Bodies and Souls (20 page)

Love had never been a problem for her before. She had been born into a lucky family; her parents had loved each other as well as most parents can, and she and her
brother and sister had always been close. Remembering her youth, Suzanna searched the patterns of her life for some portent of the woman she was to become
—a lesbian
—but could find nothing of significance. As a child, she had played with dolls more than trucks, but she had climbed trees, and been good at games, too. As a teenager, she and her sister had kept their favorite stuffed animals on top of their pink-gingham-covered beds, and hid their forbidden packs of Kool cigarettes under the mattress. In high school, Suzanna had played on the girls’ field hockey team, but she had also been president of the Pep Club, and secretly vain of the way her body curved in the short pleated blue-and-white skirt and tight blue sweater with the big gold S that the members of the Pep Club wore to the football and basketball games.

She had been neither rich nor poor, brilliant nor dull, beautiful nor homely. She had been normal, and too content in her normality to spend time examining it. When she was seven, she had vowed to marry her father when she grew up. When she was eleven, she decided instead on Elvis Presley, and when she was thirteen, she thought it didn’t matter if she ever saw Elvis Presley if only Ronnie Goodwin, the sixteen-year-old who had moved in at the end of the block, would offer her a ride in his maroon-and-gray Chevrolet.

She had fallen truly in love for the first time when she was seventeen, with a boy named David Kittredge, a tall ambling boy who had brown eyes and red hair and freckles all over his body. He was a year older than Suzanna, and captain of the basketball team. They had passed each other in the halls at school but had never spoken to each other. The summer before Suzanna’s senior year at high school, just three weeks before school was to start, Suzanna met Dave at Stowerby Lake, where he worked as a lifeguard. She was babysitting four-year-old Jackie Ellison that day, and was sitting with the little boy at the water’s edge, intently building a sand castle with him. She had not been aware of Dave’s approach; just suddenly planted before her in the sand were his two bony white naked feet. She had been stunned, and had followed the long skinny line of his sunburned body up and up until she saw his face grinning down at her. He was wearing only blue swim trunks, a white lifeguard hat, and a whistle around his neck on a chain. His skin smelled of Coppertone oil.

“Hi,” he said simply, and in the middle of that hot humid day, Suzanna had shivered into goose bumps. The connection had been as quick and definite as that.

“Hi,” she said. Dave squatted down on the sand beside her to chat, and that night
he took her out for a Coke. In a week they were going steady, and in three weeks, just before he went off to college, she slept with him because she loved him so.

He loved her, too. He came home whenever he could, which meant a three-hour drive from Boston, and wrote letters to her two or three times a week, in spite of the fact that he hated writing. But he was far away, and at college, where there were all sorts of parties, dances, beer fests—eventually he broke off with her, telling her he still loved her, but that he needed to be able to date other girls. Suzanna had been nearly inconsolable, and had finished out her senior year in high school wishing only that Dave would ask her to marry him. Her parents had to force her to enter college, she had so little energy or imagination for anything but Dave. But Dave did not ask her to marry him. He told her again and again he still did love her but wanted to have some fun. So she had listlessly gone off to college—and once there, had been weak with relief that she hadn’t married Dave.

For her college days turned out to be full of a sort of gambling joy—there were so many men! Every day she awoke exhilarated with the possibilities ahead of her, and each time she walked down the long corridor of Jardine Hall, she smiled to herself to think that each classroom she passed held a different set of men to flirt with, date, and kiss. She didn’t sleep with as many men as she would have liked to, because the birth-control pill was not yet readily available and she had to worry about getting pregnant. Then, too, she did not want to be cheap and easy, so she slept with only the few boys she felt really in love with. But she delighted as much in the preliminary challenges and temptations, in all the shimmering, unpredictable stages of romance. She liked the way that, during the course of an evening, a boy she was interested in would hold her closer and closer against him as they danced, until their hips touched and his hand moved down from the middle of her back to the small of her back to the rise of her buttocks. He would carefully press her more firmly against him, and she would nestle her face against his shoulder and press her hand against the back of his neck with a corresponding gentleness that let him know it was okay.

When she was a sophomore, Dave finally asked her to transfer colleges and marry him, but she was at the stage he had been at two years before: she was too busy having fun. She couldn’t, in fact, imagine being married. She wanted to finish college, teach elementary school, and live a life flitting from one man to another. Her young love for Dave had been so painfully intense and overwhelming that she wanted years of antidote:
she wanted freedom and frivolity. She moved through her college years as though at a casino of romance, and enjoyed it all. If a man stopped dating her, she took it in stride, because her relationship with Dave had taught her, if nothing else, how to deal with that sort of grief—she immediately began dating other people, which always proved a quick and certain remedy. And she broke a few hearts herself, unwittingly, and one of them, in the end, was Dave’s. When she graduated from college, Dave came to the commencement ceremonies, and afterward, he asked her once more to marry him. She stood before him, still in her black robe, holding on to her flat mortarboard against a spring breeze, and said no. As they looked at each other, she realized that she had come to care for Dave in an almost fraternal manner. The passion, on her side, was really gone. She was sorry she did not love him, because she liked him so. But she could not conjure or force up the emotions that had once so suddenly exploded within her, and for the last time she and Dave kissed, and parted. He went to Oregon to work as an engineer.

Suzanna went to Londonton, to take a job teaching first grade. Londonton was only a two-hour drive from her hometown, only a one-hour drive from her college, so she always had visitors and seldom was lonely. But teaching made her feel grown-up, responsible. She began to admire the reliable lives of the teachers and parents of her first-graders; she wanted to live accordingly. When one of her old boyfriends, who had become a stockbroker in Boston, came to see her one weekend to ask her to marry him, she almost accepted, in spite of the fact that she didn’t love him.

But she was glad she hadn’t, because three days later she met Thomas Blair. He was a newly tenured professor at the local college, and single. They first saw each other in the Grand Union grocery store, where they were each pushing a huge metal shopping cart filled with pathetic little quarts of milk and cottage cheese, tiny cans of vegetables, and plastic sacks with two lonely apples. Tom came around a corner too fast and accidentally slammed Suzanna’s cart with his.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, and took a good look at her, and smiled.

“That’s all right,” she said, taking a good look at him, and smiling back.

There was something in Tom that reminded her of Dave—he was tall and skinny like Dave, and moved with the same jock grace. But Tom had dark hair and brown eyes, and where Dave had been cute and appealing, Tom was downright handsome. In those days Suzanna was still slim, and her thick brown hair was cut in a flattering pageboy. She and Tom liked each other’s looks. They moved off from each other, each in different
directions of the grocery store, and they attempted to direct their attention to boxes of macaroni and paper napkins. But they were very much aware of whether or not the other was in the same aisle. Suzanna was furious at herself for breathing so loudly and because her boot squeaked. Then she didn’t see him for a few moments and assumed he had bought his groceries and left. She was disappointed, but plodded along down the dairy aisle, pushing her cart listlessly, and there he was. He came hurtling around the corner again, and almost rammed into her a second time.

“Look,” he said, “excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude, but can I speak to you? My name is Thomas Blair, and I teach English at the college, and I’ve just moved to town. I’m single and healthy and have no police record or illegitimate children, and I’d like to know if you would join me for dinner tonight. That is, if you’re free. That is, if you’re not married, or engaged to someone bigger than I am.”

How charming he was! She had to laugh at the thought of someone bigger than he, and she was flattered by the way he rushed his words as he spoke to her, as if he were really nervous at confronting her. He had hunched up his shoulders while he talked, like some awkward boy, as if he had no idea how handsome he really was. Of course she went out to dinner with him that night. They talked, they laughed. Suzanna was entranced. And Tom did not hide the fact that he wanted to make her like him. He kept saying things like: “Would you like me to open the car door for you or not? I don’t want to offend you, if you’re a feminist, but I don’t want to seem rude.” And he smiled as he spoke, such a smile that Suzanna wanted to say, “Oh, let me open the door for
you
!” He was thirty years old, a professor with tenure at the college, a man who had just published a book of essays on Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt; yet when he walked Suzanna to the door that first night he was as ingenuous as a child.

“There’s a party tomorrow night at a friend’s house,” he said. “Would you go with me?” He stood before her, shoulders hunched up again, both hands shoved into his jeans pockets.

“Yes, I’d like that,” Suzanna replied.

“Great! I’ll pick you up at eight!” Without taking his hands out of his pockets, he leaned forward quickly and kissed her—on the cheek—grinned like a little boy, and raced back to his car.

Suzanna let herself into her apartment and leaned against the door with her hand against her cheek. Nothing could have seduced her more than that shy breathy kiss.

The party the next evening was at the home of a junior member of the History department. Suzanna knew she should be glad for the opportunity to meet so many people her own age here in Londonton, but as she followed Tom through the crowd of people to the kitchen to get a drink, she resented all the others. She wanted to be alone with Tom. Everything was very casual: the sink was full of bottles of beer stashed in ice; the kitchen table held paper cups, several gallons of cheap wine, and cheese and Triscuits on paper plates. People were leaning against the refrigerator and stove and walls, talking and laughing, and they all seemed so glad to see Tom. He introduced her and everyone responded pleasantly, but it was obvious that it was Tom’s attention they wanted. She could understand why. Tom seemed to know just what tone to take with each person, just how to joke or flatter each individual, and it was perfectly natural for him to stand close to people, to wrap a friendly arm around a woman’s waist or a man’s shoulder. He was a toucher. People touched him back.

Suzanna made her own way around the house, meeting people, chatting, and she felt at ease, but she was always aware of just where Tom was, and whom he was with. He was so
popular
! He was so handsome, so endearing—so sexually appealing. She stood in the living room listening to a perfectly nice woman give her tips on the best shops in Londonton, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Tom settle back on the sofa next to a pretty red-haired woman. The two leaned into each other, nestling conspiratorially. Suzanna felt all the emotions of her high school days revive: jealousy, possessive lust, a sense of urgency. It was more a need for protection than a desire to manipulate that made her welcome with unusual warmth the attentions of an unmarried history professor who presented himself before her. She was as charming to him as she could be, and soon they were leaning up against the living-room wall, shoulders touching, their own conspiracy established. Then Suzanna began to feel a steady beam of attention focused on her as definitely as a light. She turned to glance at Tom and saw that he was staring at her with steady intensity. Surprised, she flashed him a proper party smile, but he did not smile back. He continued to stare at her, until she felt caught in that stare, surrounded by it, a fly in honey. The smile slipped from her face; she felt stunned. She felt that she and Tom were caught in a moment of truth: their mutual consuming desire. Next to her the history professor stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, while the redhead leaning against Tom gave him a playful pinch on the arm to remind him of her presence, then turned to see what in the world had so captured his attention. Still Tom stared at Suzanna, and
Suzanna at Tom, spellbound. She felt her face go warm and rosy—with wine, with desire, with embarrassment at being so obvious in a public place—but before she could turn away, Tom rose from the sofa and came across the room to her. By then half the party had fallen silent and watchful.

“Let’s go,” Tom said, and put his arm around Suzanna’s shoulders and led her to the door.

Suzanna could not speak. They did not even think to tell the hosts good-bye.

They went down the three long wooden steps of the porch and two feet more before Tom pulled Suzanna to him in a kiss so passionate that all reality gave a little shudder: this was real, this was a point of crisis. She was relieved—she had not misinterpreted his look. She pressed her body against him, and he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her forehead, cheeks, lips, neck, shoulders. He ran his hands down her sides and up the front of her jean-covered thighs; he slid his hands up inside her loose pullover sweater.

“We can’t do this—here!” Suzanna gasped. “Tom, people can see us!”