Nell (13 page)

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “We
like
Steve.”

Nell stared at Hannah. Oh shit, she thought, they like Steve. But she said, “You’re two good kids.”

She put the children to bed, then took a long, soaking hot bath. The silence and heat relaxed her, and soon she was chuckling to herself over the events of the day, thinking how Katy would laugh when she described the picnic and the pigs and the motorbike contests to her.

As she was getting out of the bathtub, just reaching for a towel, there was a knock at the door. She hurriedly dried, slipped into her robe, and went down the stairs. Her long hair was wet at the ends from the bath and clung to her shoulders and back; she could feel it through the robe. She was too tired to care much who could be knocking. It was Steve.

“I’m sorry if I got you out of the bath,” he said, leaning on the doorframe. “I just felt so bad when I left earlier, I thought I’d come back and talk with you about it.”

“Oh, Steve, that’s nice of you,” Nell said. “I’m sorry I was so grumpy. Come on in. Do you want some coffee?”

They went into the kitchen. There was a moment when Nell, at the stove in only her robe, barefoot, wet-headed, heating the singing kettle for instant coffee, turned and saw Steve seated at the kitchen table, idly looking at the evening’s newspaper, and she felt at home. This was a familiar and comforting way to be: a man and a woman, intimate in the kitchen of the house. And Steve had not changed. He was sexy and he was kind. She was relaxed. She wanted to go to bed with him.

“Nell, I’m sorry I made you mad by hitting Jeremy,” Steve said. “But then when I got home, I started thinking about it. Started thinking you and I better talk about it. You know, your kids could use a man around now and then. And you know, well, we’ve been going together for three months now, and—” he stopped.

“And what?” Nell said. She had fixed the mugs of coffee for herself and Steve and now she brought them to the table, moving slowly, almost dreamily, in a sort of warm trance of sexuality. She was so lazy-minded from her bath. She felt her clean soft skin under her comfortable robe. She saw Steve’s strong body there, solid on the chair. Soon they would be in bed together. In a few minutes she would be lying naked with his body against hers. She was not really listening to his words.

“And I think we should talk about a few things,” Steve went on. “I’m beginning
to be pretty serious about you, you know. I don’t have much to offer you, but—”

“Jesus!” Nell said. She tripped over the leg of a chair and spilled hot coffee down her robe. “That’s
hot!
Ouch. Damnit! Steve, here, take your coffee. I’ve got to go change out of this robe.”

She set both mugs on the table, her mug still sloshing over with brown liquid, and she fled from the kitchen, up the stairs. She quickly changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, and the entire time she was thinking, “Oh no, now what am I going to do?” It sounded very much as though Steve were on the way to proposing marriage, or at least some serious arrangement, and she knew she wasn’t ready for that.

Now, years later, that evening with Steve was one of the evenings of her life that Nell tried to forget. Or rather she tried to forget the details and tried to hang on to the moral, which was: For God’s sake, be careful! Steve had thought he was in love with her. He had thought she was in love with him. Had thought he would make a good father to her children. Had thought they might someday get married.

Nell had explained to him as kindly as she could that it was just too soon for her. She had been divorced such a short time. She liked Steve, and she loved being in bed with him, but she wasn’t sure, in all honesty, if she was in love with him. She thought it was too soon, too early, for her to really fall in love.

“Well, I don’t know how you can carry on in bed like that unless you love me,” Steve said.

“I don’t either,” Nell said. “But come on, give me a break. After all, we both carried on that first night together, and we weren’t either of us in love with the other one then.”

“Oh yeah?” Steve said. “That’s what you know.”

They had fought. Nell had cried. To their mutual and awful dismay, Steve had cried. Not much, but enough to make him go red in the face with chagrin. Finally, they agreed not to see each other anymore.

“I really thought I was in love with you,” Steve said. “I really thought you were in love with me. I can’t see you anymore knowing you just think this is all some kind of half-assed temporary thing.”

He had left angrily, and for good. Nell had cried some more. She had sat in the
kitchen and held Steve’s mug in her hands and put her mouth where she imagined his lips had been and cried.

But in her heart of hearts she knew she was a traitor, for among the hot muddle of emotions was a pure clean breeze of relief. She had gone on too long not introducing him to her friends, afraid he would embarrass her or feel inferior. She had gone on too long sitting through
Little House on the Prairie
shows with him when she would have preferred to read a book. She had gone on too long using him, as she had heard men use dumb blondes. At the Labor Day picnic, she had tried, and failed, to meet one of his friends with whom she could feel at ease. She had grown hot and impatient and bored and scornful at that picnic, watching the men on their motorbikes. She could never have a long-term relationship with Steve; she could never marry him.

But how horrible it was that she had hurt him. How incredibly insensitive she had been not to see that he thought he was falling in love with her. She thought all those young men just slept around casually with anyone, without ever taking it seriously. It had not given her any kind of pleasure or satisfaction at all to see Steve in tears. It had been as painful for her as seeing one of her children humiliated; it had been a wretched, excruciating moment. She thought of Steve going home alone to his farm, lying by himself in his double bed with the venetian blinds pulled shut against the night and his muddy boots dropped in the middle of the floor. She thought of how foolishly men handled their misery, hiding it in the dark, away from the eyes of others—that was what Steve would do, she was certain. He would not seek solace from his friends. He had already been hurt enough by exposing his emotions to her. She thought of how his face crumpled when she said she agreed that it would be better if they didn’t see each other again, and at the memory of his face like that, Nell’s heart crumpled inside her, a wastepaper heart, a useless heart, crushed in the fist of circumstance.

She had never meant to hurt that proud man. But she
had
hurt him, and she had done it as unwittingly as any fool. She was not a heartless bitch, but she might as well have been; the result was the same. She sat in the kitchen until three in the morning and disliked herself every minute of that time.

And that was her first time around.

Just months after her divorce from Marlow, she had met and enjoyed and hurt and
lost Steve. Wow, Nell had thought, how does all of this happen? Who’s in charge here? she wondered, and supposed that where love was concerned, no one was.

That fall she dated no one. Men asked her out, but she was too wary. She didn’t want to hurt them; she didn’t want to get hurt herself. And she was busy with her babysitting, too tired at night to simulate intelligence and charm. She just got her own children to bed and got in bed herself with a good book.

That fall turned into winter and the bills came in and Nell began to worry about money. She began to dream of money. She dreamed literal dreams about figures and dollars and columns of numbers. She dreamed convoluted, disguised money dreams, terrible dreams in which she sold the children she babysat to robotlike men who came knocking at her door for money, wild nightmarish dreams of walking black windy city streets with Jeremy at one hand and Hannah at the other, all of them crying with hunger, and she could see Jeremy’s toes sticking through his sneakers and Hannah’s elbows sticking through holes in her sweater. Nell would awake from these dreams sweating and panicked, her heart pounding an urgent drum-call in her chest: Fire, Help, Emergency, SOS, DANGER. She was tired all that fall and winter, and frightened. Jeremy got pneumonia. Marlow was in Europe, a guest professor at the Sorbonne; he was on half salary at the college and could keep up with the legally decreed child support payments but could give her no more. He was too far away to help, even to take the children for one night so she could have a rest. He was in many ways a great distance from her plight and the children’s. She was really alone.

Every morning that winter she would wake at six, dress, start the coffee, and begin to receive the babies and little children who were dropped off to her. As the weeks passed, Nell began to take on a maternal role in the lives of the parents as well as the children. They would come in, drop off their babies and the litter of bottles or potty chairs or Pampers, and complain. The best ones complained of tests they had to take for degrees, jobs they had to do, bosses who were mean. The worst ones complained of exhaustion from organizing charity luncheons and even the terror of a husband discovering a love affair. Nell listened to them all with goodwill and gave them sympathy and a cup of coffee and sent them on their way, then dealt with their children. More and more children began to come. More and more money was added up in her notebook.
Finally, Nell could breathe a little more easily about the bills, although it was always a struggle and she was never far from panic. It was only late that spring, when the O’Learys lured her to work in the boutique, that she had any real sense of financial security. Along with the sharp, biting anxiety about money, a deeper, more thrumming fear set itself up inside her. Was this it? Was this how her life was to be? She was thirty-four! She was unloved, and she seldom left her house except to go to the grocery store or the library or the druggist. She did not have the life she deserved, the life she had planned. She was lost and could see no hope of change.

Women would come to her house to drop off their children for the day, women with violet boots made in a leather so buttery Nell wanted to bite them. Women with clever, stylized coats, women with fur coats. Women who took their big diamond engagement and thick gold marriage rings off and slipped them inside their purses, casually, as they went out Nell’s door. Women who left their babies to go have facials and manicures and pedicures and lovers. Nell wore her navy blue corduroy jumper and a variety of old turtlenecks. The children didn’t care what she looked like, and someone was always peeing down her front anyway. Nell watched all those women leave her house and looked at herself and her life with a growing dismay. She did not have enough money to go out to lunch with friends or to the movies. All her money went toward paying the oil and electric bills, toward food, toward clothes for her children. She began to keep sterner accounts of the time she babysat. She had charged people by the half hour; now she charged them for each additional fifteen minutes, and even five minutes counted toward an additional fifteen. People were so cavalier about her time. They knew she liked the children and that she wasn’t going anywhere else anyway, so they were sometimes hours late picking up their children. But they paid their bills without complaining.

It was in February that Nell met Ben. Careful Ben. He was such a reserved man, such a really icy character, that Nell was certain she could never hurt
his
feelings. He was recently divorced and seemed to simply want the company of a reasonably pleasant woman. He took her to movies, concerts, ballets, plays—he took her out to dinner, and she did almost love him just for that. It seemed she had never known such joy as that of being seated in a quiet, candlelit restaurant with a good wine set before her in a goblet
and fat shrimp on ice in front of her and a thick sirloin steak on the way. When Ben took her to bed, she lay there licking her teeth and remembering, bite by bite, the food they had eaten earlier in the evening. Ben was an uninspired lover and, after the first few times, almost an uninterested one. He just sort of climbed on Nell and came and got off again and never paid much attention to how she might feel about it all. Nell didn’t know what to give Ben in exchange for the pleasures he gave her. Sex didn’t seem sufficient; he didn’t seem to enjoy being in bed with her nearly as much as she enjoyed eating the dinners he took her to. She tried harder each time she was with him to be animated and charming, to compliment and entertain him; if she couldn’t make him happy, she thought at least she could keep him from being bored. But she never thought about Ben when she was not with him. She never longed to see him. She never said one word of endearment to him or pretended that their embraces moved her very much.

So she was startled when, after only three months of dating, Ben asked her to marry him. She was so startled she almost laughed in his face. She didn’t, of course, laugh in his face, but she did refuse his offer of marriage; she did tell him that she did not love him. And it seemed to her when she looked into his eyes that night, when she looked through the thick lens of his glasses into his eyes, that she could see something glittering there, like the change of light at the end of a long hall when an opened door is pulled shut. She saw that she had hurt Ben. It was a comfort to her to know that at least he was a man incapable of being deeply hurt. After that night, he went off on a cruise in the Caribbean and they didn’t see each other again.

That was the second time around.

After that, Nell became even more careful about going out with men, about sleeping with men. One year she dated no one at all. Then she became lonely, so lonely that she thought she would pay money, take money from her children, to have some man just put his arms around her. And she did a forbidden thing, a thing she thought she would never do: She slept with another woman’s husband. Mark had a reputation for sleeping around, as did his wife. Nell checked all this out in advance. He was the type of man who got his kicks from sleeping around, and there never was any question of love or marriage between him and Nell. That was a great relief to Nell. She almost felt like someone who met him once a week for a game of squash or tennis, so unemotional was
their contact with each other. But he got bored with Nell after a while and moved on to sleeping with someone new.