Three Women (19 page)

They had just got into bed in the otherwise empty house when Suzanne heard voices and footsteps. After they made love, when they got up to shower, she looked out and saw Jim's car in the yard. Marta seldom came back during the week. Monday through Wednesday were booked-solid days, so she usually didn't get in till seven or eight. Suzanne opened the back door and softly climbed the steps partway to listen. Yes, it was Elena's voice. What were they doing back at Marta's in the middle of the day?

He could have forgotten something (then why was Elena with him?). They could be having lunch (why wouldn't they eat someplace nearer his office?). They could be having a personal conversation about some problem at the office (with all that laughter and then long silences?).

She motioned Jake to silence as they crept out to his rented car,
parked at the curb. “I have the most awful sinking feeling that Elena is doing a number with my best friend's husband.”

“Don't jump to conclusions,” Jake said, “She'll never forgive you if you're wrong.”

“I'll never forgive her if I'm right.”

“Of course you will. Down the pike. The thing to do is try to figure out what's really happening. All lawyers are part detective, or want to be.”

She sighed. “I was happy a few minutes ago. I really was.”

Elena

Elena noticed it the third week she was working there, the way Jim looked at her, how often he looked. She was surprised and not surprised. She was used to men looking at her with that kind of interest, but she had never paid much attention to him before. He was the old guy upstairs in the house where she hadn't wanted to move. Marta was always giving her little hints about life and education and the future that were really depressing. Their son, Adam, was a pain in the ass, covering everything she had been supposed to do and never did. Now he was at NYU studying film, like all the grind-hard kids from high school who thought they were the next Quentin Tarantino. Adam was seven years younger than she was, but he always acted as if he knew everything better.

Jim had been like an uncle, someone you could borrow twenty bucks from or get a ride someplace, the guy who wouldn't tell on you if he caught you smoking on the porch. She doubted she had ever looked at him carefully. He had pale gray-blue eyes like glacial runoff, eyes of tremendous intensity. He was in great shape. He ran every day. He worked out. He kept himself lean.

What she first liked about him was that Jim was no workaholic like her mother, like Rachel, like their nerdy son Adam, like Marta. Jim was a goof-off like her. She had never realized that. He had patients, sure,
five on a busy day, sometimes just a couple, but he didn't really give a fuck. Once she grasped that, she loved the job, in spite of the disappointing grungy office over a tropical fish store and next to a bowling alley in Brighton. When she had first seen the office with its beaten-up furniture, two tiny rooms that hadn't been painted since World War II, she had wanted to turn around and flee. Now she understood: he didn't care if the office turned some patients off. He didn't really give a damn. Some days he played on the Internet. They shared cool sites. She began to look at him with deliberate interest, a kind of itch, like who was he really and what was going on with him? He let himself have fun. He liked to take it easy and chill out, even in the office. He had an eye for women, she could tell. She was sure he had girls on the side. Vaguely she remembered something from years before: Rachel had told her about Jim and a student. She could hardly write Rachel in Israel and ask her, but there had been something, she knew it.

She was tired of the gonzos she had met at the restaurant, that she met at the gym. They were either lawyers like her mother or just as bad, buzz saws with penises. Or they were losers like the swimming pool salesman, nothing much going on, just boring. Or kids who had no clue. Jim did not seem to be dying to get his hands on her. What he seemed to want when she came into his office between appointments was to talk with her. To really talk. He talked about how he lost his teaching job. It had been a student and they had been in love, but it hadn't worked out. Her parents pulled her out of school and he got fired. Sure he had kept it from Marta. It was easy. She was so wrapped up in herself and her law practice, she barely noticed what was going on with him.

She told him what really happened at the restaurant, how that guy had grabbed her and she had belted him. She told him about her friend Courtney getting AIDS from a bad needle. She told him about Kevin walking off a cliff when he was stoned, and her swearing off drugs, finally.

His eyes were beautiful, icy, intense. Wintry with all the blaze of winter sun. Sometimes she found her gaze dropping from his, just because of his intensity. She liked it. That intensity felt familiar, felt right. It wasn't until the first time he embraced her, as they were about to leave the office one evening after she had been working there for two months. He slid his arms around her and held her to him. That was all he did for about three minutes, just held her. She could feel his erection,
but he did not make a move on her. Finally she pulled his head down and kissed him.

It was as she was kissing him that she understood the power, the compulsion of it: it was how he felt, his body against hers. He was tall like Evan, he was lean like Evan, and the way he held her made her think of Evan, freshly, blindingly. There was that same intensity, the way they talked with each other. Never had she thought she would find it again, a twin soul, her other, her brother. Love struck her like lightning during that first kiss, the way it should, the way it must. She was shocked with love, smoldering.

For two weeks after that all they did when they could snatch a moment was kiss and talk, make out and talk. She was melting. She was dissolving. At night she could not sleep for imagining sex with him. Instead of feeling like a jaded sophisticate, burned out and bored, she felt as if she had become fifteen again. She told him about Evan and Chad, the whole thing. He knew the general story, but from Marta's point of view, the story she had been made to tell in court, how she was just a poor innocent drag-along. How the bad boys had done her in. She told him the way it really was and then the year afterward, when all she could do was lie there for two months and then get up and go through the motions. How Suzanne had ripped her out of her old life, old school, old friends. She was waiting all the time to die. She had collaborated in Chad's death and she had been supposed to die next, but she had chickened out and Evan had been shot because of her, because of her cowardice, getting out of the car and running. That was why the state trooper shot Evan.

Marta had defended her. It was sickening, but her mother and Marta kept telling her she had to keep her mouth shut. She could not tell the truth. The big lie was that she was a weak-willed girl under the influence of two guys who had made her run off with them. They had fed her drugs and forced her into sex with them. They were evil and she was a poor misguided lamb led astray. Chad was the ringleader, Evan was the follower, and she was the victim, blah blah blah. She had hated Marta as she sat in that courtroom. She was underage anyhow. In the eyes of the law she was a child. In her own eyes, she was a guilty old woman who had lived too long and was too scared to die.

Now she was given a second chance, after all these stupid wasted
useless empty years. She talked to Jim about wanting to die. He listened, really listened, and then he took the story and made it change. He made her a heroine who had tried to save Evan and Chad. He made her a faithful friend who, when she could not save them, was willing to go with them into the land of shadows, but the police arrived too soon. Chad and Evan died of their own weaknesses, their inner demons. She was only the pretext for their immolation. Now she must find her own way. She was not to blame for the weakness of others, but she needed to believe in her own inner strength.

Jim told her about the death of his daughter, only two months after they got her home from the hospital. His second child. He knew Marta was not to blame but could not help blaming her. Something had obviously gone wrong during the pregnancy, when she had insisted on working until the day her water burst. The girl, Annette, had been fragile, born prematurely. Then she was dead in her crib, sudden infant death syndrome, it was called, as if that explained anything. It just said, your baby died and we don't know why.

Elena and Jim held each other. He seemed afraid to go much further than kissing and stroking her hair and holding her face between his hands. He kept saying he was too old for her. The more he protested, the more fiercely she argued.

She was half wild with desire for him. She told herself it was like poison ivy of the brain. She could think of nothing else. She waited until a Monday afternoon when everybody was out of the house except Beverly and Sylvia. Then Sylvia took Beverly to the speech therapist. Jim was upstairs working on his book. She just went quietly up and put her arms around him as he sat at the computer. She was not wearing a bra or panties, just a loose rayon dress, cut low and slit up one side. When he stood and began to kiss her, she put his hand on her breast. Her breast was burning to be touched. She kneaded his back, pulling his shirt loose from his pants, then slid her grasp down to his firm buttocks. He felt good, lean and sleek and hot under her hands. He was breathing hard now. Yes, she would have him. When they were undressed, she knelt and kissed his penis. “Put it in me. Just do it now. I can't wait any longer.”

They made love on the couch in the living room. She groaned and thrust up her hips, feeling him enter her. This was love they were mak
ing, something different and new again, something special, something holy. He kept saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

She kept saying the same thing. Then she added, “I want to belong to you. I want to be yours.”

“I want you to be mine.” But when they were showered and dressed, he said, “We must be very careful. If we pay too much attention to each other, one of them will guess…. You're on the pill, right?”

He was too cautious, but she could wait.

“I feel out of control with you,” she said. “I haven't felt that way in years. Always I've been the one driving the car. I couldn't trust any of them enough to let go.”

“I understand,” he said, “and your trust honors me. We have to cut through all these roles of control and the fear of it and be vulnerable and open to each other. To be naked.”

The next time, she got him to make love on the bed he slept in with Marta. It was obscene to think of them together. Marta had no right to him, for she did not love him. They were always fighting, Elena could hear them in the evenings if she shut off her music and listened. They argued about money, about their son, Adam, about accountants and doctors, about the dishwasher and roof repairs. If they had ever loved each other, it was long, long over. They were just used to living together. They were each other's bad habit. But Jim wanted her as strongly as she wanted him, because they were really one. They were one will, one life, one body. She saw that, even if he didn't; and sometimes, already, he did.

Beverly

Beverly liked her new computer. She had resisted using one for years, for she could not see incurring the expense for no good reason. At first she had thought they were a fad, and then she thought she was past learning about them, since technical stuff had never been her strong
suit. Now just to learn something new was a reassurance her life was not completely over, that she was still alive upstairs. It was hard. She forgot more easily than she ever had, and concentration was difficult and strenuous. At least the computer opened up rather than closed down her world, shrinking since the night of her stroke.

Even with the large keys to type with, she was slow. The mouse was easier. Suzanne set her up on E-mail and showed her the Internet. She didn't think any of her old friends did E-mail except Lucy, who had taught at CUNY for twenty-five years and had a computer before any of them. She carefully typed out a note on the computer to Lucy at Eighty-fifth Street, asking her if she was on E-mail. Sylvia would mail it for her. Beverly wanted to E-mail somebody. She asked Suzanne at breakfast the next morning. Suzanne printed out a list of the E-mail addresses of politicians.

Later that morning, Beverly composed an E-mail to the President about the problems of Medicare coverage. She wrote about all the people she had seen in the hospital and in the rehab center and what happened to them and how awful it was that people couldn't be covered at home, where they were much better off than in a nursing home-dump, and it was less wasteful of money and resources. She wrote the letter for forty-five minutes. Then she hit “send” and went to bed. She was exhausted. But she was happy.

Now she could send the same letter to the senators from New York and the two from Massachusetts. She would find out the name of the representative for Brookline and send him one too. She was no longer helpless. She would collect useful E-mail addresses and harangue them all. It seemed much more intimate than writing a letter. She felt as if she was going right through their defenses, past their secretaries and assistants, straight into their faces. Tomorrow she would compose a letter on immigration policies. Then welfare. Then minimum wage. Suzanne showed her a site where she could monitor proposed legislation. She would have plenty to tell them all.

She actually had some appetite for supper. Suzanne brought home Chinese takeout. Beverly remembered how she used to eat proficiently with chopsticks. Back in '68, she had a Chinese boyfriend, a Maoist and nutty, but she liked him anyhow. He had beautiful eyes, great bones, and an erection that never died. She sighed, remembering. He had mar
ried a Chinese woman who managed a television repair shop. For months, he continued to visit Beverly, but she wasn't comfortable with that. Soon he had a baby boy and they moved to Atlanta, where his wife's family sent him to graduate school.

Now she had to eat with a special fork that could be managed easily. She got so weary sometimes of all the things she could no longer handle, ordinary silverware and cups, ordinary clothes she could no longer fasten. Ordinary stairs. Ordinary public transportation she had used all her life.

But tonight she would not dwell on that. “Letter…Rachel?”

She had seen it in the hall when Sylvia was helping her go for her walk. When they had finished supper, Suzanne read it to her. It was full of tourist stuff, this road, that shuk, going to Sarah's Tomb. She and Michael were living in a dormitory near Hebrew University. “We each have a roommate. Mine is from Cincinnati. She is two years older than I am and much prettier, with blond hair halfway down her back. Michael is rooming with a Brit from Coventry. Every day we walk and walk and walk. When we don't walk, we take buses. We are memorizing all the bus routes. You have to know before you get on, because it's push and shove and chaos. I always expect the walls to buckle.” Beverly wanted to know what Rachel thought about Israel politically, if she had met any Palestinians yet, how she was getting on with her boyfriend: the real stuff. “Yesterday we visited the Old City again. When we went out the Damascus Gate where there's a row of some kind of palms (I can't tell the different kinds yet) that look like upright feather dusters, we saw this fountain, nothing fancy, and in the basin, already kids were splashing around. It made me feel like joining them, but we're on our best behavior—although nobody else is! I'll have E-mail by the time you get this. Here's my address.”

Suzanne gave her Rachel's E-mail address. Now she could ask her all the questions she wanted to. Beverly felt as if she went around grinning now, maybe crookedly, but with honest joy.

A couple of nights a week when Suzanne was actually home all evening, after supper, Suzanne would clear and load the dishwasher while Beverly lay down to nap. Then Beverly would wake in an hour or so, and they would go together to her computer. Suzanne logged her into the
New York Times
on-line. Then AP. Then ABC news. Then the
Washington Post
. Beverly's heart was beating hard. She would keep up with news after all. There must be liberal and radical sites. She would find them. Now every morning and noon and night she would dip into some news site and pick up the breaking news. She also discovered there was a huge amount of stroke information on-line. A couple of days later, she stumbled onto a listserv of old radicals, and Suzanne showed her how to subscribe. Now every day she got messages from people all around the country who were politically savvy and experienced. She could get into wonderful arguments and discussions. There was also a stroke support group she joined, although it was sometimes depressing.

She wished she did not tire so quickly. But on-line communication was easy compared to writing a real letter. The phone was her bugaboo. She hated the rare times when she had to answer. She had been hung up on numerous times, because she could not force out a reply quickly enough. But with E-mail, she could take her time reading and comprehending what people wrote and composing and laboriously typing an answer with one hand. Nobody got impatient except her server, who dumped her occasionally, and then she had to reconnect.

She began doing her hand and arm exercises with the same fervent concentration she brought to her speech exercises. Her clumsy left hand was her link to the world. However dimly, she was reconnected. Her old friend Lucy wrote back. Almost every day they E-mailed short or longer notes about their lives. Lucy had broken her hip when she was knocked down by a Rollerblader and had trouble getting around. She had undergone a hip replacement, but it was painful, and she would never walk easily again. Then she heard from her friend Rose, who had written five books on labor history. Lucy had given Rose Beverly's E-mail address. Now she had two friends as well as her correspondence with all the politicians she felt like advising, berating, occasionally praising, and all the old lefties on the listserv with their monikers. Hers was West Side Rosa, for she had always identified with Rosa Luxemburg, and the West Side was her spiritual home.

She was sorry when her eyes got tired or when her back hurt too much for her to continue. She would have loved to get on-line when she woke up and to stay connected all day. It was exciting. It felt right. She was no longer alone in this pale green room when Sylvia went home
but was still vitally in the world. She kept finding new subjects to explore: UFOs, archaeology, specific writers.

Her hand and her eyes betrayed her, particularly her hand. She had to stop after around an hour, although she had got much better at making full use of that hour of connection. She lay resting then, sometimes dozing, sometimes just listening to the house around her. She had identified the steps and voices of Elena and Jim. Two or three times a week, Elena sneaked upstairs or they came back from work together. They were going to bed, of course. She smiled slightly. Elena was still her favorite. Beverly liked Jim. He was an attractive man, and Marta didn't pay enough attention to him. Besides, they had only one kid, in college. Lots of men went off on their own then, found someone new. It was human nature. Often enough in her life, what they had found had been her. She could not judge Elena.

Elena knew she knew. Elena came in and sat down one afternoon. “I love him,” she said without preamble. “I can't help it.”

Beverly nodded. She understood.

“I knew you'd see it my way,” Elena said. “Now I have to go back to work. It's a pretty easy job. I'll look in on you tonight.”

From then on, Elena took some time each day to sit with her. Beverly had felt bad that Elena did not want to be with her. Now she understood. It wasn't because of her stroke or her distorted face, no, it was just that Elena was having an affair and had to cover it up. Now that Elena knew that Beverly was not going to make a fuss or be judgmental, they were close again. Beverly thought, I am slowly, slowly coming back to life. It isn't the life I had, but it's a great improvement on last month and infinitely superior to the month before that.

Besides, Beverly rather enjoyed knowing something that Suzanne didn't. Suzanne was worrying about something, Beverly could feel it, probably a case. Suzanne might know a lot about the law, but she was no observer of people. Beverly smiled inwardly. She had Elena's confidence, and Suzanne didn't.