Between Husbands and Friends

by Thayer, Nancy

  Her tongue stuck between her teeth as she concentrated, Margaret gently placed the baby in Kate’s arms, then she skipped up the stairs.

  Matthew said, “There, Mom! What do you think?”

  Kate scrutinized her red toenails. “It looks perfect, Matthew. Thanks.”

  Matthew climbed up on the sofa, snuggled next to his mother, and made a series of comic faces at his sister. Abby cooed and reached out for him, enchanted. Then her face flushed again and she threw herself backward and began to cry in earnest.

  “She’s hungry, honey.”

  “Here’s the diaper!” Margaret skipped back into the room.

  Kate put the diaper on her shoulder, unbuttoned her shirt and unfastened her bra. She lifted her breast into her daughter’s mouth, adjusted her arm and legs. Margaret sat on one side, watching every movement with wide eyes. On the other side, Matthew scooted close to his mother, reached out his finger, and grinned when Abby clutched it in her fist. The four of them sat there, completely engrossed in the moment.

  I could almost feel the tug of a baby’s mouth on my nipple, the answering pull deep in my pelvis. The tingling flood of milk. The relief and the narcotic sensations of pleasure. The knowledge of being pulled into the sweet hot core of the universe.

  I rose and went upstairs. No one called my name.

  That weekend, Chip came down to visit his family and I went back to Sussex. Max had called to say he was so busy that he couldn’t come to Nantucket; he would try to come the next weekend. His voice on the phone had been dull, preoccupied, listless.

  My own week had been lonely. Kate and Abby and Matthew and Margaret had coalesced into a kind of hive with the baby at the center. Twice I’d taken the M&Ms to the beach while Kate and Abby napped, but when we returned home they flew from my side to find the baby.

  I know there is something mysterious and desirous about a nursing mother. There is something primitive and erotic and compelling about a woman with an infant, and Margaret was caught in the spell. At the back of my mind, I was glad. I wanted Margaret to see—to feel—the primal satisfaction of motherhood, so that she would want to have children, so that she would be a good, involved mother. It was possible she would not have the chance to observe this with me. I might never have another child. Certainly not if Max continued to be sexually numb.

  Perhaps it was the unusual heat of that summer, or the humidity that lay over the island like a press, or perhaps it was the spell of a baby, but the six-year-olds were oddly indolent, happy to lie on the floor staring at Abby, or gazing at picture books, or pretending to be babies themselves. I had nothing they wanted. So when I suggested that I go to Sussex to visit Max for the weekend and leave Margaret with Chip and Kate, Kate agreed happily.

  And so did Margaret.

  Max wasn’t home Friday night, so I left a message on our answering machine: “Max, I’m coming home for the weekend, and I’m bringing Nantucket to you.” In the back of the Volvo, I had a cooler packed with lobsters and ice and Nantucket butter-and-sugar corn fresh off the stalk. I had gotten a bit of a tan on Nantucket and a good rest, lying out in the sun, reading, while Margaret hung out with Abby and the gang. It was a treat, traveling all by myself; I put in tapes of Carl Nielsen’s symphonies and heard two all the way through, without interruption. By the time I arrived home, I was relaxed, hopeful, even eager to get on with life.

  We always had a local boy mow our lawn and water the flowers every August, and as I pulled into our driveway I noted with pleasure how tidy everything looked. Still, there was an air about the place that spoke of emptiness. Perhaps it was the shades pulled down on every single window. Against the sun?

  The house was empty when I walked in. I knew it would be. I knew Max would be at work. I planned to shower and set the table with candles and serve a succulent dinner and woo him back to life.

  The living room was slightly dusty and had a forlorn air. I walked through the kitchen and into the den, then stood there, stunned. The floor and coffee table and the top of the television were littered with empty Häagen-Dazs cartons, beer bottles, Cheez-It bags, and candy bar wrappers. Not just a few. A week’s worth. As if Max had been glutting himself on junk food.

  Within Max lived a secret slob; within all of us, probably. During the week before my period I consume chocolate and salt in bizarre combinations, but shame always drove me to hide the containers. Max was generally a tidy man. Even in the chaos of his office he knew where each article was, and while he might settle into a nest of beer and chips for a baseball game, he picked up afterward. But this. This room …

  I had called Max last night to tell him I was coming today. He had had time to pick up, to go through the room with a trash bag and stuff in at least the worst of the trash. This room was like a message. But what was the message? I can’t deal? I don’t care?

  The bathroom and bedroom were the same. The bed was mussed, one corner of the bottom sheet pulled away, exposing the mattress. A week’s worth of dirty clothes layered the floor. Damp towels huddled in clumps in the bathroom.

  This was not Max. Even in college he had not been so sloppy. I was angry and alarmed. I brought the cooler in and put the lobsters into the refrigerator, then I began to clean. I picked up a basket of clothes and began a wash. I went through the house picking up trash. I vacuumed, set the table, and showered. I put on a pretty dress that set off my tan and the figure I had regained over the past three months.

  Then I waited for Max to come home.

  It was after eight when I heard the car pull into the drive. I knew by heart how many seconds it took for him to slam the van door, come up the walk, put his key in the lock, and enter our house. I remained on the living room sofa, curled up with a book, wanting to give him all the space in the world.

  “Hey.” He set his briefcase on the floor and dropped into a chair.

  Perhaps it was that everyone on Nantucket looked supernaturally healthy, but to my eyes Max looked ill. Pale and pasty-faced, his shoulders slumped forward like a man who carried a heavy burden. His eyes were ringed with dark shadows and his multicolored beard sprouted in shaggily, unkempt tufts. His chinos and plaid cotton shirt were wrinkled and soiled.

  “I’ve brought lobster,” I said. “And fresh corn. The water’s boiling on the stove. Why don’t you shower? Dinner will be ready in ten minutes.”

  “I’m too tired to shower,” he said.

  I lighted the tapers on the dining room table. I bustled around in the kitchen, then carried steaming platters of luscious corn and red lobster to the table. I set bowls of butter before each plate. I’d bought a sparkling Italian white wine and I poured it into flutes.

  I flapped my napkin open exuberantly. “Tell me what’s happened in Sussex while I’ve been gone.”

  “Not much.” He bent over his plate, cracking a lobster claw.

  “Have they found a replacement for the superintendent of schools?”

  “Yes. Guy from Boston.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Great references. Dottie interviewed him. Said she liked him.”

  It was like oiling a rusty door, but smoothed with wine and buttery lobster and corn, Max relaxed. I kept plying him with questions. He answered. It was pretty much like having a conversation. It got us through the meal.

  Afterward, Max helped me carry the dishes into the kitchen. As I bent to open the dishwasher, he turned to leave the room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To my study. I’ve got work to do.”

  “You’ve always got work to do.” I tried to keep my voice light, teasing. I dried my hands on a towel. “Let’s do something else tonight.”

  “Lucy.”

  I sauntered toward him. “I want to show you my tan.” I shrugged one shoulder so that the strap of my dress fell down along my arm and the front of the dress dipped, exposing the line where tan skin met white.

  Max sighed. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  I pressed m
yself against him. Found the spot on his neck where my head fit perfectly.

  “Max.” I wrapped my arms around him. “Oh, Max. I’ve missed you.”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t hold me. His body didn’t answer mine. I rubbed against him, and felt no quickening response of lust.

  Taking his head in mine, I turned his face to mine and put my lips on his. It had been months since we had kissed. It felt odd, shocking. I ground my hips against his, ground my mouth against his. He remained passive.

  “Let’s go in the bedroom,” I suggested, and took hold of his hand, and tugged. “Come on.”

  He followed diffidently. It was strange to be alone in the house without Margaret, to be able to leave the bedroom door open. I pushed Max down on the bed and knelt over him. I reached for the zipper of his chinos. When my hand touched his skin, he gasped. I thought he gasped. But when I looked at his face, I saw that he was crying. His face was crumpled with sorrow.

  “Oh, Max,” I said. “Honey.”

  He sat up. Zipped up his pants. Took out a handkerchief and blew his nose.

  “Max. Talk to me.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder, and to my dismay, he flinched. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Max …”

  “I’ve got work to do.” He rose.

  “No!” I rose, too. “I won’t let you walk away from me. I’ve traveled all day to be with you. Max, don’t shut me out like this.”

  He stared at me through red-rimmed eyes. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to talk to me. I want you to talk to me about Maxwell’s death.”

  Again his face crumpled. He turned his back on me.

  “Max.”

  “I want a son,” he said.

  Something in his tone of voice chilled me. Moved me to a strange new realm of fear.

  “All right.” I spoke gently, as if he were a wounded animal. “Go on.”

  “What else is there to say?” Crossing the room, he sat down on the little slipper chair, oblivious of the several shirts he’d tossed there. “You … we lost our son.”

  “I know.” I sank onto the bed, facing him. Leaning toward him. “I know, and it’s unbearable, but somehow we have to bear it. And go on.”

  “I never wanted to tell you how much I want a son,” Max confessed. His face was in the shadows. “It seemed”—he laughed—“politically incorrect to admit how much I want a son. It doesn’t mean I don’t love Margaret. I love her more than the earth. But still … I want a son. I’ve dreamed about him, my boy, someone to teach baseball and soccer, to take fishing and camping like my father took me. Someone to take to the Red Sox games. To see the Celtics. Someone who looks like me. Someone who is like me. A male. A guy. My boy.”

  “I didn’t know.” I had never been so sad in all my life. “Oh, honey.”

  “Maxwell looked like me.”

  “Yes. He did.” We sat in silence for a while, thinking of the baby. Then I said what others had said to me, what the doctors had said, and the nurses, and all our well-meaning friends. What I didn’t believe until this moment. “We can have another baby, Max.”

  He shook his head sharply. “No.”

  “What do you mean, no? Of course we can have another baby.”

  “Go through nine months of waiting, and have another dead baby?”

  I was stunned by the bitterness in his voice. “Max, what happened to Maxwell was unusual. Unpredictable. Statistically—”

  “Statistically means nothing. Your record is, one live child, one dead. I don’t think we want to see what the third try brings.”

  “My record.”

  Max did not reply.

  I sat, letting his words reassemble in my mind, forming a new and terrible pattern. I want a son. Your record.

  “Max, are you saying that you don’t want to have another child with me?”

  He hesitated. “That’s right.”

  “But you want a son.” He nodded.

  A stream of ice poured down my spine. “You want to have a son with someone else.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “No,” I said firmly. “No, you can’t do this. You love me, Max, you know you do! You don’t want to have a baby with someone else! You need me, me and Margaret. You love us and we love you.” I knelt before him, taking his hands in mine. “Come on, sweetie. We can have another baby, a baby born healthy like Margaret!”

  He stared at me, and there was nothing but sorrow in his eyes.

  And a new thought struck me, and I shrank back from Max.

  “Are you in love with someone else?”

  He swatted my words away. “No.”

  “Max. You owe me the truth.”

  “No.”

  “Are you interested in someone else?” He didn’t reply.

  “Are you seeing someone else? While I’m in Nantucket?”

  “No.”

  “But there is someone else you want to see. Who? Some hefty wide-hipped cow who could birth entire tribes?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m trying not to be. But you’ve got to help me, Max. I’m in the dark here. I’m—I feel like someone who’s just been pushed over the edge of a cliff.”

  My fingertips and lips had gone numb and I was having trouble breathing.

  “Do you still love me, Max?”

  Max said, “I don’t know.”

  Summer 1991

  That weekend with Max was probably the loneliest weekend of my life. My husband had entered a dark solitude and shut me out. I was as worried for him as I was for our marriage. I didn’t think he was having an affair. He didn’t have the ease or glow of a man who was having an affair.

  Before I left Sussex to return to Nantucket, I had paid a private visit to Roland Cobb, Max’s second in command at the newspaper, and his good friend. Roland told me that even at the newspaper Max was showing signs of depression. He, too, was worried about Max. He promised to try to persuade Max to see a psychiatrist, to get some kind of help. His opinion would be more convincing to Max than mine.

  As I drove back to Hyannis, I told myself that when Max felt better, he would think rationally again. He would understand that we could have another child. That we could have another, living child.

  If staying with Max would have helped him, I would have brought Margaret back to spend the remainder of August in Sussex. But during that sorrowful weekend in August, I was made aware with every moment that my presence brought Max no joy, no relief. I was terrified; I was heartbroken. I had been warned that this could happen, that the death of a child often caused a couple to separate, but I never dreamed it could have happened to us. To Max and me. We were soul mates. I had to believe that when Max returned from his black confusion to find his soul again, he would remember me.

  And my daughter would come back to me, too, I knew. I understood her completely. She was totally enthralled with baby Abby. She was like a woman in love for the first time, a woman possessed, as the profound, instinctive, gripping magic of infant and mother displayed itself to her day after day. She could not take her eyes from Abby and Kate. She wanted to be both of them. She wanted to be in their skin.

  She was learning what it meant to be a mother.

  She was learning it from Kate.

  And Kate. I understood Kate, too. She was punch-drunk on hormones, blissed out by glands. She moved slowly. She was in no hurry. She was at the center of a hot, immediate, pungent, juicy world. She was like a queen, and Matthew and Margaret trailed her like the attendants she deserved.

  One night, during the middle of the week, I said to Kate, “Want to go dancing some night at the Muse?”

  She burst out laughing. “You must be kidding! With these?” She glanced down proudly, derisively, at her breasts. “But why don’t you go?”

  “Yeah, like I would go without you!”

  “I’m sorry, Lucy, but the thought of being in the room with a bunch of clueless drunks just doesn’t appeal to me anymore.”

>   I considered. “Well, then, why don’t you and I go out to dinner some night. The Chanticleer. I’ll treat.”

  Kate shifted on the sofa, stretching her beautiful long legs. She studied her brilliant red toenails. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m so lazy these days, Lucy. I’m perfectly content. Abby’s being such a good baby and the M&Ms are being such a help.”

  “You’ve changed.”

  “I know. I’ve lost that old craving for something new and exciting. But that’s all right. It’s probably natural. We all change as we grow older.”

  I considered saying, “Yeah, but, Kate, what about me? I need someone to play with. I need my friend.”

  But it would be demeaning to say that. I didn’t want to beg for her company.

  So I spent two more lonely weeks in my Aunt Grace’s house watching my daughter and Matthew hover around Kate and her baby as if held there by some kind of magnetic force. Chip arrived on Thursday night; he spent Friday swimming with Matthew. Margaret opted to stay with Kate and baby Abby. I spent the day by myself, at another part of the beach, reading the bloodiest paperback mystery I could find. Or, rather, I spent the day staring at the book, where the words ran together on the page into a blurry pattern no less incomprehensible than my life. When no one else was around, I let myself give in to great heaving soundless sobs. Before I went back to the house, I immersed myself in the water, so that my wet suit and dripping hair would provide a reason for my red-rimmed eyes.

  Then, on Saturday, Chip asked, “Anyone want to go sailing?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Kate said.

  I said, “I’ll go.”

  It was the third weekend in August, and very hot and muggy. Kate reclined on a chaise on the porch, reading; Abby drowsed nearby in a wicker cradle; Matthew and Margaret were in the backyard, running through the sprinkler.

  “Want to go to Tuckernuck?” He named a small island to the west of Nantucket.

  “Sure. I’ll pack a lunch.”

  I filled a hamper with all kinds of grown-up delicacies, and organized a carryall with towels and sunblock. I pulled Margaret from the rainbow arcs of the sprinkler water to tell her I’d be gone most of the day. She was dripping wet and giggling at Matthew who slid and fell on the slippery grass, and she pecked a kiss in the direction of my cheek before racing back into her game. I told Kate good-bye; she told me, without looking up from her book, to have fun.