Practical Jean (16 page)

There were more plates of pickled this and fishy that.
Fishy
,
fishy
. There may have been some cured moose as well.
Moooose
meat—was that even legal? And Jean just marveled at how well aquavit seemed to complement every kind of Norwegian food, making everything so much tastier than it had any right to be. And Adele was so sweet, thought Jean, for making her feel better after falling into the dumps the way she had. The city wasn't so bad, now that Adele was here. Adele. Adele. She wasn't stuck up at all. Natalie could not have been more wrong. Adele. Was. So. Sweet. Jean put her head back on Adele's arm, and watched her as she ate little creamy pastries one-handed. She admired her straight, straight hair and her porcelain ear and the corner of her fine-drawn mouth. Adele was so . . . something.

“You're so
something
,” Jean said, and giggled.

She wasn't pretty. Not really. But she was good-looking. She looked good, the way her jaw moved as she ate, the way her lips moved as she sipped.
Handsome
was the word. Would Adele like to be called handsome? Would anyone? Jean didn't know. It seemed like a dangerous word, and she giggled just thinking it.
Handsome
. But that's what Adele was.

“You're so handsome, Adele,” said Jean. And Adele looked at Jean and smiled. She didn't seem to mind at all.

Pretty soon they were out on the street, walking in the summer night air. Cars somewhere were honking. Because it was the city. Jean seemed to remember having tickets to the theater. That was why she was all dressed up! She twirled on the sidewalk to let Adele see her outfit, and then she had to rest against the side of a big building. Adele said it was too late for the theater and too dark to see and they should just go back to her condominium, have some more to drink, and relax. Jean had never seen Adele's condominium, which she'd bought a few years before, and she thought that was a very good idea. Then she stopped.

“My bag!”

“Your bag?” said Adele.

“My overnight bag! I can't leave it!”

“Is that it in your hand?”

Jean looked at her hand and there it was. Just like magic.

They climbed into a taxi and Jean lay her head on Adele's shoulder as they drove along the city streets with lights flashing past and people out having a good time. Young people and people walking their dogs and nice older couples and crazy loud people on the sidewalk, everyone had a good time in the city, thought Jean.

“Are we having a good time?” she asked Adele.

“Yes,” Adele said.

“Good,” said Jean. And she held Adele's hand and closed her eyes.

When they got to Adele's building the lobby was marbled and empty, and they took the elevator up to the twenty-third floor. Jean leaned against Adele and kept her eyes closed because the elevator light was so bright. She felt a little wobbly but Adele held her so she wouldn't fall, and Jean was so thankful that they hadn't gone to the theater because . . . well . . . it just wouldn't have been good.

The elevator door opened and Adele steered Jean down the corridor to her apartment, and when she opened it and they walked in, Jean just went . . .

“Wow.”

It was a great big amazing apartment with an amazing view of the big black sky and the sparkling city below, and amazing big jumbly art on the walls, wow, and an amazing big wide couch constructed of blocks of cushions that Jean decided she had to flop down on that instant.

“Wow,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “This is an amazing couch.”

“Wine?” said Adele.

“Do you have any more aquavit? I think I love aquavit.”

“No, I'm afraid not.” She took off her earrings. “But I have a lovely Muscadet.”

“Are you going to rave about the Muscadet?” Jean giggled. “Because if it's here in the city, in Adele Farbridge's apartment, it must be the most amazing Muscadet anybody has ever tasted.”

“It's very good.”

Jean thrust a hand toward the ceiling. “Then I will drink it!”

In a moment, Adele brought a tray with two glasses of wine and some cheese and crackers. Jean was staring at the buttons of her bolero jacket as Adele set the tray on a low coffee table and sat down beside her. Jean would have looked up, but the buttons commanded her attention.

“I hate these buttons,” said Jean, taking hold of the glass of wine Adele placed in her hand. “I hate this jacket.”

“It looks quite nice on you.”

“I only wore it because my arms are fat.”

“No they're not.”

Jean sat up suddenly, spilling some of the wine on her hand before she could set it down, and wrestled with the jacket to get it off her. It might have been alive it was so hard to get off! But she did finally manage it, flinging it across the room, and then she showed Adele the arm that was closest. “See?” she said, squinting. “Fat, flabby, middle-aged arm, that's what that is.”

Adele reached out and drew her fingertips down Jean's skin from her shoulder to her elbow. “I think it's a lovely arm,” she said.

Jean giggled. She felt goosebumps rising on all her limbs and a shiver going right down to her toes. And then another shiver, because Adele leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Suddenly Jean's throat felt parched and she reached out to grab her wineglass.

“You relax,” said Adele, rising to her feet. “I'll be back in a minute.”

While Adele was gone, Jean lounged on the couch and drank most of the wine in her glass. She wasn't sure it was the best thing to be doing, because she was very obviously drunk. But she didn't see what actual harm it could do, and anyway, she felt safe in the big wide apartment with the whole dark world outside.

She called out, “Why have I never been here before?”

“I didn't think you were interested,” came Adele's reply from another room.

Jean swiveled her head against the couch cushions and looked around her. There were plants in pots, she noticed, flanking the wide view of the city, and she lurched to her feet to examine them. It took her no time at all to realize they were Virginia chain ferns. The spores on the underside of each delicate leaflet were gathered in what looked for all the world like a series of tiny chain links. This was the very plant that had first got Jean interested in greenery; she'd seen one in a professor's solarium and couldn't get over how something as ordinary as a leaf, the leaf of a plain old fern, could reveal itself to be so fascinating. And when she was young and investigating the possibilities of her life, this discovery seemed to tell her something about the world. There were flowers that got all the attention, and leaves that did all the work, and lots of those leaves were dull and boring. But if that's all you thought about leaves, you missed something. Because if you looked closely, if you didn't get fooled into thinking one leaf was like any other, you found out that some of them were truly bizarre.

Jean was holding one of the leaflets in her hand when Adele came up behind her and stood very close.

“Adele, these are my favorite ferns in the whole world. I can't believe you have them. They're Virginia—”

“Virginia chain ferns,” said Adele. “You told me about them.”

“I did? When was that?”

“When we were in college. We used to talk a lot back then, late into the night, remember?”

“I remember we got drunk.” Jean giggled.

“Do you remember I used to give you back rubs?” Standing behind her, Adele laid her hands lightly on Jean's shoulders and began to rub and squeeze.

“Mmm,” said Jean, closing her eyes. “That feels nice.”

Jean tipped her head forward a little, let Adele's fingers slide over the straps of her dress and scale the tense incline from her shoulders to her neck. She hadn't realized how stressful the last weeks had been, and how all of the tension had migrated to those particular muscles, and now here was Adele doing just the right thing to make it all go away. She was like a kind of angel, and such a good friend. Her hands were so strong, and yet so soft, and they seemed to know just where to go and what to do. When Jean was thinking the word “wine,” or maybe she said it out loud, Adele's hands brought more wine. When she felt very sleepy, they led her to a soft place to lie down. To Jean, with her eyes closed, anything Adele's hands did seemed to be right. So when they slipped down over her arms, and her hips, and then her breasts, that felt nice too, and right in a way, if a little unexpected. Jean was feeling quite hazy, and just then what was right and what was unexpected were blending and floating together in a very interesting way, becoming part of the same misty cloud of experience. And when Jean felt the tickle of hair on her face as Adele bent over her, and the warmth of her breath, and the pressure on her mouth from Adele's lips and her tongue, that was also unexpected. That was quite unexpected, actually. Jean thought the word, “Oh,” or maybe she said it out loud. And then she opened her eyes and saw that Adele had no clothes on, and they were in her bed, and she said it again.

“Oh.”

Adele lay down on the bed with a lazy smile and drew a finger across Jean's cheek to brush away a hair.

“Adele,” said Jean. Her head was clearing rather quickly. “What's happening?”

“We're just enjoying ourselves.”

Adele seemed to enjoy sliding the straps of her rayon dress off her shoulders, Jean noticed, and reaching around and pulling down her zipper. Being naked and having other people be naked seemed to be something she enjoyed very much.

“I'm just a bit confused,” said Jean.

Adele kissed her shoulder. “Why are you confused?”

“Well,” Jean put her hands over her eyes and tried to focus, “I know we're very good friends. Because we've known each other for so long. But now I think you're taking off my dress.”

“I am.”

“Right. So . . .” She watched as Adele pulled down the top of her dress to reveal first her left breast, and then her right one. “It's just unexpected, that's all.”

Adele began to explain to Jean, and as she explained, she rhythmically kissed Jean's breasts, first the left and then the right, so that Jean found it very hard to concentrate on exactly what Adele was saying. But it seemed that Adele had felt this way for a very long time, since she and Jean had roomed together in college. And it had always been Adele's hope that one day she would be able to make love to Jean. In fact, she explained that one night she had gotten Jean very drunk and she had tried her best to seduce her. But before it could happen, Jean had sat up and announced that she had to go home. And because at the time Jean was living with Adele in the residence, “home” meant Kotemee. Jean had just packed a bag that night and left. She was gone for three days, and during that time Adele realized that she was in love with Jean, and she could never have her. That was quite clear. So she decided to do what her parents had always wanted her to do, which was to study economics at Cornell.

“You left art college because of me?” said Jean.

“I just thought it was easier that way. I never brought it up because I was happy just to be your friend, and I didn't want to risk losing you again.”

Jean thought that might have been the sweetest thing she had ever heard. It was certainly nicer than anything Milt had ever said. So as she lay on Adele's bed, with the top of her green rayon dress bunched around her rib cage, exposing her breasts to this woman she had known, but not really known, for so long, Jean collected her courage like someone gathering tomatoes after a frost. Carefully, uncertainly, hoping to make the best of what was there.

“Adele,” she said, “is this very important to you?”

Adele was blowing a tickling stream of air down her neck from her ear to the ridge of her collarbone. She stopped and said, “Yes.”

“If this happens, will it make you very happy?”

“It will make me wonderfully happy.”

“Then . . . we should probably get this dress all the way off.”

There was no bluff or bluster to Adele Farbridge now, no city airs, and Jean wondered if that rarefied manner of hers, which so grated on Natalie and others, had for all these years been a kind of shield. Well, at least now she saw her the way she really was: worn by years, more brunette than Jean had realized, and needing love like any poor soul.

When Adele lay back on the sheets, Jean was able to see for the first time the long white scar and puckered skin where her friend's left breast had been. In the bell of light from the bedside table, it had its own kind of beauty, and Adele seemed not to mind when she drew her finger along that sinister line, and over the small drumlins of flesh, from the place her nipple had been to the hollow beneath her arm. Lying against Adele's small, marked frame, feeling the velveteen brush of her tight skin, Jean was aware of her own body's fluid expanse, its carnal heft, like the weight of her responsibility. And so, still just a bit light-headed, she embarked on her quest to make Adele happy, to receive the pleasure Adele seemed determined to provide, and to give the same in return.

The receiving, it turned out, was . . . oh . . . remarkably easy. It was tender and deep, felt both sisterly and sinful, and Jean was quick to compliment Adele again and again and again. The giving, she quickly found, was the more stressful part of the exchange. Not that she didn't know what she was doing. She'd spent so many years willing Milt's appendages into various movements and places she had a ready catalogue of what worked and didn't. But Jean knew what was coming, there was no doubt about that now. Adele had sacrificed the happiness of being with her (in that way) for the sake of their friendship, and Jean could not let her down. And if she'd needed one last sign of the rightness of her course, it came in the form of Adele's scar. The moment she saw that she knew she could never abandon her friend to the lottery of malignancy. So as Jean made her way down the slippery paths, she felt the force of her obligations. The pleasure she gave couldn't be just any pleasure. It had to be the greatest gratification Adele had ever known. A part of Jean was glad to be able to give Adele that gift, but as she worked away, measuring the increments of her success in moans, she felt sympathy for men she had known who had crumbled under similar pressure.