My Summer With George

by Marilyn French

  Why had he gone to the movie with other people if he was intending to see it with me? Why hadn’t he left a number? Why did I always have to wait for him to call me? Suppose seven o’clock was too early for me? Suppose I’d already seen Thelma & Louise? What did he mean, the women had loved it? What women?

  He wanted to keep control of things firmly in his own hands, I thought. I could probably call the Columbia School of Journalism and track him down, but that might offend him. Besides, I was willing to cede control to him, if he’d just be a little more…communicative. I decided to leave the telephone bell on next morning, even though this would interfere with my work.

  The next day, ten people called before 9:00 a.m. George was not one of them. My irritation grew, hour by hour—irritation and anxiety. I felt helpless, a passive victim, and I cursed myself.

  He finally called late Thursday afternoon, to say he was running late and could not after all come to my apartment. Would I meet him at the theater, Broadway and Eighty-fifth, at seven-fifteen? Again I felt absurdly let down, bruised, but I brushed away the feeling, concentrating on good cheer.

  I saw him as I got out of the cab, before he saw me, and my hurt vanished. My heart leaped out of my body and flew to encompass him. Of course, I forced my body to walk to him in dignity.

  He was wearing a white suit and a red-and-white-striped shirt and was leaning against a mailbox on the corner in front of the movie house, waiting for me. His stomach hung over his belt, and his head dropped onto his chest; his whole body sank in hollow dejection. I longed to wrap my arms around his head and stroke his hair and lean my cheek against his and whisper that he was loved and could rest in that love.

  I walked toward him, and while I was able to restrain myself from putting my arms around him, I could not restrain myself from touching him. I reached out and fixed his collar, which was folded up.

  “What are you doing?” he barked.

  I jumped a little. “Just fixing your collar,” I apologized. “It’s bent up.” Vowing I wouldn’t touch him again, I told myself not to take this personally. I recalled a lover I’d had years before, a beautiful young man with skin the color of golden mustard. He didn’t object to being touched during sex, but he quite peremptorily stopped me from stroking him as we lay side by side afterward. I tried to believe that his upset had to do with his feelings about his color, not me. I tried not to take it personally.

  Still, I never saw him again.

  I brushed away my downheartedness, and we went in and found seats. He talked about the movie: it was great, fantastic, hilarious, he said. Later, as we left the theater, I told him I agreed with him—except I added that it was heartbreakingly true. I looked at his face, expecting him to be pleased that he’d pleased me, but he showed no emotion. We walked out into a mild summer night.

  We made our way to a little Italian restaurant just a couple of blocks north of the theater. George wanted to sit at an outdoor table. I thought it was going to rain, but I did not say so. This was unlike me. I usually said what I thought. But something about him silenced me. I was so pleased he’d indicated a preference—it didn’t matter what for—that I simply bowed before it.

  We discussed the movie; we discussed other movies.

  “What’s the best movie you ever saw?” he asked.

  “Oh, if I had to pick one—Bergman’s Cries and Whispers,” I said.

  He was outraged. “What?” It turned out he’d never heard of it. He seemed to feel I was trying to humiliate him.

  “You’ve never heard of it?” I was incredulous.

  “We don’t get those egghead films in Louisville.”

  I doubted that, but not out loud. Change the subject.

  “So. Tell me about your life. Have you ever been married?”

  “Four times,” he said brusquely.

  “Really! Me too,” I confessed.

  “Really?” He seemed dismayed.

  I nodded.

  “Four divorces?”

  “Two divorces. Two of my husbands died. What about you?”

  “Four divorces, but from one woman twice. My second wife was also my third wife. I married my first wife when I was young, in the service.”

  “Is that supposed to mean you were too young to know what you were doing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Umm.”

  “And you married the second twice?”

  He grimaced. “She was gorgeous,” he explained.

  I studied him.

  “And the fourth?”

  “She was young—too young, I guess. She was great with my kid, my daughter. I thought Liddy needed a mother, and I thought she’d be a mother to her. But she walked out on me, just walked out. I never knew why. She just left.”

  As he said this, his voice edged into rawness. I would come to recognize this tone, which appeared only when he spoke of this last wife. Although she had left him over five years before, he was still apparently smarting from it. I wondered at pain that long-lasting. Maybe Marsha was right about him.

  “So you have a daughter?”

  His face lighted up, and for the first time, he spoke easily. He had raised his daughter himself. Liddy was a joy and a delight to him, bright, had done well in school.

  “How did it happen that you got custody?”

  “Her mother was crazy,” he said. I would have challenged such a statement from any other man, but I said nothing. He adored Liddy, he had loved raising her, and she was terrific. She had done well at Radcliffe and then gone off and joined the Peace Corps. She was working in Ghana now; she loved Africa. She was doing good works. He was proud of her. She was twenty-four. She was great.

  I smiled. “She sounds it. I have kids too—four of them.” He expressed no interest in my kids. We were midway through our pasta when a sudden downpour drenched us. George handled our damp remove indoors—a test for most men, I think—with good temper. Still, once our watery dinners lay on a dry table before us, we could not face finishing them. We sat with dripping hair, shivering in the air-conditioning. I ordered a decaf cappuccino; he ordered coffee. I gazed at him and thought he looked a little tired. The evening was over, I felt. But we sat making conversation for another half hour, the way lovers do at the very beginning of an affair, when they are reluctant to part. At least, that was how it seemed to me. It was good, I told myself. Especially since, as we were saying good night in front of my building, he asked:

  “You want to have lunch tomorrow?”

  The entire world seems to be heating up these years—at least, compared to my youth. It was hot and muggy that Thursday night, but I didn’t turn on the air conditioner because I dislike its noise. I turn it on only when there is no other way to sleep. Again I could feel myself starting to have a bad night. I lay naked on my cream satin sheets, while fantasies of George and me together played in my imagination. My body was hot, every one of my pores was open and parched, panting, noisily demanding nourishment. And what they wanted was George’s hands on them. My poor starved body. My hands felt huge and empty, tingling with emptiness; they wanted to be on his body.

  Then he was there, transported by magnetism. We had only to look at each other, only to think about the other, for our breath to come more quickly. Hot, with quick, shallow breaths, we turned our bodies toward each other. When they met, we jumped with electricity.

  Each of us instinctively understood the other’s body, knew where to touch: the soft places behind the ear, on the eyelids, in the crook of the neck and arm and leg, on the upper thigh near the groin. We moaned. Kissing, our mouths were unwilling to let go. Electric charges ran from mouth to groin to toes in each body in which body in both bodies. We pressed against each other, we could not get close enough to each other, we wanted to be inside each other, but we held off. We got hotter and hotter, we twisted and squirmed, we pressed and kissed and stroked, and only after a long time, when the tension was unbearable, did I rise up and sit astride him, and when I put him in me, he cried out in relief, and
I rode him, slowly, slowly, bending to kiss his chest, his eyes. But we were both too hot, we couldn’t wait, and before we wanted to, we exploded, hot liquid spouting out of us, we both screamed in pained ecstasy, I kept crying out, kept going and going, and he kept going for me, until I was completely spent and fell on his chest, he with his arms around me, my cheek on his breast, our bodies still together.

  Oooohhhh.

  4

  MOST WEEKENDS, I DRIVE out to the country, to my Sag Harbor house. I leave early Friday morning, hitting the LIE long before the endless line of cars queues up for the Hamptons. But this Friday, my women’s group was holding a birthday dinner for a dear friend, Mary Smith, so I agreed to have lunch with George.

  He called around eleven to say he was running late. Could I come up to Columbia and have lunch there? At noon?

  Of course I could, I said without thinking. But afterward I shivered: another cancellation, and after we’d had such a nice time the night before!

  I had to race to dress: I didn’t want to go in my jeans and T-shirt. It was a long trip to Morningside Heights, and despite my rushing, I was late. I didn’t reach the coffee shop he’d described until almost twelve-thirty. George was sitting with four other people, three men and a woman. He introduced them to me as editors attending the conference. They were halfway through their sandwiches, so I just ordered coffee and a muffin. I listened as they happily dissected the conference. I didn’t feel too left out, because every once in a while George would lean toward me and whisper some explanation of what was being discussed. He made me feel cherished, despite the awkwardness of the meeting.

  A little before one, they all pushed back their chairs and rose.

  “Today’s the last day of the seminar,” George explained. “They’re giving us a cocktail party at five, so we have a short lunch break, one hour instead of two. That’s why I asked you to come up here.”

  Inside, I froze, but I tried to control my facial expression. I stood, tossing some bills on the table for my half-eaten muffin.

  “Oh, hey, I’ll get that!” he cried.

  “It’s nothing.” I shrugged.

  He walked with me out to the curb. “How will you get back?”

  “I’ll take a cab.”

  “I’ll flag one for you,” he said, stepping into the street.

  “It’s all right. I can do it. Your friends are leaving,” I said, nodding at their receding backs.

  “Okay, then. Well, I’ll call you!” he cried, striding off. He didn’t look back.

  During the nearly fifteen minutes it took to get a cab, it began to rain. When, finally, a gypsy cab stopped, I took it eagerly. I slid onto the seat, soaking wet, and leaned back, my head numb.

  I was shaking with anger and hurt. I wanted to hurt him back. I wanted to leave him in the lurch, let him know what it felt like. I wanted to drive out to Sag Harbor this afternoon, strip off my clothes, and dive into the bay, letting New York—and George—roll off my body like a coat of sweat. He must have known earlier that today was the last day of the seminar, but he hadn’t mentioned it. He must have known about the short lunch hour: why had he made me travel so far for so little? If the seminar was over, would he be leaving now? He said he’d call me. When? From where? Louisville? What was I doing with this man? What was I doing with myself?

  I decided to spend the afternoon working. But I couldn’t concentrate. I kept jumping up to rearrange a file, water a plant, deadhead another, get a cup of tea. I wandered through my apartment blindly; my magnificent rooms could have been one long subway stop, for all the pleasure they gave me. Around four, I lay down on the chaise in my study and fell into a deep, disturbed sleep.

  I woke feeling logy, reluctant to get up. Could I be depressed? That is extremely rare for me. I determined, as a matter of will, when I had my first child under rather trying circumstances, that no matter how unhappy I felt, I would not, like my mother, lay a black cloud over my children’s lives. Whatever my problems, I would remain cheerful or at least stoical. To do this, you have to emphasize the hopeful elements in any situation or even, in some cases, invent some. In other words, you have to be able to lie, to others and to yourself. I had grown quite adept at this over the years.

  My depression arose because my self-deceit was wearing thin: I was losing faith in George’s attraction to me. His seesaw motions were starting to feel like a pattern, in which resided something deep and negative that would never be resolved but would simply continue. I was urgently fighting off an awareness of this. I felt, in regard to him, as if I were carrying a vial of nitroglycerin: if I dropped it, all of what I had planted in him, in our relationship, would blow up in my face. And I wanted to avoid that above all. I’d rather let him treat me shabbily than accept that failure. After all, I had only two choices: I could let myself love him and hope he would return it, thus risking disappointment or even serious hurt in the future; or I could retreat behind my prickly wariness and end this right now.

  If I had been thirty or forty, I would have ended it then. Before my mid-fifties, I met attractive men with some regularity. I could count on meeting at least one every few months, and there were periods in my life when the world seemed to be populated mainly by amusing sexy men. There simply wasn’t time for all of them, alas, but a light regularly went on in me, indicating that I was sexually alive. I relished the feeling.

  This was no longer the case. Nowadays, not just months but years went by without my meeting a man who shimmered for me, who made the night brilliant. Partly this was because I had erected a new barrier to love—age. I created it out of cowardice, nothing else. It wasn’t that twenty-odd-year-old boys no longer appealed to me (although, in truth, they no longer did). But mainly I dreaded being perceived as acting flirtatious or seductive toward anyone who might find my no longer young person repulsive. So afraid was I of finding my physical being a source of repugnance that I simply erased the young from my sexual vision, I deleted their existence from my sexual consciousness as completely as if they had been some other form of life, robots or chimpanzees, say. But of course, to expunge any class of people from consideration greatly reduces one’s possibilities. Moreover, as I aged further, the ban silently spread from people in their twenties to those in their thirties; I was eliminating the most gorgeous people in the world, so of course I faced greatly diminished prospects.

  I gave this matter considerable thought, but I always ended up making the same choice. Even if it meant feeling less than alive sexually and possibly even sacrificing some possible felicity, I would censor my vision, limit it to people within a decade or two of my own age rather than find myself reflected in the eyes of some beautiful young person as a ludicrous grasping old lecher.

  Perhaps as a result of this policy and the generally uninspiring appearance of most (but by no means all—consider George!) people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies; or perhaps because desire does wane as one grows older; or because older people who remain vivid and interesting tend to be deeply committed to long-term relationships—the last decade of my life had been far less populated with sexual partners than earlier ones. The truth is, there had been none. And while I missed the frequent passionate raids, forays, and pincers movements from near strangers that I used to enjoy—missing, no doubt, because of signs of age on my own person—I was even more disturbed at the fact that I myself rarely felt drawn to anyone, rarely found anyone desirable. I missed feeling desirable, but even more, I missed feeling desire.

  Yet I had felt drawn to George from the first moment I laid eyes on him, and felt desire for him the moment he looked at me with excitement. This feeling was too rare, too precious nowadays for me to let it go, even if grasping it meant I would eventually suffer—indeed, was suffering already. With this man, I was sexually reborn, reawakened, returned to youth and vitality. How could I not submerge myself in the feeling, clasp it to me like a dram of eau-de-vie, the water of the fountain of eternal youth?

  I thought about all this as I d
ressed for dinner. I wondered if I would bring it up that evening.

  I love my women’s group. Women’s groups are the most wonderful thing about living in New York or Boston. They do not exist in many parts of the world—although they would if women dared to form them. It just isn’t customary in some places. I don’t know how things are in Detroit or Cleveland, but if a French or German or Italian woman has no husband, she is likely to have almost no social life either. And most older women don’t have husbands, so many lead very lonely lives. I have two communities: one in the city and one in Sag Harbor. I’m lucky enough to have groups of women friends in other cities and abroad too.

  Just about all my friends are self-made women, but some of us are more so than others: Mary Smith and I have reinvented ourselves right down to our names. Thirteen years ago, Mary left her husband and academia and took up a new career as a photographer and bisexual. She purposely chose an anonymous name and won’t reveal her original one, but ironically, she’s made her anonymous name famous. As Mary Smith, she photographs scenes and people in such a way that the violence or hatred underlying them is just perceptible. She’ll photograph a parent with a child at a moment when one of them is just breaking into rage, or the sky the moment before a storm breaks. So her name has become part of the language—“Mary Smithing” something means capturing emerging violence when it is barely perceptible.

  Mary was turning forty, and her agent, Naomi Gold, wanted to throw a big party for her most important client. But Mary said it was bad enough to be forty without advertising it. I told her if she thought forty was bad, just wait. But she was immovable. So Naomi arranged this dinner instead.

  There were to be eight of us—Mary, Naomi, Enid, Dotty, Babette, Hazel, Leni, and me. Mary, Babette, and Dotty are good friends of mine; the others are pals, people I enjoy seeing once in a while.