Other Women (31 page)

“Why not?” asked Caroline, jutting out her jaw.

Hannah smiled. “Indeed. I’m not making value judgments, Caroline. I’m just curious.” Now that she had her lake view, she wondered if she could get away with installing a recliner in place of her desk chair. Would it undercut her authority if she issued observations from a supine position with closed eyes?

“I prefer female bodies aesthetically,”

Caroline was surprised to hear herself say. She realized it was true, thinking with distaste of all the hair and hard muscles on Jackson and David Michael, and those ridiculous prangs they were so proud of, that jabbed at you like cattle prods. In contrast to the smooth soft curves and mounds, the warm moist cavities of that head counselor’s body Friday night.

“Who doesn’t? Why do you think so much pornography and fine art feature women’s bodies?”

Caroline looked at Hannah. “If you really feel that, why are you with a man?”

“Because I love Arthur.”

Caroline blinked, then blushed, then studied her snowmobile boot. “I see.”

“Choices.”

“Why choose?” asked Caroline. “Why not have it all?”

Hannah shook her head. “You must have more time and energy than I do, is all I can say, Caroline.”

Caroline was awakened from a deep sleep by her ringing phone. Flinging out an arm to her bedside table, she found the receiver. “Hello?”

A male voice said, “Hello there, darling. I hear you like stiff cock shoved deep into your wet pussy.”

“Wrong.”

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After a bemused silence, the man hung up.

“Who was that?” asked Diana, wrapping her arm around Caroline and molding her breast with her hand.

“Some guy who’d heard I like stiff cock.”

“Jesus.” She laughed the husky laugh that had made Caroline fall in love with her over the bed bath in nursing school. “You said “wrong”?”

“From a deep sleep. Without a moment’s hesitation.”

“God, you’re such a dyke.” She nibbled Caroline’s shoulder.

“I guess I am.” Caroline was remembering the early months in this cabin, after her arrival from Somerville, as she and Diana tried to convince themselves with locker room language that they both wanted a stiff cock. The unacknowledged sexual tension between them could have blown all the fuses in the cabin. For Caroline, exposing vulnerparts of her anatomy to a member of the male species, who she’d recently realized performed the violent deeds she spent her career mopping up after, seemed about as appealing as suckling a rattlesnake. She and Diana, fed up with men, were spending a lot of time working at the abortion referral center downtown, sick to death of seeing women bear the brunt of male lust and violence. Pam, jenny, and several of the other workers were lesbians. Caroline and Diana eyed them uneasily when they sat too close at meetings. “I’m not that kind of girl,” Caroline once said to Pam, who’d hugged her affectionately.

“Tell me about it,” said Pam, amused.

Once she and Diana went to lunch at Maude’s with Pam and Jenny. Pam ordered peach cobbler for dessert. When it arrived, Pam picked up the dish and plunged her face into the whipped cream on top.

Then she turned to jenny, who slowly licked off all the cream, gazing into Pam’s malamute eyes.

Diana and Caroline looked uneasily at them, at each other, and at their appalled neighbors.

One night over a bottle of wine on the couch in Diana’s living room, Diana said, “You know, I really resent how Pam and jenny think every woman they meet is a lesbian.”

Caroline nodded. “Yeah. I mean, you can be aware of attractions to women without wanting to do anything about it.”

“Exactly.”

Caroline opened another bottle of red wine.

“What do you think

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about that new abortion bill before the legislature?” she asked Diana, filling their glasses for the sixth time.

“That guy from Nashua who’s sponsoring it is a real hunk,” replied Diana. “You ought to put the make on him.”

Caroline looked into her wine for a long time, swirling it as though preparing to read tea leaves. “If I were going to put the make on anyone,” said Caroline, “it’d be you.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” She looked up at Diana, who’d blushed a bright scarlet.

“I guess I did.”

“Oh, to hell with it.” Caroline began unbuttoning her own chamois shirt.

“What are you doing?” asked Diana in a panicked voice.

“You know perfectly well what I’m doing.”

Caroline stared into Diana’s green eyes belligerently.

“Yes, I do actually.” Diana started to unbutton her own shirt. “How come we didn’t think of this before?”

“I sure have.”

Caroline sighed with contentment under the down comforter and pressed her back and buttocks more closely against Diana’s front. Stiff cocks indeed. “Why would somebody do without sex for a minute, much less for months?”

“Because she’s a fool,” said Diana.

Diana had simply appeared in Caroline’s bed earlier that evening, a gift of the night. As Caroline began to comment on her presence, Diana placed her hand over Caroline’s mouth and said, “Let’s not talk about it. Let’s just do it.” Afterwards, discussion seemed irrelevant. Although she hadn’t told Diana about the woman from the sauna, it seemed as though Diana had picked up the message that Caroline might slip away without some enticement to stay. Whatever Diana’s reason, Caroline liked the results. In the morning she’d call Brian and cancel their date. It wasn’t fair to lead him on when she was clearly a raving lesbian.

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They settled in to sleep. Out the window past the loom, Caroline saw the edge of the new moon, hanging over the lake like a luminous fingernail paring.

She started thinking about stiff cocks and what a lot of trouble they caused. She’d changed thousands of diapers on Howard and Tommy, Jackie and Jason. Their tiny penises sprayed all over her. Her goal was to get them covered up again as quickly as possible. That Freud and most men assumed women coveted them always intrigued her. Probably it was impossible for an older sister of brothers, or the mother of sons, to take men seriously. It took a real leap of the imagiafter that to regard a penis as erotic. Probably that was why she was such a dyke.

Yet you’d better take men seriously, or you’d find yourself with a knife at your throat and a cock up your ass. Wars were fought over which cock got shoved where. Nuclear missiles had been launched by men who couldn’t get anything up any other way.

David Michael said his mother used to tell him as a little boy that his cock would fall off if he played with it. Caroline remembered meeting this genius of a mother in her gloomy seaside mansion in Mar8,4. She looked like a member of the Addams family, and conveyed about as much warmth.

All of a sudden Caroline understood that David Michael had spent his entire adult life shoving his cock into every hole he could find to prove it was still there.

We have to treat each other with kindness because we’re all laboring under similar disabilities.

She felt a stab of remorse that she’d cut off David Michael so abruptly, taking a taxi to the Trailways station with Jackie, Jason, and half a dozen suitcases, without even telling him good-bye.

As she dozed off, she dreamed about David Michael in his green scrub clothes and Fu Manchu mustache. He and she were standing in his cluttered room at the Somerville commune, the American flags flapping at the windows. He yelled, “You women are all the same. All you care about is stiff cock.” She looked at him.

Then she scooped a handful of ashes from his Lincoln Continental hubcap and rubbed them all over his mouth and face, his beard scratching her hand like coarse sandpaper. He looked hurt and confused. Caroline felt awful. She dumped ashes in his hand and knelt at his feet, begging him to rub them into her face.

Caroline jerked awake. What the hell did that mean? Suddenly sad and lonely, she kissed Diana awake and buried her face between Diana’s large breasts.

The next morning Caroline awoke before Diana, got up, fixed toast and coffee, and brought them back to bed on a tray. Diana, hidden under the comforter with just her scrambled red head protruding, smiled without opening her eyes. “You beat me to it.”

“Anything to keep you in my bed,” said Caroline, piling up pillows.

“Actually I have to get up in a few minutes.”

Caroline paused to look at her. She’d been anticipating a morning in bed like in the old days, when magazines, books, food and dirty dishes, cats, dogs, and children had gradually filled the room. Amelia the cat already lay purring in a nest in the comforter at the foot of the bed. “Are you on duty today?”

“No, I’m going shopping with Suzanne.” She avoided looking at Caroline.

Caroline climbed into bed and took the tray on her lap. “So cancel

Diana sat up and slipped on her nightgown.

“She wants me to help her pick out an outfit for her sister’s wedding next week.”

“She’s a big girl. I’m sure she can buy her own clothes. Tell her you’re busy.”

“Suzanne’s been counting on me to help her.”

“Well, I’ve been counting on you to fuck me,”

said Caroline with a grin.

“We did that already,” laughed Diana. “Quite a lot as I recall.”

“So what was that charming little interlude all about then?”

“What do you mean?” Diana picked up a piece of toast.

“You waft in here in the middle of the night, seduce me, and now you rush off to your child bride. What the hell are you doing?”

Diana looked at her with surprise, toast halfway to her mouth. “I wanted you. You apparently wanted me. We had each other. And now life continues.”

“I see.” Caroline’s heart contracted into its shell like a turtle’s head. This was a fling, not a reconciliation and renewal.

Diana drank the last of her coffee and rolled out of bed.

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“Have a lovely day,” snarled Caroline.

“Thanks.”

“Leave the lights on tonight. I’ve got a date with Brian and may be home late.”

“Why a man?” Diana asked as she picked her terry cloth robe off the floor, where she’d flung it last night.

“Why a teenager?” Caroline sipped her coffee.

Diana whirled around and stalked out. Caroline called, “And please phone next time before turning up in my bed. I may not be alone.”

Diana returned to the doorway and leaned against it, eyeing Caroline. “The therapy is definitely changing you, but I’m not sure I like the changes.”

“Too bad.” Inside Caroline was terrified.

If Diana didn’t like the changes, she wouldn’t stick around, even in this attenuated form. But no one had stuck around in any case. You

feel you have to do nice things to keel them around?

Maybe so, but it hadn’t worked. She’d knocked herself out doing nice things, and where were all the recipitoday? The most appealing aspect to Brian was that maybe he’d stick around. He showed every sign of being prepared to devote himself to her. Maybe she could work up a similar case of devotion to him. The boys would have a father; she’d have a husband; she’d be respectable again; together they’d have plenty of money, even with his payments to his wife. The only thing missing was that spark of excitethat had ignited all her other relationships. She’d been Miss Kitty to Jackson’s Matt Dillon; Maid Marion to David Michael’s Robin Hood; Cherry Ames, Rural Nurse, alongside Diana. But Brian didn’t inspire her. But maybe that was a function of encroaching middle age.

Maybe she could no longer fool herself that any mortal could live up to the lyrics of those popular songs on the car radio behind the Stop “n Shop: “You are my special angel, sent from up above. .

.” But maybe she and Brian could share a mature love, like Hannah and her husband. If the sexual connection worked, maybe everything else would-like boxcars hooking up to an engine.

She leaped out of bed and rushed to the store, where she bought ingredients for a dinner. Roast lamb, scalloped potatoes, spinach salad, apricot souffte, a good wine. She cooked and cleaned all day,

then dressed carefully in her least dykey outfit, a silk shirt and tweed skirt. She splashed herself with Chanel No. 5, rather than the usual Eau Sauvage Diana loved. She stole some makeup from Sharon’s room and tried to recall how to apply it.

When Brian appeared at her door, flushed from the cold, she announced, “I’ve cooked supper. I thought maybe we could stay home tonight.”

“Fantastic,” he said, eyeing her

speculatively. “It smells wonderful. Or is that you?”

He’d had his children for the school vacation. They’d just returned to Irene in Boston. He’d taken a few days off to go skiing with them at North Conway, and talked about their progress on the slopes, as he and Caroline drank Scotch on the sofa in front of the fire before supper. Caroline studied his profile. He was a very attractive man, especially with his skiing tan, which set off his white teeth.

“I miss them terribly,” he said. “When I think about them growing up without me around to watch, it kills me.”

“I can imagine.” She reflected on how different Brian’s involvement with his children was from Jackson’s benign neglect. “I wish my husband felt the same.”

“Doesn’t he want your sons around?”

“He invites them down a couple of times a year.

But his wife is the one who spends time with them.”

“Boys need a father,” said Brian, looking into the fire.

“I agree.” Caroline studied Brian’s sad eyes and receding hairline, and wondered if she could fan her warm feelings for him into a flame. If only Diana hadn’t fucked her senseless last night.

“And a man needs a woman,” he added, looking at her with urgency.

Unable to think of a comeback, Caroline opened her arms. Holding her face with his delicate hands, he kissed her hungrily.

Leading him into her bedroom, Caroline felt her face twitching. It had been a long time since she’d been with a man, and her final experiences with David Michael had been painful and humiliating.

But maybe it would be fine. And if it was, her life might take on a new simplicity, stability, and integrity.