Blessings (30 page)

“I’ll never believe in anything or anyone again,” Jay said.

And he walked away. The door swung on its weight behind him and clicked shut.

Jennie stood with her back and the palms of her hands flattened against the wall. Peter went to the bedroom closet, came back with a robe, and put it over her. In silence she begged, Don’t ask me anything. Please, no questions.

And he did not. As if he had understood, he took one of her hands and held it between his to warm it, saying only, “You’re cold.”

“I can’t,” she began, meaning, “I can’t talk.”

That, too, he understood. “You needn’t talk. I’m not going to ask you anything. But you have to go back to bed while I make some tea.”

The tea was hot and milky. He held the cup and wiped the spill that came from her dry, quivering lips.

“The hot milk will put you to sleep,” he whispered.

When she had drunk, she lay back on the pillow. The lamp in the corner, distant and dim, threw a rosette on the ceiling. He stroked her forehead; firm fingers moved in rhythm. And she let herself sink and sink. Die …

When she woke in the morning, Peter was sitting in a straight chair near the bed. It occurred to her that he might have been sitting there all night.

“I’ve made breakfast,” he said. “First, though, go shower and do your hair.”

But now she was completely clear, and everything that had been foggy the night before sprang out like a headline in the Times. Jay’s face had been blurred, doubly blurred, by his anguish and her own. Yet she was distinctly seeing his eyes; they must have registered in her subconscious. Now they were fixed upon her in a fierce glare of pain. Once, while still a young girl living in the row house, she had seen a man in the yard at the end of the street whipping a dog and had never forgotten the poor dog’s eyes… .

She turned her face into the pillow and cried, excruciating sobs that shook her body. So people weep when someone dies. I remember Mama when Papa died. I thought the crying would kill her too.

After a while, when the sobbing ceased, Peter came back to the room. He waited, not speaking, only shaking his head a little, smiling a little as one pities and gently reproaches a child: Ah, don’t cry… .

“There was nothing,” she said. “We did nothing.”

“No, but it certainly looked as though we had done something.”

“We were going to be married.”

“Who is he?”

“A lawyer.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“No.”

He smiled again and shrugged.

“Are you angry because I won’t tell you his name?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You’ve been very nice to me, Peter.”

“Of course. Wouldn’t you have done the same?”

“I suppose so.”

“You would. You of all people would.” He had sat down on the straight chair in the corner and now gave her a straight, piteous look of appeal. “I’m feeling horribly guilty. I don’t know your story, but it’s not hard to figure it out—some of it, anyway—and I see that my being here has made terrible trouble for you again.” When she didn’t answer, his forehead wrinkled. “It’s the second time I’ve come into your life. What can I say? Can I do anything at all?”

“Nothing. What is there to do?” It took too much strength to talk, but he looked so wretched that she had to say something more. “You didn’t do this on purpose. You meant well, staying here with me.”

“You scared the life out of me when you left the table like that. Jill was scared too. You looked—well, frantic. Yes, frantic. That’s why I had to come.”

“I’ve been frantic for quite a while.”

“Because of him? You didn’t want him to find out about Jill?”

A leftover sob caught in her throat. “That wasn’t—that wasn’t thinkable.”

He asked no more, and for a minute or two neither spoke. She felt unkempt, unclean, and miserable because of it. Making a great effort, she forced herself to sit up and asked him to leave the room. Modestly wrapping herself in her Turkish bathrobe, she went to the shower.

Under the lulling patter of warm water, she stood, mechanically soaping herself. In a kind of lethargy she stood too long, wasting water, taking refuge in the curtain of gentle heat. Then she got out, brushed her teeth and flossed them, and brushed her hair; its dark waves fell into place. But the face in the mirror was devastated, with red eyes sunken to half their normal size under fattened, glossy lids. Ugly. It didn’t matter. Nothing did. One tidied one’s hair and flossed one’s teeth. What sense did it make? What difference, if one’s teeth should rot?

“You look better,” Peter said.

“I look like hell. Look at me.” Perversely she wanted him to acknowledge the devastation.

“Well,” he said, changing the subject, “how about having coffee in bed?”

“Bed? I have to go to work, Peter. It’s eight o’clock.”

“You’re in no condition for work today, and you know it, Jennie. Go on back to bed for now. You can get up later.”

He had made toast and a boiled egg, which she didn’t touch. It had been days since she had had any appetite, anyway. For a while he watched her sipping the coffee, hugging the cup between her palms, and then said, “I’ll call your office for you, unless you want to do it, and say you’re sick.”

“You can do it. Just ask for Dinah.” All energy, all ambition had seeped away, yet she had to show fortitude in the face of devastation. “Say I’ll definitely be in tomorrow.”

“I’m not sure you will be. You’re entitled to time off.”

“I’m not ‘entitled’ to anything.”

“Why are you so hard on yourself? You’ve had a shock. You were in a state of shock, as if there’d been a death.”

That was a strange way to describe it, yet it did feel like a death. I’m not certain I know how to go on from here, she thought. It makes no sense, that everything can end this way. All over in two or three minutes.

“He said something when he was standing at the door,” she began. “I can’t seem to remember exactly what it was. Can you?”

As Peter looked puzzled, she prompted, “Last night when he was leaving. I’ll call him Joe because that’s not his name. I’m trying to think. Was it something about not believing?”

“Oh. Do you really want to know? Do you have to go back over it?”

“Yes, I want to know.”

“He said, ‘I will never believe in anything or anybody again.”

The words, even secondhand, had an elegiac ring, a terrible finality. For a time she listened to them inside her head, then asked Peter whether he thought “Joe” could have meant them.

“Never is a long time, Jennie.”

“You’re right. It was a stupid question.”

So then, sometime or other, there would be another woman. And shutting her eyes, she let herself imagine in every fleshly detail the women to whom he would turn in bed and open his arms. What words would he speak? The words they had said to each other in their special language?

Oh, they can fill a thousand pages with pop psychology, and write off jealousy as something immature and degrading, but it’s true nevertheless that jealousy is torture, and people kill because of it, and kill themselves too. It’s loss, final loss, and worse.

So now you know, Jennie, you know as if you were in Jay’s skin, how he felt when he saw you here last night.

The doorbell rang so abruptly that Peter started.

“It’s Shirley from across the hall. She generally rings to ask whether I want to walk to work with her.”

“Okay. I’ll say you’ve got the flu.”

When he returned, he looked amused. “If you ever saw amazement on a face! Her eyebrows went up to her hairline.”

Jennie said bitterly, “I can imagine. You don’t look at all like the man she’s used to seeing here in the mornings.”

“She wanted to come in, but I said I was taking care of you, that I’m an old friend and a doctor too.”

“Thank you. I didn’t want her to see me like this.” It was odd that she wasn’t ashamed to have Peter see her. “Shirley’s a good soul, but she talks too much. She knows everything about everybody.”

“You must have other friends. I think you should talk to a friend today.”

“I don’t want anyone.”

He countered gently, “But you need some help until you can straighten things out.”

“They may never be ‘straightened out,’ don’t you see? I’ll probably have to manage by myself, so I might as well get used to doing it now.”

They were brave, commonsense words; still, Jennie only half believed them. Surely Jay would come back and want some explanation… . Then she reminded herself: Even so, the question of Jill would still be there, and she would only be back where she had been in the first place.

“Excuse me. May I ask you why you say ‘never?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Maybe you can make it shorter.”

“Well, I lied to him. And he has never lied to me. Oh, you don’t understand! You would have to know him, and everything that’s gone before.”

Peter looked doubtful but asked no more. And Jennie, stepping outside of herself for an instant as was her habit, saw herself sitting up in bed facing this longtime stranger who was subtly beginning to become familiar again. A faint red stubble had grown on his cheeks overnight; she could remember the time he had talked about growing a beard. She could remember …

And she made a comparison: He wasn’t much younger than Jay, although he looked much younger, lighter somehow, as if life were easier for him. Maybe it had been. She realized that she knew nothing about him except that he was a professor. For a second she had a vision of him in a professional pose, perched on a desk with one leg swinging; he would wear polished loafers and a cashmere pullover in an argyle pattern. She wasn’t sure whether he would smoke a pipe and decided that he probably wouldn’t; it would be too much of a cliche. The girls would be arch with him. The boys would respect his height and powerful frame. But she really knew nothing about him.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“Me? What made you ask?”

“I don’t know. Just wondered.”

“Not married.”

“I read about you once. It was in a directory of American scholars. I was glad to know you were a success. That you’d arrived where you wanted to be.”

“You were glad?” He was surprised. “After everything that happened between us, you could be glad for me?”

“The one thing has nothing to do with the other,” she said simply.

He shook his head. “What makes you so kind? But then, you always were.”

She smiled slightly. Indeed she had been kind to him. And she said, “It’s not just that. I admire a good mind that hasn’t been allowed to go to waste.”

“Well, I’m certainly no Schliemann in the ruins of Troy, but I have written about some interesting discoveries in our southwestern deserts, and I do like teaching, so all in all, I’m fairly satisfied with my life. But tell me about yourself, about the law business.”

He was almost jocular, and she saw that this was an awkward effort to divert her thoughts and change her mood. But everything went abruptly queer and bleak again. The winter light, thin and blue as skimmed milk, was unkind to the little room that could be so cozy at night: the chest of drawers was scarred; the white curtains were yellowed and flimsy. Failure dwelled here.

Since she had not replied, Peter spoke once more, this time more seriously. “I don’t like to leave you alone this way. I wish I didn’t have to go.”

“Back to Chicago now?”

“No, I’ve planned on a week here in the city. I’m to meet a few people in the Archaeology Department at Columbia. There’s a conference this afternoon and a couple of dinners. Then next week I’ll have to fly back to Atlanta.”

She made no comment.

“It’s my parents’ fortieth anniversary. A milestone.”

Still she was silent.

“I know you don’t want to hear about them.”

She could have countered with a question: Since you know it, why talk about them? But that wasn’t her way, so she answered only, “It really doesn’t matter to me at all, you know.”

He flushed. “Well, I only wanted to say that I have to go to Atlanta. Otherwise I’d stay and try to help out. Help Jill and you… . Oh, you know what I’m trying to say, Jennie. Mostly help you, although I don’t know how.”

“I don’t, either. So you’ll do just as well by going to the celebration in Atlanta,” she said coolly enough.

He seemed to have a need to pursue the subject. “It’ll be only a small celebration. The family’s shrunk. A lot of the relatives have died off since you— I mean, there won’t be so many of us there. Sally June has no children—”

Jennie could see them all at the dark-grained, candlelit table, each of them seated behind a neat pool of white linen. In winter the view from the tall windows would be subdued: dark evergreens and sere lawns. The sister has no children, so they have no grandchildren. That would be a hurt, especially for people like them, with all their pride in lineage and continuity.

And she couldn’t resist a question. “Have they never asked, never mentioned … ?”

“No.” She saw that he was unable to meet her eyes. Yet he added, “I often wonder whether they think about it or ever mention it between themselves.”

“Are you going to tell them, now that you know?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t think what’s best. Can you?”

“Me? I can’t think at all,” Jennie said with bitterness.

They were both silent until Peter said, “I hate to leave you here alone with trouble like this, but I have to.”

“Of course you do. Please go. Don’t be late because of me.”

“I’ll telephone you. Or maybe I’ll stop by again.”

“You don’t need to.”

“I know I don’t, but I will. There’s a pitcher of water on the table. Lock the door when I leave.”

Another wave of despair swept over her when he had gone. It was as if all the radiance of life, the hope, the sunlight, and all the wild, sweet joy had been swept away. And never, never had she been so tired.

She prayed for sleep. For a long time it would not come. But after a while the separate noises of horns and engines began to merge into a single monotonous, oceanic roar, and sleep was ready to engulf her. Even while she knew she was making only a temporary escape, the escape was blessed.

Off and on, Jennie slept through the day and the night. On the second morning her physical strength had returned enough for her to get up quickly, dress, eat a little something, and take stock. Another day away from the office would not bring disaster, she decided. Hope, which she doubted even as she felt it rise, encouraged her nevertheless. Perhaps it would be wise to wait at home. Jay might come… . He would telephone the office, learn that she was sick, and then—