The door of the club stood open. The wail of Newman's horn and the complicated percussion behind it drew her inside and she pushed her way impolitely through the SRO crowd. Matt was already there. She saw him before he saw her and she stopped to stare. The blue and violet stage lights played on his profile and turned his hair satiny. He was a beautiful man, beautiful and potentially dangerous. Newman hit and held an impossibly low note as Nan let her hands fall on his shoulders and work their way slowly down his back.
The waitress came by and he told her, "Bring the lady a Merlot." She sipped it and thought again of her mother, knowing how much she would have loved being here and very glad she wasn't.
They told each other they were sorry to leave after the first set, but it would have been impossible for them to stay without making a spectacle of themselves. As it was, they stopped to kiss half a dozen times on the block-and-a-half walk to his apartment, and were already partly unbuttoned and unzipped by the time he shut his door behind them and they clutched each other in a serious embrace.
His shirt came off in the foyer. His spine was long, his shoulder blades smooth. She forced herself to wait a second or two before plunging her hands into the light fur at the small of his back. Keeping as much of their bodies pressed together as they could, they stumbled into the living room, where she bent her head and one by one took his nipples between her teeth. It was all she could do not to bite down, and he did wince, gasp, laugh in surprise.
He started to pull off her shirt but she stopped him with a sharp, "No!" Instead she unbuckled his belt, pushing his hand away when he made as if to help her, working at the snap on his jeans until it came loose.
"Let's go in the bedroom," he whispered, tongue playing in the whorls of her ear.
But she pulled him down with her onto the oval braided rug and they made love there, hard and fast, both coming at once and crying out together. Before the spasms of pleasure had completely subsided she was sobbing against his chest and thinking how she would tell Tonya about this.
TRIAL
Maids-R-Us advertised the fact that they were fully bonded, therefore all employees were fully investigated. The truth was demand exceeded supply and the employee turnover was enormous. So what if a few of the men and women who worked for them slipped through the cracks and back under the rocks for which the county had been named.
Sometimes they only stayed for a day, like the one who came to work in scrubs, a nurse in need of extra funds. A lot of their elderly clients requested nurses who could help them out for a day with their meds and meals and showers and were willing to pay extra for those services. By good fortune, they had one on their list that day–the only day the nurse showed up.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Although Nan arrived at the support group meeting fifteen minutes early, the two seats on either side of Tonya were already taken. She was annoyed at herself because she could've been here earlier and equally irritated by the fact that she was annoyed at all. Like a teenager going to a party where she knew only the hostess, she'd sat in her car in the parking lot listening to the radio and counting down the minutes, not wanting to appear too eager, but not wanting to be late. She didn't like not knowing how to behave and was nervous about what Tonya and the others would think of her, let alone about what she'd be expected to do or say in a support group for people with repressed memories of parental sexual abuse, especially since she wasn't at all convinced she was one.
Most of all, now that she was in the room, she hated how distressed she was by not being able to sit beside Tonya.
Tonya came across the room to greet her. Her hug was gentle and professional, and Nan was aware of feeling a little abandoned when the therapist stepped back.
"Welcome," Tonya said softly. "I'm glad you came."
Nan stiffened. "Why?" Being suspicious of Tonya's motives made her feel guilty, and smart and strong.
Tonya met her gaze so calmly and directly that Nan had to stop herself from looking down. "Because I care about you," she said, and turned to talk to someone else.
Nan got herself a cup of weak coffee and a store-bought cookie, neither of which she wanted, and took a seat on the other side of the circle of chairs from where Tonya was sitting. There were ten people in the room, counting herself and Tonya. Two were men. All were white; she wondered what, if anything, that meant. Of the rest, most fit the demographics as demonstrated in her research–young women, around Ashley's age, in their mid-thirties to early forties. A couple looked older and one in particular had to be at least seventy. Good Lord, Nan thought miserably, if you haven't resolved your "issues" by that age, what's the point?
What surprised her most about this group was its mood. The chatter was about the weather, jobs, kids, diets, movies, and there was frequent laughter. Could these people really have gone through the kinds of things Tonya had suggested to her? Wouldn't they be crying and gnashing their teeth?
The crying, if not quite teeth-gnashing, started soon after Tonya called the group to order, as it were. There were introductions–"just your first name," Tonya admonished, "and how long you've been coming to group"–and Nan was flustered just to have to say out loud, "My name is Nancy, and this is my first time." "Nancy" felt suitably like an alias.
"Any questions before we get started?"
"Where's Joy?" someone asked. "Shouldn't we wait for her?"
"Joy won't be with us today."
"Is she sick?" one of the younger women asked.
"She's fine," Tonya said. "Her mother died and she has to take care of things."
Someone applauded softly. A second person joined in, then a third.
"Probably a heart attack," someone said. "Or a Joy attack." Everyone laughed. "Bet she offed her. Serve the old bitch right, after what she did."
"She slipped in the shower," Tonya said quietly. "Now settle down and let's start with a few moments of meditation. Carl, could you dim the lights, please?"
Nan's heart was racing. She felt uncomfortable and out of place. Carl, an almost certainly gay man in his thirties–or his forties or fifties, with a lot of youth-maintaining work–lowered the lights and returned to his chair looking somber. People settled themselves. Instinctively Nan closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Someone had begun to weep. From under almost closed lids she saw that it was the elderly woman.
"Shut your eyes and take a few deep slow breaths," Tonya intoned, and Nan felt like the teacher's pet for having done so already. Around the circle, everyone audibly inhaled and exhaled. "Now, starting at the top of your head, I invite you to imagine warmth and light spreading like a ray of sunlight through your entire body."
Someone moaned softly. Another person began to breathe raggedly. Nan didn't look this time.
"Across your skull, in the roots of your hair, down the back of your head, across your forehead and your cheekbones and softly across your eyes. Pay attention to any tension that may be held in any of these places, to any places that might seem especially tender or tight or frightened."
Frightened? This last caused Nan to open her eyes in order to see the therapist. At first she thought Tonya was looking straight at her, but her gaze was unfocused, or focused on something far outside this circle, this room.
Tonya's soft, deliberate voice sent the visualization over and through all parts of the body, and Nan did, indeed, seem to find places where tension could be relaxed, places where the imagined touch of the warmth and light caused pain. And, yes, places–her left shoulder blade, her navel, her buttocks, the sole of her right foot, her (oh, god) clitoris–that seemed frightened. Afraid to be noticed. Afraid to be touched. Longing for both. Terrified of the longing. She was having trouble breathing. Carl was rocking and hugging himself.
"Now," murmured Tonya, and there was anticipatory stirring around the circle as if everyone but Nan knew what was coming, "I invite you to bring the warmth and light into the most intimate part of your body, between your legs, your private parts, your genitals. Notice what you feel,
what images and memories come to the surface." One of the young women was wailing. "And when you are ready," Tonya went on, gently but not turning away, "when you are ready, I invite you to share what you are remembering, perhaps for the first time."
Nan stood up. Tonya was looking at her; if the others noticed, they gave no indication. Nan mouthed at the therapist, "I'm leaving." Tonya nodded and closed her eyes again, dismissing Nan or respecting her own process.
Nan stumbled out of the room and the building and to her car, and sat shaking until she could drive. Even then, she couldn't bear the thought of going straight home and having to deal with her mother. Becca wouldn't mind another few minutes. Nan drove to the far end of New City, beyond the golf course to a small grove of trees, which had miraculously survived around the banks of a stream. Sitting in the grass, she took comfort in the solidity of the earth under her and the broad trunk of an old tree at her back.
Frantically reviewing her research into Repressed and False Memory Syndromes, she decided that Tonya's body scan thing must have been what more than one article had referred to as "expressive bioenergetics," or maybe "narrative therapy." And all that crap about "the most intimate part of your body"–talk about leading the patient! Next thing, Tonya would be reciting childish names for various private body parts; one transcript of a therapy session, which had seemed so outrageous she hadn't known whether to believe it, had recorded the therapist hypnotically intoning at least a dozen such terms, and a footnote had explained that this was for the purpose of "accessing primal memories."
She brought her fist down on the ground at her side. It was not possible that her mother had ever done any of this. She couldn't allow herself to be hypnotized or seduced–a good word for it–into even entertaining the notion. What a tragedy it would be if the last few years she had with her mother were ruined by this filthy nonsense.
She was done. She was not going back to see Dr. Tonya Bishop ever again. She was going to go on with her life as if this ugly little interlude had never happened.
For a while, Nan's resolve translated itself into a feeling of well-being. It was autumn, and nothing rivaled autumn in upstate New York, no matter how much she traveled and despite the fact that it augured the end of the outdoor tennis season. Shopping for a pumpkin with Jordan and carving it on the porch. Filling the inside with leaves without having to duplicate a single color. Wearing chunky turtleneck sweaters and scarves and soft, lamb leather jackets. She loved all of it. Even at work, everything seemed heightened. The campus was brighter than usual, the yellows and oranges and russets almost iridescent. She ate chocolate bars with abandon, stealing from the bags of miniatures she was storing for Halloween, and she offered to make a costume for Jordan who said, "Oh, Grams, I'm too old for that."
There was excitement in the air, a feeling of celebration she'd never lost from childhood, but there was something else, too, something that made her feel as if she was balancing delicately, carefully, on the edge of a cliff. Every time she thought of Matt, a physical sensation shot into her groin, as if it had been hit by an orgasmic bolt of lightning. While the sensation was not unpleasant, it left her wanting the real thing.
Nothing satisfied her. Her less-than-convenient class schedule, which ordinarily might have been worth a bitch session or two over coffee with Dan, enraged her. Seeing Peter Sanchez here and there on campus made her giddy in a way that felt dangerous.
At home, she could hardly stand to be in the same room with her mother, yet could hardly stand to leave her alone at all. Catherine's mental and physical decline worsened noticeably from one day to the next, and Nan was terrified. Of losing her. Of never being able to find out what had really happened between them. Of finding out.
At school, she was holding the line, or thought she was until she bumped into Dan half-running toward the parking lot. His face was filled with concern.
"Everything okay?" she called out.
He stopped moving. "It's Professor Dawson. They moved him into a hospice yesterday and he's asking for me."
"So he's–"
"Close." He paused. "What about you, Nan? How are you doing? I don't mean to pry, but you've been looking kind of–stressed. "
"I'm fine. Really. Just have a lot on my plate right now, with my mother and..."
When she didn't continue, Dan asked carefully, not looking at her, "How are things with Matt?"
"Okay. Complicated. What does he say?"
Dan grinned sideways at her. "He says things are incredibly wonderful." They'd reached his car. He gave her a quick one-armed hug before he unlocked the door. "I hope I didn't screw up, introducing you to him." He waved and slid behind the wheel, saving them both from her reply.
"Complicated" was putting it mildly. Her relationship with Matt had turned almost entirely sexual, and almost all the initiative was hers. She couldn't keep her hands or her mouth off him. She wanted–needed–him inside her all the time. She didn't want to do anything but make love, and she wanted to do it everywhere–hotel rooms and his office and her office and the tennis court on a moonless night and the handicap stall of the ladies' room at Le Jazz Hot.
He was often amazed, sometimes put off, once in a while actually shocked. "Jesus, Nan, what's come over you? You're wearing me out." Or "Let's go out to dinner," or "Let's just talk."
But she couldn't stop. Her sexual ardor had a nasty manic quality to it, she knew, but the pleasure and release were necessary. She crossed boundary after boundary, discovering and inventing erotic activities she'd never have considered before, taking greater and greater risks of making a public display. She couldn't get enough.
And she didn't tell Tonya.
One hot late-August morning, over their usual coffee and biscotti before her first student, she declared, "Tonight we'll make love at my house." It was a demand, a statement of fact.
His eyes widened and he heaved a sigh. "I don't think that's such a good idea. Your mother–"
"Fuck my mother." Nan laughed harshly, ignoring the look akin to revulsion that crossed Matt's face. "Just come over at eight, okay? She'll be in bed."
Happily, Catherine was sound asleep well before eight. Nan had had to brush her hair for only a few minutes. Sometimes it took an hour before the old woman let herself be lulled. Sometimes Nan could hardly tolerate the feel of the white strands, which not so long ago had made her think fondly of words like "gossamer." Now they were coarser, something she'd been told happened to old people more often than not. When she was little, she and her mother had brushed each other's hair. That used to be one of her favorite memories. She vowed it would be again.
Matt was late. Maybe he'd chickened out. She couldn't handle that, not now when she was this horny. When she thought about it from a left-brain perspective, she thought it was because she was delving into primal sexual feelings.
The phone rang. She snatched it up in half a ring, desperate not to wake her mother. "I'm waiting," she cooed into the receiver.
There was a pause, and then her brother said, "Nan?"
"Patrick?"
"Becca said you wanted to talk to me." For a moment, Nan didn't know what he meant. "Something to do with Mom?" he prompted, and she caught the indignation in his voice. "Some stupid thing about something Mom is supposed to have done to you?"
"Wow. That really makes me want to talk to you. You always did have a way with words."
"What the hell do you think you're doing? This is our mother we're talking about."
There was a double-rap at the front door. Her heart pounded. "You know something, Pat? I don't have time for this now. I've got better things to do than–"
"Well, Becca said you wanted to know if I remembered the same kind of crap. The answer is no. She was a great mom. To all of us."
"Yeah, okay, fine. I'll call you tomorrow and we'll talk some more–"
"No, we won't." They'd always competed to see who could hang up on the other one first. As usual, it was impossible to tell.
CHAPTER SEVENTEE
N
Waiting for Nan or Catherine to answer his knock, Matt considered again the thrilling and unsettling turn this affair with the once-cautious and really quite conventional Nan Jenssen had taken. Self-editing, as was his habit, he mused that neither "considered" nor "again" was the right word; to speak of something being considered implied calm and rationality, neither of which was even remotely applicable, and "again" required a stopping and a re-start when in fact these days he hardly thought about anything but the turn this affair had taken.
"Thrilling" was right, though. He hadn't felt like this in a long time, probably since the passion in his marriage to Marcia had succumbed to the demands of an infant. The thought of Eliot, and the still-sharp regret that he and Marcia hadn't had a chance to rekindle and rebuild, caused a migraine to stir and make its presence known. "The gathered creature," he'd called it in a poem, "always alert for my unwilling summons." Please, not tonight, he prayed, pressing his temples.
But he was also thinking, as he often did these days: What have I gotten myself into? Nan's new sexual insatiability was thrilling, yes, but it was also a little crude and off-putting, and more than a little disconcerting. Maybe she won't let me into the house and that'll be the end of it.
They really hadn't known each other very long. There was time to get out of this without much pain to either of them.
The trouble was, he really did like her. A lot.
Yet she thought it possible that he could have molested his own son. He fought down nausea and hoped he'd be able to wash soon without it seeming too odd.
When Nan opened the door, Matt took a step back. Something's wrong here, he told himself. Be careful. But she said come in, in a husky voice he'd come to recognize, and he decided he was more than welcome.
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