Away from Home (45 page)

“A
garçonier?
” Margie said. She smiled, although there was nothing amusing about it; she smiled because now she remembered that it was Neil who had told her about the
garçoniers
married men kept when they wanted to have affairs. “You’ve had this planned for a long time, haven’t you!”

“No, I haven’t. I only rented the apartment on Friday. I think I should leave because it will be easier for you.”

“I can’t think.”

“I know,” Neil said. “I know. If you don’t want me to leave tomorrow I won’t. I’ll wait as long as you want.”

“Forever?”

“I mean a week. I think it’s better, Margie.”

“Do you love her?” she said. “
Do you love her?
Do you really love her?”

“Yes.”

“But how do you know?” Suddenly she wasn’t Margie the rejected wife any more; for a moment she was Margie the mother, and this was her Neil who needed to be taken care of. “What makes you so absolutely sure?”

He caught the change in her tone, the warmth of it, the sign that at last Margie was becoming recognizable to herself again, was returning to life. He leaned forward and his face opened up to her, all his feelings: romance, hope, confidence, hope of happiness. He looked softer. She realized then that he was really only a very young man hiding forever against his will behind a mask of placid rightness, and her heart went out to him in the old kind of love she had always had for him. They were still tied to each other, always would be in a way, even though they were separating now and that parting would be irrevocable.

“Oh, darling,” Margie said, “you don’t have to tell me. I know.”

He stayed on with her in the apartment for three days, and in those three days Margie realized he had been right: it
would
be easier for her if he left altogether. Whenever he made a quiet phone call she felt ill. She walked past the telephone on some pretext, only to know if he were talking to that girl, telling that girl everything had been arranged, would be all right for them now. The calls were always business, and after each elaborately casual walk past Neil and the phone, when she realized he was not lowering his voice or trying to hide anything from her, Margie would feel a small shock because she had been wrong about him. It was at these times she realized how truly far apart she and Neil had grown during the past months, for her to have become so suspicious now and so wrong about his motives.

He tried to pretend nothing had changed, but of course everything had changed. Even his need for her as a friend, as a comforter and guardian, had changed. He needed that other girl now. It was obvious in the little things, the way he neither noticed nor complained when something in the house went wrong, as if Neil were now only a polite and grateful houseguest instead of her husband. When, one morning, Margie discovered that the laundress had torn a large hole in one of Neil’s sheets, and that he had been sleeping on the torn sheet, with his feet tangled in it, for almost a week without mentioning it to her, she sat on the edge of his bed and cried. The tears poured down her face, she shook with sobbing, but it was not because of this alone but because of everything. She could not do anything for Neil any more, she could not help him, and what was much worse, he did not want her to. Perhaps, she thought, he had not even noticed the sheet was ripped and twining around his restless legs like the rag supplied by some third-rate hotel. He went to bed satiated, relaxed, rich with love. His body was drugged from happy love-making; his mind raced ahead with plans and then slowed peacefully to sleep. There was nothing more his wife could give him.

Outside, the autumn rains had begun, in torrents. The inadequate drainage system clogged up immediately, and some streets were flooded. Someone reported seven meters of water on the highway leading to the airport. People who left to visit other cities remained there for days, floodbound. The waves shot up into the air, and the beach was deserted, the red flag whipping back and forth in the wind. In many parts of the city there was no telephone service. Margie hardly noticed any of this. There was no one she wanted to speak to and nowhere she wanted to go anyway.

Neil tried to pack secretly, to spare her. This only hurt her more, because she still wanted to take care of him. She felt deserted and suspicious, and whatever he tried to do to make things easier she mistook for signs of surreptitiousness and rejection. She thought perhaps she was losing her mind. Neil had taken off his wedding ring; she noticed this the morning of the day he finally left. The flesh of his finger was slightly swollen from the years-long pressure of the gold band, and there was now a band of white where the sun had never touched the skin. He was still bearing her mark; he was tattooed with her existence. She saw him rubbing the swollen place absent-mindedly and she took that as a rejection too; it almost made her heart stop, because she felt that Neil was trying to smooth away everything that was left on him of her.

She thought vaguely every day of home, of when she would leave, of how she could close this apartment and get rid of the furniture. It seemed too drastic a step, like the cremation of a body that was actually only unconscious; an irrevocable tragedy. One part of her mind told her everything was over, she might as well think of the future if there was any, but she knew she could not think of a future when the present still seemed so unreal. Her parents’ home seemed both a haven and an insupportable embarrassment. She had not had the heart to write to tell them. What could she tell them? She did not even know how to begin. She and Neil had always been the ideal young couple, and the truth could never be explained. Margie wondered now if she herself had ever known the entire truth. Had she and Neil ever loved each other as much as they thought they had, or had they only loved the idea of being married to each other, of joining the stream of life?

How could she not love him? She might as well not wish well for her own self, her own face and body. You could look into the mirror critically and say, I hate this and that, or you could analyze your spirit and say that you were selfish or dull or too lazy, but you never really wished yourself ill. You had to love yourself to stay alive, and that was how she felt about Neil.

When he left, with his suitcases, unexpectedly he kissed her. It was a brief kiss, on the mouth, with his lips open. They had not kissed this way for months. There was a strength and confidence about Neil in that sudden kiss that startled her. But she knew it did not mean reconciliation. It meant only that now, for the first time, he was truly free of her. She did not know how she knew it, but she knew.

“I’ll call you,” he said. “And please, please call me, whenever you want something. If you feel lonely, if you only want to talk, please call. Any hour, Margie; I mean this. You have the number at my apartment, and at the office, of course.”

“If I call you at … home, she’ll be there.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“All right,” she said, biting her knuckle with sharp teeth she could hardly feel.

“You can use any money you want in our joint account. I’ll put in a deposit this week for your plane ticket.”

“All right.”

“I’m not going to say goodbye,” he said. “I’m still here. Remember that.”

“I guess I said goodbye to you a long time ago,” Margie said.

He was gone. She stood in the doorway after he had left and thought absurdly that he should not have gone out in the rain like that; he would be soaked to the skin. He should have waited another day or two until the rains stopped. He must be in a hurry, she thought dizzily, he must … because it’s raining so hard out and he’ll get so wet.

It continued to rain almost every day for two weeks, but Margie stayed inside the apartment the entire time even when it was not raining. She had always cared for her appearance, had gone to the hairdresser at least twice a week, but now she did not. Neil called her every afternoon. He sounded friendly on the phone, almost paternal. Now it was she who needed the care. He talked about money, he asked her plans, he told her amusing little anecdotes about the office. He was always in a hurry. “I called to say hello,” he would say, his voice light and kindly, pleasant, and she could never decide if it were a duty call or if he missed her. Then, after two weeks, he didn’t call any more.

She did not see anyone but Helen. Helen came over every day and tried to make Margie come out of the apartment, but it was useless. Several times Helen brought Julie and Roger, and Margie liked that. The children made her happy for a while. She wondered if she and Neil had had children if he would ever have left her then. They’re right, she thought bitterly, those women who have babies right away, get pregnant on their wedding night; then their husbands can’t leave them. The ones who have a lot of children are even smarter; then the husband can’t
afford
to leave. In a way she even resented Helen now, for having two lovely children and a husband who would stay with her. She knew this was distorted, that Helen was her best friend in Brazil, and if she began to resent Helen’s happiness she would have no one. But she could not help feeling jealous.

Then one morning she woke up and felt as if she had come out of an illness. She was neither unhappy nor happy. The sun was out, it was a good day, and she thought she might go to the beach. She looked in the mirror carefully for the first time since Neil had left and she was startled to see the thin wildness of her face. Suntans faded as quickly as they came in Rio, and her skin was a pale yellowish beige. There were circles under her eyes. Her hair looked frightful; it was the unkempt, unwashed mane of an invalid. She had not bothered to wear lipstick for so long that her lips had become as pale as her face.

“What a beast you are!” she told her reflection, and she took a shower and ate a large breakfast and then she telephoned the
cabellereiro
to have her hair and nails done. “A man wouldn’t look at me,” she said, not unhappily. “Not even a blind man.”

When she was finished at the beauty parlor she walked over to see Helen. The noontime sun in the streets felt good, like a new skin to cover exposed nerves. “I’m alive,” Margie said, when Helen followed her maid to the door.

“You look pretty,” Julie said, sounding rather surprised, because children get used to anything in several weeks and begin to think it was never any other way.

“Julie!” Helen said, and then added. “You
do
.”

“If you want to buy any of my furniture,” Margie said, trying to be casual, “you have first call. I’m going to make a list. Neil says he doesn’t want any of it.”

“Sit down and have some coffee first.”

“I want to keep busy,” Margie said, and for the first time that morning her voice was unsteady. She was alive, but none of this was going to be easy. She had changed twice, she realized, in a few short weeks. Once when she discovered you could not count on life to remain the same while you grew different, and again when she realized no one was going to take care of her any more. It was going to be strange, this new life alone. Stranger still because it was happening to her for the first time at twenty-five. She wondered if she was going to be able to manage.

CHAPTER 21

It was a month now since Helen had gone to the
fazenda
to begin a serious affair with Sergio Leite Braga and had left him before it had begun. In this month, for the first time since she had come to live in Rio, she did not feel that her life was suspended, or that she was apart from the daily things that happened to her. The guilty secret of what she had almost done to Bert was with her always. Although her routine went on almost as before, she felt everything very strongly: loneliness, a sense of uselessness, of waste, homesickness, and timid hope for a future that was several years away. She wondered if she and Bert could have another child. Somehow the idea of having a baby to care for made the idea of the next several years seem less mysterious and frightening; she had brought up two babies to the age of childhood and at least in that area she knew what to expect. For everything else in her life this moment she felt only fright, for the first time, because for the first time she had to admit to herself that she and Bert could not reach each other any more. She wanted to confess, she could not confess, they could not even speak together.

She had never before realized how much she had depended on the outward signs of peace and security in her friends’ households to add stability to her own. When Mil Burns had left Phil and gone home to the States it had upset Helen out of proportion to the friendship she had felt for Mil and Phil. It had shocked and repelled her, as if in all other marriages she saw her own. And now Margie and Neil Davidow—the happiest marriage in the world—was all over.

She came every day to Margie’s apartment, smiling, comforting, often bringing one of her children, but the entire time she had to conceal from Margie her mounting panic. She saw the light go out of Margie’s face, the glow of a loved woman fading as visibly and quickly as the golden tan left her skin. Without being loved, Margie was no longer pretty. The change in her hurt Helen very much, not only for Margie herself, whom she loved, but because it seemed an omen. If Margie and Neil could separate, then anyone could. Helen knew now that whatever had been wrong between Margie and Neil had not been a sudden thing; it had been hidden from her and their friends for a long, long time, and that was even more frightening. From the look of paralyzed bewilderment in Margie’s eyes Helen knew that Margie Davidow had done such a good job of hiding her dissolving marriage from all her friends that she had ended deceiving even herself.

Although it was spring in the States and fall in Rio it was not much cooler yet. At night Helen had begun to dream again of home, and during the day she sometimes thought of it so longingly she felt as if she were a child again at camp crying secretly the first two nights, with her head under the khaki blanket of her cot so no one would discover what a baby she was. It was funny how quickly one could lose patience with all the little things that had seemed so enchanting: the casual uncaring, the tomorrow or next week attitude, the provincialism that had seemed cozy and now was so boring she wanted only to be alone. But to be alone for what? She wanted to confess; she could not confess. When she was alone with Bert she noticed now for the first time how he constantly occupied himself with things; reading a new book, an old American newspaper, a magazine, attending to work he had brought from the office, teaching the children how to play cards, complaining about the car. The car had been giving him trouble lately, and when he was alone with her he spoke about it all the time—how he had tried to obtain a new part, what might be wrong, what went wrong with automobiles in tropical countries, the unpleasant personality of his repairman, and so on. She had heard about other couples who were united during the dark hours of early evening by nothing more than a car or a washing machine, but now she knew it had happened to her.