Other Women (39 page)

.” He became embarrassed by his fervor.

“Well, you know what I’m saying, Caroline.

What do you think?”

She studied his kind face, begging her mouth not to say the words she heard it emitting: “You’re right, Brian: We both want women.”

His lips pressed together tightly. Caroline was filled with remorse. “Brian, you’re a lovely man. I’m very fond of you. And I’ve tried. I swear to you I’ve genuinely tried to make this work.

But I guess I’m just a hopeless lesbian.

Please forgive me for hurting you. If I could choose, I’d choose to be with you in a minute.”

She could see tears gathering in his eyes. “But I don’t understand, Caroline. We’re so good together. And here’s this house, ready for you to move in. I’d be a good father to your boys.”

“I know you would, Brian. And I appreciate that more than I can say.”

“What’s the problem then?”

She was at a loss for words. “It’s just not me, Brian.” She was beginning to have some idea who “me”

was.

Caroline could see he was getting annoyed. Maybe self-denigrating humor would help. “I’m a pervert, Brian. Respectability suffocates perverts. It’s like putting a lobster in fresh water.”

He shook his head, dazed. “Well, you were candid from the start, Caroline. I have to say that for you.”

Caroline looked him in the eye, feeling increasingly certain this

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was the right thing to do. “Thank you for letting me try, Brian. And I did try. Harder than you might imagine.”

He shook his head again. “I never knew a woman who’d turn her back on all this so easily.”

He gestured vaguely around his house.

“Who said it was easy?”

As Brian dressed to drive her home, Caroline sat with her elbows on the table, head in her hands, feeling terror and loss so acutely that she realized it had very little to do with Brian, whom she scarcely knew. To dispel it, she summoned the image of Hannah. But when it arrived, the head was turned away, no longer looking at her, no longer telling her she was a fine person. She was picking a different course from Hannah’s. No bridge, no motor homes, no Caribbean cruises. Hannah would kick her out.

Her hand trembled as she raised her mug to her lips. Resolutely she dismissed Hannah and thought instead about a jungle full of garish birds and gorgeous flowers. Brian, his face a mask, walked out of his bedroom with his car keys, a padre escorting a death row inmate down that long last corridor.

Caroline strode into Hannah’s office, glancing around to make sure the furniture hadn’t been rearranged. Hannah, holding a mug of coffee, looked up from her chair. “My, but you look purposeful today.”

“Do I?” Caroline perched on the couch in her white uniform. “I guess I am. I’ve been making decisions left and right.”

“Oh yes? Like what?” Hanah sipped her coffee.

“Like that I want a new job. I’m

sick of the emergency room.”

“Oh yes?” said Hannah with sudden interest. She set her mug on the desk and swiveled around to face Caroline. “What kind of job?”

“Still in nursing. But a different specialty. I don’t know what. I just decided today.” She’d been standing by the operating table assisting as a knife wound was sutured, neatly tucking yellow fat globules under jagged flaps of skin, when it suddenly occurred to her: I don’t have to be here.

“Want some coffee?” asked Hannah.

“No, thanks. Caffeine would probably send me right over the top.”

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“So what else have you been deciding?”

Caroline studied Hannah, suddenly afraid.

“I broke things off with Brian Stone this weekend.”

“Oh yes? How come?”

“Well,” she said, studying her hands, “I guess I realized Mr. Right was Mr. Wrong.” She’d just bumped into Brian in the hall outside the lab at the hospital. He’d been aloof and efficient.

She hoped once he got over hating her, some of the initial friendship would be left. She’d be happy to resume hearing tales of woe about Irene.

But she wasn’t holding her breath. Meanwhile, it was like Chinese water torture knowing someone wanted something from her that she had to deny.

“What was wrong about him?”

Hannah didn’t look or sound particularly disappointed. In fact she was the picture of indifference, sitting there glancing out the window to Caroline’s old view of Lake Glass. Did she really not care that Caroline was abnormal? “It occurred to me in the middle of the night that he’s very similar to Jackson and David Michael and my father, and that life with him would probably be just a rerun. I felt like Cinderella’s stepsister trying to wedge her foot into the glass slipper.”

Hannah smiled and stopped herself from applauding. It actually worked sometimes, what she spent her days doing. Then she reminded herself not to get carried away. Caroline would probably backslide.

What people said and what they were able to carry out were usually two different matters. “What do you think it would have been like, this life you’ve decided not to live?”

“Alone and lonely. Taking care of him when he needed it, but not receiving the same from him.”

“You’ve had a lot of practice at that.”

Caroline nodded.

Hannah looked at her kindly. “That must be painful to see.”

Caroline nodded again. Then she looked up. “For a while I thought maybe it could be different with Brian if I was aware of the pattern.”

This came out sounding to Hannah like a question. “It’s possible, but some people just have to stay away from their poison, like an alcoholic from liquor.”

Caroline was dazed. Hannah was not only not critical, she looked

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pleased. Her face had softened. She was even implying that Brian was “poison” for her.

“Are you aware,” asked Hannah, “that you’ve just made a choice? That you’re shaping your life, and not just letting it happen?”

“Yes.”

“And are you aware that you’ve been doing that all along?

Even though you didn’t know it?”

Caroline nodded, looking doubtful.

They sat in silence, Caroline idly studying the mimi spirit on the wall by the desk. She’d actually started to like the hideous little creature with its hollow Orphan Annie eyes. It had begun to look friendly and lively, instead of weird and threatening.

Hannah was looking outside to a row of icicles that hung like translucent fangs from the window frame.

They dripped in the heat of the sun. For the first time Hannah could recall, Caroline wasn’t displacing her inner sense of abandonment onto other people and the world at large. She was leaving Brian, and acknowledging it as her move, rather than his fault.

“I didn’t think your heart was in that relationship,”

said Hannah.

“You didn’t? Why not?”

“Something about the way you talked about him. Calling him Mr. Right, for one thing. You always sounded faintly ironic.”

“I thought I was trying to make it work. But maybe I knew it wouldn’t.”

“Why did you want it to? You’ve insisted all along you’re a lesbian.”

Caroline looked at Hannah. “I guess I wanted it to work because I wanted to be like you.”

Hannah smiled faintly, remembering wanting to be Jewish so she could be more like Maggie.

“What stopped you?”

“Being me.”

Hannah studied her, then nodded. Caroline grew up with parents bound together like prisoners on a chain gang. No wonder she felt contempt for all that.

Whereas Hannah, her mother dead, her father departed, longed for it as a child and clung to it now.

“Maybe I’d like to be normal and respectable like you,” said Caroline, “but I’m not. So fuck it.”

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Hannah smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know if I can explain,” said Hannah. “It’s just that I’m not sure we’re as unalike as you think. I had an appointment with a friend of yours the other day,” she added, to change the subject. Because Caroline needed to believe in their differences for the mohoning her sense of who she was by contrasting herself to other people. She pictured Caroline’s friend jenny with her one dangling silver earring, a raised fist inside a woman’s symbol. Jenny sat on the couch in a belligerent posture, her legs planted firmly apart. “So do you think you can handle me?” Jenny demanded at the end of the hour. “Well, I’m not afraid of you, if that’s what you mean,” Hannah replied, watching as jenny’s eyes suddenly filled with tears.

“I know. Jenny told me.”

“She said you suggested she see me?”

“Yes.” Jenny was heartbroken over yet another true love who’d returned to her husband, and had spent an evening weeping in Caroline’s arms, her tears causing Caroline’s new red chamois shirt to run all over her T-shirt underneath. Expert that she’d recently become on the human heart, Caroline knew jenny needed to face her inability to steal Mommy from Daddy, and Hannah would help her do that.

“Well, please don’t refer anyone else.”

Now Caroline was going to start trying to take care of her professionally.

“Why not?”

“Why do you think not?”

Caroline frowned. “I don’t know. I thought you’d be pleased.” Whatever reaction Caroline assumed Hannah would have, she usually had the opposite.

“I have all the clients I can handle.”

“Well, I’m sorry to burden you with another.”

“Don’t be miffed,” said Hannah.

“Think about what you’re setting up.” She’d done the same thing to Maggie-referred friends to her, then resented Maggie’s involvement with them. Just like her children, who begged for baby brothers and sisters, then loathed them when they arrived. Just like herself, feeling stabs of jealousy watching Arthur cradle their new babies and gaze besottedly into their eyes.

Caroline didn’t see why Hannah had to turn everything into some

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Byzantine plot. Some things were as they seemed and nothing more. She imagined what living with her would be like: “Arthur, you may think this is pot roast, but ask yourself what else might be under that gravy.”

“What’s so funny?” asked Hannah.

“You are. I just don’t believe everything has all this hidden significance.”

Hannah smiled, glad Caroline could challenge her pleasantly now, tease her even. “But don’t forget how many times I’ve been through this with other people, Caroline.”

Caroline felt a stab of jealousy. “Okay. So tell me what I’m setting up.”

“It registers better if you figure it out yourself. But I can tell by the set to your jaw that you’re stubborn today.” She watched Caroline nod in agreement, while mouthing disclaimers. “If you send me clients, you could see me as replacing you with them.

As your mother did you with the younger children. As Arlene did you with what’s-her-name. As Diana has you with Suzanne.”

Caroline was looking baffled. “I thought it was a compliment that I’d send my friends to you.”

“It is. But after you’re finished, then send people. Not now.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think you’re trying to send me a replacement so you can feel rejected. And I don’t believe you really want to be replaced because I know I’m very important to you.”

Caroline blushed, her eyes meeting Hannah’s.

She felt a deep longing for her, in any form she could have her. Therapy, lunch, bridge, bed, anything. She dropped her eyes and said almost in a whisper, “Yes, you are.”

They sat in silence as Hannah studied the dripping icicles and thought about golf balls. She used to find stray ones among the blackbushes on Hampstead Heath. She’d slit open and peel off the tough outer cover to reveal the tangle of cord beneath. Which she’d unravel carefully to expose the small round core, whose smooth surface was scarred like a fossil from the protective cord.

Working with a client was similar. You had to penetrate the protective shell, which concealed a maze of vulnerabilities often opposite to what outward OTHER

appearances would suggest. The bull dykes who arrived on motorcycles and swaggered into the office in full leathers turned out to be frightll girls.

And the Total Women were often as cold and sharp underneath as those icicles out the window.

But once the core lay bare, as Caroline’s did right now, Hannah felt awe, and a twinge of fear.

You tapped gently for signs of life, aware anything too sudden or forceful could unleash a new landslide that might bury forever anyone still alive in there.

Hannah looked at the photo on the wall over the bookcase, done by an ex-client who was an aerial photographer. At first glance it looked like what it was-patches of snow on a plowed field. But a shift of vision converted the portions of dark field into the silhouette of a veiled woman’s head. Her client, convinced it was the Virgin Mary, experienced a conversion, terminated therapy, and went into the priesthood. Hannah was skeptical about the Virgin Mary bit, but was a true believer in the shift of vision. But this shift would probably frighten Caroline even more than all her dependency, anger, and sexuality. And she did in fact look terrified by what she’d just said as she studied her fingernails and tried to appear blase.

Caroline was thinking about how important Hannah had

become to her. She’d split with Brian. Who knew what Diana was up to? Hannah had become the focus for her emotional life. She thought about her in the night to quell her terrors. She planned her week around these sessions, thinking over what got said at the previous ones and storing up observations for the next. When she drove to the hospast Hannah’s office, she noticed whether her light was on. When it was, the world felt like a safer place. Here she’d acknowledged Hannah’s importance. And her belief since Pink Blanky and Marsha was that once the gods knew what was important to you, they were obliged to take it away, for reasons understood only by themselves. I know what you want and you can’t have it.

Caroline had failed to play it cool. One way or another, Hannah would vanish. Rubbing the bridge of her nose with her fingertips, she felt sweat drench her armpits and stain her white uniform.

“What are you thinking?” asked Hannah gently, watching sweat stains appear under Caroline’s armpits. Wasn’t Caroline too young for hot flashes?