by Susan Isaacs
“If you think I’m spending too much money, why don’t you just say it.”
“I don’t care. Spend whatever you want.”
She could feel his breath on her shoulder. He was only an inch or two away from her. “Whenever you’re home you have people coming up three or four nights a week,” she said. “If you want me to wear tacky little housedresses and look like Mrs. American Gothic—”
“You’re starting to sound like your brother.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Because I don’t like getting into bed with a Cincinnati faggot.”
She turned and glared at him. “You can go to hell, Nicholas.” She started to turn back, but he threw his leg over her. “Let me go,” she said.
“Let’s not fight,” he said.
“I didn’t start this. Ever since you came home from Los Angeles you’ve been in a disgusting mood. Being absolutely rotten to me, snapping at the girls. You didn’t even say hello to the new housekeeper. You didn’t even nod.”
“She had her mouth hanging open and her tongue hanging out. Where did you come up with her? She looks like a retard.”
“Nick, just cut it out. She was a little nervous, seeing you in person for the first time. What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You’re acting like the whole world should stop what it’s doing and genuflect every time you walk by. You’re acting just like every actor you’ve ever criticized. Calling and speaking to Murray like that, as if he were your errand boy.”
“He screwed up on a reversion clause.”
“Is that any reason to start shouting into the phone?”
“Enough, Jane.” His leg was still over her. Using his knee, he began manipulating her nightgown higher. She pushed it back down. “Why are you doing that?” he demanded. He reached over and pulled it up to her waist.
“Do you really think I’m in the mood? You come home and play Nicholas Cobleigh, Superstar, and I’m supposed to swoon? Do you think when you act so tough it puts me in the mood—”
“Do you think I was in the mood two nights ago?” he snapped. “Do you, Jane? Sitting there with my mother. Going up and accepting two awards and both times giving the same old smile and saying ‘Jane, this is yours too’ or whatever the hell I said. The fifth goddamn time I’ve been there without my wife. Don’t you think people talk? Or don’t you give a damn any more? Are you so wrapped up in your own problems you can’t see what anyone else feels? Oh, shit! Don’t start that crying on me.”
She couldn’t help it. Like a child who’s fallen and injured herself, she couldn’t even catch her breath. And when she finally could, the first rush of oxygen built up so much pressure that, as an involuntary reflex, tears sprang forth. Her breath came in little hiccups, and it took her some time before she could speak. “I thought you meant it.”
His head was raised. He was staring at the headboard. “Meant what?” He sounded bored, and annoyed at being bored.
“Meant what you said at the Academy Awards.”
“Oh, Christ. I meant it. All right?” He raised his voice. “I said I meant it. Come on. Stop crying. Stop it. There’s nothing to cry about.” She swallowed and took a deep breath. He waited. She knew he knew her so well. He knew just when she was calm. And at that precise minute he began to roll up her nightgown again.
She knew him too. As he pulled it over her head and dropped it onto the floor, he leaned over and kissed her. He would kiss her for less than a minute. Then he would fondle her breasts and, seconds later, ease down the bed and begin to kiss them. That would take a few minutes and then, once his erection was established, he’d move up and kiss her once more—again for less than a minute—and then climb on top of her, where he would rub against her and caress her for ten to fifteen minutes, until he determined she was ready for intercourse. Once in a while he’d pull her on top of him. Now and then he’d push her down the mattress, his signal that he wanted oral sex, or rise on his knees to indicate he wanted to straddle her and ejaculate between her breasts. But most nights were predictable, like this one.
Here it was, right on top of her: the body everyone wanted. A magnificent body. Powerful but graceful. Fabulously muscular without the grotesque excess of the bodybuilder. The ideal body.
It was not the body she wanted; it was not the body she had married. Nicholas’s beautiful, natural form had disappeared. He’d become an Adonis. His body was a creation, just as a statue was.
He worked at it tirelessly, every day. Since his second film, he’d appeared semi-nude in every movie he’d made. His face was his first fortune. His manner, steam under ice, made him his second fortune; his ability to act his third. His professionalism, his shrewdness, his reputation as an aristocrat, his cool charm made him even richer.
But his body set him up for life. It had become an international standard of excellence: French wine, Southern hospitality, Nicholas Cobleigh’s physique. At thirty, he’d begun doing a half hour of exercise each day. Now, with his gymnastics trainer, he was doing two hours on the rings, rope, horse, and trapeze. He spent another half hour working with weights. For most of their marriage, his first act each day had been to curl up against her and deny it was morning. Now it was slipping out of bed to do two hundred sit-ups.
Nicholas Cobleigh’s famous chest, perfectly formed, solid, pressed against hers. How many women dreamed of this?
Sometimes she dreamed of Charlie Harrison. He’d spent a weekend with them the previous summer and one afternoon came into the house after a swim in the pond. He was wearing baggy plaid bathing trunks. His shoulders were still the massive ones of a college football player, although his stomach had become a gut, pushing against the waistband of his trunks, threatening to overhang it in a year or two. But his chest had a thick covering of brown hair, and it sparkled with the droplets of water that adhered to it. He’d stood by the stairs and chatted with her for a few minutes before going up to change, resting his elbow on the newel post. The hair under his arm had hung in wet, dark strings.
She imagined rubbing him dry with a towel, having him reach for her and take her into his arms. Feeling Charlie’s messy, hairy, damp masculinity, sensing how he would let himself go in a way sleek, shining, perfectly molded Nicholas never could. She thought of going to bed with him, having an orgasm. “Charlie, Charlie, I’m coming,” she’d cry out. He’d have to clap his hand over her mouth to keep her quiet. But he’d want her to cry out. He’d want to hear it.
“Ready?” Nicholas asked.
“Yes.”
Smooth, muscular, hairless Nicholas. No excess anywhere. He could be photographed from any angle. Perfect. Cut, print. In such splendid shape sex was no exertion. His respiration did not alter. He did not perspire. His thrusts were so rapid and regular they felt automated.
Charlie would want her to writhe under him. To scream. He would want to hear her losing control. It would make him willing to surrender the last bit of control he had. His sounds would be low and rumbling, a tremor in the earth.
She didn’t cry out for Nicholas. She no longer pretended to have orgasms. One night she’d kept silent and he’d merely continued until he was finished, just as he always had, just as he was doing now. He didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t seem to care.
Jane finally fell asleep. He wished he could get her to keep the curtains off the windows. She was so beautiful in the light.
The month before, she had turned thirty-seven. She hated the four months when she was a year older than he. “I make old hags look young,” she’d said.
“You’re more beautiful than when I married you.”
“No, I’m not. You’re more myopic.”
She was more beautiful, although he knew she didn’t believe him. Her features were still strong enough to suggest her personality, but the hard edges of her jaw had softened. Her wide mouth, which had sometimes looked too big, was now—he looked at it, slightly slack—luscious. And her coloring: the black hai
r, those deep blue eyes, along with her velvet skin. She said her glow was makeup, but he thought it was something more, an aura that had descended over her. It was a terrible thing to think, but being a prisoner became her: pressure from interior turmoil and exterior walls creating a perfect balance.
Charlie had hinted at it the summer before. “Jane looks well,” he’d remarked. Nicholas had nodded, and Charlie had added, “She’s like a hothouse flower.” Then, sensing he’d said the wrong thing, Charlie dropped the subject. But he’d been right. For the first time in her life, after nearly seventeen years of marriage, Jane was in full bloom.
But the more desirable she became, the less she seemed to desire. The more desirable he became, the less she wanted him.
Everyone else wanted him. Women might start out flirtatious, aloof, maternal, friendly, or even hostile, but he knew they all wanted to end in the same place, and after the disaster of Laurel Blake, he didn’t want to be there with anyone else. A few times, worn out by loneliness and tempted by the need just to bury himself inside someone, he’d given off a signal: a hand that rested seconds too long on an actress’s shoulder, a soft thank-you kiss to a hostess that landed on lips instead of cheek. But the signals emitted in response had been too strong; they’d nearly knocked him senseless. So here he was, where he belonged, with his own wife, the one who knew him best, the only one who didn’t want him.
The moment they had finished intercourse, she’d leaned over, groped on the floor, found her nightgown, and hurriedly put it back on, as if to preclude skin from brushing skin during the night. In her sleep, Jane drew up her arm to shield her eyes from the unaccustomed brightness of the room.
She didn’t seem to care that in a week he’d be leaving to spend two months on location in Alaska. Beyond reading and commenting on each draft of the screenplay, she hadn’t said a word about his film. She didn’t seem interested. He’d had to bring up all the details about the writer, the supporting actors, the political coups he’d pulled off against the studio. He’d had to show her the sketches for costumes and set design; she’d never even asked. He’d had to remind her to call the bookstore to order his books, and she hadn’t said a word about having his family and Murray for dinner, a traditional event before he left for location. The way she was behaving, he could have been a car salesman about to go off for a half-hour demonstration drive.
She didn’t seem to want him. Not in the way she had all through the years, ever since college. Her need had always been strong, sometimes bottomless, so blatant and desperate he’d actually pitied her. Now, half the time she didn’t even try to pretend. Half the time she acted as though she didn’t even care.
The year before, the gardener had put in hundreds of bulbs, and now from the kitchen Jane could see the hyacinths—pink, purple, and white—stretching down the slope in the back toward the pond, lying like a giant elongated Easter egg in a grassy basket. Their scent was powerful and inordinately sensual, far too blatant for Connecticut. She waited, holding the telephone receiver in one hand and the newspaper clipping Cecily had given her the morning before in the other. Both hands trembled.
“Hello.” A voice finally came onto the line. “This is Dr. Fullerton.”
His name was right there in the article: “Dr. Judson Fullerton, the psychiatrist who founded—” The name had a false, pretentious sound, as though chosen as a stage name by a young actor who was foolishly patterning his career after Nicholas Cobleigh’s: yeah, man, Judson Fullerton just oozes class.
Maybe Judson Fullerton was an anglicization of Jack Fleigenbaum or something like that. Even though she knew better, she still imagined psychiatrists as Jewish and bearded: tweedy, middle-aged Freuds. She wasn’t sure she wanted to trust someone who had to become a Judson. Her heart fluttered. She thought of hanging up.
“My name is Jane Cobleigh.” She said her last name fast, so it came out like Coe-bee. That way, if he didn’t sound right, she could just hang up and he’d never muse whether the Cobleigh who’d called was related. He’d never be able to tell all the other psychiatrists, I got a call—highly neurotic woman, hung up—but I had the distinct impression it was Nicholas Cobleigh’s wife.
“Sorry. I didn’t catch your last name.”
“Cobleigh,” she said. “C-o-b-l-e-i-g-h.”
“What can I do for you?”
She waited for him to say Mrs. Cobleigh. Ms. Cobleigh. She didn’t think she sounded like a Miss any more. He didn’t say anything. They waited for you to say it. “I read about your phobia clinic.”
“Yes.”
They waited for you to make a fool of yourself. She’d probably make some terrible Freudian slip, say “my father” instead of “my husband” and then he’d say, Would you like to talk about that? No, she’d say. I wouldn’t. But he already had her last name. He’d probably talk about it that weekend at a cocktail party in Westport: Well, ethically you know I can’t mention names, but just the other day I got a call from a very famous actor’s wife…. “I read about how you work with women,” Jane said. “With people who can’t—” She couldn’t think of the right way to say it. He was absolutely silent. He didn’t even breathe into the phone. “People who can’t leave the house.”
“Yes, we do.”
“That you’ve had success even after regular analysis or—what do you call it?—therapy failed.”
“Yes.”
“It says if they can’t come to you, you send someone to them.”
“That’s right. Are you having difficulty leaving your house?”
“In a way.”
“I see.”
She could tell; he was just waiting for her to break down and spill everything. This probably happened ten times a day. His motto was probably Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves. His wife probably had needle-pointed it onto a pillow: the motto and Judson Fullerton, M.D., in a herring-bone stitch. “I haven’t been out of my house in six years.”
“That’s a long time,” he said.
“I’ve never seen my daughters’ school.”
“And you’d like to.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Would you like to have someone come to your house and talk to you?”
“What if I don’t want to? What if I decide—”
“No one will force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Now, what would be a good time for you?”
“Any time.”
“This afternoon?” he asked.
“Please.”
Nicholas stood before her in gray sweat pants, a towel around his neck. An hour had passed. She had not left the kitchen table. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it,” he said. “I’m just saying you should be careful. Do you have any idea who these people are?”
“He’s a psychiatrist. You read the article.”
“But what’s his reputation?”
“I’m sure it’s good. He was written up in the paper. It’s the first phobia clinic in this part of Connecticut.”
“But who is he? Where does he come from?”
“I don’t know.”
Nicholas wiped his hands on the back of his pants. “Don’t you think we ought to check into this first?”
“Cecily’s looking him up in the library. She’s going to be calling any minute.”
“And Cecily Van Doorn is an expert on psychiatry. Is that what you’re telling me? She marries a father-and-son combination, and now she’s going to marry a town maintenance man who drives the goddamn snowplow—”
“He’s a poet.”
“A poet. Twenty goddamn years younger than she is and she’s going to evaluate a psychiatrist for you? Are you serious?” He pulled out a chair and sat. His body had the sour smell of dried sweat. “Jane, I can’t tell you how happy I am that you want to try again. But this is a problem you’ve had for years, and all I’m doing is suggesting you wait another day or two and let me have him and this clinic checked.”
“I can tell when I meet whoever they’re s
ending over. I have judgment.”
“Jane, I’m not saying you don’t. I just think you’re in a vulnerable position, and you don’t want some slick—”
“He’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“Read the article again.” She pushed it at him. “Read all the quotes from people he’s helped.”
“Jane, there are people who are helped by witch doctors. Come on. I just want to protect you. You’re not the average American housewife, you know.” She took the article, folded it, and eased it into her skirt pocket. “You’re my wife. I can’t afford having people I don’t know anything about probing into my life.”
“It’s my life!”
“It’s our life. You know it is. He hears the last name and a light bulb goes off in his head. If he’s not on the up and up, do you realize the damage he can do? Do you?”
“Nick, please.”
“I’ve done everything I can in the last couple of years to keep my name out of the paper. I haven’t given an interview in over eighteen months. That’s all for a reason. We both agreed that privacy—”
“He’s a psychiatrist!”
“Listen to me. They’re all voyeurs. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be sitting there all day, getting their thrills by listening to other people’s secrets. Don’t you think it would be a thrill for some third-rate local psychiatrist to know all about Nicholas Cobleigh, the inside scoop? It would make great cocktail party conversation.”
She stood, rested her palms on the table, and leaned forward toward Nicholas. “That’s all you can think about, isn’t it? Me, me, me.”
“That’s not true.”
“Me, me, me,” she crooned. He rose and faced her. “Me—”
“Shut up!”
“Me, me, me. Let me stay here another six years, let me rot, as long as you aren’t embarrassed. Keep bringing in psychiatrists who report back to you, telling you I’m being resistive.”
“It was just that one, and he said he had your permission.”
“Do you want to know the real reason you don’t want me to see him? You’re going to Alaska the day after tomorrow, and you want me to pack for you and listen to your lines and play sweet, little wifey-poo. ‘Oooh, Nick, you are just one big, beautiful hunk of brilliance and this is going to be your greatest film, an American classic, and I’m honored to have the most infinitesimal role in making it happen. Deeply and profoundly honored.’ That’s what you want.”