Nell (10 page)

One May evening, when the children were visiting their father for the weekend and Nell was in this blessed blissful stupid state, she had gone to the Andersons’ for dinner. They sat on the slate patio, Katy and John and Nell, enjoying the warmth of the evening and discussing the great hole in the backyard that was soon to become the Andersons’ new swimming pool. A young man in blue jeans and a work shirt and a red cap that said
BUDWEISER
came around the corner of the house. He was Steve Hansen, the contractor who was putting in the Andersons’ pool, and John got up to greet him and talk with him about the progress of the pool.

Nell leaned back in her lawn chair, sipped her gin and tonic, and looked at Steve. It had been years since she had studied a man’s body so completely, with such relish. Steve was short, lean, hard-bodied, and tan. He wore a thick silver ID bracelet on his wrist, and the sun glinted off it and off the golden hairs each time he moved his muscular arm. His shirt was damp at the armpits and back with sweat, and his jeans hung low on his hips, stretched taut over his thighs. He had straight blond hair that hung shaggily from under his cap. From time to time he glanced over at Nell: his eyes were a brilliant blue.
John Anderson gestured and talked, leaning with one hand on the back of the lawn chair. Steve just lounged into his own body, comfortable and sweaty and strong. He had a tool belt slung low on his hips. Nell couldn’t take her eyes off the man. Katy, watching Nell watch Steve, finally said in dulcet tones that sounded merely kind to a stranger but were weighted with meaning to her husband: “John, why don’t you offer Steve a drink?”

So Steve had stayed. He had joined them on the patio and had been introduced to Nell. They sat with the spring sun warm on their skin, sat in lawn chairs sipping gin and tonics, idly chatting till the light began to fade from the sky.

Later, Nell would not remember a word of that conversation, but she could close her eyes and instantly feel the sun on her skin and see the slice of lime floating in her glass, that tart green half moon of fruit trapped in the ice and liquid like a fact caught in the midst of bewitchment. She had not gotten drunk. She had only sipped at the drink. Mostly she stared into her glass, because if she looked at Steve, she felt a flush come up her neck and cheeks, and if she looked at Katy or John, she broke into a foolish grin that was usually completely irrelevant to whatever topic of conversation they were discussing. She just stared at the lime in her drink and felt wonderful. Felt alive and acutely aware of the man sitting next to her. She was experiencing the most wonderful grown-up lust.

Steve was a quiet man. Marlow had always been so dramatic, theatrical, even grandiose, expressing even the most banal statement with passion; Nell as a young woman had admired him for that. But then as time went by it seemed that most of the men Nell knew were this way. Many were actors or were connected with the theater, and they all had such style, they all prided themselves on their flair. But Steve had an unexamined stillness about him that fascinated Nell. His answers were simple and direct, and he had a good, short laugh. He was contained, as if content with himself and his secrets. As the evening went on, Nell felt a lust for the man mount inside her until it was nearly intolerable. Each time she looked at the man she felt an excruciating pleasure seize her, and soon she could not control her imagination. It rampaged inside her mind and body: she would glance at Steve and imagine kissing his tanned neck, kissing down into the collar of his blue shirt, licking his chest—Nell would quickly glance back into her glass. She was agitated yet forced to sit serenely—she was a grown and cultivated woman, after all, not a child, not a savage. But she was very nearly drooling in the
presence of this calmly and powerfully sexual man. When he finally rose and left, Nell was trembling, exhausted. She had not experienced such an intensely sensual experience since she’d given birth to her babies and nursed them. She didn’t know if she had ever reacted so physically to any man before.

“I wonder if he gives off a
scent
or something,” Katy had said as soon as Steve was gone.

“Huh?” Nell said.

“Well, God,” Katy went on, “how else can you explain it? He’s so sexy. He’s like some kind of animal. He makes me just want to
jump
him!”

“It’s always nice to know you get on well with the help, Lady Chatterley,” John said.

“Oh give me a break,” Katy said to her husband. “You’re always lusting after Nell’s babysitters, you have no room to talk. But, seriously,” Katy said, turning back to Nell, “what do you think?”

“I think … I think he’s gorgeous,” Nell said. “I think he’s just—uhh.” She could not think of a word appropriate to that man.

“Well, goody,” Katy said, rubbing her hands. “Something to cheer our little Nelly up!”

“Katy, he didn’t even notice me,” Nell said.

“Nell,
no one
doesn’t notice you,” Katy said. “He noticed her, didn’t he, John?”

John was putting the steaks on the grill. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Sure.”

“Oh, men,” Katy said. “They’ll never have the right instincts, no matter how well they learn to cook.”

But in fact it was John who set Nell up with Steve. While Nell and Katy were thinking up elaborate plots and ruses—Nell, for example, could never ask Steve over to estimate the cost of putting a pool in her yard, the yard wasn’t big enough for a pool and she could never afford it—while Nell and Katy were lewdly laughing over the puns and innuendoes possible in asking a man to dig her yard, while they were trying to be sneaky and creative, John simply said to Steve the next day: “Why don’t you ask Nell out? She’s divorced and she’s nice and I know she’d accept.”

Steve called Nell that night and asked her out. Nell accepted, then called Katy,
silly with excitement. Katy got excited, too: “God,” she said. “A contractor for you, Nell. This is just like
Shoot the Moon
!”

They went out to a movie Friday night, then to a bar. They drank beer and talked. Steve was twenty-five, eight years younger than Nell. He was divorced, too, and had a little boy, four. He lived on a small farm west of Boston; he had two horses. He didn’t try to sleep with Nell that night, but he did ask her to come riding with him that Sunday. And at the door he kissed her so deftly that Nell’s body went warm all over, she went right into an adolescent swoon.

By the time Sunday came, Nell was out of her mind. This was her first date since her divorce, her first man other than Marlow in ten years—if she slept with him, the only man other than Marlow in her life. She was terrified.

She’d been awake most of Saturday night, watching out the window at the sky; she was afraid it would rain Sunday and the ride would be canceled. She was afraid the babysitter would get sick. She was afraid her children would come down with a serious illness. She was afraid she’d fall in the bathtub and break her leg. She dreamed of the sexual pleasure of riding horses with Steve and perhaps kissing him in the meadow, then going back to stable the horses—perhaps they would embrace and in their frenzy they’d make love in the barn, on the hay! Nell had never done that. She was so glad to be divorced and free for new experiences—she felt young, she felt young enough to think she could fly.

It did not rain. The sitter came. The children stayed healthy all day. Nell did not break a leg. She wore jeans and sneakers and tied her hair back, but not severely, and drove out to Steve’s farm. It was a glorious, warm spring day, a perfect apple blossom day. Steve saddled up a horse named Maud for Nell, and together they rode out into the field. They trotted, cantered, walked; they stopped now and then to admire the view. When they looked at each other, it was very much like kissing, and under the sun, out in the meadow, they smiled at each other, making a tacit agreement.

They rode for an hour. As they rode, Nell remained aware of Steve’s intense sexuality, but slowly she became aware of something else. She had not been on a horse for a long time, for years, and it took all her strength and concentration to ride and post on Maud and not look like a bouncing fool. When they were finally back at the barn and
Nell slid off her horse, she landed on legs made of rubber. Pains shot up her thighs and through her pelvis. She looked at Steve, so near her, so masculine and strong, as he hauled off the saddles, tossed them on their hooks, tended to the horses, his muscles bulging through the cloth of his shirt. She looked at him and wanted him, but knew that if she felt anything between her thighs except warm bath water she would cry out in agony. She almost did cry out in frustration.

“How’re you doing?” Steve asked.

“I’m really feeling it,” Nell said, rubbing her rear.

“So am I,” Steve said, misunderstanding her.

He came over and took Nell in his arms and kissed her for a long time on the mouth. He moved his hands up and down her back, her bottom, her legs, pressed her gently against him. Nell did not know if she was shaking because of the horse ride or the man. She and Steve were almost exactly the same height, so that they matched, all up and down, their legs touching, their pelvises pressed together, and then Nell felt a wonderful oblong of hardness pushing through the fabric of Steve’s jeans against her body. She had never slept with any man but Marlow. She began to shake, to quiver. Her legs went weak and would not hold her. Her body became a riot of conflicting sensations because of her desire and because of the pain of her body from the horseback ride. She was all warm and sweet between her legs, but at the same time the muscles in her thighs and back cramped and each slight shift of her legs sent a stabbing pain around her pelvis. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Steve,” she said finally, pulling away from his mouth, “I’m sorry. I have to go. I have to go home.”

Steve took her face into his hands. “What?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Nell, what’s the matter?”

She could not bring herself to tell him the truth. It was too embarrassing. She already felt strange and at a disadvantage, being eight years older than Steve: she didn’t want him to think she was physically decrepit, already falling apart. She pulled away from Steve and, walking on legs that sent jabs of pain shooting up into her crotch, she hurried to her car. It took all of her dignity and will power to force her legs into a normal walk: if Steve hadn’t been there to see her, she would have wobbled, splayfooted and
quaking, across the drive to her car. No, she would not have done that—she would have crawled. By the time she got in the car, tears of pain and embarrassment and frustration were in her eyes.

Steve hurried to the car and leaned down to the window. “Nell!” he said. “I don’t understand. Did I upset you? What did I do? I didn’t mean to come on so strong—”

It was such a relief to Nell to have her bottom, legs, and back supported by the cushioned seat of the car that she nearly cried out. Her traitorous legs quivered, out of her control, and she hoped Steve didn’t see them. She wondered if she would even be able to drive the car. “It’s not that,” she said. “You didn’t come on too strong; I wanted you to come on so strong.”

“But—” Steve looked at her, baffled.

“I’ll call you,” Nell said, and started her car and fled. She had spent that evening and every evening for the next three nights sitting in a warm bath of Epsom salts, taking aspirin, glaring at her wobbly, ridiculous weak legs.

Poor Steve. He had misunderstood it all. Nell never did tell him just why she had left that day, because she couldn’t. When they did talk about it, Steve told her that he knew she had been scared by the power of their desire for each other—and how could she tell him it had been not lust but agonized legs that had driven her away? She could not humiliate him or herself with the truth.

And in fact it had not been a bad thing that she had driven off in tears, because it made Steve feel responsible to her, considerate of her; he thought she was emotionally more fragile than she was. Oh, she had been fragile—she had been terrified. She had been so terrified that she would not let him have a light on the first time they went to bed together. They made love in total darkness, because Nell was so afraid that if Steve saw her stretch marks, he would say, “Oh my God!” and get up and leave in disgust. But a strange thing happened to Nell with Steve, one of the strangest things that was ever to happen to her in her life. It was a turning point for her, a milestone.

Because Nell had driven off crying, Steve decided that she was sensitive and virtuous and delicate—and she was, in truth, all those things. She had never slept with a man before Marlow, and she had never been unfaithful to her husband, and in the months since their divorce and the few months before that, she had not made love with any man.
So she was in fact sensitive, virtuous, and delicate. But she was also wild with lust. She would have gladly jumped into bed with Steve that Sunday afternoon if it had not been for her ridiculous legs. But Steve did not know this and so he set out to court her, to show her that he did not think of her as just another casual piece of ass. It was a very endearing thing for him to do. On their next date, he took her out to dinner and did not try to do more than kiss her when he brought her home. The date after that, the night they did go to bed with each other, he fixed dinner for her himself in his own house. And by that time this strange thing had happened to Nell: She had come to realize that he was not her intellectual equal, and so she stopped being afraid of his judgment. And that made the most enormous difference in her life.

All of her life Nell had been at the mercy of the judgment of men. Because she was pretty, because she so often “won” in the open and hidden competitions among women, she had assumed that she was one of the lucky ones. It wasn’t until after her divorce from Marlow that she realized how crippled she really was, how she could not make a move in her life without considering how she would be judged by men. Of course this was magnified in her youth when she was chosen cheerleader, voted homecoming queen, cast as lead in plays; it was magnified a thousand times when she walked out onto an empty stage before male directors to audition for a part. They actually were judging her. Perhaps she had thought, unconsciously, that marriage to Marlow had put a stop to all that, but in fact it had only had the opposite effect. Marlow had judged her every day of their life together and always found her wanting. He had judged her professionally; he had judged her personally. As she grew older, he casually compared her to younger actresses; as she grew more involved with the business of running a home and family, he found her more and more wanting intellectually. With every year that passed between them, Marlow found more and more to judge Nell by, more to condemn her by. She could act, but not as well as any number of the new students in Marlow’s classes. She was attractive, but not nearly as attractive as almost every other woman Marlow saw: look at Nell at thirty-three, how her breasts now sagged from nursing, how her stomach was no longer taut and smooth, how it puckered at the navel! She was a good enough mother, but hear how she yelled at her children, listen to them cry! And she had once been intelligent and well read, but now—well, it was ridiculous really, wasn’t it? After
all, she found time at night, after the children were in bed, to read mysteries and light novels; why couldn’t she read Pirandello, Brecht, Albee, why couldn’t she keep up with what was happening in the theater, keep up her mind?