‘That’s nice,’ said Mona. This is not something she would have said in her previous incarnation. In fact, she is a much gender person now than she was when we were married. She’s had a knockabout life over the past twenty years. Some would say it has been one false start after another, but to hear her talk there was always a logic, always some important lesson to draw from her year in a mobile home, from her ill-fated decision to go to Hawaii with someone she had met at a yoga class, from the thousand and one bars she had to work in when she turned up in strange towns without any money. She told me she had only ever had one job that was worthy of her degree and her brain. It was working for a charity organization in Colorado. She left after three weeks, she told me, because ‘the challenge’ scared her. It was strange hearing her say this – it was just the sort of thing that would have driven me wild when we were together. I would have been furious about the stupid risks she took, the way she was trashing herself – but now I could look at her and think, almost with affection: This is who this woman is. These are her limitations, and so what? We talked until way past midnight, and that gives me hope. That makes me think that one day you and I will be able to sit down together and talk like that, too.
She wanted to know about the stack of notebooks on my desk. So I told her this story. She listened quietly and I thought sympathetically, but afterwards she told me that she was more in the dark about what kind of person you were than she had been at the beginning. ‘You don’t know this woman at all, do you?’ she said. We argued about it – in a friendly enough way – but I couldn’t convince her. ‘You never understood her. That’s obvious. But don’t worry,’ she said as she stood up to go, ‘I never understood you, either. Talk about dark continents!’
As she slipped her son into her backpack, she told me she was about to go to Singapore to work for a couple who own a gallery in Santa Fe. I told her it sounded suspect to me, and she said it did to her, too. ‘But hell, it’s more exciting that way.’ She said she liked being a pioneer.
She kissed me on both cheeks – a new affectation – and then off she went. As I watched her emerge from the building with her son on her back, and saunter down the street, I felt like there was nothing left of me except her opinion. I thought: This is the way things are these days. The women and children go off on adventures. The man stays and waits in what soon becomes a museum of discarded toys. He doesn’t throw them away, because even though his children have outgrown them, he doesn’t want them to forget, and that is his job, to make sure they don’t. As I watched her disappear around the corner, I asked myself, is this what it means these days to be a man?
Then I told myself, no, that’s her version, not mine. I felt this empty before. Walking like an automaton through the museum, past the tired vases and statues and friezes, with no idea of what was waiting for me on the other side of the door … how can she claim to know me, Laura, if she doesn’t know what happened next? How can it be that I don’t understand you, if I can’t even wake up in the morning without seeing you there next to me, if I can’t even go into the shower without imagining you in it with me, imagining you right down to the last detail, right down to the way you rub the soap up and down your back?
How can she say I don’t want to understand you, I who have spent the past four years going through your books and your letters and your pictures? Who has tried harder to look for the missing links? Who else can remember exactly how your food tasted, or how you put your lips on a glass, or how you grimaced when you were trying to string two disparate thoughts together, how you laughed with your friends in the days when they were still your friends, how you put your arms around me when you half woke in the middle of the night, what you said to me when you first saw Jesse in the hospital, how you looked when I carried Maria in to you? How can she say I don’t know you when you are so much in my mind that I can’t even walk to answer the door without hoping that when I open it, I’ll find you standing there waiting to forgive me?
A Note on the Author
Maureen Freely is a freelance writer and critic, and the author of two
previous novels, Mother’s Helper and The life of the Party.
By the Same Author
MOTHER’S HELPER
THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
First published 1992
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 1992 by Maureen Freely
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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The Stork Club Page 33