by Jo Barney
“Madge guessed right in lots of ways in my story. I had lived a good San Francisco life, built on dreams that were dreamt long before I got to Lee and the Gamma Psi’s, but college and finding a rich husband were part of them. Tim wasn’t rich, but he could have been, as a doctor. I would have children, a life of art and music and the NY Review of Books and money enough to fill in all of the emptiness left over from my childhood. I’ve never talked about my family, on purpose. The past didn’t fit the person I was attempting to be.”
She is surprised. This confession is not as painful as she had imagined, actually a relief, like opening a tight belt. She can feel warm air filling her lungs, feeding her words. “I was miserably poor as a little kid; I envied children with fathers and mothers who went to PTA; as a teenager, my hands were stained red every fall from sloshing cherries in maraschino juice.”
Lou interrupts. “Maraschino cherries?”
“I worked in the cannery. I bleached my hands for days before I came back to college in the fall.”
“Damn. All that time I thought you were sitting around reading F. Scott Fitzgerald in smoky coffee houses.” Lou sighs.
“That was the impression I wanted you to have, a dream. Tim and I divorced because I couldn’t live with the life we had come up with. Tim knew it, and so did Madge. She also knew that I married Brian because he was the only piece missing from my new life, a rich well-known man. And that’s why he married me, to fill in a gap in his life, although he was reluctant at first. Perhaps he knew all along that he could never change his philandering habits, or sexual compulsions, as I diagnose them now. But we needed each other to complete our vision of who we were. No, that’s wrong. To complete the world’s vision of who we were.
“I’ve always worried about how people, you two, in fact, see me. I think that’s why I fabricated a new me, a different life.” Joan pours a glass of wine and pauses. No need for her to go into the rest of the story. Madge told it as well as it could be told—until the man in the periwinkle pants wandered into it, uninvited and welcome. Joan brings the glass to her lips.
* * *
Joan had driven to Yachats and was a day away from Madge and the beach house. She was running away, she realized, but it felt more like she was heading towards something, the next place, whatever it might be. A rill of anticipation made her smile as she sat down for dinner in the restaurant. A man standing at the side of her table thought she was smiling at him.
“Are you traveling alone?” At her nod, he asked, “May I join you for dinner? I’m a little bored with myself after three weeks on the road.” He was in his sixties, she guessed, firm-cheeked and bodied, laugh lines, freckles on his hands.
“I’d enjoy the company.” This was true. She had eaten alone in Mendocino, feeling isolated in a sea of white tablecloths and vacationing couples at the inn. Tonight, someone to talk with would be a good antidote to the subtle aloneness that had bloomed like a pale winter hellebore as she had driven north along the rainy Oregon coast that day.
He wore a yellow golfer’s shirt and bright blue pants and looked as if he might burst into song at any moment, a yodel perhaps, in celebration of the good day his grin indicated that he must have had. Joan couldn’t help grinning back. A cheerful person across the table is almost as good for blowing away the blues as a Mercedes with the top down, she realized.
Bill, retired and on his maiden voyage as a true old fart, had been visiting children in southern Oregon and was headed for a mother in Oakland. Eight-eight, he said, and she was still going strong.
“Good genes,” Joan commented. “You have a lot of voyages ahead of you, sounds like.” She wondered if she sounded like a therapist. She hoped not.
“I try to take each day…”
“…as it comes.” She didn’t much like the cliché, but he seemed to be living it. “And today it was golf?”
“Every day it’s golf, even in this Oregon mist. You have to have a purpose when you suddenly stop living one life and step into the next. So, for right now, it’s playing golf.
Maybe next year it will be chain-sawing wooden bears.”
“You’d have a lot of competition around here. Who do you suppose buys all of those creatures lined up along the road?”
He laughed. “I have one in the car right now. My mother will love it on her porch. You don’t like them?
She wasn’t sure if he were joking or not, but she liked his teeth. They were probably his, flashing whitely at the end of every sentence, signs of an open-heartedness, contagious, in fact, and she found herself teasing him and at one point, tapping his hand with her fork to make a point. She couldn’t remember ever doing that before, except maybe once to reprimand a greedy son grabbing at a second cupcake. Childlike. That’s what he was. Harmless.
Dinner over, he suggested they walk down to the ocean edge and watch the sunset since the clouds had moved on to the east. He took her hand as they stepped across the black rocks and found a perch at the water’s edge.
“Have you ever seen the flash of green?” she asked.
“In Hawaii. Not here.”
“I always make a wish at the last moment of sun.”
“Tonight?
“Yes.”
“Me, too,” he said and his warm hand held her shoulder, touched her neck. Silent, they watched the orange disk flatten out, sink behind the darkening sea.
I can make a choice, Joan thought. A left-hand detour off the highway. His arm wrapped her like a warm scarf against the rising ocean breeze.
When he asked if he could walk her home, she said she would like that. She was glad she had taken off her wedding ring as she left San Francisco. Perhaps it had not been to keep the diamonds safe in the lockbox of the car as she traveled. And maybe he would not notice the white ghost of a marriage imprinted the skin of her fourth finger.
And he hadn’t. Not until after they had made love, and he had taken her hand in his as they lay back against the pillows, their bodies still vibrating with the rhythms of sex. “Rings?’ he asked.
“Maybe,” she answered. Explanation was not necessary, perhaps not even possible.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Not my business. I’ve been a widower for five years. No more rules about anything, far as I am concerned. Take what comes and be glad is my theme song. And I’m very glad about you.” He closed his eyes.
And I am glad about you, she wanted to answer. She had found out that she could enjoy sex with a stranger, and that he, her dear guinea pig, found her satisfactory. She also found out that breaking one’s marriage vows, such as they were, was easy if one were angry enough, and that was what she had been for weeks. Like Brian, an angry person also, for his own reasons. Not my fault. As she fell asleep, she began to accept the truth of that idea.
Bill got up early the next morning to make a tee time. When he asked if he could see her again, she said that she needed to be on her way. She thanked him for the evening, and although he couldn’t have known what the evening had really meant to her, he was pleased and said he hoped their paths would…”
“…cross again.” She kissed him on his firm cheek. “You are wonderful medicine,” she whispered as she led him to the door, glad that she had found her nightgown and that it covered her body now exposed to the cold light of day. His spotted hand touched her breast, brushed a nipple. She delighted at the surge she felt in her…loins? Do they say loins anymore? She felt a little crazy as she shut the door. She crawled back in under the blanket, tried to recapture the movement of his penis inside her, the weight of his gasp as he came, the kindness of his fingers that brought her to her own breathlessness moments later. A detour? An escape? Or, and she laughed aloud, a cul-de-sac. It didn’t matter.
* * *
“I have left Brian. He doesn’t know yet.” Joan feels the cushion brush against her back as Lou leans towards her. “It’s okay, Lou. This the best part of the story. I met a man on the way here, a sweet mirage of a man who liked me and golf. It is as simple as
that. After a lifetime of believing I had to be something other than myself to be loved, this man liked me just as I was.”
“Was?”
“Am. I hope. Talking about it is helping to clear up the details. Damn,” Joan laughs. “I’m having an epiphany. Therapy must really work.”
Jackie says “Shit” for no reason Joan can determine, and Lou sits back as Joan goes on. “The moment I accepted the fact that Brian was unfaithful, was even taping his dalliances, was lying to me, the dream of the perfect life fell away. It was as if I had hit the delete key and all that remained was a new, blank page. Bill, a man in the periwinkle pants, appeared and allowed me to experience for a few hours what an imperfect, joyful, unruly world could be like, how that blank page could be filled with a new dream.”
“So,” Lou asks, “perchance, you’re taking up golf?”
“So, I’m going to try to bring back the girl with the maraschino cherry hands, wash her off, start her out again knowing she’s okay despite her red fingertips.” Joan glances at her lacquered nails. They might have to go, too. “Besides, I don’t know Bill’s last name or his address.”
Behind her, Jackie laughs. “Joan, you remind me of the former me. Do I have to tell my painter stories again as a lesson to you? At least I knew his name, not that I can remember it now.”
The idea of Jackie teaching her anything stuns Joan for a second. But she realizes it is true. Jackie has led the open, the humor-filled, risk-taking life that has eluded Joan forever. This woman lives every minute of the day. She has no secrets. She is her own person. Joan turns to face her. “You’ve been trying to teach me for years. I’m just a slow learner when it comes to freeing one’s spirit. You graduated a long time ago, magna cum laude.”
Jackie’s cheeks are pink, her eyes glow with pleasure. “Thank you,” she says, and she grins.
“Methinks thou art a little hard on thyself, Joan.” Joan feels Lou lean forward, touch her shoulder, give it a lingering squeeze. The hand was warm, felt like a blessing, a moment Joan knew she would remember for a long time.
“Forsooth, let’s drink to all the Bills in your future.” Lou raises her empty glass and Jackie passes the bottle. The fire crackles and a log crashes into splinters of sparks. Somewhere on the beach a dog barks at the waves washing over her feet.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Early Sunday Evening: Clearing Skies
Lou
Lou sets her wine glass on the chest, enfolds herself in a tight fuzzy hug. “Yesterday morning I hated myself for not getting up when I heard her walking stick clicking on the terrace, her soft steps gritty with sand. Only our promise to her kept me paralyzed in my bed, crying, trying not to wake you two up. Then I heard you, Joan, whisper goodbye from your room, her side of the bed still warm, and I knew you were crying too. And Jackie, you called out in your sleep, somehow aware of her leaving.
“I waited, we all waited, until the sun rose and then we got up, knew Madge was gone. It had not been a dream. For an instant, I wanted to go out, capture, drag her back to us, but instead we went for a walk away from her, as we had said we would.”
“Seems like forever ago,” Jackie says.
Lou unhunches her shoulders, loosens her wrap. “Then this morning I read the story she wrote for me, and I remembered again why I had made such a terrible promise. Madge helped me when I most needed her. I needed to return the favor.”
“Yes,” Joan says. “Me, too.”
“She came up to the mountain and stayed for a while after I left Robert and my old home. She asked few questions; she listened as I babbled, not making sense even to myself, about loneliness in the midst of a life full of people, about the deep sadness that had settled in my bones making me heavy with a grief I didn’t understand. She paid attention to my endless complaints about my husband and the dreariness of my days, and she said only, ‘Your feelings are real. Don’t doubt them.’
“We sat in that little cold cabin, bundled against the wind slipping through the chinks in the logs, and I talked until I was empty of words and we had run out of firewood. Then she asked, ‘What will you do now?’ and I knew. The cabin would become my home, the firs outside my companions, the mountain my solace. From then on, she visited every few months as I worked on the cabin and settled into my new life. We wrote often. I told her about my alpine garden, my new friend Susan. I didn’t tell her everything.”
Lou lifts her folder from the table, flips through the sheets to the end, takes out a pile of pages torn from a spiral notebook, the only paper she has brought with her. “Madge missed one part of my story, one I’ve never told anyone about, one I didn’t let myself think about for forty years. It explains things. For me, maybe for you.” Lou clears her throat. She hasn’t read aloud since the boys were small. Before that, in literature classes with Dr. Elizabeth Wilton. Reading aloud is a matter of breathing evenly, tasting the words on one’s tongue, her professor had instructed.
“My ending starts when Susan and I decide to take out the old red rhodie in front of the cabin.” She tastes the words.
Chapter Thirty-Three
If There Be Any Virtue
“Okay, so we take it out and maybe transplant a wild one in the same spot. Some ferns, a little epimedium. Okay?” Susan is planning again, her eyes still closed.
I do not respond. This time the hydrangeas have carried me to l956, to the drawing room of the Victorian house to which my professor, Dr. Elizabeth Wilton, had invited me for tea. Green and purple stained glass grapes shuddered under the rap of the doorknocker behind which the teacher’s small shadow floated. In the entry, a Chinese pot held a tall stand of dried blue flowers, hydrangeas, remains of the past summer. Pink and white cakes teetered on tiered plates in the sitting room.
As Dr. Wilton took my coat and hung it on the mirrored hall tree, a soft trail of violins meandered in the quiet air. The scent of spiced tea and lemon and honey welcomed me as I settled into one of the winged chairs. Dr. Wilton poured, her hands sure, her cheeks rouged under a veil of powder that softened tiny lines, her skin that of a mature woman. My mother’s age, I thought, were she alive.
The fingers that offered me a second cup of tea ended in nails so perfect they seemed to be tiny shells. White tips, pink, waxy centers, trimmed cuticle, half moons rising out of them. I, conscious of my own chewed stubs, curled my fingers into my palms and hesitated to bring my cup to my lips.
“I‘m so glad you’ve come,” Dr. Wilton said, “but please, here in my home, call me Elizabeth.” At my nod, she continued. “I have admired your writing and your perceptions of the Romance writers. I especially enjoyed your Spencer paper and later the Yeats piece. Do you realize that you are an anomaly among college students today? You actually seem to enjoy mulling over the writing of dead men.” She paused, sipped, her amused eyes watching me over the edge of her cup.
“I try to imagine their lives. I try to understand whatever it is within them that compels their writing. I love ‘Songs of Innocence,’ the very human person behind those ideas. Who wouldn’t?”
“About 98% of my students, if I’m one to judge.”
Elizabeth leaned over the serving dish, chose a tiny éclair and popped it into her mouth, a limber streak of pink. Fulsome, the solarium would describe it. Behind the tall window’s lace curtains, the afternoon darkened, but we kept talking. After a moment in which we had shared bits of our childhoods, the professor turned, pulled a thin book from the shelves behind her and read a few lines of Coleridge. I listened, enthralled with the husky voice, the careful lips from which “A little child, a limber elf, singing, dancing to itself,” sang out.
It didn’t seem strange at all that at the end of the visit, a perfectly-manicured hand was laid on the small of my back, a set of peach lips pressed into my neck, a soft thank-you floating between us as we stood at the door. “Come back again, my dear,” I heard as I walked down the path.
Of course, I went back many times that spring, no longer hesitant to call my teacher
Elizabeth as we argued Shelley and Wordsworth, quoted underlined verses from Whitman and Blake to make our points, lolled under the huge oak in the side yard and read, interrupting each other with an occasional, “Listen to this.” And finally, one sunny afternoon, in a quiet sitting room, tender fingers traced the slope from my cheek to my shoulder, meandered along the valleys of my rib cage. “Sweet one,” Elizabeth murmured, “Are you ready?”
Nothing about this woman frightened me. Everything about her offered comfort and an intimate connection that I had only imagined as I tried to fall asleep in my narrow sorority cot. I lifted my face, and met that fulsome mouth with mine.
A tongue tip separated my lips, sought my tongue. It tasted of tea and desire.
I pulled away from the fingers that touched the buttons of my blouse. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.” Yet, I wanted to say, but instead I stood, straightened my skirt. We did not speak as I took my jacket from the coat tree, opened and then closed the purple-graped door.
Three weeks later, Elizabeth Wilton, calm and professorial in her doctoral hood, thanked her senior scholar and wished her well in front of several hundred parents and friends assembled for graduation. In the years that followed, only occasionally, in the midst, say, of re-reading Tom Jones, or after a moment of ephemeral joy at rediscovering “Tigre, tigre burning bright,” have I revisited the sadness of that goodbye.
* * *
I open my eyes. Susan’s chair is empty, a swath of Doug fir shadow darkening the deck. I inhale a panicked gasp; then I hear the soft whistling of a gardener at work.