Other Women (26 page)

her au pair. In Hampstead and Sussex Hannah first learned to ignore what people said about themselves, and to watch how they behaved instead.

Mrs. Abner and Hannah’s boarding school chums knew when during a meal to use their fish knives.

They knew where a china underliner went when setting a table. Hannah didn’t know these things because she refused to pay attention when her grandmother tried to teach her. They were civilized, she was barbaric. So be it.

She hung her bark painting on the wall of her room. And when she sat at Mrs. Abner’s table, she blew her nose into the linen napkin. She began sneaking out to the gardener’s shed late at night to meet a boy from the kitchen named Colin, who was unconcerned with the proper placement of fish knives.

Colin, fair-haired and pale-skinned, had grown up in the East End of. London and had come to Sussex to study furniture making, thanks to the largesse of a trustee of the boarding school, for whom Colin’s parents worked as servants.

Once Hannah and Colin worked their way up to intercourse, they’d go at it for hours on the stone floor among the rakes and hoes. Until Colin would gasp, “Bloody hell, luv, I just can’t do it anymore, can l?” He made her a beautiful walnut table clock which she kept on the desk in her dormitory room and dusted daily.

Climbing to the second-floor restaurant Simon had selected, a Swedish smorgasbord place above the main shopping street, Hannah was gripped with a sudden fear of tumbling backwards down the steps. She steadied herself with a hand on either wall, reminding herself that it was “only” menopause. Simon was seated under a hanging spider plant sipping a tequila sunrise. Normally fastidious, he was looking unshaven and unkempt, his blond hair out of place and the vest of his three-piece suit unbuttoned. His wife, Helena, had left him for anman. Hannah studied him sympathetically as she sat down. Bossy little boy and belligerent teenager, he was unaccustomed to not having his own way.

Presumably he had to get himself humbled at some point, for the good of his soul, but it was still painful to watch if he’d been your baby. She remembered his agony as a little boy when she’d wash his blanket, how he’d stand anxiously by the machine OTHER

throughout the cycle sucking a thumb. Once as she passed the blanket through the wringer, he became so distressed at the pain he assumed his blanket was experiencing that he tried

own arm through the wringer by mistake.

When Helena left, Hannah tried to figure out how it was her own fault. She’d married a man who’d died in battle when Simon was barely a year old. She’d followed another man across the Atlantic with Simon in tow. He’d lost a brother and sister, and nearly his own life. He’d had his share of upheaval and insecurity. But who hadn’t? There was no way to protect your children from the agony of loss, however much you might wish to.

“So how’s it going?” she asked, glancing at the drink list. The only thing that helped when her hormones were bullying her was gin, but too much gin gave her bad dreams and anxiety attacks in the middle of the night.

“Fine,” he said curtly, tossing his head to get the blond hair out of his eyes. He was blessed with the stiff upper lip of both British

parents, poor guy. But he’d called her more often since Helena left, set up lunch dates, come to the house for dinner, bringing his laundry.

The waiter appeared, and Hannah ordered gin on the rocks. “So what’s new? Or rather who’s new?”

He gave a pained smile. “Nothing and nobody, Mother.” His eyes were slightly bloodshot.

She patted his hand. “Courage, my boy. This too shall pass.” She couldn’t think how to help him.

Maybe you couldn’t detach until you had the perspective only fifty years of watching love affairs, marriages, and divorces could give: that there was life beyond “lurve,” as an embittered client called it. Once during her own therapy, at a time when she was furious with Arthur for being away the night of the accident, she described to Maggie the flirtation she was conducting with Allen Sullivan, presumably to punish Arthur.

Maggie looked at her coolly from her wing chair beside a potted bay laurel tree and replied, “I’m an old woman now, and I have more important things to think about than whether Hannah Burke is going to seduce her husband’s best friend.

And so should you, my dear.”

Simon was looking irritated. “I said I was fine.”

to rescue it-and ran his

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Hannah nodded. She should mind her own business.

“Well, Arthur’s not. He has a strep throat.”

“What a drag. Watch out you don’t get it.”

“I’m a war horse.” She sipped her gin, hoping to fend off the sensation that the walls were closing in again.

“I know. I hardly ever remember you sick. The rest of us would be flat out, and you’d be bringing us trays and reading us stories.” He clutched his glass in both hands on the table in front of him, gazing into the orange and streaky red concoction like Socrates about to quaff hemlock.

Hannah smiled. He’d been idealizing her since Helena left. Helena was the baddie right now.

Mum was the goodie. She was enjoying it, but she knew it would last only until he found another woman, at which point she’d be returned to cold storage, like a mink coat in summer.

She watched him as he itemized her virtues.

He was a member of his own generation. Hers, traumatized by the depression and by Hitler, wanted stability, comfort and security, at whatever cost to spontaneity. His, observing the aridity of most of their parents’ lives, despised all that.

They followed their feelings, hence were always in bliss or despair. They didn’t understand that the boring old forms could somecarry you through the turmoil and deposit you on the far shoes of contentment. Several times in their thirty-eight years together, Arthur had threatened to leave. Because she was bad-tempered before her periods.

Because she was a flirt. Because the kids were driving him nuts. Several times she had threatened to leave. Because he was gone too much. Because she didn’t know whom he was sleeping with all those lonely nights in strange cities. Because she was tired of washing his sacks, or looking at his unshaven face across the breakfast table on weekends. Each time, their tangled web of property, responsibility, shared social life, and mutual concern seemed too complicated to unravel, and they stuck it out. Until here they were, closing in on old age, more in love than even during those first besotted days in the sleigh bed overlooking the Heath. To have been through life with someone, to know all his flaws and failings and he yours, to have done every awful thing two people can do to each other, yet still to be

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together-it was a pleasure unsurpassed in Hannah’s experience. More subtle than those first furious fucks, it sometimes took her breath away just to look at Arthur in the lamplight as he read his Wall Street journal,

wearing his moth-eaten green Mr. Chips sweater, and to realize what they’d achieved-a lifelong love, like they touted in the

National Enquirer:

“High School Lovebirds Still Cooing After Ninetyfour Years.”

Back at her office, Hannah discovered Mary Beth in her ruffled blouse and Mao slippers sitting rigidly on the tweed couch, which she and Arthur had rearranged the day before so Hannah could have her lake view.

“Are you okay?” asked Hannah, removing her cape, not wanting to hear about it if the answer was no.

“I’m not sure.”

“What’s the problem?” There was something demoralizing about therapizing a therapist. If your techniques didn’t work for you, why should they for anyone else?

“A client just asked me to go to bed with him.

When I said no, he called me the worst names you’ve ever heard and marched out.”

“What’s so terrible about that?” She reminded herself of all the times she went running to Maggie in her early years doing therapy.

Mary Beth looked at her with surprise. “I must have been leading him on. Or maybe I didn’t handle his advances correctly.”

“It sounds to me as though you did fine. Either he’ll be back, or he won’t. Look, I think you’re taking this too seriously, Mary Beth. All you are is a technician. You find out what patterns got set up in infancy, and then you try to point out their recurrence.”

Mary Beth nodded impatiently, as though she knew all that. But clearly she didn’t, or she wouldn’t be so upset. Hannah recalled the constant anxiety and sense of responsibility she used to feel. Life had gotten easier once she finally realized there was a limit to her power either to help or to hurt. A therapist was, at best, a placebo.

This recognition came after a client in a deep depression took a battle of sleeping pills and climbed into his freezer. She went wailing to Maggie in her office at the university about how it was all her fault. Maggie put on her glasses, looked up from some papers on her desk, and snapped, “Where do you get off, Hannah? Whose life was it? Not

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yours. It was his, to do with as he had to. It’s a tragedy, but his, not yours. So stop feeling sorry for yourself.” The unexpectedness of Maggie’s responses always fascinated Hannah. Looking at her wrinkles and gray hair, you expected kindness. You usually got instead exactly what you needed.

The receptionist buzzed. Caroline had arrived. As Mary Beth stood up and limped to the door, Hannah said kindly, “Don’t take the full weight of human misery on your shoulders all at once, Mary Beth. It’ll snap your spine.”

Caroline did a double take as she walked into Hannah’s office. The desk and chair had switched places with the couch.

“I’ve been looking at the parking lot for fifteen years,” Hannah explained. “I finally got sick of it.”

“But I liked looking at the lake.”

Caroline tossed her navy blue parka onto the couch.

“It is nice,” said Hannah, glancing out the window to the vast silver expanse of frozen lake.

All morning clients had been freaking out over the new arrangement. They were in such flux that she and her setting were supposed to remain static. But they’d recover, and she’d have her nice new view.

Caroline was circling the office in her white uniform, like a Samoyed unable to lie down. “I can see it’s upset you,” said Hannah. Caroline could do without total predictability from her now.

Getting her to accept this would be part of the Great Disillusionment.

“I’d rather look at the lake.”

“Give me a break. I like the lake too. And I’m stuck here all day.” Caroline expressing a preference rather than enduring stoically. Hannah was delighted.

Caroline listened to herself complain with astonishment.

“Well, it is your office.” Hell, she was lucky to have a sofa to sit on, and the leisure to do so.

What did the view matter? Sitting on the couch, she glanced all around. Out the window opposite her was a grimy bank of plowed snow and several parked cars. “Jesus, I can see why you wanted to switch.”

Hannah smiled. “What have you been up to?”

“I was just having lunch with a friend at Maude’s. There was this

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really old lady, eighty-five or ninety, staring at herself in the rest room mirror. She looked at me and said, “You know, when I look in a mirror, I get scared. Sometimes I wonder what it’s all for.” his

“What did you say?”

“I said, “Don’t look in mirrors, then.” his They laughed.

“Is that something you think about?” asked Hannah.

“What it’s all for?”

“Sure I think about it.” A car out the window had a bumper sticker that read, “Eat More Lamb.

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Coyotes Can’t Be Wrong.” Maybe this new view wouldn’t be so dreary after all. “Doesn’t everybody?”

“You’d be surprised.” She herself was amazed by the number of clients who assumed the

purpose of their lives was to pay off their mortgage. “What are your conclusions?”

“If there’s a God, He’s wacko.”

“And we’re here because of some complicated chemical accident?” Having eaten a fruit salad at lunch with Simon, Hannah knew there was a God.

It would take a genius like God to invent the strawberry.

“Right. Because otherwise you have to see God as a sadist.” What was this, therapy or Sunday school?

“You do?”

“How else are you going to account for all the brutality and suffering in the world?”

“How are you going to account for that pileated woodpecker last month?” Or this incredible lake, Hannah added privately, not wishing to rub it in. She squinted slightly from the glare off the ice.

Caroline smiled, pleased Hannah should remember something she’d said so long ago. “I saw it again this weekend. It climbed a tree outside my window while I was lying in bed.”

“Oh yes? So how do you account for its existence in such a dreadful world?”

“An apparatus evolved to keep down insects.”

Hannah smiled. “Why do we need

hundreds of varieties?”

“For the hundreds of varieties of insects.”

“What I can’t figure out,” said Hannah, lighting a brown cigarette, “is why, if you hate this world so much, you don’t just shut up about it. Instead, you dwell on its horrors in such loving detail.”

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“I’m stuck here, aren’t I?”

“No. As usual, it’s your choice.”

“You mean suicide? I tried that once.” She crossed her legs and put clasped hands around her knee.

“Oh yes?”

“I was married to that doctor in Newton.

Jackson. I turned on the gas oven and stuck my head in. It was so dirty I decided to clean it first. By the time I finished, the boys were awake from their naps.”

Hannah smiled. “Is that really true? Or are you trying to amuse me again?”

Caroline grinned. “You’ll never know, will you?”

Hannah shrugged. “If you won’t let me do my job, don’t be surwhen it doesn’t get done.”

She thought about her own failed suicide.

A couple of months after the children died, she walked off across the frozen lake, leaving Arthur a good-bye note. After a couple of hours shivering beside a snow drift, when he hadn’t arrived to talk her out of it, she trudged home. Arthur was watching the news, while Simon, Joanna, and the dog staged a loud argument in the playroom. The note still sat propped against a Gordon’s gin bottle in the pine dry sink. He hadn’t seen it because he hadn’t had a drink. She handed it to him. He read it and looked at her. “I would have come after you,” he said. She shrugged, fixed martinis, and put another log on the fire.