Other Women (27 page)

Caroline was indignant. Why did Hannah so consistently refuse to be entertained by her? She sighed and began talking: “I just couldn’t take it anymore. The boys were little, and Jackson was always at the hospital. I didn’t have many friends or interests. I’d quit my job at Mass

General. My sole purpose in life was to help Jackson save the world.”

“Sound familiar?”

Caroline hesitated. “My parents, you mean?”’

She remembered waiting for them to get home at night, just as she had for Jackson.

Running their baths, rubbing their temples, bringing them tea. Just as she had for Jackson. She was a fucking automaton.

“So go on. Why did you decide to kill yourself?”

Shit, a hot flash was about to hit her. It licked across her body like a grass fire. She trembled with the effort of sitting still as sweat trickled down her chest. The room wavered and receded.

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“dis . . I used to listen to call-in talk shows on WBZ for company,” Caroline was saying. Was she being polite, Hannah wondered, or did she not notice that her therapist was sitting in a puddle of sweat? Usually clients were too caught up in their own inner dramas to notice if she did a handstand on the desk. Her face must be bright red.

… on this particular day they were discussing office sex. I started wondering if Jackson was getting any on the side with the nurses. It happened all the time at Mass General. It was how he and I had gotten together-those late nights relieving human suffering. So I wondered if that was why he was hardly ever home. This minister phoned in to say he wanted to swing, but his wife wasn’t into it, and would it be sinful to do it on the sly. Then the program ended and the news came on. About our tanks rolling into Cambodia, and the slaughter and famine. I had a moment of clarity: There I was in this huge neo-Tudor house, surrounded by all the luxuries I spent my days buying and maintaining, worrying about my husband having affairsmuch of the world was starving and homeless. I walked over to a window that looked out on a marble bird bath. The drapes were crewelwork, handmade in India. I took the edge of a curtain in my fingers and examined all those tiny stitches and realized that some starving woman probably went blind doing them for a few cents an hour. And people came into my house and exclaimed over how beauthey were.

I knew I’d sold out. I did examine the oven, but the boys wake up from their naps.” She didn’t add that this was when she took up weaving, as a form of penance. She enrolled in a course at a crafts school, intending to weave blankets for the Salvation Army. But her teacher entered her work in a craft show without telling her, and she won second place. Everything she made someone wanted to buy.

And once she left Jackson, she needed the money. She enjoyed weavso that even her attempt at penance turned into a sellout.

“Did you tell Jackson how unhappy you were?”

asked Hannah, feeling chilled and clammy.

“I tried to. He told me I was too intense, and what about all the patients at the hospital with real problems.”

“Remember the trips to the Salvation Army?

Remember Jason at Christmas?” Hannah removed her jacket, hoping her shirt would dry out.

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Caroline squeezed the bridge of her nose, marveling at Hannah’s memory. She looked up. “And you think we’re not just machines that go round and round?”

“There can be more to us than that. Are you sure it’s just the Third World that suffers and hungers?”

They sat in silence for a long time, Caroline studying the tire tracks across the dusting of new snow in the parking lot. Randy Eliot would probably be able to identify the tire brands. She and Brian had had dinner with Randy and Connie a couple of nights ago in their house overlooking Lake Glass. Caroline decided she liked them, despite their passion to know the cost of every object under discussion.

“There’s a school vacation next week, isn’t there?” asked Hannah, taking out her appointment book. “Are you and your sons going somewhere?”

“I’m driving them to Newton to stay with their father for the week.”

“Do they get along with him?” Opening the book, she looked for an empty slot for next week.

“They idolize him. But he’s very busy and doesn’t have much time for them. They usually come home angry and disappointed.”

“It’s sad what some parents do to distance themselves from their children.”

Caroline examined this remark. It was true: Just because Jackson claimed he was hostage to his patients’ needs didn’t make it so. Did that go for her parents too?

“What is Jackson’s mother like?” asked Hannah.

“She’s a bat out of hell. Nothing he does is ever right. She adores peach ice cream, and I remember one time when we went to visit her in Springfield, Jackson bought several quarts of the stuff from this really fancy place in Boston and packed it in dry ice in a cooler. She took a spoonful of it and announced, “This is disgusting, Jackson. The peaches are icy.” I

wanted to dump the rest of it on her head.”

“So can you see why he’s frightened of closeness with people, and why he stayed away from you and the boys?”

“What?”

“We’re all operating from scripts written for us when we were infants. Most of the time we have no idea what other people are really

like. You, me, Jackson. We have to treat each other with kindness because we’re all laboring under similar disabilities.”

Caroline studied Hannah in her shirt sleeves, pen poised over her appointment book. She was admitting to disabilities. Caroline didn’t want to know about them. How come her hair looked damp?

“Mr. Right and I went to the Converse Inn Saturday night. I saw you there.”

“Oh yes? I didn’t see you. It’s a nice place, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Was that your husband?”

“Arthur. Yes.” She ran the fingers of one hand through her hair, fluffing it up so it would dry faster.

“He looks nice.”

“He is nice.”

“I’m thinking about trying to make this thing with Brian Stone work.”

“Oh yes?”

“Yeah. Life seems simpler with a man. He throws the spears, and I gather the roots and berries.”

Hannah smiled.

“Besides, my friends have started calling me Saint Celibate. I think it’s a bit much.”

Hannah knew she shouldn’t let Caroline get away with joking her way out of this one. But the hour was over, and Hannah was drained from the hot flash.

Next week she’d put up more of a struggle.

“Whatever you want, Caroline.” She waved her pen hand, wondering if she actually felt as noncommittal as she sounded. Caroline would probably have an easier row to hoe if she could be respectable. But Brian Stone was Daddy and Jackson all over again. Picking him as a partner was like picking Zsa Zsa Gabor as your marriage counselor.

Twisting the claw off her boiled lobster, Hannah looked out the restaurant window to the ocean, which swelled and surged around weathered wooden posts the size of elephant legs.

“The only place I like better than

Lake Glass,” she told Arthur, “is right here.”

“Oh? Why the obsession with water, I wonder?”

They both wore plastic bibs with drawings of red lobsters on them.

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“Probably that’s what growing up in the Outback does to you. Like the Arabs” fascination with flowing fountains.”

“I remember when you arrived in Georgetown from London,” said Arthur, probing a claw with a silver nut pick. “You acted as though you’d never seen the sun. Every time it came out you raced into the backyard and just lay there. I started thinking I’d married a lizard.”

Hannah smiled.

As she dipped a chunk of lobster in melted lemon butter, it hit her: Wasn’t that what her clients did? Overcompensated far whatever they lacked as children? Pursued partners of the same sex as whichever parent had been least available? She began running through client histories in her head. Fathers were hardly every available. Maybe that was why so many women were heterosexual, and so many men closet homosexuals.

” A penny far your thought,” said Arthur as he split open his lobster tail.

“I don’t have this one together yet.” She was chewing on a tiny lobster leg, knowing it was okay to continue this train of thought in silence. After all these years, words between them had become unimportant. Each could gauge the other’s mood by the faintest twitch. And when one spoke, it was often the words the other was thinking.

Every few years the hundreds of hours of information from clients would rearrange itself into a pattern she’d never seen before, like the shifting of a kaleidoscope.

Lifeless textbook theories with which she nodded in intellectual agreement in graduate school would suddenly take on vivid new life, clothed with her clients” experiences. This could happen at any time-during therapy, but more often while grocery shopping, or while dipping lobster in melted butter by the Maine coast. It felt like what she once observed on Lake Glass: During a spring thaw the ice broke up all at once with a thunderous crack, chunks sailing high into the sky.

As she broke off the lobster’s tail with both hands, she examined her new idea from different angles, like a prospector inspecting ore to determine whether it was fool’s gold or the real thing. She nodded to herself. Arthur glanced at her and smiled, eating coleslaw from a small paper cup with his fork.

Whatever she proclaimed over the years, she’d been prejudiced against homosexuals. She’d accepted homosexuality

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as a valid response to certain factors in childhood. But she’d privately regarded her monogamous marriage to a man as more “normal.”

But Caroline, say, was no more “abnormal” than any heterosexual client, or than Hannah herself. She was bright, kind, competent, attractive, and funny. Try as you might, you couldn’t dismiss her as a sad sack or weirdo.

Carefully wiping her fingers with a towelette and removing her plastic bib, Hannah remembered wanting to touch Maggie’s face with her fingertips during therapy, wanting to bury her own face between Maggie’s breasts and feel Maggie’s hands on her flesh. And now all these healthy young lesbians sat in her office describing their sex lives in graphic detail, and wanting her sexually as a standin for Mummy, whether they were aware of it or not.

She’d have to be disembodied not to feel drawn physically to some. Especially toward the end when they were feeling better, and crediting that to her.

Probably a sculptor felt toward a completed statue as she did toward a terminating client, proud as hell to observe the serene form that had emerged from a cold gray block of misery. But she’d never acted on these attractions. Caroline had had boyfriends and husbands, yet still sought out women. What was the difference between them?

One difference was that Hannah was an only child whose mother adored her. She knew this from her mother’s letters to her grandmother. Her grandmother had also doted, in her own remote way. But her father had deserted her for Trinidad, and her grandfather had spent all his time in the City, so that she could scarcely recall what he’d looked like. Hence her longing for a man. Which had set in very early indeed, in that gardener’s shed in Sussex with Colin.

As she and Arthur, encased in sweaters and parkas, walked along a cliff path above crashing waves, icy spray stinging their faces, she thought about Colin with his pale blue eyes and pasty complexion. When she became pregnant from their sessions on the stone floor, he dutifully married her and took her back to Bow, to the horror of everyone she knew.

He went to work on the docks, and she decorated their small shabby Victorian row house in a street off Roman Road. Hannah had only ever seen the East End riding through it on the bus loops she took as a girl. Actually living there after Hampstead and Sussex was like living in a foreign country. In Hampstead greengrocer WOMEN

shops were papayas and mangoes, salsify and kohlrabi, delicacies from every corner of that empire on which the sun never set. (lucky, since the sun was never in evidence in England itself.) In Bow were cabBrussels sprouts, potatoes, and apples. In Hampstead bakeries were cream cakes and scones, croissants and a dozen types of fresh bread. In Bow were white bread and doughy apple tarts. In Hampstead there were small specialty shops whose owners asked in modulated voices about her grandparents’ health. In Bow were raucous street markets where people laughed and shouted, argued and bargained, calling each other duckie, darling, luv, and girlie. In Hampstead were Englishmen. In Bow were the dregs of the empire-Cockneys, and one lone Australian whose hybrid accent they mocked.

She enjoyed it at first, once she

recovered from the horror of unwanted pregnancy and forced marriage-and her grandmother’s fury at both.

She hung the mimi spirit on the kitchen wall, and it seemed more at home in Bow than in Hampstead or Sussex. After Simon was born, she spent long lazy afternoons nursing him by the coal fire in the sitting roam. On warm days she’d put him in his pram in the tiny garden, set off from the neighbors by high fences, while she pulled weeds and coaxed flowers. Or she’d push him in the pram to Victoria Park, where she’d nod pleasantly at the other mothers, trying not to open her mouth so they wouldn’t discover she wasn’t really one of them. Or she and Simon would stroll to the shops on Roman Road to buy things for Colin’s tea, when he came home in his high black Wellingtons, his pale boy’s face dirty and exhausted, his would-be furniture maker’s hands chapped and grimy.

But Simon had colic and cried a lot, and Colin soon began going to the Duke of Chichester pub at the end of the street in the evenings. Hannah began to nag him, since she longed for someone to talk to after spending all day with a tiny baby. Colin began to long for a woman who didn’t nag. He found such a woman, or several, and was gone even more.

So that Hannah was lonelier and nagged more. The standard scenario on both sides of the Atlantic, which Hannah had heard from so many clients since. Though at the time, rejected by Colin, isolated from her neighbors, and spurned by her Hampstead and Sussex friends, her misery seemed unique.