by Nancy Thayer
“Well,” she said when at last she opened her eyes, “you’re right. You don’t need me to be your teacher. But still—roll over.”
There is, Suzanna found, the most exquisite variety to a body. A tongue, which can lick light and wetly flat across the skin, can become sharp, bone-like, a precise point. When a lover cares, there is almost no end to the eloquent transformations the hands are capable of. When there is love, the pleasures of the body flow through with the urgency of music, and what was once a dull and everyday set of bones and organs and skin becomes buds, froth, blossoms, becomes undulating fabric, becomes a giant bell. Madeline climbed Suzanna’s body, she caressed Suzanna until her whole being went tintinnabulous with joy. She was relentless and imaginative with Suzanna, until at last she collapsed next to her on the bed. Both women lay against the sheets with their limbs intertwined and their hair damply trailing over the pillows. They were as limp and redolent and delicately drawn out as convolvuli—as morning glories.
The bedroom reeked of sex. Madeline sat up and pulled the tumbled covers up about their shoulders, then lay on her side so she could see Suzanna’s face.
“Well,” she said. “Well. Now we’ve begun.”
It was hard to be a woman in Londonton. It was easy enough to be a married woman, a wife and mother, but in spite of the propaganda of liberation, it was still implicitly assumed in Londonton that the primary qualities of a good woman were chastity and humility. After their divorce, Tom moved to another town, but he appeared back in Londonton often for parties or college dances, and each time he brought with him a different woman. How he was admired for this ever-expanding collection of lovers! For of course it was always made apparent that the current woman slept with him. One weekend he might arrive with a young blonde, and the next weekend with an older brunet, and a weekend after that with the young blonde again, and all of this only delighted the people of Londonton. But women in the town were not allowed the same privilege of implied promiscuity. The kindest thing that was hoped for them was that they would somehow manage to get married again, fast. Liza Howard was considered a woman to be spurned because she slept with married men, and yet those very men were the darlings of every social occasion.
Suzanna learned all this because, as the months went by, she found it necessary to camouflage her relationship with Madeline by appearing to be involved with men. Once at a party at Pam and Gary Moyer’s, she had met Gary’s half brother, who had come up for a football weekend. She liked the brother, whose name was Chad, and was pleased when he asked her to go to dinner with him the next night. In fact, she slept with him, and enjoyed his presence so much that she let him stay the night. But he was only twenty-four, thirteen years younger than Suzanna, and no sooner had Chad left than Suzanna was deluged with gossip about herself—in her best interests, everyone said. How could she let a man spend the night—she shouldn’t do that to her children. And what was she doing with a man so much younger than she, it was a little embarrassing, wasn’t it? It made her seem cheap to have picked up that boy at the Moyers’ party, cheap and … lascivious; and those were not qualities admired in first-grade teachers.
“My God!” Suzanna would want to yell (but never would). “I’ve been dating those men for you!” By you, she meant the entire town, which had miraculously transformed itself into one all-seeing eye and one eternally whispering mouth. Nothing escaped the town, and everything was judged. Suzanna fed the town the red herrings of her little escapades with men in order to distract them from what was growing more and more important in her life: her love for Madeline.
The months went by, and Suzanna loved Madeline, and Madeline loved Suzanna. This frightened them both, and they both kept attempting affairs with other people in order to make their love seem frivolous, but this never worked. The months went by and the two women continued to find that they were happy in each other’s company, and slightly lamed alone, as if they had so quickly grown part of each other’s bodies. They took such sheer pleasure in each other’s company. They fit each other.
For a while, Suzanna had feared that perhaps it was only the thrill of the forbidden that was driving her again and again to Madeline’s bed. For there was certainly that thrill. Lost in the wet and fragrant landscape that lay between her lover’s legs, that even at its most spread and exposed promised with its intricate convolutions that it hid more than it revealed, Suzanna would marvel. She would think: I am making love to a woman! I am touching a woman! But after two years, the shock value had disappeared, and their lust was no longer fueled by novelty or desperation. In fact, the lust finally burnt itself out. Oh, it flared up from time to time so that Madeline might call Suzanna in the middle of the day to say, “I must come see you, now.” But it was not the distinguishing quality of their relationship. All the other lovely properties were there, flourishing and growing—devotion, caring, concern, interest, compassion, conversational delight, goodwill, laughter. Suzanna and Madeline might sit in bed, naked and cross-legged, delicately teasing the nipples of each other’s breasts; they might lick the juices from each other until their own faces grew hot and sticky; they might occasionally spend whole nights building the ecstasy between them until their backs shimmered with sweat and their breasts were sore and they fell apart panting. But that was the way of all lovers, and they knew it. What they had found went beyond that, and encompassed friendship as well as lust. More than the nights of love were the days of love, when they took simple pleasure in preparing a meal together, in lying side by side reading books, like any normal married couple who had the luxury to read in bed because sexual needs were satiated, and would be satiated again and again.
Almost two years after they had first slept with each other, they were down in Suzanna’s basement at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night. By this time Madeline had come to be a welcome part of the household. The children liked her and thought nothing of it when she sometimes spent the night. They thought of her as a good friend of their own as well as of their mother. This Sunday night she and Suzanna were putting the finishing touches on two small, intricate dollhouses that the women had made from scratch for Seth and Priscilla at Christmas. They had been inspired to this task by the pleas of the children, who had seen a quaint miniature tree house in a toy store. That tree house had been priced at over two hundred dollars. “Hummph!” Madeline had said. “We can do better than that ourselves!”
She had bought the boards and saws and paint, and Suzanna had dug up bits of fabric, old swatches of rug and curtain, and together the two women had constructed the houses—the Rabbit Home for Priscilla and the Raccoon Home for Seth. Now they were sitting on newspapers, wearing old paint-streaked shirts, very carefully trimming out the windows and doors. Suzanna looked up for a moment, and saw Madeline there near her, her tongue pushed to the corner of her mouth in concentration. Madeline was intent on her task, and the thought of what that focused intensity could bring when they were in each other’s arms made Suzanna shiver. Suzanna had not realized before that it was possible to have both in love: ecstasy and companionable ease.
“I want to marry you,” Suzanna said to Madeline. “I really do. I want to marry you and share my house with you and my life with you and my children’s lives with you. I want to invite friends to dinner, and you and I will both be hostesses. I want—”
“Sssh. Don’t,” Madeline said. “It’s childish to wish for the impossible. You’ll only hurt yourself.”
“But I want it so much!” Suzanna said.
“You have too much to lose,” Madeline replied.
That was true. There was no argument, there was no solution. Both women bent their heads and resumed painting in silence.
After two years of living in such happiness that it was like moving about in rarefied mountain air, Suzanna had decided to confide her secret to some of her friends. The first friend she told lived not only in another town but in another country; she responded to Suzanna’s letter by writing: “C’est merveilleux! Je pense que l’amour
est si rare qu’on doit le prendre comme un cadeau de Dieu.” And Suzanna thought her friend was right: it was marvelous, and love was so rare that one should take it as a gift from God. This gave Suzanna the courage to confide in a friend who lived in town. Lana was divorced and had had a series of unfortunate affairs with men. She was a feminist and a bit of a radical. Suzanna had counted on her approval. But Lana had surprised her with vague censure. “I don’t know,” Lana had said, “there’s something about this that frightens me. I think this sort of thing could undermine society, and we already have troubles enough. And then, of course, you must think of the children—”
Of course, the children. Always the children. Why, Suzanna thought, were women thought unfit to raise and nurture children because they touched their hands to a woman’s body rather than to a man’s? For it had come down to that basic and particular event.
Lust between women was of the same quality as lust between the sexes. There was not one whit of difference. Lesbian love was no more violent or gentle than heterosexual love; it is the individual who makes the difference, not the gender. There were in Londonton two sisters who never been married, the Misses Toomeys, and they went everywhere together; why could not Madeline and Suzanna do the same? They kept every bit of sexual expression confined to the privacy of a bedroom, behind locked doors, or far away from the children at Madeline’s house. Carnality did not steam off their bodies or glow about them as they walked. They cooked dinners together, ate and joked with the children, strolled down tree-lined streets to buy ice-cream cones, and never in those two years did the children wake in their dreams with fears or do any other thing to indicate that they knew that their mother loved Madeline except as a friend. They came to love Madeline, too.
Tom did not know about Suzanna’s love for Madeline, and Suzanna was terrified that he would find out. After two years of collecting what was almost a harem of women around him, Tom had recently announced his engagement to a girl of nineteen who sold airplane tickets in a travel store. Tom had told Suzanna about this one weekend when he brought Priscilla and Seth back from a visit—it was a three-hour drive from Tom’s house to Suzanna’s and the two parents had fallen into the habit of stopping in for a cup of coffee before facing the grueling drive home. This weekend, Tom had told Suzanna he was to marry, and suggested that it might be wise if the children came to live with him. He missed them so. It might be good for the children to live in a home where a father figure and a mother figure lived together, instead of Suzanna’s home where they seldom—according to what the children had told him—saw a man.
Suzanna did not know if a threat had been implied in Tom’s speech, but she was frightened. I must start dating men! she thought, all in a frenzy, but Londonton was so small that there were few men for her to date. And she really didn’t want to date: she was thirty-seven now, and found the little games necessary to dating embarrassing and tiresome. She was a grown woman, and she found her life quite full. She loved taking care of her children and her house, spending time with Madeline, working on her master’s degree, teaching at the elementary school. Her life had reached that rare and satisfying balance of pleasure and gratifying work. But her work was jeopardized, also, by her love, and this seemed such a hopeless tangle to her: that the same parents who came to her time and again to tell her how wonderful she was with children, how much the children loved her, how much they had learned from her, what a wonderful teacher she was, what a wonderful person she was—these very same parents would recoil from her in horror and drive her from the children’s sight if they knew she loved a woman.
What was she to do? Suzanna had begun attending church the month she first made love to Madeline. She went simply to present herself before the face of God for punishment or rebuke or whatever He willed. She thought she would make it clear to Him, by coming before Him regularly this way, that she was ready to do His will, if He would make it clear. For example, she had thought, when she was first so furiously given over to the throes of lust, that one of her children would be hurt. It seemed logical, and then there would be a clear and simple message—but it did not happen. Seth and Priscilla thrived. Suzanna’s work went well. Tom was happy with the divorce and his new wife; the roof did not fall in, the ground beneath Suzanna’s house did not shudder and split, no plague arrived, the children stayed healthy and were not hit by cars or bitten by dogs—so what was Suzanna to think?
Oh, God, is this a trick? Suzanna would ask. She was continually weighing the happiness she felt with Madeline with the ferocious judgments handed down upon lesbians in the local and national news. It began to drain her more and more—the pretense that she was not in love and was therefore not happy, and the secret-keeping from her friends and community. But she was afraid, for her life and for her children’s happiness. There were women in the town who would not hesitate to destroy her without even attempting to understand.
Last summer at a church picnic she had been standing behind Judy Bennett, watching Seth and another little boy scrabble with each other over a Frisbee. They tusseled, and Seth, being stronger, won, and instantly the fight was over and the other boy ran back to catch the Frisbee that Seth tossed to him, and he threw it back to Seth. They went on playing. But Suzanna heard Judy Bennett say to Pam Moyer, “Oh, look at the Blair boy. He’s over there, trying to take a toy from little Bryan Haskell. Well, what can you expect from a child like Seth—he’s the product of a broken home, you know.” Tears had shot into Suzanna’s eyes. She had wanted to pummel Judy Bennett in the back, to scream in rage and frustration, to shake and shake the woman until her body broke open and compassion entered in. But she had only walked away, trembling so violently she thought she might faint. If Judy judged that little boy so harshly because his parents were divorced, what would she do to him if she knew his mother loved a woman?
People were still skeptical of women who were divorced—but not of men who were divorced. People were still frightened of women who were divorced, as if they held some kind of primitive and tainted power. Women not sanctified by the presence of a husband seemed by no choice of their own to appear to married women with an almost witchlike aura; and women who loved women were considered fallen past witchery and into the black outlands of evil.
But perhaps that was an exaggeration, for Suzanna had friends now who knew her secret and, beyond being happy for her happiness, did not care. These people saved her life.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Ursula Aranguren would say whenever Suzanna got carried away with her fears. “Everyone has a gay relative by now. If Madeline moves in with you, this town will buzz like a hornet’s nest for maybe a week or two, and then turn its attention to something else. We’re sophisticated people, after all. Life is too short to squander—live your life!” But Ursula Aranguren did not have children. She could afford to be remarkable.
“I have to admit,” Leigh Findly said, “when you first told me, my first reaction was fear—I think I thought you might make a pass at me and I wasn’t sure how to handle that. Not to insult you, Suzanna, but you’re not my type! And then I was—wary—for a while. I suppose I thought you might start showing dirty movies in your home or, well, proselytizing. But after all these months, well, I feel fine with you, perfectly comfortable. I’m beginning to understand: you don’t love a woman, you love a person.”
For that was it. Suzanna loved a person, and that person loved her, and the gender of that person was not the point. As the months went by and the emotions deepened past lust and wild exhilaration, Suzanna came to feel that perhaps this person—Madeline—was the person she could spend her entire life with, for kindness and generosity and good humor and mutual respect were all there. They could even argue and resolve the arguments without damaging their estimation of each other or crimping their loose and dear companionship.
It was society, this town, that could provide the hurt that would come, to them or to Suzanna’s children, and nowhere in this town was a group of potential judges gathered in greater
numbers than in the very church where Suzanna sat. Her position seemed impossible. She wanted to rise from her pew, to speak her defense before the community, to beg for their charity and support. But she could not do this one thing: she could not trust her neighbors.
She saw no hope. She sat beneath the shining whiteness of the sanctuary’s dome and wondered if she must live in terror all her life.
Reynolds Houston
The chairs in the chancel of the church were antique, carved from rosewood and upholstered with striped rose and gold velvet. They conveyed a majesty that seemed suitable to this territory that supposedly belonged to God. But they were not comfortable chairs; Reynolds Houston thought that perhaps these chairs had been designed in accordance with that ancient pedagogic belief that discomfort of the body sharpened the receptivity of the mind. In any case, Reynolds felt like a stork perched on a thumbtack, and thought he must look as awkward as he felt. There was no way to settle all his long bones gracefully on this little chair. Reynolds, over fifty-four years of life, had learned to discipline his extremely tall and narrow body out of most of its gawkiness; he had learned to dress himself fastidiously. He would never be thought of as a particularly handsome man, but he was distinguished, and knew he was considered elegant. In an attempt to compromise comfort with dignity on such a small space, he now leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and touched the tips of his fingers together so that his hands pointed downward in a V. This posture placed the pressure of his entire upper torso on his shoulders and arms and made it a strain to lift his head—or maybe it was simply that he was so very tired that any posture at all would have weighed him down.
Reynolds was an academic man, a professor of Greek and Latin at the local college, and privately an extremely well-read scholar and philosopher. He was a private man. He had devised a life of solitude for himself, a life limited because of complicated philosophical reasons. But in the past week he had been confronted with a personal dilemma of such magnitude that he had had to ask others for help. He had been presented with a crime committed by one of the most outstanding members of his community, and he was being forced by the strength of his own principles into what seemed to him to be an almost violent act. Certainly by calling attention to this crime he was going to violate another person’s life. But he did not see what choice he had.