Rough Strife

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “What?”

  “Are you glad we met?”

  She didn’t want to be bothered. She was sewing, and she wanted to be lost in her cross-stitches. They were very absorbing, very soothing in their unvarying monotony. She had never seen Ivan so fidgety. “What a question.”

  “Are you? I mean—” and he smiled weakly—“with my defective eye genes and all?”

  “You’re not so defective. You’re all right.”

  She wore glasses herself now, for close work. She adjusted them and bent over her sewing.

  “What’s that thing you’re doing?”

  “It’s a sampler, to embroider. I bought it in the gift shop yesterday.”

  “You mean one of those things that says God Bless Our Happy Home? Let me see.”

  She held it up. “No, see, this one just has the alphabet, in big and small letters, and flowers.”

  “I never saw you do embroidery before. Since when is this?”

  “I sew on special occasions. I’ve already done the capital X and the J, and the small a, d, and f, and two roses, and I’m working on the q.”

  He gave her an odd look. “Well, I think I’ll go and ask at the desk.”

  “It’s only an hour and a quarter.”

  “I’ll ask anyway.” He returned in a moment, unsatisfied, and sat down. “Oh, I forgot to tell you the good news. We had a letter from Vic yesterday. He’s getting married.”

  Caroline put down the embroidery and took off her glasses. “Vic is? That’s wonderful! Who’s he marrying?” Vic was thirty-five, the same age as she was. His single state had been preoccupying Ivan’s parents for years.

  “Someone named Susan. She’s a lawyer too. She works in his office. They’re going to move to New York and set up a practice, so we’ll get to see them more often. In fact, they’re having the wedding in New York in a couple of months, so we can go.”

  If she lives, thought Caroline, we’ll go. “That’s wonderful, Ivan. I’m really glad. Did he say how come this one, after all the others?”

  “I suppose Miss Right just came along. Or Ms. Right, I should say.”

  “Oh, Miss Right. You always said you didn’t believe in Miss Right. You said everything was random. Like us.”

  “They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.”

  She pondered that for a few seconds, then said dryly, “I’m deeply touched,” and resumed sewing.

  Ivan inquired at the desk about Isabel three times and was embarrassed to ask again. “You go this time, Caroline.”

  “You were just there a minute ago. I don’t like the way that woman looks. She’ll yell at me, and I don’t feel like being yelled at.”

  “Please.”

  The woman, who had a greenish pallor, fixed bulging eyes on Caroline and tightened her lips. “I have already told your husband you would be informed,” she said, and turned her back.

  “Oh, fuck off,” said Caroline under her breath. A young man typing behind the desk caught her eye and grinned.

  They were summoned five minutes later. “The child is in the recovery room,” the frog-faced woman said.

  “But when can we see her?”

  “You may go up to her room now. They’ll be bringing her back shortly.”

  Caroline turned from the desk and fell weeping into Ivan’s arms. “I was so scared. Oh God, I was so scared. This was much worse than having her.”

  “It’s all right now, baby. Everything’s all right. It was nothing, a small thing.”

  “I am glad we met, Ivan. I am.”

  Isabel was given a pair of dark glasses with round lenses and pink plastic frames, and told to wear them outdoors for two days. In front of the hospital, Caroline dropped the sampler in a wastebasket and studied her. Her heart quickened: with the glasses, Isabel looked like a blind person. But they would be home soon and she could take them off. She herself could hardly wait to get to bed—she hadn’t slept for two nights.

  “These are good glasses,” said Isabel. “I’m going to wear them to school.”

  Ivan said, “Maybe we should get her a box of pencils.”

  “Ivan, really.” But she laughed.

  “I don’t want pencils,” said Isabel. “I want my sandals.”

  Ivan looked down at her feet, in plaid sneakers. “What sandals?”

  “Mommy promised if I didn’t scream when they took my blood I could get sandals after. I didn’t scream.”

  “We’ll get them tomorrow.”

  “You said as soon as it was over,” said Isabel pleasantly. “Don’t you remember?”

  Ivan was opening the car door. Caroline looked over at him. “Please stop at a shoe store,” she said. “I did promise. There must be something nearby.”

  “I saw the kind I want at Jack and Jill.”

  At night they fell asleep instantly. Caroline awoke to the particular stillness of the hour before first light. She relived her stay in the hospital, the television vigils, the hard cot, the babies with gross deformities and their hapless mothers. The singing attendant, the coconut danish, Ivan dropping the cards. When she had run it through she had the blessed relief of waking from a nightmare. All was well. The stillness around her deepened, and in the dark hour descended like a visitation of grace one of those moments when miraculously it is clear that all things will be well. She knew by now how ephemeral such moments were, and how they must be savored. Except that Ivan, in his sleep, began groping around her back and hips. She was used to his restless sleep, less sleep than a muted form of action. He liked to cling to her at night, as a displaced person journeying to parts unknown clings to a loved relic of home. She didn’t mind; it made her feel needed. But this was extreme: he fumbled in blind frustration with the light fabric of her nightgown. Not for love; had he wanted that he would have whispered her name and groped in a way more calculated to arouse. He was fast asleep, tugging and pulling. All at once in the clarity of the darkness she understood. What he wanted was a feeling. What he wanted, after his own nightmare, was to touch living skin. She was awed by the rareness of him, a creature of such unimpeded instinct that even in sleep he sought what he needed. As she raised the nightgown for him his hands settled on her skin and he quieted, breathing evenly.

  It was by accident, a few months later, that she heard Ivan talking about the sense of touch. Vic and his wife, Susan, were up for a long weekend. Susan was Miss Right, Ivan and Caroline agreed. She and Vic were alike—hearty, gregarious, and clever. They even looked alike, both sturdy with ruddy outdoor faces, neatly combed hair and frank brown eyes, the muscled right arms of tennis players. Their life in New York was busy and sociable, and they seemed surprised, in a benign way, that Caroline and Ivan could find enough stimulation in a small university town. They held hands on the couch as they sipped their wine. If one of them needed a hand to light a cigarette or put cheese on a cracker, the hand was reluctantly withdrawn and quickly returned. “Disgusting,” Caroline and Ivan joked in private, in bed, playing their rough games of hide-and-seek with hands. Vic and Susan called each other sweetheart and darling all the time, which she and Ivan laughed at too, benignly, in private. They were planning to start a family right away, Susan said, since they were not getting any younger.

  Caroline put Isabel to bed and got out another bottle of wine. Just as she came into the room Ivan was saying, “But still, the senses exist in very different proportions in different people.” He sat in the rocking chair with the fingertips of both hands gently tapping against each other. “I don’t hear a lot, for example—I mean the fine gradations that some people do. That Caroline does. With me it’s the sense of touch. I guess I come to know things by touching them.” He paused a moment, letting each fingertip meet its opposite one in turn, like playing a silent scale on the piano. “I like to feel the textures of things.”

  She set down the wine very quietly. It was so intimate, especially coming from Ivan. More intimate, somehow, than revealing a visual or auditory bent. Vic and Susan regarded him curiousl
y.

  Susan said that that was more or less what she meant in the first place, that Ivan was as different from Vic as brothers could be. Vic was so intellectual; she was always telling him he should get more in touch with his feelings.

  “But I wasn’t talking about any pop psychology,” said Ivan kindly. “I was talking about primary, sensory experience. Before the emotions, even.”

  Touch was the most primitive. In all their years together he had never told her that.

  She lay in bed waiting for him while he brushed his hair, examining it in front of the mirror as he did nightly, for signs of thinning. There came a rhythmic rustling from the next room, where Vic and Susan were staying.

  “They’re starting a family,” said Caroline.

  “And getting in touch with their feelings,” said Ivan.

  “Oh, talking about feelings, you never told me about your sense of touch….Sweetheart.”

  “No?”

  “No. That’s very important.”

  “I never thought of it. I suppose I thought you knew.”

  Of course, she did know. The hands on her skin at night, coming to know her by the touch. Except she needed to hear him speak it aloud to know that she knew.

  Ivan approached her earnestly, brush in hand. “Caroline? I mean, darling, do you think my hair is getting any thinner? Feel.”

  “It feels fine. I can’t feel any difference.”

  He squinted at her. “I think you’re just being kind.”

  “You know I’m not kind that way. I’d tell you the truth. Oh, all right, just a few hairs less. Nothing to worry about. You’re still beautiful.”

  “That is not an objective opinion,” he said.

  “I can’t help it. I do my best. Listen, Ivan.” She put her hand on his. “Do you really think I ought to go, this winter? You give me an objective opinion.”

  “My opinion is yes, you should definitely go. Why all the fuss?”

  She had been invited to spend three months—a trimester—as a visiting professor at a small college in the north woods, giving advanced seminars in topological groups and the topology of manifolds.

  “Go ahead. You’ll be on loan,” her department head quipped when she showed him the letter. “We’ll manage.” He sounded like Ivan.

  She was hesitant about leaving Isabel, who was five, but Ivan kept reassuring her that everything would be all right. Mrs. Seward would pick her up at nursery school and stay in the afternoons.

  “But she can’t stay long enough to cook dinner.”

  “I’ll cook.”

  “You’ll cook! But your cooking is too fancy for her.” In cooking he lacked the common touch. His hamburgers were leaden, fortified with bread crumbs. The first evening he had asked her to his apartment in Rome he let the chicken burn to a crisp while he described how the lights on the Ponte Vecchio were reflected in the Arno on a summer night. The description made her shiver with love, yet she felt he should have been able to manage lyricism and chicken at the same time.

  “I’ll make Chinese food,” he said. “She likes that. Don’t worry about it.” It was true, he did quite well with Chinese food. He had taken a course.

  He urged her on, countering all her doubts with reason. At night, lying close in bed, she teased him, running a finger vertically down the hairs of his chest. “Why are you so eager for me to go?”

  “Because it will be good for you,” he answered seriously. She felt a stirring of love. But hours later she awoke and heard those words resound in the dark air. Were they patronizing words, perhaps?

  Patronizing or not, they were correct, and she would go. She was excited by the change, and by the prospect of the seminars, new colleagues with new ideas, and solitary walks in the snowy north woods. In her life now she missed solitude. She wondered what she would be like in solitude, what her habits would be, if she would enjoy her own company or be bored.

  The first few weeks in the north woods she was very happy. The classes went well, the students were bright, and the other teachers congenial. She had a small, pleasant efficiency apartment in a low building housing some twenty single faculty members. Her private office was luxurious compared to the one she shared at her own university, and it looked out over a vista of imposing evergreens in precise, satisfying rows. Best of all were the long walks in the woods along cleared snowy trails. Caroline shook the laden branches of trees and laughed as heaps of snow came tumbling down around her and over her. She discovered small bubbling waterfalls that trickled into lively ripples edging the frozen surfaces of ponds. There was even a romantic old stone tower on a hill. She clambered up with the exaltation of a prince going to rescue a maiden from captivity. She was not bored; she found herself excellent company. In the evenings she sometimes ate alone in her apartment with a book propped on the table, and sometimes, if she felt like talk, in the faculty dining room. Late at night she read Proust in bed, and smoked.

  At the beginning her mind would stop abruptly at odd moments like a train pulling up short, and she would think: Where is Isabel now? Isabel is at nursery school, listening to a story. Isabel is in the bathtub with her rubber fish. Isabel is having dinner. (What bizarre Asiatic concoction is she eating? Has he taught her to use chopsticks?) But in time those questions stopped. Caroline wrote Isabel letters and received in return stick-figure drawings with a few tender penciled words slanting downward across the page. These she treasured.

  She spoke to Ivan occasionally on the telephone, late at night. The first few times she hung up feeling weak-kneed with want, from the sound of his voice. Soon she began to long, uncomfortably, for someone to make love to her. She gaped childishly at any chance muscled body glimpsed in the drugstore or the bank. Reading the lush rhythmic prose of Proust aroused her. The homosexual and the sadistic passages aroused her most. She worried briefly about the possible implications of this, then decided there were none, she simply needed someone. Tentatively, she took a look around.

  Her department, mathematics, consisted of an elderly patriarch, a tired married man in his mid-fifties, and a chubby precocious boy of twenty-five, whom she thought of as The Callow Youth. The English department occurred to her. English departments were generally large, and their members reputed to be forever in quest of sensation. She assumed it came from dwelling so continuously in poems and stories. Gazing in the mirror at her unappreciated body, she was embarrassed to acknowledge her undertaking. But surely she was a grown woman now, she retorted to the image, old enough to know what she needed and seek means to obtain it. Hadn’t Ivan once said she looked like the kind who could go after what she wanted? And this was another world—no one who mattered would ever know.

  She began eating in the faculty dining room more frequently and more attentively. Of the English department’s three single men, one was a perpetually disgruntled Australian poet with rotting teeth, and another a specialist in Middle English, whose flailing morning hesitancy suggested that he drank all night. The last, a recent arrival, taught Victorian and modern poetry and dressed in neat faded jeans and cashmere sweaters in rich colors—wine, olive, sienna. Tall, fair-skinned, and mustached, he wore aviator-style tinted glasses, the same as hers. Common tastes. He seemed about her age too, perhaps a few years younger—old enough, anyway, to have had some experience. He had an incipient pot belly, which she would have to learn to ignore, but otherwise he was well-built, with long legs and tight muscles, and he moved easily, with comfortable nonchalance. Only his voice made her hesitate: it was strained, as if from inner tension withheld. Yet he could laugh readily at a joke with a disarmingly modest, amused light in his blue eyes. She had an old unsatisfied hunger for blue eyes, ever since the editor of the high school paper who put his hand under her skirt on her mother’s couch. His name was John and he was shy. It would take some doing.

  She first engaged his interest over the Ping-Pong table in the lounge of the faculty dining room. They played similarly: with fervor, their pride at stake in every volley, castigating themselves
for errors and relishing a point well taken. Neither of them was often able to outplay the other—the mistakes were mostly self-destructive. He told her that a point lost in that fashion was called an “unforced error.” Caroline marveled at the ramifications of that term, unforced error, but John did not seem to appreciate its nuances, as Ivan would have.

  After a few nights they grew adapted to each other’s style and developed canny modes of retaliation. He had an angled, menacing serve; Caroline learned to stand near the right-hand corner of the table, to return it. Her plays were swift, if erratic; he learned to adjust his timing. More and more they indulged in prolonged, deceptively relaxed volleys, playing a waiting game, alert for the other’s slip in attention. She felt with him, during those passages, the tacit intimacy of opponents, really accomplices secretly finding and inhabiting each other’s rhythm. The long volleys usually ended with his slamming the ball hard in a burst of violence: these were either brilliant strokes, irretrievable, or else they veered absurdly, bouncing off the walls and ceiling. She laughed out loud at his unlikely recklessness. Yes, she decided after many evenings of Ping-Pong and careful scrutiny, that is the man.

  The first time they made love she responded to him with the stored desire of five weeks. He will believe that I am mad about him, she thought; he will not understand that it is desperation. But then it hardly mattered.

  She was right. John, who even in intimacy kept a vestige of shyness, was pleased and flattered. Without his glasses his eyes were a richer blue, and they glowed with an appealing, gentle pride. Leaning over her, his fair hair brushing her face, he smiled with a tremulous curve of the lips she had never seen across the Ping-Pong table. An amused twinkle sprang to his eyes as he said, “If you like that so much I’ll be glad to do it again sometime.”

  He was a very lovable man, she realized with some surprise.

  “Oh, by all means.”

  Not bad, she congratulated herself, not bad for a small out-of-the-way college in the north woods.

  One evening Ivan said over the phone, “I’m so busy here that in the whole time you’ve been gone I’ve only read forty pages of The Dream of the Red Chamber.” He made it sound tragic.