Morning

by Nancy Thayer

  “Well, well, we’ll see what we see. You call me, either way. All right?”

  “All right,” Sara agreed.

  Now she hated parting from the doctor, hated going from the lab room to the reception room where other patients sat waiting. She felt that if she could only stay at his side, soaking in his enthusiasm, his optimism, she would effortlessly swell outward with pregnancy. She sat down a moment in the waiting room, pulling her knee socks up inside her high boots, then just sitting a moment, thinking. So many terms had been thrown around this morning, and Dr. Crochett spoke with such intimate familiarity about the mysterious movements of minute things: sperm, tubes, eggs. All those reproductive objects that she had read about but never really paid much attention to before, because they had been no more relevant to her than the existence of another galaxy of stars.

  But now. Now. She might be getting pregnant even now.

  She wanted to sit there in his room all day waiting, all month waiting, not moving, willing it to happen, as if the combination of his energy and her desire would make her wish come true.

  She had intended to do some last-minute Christmas shopping in Boston, but really she had gotten everything already, and she wanted to be back on Nantucket, back at home, like a bird ready to sit on the eggs in her nest. She would not try to go to Fanny Anderson’s house today—she had not heard from her, and was miffed. And she did not want to encounter the dragon lady, she did not want to have any negative experience today. She wanted to stay in this happy, hopeful state.

  Steve picked her up at the airport when the heavy old PBA DC-3 clunked down at eleven-thirty. Only eleven-thirty, and so much had happened. As she came toward him where he stood waiting for her at the gate, looking ruggedly sexual in his weathered work clothes, her heart swelled with love for him. Look at that man! He was so handsome, so good. He should have a son. She ran toward him, threw her arms around him, and kissed him as passionately as if they had been parted for months instead of a morning.

  “Hey.” Steve laughed, pulling away, embarrassed a little by her display. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m great. Come on, I’ll tell you about it in the car.”

  As they drove back to the heart of town, Sara described the doctor and his procedure. Steve listened intently.

  “So,” he said, very quietly, “so it seems I’m okay then. That … I’ve got enough …” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  Sara studied her husband’s face. He was driving the car very seriously, not looking at her. Oh, she thought, of course. Of course he would worry about that. Although it had never really occurred to her that it could be his body at fault.

  “Oh, Steve,” she said, laughing, and imitated Carl Sagan’s enunciation about stars, “you’ve got billions and billions and billions of sperm; I saw them swimming around, I really did. It is amazing,” she went on, “what science can do. I mean, they tell you in textbooks that all these teeny-weeny things are going on inside your body, but it’s so hard to believe.”

  “Teeny-weeny,” Steve said, grinning. “There’s a textbook term.”

  She laughed from relief because he was kidding her, he was back to normal, he was relaxed. He was fine.

  So now, she thought, sobering, now they had to see if she was just as fine.

  At their house, Steve stopped the car but kept the motor running. “I’ve got to get right back to work, babe,” he said, running his hand along the back of her neck, gently rubbing. “Will you be okay?”

  “Sure,” Sara said, smiling, “I’ve never felt better.”

  “Well, I’m sorry you have to do all this running around. I hope you know I appreciate it. All you’re doing. The flying and the examinations and all.”

  “Oh, Steve.” Sara leaned across the seat to hug him. She knew how hard it was for him to say something like that. “I love you.”

  “I love you. See you tonight.”

  “Yeah. You bet you’ll see me tonight.” She grinned.

  Once in the house, Sara hung up her coat, then sank down on the sofa to think. She realized then how tired she was, and leaned back on the pillows and instantly fell asleep.

  She awoke to the sound of the mail thumping on the floor through the slot in the door. She looked at her watch; it was just after two. She stretched. She looked down at her stomach. She smiled. Maybe she had been so tired, had fallen asleep like that, because she was already pregnant?

  After daydreaming awhile she rose and crossed the living room to the hallway to see what the mail had brought. Some Christmas cards, some bills, a magazine, and another manila envelope from Fanny Anderson.

  Dear Sara Kendall, [again the dark-blue gracefully round handwriting on heavy cream-colored stationery]

  I understand that you have been trying to reach me and I’m so very sorry if I’ve caused you any inconvenience. I haven’t been well lately and have needed to envelop myself in a cocoon of complete peace and quiet. I hope you will forgive me for not seeing you when you stopped by the other day and also for not answering any of your phone calls. It is just that I have been ill, and need to put my health first these days.

  But also please believe me, I am grateful for your appreciation of my Jenny pages, and your encouragement means a great deal to me, more than you could ever know, more than I could ever express. And the notes you sent me with my last pages—marvelous! So helpful. You are a gifted editor. You are perhaps the perfect editor for me.

  So please bear with me, if you will. I would love to meet you personally when I am better. Until then, I have sent you some more of the Jenny pages. Again let me say that you mustn’t feel obligated to read them or to like them. But your criticism is immensely helpful, immensely appreciated.

  Happy Holidays to you and yours. Perhaps we can talk after the new year.

  With warm regards,

  Fanny Anderson

  Sara looked through the envelope. This package was thicker than the others: fifty pages. She read the first page. It was a continuation of the Jenny story, picking up where the last page had left off, with Jenny sitting in a café at Montmartre, plotting to leave Henry Cook, whose love, if it could be called that, had become oppressive.

  Sara was hungry. She made herself a thick sandwich and a pot of tea with lots of sugar and milk and settled down to read.

  I found a small pension to stay in. The room was five floors up, and tiny and bare, with just a steel cot and a cheap dresser and a rickety chair, but it was clean. The W.C. was three floors down. I moved in with all I possessed—the clothes I had brought with me when I ran away with Henry—and began life modeling for artists. But it was difficult. The artists pressed me to sleep with them. They insulted me when I refused. I thought I was so sophisticated—why couldn’t I sleep with Henry? Many times I tried, only to find myself fighting, scratching, sobbing, running away, ending up on a strange street at two in the morning wrapped only in a blanket, shaking with fear. Henry first told me I was delicate. When he got tired of my evasions, he changed his mind. He told me I was crazy. Perhaps I was. Such a simple thing, to lose one’s virginity, and I had thought myself so adult, so hard. But I was afraid, and even more, I did not love Henry. Over the months we had lived together in Paris I had gotten to know him too well to love him. He was a spoiled rich boy. And he was not a good artist. But I did not want to leave Paris—some of the painters had become my friends. I wanted to stay in Paris, but not with Henry.

  When finally I had very little money left, not more than a week’s worth to live on, Henry Cook discovered my hiding place. He had seen an oil painting of me, nude, and assumed I had slept with the painter, after months of refusing to sleep with him. He broke into my tiny room, he called me names, he raged at me, and then he beat me. Not terribly, but enough to hurt me and to frighten me.

  I wired Will Hofnegle: Please send me the money to get home. I need to see you. Please don’t tell my parents.

  Will sent me the money immediately. I took an Air France flight to New
York, then a Braniff flight to Kansas City. When Will met me at the airport, my left eye was still swollen and discolored and my body was bruised. Will looked so handsome to me, so tall, so strong, so gentle, that I wept to see him and could not understand how I ever could have left him.

  He drove me down to the Flint Hills in Kansas, where his farmhouse sat in the midst of his thousand acres. His red-and-white Hereford cows grazed on green pastures; it was April. The sun slanted generously across the land, the wind swept through the undulating hills, making the grasses wave, a sea of glowing emerald. His spaniel and her puppies ran out to greet me.

  I stayed with Will. He became my lover. That was what I had wanted, what I had always wanted. How simple the right thing can be. Will was a wonderful lover, all I had ever dreamed of.

  I called my parents and reunited with them but refused to come home, insisting on living with Will, even though we were not married. This upset my parents terribly and opened a breach between us. It was all right for me to run off to Paris, but it shamed them that I was living out of wedlock with a man in my home country. I could not explain myself to them. I did not have to explain myself to Will; he did not propose marriage to me. He did not even ask how long I was planning to stay.

  And I didn’t stay long; I left the next January. I loved Will, but the Kansas winter, with its walls of snow and howling winds and frozen landscape, as dead as the moon, made me wild. I felt trapped. I had to get away. Will gave me some money. He had plenty of money. He did not try to make me feel indebted; he did not try to make me stay. He did not judge me. He did not ask, “What are you searching for?”

  I was nineteen. I flew back to Paris. It was winter there, too, but spring was nearer, the weather was not so savage, and did not matter so much in the city. The streets of Paris, the clamor, the clothes, the art, the arches, the artists! Now I was ready in every way for the complexity of this place. Within a few days I had become the lover of a young French painter who called himself, simply, Lalo. I lived with Lalo, posed for him, sat in the café with him, watching spring come in Paris. Once again there were people to see me, and I liked that. I needed the men to whistle and wink and stare and approach, I needed the envious glances of women. Cows would not appreciate my beauty, but Parisians could.

  I lived with Lalo for almost a year, then left him for another painter, Jean-Paul. He was more intellectual, more interesting, there was more to him than just good looks, and after a year I went with him and a group of his artist friends to Mexico. We rented an old run-down hacienda outside the small town of Guanajuato. Seven of us, seven artists.

  For I became an “artist,” too; I decided to write poetry. Sometimes I would recite my poetry aloud while Phillippe, one of the gay artists, accompanied me on the flute. Artists from other colonies in Mexico came to visit, and we seven bought a dilapidated van and drove through the mountainous, barren, rocky Mexican countryside to visit other colonies. People began to hear about us, to study us! Journalists came down, sweating in their wrinkled city suits to admire us in our loose, bright-colored cottons, bare skins, and sandals. The day came when I read about myself in a prestigious American periodical. There was an article on artists in Mexico, and I was listed as one of the group that was becoming known as “The Seven.” I was very happy. This was what I had meant to happen in my life. I only wished they had taken photographs.

  It did not cost much to live in Mexico, but it cost something. One of the members of our group had some money, enough to fill our most minimal needs. But eventually I began to want more, some pretty clothes, some bangles. It was chic then to be bohemian and shabby, but I longed for lovely clothes. For decorative combs to hold back my hair. For the cheap flashy rings from the Guanajuato marketplace. I began to write poetry more seriously, and then short pieces, articles, short stories, fantasy stories, and sent them off to various magazines. My poetry was rejected, as was everything else for a very long time, but at last a short article sold, a mixture of fact and fantasy about an artistic colony in Mexico. I was elated. Now my life was real.

  I insisted then that I have a separate bedroom in the old hacienda so that I could write whenever the mood struck. My small success had made Jean-Paul angry and jealous. And it was becoming obvious to us both that although I was his lover, I did not love him. Restless times fell upon The Seven, everyone changed partners, everyone slept with everyone else, or tried to—even the gay couple did their best. A period of discontent set in. Bottles were thrown in anger, voices were raised, dishes smashed, clothes torn. Nothing else I wrote was accepted for publication.

  Five years of my life had passed. I had thought I had caught hold of a comet that might carry me into the heavens, but so soon it seemed to be fizzling. I was not as happy with my new lover, François, as I had been with Jean-Paul. My beauty was taken for granted among the five I lived with.

  The next time we drove in our van to visit another artists’ colony, I packed my few belongings. And stayed with the people we had gone to visit. This was easy for me; I was so beautiful, and there were many men. This group was British; they served tea in china cups on the hottest day. These people, too, were trying to be artistic and bohemian—and they were artistic—but were so tidy and refined and reserved and brittle that they could never be truly bohemian. But because they were British, they were exotic to me, and I stayed with them, moving from man to man, for four years.

  But then it was 1960 and the times were changing. Now England was the place to be. Perhaps that was why I fell so hopelessly in love with Cecil Randolph. Or perhaps I would have loved him anyway. He was a newcomer to the British artistic colony and had come during the time when I (luckily) had fought with my current lover and moved into a room of my own. Cecil wasn’t an artist as much as a connoisseur. He had come to visit his younger brother George. The moment he walked into the room, I was enthralled. Much later I would realize that Cecil was a slimmer, more erect, more sophisticated, more haughty version of Will Hofnegle. But then I did not see the resemblance. I saw only the long, narrow nose, the cold pale blue eyes, the aristocratic lean height of the man. Perhaps one really loves only different versions of the same man all one’s life. Perhaps not. The truth was that I had not loved any man with my heart since Will, but I did fall in love with Cecil—I fell dangerously, helplessly, my wings melted, absolutely everything changed, like Icarus soaring too close to the sun.

  But if I was smitten, I was also twenty-eight, and had learned a few things. I did not let Cecil see how attracted I was. On the contrary, I was evasive and cool, pretending that I was absorbed in my writing. Cecil became attracted to me, and eventually we became lovers. We were so opposite—I so hot, he so cold—that we were magnetic together. Except for Will, it was the only really passionately sexual love affair I had been involved in, and with Cecil I was the one who loved more, who needed more, so my love was more painful, and so seemed more deep.

  Cecil didn’t care much for Mexico. He wanted to go back to England, and he asked me to come with him. He lived in a vast stone manor house in Sussex and in an apartment off Bayswater Road in London. He often went to visit his parents, who lived in an even larger manor house in the Cotswolds (he drove me by it once and pointed it out) and in a flat in London. I never met his parents, even though I lived with Cecil for five years. All along I was aware that although Cecil was truly in love with me, he found me just not quite right, this American girl he had discovered living with artistic looseness in Mexico. I couldn’t understand his friends, nor did they like me; they were so reserved, like artifacts of people. Each time Cecil had a house party at the manor, I was aware of the women’s unspoken scorn and the men’s kinder condescension. “Good” women did not live openly, then, unmarried, with men. When I walked, in a satin dress, through a blazingly lighted ballroom at one of Cecil’s parties, it was as if I were accompanied by the ghost of my sixteen-year-old self, the girl who had all unwittingly and without intent attracted the ardor of Jeremy Gardner and the dry-ice disdain of the east
ern girls. Now I was surrounded by the ultimate “eastern” girls, and again I walked through flames.

  I was without female friends. I had never wanted a girlfriend; I had vowed never to trust one. No doubt I created my own shell for protection, but it walled me in as much as it walled others out. I had no one to talk to and no one who could help me understand a thing. All I could use at that time was my physical beauty—and so I used it. When artists asked to paint me, I posed for them. That at least gave me some kind of social contact.

  And finally, in desperation, afraid I could lose Cecil’s love, I let myself be painted nude, Rubens-style, reclining on a chaise, satin pillows all around me, fat grapes in a bowl on the table in front of me, my hair tousled over my shoulders, over the pillows, my cheeks flushed. It was a message to Cecil: “Don’t forget how beautiful I am!” But I knew at once, on seeing Cecil’s face as he unveiled the portrait, that I had done the wrong thing. This was too sensual, too blatant a presentation of myself: one did not do this sort of thing. It made me seem common, and compared to Cecil I was common, at least according to the standards of the rigid British class system.

  Did I think I could really disguise the Kansas farmgirl in my own voluptuous flesh? I tried. And when Cecil and I were alone together, everything was perfect. Then we seemed two of a kind. Cecil was interested in the farmers who tenanted great parts of his land or who owned adjoining land, and this was something I knew about and could share with him, something I could even occasionally advise him on. Together we rode over fallow fields, discussing the best future use of those fields, or attended local farm meetings to fight for the best pollution control of the local streams, or stayed up all night together watching Cecil’s prize field trial bitch give birth to healthy pups. Then I would forget that we weren’t married; I would feel that we had become as one; I was happy and knew Cecil was happy, too. We were both readers—he loved nonfiction and history, and I loved fiction and poetry—so when we weren’t outside in the fields, we were inside by the fire, reading and interrupting each other to read aloud a fortunate phrase. When other people weren’t around, our union was complete; but we could not always live in our own isolated world.