True Enough

by Stephen McCauley

  “Gerald finished it off,” Jane said.

  “Oh good. I was afraid he didn’t like it.” He sat down at the table with a bowl of leftover salad and started to pick at the saturated leaves with his fingers.

  “He claimed he didn’t like it, but at some point, he sneaked down here and practically licked the bowl.”

  Thomas chuckled amiably as he sucked a limp lettuce leaf off his chin and into his mouth. “Healthy appetite,” he said.

  Healthy appetite, growing boy—haul out the usual clichés and lay the entire burden of concern about Gerald on her. Maybe if he took a bit more responsibility for his son’s problems, she’d have time to enjoy his strengths. But she wasn’t going to bring that up now. This unqualified approval of Gerald and refusal to look at any of his eccentricities and potential trouble spots was one of the many things about Thomas she’d come to expect and had learned to ignore. Hopefully, with a little more emotional growth, she’d stop seeing them altogether. Sometimes she worried that having a successful marriage to Thomas meant erasing him, trait by trait, feature by feature, until finally she’d find herself married to a completely invisible man.

  “What did you do today, Jody?” Jody was an amalgam of her first and last names, a nickname she found inexplicably embarrassing.

  She’d gone to work for a few hours, had an unproductive day, gone to see Dr. Berman, hauled Gerald to his shrink, then to his piano lesson. In the late afternoon, she’d met Dale at a coffee shop a few blocks from the house, ostensibly to discuss his ridiculous infatuation with his friend’s wife, although most of it had been restaurant talk. Unfortunately, the conversation had taken place in a booth in a back corner that provided much too much intimacy for her taste, although not, obviously, for Dale’s.

  She nodded at Desmond Sullivan’s biography of Lewis Westerly, propped up in the middle of the kitchen table. “Among other things,” she said, “I took more notes on this book. I had an idea for using it in a proposal for a series, and I’m getting very excited about it. I’m indebted to you for insisting I read it. You’ll have to invite the author for dinner when he gets here.”

  Thomas gave her one of his doe-eyed looks of sympathy. “You’re always working,” he said. “I wish you’d take a little more time for yourself.”

  She had another shrimp in her hand, but she felt her appetite dissipate and let it plop back in the Tupperware container. “This is for me,” she said. “I wish you could see that.”

  “Don’t take it that way, Jody. You know what I meant.”

  She did know what he meant and knew that he did have her best interests in mind. She couldn’t stay angry at Thomas for more than a few minutes without feeling guilty about something—not telling him she was seeing Dr. Berman again, not appreciating the amount of work he did around the house. “The dinner was wonderful tonight,” she said. “One of your best.”

  “You thought so? I thought it was a little salty.”

  “No. It was perfect.” Feeling light-headed and slightly nauseated, she snapped the lid on the container and put it back in the fridge. When she turned, Thomas was standing behind her, and he put his arms around her, tilted her chin up, and pecked at her mouth. “On you it tastes good,” he said.

  She could feel her breasts and her thighs pressed up against the sticky warmth of his body and tried to pull back from him enough to get some air without looking as if she was rebuffing him. “I’m a mess,” she said. “I can’t stop sweating.”

  “Horses sweat, women perspire, and you glow.”

  “Is that Tennessee Williams?”

  “A paraphrase of Orson Welles on the subject of Rita Hayworth.”

  Oh please, she thought, please don’t get libidinous, not now, not tonight, not in this heat, not after the week I’ve had. She immediately started to long for a small, harmless explosion somewhere in the house, a pipe bursting perhaps, something that would take hours to fix and would extinguish whatever ardor Thomas was feeling.

  When they’d met, almost a year after her divorce from Dale, Jane had been comforted and warmed by Thomas’s big, solid presence. He was everything Dale wasn’t, a large lovable man who lavished attention and tenderness on her, a man who didn’t hold back any of his emotions, a man who seemed to have been built for loyalty and fidelity. She’d had enough of fights and fireworks and the kind of overpowering sexual heat that had always been a part of her relationship with Dale. Thomas made love to her, soothed her, and even if, at times, she wished he wasn’t quite so considerate, quite so eager to please, it was a relief to find herself on solid ground. With Dale, she’d always felt like one of those women you see identified as an “unidentified woman” on the arm of a movie star or business mogul. With Thomas, she was Jane Cody again. He’d lived with a woman for almost ten years, but they’d never married, and then she left him for a tenure track position in Oregon and, eventually, another woman. Six months into casually dating Thomas for the peaceful pleasure of it, she found herself pregnant. There was never any question of what they’d do. After one tumultuous marriage, settling down and raising a child struck her as the practical, healthy choice. It didn’t hurt that Thomas had a little inherited money, a cushion, like his big soft body. Marrying him felt like the sensible, adult thing to do. The way buying the house had seemed like a good investment.

  But as with the house, she’d begun to think that she might have factored in the wrong criteria when making her decision.

  Thomas pecked at her neck and then lapped at her ear, leaving behind a trail of saliva, and all she could think about were the slugs she’d seen crawling along the walk all summer, marking their paths with ribbons of slime. What a way to think of her husband, the only man who’d been good to her, reliable, absolutely and unequivocally without qualification or hesitation.

  Love in this marriage, she’d come to realize, was like the weather, coming and going in waves and seasons, blowing in strongly from one direction one moment, the opposite direction a few days later. Sometimes, the conditions were unbearable, like the heat and humidity tonight, sometimes they were so perfect and clear and invigorating, you almost couldn’t believe they were ever anything else. It was a matter of staying calm and waiting. She had to remind herself that her feelings would change and that one day, hopefully soon, she’d wake up and a new system would have blown in and all her minor discontents and complaints and petty boredom would be a dim memory.

  Thomas cupped her breasts in his big hands and delicately lifted them, as if he were admiring something she’d just brought out of the oven. He wasn’t the type to talk about his desires directly, but she knew that the vast majority of his sexual interest in her was centered in her breasts. They were her best feature and she’d always been proud of them—once she got over her teenage embarrassment that they were too large and gave up researching plastic surgeons who specialized in breast reduction—but something in his sly enjoyment of them brought to mind images of a hefty teenage boy masturbating over Penthouse magazine or, worse still, some shadow of his attachment to his overbearing mother. “Jody’s beautiful babies,” he murmured, more to himself than to her, and then bent down to kiss each nipple, leaving behind wet rings on her jersey.

  But what if waiting for this particular weather system to change was like waiting for snow or a sudden frost in Miami: not impossible, but not very likely, either.

  “You go upstairs,” she said hoarsely. “I’ll just tidy up a couple of things here and be right up.”

  If that cleaning person hadn’t come today, she could wash the kitchen floor or scrub the bathtub, any time-consuming chore that opened up the possibility that Thomas would be asleep when she went to bed. She had only herself to blame for being so insistent about hiring a cleaning service.

  Once Thomas had left—he was so agreeable; maybe it would have been better if they’d gotten it over with down here, on the living room sofa, even if there was no air-conditioning—she went to the kitchen sink and sprayed her face and the back of her neck with
cold, chlorinated water. But as she was drying herself with a hand towel, she realized her intent had been to wash off her loving husband’s saliva. She tossed the towel into the sink and, resigned, went up the grand curved staircase that had impressed her so much when the Realtor showed them the house for the first time, all those years ago.

  2.

  The bedroom was freezing, and when she slid into the bed, the cool of the soft yellow sheets brought up goose pimples.

  He was shy, that’s what made it all so touching. He liked to leave the lights off and reach for her under the covers, as if they were doing something that had to be kept secret. He buried his face in her chest, mumbling that awful name he had for her, “Jody, Jody,” and rubbed against her leg. She could feel his fat, bloated penis bumping her, clumsily. It made her think of a Newfoundland puppy, a creature whose gawky, immature, undisciplined behavior was completely inappropriate to its size.

  He was at her nipples now, this overgrown adolescent, sucking, but too hard, making her sore and angry. So many men were plagued with premature ejaculation, impotence, and other sexual dysfunctions, but always the wrong men. But as soon as those thoughts passed through her mind, they were drowned out by a roar of remorse. So she lay there, moving her body lightly, trying to set off a spark, something that she, or, less likely, he could fan into a flame. Thomas was in for the long haul at her chest. He was hesitant, always had been, about touching her anywhere below the waist, as if it might be disrespectful to do so.

  Dale had been a different sort of lover, a strutting, self-satisfied tease who had absolutely no shame or self-consciousness, who played with every inch of her body until she wanted him so badly she’d find herself pleading with him. With Dale, there had been nothing forbidden or off-limits, no request she couldn’t make, no desire of hers he couldn’t intuit almost as soon as she felt it. But years ago, she’d trained herself to stop thinking about Dale’s uncanny expertise—especially when Thomas was making love to her. It couldn’t be a good sign that she was drifting into fantasies of him now.

  Thomas was above her, about to make his entry. He had a limited repertoire of moves, and he always ran through them in the exact same order, like a folk singer who plays the same songs in the same sequence interspersed with the exact same, supposedly spontaneous, patter. Not that she didn’t share some of the burden of responsibility, but whenever they made love she was filled with a profound lethargy, as if she’d been drugged. She found it hard to move her legs, tilt her pelvis, give him any assistance or encouragement.

  “Is this all right?” he asked, more considerate and gentle than her gynecologist.

  She managed a smile and nodded. “Mmmm,” she said. “Yes, it’s fine.”

  She tried to talk herself into feeling cared for, filled with his love and kindness, but she felt invaded, as if a salesman had entered the house and was about to start a long tedious demonstration of a vacuum cleaner.

  “Is this all right?”

  “It’s fine,” she said, a little more sharply this time.

  How had she come to this, a woman of her generation, brought up on the slogans of erotic liberation and revolutionary politics? She’d gone to nude beaches, smoked pot, used a vibrator, watched a pornographic video, and once, on a business trip, when she was much younger, had spent an afternoon in a Seattle hotel room with a total stranger. How had she ended up in an expansive burnt umber air-conditioned bedroom on a wide double-thick mattress, her hands limp on her husband’s back, desperately waiting for his assault to be over, as if she were an icy Victorian hysteric? At least those miserable creatures didn’t have to pretend to be enjoying it, didn’t have to go through the humiliation of clenching and sighing and performing a grand finale as if she were a soprano bringing a big hammy bel canto aria to a predictably shrill close.

  When he was finished, he rolled off her, grinning, like a boy pleased with himself after having sex for the very first time. “Thank you,” he said, and tenderly wiped his sweat off her neck.

  “Thank you,” she said. Now that it was over, she did feel grateful, grateful and guilty. If only, somehow, she could find some still place in the relationship or within herself, maybe she could get in sync with him. Maybe that was why she’d started to see Dr. Berman again. She really had to be more open with him about her feelings toward Thomas.

  There was a thud from upstairs, as if something had hit the floor in Gerald’s room, and then a louder crash and the sound of glass or plastic shattering. She sat up and placed a hand over her chest. It was the explosion she’d been longing for half an hour ago, but not, never, from that part of the house. Gerald, she thought, had rolled out of bed and then something, the lamp, had fallen on top of him. Here was her punishment for wanting the distraction of disaster, for worrying about an inconsequential bowl of pudding, for thinking about Dale while Thomas did his best to please her. She leapt out of bed and opened the door to the hall, feeling the warmer air hit her damp, chafed skin. “Gerald?” she called. “Are you all right?”

  Thomas ran to her side and the two of them stood there, naked and sweating, their arms around each other’s waist, as if they were both afraid to go upstairs and face their fears. “Gerald?” she called again. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, Jane,” he called out. “I just dropped my Ace Hardware $5.99 flashlight. I hate to tell you, but it smashed into about ten pieces of cheap plastic.”

  “You’re supposed to be sleeping,” Jane said.

  “I can’t sleep with you shouting at me, can I?”

  “I don’t like that tone, Gerald.”

  “I told you the more expensive one would last longer.”

  “You settle down, buckeroo,” Thomas said, his smile obvious from the sound of his voice, “and we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” He pulled Jane to his side tightly and kissed the top of her head, acknowledgment that all was right with their world—their love had been consummated, their house was intact, their son was safe.

  Six

  As One Door Closes . . .

  1.

  “What’s in the bag, Mr. Sullivan?”

  Desmond stopped on the mahogany staircase. The pocket doors to the second-floor parlor were partially open, and Loretta, his landlady, and Henry, the putative superintendent of the building, were seated in reclining loungers, watching television. He’d been in Boston two weeks, and thus far he hadn’t walked up or down the staircase more than a half dozen times without hearing Loretta’s mellifluous voice asking him “What’s in the bag?” or “What have you got there?” even when he was empty-handed. He clutched the crinkly plastic sack closer to his side. “Just some trash,” he said, enunciating each word carefully. Surely there was no need to tell her the specifics: an empty wine bottle and two well-read tabloids.

  “Just some what?” she asked.

  “Trash,” he said and made a waggling motion with his hand, as if warding off an unpleasant odor.

  “Be sure to close the lid on the barrels.”

  “I will indeed.”

  “In what?”

  “Indeed.”

  Henry gave one of his unnerving outbursts of laughter and said, “We can hear you in here. Turn down the volume.”

  What the housing office at Deerforth College had billed as a grand studio apartment turned out to be a modest room on the top floor of a Back Bay town house. The charming New England kitchen was a sink and a microwave tucked into one dark corner, and the antique furnishings were a small armoire, a rutted library table, and a sagging bed. It was true he had a private bathroom as promised, but no one had mentioned it was down the hall. Still, he couldn’t complain about the location or the views; his two round windows looked out to the sailboat traffic in the Charles River Basin in one direction and Charlestown in the other. At night he could see the lights of Cambridge, and the mist on the river and somewhere in the hazy distance, Bunker Hill Monument, an obelisk which, like almost every lamppost in Boston, had enormous historical significance, although no one seemed
to know or care exactly what the significance was.

  The most unfortunate aspect of the arrangement was the peculiar setup of the house. Loretta Neal lived on the first two floors, and because the place had never been properly divided into apartments, the top-floor boarders had to walk up a magnificently curved mahogany staircase that formed the core of her residence. The doors to her parlor were always partly open. At first, Desmond was charmed by her affability, her Boston accent, even her puckish penchant for having him repeat things he’d already said in a perfectly clear voice. But after answering her what’s-in-the-bag inquiry for the tenth time, he began creeping up the staircase, hoping she wouldn’t see him.

  She called him in out of the hall, as if she were encouraging an old friend to pay a visit. The parlor was a vast oval room with dark paneling, ceiling medallions, and long curved windows looking out to the upper branches of the trees lining the street. The windows didn’t open, or at least never were opened, and the room had the musty smell of an underused library. Loretta and Henry’s vinyl recliners were plopped in the middle of the floor, distinctly out of place among the antique tables, lamps, and fainting couches pressed against the walls. The television, an immense thing with a whole sci-fi colony of cables worming out of the back, was tuned to an infomercial about a skin care product that eliminated what the spokesperson referred to as “faux wrinkles.” As far as he could tell, Loretta and Henry watched nothing but infomercials, and watched them as if they were dramatic programming.

  “You’re always walking up and down,” Loretta said. “This must be the sixth time today, isn’t it?”

  He attempted a grin. Did she keep a record? “I haven’t been counting.”