Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  Unfortunately, David Michael’s regime for freeing himself from bodily preoccupations eventually involved orgasms with other women. Caroline went numb and silent at night watching him climb the stairs to his room with Clea behind him. Whom anyone slept with was unimportant in the face of the sub-Saharan drought, he maintained. And since Caroline couldn’t deny this, she tried to accept it. She and Clea began meeting with Sandra, another woman in the commune, who agreed to facilitate as they processed their hostility. Caroline accused Clea of stealing her man. Clea accused Caroline of bourgeois possessiveness. Caroline accused Clea of intellectual elitism. Once they’d run out of accusations, they sat in strained silence as Caroline began to comprehend why David Michael had wanted to bed Clea. She started having torrid dreams about naked female bodies with long golden hair and large soft breasts. When she was making love with David Michael, she sometimes fantasized that he had breasts, and that his penis was Clea’s hand.

  One afternoon after several silent meetings, Clea said, “Look, Caroline, do you really care about that narcissistic bastard?” Caroline smiled with relief, and they went upstairs to Caroline’s room hand in hand, Sandra nodding approval from the auto seat in the living room….

  Caroline climbed into the tile whirlpool, lowered herself into the scalding water, and propped her feet on the seat opposite. As bubbling water swirled over her chest, she closed her eyes and thought about how it had felt to hold Clea’s breasts in her hands, soft, heavy and smooth like bread dough….

  When she opened her eyes, a woman with a cap of light brown hair was stepping into the whirlpool. She looked like Caroline’s dream counselor from the Quaker work camp in New York State she attended as a girl, at which they helped some Algonquin Indians build a recreation hall. Joyce taught woodcraft. Everyone called her Jo Jo. Long, lean, wholesome and friendly, she wore blindingly white long-sleeved shirts, sleeves turned up twice to display the dark tan and bleached hairs on her forearms. Caroline had tied knots and lashed tripods in a frenzy of concentration, trying to win Jo Jo’s approval.

  Caroline and the woman smiled and nodded as the woman sat down. She had had an excellent orthodontist, and her eyes were liquid brown like Arnold’s. Foamy water washed over the woman’s high firm breasts, stiffening the brown nipples. Caroline felt a sharp stab of desire. People came and went, but she could always count on her lust. It had been the only reliable element in her life. She’d endure any amount of abuse as long as the sexual connection with someone was intact. But when that went, so did she. She recalled the evening she told David Michael she was leaving for Diana’s cabin in New Hampshire. He exhaled smoke from a joint with a hiss. They were lying on his mattress in the light from a streetlamp. The American flags at the windows flapped in the spring breeze as though from flagpoles.

  “I knew you wouldn’t stick it, baby, without your fancy house and boat and Mercedes,” David Michael said, handing her the joint.

  “That’s got nothing to do with it.” She held the remaining half inch of joint between thumb and forefinger, trying to draw on it without searing her fingers.

  “Sure it doesn’t.”

  “But it doesn’t.”

  “So what does?” She passed the soggy bit of smoldering paper back to him.

  “I don’t know exactly.” His sleeping with Clea had something to do with it. Her sleeping with Clea also had something to do with it. When Clea wasn’t insisting that Caroline’s and her nights together were a fluke, Caroline was. They were ricocheting off each other and back to David Michael’s heterosexual assurances, where they turned on each other with savagery. The big happy family was falling to pieces. Diana had written from New Hampshire that Mike had walked out to follow his star, and she needed a roommate with a shoulder to cry on. So Caroline fell back on an old solution: numb withdrawal, leaving the struggle to Clea and David Michael.

  “Don’t know, or won’t admit?” said David Michael, handing her the eighth of an inch of joint, which he held between two fingernails. It was like playing Hot Potato; you didn’t want to be left holding the joint. “Won’t admit that you miss your Newton comforts? That you’re just a boring little bourgeois housewife masquerading as a revolutionary?”

  “Whatever you like, David Michael.” It was probably true. She’d ceased to believe in David Michael’s revolution. Among her many meetings were some with the nurses at the clinic. If nothing else, they finally figured out that the wounds they spent their days binding—from rapes, knife fights, batterings, and muggings—were almost entirely inflicted by men. Capitalism wasn’t the problem. Racism wasn’t. Nationalism wasn’t. Men were. Caroline was beginning to want as little as possible to do with them, and with this man lying next to her in particular. She squashed what remained of the joint in the Lincoln Continental hubcap David Michael had stolen from the limousine of some Pentagon official during the March on Washington.

  “Damn it, don’t waste that shit! Not everybody can afford to run around putting out half-smoked joints.”

  “Meaning I can?” she asked. “The damn thing was nearly nonexistent.”

  “It requires sacrifice to build a better world. And that’s something you know nothing about, sweetheart. Me, I’ve sacrificed a lucrative practice in the suburbs.”

  “That’s no sacrifice.” She looked at his body—pale, bony, and hairy in the shifting light, his penis sluglike. In stark contrast to Clea’s firm mounds and smooth curves. She could scarcely recall what about him had inspired her to leave Jackson.

  “Okay, so you tell me about sacrifice, Caroline. You with your yacht and your Mercedes.”

  “I’m not talking about yachts. I don’t give a shit about yachts. I don’t think building a better world has anything to do with yachts.” What it did have to do with she no longer knew. Not bandaging torn anuses in some storefront slum while your lover balled your friends in the back room.

  “Suit yourself.” He got up and shrugged on his light green scrub clothes. “I’ve got more pussy than I can handle right now anyway.”

  As she watched him walk out, she longed to open wide her arms and call him back. If she wasn’t Maid Marion to David Michael’s Robin Hood, who was she? A boring little bourgeois housewife, he said, but she’d already been that, and you couldn’t retrace an overgrown path….

  Caroline opened her eyes to discover the other woman’s eyes on her breasts. She looked back for a moment, then concentrated on the water jet pulsing into the small of her back. Why had her lovers always withdrawn? She hadn’t given them what they needed so they looked elsewhere? But she’d always tried so hard. What was it they wanted? Diana said she was a taker. Jackson said she was too intense. David Michael said she was a boring bourgeois housewife.

  The image of Hannah floated into her head, smiling at her, liking her, telling her she was kind, gentle, and generous. That how other people saw her was their problem, a projection of their own hopes and fears. She sighed and felt the tightness in her shoulders give up its grip.

  Then she inspected what she’d done—used Hannah to feel better. She’d become utterly dependent on her. Yet Hannah might die, move away, get fed up with Caroline’s neediness. The tightness returned to her shoulders and began to spread down her back.

  She climbed out of the whirlpool and went into the steam room, which was like a giant shower stall. Lying on a wooden bench, she breathed deeply, feeling the scalding air move through her nose and down toward her lungs. A long lean female silhouette stood outside the clouded glass door. The door opened, steam rushed out, and the woman from the whirlpool came in. She lay at the opposite end of Caroline’s bench. Their feet bumped. Each murmured, “Sorry.”

  Closing her eyes, Caroline pictured the woman coming over to kneel beside her, caress her breasts, and lick her nipples. She jumped up, went out, and took an ice-cold shower until she was thoroughly numb. Then she returned to the top shelf of the sauna.

  The woman came in and stretched out on the bottom shelf. Caroline glanced down at the long well
-shaped legs, and the triangle of fair pubic hair where the legs joined. The woman opened her eyes and met Caroline’s. Caroline looked quickly at the joints between the cedar paneling on the far wall, and tried to figure out if the woman was following her on purpose. Surely someone so wholesome looking wouldn’t be on the make.

  They dried their hair side by side in front of the brightly lit mirrors. Arranging her hair with her Afro pick, Caroline glanced out of the corner of her eye at the woman in her beige bra and panties. Caroline wanted to run her hand down the curve of the woman’s side and up the ridge in the middle of her back. That was all. Nothing fancy.

  They dressed in tandem on the gray carpet, studiously pulling on shirts, Levi’s, and boots. The woman zipped her down parka as she walked for the door. Hand on the handle, she turned. “Look, forgive me if I’ve got this wrong. It’s not something I ever do. But would you like to come to my apartment?”

  Caroline’s heart pounded and her palms broke out with sweat. “Uh, how far?” As though that were the issue.

  “A few blocks.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  As they walked down Boylston Street in silence, past darkened stores and noisy restaurants, Caroline wondered if she ought to apologize for having made a mistake. But David Michael did this all the time. A lot of men did. Women too, for all she knew. Just because she always signed over her soul to anyone she was sexual with was no reason to assume it had to be that way. But what would Diana say? Fuck it, if Diana didn’t want her, other women did. Besides, who said she had to tell her? They weren’t having that kind of relationship anymore.

  What about Brian? Jesus Christ, what about Brian? She’d dated him a few times and was already worrying about taking care of him. She hadn’t even been to bed with him. Let him worry about himself. She’d warned him to find a woman who wasn’t a pervert. He simply wasn’t her responsibility, however lonely and bewildered he might be.

  What about Hannah? Her step faltered. What if Hannah found this behavior sordid and kicked her out? Hannah had a marriage of four decades or something. But who said she was monogamous? But surely she was, she seemed so respectable. But the camp counselor walking beside her with her hands in her parka pockets looked respectable too. What did Hannah have to do with this anyway? If she minded Caroline’s going to bed with someone, let her go to bed with Caroline herself. There had to be some way to get that damn woman out of her head.

  The apartment was one large fourth-floor room with a kitchen in one corner, a dining table and bentwood chairs in another, and a bed piled with cushions in a third. The floor was polished oak covered with area rugs. Plants hung in elaborately framed windows that stretched along two walls from floor to ceiling.

  “What a comfortable room,” said Caroline, taking off her Frye boots on the doormat.

  “Thanks. It’s ideal for me. Big enough to spread out in, but small enough so I don’t have a lot of cleaning. Want some coffee or brandy or something?”

  They sat cross-legged among the cushions sipping brandy from snifters as cars passed on the wet pavement below with a hissing sound. Caroline was reluctant to talk. They both knew why they were there, and getting acquainted wasn’t the reason. But manners were manners.

  “Do you go to that place often?” asked Caroline.

  “Yes. A lot. Do you?”

  “That was my first time. It’s really nice.”

  “Yes, it is.” She put her brandy snifter on the floor. Caroline did the same. Looking at each other, they slowly tossed all the cushions off the bed. After undressing, they climbed under the homespun bedspread. Caroline rubbed the spread between thumb and forefinger, automatically inspecting the weave.

  “Well, what do you like?” Caroline asked briskly, not knowing how to do this.

  “A lot of everything,” the woman replied with her wholesome smile, stretching her long lean body alongside Caroline’s. It already felt familiar to Caroline’s hands as she touched it tentatively, having inspected it visually from every angle.

  Caroline felt a moment of panic. It would probably be better to leave now and spend the rest of her life fantasizing what it might have been like, than to forge ahead and have the reality be awkward and uninspired. It had been so many years since she’d touched anyone except Diana. She didn’t know what to do.

  The woman smiled her camp counselor smile, then gave Caroline a decidedly unwholesome kiss. It occurred to Caroline she could probably figure this out. With each previous lover, lovemaking had been a microcosm of the entire relationship. All the stresses and expectations out of bed had found their way into bed in stylized form, like a Balinese dance. How someone made love was a template of his or her personality. The ever efficient Jackson was in and out as quickly as possible. David Michael teased, taunted, withdrew, and withheld. Diana gave pleasure unstintingly, but sometimes received it with reluctance. But she and this woman next to her, who was kissing her with proficiency, had no past together, and no shared future. There was only the present moment, and two healthy female animals, who had begun to explore each other with mouths and hands, like lost prospectors finding a water hole in the desert.

  There were silver stretch marks around the woman’s nipples, Caroline noticed as she sucked and nibbled them. She had a child, or several. But the apartment was one room, and there were no toys. The child was grown, gone, dead? Caroline realized she didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to babysit for her, fight child custody battles with her, only wanted to give and take physical pleasure, for that moment alone.

  Eventually they lay with their mouths, tongues, and breasts rubbing together and their hands moving inside each other. Like a blind person reading braille, Caroline felt with her fingertips as the texture of the woman’s vaginal walls shifted from velvet to corduroy. Increasing her movements, she felt the woman’s vagina grip her fingers convulsively. And her own career as Saint Celibate terminated abruptly in slow shuddering heaves that obeyed the rhythm of the woman’s hand.

  Later Caroline lay holding the woman and watching headlights from the street sweep across the room. So that was how women settled the issue of who came first—simultaneous orgasm? Diana would be pleased to know. She thought with satisfaction of how annoyed Diana would in fact be. But probably she wouldn’t tell her. Caroline needed a few secrets to sustain her in their struggle.

  “If camp had been like this,” Caroline murmured, “I’d have gone every summer.”

  “Excuse me?” The woman propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at Caroline questioningly.

  “Do you have any idea how wholesome you look?”

  “So I’m told,” she replied with a white-toothed smile.

  Caroline put her hands under her head and savored the fact that she didn’t know or care who’d told the woman that. They didn’t have to meet each other’s mothers or learn how much sugar to put in each other’s coffee. They’d never lay eyes on each other again. But she realized if she stayed much longer, she’d be waking up next to this woman in the morning, which wasn’t part of the deal. “I’m afraid I have to go.”

  The woman looked relieved. “You don’t need to rush off.”

  “Someone’s expecting me,” Caroline lied. “How would you feel about our not exchanging phone numbers?”

  The woman smiled. “Fine. I have certain…complications in my life.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “You’re a marvelous lover. Thank you.”

  “Thank you. It’s been great. Take care.”

  Caroline walked along the nearly deserted street to her Subaru feeling fantastic. She’d never known you could go to bed with people without assuming their debts, writing them into your will, adopting their children, folding their laundry, rubbing ointment into their hemorrhoids. She’d had no idea irresponsibility could feel so good. She began whistling, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”

  Caroline sat down and studied her new view of the parking lot. There was a photo on the wall next to the window that she’d never n
oticed from where she used to sit. Black and white, abstract. She couldn’t tell what it was.

  “So what’s new with you?” asked Hannah as she looked up from her appointment book, thinking surely something was, because Caroline had perked up since their last session like a potato plant after you plucked off Colorado potato beetles.

  “Nothing much.”

  Hannah sat back and lit a cigarette. “You look really nice today.”

  Caroline wore cords and a flannel shirt, had had her Afro trimmed. The bruised circles under her eyes were less noticeable than usual.

  “Thanks. So do you.” There was color to Hannah’s cheeks, and she looked rested.

  “I was in Maine over the weekend. Eating lobsters, reading, sleeping late, breathing sea air. Wonderful.” It was also wonderful to return and find clients had done fine in your absence.