can see how you feel about this love of yours. You can see if you do not feel repulsed and disgusted to be a woman kissing a woman.”
Suzanna walked beside Madeline back to her office, and all the while she felt as though she were burning; she could not get her breath. Her professor walked rapidly, and the easy elegance with which she usually moved had diminished; her body had gone tense.
Inside the office, Madeline shut the door and turned to Suzanna.
“Well?” she said.
Suzanna had thought that Madeline was much taller than she, but as they stood facing each other, she realized that Madeline’s superior height was due in part to her slimness, which gave an illusion of height, and in part to the shoes she wore. When Suzanna went to Madeline, she had to look up, to take her professor’s face in both hands and gently bring her facedown; and so they kissed.
“Wait a moment,” Madeline said, and she stepped back and took off her shoes. Now she was only slightly taller than Suzanna. “This is better,” she said. This time when they kissed, their bodies touched, up and down.
“Oh, dear,” Madeline said at last. She put both her hands on Suzanna’s shoulders and pushed her away, but gently. “This will never do,” she began.
“Yes!” Suzanna cried.
“Wait, I don’t mean that. I mean it will never do here, now. Not on the college campus. Not while you are my student.”
“I’ll drop your course.”
“Don’t be silly. There are only three weeks left. You’ll need this credit, and I can assure you you’ve already earned an A for the work you’ve done. We have to wait.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Listen to me. We hardly know each other. Let’s spend the next three weeks just talking. We can be together this way. We can have coffee and talk. We can become friends.”
“I want to be your lover,” Suzanna said. “I don’t want to wait.”
“Why? Are you afraid it won’t last?” Madeline asked. “Do you think that what you feel will disappear in three weeks?”
“No—no.”
“Then we have to wait. And you have to do some serious thinking.”
Another student knocked on the door then. Suzanna wanted to scream at him to go away, but he had an appointment with Madeline. It was Suzanna who had to leave, and she hated it. She walked to her car, drove home, thinking all the while of Madeline’s soft mouth, of the pressure of Madeline’s breasts and curves and hips and legs as they had been pressed against her own. She was so aware of her own body that mere breathing, mere shifting in the car seat as she drove, seemed physical acts full of exotic and sensual possibilities. She felt reincarnated or transformed, and her new body seemed as luminously edged as the William Blake drawing she had seen on the cover of textbooks: everything within her, body and soul, was inspired.
Suddenly, there was her house, a small, yellow Colonial, with autumn flowers, chrysanthemums and daisies, against the outer walls. There was her front door, with the brass knocker her husband had installed, and her daughter’s doll forgotten on the front step. There was the entrance hall she had papered and decorated and swept, and there was the large wooden-framed mirror in the entrance hall. This was a lovely, normal house, but there in the mirror was Suzanna, a woman she no longer knew.
She stood in front of the mirror, confronting her image, staring at her own face. Back in her own home, she felt disoriented. She was afraid. She walked to the mirror and touched the glass reflection.
“You are Suzanna Blair,” she said. “You are a mother and teacher. You love a woman. You love Madeline Meade. You love a woman.”
She was overcome by a terrible shaking, much like the trembling that had possessed her after the birth of her children. It was the shaking that follows severe physical shock. She shook so hard that her teeth chattered. She wrapped her arms around herself but gained no steadiness.
She went into the kitchen and leaned against the sink. Everything around her looked so endearingly normal, and she thought: I have made this room cozy and comfortable—I am capable of many things. She ran cold tap water into a glass, and looking down into the glass as if God were invisibly waiting for her there, she said, “Listen, God. You’ve got
to help me. If what I feel is wrong, you’ve got to let me know. I’m afraid.”
But there was no sound in the kitchen save the tiny ticking of the stove clock and the whispery movements of the cat who came to sit by the cupboard door, looking at Suzanna with inscrutable eyes.
“Well,” Suzanna said, and brought the glass of water to her lips. But the slight touch of the glass to her opened lips stunned her and the cold water that entered her mouth seemed to reawaken the desire that now lay sparkling, ready, within her. From now on every sensual pleasure would remind her of Madeline, and of the joy that shot through her when Madeline’s mouth met hers. Suzanna touched her lips with her fingertips, and stood trembling, bemused, fascinated, until some inner instinct brought her to look at the kitchen clock, and she realized it was time to pick up the children from the birthday party.
The next three weeks she met Madeline ten times for coffee in the college union. She told Madeline about her life, and drew small bits of information from Madeline about her life. Madeline had gotten her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. She was thirty-two years old. She spent her summers in England. She was working on a book. Madeline told Suzanna many details about the research for her book, an anthology of psychoanalytic literature written by women. She told Suzanna little about her personal life, yet it seemed they had so much in common. For when Suzanna would recount an incident about Seth and Priscilla’s squabbling, Madeline would laugh and remember a similar childhood experience, or a case study, which would in turn remind Suzanna of a joke or a book or a memory, and their words and thoughts and ideas would tumble out together so that very quickly their experiences seemed joined. It was as if they rapidly built a mutual edifice with these words, a house familiar and comfortable to both of them, so that when they saw each other, they were immediately at home—safe, yet excited, for there was so much else to create and explore.
There seemed to be no inequality in their relationship, for Madeline had a Ph.D. and the prestige that gave her, but Suzanna had children and a different kind of knowledge. They were different but equal; there was to be no hierarchy, dominance, or submission. They built their domain about them with instinctive balance, just as within themselves they balanced eagerness and courtesy in their speech. They inundated each other with words: it was, for this period of time, their only way of touching.
The semester finally ended. Madeline left Southmark to spend the Christmas vacation in New York with friends. She promised to call Suzanna when she returned, and she promised that then, after the vacation, if Suzanna still wanted to, they would spend some time alone together in a private place.
Suzanna took Priscilla and Seth to her parents’ home for Christmas. Her parents told her that her divorce obviously suited her: she had never looked better. It seemed to Suzanna that her nervous system had somehow speeded up, as if hoping that if it worked faster, time would pass faster, too, and so she found herself always racing at the edge of her emotions. She burst into tears when she saw old friends, when carolers came to the door singing “Silent Night,” when the children saw what Santa had brought them Christmas morning. She ate and drank too much. She played in the snow with the children until they begged to go inside and rest. Finally the holidays were over, and she and the children returned to Londonton.
The day before she started teaching again, Tom showed up at the house. He was tan and healthy from two weeks in Bermuda, and he played a bit with the children, and informed Suzanna that he had taken a job at another college at the opposite end of the state, three hours away. Suzanna smiled, wished him well, and thought to herself that this seemed a stroke of luck, for with Tom gone from town she would have a freedom she hadn’t felt before.
Madeline came back from New York early in January. She called, and invited Suzanna to her home for a drink. Suzanna was nearly ill with anticipation, but she found that once she was actually there, inside Madeline’s house, with Madeline physically present, she did not know how to begin. For once she had trouble talking. She was terrified and shy.
The women discussed their holidays from opposite ends of the sofa. Madeline spoke of the plays and galleries she had been to in New York, Suzanna of her parents and children. They drank wine, then more wine. Suzanna told Madeline that Tom was moving away. Madeline was curious, more curious about Suzanna’s marriage, in fact, than Suzanna was; Suzanna had suddenly come to look upon her past and her husband as if they had no more substance than a dream.
“Oh, please,” Suzanna said at last, “won’t you ever tell me about yourself? Have you ever been married? Have you ever loved another woman? Have you ever loved a man?”
Madeline smiled. “Yes,” she said.
“Yes? Yes, what?”
“Yes, I’ve been married, I’ve loved another woman, and I’ve loved a man. My life has been different from yours, Suzanna. You are in a transitional state now, but I think that most of your life you have enjoyed the company of people and their established patterns. I mean, you like to teach, you like your children, you have your friends. I prefer solitude, travel, books, ideas. No one has ever meant—very much—to me. My marriage was very brief and sad, but”—she smiled—“not too sad. What I’m trying to say to you is that yes, I can go to bed with you. I can be your lover for a while, since ‘lover’ is the term that’s used. But I can’t promise you anything more than that. I can almost certainly promise you that I won’t be monogamous, faithful, whatever. Oh, I don’t mean that I treat these things lightly. But I may not be capable of treating what is between us with the seriousness you would like, and you should decide now if it would be worth it to you, given the way I am.”
Suzanna sat watching Madeline, who now slowly paced the room as she talked, and she thought how beautiful the woman was, slim, elegant, reserved. Everything about her was disciplined and somehow bounded, edged. By contrast, Suzanna felt bulging, limp, and eager. She was astounded by her own courage when she simply rose, went toward Madeline, and took her in her arms.
“Please, let’s not talk anymore,” she said. “It’s all right, you know. I’m not a child.”
They stood in the middle of Madeline’s living room, with the curtains pulled shut and the lights on full; they held each other and kissed and embraced. Suzanna ran her hands over Madeline’s hair, over her shoulders and arms and back. Then, trembling, she touched Madeline’s breasts. She put both her hands on the cotton shirt that covered Madeline’s breasts and simply laid them there gently, as if afraid that this touching might cause their flesh to flame up and harm one or the other. But Madeline only sighed, acceding. Suzanna ran her hands down Madeline’s fine slender waist, down her hips, and pressed her palms against Madeline’s thighs. Still they kissed. Madeline touched her fingertips to the tips of Suzanna’s breasts, and Suzanna’s heart knocked so strongly throughout her body that she swayed and nearly fell.
“I think I’m going to have a heart attack,” Suzanna whispered into Madeline’s hair.
“This is what bodies are made for,” Madeline said.
Then she smiled and began to unbutton Suzanna’s shirt. Her hands on Suzanna’s bare skin were cool and light. Still standing, the women took off each other’s clothes: shirts, belts, jeans, underclothes. They stood before each other naked.
“How different we are!” Suzanna cried. She realized how unusual it was to see another woman’s body naked. She was short and round and fleshy; Madeline was lean and bony, so that her breasts seemed impertinent. They held each other then, and skin touched skin so sweetly it seemed a coming home. In Madeline’s bedroom, they lay on top of the thick violet comforter and explored each other’s bodies with their hands and lips.
Suzanna said, “I want to touch you first. I want to show you that in spite of everything you don’t need to be a teacher to me.” And she lay stretched out against her lover, and kissed her lover’s mouth, and moved her hand in a meandering line from the hollow of Madeline’s throat to the rise of her breasts, down the smooth flat stomach, to the swell of pubic h
air. She placed the whole of her hand between Madeline’s legs, and pushed her legs gently apart, then parted the swollen rise of flesh and touched the mauve and hidden clitoris. Madeline was so wet between her legs with thick liquid. Then Suzanna did the forbidden thing: she found the eager rounded rim and slowly slid her two longest fingers into what she could not see—that tiny silk-lined cave, which was now slithery with juices. Suzanna explored, fascinated, she moved her wrist, her fingers, and took care to be gentle, and at last, with a little shove, she touched with the ends of her fingers a minute protrusion which hung stalactite-like and soft inside Madeline’s vagina: it was her cervix.
“God,” Suzanna said, “how interesting women are!”
Madeline said, “Don’t stop.”
What could she not find to do? The possibilities seemed infinite, and Suzanna wanted to do everything at once. She slowly spread her two fingers apart, and Madeline’s vagina responded; it went wide, then wider. Suzanna raised herself onto one elbow and looked. Madeline lay stretched beneath her, totally given over to the experience, naked, vulnerable, displayed. Her eyes were closed and she had flung one arm over her face as if to hide. A flush had crept across the top of her breasts and up toward her neckline; her nipples were distended; her pelvis arched. There is no more satisfying sight than that of a lover receiving pleasure—and there are no more satisfying sounds. Such subtle changes in touch or angle or movement or rhythm could bring such low and luscious moans—and then, without warning, such gasping for breath. Madeline’s eyes opened, she stared at Suzanna, a demand, an entreaty, then clasped her eyes shut and grasped the sheets with both hands as if to keep herself from falling off the edge of the world. Suzanna gently turned and moved her hand until Madeline’s vagina clenched itself in helpless spasms around Suzanna’s fingers. With her own hand she could feel her lover’s ecstasy spread in waves throughout her body, like rings circling out from a stone cast into water. She withdrew her hand, which was fragrant and sticky, and brought her body down against Madeline’s body. Both women were shimmering with sweat as they lay together. Suzanna smoothed Madeline’s hair. Madeline lay silent, and slowly her breathing returned to normal.
