Mourning Glory (28 page)

"Did she ever say how wonderful and beautiful and
manly and strong and hard you are?"

"Never," he gasped.

On another level, it was impossible to believe that she was
doing this, competing in this way with the perfect Anne, the dead Anne, who had
not been even remotely perfect in this one regard. Grace herself was not a
woman of sexual experience, and everything that she was doing came from some
weird instinct buried deep in the female psyche.

"Is this good?" she asked, knowing the answer but
wanting to hear it spoken.

"God, yes."

"The best, the very best?"

"Absolutely."

She stopped for a moment and looked up at him.

"I want to taste you, Sam. Is that okay?"

He hesitated, then nodded. She had never done this and
wanted him to know, wanted it to be remembered as something that had never
happened between him and the perfect Anne, the neutered Anne.

She bent over him again and felt him tense, then explode in
her mouth.

Later, when they had cooled and she lay in the crook of his
arm, she felt oddly victorious and was certain that she had made her point. It
had also brought his focus back to her, and the questions began again.

"When you were married, Grace ... did you have secrets
from your ex?"

In the context of the moment the question was worrisome, as
if she had overplayed her hand in exhibiting what might have seemed to him too
much sexual expertise.

"Not like yours, Sam." Another absolute truth.

"Odd, isn't it, that I should feel guilt about it only
after she's gone?"

"Why torture yourself, Sam? It's over."

"The memory isn't over."

"Then maybe you should have told her. Confessed."

"I was a coward. When she was alive I was afraid to
risk telling her, and when she was dying I didn't want to add to her
pain."

It occurred to Grace that maybe her little exhibition of
sexual prowess had been counterproductive after all. Somehow it had recalled
his deception.

"Do you believe your husband was faithful?" he
asked suddenly, after a long pause.

"How can one be sure? Like Anne, though, he didn't
show much interest in that area." A half-lie, she decided. Jason's
indifference had come later.

"I admire your self-discipline, Grace."

"It wasn't discipline, Sam. I didn't care."

"Not care?"

"Frankly, I was as bored as Jason when it came to
that." She turned upward to look at him, then kissed his cheek. "Not
until you came along, Sam."

She immediately regretted the comment, although that was
another truth. She could tell by his facial expression that he might have
doubted the assertion and she let it pass. Naive older men, she supposed, could
be vulnerable to wishful thinking and might accept such an explanation,
deluding themselves. Not Sam, she decided. Millicent Farmer would have kept up
a drumbeat of praise for her unfortunate dupe.

"I hope you believe me, Sam," she said, watching
his face.

"Why shouldn't I?"

"It sounds so ... phony," she sighed, mimicking
herself. "'Not until you came along, Sam.'"

"Some things you can't lie about."

"Women fake it all the time," Grace muttered.
"You men are such ninnies."

"I told you, I'm a good judge of people. And I don't
think you're a very good actress."

"Well, you're wrong," she said, displaying a
childish pout. "I
am
faking it."

"Well, I'm not." He chuckled.

"That's pretty obvious."

Her hand felt his penis harden again.

"You can't fake that. No way."

Suddenly he reached out, brought her face to his and kissed
her hard on the lips, their tongues intertwining. When they had disengaged he
said, "There's more to this than meets the eye."

For a moment she was confused. Had he discovered the truth?

"Yes, there is," she agreed. She had, after all,
the advantage of knowing the truth about herself. For a while they slid into
silence.

"What was your husband's name, Grace?"

Oh, God, she thought, digging into her memory. Had she lied
about his name? She couldn't remember.

"Martin," she replied, unable to bring herself to
acknowledge Jason as a real person, further distancing herself from the truth
of her past.

"And you never had a clue? You know, about his being
gay."

"Not a clue."

Again she was entering territory that was unfamiliar.

"If you're not comfortable talking about it, we could
drop it."

How could she be comfortable? she thought. Creating another
person out of whole cloth was an uncomfortable process. Yet she feared
dismissing it out of hand.

"Were you devastated?" he asked.

"How would you react?"

"Not well, I think."

She wondered if she had gone too far out on a limb. But on
reflection she decided that it did have a certain logic to it. If she had said
that her husband had left her for another woman, which was equally untrue, it
might have diminished her in his eyes, marking her as a woman who could not
hold her man, undesirable and boring.

Above all, she had to protect this image of herself as
desirable, intelligent, educated and cultured. She had never considered herself
to have any of these attributes, although she was beginning to suspect that she
had not done herself justice about her intelligence. How, then, could she have
developed such cunning?

His reactions to her fictive creations, she was
discovering, were beginning to give her an outline of how he wanted her to be,
as if she were connecting numbers in a child's drawing and watching a
recognizable shape emerge. It was, she realized, up to her to place the numbers
in the proper position. She was beginning to realize that his questions were
equally informative about him as her answers were about herself.

These conversations, recalled in bits and pieces, stuck in
her memory as she contemplated what was happening between them. As much as she
tried, she could not keep herself from assessing her progress. Had she engaged
his interest beyond the sexual component of their relationship? Was he
beginning to consider her as a marriage prospect? Or was she merely a sex
object, a roaring good fuck who he would toss aside as soon as he grew tired of
her? Did he suspect her real motives, her subterfuge? Was he buying her lies?

She tried, of course, to strip such an assessment of all
emotion, discounting her own feelings toward him, fearing that her own needs
and desires might inhibit her progress toward her ultimate goal. In the process
she was discovering strange things, about herself, depths to her inner psyche she
had never noticed: her explosive sexuality, her calculation, her cunning, her
imagination and resourcefulness, her singleness of purpose.

It was particularly strange, since she had never considered
herself anything but mediocre, somewhere in the lower middle of the status
ladder, ordinary and uninteresting. Looking back to her occupation as a
cosmetician, she felt a sense of humiliation and disgust. She had been little
more than a face painter and ego massager, a servant to vulnerability and
vanity.

Of course, she had always seen her marriage as a dreary
folly, a relationship with a weak and limited man. Now Jason seemed even beyond
that—hollow, stupid, empty. She resented more than ever the wasted years and
enjoyed the idea that in her re-creation of herself she had even eliminated his
name from that history.

In fact, everything that had occurred up to the moment she
had met Sam Goodwin had been dismal, bleak and unpromising, her childhood a
nightmare of religious repression, conformity and ignorance, her teen years
aborted by her ridiculous relationship with Jason and the years after, a
struggle for crumbs that had corrupted her daughter and diminished further her
own self-esteem.

What was happening to her now was awesome, a kind of
miracle, a self-created reincarnation. Yes, despite the sheer joy of it, the
sense of liberation from the humdrum reality of her old self, she could not
shake the dread that it portended, and the occasional projection of herself
sitting among the ruins of her fantasy seemed more frightening than death
itself.

The new housekeeper, a Puerto Rican woman named Felicia,
seemed to float silently through the house, paying little attention to them,
except at mealtime, when she became somewhat more obtrusive as she served.

They walked the beach, swam in the ocean, made love and
stayed within the confines of Sam's house. There were telephone calls
discreetly taken by Sam in his den. She assumed he was conducting business and
returning calls from friends, and she used these interludes to cull through
Anne's closet and set aside those clothes she would remove. So far, she had
managed to clear out less than a quarter of the woman's wardrobe, fearing that
the end of that project might signal the end of this idyll.

She had worked out a regular routine, researching the
various charities that took such clothing donations and dropping them off in
person. Often, the volunteers on duty would comment on their quality, but she
avoided all conversation. She no longer gave out her name and telephone number,
fearing that an inadvertent call might alert Jackie to what she was doing.

As he had indicated earlier, he avoided all socializing,
begging off any appointments for lunch or tennis at the club and discouraging
all visitors. She wondered how long he would be able to use the excuse of his
grieving to keep himself, and her, isolated. But she would not give herself
permission to speculate beyond the present on that score.

On most days she would come back to Sam's house after
dropping off the clothes and they would enjoy a candlelit dinner. Then she
would return to her own apartment, usually before Jackie got home from her
night job at the movie theater. Yet, despite the routine, she considered those
moments with Sam an exciting adventure and couldn't wait until she got to his
home in the morning for their walk along the beach.

Back at her own apartment, Grace floated through the old
reality barely able to sustain a credible attitude, hoping that Jackie wouldn't
question her whereabouts too closely. It was one thing to lie to Sam, but
another to lie to her daughter.

Instead of being a detriment to their relationship, she
considered the acquisition of the little yellow Honda as a blessing in
disguise, another nudge of destiny. It gave both Jackie and herself the freedom
and latitude to pursue their own agendas. There were, of course, nagging
thoughts about her daughter's relationship with Darryl and the legitimacy of
the car transaction, but she dismissed them, hoping they would not get in the
way of what was happening between her and Sam. For the moment, that would have
to be her top priority.

Aside from school, Jackie worked the breakfast shift at
McDonald's, which required her to be at her job very early in the morning. This
burst of ambition—or was it a frenzy of illogical independence?—was troublesome
to Grace, who was concerned that her daughter's furious pace would prevent her
from keeping up with her schoolwork.

The fact of her daughter's new physical independence and
her own use of time, spending practically all of it with Sam, inhibited their
communication. As she grew more and more intimate with Sam, she recognized that
she was growing less and less intimate with her daughter. Even their brief
conversations when Jackie came home from her night job seemed coldly evasive,
deliberately so on her part as well.

But the central issue between them remained the same: money
and its scarcity. With the remainder of her severance money nearly gone and her
unemployment check barely covering expenses, Grace was heading into a financial
morass.

She had calculated that Jackie, considering both jobs at
minimum wage, and what Grace could spare from her unemployment check, would
never come close to the hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar payments for the car.
Nevertheless, she was determined not to intervene. Jackie had to discover the
true value of money and financial responsibility for herself. As for Darryl,
Grace hoped that Jackie would discover the folly of that relationship.

"Is everything going okay, Jackie?" Grace asked
one night about six weeks after she and Sam had become intimate. Jackie,
looking haggard and pale, had just returned from her night job.

"I'm doing fine," Jackie said with a strong hint
of bravado.

"You look tired, Jackie," Grace said, suddenly
realizing that she had neglected to appraise her daughter with her usual
scrutiny since becoming involved with Sam.

"You don't," Jackie snapped. It was an
observation that surprised her. She had assumed that her subterfuge was
credible, and Jackie had given no hint of questioning it. Until now.

Grace knew she looked good. She was rested and tanned from
her daily walks in the sun and her swimming exercise. Her relationship with Sam
was revitalizing, and the daily lovemaking seemed to create a profound inner
glow of contentment that apparently was more obvious than she might have
assumed. She felt a sudden tension as she prepared to deflect Jackie's
observation.

"When you're scrounging for a job you have to keep
yourself looking as if you don't need it."

"I can't understand why it's so difficult. It's not
like you're trying to be president of a company."

"I just don't want to take anything."

"Beggars can't be choosers, Mom."

"Let's not get into one of those, Jackie. I'm doing
the best I can."

"Are you playing that song again?"

"You're tired, Jackie. Maybe we should discuss this
some other time."

"Hell, you're hardly around," Jackie snapped.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means, dear Mother..." Grace could see her
daughter's hesitation. "A couple of times in the last few weeks I've
stopped by after school to catch a nap before getting to my night job. You
weren't home."