That medicine cabinet came with the house—one of the many home improvements we never made. You see the filigree work on the mirror. And here’s something funny: funny peculiar, as a particularly obnoxious colleague of Robert’s used to say, not funny ha ha. Every time I stepped out of the tub, I would see myself in that mirror. Of course I’d always seen myself in that mirror, but it struck me for the first time how I saw only my top half. It was a mermaid mirror. Yes, I was a mermaid—nothing below my waist. Of course by this time Robert and I were no longer making love, as the saying goes. So it made a weird kind of sense that when I looked at myself naked in the mirror, after stepping out of the tub, I had no lower half. That was one of your cruelest thefts: stealing my bottom half. I suppose it was just as well, since nothing any longer pleased me about my body. And this was strange, because—but haven’t we spoken of this already? You’ve really got to excuse me if I repeat myself. So many things in my head, going round and round! But you see, I’d always been easy enough, in my mind, about my body. I mean, I always did fill out a sweater pretty well—that kind of thing. Of course my legs—but that’s another story. Still, all in all. Not that I ever loved my body, for God sakes—or sake, as Robert would say. God’s. Pause. Sake. It was just that I accepted it, the way I accepted my—oh, I don’t know, my nose. There it is: a nose. Look at it as long as you like, it’s still just a nose. Hey there, nose! You know, there are people who spend their entire lives doing nothing, I mean nothing, but worrying about their noses. Then they die, and go to a heaven full of angels with perfect angel-noses, and for all eternity they do nothing but worry about their noses. That was never my way. But now, thanks to you, I found myself worrying about my body. It was wrong in every way, an immense . . . wrongness. Too this. Too that. Too—oh, everything. I hated it all. For the first time in my life, at the tender age of forty-seven, I became an adolescent.
Do you know what I wanted? What I really wanted? What I wanted, the thing I wanted—it was to become a little girl again, in saddle shoes, with a dab of Mercurochrome on my knee.
Yup, you got it, sister. To start over. . . .
Oh and by the way. I was wrong. No bookcase here. But the ghosts of books—from Robert’s time. See? One on the radiator—one on the floor—and there, on the edge of the tub.
You know, when you hate your body, then you think continually about your body, and when you think continually about your body, then you become nothing but a body. You become a disgusting little materialist. You become a secret sensualist, a sort of—a sort of hangdog sensualist. Oh, I like that. Hangdog sensualist. I do have a way with words sometimes, you will grant me that. “You have a way with words,” Robert once said, and then he paused, thinking it over, and then he said: “Sometimes. I grant you that.” So. Let us grant me that. But here’s the thing: I hated my body. I hated my body because it wasn’t your body. You look as if you’re about to maul me with a compliment. Please refrain. Besides, I didn’t hate only my body. I also hated your body. Why don’t we change the subject?
STUDY
Robert’s study. Wall-to-wall books, arranged by historical period. And listen to this. Within each period?—alphabetical by author. Is that order, or what? All summer long I seemed to hear him pacing. Scrape the chair back, pace, scrape the chair forward. Scrape it back. Pace, scrape, pace, scrape. God. Why no rug? Sometimes I blame his book for everything. Of course that’s too easy, it lets everyone off the hook: you, Robert, and li’l ol’ me. Besides, a man set on betraying his wife is bound to find an excuse. Bound to. Still! That awful book. Robert was too self-critical ever to write a book. A book for him was pure torture. He should never have taken that leave. Poor Robert. And there you were, waiting for him in that little house, with your long legs practically sticking out the window. You must have seemed—the solution. Of course he needed consoling. Those long walks he used to take that spring! That was the time, you know, when I felt something was a little wrong between us, a little . . . off. Later I realized he must have met you on one of those walks—unless he’d met you before, and was simply walking straight to your bedroom. What drove him crazy wasn’t the knowledge that he wasn’t going to finish his book. It was the knowledge that he wasn’t going to begin it. He took notes, billions of notes, typed up parts of a chapter, fragments—never good enough. Scrape, pace, scrape, pace. A body in a bed was something he could count on. Makes a man feel young again, m’boy. Nothing like greasing the old engine. Of course you got something out of it, too. A needy man. A man wanting to be rescued. What could be better than that?
Did I fail Robert? Was there something I didn’t understand? Of course I brooded over that too. Because if your heart is broken, if I may use that dear old expression, famous in song and legend, then the time comes, sooner or later, when you begin to wonder . . . at first only for a second or two, then for longer periods of time . . . whether you deserved to have it broken . . . if I may continue to make use of these time-honored phrases. Because surely it wouldn’t just happen to you, something like that, for no reason.
So maybe Robert’s little infidelity was the very sign that was supposed to alert me to my own lack of something. It was supposed to show me the way. And I misread the sign. Imagine! A bad reader, after all.
Oh my. I do hope I’m not sounding histrionic. That’s what he called me once: histrionic. It was a way of showing he disapproved of my sadness. Robert’s histrionic wife. I just love the theater, darlin’—don’t you? All those histrionic people.
I don’t know when I began to suspect he hadn’t stopped seeing you. After my . . . breakdown, I somehow imagined . . . But you see how naive I was! I thought a sense of decency—a sense of respect . . . Even you, I thought . . . But no. He must really’ve liked those black lace undies. And you must have enjoyed showing them to him. That fall he began teaching again, three days a week, but he’d always rush right home. Make sure nothing had happened to the crazy wife. A girl can fall down the stairs, you know. She can get dizzy in the bathroom. She can fall out a window and break her pretty neck. Razor blades have been known to cause trouble in the most well-regulated families. A house is a dangerous place: kitchen knives, deadly hammers, sleeping pills, gas stoves. . . . Ours is electric, but I’ve always preferred gas, at least for disposing of unwanted wives. Rope. Gasoline. Matches. No wonder he hurried home, the poor man. He’d find me lying in bed, in my nightie, or else in the shower. But I was already getting better! I was eating a little. I felt like a house that had burned down, leaving the charred foundation and half a chimney. Of course, I was still a burned-down house. It’s just that I wasn’t burning down anymore.
Besides, what was all the fuss about? Men have affairs every day. It’s chic—it’s cool—and good for you too. Keeps down that bad cholesterol. And great for your lower back. The numbers say it all. According to the most recent survey, ninety-nine point eight percent of all American husbands have been unfaithful to their wives at least twice in the last year. Did you know that? Also, and this may surprise you, ninety-two point four percent of all American men have slept with their own mothers. Sad but true. But here’s the good news. Ninety-four point six percent of men with erectile dysfunction say that it doesn’t really matter—they never enjoyed it anyway. I found these facts in women’s magazines. I was beginning to eat, as I mentioned, and I was starting to go out a little in the car: CVS, Grand Union, you name it. Wherever I went, women’s magazines sprang out at me. Sleek, insolent panther-women looking at me with jungle eyes. Cheekbones like ski slopes. Thumbs hooked in bikini underpants, like a guy wearing jeans. Forty-three Ways to Snag Your Man. One Hundred Sixty-three Ways to Drive Him Insane with Lust. All over America, housewives were reading this stuff. Was I the only one who wasn’t in on the secret? I bought a few and read them sitting in the car. Eat All You Want and Get Thin. Twelve Sizzling New Positions. Apparently the thing to do was find his E spot. When you found it, you pressed it. Then he raped you. Your marriage was saved. The trouble with the E spot was tha
t it was very hard to locate; it was somewhere near the abdomen, or the pancreas. You could waste a lot of time looking for it, and meanwhile your man might fall insanely in love with someone else— someone thinner than you. I think I’m talking too fast. Am I talking too fast? I feel that I’m talking a little rapidly and I am going to make a conscious effort to control myself.
There.
One evening after returning from the Grand Union—I liked to walk up and down the long aisles pushing my basket, how it soothed me—I took a drive to your house. I parked almost across the street and watched the front windows. In the living room the blinds were down but the lights were on. Your bedroom was dark. After a while I saw the light go on in your bedroom. The blinds were closed and lowered halfway. I saw you move toward the window and lower the blinds some more, as if to keep me from spying. I could see only part of you, from a little above the waist to about mid-thigh. You were wearing an Indian-print skirt with a wide red belt. I thought of my bathroom mirror: I was the woman without a bottom half, and you—you were nothing but a bottom half. Then I imagined you were a mermaid in reverse, legs below and fish scales above, and the idea struck me as so absolutely incredibly hysterical that really I nearly died laughing.
GUEST ROOM
Bed. Bookcase. No one’s stayed here in nearly a year. And yet, at one time, practically everyone stayed here: my mother, my father, Robert’s mother, Robert’s grandmother, for God sakes, his unmarried sister—let us please not forget Robert’s unmarried sister—the sort of woman who does you a little favor, like picking you up a quart of milk at the corner store, and says with a bright little laugh, “You owe me one,” meant to show her brave girlish humor in the face of life’s burdens—and Robert’s old roommate the failed painter, who backed me up against the refrigerator and instead of kissing me asked me the recipe for my ratatouille, and Robert’s old friend Lydia, who is so relieved to get away from Manhattan and so happy to be up here where you can actually see the stars at night . . . and many more . . . scads of colorful folks . . . all of them right here, in this room. And sometimes I think of it as your room, if you know what I—in the sense that that would have been one solution. To the problem, I mean. Because you really were a problem, you know, a great big problem that didn’t seem to have a solution, or had only difficult solutions that themselves were problems without solutions. You could have died of cancer, for example—but you were too healthy for that—or I could have killed you that night—or Robert could have given you up. The poor man was suffering so. We talked a little, now and then. I would come down for my late breakfast, and Robert would materialize from somewhere or other and stand by the table, looking proud and sad and doomed.
“I need to know what you’re going to do.”
“Going to do?”
“About us.”
“Us, Robert?”
“Stop echoing me, will you? Just stop echoing me.”
And then he would disappear; it was very strange. Poof! Gone. A sad, angry ghost. And so in certain moods I would think: Oh, for heaven sakes. Come on, girl. Grow up. There’s no reason to be so childish about this. Why am I being so selfish? It’s all me me me. Why don’t I ever think of his needs? Then of course I would think that you might as well move into the house—into the guest room. If I loved Robert, then I wanted him to be happy, didn’t I? I saw myself tucking the two of you in at night, sitting on the side of the bed—oh, the adorable little rascals!—telling a bedtime story. And they allll lived hap pilyeverafter. Nighty-night! Don’t let the bedbugs bite! I would be a sister, a saint. And if any little problem came up between you two, why, I’d be right there, in the house. I could serve you meals. I could bathe you. Gosh, I could do your nails: red hot, or a nice minty green, or black as witches. I could even dress you in the mornings, after your strenuous nights. As I say, it was one solution . . . to the problem. Look, the sun’s gone in. Or is it getting dark? I’m feeling a little tired. I’ll just sit for a minute on the side of the bed. If you don’t mind. You sit on that side. No, go right ahead. There was something I wanted to tell you. . . . You know: when I was lying at the foot of the stairs? Oh, now I remember.
In high school, senior year, I had a crush on a boy called Tom Conway. He was a good-looking, clean-cut sort of boy, not my type really, very shy, a little awkward, as if he’d grown into a body he didn’t know what to do with—all those arms and shoulders and elbows and things. I don’t know when I realized I had a crush on him. I liked being around him; it was like turning a corner and finding yourself on a street with shady maples and front porches. This wasn’t crazy teenage love, with wildfire burning in your stomach, but something else, something . . . restful. Somehow we began taking walks together, that spring. We held hands. And that was it: no kissing, no hugging, no touching except for hands. We walked all over town, along tree-lined streets, with sun flickering on us through the leaves, up into the wooded section where the roads were curvy and there were no sidewalks and the big houses were set far back from the road. One day he took me to his house to meet his mother. She was a friendly woman, standing in the kitchen wearing an apron embroidered with apple branches. Right off the kitchen was a small room, with white curtains— a guest room, where his grandmother used to stay. Somehow we ended up lying on the bed in that room. We lay on our backs, on the green spread, holding hands. I remember it was late afternoon, and the sun coming through the windows had a very orange cast to it. Everything in the room was glowing in the orange light. I lay there entirely peaceful, entirely happy— I was without desire. Or let’s say the kind of desire I had for Tom Conway was completely satisfied by lying there on his grandmother’s bed, in the orange light, holding hands, while his mother moved around in the kitchen. That summer his family moved to Arizona. I never saw him again. I don’t know that I had time to miss him much, what with college starting and all the rest. But every once in a while, for no reason, when I’m walking along a familiar street, or coming up the back steps with a bag of groceries, or lying there at the foot of the stairs, I think of that room, with the white curtains, and the orange sunlight coming in.
You look tired. We’re almost done.
BEDROOM
Our room. No, come in. I want you to come in. I said: Come in. You know, I admire that hesitation. It shows you have a certain . . . decency. Or are you afraid of something? Good heavens! Nothing to be afraid of in here. Look: another bookcase. And permit me to introduce you to the, um, conjugal bed. Or have you two already met? Ha ha: my little joke. We used to read ourselves to sleep . . . in the old days. We made love every night, just about. Maybe not every night, but a lot—we didn’t have to count. People count, you know. Twice a week. Once a decade. Then they look it up and compare themselves to the national average. That’s what I find so . . . I mean, if we had grown distant or. . . . Of course sometimes we were tired, or not exactly in the mood. But then the next night . . . or the night after. . . . And sometimes there were longer gaps, when we both, for no reason . . . I mean, twenty-two years. It’s a long time. I’m going to lie down here, I’m feeling a little . . . You lie down, too. I want you to. No, please: lie down. You’re tired, I can tell. We can have a nice pillow talk, like girlfriends in junior high. Of course I never had them, those nice pillow talks in junior high, but still. Oh, don’t you just adore that dreamy new math teacher? And Todd Andrews. He’s soooo cute. That’s how girlfriends talk, you know. At least I think they do. I used to imagine having talks like this with a girlfriend, but they weren’t about boys, those talks, they were about . . . oh, books, and . . . and things. Take my hand. All right, then I’ll take yours. Sisters! We’ve been through a lot together, we two. Listen. This is where I was lying when the call came about Robert’s accident. That was in January. He’d been very upset, you know. We’d had an argument, a week earlier. Oh, a bad one. Do you know what we were arguing about? We were arguing about making the bed. Isn’t that the strangest thing? The man on the phone kept saying something about black ice. The words se
emed weird and scary, as if he were talking about some disease. The Black Ice Plague. Black ice in your carotid artery. Sharp splinters of black ice piercing the left ventricle. Robert was what? Was dead? He was angry, for God sakes, how can you die when you’re . . . ? Killed by black ice. The black ice of his black-hearted icy wife.
Isn’t it fun talking like this, just the two of us? Here’s a secret. Don’t tell anybody. When Robert and I fell in love, when I was twenty-four and he was thirty, it was all very passionate and so forth, but for a while there . . . he couldn’t make love to me. It drove him wild. He swore that never, never before. . . . He was ready to kill himself. But you know something? I didn’t care. I was so in love with him that even if . . . It came right, soon enough. He was so grateful to me, as if I’d endured the impossible—fought some heroic battle. He swore I was an angel, a goddess. How I hated that. What he couldn’t understand is that I was so happy that I didn’t care about . . . about anything on earth. I was demented with happiness. They should’ve carted me off to the loony bin. And then, when we started making love, I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but it became absorbed into the happiness I was already feeling.
I asked him about you once. Only once. I asked him if you were married. I don’t know why, but it seemed the one thing I had to know. He was shocked. His “No!” was almost violent. He looked at me—a sad, raging man. A man misunderstood. “I’d never break up a marriage.” That’s what he said to me. Proud pose: shoulders back, defiant look.
But what about my marriage, Robert?
Here’s another secret. You won’t tell, will you? Come closer: I have to lower my voice so no one will hear. I know that you’ve slept in this bed. With my husband, of course. Don’t you pull away from me. We’re having a nice little pillow talk—just the two of us. Of course it must be unpleasant for you to know that I know. I understand that. I mean, that I’ve known all along. It must be upsetting. Even embarrassing, for some people. But once you start sharing secrets. . . . I admit it changed my idea of you. I hadn’t thought you would be so . . . what is the word I want? Bold? Cruel? I’ll even tell you how I found out. Robert told me! Wasn’t that sweet of him? Of course he had no choice. He knew I was on to something. That was in December, just after Christmas, when I went to visit my mother for a few days. At the time I’d begun to think that maybe we could somehow survive, Robert and I, the way a ruin survives. You can preserve a ruin, you know. It’s artful, expensive work. And I thought: I’ll stay in the house, and he’ll stay in the house, and together we’ll be a ruined monument, with ivy on the walls. People can come and admire us. We can charge admission. Of course you were still at the other end of town, pulling down shades, crossing and uncrossing those legs of yours. When I came home from my mother’s I went up to my room to lie down. Robert had never moved back from the study. I saw right away that the bed had been made up wrong. Robert has absolutely no sense of such things. He was a domestic idiot, in some ways. I screamed; we had it out. He confessed. How many times can you confess to someone before you start wanting them dead? Or before you start wanting to be dead yourself? I remember one thing he said. He said he didn’t think I loved him anymore. I believe he meant it, poor man, but it was also very clever. Because I broke your heart, dear, and because you’re a cold-hearted bitch who won’t forgive me one little bit for breaking your heart, I have the God-given right to screw somebody else in our bed. Like it or lump it, baby.
The King in the Tree Page 4