She and Leah were sharing a room. The first afternoon, they had talked about what they would do if Leah should meet someone at the conference. A man. “The divorce is final,” Leah had said. “I’m on the loose.”
“Twice is different from once,” Leah said, the first time May ducked out of assembly to get her plane ticket to meet him. He had wanted to meet in Chicago, but already she had decided against going back to the same city. “You’d better give this a lot of thought,” Leah said. “You’re not unhappy, you and Cole.”
It was true, they were not unhappy.
They had been, in the early days, when they were young and neither one of them knew what to do with the burden of jealousy and possessiveness leading to their exhausting quarrels and long-drawn-out reconciliations, or with their uncompromising expectations of each other, fierce and selfish. Somewhere underneath all of that were their reasons for stopping dead in the middle of perfectly good lives and marrying each other, as people all around them were doing with the war under way. These reasons, so vague and overmastering that May could never fully explain them even to herself, had braided themselves tightly over the years into that heavy rope of blind favor and routine opposition hardly movable, insensible of anything but its own fibers of pained tenderness, lying peacefully coiled in the sun. That was marriage. She and Cole were married.
So it was not true, the adage believed and repeated, endorsed in all the magazines, that a third person could not enter a marriage except through an existing crack. The truth was more insidious.
As for Nathanael, he seemed to want her but he did not. He wanted her, but not in life: in his imagination. Perhaps because he had lost his mother. That was Leah’s interpretation. She had begun to see a psychiatrist, the first person of May’s acquaintance to do this; she was reading Freud and Jung and dipping into The Great Mother. “And me—I’m the mother?” May laughed. “Are you kidding? The man has six sons.”
She wanted no explanation. She wanted Leah to see what had happened in all its sudden, forbidden, irresistible worthiness. Its inevitability. Yes, she wanted Leah to submit to it, as she had submitted.
Leah said not to pull everything down around her just because at forty she had succumbed to a momentary attraction. Leah was older, in her fifties. “The man’s my age!” Leah said. “I could tell him a thing or two.” Leah might be divorced now, but she had been very careful not to let things go when her own children were young.
When they met the second time, Nathanael took a picture out of his wallet and showed it to her. “I’m sorry, it’s not funny,” she said, laughing, “but your mother, really, she looks a little bit like my stepmother. No, I mean it.” For this was a calm girl with a circlet of braids, showing the camera a broad, sweet, low-slung face with something willful in it.
His mother had come to Ohio from Alabama, early in the century, and found work in the hotel where his father worked. They were twenty when they married.
This was the conversation she shouldn’t have related to Leah, who, even before the psychiatrist, had gone in for what she called “solving for x.”
“May I look at the rest?”
“If you like.”
There were his sons, his smiling wife, not heavy and confident and stylish as May had pictured her, but lean, big-eyed.
“Here,” she had said, taking out her own wallet, where she kept so many pictures the thing fell open like a fan. Cole, the girls, her students, friends. “See, there’s my stepmother. The braids. See the resemblance?”
“Can’t say I do.” He studied every picture, without comment, and gave her a long look when he handed back the wallet, one of the looks that rested her inexplicably. They were in a hotel restaurant, in a high curved booth where they could sit pressed close.
“All those people.” When he made no reply she said, “Tell me about her.” The picture of his mother still lay on the table.
She knew his mother had died. As he spoke May could see it in his broad face as if it had just happened to him. She had died when he was five years old. It must have been that, not the wife and sons, that she had glimpsed that night at the banquet table, and again in the bar.
“You must have had a stepmother?” But he had not. His father had been one of those widowers who don’t make a second try. That was the pattern in his family. Except for one happy woman, the grandmother freed from slavery in her teens, who rejoiced and sang and prayed the day long—with that one exception, it appeared, Nathanael’s family was ruled by silence, self-reproach, and bullheadedness, coming down through generations. There was a religious streak. The women fell out in church, the men worked fanatically hard and inched ahead. If someone died they never got over it. His grandfather had suffered losses enough that he did not open his mouth to speak more than once or twice a day, though it was he who had married the talkative, happy one who had been freed in her girlhood. When Na-thanael’s mother died, his father took him over to the grandparents’ house with his clothes and coat and shoes in a Sears, Roebuck box, and his one book, the Bible, and his grandparents raised him.
“He really did that. And you were five. Well, I guess I can’t complain that my father remarried the year my mother died.”
“A lot of folks will do that. Don’t forget this was 1913.” By then she knew his age, fifty-two; she knew many things about him not unfolded to anyone since his wedding day. His wedding night, when he and his wife had first let down their guard. That was not so unusual then, he said, to wait a while before you told on yourself.
“Don’t. Don’t make me think about her. Are you? Are you thinking about her? But your father, in 1913—back then men got married as fast as the women could die off, didn’t they?”
“Not in my family.” He threw his heavy arm around her, his mouth pulled childishly downward.
“To tell the truth, I never got over it, that my dad did that,” May said. “That he brought somebody straight home. I don’t think I ever forgave him.” The truth was not so simple; she had loved her stepmother. Yet that was the start of an evening in which she set before Nathanael, and even heightened, the drenching sorrows of her teens, as well as certain buried cravings of the present time. Not those too minor to be known to her until gratified, such as the wish to have hands enclose her face, as Nathanael’s had already done through his own inclination more than once, with their big arthritic fingers and their palms like warmed cushions. But secret things, things too perverse or longstanding to bring up so late with Cole, in the established rhythm of a household.
In a more temperate way, Nathanael had been doing the same, scratching his close curls and wondering at so much he had forgotten about himself.
“Well now, May,” he said, at length. Then because of her name on his lips, and because the atmosphere seemed changed, as if they had cleared up the subject, they relaxed, a cleansing energy flowed through them, they smiled at each other with an absurd happiness and in their room returned to the kissing, the hungry, hopeless breathing of sighs, the lying down, the loss of themselves.
“So Mom, don’t take offense,” Vera said in her practical way. “But now, what were you to him? I mean, looks, of course—I remember wanting to look like you. Wait, I’m not saying it was that. But did he know you? Did he know my mom? How old was I?”
“You were nine.”
“Did I ever see him?”
“No, no one saw him but me.”
“OK, so he was wild about you?”
“I think he was. I can’t say why.”
“I’m serious, did he want you to get divorced? Don’t fall.”
May had put one foot off the curb. “I don’t think he ever did. I don’t think so.”
“I’m being a shit,” Vera said. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“But I think if he had asked me to, I would have been in a mess. I might have tried to. Before Nick was born.”
They were getting close to the part Vera did remember. With her own stories, Vera would tell anything, go anywhere. Bu
t she stopped May there, in her story. She helped her into the car. She told her to close her eyes and not look at the headlights.
Her will had deserted her. Her will, except for that part of it she had to exercise to get to him, had nothing to do with what took place between them. So for a time she was quiet. It seemed to her that anything she said or did might surprise or offend him, or hurt him. She couldn’t fight with him, or exult in his subjection to her when it came, because by then she was not fit for power.
After those hours of staring at his face the first night, she was embarrassed sometimes to look at him. When she first saw him the next time, coming toward her in the airport, she had to turn her head to avoid his big eyes on her with their pressing, exposing knowledge.
In her life with Cole, a staring down, a regular tipping of the balance went on, making it possible for them to establish themselves again and again, or force a pause, a change of course. If that was a contest, as Vera was fond of saying it was, it was not a bitter one. There was energy in it, there was a comical, invigorating repetitiveness. But with Nathanael she was at rest. And he, too, with his strong, practical wife and her ideals and efforts that carried the big family along toward some culmination that was, he confessed, a mystery to him: with May he was at rest. He told her so the second time they met, and she felt it in his own lapse into silence, from one meeting to the next, and in his hands, and the weight of his head on her chest.
Could she be blamed for allowing the thought to form, in those months, that there must be meaning in this, that their households, their schools, and the ten unsuspecting hearts that cruelly hindered them might have to be broken in on to make way for it, that a child might already have come of it?
Yes, she could be blamed.
All May could have said about the weeks after the baby was born was that they were running on, while she had stopped. She felt them skimming under her when her eyes opened on the sight of Cole and the girls in the room where she had lain all day passing fitfully in and out of sleep, with the baby beside her in the smelly bed, asleep in his wet diaper, with his swollen navel and a crust on the tiny flat gills that were his nostrils. A helpless newborn an arm’s length away, all that time. Awful. Her own child Vera had the sense to be outraged. Laura did not have time for outrage; she just took over. Laura was the pharaoh’s daughter; she dragged the basket out of the bulrushes and picked up the baby.
Snow was falling. She could see it from the bed, endlessly passing the window as if the house were rising.
“Thank God someone in this house is sane.” That was what Cole said to May, in furious despair. May could have been in the basket herself; she could feel the slosh under her. She felt a little of the ebbed-out life run back, remembering the word bulrushes, a word she had loved as a child. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she kept telling Cole.
During the day, when the girls were in school, Leah came over on her lunch hour to check on the baby. “When did you change him? Oh, look at his bottom all sore, isn’t him? Oh, the poor little man. Yes! You yell at your mommy. Oh, May.”
Later May said, “Leah, this isn’t me. Is it?” They were both looking into the bedroom mirror, at her in her bathrobe, with puffy eyes and lines around her mouth.
“It had better not be.”
Once every week or so, when the girls came in from school and took over, she put on her clothes; she went down the steps into the garage and started the car and drove to Leah’s house. Yes, she could be trusted at the wheel of a car. But there was snow on the streets. That was all right, she was a different person in the car; she had always been the one to drive, wherever they went as a family. No, she wouldn’t run over anybody.
Leah always opened the door to her, hugged her. Why did she do this? Why not say, Shape up or you’re no friend of mine.
“I won’t go on like this, I’ll get over it,” she told Leah firmly. Just saying it, she was getting over it. It was a question of throwing off the wish to lie still and moan.
Leah liked to bundle up a life and push it off in a boat. The boat belonged to you, had been yours from birth. You might as well sit down, you were in it already. That was only your shadow on shore debating whether to go. As well debate whether to digest your food. She wouldn’t let May smoke in her presence anymore because that was part of the negating, the death-seeking in May. For the first time in weeks May laughed out loud, in Leah’s kitchen where she had dragged herself. Death-seeking. In her! who was married to life.
“I don’t like explanations of life and I never have,” May said one day, and that was how she knew, with relief, that she was getting back her opinions.
“We didn’t know,” Leah would say when they looked back on that time. “There was no reason for you to know, but I should have.” Even Leah, with her Jung and her magazines and her psychiatrist, had been surprised to find that the condition May was in after the baby’s birth had had a name.
Nathanael left education and entered a second life as a politician, of all things. Drafted to be mayor of his little city in the Midwest, he stayed in office for years. He stayed married, as May did. Every year they wrote a few words at Christmas. All six of Nathanael’s sons did well, the two older ones very well. One went to Washington; you could see his name in the papers. Nathanael was twelve years older than May; he was getting old, becoming, two thousand miles away, the handsome old man who had flashed into her mind in the hotel bar.
But not before they had their occasions. For the last of these she had invented a meeting. “Another one?” That was Cole. “The teachers are out-meeting the doctors.”
“I don’t want to do this, May,” Nathanael said, the third time. “I’m drinking, at home. I don’t want to drink.”
“I’m a sinner,” she said bitterly.
“Sinful girl,” he said, without smiling. “I’m too old. I could almost be your daddy. That makes me responsible. I’ll get away from you.”
“Get away from me,” she said, pulling him against her.
Finally he said, “No, May. This is it. No more. I’ve been in torment. I’ve been sitting up in the church. I’ve been down on my knees.” They were in the train station. He spoke slowly, while May ground her head into his shoulder. She was pregnant; he had his hand on her belly with the child in it. “I call myself a Christian!” He spoke as if May, allied with her own body against him, would be at a loss to know what he meant by the term. By then, though, she did know. She knew she had been flattering herself, making the mistake of thinking he must see that he was like her: marked, motherless. Hers. A man like him, a Christian.
In the train station she went over what he had said about sitting in the church in torment.
Torment. Away from him there was not as much torment in it as she would have expected of herself. No more than if she had been in an accident and had to be knocked out for the time it would take to recover. Away from him, waking and sleeping, her mind persisted in childishly dwelling on her own sensations. A constant low vibration of excitement left her standing in the supply room some afternoons with her cold hands on the chalk and pencils and her forehead against a shelf.
The first time, there had been only the surrender to unthinking, unnerving pleasure, and afterward their first taste of the comfort they would be to each other in what seemed to be a form of friendship, a shamed friendship.
By the third time, she drank in the bar with him and speculated giddily about a full confession to both families and a step off into the thin air of a life somewhere in the world where they might possibly live. “You don’t mean that,” he said with a forbidding calm.
He had come all the way to Seattle; Cole was away and Leah had the girls for the weekend. His window looked out on the Sound, and in the afternoon seagulls dropped to the ledge and sat with blowing feathers. “Spies,” she said, and drew the curtains, but he wouldn’t joke; he never would. And the hotel room in the same city with her own house seemed to warn her, with its wrapped soaps and maps and directories, that it existe
d for someone not herself. Going down to the bar with him she prepared herself for the stares. This night drew to a close in protracted tears that left her with a sore throat. Following that, she narrowed down to asking for one more day in the hotel, and finally merely for a promise that he would call. She had always been the one to call. He could, he must, call her at school. She kept repeating it. Behind the mimeograph was a phone where the teachers could take a call in private.
When they met for the last time she built up to a hopeless wrath and ran to lock herself in the bathroom, where after half an hour she fell to putting on makeup with no embarrassment and calling to him to unpack her new nightgown and hand it through the door. In the morning she watched him move slowly around the room in his brown skin and white shorts, eyelids swollen, heavy mouth in a frown. When he sat down and faced her she shut out his voice and kept her mind on the two colors in his irises, the deep creases in his forehead.
It seemed to her she had never seen a man before in the way she was seeing him, never realized what a man was, how concealed, while exposed to any insult. How comically bound to show himself as both strong and harmless, to shave his jaws smooth and hide his big shoulders and belly, his whole greedy, wary, delicately sensing body, in a suit. His wife bought his suits. They were nicer than anything Cole had in his closet. His wife left them on layaway for months, making the payments.
This time he had flown to Portland. Where had the money come from for his ticket? After he left, she sat by herself in the train station, leaning on the tall wooden back of the bench. It was like a pew. Where exactly did he get down on his knees? Was it in church or in his house? What if the three-year-old ran in? Or would he be used to the sight of his father on his knees? She had been sitting on the bench as if thrown there; she should cross her legs. Her body felt as if she had been in a bathtub too long. It felt scalded. Four hours ahead of her on the train, for grading papers. She shut away the shocked face of the maid who had come into his room, and the stark lies involved in two phone calls to Cole, and the word love formed with lips crushed against skin. When she took off her coat in the hotel lobby the people who had been watching them had seemed reassured: she was pregnant. What could that have to do with the two of them? They must be officials of some kind. He must be foreign. A dignitary, in that suit. Of course. That kind of dignity, in a man like that, would be foreign.
Seven Loves Page 4