“She’s just bitter and dry and angry,” she imagined people saying in private, when her name came up, and she approved. She liked the idea of being thought of as bitter and dry and angry. Anything but “Poor Louise Cooper. You know her husband has a lover, and she has cancer, and both—both!—her children are homosexuals. Isn’t that terrible? Poor woman. If I were in her shoes—”
___________
When she got home, Nat was back already, cracking peanuts in the kitchen. He was often home early these days; he had little work to do, little to occupy himself with. His research was at a standstill, his teaching a matter of prepared lectures he could give by rote.
“How did it go today?” he asked her when she walked in the door.
“Fine,” she said, searching his eyes for anything suspicious. There, in his eyes, lay the clues to her other darknesses—his still-not-admitted adulteries. Well, she didn’t care about who he did it to, didn’t care as long as it was a prostitute in Thailand, a girl picked up in a bar in Los Angeles, paid with dinner and a movie and the pretense of tenderness. Even when it came to Lillian Two-Names, she didn’t care if he was fucking her; that in and of itself didn’t bother her. She had had her own moments after all, had her memories of Tommy Burns and Xavier and Mike Spivack. Who cared if Nat had fuel to burn? No, what hurt—what sliced like a knife through her heart—was this scene she often imagined: Lillian Two-Names sitting across a table from some woman, maybe a secretary from Nat’s department, drinking coffee, weeping, confiding. And the words Lillian says, in this reverie, cut sharp: “A good man like that! Why does he stay with her? Pity, that’s all, pity because she’s got cancer. If she didn’t have cancer, he’d leave her, I know he would.”
The nameless second woman nods sympathetically. She is no one; she is a nod, that’s all.
“I just have to be patient,” Lillian says. “I just have to wait.”
The scene played in Louise’s head. It expanded. It lit a flame.
“Remember we have that dinner at the Rosens’ tomorrow,” she reminded Nat.
“Don’t embarrass me with any political arguments this time, will you?” he said, referring to the last dinner party they’d gone to, where she’d challenged the dean of sciences on Reagan’s foreign policy. (Nat hated how she sometimes flared like that in public, then just went on, saying what she had to say, indifferent to the comfort of the other guests, who had to sit silently by, chewing on toothpicks. Indifferent, finally, to his own comfort. He failed to see what good it did to stir up bad feelings or make unnecessary enemies.)
“Great,” she said hotly, irritated to be reminded of this old indiscretion. In truth she felt guilty about it and was planning to make an effort at Joyce Rosen’s party not to argue with anyone, but now Nat had put her on the defensive. So she said, “If that’s the way you feel, I won’t go. I’ll stay home.”
“Louise—”
“Never mind. You don’t want me, I’m not going. That’s it.”
“That’s ridiculous, Louise. She’s your friend. Anyway, you’re the one who accepted. If anyone isn’t going, it’s me.”
“Why,” Louise said, “do you always have to squelch me, to shut me up, as if my opinion’s worthless? It just isn’t fair, Nat. You’re so damned determined to keep the peace, to keep everything nice and calm. But I’m not just going to sit by like some stupid wife while some big-bellied man holds forth about the glories of Ronald Reagan. I am just not. I have my integrity.”
“I have my reputation,” Nat said.
“I have my reputation,” Louise said.
“You have a reputation,” Nat said, “and if you’ll pardon my saying so, it’s not a very good one.”
That stung her. She looked at him, and her first impulse was to say, Really? Is it true? Do people talk about me? She feared and despised the idea of people talking about her. But no, it was just a tactic, an attempt at intimidation.
“Shut up,” she said challengingly.
“Why should I? You never do. You talk and talk, and it ruins the dinner party for everyone else.”
Rage left her speechless. She wanted to throw something. There was nothing to throw.
“I wish you would just go to hell,” she said, turning from him.
Nat walked out of the room.
“That’s right, just storm away, you bastard!” And when there was no answer, she said it again: “You bastard! You bastard!” Her voice high-pitched, the words echoing across the house. A door, loudly slammed, was the only answer.
Then there was a moment’s silence, before the crying started. He came back into the kitchen. Very efficiently he put on his jacket; he said, “I don’t have to take this crap from you.” She buried her face in her hands.
“Don’t go,” she said softly.
“Can’t hear you,” he said. “All that yelling has wrecked my eardrums.”
A last surge of rage rose in her. “You bastard!” she shouted again, but it only gave him a good reason to slam the door.
She stood. She opened the window. “Nat!” she called. “Wait! Wait! I’m sorry, Nat, I’m sorry.” But he was in the car already. She opened the back door, flew out after him. “I’m sorry,” she said again, “I’m sorry.” He was pulling out, turning away.
“Nat!” she called. Ridiculous, barefoot, in the street.
Immediately she ran back inside, grabbed her purse and car keys, ran out again, got into her own car, pulled out after him. He was turning left at the stop sign. She approached him from behind. He drove through, made a surprising, sudden right turn without signaling. The dusty rubber of the accelerator pedal was warm against her bare foot.
Three more stop signs. He was off his route, ashamed, or angry, or both, about where he was going. Finally: a red light on a country highway, no traffic, no cars. She pulled up her emergency brake and ran out, paying no attention to the street gravel, which was cutting her bare feet bloody. “Nat,” she said, trying to sound calm, normal, “Nat, I’m sorry.”
His electric window closed on her face.
“Nat,” she said!
“Leave me alone, for Christ’s sake,” he said, his voice barely audible through the closed window.
“Nat, no!” She rapped on the window. Then the light changed, and he was off, leaving her there, barefoot in the intersection.
There was a sudden quietness in the aftermath of his parting in which she could actually hear the chirping of birds and the breeze moving the leaves. A child in a Hugga Bunch T-shirt stood across the road, her legs stretched over her bicycle seat, taut as a dancer on point. The child’s bicycle had a white wicker basket attached to the front, and Louise found herself trying to remember the color of the wicker basket on her own childhood bicycle, in Little Nahant. A car approached from behind, slowed down in puzzlement at the sight of Louise’s car, apparently parked there, in the middle of the road, and Louise, shaken, suddenly, from her rapt contemplation of the bicycle basket, shrugged her shoulders, smiled at the driver of the car, mouthed the word “stalled,” got back in, and floored the gas pedal. In the rearview mirror she could see the driver of the other car shaking his head, and the child, like someone wakened from a trance, pedaling away in the opposite direction.
Back at her own house, she sat at the kitchen table. There, in the center, as always, were the salt and pepper shakers, a vase of flowers, the ceramic sugar bowl with its cracking moon and stars. As usual, she found herself retracing the torrid plot of the argument, trying to gauge her rectitudes as well as her missteps, squinting at those foibles she saw clearly. She couldn’t help any of this. The old-news argument with the dean of sciences several weeks back kept replaying in her head, until she had herself convinced it was all ultimately the dean of sciences’ fault, the world’s fault. After all, if he hadn’t started that argument, there would’ve been no subject for this one. Had it been wrong of her to challenge the dean? Should she have just sat by? All those blustery Ph.D.ed men, holding forth as if they owned the world, and she,
powerless, without even a college degree. (A fact that Nat never mentioned to anyone, but which she knew was often a foremost embarrassment in his thoughts; she had gone to nursing school and dropped out at the beginning of the war.) Oh, Nat! (And now she addressed him with all the secret, unleashed eloquence she could somehow never muster in his presence.) Oh, Nat, don’t you understand that what little pride I can gather these days depends upon my proving to the dean of sciences that I am his equal, his contender, and will not, like so many others, let his noxious opinions pass unremarked? But of course you only understand diplomacy, keeping the peace, making no enemies. As my mother used to say, “A person with no enemies is friends with a bunch of snakes.” And in this new argument, this fantasy argument, she turns away triumphantly, leaving him speechless, without recourse, stunned by the rightness of her point of view, savaged, changed. “Louise!” he says. “You’re right! From now on, no more diplomacy! Life is an adventure! And I don’t give a damn what your reputation is! Anyone puts you down to me, honey, you can bet I’ll tell him where to stuff it!” Yes, Nat! Right, Nat! As if a reputation for having a hotheaded wife were really such a terrible thing! True, if she had a reputation for having affairs, or lying, or poisoning cats! But really, in the scheme of things, was it so terrible to be a hotheaded wife? He should be grateful, she said to herself. Other men would’ve been grateful.
So, a voice said, why don’t you leave him?
Forget it, forget it. Fear. Such unbelievable, all-consuming fear.
She got up, walked a hesitant circle of the house, and sat down on the yellow sofa in the family room, determined not to pace anymore; took out her knitting; put it down again. If, in the big, just world, she was right, didn’t that make some difference, hold some influence, in the little world of her little life? Or was he judge, jury, and executioner? Marriage as dictatorship, not democracy; she’d suspected it all along. And even if she won on facts, what did facts matter? She’d never wanted it that way, she’d never asked for it, but there it was: As far as her well-being was concerned, his opinion was the only one that counted.
She got up, went back into the kitchen. The sun was beginning to set. The momentary sense of triumph brought on by her earlier raging had long since left her; she felt no pleasure, only sorrow that her anger had again won her nothing. What were facts? What did the dean of sciences matter; what did hotheadedness, her desire to prove her worth, matter? The truth was that Nat encouraged these fights because they gave him an excuse to leave.
She felt as if she had miscarried. Her stomach was raw. So she turned on every light; she turned on every television. She paced the bright arena of the many-windowed house, chewing on a cigarette-shaped pacifier, a plastic toy from when she’d quit smoking, wondering if this last fight might be the one too many, the straw that broke the camel’s back. Driving after him like that! Why hadn’t she just let him alone, let him stew it out alone, maybe feel a little guilty? Nat had endured so much with her, after all, in her own lapsing days; he had been patient, stoic; he’d never yelled. She owed him her loyalty for not leaving her when he really had a reason to, when it would have been so easy. Back then—had it really been thirty years?—his reasoning had been simple: He loved her, he said. More than anyone he could imagine. And she—oh, how she regretted it now!—she had said, “You make it seem so damn simple! Love for me isn’t like that, it isn’t simple. I have different kinds of feelings—sometimes they’re very complicated.” How she wished she herself had been simple then, as he had been, for by now he had taken her words to heart, and she dreaded the inevitable day when he’d quote them back at her.
He would be back by ten the next morning. He always was. Slipping in the kitchen door, slightly sheepish, his rage for the moment quelled. But never, never forgiving.
Quietly, patiently, she began to plan her apology: how she would kiss him and lay her head on his resisting or giving shoulder. How he would sigh, look away. How, if worse came to worst, if he said, “We can’t go on like this,” she would say what she was saving to say at that inevitable moment: “You cannot leave me. I can’t live without you, and I can’t die without you either.” Those words that she had never spoken, but which reverberated through the house, provisional, assumed. All she had to do was say them, she knew, and their power would bloom like the power of a magic spell. Lillian Two-Names might call it blackmail, and maybe it was. But her pride—once such a strong shield—was by now so damaged it hardly existed at all. So she took comfort in those words and in the knowledge that in the final confrontation, she could save herself by using them, and keep him.
At about this moment Louise understood Nat’s car to be pulling into Lillian’s driveway. She had timed the trip. She imagined she could hear the wheels against the tiny bits of gravel in Lillian’s driveway. Every nuance of that tiny crunching reverberated in her ears.
___________
As for nat, by the time he got to Lillian’s house he was close to shaking. For more than half an hour he’d been driving in meaningless circles, through unfamiliar suburban neighborhoods, down and around the circular ends of cul-de-sacs where the sidewalks sloped to the street. The houses he passed were series-uniform even in color—pink, mauve, lime, pink, mauve, lime—and brought back Carrollton to him, that perfect town of the future, built on garbage, where he had idealistically settled his family upon arriving in California. A sadness and a regret—he had invested in such suburban projects, back in the fifties, his own utopian urges, and now they had fallen to wear and tear and ruin, or, worse, the ravages of renovation, which individualized and wrecked what beauty they had, the beauty of one house the same after another. That mathematician’s beauty, that city planner’s beauty. Now he was on Ruthelma Drive, named, he suspected, for the wives of the builders. Ruthelma Drive, Tedlee Way. Louise had hated all that, had had no patience for it. And of course, all this time, as he drove aimlessly through the landscape of his past loves, he was convinced Louise was still following him, cursing Ted and Lee and Ruth and Thelma as much as she was cursing him. Where, in all of this, was Danapril Street? Natlou Street? Lillnat Street?
He pulled up along the curb of a closed shoe store. Waited. She didn’t approach. Well, he had finally shaken her. And now he began to worry about consequences: What if she gets into a car accident? What if I drive her over the edge and she does something impulsive, something terrible? Turning off the ignition, he got out of his car and walked to an open pizza parlor, dug through the rows of sticky, dark tables and red-net candles to the phone booth, dialed his own number, then hung up before there were any rings. He couldn’t bear to hear her voice. Oh, what should he do? He was tempted to go home again, except that the thought of her in the bed next to him in her lace nightgown, curled into herself like a nut, was almost too much for him. Going back would mean having to listen to her recriminations and resentments and unhappinesses all night. Whereas what he wanted now—what he needed—was something positive, some good light, some pleasure in his life. Louise took advantage of him, he told himself now. He was her dishrag, her handkerchief. When she hurt, or when she was scared about the cancer, or when she just felt her life was shitty, it was Nat she took it out on. Why the hell can’t you clean up after yourself? Well, then, what did you do with it? I do everything for you, and you don’t lift a finger for me. No, don’t touch me. No, don’t talk to me. Just leave me the hell alone. And underneath that, and oddly at the same moment: Touch me. Hold me. Help me.
He dug his way back out of the cavernous pizza parlor, drove to Lillian’s. She was at the door, waiting for him, by the time he made it out of his car, slowed to hesitation by fantasies of Louise with a gun, hiding in the bushes. She had her hair pulled back in a bun, and wore a beige chiffon bathrobe, and smelled of face cream. “Nat, you look like you just got run over on the highway,” she said, and taking his hand, ushered him quickly through the door. Her living room was bright, cleaning-lady clean, with Beethoven on the stereo, pictures of her clean-cut (heterosexual) childr
en, smiling, above the dining room table.
As soon as he was in the door and it was locked, he fell into the sofa and sat there, slumped, while she fetched him coffee. “And I have that chocolate hazelnut torte you love so much from O’Hanlon’s,” she called from the kitchen. “I’ll cut you a piece.”
He smiled, unable to move, and waited for her to bring him the coffee and cake and sit down next to him.
“How was your day?” he asked.
“Crazy. That goddamned Krautheimmer is going to drive me insane, trying to plan this conference around all his agendas. But I don’t want to talk about me! Natty, what happened?”
He shrugged. “Nothing unusual. A fight.” And suddenly, to his own surprise, he was weeping.
“Natty,” Lillian said. “Oh, Natty.” And putting down her mug and cake plate, she enfolded him in her chiffon-enfolded arms.
“Jesus, Lil, I don’t think I can take another day of it,” Nat was muttering. “I just don’t think I can take another day of it. She’s crazy, Lil. No, no, she’s not crazy. She’s just so unhappy she does crazy things.”
“She needs help,” Lillian said quietly, strumming his hair with her long fingers.
Equal Affections Page 11
