My Dearest Friend

by Nancy Thayer

  Now Daphne really couldn’t breathe. She clutched her books to her breast, truly nearly fainting: my God, she had suddenly become a damsel in distress overhearing her knight in shining armor rallying to her defense. She was weak with astonishment.

  “Jesus, Joe, you should be studying debate, not English literature!” George Dobbs said, laughing. “Give me a break—you sleeping with her, or what?”

  “I haven’t even spoken to her, you asshole!” Daphne’s hero said, and then Dr. Frazier, the Shakespeare professor, came down the hall and caught Daphne standing outside the door, rigid with shock.

  “Are you going in, Miss Lowell?” Dr. Frazier asked, and before she could move, he had pulled the door back, intending to allow her to pass through before him, unintentionally exposing Daphne to the lounge full of English T.A.s.

  Daphne stared—and saw one person, Joe Miller. And he was seeing only her. She turned—she fled. She ran from the building and across campus and down nameless streets until she came to her apartment. Not until she was safely inside, in her bedroom with the door locked, on her bed, did she feel safe.

  Daphne lay there and caught her breath, and replayed the entire morning in her head—and began to smile, and could not stop.

  She had longed to have a knight, a hero, and she had one. She had been defended. She had been praised. It was obvious, it was undeniable—she was loved from afar! She felt radiant, ethereal, she felt like Guinevere reincarnated. And in her mind from that moment on, she thought of herself and Joe in impossibly romantic ways, like Tristan and Isolt, like Aucassin and Nicolette.

  Finally she came around to thinking about Joe himself, Joe Miller, her knight. She hadn’t really thought about him before, ever, had seldom seen him—there were, after all, twenty-three T.A.s in the department, and scores of other Ph.D. and master’s candidates.

  She summoned up a vision of Joe in her mind: he was blond, with thick hair that he wore longer than most men these days, and he had blue eyes and a straight nose and a great smile—why, he was handsome! Why hadn’t she noticed that before? He wasn’t very tall, unfortunately, and perhaps that was why she hadn’t paid much attention to him; Daphne was tall for a woman, five-eight, and slender, but big-boned, and she was attracted to very tall big men. Joe was probably the same height she was. Probably the same weight, too, though she’d never tell him so—but could he pick her up? Could he carry her in his arms? He was the serious type, she remembered, very serious, even fierce, and competitive, and, now she remembered, he was rumored to be quite brilliant. Well, wow! How wonderful. How romantic. A brilliant man had come to her defense. Had proved that the age of chivalry was not dead.

  When the phone rang, she knew it would be Joe, and it was.

  “Hi,” he said. “I think that after this morning it might be nice if we could get together.”

  And so they did.

  It really had been a wonderful thing that Joe had done for Daphne. She had told Cynthia about the way they met, because the psychology books said to tell the child of a divorce about the time when her parents loved one another. She told Cynthia how after just three months of going together they were married, and how they laughed together and understood each other and shared everything, told each other everything. They were the dearest friends, but they were husband and wife too. She did not tell Cynthia in exact words, but let her understand that sexually the marriage had been fine and rich: it was a treasure. (She did not tell Cynthia about the time that she finally said, laughing, wet all over her body from different bodily moistures—sweat and kisses and sex and tears: “Oh, Joe, you have a noble cock!” How they had laughed, so pleased with themselves.)

  And who could take that away from Daphne now? What could make it change, what could make it false? Because Joe had betrayed her and left her for another woman, did that mean he did not truly love her then, in those young years? This was the mystery of life, not how death transforms us, but how life transforms us, even our memories, even our most radiant memories—if what Joe gave Daphne in their youth was golden, did his later betrayals tarnish it, demean it, debase it? So that the gold fell away, a lie, leaving only base metal, leaving a cheap pretense, tin?

  Daphne sat alone in her cottage, wrapped in a light summer quilt, rocking in the curved wicker rocking chair in which she had rocked Cynthia when Cynthia was newly born. Daphne had put the chair here, by the long window looking out at the field and forest, just so she could sit this way, and look, and think, and remember, and be calmed by the way the lawn slanted and the woods stood firm, guardians of her realm. So long ago, she had been romantic. She could still be romantic. In fact, she was. Some of her friends, especially her new friends, saw her life as a sort of cliché, a cautionary tale to younger women: Look at what poor (foolish) Daphne Miller did with her life! Such potential, such a brilliant student—and she threw it all away, by trusting a man, by falling in love. They would say she had been duped and even robbed, and in a way that was true, for when she married Joe, she had stopped taking courses, had stopped working toward her doctorate. Joe was poor, and two years older, and was closer to finishing his doctorate than she. So she had worked for four years as a secretary in the chemistry department so that they could pay the rent on a little apartment and eat and wear clothes. Then he had gotten a teaching position at this prestigious college—wonderful for him, but what was Daphne to do? For their plan was that when he had gotten his doctorate and had a teaching position and was earning money, then she would go back to school. But this small college gave only undergraduate degrees; she could not get her doctorate here. The only thing for her to have done was make a long commute, an hour-and-a-half drive over treacherous mountain roads, back to U. Mass. at Amherst. She would have done that—but she got pregnant with Cynthia. So her life had become a perfect feminist tract: the woman who gave up her career to support a husband who then left her with a small child and little money. She had to work as a secretary to support herself and Cynthia (Joe paid child support, but college professors didn’t earn much); there was no way she could work and take care of a small child and study for a Ph.D. Now here she was, forty-six years old, a woman who had been a brilliant student with a promising career—and she was a secretary, just a secretary! If the feminists knew about her, they would take her like a dog-and-pony show around the country to show her off to young women as an example of promise denied.

  But it was not the teaching that she missed now. It was not a career that she yearned for. If she could have what she wanted right now, on this starry end-of-summer night, she would simply wish to be loved. To be held right now by a man she loved who loved her in return. Oh, well, she was still a romantic, still hopelessly mushy. She supposed she always would be. She wished David were still alive. She had cared for him so deeply, even when she was furious at his drinking. And he had loved her. His arms … his embrace. David had been a huge man and his body had been a kind of shelter for Daphne, but more, and terribly, it had been a shelter for his disease. He had died, as everyone feared he would, of cirrhosis of the liver, when he was only forty-seven, just two years ago.

  She had not been held by a man for two years. There was Hudson to talk to, and she knew he cared for her. They had a kind of silent communing, a caring and affection that were expressed tenderly and obliquely, as if they were together in a pool of life, and although they did not actually touch one another, their feelings caused life to lap at them like gentle waves, giving them soft sensual satisfaction. But it was not the same as making love, as being held in a man’s arms. Daphne missed that. She often thought of trying to seduce Hudson, because she knew they could give each other pleasure and comfort and even joy, but no, there was Claire.

  And really, most of all, Daphne missed her daughter. She missed Cynthia terribly. She had lived her life around her daughter as if around a glowing fire, and she had spent all her time bringing fuel to that fire, feeding that fire, tending it, watching it flourish and flame, and standing back in amazement sometimes at how b
rightly it burned, how high it flared! And now Cynthia was gone. Daphne was left with a void, a hole where the fire had been.

  She ached, missing her daughter. Not being loved by a man did not defeat her, but this did. Not having Cynthia in the house defeated her. She could understand why Joe had left her, and she could bear that. She could understand why her daughter had left her, but she could not bear that. It hurt to think of it. It was as if her heart had been torn from her body, and nothing in the world would stanch that wound.

  Daphne huddled in her chair and cried. The old release. She was a lonely woman, a woman who had been left and left again, a woman who was growing old. She was a lonely woman wrapped in a cotton quilt sitting in a rocking chair crying in the moonlight, and no one heard her cry. And never, not even in all the romances she had ever read, did someone come to the rescue of such as she.

  Down the road in their A-frame, Jack and Carey Ann were fighting. Again. Still. It had started in the car, when Jack had asked pleasantly (hopefully), “Well, did you have a good time?”

  “Oh, sure,” Carey Ann had replied, her voice low with sarcasm.

  Jack sighed. He hated it when Carey Ann’s voice got like that. “What does that mean?”

  “What do you think it means?” Carey Ann replied, and before he could answer, she had said, “Let’s just be quiet till we get home, okay? Alexandra’s just about asleep and I don’t want to wake her up.”

  So they had ridden home in silence, silently fighting every mile of the way. Carey Ann had hunched over against the door, as if afraid his arm might touch hers, inflicting injury or disease. Her face was stony. When they came to the house, she didn’t wait for Jack to come open the door and help her and Alexandra out, which he usually did, which he enjoyed doing. She awkwardly nudged the door open with her elbow, then kicked it open the rest of the way, crawled out, and walked past him into the house.

  Jack poured himself a beer and one for Carey Ann too while she put the baby into her crib. He was sitting on the sofa in the living room when she came out. “Here,” he said, indicating with his hand the beer, the cushion next to him. “Sit down. Let’s talk.”

  Carey Ann picked up the beer but didn’t sit down next to him. She chose the chair across the room next to the stone fireplace. She sat down and crossed her legs and swigged her beer and swung her leg back and forth in a maddening little rhythm and stared into space as if she were all by herself riding on a subway.

  “All right,” Jack said finally, “now tell me, what’s wrong? What didn’t you like? Who didn’t you like?”

  “What didn’t I like?” Carey Ann asked, turning to look at him—to glare at him. “Who didn’t I like? Everything, everyone, that’s what, that’s who!”

  “Well, I thought there were a lot of nice people there—” Jack began.

  “Fuddy-duddies!” Carey Ann said. “Jack, they were all fuddy-duddies!”

  “Well, I know some of the older ones—”

  “Oh, I’m not talking about the older ones,” Carey Ann said. “I don’t care about them. I’m talking about the ones our age. That Madeline Spencer. For example.”

  “She seemed very nice. And her little boy is just Alexandra’s age,” Jack said, wondering what on earth Carey Ann could have against Madeline Spencer, who seemed to him to be an awfully nice woman.

  “Well, did you notice her hair? Did you even notice it? How it just hangs there on each side of her head? It’s just so limp, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup and she had on horrid shoes like retarded people wear, and her little boy wouldn’t let Alexandra play with the teddy bear—”

  “Madeline did say it was his special bear,” Jack said. “You know, like a blanket, a security thing.” When Carey Ann went silent, he said, “I thought the two of you were getting along fine.”

  “Oh, she wasn’t so bad, but the others with her. You didn’t hear them, you were talking to the men. ‘And what do you do, Carey Ann?’ ” she mimicked. “And when I said I took care of Alexandra, they said, ‘I mean what do you really do?’ Like being married and having a family isn’t really anything. They’re all so serious, Jack, talking about how hard it is to be a faculty wife here and not be able to ‘pursue their interests,’ and making cookies for the students during exam week, and hospital committees and stuff. They’re so earnest.”

  Jack looked at his wife, feeling hopeless. What could he say? How could he defend his colleagues and their spouses? In fact, they were a pretty earnest bunch. They had had to be to get their Ph.D.’s and be asked to teach by this college. He could see, too, how they might look pretty drab to his wife, all his colleagues with their thinning hair and horn-rimmed glasses and pimples and pipes. They were all like he was, riddled with worry and concern: how to support a family on a minuscule amount of money, teach a bunch of aggressively bright students who were paying a fortune to be taught by them, and write profoundly original essays that would bring critical praise—and tenure.

  “… doesn’t anyone here know how to have fun?”

  “Well, Carey Ann, maybe when we get to know some of these people a little better—you know, this was a faculty affair at the college, so everyone had to be on good behavior.”

  “Oh!” Carey Ann wailed. “I don’t want to get to know any of them! And they don’t want to get to know me!” She took a deep breath, and then, to Jack’s dismay, she burst into tears and crumpled in the chair. “Oh, Jack, I’m not blind. I may be pretty but that doesn’t mean I’m a complete fool. I saw the way some of those women looked at me, and I know I was underdressed, but at least I looked pretty, and women out here don’t care anything about looking pretty. I can’t imagine ever talking to them about … oh, my hair, or what kind of dress to buy, or anything at all! Do you know what one woman said? I went up to her because she had a little baby and I thought we could talk about babies, but she started telling me all about how her husband was studying ‘quarks.’ What the fuck is a quark? I thought she was joking so I laughed and she got such a stuck-up look on her face like she was so much better than I am. Oh, Jack, are there such things as quarks?”

  Jack rose then and went over and put his arms around her. He brought her with him back to the sofa and sat and held her while she cried. “It will get better. You’ll make friends. I know you will. You’ll be a great faculty wife, you’ll see.”

  “A great faculty wife?” Carey Ann raised her head and stared at Jack in dismay. “You want me to be a great faculty wife? Oh, Jack, sometimes I don’t think you know me at all.”

  “What do you mean?” He was trying to be careful.

  “I mean, I don’t want to be a faculty wife! I know you, and no matter what you think you feel, if I get all old and limp-haired and saggy and intelligent, you’ll stop being in love with me.”

  Jack thought a moment, racking his brain for the perfect answer. “No. I would be in love with you even if you were old and limp-haired and saggy and intelligent,” he said.

  Carey Ann was quiet for a moment and Jack thought she was trying to decide whether she had just been insulted or complimented. “Oh, honey,” she said at last, and hugged him. “Sometimes … sometimes I just feel so … young or something. Like I don’t know what to do around those people. Jack, I try, I want you to know that, I really am trying. Like I was really polite to that Daphne Miller tonight even though she insulted me and Alexandra.”

  “I told you, Carey Ann, she—”

  “Oh, let’s not go into that again, I don’t want to talk about that again, I’m trying to say something here,” Carey Ann said. She reached up and put her hand, gently, softly, over his mouth. At the same time she kept her arm around his waist and leaned her hips in against his. “All my life I never had to change,” she said. “Then I met you and all I seem to have to do is change. Get married, get pregnant and all fat and swollen, have a baby, move halfway around the world from all my friends … oh, Jack, and now you say you want me to be a faculty wife.”

  “Well, I am a member of the faculty. And yo
u are my wife.”

  “You know Daddy always said he’d support us so you could write.”

  “And you know I’ve got more pride and sense than to accept that offer.”

  “Yes, I know.” Carey Ann sighed. “Men.”

  Jack moved his hands down her back to rest on her buttocks. “Women,” he replied.

  They were kissing when Alexandra began to cry. Honestly, Jack thought, does that child have some kind of built-in sensory device?

  “Let her cry,” he said. “She’ll cry herself back to sleep.”

  “Jack! I couldn’t let the poor little thing do that!” Carey Ann said. “Let me go just a minute. I’ll just rock her back to sleep.” She pulled away from him.

  Jack watched some late news, waiting for his wife, but when she didn’t come down, he took off his shoes and tiptoed up the stairs to their room. The hall light shone on their queen-size bed, where Carey Ann lay in one of her lacy nightgowns, and Lexi lay in the curve of her arm, crooning softly to herself, trying to ward off sleep, fighting to stay awake. When Lexi saw her father enter the room, she grinned mischievously. Looking at Carey Ann, reclining, made Jack desire her terribly, and feel base for this desire, and feel wretched because he could tell that tonight his desire would not be fulfilled—and because she did not equally desire him. He could almost feel his penis shrinking into his body, unloved, rejected, disappointed. As he went into the bathroom to wash up for bed, he felt his sex against him, a small bobbing sack laden with displeasure and resentment and frustrated desires, like some heavy symbolic object in an ominous ancient tale.