Anagrams (16 page)

When dinner comes we eat it. I’m not concentrating. Why is it that I can’t quite describe or picture Darrel? I close my eyes for two seconds and try. Is it that I’m not paying attention? I think of him as tall and strong, but perhaps he’s not really. Does he have a mustache? I open my eyes quickly to check. No, he doesn’t.

“Do you feel okay?” asks Darrel.

“It’s the liar eggplant,” I say cryptically.

Darrel is looking at my teeth. “You have nice teeth,” he says.

Afterward, at home in my living room, we drink wine, but we don’t kiss. Behind him, like a movie screen, I see the war, the muck of the paddies, swoop of helicopters, the hollers and cries. I suppose that is why we do not kiss.

But perhaps the reasons are not large and public but small and personal. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m too unattractive, older, perhaps my body has forgotten how to do things, my lips no longer firm or flip, my nipples no longer pink as calamine, my tongue no longer newly, nimbly amphibious but a thick, thrashing fish-muscle. Now I’m middle-aged: hairs sprout, skin sags, my mouth grows stupid as a boot. How can I make it work? I
try to think about Congress and about polyps: how they make currents with their lips in order to receive food.

Darrel is talking aesthetics, poetry, voice, my thesis, and at the mention of the last all I can think of is how my whole life all I’ve ever really wanted was for my small, bug-bite breasts to heave seductively up over the neckline of my shirt, like a scientific wonder. Perhaps one might learn it with practice, discipline, commands: Heave! Heave-ho! “Do you like Joan Baez?” Darrel is saying. “I think her voice is more beautiful than any other singer I can think of.” I burst into a medley of all the Joan Baez songs I know. Darrel sings an old army thing about Nixon, set to the tune of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

Our laughs grow louder and hazy. Soon we are kissing. Soon we are unbuttoning. I haven’t kissed or unbuttoned in a long time and it’s like, at long last, a meeting of friends, falling into a familiar, ineffable dance we’ve both learned elsewhere, long ago, but have revived here, a revival! perhaps like Agnes DeMille’s
Oklahoma!
something like that. It is as if our separate pasts were greeting each other, as if we were saying, This is how I have been with other people, this is how I would love you. If I loved you. Everything always seems to boil down to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Off you would go in the mist of day and all that.

“You know, I’m probably old enough to be—” but here I stop for a second. “I’m old enough to be older than you,” I whisper. “Don’t look at my body. Don’t say anything about it.”

Darrel smiles. “I wouldn’t dream of bringing it up at a time like this.”

And soon we are upstairs, pulling down the bedspread, something in us pounding and accommodated, a mashing of hips, a pressing of faces, a slow friction of limbs and chests and lips against the sheets, this argument that is sex. Sometimes his chest
moves up from mine with a soft sucking sound from the damp, trapped space between our sternums—something wet and reluctant, like marine life or a heart that can’t stop beating no matter how it tries. We are gasping, quiet, in the dark, and then the wash of violet and night tornadoes through my legs and up behind my eyes, plumbs and spirals my spine, and I know if I can keep feeling like this I’ll be okay, if I can feel like this I’m not dead, I won’t die. Life is sad. Here is someone.

The next three Saturday nights we sleep together. They are full of chuckles and whispers and much munching about the neck and shoulders. They are sweet and gentle, not at all like my marriage, where my husband used to laugh and slap me on the back after I’d had an orgasm, like a buddy, like I’d just hit this crazy home run. I don’t remember feeling such relief at the start of an affair: I’m not afraid. It’s like the joy of meeting someone who knows your favorite cousin—everything proceeds from this momentous, bridging fact. Like two Maine license plates honking and waving on a California freeway: the warmth of shared exile; two ugly step-siblings meeting at a ball, smiling and waltzing and, having no fairy godmother, not having to rush off in a tizzy like Cinderella who was all jitters and economics, foot small as her bank account.
We
don’t have to rush home, we can dance all night, curfewless and happy, our feet warty and huge as skateboards.

“You’re out of your mind,” says Eleanor, not smiling. “Your professional position is precarious enough. Why jeopardize things further with another affair with another one of your students?”

“What do you mean,
another
?” I ask warily. She has said it twice. I’ve noticed. “It’s not like I sleep around with my students. Look, you don’t know Darrel. He’s great. He’s the sort of guy
who tells you just the edge of his whole tragic life story, then smiles and leans over and sniffs your hair.”

Eleanor shrugs. “It only matters how things look.”

“Now you sound like my husband, Mr. Photography.”

“To
them
, to
them
, it matters.” The invisible them. The them upstairs with offices and foot-long pens. Eleanor is exasperated with me. She goes out to get a drink of water and doesn’t come back.

When I pull into the driveway, it is late, five o’clock, and the Shubbys next door are having a happy-hour party. Despite the autumnal nip in the air, the guests have spilled out onto the front porch, shouting, dancing, waving cocktail glasses.

“Hey, Benna,” Mr. Shubby calls to me, as I get out of my car. “Come on over.”

“Thanks, but I really can’t,” I call back, though for a split second I consider going. What could it hurt? Some small talk about the New York Film Festival and what I do for a living? I’m not in the mood. I slam the car door and walk across my lawn which is already scaly with leaves. An orangey crimson is settling in all along the street. The cork-bark in the front is in a cold, deep blush.

“Okay, be that way,” Mr. Shubby shouts back. He’s being good-natured. He’s being the life of the party. My arms are full. I smile and shrug. Mrs. Shubby comes out on the porch and signals flirtatiously to her husband. “Irv, you’re needed in here to open a bottle.” She spies me on my own front steps, fumbling for keys. “Benna, dear, why don’t you come join us.” The “dear” is to make me feel like a girl, a foolish girl, an unwed mother.

“Thanks, really,” I say. “Maybe next time.” I find the keys and by this time the whole Shubby porch is waving and calling. “Join the party! Come on!”

“Can’t, sorry.” I slip inside my front door, close it, sink back against it. The party sounds now are distant, deeply buried rumbles and squeals, like something wrong with your car though you can’t figure out what.

The ants sniff and speed around the window frames. They are frightened: It’s October. Like all things without recourse, they scurry, veer off into the walls of their own overpopulation, their own destructiveness, looking for a way out.

Georgie has a note from the school nurse. She might need glasses. I’m supposed to take her to an eye doctor. “I can’t see, I can’t see,” she says, stumbling around the house, deliberately bumping into furniture, arms outstretched and groping stupidly. “Where am I, where am I? Is this the bathroom?” she says, staggering into the kitchen, her eyes squinted almost shut. I am mincing onion for Quick Chili, my own very personal recipe.

“Cute, George,” I say, looking back at my onion. And then because she doesn’t say anything else, I say, “Tell me. What do you think of Darrel? Do you like him?”

She has opened her eyes and is playing with the buckle of her shoe, which she has taken off so she can fly it around like a spaceship. “He’s okay,” she says. “When’s Gerard comin’ over?”

The last argument I had with my husband was about intelligence and sexual fidelity in marriage. “An intelligent person does everything with ambivalence,” he said. “Strictly speaking, fidelity can never be a given.” We were in front of a drugstore. In the window was a Russell Stover candies display. I couldn’t believe my ears. Was this the difference between men and women? That women could never believe their ears?

“No!” I shouted. “That’s just not true. An intelligent person has an intelligent faith, and when an intelligent person decides
to do something, it’s done unambivalently, unequivocally, intelligently. Why the hell did we get married? Sexual fidelity must always be a given!” Strictly speaking strictly. Whenever I’m furious, the only vocabulary I can come up with are words that have been spoken in the last thirty seconds. My sentences become anagrams of the sentences before. “Intelligent people are not ambivalent people.” He was being an asshole, so I would be one too. I would ask him to love me unambivalently, to love me in theory, to love me unambivalently in theory as I shouted at him in front of dozens of persons, persons in cars, persons with newspapers under their arms, and Russell Stover gift boxes and friction pour le bain in bags coming out of the drugstore, sick, ailing persons with unfilled prescriptions going in, persons walking by, putting up umbrellas, persons turning on their windshield wipers. How could he help but be ambivalent about our marriage? I think, in fact, that right then and there, in front of the drugstore, was where and when his ambivalence ended. I think that is when he became unambivalent and unequivocal and decided he didn’t want to be married to me anymore.

We never made it into the drugstore. I forget what we were going there to get. We went back to the car, to our Rabbit bandaged in bumper stickers. It was starting to drizzle, and we each slammed doors and didn’t talk to, look at, or touch each other. I stared at the glove compartment knob. He started the car, started the windshield wipers, and we drove home. He twitched in his jaw; I could see it in my peripheral vision. There was a purity to the hate, to the determination. It continued for twelve hours. Then, the next morning when both of us were in the bathroom, brushing our teeth and dressing for work, he said, “I never want to see you again,” only I misheard him at first and thought he’d said, “I want to see again.”

When I was little, I didn’t understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something
entirely different. When I told teachers my name was
Benna
and they said, “
Donna
who?” I would say, “Donna Gilbert.” I thought close was good enough, that sloppiness was generally built into the language. I thought Bing Crosby and Bill Cosby were the same person. That Buddy Holly and Billie Holiday were the same person. That Leon Trotsky and Leo Tolstoy were the same person. It was a shock for me quite late in life to discover that Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau were not even related. Meaning, if it existed at all, was unstable and could not survive the slightest reshuffling of letters. One gust of wind and Santa became Satan. A slip of the pen and pears turned into pearls. A little interior decorating and
the world
became
her twold
, an ungrammatical and unkind assessment of an aging aunt in a singles bar. Add a
d
to
poor
, you got
droop
. It was that way in biology, too. Add a chromosome, get a criminal. Subtract one, get an idiot or a chipmunk. That was the way with things. When you wanted someone to say “I love you,” approximate assemblages—
igloo, eyelid glue, isle of ewe
—however lovely, didn’t quite make it. “You are my honey bunch” was not usually interchangeable with “You are my bunny hutch.” In a New York suburban bathroom, early in the morning, a plea for sight could twist, grow slightly, re-issue itself as an announcement of death.

“You want to see again?” I asked, incredulous. His vision had always been fine. And he looked at me. He was standing in front of the sink. Then he looked into the drain, the stopped-up drain. He shook his head and said, “I never want to see you again.”

“Oh,” I said, three syllables short, where had they gone? Zapped by the ray-gun of a mumble. “Oh. I thought you said, ‘I want to see again.’ ” And I grabbed some Merthiolate from the medicine cabinet and went back into the bedroom and painted peace signs all over my thighs. A few minutes later he came in and, looking like someone about to spit, lifted our largest red
Samsonite bag down from the closet shelf and loaded it with as much stuff from his dresser as he could. He never came back for anything else. I had turned into a bitch, and he had turned into a man with a fire-engine-red suitcase marching off toward the commuter train, looking as if he might spit. The last thing he said was, “What the fuck are you doing to your legs?”

I did cry. I didn’t think I’d really turned into a bitch. I thought he was in love with someone else. And the Merthiolate took three days of hot baths to come off. Six months later, when he was dead, I knew that life had been unfair to him.

Georgie and I go to Woolworth’s to buy barrettes. We walk almost aimlessly up and down the aisles, Georgie singing a song she thinks she’s heard on
The Best of Broadway:
“ ‘When you walk through a store hold your head up high …’ ”

In the housewares aisle she teaches me songs she has learned at school. Most of them have trees and flowers and animals in them. I think at peace talks and arms negotiations all those magisterial, overweight men should be forced to sing such rounds of “White Coral Bells” and “Lady Bug, Lady Bug.” It might save us. How afterward could those same men lumber gruffly off to go press buttons, lily of the valley decking their garden walks, checking their misfired testosterone.

I have fantasies. Such plans, such hopes. Walk on, walk on with holes in your heart.

George pulls a damp Band-Aid from her pinky and shows me the crinkled fish skin beneath. “Little white fish pinky,” she sings and dances it in the air, her finger sticking upright like a startled periscope.

At Hank’s I ask Gerard if he scribbled on my
Mme. Charpentier
. He looks at me and his mouth drops; a small cave opens up in his beard. He is clearly appalled. “Why the hell would I do something like that?”

I’m sorry I’ve asked him. I don’t dare tell him that George suggested it. She, of course, is the logical suspect.

“Sorry,” I say. “I wasn’t really thinking, I just thought I’d ask, I wasn’t really serious.” I try to change the subject. “How’s the singing going?”