Between Husbands and Friends

by Thayer, Nancy

  This is where I usually give up. It’s at junctures like this that I’ve thought, Oh, fuck it, and walked away. But not tonight. I feel like some kind of mythological heroine, leaning over a well or a cliff, trying to grasp her lover, to haul him back up from his fall into the depths.

  “Max. Honey. It’s nine-fifteen. Let’s take the phone off the hook and give ourselves twenty minutes. We haven’t had twenty minutes for quite a while.”

  I don’t know about him, but the pitch of my voice is seducing me. My need seduces me. I reach out and put my hand on his wrist. I do love this man. After all these years I am intensely attracted to him. I love the electric bristle of the curly black hair on his arms.

  Sighing, he turns and pulls me against his chest. “Lucy, please. Not now.”

  “Don’t shut me out,” I say.

  “I’m not shutting you out,” he protests gently. “I’ve just got a lot to get done.”

  I look up into his eyes. “Max, I’m worried about you. I want you to see someone. I want you to try antidepressants.”

  He laughs. “Hey, just because I don’t want to make love one time doesn’t mean I’m depressed.”

  “No, but it could be a sign. Added to all the other signs—”

  “There are no other signs. I’m just tired and overwhelmed with stuff from work. After a week on Nantucket, after this damned humidity drops, I’ll be fine.”

  “It’s just so hard to live with you when you’re depressed.”

  “I’m not depressed!” Max insists.

  “Well, I am,” I mutter as I leave the room.

  Summer 1989

  Chip bought a sailboat, a beautiful twenty-foot sloop that sliced gracefully through the water and responded, he told us, with an almost sentient quickness. The second Friday in August, Chip and Max brought the boat to Nantucket from the Cape, and on Saturday we all went sailing. Chip had the best of intentions for all of us, and eventually the children came to love sailing, but that first time out was misery.

  It was a blustery day. Margaret and Matthew were energetic, wriggling, goofy five-year-olds, and they hated the rubbery confinement of life jackets. The wind whipped Margaret’s hair into her face and batted the sheets against Matthew’s head. The dazzle of the sun off the water hurt their eyes. They wanted to hang over the sides and dangle their hands in the bubbling water, but Kate and I clutched on to them for dear life, knowing how easily one sudden move of the boat could send a small child into the sea. Sniveling with boredom, the little ones crouched down in the cabin while Kate and I watched them fiercely to be sure they didn’t get clubbed by the boom or tangled in the sheets. And all the time Chip was too happy and busy to notice, and Max was crewing and having a great time himself.

  When we got back to shore, Kate and I took the children off to Children’s Beach, where they ran and splashed in the water, releasing their pent-up energy. The late afternoon sun seared our windburned skin, and we were thirsty and hot. We arrived back at the house with two tired, sandy, cranky children, to find Chip and Max reclining in chairs in the backyard.

  “What’s for dinner?” Chip called.

  “Whatever you and Max find at a takeout,” Kate shot back, as we ushered Matthew and Margaret upstairs to shower.

  Sunday morning the men left early to spend the day sailing alone. Kate and I took the kids to the beach, but about an hour after we got settled, clouds came scudding in, the air turned pearly with mist, and the temperature dropped. We had to lug all our paraphernalia back to the Volvo, back to the house. We showered and changed and walked into town to buy books and little treats. The streets and shops were jammed with families doing the same thing on this cloudy, cool day. We picked up videos. We played numerous games of Candyland. That evening the men came back, smelling of salt and wind and sea, expansively pleased with themselves and invigorated from sailing on a day full of wind. They barely had time to shower and dress before jumping into the Volvo so that we could drive them to the ferry.

  Max put his bag in the car, then sat on the front porch, holding Margaret on his lap, spending a few moments just with her. I ran up to the bedroom to pull on a thick cotton sweater, when I heard Chip and Kate in the hallway.

  “Is this the way it’s going to be?” Kate asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, are you going to spend every weekend sailing and ignore me and Matthew?”

  “I didn’t ignore you and Matthew. Didn’t we all go sailing yesterday? And I invited everyone again today.”

  “Chip. Your son is five years old. Sailing bores him. All he can do is sit. That boat is too big for him, too dangerous.”

  “Look, Kate, I don’t want to miss the ferry. I’ll call you and we can talk about this, okay?”

  I couldn’t hear her answer, but her face must have expressed something clearly because all at once Chip’s voice took on a tone of exasperation. “Jesus, Kate, what is it with you? I can’t do anything right these days!”

  I held my breath, feeling fascinated and guilty. Should I pop out into the hall now, pretending I hadn’t heard anything, or remain hiding here, where I couldn’t help but overhear even more?

  I didn’t have to decide. Without a word Kate stamped down the stairs, and after a moment, Chip followed.

  Kate was having an unsettled year. She’d been approached by an Italian designer who wanted to open a shop on Newbury Street and wanted her to work there as a saleswoman. She’d agreed. It was a posh, snobby place, with a doorman out front and a pair of brass-ornamented glass doors that opened only if the saleswoman on the inside pushed an electric button.

  I’d visited the shop. Once. The few clothes displayed cost thousands of dollars and the other salespeople were condescending to the point of rudeness.

  “How can you work there?” I’d asked Kate later. “How can you stand being around those horrid people?”

  “They’re all right, once you get used to them.”

  “But what kind of people shop there? Who spends two thousand dollars for some hideous piece of fabric that looks like my grandmother’s rug?”

  Kate bristled. “You just don’t understand couturier fashion.”

  “Damn right I don’t.”

  “Look,” Kate shot back. “Your last article was all about how great the school concert was, and you know that that poor Miller child never got anywhere near the notes he was supposed to play. And Kenny Freeman’s piano solo was just pitiful.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “That we both deal in illusion. And you have no more right to insult my work than I do to insult yours.”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it. Why was I so upset, anyway? Why did I care where Kate worked?

  “Kate, I apologize. I think I’m just defensive because you’ve entered a world I don’t feel comfortable in. So it makes me feel like I’m losing you, or that somehow we’re not as close as we have been.”

  “Well, that’s just silly,” she snapped, then relented and hugged me. “Oh, Lucy, you know you’ll always be my best friend.”

  But her job did signify the difference between us. I was thrilled to shop at a sale at Talbot’s. Kate bought dresses costing as much as our monthly mortgage. She was on the board of a number of prestigious organizations, and she and Chip had a social life in the winter that was far more glamorous than anything Max and I would even aspire to. Neither Max nor I was particularly interested in money, so it never became an issue. In fact, when Max and I lay in bed, talking about our friends, we always felt more concern than envy for the Cunninghams. I would have found all the socializing and the pretension boring and distasteful, and I knew Chip was always on the edge, trying to keep in favor with the formidable powers that ran his firm and established the hierarchy.

  It surprised me, that summer, when Kate expressed her concern for me.

  It was a rainy night and the children were watching a video while we sat in the kitchen, finishing a bottle of red wine.

  “Don’t you ever feel
resentful,” she asked, “that you have to work for Max? That you have to do what he tells you? That you’re helping him achieve his goals but achieving none of your own?”

  I was stunned. “I never think of it that way, Kate. I like what I do.”

  “But you’ve told me …” She gestured toward Aunt Grace’s living room, with its shelves full of books.

  “Oh, Kate, I’ve got the rest of my life to write books. I’m not interested in that sort of stuff now. I’ll tell you what I really would like to do.” Kate leaned close.

  I whispered, even though the children couldn’t possibly hear: “I want to have another baby.”

  Kate moaned. “I know. I can’t believe it, but so do I.”

  We spent the rest of the evening thoroughly discussing it: when would be the best time for Matthew and Margaret to have a sibling, how we would change our houses, our schedules, what baby furniture we had tucked away in our attics, the best babysitters in Sussex, the best pediatricians.

  We always got to the heart of things on Nantucket. During the other eleven months we were rushed with our daily lives, and even though we talked several times a day on the phone, it was always about details, emergencies, necessities: town meetings, children’s raincoats, doctor’s appointments, birthday cakes, new shoes. On Nantucket we had the leisure to begin conversations that would last the whole month long.

  The next weekend both men were to arrive on Friday night, and to my disappointment, though not surprise, Max called to say he wasn’t coming. Another newspaper crisis. He was impatient and energetic, caught up in the moment, and I smiled to myself even as I assured him we’d miss him. Max was in his element.

  “Hey,” I said to Kate, “Max isn’t coming this weekend. Why don’t you let me take Margaret and Matthew to a movie, and you and Chip can have an evening alone together?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Kate said.

  We’d always been easy with each other about responsibilities, efficiently dividing up the housekeeping tasks, generously taking over the care of the other’s child to give each other time off to shop or simply lie in the hammock and read. If Margaret ran into the house with a splinter in her foot or a skinned knee, she addressed whichever adult was nearer and took comfort and direction from either mother. It was as if we were a family during the month of August, two adults who both happened to be mommies, and the daddies were only visitors, arriving in their strange, heavy, somber work clothes from another world. The daddies didn’t know in which cabinet the Band-Aids were kept, or which store carried the penny candy. They cooked only when they felt the urge, usually if they’d gone off on a charter fishing boat, returning with bluefish. They never cleaned or vacuumed or went to the grocery store. Kate and I did that while they spent time with their children.

  Friday night I took the children out for a spaghetti dinner at Vincent’s and to a movie, and then to walk around town listening to the street singers. All this was to give Kate and Chip the entire evening at home, to dine in peace and to spend as much time making as much noise in the bedroom as they desired.

  It was almost eleven when we got home. The house was quiet. Kate came out from her bedroom in a long shirt and shorts.

  “Daddy’s sleeping,” she told Matthew as she led him to his room. “You can wake him up in the morning.” She shot me a wry look that made it clear they hadn’t had a wildly passionate evening.

  Saturday I woke to find a note: Chip and Matthew were off on a bike ride, Kate had taken Margaret into town. The morning was mine. I poured myself a mug of coffee and called Max. He was already at the paper.

  “All hell’s breaking loose,” he told me. The high school guidance counselor had been accused of rape by a junior. The town was taking sides. It was possible that the counselor had also falsified some references to colleges. It was a terrible mess. The newspaper’s phones were ringing constantly. We talked about the counselor, the girl’s family, the lawyers, the evidence, the need for great caution in reporting this, and suddenly it was noon and Matthew and Chip and Margaret and Kate were bounding into the room. I told Max good-bye; he’d call on Sunday to talk to Margaret.

  “We ran into each other in town,” Kate said. “We’ve brought lunch.” She spread a variety of sandwiches out on the kitchen table. Something abrupt and edgy in her movements made me look from her to Chip.

  “So, what do you think?” Chip asked. He was patiently scraping mayonnaise off a sandwich for Matthew.

  I bent over Margaret’s plate, cutting her sandwich into small pieces, thinking, Whatever it is, Chip, if you can’t tell just by the way Kate’s mouth is set that the answer’s no, you’re thicker than I thought.

  “Why don’t you take Lucy,” Kate asked through clenched teeth.

  “Take me where?” I asked brightly.

  “Sailing,” Chip said. “This is a perfect day for a sail. Kate doesn’t want to go. I need someone to crew. Want to come?”

  “I—” Actually I had no idea whether I wanted to go or not. First I thought of Matthew, then Kate, then Margaret.

  “Go,” Kate said, plonking down into a chair. She lifted her long hair, tied it into a knot, let it all fall down again in a cascade of blond light. “Please. The kids need naps and so do I.” Kate looked at me. “Go.”

  The sailboat skipped over the choppy water as we sped between the cut in the Jetties and out toward the northeastern part of the island and the wide Atlantic. High above us the August sky spread in cloudless blue, but toward the northeast whipped-cream clouds were piling up. Dozens of motorboats and sailboats dotted the horizon like a million Monet canvases flickering in the wind.

  Everything was new to me and excitingly unfamiliar: the rough bite of line as I sheeted in the jib, the impatient flap of the sails, like wings of a great bird lifting off into the sky, the greed of the boat to move, so that it seemed we spent as much time reining it in as letting it go.

  Chip was totally engrossed in the sail and infinitely patient with me as I bumbled around taking directions from him, usually having to ask him what he meant. The wind was capricious and unsettled, blowing steadily, suddenly gusting. We skipped across the waves, the bow lifting and falling wildly in the churning water. The low green and gold shoreline raced past us as we headed out into water that was the rich, brilliant blue of great depth. I was secretly afraid, and very grateful that we hadn’t tried to bring the children.

  Chip sat out hard on the side of the boat, using his weight to balance the heeling of the vessel. He was grinning from ear to ear. It occurred to me that I’d never seen him look quite so young and happy. The stiff restraint with which he carried himself at all times had lifted off, and he was moving fluidly. He was exactly where he wanted to be, and it was exciting to see him. Exciting and oddly intimate. This was a man I didn’t know; this was his secret heart, exposed.

  If Kate weren’t my best friend, if I weren’t so happily married … I slammed the lid tight on the thought.

  When I looked back at the water, I saw that it had darkened, had become as indigo blue as the sky just before night falls. I looked up. Storm clouds were advancing toward us like an implacable battalion, bearing the wind. The dark surging sea frothed with whitecaps. All at once I was frightened.

  “We should go back!” I shouted at Chip.

  He looked surprised. It was as if he’d forgotten I was there. I saw him evaluate the situation. The wall of clouds rolled relentlessly forward, blocking out the sun. The air grew chill. The water deepened to a green-black.

  “Right,” he said. “Ready about. Hard-a-lee.”

  I scrambled for the next few moments, ducking under the boom, then settling back and sheeting in the jib sheet. We planed across the water, the waves slapping against the bow. We were far from shore now, but speeding back, and I grew a little more comfortable as the land enlarged.

  Rain began to fall in large, fat, icy drops. The wind whipped it sideways so that it stung my skin. A gust came roaring up, Chip yelled something at me that the wind ri
pped away, and the little boat lifted up on the crest of a wave, rode the air for a few wild moments, tilted sideways, and plummeted toward the water. This was way past my experience with sailing, and I was frightened, but Chip was laughing.

  “This is great, isn’t it?” he yelled, and was too busy with the boat to wait for my response.

  I wrapped my arms around myself. If I were on land, I’d love this. This was the sort of weather that drew Margaret and me from the house in our rubber boots and rain slickers to dance along the beach, stretching our arms out for maximum impact from the wind, throwing our heads back to catch raindrops in our mouths, shrieking with exhilaration.

  Now I hunkered down in the cabin, cold and wet and worried. It was a relief to see all the other boats heading in; we looked like a regatta. When we slipped back through the cut in the Jetties and entered the calmer waters of the harbor, I felt my muscles unclench. If I had to, I could swim from here to shore. In only moments we were back at Chip’s rented buoy. I helped Chip lower and roll the sails. We took a launch back to shore, where I actually thought about kissing the ground.

  As we walked to the car, Chip hugged me against him with one arm, a side-by-side, jovial, comradely sort of hug. “How’d you like that?”

  “It was a little too much for me,” I confessed.

  “Were you frightened?” he asked as we arrived at the car.

  I nodded. The weather had changed so quickly; when we came out I’d worn only a bathing suit and a T-shirt, both of which were completely wet. I found a towel in the backseat and wrapped it around my shoulders like a shawl.

  “God, I’m sorry, Lucy.” Chip turned on the heating, even though he seemed perfectly comfortable in only his wet swimsuit and visored cap. “I grew up sailing. I forget that it’s not second nature to everyone else.”

  “You really love it, don’t you?”

  “It’s a lifesaver.”