Somebody Else's Daughter

by Elizabeth Brundage

  “It’s certainly open to interpretation,” he said. “It all depends on how you see things, where you come from, your background, what your life experiences have been. It’s impossible for everyone to agree, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe, but then everyone’s justified in their thinking, and there’s no right and wrong. Laws become arbitrary decisions. That doesn’t work either. Then you have teams. You’re either on one team or another, right or left, Red Sox or Yankees—even the judges on the Supreme Court. It becomes more about the teams and the players than the issues.”

  “I hate politics, don’t you?” He smiled at her. “But I happen to love baseball.”

  He looked at her work. He walked around the sculptures in the way that people do, contemplatively tilting his head to one side then the other. “These are very good.” He looked at her. “You’re very talented.”

  “Thank you.”

  He lingered over her sculpture called Spanking Machine, the inspiration of which had been stirred up years before, watching children on a playground.

  “Still one of my favorite games,” he said.

  She laughed as he pondered Road Map, a naked woman standing in a puddle of tar.

  “She looks sad,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Are you?”

  “Sad?” She shrugged. “Sometimes. There’s a sense of loss in people’s faces that interests me. In their bodies. The way the shoulders roll forward, the spine, the heavy head. Gravity. The way you get pulled down over time.”

  “These are really good. I like the way you think.”

  “Do you want some coffee? I was just about to have some.”

  “I would.” They walked outside. The trees shook off their leaves.

  “That’s some car. What is it?”

  “A ’57 Austin Healey. A bunch of us are in a club. We share vintage cars.”

  “It’s adorable.”

  “A great car. A work of art.”

  “What is it with men and cars?”

  “They’re like women, but they don’t lie.” He smiled and held up his hands, as if to defend himself.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t hit you. Not yet anyway.”

  They went into the kitchen through the side door. He sat in her father’s old Windsor chair and she put more wood in the woodstove. “It’s impossible to heat this place,” she said. “The stove helps.”

  “It’s quite a house.”

  It was still early, a windy day that gossiped of winter. The trees scratched against the glass. The sun roamed the wood table. Joe rubbed his hands together. “You look hungry,” she said. “Do you want to eat?” She poured him coffee.

  His dark eyes caught the sunlight. He shook his head. “Would you mind very much if I kissed you?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.” He held his hands out before her like a criminal caught in the act. “I just want to hold your face,” he said.

  “But you’re married.”

  “We haven’t had sex in years. Half the time we sleep in separate rooms.”

  Now she was feeling sorry for him, which, she imagined, was exactly what he wanted. “It’s important, sex. It’s good for the soul.”

  She nodded. She couldn’t help agreeing with him. “But it’s not fair to Candace.”

  “Is it fair that she doesn’t sleep with me?”

  “Why doesn’t she?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Menopause.”

  “That’s not why.”

  He looked at her. “It’s not about the sex anyway. It’s something else. We’re,” he paused, trying to find the exact words, “out of synch. When I’m with her, it’s like watching a movie without sound. You only get half of what’s going on. The other half, the important half, is this huge mystery.”

  “So you’re not communicating.”

  “We don’t speak the same language.”

  “Maybe you need a translator.”

  “What, a shrink?” He scoffed. “We’ve been down that road before. I’ll be sitting in the guy’s office thinking: What the fuck is his problem.”

  She smiled, she understood.

  “I don’t believe in shrinks,” he said. “They’ll take your money. Misery is very lucrative.”

  “As much as I’d love to, it’s not a good idea.”

  “What the fuck does that mean, ‘as much as I’d love to’?”

  “It means it’s not a good idea.”

  But Golding was a salesman. “When was the last time you got laid?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t pretend to be prim. I know you’re not.”

  She was aware that her heart had begun to beat very hard and very fast. “How do you know?”

  “Your work, for one. We have a lot in common, you just don’t know it yet. And anyways, sex is good for you, healthy. People should be having more of it.”

  She stood there; she didn’t know what to say.

  “Come sit on my lap.”

  “What?”

  “I want to feel you in my arms.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You know you want to.”

  She opened the door. “I have work to do. You should go.”

  He got up. “Did I offend you?”

  She nodded and he came right up to her ear. “Good, because anyone as uptight as you deserves it. Let down your hair, Rapunzel.” He pulled out her clip and her hair spilled down. He put his hands through her hair and he kissed her. She hadn’t been kissed in a very long time and she was reminded of her loneliness and she almost started to cry. Her heart opened like an old wound with the blood rushing through.

  “Out,” she said. “I can’t do this.”

  But he kissed her again and the kiss was good and she went deeper into it. They did a kind of crazy dance through the kitchen, turning through the hall, into the living room, up the stairs. They were on the landing in the bright wind of the open windows. They were down the hall, they were in her room, they were rolling across the unmade bed. Afterward, she told him, “This is crazy.”

  “It’s the sanest thing I’ve done in years.”

  She pulled on her white blouse. “You’re married.”

  “You’re gorgeous,” he said. “I’m in love with you.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  He came over to her and kissed her again and they fell back down onto the bed. They rolled around kissing while the bed springs squealed. “I feel like I am.”

  “You love your wife.”

  “Out of obligation I love her.”

  “Love is love. You have to work at your marriage.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  “Ve must shrink your head!” she said in a German accent.

  “If you’re such an expert, tell me this. What’s a nice girl like you doing without a husband?”

  “I don’t know.” She told him about Billy, how he’d gotten busted and gone to jail, how she’d never told him that she was pregnant. “I should have, but I didn’t. We haven’t spoken in years. I don’t know if he’s still there, in Mexico, or if he got out. Truthfully, I just wanted to forget about him. Does that sound awful?” He didn’t answer her. She sat up on the edge of the bed. He put his hand on her back. She could see herself in the mirror across the room. It was a scene from a movie, she thought, the two of them half naked on the bed, her shirt open, her breasts falling heavy. “I guess I’ve never been in love,” she said finally.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. “And so intriguing.”

  “It’s a relief to know you don’t just want me for my body.” She laughed. “I mean, look at this body.” She grabbed her amble buttocks, her drooping breasts.

  “You are like my friend’s good bread,” he said. “Warm and soft. I want to get very fat on you.”

  She rolled on top of him, her face inches from his. “Eat,” was all she said.

  They began an affair. It was vigorous and raunchy and incredibly s
atisfying and it surprised them both. They’d meet in the morning and walk in the woods behind the house. They’d walk on narrow trails, fighting the branches, or along the lake where there was always wind. You would hear the wind all the time. It was too loud to talk, so they would kiss instead. They walked and kissed under the watchful trees. They kissed with the wind loud in their ears. They’d make love on the old beds in the barn. Years before, when there was a farm, they’d been used by the help, to rest after lunch. There were two rickety old beds that he pushed together. You smelled straw, dirt, and plaster, and the old beds squealed and complained. They made love as her sculptures looked on impassively. They made love as the mice went about their business of being mice. They made love as the wind shook the flimsy wood siding. Although Joe was rich, he made love like a peasant, with his sturdy square hands, his barrel chest, his swarthy face, his brown eyes dim with longing. He sweated, he stunk up the place. Guilt had sewn lines of regret in his forehead. His fingertips were callused, fragrant with tobacco. He’d made so much money, but seemed to regret it, and his fucking was a method of diligent penance, a way of showing her that he was no different than the man on the street.

  It was a kind of love, not married love, something else. They had made a pact, and it was sacred in its secrecy, it wound itself around them like rope, it bound them together, tighter and tighter, until it seemed there was no escape. They knew each other in one way, but in another they remained strangers. She knew nothing of his work, his marriage. She only knew that he loved his daughter, he was completely devoted to her. Everything he did, he told her, was for her happiness.

  One morning she said to him, “Don’t you work?”

  “Of course I work. What kind of question is that?”

  “Where’s your office?”

  “Where’s my office? California.”

  “What exactly do you do?”

  “I make money,” he said. “Lots of it. I’m a money-making machine. ”

  But this didn’t satisfy her. “How do you make this money?”

  “Why does it matter to you?”

  “It’s what you do,” she said. “It’s part of you. It’s who you are.” He seemed angry suddenly. He stood up and took out his wallet and showed her a wad of cash—hundreds of dollars’ worth. Impulsively, he threw it up in the air like a handful of confetti and the bills tumbled down.

  “What are you doing?”

  “That’s who I am.” He left the money like that and walked out.

  “Where are you going?” she ran after him. “That’s not very nice.”

  He turned around, his face angry. He hit himself on the chest. “This is me, Claire,” he said. “This is who I am. Right here, right now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He waved her off. He got into his car and pulled away. She stood there, watching him disappear in a cloud of dirt.

  22

  Golding couldn’t bring himself to tell her what he did. And for good reason, because he knew she would stop seeing him and even worse she would begin to hate him. But it was too late now, because she would demand to know. What had started as a whim was now something else, something complicated. He didn’t like having feelings for the women he fucked, but he had feelings for her.

  He admired Claire. She was elegant in the way of a forest, how you will come upon moss or the startling beauty of a white birch and become transfixed. After making love they would eat something in her kitchen. Using a very sharp knife, she would slice apples or pears, the good smoked cheese in the green wax. Springwater with lemons. There were mannerisms she’d inherited from her mother, a woman he had seen in photographs around the house, regal, elegant, her neck wrapped in strands of pearls. Claire knew certain things that his wife did not—how to fix a martini, how to set a table, how to use the silver, how to place the knife on the plate when she’d finished using it, at precisely the right angle, how to read Ulysses. He would watch her work sometimes, if she let him. In the chilly barn, she would vanish before his eyes, her face soft in a kind of dream-state. She made a woman and scattered feathers at her feet. She wrote on the woman’s body with Magic Marker. It seemed to him that she was a true artist. He had never met one before, and there was something exciting about watching her work. Although his conscience told him he was wrong for wanting her, he did not feel that it was wrong, but he knew it could not last.

  In her work, she made connections about the body and sex and desire and, in a way, he did the same thing in his work. His work was considered illicit, and they were on opposite ends of the decorum highway. In art, you could present a naked woman and a dog in the same scene, but when you did it in porn, it was considered obscene. It was something he would have liked to discuss with her. In her work, you could put the images out there and ask the public to make their own connections, banking on the fact that those connections would venture into the lurid and perverse—or you could show them porn and do it for them—and sometimes the porn was less perverse, just people fucking. Either way, the images came from the same dirty place. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t dirty— maybe they’d all been sold a bill of goods by a couple of uptight Puritans and their lives, incredibly, still adhered to the same rules.

  One afternoon they went for a drive. They took the convertible, and the sun shone on her hair. It reminded him of the fields of sunflowers in Provence, where he and Candace had spent their honeymoon, and he felt the same pleasant disturbance of being in a foreign place, at the mercy of so much beauty.

  She had on a linen blouse, a gauzy black skirt, little black boots. The magenta scarf around her neck she’d woven herself on a loom. They went to the museum in North Adams, MASS MoCA, and walked around the sprawling space and Claire explained some of the art to him, the more modern pieces that seemed to him elliptical and abstruse. One artist she had known at CalArts. Joe was struck by her confidence, her knowledge, and when he compared his own expertise in business, she seemed smarter. It came to him rather abruptly that he’d gone soft, that his money, nice as it was, had made him lazy. He was essentially a salesman; he took little pride in it. He envied her passion for her work.

  They ate in the small café and shared a bottle of wine. On the way back to Stockbridge he said to her, “I haven’t been totally honest with you.”

  She looked at him, waiting, and he was grateful for the wind, the roar of the engine. Maybe he hoped she wouldn’t hear him.

  “I’m in the porn business,” he said. “It’s a business. It’s what I do.”

  She just sat there with her sunglasses on, he couldn’t see her eyes. He told her how he’d gotten into the business, by accident. How he and his brother had worked to build the company.

  “Nothing is by accident,” she said.

  He turned onto Prospect Hill and pulled up to her house. She sat there a moment. He could feel his anger kicking around inside his chest like a sneaker in the dryer, that clumsy thud was the beating of his heart. He had to concentrate very hard on keeping his mouth shut. He suddenly realized that it had been foolish to lie about what he did—not just to Claire, but to the community. It was a mistake that he and Candace shared. They’d done it for Willa, to protect her, not because they were ashamed of porn, but because the rest of the world was in fucking denial. And denial brought out the worst in people. Willa would have been the one to suffer for it.

  And then, proving his point, she said, “It’s a despicable industry. It’s the most demeaning thing how you use women.”

  “It’s not like we use them against their will. They’re on the payroll. In fact, it’s the only business I know of where the women routinely make more than the men. And furthermore, the girls love the sex. That’s why they do it.”

  She balked. “Yeah. Right. I’m sure they do it because they love it. They just can’t get enough of it.”

  “Look, you’re entitled to your opinion.”

  “You’re damn right I am.” She got out of the car and he followed her and grabbed her wrist.


  “I don’t get you, Claire.”

  She pulled her arm away. “What’s not to get?”

  “I thought you were so liberal, so progressive.”

  “This has nothing to do with my politics.”

  “No? Then explain to me why you’re so mad.”

  “Because you weren’t honest with me.”

  “I was ninety-nine percent honest.”

  “That’s not enough. What you do defines you. It’s who you are.” She shook her head, incredulous. “You’re in the fucking porn business!”

  “It’s only a part of who I am.”

  “I can’t accept that.”

  “Look. Nobody knows what I do, not even Willa.” She looked surprised. “I was afraid to tell you because I knew this would happen.”

  “Well, you know what? You’re smarter than you look.”

  She left him there and went into her house. Still, he followed her. She stood at the sink, drinking a glass of water.

  “God, you’re tough.”

  “You want the truth? What you do, how you make your money— I’m repulsed by it. Not for some creepy moralistic reason, but because it continues to reinforce the century-old idea that, when you come right to it, every woman’s a whore and deserves to be used—now if you’ll excuse me I have work to do.”

  But he wasn’t ready to go. “What about you?” He took hold of her arms, pressed her against the counter. “You know you’re going to miss me, admit it. Your highbrow pussy’s no different.” He kissed her neck. He could smell her sweat, the faintest orange blossom cologne. Just when he thought he had her, she pushed him back, hard.

  “Get out.”

  “What about your work? I wouldn’t exactly call it prim. It’s okay for you to be suggestive, but not for me?” He shook his head. “What you don’t seem to get is we’re in the same business. Granted, what you do is all dressed up in intellectual bullshit, and what I do is the processed-cheese version. But you know what? As much as you don’t want to believe it, we’ve got the same customers.”