Family Secrets

by Nancy Thayer

  “Mom. I want to marry Sam.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “No. I mean really. Now. I don’t want to go to college. I want to marry Sam and live with him.”

  Diane was shocked and, for a moment, angry.

  “Honey, you’re too young to get married. Your whole life is in front of you. You can do anything you want, be anything you want!”

  “I only want to be with Sam.” Julia dissolved into tears. Her slender back shook.

  “Oh, Julia, I know, I know.”

  “No, you don’t,” Julia wailed. “You don’t understand at all.”

  Diane had rocked Julia in her arms, hoping to soothe her.

  “I know how you feel, sweetie. Really I do. I remember falling in love with your father. It was amazing, like being hit by lightning. It was so—intense. I was a little scared. But, honey, we all survive.”

  “I don’t want just to survive!” Julia said impatiently. “I want to be with Sam.”

  Diane had stayed with Julia until she calmed down. Then, unable to relax, she went to a nearby grocery store and bought apples, raisins, shelled walnuts, and, for comfort, chocolate bars and the graham crackers Julia had loved as a child. When she returned to the dorm room, Julia was calmly working at her desk, a math book propped open in front of her.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Julia had said politely, while Diane’s heart had ached to give more to her daughter than food.

  Well, Diane thought now, who ever has the remedy for love? She crossed her studio and leaned on the windowsill, looking out into the street. Fresh air, a sense of perspective.

  She remembered feeling that way about Jim. It hadn’t been an entirely pleasant sensation. Desperation had been too much a part of it, and an overpowering craving that was really irrational. Well, all early love was a form of madness. With luck, it cooled into an enduring warmth.

  And then?

  And then, after twenty-one years of marriage, what did it become? The blaze of Julia’s emotions cast a bright light on Diane’s own heart. She still loved Jim. But did she still desire him?

  When she and Jim met, it had been a coup de foudre, a thunderbolt—for them both—not a falling in love but an arrival, a jolting moment of recognition, as if they’d walked through a door into the room of their lives. She’d never doubted that Jim loved her—or that she loved him. Her only worries had been about how this love would affect her life, for she had definite plans. She longed to be bohemian, to live in Paris and Amsterdam, to travel to the Orient, garnering ideas for her art. She’d intended to have many lovers, to be famous for the broken hearts she left behind her in every country through which she passed. She planned to be as different from her mother as she could possibly be.

  Oh, her poor mother! Leaning on the windowsill, Diane sent a silent note of gratitude and apology winging out in the air. Now, as Chase and Julia neared adulthood, she began to understand all her parents had done for her, all that she had shunned. Diane’s father had served as an officer in the Navy during World War II, then had joined a firm of lawyers in Washington, D.C., where he worked all his life, providing for his wife and four children a comfortable, even luxurious, life. Diane had chafed at their expectations and rules. Obviously bright, artistic, she’d disdained studying and lived in a dreamworld. As she grew into her adolescence, she decided she’d be an artist.

  Like her mother, she went away to Boston to college, but not to Radcliffe: to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She had high hopes. But she was drawn to work on a small scale and to detail, and her work was considered “decorative,” a dirty word among painters. By her second year it was clear that she wasn’t destined to be an artist. But by then she was leading what she thought of as the artistic life, and that had been what she’d really wanted. She and two roommates shared a loft on Brookline Street in Cambridge. Scented with eau de turpentine, hands stained from oils, they attended gallery openings, foreign films, poetry readings. They danced, partied, and eventually fell into what they considered in their youthful pride dramatic liaisons with eccentric, artistic young men. Diane loved her life. A teacher suggested that she enroll in the jewelry-making program; when she did, she discovered that this was where she belonged. Her fourth year in Boston she went to work for a jeweler. In 1966 she began stringing beads at home, making karmic faux-gypsy/Indian/astrological necklaces laden with charms that she took around to stores in Boston where they were quickly grabbed up and sold out. By the time she was twenty-four, she had hired one of her friends to be her bookkeeper and sales rep.

  She remembered those as glorious days. She, Karen, and Laurie slept on mattresses covered with batik Indian bedspreads. They wore turtlenecks and swirling gauzy skirts. They sat up all night smoking Camels, drinking red wine, discussing the meaning of life.

  One summer night someone on Putnam Avenue threw a party. Diane’s date was a guy she’d only just met: Roger, a handsome, messy, messed-up, slightly maniacal artist whose idol was van Gogh. Together they drank beer and argued politics in the kitchen. They swayed together sweatily in the living room to music from a record player. It was a hot, humid night. Roger stopped drinking beer and changed to the hard stuff, whiskey or vodka or both; it didn’t seem to matter. As the night went on, Roger grew obnoxious, vulgar, and finally, roughly amorous. Diane pushed away from him, or tried to, but they were pressed together in the crowded room. Just when she was afraid there would be some awful scene, Roger careened toward her, nearly falling, eyes bulging. Shoving people out of his way, he staggered across the room and out the door that was open to the hall.

  Perhaps he’d decided to go home, or pee in the hall; she didn’t care, though she did feel vaguely responsible. Squeezing her way through the crush of dancers, she followed Roger. She found him in the hallway, being sick over the bannister, while a tall, slender young man held his shoulders, preventing him from falling.

  “I have to lie down,” Roger groaned, and he did, right on the floor of the hall.

  Diane looked down at her date, then up into the young man’s clear brown eyes. For a moment she couldn’t breathe.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He was wearing chinos and a white T-shirt. His arms were long and slender with a swimmer’s sleek muscles.

  “I guess so. I feel a little faint. It’s so hot, and he wasn’t very pleasant just now—”

  “Would you like to come in and sit down for a minute? Have a glass of water? My apartment’s right here, across the hall.”

  “Oh. Well. Thank you.”

  “I’m Jim Randall.” He held out his hand.

  “Diane White. Thanks.” She put her hand in his. Looking into his dark eyes, she sensed a powerful, yet kind, intelligence. The long, sleek lines of his face gave him an elegant, even patrician air, which was softened by his surprisingly sweet, boyish smile. They stood there, forgetting to shake, just looking at each other. She blushed with desire. “It’s so hot,” she said again, embarrassed.

  “I’m Carolyn Whitney.” The redhead standing just inside Jim’s door was not amused by all this.

  “Oh. Oh, I don’t want to interrupt—”

  “It’s all right. We were just coming in from a movie,” Jim assured Diane.

  Walking past the disdainful Carolyn, Diane entered Jim’s apartment and sank onto a sofa. Immediately she noticed it was the softest thing she’d sat on in some time. Looking around, she saw a room furnished with a desk and chair, a coffee table and easy chair, books and newspapers, a standing lamp—a grown-up room, orderly and organized.

  Carolyn perched on the sofa next to Diane. “They throw great parties across the hall—Jim and I’ve had some terrific nights there.”

  So. Carolyn was staking her claim. But when Jim handed Diane a glass of cool water, his fingers lingered on hers for a few significant moments. She sipped the water. “It’s the first time I’ve been here. First time I’ve been out with Roger, too. I suppose this heat affects you when you’re drinking.” She wanted desperately to connect wi
th Jim. “I live over on Brookline Street, above Barr’s Deli, and it’s always hot there, so I ought to be used to this heat.” There. Now he knew where to find her, if he wanted to. Every time she looked at Jim, she was stirred by a current of desire—and he surely felt it, too. If only Carolyn weren’t here …

  But, of course in the end, she was the one to go. She drank all the water, then had no choice but to say, “That was great. Thanks,” and rise and walk across the bright airy room toward the hall.

  “Will you be able to get home all right?” Jim asked.

  Before Diane could answer, Carolyn said firmly, “I’m sure she will. She must have some friends there who can help her.”

  Diane wanted to say, no, I have no friends, I’m alone in the world. Instead she smiled at Jim and stepped out into the hall.

  Roger was asleep on the floor. He looked awful and smelled worse. The door to the party was open, and music and laughter blared out. Without a trace of remorse, she left Roger lying there and went home alone. She could hardly sleep. She was waiting.

  She knew Jim would come to her.

  And she was right.

  Sunday morning she awoke before eight, feeling hot and flustered from her restless night. After a quick shower, she slipped on a loose, swirly, thin cotton sundress tie-dyed into streaks and curls of lavender, violet, and mauve that brought out the blue of her eyes. Her cheeks were becomingly flushed from the summer heat and her own excitement. She pulled her long brown hair back with a barrette, then changed her mind and let it hang free; immediately the humidity lifted it into spirals floating around her head. She added a pair of earrings she’d made herself, a long dangle of blue beads and delicate silver bells that tinkled when she tossed her head, which she did often as she moved her warm mane of hair away from her neck. Studying herself in the bathroom mirror, she smiled, approving.

  Coming out of the bathroom, however, she noticed that the room she shared with her roommates—both still sleeping—looked absolutely chaotic. Clothes, books, papers, curlers, lipsticks, and plates were scattered around the room. Her own sheets were twisted into waves and peaks on the ancient Goodwill mattress on the floor. She didn’t want Jim to see the mess she lived in, not today.

  Shutting the door firmly behind her, she went out to sit on the dusty wooden stairs leading up from the street. It was hot in the enclosed and windowless space, so she turned off the overhead light, leaned against the wall, closed her eyes, and lost herself thinking of the man she’d met the night before.

  At exactly ten o’clock she heard the creak of the ground-level door and footsteps mounting the stairs. Her breath caught in her throat. Jim rounded the curve in the stairs and came into view.

  “Well, hi,” he said, stopping two steps down.

  Diane swung her feet around and smiled up at him. “Hi. I hoped you’d come over. I thought I’d wait out here. My roommates are still sleeping.”

  “Oh. Well, um. Want to get some coffee?”

  “Sure.” She got up, shaking out her skirt. Standing one step above, she was just at eye level with him. He was very tall. She liked his face very much, even more than she had the night before. He was wearing khaki shorts and a spotless white T-shirt. His forehead gleamed with a sheen of sweat, but he smelled of soap, and when he smiled, his teeth were as white as milk.

  For a few long seconds they remained on the stairs, looking at each other. A slow flush reddened Jim’s skin from his neck up to his freshly shaven jaw. A responding heat broke across Diane’s body. She licked her lower lip, then caught it between her teeth and bit it, to rein in her body’s tug. The sexual pull between the two of them was intense, but she wanted more.

  Jim drew in a shuddering breath and pulled backward, nearly losing his balance.

  “Well,” he said, “shall we go?”

  Diane was so entranced that when he reached up to put his hand on her back she didn’t understand for a moment what he meant, but then he turned slightly, and she saw that he was letting her pass by him, to go down the stairs first, a gentleman’s gesture.

  They walked to a nearby cafe and sat talking over coffee and fruit pancakes. Jim was finishing his doctorate in molecular genetics at Harvard. His voice deepened when he told Diane that he wanted to go into research, specifically in the area of breast cancer. When he was ten, his mother had died of the disease—as he told Diane this, he looked down at the table. His father had been killed in Germany in World War II. He’d been raised by his proper Bostonian grandparents and, when his grandfather died, by his grandmother and a librarian aunt. Diane described her family, her good, all-American, safe and boring family, with all the charm and wit she could summon. She told him about art school and her increasingly successful jewelry business. They talked through four refills of coffee, until a crowd of people came in for lunch.

  Then they walked down to Harvard Square to buy the Sunday papers and headed over to the banks of the Charles River, where they settled on the grass in the shade of a towering oak. The heat of the summer afternoon lay against their skin, and when a delicate breeze came up, stirring the leaves above them into a sultry sway, the small hairs on Diane’s arms lifted. Light shimmered off the river. Sailboats glided past on the blue water. Children raced by, whooping with laughter; old people toddled past, talking to their dogs.

  They were sitting, both of them cross-legged, slightly angled toward each other, the papers lying opened on the grass in front of them. Their knees and elbows were almost, but not quite, touching.

  “I can’t seem to concentrate on world news,” Jim confessed, grinning.

  “I know,” Diane agreed. “I think I’ve read this paragraph about eight times.”

  They smiled, pleased at their mutual beguilement. They looked into each other’s eyes. Jim’s eyes were dreamily large and luminous, the intense black pupils pulling her into his gaze.

  Jim leaned forward and kissed her. His mouth tasted as fresh as the air after a spring rain. When he put his hand on her cheek to draw her nearer to him, he brushed her earring with his thumb, causing a shivery chime from her silver earring bells. She put her hand on his warm, hard chest. Beneath the soft cotton of his T-shirt, his heart beat firmly.

  Carefully bracing himself with one arm, he pulled her to him and lowered her gently to the grass. He pressed his long body against hers and kissed her mouth, cheeks, eyelids, forehead, hair. This was sweetness, youth, summer, heaven, the green grass tickling the bare skin of her leg, a momentary breeze ruffling the light skirt of her dress, Jim’s kisses coming harder, lasting longer, the tension between them mounting so that she trembled and was grateful for the solid ground.

  “Look, Mommy!” A child’s high voice broke out. “Those people are kissing!”

  Jim drew back. He sat up, abashed, his face flushed, his dark hair falling over his forehead. “I forgot we weren’t alone.”

  Diane sat up, too, smoothing her hair. Her lips tingled. “I wish we were,” she said.

  She felt Jim studying her face and waited for him to touch her again. Instead, he jumped to his feet. “Let’s see what’s on at the movies,” he suggested.

  “All right,” she agreed, disappointment rushing through her.

  Jim reached out his hand to help her up. “I really want …” His voice broke. He began again. “I really would like to do this right.”

  She understood. Still, she burned with impatience the rest of that day as they sat side by side, arms touching, watching The Lion in Winter, then strolled hand in hand through Paperback Booksmith, discussing their favorite authors. They sat in a booth at the Wursthaus, thighs pressed together, eating dinner. When it grew dark, Diane hoped he’d take her back to his apartment; she’d made it clear they couldn’t be alone at her place. But after dinner he walked her back to Brookline Street. At the door he said, soberly, “This is our first date.” By then she knew him well enough to understand that he was trying to live up to some private standard of behavior. While part of her, the wicked rebel in her, wanted to torm
ent him into passionate action, the wiser part of her advised her to let him have his way, to let them “do it right.”

  They met the next night for dinner at The Pewter Pot. Afterward, as the sky deepened into a twilight shade of blue, Jim asked if she’d like to come back to his apartment. She said she would.

  Again Diane was struck by how clean and orderly Jim kept his rooms. Newspapers were folded neatly on the coffee table, papers sat stacked in systematic piles on his desk, and even his books seemed to be arranged according to height. In the sink stood a glass waiting to be washed; she could imagine him drinking orange juice that morning and setting the glass there instead of on the floor, or bathroom sink, or windowsill as she might have done in her careless hurry. It almost broke her heart to see this tidy apartment; she could sense the good little boy Jim had been, at the mercy of proper, fastidious old women.

  When he pointed out his bed, which was covered with a patchwork quilt in browns pieced together by his aunt, the desire to muss it all up was overpowering.

  Diane asked, “Is your bed comfortable?” She sat on the bed, then lay back on it, stretching her bare arms above her head. “Mmmm,” she hummed, closing her eyes.

  Fortunately, that was all it took on her part. Secretly, she admitted to herself it was a sort of test. If Jim was so strict with himself as to live by his grandmother’s rules in his own home, then he was not the man for her. But it was only a few moments before he joined her, kissing her almost violently, as if he could not help himself. That night she’d pulled her hair back with a barrette, which came loose with their tussling and got trapped under her back. The metal grip of the barrette bit into her shoulder blade as she was pressed into the mattress. Jim kissed her, touched her neck, and, moaning, reached down to force her loose cotton skirt up around her hips. He unzipped his white slacks, yanked them down, pulled down her panties. She kept her hands on his head, feeling his hair grow moist and silky with sweat. He shoved his way into her and they both sighed with infinite relief, as if they’d finally gotten where they’d always needed to be. Only a few seconds later, he came, pulsing inside her while she closed her eyes in concentration, trying to memorize the sensation of their bodies joined this way.