I have a lover, Jodie thought. Most people have lovers without paying any attention to what they have. They think pleasure is a birthright. They don’t even know what luck they have when they have it.
At the end of the day she couldn’t wait to see him. Every time she came into the room, his face seemed alert, relaxed, and sensual. Sometimes, thinking about him, she could feel a tightening, a prickling, all over her body. She was so in love and her skin so sensitive that she had to wear soft fabrics, cottons repeatedly washed. Her bras began to feel confining and priggish; on some days, she wouldn’t wear them. The whole enterprise of love was old-fashioned and retrograde, she knew, but so what? Sometimes she thought, What’s happening to me? She felt a certain evangelical enthusiasm and piety about sex, and pity for those who were unlucky in love.
Her soul became absentminded.
On some nights when Walton didn’t have to go to the loading dock, she lay awake, with him draped around her. After lovemaking, his breath smelled of almonds. She would detach herself from him limb by limb and tiptoe into the kitchen. There, naked under the overhead light, she would remove her tarot pack from the coupon drawer and lay out the cards on the table.
Using the Celtic method of divination in the book of instructions, she would set down the cards.
This covers me.
This crosses me.
This crowns me, this is beneath me, this is behind me, this is before me, this is myself.
These are my hopes and fears.
The cards kept turning up in a peculiar manner. Instead of the cards promising blessings and fruitfulness, she found herself staring at the autumn and winter cards, the coins and the swords. This is before me: the nine of swords, whose illustration is that of a woman waking at night with her face in her hands.
She had also been unnerved by the repeated appearance of the Chariot in reverse, a sign described in the guidebooks as “failure in carrying out a project, riot, litigation.”
Propped up in her living-room chair, she had been dozing after dinner when the phone rang. She answered it in a stupor. She barely managed a whispered “hello.”
She could make out the voice, but it seemed to come from the tomb, it was so faint. It belonged to a woman and it had some business to transact, but Jodie couldn’t make out what the business was. “What?” she asked. “What did you say?”
“I said we should talk,” the woman told her in a voice barely above a whisper, but still rich in wounded private authority. “We could meet. I know I shouldn’t intrude like this, but I feel that I could tell you things. About Glaze. I know that you know him.”
“Who are you? Are you seeing him?”
“Oh no no no,” the woman said. “It isn’t that.” Then she said her name was Glynnis or Glenna—something odd and possibly resistant to spelling. “You don’t know anything about him, do you?” The woman waited a moment. “His past, I mean.”
“I guess I don’t know that much,” Jodie admitted. “Who are you?”
“I can fill you in. Look,” she said, “I hate to do this, I hate sounding like this and I hate being like this, but I just think there are some facts you should know. These are facts I have. I’m just … I don’t know what I am. Maybe I’m just trying to help.”
“All right,” Jodie said. She uncrossed her legs and put her feet on the floor and tried to clear her mind. “I get off work at five. The office is near downtown.” She named a bar where her friends sometimes went in the late afternoons.
“Oh, there?” the woman asked, her voice rising with disappointment. “Do you really like that place?” When Jodie didn’t respond, the woman said, “The smoke in there makes me cough. I have allergies. Quite a few allergies.” She suggested another restaurant, an expensive Italian place with lazily stylish wrought-iron furniture on the terrace and its name above the door in leaded glass. Jodie remembered the decor—she hadn’t liked it. However, she didn’t want to prolong these negotiations for another minute. “And don’t tell Glaze I called,” the woman said. Her speech was full of italics.
When Jodie hung up, she began to chew her thumbnail. She glanced up and saw her reflection in a window. She pulled her thumb away quickly; then she tried to smile at herself.
She was seated in what she considered a good spot near a window in the nonsmoking section when the woman entered the restaurant and was directed by the headwaiter to Jodie’s table. The woman was twelve minutes late. Jodie leaned back and arranged her face into a temporary pleasantness. The stranger was pregnant and was walking with a slightly prideful sway, as if she herself were the china shop. Although she was sporting an attractive watercolor-hued peacock-blue maternity blouse, she was also wearing shorts and sandals, apparently to show off her legs, which were deeply tanned. The ensemble didn’t quite fit together, but it compelled attention. Her hair was carefully messed up, as if she had just come from an assignation, and she wore two opal earrings that went with the blouse. She was pretty enough, but it was the sort of prettiness that Jodie distrusted because there was nothing friendly about it, nothing settled or calm. She was the sort of woman whom other women instinctively didn’t like. She looked like an aging groupie, a veteran of many beds, and she had the deadest eyes Jodie had ever seen, pale gray and icy.
“You must be Jodie,” the woman said, putting one hand over her stomach and thrusting the other hand out. “I’m Gleinya Roberts.” She laughed twice, as if her name itself was witty. When she stopped laughing, her mouth stayed open and her face froze momentarily, as more soundless laughter continued to emerge from her. Jodie found everything about her disconcerting, though she couldn’t say why. “May I sit down?” the woman asked.
Feeling that she had been indeliberately rude, Jodie nodded and waved her hand toward the chair with the good view. The question had struck her as either preposterous or injured, and because she felt off balance, she didn’t remember to introduce herself until the right moment had passed. “I’m Jodie Sklar,” she said.
“Well, I know that,” Gleinya Roberts said, settling herself delicately into her chair. “You must be wondering if this baby is Glaze’s. Don’t worry. I can assure you that it’s not,” she said with a frozen half grin, a grin that seemed preserved in ice. The thought of the baby’s father hadn’t occurred to Jodie until that moment. “I’m in my fifth month,” the woman continued, “and the Little Furnace is certainly heating me up these days. Bad timing! It’s much better to be pregnant in Minnesota in the winter. You can keep yourself warm that way. You don’t have any children yourself, Jodie, do you?”
Jodie was so taken aback by the woman’s prying and familiarity that she just smiled and shook her head. All the same, she felt it was time to establish some boundaries. “No, not yet,” she said, after a moment. “Maybe someday.” She paused for a second to take a breath and then said, “You know, I’m pleased to meet you and everything, but you must know that I’m … well, I’m really curious about why you’re here. Why’d you call me?”
“Oh, don’t let’s rush it. In a minute, in a minute,” Gleinya Roberts said, tipping her head and staring with her dead eyes at Jodie’s hair. “I just want to establish a friendly basis.” She opened her mouth, and her face froze again as soundless laughter rattled its way in Jodie’s direction. “Jodie, I just can’t take my eyes off your hair. You have such beautiful black hair. Men must love it. Where do you get it from?”
“From? Where do I get it from? Well, my father had dark hair. It was quite glossy. It shone sometimes.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “I don’t think women get their hair from their fathers. I don’t think that’s where that gene comes from. It’s the mother, I believe. I’m a zoologist, an ornithologist, actually, so I’m not up on hair. But I do know you don’t get much from your father except trouble. Sklar. What kind of name is that? Do Sklars have beautiful black hair?”
Before Jodie could answer, the waitress appeared and asked for their order. Gleinya Roberts reached for the menu, and while Jodie or
dered a beer, the woman—Jodie was having trouble thinking of her as “Gleinya”—scanned the bill of fare with eyes slitted with skepticism and one eyebrow partially raised. “I’d like wine,” Gleinya Roberts said, and just as the waitress was about to ask what kind, she continued, “but I can’t have any because of the baby. What I would like is sparkling water but with no flavoring, no ice, and no sliced lemon or lime, please.” The waitress wrote this down. “Are you ordering anything to eat?” Gleinya Roberts asked Jodie. “I am. Perhaps a salad. Do your salads have croutons?” The waitress said that they did. “Well, please take them out for me. I can’t eat them. They’re treated.” She asked for the Caesar salad, explaining that she positively lived on Caesar salad these days. “But no additives of any kind, please,” she said, after the waitress had already turned to leave. Apparently the waitress hadn’t heard, because she didn’t stop or turn around. If Jodie had been that waitress, she believed that she wouldn’t have turned around, either. “I’m afraid I’m terribly picky,” Gleinya Roberts announced. “You have to be, these days. It’s the Age of Additives.”
“I eat anything,” Jodie said, rather aggressively. “I’ve always eaten anything.” Gleinya Roberts patted her stomach and smiled sadly at Jodie but said nothing. “Now, Gleinya,” she pressed on, “perhaps you can tell me why we’re here.”
Gleinya held her left hand out with the fingers straight and examined her wedding ring. It was a quick mean-spirited gesture, but it was not lost on Jodie. “It’s about Glaze, of course,” she said. “Maybe you can guess that I used to be with him. It ended two years ago, but we still talk from time to time.” She took a long sip of her water, and while she did, Jodie allowed herself to wonder who called whom. And when: probably late at night. “Anyway,” she went on, “that’s how I know about you.” She put down her water glass and smiled unpleasantly. “That’s how I know about your sleeping porch. He’s been spending some nights there. He’s terribly in love with you,” she said. “You’re just all he talks about.”
Jodie moved back in her chair, sat up straight, and said, “He’s a wonderful guy.”
“Yes,” the other woman said, rather slowly, to affirm that Jodie had said what she had in fact said but not to agree to it. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, Gleinya Roberts half stood up, then sat down again and settled herself, flinging her elbows out, and before Jodie could ask why she had done so, though at this point the inquiry did seem rather pointless, Gleinya Roberts said, “It’s so hard to get comfortable in your second term. All those little infant kicks.” She patted her stomach again.
“They don’t seem to have hurt you, exactly,” Jodie said.
“No, but you have to be careful.” She touched the base of her neck with the third finger of her right hand, tapping the skin thoughtfully. “You have to try to keep your looks up. You have to try to keep yourself up. Men get fickle. Of course, my husband, Jerry, says I’m still pretty, ‘prettier than ever,’ he says, a sweet lie, though I don’t mind hearing it. He only says that to please me. It’s just a love-lie. Still, I try to believe him when he says those things.”
I bet you do, Jodie thought. I bet it’s no effort at all. “You were going to tell me about Walton.”
“Yes, I was,” she said. The waitress reappeared, placed Jodie’s glass of beer, gowned in frost, in front of her, and Jodie took a long, comforting gulp. All at once Gleinya Roberts’s voice changed, going up half an octave. She had leaned forward, and her face was infected with old grudges and hatreds. “Jodie,” she said, “I have to warn you. I have to do this, woman to woman. I want you to protect yourself. I know how suspicious this seems, coming from an old girlfriend, and I know that it must sound like sour grapes, but I have to tell you that what I’m saying is true, and I wouldn’t say it unless I was worried for your safety. He likes fights. He likes fighting. You’ve seen how he favors his right foot, haven’t you? That old injury?”
Jodie swallowed but could not bring herself to nod.
“He got it in a bar fight. Somebody kicked him in the ankle and shattered the bone. I mean, that’s all right, men get into fights, but what you have to know is that he used to beat me up—and the girl before me, he beat her up, too. He’d get drunk and coked up and start in on me. Sometimes he did it carefully so it wouldn’t show—”
“He doesn’t drink,” Jodie said, her mouth instantly dry. “He doesn’t do drugs.”
“Maybe not now, he doesn’t,” Gleinya Roberts said, smiling for a microsecond and patting the tablecloth with little grace-note gestures. “But he has and probably will again. His sweet side is so sweet that it’s hard to figure out the other side. He just explodes. He’s such a good lover that you don’t want to notice it. He’s quite the dick artist. But then he just turns, and it’s like a nightmare. He waits until you’re really, really happy, and then he blows up. Once, months and months and months ago, I told him that someday I wanted to go out to the West Coast and sit on the banks of the Pacific Ocean and go whale watching. You know, see the whales go spouting by, on their migrations. We both had a vacation around the same time—”
“I don’t think it’s the ‘banks’ of the Pacific Ocean. That’s for rivers. I think you mean ‘shore,’ ” Jodie said.
Gleinya Roberts shrugged. “All right. ‘Shore.’ Anyway, we both had a vacation around the same time, and we drove out there … no, we flew … and then we rented a car …”
She put her hand over her mouth, appearing to remember, but instead her eyes began to fill with dramatic, restaurant-scene tears; and at that moment Jodie felt a conviction that this woman was lying and was still probably in love with Walton.
“We rented a car,” she was saying, “and we drove up from San Francisco toward Arcata, along there, along that coast. There are redwood forests a few miles back from the coastline, those big old trees. We’d stay in motels, and I’d make a picnic in the morning, and we’d go out, and Glaze would start drinking after breakfast, and by midafternoon he’d be silent and surly—he’d stop speaking to me—and by the time we got back to our motel, he’d be muttering, and I’d try to talk about what we had seen that day. I mean, usually when you go whale watching there aren’t any whales. But there are always seals. You can hear the seals barking, down there on those rocks. I’d ask him if he didn’t think the cliffs were beautiful or the wildflowers or the birds or whatever I had pointed out to him. But I always said something wrong. Something that was like a lighted match, and he’d blow up. And he’d start in on me. You ever been hit in the face?”
Jodie had turned so that she could see the sidewalk through the window. She was getting herself ready. It wasn’t going to take much more.
“I didn’t think so. It comes out of nowhere,” Gleinya Roberts was saying, “and you’re not ready for it, and then, boom, he lands the second one on you. The first time he beats you up, it’s an initiation, and then he makes love to you to make up for it, but it makes the second one easier to do, because he’s already done it. You don’t expect it. Why should you? Why do you think he got thrown out of medical school? He hurt somebody there. He broke two of my ribs. I had a shoulder separation from him. He got very practiced in the ways of apology and remorse. He has a genius for remorse. And then of course he’s a demon under the sheets. The man can fuck, I’ll give him that, but, I don’t know, after a while great sex is sort of a gimmick. It’s like a 3-D movie, and you get tired of it. Well, maybe you’re not tired of it yet.”
Jodie said nothing.
“I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t say anything, either. I thought he was Prince Charming, too. I’ve been there. And believe me, I had to kiss a lot of frogs before I found the right guy. I had to kiss them in every damn place they had. But he won’t tell you. He won’t tell you about himself,” she repeated. “Ask his father, though. His father will tell you. Well, maybe he’ll tell you. You haven’t met his father yet, have you?”
She speared a piece of her Caesar salad, chewed thoughtfully, then put down her fork.
Jodie looked. The eyes she saw were gray and blank, and for a moment they reminded her of the blankness of the surface of the ocean, and then the waters parted, and she saw a seemingly endless landscape of rancor, a desert of gray rocks and black ashy flowers. Demons lived there. Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the desert was covered over again, and Jodie knew that she had been right not to believe her.
“You’re lying to me,” Jodie said. She hadn’t meant to say it, only to think it, but it had come out, and there it was.
Gleinya Roberts nodded, acknowledging her own implausibility. “You’re just denying. You’re gaga over him. Just as I was. Taking a cruise on his pleasure ship. But, Jodie, trust me, that cruise is going to end. Don’t play the fool.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘Don’t play the fool.’ ”
“I thought that was what you said.”
Jodie, her head buzzing, and most of her cells on fire, found herself standing up. “You come in here,” she said, “with your trophy wedding ring, and your trophy pregnancy, and your husband who says you’re still pretty, and you tell me this, about Walton, spoiling the first happiness I’ve had in I don’t know how long? Who the hell are you? What are you? You don’t even look especially human.” Gleinya Roberts tilted her head, considering this statement. Her face was unaccountably radiant. “I don’t have to listen to you,” Jodie said. “I don’t have to listen to this nonsensical bullshit.”
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