“You wouldn’t expect that, would you? Right in the barnyard? How are the calves?”
“Everything looked normal in our pasture but I’ll have to keep the rifle loaded, just in case.” He slurps up a spoonful of soup. “Aren’t you eating?” Eldon asks as he crushes a handful of crackers into his bowl.
“I’ve eaten,” Caroline says quickly, although she hasn’t had a bite, not even a piece of toast for breakfast, her stomach all knotted up from nerves and excitement. She busies herself at the counter, spooning out a small dish of fresh strawberries and cream. “What do you have planned for the rest of the day?”
“I have to drive out to the west Conway field to check up on Bert. He’s working the summer fallow and he should’ve been back by now.”
Caroline is relieved. She was hoping Eldon would be away from the yard for the afternoon, although she plans to set out with a small bucket and say she is off to pick berries, should he ask.
Eldon dawdles over his soup while Caroline watches the minutes tick by on the clock. She pours the leftover soup into a two-quart jar and puts it in the fridge. Eldon pushes away his empty bowl, tips back his chair and runs his tongue over his teeth, making that sucking sound that grates on her nerves. Why won’t he leave already? She washes his bowl and the pot and puts them away.
“Back to work for me,” she finally says as she hangs up the tea towel, encouraging him to go. “I’m putting the finishing touches on that skirt I’ve been sewing.”
Eldon slides away from the table and pulls on his cap. “And I’d better go see what the hell Bert’s broken this time.”
Once he’s gone, Caroline races up the stairs. She washes her face and under her arms with a cool, soapy cloth, changes into her new ivory blouse and runs a brush through her hair. She applies the faintest blush of pink rouge to her cheeks and picks up the bottle of Evening in Paris from her dressing table, then reconsiders. Nick seems like the kind of man who would like the natural smell of a woman. Through her bedroom window, she sees Eldon’s truck slowly turn out of the lane. As she dashes through the kitchen, she notices it is a few minutes to one. It takes at least ten minutes to walk to her tree.
She is halfway there when she realizes she’s forgotten her pail. “Damn,” she says, and Sport looks up, surprised she’s spoken out loud. He trots along at her heels, stopping to sniff at the edges of the grass path every few minutes then loping along to catch up. It’s a perfect day, the sky a cerulean blue with lacy white clouds painted on, and a cooling summer breeze has sprung up.
Nick is already there, standing under the elm tree, its canopy laid out like a beach blanket on the broad blue sky. “Hey,” he says.
She comes to him, suddenly shy, and he takes hold of her hands.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“Don’t be. I’d wait by this tree all day, all week if I had to, just to have a chance to see you.” He is wearing a silver-green shirt, the colour of willow leaves, buttoned down the front, with the sleeves rolled up the way they were when he first walked into her kitchen. He lets go of her hands and touches her face, brushing away a stray tendril of hair. He sweeps his sweet fingers across the curve of her lips, cups her chin then leans in and kisses her. It’s a chaste kiss, as considerate and amiable as he is, his lips soft and smooth and pliant.
“I knew you would do that,” Caroline says, when he finally pulls away.
“I knew you wanted me to.”
It’s true. She can’t deny the constant flush of desire she feels whenever she thinks about him. She wants Nick Bilyk, has wanted him to kiss her since she felt his breath on her hair in the alcove. She leans into him again, feels the hard press of his body against her breasts and knows he can feel her, too. She wants to fall inside of him, be encased by the heat of his body, stay there forever.
They sink to their knees in the grassy hollow under the tree. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he half whispers and tilts her chin up, bringing his mouth to hers, not moving, just holding it there for a few moments until he parts her lips with his tongue and she feels its curious tip graze her softness inside. She hardly knows what to do with her own tongue during this gentle exploration, so shocked is she by the strange sensations his circling tongue inflames. With trembling fingers, she draws his tentative hand to her breast until he cups it the way a thirsty man might cherish a handful of water. He moans, an unintelligible sound that may have invoked God’s name, and he pulls away, looking at her in the midday light. “Are you sure? We can stop, if you want to.”
She could turn her head away, apologize shamefacedly for agreeing to meet him, tell him she’s made a terrible mistake, she can never do this again. But he’s stoked a fire inside her, awakened a need she hadn’t even known existed before she’d met him and she doesn’t want it to stop. She reaches up, unfastens the top button of her blouse and lays back into the thick cushion of grass in the hollow. The sun slants through the boughs and filters through the leaves, scattering like honey-coloured coins around them.
AUGUST
The landing is cramped and poorly lit, with barely enough room to turn around. Caroline makes her way cautiously up the narrow staircase, bracing herself with one hand against the dingy wall. Someone is boiling cabbage, the smell masking the underlying odour of mildew and unwashed clothes Caroline noticed in the stairwell the last time she was here.
Alice’s room is next to the communal bathroom, a bachelor’s suite, she calls it, although it’s really just a square box with her bed in the kitchen and not even a proper closet to hang up her clothes. Her door is slightly ajar and Caroline raps gently then pushes it open. Alice is sitting on the bed, propped on the heels of her hands. Susan is standing in front of her and she turns to the door when Caroline knocks. Her eyes are swollen and she’s holding a wadded tissue up to her nose. She looks a fright. Her hair, usually as brilliant as a raven’s wing, hangs in dull strands around her pale face.
“Caroline,” she wails.
Caroline drops her purse by the door and draws Susan in, hugging her close. “Oh, Susan. I’m so sorry.” She lets Susan weep on her shoulder while Alice stands up and motions to the clock on the wall, flashing ten fingers twice, then tracing a finger down each of her cheeks.
“Who wants tea?” Alice asks.
“Come, let’s sit.” There is only one chair in the suite, pushed up under the table, so Caroline leads Susan to the bed and sits next to her, folding her arm around her shoulder. “You’ll feel better once you have some tea. Then you can tell us all about it.”
Susan shakes off Caroline’s arm, springs from the bed and paces around the small room. “I can’t sit! I can’t drink tea. I can’t eat.” She pulls another tissue from the box on the table and blows her nose.
“I’ve told her she just needs to get over it and move on. There are plenty of fish in the sea,” Alice says as she empties the kettle into the teapot.
“I don’t want another fish,” Susan says, and begins sobbing again.
“He’s a barracuda, that’s what he is,” Alice says sharply. “Any man who preys on a young girl’s feelings like he did …” She slams the teapot down on the table and the lid clatters off and falls on the floor.
Two days earlier, Caroline received a phone call from Susan’s distraught mother. Susan was on her way home. She’d quit her summer job and was moving back, giving up on school, Mrs. Wawryk said, and it all had something to do with the man she’d been seeing. Would Caroline and Alice please try to talk some sense into her because there wasn’t a thing she or Susan’s father could say to make her listen to reason.
It troubled Caroline to see sensible, level-headed Susan like this, falling to pieces over a failed romance. What had that man done to her?
“I know whatever’s happened seems like the end of the world right now. But you’ll get through it. You’ve had your heart broken, and I can’t begin to understand how that feels, but it will mend in time. You can’t drop out of school over this.”
“But how can I ever go back? I’m registered for another one of his classes this fall, and even if I drop it, I’m sure to bump into him on campus. I couldn’t bear to see him. Not after the dreadful things I’ve found out about him.” She blows her nose pitifully into the tissue again. “And I’m just so ashamed. I feel as though everyone will know; gossip spreads like wildfire around such an intimate campus.”
“You’re making too much out of all of this,” Alice says, pouring the tea and handing Susan a cup. “I’d march right back into his class if I were you, show him he hasn’t got the best of you. What do you think, Caroline?”
Caroline takes a sip of tea — too hot — and puts her cup back in the saucer. “I think Susan needs to start at the beginning and tell us the entire story.”
Susan met John Talbott in her second year. He was much younger than her other professors; she was surprised on the first day when the attractive young man wearing a smartly cut jacket stepped onto the dais at the front of the class. He was a gifted lecturer, his voice melodious. When she got a C on her first essay, she was horrified by such a bad mark. He’d pencilled a note on the last page, asking her to make an appointment to see him. He charmed her at that first meeting and offered extra instruction outside of class. And so began a two-year romance, simple and sweet in the beginning, not even a kiss until Christmas that first year. He was married, he made that perfectly clear to Susan from the very beginning, with two small children not yet in school. But he was dreadfully unhappy; his wife — the daughter of his mother’s best friend he’d been coerced into marrying — was a shrew.
As time went on, he tempted Susan with the possibility of a future after the dissolution of his floundering marriage. He told her he loved her, he wanted to be with her and only her, forever. He couldn’t live without her.
“Oh, Susan. What were you thinking, carrying on with a married man?” Alice says as she plucks another tissue out of the box and pushes it across the table.
This sets Susan sobbing again and Caroline takes hold of her hand. Susan was as innocent and guileless as she had been, believing like she did in every promise Eldon made in those early days, falling for the show he put on, never suspecting the malice that lay beneath the facade. If only she’d been as perceptive as Eldon’s first fiancée must have been and caught on to his true nature before it was too late.
Susan takes a deep, shuddering breath. “There was always some reason he couldn’t tell his wife it was over — the baby was teething, her mother was sick — on and on it went. On some level, I considered he might never leave his wife, but he made me feel I should be content with what we had and I convinced myself I could carry on that way, as his mistress, and I kept it up. I was there for him whenever he wanted me.”
“Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?” Caroline asks gently.
Susan covers her face with her hands. “I was ashamed. He was married. And he insisted we keep our affair a secret so I did, even though it was gnawing away at me from inside.”
“Uh oh,” Alice says. “I know where this is going. You know that saying, your secret’s safe with me? It doesn’t happen, someone always slips up. A secret’s next to impossible to keep.” She nods wisely.
“A few weeks ago, I got a letter from a girl named Etta Winters,” Susan continues. “She’s a graduate student, studying Victorian literature. I’d seen her come out of John’s office once or twice. She said she’d found out about me from John’s teaching assistant and she wanted to meet with me.”
“You don’t even have to tell me …” Alice says, a look of indignation sweeping across her face.
Caroline knows what Susan is about to say, too. This man of Susan’s is even worse than she imagined. The two young women met and the stories they’d been told were remarkably similar. John loved Etta, he couldn’t live without her, it was impossible to leave his wife, if only she’d wait. He’d already been having an affair with Etta for two years when he invited Susan, so young and naive, to his office. They confronted him, threatening to tell the dean he’d taken advantage of them, but he laughed and said he would deny it. They were infatuated, hysterical girls; he, a tenured professor. Who would the dean believe?
“I’ve been sitting in my room for the last two weeks, trying to decide what to do. Mom and Dad don’t know the half of it. They think it’s just a boyfriend who’s dumped me. Mom, especially, thinks I’ve lost my mind, throwing my life away over a man.”
“Well, aren’t you?” Alice says, standing up and clearing away the cups. “There’s no reason for you not to go back to school in a few weeks, waltz straight back into his classroom, and stare him in his two-timing face!”
“But how can I face him without falling apart? I love him and I want him to choose me.” Susan crumples to the bed, her face covered by a curtain of hair.
Caroline reaches for her hair, pushes it away from her eyes.
“I tried to talk to him, to convince him it’s me that he loves. He called me a foolish little girl,” Susan whimpers. “He said I knew he was married and I didn’t seem to care so why should it matter now that I knew about Etta?”
There is a soft pop, then the gurgling of water on the other side of the wall. Caroline’s head is spinning, swirling like water flowing down a drain. How easy it is to ignore your own moral compass when you’re hopelessly in love. She knows it’s wrong to carry on an affair with Nick while she’s married to Eldon, but she, like Susan, finds it impossible to stop.
“I still don’t see why this means you have to quit school.” Alice sits cross-legged on the floor and hands Susan another tissue.
“There’s no way I can avoid seeing him on campus. He teaches in the same building as most of my classes.”
“So what?” Alice says.
“It’ll take time, but you’ll get over this. You have to go back to school in September,” Caroline says.
Susan’s face is grey, and blue-black circles stain the hollows under her eyes. “I’m just so tired. I can’t even think about this anymore.”
Caroline and Alice stand up, settling Susan’s head onto the pillow. “Why don’t you rest here awhile?” Caroline says. “I have to get going. Eldon’s likely waiting. Alice, can you walk me out?” She hugs Susan and tucks a blanket up under her chin. “I’ll get Eldon to drive me out to see you in a few days.”
“I think it’s helped her to tell us,” Alice says when they’re out on the street. “She should have told us about this man long ago. That’s the trouble with secrets; they eat at you if you keep them bottled up inside.” She laces a tissue she’s holding through her fingers, up one and down the other like a running stitch, and avoids Caroline’s eyes. “There’s something I’ve been keeping from you, too, and I’ve been meaning to tell you but the time never seems right. We’re either at the café and there are people nearby, or I’ve been avoiding the topic altogether.”
“What is it? Is everything all right?” Caroline is alarmed. She can’t take much more bad news in one day.
Alice looks away, her eyes bright. “It’s Bill. He’s been avoiding me. The first few dates were fine, but he seems to have lost interest in me. It’s not a wife he wants. He’s just putting in time here at the bank before he moves on to a bigger and better town … and he’s shown me what he’s really after while he’s here.” Her eyes brim over and a tear trickles out from behind her glasses and down the side of her nose.
Caroline pictures Bill, with his manicured moustache and that perfectly coiffed hair. She had her reservations about him, thought him too slick for a decent girl like Alice. “I didn’t care for him when I first met him, to be honest,” she says. “Someone better is sure to come along. You’ll see.”
“I didn’t give in to him and that’s why he’s ignoring me. Why did we all think this falling in love business would be easy?” Alice is still looking across the street and she gives a weak wave. “There’s Eldon,” she says. “He just came out of the drug store. He doesn’t look happy you’ve kept h
im waiting.”
He is standing in front of Clarice Hubley’s parked Crown Victoria, lighting a cigarette, when he sees that Caroline has noticed him. He points at his watch then beckons her over.
Tomorrow she has another rendezvous planned with Nick for when Eldon takes his mother to church. They’ve met four times now, the passion mounting with each encounter, but it’s the conversation she waits for; hearing Nick reveal bits and pieces about himself, learning about the sort of man he is, and noting his attentive eyes when she does the same. Sundays, church day, are the best days to meet. She can slip away, guaranteeing herself a full hour, and be back before Eldon gets home. But she doesn’t know how much longer she can continue this charade; Elvina is starting to ask questions about her absence from church. How much longer can she say she’s feeling unwell? And what would Susan and Alice think if they knew she was carrying on with Nick behind Eldon’s back? Her secret is getting harder and harder to keep. She feels the burden of it weighing her down like stones in her pockets.
Caroline balances on the edge of the porch rocker, washing cucumbers. She pulled out the vines and plucked off the last of them this morning, leaving the old, yellow ones in a heap in the garden. There are just enough to grind for one more batch of sweet relish. She reaches to the bottom of the galvanized washtub, swishes her hand around, and scoops out the last cucumber, small and curled as a snail, with spiky spines. It reminds her of a photograph from a science textbook, a human embryo floating adrift in a womb.
She stands and stretches the cramp out of her back. There is the unmistakable scent of autumn in the air even though it’s not quite September. Harvest arrived early this year, with a stretch of clear, dry weather the last two weeks. The wheat is bountiful, plump, and red, and their good fortune has put Eldon in unusually good spirits, even though he’s been toiling long hours. She, too, has been working like mad, especially on the days of her meetings with Nick. She picks and pickles and cans all morning, cramming a day’s work into a half, so Eldon will see the jars of sweet pickles, chokecherry jam, and pink crabapples lining the countertop when he comes in at night. He just left in the grain truck to take a load of wheat to town. There is sure to be a lineup at the elevator and Caroline estimates she has an hour with Nick at the tree.
A Strange Kind of Comfort Page 16