Other Women (11 page)

“Who else in your life hasn’t thought it was fine?”

asked Hannah, putting her cigarette between her lips and leaning forward to shrug off her blazer, which she folded and lay on the desk. The sunlight through the window was baking her left shoulder.

As they sat in silence, Caroline

reflected that hardly anyone knew, to think one way or the other. David Michael had been appalled and had done his best to dissuade her from a life of bourgeois decadence, but she never saw him now.

Jackson probably had a clue because on the rare occasions when he showed any interest in Jackie and Jason, he grilled her about her living arrangement. Her parents carefully avoided that topic. She was going home for Christmas, but without Diana. There was no one in her life who thought lesbianism was fine except her lesbian friends.

Which was why she spent as much time as possible with them.

Though she’d had some lunches lately with Brian Stone, who kept dropping by the ER admissions desk in his scrub clothes while she was on duty.

His sad dark eyes were starting to take their toll.

She felt a growing need to cheer him up, bolster his shatego, make everything all right. A time or two she found herself wondering if lesbianism could be just an interlude in a lifetime of rampant heterosexuality.

(@.

OTHERWOMEN

“What are you so afraid of?” asked Hannah.

Caroline looked up. “Why would you

assume I’m afraid?”

Hannah pursed her lips and shrugged, stubbing out her cigarette in Nigel’s stone.

Caroline heard words coming from her mouth without her permission: “That I’ll open myself up to you and get clobbered.”

Hannah drew a sharp breath. Caroline’s candor, when it came, was painful. She left herself wide open. Hannah said nothing, unbuttoning and rolling her shirt sleeves to her elbows. Wanting Caroline to feel her wish to confide, cling, collapse-feel it, expose it to the air, find it didn’t frighten or appall Hannah, and needn’t Caroline herself. Caroline put on a brave show of tending everyone else. Doing for others what she wished someone would do for her.

“Well, I can’t promise that won’t happen,”

Hannah finally replied, lighting another cigarette, “because someone who’s determined to get clobbered will see a clobbering even when the other person intends nothing of the kind. But let’s set this aside for a while. How was your week?” Jonathan sometimes encouraged massive explosions, like emoelectroshock, but Hannah preferred to deplete the stockpile little by little. Most of her clients still had to function in the everyday world, and they couldn’t if they were in pieces.

Caroline slumped into the sofa, the armpits of her white uniform clammy. “I thought a lot about transference.”

“What about it?”

“About why I’m not going to do it again.”

“What was it like for you before?”

“Do you think it’s possible to transfer onto objects?”

“Sure. People transfer onto anything.

Ideologies, pets, shoes, pills. This world can seem a very scary place. Most people search for someor something to make everything all right.” Mary Beth yelled in the next room. Hannah glanced at Caroline, who didn’t seem to have noticed.

Caroline studied Hannah in her oxford cloth shirt, her eyes squintfrom cigarette smoke that drifted on the sunlight through the window. Maybe she understood more about the misery of the world than she let on?

“I had this pink blanket when I was a kid, and I used

to think if I covered myself with it, the knives of invading murderers would be deflected.”

Hannah nodded. “Sounds like a useful item.”

Caroline smiled.

“What happened to it? Or do you still have it?” Mary Beth yelled

again. Hannah frowned. What was this, Yankee Stadium?

“The maid cut it into cleaning cloths.”

Hannah grimaced, closing her eyes. “That’s bad.” She tried to avoid value judgments, but she was remembering how her children clung to their bottles, stuffed animals, and blankets, anchors in a turbulent sea of objects.

Simon used to stand mournfully in front of the washer while his blanket went through the cycle. Each child had disrupted at least one vacation by forgetting a cherished object and insisting they turn the car around to retrieve it. She bought Mona three identical stuffed lambs because she was always misplacing one and getting frantic. Nigel had dragged around a pink plastic bottle for years.

She glanced at her gray stone Venus, then at her mimi spirit. Was their function any different, however much classier their appearance? Whatever got you through the night. She glanced at her brown cigaIf she gave these things up, what unattractive habit would she replace them with? Maggie used to say in her Eastern European accent, “My dear Hannah, eftryvun is queer for somezing.” The trick was to get someone to replace fucking his son with stamp collecting.

“That must have been painful,” said Hannah.

Caroline thought this over, looking out the window. Lake Glass was doing its thing, reflecting in its still waters the sun overhead and a solitary bird in flight. It must have been painful, though she couldn’t recall feeling anything. “I was thinking this week about my best friend when I was a kid … . his As Caroline talked, Hannah reflected that Caroline’s reality was a vacuum of fear, insecurity, and longing for affection and protectionshe’d attempted to fill with a parade of people, objects, and projects. The color guard in Hannah’s similar parade included her parents, her grandparents, Colin, Arthur, Maggie. All dead now except for Arthur.

OTHER

“Do you realize,” asked Hannah, “that your feelings for Marsha were the same as for your blanket?”

“Yeah, the other night it hit me that I’ve felt like that towards a bunch of people. Time after time. Like angina attacks.”

Hannah smiled and nodded. “Very good. And so what happened with Marsha?”

“She got hit by a bread truck and died.”

Hannah flinched. Caroline’s expression was so bland that Hannah wondered if she’d ever mourned her friend.

“I should have been with her that day. She’d probably still be alive if I had been.”

Hannah shrugged. “Whatever happens, happens.

I think your pattern of feeling responsible for disaster was set much earlier.” If you’d caused World War II, subsequent disasters must seem like small beer.

Caroline pinched the bridge of her nose and frowned.

This hadn’t elicited the sympathy she’d expected.

Once again Hannah had just shrugged. “I was talking to a guy at the hospital yesterday. He smiled, and I felt this pang. I realized his smile was just like Marsha’s. I thought, God, the girl’s been dead over twenty years.”

“She’s part of your program now. In that sense she’s still alive for you. But it’s got nothing to do with her. You use the memory of her smile as an excuse to feel bad.”

Caroline looked at Hannah. Did she have any normal human emotions, or was everything just an intellectual exercise?

Hannah observed Caroline’s look of indignation, one she was accustomed to. But it was one way to jar a client out of a twenty-year rut. She remembered feeling similar outrage one day at the hospital when Maggie, dressed in a quilted bed jacket, meal tray on the bed table before her, eyes clouded with pain, said, “One nice thing about dying is that you don’t have to be on a diet.”

“Do you have any childhood photos?” asked Hannah, rolling down her shirt sleeves, suddenly chilled. Her internal thermometer was haywire today. Must be about time for some hot flashes.

Caroline nodded yes.

“Why don’t you bring some in next week?”

Caroline frowned and said nothing. They were moving to another

WOMEN

assignment, and Hannah hadn’t noticed that she’d failed to complete the last one.

“It helps me if I can picture whom we’re talking about,” explained Hannah, knowing Caroline would do it if the request was made in terms of helping someone else. Poor sap.

Hannah walked along the lake, which spread out still and silent to the snow-covered mountains on the horizon.

The cold air stung her cheeks. As she wrapped her arms across her parka, she reflected that there was nowhere on earth she’d rather be. But she hadn’t always felt this way. Compared with London, rural New England had seemed, as it must have to Arthur’s forebears in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, like a barren wilderness inhabited by savages. In her first months here, recently wed to Arthur, she experienced the sudden stillness as emptiness. And she proceeded to fill that emptiness-with babies, belongings, and emotional intrigue. She thought about the many flirtations she conducted at parties-the glances and innuendos, the phone calls and notes, the displays of outraged innocence on the bedroom threshold. Time after time through these unsuspecting men she punished her father and Colin for leaving-and Arthur for not leaving as he was supposed to. Arthur watched it all with a wry expression and still didn’t leave. And she felt contempt for his weakness, not having the sense to realize that his staying came from a strength she knew nothing about.

Besides, he couldn’t leave her. He’d given up too much to be with her in the first place.

She filled the house with china, silver, linens, and antiques. She filled her closet with expensive clothes. She insisted Arthur buy a Lincoln Continental and a sailing yacht.

And then Mona and Nigel died, and the antiques were stolen. The children were missed. The antiques were not.

Her previous life fell away like a dried-up husk. The yacht was sold. The silver was put into storage. She continued to wear the clothes, not noticing or caring as they went out of fashion. She avoided parties; and when she couldn’t, she avoided past and potential male prey.

Her clients talked about the complications of their lives as though

divinely ordained. They were unimpressed when she suggested they’d devised many of the complications themselves, and could therefore simply drop them. But fiveyear-old children knew this. On the shale beach where she now stood, she used to give her children sparklers on the Fourth of July. They traced elaborate designs on the night sky and yelled for her to come look. In no time the sparklers burned out, and the designs vanished without a trace.

The children too. But thirty-fiveyear-old children had lost track of the fact that it was their hands that waved the sparklers.

She strolled over to the flat gray rocks where her children had flopped and scrambled like small white seals. Ice coated the bare branches of the huge old oak at the water’s edge, from whose branches her children had swung on knotted ropes. Those had been frantic years, with four young children and a husband often away on business. She’d had very little idea what she was doing. Like Caroline with her pink blanket, Mona had clung to her stuffed lambs and Nigel to his pink bottle. She could recall times when she scowled at Nigel’s jokes and rebuffed Mona’s hugs. If she’d known then what she knew now about a parent’s impact on a child, she’d have behaved differently. But I didn’t know, she insisted to herself. How could I?

She pulled herself up short. This particular routine was too tedious. She’d done pretty well, especially considering that she had no parents to copy.

Witness how well Simon and Joanna turned out.

And Nigel and Mona had happy times and lots of love while they were here. She looked down into the still gray water and saw a middle-aged

woman, nearly old, in an overstuffed parka and Wellingtons, with a pleasant face and curly gray hair. She watched the woman touch her face with her gloved hand. Feeling her fingers against her face, she smiled and shook her head-and saw the woman in the water do the same. There was no question about it: life was a strange experience. No doubt death would be even stranger.

She looked up to the icy oak branches, which were gleaming in the late afternoon sun. In spring the ice would melt and sink into the earth, be absorbed by rootlets, and erupt on a branch as an oak leaf. Which would turn dull purple and fall in the autumn, to rot and be devoured by earthworms …

And so on, until she got bored following the permutations of the

initial drop of water, and went home far a martini and a cuddle with Arthur by the fire before the Sullivans arrived for bridge.

Hannah had just won the bid at five no-trump when the phone rang.

“Julie Byington,” Arthur whispered in her ear.

Hannah groaned and gazed wistfully at her hand full of face cards and aces. She took the phone behind the refrigerator so Allen and Harriet couldn’t heat “Hi.”

“I’m sorry to bother you at home,” a frail voice said.

Then why are you, turkey, Hannah wondered, carefully not saying it was okay. Even members of the helping professions needed their nights of bridge.

“I hope I’m not interrupting something?”

Only an orgasm. “Only a five no-trump hand.”

“What?”

“I’m playing bridge.”

“Oh.”

Hannah could imagine her thoughts: You’re playing bridge while I’m here all alone mixing a Drano cocktail. “What can I do for you, Julie?”

“I feel awful about interrupting you.”

“It’s okay.” They needed you not to reject them, but they were so accustomed to rejection that they did everything they could to trigger it-like calling on a Saturday night during a five no-trump hand.

“I feel really awful.”

“What’s the problem?” Holding the phone against her ear with her shoulder, Hannah crossed her arms, one hand holding her drink, and leaned against the refrigerator.

“Terry’s left me. He kicked me in the stomach and walked out.”

Hannah took a sip of her martini and thought wistfully of those three aces. “Do you want to talk about it now, or can it wait until Monday?” Just then a hot flash hit her. The burning sensation spread across her back and chest like a prairie fire. Sweat popped out on her forehead and began dripping down her sides from her armpits.

“It can wait, I guess.”

“Call me Monday morning at the office and we’ll set a time. And

remember: You’ve been doing fine, and you’ll be fine again.” The receiver trembled in her hand.