Other Women (5 page)

Excitement in those bad old days consisted of chasing men at parties in other people’s living rooms, men whom she treated as cavalierly as Colin and her father had her. But when Mona and Nigel died, it was Arthur’s steadiness that got her through-and that was when she began to regard staying power as a virtue, and one Arthur had developed slowly and painfully in his private struggle to come to terms with having left behind one family in order to form a second with her.

“One thing does lead to another.” He sipped his gin.

“Did you think about consequences?”

“Are you kidding? With bombs falling all around me?

You’d have to be crazy to turn down a gorgeous woman groping in your greatcoat at a time like that.”

He caressed her cheek with the back of his hand.

“Me groping?”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t my idea. After all, I was a married man.” He draped his arm across her shoulders.

“You didn’t bother to tell me.”

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“Would it have made any difference?”

“Probably,” she replied primly.

He laughed. “Tell me about it. Well, it’s worked out okay, I’d say. You don’t even talk too funny anymore. If only you’d get rid of some of these plants. It’s like living in an oxygen tent.” He nodded toward the greenhouse window, beyond which the mauve sunset was losing its struggle against the night.

“So what do you think is going to go on in here?” asked Hannah, sitting back in her metal desk chair and lighting a brown cigarette. Caroline was wearing a rumpled white uniform and white shoes.

Evidently she was a nurse. Or a Good Humor man. She looked sallow, with dark circles under her eyes, as though her mascara had run, only she wasn’t wearing any. Hannah hadn’t been surprised to hear her voice over the phone again. But Caroline had sounded both surprised and reluctant. Hannah remembered early in her own training analysis insisting to Maggie that she was absolutely fine and was in Maggie’s office only to earn her degree. Maggie’s mouth twitched, but she managed not to smile.

“I don’t know,” replied Caroline. “I assume you’ve got techniques and stuff.”

Please don’t make me be a chair or beat a pillow, she thought, recalling accounts from jenny, with whom she played poker every week, who was an acolyte for the Growth Movement. I don’t want to own my wild child or explore my beingness. I just want to wake up not wishing I were dead.

“No, we’re just going to have an extended conversation.”

She watched Caroline rub the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinThen Caroline gave a wan smile. A good omen. Usually clients took their miseries so seriously that you couldn’t get a smile out of them for weeks. “What’s the most painful thing that’s happened to you lately?”

Caroline sighed. How could she choose?

Celibacy? A dead goose on her doorstep?

Norman Rockwell’s death? “The Jonestown thing, I guess.

“Why is that so painful for you?”

“Well, I mean, aren’t nine hundred

cyanide-soaked corpses rotting in the jungle painful for you?”

“It’s not too pleasant. But I’m not one of them.

And I don’t have to think about them for very long unless I choose to. And I don’t. So why do you?” She considered the symbolism and gave a nod of respect to Caroline’s unconscious.

Caroline looked with weariness at Hannah in her red plaid Pendleton skirt and sweater. It was a mistake to have come back. She’d thought that dream was a message from her unconscious, but clearly her unconscious was as out to lunch as usual. Hannah was hopeless. She lacked a political analysis.

You didn’t need one to play bridge. “It tears me up, the gap between what they were trying to do and haw it all turned out.” Jones as a young man,

downtrodden, sounded not unlike herself, her parents, her classmates at nursing school, her colleagues at the People’s Free Clinic and the abortion referral service and the ER. The same wish to serve and to save. What had gone wrong?

What always went wrong?

“Ah.”

“Ah what?”

“Did you hear what you just said?” asked Hannah.

She tapped her cigarette into a hollow stone Nigel had given her years ago. He found it on the beach one afternoon. “Mommy, come look at the gray grapefruit,” he called. Splitting open this unlikely gemstone with a hammer and chisel, he discovered a hollow interior studded with quartz crystals and lined with mica, which flashed in the sun like fish scales.

“Yes.”

“Can you apply it to your life?” Hannah was seeing that infant, trying so hard to please and failing so consistently. A normal baby didn’t just hang in a jump seat. Nigel practically tore the doorjambs down, swinging like a parachutist in a windstorm. During her internat the state hospital, she tried to work with a teenage girl who did nothing but sit in a corner with her knees to her chest, her sweat shirt drawn up over her head and down around her ankles. The girl seemed to feel if she could remain perfectly still and silent, she’d offend no one and stay safe.

“What?” Screwing up her face, Caroline studied the pale, limp

with all his concern for the

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asparagus fern in the window. It was criminal to treat your plants like that. She’d bring Hannah some Miracle-Gro.

“What about in your personal life? What was the most painful thing at home this week?”

Caroline twitched. This was going exactly nowhere.

How could this British housewife understand American genocide?

“Think,” suggested Hannah. These failed revolutionaries somepissed her off, projecting their inner state onto the world and then insisting it constituted objective reality. Chippie the Hippie had been in that morning moaning about lack of world peace.

She’d asked if it wasn’t

hypocritical to demand world peace when you hadn’t even achieved personal peace. “There must have been something.”

They sat in silence as Caroline, ankle resting on opposite knee, traced the red rubber tread on one white shoe with her finger.

Hannah shifted her gaze out the window to the parking lot. Jonawalked by, fluffy snowflakes falling on his gray Afro, which looked like a dandelion gone to seed. He climbed in his Scout and drove off. Hannah struggled not to smile at his new bumper sticker, which read “Eat More Lamb.

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Coyotes Can’t Be Wrong.” A part-time farmer, he was also cofounder and codirector, along with herself, of the Lake Glass Therapy Center. They’d gravitated toward each other in graduate school because they were older than their classmates, and they’d worked together ever since, despite times when they irritated the hell out of each other.

The silence was oppressive. Caroline cast around for something to placate Hannah. “My sons, Jackie and Jason, got into a fight and broke their video game.”

“Why was that painful?”

“Because it was brand-new.”

“So get it fixed.” Any minute now Caroline was going to shoot off into some complicated evasion, a startled quail catching sight of a hunter. “What else?” Caroline was right to be scared. Some of the things she’d have to face about herself would be painful.

Caroline pinched the bridge of her nose. “Nothing else.”

“You’ve had a pleasant week?”

“I guess so.”

“Then why are you here? You must have better ways to spend your money?”

“Yeah, actually I’ve been saving up to build a sauna …”

Here came the digression. Hannah raised her eyebrows ironically to stave it off. The stronger the defenses, the more devastating the wounds underneath, she reminded herself to reclaim patience.

Caroline observed the raised eyebrows and fell silent, aware that she wasn’t trying. She glanced out the window to the lake. Snowflakes the size of goosedown were swirling around, as though Jackie and Jason were having a pillow fight in the yard.

Eventually she began to talk in a low voice: “Diana, my lover, or my ex-lover, left out a letter she was writing that said I was difficult to live with because I was a taker.” She fiddled with the ivory gull at her throat.

Stubbing out her cigarette, Hannah suppressed a smile at the ease with which Caroline acknowledged reading someone else’s mail. She was beginning to like this woman. Once she got through the bullshit, she was alarmingly straightforward. Hannah made a mental note of the ex-lover bit. Her sex life was messed up. That was enough to depress anyone. “You don’t see yourself as a taker?”

“I’m a nurse, for God’s sake. A mother.

Anyhow, last month Diana complained I was cloying because I did things for her all the time.” She ran her hand distractedly through her Afro.

“How do you see yourself?”

“Huh?”

“List some adjectives that describe you. Tell me what you’re like.” Hannah was pleased they’d gotten to the heart of the matter so quickly: Caroline didn’t know who she was.

Caroline sat silent. Jackson said she was too intense. Howard inshe 0was cruel when they were kids because she lynched his teddy bear and let the air out of his bicycle tires so he couldn’t fallow her. Of course he also said the worst day of his life was when he realized he couldn’t marry her.

Cloying. A taker. Which was she?

“Does it occur to you that Diana sees you as a taker because she’s afraid she is herself? Otherwise, why would it be an issue for her?”

Diana a taker? Wrong. Diana sent her friends solstice cards, went to the mall to hand out extra vegetables from the garden, knitted ski caps for the Special Olympics, put stranded tourists in her spare room

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during foliage season. Then she remembered Diana’s mother, a shrill woman in pink plastic rollers and thin white socks, who was always phoning from Poughkeepsie to complain that Diana was an ingrate.

Diana laughed sourly after each conversation, but maybe she was secretly worried her mother was right.

“Do you see the link?” asked Hannah.

“What link?”

“Between your reaction to the Jonestown thing and to Diana’s letter?”

Caroline frowned. “What?” Where was this woman coming from? Nothing she said made sense.

“Think about it. Your assignment for next week is to make a list of adjectives that describe you.”

“My assignment?” She didn’t realize she’d indicated an interest in returning. “How long does this usually take?”

“Does what?”

“Therapy. his

“If I can’t get somebody back on her feet in a couple of months, I ought to be in another profession. I don’t want my clients to become my breadline.” Caroline probably wouldn’t even try if she knew how long it sometimes took to unravel patterns woven over thirty-five years.

Caroline looked at her. Everyone she knew had been in therapy for eight years. Hell, she could stand anything for two months. Even this nonsense. Then she could tell jenny she’d tried and it hadn’t helped. There were always those pills in her closet.

“So you’re a nurse,” said Hannah, as Caroline wrote a check. “Where do you work?”

“In the emergency room at Lloyd Harris.

It’s my lunch hour.”

Hannah nodded. “Just like home, huh?” She stretched her feet out on the rush

footstool.

Caroline looked up. “What is?”

“It sounds as though you’re accustomed to being surrounded with crisis.”

“It does?”

“That’s how it sounds to me.”

“No, I had a very happy childhood.” Caroline stood up, handed

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Hannah the check, and took the appointment card Hannah held out to her.

“Good. I’m glad.” Folding the check in half, Hannah felt Maggie’s smile tug at the corners of her mouth.

As Caroline walked out, Hannah stood up, stretched, and thought about Maggie, a fierce old lady with a sharp brain and an even sharper tongue.

She had trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New York and hung out with all the famous Sullivanians, prior

to retreating to her summer house on Lake Glass after the death of her husband. Where she went into a funk for several years, from which her own therapeutic skills couldn’t rescue her, emerging eventually with some new techniques hammered out in the forge of her own private hell. Upon her return to the land of the living, she split her time in New Hampshire between private practice and teaching at the university in town, where she helped the clinical psychology departdevelop its Ph.d. program, from which Hannah was one of the first graduates. Born in Czechoslovakia, Maggie had lost most of her family to concentration camps, which gave a certain credibility to anything she might say about human suffering. Her house on the lake near Hannah’s had been filled with antiques, carpets, and art objects purchased on her world travels. She was one of the few people in the area with whom Hannah had been able to discuss England and Australia.

Arms folded across her chest, Hannah strolled down the carpeted corridor picturing Maggie, glasses on a chain around her neck. She put them on, not to see better, but to conceal her eyes, which were always revealing inappropriate reactions to clients’

dilemmas, such as amusement or fascination. But Maggie had poked and prodded with delicate restraint to get Hannah to face her own pain and rage. Watching them finally gush out like amniotic fluid during labor had been a sobering experience. Years later, after she and Maggie became coland friends, Maggie used to maintain that doing therapy was simply a question of raising the child concealed within each client, and then disillusioning the client about the extent of your own powers.

Hannah visited Maggie at Lloyd Harris every day as she was dying of cancer. Maggie retained her sharp mind and tongue, but her body wasted away.

Her eyes, which had so often sparkled at Hannah with WOMEN’

amusement, were clouded with a pain her glasses couldn’t conceal. The corners of her mouth, which had twitched with suppressed smiles, now twitched with grimaces.

It was the ultimate in disillusionment. Among her last words, spoken in a raspy voice as she lay in the hospital bed surrounded by life-support equipment with dials like hyperthyroidal eyes, were, “So you see, my dear Hannah, as wonderful as I may be, I die just like everyone else.”