Other Women (36 page)

“I wanted to apologize for my tantrum the other day.” She played with the prongs on her fork.

Hannah shrugged. “Why should you apologize for saying what you think?”

“I didn’t have to say it so forcefully.”

“You didn’t have to, but you did. And so what? It’s okay. The globe didn’t tilt any farther on its axis.”

“It felt that way to me.” Caroline jabbed the fork through her paper napkin.

“Which way?”

“Disastrous. When I got home, I thought maybe I’d made you sick, or even killed you. That’s really why I called.”

“I know.”

Caroline looked at her. “You did?”

“This is my job. Do you understand that on one level you’d like me to be dead? And that’s why you were terrified I might be?”

“What?”

“People don’t like to need other people.” From Caroline’s look of consternation Hannah knew she wasn’t ready to face this yet. “Did you ever get angry with your mother?” Caroline had shredded her napkin with her fork. Hannah wished there were some simple way to let her know everything was all right.

Caroline sorted through the canceled checks in her memory bank. “I came downstairs one Sunday and said I wasn’t going to church since I didn’t believe in God. Because if God was so great, how come He’d created a world in which so many people were suffering.

She said I didn’t know anything about God. I said I could believe whatever I wanted. his “What happened?” David Dickson, an

ex-client whose poorly tied bow ties had riveted Hannah throughout therapy, walked past their table with a woman who wasn’t his wife. He pretended not to see

.other

Hannah, so Hannah pretended not to see him.

Though she did wonder if he was getting it up yet.

“She got upset and went to bed.”

“How did you feel?”

Caroline struggled to remember. “I kept trying to bring her tea and food and flowers, and she kept refusing them. I think that was when I broke my nose.”

“You what?” The waitress brought their coffee.

Struggling to open her cream container, Hannah squirted the cream halfway across the table.

“Ran into the edge of her door and broke my nose.” Caroline tried to blot the cream with the remains of her napkin, and made a swamp of shredded paper.

“Here?” asked Hannah, rubbing the bridge of her own nose with thumb and forefinger. Then she tried to wipe up the whole mess with her napkin. They ought to have a sheet of plastic under their table, like the one she spread under the high chair at home while each child was learning to eat.

Caroline nodded.

“So that’s why you rub it all the time?”

“Do I?”

“You aren’t aware of it?”

“No.” Caroline copied Hannah’s gesture.

It felt familiar.

“Well, I am, because I’ve picked it up from you.”

“You have?” Caroline was amazed she had any impact at all on Hannah. She tried to reconcile this with her conviction over the weekend that her anger had killed Hannah.

“So what happened after you broke your nose?”

“My mother got out of bed and drove me to the emergency room:”

“Was she still depressed?”

“No, she was really nice. She took me out for an ice cream soda, and we joked about how I looked like a pig.” The waitress placed their sandwiches before them, on plates overloaded with potato chips.

“How did you feel?”

“Good. My face was all swollen and purple, but I was really happy.”

“Did your mother go back to bed?” In some ways it was easier to

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cope with outright child abuse. At least everybody knew what was going on.

“No. She fixed me ice packs. Read me stories because I couldn’t see with my eyes all puffy.” She watched Hannah pick up her BIT and take a bite. Gin, sole, BLT’S, hot flashes, a husband. Caroline spent so much time consulting the idealized image of Hannah in her own head that it was odd to realize she had a body, needed food and sleep.

“Do you see the pattern?”

“Huh?”

“You assert yourself. Other people depart or collapse.

You get frightened and guilty. The world starts looking like a terrifying place. You punish yourself, or try to get them to-in hopes of regaining their patronage. his

“What?”

“Think about it. All right, so you got angry and told me off. Then you got scared. And you worked yourself up into an awful state as an excuse to call me.

And what did you discover?”

“That you were all right. That you were drinking martinis.”

Caroline realized she hadn’t touched her egg salad sandwich. She had no appetite. She nibbled halfheartedly at a rippled potato chip.

“What if I hadn’t been all right? What if I’d been in a bad mood? It still wouldn’t have been your fault. I might have burned the sole or run out of gin. I have a full complicated life, much of which has nothing to do with you. You simply don’t have that much power over me, Caroline. You didn’t over your mother. She used your behavior as an excuse to feel depressed. But each of us is author of her own moods.”

Caroline knew this was true. She’d been using Hannah to feel better all these months.

“Like I used my pink blanket.”

“Yes. But you can dispense with people and objects, and feel without intermediary the states of mind you’ve assigned to them.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. If people and events are irrelevant, why would I pick depression?”

Hannah raised her eyebrows. “Why would you?

What did you grow up with?”

“No, that’s ridiculous. Horrible things go on.

It’s no good pretend-

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ing they don’t.” Caroline remembered the word that set her off last week: Joy. Joy to the world.

What a joke.

“Things go on. Whether you perceive them as horrible is your choice.”

“Like those Argentine peasants in Sunday’s paper, who raped that girl and sewed a human head inside her?”

Hannah closed her eyes and returned her sandwich to her plate, suddenly nauseated. “Yes, I saw that too.”

“You can choose to perceive that as not horrible?”

Hannah hesitated. She was sounding more sure of herself than she felt. “That was horrible. But all you can do is try to maintain your own peace of mind, with the hope that it can soothe the savagery. The way an experienced rider can calm a skittish horse.”

Stepping back from her own revulsion, she realized Caroline was doing her cosmic number again.

“Did you ever read

Middlemarch?”

asked Hannah.

“What’s that?”

“An English novel I read at boarding school.

Anyhow, this one woman tells another character the most important thing she’s learned during her lifetime is the need to spread the skirts of light in the world.”

“Spread the skirts of light?”

less-than ,

Yes.”

“Dessert?” asked the waitress, cocking one hip and resting a hand on it. Her glasses had small gold script letters down the side of one lens that spelled

“BABS.”

“Not for me, thank you,” said Hannah.

Caroline shook her head no. She said nothing for a long time, staring out the window past the plant tendrils to the traffic through the parking lot. Lighting a brown cigarette, Hannah pictured that infant in her jump seat, so anxious not to offend that she wouldn’t even bounce. “Don’t shut down,” she said gently. “I’m not your mother. You can disagree with me all you want.”

Caroline looked at her, startled back into the present. “I don’t see how you can sit there feeling serene with horror going on all around. You have to do what you can.”

“But I do. So do you. We both work very hard. All we can do is

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our best, which often isn’t enough. Besides, young girls are being raped by idiots, but there are also pileated woodpeckers.”

“Who’re murdering insects. And waiting to be murdered by cats.”

Hannah could feel Caroline’s distress massing like floodwaters behind a dam. “Look, you’re a nurse. Think about the human bodynetwork of neurons that forms the brain. The meshing of the hormones. The miracle is all around you.

Stop insisting on loaves and fishes.”

Caroline rubbed the bridge of her nose. She looked up, eyes clouded with pain. “That diamond on black velvet stuff. I wish I could believe you.”

“But you shouldn’t take my word for it in any case.

Just open your eyes. See what you see when you’re not set to see horror.”

“You make it sound easy, but I can’t.”

“Won’t?” suggested Hannah.

The waitress brought the check. Caroline reached for it, but Hannah covered it with her hand.

“I’d like to treat you,” said Caroline.

“I think we’d better split it.”

“But I asked you for the extra time.”

“One of these days you can take me to lunch. But not yet.”

“Why not? What would that mean?”

“That you had to pay for people to spend time with you?”

“But that’s the nature of our relationship,” said Caroline, taking out her checkbook. “It’s your profession.”

“I don’t have rules for how I conduct my profession, so don’t make any for me. And please put your checkbook away. I

went to lunch with you because I wanted to.” Hannah realized this was true. She liked sessions with Caroline. Her hunger to understand dragged words from Hannah that were news to her as well. Caroline was a serious person. Unlike David Dickson, who gave Hannah a perfunctory nod as she caught his eye while passing his table. David went round and round, a squirrel on the wheel of his own neuroses. But Caroline was halfway out of her cage.

As Caroline drove back to the office, Hannah tried to recall the phase of her own life that was equivalent to Caroline’s. One day she was a suburban housewife and mother of four, preoccupied with her

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flirtations and the proper placement of Tiffany lamps. The next day the pine cupboard, Nigel, and Mona were gone. Her disillusionment with the chimeras of this world had been brutal and cataclysmic.

Caroline’s had been more gradual. But the end result was the same.

She remembered the months of numb disbelief, during which every cowlicked teenage boy she glimpsed in the street was Nigel, and every plump ten-year-old girl was Mona. Once she found herself changing the sheets on their beds as though they’d be sleeping in them that night.

Then came the months of fury, in which she searched for someone, anyone, to blame-Arthur, the furnace dealer, the rescue squad, the north wind. Then the months, years maybe, when she turned the blame on herself. Daily she dwelt on the ways she failed Nigel and Mono-the arguments over muddy sneakers, the missed opportunor kisses and kind words, the motor boat they wanted she refused to buy.

Finally, in self-defense, she forged her way into a space in which seeming disaster wasn’t disaster, so there was no need for blame. Apparent loss wasn’t real loss. Disasters and losses were illusions, prodof limited perception. But there was no way to convey this conviction to someone else.

“Have a pleasant week,” she said to Caroline, getting out of the Subaru.

“You too. And thanks.”

“My pleasure.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

Caroline drove up the hill to Lloyd Harris, thinking about Hansaying Caroline could take her to lunch “one of these days.” It sounded as though Hannah thought they might know each other for a while.

Or was that wishful thinking? Probably Hannah was like the plumber, and would stick around only until the drains cleared. But at least she’d stuck around this long, a miracle considering Caroline’s behavior.

But of course it was her job. But she didn’t have to be so nice about it.

As she walked in the ER door, Brian came up in light blue scrub clothes. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

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“Hi. I went to lunch at Dooley’s.”

“With whom?”

Unzipping her parka, Caroline looked at him, not sure it was any of his business. “With a friend.”

“I’d hoped we could run over to my house for lunch.”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“How about a drink after work?” He took hold of her upper arm.

“I have to get home and cook supper.” Brenda rushed by, looking quizzically at Brian’s hand on Caroline’s arm.

“One hour, Caroline. I want you to see my house.”

Brian’s fieldstone house sat in a forest of birches near Randy Eliot’s, with equally handsome houses belonging to electronics execon both sides and across the road. Inside, plush carpeting on slate floors, a huge stone fireplace and cathedral ceiling, colorful Navaho rugs on white walls, antiques mixed whimsically with Danish modern. The eclectic look Caroline had striven for so valiantly in Jackson’s neo-Tudor house. From the furnishings Caroline guessed that she and Irene Stone would have a lot in common. As she and Brian inspected the bedrooms, Caroline couldn’t stop herself from assigning one to each of her boys. Diana told her she could stay at the cabin. But who knew when she’d change her mind again? The place felt different now that Diana had claimed it. And the deed and mortwere in Diana’s name, whatever Caroline had invested in time, energy, and money over the last five years. She’d been a fool not to get some agreement in writing. But in the grip of passion, such practicalities didn’t occur to her.

Out the sliding glass doors in the living room, Caroline could see a swing set, seats filled with cushions of snow. When they reached the master bedroom, Brian made love to her with finesse and enthusiasm on his king-sized bed. Lying in his arms afterwards, she held a pep rally for her heart.

Brian was kind and thoughtful, a good lover, a homeowner. Why couldn’t she just fall in love and get on with it?

As she dressed, she said, “It’s a gorgeous house, Brian. Thanks for showing me.”

“I’m glad you like it,” he replied from the bed. “Will you come spend a night with me soon?”

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“Yes, sure.” If she worked at it, she could fall in love with him. Wasn’t that the Protestant ethic? With hard work you could realize your aims?

Except she was half Catholic …

“So?” asked Diana as Caroline walked into the cabin carrying a flat cardboard box from the Pizza Hut.