The Last Worthless Evening (19 page)

“I'm going to tell you something else, and thank God you'll hear it first from me. Or at least completely from me. I can't tell you not to share this with your friends. But I'm going to ask you. I'm going to ask you please not to. Because this is for families. For you and me. And your friends should hear it and talk about it at home. We've no right to violate that. Each girl has her own timing for this, and you've got no way of knowing what a girl should know, and when. Okay?”

The nod again, the young eyes oblivious now of Claire's smoking, as though knowing what Claire was about to say and already intent on that; the same desire, though, was in her face, and the shyness, and Claire did not know whether to see this as a sign of the deep and trusting comfort between them, or a sign that already she had said too much; and, entrapped by herself, was about to say far, far too much.

“It's the pleasure too,” she said. “With a man. Making love with a man. You know how his seed gets into a woman. You looked worried, afraid, when we talked about that. Because you could only imagine pain. That part of his body going into you. But now you know girls who are experimenting. Touching boys there. Letting boys touch their vaginas. Maybe put in their fingers?”

This time Molly's nod was slow, and she blushed.

“They don't talk about pain, do they? Those girls.”

“No.”

“Only the first time. When the hymen breaks. When a man— or a boy—breaks it with his penis. But it's worth it. It's one of the most wonderful pleasures we can have. Maybe the most intense. Surely the most intense. Making love with a man you care for. It's everything I was talking about before, the way you feel like you, yourself alone among everyone else, and you feel it with your body
and
your heart. Damnit, I'm not going to lie to you. Mostly it's the body. The man's orgasm is his deepest pleasure, and that's when he ejaculates his seed. Our orgasm is even more intense, it lasts longer, and it's better than theirs.” She paused, looking at Molly's puzzled, quizzical eyes. “Climax,” she said. “Coming. Orgasm is coming.”

“Oh. I thought it was—” She looked at her plate, then back at Claire's eyes, blushing again.

“What?”

“Getting pregnant.”

“No. It's the completion of lovemaking. And when your body matures, you need it. Not
all
the time. It's not the most important thing in our lives. It's a very small part. But I need it. And that's what I thought and thought about when Norman left. There's masturbation, but it's not the same. It's like seeing only the end of a movie. So I decided back then that I could make love with a man—not any man, not
just
for the body, but a man I felt something for. Respected. Cared about. Could be myself with. And
feel
I was myself with. I hadn't listened to some snake and talked somebody into eating an apple. I was too young to know better, so I married a snake and he crawled away, to California. And left me to get banished like Eve. It wasn't right. Your generation won't go through all that worrying. But it was different for me. Being a young mother. I had to think things through, be sure I was right.” Like a narrow beam of white light through a cloud of colors and images in her mind, a discovery came to her: she had either drunk too much, or had become too excited by talking like this to Molly; but something was spurring her to a volubility beyond Molly's reach, beyond her age and experience, and so beyond her ability to comprehend with comfort, with confidence. Then with a heedless shrug or a brave leap of her heart she ignored the light and opened her mind again to the flow of images from her memory and her ideas that she wanted to form into sound, into words.

“Good Lord,” she said.

“What?”

“The grape. I'm talking too much. Listen: here's what I want you to know. Since sometime in the first year Norman left, I've had lovers.” Molly's body showed nothing, was still, even relaxed; her eyes looking into Claire's were patient and calm. Claire sighed, audibly, louder than she needed to: a sign to Molly that a gift had passed between them, through the fire of the candles. “They've been nice men, good men. I don't hang out in bars and—” Molly quickly shook her head. “Thank you. As long as you don't think I go around looking for them. It's a pleasure I need sometimes.” Then she smiled, and then her shoulders and abdomen shook with laughter that she tried to keep behind her closed lips, but it forced open her mouth, and she sat laughing, and as her face rose and fell with it she saw, through the tears in her eyes, Molly's smile. The smile was not forced, yet could not become laughter either. “Woo,” Claire said. “Sorry. I just remembered a man who had been in the Navy. On a ship. He told me one night after they'd been at sea for a good while, they anchored off some island. Okinawa. Whatever. Their first night ashore. So you know what they did, besides get drunk. They went by a small boat from the ship to the island and back. They were coming back to the ship at midnight, and an old sailor looked around at all the drunk young men and said: ‘Sex is the one thing you can get behind on the most, and catch up on the quickest'—” Then she was laughing again, her legs tightening with it, her torso and head swaying to and fro with it; and across the table Molly was laughing too, doubling over her cold dinner plate; and Claire knew their talk had ended, in this crescendo of laughter, and she gave herself to it until it ended too, then stood and gathered up dishes and carried them to the sink. Then Molly was beside her with glasses and a serving bowl, and she felt Molly's body touching her thigh and hip and ribs, and she placed a hand on Molly's long soft hair; then she gently pressed Molly's head against her side, and she said: “When you're ready—in high school, college, whenever—we'll get you a diaphragm.”

She did not have a lover then, but two months later she did, and after twice going to his apartment and then coming home to Molly and the sitter, she told Molly about him. This was in winter at their cocktail hour, Molly with her cup of tea and Claire with the second martini she allowed herself before dinner.

“He's a nice man. Divorced. Or just separated now, getting divorced. I sold him their house three years ago. Now she has it. Some couples do that, you know: their marriage is going under, so they make a leap: buy a new house, or have a baby. It's sad. I had a hunch, when I was showing them houses. There was a sadness about them. And a shyness between them. A fragile commitment to stake their marriage on doing something new together. Now she has the house and the kids and the poor guy—Stephen, his name is Stephen—has the mortgage payments and a little apartment above a dentist's office. He pays rent to the dentist. Are you all right?”

“Sure.”

“Hearing this, I mean. Knowing it's where I was last night. I go to his apartment.”

“I don't mind.”

Molly was twelve still, in the seventh grade; next summer she would be thirteen, and her body was shaping itself toward those numbers, her waist lengthening, becoming distinct and slender, and her breasts giving her sweater two small contours of fertile hope. She wore the subdued lipstick, a delicate deepening of her lips' color, that Claire allowed her for school and parties. On these winter days, when she came in from the cold, with her cheeks reddened, the lipstick looked from across a room like the true coloring of her mouth.

“Would you like to meet him? Have him come here for dinner?”

“Yes.”

“What if he stayed?”

“I don't mind.”

“To sleep with me.”

“I know.”

“Are you sure? You wouldn't be embarrassed? Or something else? When you went up to bed and—”

“Mom. It's okay.”

“Or at breakfast? Think about it. I'm very serious about this.
It's
not serious, me and Stephen. But our home is. It's more important than me and Stephen, and how you feel about your home is more important. So tell me the absolute truth. Because, Molly, if there's ever anything but the absolute truth between us, then we've failed. And the failure is mine.”

Molly had different smiles: some private, some distracted, some childish, some courteous, and she had one that for years had warmed Claire, as though it came to her on wings over whatever space lay between her and her daughter, and touched her; it was the smile of an old and intimate friend who loved you, trusted you, and did not have to forgive you. She was smiling that way now. For moments she did not speak. Then she said: “I better make you a third one tonight. You're like me in the principal's office.”

“Do you know how?”

Molly crossed the room, took Claire's glass.

“It's gin and vermouth, right?”

“Not much vermouth. And four olives.”

“Two ounces of gin. A few drops of vermouth. Stir.”

Claire watched her walk into the kitchen, listened to her tossing ice from the glass into the sink, then working with the ice tray and dropping new cubes into the glass. She lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Her body felt relieved, as though she had just completed a task. She opened her eyes to a tinkling martini. Then Molly sat across from her on the couch and sipped her tea and frowned because it had cooled.

“Why were you at the principal's office?”

“Smoking.”

Claire straightened, her arms rigid in front of her, and cold martini dropped onto her fingers.

“
Dope?
”

“Yuk. I'll never smoke that stuff.”

Claire eased back into the chair, and lowered her arms.

“Molly, don't smoke.”

“We just passed one around. I didn't even in
hale
.”

“Whose was it?”

“Belinda's.”

“Do you smoke?”

“
Mom
.” Molly lifted her purse from the cushion beside her, the purse filled, bulging. “Want to look?”

“No. No, of course I don't.”

“I took a drag and Conway came in. The French teacher. They've got their own lavs. She just likes to catch people. What kind of grown-ups like to do that anyway?”

“Lord knows, sweetie. Not me, anyway. But please don't start, and get hooked.”

Molly's smile now was sly, teasing, and they both looked at Claire's cigarette poised over the ashtray, her finger raised to tap ashes.

“Okay,” Claire said. “Hell with spaghetti. Want to go out for dinner?”

The dinners, the evenings, and the breakfasts with Stephen were more comfortable than she had expected them to be; were even as comfortable as she had hoped they would be. On the first night, two nights after Claire had talked to Molly, Stephen came to dinner, and Claire was shy. She heard it in her voice too, and felt it in her cheeks, and glimpsed it in Molly's watching eyes. Molly watched them both as the three of them sat in the living room before dinner, and at dinner, and afterward as they lingered at the dining-room table, then as all of them cleared it and filled the dishwasher. But mostly she watched Claire, and Claire remembered Molly years ago watching her put on make-up. For in Molly's eyes now there was that same look of an astute apprentice. And there was a nuance too of collusion, the look of a female roommate who shares dinner with you and your lover before going to a movie, or to her room for the evening. When the kitchen surfaces were clean and the dishes were in the dishwasher, they went to the living room, and as Claire finished her coffee and offered Stephen more cognac, she realized that she did not control the evening; Molly did. For Claire did not have the courage to send her to bed. So, sitting with Stephen on the couch, she kept talking, including Molly, and hearing her own discomfort in her voice, feeling it warming her face. At ten o'clock Molly stood and said goodnight and came to the couch and kissed her. She shook Stephen's hand as he rose and told her goodnight. Then she left them.

Claire did not want to make love, did not want to climb the stairs with Stephen and take him into her bed where she had slept alone since Norman left. On the couch they kissed and touched until the second floor of the house was quiet. Still she kept Stephen on the couch until her passion overcame her; or nearly did; and she led him creeping up the carpeted stairs and down the carpeted hall and into her bedroom, and behind them she eased the door shut, and slowly turned the knob. She had not made love for so long in this bed that she could not remember whether it was audible or silent. It was silent, as silent as the one down the hall, behind the closed door: her daughter's bed she listened for as Molly slept on it or lay awake listening too, imagining, in the darkened knowledge of her bedroom. Then Claire's body surprised her, left her alone with her caution; yet as she came she clamped her teeth on her voice, panted through her nostrils, then held Stephen to her breasts, and kissed him. At early breakfast, feeding Stephen and Molly before the school bus came to the driveway, she was no longer shy.

That summer Molly celebrated her thirteenth birthday. She and Claire planned a party: after dinner, friends to come for snacks and music, maybe dancing if the boys could be coaxed. Claire and Molly ate dinner in the evening sunlight, the two candles between them: always at dinner Claire burned candles. When they finished dinner Claire went to the kitchen for her coffee and returned to sit with Molly. She lit a cigarette. Then Molly reached across the table for the pack, took a cigarette, tapped it, smiling at Claire; and as Claire watched, with the old cooling fear rising from her calves to her heart, Molly placed the cigarette between her lips, pulled a candle closer, leaned toward it, and drew from its flame—and oh not like an experimenting child with lips curled clumsily inward but with her lips delicately pursed, then she leaned back from the candle, and two fingers gracefully took the cigarette from her mouth and held it beside her cheek as she inhaled.

“Very sexy,” Claire said, and heard the bitterness, the angry sense of betrayal in her voice, before she knew it was in her heart too. Molly smiled. Then Claire's bitterness was gone, and the fear too: it was sadness now, and resignation to it.