Part 27 (1/2)
We try to look at pictures, but it is no good, the baby cries incessantly. Besides, we really do not want to be together anymore. He puts me in a taxi and tries to embrace me, but the baby is strapped to me and all he can manage is a chaste and distant kiss on the cheek. It is the first time I have disappointed him; and I feel the failure all the way home. The baby falls asleep the minute she gets on the bus; she was crying from exhaustion. I do not know what I was thinking of, making this expedition. Or I know precisely what I had been thinking of, and cannot now believe I was so foolish.
IV.
It is evening. My husband and I are going to dinner at our favorite restaurant. The girl who is taking care of the baby is a girl I love. Seventeen, she is the daughter of a friend, a woman I love and admire, a woman of accomplishment whose children are accomplished and who love her. E is beautiful, a beauty which would be a bit inhuman if she under stood its power, and were it not tempered by her sweetness and her modesty. I know her well; she lived with us in the summer. I was relieved to be unable to a.s.sume a maternal role with her; I believed, and still believe, that she sees me as a slatternly older sister, good at heart but scarcely in control. She plays the flute; she gets my jokes; she speaks perfect French; she does the dishes without being asked. The baby adores her. We can leave telling her nothing but the phone number of the restaurant. She knows everything she needs to know.
It is not a good dinner. I want to tell my husband about M but cannot. It is not his business; spouses should never be able to image their fears of their beloved's being desired by another. And I may want to see M again. I am distracted, and my husband knows me well enough to know it. We are both disappointed for we do not have much time alone.
We do not linger over after-dinner drinks, but come home early to find E in the dark, crying. My husband leaves her to me; he has always said that a woman, however young, does not want to be seen in tears by a man who is not her lover. In the car, I ask her what is wrong.
”It's R,” she says, her first boyfriend, with whom I know she has broken up. ”It's awful to see him every day, and not be able to talk to him.”
”Mm,” I say, looking at the dark road.
”It's just so awful. He used to be the person in the world I most wanted to see, most wanted to talk to, and now I rush out of cla.s.ses so I don't have to pa.s.s him in the halls.”
”It's hard.”
”Was it like that for you? First loving someone, then running away from the sight of them?”
”Yes, it happened to me a lot.” I conjure in my mind the faces of ten men once loved.
”Do you think people can ever be friends when they fall out of love with each other?”
”I suppose so. I've never been able to do it. Some people can.”
She looks at me with anguish in the dark, cold car. ”It's such a terrible waste. I can't bear it, I don't think. Do you think it's all worth it?”
”I don't think there's an alternative,” I say.
”What a relief it must be that it's all over for you.”
So this is how she sees me: finished, tame, bereft of possibilities. I kiss her good night, feeling like that German woman with thick legs. Lightly, E runs through the beam of the headlights over the gra.s.s to her house. I wait to see that she is in the door.
Her urgent face is in my mind as I drive home, and M's face and the face of ten loved men. I realize that I am old to E, or middle-aged, and that is worse. The touch of M's hand on my breast gave me no pleasure. That has never happened to me before.
I have never thought of myself as old; rather I fear that I am so young-seeming that I lack authority in the outside world. I feel the burdens of both youth and age. I am no longer dangerous, by reason of excitement, possibility- but I cannot yet compel by fear. I feel as if the light had been drained from my hair and skin. I walk into the house, low to the ground, dun-colored, like a moorhen.
My husband is in bed when I return. I look in at the baby. Under her yellow blanket her body falls and rises with her breath. I wash my face and get into my nightgown. It is purple cotton, striped; it could belong to a nun. I think of the nightwear of women in films whose bodies glow with danger: Garbo, Dietrich, Crawford. Faye Dunaway, who has a baby and is not much older than 1.1 see my husband is not yet asleep. He takes me in his arms. I ask, ”Do you ever think of me as dangerous?”
He laughs. ”Let me try to guess what you've been reading. Anna KareninaZ Madame Bovaryi Vanity Fair?'
”I'm serious. I'll bet you never think of me as dangerous.”
He holds me closer. ”If I thought of you as dangerous, I'd have to think of myself as unsafe.”
I pull him toward me. I can feel his heart beating against my breast. Safe, of course he must be safe with me. He and the baby. Were they unsafe, I could not live a moment without terror for myself. I know that I must live my life now knowing it is not my own. I can keep them from so little; it must be the shape of my life to keep them at least from the danger I could bring them.
In a few hours, the baby will awaken, needing to be fed again. My husband takes my nightgown off.
The Dancing Party.
”I know why you're in this mood,” says the angry wife, ”I just wish you'd admit it.”
They drive in darkness on the sandy road; she has no confidence that he will find the house, which they have only seen in daylight. And she half wishes he would get a wheel stuck in the sand. She would be pleased to see him foolish.
”I'm in a bad mood for one reason,” says the husband. ”Because you said to me: Shape up. No one should say that to someone: Shape up.”
”I could tell by your face how you were planning to be. That way that makes the other people at a party want to cut their throats.”
”Must I sparkle to be allowed among my kind?”
”And I know why you're like that. Don't think I don't. It's because you watched the children while I swam. For once.”
”Yes, it's true, the day was shaped by your desires. But I'm not resentful. Not at all. You must believe me.”
”But I don't believe you.”
”Then where do we go?”
”We go, now, to the party. But I beg you: Please don't go in with your face like that. It's such a wonderful idea, a dancing party.”
The house is built atop the largest dune. In daylight you can see the ocean clearly from the screened-in porch. The married couple climb the dune, not looking at each other, walking far apart. When they come to the door, they see the hostess dancing with her brother.
How I love my brother, thinks the hostess. There are no men in the world like him.
The hostess's brother has just been divorced. His sister's house is where he comes, the house right on the ocean, the house she was given when her husband left her for someone else. Her brother comes here for consolation, for she has called it ”my consolation prize.” And it has been a consolation, and still is, though she is now, at forty-five, successful. She can leave her store to her a.s.sistants, take a month off in the summer, and come here. She earns more money than her ex-husband, who feels, by this alone, betrayed. She comes, each morning, to the screened-in porch and catches in the distance the blue glimpse of sea, the barest hint, out in the distance, longed for, but in reach. She'd brought her daughters here for the long, exhausting summers of the single mother. Watched their feuds, exclusions, the sh.o.r.e life of children on long holiday, so br.i.m.m.i.n.g and so cruel. But they are grown now, and remarkably, they both have jobs, working in the city. One is here, now, for the weekend only. Sunday night, tomorrow, like the other grown-ups, she will leave. The daughter will be in her car, stuck in the line of traffic, that reptilian creature that will take her in its coils. Exhausted, she will arrive in her apartment in Long Island City. She will wait till morning to return her rented car.
I will not be like my mother, thinks the daughter of the hostess. I will not live as she lives. How beautiful she is, and how I love her. But I will not live like that.
She lifts an angry shoulder at the poor young man, her partner, who does not know why. She is saying: I will not serve you or your kind. I will not be susceptible.
She sees her mother, dancing, not with her brother any longer, but with another man. She sees her mother's shoulder curving toward him. Sees her mother's head bent back. Susceptible. Will this be one more error of susceptibility? Oh, no, my mother, beautiful and still so young, do not.
Sh.o.r.e up and guard yourself. As I have. Do not fall once more into those arms that seem strong but will leave you. Do not fall.
The daughter leaves the young man now to dance with the best friend of her mother. This woman has no husband and a child of two. The mother with no husband and a child of two dreams of her lover as she dances with the daughter of the hostess. She thinks: I have known this girl since she was five. How can it be? I have a child of two; my best friend has a daughter who lifts her angry shoulder and will drive away on Sunday to the working world. Do not be angry at your mother, the mother with no husband wants to say. She is young, she is beautiful, she needs a man in her bed. The mother with no husband thinks of her own lover, who is someone else's husband and the father of the two-year-old child. Someday, she thinks, it is just possible that we will live together, raise together this boy of ours, now only mine. She longs for her lover; she spends, she thinks in anger, too much life on longing. But she chose that. Now she thinks about his hair, his rib cage, the feel of his bones when she runs her fingers up his back, the shape of his ear when she can see him in the distance. She thinks: He is torn, always. When the child was conceived she said, being nearly forty: I will have it. There is nothing you need do. He said: I will stand with you. He came on the first day of their son's life and visits weekly- uncle? friend?- and puts, each month, three hundred dollars in a small account and in a trust fund for college. Says: I cannot leave my wife. The mother with no husband longs sometimes to be with her lover in a public place, dancing, simply, like the married couple, without fear among the others of their kind.
The scientist has come without her lover. He has said: Oh, go alone. You know I hate to dance. She phoned her friend, a man in love with other men. Come dancing with me. Yes, of course, he says. He is glad to be with her; he too is a scientist. They work together; they study the habits of night birds. They are great friends. The lover of the scientist is brilliant, difficult. In ten years she has left him twice. She thinks now she will never leave him.
The daughter of the hostess puts on music that the angry wife, the mother with no husband, and the scientist don't like. So they sit down. Three friends, they sit together on the bench that rests against the wall. They look out the large window; they can see the moon and a newly lit square white patch of sea. They like each other; they are fortyish; they are successful. For a month each summer they live here by the ocean, a mile apart. The angry wife is a ba.s.soonist of renown. The mother with no husband writes studies of women in the ancient world. These women, all of them, have said to each other: What a pleasure we are, good at what we do. And people know it. The angry wife has said: You know you are successful when you realize how many people hope that you will fail.
And how are you? they ask each other. Tired, say the two, the angry wife, the mother with no husband, who have young children. I would like to have a child, the scientist says. Of course you must, say the two who are mothers. Now they think with pleasure of the soft flesh of their children, of their faces when they sleep. Oh, have a child, they tell the scientist. Nothing is better in the world.
Yes, have a child, the hostess says. Look at my daughter. See how wonderful. The daughter of the hostess has forgotten, for a time, her anger and is laughing with the young man. Asks him: Are you going back on Sunday? Would you like a ride? The hostess thinks: Good, good. My daughter will not drive alone. And maybe he will love her.