Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  Caroline jerked awake. What the hell did that mean? Suddenly sad and lonely, she kissed Diana awake and buried her face between Diana’s large breasts.

  The next morning Caroline awoke before Diana, got up, fixed toast and coffee, and brought them back to bed on a tray. Diana, hidden under the comforter with just her scrambled red head protruding, smiled without opening her eyes. “You beat me to it.”

  “Anything to keep you in my bed,” said Caroline, piling up pillows.

  “Actually I have to get up in a few minutes.”

  Caroline paused to look at her. She’d been anticipating a morning in bed like in the old days, when magazines, books, food and dirty dishes, cats, dogs, and children had gradually filled the room. Amelia the cat already lay purring in a nest in the comforter at the foot of the bed. “Are you on duty today?”

  “No, I’m going shopping with Suzanne.” She avoided looking at Caroline.

  Caroline climbed into bed and took the tray on her lap. “So cancel it.”

  Diana sat up and slipped on her nightgown. “She wants me to help her pick out an outfit for her sister’s wedding next week.”

  “She’s a big girl. I’m sure she can buy her own clothes. Tell her you’re busy.”

  “Suzanne’s been counting on me to help her.”

  “Well, I’ve been counting on you to fuck me,” said Caroline with a grin.

  “We did that already,” laughed Diana. “Quite a lot as I recall.”

  “So what was that charming little interlude all about then?”

  “What do you mean?” Diana picked up a piece of toast.

  “You waft in here in the middle of the night, seduce me, and now you rush off to your child bride. What the hell are you doing?”

  Diana looked at her with surprise, toast halfway to her mouth. “I wanted you. You apparently wanted me. We had each other. And now life continues.”

  “I see.” Caroline’s heart contracted into its shell like a turtle’s head. This was a fling, not a reconciliation and renewal.

  Diana drank the last of her coffee and rolled out of bed.

  “Have a lovely day,” snarled Caroline.

  “Thanks.”

  “Leave the lights on tonight. I’ve got a date with Brian and may be home late.”

  “Why a man?” Diana asked as she picked her terry cloth robe off the floor, where she’d flung it last night.

  “Why a teenager?” Caroline sipped her coffee.

  Diana whirled around and stalked out. Caroline called, “And please phone next time before turning up in my bed. I may not be alone.”

  Diana returned to the doorway and leaned against it, eyeing Caroline. “The therapy is definitely changing you, but I’m not sure I like the changes.”

  “Too bad.” Inside Caroline was terrified. If Diana didn’t like the changes, she wouldn’t stick around, even in this attenuated form. But no one had stuck around in any case. You feel you have to do nice things to keep them around? Maybe so, but it hadn’t worked. She’d knocked herself out doing nice things, and where were all the recipients today? The most appealing aspect to Brian was that maybe he’d stick around. He showed every sign of being prepared to devote himself to her. Maybe she could work up a similar case of devotion to him. The boys would have a father; she’d have a husband; she’d be respectable again; together they’d have plenty of money, even with his payments to his wife. The only thing missing was that spark of excitement that had ignited all her other relationships. She’d been Miss Kitty to Jackson’s Matt Dillon; Maid Marion to David Michael’s Robin Hood; Cherry Ames, Rural Nurse, alongside Diana. But Brian didn’t inspire her. But maybe that was a function of encroaching middle age. Maybe she could no longer fool herself that any mortal could live up to the lyrics of those popular songs on the car radio behind the Stop ’n Shop: “You are my special angel, sent from up above…” But maybe she and Brian could share a mature love, like Hannah and her husband. If the sexual connection worked, maybe everything else would—like boxcars hooking up to an engine.

  She leaped out of bed and rushed to the store, where she bought ingredients for a dinner. Roast lamb, scalloped potatoes, spinach salad, apricot souffle, a good wine. She cooked and cleaned all day, then dressed carefully in her least dykey outfit, a silk shirt and tweed skirt. She splashed herself with Chanel No. 5, rather than the usual Eau Sauvage Diana loved. She stole some makeup from Sharon’s room and tried to recall how to apply it.

  When Brian appeared at her door, flushed from the cold, she announced, “I’ve cooked supper. I thought maybe we could stay home tonight.”

  “Fantastic,” he said, eyeing her speculatively. “It smells wonderful. Or is that you?”

  He’d had his children for the school vacation. They’d just returned to Irene in Boston. He’d taken a few days off to go skiing with them at North Conway, and talked about their progress on the slopes, as he and Caroline drank Scotch on the sofa in front of the fire before supper. Caroline studied his profile. He was a very attractive man, especially with his skiing tan, which set off his white teeth.

  “I miss them terribly,” he said. “When I think about them growing up without me around to watch, it kills me.”

  “I can imagine.” She reflected on how different Brian’s involvement with his children was from Jackson’s benign neglect. “I wish my husband felt the same.”

  “Doesn’t he want your sons around?”

  “He invites them down a couple of times a year. But his wife is the one who spends time with them.”

  “Boys need a father,” said Brian, looking into the fire.

  “I agree.” Caroline studied Brian’s sad eyes and receding hairline, and wondered if she could fan her warm feelings for him into a flame. If only Diana hadn’t fucked her senseless last night.

  “And a man needs a woman,” he added, looking at her with urgency.

  Unable to think of a comeback, Caroline opened her arms. Holding her face with his delicate hands, he kissed her hungrily.

  Leading him into her bedroom, Caroline felt her face twitching. It had been a long time since she’d been with a man, and her final experiences with David Michael had been painful and humiliating. But maybe it would be fine. And if it was, her life might take on a new simplicity, stability, and integrity.

  “I can’t exactly remember what to do,” she said as she and Brian stretched out naked next to each other. She did remember about stiff cocks, one of which was now prodding her abdomen like a doctor feeling for a tumor.

  “I think it will all come back to you,” said Brian, putting an arm around her waist and pulling her to him.

  And it did. Evidently lovemaking was like swimming. You didn’t forget how despite long periods of inactivity. As Brian entered her slowly and lay still for several moments, she recalled the safe feeling of having her hollows filled by a man. With a man around again, maybe there’d be no voids.

  “Are you okay?” he asked in a trembling voice.

  “Yes,” she gasped. “Proceed.”

  “Do you want some supper?” Caroline murmured afterwards, smelling the lamb burning in the oven. He shook his head no, holding her tightly, face buried in her neck.

  The next morning she tossed the charred leg of lamb out the door to Arnold, thinking guiltily of Howard in Chad fighting famine, and took Brian eggs, bacon, and toast on a tray, feeling malicious pleasure at performing one of her and Diana’s rituals with him. Diana’s Chevette was in the driveway, alongside Caroline’s Subaru and Brian’s Pontiac; Suzanne’s Toyota was missing. Caroline hoped Diana was upstairs glaring out the window at this latter-day hitching post.

  “This has been wonderful,” Brian told her at the door as he left to do rounds. He touched her lips with his fingertips. “For you too, I hope?”

  “Very much so.” Caroline took his hand and kissed the fingers, which had functioned with as much delicacy and proficiency last night as at the operating table. Stiff cocks aside, she thought maybe she could fall in love with
a man with hands like that. And why not? She’d been in love with practically everyone else.

  “I’ll call you tonight,” he said.

  “Good. I’ll look forward to it. Have a pleasant day, you lovely man.”

  The phone rang as Brian drove out the driveway. “That was very cute,” said Diana.

  “Oh? Did you think so? It wasn’t meant to be cute. It was meant to be fun. And it was.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Continuing with my life. Just like you said yesterday.”

  “How can you do that to that nice man?”

  “Why don’t you mind your own goddam business, Diana?”

  “I am, and I don’t want men in my house.”

  There was a stunned silence. Ever since they’d been lovers, it had been their house.

  “You want me to move out?” Caroline finally asked.

  “No, of course I don’t. I just wish you’d get your act together.”

  “Your act, of course, is a miracle of coherence.” Caroline stood in her down bathrobe twisting the phone cord around her arm.

  “At least I’m not messing around with men.”

  “What if I’m not messing around with Brian, Diana? What if I mean it?”

  “If that’s true, then, yes, I do want you out.”

  “Fine.” Caroline slammed down the phone, nearly dislocating her arm with the cord tangled around it.

  The bus from Boston pulled in on time, and Jackie and Jason got off, safe and unmolested, each cradling a BB gun like a violinist a Stradi-varius.

  “What on earth are those?” asked Caroline, trying to embrace them around the guns.

  “Rifles, what do they look like?” said Jason, with a Robert Mitchum look of bland superiority.

  “Dad gave them to us,” said Jackie. “Aren’t they neat? He couldn’t take us to the Celtics, so he gave us these instead.”

  “Wonderful,” said Caroline, taking the gun Jackie handed her as though it were contaminated with strontium 90. “Why couldn’t he take you to the Celtics?”

  “He had a mergency,” replied Jason, sighting down his gun at Leonard Litter painted on the side of the trash receptacle on the sidewalk.

  “I should have guessed. Well, I don’t like guns, boys. I want you to send them back to your father. You can use them when you’re down there.”

  “Ah, Mom!” they howled in unison.

  “Never mind. We’ll discuss it later.” For the moment there were more pressing problems, such as where to live next.

  As they drove out of town along the lake road, Jackie in the backseat and Jason riding shotgun, the boys chattered about their journeys around Boston with Deirdre. “You know what we saw, Mom?” asked Jason, aiming his rifle at some Holstein cows waiting to be milked lined up outside a barn. “In the park watching the swan boats. Two lezzies holding hands.”

  “It was gross,” said Jackie, leaning on the front seat.

  Caroline frowned. What did they think had been going on around them all these years? “What are lezzies?” asked Caroline, just checking.

  “Girl queers,” said Jackie, flopping back in his seat.

  “Why is that gross?” asked Caroline. “Men and women hold hands all the time.”

  “Yeah, but they’re supposed to,” said Jason.

  Caroline felt rage rising into her throat—at the culture that had put these notions into her little boys’ heads. “And women who care about each other aren’t supposed to?” The boys were suddenly silent, Jason stroking the barrel of his gun. Caroline looked at them. All her years of effort, and they would still grow into men, and stalk the woods and battlefields with their instruments of destruction.

  “Look,” she said in a low, wavering voice, “the best people you know are lesbians.”

  They said nothing for a long time. Finally Jason asked, “Like who?”

  “Like Jenny. Like Pam. Like Brenda. Like Barb. Like Diana.”

  “Like you, Mom?” asked Jason, looking at her. Jackie was silent in the backseat. Lake views were flashing by out the windows.

  Caroline drove in silence, wondering what the honest answer to this question was. She drew a deep breath, then said, “Yes, like me.”

  “Ah Mom, do you have to be a lezzie?” asked Jason, sighting along his rifle barrel at a dead cat in the road. “Pow!” he yelled, falling back into the seat from the imagined recoil.

  Caroline thought this over, then replied, “I don’t know.”

  As she walked in the door, the phone was ringing. It was Brian. “I’ve been trying to reach you. Where have you been?”

  What’s it to you? she thought. Then she remembered they’d made love last night. She was his honey. “The boys are back from Boston. I picked them up at the bus station.”

  “We ought to get together with our ex-spouses and coordinate this. The kids could ride up from Boston together. Get acquainted.”

  “Good idea.” He was already taking charge. It was what she thought she wanted, but now that it was happening, she felt colonized. Wasn’t it enough that she was allowing him into her body? Did he have to take over the rest of her life as well? But she needed a place to live, and he kept mentioning his big empty lonely stone house.

  “When can I see you again? How about tomorrow night?”

  “I need to spend some time with the boys, Brian. They’ve been gone all week.”

  “I understand. But we could all spend time together. The four of us.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea just yet, Brian. I think they need me to themselves.”

  “How about Thursday night then?”

  “All right. Fine.” After hanging up, she stood with her hand on the receiver trying to figure out what she was doing. Three lovers in one week, after none for months, appeared to be addling her brain. She wanted to pick up the phone, dial Hannah, and ask her what to do. But she could already picture Hannah shrugging, smiling wryly, and saying, “Choices, Caroline.” But to choose, you first had to know what you wanted.

  • 5 •

  Simon’s new woman Estelle was attractive, Hannah supposed, if you went for the Farrah Fawcett look. Cascades of blond hair; made up to look as though she wasn’t; well dressed in pleated trousers and a silk shirt that featured birds of paradise. Hannah sneaked glances at her as they ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding off Arthur’s mother’s Wedgwood in the circle of light from the Tiffany lamp above the oak pedestal table. Estelle seemed bright and even-tempered, and nice to Simon. Though of course they’d just begun. It was intriguing to try to figure out how each of Simon’s girlfriends was similar to herself, since presumably that was why he picked them. They were always attractive, which Hannah took as a compliment. Usually intelligent and competent. And a trifle sharp-tongued, which Hannah was unsure how to take.

  Simon, on the opposite side of the table in the spot where he presided as a boy, teasing and bossing the younger children, had the glazed cat-who’s-swallowed-the-canary look of the first flush of sexual passion. Hannah was amused to notice twinges of unpleasant emotions in herself. Inappropriate now that Simon was nearly middle-aged, but evidently still operative. Jealousy that another woman was replacing her. Envy toward anyone in that mad state of simple-minded besottedness when nothing that wasn’t reflected in the eyes of the beloved even existed. Anger that Simon had brought Estelle here to parade this in front of his aging mother, who’d spent a lot of time being sweet to him during his past months of anguish. Grief that he was withdrawing from her after these months of closeness. Anyone who thought sex united people was out to lunch. Simon and Estelle could see and hear no one but each other right now, and not that very clearly.

  “So where do you work?” she asked Estelle, cutting her meat. Arthur’s eyes were amused as he listened to the drama being acted out on an airwave higher than the frequency of sound.

  As Estelle said something about issuing rent subsidy checks, flipping back one side of her hair with a hand, Hannah glanced at her handsom
e, horrible son in his suede vest and tweed jacket and recalled his first serious girlfriend, when he was seventeen. Penny had braces, saddle shoes, a ponytail, and Simon’s class ring on a chain around her neck. He paraded her similarly, signaling to his mother to back off. He stayed out late with Hannah’s car night after night. Once he left a used condom on the back floor. She and Arthur grumbled, as they were supposed to. Though her side of it didn’t carry much conviction, since she remembered only too well what she was doing in that gardener’s shed with Colin at Simon’s age. Simon ranted about how they were stifling and suffocating him, as he was supposed to. She figured if he got out his rebelliousness with her and Arthur then, he wouldn’t plague some poor therapist in a few years, or some poor spouse for a lifetime. But even with all the practice she’d had relinquishing people dear to her, it had been difficult to let Simon go. And harder still when he wanted to come back emotionally after ditching Penny. Since then he’d come and gone several times, but it still wasn’t easy. Each time someone she cared about withdrew, it evoked echoes of all those others who departed and never returned—her parents, her grandparents, Maggie, Colin, Nigel and Mona. As far as Hannah was concerned, intimacy was definitely an overrated experience, considering the inevitable aftermath.

  “So where are you from?” asked Arthur.

  Hannah shot him a look of gratitude for keeping the conversation going. Simon wasn’t helping at all, the bastard. He was behaving just like a client. They’d cling to her while they recovered from a breakup. But when they found a new true love, they’d invent a reason to terminate. Until the new relationship broke up. Unfortunately, she had more to offer than a breakup service. She was pleased if someone stuck around to see what might be found on the far side of passion—rather than burying his head in the shifting sands of sex, as Simon seemed hell-bent on doing. Of course he had a lot to hide out from. For years he felt Mona’s and Nigel’s deaths were his fault since he’d been in the house when they happened, albeit unconscious and nearly dead himself.

  “Why does he do that to me?” she asked Arthur after Simon and Estelle left, explaining self-consciously that they wanted to make it an early evening.