She Poured Out Her Heart

by Jean Thompson

  Later, at the reception (pizza and homemade cake at a friend’s apartment), Jane and Eric stood, arms entwined, happy, tired, gamely smiling. There was a sense that perhaps they had done something extraordinary and important, but that they would have to wait until they were alone to be certain. Eric’s parents—her in-laws! She had in-laws!—kept drifting up to them and attempting conversation. Eric was their only child, and they felt bereft. “I can’t believe we’re going to have to spend Christmas without you,” the mother-in-law said.

  “Mom, it can’t be helped. Anyway, it’s practically Christmas now.”

  “Well it’s not Christmas Christmas,” the mother-in-law said, tearily, giving Jane an aggrieved look. Jane, mortified, smiled harder.

  Jane’s father and brother sat on the couch, watching a basketball game while her mother roamed the kitchen, looking for things to clean. The musicians were off-duty, and someone had put on a hip-hop tape, probably trying to get rid of the parents. Bonnie strolled up to them, glass in hand. “Why don’t you do the cake thing?”

  The cake was chocolate, and the baker had aspired to three layers but settled for a lopsided two. Some of Eric’s old soccer club friends had procured a cake topper in the shape of a soccer player fleeing, being tackled by a bride in full dress. Good old Jane laughed along with everyone else. But why was it assumed that she was the one catching Eric? Even if he was a doctor, even if that was how everybody saw it. Wasn’t there some more refined tradition, in which the gentleman pursued the lady, paid her court, won her hand, and then was congratulated on his good fortune?

  “We’re not going to feed each other cake,” Eric announced, in case anyone was expecting it. No one seemed to be. Their friends were all smart, modern. Not that many of them had married yet themselves, but they were not inclined to follow a lot of used-up customs like smashing cake into each other’s faces, or the groom taking off the bride’s garter, even if Jane had worn such a thing as a garter. Jane supposed she might have to throw her bouquet, though there wasn’t much clearance in the apartment. She would worry about that later, along with everything else she had to worry about. Now she concentrated on cutting an acceptable slice of cake, Eric’s hand on the knife alongside her own. The cake was delicious, everyone agreed, and if it was a bit crumbly, that didn’t interfere with taste.

  The family members ate their cake and began to migrate doorward. “Call us,” Jane’s mother said, kissing her. “Oh, I wish you weren’t going so far away!”

  Oh, but she was glad she was. She was ready to be someone else, not the focus of everyone’s worry and exasperation, Jane the difficult, the delicate, the droopy. Someone she could only be in her new estate, one half of this new and splendid creature, a married couple.

  The parents, both sets of them, shook hands with each other and said they’d be seeing each other again before too long, and then retreated to their own cars to nurse their private opinions of each other. Behind them, the party loosened up, grew louder. Jane took off her shoes, Eric his tie, and when a slower, smokier song came on, they danced in the center of the small living room, to general applause.

  They collapsed onto the couch, breathless, happy, beginning to think about the end of the evening, of going home together to the packed-up apartment and making love. They squeezed hands, meaning they wouldn’t stay that much longer.

  The best man, one of Eric’s med school friends, said that he guessed he should propose a toast. That was what you did at weddings, even one as marginally traditional as this one. “To Eric and Jane,” he announced, holding his plastic cup on high. He was a little drunk, as were they all. “They go together like, wait, I got this. Like . . .” He shook his head owlishly.

  “Like Bonnie and Clyde,” someone suggested.

  “No, not them.”

  “Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. And maybe Trigger.”

  “You guys, just let me finish, OK?” The best man lowered his glass to take a drink, then stopped himself and raised it again. “Eric, Jane, the two of you are meant to be together, because who else would put up with Eric? Jane, don’t let him get away with any shit. I know you think he’s a nice guy, but soon the scales will fall from your eyes. Jane, I don’t know you that well, but there’s probably something wrong with you too.”

  Somebody said, “What exactly are we drinking to here?”

  “Alcohol and happiness,” the best man declared, but the group voted to edit that to just happiness.

  “To happiness!” They toasted, drank, and cheered. The maid of honor had departed along with her mother, but Bonnie stood up next.

  “I’d give you guys advice, but you can sum it all up as: ‘Men are stupid, women are crazy!’”

  And they all drank to that too. Bonnie sat down next to Jane on the couch. She’d been dancing and she smelled of cologne and sweat. Her hair had broken loose from any gels or sprays and assumed its default position, falling into her eyes. “So how does it feel?”

  “Brand new,” Jane said. But it was more than that; she felt as if she were carrying something both heavy and fragile, and if she lost her grip, it would shatter. “God, I wish we weren’t moving right away,” she said, because she didn’t want to talk about what was closest and keenest, so she fell back into perfunctory complaints. “There’s still so much to do.”

  “Want me to come over after work tomorrow?”

  “Thanks, but we have to take some boxes to Eric’s parents, stuff we don’t have room for.”

  “It really is a shame you won’t get to spend Christmas with them.”

  Jane gave her the shut up look. A new, cautionary thought came to her. “Honey,” she said to Eric, sitting on her other side, “your mother isn’t expecting us for dinner tomorrow, is she?”

  Eric groaned. “I’ll call her. Remind me.”

  Bonnie leaned around Jane to talk to him. “Hey Eric, I have this pain in my ass, do you think it’s serious?”

  “Probably. I expect you’ll have to have surgery. A radical ass-ectomy.”

  The music started up again and Bonnie had to shout to be heard. “So, can you recommend a good ass man?”

  Jane said, “You don’t have to answer that. In fact, better you don’t.” The two of them got along famously, like a pair of thirteen-year-old boys.

  Whatever Eric might have said, he was interrupted by another of the med school friends coming up to talk to him. Bonnie sat back again. “It can be so difficult to find good medical care,” she remarked.

  Eric was the first of Jane’s boyfriends that Bonnie liked. This was hard for Jane to get her mind around. Did that mean Bonnie had been right all along when she disapproved of the others? “He’s cute,” Bonnie pronounced, after she’d met Eric for the first time. “He looks like an intelligent chocolate Lab.” And he did, a little, with his friendly brown eyes and upturned nose. “And he’s a bit arrogant, which I think you have to be if you’re going to be a doctor and do all those life and death things.”

  “Self-confident, not arrogant,” Jane said.

  “I meant, arrogant in a good way. He’s a solid guy. Not one of those weedy, whiny ones who you’d end up supporting because they’re so terribly unfulfilled.”

  Bonnie, as always, was some combination of irritating and accurate. Eric was, if not arrogant, at least ambitious, diligent, focused. Each step of medical training was a competition, everything scored and ranked, everything depended on admissions, or rejections. Eric took to it all, thrived. Jane had never known anyone like him.

  “You mean,” Jane said, “he’s not like Adam.” Adam had been her last serious boyfriend before Eric.

  “Adam was not what you would call a man of action.”

  “More like an action figure,” Jane agreed.

  “Wasn’t there something wrong with his gums? I always insist on good periodontal health, no matter what else is lacking.”

  “Someday,” Ja
ne told her, “you’re going to fall in love with the really, really wrong guy.”

  “But meanwhile, there are so many delightfully wrong guys out there for me.”

  She and Bonnie didn’t see that much of each other these days. Bonnie lived in the city, in Wicker Park, and spent her days doing training and simulations for cops and firefighters, also the occasional ride-alongs when they had to deal with the dope sick, the pillheads, the unmedicated homeless or people who were blasted out of their minds on street drugs or alcohol, or some combination of all of the above. She had her share of war stories. The naked guy, the Jesus guy (there were several of these), the guy with a dozen fishhooks impaled in his face. The mother holding a knife to her baby’s throat, the guy pulling behind him a stuffed cat on wheels. The job was a good fit for Bonnie. She had an affinity for the outlandish and the downright dangerous, she was unafraid of them, she spoke their language. She could help people who didn’t especially want to be helped. She was dating a cop at present but she had not brought him to the wedding because, she said, he was not the kind of guy you took to weddings. Jane wondered what was wrong with this one.

  Jane, meanwhile, lived in Evanston and worked for a nonprofit that was doing a study of blood banks. (She was a vampire, Eric teased.) She distributed questionnaires—How does your facility do outreach? Do you target specific populations?—she gathered data, she wrote reports. She got used to the sight of blood, at least, as it was stored in refrigerated plastic units, those cold liquid jewels. She had friends from work and often on weekends they went out for drinks or dinners. From time to time she took the sort of classes that were meant to give you a better mind in a better body: tai chi, journal writing, cookery.

  Sometimes she was lonely, sometimes she was merely alone. Her occasional boyfriends were just placeholders, nobody you might consider as the companion of your life or even a considerable portion of that life. Because she did want to get married, she did want kids, all the things everybody wanted and you did not wish to miss out on them.

  But at odd and unpredictable moments she might have a sensation—the shadow of a sensation—as of something sliding away beneath her, jarring loose—the familiar become strange. Had her repaired heart sprung a leak, begun sending electrical short circuits into her brain? She wondered, but she didn’t tell anybody. She didn’t want to get caught up in some medical juggernaut of CT scans and EKGs and galvanic skin responses, all the tests that ruled things out but ruled nothing in and ended up with a prescription for anxiety medication. What would she tell them anyway? They wanted a list of symptoms: dizziness, blurred vision, palpitations. You could not say, it is a different life trying to nudge this one aside. I am meant to be living that different life. Who would understand that, if she could make no better sense of understanding it herself?

  The sunrise colors began so imperceptibly, she could never catch the exact moment when the wall began to change. It broke over her and over and over and over, every day, for a suspended instant of ecstasy.

  She and Eric met when they were both standing in line for the bathroom at a party, and although Eric was ahead of her he stepped aside when the door opened. “Ladies first,” he said, bowing her in, and she guessed that was polite, even gallant, but she didn’t like the idea that he was standing outside and hearing her pee. She had to run water in the sink before she could go. Of course he was right there when she came out and she blushed and tried to walk sideways past him. But he said, “Wait for me, OK?” She retreated far enough so that she would not have to listen to his toilet noise. He emerged perfectly cheerful and untroubled. When she found out he was a medical student at Northwestern, that made sense: bodily things would have no mystery or shame for him.

  Much later, once everything was settled between them, she asked him, “What was it you liked about me? Why did you tell me to wait for you?”

  “Because,” Eric said, “you were about to get away.”

  At the party they sat on a back staircase. He talked. She talked. Jane was a good listener, she’d had years of female practice, but Eric wasn’t bad, for a man. He laughed, he nodded, he asked questions. He’d grown up in Highland Park, where his parents still lived. He’d wanted to be a doctor for as long as he could remember. He was still at the beginning of his training and had not yet decided on a field, but he was leaning toward cardiology. Jane said as a matter of fact, she knew a little about cardiology, and told him the story of her childhood heart condition. “That is really something,” he kept saying, wonderingly, and if offering yourself up as a medical curiosity was not the usual way of piquing a man’s interest, well, you did whatever worked.

  Jane thought he was good-looking, in a normal, ordinary way, like those figures who fill in the background in beer commercials. She liked his hair, brown and worn curly/shaggy. He had a kind of ease or confidence—which Bonnie would later call arrogance—he seemed to know exactly what he wanted. And what he wanted, strange as it might seem to her, was Jane.

  “I’m so glad you’re not a nurse,” he told her once. “I’m up to my neck in nurses day in and day out.” So that was one of her attributes: not a nurse. In the most roundabout way possible, Jane inquired about his past girlfriends. He looked at her seriously. “I have a confession to make. I wasn’t a virgin when I met you.” Jane threw a pillow at him.

  He mentioned the old girlfriends from time to time, but not in any way that Jane found very helpful. His high school girlfriend, he said, had confounded him some years later by going Goth in a big way. A girl he dated in college had a pet ferret. And so on. Certainly not, the girl who broke my heart, or the one who got away, or the gorgeous, sexually depraved one. She guessed that was gentlemanly of him, but also disappointing. Had they left no mark on him, had he simply said good-bye and gone on his blithe and untroubled way? He was incurious about Jane’s past sweethearts, which was just as well, since there were not all that many of them and none of them made for interesting anecdotes. The one who helped himself to my groceries. The one who watched football. Or maybe that was true of all of them. What kind of a mark had they left on her? Dismay, mostly, and disappointment.

  After the first time she and Eric made love, Jane apologized. “I guess I’m just not really a physical person.”

  Eric, dozing and drowsing, stirred. “What?”

  “I’m not . . . I’m sorry I’m not better at this.” She had bundled herself in the sheets, hiding her sorrowful body away. He wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her now.

  “What are you talking about? Hey!” They’d been lying side by side on their backs, and now he rolled over toward her. “I don’t have any complaints. So I guess you do.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that, I just . . . I’ve never been exactly passionate.” She was horribly embarrassed. She shouldn’t have said anything, except that she was certain she’d never see him again, now that her dismal sexual self had been revealed.

  “You’re apologizing because you didn’t have an orgasm?”

  “Ahh, oh . . .” She was an idiot to have said anything. She hadn’t meant orgasms, she didn’t even care about that. She just didn’t have his kind of enthusiasm. He deserved better. Then again, she was aware that men did not necessarily notice what might be going on with you, as long as you were compliant.

  “Come here.” He tugged at the sheets, unwrapping her.

  “You don’t have to . . .” Jane began, but he was already busy, rubbing, stroking, licking.

  “Just relax,” he murmured.

  She was not relaxed. She was waiting for it to be over. Even though she wanted all the kissing and holding and lying in bed next to him. She liked watching and touching his body, which was slim and compact and not so large as to make her feel overwhelmed. She was OK with all that. The rest of it she was accustomed to go along with, which was all right because it usually didn’t last that long.

  He was still diligently working away at her. “Ho
w’s that?”

  “It’s fine,” Jane said, because it wasn’t not fine. But if there was some goal involved, she was falling short of it. She put her hand on top of his, stopping him. “I think I need a break.”

  He did stop then, and folded his hand over hers. “You have to tell me what you like.”

  Did she? Was it something else you had to work hard at? They hadn’t known each other very long. She thought she would like talking to him and watching movies on television with him and eating take-out and having someone to tell if she had a bad, or a good, day at work. She would like trying to imagine what he was doing at different times of the day, and dressing up for him when he was coming over. But that was not what he wanted to hear. “I like being close to you,” she began. “I just have trouble being in the moment.”

  “Are you . . . afraid or something?”

  What should she say? He was being nice, he was nice, and it came to her that he was concerned for her, he was asking if she’d had anything horrible happen to her, like had she been raped or abused. It would be easier if she had been, or maybe she could make up some story. But she couldn’t be that dishonest.

  She said, “I guess it’s mostly nerves.” Which was only a little dishonest.

  “I just want to please you,” he whispered. He slid her hand down to his penis, which was poking around again in an amiable way, and at least Jane knew what was expected of her here, and that was all right too, as long as you didn’t have to do it every time.

  This was pretty much how things would continue between them, for some number of years.