Belonging (52 page)

She looked left and right. Left led only to a barren dark expanse of airfield and looming plane hangars. To her right, far away, the enormous complex of La Guardia sprang up, with ramps and cement walls and dark holes in the stretch of land she’d have to cross to reach the outer limits of the multilevel terminal.

She raced back into the small building behind her and rushed through it, searching frantically for the pay phones. She found them. She’d call a cab. But the hard plastic covers for the telephone directories hung emptily from their chains. She dropped coins into the machine, punched in the numbers for information, and waited. Finally someone answered, gave her a number for a taxi service, and clicked off. Frantically she dialed, and begged for a taxi to be sent to her, then hurried back outside where, to her amazement and joy, a taxi appeared almost instantly.

She threw herself into the backseat and barked the address at the driver.

As they pulled away from the airport and entered the stream of cars headed for the city, Joanna once again took out her compact and checked her face. Her face, that face, which now, according to the kind of light cast by the lamps they passed, showed her in either an orange or a blue glow, that face was pretty much set. Lipstick would help, and eyeliner, but on either side of her mouth a pair of parentheses was indelibly indented, and the appealing slant of her eyebrows was changing, sinking into a downward slant. She looked tired. Well, she should, she’d had quite a year. And Jake knew what she looked like and had asked her to marry him anyway.

The cab began to lurch; a sure sign they’d entered the checkerboard grid of city stoplights and double-parked cars and one-way streets and general traffic congestion. They were almost there. She glanced at her watch: it was a little after nine o’clock. Wednesday night. Jake would be home. Should be. She was familiar with his routines. He would have left the network and taken a cab to one of his clubs, where he would have eaten a large meal and had a Scotch or two with it, while perusing piles of memos, files,
and reports from the briefcase he carried with him everywhere. He’d take another cab to his apartment after dinner and settle in to watch television. CVN had a block of comedy shows they ran on Wednesday nights from eight until eleven, the latter shows aimed at more mature and sophisticated audiences. For relaxation, Jake would be watching those.

But where? She didn’t know. Did he stretch out in bed and watch television? Or sink into one of the leather chairs in his den? Would he have showered, would he be in pajamas? Or a robe? Perhaps, saddened by Joanna’s rejection of his marriage proposal, he would have started dating one of the many bright young things who worked at the network. Perhaps he had one of them in his apartment now, and was plying her with liquor and admiring her flat stomach and pert breasts. Why should Joanna believe that she was the only woman for him? Jake was a man of great appetites. Jake wasn’t one to wait around, nursing his wounds. He was a man of action; he got things done. He was a hot-blooded, warmhearted man, who liked to eat and drink and laugh, and therefore who undoubtedly liked to make love. The more she thought about it, the more certain Joanna became that Jake would have moved on after Joanna’s rejection.

It was quite probable that he had a woman with him now.

What if Joanna knocked on his door, and he opened it and was wearing mussed clothing with lipstick on the collar and a young woman half-undressed on his sofa?

“This is it, miss,” the cabdriver called, startling her from her thoughts. Jake’s apartment building rose up before her.

“All right,” Joanna said meekly. She paid the driver, picked up her bag, and stepped out of the cab.

The doorman politely asked Joanna her name and whom she’d be visiting. For one wild moment Joanna wanted to clutch the man by his lapels and beg him to tell her whether or not Jake Corcoran had a woman with him tonight.

“It’s Joanna Jones. For Jake Corcoran.”

The doorman spoke into the intercom.

Perhaps Jake wasn’t even home.

“Go right on up,” the doorman said, and held open the door.

She crossed the small foyer, stepped into the elevator, and pressed the button. Her heart knocked against her chest. The door slid open. In this building each floor belonged entirely to one owner, and Joanna stepped off onto the fourth floor and into Jake’s entrance hall.

He was waiting there, a perplexed smile on his face.

“Joanna. What a surprise.”

He was wearing suit pants and a rumpled work shirt, with his tie yanked down and his sleeves rolled up. A familiar sight. He’d been running his hands through his hair again, and it stood out in a dark halo around his head.

“Yes, I wanted to surprise you,” Joanna told him. She could tell that he was happy to see her. “Jake. Jake, I want to change my answer to your proposal. If it’s not too late.”

Jake shoved his hands into his pants pockets and eyed her with a lazy smile. “And what did you want to change your answer to?”

“Yes. I want to say yes.”

A smile broke out over his face. “That’s the best news I’ve had in a long, long time, Joanna.”

“Oh, Jake, I’m so—excited and exhausted!” Joanna confessed. And he laughed, and took her by the arm and with the other hand took her bag, and led her into his living room and shut the door to the outside world behind them.

They sat on the sofa and talked. Joanna told him about Madaket and Gardner, and on the strength of that news Jake rose and went into his kitchen, and she followed him and watched while he took a bottle of Perrier-Jouët from his refrigerator.

“I always keep one cold, just in case,” Jake said as he uncorked the bottle and took out two crystal flutes, and Joanna smiled with delight at this new bit of insight into Jake’s life—what a wonderful man he was, what an optimist, always to have a bottle of champagne ready, always certain, even after all life had tossed him, that on any normal day life might give him something to celebrate.

Returning to the living room, they sipped champagne and talked, or rather Jake listened to Joanna with a new light in his eyes, and Joanna told him all about Madaket and Gardner and Christopher and
Fabulous Homes
until at last she realized that she was talking faster and faster, almost babbling. She was nervous, in spite of the effects of the champagne, about the next step of intimacy with Jake. About going to bed with him. Odd thoughts flashed through her head: she’d gotten so stretch-marked from her pregnancy, what if Jake found her body unattractive? Or what if her body didn’t work, somehow, for him or for her?

Then suddenly Jake’s arms were around her and his mouth was on hers, and he was leading her to the bedroom, and not turning on the lights, but letting in a gentle glow
from the hallway, and delicately, slowly, helping her out of her clothes and onto his bed. It was covered with soft goose-down comforters which surrendered, seeming to melt to the shape of Joanna’s body. Jake took off his clothes and lay next to her. His skin was warm, his thighs shockingly large and muscular, his chest matted with hair, his torso fleshy to the touch. She had only held her little baby over the past many months, and now Jake seemed like a giant to her.

“Are you all right? Is this all right? Am I going too fast?” he asked.

“Yes, no, oh, Jake,” Joanna answered, greedily pulling him to her.

Jake kissed her and ran his hands over her body, learning its lines and swells and hollows. He rose up above her. She parted her legs. He entered her. He was wide, big. He could wedge himself into her only so far before she shifted her hips to stop him.

He asked, “Am I hurting you?”

“Yes,” she admitted. He withdrew slowly, and as he did, she felt her muscles and skin contract, as if trying to keep him. “No,” she said. He entered again, a little way. The pressure was intense and painful and delicious. “Just there,” she said, and Jake stayed, just there.

He was supporting himself on his arms above her, and his face was next to hers, his mouth against her ear. She had brought her knees up so that she could find some purchase on the comforters with her feet to help her bear the brunt of his wide penis. He smelled so good, so Jake-like and familiar and safe, an aroma of coffee and Scotch and ink, and yet he felt so unfamiliar, so excitingly strange.

“This is going to take us a while,” he whispered, moving a millimeter farther into her.

“Yes,” she agreed in a sigh.

“We’ll have to work on this a lot,” he told her.

“I know.”

“I love you, Joanna,” Jake said.

“Oh, Jake. Oh, Jake, I love you,” she replied.

They lay in silence then, adjusting themselves by degrees to the contours and desires and limitations of their bodies together. Finally Jake said, “Joanna, I can’t—” and he pulled back, but as he did she felt him swell even more, so that he was like a boulder wedging against her. She felt the ripples of his pleasure radiate into her body. She shuddered with a delicious pain, and when he lay next to her, exhausted, catching his
breath, subsiding, holding her to him, his chest heaving against her, she lay like a woman who has just emerged from a dream and awakened to the fullness of life.

Part Three

Twenty-nine

The courts of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts were housed in Nantucket’s town hall, a modest two-story brick building on Broad Street. Its main, front door faced oddly away from town so that most people, approaching it from the center of the village, used the side doors to enter. Inside, a gloomy long corridor punctuated by doors to the Assessor’s Office, the Town Clerk’s Office, the Registry of Deeds, and other town boards and commissions stretched straight between side entrances with staircases to the second floor. There the upper hall repeated exactly the long straight run, institutionally bland, with offices on each side opening to the Registry of Motor Vehicles, the Courtrooms, and the Judge’s Chamber.

On a bright early June afternoon a group filed into the courthouse and up the stairs to the second floor: Joanna, Madaket, Jake, who carried Christopher, Gardner, Pat and Bob, June and Morris, Claude and his new beau, Larry, Gardner’s sister Norie, and Marge and Harry Coffin. The women wore fluid, pastel dresses and romantic hats trimmed with flowers or lace or silk bows. The men wore sports coats and ties and Christopher wore a pale blue sweater over his white cotton romper.

No benches or chairs lined the long hallway for the waiting crowd, but an officer of the court, smiling above his dark suit, assured them they wouldn’t have to wait long. He lingered to chat about the fine June weather. Everyone talked at once, and then the door opened and they were summoned into the courtroom.

Judge Julius Cohen, who came several times a week from Boston, sat in black robes behind his high bench. He peered down at them through thick black-framed bifocals.

“Will the parties concerned please approach the bench?” he directed.

Joanna and Madaket went forward. The witnesses solemnly clustered in a half-circle.

The judge stared down at the two women in stern silence. A hush fell over the room. Even Christopher, who’d been squirming in Jake’s arms, trying to get a look at this new room, went quiet, eyes wide as he looked around.

Judge Cohen studied the forms before him.

“Joanna Jones?”

“Yes.” Joanna smiled.

“Madaket Brown?”

“Yes, sir.” Madaket smiled, too.

The judge looked them over, taking his time, then spoke. “You, Joanna Jones, have petitioned this court to adopt Madaket Brown as your legal daughter.”

“That’s right, Your Honor.”

“And you, Miss Brown, are twenty years old and understand that we are therefore waiving the social services procedures.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“You want to be adopted by this woman.”

“I do.”

“I see you want to change your last name to Jones, also.”

“Yes.”

“Very well. By the powers vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I declare that you, Joanna Jones, have now adopted Madaket Brown, to be known henceforth as Madaket Jones, as your legal daughter.” He slammed his gavel down, once, hard.

Then he smiled.

Joanna couldn’t help herself; she was crying. She pulled Madaket to her in a warm embrace. The two women hugged tightly, then Joanna took Madaket’s face in her two hands and looked at her as if she’d just arrived in the world and was brand-new.

“Hi, Mom,” Madaket said.

“Hi, kid,” Joanna whispered through her tears.

Gardner raised the camera hanging around his neck and clicked pictures. Judge Cohen rose from his seat to lean over and shake hands. “Congratulations,” he said to the women.

It was the end of the day, and no other cases were waiting, so the judge and his officer didn’t mind letting the others take their time snapping photographs: Joanna and Madaket and the judge, Joanna and Madaket and Christopher, Joanna, Madaket, Christopher, Gardner, and Jake, then all the witnesses, and then the entire group, including the judge and his court official.

Then the crowd clattered out of the courtroom, down the stairs, and out into the
sunny afternoon.

Of all the people invited to the adoption ceremony, only Tory declined to attend, not because she didn’t approve of it all, which in fact she didn’t, but because her life had suddenly fallen apart. That spring Tory discovered that her husband had a mistress, had been involved with her for several years now, a thirty-year-old journalist named Madeline. John was leaving Tory to marry Madeline because she was pregnant. John insisted they sell their New York apartment and the ’Sconset house; they would divide the profits equally. John would use his share to buy a new home for himself, his new bride, and their new child.

At the end of May Tory flew to Nantucket for the gloomy task of readying the house to be shown to prospective buyers. Joanna had just returned from taping an FH show in Cleveland, and Saturday evening she drove out to ’Sconset with a picnic dinner and a bottle of wine. She had Christopher with her, too, even though Madaket had offered to take care of him; she wanted to be with her baby every second she could.