by Robin Beeman
“I was seeing a woman for a while, but it didn’t work out.” He blew his nose into a large handkerchief with a wet morose sound. “I wish you could have stayed around.”
A waiter arrived with chips and guacamole and salsa. I ordered a beer. “Well, I’m married, Jonah, and I couldn’t allow myself to get serious. But I like you. It was nice making love to you.”
“Better than nice,” he said.
“It was nice for me because it was supposed to be fun. I didn’t want it to go anywhere. It wasn’t supposed to become a courtship.”
“You believe that, don’t you?”
“Yes. I don’t think good sex and a good relationship are Siamese twins. You don’t get one with the other necessarily.”
“You’re sick,” he said, sounding immensely dismal for my sake.
“Maybe so, Jonah. I just don’t take what we did that seriously.”
“Well, I still want to sleep with you.” He stabbed the guacamole with the chip.
“I still want to sleep with you too, but that’s not why I called.” If I had when I’d called, I didn’t any longer. I stabbed my own chip into the gaucamole. It would be a long lunch. “It’s hard to find a good relationship, but it’s worth it—even if the sex isn’t the greatest. You have to try not to get discouraged.”
He loosened his tie. He’d gained weight again. He wiped his eyes.
I invited my father for dinner. I wanted to warn him that I was moving my mother to town. Despite the fact that they’d been separated for almost thirty years and divorced for twenty-six, my mother still called him from time to time whenever she felt a need to lay her misery on his doorstep. I’d heard both ends of these conversations and I’d been on both sides. My father had moved up here after Bill and I had, not to be nearer us, but because one of his girlfriends lived here. He hadn’t married her, but he had married someone else later on who also lived in town. After they’d divorced, he’d stayed, claiming he’d lost his taste for the city. That night, my father arrived with a bottle of very good cabernet sauvignon and a bouquet of irises.
I placed the irises in a tall vase while Mandy lit candles for the table, which she had set with the good china and silver. This seemed excessively elegant to me for a dinner of deli ravioli and salad, but both of my daughters responded to their grandfather much as Maureen and I had, and there seemed no way that I could change that. Richard Kellerher was a romantic and enigmatic figure, always impeccably dressed, charming, and polite. They were too young for me to tell them that he was a heartbreaker—an untrustworthy and duplicitous person.
He flattered my daughters as no one else did. He noticed what they wore, when they changed hairstyles. He paid for Mandy to have riding lessons, for Amy to take ballet. Amy was less susceptible to his charms than Mandy, but only because she was more self-absorbed and less susceptible to everything. For this reason, he wooed her even more. “Let me see that arm,” he asked as she set the plates around the table.
She had been self-conscious when the cast came off. “There was all this old scaly skin at first,” she said. “It looked like a dinosaur arm.”
“Ah,” he said, holding it between his hands and examining it. “I can’t believe that. Now it looks like something carved from precious ivory.”
“That’s silly, Grandpa,” she said, giggling.
“No. It’s a treasure that has been sealed away and is now revealed.”
She giggled again and rolled her eyes in my direction.
“It’s skinnier than the other,” said Mandy. “Amy should lift weights.”
“Not too many weights,” he said shuddering. “Girls shouldn’t look like boys.”
“I’m going to lift weights,” said Mandy, studying him for a reaction. “But just enough.”
After dinner, I made him come into the kitchen as I loaded the dishwasher. It would never have occurred to him to help clear the table. “I’ve found Mother a place close by,” I said. “So I can keep track of her. I’ll check on her every day.”
“Why is it that no one checks on me every day?”
“Because you don’t need it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with her, you know.” He sat on a high stool and crossed his legs almost primly. I’d noticed the same occasional primness in Jack. “She just likes to annoy people. She’s extremely dramatic.”
“She doesn’t make anyone nearly as unhappy as she makes herself.”
“I know,” he sighed. “Do I have to suffer her? I hope she doesn’t expect to see me. She can’t seem to understand what divorce means.”
“She doesn’t believe in it. You know that. But I doubt that she’ll turn up at your door and harangue you.”
“I’m seeing other women, you know.”
“When haven’t you?”
He chuckled and looked smug. “Very good. When haven’t I?”
“The one you brought on Christmas eve?”
“No. She was too young. Someone nearer to my age.”
“I guess that’s a good thing.” I closed the dishwasher and turned the knob.
“You women have it made nowadays,” he said as the machine began to hum.
“She’ll phone you.”
“I have never deserted your mother, despite what she likes to believe,” he said and recrossed his legs. “Never.”
On Saturday, Bill drove a rented U-Haul down to Oakland where Mr. Boudreau supplied his nephew Calvin to help us load my mother’s things into the truck in order to hasten the departure of his troublesome tenant. Calvin was a surly young man with a shaved head and extremely expensive sneakers who sneered at each box he carried to the U-Haul. I’d come down the day before to help Mother pack, to wrap glasses in newspapers, and sort things for Goodwill. In anticipation of some fit of anger or intransigence, I’d made sure that she had taken her pills, but she seemed positively cheerful as the morning of the move arrived. Perhaps she enjoyed the attention, for she dawdled regally each time Calvin arrived to ask her which box was ready to go down next.
“Doesn’t she realize I’m paying him by the hour?” Bill whispered to me as my mother took a set of plates out of one box and repacked them in an almost-identical manner in another while Calvin drummed on the refrigerator—which, thank God, belonged to his uncle and didn’t have to be moved.
“She’ll push it to the limit,” I said, but Bill already knew this. He groaned loudly as he lifted a box of pots and pans and winked at me.
My mother ignored the groan and scowled at Calvin. “This is probably the most exercise you’ve had in years,” she said.
His reaction to this was an uncontestable look of shock. I picked up a box and left the room. “Not exactly,” I heard him say.
The early fog had evaporated and the morning was one of those fine ones in which the sun and the air seem to combine so that the air shimmers and the light has substance. A breeze carried the scent of water in from the bay. I followed Bill into the interior of the truck where he and Calvin had already placed my mother’s couch and easy chair and dresser. I put down my box, pivoted him by his shoulders, and pressed him against the upended mattress and kissed him. He tasted salty with sweat from all the lifting and stairs. “I love you,” I said licking his unshaved Saturday cheek. “I’ve never loved anyone but you.”
“What’s this all about?” He had wonderfully candid eyes and talk of affection still embarrassed him, but he put his arms around me.
“I missed you when you were gone.”
He tightened his arms as I leaned against his chest, pressing against him, glad for the comfort of his honest body, happy to be found in those arms by Calvin a few minutes later.
I am not ignorant of the fact that what Jack and I did is the stuff that provides the grist for the mills of daytime talk shows, radio call ins, and countless articles in all kinds of journals. “What to do if your husband—or wife—is unfaithful?” “Portrait of a cheater?” “Is infidelity a disease?” “Is infidelity an addiction?” These banners lurk in magazine
racks as we wait for our groceries to be lifted and weighed, scanned and paid for. It’s as if these magazines also offered some sort of nourishment—bar-coded as they are just like the cartons of cereal and bags of bread and cans of beans.
I’ve read my share of articles. And yet none of them really seems quite right when they try to explain infidelity. They all seem too complicated in a way and yet not complicated enough.
I know my behavior runs the risk of putting the marriage in jeopardy, but affairs provide me with something no other activity seems to offer—and in a very brief, condensed amount of time. If it could be considered a hobby, it would occupy a great deal less time than most hobbies. I have a friend who figure-skates and is away from her family almost every evening and on many weekends when she goes to competitions. If you live in a big city, you could probably spend more time looking for a parking space than I spend in these trysts.
And it is precisely the matter of time that is important. Because of the very nature of an affair, because it must be covert, the time with a lover is limited. The time spent in an affair is also qualitatively as well as quantitatively different than times with a spouse. The time spent with a lover is analogous to the taste of a dried pear from which the tasteless water has evaporated so the gritty sweetness of the flesh is concentrated. Because an affair requires strategies and risks, the other person in that affair must be viewed as worthy of these efforts. It is the distance and obstacles between two people that create the conditions of desire. A person is desired because that person is not possessed.
When I’m meeting a lover, my heart does pound faster and therefore there is more blood circulating, and more oxygen is being carried to my lungs and brain. I am more alert. Smells, textures, tastes are all heightened. A sensory edge emerges that ordinary time dulls. The first encounter is always feral with its sniffing, touching, its dance of seduction. The very act of coming together involves immense delicacy and even wariness since the goal is to surprise but not startle. There is no map for this. I am going into new lands in which I need both the ability to rely on pure reflex and also to pay complete attention. I have to lose myself and yet be present. Nothing else is so focused and also so expansive.
Although by my calendar calculations I reckoned that Jack must have returned from his cruise, I didn’t hear from him. I told myself that this was fine, that I hadn’t wanted to go on seeing Jack anyway, that I really wanted only Bill, that I was finally willing to settle into monogamy. I warned myself that sooner or later Bill would discover what I had been up to. I didn’t want my marriage to end. I didn’t want to lose Bill. I was also puzzled and stung to think that Jack would ignore me for so long.
My mother claimed to love her new apartment. On the now-empty hours of my break, I took her shopping for curtains, for a new bedspread, for plants for the patio. The girls rode over on their bicycles after school and my mother offered them cookies and milk and even allowed them to make suggestions for the types of cookies for future afternoons—Maureen and I had been limited to vanilla wafers or graham crackers. Bill brought her a hummingbird feeder and the girls mixed batches of liquid for her so the birds wouldn’t be disappointed when they swooped by.
Jonah came by the reference desk and asked me for a drink after work. I told him I had to go right home. He looked unhappy enough for me to feel sorry for him all over again. I think he’d gained even more weight, but at least his nose and eyes weren’t running.
Now that the days were getting longer, Bill had both girls out on the public tennis courts and they conspired to get me there, too. I heard the term doubles on more than one occasion. Amy retrieved my old racquet for me, but I explained to my daughters as they sandwiched me onto the court that I had poor peripheral vision and even worse hand-eye coordination and they should not expect much from me. They both moaned to let me know that these were not acceptable excuses, that we were about to become a tennis family.
III
When Jack arrived at the reference desk just as I was about to leave on my break, I saw that things were terribly wrong. There was a pallor under the assertiveness of the tropical tan. Even the starch of his shirt looked less starchy than normal. We drove in the Mazda to the friend’s place that looked more gray than ever now with the addition of a thick, charcoal-colored rug under the glass coffee table. He mixed us each a vodka and tonic before he even kissed me. When we finished the drinks, he took my hand and led me to the bed and insisted on undressing me. He’d never before been so passionate, so considerate, or so unhappy.
“She’s in the hospital,” he said afterward as we lay together. He had his legs thrown over my legs, his head on my shoulder. It was a position Bill often took. I stroked his hair. “Her arm started filling with fluid on the ship the day we arrived in Barbados and there was this feeling of pressure right under her rib cage. She said it felt like indigestion and she decided to ignore it. She wanted the cruise to be happy, you know, but each time we’d reach a port I felt like we were just bumping into some crazy wall. I just wanted to be out of there. It was supposed to be a second honeymoon sort of thing.”
“You don’t have to tell me this,” I said. My stomach was already clenching, my throat constricting.
“You’ve got to understand this. She wanted me to make love to her but I couldn’t. There we were lying in this big bed in our stateroom and all we could do together was cry. God, how I cried, but even when I was crying with her I wanted you—I wanted a woman who wasn’t dying.” He moved his arm so that it rested on my chest. His arm felt like the beam of a building had fallen on me and was crushing me. “Oh, Jesus, it was awful,” he said. “She’s just so thin now, and her poor little head is like a little baby chicken’s body with all this little fluffy hair that’s like down on something new, something fresh. And she’s rotting inside. Oh, Jesus.”
“But you said she was getting better.”
“Well, the doctors never say exactly what’s going on, but they just did a scan and it’s everywhere now. She wants to leave the hospital and spend her last days at home.”
“She’s dying?”
His hand moved to my breast and rested there. I tightened every muscle in an effort to turn my flesh into some kind of carapace.
“I’m sorry to drop all of this on you. I know this isn’t supposed to happen. I know you didn’t bargain for this, but then neither did I.”
I took his hand away from my breast and brought it to my lips. It was a soft-palmed hand, the fingers narrow and tapering. I kissed the palm of the hand and slid myself away from him. “I have to go.”
“I need you,” he said. It was almost a whimper. “I told her about us. I’m a confessor. I mean, she’s known all along, almost from the start, about you and all of the others. I just haven’t been able to resist other women. She was going to leave me years ago, but she didn’t. I’ve always managed to talk her out of it. I’m a good husband in other ways. We have a beautiful house. Financial security. I love our kids. Jesus. It’s just this business with women.”
“Like me.”
“You, yes. And, Jesus, there was a woman on the ship. Beautiful. Red curly hair. A widow. We had a drink while Roxie was sleeping. When she bent over I could see down her dress to her navel. She told me where her room was. I mean, I was giving myself points all during the trip for all the things I wasn’t doing, patting myself on the back for being such a good boy.”
“I need to go.”
“Not yet.”
I put on my bra and my panties, my hose, my blouse and skirt, my loafers. I smelled sulphur as he struck a match and lit a cigarette. Then smoke. I smelled him on my hands as I lifted them to push back my hair. My hair would smell of him and of his smoke. The room reeked with our sourness. I had to get away. “I need to go.”
“This is agony for me,” he said and sat up resting the cigarette on the edge of the nightstand. “Pure agony.” His stomach sagged over his groin which beneath its tangle of pubic hair was a ghostly white in contrast to the deep t
an above the waist. I wondered if Roxie had gotten tan, too. I fought away a picture of them lying side by side on those ship’s lounge chairs, both of them slathered with oil, Roxie in a demure suit that wouldn’t subject her tender scars to the equatorial blaze. She’d wear a big hat over her bandana—or her wig. He would hold her hand and be solicitous. He’d suck in his stomach when he stood to walk to the railing where he’d manage to rub against the shoulder of the widow with the red curly hair. Next year he could take another cruise and find more widows with various hair colors who’d whisper their room numbers over margaritas.
I walked the eight blocks to the library facing a southerly wind that promised to bring rain. Maybe it would be one of the last rains of the season. There were only a few trees still in flower. Spring was no longer fresh.
Lately the library had more and more come to resemble a waiting room. A crowd of street people had arrived to establish their positions early, before the rain fell. They slumped in the armchairs, either leafing through magazines or dozing, their day thickly plotted with minutes to be filled. I knew most of their first names. Some were extremely literate and were proud to identify themselves with the library, pleased to be part of an institution that provided both information and shelter.
When I had been a girl in parochial school, I had considered life in a convent. It seemed to be daring to live apart from men. To aspire to a higher love. To reject the mundane. The library had become my convent. I was not celibate, but neither was I monogamous. I was using the tightrope of lust to span the abyss between these poles.
Alice Cortezar, the other reference librarian on then, was in the back room Xeroxing recipes from a new, expensively illustrated Italian cookbook. “Here,” she said handing me a sheet of paper, “try this one tonight. Everything I’ve made from this book is delicious.” It was a recipe for fettucini with crab and shrimp in a white wine and cream sauce.
