Away from Home (5 page)

She moved away from him then and lay on her side of the bed, listening to the tiny ticking of the clock and the sound of Bert’s even breathing. Why is a man always able to fall asleep so much more quickly than a woman? she wondered. She turned on her side, trying not to waken him. Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark so that she could see everything in the room clearly. She did not like to sleep naked, so after a while she got up and took her nightgown out of the closet and put it on, and then lay down again, and waited for sleep.

Lying tensely in the dark, she was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of loneliness and futility. She remembered what she had thought earlier that evening watching Margie and Neil: I’m glad I have a happy marriage. It’s always going to be there … always going to be the same. The same? If sameness meant tolerance, indifference, habit, then their marriage would always be the same. But it had not always been this way. A long time ago, just nine years, she and Bert had been loving strangers, excited and wondering with the freshness of their love, reaching out to touch each other a hundred times a day, making mistakes together, alone together, lucky—no, charmed.… And now they were strangers again, alone together again in a new world, and there was loneliness. Perhaps if they had stayed at home among the reassuring, familiar things she never would have noticed the change, accepting it only as a sign of the passage of time, but here, halfway around the world, alone with Bert, she was afraid.

She could reach out to him now, touch him, make him awaken from sleep, but she would only awaken the stranger. He might murmur, groan with weariness and protest, open his eyes in startled question: Is everything all right? The children? But never with the smile of sleepy love that knows the answer—everything is all right, I just wanted to be sure you were still there, I wanted to tell you I am here. There was no magic kiss to awaken the dreamer to the beautiful image of the past.

Merry Christmas, Helen said to herself, and felt her own smile like a grimace in the dark. Merry Christmas. But, after all, Christmas morning too was for children, like everything else that was filled with mystery and excitement. The grownups, as Bert would say, had to pay for the presents.

CHAPTER 2

A half hour after midnight on Christmas Eve, or more accurately, Christmas Day, Margie Davidow followed her husband into their apartment and turned on all the lights in the living room. The martinis she had drunk in the kitchen before dinner and the gin-tonics she had consumed during the party later had worn off, and she felt sober, tired, and slightly apprehensive. She didn’t like this feeling of complete sobriety at night, especially after she had been high, because she was still too close to the feeling of wonderful fuzziness that had vanished.

“Why are you putting on the lights?” Neil asked, behind her. “I want to go to bed. Aren’t you tired?”

“I … thought I’d stay up a little while. You go to sleep, darling. You worked today; you must be exhausted.”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll stay up a little with you. Let’s have a drink.”

She felt the churning begin then, in her stomach, and her heart began to beat so heavily she wondered if some night she would end up having a heart attack. But it was impossible; young women of twenty-five with healthy constitutions never had heart attacks just because of panic. “All right,” she breathed, and the sound came out as if someone were holding her very tightly around the waist.

“Scotch? No, you’d better stick to gin.”

She watched Neil measuring out the drinks and saw that he was making hers a good deal stronger than his. The docility of the gesture, the resignation it implied, filled her with guilt, and she wanted to go to him and put her arms around him. She almost did, and then she stopped, knowing he would misunderstand. She shut her eyes and wondered if she were going to cry.

“It was a good party,” Neil said. “Didn’t you think so?”

“I had fun.” She took several swallows of her gin-tonic, waiting for it to warm her and knowing in despair it would not. She never could get drunk after she had eaten a large supper; she simply was not made for it. She would be sick first, and that would only make matters worse.

“If you want to,” Neil said quietly, “we can play chess for half an hour or so.” He was standing by the little marble-topped table that held the chess board, with the chessmen already standing on it ready for the war. He touched the Queen with his long, clean fingers, and the touch seemed almost sensual. Margie shook her head. “You shouldn’t smoke so much,” he said abruptly.

“I’m sorry.” She put her cigarette out quickly and folded her hands in her lap, feeling her nails cutting into her own knuckles and powerless to stop.

There were so many things they loved to do together: play chess, listen to music, talk, talk, talk. Sometimes, when they just wanted to talk together, she and Neil could stay up all night, each of them glancing at each other in delighted surprise when they saw the sky beginning to lighten with dawn. Sometimes then they would go out and walk on the beach, hand in hand, like friends, and perhaps they would swim when the beach was fully light. There would be no one there at seven o’clock, except for a few maids who went swimming before they returned to cook breakfast for their awakening employers. And then Margie and Neil would go back to their apartment and have coffee and toast and eggs, ravenously, and he would slap his forehead with the palm of his hand and laugh and say, “It’s all right for
you
; you can sleep all day!” He would kiss her goodbye and go to the office, and she would pull the heavy curtains across the bedroom windows and curl into bed, the sheets still cool from the night breeze, and she would sleep, thinking how much she loved him. But on a night like tonight, when he did not want to talk, there seemed to be nothing for either of them to say; except for the one thing that neither of them dared say.

“Come on,” Neil said. “It’s late.”

It was hopeless even to try to finish her drink; the taste of it was making her feel ill. She put the glass on the coffee table and stood up.

When they walked down the hall to their bedroom Neil put his hand on the back of her neck, and then she knew. She knew, as if there were a sign language for people who have been married for several years and know each other’s habits so well they imagine what they know is the other’s thoughts. But it’s never the thoughts, Margie thought; it’s only the habits. She looked at their shadows joined ahead of them on the white carpet and she felt very lonely.

“Look,” Neil said, pointing. “There’s a saying in Bali that when two people walk together and their shadows join, they’ll be together for the rest of their lives.”

“I hope so,” Margie said softly.

“What do you mean, you
hope
so?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Monkey. You know that.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me Monkey.”

He looked at her, astonished and almost hurt. “Then I never will again. If you didn’t like it, why didn’t you say so?”

She shrugged. “It didn’t seem … to matter.”

He put his hand on the back of her neck again and began to stroke her, very lightly. “It does matter.”

She went into her bathroom and shut the door, and a moment later she heard the groan of plumbing and the splash of water as Neil turned on the taps in the sink. He’s brushing his teeth now, she thought, and felt like an idiot who had to catalogue the everyday occurrences of life in order to make them seem real. She sank down on the edge of the tub, consumed with inertia, and watched a
barrata
scuttle behind the sink and disappear. That was a small one, she thought—clinging to things, to objects. There are clean towels on the rack tonight. I like these pink ones. I must write to Mother and ask her to send me more just like them, and some beige ones for Neil. He likes beige towels. She felt her heart beating so hard it seemed to be pulsing in her eye sockets. How long can you keep on bribing him? she screamed at herself silently. He wouldn’t care if his towels were beige or Hell’s own color if you gave him what he really needed. She stood up then, moving as carefully as an invalid arising from bed after a long illness, and went to the sink to prepare for bed.

Neil had turned out all the lights but one of the small lamps on their double dresser, and he had pulled the curtains closed and taken off the spread. They kept a small portable radio in their bedroom, and when she walked into the room he was still fiddling with it, trying to find a station that still played music after midnight. He looked up at her almost guiltily, as if he had been trying to arrange everything nicely before she arrived and she had caught him too soon. His look filled her with compassion and reminded her how deeply and protectively she cared for him, so that the first moment after he stepped toward her and took her in his arms she felt calm. She put her arms around his neck.

“Your hair smells nice,” Neil murmured.

Her thought swirled to perfume then. What kind was it? Oh, yes, Fleurs de Rocaille. It was nice perfume, she liked it too, it was nice, it was nice.… She tried to direct her thoughts away from his hand where it was stroking her breast, and she closed her eyes. I love him, she told herself; he’s the only man I ever loved. She felt his fingers inside her brassiere then and she took a deep breath, trying to will the physical reaction of desire, concentrating, praying that she could force herself to rise to his caress, so that he would not know, when what she really wanted was to scream.

“Why don’t you get undressed?” he whispered.

Margie removed her clothes slowly, knowing that Neil was watching and hating herself for the numbness that did not permit her to hurry for him. Some compulsion made her hang her dress in the closet instead of dropping it over the back of a chair, and she could not stop herself from hanging up her crinoline too and folding her bra and underpants neatly on the chair even though she would only toss them into the laundry hamper tomorrow. She had never been a compulsively neat person, only tidy, but tonight somehow the folding of her clothes took on a monstrous importance, as if she could never think of another thing if it were not done properly. I should have gone to bed first, she thought desperately, and pretended to be asleep. But I did that three times this week, and he must know …

She knew he was nervous because his hand on her hip was trembling slightly. Perhaps it was the vibration of his nerves communicating itself to her, or perhaps it was something else, but suddenly Margie felt herself begin to tremble. For an instant her husband mistook her trembling for the beginning of passion and he rose on his elbows and covered her with his body, and only then he realized that it had not been excitement but revulsion. For one moment their eyes met, unguarded, and Margie saw in his face such a look of open misery and bewilderment that it almost made her heart stop. He rolled away from her and lay on his stomach, his face in his arms.

“This is the last time,” Neil said. “The last time.” His voice was muffled.

“What? I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you,” Margie said, and as soon as the words were out she cringed from them because they sounded so heartless and stupid. She wondered for a terrified instant if he were crying.

He shook his head and sat up, looking for a cigarette on the bedside table. He did not look at her until he had found one and lighted it. “Do you want a cigarette?”

“You must hate me,” she whispered.

“It’s funny, that’s just what I was thinking about you.”

“Hate you? Oh, my God! Oh, Neil, I love you! I do. You don’t believe it, I know, but I do, I
do!
”

He smiled at her bitterly for a moment and then his face softened. He reached his hand out to touch her and then suddenly drew it back as if he had remembered how repellent his touch seemed to her. Margie reached for his hand and took it in both her own. “Please,” she said.

“Do you mind if I ask you not to touch me? I’m human.”

“Please,” she said, and then her throat closed and she could not speak.

“It wasn’t like this in the beginning,” Neil said. His voice was preoccupied, while he remembered. “I think for a while you almost liked it. In the beginning I thought you were this way because you were nervous, because you were a virgin. It even pleased me, in a way, your being so stiff and held back. I thought I could teach you so many things. I wanted you to learn to like making love. I wanted to be the one who gave you the gift of love. I would have given you anything, Margie. I think today I still would—anything—in spite of this. I’d give you anything.”

“You do!” Margie cried. “You’ve given me my whole life.”

“Except I come with it, don’t I.” He looked at her stricken face. “I’m sorry I said that, darling.” He reached over and stroked her hair with a gesture that was tenderness completely without passion. “I know it’s not your fault,” Neil said. “The only thing I have to keep telling myself is that it’s not my fault either.”

She realized then the extent of what she had done to him, and she closed her eyes, wishing she could die, disappear, vanish from this bed and this room and this life they had made for each other.

“Sometimes,” Neil said, “two people just aren’t right for each other in bed. Everything else is all right, but when they make love it’s a nightmare. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s chemistry.”

“I love you,” Margie said. “I
love
you. Please believe me.”

“I believe you.”

“Maybe … there’s something wrong with me. I’ve thought about that a lot. Maybe I’m … a Lesbian.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid!” There was genuine anger in his tone. “Don’t ever say that again or I’ll hit you.”

“Maybe I am,” she repeated, and then she began to cry. The image rose up before her of a weird sexless woman, an outcast, dressed in mannish clothes, with hair cropped short and a belligerent, lost, sexless face. She had seen Lesbians dressed as men in the Greenwich Village queer bars where she had occasionally gone as a lark when she was an N.Y.U. freshman, when she and a date and another couple had made a rather supercilious tour of the smoky dens where the third sex gathered. Her feeling toward those women then had been revulsion, and when once she had seen a Lesbian fondling the shoulder of a girl who couldn’t have been older than Margie herself, she had been more disgusted than pitying. True, she had never had any wild feelings toward a man, but she had never had any feelings at all for a woman except fondness.