My Dearest Friend (31 page)

“You can’t! You can’t sleep out here!”

“Why not? It’s a warm night. This is comfortable. My mother-in-law will take care of Hanno. Daphne, I have a headache. I want just to go to sleep. Go away.”

Laura turned on her side and raised her arm to cover her face. Daphne stared at her. Somehow it seemed so … disreputable for Laura to spend the night outside on a lawn chair. But she went into the house and found a light summer blanket. By the time she got back, Laura was asleep, or seemed to be, so Daphne wrapped the blanket around Laura, being sure to tuck the bottom under the cushions so it wouldn’t fall off in the night. Alcohol seemed to be steaming from Laura’s breath and every pore, mingling with the night’s fragrances.

Daphne went inside to her bedroom, to the bed made warm by Joe.

When Daphne awoke at eight the next morning, she looked out the windows and found that Laura and her car were gone. She fixed two huge mugs of coffee and brought them back to bed.

Daphne told Joe about the conversation with Laura—omitting a few things: not telling him that Laura said she could get Joe to sleep with her; not telling him how Laura had kissed her. She must have been so very drunk.

“Isn’t it sad, isn’t it surprising, Laura not liking sex, not being able to have orgasms,” Daphne said. “I mean, to look at her, you would think—”

Joe shifted uncomfortably next to her. “Really, do you think you should be telling me all this? Surely she meant this to be confidential.”

“Joe, she must know I tell you everything! Wives do that, they tell their husbands everything.”

“Still …” Joe said.

“But
really,
” Daphne pressed on. “Don’t you think it’s just amazing that Laura is that way about sex? I mean, Joe, looking at her, at the way she moves and talks and touches people, you’d think she just loved sex, wouldn’t you?” She waited for Joe to answer. He grunted noncommittally. “I don’t know,” Daphne went on, musing aloud, “you just never know about people, do you? You never know what’s really hiding under the surface. I mean, Laura is my closest friend and we’ve talked about everything, I
thought I knew everything about her—and now look.” She turned toward Joe. “I don’t know what to do to help her.”

“I don’t think there is anything you can do.”

“Oh, there must be. Think how lonely she is. And I can’t help but think that it was marriage to that horrible Otto that made her think she doesn’t like sex. Anyone married to Otto would hate sex and men. Poor Laura.”

“What are you going to worry about when Laura’s happy?” Joe asked, laughing, pulling Daphne close to him. “Listen, if I could get you to forget her and remember me for a while, perhaps we could take advantage of Cynthia sleeping late …”

“Oh, Joe,” Daphne said, and put down her mug and wrapped herself around him. He was so very much
there
—all masculine and muscular and physical—and she quickly forgot anything else.

Summer brought several changes. Otto and Sonya went back to Germany for the three months of school vacation, and Mrs. Kraft, resigning herself to the divorce, went with them. Laura, suddenly so alone, and realizing that at the end of the summer she would be legally divorced and Otto and Sonya would be married, went into a deeper depression. She seemed unable to take control of her life, to make even minor decisions. She spent more and more time at Daphne’s house. Sometimes she even sat there with Hanno, watching TV. Often she stayed for dinner, helping Daphne cook it or clean up after. Those evenings, Joe would retire to his study as soon as possible.

But the more unexpected change came from a phone call for Daphne: the head of the English department at a nearby community college said that they were looking for a temporary part-time freshman-English instructor for the fall, and Pauline White had recommended Daphne: would she be interested? She was ecstatic. She accepted the job. Joe was happy for her, for he knew it was what Daphne wanted, and they could use the extra money.

But “How can you leave your little baby?” Laura demanded. She was strangely angry with Daphne. “What kind of mother are you?”

“Laura, Cynthia is a year old now. I’ve been with her constantly for a year. I’ll teach only two mornings a week. It’s not going to harm her for life to be with a babysitter. Don’t be crazy. Oh, I can’t wait, I love teaching so.”

After the phone call, Laura began to take care of Cynthia for an hour or two in the
mornings or afternoons while Daphne dug out old textbooks and lesson plans. The women didn’t plan it that way; it just fell naturally into place, since Laura and Hanno came over almost every day to lounge around with Daphne and Cynthia. Daphne bought a large blue plastic wading pool to put in the backyard, and while she worked inside at the dining-room table, Laura would sit in a bikini, drinking iced tea, watching her son play in the water, or helping little Cynthia toddle and crawl in the pool. Daphne would lift her head from a passage in an essay, and hear the shrieks of children’s laughter, and Laura’s low laugh, and think how happy she was.

At the end of the summer, Laura said to Daphne one afternoon: “I think you should hire
me
to baby-sit Cynthia when you teach.”

Daphne was sipping some iced tea, and she kept her head lowered so that Laura wouldn’t see her face. What was she to do? She wanted to put Cynthia with a sitter who had other babies Cynthia’s age. But she didn’t want to hurt Laura’s feelings.

“But Hanno will be in kindergarten,” she said. “You don’t want to waste your time babysitting.”

“I never think of babysitting as wasting my time!” Laura said. “That’s the most important work in the world, caring for little ones.”

“But, Laura, I mean, you should get a real job. One where you could make a decent amount of money.”

“I am getting quite a decent amount of money in the divorce settlement,” Laura said. “Otto is being very generous with child support too. And I will own the house clear and free. What do I want with more money?”

Daphne gave in. That evening, when she talked it over with Joe, he seemed uninterested—whatever Daphne wanted to do was fine. So the fall began, and Laura came to the Millers’ house two mornings a week and Daphne went off to the community college to teach. Daphne would return home to find Cynthia in clean clothes and giggles, the house immaculate, and a freshly baked cake or bread sitting on the kitchen counter.

“Don’t complain,” Joe said one evening as they finished one of Laura’s cakes late at night, when Laura had gone home. “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten. If it makes her happy—”

“I feel like I’m exploiting her somehow.”

“You’re only letting her do what she wants. She volunteers all this. You didn’t ask her to cook. You didn’t even ask her to baby-sit.”

“But, Joe, somehow it just seems wrong. It seems as if … oh, I don’t know, as if she’s demeaning herself. My best friend, cleaning our toilet. Don’t you see?”

“Your feminism is running away with you,” Joe said. “Stop a minute and remember all Laura has said. She really likes housework and cooking. Not every woman finds housekeeping demeaning.”

“Well,
you
wouldn’t want to spend every day of your life at it,” Daphne said.

Joe just looked at Daphne and sighed, letting his expression carry the message that she was now going past the rational in her thinking.

So the semester unrolled. Joe taught, Daphne took care of Cynthia and taught, Cynthia grew and blossomed into a strong-willed and active little girl. Laura and Hanno spent Christmas with the Millers. Then Daphne took Cynthia down to Florida, where her widowed mother had retired. She returned after two weeks to find that the college wanted her to teach again, two courses, and Laura said she wanted to continue babysitting Cynthia. Much of Daphne’s energy went into the teaching, but underneath the steady pattern of her days ran an electric current of tension. She could not feel comfortable with all that Laura was doing. It just seemed wrong. She wanted more for her friend’s life than babysitting and housecleaning.

In May Pauline and Douglas gave an enormous cocktail party. Daphne spent hours cajoling Laura into going and then planning with her what to wear. She had more fun getting ready for the party with Laura than with Joe, because Joe had been grouchy recently, one of the results of a large and painful hemorrhoid. After the doctor assured him it was not dangerous, he would not die of it, Daphne stopped worrying and found it secretly amusing. All the fuss he’d made over getting her hemorrhoid medicine after Cynthia was born! He deserved to suffer the same ailment, really he did. She tried to tease him about it, but he got angry.

“It’s painful, dammit!” he said. “It’s nothing to laugh about!”

“Joe, sometimes you are such a
priss
!” Daphne said in return.

Joe had to drink a thick and slightly sickening fiber drink at night, and the doctor gave him a special cream to apply to the hemorrhoid twice daily. Joe was afraid the medicine would stain or smell. The hemorrhoid was so large that the doctor wanted to ligate it in the office, but Joe became ill at the thought. The entire episode embarrassed him horribly.

“You should be a woman for just one day,” Daphne said. “God, how I would love
it. I’d love it if you were a woman for just one day—after having a baby, or when you’re having the first few days of your period. Talk about mess! And staining! And smells!”

“For Christ’s sake, Daphne, must you carry on like this?” Joe asked, stomping off into the bathroom for privacy.

He didn’t want to go to the Whites’ party because he felt so awful. “Oh, no,” Daphne pleaded. “Please, Joe, I can’t go without you and I really want to go!” He finally agreed, as long as she would agree to leave when he got too uncomfortable. But it was a smashing party with lots of guests and food and booze, and before long Joe, like the others, was laughing and talking.

Daphne had been having a good chat with Pauline but she kept her eye on Laura as she talked, to see if Laura was hitting it off with any of the men. Otto and Sonya fortunately had not been invited, but several attractive single men had.

When Pauline went off to check on the caterers, Daphne went searching for Laura. Laura seemed to be on her way outside toward Joe, no doubt looking for Daphne.

This is ridiculous—Laura shouldn’t spend all her time with Joe and me just because she feels safe, Daphne thought. I must get her to mingle. She relies on us too much.

The backyard and patio were not lighted, because the evening was so chilly that Pauline thought everyone would want to stay inside. But several couples and groups were standing around in the dark, talking in low voices or smoking. Joe was leaning against the side of the house, looking out at the dark garden, drink in hand.

Laura, her wineglass in her left hand, approached Joe and slowly slid her right hand around Joe’s waist, up under his shirt.

“Hello, Asshole,” Laura said, laughing her low luxurious laugh.

“Christ, Laura, not here!” Joe said. He put his arm around her shoulder and steered her around the corner of the house, out of Daphne’s sight.

It was as if she had been struck by lightning. Daphne stood unmoving, both hands pressing against her belly, where the bolt of knowledge had speared in with its electric shock. She had dropped her drink, but the glass had landed on the grass at her feet and did not break.

There had been moments like this before, moments when she knew that from this point on her life would be completely changed. Horrible moments: when her father told
his family he was dying of cancer. Miraculous moments: Cynthia’s birth. It was as if the physical absorbed the knowledge before the understanding could take it all in, and one was left with a numbed mind and a rubbery body, poor flash-struck thing, containing the jagged terror.

Was it possible that she had told Laura about Joe’s hemorrhoid? But, no. Never. Joe was such a privacy maniac that he would have been furious if Daphne had told anyone. Well, then, could Joe have told Laura, casually? He had scarcely been able to talk to the doctor about it; he couldn’t have told Laura unless they were intimate.

“Beautiful evening, isn’t it?” Hudson Jennings was standing next to her.

Daphne looked up at the tall, slender, elegant man with his beautiful brown long-lashed eyes. She must be giving off vibrations, fumes, sparks, she was so radically hit. Didn’t he notice anything?

“Yes,” she managed to say. “Beautiful evening.”

“But still a little chilly to be outside. How do you like teaching at the community college?”

Hudson was always so kind. “I like it very much.” What would
Hudson
think if she told him she was standing here in agony because she had just discovered her husband was having an affair with Laura because Laura had called Joe “Asshole”? She would have to explain it all, Joe’s hemorrhoid, his mania for privacy. A great bubble of hysteria welled up inside her. “Excuse me, Hudson, I think I’m going to be sick.”

She escaped from him and rushed into the house and to the downstairs guest bathroom in time to vomit out her drinks and food, but not, she realized, as she lay gasping against the door, not the terror and the grief that now spread through her body.

“Daphne?” Joe was knocking on the door. “Are you all right? Hudson said you were sick.”

Daphne crawled to her feet and opened the door. There he stood, her husband, looking so innocent, slightly worried, slightly annoyed.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sick. Please take me home.”

Joe reached out his hand to support her, but she shook it off and hurried on ahead of him. They went out the back door and around the side of the house, so that they would not have to explain their departure to everyone. As soon as they were in the car, Daphne said, “You are having an affair with Laura.”

Joe looked over at her, then back at the road. “Where did you get that idea?”

“Asshole,” Daphne said.

“What?” Now he was startled.

“She called you Asshole. In such an endearing tone of voice.”

“Christ, Daphne, and because of that you think we’re having an affair?” Joe exhaled angrily. “Look. I was home once, when you were teaching. I had to come home to get some papers, and I was feeling terrible, and she was babysitting Cynthia and she asked how I was and I told her. That’s all. That’s hardly having an affair.”