The Canterbury Sisters (15 page)

“And then you forgot about it,” Valerie says. It’s an odd guess as to what might have happened next, for if Claire had forgotten about the tape, she wouldn’t have chosen this for her story. That’s what we should have told Becca, that of course we were going to tell complicated stories. Because if there isn’t a complication, there isn’t a story.

“Oh, I should have forgotten about it,” Claire says, with another tinkly little laugh. “That would have been the smart thing to do. But my problem is, I’m incapable of forgetting anything. It probably explains why I’ve been married so many times. I’ve always thought the greatest skill a wife can possess is the ability to judiciously forget certain things, to just delete them right out of her brain at will. Because that’s what we’ve been talking about this whole time, haven’t we? The difficulties women have in understanding men . . . how we never really see them, really know them, even after years of love and marriage? But there’s a whole other category of problems: those that come when you’ve seen too much. Trust me, when you’re talking marriage, seeing too much is far more dangerous than seeing too little.”

We digest this as we walk, along with a few of the apples. For almost all of us have pulled one, at some point, off a tree. The branches were so heavy, it would have seemed ungracious not to. Only Steffi demurred, muttering something about pesticides.

“I was taking care of a friend’s cat while she was out of town,” Claire goes on, tossing her half-eaten apple to the side as she walks, “and the cat was really unhappy being alone. When I was in her house one day, feeding him, I saw she had a VCR and I remembered the tape. I thought,
Why not bring it over and watch it here? I can snuggle up and visit with the poor lonely kitty and watch the tape and I’ll see what Adam was like at his first wedding.
When we were married he’d said he was an atheist and he wasn’t going to go through that silly charade again . . . yet I knew he had gone through the charade for Edith, that he’d been willing to put on the tux and say the vows for her. So I was prepared to curl up on that couch and have myself a complete pity party.”

“Okay, the truth,” Silvia says. “That was my house and my cat, wasn’t it? You’ve never told me this story.”

While her best friend is as perfectly groomed as ever, even now, just a day deeper into the trail, Silvia has already taken to brushing her hair straight back, flat to her head, so that she looks like a swimmer emerging from a pool. I had this science project once, way back in fourth grade or something, that measured the speed at which various things decompose. It was the perfect project for a kid raised on a commune, where everyone was obsessed with composting, because all I had to do was go outside the kitchen and start digging things up. But the more organic the substance, the faster it fell apart, that was the takeaway of my little experiment, and this basic truth comes back to me now. If we were to be hit with a sudden rockslide, Silvia would dematerialize at once, while future archaeologists would probably find Claire pretty much intact.

“I’ve never told anyone this story,” says Claire, and, that fact in itself makes her different from Jean and Angelique, both of whom told well-practiced tales, the sort they had obviously repeated many times. I’m a little surprised that there’s anything about Claire that Silvia doesn’t know—they speak in that sort of shorthand only best friends use.

“I’ll confess. It was your couch, your television, your cat, and your house where all these atrocities took place,” Claire goes on. “I was probably eating your ice cream out of your bowl as well. But I went over the next afternoon, got myself all set up on the couch, popped in the tape, and got an eyeful of . . . who can guess?”

“Porn,” say Angelique and Valerie, almost in unison.

“Yes, porn,” says Claire. “Homemade porn. What else?”

I’m ashamed to admit the thought had never occurred to me.

“Your husband with his first wife?” says Becca. “Oh my God. That is without a doubt the grossest thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life.”

“My first impulse was to agree with you,” says Claire. “Imagine me lying back on the couch in that empty house, pillows propped up all around me, the cat on my lap, the ice cream bowl on the table, expecting to see candles and roses and bridesmaids in pastel dresses. Then the first image is upon me full-blown, like some sort of horrible hallucination—Edith, totally naked, lying back on a bed and smiling, looking straight ahead while he’s still adjusting the camera, and I’m struggling to my feet, knocking the ice cream one way and the poor cat the other and then Adam appeared on the screen. Or at least his body appeared, not his face, because the camera was focused on the bed, but of course I knew it was him, of course I recognized . . . Well, I just froze. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Because he was younger and hotter in the video?” Becca asks. Despite the fact that she claims to be grossed out, her tone is slightly hopeful. She’s still looking for a love story. If not one of ours, then at least somebody’s.

“But that’s just the problem, he wasn’t younger,” Claire says. “Or at least not by much. It wasn’t as if they’d made this sex tape in the early days of their marriage. That would have been easier to take. What I was watching clearly had been made within the last few years. It was a last-ditch attempt to save the marriage, I suppose, and it happened before I met him, but either way there was the Edith I knew from the kids’ graduations and birthday parties, the woman I thought of as ‘plain Edith’ with the permanent circles under her eyes and the thick waist. But the way they were . . . performing, it was obvious they had taped themselves before.”

“Seriously,” says Becca, now truly horrified. “Even though they were old and ugly? Why would anyone want to take a picture of that?”

“I never said they were ugly,” Claire says. “And they must have been just over forty, an age that seems quite young to me now. But yes, in a way, you’re right. They certainly didn’t look like your typical porn stars, they looked just like themselves. And there was Adam, naked on the screen before me, and he was . . .” She stops and traces her lower lip thoughtfully with a fingertip, as if debating precisely what to say next.

“It must have been horrible,” Jean says softly. “Seeing your husband having sex with another woman.”

“Or was it exciting?” says Angelique. “Or exciting and horrible, a little bit of both?”

“Was he the same with her?” Valerie asks. “As he was with you?”

“No,” says Claire sharply, whirling around to look at Valerie. “Thank you, because it’s a simple thought and yet somehow I couldn’t find a way to say it. That’s exactly the issue. Adam was a different man with her. He was loud and rather violent.”

“Violent?” asks Jean. “Surely you don’t mean violent?”

“No, ‘violent’ is the wrong word,” says Claire. “Completely wrong. It’s just that on the tape he moved in a more . . . uninhibited fashion, there was something more animal or maybe you’d even say . . .”

“He was more passionate with her than he’d ever been with you,” Tess says. She’s either back to her trick of summing everyone up, putting the stories into neat little boxes before we’ve half-finished telling them, or she’s terrified to think what sort of explanation we all might collectively come up with if she doesn’t step in to supply a suitable one. So she gives us a word like “passionate,” which is nice and soft and polite and thus sounds like the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to mean.

“Passionate,” Claire says slowly. “Yes, I suppose that’s it, and she was . . .”

A pause. A long pause. Uninterrupted. No one among us has the slightest theory about what naked Edith might have looked like on that bed, not even Tess.

“She was what?” Valerie finally asks.

“She was much better than I was. Better than I ever was. Better than I am now.”

“Edith?” says Silvia, in complete disbelief. Evidently she’s met the woman at some point. “You’re telling me that Edith Morrison, the Queen of the Faculty Teas, Miss I-Won’t-Vaccinate-My-Children-Because-I-Read-Some-Report-About-Autism, the woman who’s worn the same pair of black pants for ten straight years because she claims they still have plenty of wear in them . . . You’re telling me that woman was good in bed?”

“No,” says Claire. “I’m telling you that she was spectacular. What’s that line from ‘Pinball Wizard’?
At my usual table, she could beat my best.
And she could—no comparison, hands down, slam dunk. Edith Morrison was a goddess of sex.”

We walk on, munching our apples, each of us likely contemplating the irony. That the plain, cautious, stalwart first wife was sexier than the thin, pretty, elegant second wife. The possibility raises a rash of questions, none of them comforting. For if the sex was so good in the first marriage, why did it fail? And exactly what did Claire mean by saying Edith was spectacular? The word implies trampolines and whips and choirs of angels—something beyond ordinary coupling, something that could reach right through the television screen and shake a woman to her core. And this time the man is literally faceless. Off the bridge, in the shadows, out of focus . . . why do we have so much trouble seeing the men in our stories? If we continue in this vein much longer, soon we won’t even be bothering to name them. But Adam—intellectual, arrogant Adam—what could he have been thinking? When he swapped Edith for Claire, did he realize that even though he may have been rising in the eyes of the world, that from a bedroom sense he was stepping down? Because I believe Claire when she says that she knew at a glance that Adam’s sexual connection with Edith was stronger than the one he had with her. That’s the sort of thing women just know.

“Did you watch the whole tape?” Steffi asks.

“Several times. It was sixteen minutes long, I remember that most specifically. Sixteen minutes for me to realize that everything I’d ever thought about my husband was wrong.” Claire sighs. “And I watched it the next day too, and the next. Every day I was supposed to feed Silvia’s cat. I became quite obsessed, I suppose. I turned up the volume, in case they were saying things I was missing. They weren’t. I studied it from every angle. I played it in slow motion. I even ran the tape in reverse, can you imagine? As it turns out, sex is one of the few things in life that looks exactly the same backwards as forwards. There’s no difference at all.”

“Did you tell him you’d watched it?” Angelique asks.

“Of course not. How could I do that? We didn’t have a VCR player so there’s no way I could have claimed to have seen it by accident. I tried to go on as if nothing had happened and the next week, there was a banquet at the high school. Adam and Edith’s middle son Graham was getting a basketball award. So we were all there. I wore a pink dress, I remember, a sleeveless Dior with a matching coat. It was the best thing I owned—a gift from my first husband, come to think of it—and probably far too extravagant for a sports banquet in a high school cafeteria. What am I saying? Of course it was completely wrong. But it was my favorite dress and I put it on like a suit of armor. Because I knew I’d see Edith, sitting there at the same table, wearing her good black pants, and she looked exactly the same as she always had, and she was friendly enough. You know, I don’t think she ever resented me at all. I never got that feeling. We ate the chicken and green beans and afterward they called the boys up, gave out the awards, and made the speeches. We clapped and took pictures and that was that. A perfectly pleasant evening with the extended family, everyone acting appropriately and keeping the attention on Graham, just as it should be. But all the time I kept staring at Edith. I couldn’t seem to stop myself, even though there certainly was no flirtation between her and Adam. No crackling sexual electricity. They were polite and all about the children, just as they had always been. But everything had changed.”

“Changed like how?” Becca asks. She’s dropped her attitude now. The question is sincere.

“I’m not sure if I can explain it,” Claire says. “All my life I’ve never been the smartest or the most talented. I was never the best at anything. Except for attracting men. That was my singular God-given gift. And I had never envied another woman before the moment that I saw that videotape. I suppose it had never occurred to me that a man might find another woman more desirable—and I know that makes me sound like a dreadful person, but why tell these stories if we aren’t going to be honest about them? What would be the point?”

“There would be no point,” says Silvia.

“We aren’t sharing these stories to entertain each other,” says Tess. She’s walking at the rear of the pack for once, because here in this apple orchard the path is clear enough and it is Jean who has somewhat improbably emerged as the morning’s leader. Jean who is walking fast, who must be almost out of earshot, chopping the air with her arms and pulling the rest of us into her pace. Tess’s statement is odd. If we aren’t telling these stories to entertain each other, why are we telling them? My head swims for a moment in a temporary vertigo. I get these attacks at times, especially when I’m driving, when I look up and around and for a minute I don’t know where I am, what road this is, or even what city. Perhaps it’s nothing more than what Claire said, the confusion that comes upon a woman in her forties. Because it’s one thing to not know where you’re going, but it’s a whole other thing to forget where you’ve just been. It’s terrifying. I could accept uncertainty about the road ahead—everyone feels that at some time or another—but this is something else. A more complete kind of disorientation.

“Tess is right,” Valerie is saying. “The stories aren’t meant to be a distraction, or a way to pass the time. They’re our confessions.”

“Mom,” Becca calls up to the head of the pack, “slow down. You’re leaving us.”

“What do you mean by ‘confessions’?” Steffi snaps. “I wasn’t aware I had anything to confess.”

“Then why are you walking to Canterbury?” Valerie says, in an irritatingly calm tone of voice. No inflection at all, just a series of words. She sounds like a therapist.

“The Cathedral is one of the great wonders of the world,” says Steffi, “and when I studied it in school I always promised myself that someday—”