Morning (36 page)

She did not see much of Fanny after that. They had planned three more days in London. Fanny had more interviews and some book signings, which Sara went to with her, and Sara had several appointments and luncheons with old friends and colleagues. In the evening, every evening, Fanny was busy with Randolph—did Sara mind terribly? For it was obvious that this much remained of the old Fanny—an ability to abandon heartlessly any relationship with any woman in order to be with a man. In this case, Sara didn’t blame her, and in fact was delighted to see how easily Fanny went off on her own, not needing Sara’s reassurance, not hiding away in her room, worrying about how she had aged.

Still, she was surprised when, the last day they were in London, Fanny came into the little bedroom where Sara was packing and announced that she would not be flying back to the States with her. She was planning to go to Randolph’s country house in Sussex, where they had been lovers so many years ago. Randolph’s wife had not died, but she had left him; they were divorced; their marriage, Fanny reported, was apparently never any good. Randolph claimed that he had never stopped loving Fanny. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he married me this time,” she said. “Now that I’m so respectable and celebrated.
And
his dreadful parents are dead! He doesn’t have to answer to anyone.”

“Oh, Fanny,” Sara had cried, “this is a fairy tale! I can’t believe it.” She crossed the room and gave Fanny a hug.

“Oh, it’s no fairy tale,” Fanny said smugly. “It’s more like a contemporary romance novel, wouldn’t you say? I mean, it’s very
fleshy;
I don’t believe they had lust in fairy tales.”

“But, Fanny,” Sara protested, emboldened by Fanny’s high spirits, “listen. Sit down a minute.” And when the writer had perched on the edge of the bed in the one spot not covered by Sara’s tousled underwear and sweaters, Sara took a deep breath and asked, “What happened to all your fears? Your horrible suffocating anxieties? I mean, I feel terrible even mentioning it, but your feeling that you were old now, and that your looks have changed so much that no one could ever love you—all those fears that kept
you in your house for years—what happened to them?”

“Oh, they’re still there, my dear,” Fanny said. She picked up a silk scarf of Sara’s and began to fold and smooth it with a gentle absentmindedness as she talked. “Of course they’re still there. With me every minute of the day. It’s just that I have a different perspective on it now. First of all, as far as my vanity’s concerned, well, I won’t go into detail but I will tell you that Randolph seems to find me still quite arousing, and the marvelous thing about it all, really, is that when one comes right down to it, one only has to turn off the lights! Then there we are, all alone in the dark, with all that nice soft sensitive loving flesh and who cares what one looks like. Who knows what one looks like in the dark!”

With an abrupt gesture, Fanny put down the scarf she had been playing with and looked at Sara, who sat in the bedroom’s one armchair and was looking intently at Fanny. Fanny’s eyes held Sara’s—how beautiful she was! Sara thought, and when she talked earnestly it was like being given a message from a goddess.

“But really, Sara, I’m being facetious,” Fanny said. “Or partly so. What I’ve learned since I’ve been here is much more important—shocking, really. You see, Sara, now that I’ve had a good long look around London and a good long gossip with Randolph, I find that half the people I thought would be here judging me are
dead
! Absolutely under the ground or in an urn on someone’s mantel. I don’t know how I’d forgotten about that—death, I mean—but I won’t again. Oh, I used to play at suicide, but that was only an attempt to get fate’s attention: Look at me, I’m desperate, if you don’t change my luck, you won’t have me around anymore! A childish ploy. I never seriously tried to die. You know, I don’t believe I ever seriously thought I
could
die. And now, to suddenly find that so many people I’ve known are just
gone
. It’s dreadful, I mean it inspires real dread.”

Fanny rose from the bed and walked around the room, clasping her hands in front of her. “Oh, Sara, in the face of death, all my anxieties seem so petty. Well, they are petty. I would
like
to have eternal youth. But I can’t have it, and it seems I’d better stop wanting what I can’t have and enjoy what I do have! I know people will still judge me—next week we’re having tea with Randolph’s sister, and believe me, she’ll judge me, what a bitch she is. But I’ll be judging her, too. And, Sara, I’m so much braver now, having won the Shelburne Prize, having published a novel. I don’t know if I can explain it to you, but I really feel like a different person. I think I even
am
a different person. I am not
a farmgirl snubbed by easterners anymore. I am the writer who won the Shelburne Prize. I deserve some wrinkles and gray hair. So many things have changed for me, don’t you see?”

Fanny looked at Sara long and hard. She crossed the room, and to Sara’s surprise, sat down on the bed across from Sara, right on Sara’s neatly folded skirts. She reached over and took Sara’s hands in hers. “And all because of you. Do you hear me? I mean it. All because of you. You pried me out from under my rock and gave me the courage to write and go back into the world—and here I am, and I love it! And I owe it all to you!”

“Well,” Sara began, modestly protesting, “not all, Fanny.” The two women looked at each other for a long moment, holding hands. Sara thought:
I love her. And she loves me
. She could see the love in her friend’s eyes.

“Do you know,” Fanny said, breaking the intensity of the moment, rising and straightening Sara’s clothing as she talked, “Lindsay Torrance suggested the most marvelous idea for a novel the other day at lunch. About a woman like me,
une femme d’un certain âge
, hell,
past
a certain age, who hides away for years, in fear, just like I did, and then comes out and discovers, when she’s almost sixty, how much life there is left to live, how exciting life can be! It’s certainly a book I could write, and I can’t stop thinking about it. But I won’t make her a writer who writes a novel, it will have to be something else. I don’t know. But I know that will be my next novel. And I hope you’ll edit it for me, Sara.”

“You know I will,” Sara said, smiling.

“Oh, my dear!” Fanny said. “There is so much in the world to want!”

There is so much in the world to want.

Well, that was certainly true, Sara thought as she sat alone on the long flight back to America. It was a morning flight; the stewardesses had served and then removed breakfast trays and the first bustle of the flight was over, everyone was settling down, relaxed by the plane’s steady drone.

She had in her lap a manuscript that Lindsay Torrance had asked her to read and give an opinion on. She looked down at the typewritten pages, then looked away. Across the aisle, a young mother unbuttoned her blouse so that her baby could nurse. Sara started to look away, then forced herself to watch.

The baby. The soft skin. The bald and vulnerable head. The white blanket. With a
squeal and a kick, the emergence of a tiny foot in a tiny blue booty. The tiny body. The enormous trust. The flash of plump bare pink thigh as his diaper was being changed. The satisfied little sounds, and asleep at last, the flushed flawless face the source of perfect peace.

Sara turned away and looked out the window. She wiped the tears from her face. Outside there seemed to be nothing, the morning blue bleached by distance into nothing. Nothing as far as she could see. And that was death, she supposed, that endless empty faded air where nothing could occur. That was what death was like: nothing. And on her other side, sleeping in his mother’s blissful embrace, was a child, who was life. Who was everything: noise and flesh and the future. If she could never have the one, and it looked as if she couldn’t, still she did not yet want the other. There was some middle ground.

She repeated to herself Fanny’s admonition to enjoy what one did have instead of wasting life pining for what she didn’t have. If fate had sent her to Fanny to help Fanny complete her book and thus change her life, perhaps fate had also brought Fanny to Sara to show her what her life was to be about. Across the aisle, the woman held her baby. Sara held a manuscript. And that was not nothing. She loved her work and never wanted to give it up, and now she was having great success. Perhaps fate meant for her to put her whole life into her work.

And there was Steve. Always Steve, who loved her and who, she believed, would continue to love her whether she gave him a child or not. They had already weathered so much together: lust and jealousy and boredom and anger and disappointment and hard work and the disgrace of stomach flu, the embarrassment of a night’s failed passion, the humiliations of a body’s repeated failure to reproduce, hope and failure, achievements in work, carnal unions of such bestial intensity that they hurled each other into the heavens, bodies causing souls to meld. They were on intimate terms now, Steve and Sara, and their mutual misfortune had united them as much as their mutual ecstasy.

This was a great deal to have. Sara looked out at the vapid sky and vowed that if the plane landed safely, bringing her back to the complicated world, she would do her best to love what she had; not to spend her life in mourning for what was not being given.

She would not give up hope, though: but she would not live her life only hoping.

At the end of January, Ellie had her second baby, a little girl whom they named Sara Melinda.

In February, Steve and Sara took a short vacation. Because they needed to be careful with money, they took a super-saver flight to Florida and stayed with Steve’s parents. Clark and Caroline refrained from making any comments about grandchildren and, to Sara’s delight, asked her opinion about various books they had been reading. It was as if they were trying to say, without words, “It’s all right. We love you as you are.” At the end of February, her period started again.

In March the weather was terrible. The island seemed frozen, encased in gloom and cold. Sara missed Fanny. No matter how hard she worked—and she was working very hard on the Heartways House series—time poked by with frustrating, faltering, slug-ugly slowness. Mary Bennett’s baby was born, another healthy boy.

Sara looked out her window at the ungenerous white winter sky and remembered her vows on the plane home from England. So she flew into action: she turned the room that they had planned for a baby’s room into a study for herself and Steve. She papered the room herself with a cocoa-brown wallpaper with small white fleur-de-lis and painted the trim a crisp white. She stained the floorboards dark and covered them with a gorgeous white Chinese rug with brown and jade and sapphire petals, a rug that no child could even come near without staining. With the money she was making, she bought a word processor for Steve’s thirty-seventh birthday. He needed it for his work, and she used it, too. She found an old walnut desk and an older walnut table at a secondhand-furniture store. She sanded and stained them until they gleamed. She hung heavy white linen curtains at the windows. The finished study looked so elegant, so perfect, that she told herself she didn’t mind when her period started at the end of March.

In April, for her birthday, Steve gave her a kitten, a tiny fluffy white Angora, so feminine and voluptuous and languorous that they could only name her Fanny. Fanny sat in a white wicker basket on a pink cushion while Sara worked. And in April, Sara’s stomach bloated and her breasts swelled and ached and the tears came, and the blood. To cheer herself up, she called Julia.

Two days later, she received another missive from Julia in the mail.

It is said that Rumanian gypsy women who had difficulty conceiving, at one time made animal sacrifices to the moon. During a full moon two male and female birds and two male and female four-footed animals were buried on a
mountain. Libations were poured over the buried animals as a sacrificial offering to insure pregnancy.

“Go for it!” Julia had scribbled on the other side of the Xeroxed sheet. “I’m sure you can find two dead seagulls washed up on the beach somewhere. Throw them in a bag, come to Boston, we’ll buy two lab rats, chop off their little awful heads, head for the Berkshires and do some full-moon voodoo. I’m ready if you are.”

This time Julia’s humor seemed a little off—frantic, shrill. Sara called her friend again. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“No,” said Julia, sobbing. “No, I’m not and I never will be in my life. Perry is moving to California with his wife and their entire bloodsucking tribe of kids. It’s all over, Sara. It’s all over between us. And I swear I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. You know, I think that if there were some magic, even black magic, that would make him stay with me, I’d do it, I’d kill animals, I’d drink blood, anything, anything.”

“I want you to fly down here and stay with us for a while,” Sara said. “I want you to come today.”

“I can’t leave the gallery,” Julia said.

“Of course you can leave the gallery. Come on, Julia, I mean it, I want you here on a plane today.”

“You’re getting to be a real bossy bitch,” Julia said.

“That’s what happens to us frustrated barren broads,” Sara snapped back.

Julia arrived as ordered and stayed for a week. The local spring festival, Daffodil Weekend, with its parades and outdoor picnics and displays of millions of daffodils, took place while she was there, and Sara secretly hoped Julia would meet a new man in the crowds of people that came to the island that weekend. But it didn’t happen.

“Are you going to be all right?” Sara asked Julia the day she drove her to the airport for the flight back to Boston.

Julia gave her a dead-eye stare. “No,” she said. “I’m not. I don’t think I’m going to be all right for a long time.” Then she managed a nasty little grin. “But don’t worry about me, kid, you know what they say. I’m too mean to die.”

Why?
Sara thought, as she watched Julia’s plane lift off into the cloudy spring sky.
Why can’t we get what we want? Why can’t Julia have Perry for a husband, why can’t I have a child?
Julia’s plane disappeared from sight, leaving the sky empty, white and blank.