S. (2 page)

(Wet spot here because stewardess came with second drink. Little and giggly, just your type, a Filipino I think. The prefab daiquiri mix is not so absolutely sugary as most. Daiquiris it just occurs to me have always been my drink for “letting go”—remember that time we flew down to Saint Martin for your vacation?)

My old Charles—how much I loved you and love you still! Your cheek so excitingly rough in bed at night, that of a beast in whom time had been ticking all day, and then so excitingly smooth in the morning when I kissed you goodbye so you could go heal the world. The wonderful
worthy
way you smelled—aftershave lotion and the starch in your shirt collar
and your hands all soapy and antiseptic and pink. And your sweat, your distinctly own, after we played tennis or made love. Sometimes (may I confess?), even when we were along in years and a distance had grown between us, even then I would miss you so much, the afternoons in the house alone stretching so silently long for me, and the sea that bright metallic four-o’clock blue but the rocks already in shadow, that to cure my hollowness, my dread, I would go to your pajamas on their hook in the closet and smell them—bury my face in their soft flannel in search of your faint, far stale sweat. It was most intense around where your neck rubbed: I found that touching. Somehow we American girls are raised for the smell of a man in the house. Even the scent of your urine and of that unmentionable other lingering in the bathroom into the middle of the morning was comforting—doorways into another being, another body like your own, helplessly a body.

And unlike, say, Midge and Ann Turner and even Liz Bellingham, I was never really satirical about our material advantages, the socio-economic side of it all. Our comfort did not embarrass me. I knew how hard we had worked together to make you a grand grave man, with just enough silvery hair flaring out above the ears, and how important to you the alchemy was that turned your horrible patients’ complaints and diseases into our prosperity. Unlike some (Liz, who should talk, whose father never lifted a finger except to sign a bar bill) I saw nothing funny or vulgar in our matching Mercedeses, or the heated lap pool we installed in the old conservatory for your back and my figure. This was economic
health
, it seemed to me, as attractive as any other kind. The Truro house perhaps was an enhancement that didn’t quite work—I could never get used to that mildewy mousy little damp stink that hangs under the pines—
so
unlike the North Shore with
its stern chaste oaks and hemlocks and granite—or keep the squirrels out of the crawl spaces in the winter, or get the aura of the previous people’s fried clams and onion rings out of the kitchen. And then of course Pearl and her friends rather ruined my happy early associations (when you could still go skinny-dipping in the ponds in the dunes and the roads really
were
just ruts in the sand) after they got old enough for rock and beer and cigarettes and the dreadful rest of it those last summers. For me it became like running a bus route, slithering up and down the driveway heading back into Wellfleet for one more ton of hot dogs and some pimply guest’s highly specific favorite munchie called Fritos or Doritos or Cheez Doodles.

Why do Americans always think they should feel guilty about their
things?
I loved our things. Things are what we strive for, what all the waves in the air tell us to strive for—things are the stuff of our dreams and then like Eve and Adam digesting the apple we must feel so
guilty
. I didn’t, I don’t think. Through my thirties I was shamelessly happy about being me, being part of
us
. I loved our renovations, the amalgamated maids’ rooms and the garage excavated under the porch and the marble-topped island in the kitchen and the lap pool echoing and splashing under all that whitewashed-dappled conservatory glass. I grimly enjoyed doing battle with the aphids on the roses and the chinch bugs under the sod and the garden boys with their headphones and lazy stoned smiles, their pulling up groundcover and leaving weeds and poisoning the lawn with fertilizers every summer in big brown stripes. I loved even those famously dreaded suburban cocktail parties, going in the car with you and in the door on your arm and then us separating and coming together at the end and out the door again like that Charles Addams cartoon of the
two ski tracks around the tree. I loved you, my eternal date, the silent absent center of my storm of homemaking, the self-important sagely nodding doctor off in his high-rise palace of pain. I didn’t mind fatally the comical snobbish brusque callousness that comes when you’ve processed enough misery, or the rabid reactionary politics that came with not wanting any national health plan to cut into your fat fees, or even the nurse-fucking when it became apparent—I could smell them on your hands no matter how many times you scrubbed, and there was a new rough way you handled me—because though in some sense you were just another Boston-bred preppy brat not much older than I in another you were my creator, you had put me here, in this rocky grassy sparkling seaside landscape, amid the afternoon silence and the furniture (except of course the things Daddy wanted me to have and Mother had to ditch, grudgingly, when she sold the Dedham house and bought her hideous Florida condo).

Charles darling, it was not your
fault
.

(Long interruption. They brought me food on a tray—funny chickeny sort of rolled-up thing. Fork and knife and napkin all rolled up too. Hard to unroll and not bother with my elbows the sleeping man next to me. He already hates my writing, my scratching and scratching and pausing now and then to blot my tears. He’s terrified I’m going to start confiding the reason for my hysteria and so feigns sleep. Typical male avoidance maneuver. Then
I
got sleepy, having consumed the little
demi-bouteille du vin rosé californien
. Plane bounced up and down over some white-nosed mountain range as soon as the girl filled my coffee cup. No girl, actually—a woman about my age, both of us too old to be bouncing around in the sky with these mountains poking upwards at us. Then I dozed. I don’t know where your Filipino
went to—she seemed busy in the first-class section and then got absorbed into the cockpit. They say with these automatic pilots all sorts of things go on—nobody, really, is flying the plane. Just like the universe.)

Perhaps it
was
your fault. Leaving me alone so much amid our piled-up treasures, you gave me time to sense that my life was illusion,
maya
. Midge’s yoga group, that I joined just for the exercises and something to do, gave me a vocabulary. My spirit, a little motionless fleck of eternal unchanging
purusha
, was invited to grow impatient with
prakriti
—all that brightness, all that flow. I would look at the rim of the saucer of my fourth decaf for the day and feel myself sinking—drawn around and around and down like a bug caught on the surface of bathwater when the plug is pulled. Pearl’s going away to England was part of it. Your emotional desertion and the fading of our sex life was part of it. But there was something beyond and behind these phenomenal manifestations that was rendering even my unhappiness insubstantial. I seemed, like some dainty Japanese on the other side of the world with her rice-powdered face and pigeon-toed stockinged feet, to be living in a paper house, among miniature trees and gardens raked to represent nothingness. And into this papery world broke love.

That much you should know. I have left you out of love for another. Your own genteel atrocities of coldness and blindness toward me were not by themselves enough. I was too stoical, too Puritan, too much a creature of my society for solitary rebellion; I needed another. Who he is, and where we are together, I will trust you
not
to seek out. Your dignified useful life, of which I was an ever smaller and less significant adornment, surely will forbid any ugly vulgar furor of detectives and lawyers and warrants. Let me become truly nothing
to you, at last. I will change my name. I will change my being. The woman you “knew” and “possessed” is no more. I am destroying her. I am sinking into the great and beautiful blankness which it is our European/Christian/Western avoidance maneuver to clutter and mask with material things and personal “achievements.” Ego is the enemy. Love is the goal. I shed you as I would shed a skin, with some awkwardness perhaps and at first a sensitivity to the touch of the new, but without pain and certainly without regret. How can I—we—regret a phase of life that is already dead? Are not all our attachments, in truth, to things that are already dead?

If you decide to sell the house or any part of our joint holdings, I of course expect my legal half. If in time you wish to remarry (and I expect you will, not out of any great talent for uxoriousness but because the ferocious sea of seeking women will at some point overpower your basic indifference; the only bulwark against women is a woman, and a wife is
convenient
, especially for spoiled and preoccupied men of middling years) I will ask an appropriate settlement in exchange for your freedom. The affront, to your pride and convenience, of my desertion should weigh little, in any wise court, against the nearly twenty-two years of mental and emotional cruelty you with your antiseptic chill have inflicted on me. More than twenty-two—since I date my bondage not from that rather grotesquely gauzy and bubbly and overphotographed August wedding at King’s Chapel the year our fathers were all for Goldwater but from the moment when you, with the connivance of my parents, “rescued” me from what was so generally deemed to be an “unsuitable” attachment to dear little Myron Stern.

But enough, my once and only husband. No grudges. Between us the scale is fairly balanced. Darkness, though the
plane has moved west with the sun and given us a sunset in slow motion, has at last come, and little unknown cities twinkle below. We are descending. The human pilot has resumed the controls and the pretty little Filipino has reappeared, checking our seat belts with mock concern for our well-being. The fat man has stopped pretending to be asleep and is leaning his bulk into me, straining to see out my window. He fears for his life. In his gross voice he has the temerity to tell me I should put up my tray. I hope he reads this sentence. That is not my hand trembling, but the sudden uncongenial mixture of air and metal—the shaking of the plane. No—I am suddenly
terrified
to be without you (interruption: we have landed and are taxiing)—to be without you now that dinner hour has properly come, and our windows will be black against the yews outside, with the lights of a lone boat moving across the cove, and the automatic garage door will be grinding upward to receive your Mercedes, and rumbling down again, and the stairs up from the basement will resound with your aggressive footsteps, and there you will be, so solid and competent and trusting and expecting your quick martini before dinner. But then I realize that this happened—darkness came to you, you found the house empty, you read my horrible hasty note—hours ago, in quite another time zone.

Love,
S.

April 22

Dearest Pearl—

Perhaps by now you will have heard from your father. He was always less afraid of the transatlantic telephone—those
strings of dialled numbers, those crackling foreign accents—than I was. My wiggles, you used to call my writing. When you were two, and we were still living in the little Brighton house, you would crawl up on my lap expecting to see a drawing on my desk as when we crayonned together, and were
so
disappointed to see just my wiggles, little crooked lines all in one dull color.

Well, darling, I am doing my wiggles now in a motel in Los Angeles, and have left your father. It was nothing he
did
, or that I did, suddenly—it was more a matter of what he and I had been doing for years and years, or not doing, rather—not even paying attention. You remember how conscientiously I used to tell him, at dinnertime, of my day?—the little tail-wagging housewife-puppy, whimpering and drooling, offering up her pathetic worried bones and chewing sticks, her shopping trips to Boston and her excursions to the plant nursery in Wenham, her tennis games and her yoga lessons and her boozy little lunches at the club with the same women she played tennis with yesterday, as if to say to this big silent he-doctor, this gray eminence, “Look, dear, how hard I’ve been working to enhance your lovely estate!” or “See, I’m not wasting your money, I couldn’t find a thing I wanted to buy at Bonwit’s!” or “Every hour accounted for—not a minute of idleness or daydreaming or sleeping with all those dark handsome strangers that came today to pump out the fat trap!” Well, I recently tried an experiment. I didn’t tell your father a thing about my day. And
he never asked
. Not once, day after day of biting my tongue—he utterly didn’t notice. That settled it. So absent from his perceptions, I might as well be absent in fact.

Of course, there is a little more to it than that. We of the frailer sex have to have some wild hope, something
to
go to
—otherwise a million years of slavery has conditioned us to huddle by the hearth, stony as it is, and pound some more millet, and get pounded in turn by way of thanks, and commune with the moon. I speak as one of my generation, that came of age just as the Fifties ended—I was nineteen when Lee Harvey Oswald shot them dead—and then by twenty I was married to your father and working too hard to support him really to notice that a revolution was going on, and all the old barriers were down. With your generation, dear Pearl, the barriers are not just down but forgotten, trampled into history. The harvest is in. How thrilling it has been for me—I almost wrote “us,” still thinking in the plighted plural—to see you grow, tall and fearless and carrying your femaleness like a battle flag! Even when you were tiny I saw you as a soldier, your hair pale and straight and shiny as a helmet—magical blond child of a dark mother and prematurely gray father. I had been a tall girl too but had always to fight the impulse to hunch. Your father, to give the devil his due, loved you extravagantly. He didn’t want a son—when you were born he confessed to me he couldn’t have tolerated sharing me with another male. That was still in his chivalrous days. To your generation his remark will sound chauvinistic but at the time it expressed our happiness, our three-cornered joy. My own bliss, holding you even that first hour with your pulsing hot bald skull and freshly unfolded hands that even then had a bit of a grip, was that of seeing myself extended, my womanhood given a second try. My genitals had always been presented to me subtly as a kind of wound and you I vowed would never feel wounded.
Daughter
, your father liked to say. Just the word. It
is
a much more satisfying word, with those mysterious silent letters in the middle, than simple little
son
.