Enchanted Islands (32 page)

“I thought that was opposable thumbs.”

He had made a joke, a feat of which I had thought him incapable. I laughed.

The coffee cup shook on its saucer, and the silverware began to jump around on the table. The salt and pepper shakers knocked together, and before I could wrap my mind around what was happening, I had been pulled onto the dirty floor under the table.

I had lived in San Francisco long enough that a small earthquake didn't scare me, especially after the big one of 1906, and it was likely that I would have stayed seated waiting for it to pass. Of course, Joseph was right to get under the table, but if one did that for every small tremor, we'd be living under tables.

I could hear his breathing and he reached for and clutched my hand tightly, though the tremor passed quickly. I felt a shock of electricity. He looked at me, his brown eyes searching, vulnerable. So this is how it starts, I thought. A heightened shared experience, a significant look.

I could choose now. And I thrilled to think I had a choice. I could make this happen, easily, this affair with this stilted man. Certainly Ainslie had done so. I didn't think he would begrudge me the same freedoms he enjoyed. Joseph belonged to my Rosalie life, a separate plane of existence, almost a different planet. Rosalie was San Francisco, was history, was the alternate story where I married within the faith and raised children.

The noise of the diner resumed, the nervous laughs of relief, the banging of dishes put back on the shelf or rattling as they were swept up from the floor. I heard the waitress yell, “Over easy!”

I couldn't think. I couldn't speak. Of their own accord my legs got me up out from under the table and I grabbed my purse and coat, running outside. If Joseph called my name, I didn't hear him.

Throughout that afternoon I had cotton in my ears. I could hear people, but only from far away. I told everyone I was rattled by the earthquake, which I'm sure no one believed. Finally Childress told me to go home a bit early and not to worry about the personal hours.

“That bad?” I asked.

“No, not at all,” he said. “I just don't need you. No reason for you to sit here and push papers.”

That bad.

I decided to walk home, to lose myself in the bustle of immigrant Chinatown, through my old neighborhood, the Fillmore, which had become the jazz district. I had thought all the nonsense of sex was behind me. And now someone wanted me, an experience I had rarely enjoyed. I wasn't sure how deep his interests lay, whether he was simply lonely and I was available, or if he really saw something in me that he wanted to be closer to.

I wanted to do this, I realized. I wanted to do this for myself. I had sacrificed so much, deprived myself of so many things for my country, for Ainslie. Now I wanted something for me. I wasn't particularly attracted to Joseph, but I was attracted to his attraction to me. Even on Ainslie's most attentive days, his mind was always racing elsewhere. And, if I had been honest with myself, I wanted Ainslie to know that I was capable of having an affair as well.

But was Joseph a good choice? First, I barely knew him, but I could see that all was not peaceful within him. Then there was the clear complication that Rosalie knew both of us. How could I explain to her that my marriage was not what it seemed?

And then there was the same argument that I'd used with Ainslie when I caught him with Victor. Infidelity meant that someone could blackmail you, someone had that dreaded leverage. Worse, you could volunteer your secrets. Better to stay distant.

I went back and forth. I'm sure no one ever agonized so rationally over an affair. And then I asked for a sign from above from a God I didn't think I believed in. If that streetlight changed before I entered the intersection, if that dog turned around three times…

I got home to find a letter from Ainslie, full of his jolly anecdotes that would pass the censor. He closed with love and missing me, and while I'm not sure if I believed that or not, I knew he meant it in his own way, and I was comforted.

I avoided Rosalie's Shabbat dinners; I was worried I'd see Joseph there. Instead, I went to the library and took out the classics that had comforted me in the past. I reread all of Austen, of Defoe, of Thackeray. Then I read Tolstoy (that took a while). And then something curious overtook me. I brought out my Galápagos diary and pen and paper and began to set down our adventures as a book. I doubted that the government would let even a sanitized account be published, but it gave me pleasure to pretend we were still there, to listen to sirens and imagine braying donkeys, to hear horns and imagine birds, to be interrupted by shouts and imagine sea lion bulls. It ended up being a rather funny account, and in this way many weeks passed without me realizing that they had. It was the best sort of distraction.

Rosalie continued to invite me out; she wouldn't take no for an answer. She said I wasn't allowed to “wallow in the soup of sadness.” But I turned down luncheons, lectures, outings, lessons. Then it was Clarence's fiftieth birthday. Rosalie was planning quite a to-do, and would not be put off by my excuses that I was working on a book. It was ridiculous to her that I would bother to write in my off-hours. I assumed Joseph would be there. But who cared? We hid under the table during an earthquake. Hardly news. I should have known by the way I overreacted that I was indeed reacting to something.

I put on a dress that I knew Rosalie would dislike, a little act of rebellion. It was plum and waistless, more of a 1920s style than 1940s. The 1920s had been kinder to those built like me. I pinned my hair up messily, wore only lipstick as makeup. There was no buying new stockings, so I went bare-legged.

It was a large party, noisy in Rosalie's high-ceilinged rooms. Waiters were passing Tom Collinses and so I took one. I knew various people vaguely, but they knew me to be a bit of a challenged conversationalist, and so they merely greeted me instead of coming over. I took a second Tom Collins.

Rosalie had a proprietary hand on Clarence's back. She was steering him around the party, pulling him away from the bores and making sure his glass was full. Did Rosalie love Clarence? She was unable to tease apart what he gave her—security, children, a nice life, servants—with how she might have felt about him. So she was content. And, like I had been our entire childhood, up to our abrupt rupture, I was jealous. Rosalie was beautiful; Rosalie was rich. She'd had a hard life, yes, but she was a fur seal: Water slid off her back as she glided through it, at home in sea and on land.

I stood apart as I tend to do at social events, a scientist observing the finches chattering at one another, flitting off to alight on other branches. I was the lone human observer. I felt this separation keenly, tragically. My glass empty, I plopped onto the sofa. And then here, of course, was Joseph.

“Are you all right?”

I bit my lips to avoid the tears that were welling.

He must have seen my distress. “Come,” he said. “I'll take you home.”

I could not have afforded a taxi, and I doubt that he had budgeted for one either, but we found one dropping off another couple and I mumbled my address. He saw me into the apartment and put on water for coffee. And then I took off my coat. I unzipped my dress and let it fall to the ground. He stood watching me. I pulled my slip over my head, unhooked my bra. I stepped out of my panties. All the while he stood at the sink. His expression was impossible to read. I steeled myself for rejection. For a moment I thought I'd had it all wrong, that I'd completely misread the cues. He turned around and I wanted to disappear off the planet, so intense was my humiliation.

He turned off the kettle and walked toward me, appraising me. He took my hands and brought them to his mouth, kissing them, and we fell into each other.

We continued to see each other in the weeks that followed. I was free of guilt. Joseph proved to be a skilled lover, attentive in a way he was not during conversations. He would come over, we had sexual relations, and he left. So different from Ainslie's chattering. He rarely spent the night, and when he did our conversations in the morning were like an old married couple's—the weather, the strength of the coffee, who should go down and get the newspaper.

The landlord lived on the bottom floor, and one day his wife knocked on my door just after I'd gotten home from work. She must have been waiting for me to arrive. I invited her in; she claimed she couldn't stay but a moment and stood in the hallway.

“This is delicate,” she said. “I've seen a man, coming over, several times.”

I wasn't going to help her out. I smiled.

“And sometimes I see him leaving. In the morning.”

I continued to offer her nothing.

“It's just that, for the sake of the other tenants, families, you know…I thought you were married. Your husband was helping the war effort?”

“That's right,” I said. “Ainslie's in the Pacific.”

“Well, we appreciate his service, of course. So brave, but I'm just wondering who your visitor is, then.”

I was taking a grim pleasure in her suffering, like a dog toying with a chicken he's caught. “You must be referring to my cousin Joseph. He was recently widowed, so he comes over and I make him dinner, the poor dear, and sometimes it gets late and he stays on the sofa. Not that it's any of your beeswax.”

“Of course not,” she said quickly. “I'm just making sure you're safe.”

“I believe I'm safe enough with my cousin.”

Red-faced, stammering, she left.

I laughed about this with Joseph. He was smoking in bed, a habit he shared with Ainslie that I abhorred.

“Well, cousin,” he said. “Thank you for consoling me. And all the meals.”

“Were you ever married, cousin?” We had never spoken about our lives. He knew I was married, saw the picture of Ainslie and me on the entry table, but he never asked about it. He never asked me about anything after that day at the luncheonette.

“I might still be,” he said, “though I doubt it.”

I looked at him.

“When I came here, I offered for her to come, but she said she didn't want to until I was settled. So I got settled, and then she said she needed a year. And then she said she didn't want to leave home. I was preparing to return when the war broke out.”

“And…what happened to her?”

Joseph looked up at the ceiling as he shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “There is no communication there.” He rolled over to stub out his cigarette.

“How can you be so…” I trailed off.

“So?” he asked.

“Callous? Cavalier?”

“What is my choice? We were estranged before I left. At least we had no children. I hope for her sake she is alive and married elsewhere. More likely she is dead. But I do not expect to see her again in this life.”

I lay back against the pillow, aghast. I pulled the covers up over me with a shiver. With whom was I sharing my bed?

“You're strange,” Rosalie said, as we were getting our hair done on Saturday afternoon. I was reading
The Woman in White
and Rosalie was reading
Woman's World
magazine while we sat under the silent dryers, waiting for our set hair to cool enough to remove the curlers.

“I don't know what you mean,” I said.

“You're queer, somehow, cagey.”

“And you're paranoid,” I said.

“You know,” she turned to me from the bubble of her dryer, “you never said what you do all day at work.”

“You've never asked.”

“Okay, fine, what do you do all day?”

“Mostly I answer phones, type letters, fill in budget reports.”

“But for whom?”

“I told you, navy intelligence, which is not an oxymoron, despite the name.” I looked across the salon at the clock, whose hands were moving slowly. Another ten minutes to dry.

“As in, spying?”

“Ha.” I threw my head back, overselling it, perhaps, as the curlers bumped the dryer. “More like observations. Cargo ships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, what they see.”

“And do you get any information from the Pacific?”

“Well, yes,” I answered truthfully. My boring job had gotten even more boring, now that all the real intelligence was done in the central OSS office. “But mostly it's just in the form of data, so it's not particularly interesting. It's not like I'm decoding messages from the Japs or arranging prisoner-of-war exchanges.”

Rosalie nodded. “Why is life never as glamorous as we imagine it?”

“So that there is a market for fantasy.” I pointed at her magazine.

Rosalie returned to the page. I could tell something was brewing, though.

“Fanny?” she asked. “The magazine says that there are five signs that your man is straying, and, well, Clarence has some of those.”

“Do you think?” I asked. Her eyes were wide and glistening.

“I don't know what to think. He goes down to Los Angeles every other week. He could be doing anything.”

“What are the signs?” I asked.

She read: “ ‘He's secretive about his plans, and he often comes home late.' True, but that was always the case. And he's not secretive, he's just not…communicative.”

“That doesn't seem damning,” I said. “What else?”

“ ‘He seems distracted.' He does. I commented on it a couple of days ago at dinner. It's like he's physically present but his mind is somewhere else entirely.”

“What did he say?” I was still unconcerned. One of the great advantages of living on the Galápagos was freedom from the women's rags, which were invented to make women feel incompetent and inferior, not to mention fearful and insecure.

“He said work was stressful.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“ ‘There is an increase in presents, bought for no reason.' He brought home this brooch just last week saying it made him think of me!”