"I remember the night she left. I took her to the airport. We were three hours early- you know how I am- so we had too many drinks, which she said she wanted; she wanted to sleep the flight through. But when she landed in Heathrow, she got the news: Bobby Kennedy had been shot. She got hysterical in the airport; when you meet her you"ll see how extraordinary that must have been. It was as if someone had taken her marriage to Jack, which she"d decently buried, dug it up and hacked it to pieces publicly. She phoned me, really out of control. I told her to come right back and stay with me. But she said she wouldn"t. I just wanted to hear a friendly voice," she said, "And now I must get started.""
"And she did," said Ruth, "she did get started."
"In a way, yes, of course she did. She got a flat in Clapham and had a small piano moved in. Three days a week she took lessons- she"d never touched the instrument in her life before- with some terribly hard-up young student at the conservatory. Then he got married and went to Sweden, and she began taking lessons with Miss Taub.
"You"ll meet Miss Taub, no doubt," Phil said. "She must be seventy if she"s a day. She and Sylvie became best friends almost immediately, and she took Sylvie into her circle, although Sylvie"s the youngest of the group by twenty years. And she has this job, she runs some sort of inst.i.tute for the blind. So she"s become a kind of fixture on the South Bank, this beautiful, rather remote woman, taking old women and blind people to concerts. You"ll see, we"ll have at least one night with Miss Taub, and possibly a blind person. I never know what to do with those occasions."
"Why?"
"Well, I always feel that my physical health and whatever youth I have is a kind of affront to them. Besides, I"m always afraid I"m going to step on the guide dog"s tail and start him howling in the middle of something pianissimo."
"Phil, guide dogs don"t howl. They"re used to people stepping on their tails."
"It would be just my luck to get one that"s hypersensitive."
They drove out of the impressive part of London; just into Clapham it was easy to imagine people living ordinary lives, taking their shoes to the shoemaker"s, getting quick meals from Indian takeouts, going to movies because they were too tired to read. Ruth wondered what Sylvie had looked like when Phil had first known her. She remembered the first thing Phil had told her about Sylvie, something her ex-husband had said, that she had always wanted to be an old woman, and she"d turned herself into one so she could have the life she wanted. Ruth had been puzzled by Phil"s tone in telling her: he"d sounded angry. She had a.s.sumed that he was angry for the whole estate of men: in refusing to fight against aging, in embracing it prematurely, Sylvie was taking herself out of the game. "I won"t play," she"d said, and left the other players feeling foolish. Yet Phil considered her one of his dearest friends.
"You know," he said as they approached her street, "you can ask Sylvie anything about me."
Ruth didn"t say what she was thinking, that the problem was that she knew too much about Phil already, that the only real information she wanted was impossible to get: she didn"t want more history, she wanted guarantees. "You will be happy now," she wanted someone to say, "I promise." Perhaps that was what she"d wanted from Sylvie, but her first glance as Sylvie opened the door told her she wouldn"t get it. Sylvie had taken pains to show that her allegiance was with a past which was more real, more vivid to her, than the thin present in which she felt herself required now to live.
Her flat was based on the idea of home of single women who had come to London from the Continent after the war. Modestly, wisely, they had bought the first luxuries available in the early fifties; as if they didn"t want to seem too brash they concentrated on light browns and cream colors. Accents of gold might show themselves from time to time- some braid on a throw pillow, a detail of a tapestried chair. Pale green lamps threw their genteel and muted lights on objects neutral as sh.e.l.ls. Only occasionally a porcelain box, a cigarette case, a small dish for nuts or candy would cry out that it was un-English and suggest some difficult, exciting European life that had been left for good.
At first Ruth thought that Sylvie had chosen her clothing along the same lines, and as a kind of camouflage to beauty. But then she looked more closely and saw that those careful clothes- the dun-colored blouse, the olive green loose skirt, the beige shoes with a thin chain on the instep- represented Sylvie"s real understanding of the nature of her beauty. Ruth wondered if, like a tall woman who wears high heels, Sylvie underscored her unfashionableness to turn it into an a.s.set. She was, after all, nearly fifty, and by choosing to dress older than she was, there was no need for her to acknowledge that she was no longer young. Ruth felt arriviste in her red flowered skirt, blue shirt, jade beads, an outfit she"d been pleased with in the hotel mirror.
Sylvie offered them drinks and brought out little plates of sandwiches. She disappeared again and again into the kitchen, bringing out dishes of odd, Germanic foods: pickled or salted, all desirable because they looked distinctly unnutritious. She seated herself across from Ruth, her spine an inch or two away from the chair back, and said, "Now you must tell me all about your children." But Ruth grew tongue-tied; her children seemed out of place in the flat. You wouldn"t like them, Ruth thought, catching Sylvie"s bright and overeager eye. You"d think them spoiled and greedy and uneducated.
"It"s so hard to describe one"s children," she said, defeatedly. "One never knows if one"s being at all realistic."
"Anything you said about them would sound like bragging," Phil said. "Only it would be the truth."
"How enchanting," Sylvie said. "Phil"s a born father, Ruth, don"t you think?"
"None of the potential mothers seemed to think so," Phil said. "I was game."
The personal tone seemed almost obscene to Ruth among the artifacts of Sylvie"s flat; she blushed for Phil"s misjudgment. But Sylvie went on to talk about the other wives, the other women, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The conversation led naturally to people they had known, and Ruth could see Sylvie straining not to talk about old times, times Ruth had not been a part of, but her efforts to update their talk made Ruth feel childish, as if the grown-ups had kindly taken the time to ask her how she liked her school. She"d been through this before, meeting Phil"s friends, but it was different with Sylvie. The smooth surface of Sylvie"s life, her presentation of herself, left no foothold for Ruth. She jumped up eagerly when Phil said they must leave for dinner; then she felt her action made her appear greedy, and she told Phil to sit down again, they needn"t rush. But Sylvie arose then, slowly, as if she were walking out of the ocean, and said, "No, let"s go now. It"s horrible to be late, don"t you think so, Ruth?"
"No, Ruth is unable to be on time," said Phil. "If she happens to be early, she"ll do something- wallpaper the bathroom or begin to learn to play the flute- anything to avoid the terrible fate of being on time."
"How extraordinary, Phil, and you so anxious always about lateness," Sylvie said. "This must be love at last."
They walked into the street wrapped in a garment of bonhomie that Phil, Ruth saw, believed was genuine and beautiful and that to her was a hair shirt.
Phil had been right; Sylvie had made arrangements for them first to have dinner, then to go to the Schubert lieder in the Purcell room with Miss Taub. One of the people from the Inst.i.tute for the Unsighted had been asked but, Sylvie explained, at the last moment she had got the flu.
"Ah, here"s Miss Taub," said Sylvie when they approached the restaurant. "She makes rather a fetish of being early, but through the years I"ve managed to indulge her when I can. Tonight she"s had to wait."
Miss Taub kissed Phil and gave her hand to Ruth. It was appropriate, of course; she"d known Phil, and it was her first meeting with Ruth. Of course, it was appropriate, but it was one more brushstroke, Ruth felt, in the group portrait: the two older women, eminently civilized, being courted safely, tenderly by Phil, and Ruth apart, spread out and representing Nature. Sylvie floundered visibly in trying to keep the conversation nonexclusionary, entertaining, smooth. Then, all at once, she gave Ruth a look of pure unhappiness. "See, I am drowning," the look said, "and it is your fault." At once Ruth saw that she had been impossible. The pain in Sylvie"s eyes was genuine. Its disproportion drew out the maternal side of Ruth: she would not let this woman, who had so clearly suffered, suffer more. She sat up straight, then leaned her elbows on the table. She talked about her children and asked Miss Taub"s advice about their music lessons. Phil turned on Ruth his look of bliss. She knew that they had triumphed, but the triumph had been brought about by Sylvie, who had let herself appear, to this unpleasant stranger, intimately weak.
"Bonne chance" Miss Taub said, as they put her in a taxi. "I know we will meet again."
And Ruth hung on her lover"s arm, because the words seemed like a blessing and a talisman, and in her grat.i.tude for them she felt suddenly weak as if she could, without Phil"s arm, fall down or faint.
Sylvie had invited them to lunch Sat.u.r.day at her flat, but she phoned in the morning to ask if she could take them, instead, to a restaurant near her office. The inst.i.tute librarian, she explained, was sick, and many of the members could use the library only on Sat.u.r.days. She could leave one of the members in charge while they lunched, but they could not be leisurely, she said, not half so leisurely as they"d have liked.
Phil had a meeting in the morning; he told Ruth that he would meet her at the inst.i.tute at one o"clock. But when Ruth arrived, Sylvie told her Phil had telephoned; the meeting would be indefinitely long, and they would have to lunch without him.
Ruth looked around her in a kind of panic. The blind people walked around the room, so even-paced and so sagacious she could have gone down on her knees. And Sylvie walked slowly, certainly, among them, touching some of them on the shoulder, saying their names, as a queen might walk among her castle staff. She introduced Ruth to the man who would sit at the desk while they lunched.
"How lucky you are to have our Sylvie to lunch," he said, his smile courtly beneath his merely damaged gaze.
"Yes, I"m only sorry my friend is tied up and can"t join us," Ruth said, then felt she"d been tactless. "I mean, it"s terrible that on a day like this he has to work."
"Your friend?" laughed Sylvie. "Your fiance, you mean. They will be married, Ted, within two weeks."
"Taking your honeymoon before," he said, but he could not sound worldly. Ruth smiled, then realized he couldn"t see her, so she laughed too loudly. Some people sitting at the tables looked toward her with the self-righteous stares of interrupted readers. That the stares were sightless was irrelevant, the censure was the same, and Ruth apologized to Sylvie and to the man Ted, whom she had wanted to praise by her laughter.
"Not at all," he said. "There"s nothing worse than a library prig."
"Take your time," he said to Sylvie, who said she would. But when she got outside, she said to Ruth, "Ted"s such a dear, and wonderfully intelligent, but if a crowd should gather at the desk, he simply couldn"t cope."
As they walked, Ruth wondered if Sylvie suspected, as she did, that Phil had invented his overlong meeting so that the two women could be alone. For herself, she felt he had erred badly; the small ease she had gained with Sylvie at dinner days before had vanished. She felt, as they walked, that she followed in Sylvie"s majestic wake, an undistinguished tug behind a schooner.
After they had ordered, Sylvie asked her about her work, apologizing for her ignorance in science. Then, without transition she said, "Have you ever met my husband, Jack MacGregor? Phil still sees him, I believe."
"Yes, but he lives in California, and I haven"t met him yet."
Ruth was shocked by Sylvie"s question and embarra.s.sed to hear her call Jack "my husband." They had been divorced seventeen years; Jack had teenage children by the woman he"d left her for.
"We never write, it"s such a shame. We"ve quite lost touch. I"m utterly dependent upon Phil for news of him. Strange, isn"t it? You"d think that one would keep in touch with someone so important in one"s past. It"s lucky I have Phil, or Jack could die without my knowing."
Sylvie patted the corners of her mouth with her stiff napkin, then folded her hands as if to say, "What is it exactly that you want to know?" Ruth tried to read the beautiful, pale face, but it was blank and formal. A poker face, Ruth thought, and then realized at once how it was between them. She sat across from Sylvie like an inexperienced player before a seasoned gambler. Sylvie had, Ruth saw now, the professional"s immaculate composure. The formality of every gesture was a weapon and a code. Concealment was the metier, the game unt.i.tled and the stakes unnamed. The purpose of the game itself became known only gradually. It was to get the green player to reveal her hand. Then the professional, seemingly prepared to throw down everything, would discard, in fact, only selected single cards- the obvious, the garish pictures- which could distract the green player from the game"s real feat: everything valued or thought important had been kept back.
Ruth felt herself dig in, take root, grow obdurately stable. She asked Sylvie about Belgium, her childhood, her emigration to America. It seemed to Ruth that Sylvie quite purposefully drained all these topics of interest in order to return the conversation to its natural center: Phil. But Ruth knew that she could resist, for lunch was not meant to go on too long. They were both grateful to leave each other. When they parted, they did not kiss.
Ruth watched Sylvie walk down the street, unhurried and a.s.sured.
And yet her back was angry, and she thrust her neck a shade uncomfortably forward as she walked. Phil well might say that she was happy, but watching her progress, Ruth saw the effort and the cost. She understood that Sylvie"s life had been finished when Jack left her; she walked now as one dead. A blow that others might recover from, she never would; the damage that was temporary for some had been for Sylvie quite final. And the recovery of others, somehow, made it worse. It put everyone into a falsifying light, for if Sylvie"s response was just, then others were deficient; if they were sane and sensible, then her life was a waste.
She walked around the squares of Bloomsbury feeling for no reason that she must kill time. The chestnuts held their flowers jealously, like precious candelabras that had been in the family for years. Some roses were beginning, others would be over in a day. The image of Phil"s body kept floating before her eyes, and then parts of his body only: the torso, the back, the legs. She began running to the hotel, terrified that when she got there the room would be empty. It was not. She found Phil on the bed, reading a six-week-old copy of the New Statesman; others were spread out on the floor around the bed. He was touched and gladdened by her eagerness, though she suspected he mistook its causes and believed Sylvie had eased her mind about his past.
They would spend their last evening with Sylvie. Phil apologized when he told Ruth, but it seemed to be the only night Sylvie was free, and they had a piece of luck: they could get tickets for Antony and Cleopatra."Fine," Ruth said. "Really, that"s wonderful." She was thinking that she wanted to be home with her children. Their presence was a forced balance to her always. If they were here, she thought, the figure of Sylvie might not have loomed so menacingly, so symbolically; with the children along, she felt she might have been less cruel.
"I"ve always liked the character of En.o.barbus," Phil said, after the play as they drank gin on Sylvie"s settee. "I"d like to have seen him played by Ray Bolger."
They made up their ideal cast of Antony and Cleopatra, and the time went pleasingly and fast. But Ruth could sense behind it all, like a perfume at once menacing and seductive, Sylvie"s dread that they would leave. She kept thinking up little strategems so they would linger: she wrote down things she"d love for them to send her from New York; she asked questions about the children to which she already knew the answers. She kept offering them different foods, and when they refused, running into the kitchen to see what else she had to offer. But in the air there began to arise another scent: the thin, high one that was merely Phil"s anxiety about packing, about missing planes. Both women knew that was the scent that must be followed, and they rose at once.
"Next time I see you, you will be married," said Sylvie, holding Ruth"s hands. "I wish you every happiness," she said, handing them a gift. It was a miniature of a woman, blonde and blue-eyed, in a low-cut yellow dress. "It is from my family."
Phil had tears in his eyes as he thanked Sylvie, but Ruth could only wonder what gift Sylvie had given the other women as they parted. Were they all treasures from her family? Had Phil taken them with him when he left the women? Were they even now in his apartment, in his office, objects that she hadn"t questioned, that he"d got in just this way?
"Things change, my friend, but we are constant," Sylvie said, as she kissed Phil goodbye.
She smiled at Ruth as she looked over Phil"s shoulder, and Ruth felt herself forced to return the smile in kind.
She sat in a chair across the room and watched Phil as he slept. Usually she was a sounder sleeper than anyone she slept with. She wondered whether any man had watched her as she watched Phil now; she could not imagine it.
The light that came from the streetlights made the room seem unchangeable: an object in history, a work of art. Phil"s back was to her, and his posture made him boyish. The fine shoulders were the shoulders of a boy, the few dark hairs made a pattern she wanted to follow with her lips. She could not bear anymore to be merely looking, and she wondered if she lay against him if she would wake him up. She decided to take the chance; he seemed deeply asleep. She took her nightgown off because she wanted to feel the softness of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against the hard curve of his back. He did not waken. She moved away, back to the chair. She wanted to be watching him again.
She understood that if he left her it would be like death and wondered when it happened how she would go on.
The Other Woman.
She was lying in the spare room in the single bed at three in the morning. It was hot, and her sense of moral failure made her head go queer. She was not asleep, and yet you would have to say she was dreaming. Images behind her eyes buzzed and skipped as in a nightmare.
Two hours before, she had been lying in bed next to her husband. They were reading; sometimes her husband"s hand would fondle her belly or scratch her thigh. He would read her a sentence from a book about England; she would look up from her magazine. They would read each other sentences; they would say, "You should read this."
She was reading a story about an adulterous affair. The woman had been left by her lover (who adored her), who went back to his wife. It was the sight of his children"s hands as they slept, he had said, that made his decision for him. He loved the woman; he would go back to his wife. Because of the hands of his children as they slept.
She lay back, her arms behind her head, looking at her naked b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the curve of her waist. What does this body mean to me? she wondered, and ran her palms along the high bones of her pelvis. How peculiar it was, she thought, looking at her husband, that her body had the power to excite him, to make him lay down his book and turn to her, cupping her b.u.t.tocks in his hands, wanting her like that. Her sense of the oddness of it all made her distant from him, but she began to feel his desire soothe her; it became a dwelling she could rest inside, and she thought as she met his desire with her own familiar body, How easy it is to be faithful! For it was not his body that excited her (it had never been men"s bodies that had excited her), but the idea of him, of all that he was and was to her, that made her rise to meet him, desire for desire. It was the oddness of it all, and the familiarity.
He always became invigorated after s.e.x, with a pure, inappropriate energy. She drew the quilt around her bare shoulders and settled down in the bed. It was sleep she wanted, sleep to flow over her. But she could see the muscles of his back twitching with impatience, like a horse"s flanks sucking in and out. The magazine was still on the bed, and she threw it benevolently in his direction. "Read that story," she said. "You"ll like it." And she brought the covers over her head so that she could be in darkness. She was content. He was engaged; she had earned the delicious feeling of cool sheets around her shoulders, of roundness, of being what we so rarely feel ourselves to be- in exactly the right place, doing what it is we are meant to do at that moment. The air conditioner hummed soothingly nearby; it was possible to sleep.
She became aware of the peculiar sensation that occurs when the interface between a dream and the world is violated. In her dream she was in a car, driving; outside the dream the bed was shaking with awkward, uneven spasms. She woke in a resentful confusion.
The sight she saw was the one that to her, even in a state of full wake-fulness, was most finally disturbing. Her husband was weeping. He was a strong man, even in the obvious senses, and she depended on that. The strength of his body and its predictability were a center for her more random life.
In the years she had known him, he had been sick twice; he had wept four times. She remembered these incidents distinctly. When he wept, his weeping was torn out of his body. She could weep and be engaged in other activities; she could walk and weep or weep and pack a suitcase. But when he wept, his entire body was taken up with it, so that he needed her for physical support.
She sat up quickly and was annoyed by her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, bobbing so foolishly, so irrelevantly, as she moved to put her arms around him for comfort only. This now was the function of her body, and the other, earlier one, the one she was reminded of by her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, vexed her; it seemed peculiar that she had the same body for comfort as for excitement. It was as though she were divided in some final, harmful way.
She put her arms around him and put his head against her breast. She began to swim up past sleep and became aware that she did not know the reason for his weeping. She stroked his hair and spoke so quietly that her own voice was unfamiliar to her. But her words were coos and nonsense syllables- ancient language she had learned somewhere, in some life. For the moment, she did not want to ask him anything; she did not want to use her language for that.
She looked at his face and wiped his eyes with the sleeve of the nightgown that she had taken from under her pillow. She had never seen anyone look as he did- it was a look of such pure grief, a look of no extraneous emotions. His face looked ancient, as though it bespoke a great sorrow that had not spent itself in mourning. It was the face of a mother holding a dead child, of a wife whose husband has been drowned. One expected such a look from women, but this- this was her husband, a man, and that made it more terrible.
His sobs had stopped and he lay with his head against her in silence.
"My darling," she said. "What is it?"
"The story," he said.
"The story?"
She was surprised, for it was she who lived in stories and he who lived in the world.
"It was when the children were babies," he said. His children both were in their teens now, but still his children, and her husband"s love for them, she had come to understand, was the deepest thing in his life. You could not say that it was a love that could come between him and her, because his love for her was outside that center of him, the center that was his love for his children. She had borne no children, and so she had no place in that center. It was as if he and his children stood somewhere at the bottom of a well, in a spot so dark, down so far, that she could not see it. It was not like his past, his divorce, which was another kind of darkness to her, because this with his children continued into her life, into all their lives. But it was a darkness she could live with, for they were children and she was a woman. That difference, she had come to understand, made it all right.
"It was when the children were babies," he said. "There was a woman. I never told you about her." And he began to weep again.
The area under her breast grew cold and stony. She wondered how he could leave his head there.
"I had never loved anyone so much," he said. "She was going to leave her family. We were going to go away. I had never loved anyone so much. I hated my wife; all that was nothing. And then I looked at the children, and I knew that nothing on earth could make me leave them."
"And the woman?" she said, almost sick with the effort it took her to go on holding him.
"She went back to her husband. That was the terrible part- how I failed her. I had never loved anyone so much."
He wanted her to weep with him, to sympathize, for her flesh to warm with his sorrow; and all she could think was, Why must you tell me this? You must not tell me this. How can you expect me to comfort you for this?
Suddenly he sighed, a great sigh, the release of a burden. "It was a very long time ago," he said, exhausted, and he wept sleepily against her. But her body was tense with effort. She was his wife, and a wife must do this, must hold her husband in sleep and keep him from his sorrow.
But the idea of hurting him came to her mind like the thought of a delicious confection. She wanted to push him away from her, to let him lie there in the dark, wanting her, in shame, in need. She wanted to say, How you have hurt me! But she held him in her arms and stroked his head until she heard his gentle breathing. Once he was asleep, she could no longer endure the touch of his skin on her skin.
She put on her nightgown and went into the other room. She did not want to open the window for fear of waking him, so she lay in the hot, dusty air, conscious of sweat beginning to form arcs under her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. And she thought of her husband, who had loved a woman so much that after all these years her loss was his deepest sorrow. He would never weep like that for her. Often she had imagined her husband"s response to her death. And she had always seen him accepting it as a part of their lives, going on, his mourning taking a practical turn. He would think of her, perhaps, in the garden.
For she had been his wife, and their love had known no obstacles. They had met, loved, been free to marry. Their love was even, sweet, and temperate, like milk in a brown bowl on a shelf in a fragrant pantry. But, it seemed to her now, such a love might be too mild- toothless, without the edge of frustration to eat its way into his life. Like the other. And so he would never love her so much, so much as he had loved the other woman. Even when she died he would not mourn her so deeply. He could not, for their love had been born of ease and was happy. His love for the other woman had been born of sorrow, and so he would never love her so much as he had loved the other woman.
And how could he ask her for comfort? The coldness under her breast grew until her body was entirely filled with it. And through her mind, in anger, in exhaustion, beeped two sentences: He will never love me so much. How can he ask me for comfort?
She lay on top of the spread, stretching her limbs out as far away from her body as she could. Her s.e.x was open- utterly vulnerable, she thought.
She began to fall into a sleep that was harsh, like rusted wires.
She heard the door open. Her husband came into the room, and even in the dark she could see that he was frightened; she could smell his fear in the darkness. But his fear did not move her; inside her were the cold light and the words that buzzed and skipped: He will never love me so much. How can he ask me for comfort?
"I had a terrible dream," he said. He was sweating. She did not tell him to continue, but he lay down beside her and said, "They were in a car. The children and the other woman. The car exploded. I woke up weeping. You weren"t there."
"I was restless," she said. "I didn"t want to wake you."
She wanted to get up and walk away from him- anywhere, outside into the air. But she stroked his hair and said in a voice that was thick with effort, "Come here. It was only a dream."
She thought surely he would discern the strain in her voice, in her hands. And she was torn between the desire for him to know what he had done to her and the desire to keep it from him, to absorb his sorrow into herself. But since she was a woman, her body had been bred to deceit.
How easy it was for her, quite mechanically, with no connection to herself, to soothe her husband, to be a comfort to him. And he settled into her false comfort, pressing against her body for relief. She knew that he would never know what she was feeling, and knowing this, she had never loved him so little.
Billy.