Other Women (32 page)

WOMEN

“I can’t exactly remember what to do,” she said as she and Brian stretched out naked next to each other.

She did remember about stiff cocks, one of which was now prodding her abdomen like a doctor feeling for a tumor.

“I think it will all come back to you,” said Brian, putting an arm around her waist and pulling her to him.

And it did. Evidently lovemaking was like swimming.

You didn’t forget how despite long periods of inactivity. As Brian entered her slowly and lay still for several moments, she recalled the safe feeling of having her hollows filled by a man. With a man around again, maybe there’d be no voids.

“Are you okay?” he asked in a trembling voice.

“Yes,” she gasped. “Proceed.”

“Do you want some supper?” Caroline murmured afterwards, smelling the lamb burning in the oven. He shook his head no, holding her tightly, face buried in her neck.

The next morning she tossed the charred leg of lamb out the door to Arnold, thinking guiltily of Howard in Chad fighting famine, and took Brian eggs, bacon, and toast on a tray, feeling malicious pleasure at performing one of her and Diana’s rituals with him. Diana’s Chevette was in the driveway, alongside Caroline’s Subaru and Brian’s PonSuzanne’s Toyota was missing.

Caroline hoped Diana was upstairs

glaring out the window at this latter-day hitching post.

“This has been wonderful,” Brian told her at the door as he left to do rounds. He touched her lips with his fingertips. “For you too, I hope?”

“Very much so.” Caroline took his hand and kissed the fingers, which had functioned with as much delicacy and proficiency last night as at the operating table.

Stiff cocks aside, she thought maybe she could fall in love with a man with hands like that. And why not?

She’d been in love with practically everyone else.

“I’ll call you tonight,” he said.

“Good. I’ll look forward to it. Have a pleasant day, you lovely man.”

The phone rang as Brian drove out the driveway. “That was very cute,” said Diana.

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“Oh? Did you think so? It wasn’t meant to be cute. It was meant to be fun. And it was.”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Continuing with my life. Just like you said yesterday.”

“How can you do that to that nice man?”

“Why don’t you mind your own goddam business, Diana?”

“I am, and I don’t want men in my

house.”

There was a stunned silence. Ever since they’d been lovers, it had been

their

house.

“You want me to move out?” Caroline finally asked.

“No, of course I don’t. I just wish you’d get your act together.”

“Your act, of course, is a miracle of coherence.” Caroline stood in her down bathrobe twisting the phone cord around her arm.

“At least I’m not messing around with men.”

“What if I’m not messing around with Brian, Diana? What if I mean it?”

“If that’s true, then, yes, I do want you out.”

“Fine.” Caroline slammed down the phone, nearly dislocating her arm with the cord tangled around it.

The bus from Boston pulled in on time, and Jackie and Jason got off, safe and unmolested, each cradling a BB gun like a violinist a Stradivarius.

“What on earth are those?” asked Caroline, trying to embrace them around the guns.

“Rifles, what do they look like?” said Jason, with a Robert Mitchum look of bland superiority.

“Dad gave them to us,” said Jackie. “Aren’t they neat? He couldn’t take us to the Celtics, so he gave us these instead.”

“Wonderful,” said Caroline, taking the gun Jackie handed her as though it were contaminated with strontium 9o. “Why couldn’t he take you to the Celtics?”

“He had a mergency,” replied Jason, sighting down his gun at Leonard Litter painted on the side of the trash receptacle on the sidewalk.

“I should have guessed. Well, I don’t like guns, boys. I want you

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to send them back to your father. You can use them when you’re down there.”

“Ah, Mom!” they howled in unison.

“Never mind. We’ll discuss it later.” For the moment there were more pressing problems, such as where to live next.

As they drove out of town along the lake road, Jackie in the backand Jason riding shotgun, the boys chattered about their journeys around Boston with Deirdre. “You know what we saw,

Mom?” asked Jason, aiming his rifle at some Holstein cows waiting to be milked lined up outside a barn. “In the park watching the swan boats. Two lezzies holding hands.”

“It was gross,” said Jackie, leaning on the front seat.

Caroline frowned. What did they think had been going on around them all these years? “What are lezzies?” asked Caroline, just checking.

“Girl queers,” said Jackie, flopping back in his seat.

“Why is that gross?” asked Caroline. “Men and women hold hands all the time.”

“Yeah, but they’re supposed to,” said Jason.

Caroline felt rage rising into her throat-at the culture that had put these notions into her little boys”

heads. “And women who care about each other aren’t supposed to?” The boys were suddenly silent, Jason stroking the barrel of his gun. Caroline looked at them. All her years of effort, and they would still grow into men, and stalk the woods and battlefields with their instruments of destruction.

“Look,” she said in a low, wavering voice, “the best people you know are lesbians.”

They said nothing for a long time. Finally Jason asked, “Like who?”

“Like Jenny. Like Pam. Like Brenda. Like Barb.

Like Diana.”

“Like you, Mom?” asked Jason, looking at her.

Jackie was silent in the backseat. Lake views were flashing by out the windows.

Caroline drove in silence, wondering what the honest answer to this question was. She drew a deep breath, then said, “Yes, like me.”

“Ah Mom, do you have to be a lezzie?” asked Jason, sighting along his rifle barrel at a dead cat in the road. “Pow!” he yelled, falling back into the seat from the imagined recoil.

Caroline thought this over, then replied, “I don’t know.”

As she walked in the door, the phone was ringing. It was Brian. “I’ve been trying to reach you. Where have you been?”

What’s it to you? she thought. Then she remembered they’d made love last night. She was his honey.

“The boys are back from Boston. I picked them up at the bus station.”

“We ought to get together with our ex-spouses and coordinate this. The kids could ride up from Boston together. Get acquainted.”

“Good idea.” He was already taking charge. It was what she thought she wanted, but now that it was happening, she felt colonized. Wasn’t it enough that she was allowing him into her body? Did he have to take over the rest of her life as well? But she needed a place to live, and he kept mentioning his big empty lonely stone house.

“When can I see you again? How about tomorrow night?”

“I need to spend some time with the boys, Brian.

They’ve been gone all week.”

“I understand. But we could all spend time together. The four of us.”

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea just yet, Brian. I think they need me to themselves.”

“How about Thursday night then?”

“All right. Fine.” After hanging up, she stood with her hand on the receiver trying to figure out what she was doing. Three lovers in one week, after none for months, appeared to be addling her brain. She wanted to pick up the phone, dial Hannah, and ask her what to do. But she could already picture Hannah shrugging, smiling wryly, and saying, “Choices, Caroline.” But to choose, you first had to know what you wanted.

Simon’s new woman Estelle was attractive, Hannah supposed, if you went for the Farrah Fawcett look. Cascades of blond hair; made up to look as though she wasn’t; well dressed in pleated trousers and a silk shirt that featured birds of paradise. Hannah sneaked glances at her as they ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding off Arthur’s mother’s Wedgwood in the circle of light from the Tiffany lamp above the oak pedestal table. Estelle seemed bright and even-tempered, and nice to Simon. Though of course they’d just begun. It was intriguing to try to figure out how each of Simon’s girlfriends was similar to herself, since presumably that was why he picked them. They were always attractive, which Hannah took as a compliment. Usually intelligent and -And a trifle sharp-tongued, which Hannah was unsure how to take.

Simon, on the opposite side of the table in the spot where he presided as a boy, teasing and bossing the younger children, had the glazed cat-who’s-swallowed-the-canary look of the first flush of sexual passion. Hannah was amused to notice twinges of unpleasant emotions in herself.

Inappropriate now that Simon was nearly middle-aged, but evidently still operative.

Jealousy that another woman was replacing her. Envy toward anyone in that mad state of simple-minded besottedwhen nothing that wasn’t reflected in the eyes of the beloved even existed. Anger that Simon had brought Estelle here to parade this in front of his aging mother, who’d spent a lot of time being sweet to him during his past months of anguish. Grief that he was withdrawing from her after these months of closeness.

Anyone who thought sex

united people was out to lunch. Simon and Estelle could see and hear no one but each other right now, and not that very clearly.

“So where do you work?” she asked Estelle, cutting her meat. Arthur’s eyes were amused as he listened to the drama being acted out on an airwave higher than the frequency of sound.

As Estelle said something about issuing rent subsidy checks, flipback one side of her hair with a hand, Hannah glanced at her handsome, horrible son in his suede vest and tweed jacket and recalled his first serious girlfriend, when he was seventeen. Penny had braces, saddle shoes, a ponytail, and Simon’s class ring on a chain around her neck.

He paraded her similarly, signaling to his mother to back off. He stayed out late with Hannah’s car night after night. Once he left a used condom on the back floor. She and Arthur grumbled, as they were supposed to. Though her side of it didn’t carry much conviction, since she remembered only too well what she was doing in that gardener’s shed with Colin at Simon’s age.

Simon ranted about how they were stifling and suffocating him, as

he

was supposed to. She figured if he got out his rebelliousness with her and Arthur then, he wouldn’t plague some poor therapist in a few years, or some poor spouse for a lifetime. But even with all the practice she’d had relinquishing people dear to her, it had been difficult to let Simon go. And harder still when he wanted to come back emotionally after ditching Penny. Since then he’d come and gone several times, but it still wasn’t easy. Each time someone she cared about withdrew, it evoked echoes of all those others who departed and never returned-her parents, her grandparents, Maggie, Colin, Nigel and Mona.

As far as Hannah was concerned, intimacy was definitely an overrated experience, considering the inevitable aftermath.

“So where are you from?” asked Arthur.

Hannah shot him a look of gratitude for keeping the conversation going. Simon wasn’t helping at all, the bastard. He was behaving just like a client. They’d cling to her while they recovered from a breakup. But when they found a new true love, they’d invent a reason to terminate. Until the new relationship broke up. Unfortunately, she had more to offer than a breakup service. She was pleased if someone stuck around to see what might be found on the far side of passion-rather than burying his head in the shifting sands of sex, as Simon seemed WOMEN

hell-bent on doing. Of course he had a lot to hide out from. For years he felt Mona’s and Nigel’s deaths were his fault since he’d been in the house when they happened, albeit unconscious and nearly dead himself.

“Why does he do that to me?” she asked Arthur after Simon and Estelle left, explaining

self-consciously that they wanted to make it an early evening.

“You’re his mother,” he said, clearing dishes from the table.

“Yes, but he could have waited a few weeks until the glow tarnished a bit.” She gathered up the soiled napkins.

“But that’s the whole point. You know that.”

She did know that. She knew Simon had to push her away because they’d been so close since Helena left. Though he could have pushed her away more delicately. She remembered Mona’s announcing one day when she was seven, as she tried to skip stones on the lake, “Mommy, I hate you.”

“Oh yes? Why?” asked Hannah, looking up from her book.

“Because I love you.”

As she scraped leftovers into plastic bowls, Hannah pondered the weird mix of attraction and repulsion in a family. Like the competing energies in an atom that bound the electrons together, yet prevented them from collapsing in on each other to form a black hole.

“If I know it and you know it,” she said, wiping counters with a sponge, “why doesn’t he know it?”

“He probably does on some level.” Arthur was washing dishes in the sink, his sleeves rolled to his elbows.

“You ought to be a shrink, darling.”

“I was, in my fashion. What do you think I did all day? Divorces, assaults, the whole bit. Same as you.”

“Funny, I never thought about it that way. Do you miss it?”

He laughed. “Hell, no. I’ve done my bit for suffering humanity. Let Simon and Joanna take over. I want to exit with a smile on my face and a par on my scorecard.”

“Simon and Joanna can’t take over. They haven’t the time. They’re too busy getting their hearts broken and mended.” She wondered what it would feel like not to be needed, after a lifetime of it.

Marvelous probably. She ought to try it sometime.

Or would she feel lost, like an

old brick wall stripped of the ivy that had held it together? Certainly on days when she was in a bad mood, doing therapy cheered her up. If she retired early, she might have to subscribe to Punch or something.

“I wonder what that poor young woman made of all that,” said Arthur, sitting down on the couch and picking up the paper.