by Jane Rule
I intended, until I had admitted it at least twenty times to myself, to take a boy half my age into my arms and then figure out later, too late, what I should have done instead. Why not? The French did it. It was ordinary for an older woman to have an affair with a young man—boy, I corrected myself. Marriage didn’t have to have anything to do with it. He could be free later, when he was ready, to marry. I looked at myself, the extra ten pounds that testified to my long indifference, but, if I dieted, if I let my hair grow a little, I still had some time, two or three years, perhaps even five. More than I needed. Frank would go somewhere else to graduate school in eighteen months.
“This is not France. You are not Simone Signoret in a Colette movie.”
No, I was a mathematician in the moral wheat belt, already divorced and old enough to be Frank’s mother. It was necessary to drive fifty miles to see a foreign film. We would have to drive a hundred and fifty, still unsafe, my job and his degree at stake. And for what? That was not a good question to ask. Why didn’t he telephone? Why didn’t he pound down the door?
He did not attend class all week, nor did I see him anywhere else on campus. What if he’d dropped out? Frank couldn’t do a thing like that, not with his mind, not with his certainty. But, if he had, where was my argument for protecting him from possible expulsion? Denying him, I might still be to blame.
At no point in that long week or the week that followed would I have used any argument at all. If Frank had appeared anywhere, I would have gone to him and stayed with him, whatever the cost. I knew that; therefore I couldn’t phone him. I lost five pounds without dieting. It was not becoming. I looked a year older for each pound.
Then early in the third week I did see him, far off, going up the steps of the library, just a tall, thin, khaki colored boy, but he was golden to me. He was all right. I did not even mind his absence in class that day because I knew he was somewhere, getting on with his own work and his own life. I looked at my students again with real academic interest. There were one or two not as bright as Frank but quite bright enough, and there were all the others, needing help. Perhaps in another week, he’d be able to come back. We could have coffee together…
I had gradually lost hope with pounds. That night I felt shamefully and bitterly reduced, not because for three weeks I had wanted Frank out of all reason but because now I could hope we might some day have coffee together. I never wanted to see him again like that. If I couldn’t love him—if I couldn’t tell him I loved him, at least I would refuse to pretend not to.
I began to take different paths from the library to my office, from my office to class, for, of course, he had known my pattern as well as I knew his. I wanted to see him, not to speak to him, just to see him. And occasionally I did, always at a distance, the strong boned forehead, the boy’s neck. And each time I had the same sense of relief. But in the evening I suffered from that luxury.
A thirty-eight-year-old woman in love with a twenty-year-old boy is a fool. Perhaps all women in love are fools; a thirty-eight-year-old simply knows it. Such knowledge does nothing but intensify the suffering. The rationalizing and daydreaming don’t stop for all the self-mockery. How did the end of Candida go? “Say to yourself, ‘when I am thirty, she’ll be forty-eight.’” Absurd.
And, of course, I wondered what Frank was thinking and feeling. Was he angry with me? Or had he decided from the moment I said, “I don’t know,” that he must take responsibility? I wondered if he was protecting me or himself. Why should I want to be protected? I could lose a job. I could get another. It was a seller’s market. I wondered if he knew enough to protect himself.
Then, after a month, there he sat in class. I was in the middle of a long proof, which, after half an hour, did not work out. I did not feel the usual interested panic, but I could not simply stop in front of fifty students and burst into tears or swear and walk out. I began to check back through the steps. Then Frank spoke in that familiar tone, polite and protective.
“There was an error in the first part of the problem,” he explained, “the part you did on Wednesday.”
The students all turned back in their notes to find the error and correct it. For a moment I looked directly at Frank, his golden eyes, his carefully shut mouth. He must have been studying the notes all along, seen what would happen today, and come knowing I would need him.
“Thank you,” I said.
He looked down at his hand, the thumb carefully rubbing the cuff of his shirt.
He did not join the group for coffee, but at the end of the day, as I was gathering up books and papers to go home, he knocked on my office door.
“I’d like to apologize,” he said, awkward in his height, as if he’d grown another inch in the month he’d been away.
“Apologize? Why?”
“For being such a fool,” he said. “I suppose you must get a lot of that sort of thing. I mean, I suppose a lot of guys like me think that…”
“There aren’t a lot of people like you, Frank,” I said, but quietly so that it might even have been taken as a mild reproof.
“I hope not,” he said. “For your sake. Would it be all right with you if I did come back to class now? If I had coffee occasionally?”
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t,” I said.
He smiled then with an embarrassment of long teeth and held out his hands for my books. On the way to the car, he told me about new fellowships, about the average he thought he would have at the end of the year, about his schedule for next year. I didn’t say much, but I doubt that he noticed. When we stood by the car, I did not ask him, “What are we going to do?” I knew.
I cooked myself a marvelous meal that night with rich sauces and I enjoyed it. For the first time in a month I did not have to imagine myself with only eighteen months to live, under the love-death sentence of my thirty-eight years. Nor did I have to imagine Frank, his young bones burdened with so grotesque a loving mistake. We were free, two bright cornbelt mathematicians, to talk together, to drink coffee together without addresses or personal histories. It was simply a matter of numbers, eighteen years or eighteen months. And Frank was already my superior, having both defined the problem and worked out the solution. Loving like that is a relief; it doesn’t end.
ONE CAN OF SOUP AT A TIME
“IT’S NOTHING PERSONAL. I just don’t like being married,” she said, lying next to him in the dark.
“Nothing personal?” She felt him sit up, dragging the blankets away from her shoulders as well. “What do you mean, ‘nothing personal?’”
“Just that. I like you fine. I just don’t like being married.”
“Like?”
“That’s a compliment,” she said, reproof in her voice.
“Thanks.”
“Oh, how can we talk about it if you start out taking it all personally and getting your feelings hurt?”
“All right. Okay. Let’s start this again.” He was reaching for a cigarette. “Shall I turn on the light? Do you want a cup of soup?”
“I’ll get it,” she said.
“No, I’ll get it.”
“I’m tired of this particular argument.”
“What argument?” he asked, the light blooming behind his head.
“About the soup.”
“You know what I’m tired of?” he asked, and his voice was simply tired.
“I know what you ought to be tired of.”
“Just that,” he said. “And it’s been getting worse. There is nothing I can do, no minor, automatic, mindless, little gesture…”
“The minor, mindless automatic little gestures are just where the trap is,” she said, relaxing now that the real argument was getting underway.
“I understand you. I know what you’re saying, the daily fabric of life and all that. Okay. But when a man can’t even offer to get his wife a cup of soup when she’s at the point of asking him for a divorce without first consulting the principles of women’s liberation…”
“It’s degradi
ng,” she said.
“What’s degrading?”
“Feeling obliged to get me a cup of soup.”
“I don’t feel obliged. I would genuinely enjoy getting you a cup of soup. What in hell’s the matter with that?”
“You’re trying to set me an example,” she said.
He groaned.
“I know you don’t mean to, but you are,” she said more gently.
“If I don’t offer to get you a cup of soup, I’m a male chauvinist pig. If I do, I’m trying to set an example.”
“That’s right.”
“Then how can I win?”
“You can’t.”
“And that’s a male chauvinist’s fantasy in the first place,” he said, his face in his hands.
“Do you know why it’s easy for you?”
“What’s easy?”
“Getting me a cup of soup?”
“Weren’t you the one who said you were tired of this particular argument? Fuck the cup of soup!”
“Because you only have to do it for a year or two, and just over 800 cups of soup is possible to imagine, for someone as good natured as you. But once you get your degree, once your paycheck starts coming in, how many cups of soup am I going to be obliged to make?”
“Well, let’s see,” he said. “I’m twenty-four now. It’s going to start when I’m twenty-six. I’m not sure what the life expectancy of a man is now. Around seventy? Seventy from twenty-six is…ah…”
“Forty-four years.”
“Times three hundred and sixty-five…What makes you think I’d suddenly stop getting the soup? By then we’ll be able to afford beer, and I’ll put a fridg in the bedroom. Why don’t we buy a hot plate now?”
“Are you asking my permission?”
“Well, damn it, darling, it is your money,” he said, a plea for understanding in his voice.
“And then it will be yours.”
“You think I’ll make you ask permission for every stupid little thing? Don’t you know me better than that?”
“Then why do you feel you have to ask my permission?”
“I really need that cup of soup,” he said.
“I’ll get it.”
She was just pouring the soup into the saucepan when he came into the kitchen, lighting another cigarette.
“I smoke too damned much,” he said.
“Too expensive?”
“You are a relentless woman without an ounce of nagging love for my lungs.”
“They’re your lungs.”
“I didn’t know you were thinking of quitting work once I’m through,” he said, a careful, crafty neutrality in his voice.
“I’m not.”
“Then what’s the problem about asking permission? You don’t ever plan to go through what I’m going through. You don’t ever intend to be humiliated by being dependent.”
“Do you feel humiliated?”
“I have to work damned hard not to be sometimes. And conversations like this don’t help much when you make me see myself as some sort of groveling, unliberated little housewife. I need to be reassured that I’m really just a guy learning to live without false pride, doing enough of the housekeeping to learn permanent instead of temporary lessons.”
“So that you’d never, under any circumstances, do to me what you’re doing to yourself.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Even when you start making more money than I do. Even when I take a year off to have a baby.”
“That’s right.”
She put a cup of soup down in front of him and sat down on the other side of the table. They looked at each other.
“But I’m not doing it to you,” she said. “You’re doing it to yourself. I don’t have to say, ‘It’s my money,’ for you to think it’s my money. You won’t have to do it to me. I’ll do it to myself, thinking he was so good natured, so unselfish, so thoughtful; he didn’t even make a martyr of himself.”
“You’d have better sense.”
“Why? Do you think a woman who’s supposed to be dependent and like it is going to have more sense than a man who only tries it for a couple of years?”
He bent down and sipped his soup without lifting it from the table. “I want a separate bank account.”
“What?”
“I want a separate bank account,” he repeated. “And, since I do the shopping and pay the bills, I want all but fifty dollars deposited in it every month.”
“There’s no more than fifty dollars’ spending money between us.”
“All right,” he agreed. “All but twenty-five.”
“I really do like you.”
“I like you, too,” he said.
“Do you think it’s as simple as that? Lots of husbands do that for their wives.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not really my husband,” he said. “I’d like to handle the problem a bit more personally anyway. I’d like to take it very personally, on a day-to-day basis, one can of soup at a time.”
“When I said I didn’t like being married, I didn’t mean I was thinking of leaving you.”
“Couldn’t very well while I was a helpless dependent,” he agreed.
“And now that I’ve got only $25, I can’t afford to.”
“Surely a woman who’s only going to be in that trap a couple of years can figure it out as well or better than a man who’s supposed to be in it for life and like it.”
“I don’t even want to set you a good example,” she said through a yawn.
“You’d better not. I couldn’t stand it either.”
A CHAIR FOR GEORGE
WHAT PUT THE IDEA in Harry’s head was the fight his neighbor had had with a visiting mother-in-law. Harry found her in the middle of the street with her luggage at eight o’clock in the morning; so, as much for his neighbor as for the poor woman, Harry drove her to the airport, listening all the way to her indignant descriptions of domestic practices easier to credit to transient baboons than to those seemingly normal people next door. On his way back downtown to cheer himself up, Harry imagined what a visit from his mother-in-law would have been like. She’d been dead for fourteen years, a year longer than he’d been married to Anna, and Harry had never met her. He assumed, because he loved and admired his wife, that her mother would have had the same resourcefulness and humor, but perhaps tempered by a white-haired, totally uncritical devotion to him and, of course, the children. The image of this aging, loving woman, called up to comfort and reassure Harry, made him sad instead, for he realized how much he and Anna and the children had been deprived of the reality of her care. His poor motherless wife, his poor grandmotherless children. Harry’s own mother lived somewhere in South America with a third husband and sent a Christmas check once every two or three years.
Harry’s sorrow was made so real to him that he spoke to Ray about it during their morning coffee break.
Ray, who didn’t have a mother-in-law either, agreed that you certainly did read a lot about the deprivations of the nuclear family, such a narrow unit of loyalty in a hostile urban environment. It was no wonder women turned to drink and children were too much influenced by peer values. Back at work over specifications for the new hospital annex, Harry was not only sad but beginning to be anxious. Anna was making twice the blackberry wine she had last year. It was true the crop was better than it had been in two years, and she’d already made more jelly and frozen more berries than they could use. Then there was Joey’s refusal to pick because “none of the other kids had to.” Anna had pointed out to him that none of the other kids had a mother with an Irish temper who had inherited the secret of the Chinese water torture; so he’d picked, eighty pounds Anna said, and ruined only two shirts. Not bad for a nine-year-old. But, if Joey had had a grandmother…Here Harry’s imagination went vague, perhaps distracted by his work, perhaps simply unable, in the circumstance of the blackberries, to see what joy she might add to an enterprise everyone else in the neighborhood already considered quaintly archaic. But still she w
as rocking in an as yet unpurchased rocking chair, maybe just keeping Anna from sampling too much of the wine or discouraging Sally from wearing one of Anna’s discarded bras on her head. When Harry sometimes registered mild complaints about such antics in his six-year-old daughter, Anna chided him for projected vanity. Sally was a pretty child, but she looked more like Anna than like Harry. Anna’s mother would have taken a natural pride in her, taught her that a little vanity is not a fault in a woman or a little girl.
The article in the paper that night was not, therefore, as Anna suggested, another of his instant pudding ideas but simply a marvelous solution to the problem that had been troubling him all day. The next Sunday, the YWCA was going to gather all the grandchildless grandparents and all the grandparentless grandchildren together for an adopt-a-grandparent tea, and Harry was determined that they would all go and come home with a grandmother of all their dreams.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” he said earnestly.
“How long?” Anna asked. “Since this morning when you drove that old harpy out to the airport? I’ve spent the day drinking with her poor daughter.”
“Drinking?”
“Yeah, drinking.”
“They were drinking coffee,” Joey put in.
“That’s not drinking?” his mother asked.
“It’s not what Dad means, I don’t think,” Joey said, a bit uncertain.
“Grandmothers make people cry,” Sally observed.
“Not all grandmothers, Sally,” Harry corrected. “It’s limited experience that leads to bigotry, Anna, don’t you see? We don’t want the kids to be culturally and emotionally deprived.”