“I didn’t realize that you were a dancer,” Renata said.
“Well, you know, I’d like to be. I’ve studied for years. And New York is where all the important dance companies are.”
“You wouldn’t quit school, would you, June?” Mrs. MacGregor asked.
“No, not if I didn’t have anything definite lined up. But I could always go down this summer and check things out, and then come back to school in the fall.” She was making it up as she went along, but it sounded good.
“That’s probably what Owen was referring to. He made it sound like you were leaving next week,” Renata said.
“I guess maybe I left him with that impression,” June said. “He was trying to get me to go skiing with him, and I didn’t really want to.”
“He seems like a nice young man,” Mrs. MacGregor observed.
“But you must admit, Eleanor,” Renata said, “he’s not exactly June’s type. Too, too …”
“Nerdy,” June said.
Renata laughed. “Exactly. We want someone a bit more fun for June.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a steady, reliable fellow. Fun wears out,” Mrs. MacGregor warned.
“Tell us about your husband, Eleanor,” Renata urged, pouring them more wine. “Was he steady and reliable, or was he fun?”
Mrs. MacGregor frowned slightly and sat back in her chair. June thought Renata had overstepped. You didn’t barge into Mrs. M.’s personal life unless you were invited. To her surprise, Mrs. MacGregor took a sip of wine and reflected.
“He was steady and reliable, and fun,” she pronounced. “He knew how to have a good time.” She seemed on the verge of continuing, then took another sip of wine and stopped. She looked at June. “It is important that they know how to make you laugh,” she said.
“But it’s also important that there’s more to them than that,” Renata said, a sudden emphasis behind her words. “Listen to Eleanor, June, not me.”
June and Mrs. MacGregor looked at her, waiting for her to elaborate. But Renata just stood and began clearing the table. June rose to help her.
“Well, ladies, should I open another bottle of wine?” Renata asked, holding up the empty bottle.
“Goodness, no,” Mrs. MacGregor said. “I shouldn’t be drinking at my age, and I don’t think June shouldn’t be drinking at her age.”
“And I shouldn’t be drinking at any age,” Renata said.
June had begun to notice that Renata never fully explained herself. In fact, all three of them seemed to have little doors that they began to open to each other, but only partially. Just when you started to see around the door to what was inside, it closed. Even so, it was a wonderful evening. Sitting in Renata’s kitchen with the two of them made June feel part of something. On the way back to her apartment, June found herself humming the song Renata had taught her as they did the dishes, something about three Irish maids, and their hard Irish luck.
ELEANOR WAS FORCED TO OPEN ANOTHER BOX to get at something to wear to the Bryces’ Christmas party on the twenty-third. She had forgotten to RSVP, and when Marjorie Bryce called her, Eleanor had an unguarded moment and said she would come. She would have liked to wear her usual clothes, but she knew everyone else would be in finery. Pride overcame her reluctance. She fished out a cherry red blazer piped with black velvet, and wide-legged black silk pants. She made up her face carefully, and rolled her hair in a French twist instead of her customary chignon. No one would say Eleanor MacGregor was going downhill.
At a quarter of eight she looked longingly at her armchair and newly begun novel, and called a cab. She hadn’t driven in more than three months; she really should sell her car before it quit running.
Lionel greeted her at the door effusively, kissing her on both cheeks. She detested the affectation of a European kiss. A plain peck on the cheek was perfectly adequate. He led her through the crowded living room, taking her coat and saying, “Look who’s here!” to anyone who would listen. Lionel always was a fool. He wasted time in his court making unnecessary conversation and telling jokes, so his docket was glutted with a huge backlog that never went away or seemed to trouble him. In family court, the nature of the cases often carried life-altering consequences for the children involved. Eleanor had considered it a duty and a kindness to deal with her cases briskly and without time-consuming pleasantries, so that her docket was kept current and her judgments delivered with dispatch.
The doorbell rang. Lionel deposited Eleanor with Marjorie, who effused over Eleanor’s outfit. Marjorie was a tiny woman who wore fitted little suits that looked as though they were sized for dolls. She was vain about her hundred-pound frame, and always made a point of complimenting styles she never wore, saying, “I could never get away with that; I would simply swim in it. You’d never find me!”
“Lovely house, Marjorie,” Eleanor said.
“Oh, you know, we have a tradition of doing it up. Every year I swear I’m going to leave half of the stuff down, but then we get the boxes from the attic and the decorations just sort of make their way to their usual places.”
Eleanor agreed. It had been precisely that way in her Belmont home. Every wreath had had its appointed spot, every angel and candle its habitual place. This year she had no decorations whatsoever except June’s strand of lights. The lights didn’t feel Christmasy to her so much as they seemed magical, making her stark-white walls blink pastels.
“You’re so smart to have scaled down, Eleanor. Lionel and I keep thinking we might sell and get a condo in town, but when it comes right down to it, I know I lack the courage. How did you ever fit everything into a little apartment?”
Somehow every time Marjorie offered praise it sounded back-handed. To converse with her was always to be slightly on the defensive, to say, “Oh but it’s not that little, you know,” so that Marjorie could come back with, “Of course it’s not,” as if she were generously sparing your feelings. Eleanor didn’t want to play the game. She said, “I sold practically everything, and when I got to the new place I never unpacked my boxes.”
Marjorie blinked, then brightened. “Wouldn’t we all love to do that,” she chirped, steering Eleanor over to the drinks table.
Eleanor asked for a hot buttered rum and sipped it from a chair near the fire. As always, the Bryces’ house looked like a Talbots ad: wreaths in every window sporting giant tartan bows, a tall spruce Christmas tree with imported glass ornaments, and white votive candles flickering everywhere. Lionel was wearing a reindeer tie with a red lightbulb nose that actually lit up. Eleanor spent a minute speculating on how it worked, concluding that a tiny battery must be embedded directly in the fabric. The Bryces were very Cambridge. They voted Democrat but lived Republican, stabling horses in the country and putting all of their five children through the best private schools. Marjorie came from family money and made a career out of volunteer fund-raising for non-profit arts organizations. Their names were listed under “Angels” in symphony and opera programs every year.
Did Lionel remember, Eleanor wondered, making a pass at her at one of these Christmas parties years ago? Robert had been talking deep-sea fishing with someone in the kitchen and Lionel had asked her to come see a new painting hanging on the second floor. As she looked at the painting she felt Lionel’s arm encircle her waist, and the next thing she knew he had planted a sloppy, whiskey-soaked kiss on her lips. “You’re the finest thing going, Eleanor,” he whispered thickly in her ear. “I mean it; none of these women can hold a candle to you.” This included, presumably, his wife, downstairs arranging more canapés on a platter. Eleanor felt no awkwardness in shoving him away, saying, “Lionel, don’t be an ass,” and going downstairs to rejoin her husband. She neither held it against him nor felt flattered by the episode. Eleanor had to respect a man before she could feel any attraction to him. Intellectually Lionel was a buffoon; had been appointed to his seat on the court through his political connections, and she suspected he had gotten into Harvard the same way. He was, for her, a pleas
ant enough host or guest once or twice a year, but as a man, or a real friend, she found him beneath notice. It never occurred to her that the rebuff had meant anything more to him than it had to her until one summer day at a barbecue in Belmont, Robert had teased her, saying, “You’re hard, El,” after she had said something sarcastic, and Lionel, who had been standing nearby, agreed, “Hard as nails.” It was the way he had said it, with real feeling, that led Eleanor to believe he might be thinking of something specific, like the kiss in front of the painting.
Sitting there now, masking her boredom as she listened on the margins of a conversation about the condominium market, Eleanor couldn’t imagine what she ever saw in these parties. She had loved dressing up for them, that was true. Robert and she had presented quite a stunning picture when they wanted to; he was magnificent in black tie, and she had a beautiful neck and shoulders that she often bared in an evening or cocktail dress. She passed most of those dresses on to her daughters—though, come to think of it, she had never seen either of them wear one. Helen would have to have them let out a size, and Janice didn’t lead the kind of life that required off-the-shoulder gowns. She wondered if anyone did anymore. Even tonight at the Bryces’ party, she and all the other women wore beaded sweaters or silk jackets with flowing pants rather than dresses. It was their age, she supposed. They were the last generation to dress formally for special occasions, which also meant they were of an age when it wasn’t attractive to show too much flesh.
She began counting how many of the couples she knew were still with their original spouses, and how many had remarried. Of course even the long-standing marriages might be just for show; no one ever knew what was behind the façade of someone else’s domestic life.
To this day she didn’t know whether Robert had had the affair she had suspected, or not. He had worked with a female doctor, a surgical resident twenty years his junior named Deborah, who clearly had thought the world of him. When they had cocktail parties or holiday open houses, there was Deborah, hovering at Robert’s arm all night, laughing at his witticisms, smiling into his eyes as she tucked her hair behind one ear. Seeing this, Eleanor never worried. She was a confident woman, and felt her own value. The fact that Robert’s protégé might have a crush on him seemed natural, something that they could laugh about together as they picked up glasses and napkins after a party. But this was during a cool period between them, when Eleanor had just been appointed to the bench and was spending long hours learning the job—a circumstance that had made Robert sulk—and somehow Eleanor never made the joke she intended to about Deborah’s adoring looks. Then, when they threw a retirement cookout for a good friend of theirs, the chief attending surgeon Robert was later picked to replace, Deborah was there, but she kept a measured distance from Robert, and didn’t seem to speak to him all night.
That was when it occurred to Eleanor that this woman might be having an affair with her husband. She watched them carefully, and although Robert and Deborah were not ever beside each other in the backyard where the Japanese lanterns bobbed around the patio, it seemed to Eleanor that they were somehow constantly in touch. She didn’t see them looking at each other, but rather felt that they were ignoring each other with a hypersensitivity that could only mean they were absorbed with thoughts of the other person. Eleanor didn’t know why she suddenly knew how Robert would act if he were having his lover over to the house under her nose, but she was sure that she did know, and that Robert was behaving exactly this way.
By the evening’s end, when the suspicion had fully gripped her, Eleanor felt her mind become even more analytical and methodical than usual. A coolness imbued her thinking. First, she reminded herself that she might be entirely wrong. Deborah might have had other reasons to stay away from Robert; perhaps he had slighted her on an evaluation. Or she might have even flirted with him at work, felt herself to be rejected, and was now angry. These were possibilities. Eleanor owed it to everyone not to assume her intuition was infallible. But even with these counter-arguments running through her mind, Eleanor could not shake the feeling that something had happened, and nothing would be the same for her again.
She waited a week, maybe ten days, and, in a general conversation at the breakfast table about people at the hospital, Eleanor inquired as to how Deborah was doing. Robert kept his eyes on the knife buttering his toast as he told her that Deborah was doing great, and had gotten the best evaluation of any of his residents. Then he bit into his toast and discussed the chief attending job that was opening up, and whether he would accept it if offered. Eleanor counted this as changing the subject.
She never did find out if she was right. Perhaps she had fantasized the whole thing to remind herself that she still loved her husband, and what the stakes might be if they didn’t get beyond this estrangement. Eleanor decided never to bring the matter up with Robert, nor to act as if she suspected anything. She began to come home at five-thirty on weekdays, and, if she absolutely had to work on weekends, bring the files home with her rather than drive in to her chambers. She began to invite her husband to do things with her—a golf game on Saturday, a museum benefit. Quietly, steadily, she waged her campaign. She was fifty-six years old; she was not about to make herself ridiculous, but she did buy herself some smart new clothes. Gradually Robert seemed to notice that Eleanor was around more, that she was interested in how his day went and in his company. At least that was the turn that Eleanor put on things, because one night they found themselves deciding to go to a movie, something they hadn’t done in more than a year. Eleanor’s birthday came around, and Robert bought her some large diamond earrings, the most extravagant jewelry he had ever given her. He took her out to dinner at the Ritz, and as the jewels sparkled in her ears and she looked at him across the table, she felt herself begin to relax inside again. She had her husband back; she was sure of it.
Two years later, an invitation arrived in the mail to attend Deborah’s wedding in New York. Her residency was in its final year in Boston and she was moving in the spring to begin her practice in Manhattan.
“How long has this been going on?” Eleanor asked, waving the invitation.
“What?” Robert looked up from his newspaper. “Oh, Deborah and her fiancé? A year maybe, not sure. She’s been commuting a lot.” He resumed his reading.
So Eleanor never knew, and she surprised herself by not caring to know. Occasionally she examined her slim evidence, based on nothing, really—a feeling, a look—and decided that she must have simply been imagining things. But from the time of their reconciliation until Robert’s death twelve years later, she could honestly say that she had a moment almost every day when she felt grateful to have her husband back. She would have hated being divorced. Being a widow was different. You lost the company of your husband, but you didn’t lose all the years you had had with him. You didn’t have to change the way you thought about the primary fact of your past.
The room was beginning to seem too close to Eleanor; she didn’t feel as if she had quite enough air. She was grateful that she had taken a seat a few minutes ago, because suddenly she felt light-headed. Surely two or three sips of rum weren’t enough to do her in.
“Eleanor, what a pleasure to see you. It’s been ages.” Eleanor smiled and blinked at the woman, waiting for the name to come to her, or at least the face.
“So, how’s the place in Brookline?”
“It’s very convenient to everything,” Eleanor said, completely at a loss as to whom she was talking. The woman was tall and olive-skinned, and somewhat younger than she was.
“Don’t I know! You don’t miss the gardening?”
“Frankly, no. Enough is enough of anything.” Eleanor was having trouble focusing on the woman’s words. They seemed to be bouncing around her ears, but not really penetrating.
“You’re so right. Though you had such beautiful landscaping in Belmont. For years I coveted that flowering cherry of yours.”
Eleanor began to panic. This face meant nothing to her
, yet clearly they had known each other for years. She gamely tried to keep up her end of the conversation. “Finish your Christmas shopping yet?”
The woman looked at her strangely, then laughed. “Thank goodness I don’t have to get involved in that scene. Hanukkah is so simple by comparison.”
Eleanor laughed too, as if she had merely made a joke. But she was beginning to see that faking it was not simple.
“You’re in the same place?” Eleanor asked.
“Well, yes. The same place I’ve been in for the last year. Didn’t I send you my new address? I was sure I had.” The woman fished in her bag for a pen and drew out a business card. “We’re so close now, we really should get together for lunch. Give me a call when you get a chance,” she said, scribbling a home address and phone number on the back.
When the woman moved on to speak with someone else, Eleanor stole a glance at the card. ELSA GREEN KATZ, M.D., PSYCHIATRY. Eleanor tried to survey the years, like looking backward down a telescope where her old friends and social life dwelled tiny in memory. Elsa, Elsa. A colleague of Robert’s? Probably. She was fairly sure none of them had ever consulted a psychiatrist for anything. It wasn’t like them. She shook her head to focus things.
She was suddenly exhausted. She could barely stand under the wave of tiredness that had swept over her. She made her way to Marjorie and Lionel, who were standing together telling some practiced story that they each took turns with. When Eleanor approached them, Lionel was waiting for his lines, an impatient smile playing on his lips. He winked at Eleanor, and returned his gaze to the couple who were their audience, trembling for his turn like a racehorse at the gate. Eleanor saw that they were only in the middle of their tale of lost luggage in Bermuda. Knowing how Lionel loved to draw out his anecdotes, she broke in just as he began to speak.
“I’m off, you two. Wonderful party.”
The Hunger Moon Page 10