by Marge Piercy
The new couple, the Dorrs, had three children, one of whom was playing music so loudly upstairs that the ceiling above them heaved like a bullfrog’s throat. They served cocktails for hours while supper cooked into leather. It was nine-thirty before they sat down to the sad little mummified scallops in mucilage, by which time both Ross and Daria had drunk too much and eaten far too many peanuts and cubes of art gum passing for cheese.
As they walked home, Ross was singing something she recognized as from Madama Butterfly. Inside he flung his overcoat on a chair instead of hanging it and followed her up and into the room that was now hers alone, still singing. “Jesus, what losers.” He dropped on the bed, tossing his trousers in the general direction of the bathroom. “You’d never give Torte a meal like that. You’re a good old bean, old kid. Come here.”
They made love exactly as they would have on a night when they came in too late to make a production of it. Suddenly it was last spring again, suddenly it was a year before. The ugly tension dropped away like slush off a warming roof and they were in each other’s arms. Over the years he had learned certain tricks to excite her quickly when he did not want prolonged lovemaking, touching her breasts hard after he had entered her, bringing his hand to her clitoris as he was already moving inside her. She was so surprised she could not stop thinking long enough to let herself become fully aroused. Rather than possibly discourage him, she faked orgasm and held him as he came. She was as delighted as if a full peacock tail of orgasm had opened in her. He fell asleep still curled in her arms. She lay beside him, too happy to sleep, almost too happy to breathe. Whatever had taken him from her must have finally released its grasp.
But the next evening he had Lorraine call and say he would not be home for dinner, not until late. No explanation, no apology. A call at four P.M. and no Ross until long after she had crawled into bed at eleven. Did he believe she had seduced him? Had she imagined last night? Had he been too drunk to remember who she was? Too drunk to care? She felt battered by her confusions. She could no longer even guess what he was thinking about her, about them. She felt worse cheated than before: she had been given for a moment what she had longed for, the reality of his love that still felt far more real to her than the mysterious coldness and hostility, and then it was as if it had not happened. To hurt this much inside, to feel this raw, this stripped, perhaps she was merely crazy.
The photos were spread on the dining-room table. Normally Ross did all his own darkroom work, but he had not objected when she suggested getting the roll commercially developed and then printed in three-by-five format to choose the best to have enlarged. “Pick out the ones you like,” he said expansively, his eyes gliding over the shots laid out. “Whichever please you the most.”
She felt twisted with despair. “But, Ross … Perhaps that wasn’t the best day …”
“Why? What’s wrong with them?…”
What could she say? She looked terrible in those photographs. She looked sick to herself, hunched over, her eyes too big and everything else puffy. She looked vaguely doglike. “Well … they aren’t the most flattering.”
“Now, come on, Daria, the camera doesn’t lie. What’s wrong with them?”
“Do I look like that?”
“Of course. Daria, what’s wrong with you? You want to look the way you did ten years ago, is that it? I can’t make you young for the camera. Don’t act like a disappointed child!”
She selected the five she found the least disquieting and sent them off to Laura, her agent, to choose the couple she should have enlarged in quantity. That day one of the linen weave notes came, apologizing for something unnamed and suggesting a meeting, same time, same place. Had Lou stood him up and therefore he had briefly turned to her?
“But you’re acting like a complete idiot! A child of ten would have more gumption.” Gretta slapped down her soup spoon with a clatter. “I can’t believe this passivity. It’s classic!” Gretta was tall and lank with elegant bones and eyes such a light grey they looked silver.
“What do you mean?” Daria folded and refolded her napkin, her eyes seeking her familiar garden under a shroud of snow outside.
“You think he has a girlfriend. What are you waiting for? Ross to decide to marry her?”
Gretta was saying that because her ex-husband had done just such a thing. “But Ross won’t discuss it. It makes him more hostile if I bring it up. I feel he’s mocking me. Then I feel crazy. Maybe he doesn’t have anybody. Maybe he’s just tired of me.”
“I have never, never known a woman who thought her husband was running around on her who was wrong. I’ve known twenty wives who thought their husbands weren’t, and they were all wrong. This is delicious.” Gretta resumed eating with gusto the black bean soup.
“But I can’t quarrel with him every night. I’m driving him away. Yet I can’t stand not knowing.” Daria felt tears pressing against the back of her eyes.
“Ignorance is dangerous! You’re waiting for the rest of the roof to fall.” Gretta shook her bracelets for emphasis. Since her divorce she had been dressing more exotically. She had dropped weight and changed her style. If she had not exactly landed on her feet, she had managed to regain them by now, three years later. “Why not hire a detective to find out?”
“Gretta, I couldn’t. I’d rather leave him than do that.”
“Leave him the house? You want the house. You walk out that door and he’ll have the real estate agent on the phone before you can back your Rabbit out the drive.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Daria said softly. “I love him.” Gretta was trying to make her think that Ross was just the same as her ex-husband, almost a stranger to her now.
“Besides, you can do your own snooping. You can find out what’s going on if you apply your brain to it.”
She buried her face in her hands. “I haven’t wanted to know. I’ve been hoping it would pass. But it just gets worse. It’s so bad now I have to know what’s happening, if it kills me.”
“Nothing he says or does can kill you, unless he buys a thirty-eight and pulls the trigger. You can survive him. We all do.”
“I don’t understand why this is happening. I don’t!”
“Daria, I felt the same way. Remember? Half the women we know have gone through this. Either you beat her at her game or she’ll whip you, so you have to find out what kind of hand she’s holding. It’s winner take all.”
Gretta’s game metaphors oppressed her. She kept thinking about the photos still on her desk, but she was ashamed to show them to Gretta.
“Daria, remember when I was getting divorced, I told you to check on your deed?”
Daria blew her nose. “Right. I’d always thought it was joint, but it turned out to be—what do you call it?”
“Tenants in the entirety. Just him and ux, whoever ux happens to be. You had that changed then, right?”
Daria nodded. “It shocked me to find out it wasn’t half mine. I insisted we straighten out the deed. Ross was annoyed at me for making a fuss, and I had to get my brother Cesaro to talk him into fixing it.”
“Is that the cute one?”
“You mean Tony.”
“Anyhow, how do you own the rest of your property—stocks, whatever?”
“I don’t know. That’s always been Ross’s affair.”
“Daria, you’d better learn. That’s what I mean by acting like a child. Daddy, may I have five dollars, please? It seems to me you must have made a fair amount of money over the past seven or eight years. Where is it?”
“Ross manages our finances. After all, he’s a lawyer.” She blew her nose, stuffing the paper handkerchief into the pocket of her suit jacket. A wad of them there, damp from earlier.
“Sure, he’s a lawyer, and if he starts wanting to get rid of you, he knows a thousand legal ways to screw you.”
“Gretta, he wouldn’t! I can’t imagine him acting that way.”
“Would you have imagined last year that now you’d be sleeping in two different
rooms and snarling at each other? That’d he be dashing off to whatever young bimbo he’s got stashed in Boston?”
“Gretta, would you be honest with me? Have I aged a lot?”
“Aged?” Gretta stared. “You look a little discombobulated these days, shiny around the nose, but you’ve always had a very young face.”
“We have to talk.” Daria placed her hands flat on the table.
“I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to!” Ross bounced up from the table.
He sounded like Robin at fourteen. Was he going through a late adolescence? She had inveigled him into having a cup of morning coffee with her, but now he was off to the city. She trotted after him to the door, feeling ineffectual. “You’re treating me completely unfairly!”
“I’m not treating you any particular way. You’re just complaining all the time. Like your mother did.” He stopped and faced her with a knowing look. “Maybe you’re imagining all this persecution because you’re beginning menopause.”
“Ross! I’m only forty-three. Nina was my age when she had Tony.”
“It could come early because of that thing you had done to yourself.” He was out the door and gone.
She found herself shaking. He was referring to her being sterilized after Freddy. How could he put it that way? That thing. He had not been willing to have a vasectomy. Had he been looking down on her for the past ten years for being sterilized?
She went to the phone and called Robin. “Yes, it’s Mother. I thought I might come by and have breakfast wih you and Dad this morning after you run. I have to spend the day at the BPL looking up some references.”
“The what?”
Robin was not an intellectual. “The Boston Public Library. It’s near your apartment, over on Boylston.”
“But I don’t eat breakfast.”
“Not after your run? I assumed you made breakfast for your father.”
“I have to go to work, Mother. I can’t hang around! I never eat breakfast,” Robin said vehemently, as if dismissing an accusation.
At nine she called his office. Lorraine answered. “Oh, Mr. Walker hasn’t arrived yet.”
“Of course not. I should have realized. I forgot to ask him to run an errand for me.”
“He usually gets in around ten. Shall I have him call you?”
“Don’t bother. I’ll do the errand myself. How are you?”
“Just fine, Mrs. Walker. And how are you?”
After she had chatted with Lorraine the obligatory few minutes, fancying all the while that Lorraine was being unusually reticent with her, she called Gretta. “So already I figured out he sees her in the morning, in between running with Robin and going to work.”
“A morning romance. Ugh. I don’t think I could hack that,” Gretta said. “I can’t face the rigors of love before lunch and a wee drink.”
She could not tell Gretta that the morning had been their own preferred time for making love. “This is the first concrete thing I’ve learned. Maybe I’m not losing my mind. He leaves here at seven and he gets to his office at ten. There’s a lost hour and a half in there somewhere.”
“Unless he has a long breakfast in a coffee shop.”
“Gretta, if he does, I’m going to feel like a complete fool. I’ll go see a shrink.”
After she hung up, she wanted to run upstairs to bed. But she made herself sit still and confront her predicament. If she was crazy, she must seek psychiatric help at once. If she was sane, she must grasp her situation. But how? Follow him. How not to be seen? He would recognize her car. Today she must rent a car. Tomorrow when he left she would rush to Robin’s block on Commonwealth in her rented car and take up a position of surveillance. When Ross came out and drove off, she would follow him. Her plan was absurd, demeaning and totally necessary. Before she could dissuade herself, she called the nearest car rental listed in the Yellow Pages.
The next morning by eight she was sitting in a rented Chevette on Commonwealth Avenue with Robin’s doorway in view. Although she had circled the block, she had been unable to locate his Mercedes. Now she saw Robin and Ross jogging together along the sidewalk lightly dusted with snow. At the entrance to Robin’s apartment building, Robin ran in. Waving to her, Ross continued. Let him head for his office. Let him go to a health club. Please.
He ran on down the block and around the next corner, toward Marlborough and Beacon, toward the Charles River. Putting on her dark glasses and pulling the scarf forward over her head, she drove after: Once she had the light and rounded the corner, she could see him crossing Marlborough, heading for the river. By the time she came to Beacon he was trotting the wrong way. She pulled over, double-parked and watched in the rearview mirror. He crossed to the river side. When she could not keep him in the mirror, she jumped out and ran to the sidewalk just in time to see Ross walk into a large apartment building.
She had to drive around the long way to get back to him. Almost ten minutes passed before she was idling outside the redbrick high-rise into which Ross had walked. She stared and stared at the building, as if its facade could tell her something important. The first two stories went straight up but then the facade of the building was broken by bays made of two sharp angles. The windows were alternated in the bays to give a trompe d’oeil effect of staggered projections. In front a small area was enclosed by an iron fence with a cement bench inside it. She imagined it had been placed there for her to sit and wait for her husband to appear. She did not see Ross’s Mercedes, but the building had a garage under it.
By eight-thirty people were driving off and she parked properly. She felt chilled sitting in the car with snow beginning to drift down. She felt colder and colder. She could not distinguish the pain she felt from the cold. At first she rubbed her hands together but then she could not seem to move at all. She sat on and on. The snow settled lightly over the windshield. Her breath steamed up the windows. Her feet turned numb.
Finally she felt she was asphyxiating in the car feathered over with snow. She did not care if he saw her. She got out abruptly and started to cross to the building. She was halfway across the street before she realized she had forgotten her purse and left the key in the ignition. She turned back to fetch the key and her purse. Why? She could not remember why she needed them.
She stood in front staring up at the bulk of the high-rise. Where was he? Was the woman beautiful? Perhaps Lou was some brilliant and successful professional woman, perhaps a lawyer with whom he discussed his practice. Daria saw her as tall, lean, impeccably dressed in a dove grey suit with a mauve silk ruffled blouse, saw her carrying a leather attaché case slim as an envelope. Lou wore real pearls and smelled of Joy. Was she married or was she available? If Ross could park in her garage, that would mean she could not be living with a husband.
She felt sure they were looking down on her out of one of those hundred windows, laughing. She wanted to scream at the building, her voice echoing off the jagged bays, her voice breaking windows. To stand and scream until he came out to her. A woman brushed past her with an akita on a leash. She wanted to ask the woman questions. She realized she had to make herself behave as if she were not crazy. Yes, back to the car. Insert the key in the ignition. Wait.
At nine-forty he emerged in his overcoat and wool slacks and set out at a brisk pace, but he did not turn toward his office in the Little Pru. Instead, glancing at his watch, he marched fast, very fast down Beacon. She could not seem to respond. She watched him into the next block. His hair shone like a flag above his coat. There was no mistaking Ross, whoever Ross was.
She made herself follow, pulling over now and then so that he could precede her. On Massachusetts Avenue he turned left. Outside a coffee shop he stopped. His girlfriend must have neglected to give him breakfast.
As she double-parked across Mass Avenue, she saw a man come out to Ross. The man was some years younger than Ross and several inches shorter, with hair and moustache of an ashy grey blond. He wore jeans and a leather
jacket, collar turned up against the cold. They strolled on a few paces, arguing intently. Was Ross having an affair with a man too? Was this man a pimp for some fabulous call girl who had ensnared Ross? As she watched, Ross handed the man an envelope and then strode on without glancing back, again at a brisk trot, checking his watch. Now he was heading for his office, she felt sure. She had no stomach to follow him farther.
She stared at the blond man in the leather jacket as if she could read in his face or clothing or posture some answer to her questions. The man glanced back through the coffee shop window, looked around but not at her, then strolled leisurely after Ross, whistling to judge from his face. Ross was two blocks ahead by now. The man got into a Dodge pickup parked illegally in a bus stop. The cap was on the back, which was loaded with building supplies.
She pulled out into traffic jerkily. Drive slowly. Stop at the red light. Yes. One move at a time. Do not scream. Do not cry. Slowly. If you cry, you can’t see.
Even back in her own home at last, she could not breathe. She lurched from room to room. Whatever he was doing in that building, he wasn’t having breakfast in a coffee shop. He had clothes there. He was seeing another woman.
What did it mean that he would not tell her? “What does it mean?” Torte thumped his tail. The kittens, watching the snow through the many panes of the dining-room window, turned to gaze at her with their round yellow wondering eyes. Sheba rose on her hind legs to peer into Daria’s face, paws holding her jacket. “Mrew?”
“Maybe it’s temporary,” she said to Sheba. “Maybe I don’t need to know more. If I pay no attention, it will stop. It will end. It has to!” Sheba seemed to disagree, turning disdainfully to watch the flakes swirl down.
She found herself out in the yard, kneeling in her tweed skirt in the snow. “Mama,” she muttered, “Mama, it’s happening to me now.”
“Daria?” Annette’s kitchen door opened. “Did you lose something?”
“Yes.” She had the urge to shout that she had lost her husband. “I dropped … my ring.”
“Can I help you look? Your ring?”