by Nancy Thayer
For her college days turned out to be full of a sort of gambling joy—there were so many men! Every day she awoke exhilarated with the possibilities ahead of her, and each time she walked down the long corridor of Jardine Hall, she smiled to herself to think that each classroom she passed held a different set of men to flirt with, date, and kiss. She didn’t sleep with as many men as she would have liked to, because the birth-control pill was not yet readily available and she had to worry about getting pregnant. Then, too, she did not want to be cheap and easy, so she slept with only the few boys she felt really in love with. But she delighted as much in the preliminary challenges and temptations, in all the shimmering, unpredictable stages of romance. She liked the way that, during the course of an evening, a boy she was interested in would hold her closer and closer against him as they danced, until their hips touched and his hand moved down from the middle of her back to the small of her back to the rise of her buttocks. He would carefully press her more firmly against him, and she would nestle her face against his shoulder and press her hand against the back of his neck with a corresponding gentleness that let him know it was okay.
When she was a sophomore, Dave finally asked her to transfer colleges and marry him, but she was at the stage he had been at two years before: she was too busy having fun. She couldn’t, in fact, imagine being married. She wanted to finish college, teach elementary school, and live a life flitting from one man to another. Her young love for Dave had been so painfully intense and overwhelming that she wanted years of antidote: she wanted freedom and frivolity. She moved through her college years as though at a casino of romance, and enjoyed it all. If a man stopped dating her, she took it in stride, because her relationship with Dave had taught her, if nothing else, how to deal with that sort of grief—she immediately began dating other people, which always proved a quick and certain remedy. And she broke a few hearts herself, unwittingly, and one of them, in the end, was Dave’s. When she graduated from college, Dave came to the commencement ceremonies, and afterward, he asked her once more to marry him. She stood before him, still in her black robe, holding on to her flat mortarboard against a spring breeze, and said no. As they looked at each other, she realized that she had come to care for Dave in an almost fraternal manner. The passion, on her side, was really gone. She was sorry she did not love him, because she liked him so. But she could not conjure or force up the emotions that had once so suddenly exploded within her, and for the last time she and Dave kissed, and parted. He went to Oregon to work as an engineer.
Suzanna went to Londonton, to take a job teaching first grade. Londonton was only a two-hour drive from her hometown, only a one-hour drive from her college, so she always had visitors and seldom was lonely. But teaching made her feel grown-up, responsible. She began to admire the reliable lives of the teachers and parents of her first-graders; she wanted to live accordingly. When one of her old boyfriends, who had become a stockbroker in Boston, came to see her one weekend to ask her to marry him, she almost accepted, in spite of the fact that she didn’t love him.
But she was glad she hadn’t, because three days later she met Thomas Blair. He was a newly tenured professor at the local college, and single. They first saw each other in the Grand Union grocery store, where they were each pushing a huge metal shopping cart filled with pathetic little quarts of milk and cottage cheese, tiny cans of vegetables, and plastic sacks with two lonely apples. Tom came around a corner too fast and accidentally slammed Suzanna’s cart with his.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, and took a good look at her, and smiled.
“That’s all right,” she said, taking a good look at him, and smiling back.
There was something in Tom that reminded her of Dave—he was tall and skinny like Dave, and moved with the same jock grace. But Tom had dark hair and brown eyes, and where Dave had been cute and appealing, Tom was downright handsome. In those days Suzanna was still slim, and her thick brown hair was cut in a flattering pageboy. She and Tom liked each other’s looks. They moved off from each other, each in different directions of the grocery store, and they attempted to direct their attention to boxes of macaroni and paper napkins. But they were very much aware of whether or not the other was in the same aisle. Suzanna was furious at herself for breathing so loudly and because her boot squeaked. Then she didn’t see him for a few moments and assumed he had bought his groceries and left. She was disappointed, but plodded along down the dairy aisle, pushing her cart listlessly, and there he was. He came hurtling around the corner again, and almost rammed into her a second time.
“Look,” he said, “excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude, but can I speak to you? My name is Thomas Blair, and I teach English at the college, and I’ve just moved to town. I’m single and healthy and have no police record or illegitimate children, and I’d like to know if you would join me for dinner tonight. That is, if you’re free. That is, if you’re not married, or engaged to someone bigger than I am.”
How charming he was! She had to laugh at the thought of someone bigger than he, and she was flattered by the way he rushed his words as he spoke to her, as if he were really nervous at confronting her. He had hunched up his shoulders while he talked, like some awkward boy, as if he had no idea how handsome he really was. Of course she went out to dinner with him that night. They talked, they laughed. Suzanna was entranced. And Tom did not hide the fact that he wanted to make her like him. He kept saying things like: “Would you like me to open the car door for you or not? I don’t want to offend you, if you’re a feminist, but I don’t want to seem rude.” And he smiled as he spoke, such a smile that Suzanna wanted to say, “Oh, let me open the door for you!” He was thirty years old, a professor with tenure at the college, a man who had just published a book of essays on Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt; yet when he walked Suzanna to the door that first night he was as ingenuous as a child.
“There’s a party tomorrow night at a friend’s house,” he said. “Would you go with me?” He stood before her, shoulders hunched up again, both hands shoved into his jeans pockets.
“Yes, I’d like that,” Suzanna replied.
“Great! I’ll pick you up at eight!” Without taking his hands out of his pockets, he leaned forward quickly and kissed her—on the cheek—grinned like a little boy, and raced back to his car.
Suzanna let herself into her apartment and leaned against the door with her hand against her cheek. Nothing could have seduced her more than that shy breathy kiss.
The party the next evening was at the home of a junior member of the History department. Suzanna knew she should be glad for the opportunity to meet so many people her own age here in Londonton, but as she followed Tom through the crowd of people to the kitchen to get a drink, she resented all the others. She wanted to be alone with Tom. Everything was very casual: the sink was full of bottles of beer stashed in ice; the kitchen table held paper cups, several gallons of cheap wine, and cheese and Triscuits on paper plates. People were leaning against the refrigerator and stove and walls, talking and laughing, and they all seemed so glad to see Tom. He introduced her and everyone responded pleasantly, but it was obvious that it was Tom’s attention they wanted. She could understand why. Tom seemed to know just what tone to take with each person, just how to joke or flatter each individual, and it was perfectly natural for him to stand close to people, to wrap a friendly arm around a woman’s waist or a man’s shoulder. He was a toucher. People touched him back.
Suzanna made her own way around the house, meeting people, chatting, and she felt at ease, but she was always aware of just where Tom was, and whom he was with. He was so popular! He was so handsome, so endearing—so sexually appealing. She stood in the living room listening to a perfectly nice woman give her tips on the best shops in Londonton, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Tom settle back on the sofa next to a pretty red-haired woman. The two leaned into each other, nestling conspiratorially. Suzanna felt all the emotions of her high school days revive: jealousy, possess
ive lust, a sense of urgency. It was more a need for protection than a desire to manipulate that made her welcome with unusual warmth the attentions of an unmarried history professor who presented himself before her. She was as charming to him as she could be, and soon they were leaning up against the living-room wall, shoulders touching, their own conspiracy established. Then Suzanna began to feel a steady beam of attention focused on her as definitely as a light. She turned to glance at Tom and saw that he was staring at her with steady intensity. Surprised, she flashed him a proper party smile, but he did not smile back. He continued to stare at her, until she felt caught in that stare, surrounded by it, a fly in honey. The smile slipped from her face; she felt stunned. She felt that she and Tom were caught in a moment of truth: their mutual consuming desire. Next to her the history professor stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, while the redhead leaning against Tom gave him a playful pinch on the arm to remind him of her presence, then turned to see what in the world had so captured his attention. Still Tom stared at Suzanna, and Suzanna at Tom, spellbound. She felt her face go warm and rosy—with wine, with desire, with embarrassment at being so obvious in a public place—but before she could turn away, Tom rose from the sofa and came across the room to her. By then half the party had fallen silent and watchful.
“Let’s go,” Tom said, and put his arm around Suzanna’s shoulders and led her to the door.
Suzanna could not speak. They did not even think to tell the hosts good-bye.
They went down the three long wooden steps of the porch and two feet more before Tom pulled Suzanna to him in a kiss so passionate that all reality gave a little shudder: this was real, this was a point of crisis. She was relieved—she had not misinterpreted his look. She pressed her body against him, and he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her forehead, cheeks, lips, neck, shoulders. He ran his hands down her sides and up the front of her jean-covered thighs; he slid his hands up inside her loose pullover sweater.
“We can’t do this—here!” Suzanna gasped. “Tom, people can see us!”
Indeed people could see them. As they turned to hurry toward Tom’s car, Suzanna caught a glimpse of several of the party guests openly staring from the windows of the house. She didn’t care. She didn’t care what anybody saw. She only wanted to be in bed with Tom. They went to her apartment because it was closer, and fell into bed with an urgency that made them clumsy, and they laughed at their own clumsiness, and Suzanna’s heart filled with joy at this: their friendly easy laughter in the midst of powerful lust. When they had finished making love, they laughed again, to see each other so disheveled, Suzanna still wearing her necklace and earrings, Tom still in his socks and shirt and tie.
“My goodness, what a performance we gave your friends tonight!” she said, smiling as she unbuttoned his shirt. She did not know then how her words would come to haunt her in the years to come.
For Tom turned out to be, in spite of his Ph.D., a bit of a fool. It took Suzanna a long time to realize this, and in the meantime she married him and they had two children and established a life together. Tom was as addicted to popularity as an alcoholic to alcohol. The need for it ruled his life. For him life was always a drama, and he was not happy unless he was the star. This made him a hard worker, an excellent classroom instructor, and a great help to the college trustees, who could watch him charm the alumni into generous donations. But Tom was not as brilliant as many of his other colleagues, and since charm was not a quality essential to good research, he found time and again that his colleagues’ papers were accepted by academic journals and his own were not. Over the ten years of their marriage, Tom’s hair thinned, exposing a rather knobby forehead, and he accumulated unwanted weight—he was aging physically, as who does not? But he continued to be encircled by eternally youthful, muscular students and new young faculty members, so he felt his aging even more strongly by contrast. In public he continued with his winning ways, but in the privacy of his home he grew sullen. He did not need to charm Suzanna anymore; she was his already and for good, his wife. He cared for her in his own way, and was grateful to her for all that she provided: love, a home, a pretty life. He liked bringing students home to dinner so they could admire his house with its wood-burning stove and solar greenhouse, his study with its books and stacks of correspondence, his children with their rosy cheeks and sturdy bodies. But of course nothing could compare with the scene he and Suzanna had first set: their desperate passion in the living room and front yard of a faculty member’s house for all the world to see. Nothing really compares with sex for drama.
He could have had affairs with some of his students; he was offered opportunities, and some of his colleagues would have envied him. But he did love Suzanna enough to stop short of hurting her in this way. Instead he slowly grew to begrudge her because she was growing older also, and heavier, and because she was a mother, tied down to the worries of running a house and keeping people well fed and healthy. He resented her for providing the commonplaces that he could not have lived without. It was not very long into their marriage that he began to turn the full force of his petulance against Suzanna, as if she were responsible for redressing the grievances he suffered.
She continued to love him, but her affections of necessity took on a maternal tone. In what came to be the last year of their marriage, she dreaded all social occasions because of the risk involved. If Tom felt he had been sufficiently admired and appreciated, he came home happy, and made love to Suzanna with something close to élan. But if he felt slighted in any way, his mood turned black the moment tot in the car to drive home, and nothing could cheer him up. Then he would rail against Suzanna, against the boredom of their marriage, the weight on her hips, the pressures of providing for a family which kept him from doing significant research.
One fall almost exactly ten years after they first met, Suzanna and Tom were at a dinner party, and everyone was rather silly with wine. Yet Suzanna was alert and worried, for at the end of the dinner table, next to Tom, sat the newest member of the English department, a young woman who was a guest lecturer in creative writing. She had just published a book of short stories which had received literary acclaim, and she was young and slim and actually very beautiful, with long blond hair. And Suzanna could see from her end of the table that this new young woman was not adoring Tom at all; she was polite to him, but just not interested. Suzanna watched Tom’s motions grow wider, larger, in his desperation. She heard his voice grow more hearty.
“Will you go away for Thanksgiving vacation or stay in Londonton?” the man across the table from the blond woman asked.
“I’ll probably stay in Londonton,” she replied, smiling. “My family’s all in Arizona, too far away to travel for just four days.”
“Ha, Thanksgiving!” Tom bellowed. He leaned his arms on the table, as oblivious of the spoon he knocked to the floor as if he were drunk, and leered. “Imagine the plight of the poor Thanksgiving turkey—he only gets eaten once a year.”
Tom laughed at his own lewd joke, but the blonde only stared at him with complete deadpan disdain, then looked away. After a brief awkward silence, everyone else at the table broke into the sort of nervous babble that follows a social gaffe, and the moment was over. But Suzanna was chilled with apprehension. It was the first time that Tom had stepped over the line and tried to get attention in such a stupid way. And of course he knew he had been stupid; that made it worse.
They fought that night—or Tom fought, while Suzanna cried. She knew she had no power to help get the spotlight back to Tom; she was not beautiful, and she was getting older, she was just a nice elementary-school teacher, not destined ever to be famous or distinguished. She liked her life, but feared that her marriage was doomed: she could do nothing more for Tom. And she was tired of nurturing him. In a way he had become a full-time emotional invalid. This life they were leading did not bring out the best in either of them.
But they had been married for ten years, and their daughter Priscilla was five,
their son Seth only three; they were a family. So it was with mixed hopes that Suzanna at last brought out the crucial word. Divorce. Perhaps, she suggested, they should get a divorce. She hoped that Tom would agree, because she wanted to be free of him and his everlasting needs; but she also hoped for the impossible—that Tom would be so devastated by the very thought of divorce that he would promise to change, that he would change.
She had only to watch his face as she spoke to see just which hope would be fulfilled. Tom looked away from her; his eyes went sly. And she could see how he calculated the different possibilities in his mind. On the one hand, he would lose his wife, his children, his pretty home. But on the other—divorce! At last, at least, a drama! He would be invited to dinner by sympathetic women. He could sleep with young slim blondes without any censure. And if he made an ass of himself, he did not have to bear Suzanna’s tolerant insights; he could be miserable alone, in privacy.
“Well,” he said, raising his eyes to Suzanna, “yes. I think you’re right. I think it’s best if we get a divorce.” He tried to speak with the necessary solemnity, but he could not suppress his joy at the thought of a new life, a new adventure, and as he stared at Suzanna, a huge, uncontrollable smile spread across his face. Suzanna turned away. She sank down onto the sofa and began to cry. It hurt to see him so happy at the thought of living without her. But later, as the weeks passed, it was the memory of that smile which set her free.
Tom moved through the divorce with the ease of a duck through water. This was his element—drama, phones ringing, long sincere discussions over drinks with sympathetic colleagues, hearty greetings of good cheer from people in the community who had only nodded at him before. In fact, this private crisis seemed to perk up the town. Happily married couples felt their bonds reinforced by the contrast of their tightly knit lives with the Blairs’ rapidly unraveling one. Divorced and single women, even college students, suddenly recognized Tom as an intriguing and sexual object now that he had come out from under the proprietary mantle of his marriage. The world was just a little more exciting. More parties were given. Tom, seeming younger by virtue of his new bachelorhood, bestowed on those around him a temporary sheen of youthfulness, like a child’s chin shining yellow when a buttercup is held near. For a few months people gave, instead of the usual staid cocktail parties, rock-and-roll parties, masquerade parties, disco parties. Couples turned off the television and lay in bed at night analyzing the Blairs’ marriage and their newfound duties as friends: Could they invite Suzanna and Tom to the same party? Or should they plan two separate parties? What exactly were their responsibilities? Their new self-importance made them unconsciously fond of Tom, and slightly cautious and resentful of Suzanna—they were afraid she might act sad and depress everyone. But they felt expansive around Tom, and in turn buoyed Tom up, so he was able to see himself as a ship tossed on a turbulent sea, and all the while he was quite safe in his own small pond of life.