by Robin Beeman
Some of the stories in this collection have previously appeared in the following magazines:
“Taking Fire” in Ascent; “Three Rivers” in Apalachee Quarterly;
“Life Signs,” “UFO,” and “Bougainvillea” in Fiction Network.
ISBN 978-1-4521-3706-3 (epub, mobi)
Copyright © 1992 by Robin Beeman. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without
written permission from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:
Beeman, Robin.
A parallel life and other stories / by Robin Beeman.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8118-0085-7 (pb)
I. Title.
PS3552.E346P37 1992 91-31069
813’.54-dc20 CIP
Cover design: Sharon Smith
Interior design and composition: Ann Flanagan Typography
Cover art: Dan May
CHRONICLE BOOKS, 680 SECOND STREET, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107
Contents
A Parallel Life 1
Solstice 57
Taking Fire 75
The Realm of the Ordinary 87
Three Rivers 97
Life Signs 111
UFO 121
Secrets 131
Bougainvillea 145
Burning Joan 151
A Parallel Life
I
“WE DON’T GET the lives we want,” he said, rolling over, giving me his pitted shoulders to stare at and reaching for a cigarette.
“No smoking,” I said. “You smokers don’t know how the smell hangs on. The stink will outlive you. He’ll know in a second that someone was here.”
“Doesn’t he have some idea?” He dropped the package of cigarettes and rolled back over to look at me. He had a large forehead from which his crinkly black hair seemed to have shrunk and protruding, practically pupilless eyes that were almost the same color as his hair.
“Of course not,” I said pulling up the covers. I wasn’t modest but the room was cool—chilly really. “You’re right about not getting the lives we want. We’re expected to choose before we know who we are.”
“Exactly. And because we made certain choices before we knew what life was all about, this is what we wind up doing.”
“Well, at least we get this,” I said, turning away, not wanting to let him slide into some desultory song and dance. “There are a lot that don’t.”
“Won’t. My wife for one.” He picked up his watch from the nightstand. “God, I’d wish she’d cheat.” Then he stood up and began to dress, first putting on his shirt, next his tie, and I was left lying on my new sheets, 230 threads per inch, feeling not desultory, but sad—the way I always did after I made love to a man who wasn’t my husband.
I told myself that I could take credit for not lying. I never said that I did what I did because my husband didn’t love me. That’s not the way it was. He did. And I loved him in return. And I didn’t love the man I was with. I refused to be sentimental, to invent a romance to excuse myself. There was nothing wrong about my life with Bill. I didn’t look for love. I understood what Jack meant. We wanted more than we felt was allowed. We were restless and curious. I had no quibbles with the concept of monogamy. It just hadn’t been enough for me.
So while Jack Duggan pulled on his trousers and I slid on my pantyhose, I didn’t have any particular expectations about the way things might go. I didn’t know then that in eight months I’d be stumbling out of a room leaving Jack Duggan inside pounding on walls and wailing. I couldn’t have foreseen then that in eight months I’d be so filled with despair and sorrow that I was sure if I spent even five more minutes with Jack I’d sink into a darkness so profound that I’d never swim out.
I’d liked Jack from the moment he edged around the browsing rack and into my view. I was happy to have him appear because it had been such a slow morning at the library. The most excitement so far had come from two street people having a race for a corner chair, which was best for dozing. The older man, a fellow named Burt who kept up appearances by always wearing a tie, won. He’d celebrated his victory by falling asleep immediately and letting small gruntlike snores escape. More excitement arrived when my supervisor passed by with a memo on new rules for the use of the refrigerator in the staff room.
I could tell right away that Jack was not a man who knew his way around a library, but he was also a man who hated to appear as if he wasn’t in control of a situation. First he flipped through the records, then he took magazines from the periodicals rack, then he eyed a display on local history. His face was square and candid, and his eyes did very quick takes, almost as if he was snapping photos for future use.
“I had no idea all of this was here,” he whispered, leaning over, both elbows on my counter, and smiling to show me how much he approved. He had a gap between his front teeth, something I’ve always found appealing.
“You don’t have to whisper,” I said.
“No?” He looked surprised. Then he tilted his head slightly so that my eyes would have to meet his. “But I like to whisper.”
His son had a report to write on some aspect of World War I, and Jack had decided that the boy should do it on the fighter planes of that period. I led Jack to the right section. Air Battles are catalogued by the Dewey decimal system at 940.4 and War Planes at 940.44. “It’s all computerized today,” he said, going to the shelf and running his fingers down the spine of a book. “War, video games, it’s all the same. Where’s the adventure? I want him to read about the real stuff.”
I shrugged. He moved along the shelves pulling down one book, then another as he swaggered to compensate for a small limp. I decided that I had a fix on Jack already. He wore a raw silk jacket and linen slacks, a nice silk tie loosened at the throat, and good Italian loafers. He was a bit of a hustler, I decided, a man who liked the surface of things, a sentimentalist. He was vain and shallow, which would give me the liberty to despise him a little—a precaution against falling in love. But as I said, I liked him. He was open and he didn’t take himself completely seriously.
We had lunch in a downtown restaurant that day. The next week I brought him to my house during my break. One of the best things about my job is that I have a four-hour break in the middle of the day. Contrary to what the movies would have you believe, most affairs—cheating, or whatever—go on during the day. People with families generally have to be home at night.
In the beginning, I’d told myself that Jack and I played by a set of mutually understood rules, and that we could leave our other lives on the floor with our clothes and climb into bed truly naked. I was wrong, of course. I’d assumed too much. I’d assumed that we could handle any situation. I’d assumed we understood consequences.
On the way out of the door of my house that first afternoon, I remember picking up a McCall’s pattern from the kitchen counter. I was making a clown costume for my eight-year-old, Amy, for Halloween and hadn’t bought enough material for the ruffled collar. Mandy, my eleven-year-old, was going out to trick-or-treat as a hobo. She had just reached the age at which she wanted to put together her own costume and I remember feeling a sense of loss as I stuffed the envelope into my handbag. I liked sewing for my daughters and I was going to miss it. I’d loved making frilly little-girl dresses, but as soon as they got into school neither wanted to wear anything except jeans and T-shirts like the other kids.
I got in my car and Jack sat in the passenger seat and ducked down as I opened the garage door with the remote. Driving up to the house or away from it with a guy crouched over so as not to be seen by the neighbors was so quintessentially slapstick that I almost always wound up gigg
ling. It was always a relief to laugh about what we were doing because ultimately these afternoon liaisons struck me as pretty silly—lighthearted and insignificant ways to spend time. As I pressed on the gas, easing the car backward, Jack chuckled and inched his hand up under my skirt and gave me what felt like a fond pat on my inner thigh.
So Jack Duggan went back to his insurance office and I went back to the reference desk. It’s funny how much I like the job—how much I like knowing where I’ll be able to find out what comet it was that some kid in junior high saw with a telescope at two in the morning, or what the cost of chicken feed was in Duluth, Minnesota, on April 15, 1911.
I’d known that Jack was married. When he’d come into the library to find books on World War I planes, he was wearing a ring. Well, so what? I was married too. I wore a ring. Soon, with Jack, as with the others, we wound up talking about our spouses. It was a pretty safe thing to talk about—spouses, kids, or ex-spouses, if there were any. There was always an understanding that there wouldn’t be any future for the “us” thing. Sometimes there’d be plans for a weekend somewhere—up on the coast or to the Sierras or Tahoe—but those weekends usually involved too many variables. Weekends away were a risk to the affair. We weren’t kids, after all, trying to find out how it would feel to be married.
Little by little I heard about his wife, Roxie. A funny name. He told the story they all tell. Roxie didn’t really like sex. They slept together, but if he would so much as touch her, she’d move away and make growling noises. It was funny, of course, to picture him reaching out and her growling—funny if I didn’t allow myself to think about it.
I’d done the same thing to Bill. I’d pulled away from his touches, pretended to be asleep, added an extra couple of days to my period. I don’t know why. I loved Bill. I even liked him. I liked the way he smelled. I liked his sweetness, his ability to be patient with my mother’s tirades, his gentleness with the girls, his ability to handle a hard job and not take out his stress on me.
Jack sold insurance. He’d gone to City College and taken business courses. He’d been struck by a car when he was fourteen and his knee was smashed into a pulp that even the best surgery wasn’t able to restore completely, so although most of his friends tried to avoid the draft and Vietnam, Jack felt that he was being kept out of something grand and glorious. He saw himself as an exile at home. His mother’s brother had recognized Jack as a natural salesman and given him a job in his insurance firm. Jack turned out to be a very good salesman indeed, and with a fair amount of money coming in, Jack married—but not Roxie. He’d married a neighborhood girl. Even though they lived only blocks away from the Haight Ashbury district with its hippies and drugs and casual sex, Jack and Brigit were both virgins at the altar. Lots of things went wrong in the marriage and six months later they’d separated. Eight years after that, he met Roxie.
He was surprised when she agreed to marry him because he truly believed she was much too good for him. Roxie had finished Stanford, and in his words, “Roxie had a lot of class.” Roxie taught fourth grade and he was proud of her. She’d been voted the best teacher in the Walnut Grove Unified School District. Her father was a doctor. He hadn’t wanted Roxie to marry Jack, whose father worked in a brewery. Roxie had had three miscarriages before they’d been able to have little Jack and then little Annie. Roxie was delicate. Roxie liked nice things. Sometimes it drove him nuts the way she was so particular about the house. She had a nice body but she didn’t like him looking at it. She wouldn’t go down on him. But she loved him. And he loved her.
“I ask myself over and over why I do this,” he said, raising his foot and touching my right nipple with his big toe. We sat facing each other in the Jacuzzi in one of Jack’s friend’s places in a big condo complex close to downtown—convenient for us both. Jack received a key in exchange for being able to get the friend off of an assigned risk policy after a drunk-driving arrest.
“You think I haven’t wondered about it myself,” I said. I was getting antsy. I had to be back at work in half an hour. My hair was wet and I’d forgotten to bring a dryer. “I look at it this way. I have affairs on my lunch break because I can take only so much of sitting around with my colleagues talking about wallpaper for the kitchen, menopause, or who’s getting the best assignments.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “Do you think this is the sign of insanity? Why is it that I’ll see a woman and be drawn to her so much I’ll do anything to get to know her? Like you. I liked the way your glasses slipped down your nose and the way you kept pushing them up. I loved the inside of your hand. It looked so soft that I wanted to touch it. And you were wearing that plaid skirt. It was such an ugly skirt that it made me want you just like I’d want girls in high school when they wore those ugly plaid skirts.”
“I don’t want to think about it. I just accept it.” I eased out and sat on the rim. He slid his hand over my wet ass and down to my knee. “I have important things to decide this afternoon. We’re all chipping in for Shelly Novack’s baby shower. Would you get her a playpen or a high chair?”
“We could just be friends, you and I,” he said. “We’d have coffee downtown from time to time. Maybe a lunch. A walk by the creek in the park.”
I wrapped a towel around myself. The Jacuzzi was on a ridiculous little deck with a view—if we wanted to open the louvers—of the county administration center, built in the fifties, and the new jail, a Postmodern version of an Art Deco version of something Assyrian. “I don’t want to be just friends.” I ran my hand through his hair and lifted it. It was thin but so lacquered it stayed up. “When you decide to be just friends, I’ll find someone else.”
He sighed and closed his eyes. He wanted me to feel sorry for him—for us. I went into the bedroom and began to dress. Maybe my hair would be almost dry by the time I got to work. I ran a comb through it and rubbed it with a towel and combed it again, ignoring the mirror. My hair was curly and I wore it short, the perfect hair for someone who’s not going to be able to keep her head off pillows in the middle of the day. It was easy to resist looking at myself in the mirror. I was thirty-nine and the wrinkles had landed and were charting their territory. I had never been a beauty but I had decent features and good teeth in a pleasant, slightly too-long face. I looked like everyone’s sister’s best friend.
“We’re good together,” he said, coming up behind me and putting his nose in my damp hair. I could feel his cock against me.
We were, too. Better than I’d expected. When we made love the very first time everything worked like gears meshing neatly. With Bill there were always problems now—mostly mine. I can find no fault with Bill. He’s a better lover than most of the men I messed around with. In fact, I can say from some experience that men who mess around are usually not great lovers. The great lovers are men who love—not the performers who have all the tricks. And Bill loved me. He really did. I loved Bill. I had trouble desiring him. Maybe you can only desire what you don’t have.
In high school the nuns told us that it was our obligation to make love to our husbands, that we should never refuse them. I reached up and pulled Jack’s head against my neck. He licked the spot beneath my ear and I turned and pushed him away, my hand squarely on his bare chest. “Back off,” He laughed and raised his hands in surrender. The ease of this was good.
That was late October. After some long pleasant November days, a bad winter began. On Thanksgiving, Bill came down with bronchitis that lingered until Christmas, and then right after New Year’s, Amy hit a curb on her new bike and fell and broke her arm. While waiting outside the X-ray room in the hospital, I ran into Jonah coming out of the elevator.
I’d met Jonah at his garage sale two years ago. I was looking for an Exercycle for Bill. As I drove up, a young couple were loading a sofa onto the back of their pickup. “I just sold the love seat to that an hour earlier,” he said, trying to laugh. He was a tall overweight young man with a jerkiness to his gestures caused not by palsy but nervousness.
The garage was practically empty. Bolt-together metal shelves held a few quarts of motor oil and nothing else. Jonah scanned the space like a man peering into the water for some sign of bubbles from objects that had just disappeared from view.
“Give me a good price on the Exercycle and you can close shop.”
“Twenty bucks,” he said quickly, as if it were something he’d be glad not to have to deal with again.
“Sold.” I opened my handbag.
He seemed surprised. “It needs a new chain.”
“My husband’s handy,” I said.
“Some are.” He turned away from me. Both the washer and dryer were disconnected and pulled from the wall. A dusty crew sock hung from the cold tap. “I guess I’m done.”
I handed him two tens and smiled my best-friend smile and then decided he didn’t need a best friend. I looked up and, as they say, established eye contact. It took him a minute or two to decide what to do as he folded and refolded the tens. “I’ve got some cold beer in the fridge,” he said finally, checking up and down the empty street.
“Sounds good.” I followed him into the garage and he lowered the door. In the kitchen we sat on the floor and drank a couple of supermarket-brand beers. Next, on a mattress on the floor in a bedroom surrounded by overflowing cardboard boxes, we made love—very nicely. Then he sobbed and showed me a stuffed bear he’d been sleeping with since his wife left.
I saw him maybe a dozen times after that. I helped him set up the kitchen in his new apartment and then I said good-bye for good. He was beginning to think something real was going on.
Jonah,” I said, dropping an empty diet Coke can into the trash.
“Ellen?” He still looked nervous, but he’d lost weight. Maybe he had a girlfriend. I hoped so. We caught up quickly. His mother had had surgery, an aneurysm repair, that morning. She was doing well. I told him about Amy’s fall. It struck me that he didn’t seem to have realized back then that I had children. When the orthopedic surgeon came over to tell me about Amy’s X-rays, Jonah blushed and took two steps backward and bumped into a gurney.
