Other Women (43 page)

Who’s there? Irish. Irish who? Irish I hadn’t had that last drink.” In the liquor store she bought some Chartreuse liqueur. At Baskinas the clerk hand-packed pistachio ice cream, Caroline flipped open the

Penthouse

to Miss March, who lay masturbating in black stockings, high heels, and a lacy garter belt. In real life she was an accountant, who attributed her success to her friendly personality.

A teenage boy, whose wide leather belt had a silver buckle shaped like New Hampshire with “Live Free or Die” emon it, stood next to Caroline. He was also studying Miss March, and Caroline’s own interest in Miss March, so she shut the magazine.

Glancing over her armful of packages, Caroline suddenly realized: This isn’t love, this is psychosis. Both she and Diana were coming down with another case of Terminal Thoughtfulness. They would pamper each other to death. What was it all about? You feel you have to do nice things to make them love you?

Each felt herself inadequate to maintain someone’s interest without showering that person with the entire inventory of several small shops.

She handed the

Penthouse

to the startled teenager and left the clerk holding the half-filled carton of ice cream. She dumped all her packinto a Leonard Litter trash can in the corridor like an alcoholic pouring liquor down the drain. If Diana didn’t want her just as she was, without props, then to hell with it.

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Driving back to the cabin, she wondered if anyone would want her unadorned by gifts and services, least of all Diana. Something in her was insisting she find out. But she felt naked and afraid empty-handed.

She pictured Hannah’s face. But it was strained and tired, as Hannah had been at their last session.

That’s what I’m here for-to be left. To please Hannah she’d have to leave her. Besides, she couldn’t lean on her indefinitely. She’d have to lean elsewhere. But where? Brian was gone. Probably Diana would soon be gone without gifts to hold her.

Hannah would be gone.

Frantically she summoned the gorgeous jungle birds and flowers.

The miracle is all around you.

The strange feeling of warm gratitude began to creep over her, like the numbness that rose up her legs when she had too much to drink. Was it possible she didn’t need another person to feel happy and safe? That the contents of her own head, which no one could take away, were sufficient? Surely not.

Caroline sat in her Subaru watching two men in rust-colored ski patrol parkas load a gray metal desk into a small moving van that stood in the parking lot of the therapy center. Maybe Hannah really was going into real estate. Maybe she’d lied last week when she said Caroline would have to do the leaving. But surely she’d give her clients some notice? Caroline’s stomach felt queasy, as it had the day she arrived to find Hannah’s office rearranged. Nothing here was supposed to change.

Caroline was the one who was changing.

“What’s up?” she asked as she walked into Hannah’s intact office.

“What do you mean?” Hannah swiveled in her chair to look up at Caroline, who stood shifting nervously from boot to boot.

I Who’s moving out?”

““Oh. The woman in the next office killed herself. Her parents are clearing out her stuff.”

Caroline sank down on the couch.

“Does that distress you?” It could be part of the Great Disillusionment to let Caroline know that therapists sometimes had worse probthan clients. Hannah had been seeing some of Mary Beth’s clients, trying to discourage them from copying Mary Beth’s example. “It makes all my months with her one big joke,” wailed a woman

OTHER

student in a blue lean jacket covered with badges that said things like “Fuck Authority” and “Chaste Makes Waste.” But if Mary Beth helped her, and she apparently had, did it matter how?

“I guess it does.” Caroline rubbed the bridge of her nose.

“Do you know why?”

“I guess I want you all to have it all together. I want

someone

to.”

“Why not yourself?”

“I’m working on it,” said Caroline.

“Yes, you are. You’re working hard. You listen, and you hear, and you apply what you hear. It’s impressive.”

“Thanks,” said Caroline, smiling faintly, wondering what wrecks other clients must be if she herself was impressive with all her fear, anger, and longing. She studied that damn photo over the bookcase. She simply couldn’t find the Virgin Mary. Maybe she wasn’t there. Maybe it was a ruse to check clients” honesty, like the emperor’s new clothes.

“What shall we talk about today?” Hannah propped her feet up on the stool and settled back in her chair.

“I’d like to talk about Diana.”

Hannah refrained from commenting on Caroline’s previous relucto talk about Diana to a heterosexual. Now that Caroline had accepted herself more fully, maybe she didn’t need to pin her own lack of acceptance on other people. “What about her?”

“We had a bad fight a couple of weeks ago.

And we got so scared of losing each other that we started trying to outpamper each other again. So last night at the mall buying cards and candy and stuff, I suddenly got fed up. I thought, fuck it, if me as I am isn’t enough, then it’s no good anyway. So I dumped everything I’d just bought into the garbage can.”

Hannah laughed. “That was courageous.” Also extravagant. This woman ought to meet Arthur.

Caroline hesitated. “At first I felt as though I’d been let out of a cage. But the closer I got to home, the more frightened I became. Because maybe she really won’t stick around if I

don’t do nice things for her.”

“I trust by now you see where that feeling comes from?”

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Caroline nodded. “But maybe she won’t.” She wanted to be assured that she would.

“Maybe she won’t. That’s the risk you take if you change: that the people you’ve been involved with won’t like the new you. But other people who do will come along.”

Caroline’s hand trembled as she stroked the tweed sofa cover with her fingertips. She didn’t want other people. She wanted Diana.

“What did you fight about?”

“We’d just made love. I was feeling peaceful and happy, as though maybe we’d make it after all.”

Caroline blushed and studied her finCould you really say these things to Mother? “Uh, I told her I loved her. And she asked me not to sleep with Brian Stone at our house, so I flipped out.”

“I thought you ended it with him?”

“I have. It was the principle of the thing. I pay half the mortgage. I can do as I like there.”

Hannah studied Caroline’s indignant face, wondering if it was really so difficult just to hug Diana and tell her Brian was out of the picture. The games everyone played were exhausting.

“Principles start wars.”

Caroline said nothing. Hannah had just betrayed her.

“So you told her you cared for her, and she let you have it,” said Hannah. “Just as you thought I’d do last week because you told me I’m important to you?”

Startled, Caroline said nothing, looking out the window to the moving van in the parking lot. “I guess so,”

she finally said. “Oh yeah, I did that assignment.

Thought about what happened when I told people I cared about them.”

“Oh yes? What have you remembered?”

As Caroline described her routs on the battlefield of affection, Hannah recalled her own experiences. The one time she told her father she loved him, he laughed with embarrassment and returned to Trinidad on the next plane. When she told Colin she loved him, he threw her walnut clock to the floor and chopped it up. But with Arthur it was the other way round. When he told her he loved her, she kicked him out of bed. And whenever the men she used to flirt with at parties OTHERWOMEN 2

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proclaimed their devotion, that was her cue to get rid of them. What

was everyone so afraid of?

When Caroline stopped talking, Hannah asked, “Do you see why

they reacted like that?”

Caroline shook her head no, her glance sullen.

“I guess I’m too

intense. Just like Jackson always said.”

“No, you’re not too intense. You’re not too anything. You are who

you are. But other people don’t want to hear what doesn’t fit with their

own view of themselves. If Diana is accustomed to feeling unloved,

she won’t want to hear that you love her, and she’ll try to reinstate her

unlovableness. It’s like a heart transplant: A body often rejects the very

thing that would keep it alive because the immune system won’t accept

it. I didn’t have to flee when I heard I was important to you, because

I’m important to me too.”

Laughing, Caroline said, “But I don’t understand why someone

wouldn’t want to hear she’s loved.”

“Ask yourself that. How come last session you seized on my request

that we leave early as proof I didn’t care about you? When I told you

the previous week I do.”

Caroline could scarcely hear Hannah. She saw her mouth moving, but she couldn’t pick up the words.

Hannah tried to think of a different way to make the same point.

If she could come up with five or six versions, sometimes later in the

week it would fall into place for clients. Or later in their lives. “Caroline, someone important to you is telling you she cares about you. Do you know why you aren’t hearing me?”

Caroline sat in confused silence.

“You can’t hear me because you’ve had no experience of an authority figure who wasn’t aloof and rejecting. Either you have to classify me with the refugee maids and your little brothers, who were nice to you because they had no choice. Or you have to see me as rejecting.

But I’m neither. Can you face that?”

Caroline didn’t even understand what she was supposed to be

facing. She studied one of the men in green work clothes and ski patrol

parkas, who was hefting a cardboard box into the van.

If Hannah

killed herself, Caroline would kill her.

“Look, the people you really wanted-your parents-were absent or aloof. So you yearn for affection from such a person now. But if such a person gives you affection, he or she ceases to be unattainable. So you try to get the person to withdraw. Or you start looking around for a new unattainable. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“Uh, I don’t think so.”

“The point is,” Hannah said with urgency, “most of us have had difficult childhoods, and we have to learn to accept acceptance.”

Caroline noted the “us.” “Did you have a difficult childhood?”

“My mother died of typhoid when I was four, and my father deserted me when I was five.”

Caroline studied Hannah. A dead mother, dead children, a rejecting father. You

think you’ve got problems?

How come Hannah was so cheerful most of the time?

The movers were stomping down the hallway slamming doors. “All right, think about Jackson,” said Hannah, pursuing another tack, the way Nigel used to when landing his sailboat against the north wind.

“What did he say when you told him you laved him?”

“He asked me what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

“That I laved him.”

“What do you mean by love?”

Caroline studied her. “Uh, that I liked being with him. Thought he was a nice person. I don’t know.”

“When some people say, “I love you,” what they really mean is, I want to go to bed with you. Or I want you to support me financially. Or please don’t leave me all alone.”

Caroline was remembering the songs on the car radio when she necked with Kevin behind the Stop ‘n Shop-“Young Love First Love,” “When Will I Be Loved,” “When I Fall in Love,” “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with Y.”

The songs took for granted that everyone knew what love was. “What is lave?”

Hannah laughed. “I asked you first.”

“Well, you just said what it isn’t. So what’s left?”

“Why don’t you figure that out for next week?”

Hannah smiled, since most people spent their entire lives trying, and failing, to figure OTHER

it out. Because they assumed love was something that had to do with other people.

“Nothing’s left, as far as I can see.”

“Maybe love is whatever ‘s left once you’ve eliminated everything else.”

“What?”

As Caroline walked out, Hannah lit a cigarette and reviewed Caroline’s dilemma as a child. If she expressed need, she got taken to the Salvation Army. If she expressed anger, her mother took to bed with depression. If she expressed love, everyone got up and left. What remained except to stay as still as possible and hope her mere existence wouldn’t offend? A suicide of the emotions.

Watching a moving man pass her open door with a box of books, Hannah reflected that Caroline was in the most difficult phase of therapy.

The dependency, anger, and sexuality Hannah could handle fine, but the alternative was so nebulous it defied description. Either a person felt it or she didn’t. If she didn’t, no amount of discussion would help. Besides, love wasn’t something a client could experience in any depth with a therapist.

The unequal nature of the relationship precluded it.

In the parking lot the van revved up, spewing black exhaust, and rolled away. Farewell, Mary Beth, thought Hannah. May you finally find some peace. Though she suspected suicide wasn’t a long-term solution. Mary Beth would probably have to come back as a barber, until she learned the proper use for razors.

As she tapped her cigarette into Nigel’s stone, a stick of incense to ward off evil spirits from next door, Hannah thought about her first lunch with Maggie after ending her own therapy. They met at a restaurant overlooking the lake and sat in the sun at a table on a wooden deck.

“I’m afraid I’m in a rush,” said Maggie, studying the menu, which had drawings of nautical knots all over it. “I have a two o’clock appointment.”

Hannah was miffed. She was also relieved. Never at a loss for words in Maggie’s office, outside it she felt like a teenager on her first blind date.

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After they placed their order, Hannah “You remember that fight Arthur and I Maine or the Cape for our vacation?”