Other Women (10 page)

She’d have grown up to be a mother, a nurse, a therapist, a social worker, burdened as she was with her mother’s sympathy for anything weak or injured. And Joanna, brisk and efficient as a little girl, the librarian when the kids played library, head nurse when they played hospital. A successful stockbroker now, president of the Lake Glass Business and Professional Women’s League, New Hampshire Businesswoman of the Year last year. The game warden once gave them an abandoned fawn. Joanna planned how to shelter and feed it, but it was Mona who nursed it with a baby bottle day after day.

As to how Hannah was managing without them-well, it certainly was different now in this perpetually neat and quiet house. She kept waiting for the empty nest syndrome to arrive, but so far it hadn’t. Occasionally she felt lonely, but it was easy to convert that into a sense of delicious solitude. She had only to recall the chaos of a house crammed with small children; the piles of laundry and dirty dishes and broken toys; the fights and blaring music. Of course during that raucous phase she maintained her sanity by reminding herself that one day soon they’d all be gone and she’d miss their mad chaos. That time arrived, much sooner than she’d imagined, and miss them she did. But not to the point of not savoring this sudden stillness, broken only by the snapping of the fire in the Franklin stove and the rustle of Arthur’s

Wall Street Journal.

That was probably the difference between her and some of the mothers who landed in her office. They felt frantic during the chaos, lost when it was over.

She strolled into the living room and fixed herself another martini in the antique pine dry sink that served as a bar, wondering if she drank too much.

It was true that a night without a martini seemed to her like a birthday without a cake. But she never claimed to be an ascetic. She sat down on the leather couch across from Arthur, who smiled at her over his paper. He wore his favorite tattered green sweater with leather buttons and elbow patches, which made him look like Mr. Chips. She began sorting through that day’s clients. She tried to identify and detach from the emotions that swirled through her office so they didn’t distract her. Early in her career it had been tempting to regard them as real and to leap into the fray, but eventually she realized that the emotions clients sparked in her were important only as clues to the reactions they’d elicited from previous significant people in their lives. If she felt anger, probably that client was accustomed to inciting anger.

Ed, an engineering student with a double cowlick and lanky legs, had been in that afternoon. Gentle, whimsical, and attractive, he struck her as the kind of young man Nigel would have become. He talked about his sexual attraction to older women.

She’d guessed this

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was coming and had felt the attraction too. These attractions tended to be fleeting. Apart from her devotion to Arthur, to lose interest she had only to think about how much training a young person would require. Training in physical lovemaking, since the enthusiasm of youth couldn’t compensate for the expertise of long experience. But especially training about what one could reasonably expect from anperson, training about the space and freedoms you had to allow so as not to kill off the qualities that drew you to someone in the first place. She’d been through all this with Arthur-the frantic demands for proofs and declarations of devotion-in the course of learning to let love alone, to wax and to wane, to heave and shift and settle and heave again, without endless dreary dissection. Learning to come as close as possible for two.people lodged in separate bodies, but then to accept the necessities of that separateness and move away, sadly perhaps but without rancor, knowing you were merely setting the stage for reenacting the pleasure of breaking down the separateness once again.

“How much older?” she asked Ed with a smile, teasing him to defuse the issue.

“A lot older.” He blushed and gazed at her.

Fuck you, kid, you just blew it, she thought. “Ed, let’s look at why you bring that up now … . his Sipping her martini, she considered Caroline’s wariness about transference. Quite right. They couldn’t just replace their parents with her as their magical protector. They had to find protection within themselves. But how to get them to switch from looking out to looking in? Transference was so delicious at first, like being in love.

Probably it was the same thing. At the time, in her grandmother’s house overlooking the Heath, she’d have said she was “in love” with Arthur. But in retrospect it certainly resembled the transference she felt later toward Maggie, and that many clients now seemed to feel toward herself. The same hunger for acceptance-and the same eventual fury at feeling such need, longing, and gratitude. After she and Arthur had been going at it for several weeks in her Victorian sleigh bed, she sat up one morning and announced, “You miserable bastard!”

“What?” He rolled over, his brown hair scrambled, and opened his eyes in alarm.

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“You’re going to leave me.”

“What?” He sat up, clutching the covers to his chest.

“Get out of here.”

“Huh?”

“I said go away.” She shoved him out of bed with her feet.

“What are you talking about? I love you.” He stood there on the cold oak floor, naked and vulnerable in the early morning light.

“Oh, do shut up!” She began sobbing.

“I have to return to America. But I’ll come back for you.” He climbed under the covers again.

As he tried to hold her, she swatted him over the head with the folded London

Times,

snarling, “Don’t bather. Just scram and get it over with.” She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth, thinking of her handsome father in Trinidad with his bright white teeth, thinking of Colin rotting in his mossy Belgian grave, thinking of her mother turned to dust in the Outback. Loving people wasn’t worth it.

“Arthur did scram that day, but he came backand kept coming back. Gad knows why, since she insisted on punishing him for the others who’d run out on her.

Except that he always acknowledged she was the best piece of ass he’d ever had.

Stubbing out her cigarette and setting her martini on the end table, she called sweetly,

“Arthur.” They’d had no further problems once they established that he made the big decisions, like whom America would go to war with, and she decided everything else. “Get over here.”

“I recognize that tone of voice,” said Arthur, lowering the Wall

Street

Journal. “I believe it’s my wild

aboriginal rose.”

“Damn right,” she said, patting the couch beside her.

Standing outside her office door, hand resting on the doorjamb, Hannah closed her eyes and tried to regain her composure after an hour with a banker who’d been sodomizing his son. Doing therapy had gotten easier since her discovery that she wasn’t running the show. When she first started, fresh out of graduate school, she took notes, analyzed them in accordance with whichever theory had her in its .otherwomen

grip, and plotted a course of action. Then, when clients failed to conform to her plans, she wanted to kill them. But over the years, as she struggled to make sense of Mona’s and Nigel’s deaths, she was forced to choose between cracking up and accepting that events occurred at their own pace and for reasons that were often opaque. You tried to learn from whatever happened, however little enthusiasm you might feel.

Caroline sat on the tweed couch feeling alternately alarmed and pleased that she hadn’t divided her list into categories. Would Hannah kick her out? But Hannah hadn’t seemed to care about the list last week. Doing the list hadn’t pleased her. Telling her jokes hadn’t. For God’s sake, what did she want?

Caroline’s glance shifted to the gray stone Venus on the windowSwollen belly, hands resting on huge breasts. Seemed like a dykey object to have in an office. Was that why Hannah hadn’t been shocked when Caroline came out to her? She was a lesbian too? No, that was ridiculous. She was far too respectable. Besides, she’d mentioned some repulsive husband. Caroline didn’t care for the idea of Hannah with a man. But she was probably too old to sleep with anybody.

What’s it to me whether Hannah sleeps with her husband, Caroline reflected. She’d better stick to the topic at hand-herself. Should she reveal her meditations on Pink Blanky? It seemed a bit much.

Hannah walked in dressed in a wool skirt, navy blazer, and pinstriped shirt open at the throat. And no shoes. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Caroline nodded toward the Venus. “That thing’s neat. Where did you get it?”

“Bought it at a stall in a market the last time I was in London. It was a blustery day, and she looked so exposed I felt I had to rescue her.” The last time she’d been in London had been for her grandfuneral, at Christ Church down the street from the house on the Heath. Probably she bought the statue in a vain attempt to replace the old woman. A portable mother figure that would never die.

“How come you have it in here?”

How come you want to know, wondered Hannah. “The originals of those statues were used in fertility ceremonies. The community held the image of a fruitful female in their heads, and then their flocks and herds and crops and families prospered. And that’s more or less

what I do in here. So I keep it around to remind me.” She sat down and rested her stocking feet on the rush footstool.

“What?” Caroline thought they were doing therapy in here, not hocus-pocus.

“What what?”

“I don’t see what you mean.”

“I hold an image of a healthy happy coping client in my mind, and that’s what I work toward.

If I held the idea of a depressed depenclient in my mind, then that’s what I’d work toward.”

Hannah shook a brown cigarette from a pack of Mores on her desk and put it between her lips.

“I disagree.”

“You disagree that’s what I do?” Hannah raised her eyebrows. The lady was combative today. Good.

Hannah could use a nice set-to. She was still a bit agitated from her sodomist.

“I disagree it’s that simple.”

“Well, that’s certainly your privilege.” She’d had enough success with her methods not to have to defend them.

“It’s also your privilege to stay depressed if you want to.” Flicking her lighter, she drew the flame into the tip of her cigarette.

“Want to?”

“It’s your choice.” Hannah exhaled a steady stream of smoke into the beam of weak winter sunlight coming through the window.

“Choice? If you really look at this world, you can’t help being depressed.” Apparently Hannah had never been depressed. She didn’t know how it felt for the air to turn too heavy to breathe.

“That all depends on what you see when you look.

What do you see?” Hannah arranged both arms along her chair arms, hands hanging over the ends.

“Injustice, brutality, war, hunger.”

“True. But it’s also a place of incredible beauty and intricacy. Inhabited by some people capable of great generosity and decency.”

“Tell me about it.” Didn’t this woman read the papers?

“I just did,” said Hannah. “Why are you so pissed off today?” Caroline’s mouth looked pinched, and there was a slow blue burn to her eyes.

“Who’s pissed off?” Hannah had dumped on her jokes last week,

—

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and she was right to. They were here to deal with Caroline’s depression. Caroline was determined to keep it businesslike. Hannah seemed to have some skills, and maybe Caroline could benefit from them, but she didn’t have to start liking her. She’d regard these sessions as visits to the dentist, appointments with the plumber.

“You want to know why I think you’re pissed off?”

Caroline heaved an impatient sigh.

“Because you’re starting to like me.” She looked at Caroline matter-of-factly.

Caroline was astounded. Like her? She didn’t even know her. She hadn’t been angry before, but she was certainly getting angry. “The real reason I’m angry is that when I told you I was a lesbian, you changed the subject. It took me a long time to face that, and you just shrugged.” She remembered her horror when she woke up naked in bed with Clea, whose golden hair fanned out across the pillow like harvested wheat in the summer sun. She’d made love with a woman. She’d taken to it like a hog to mud. She practically wore David Michael to a stub in the ensuing weeks trying to prove that she wasn’t a pervert. Surely lesbianism couldn’t descend unheralded onto such a vigorous heterosexual. But it had. Which was why Hannah kept fleeing the topic.

“I didn’t know you still trusted me so little,”

said Hannah, glancing out to the parking lot.

Jonathan stood talking to a man leaning on a shovel who’d just scraped ice off the sidewalk.

Sometimes she wished she had a nice straightforward job like shoveling snow.

Caroline felt a stab of remorse. Hannah wanted to be trusted, and Caroline had let her down. But what did trust have to do with anything? “What makes you think I don’t trust you? What I just said?”

Hannah nodded, drawing on her cigarette.

“See? You did it again. Changed the subject.”

“I didn’t change the subject. I was trying to address what was really going on.”

“What was really going on,” said Caroline, “was that I was trying to talk about my sexuality, and you changed the subject.”

“What was really going on, from my point of view, was that we got pretty close last week, and now a reaction has set in.” Hannah felt at WOMEN”

an unfair advantage. She’d been through this so many times. Whereas to Caroline it was all new, real, and in earnest.

Was this true, Caroline wondered. Hannah told her last week she was kind and gentle. But she hadn’t really meant it. It was a ploy, something to do with that stone Venus. “Why can’t you just accept my lesbianism?”

Hannah laughed and shook her head. “But I do accept it, Caroline. You make love with women, and I make love with men. Fine. Who cares?”

So she did screw her husband, reflected Caroline. Men? Who besides her husband? Maybe she wasn’t as respectable as she looked. What about those bare feet? “You don’t really think it’s fine.” Caroline knew that a woman who hadn’t felt desire for another woman regarded lesbianism as an inferior form of sexuality, fit only for the unfeminine and the immature. This was incorrect, but you couldn’t tell hardened heterosexuals anything. They had biology and the pope on their side.