Hot Flashes

by Raskin, Barbara;

  Max’s monologue has moved me to a pitch of emotion more intense than any I’ve allowed myself to experience in recent years. I feel gratitude toward him for riding the roller coaster of Sukie’s moods for so long, even though he understood so little about them. Still I want to remain wary because I don’t want him to con me. I don’t want to be seduced by any self-congratulatory description of his intense involvement with her.

  “Of course, our sex is a whole other subject. I’ve made it with Sukie when she was stoned, drunk, speeding or high on coke. But this is the truth, she’d never been more turned on than she was that summer. I mean, I’d had twenty years of one-night stands with her because, sexually, she always acted like a stranger with me. But that summer it was different. It was like a second honeymoon or something.

  “Sometimes I thought—or maybe wished is a better word—that she’d had a permanent lover all along. Someone who had been there from the very beginning of our marriage. Because I really wanted there to be a third party—some outside force—that was fucking us up. I wanted there to be some excuse for her weirdness. But if there was, I never found out. In fact, the craziest thing was that I could never guess what Sukie did when I wasn’t there. Maybe she wrote or read or played with the kids. I just never knew. But finally I stopped wondering or worrying about what she did when we were apart and concentrated on trying to figure out what was happening when we were together.

  “Still, she just kept on getting sadder and sadder that summer. And the sadder she got, the tighter the jeans she would wear. Finally she started wearing Carol’s Levi’s, which are size sevens and so small that they irritated the insides of her thighs and she finally got a skin infection. I mean, finding too-small clothes to wear so she could feel fat? Gimme a break.

  “Actually, sometimes I think that one of her basic problems was that she read so goddamn much she started feeling like a fictional character. I mean, Sukie really got hung up on this woman, Marge, in Dog Soldiers. She read that book maybe eleven times. And pretty soon she started to talk like Marge and act like Marge and, excuse me, but she also started to fuck like Marge because I read that goddamn book in self-defense. And who was this Marge? A flake. A complete flake. A junkie. A dodo who pushed dope for her flake of a husband while balling his best buddy. I mean, Marge was a mess. And that’s who Sukie modeled herself after in my bed.”

  Suddenly Max stands up and begins pacing around the room. I do not have to watch where he goes. I know where he is without looking. Because now I have a leash—woven from multicolored emotions—tied around my neck, tethering me to him. Now when Max moves, he takes up the slack and tightens the leash of feeling between us. I am yoked to him by the heat of his white-hot revelations.

  “Diana, Sukie was too much for me. I just couldn’t handle her anymore. I’m fifty now, but even five years ago I was too tired for that sort of shit anymore. I wanted an easier relationship. The kids were older and to tell you the truth, when I met Elizabeth, she seemed irresistible because she was so … easy, so … well, not transparent, but let’s say predictable. I knew what was happening every minute. Or, more important, I knew what was going to happen the next minute. And when she fell in love with me, well, I just couldn’t walk away from that. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t. But I was being buffeted about by enormous waves of contradictory feelings, feelings that Max had both reported and stirred up inside me. Here was a man swimming in an ocean of feelings just as I was splashing about in a sea of separateness.

  After a while Max says, “I know how all of you feel about what I did. And maybe to her friends, Sukie’s behavior was charming. But twenty years of marriage under those conditions was all I could take. I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, and God knows I loved her for a long, long time, but I just couldn’t live with her anymore. Can’t you understand that?”

  Since I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know if she told you, but she started going through her menopause pretty early. Her mother did too; that stuff’s hereditary. But after her mother died, Sukie started getting more and more irregular; she’d skip her period two or three months at a time. She was only forty-four when she first started getting hot flashes. Sometimes, and this is the only thing that makes me feel a little guilty, sometimes I think she got more erratic when her menopause started. And then I feel bad because if her craziness was chemical and not her fault, I should have … Sometimes I think some of her depression might have come from that. But of course she was always a bit off base before then, too.”

  “I get hot flashes all the time now,” I say softly. “They’re awful. No, not really awful. Just awfully upsetting.”

  “Yah … well …”

  He walks to the window and stands, hands in his pants pockets, looking outside for a while. He is breathing heavily, apparently struggling for a full order of air.

  “After she started skipping some of her periods, one night—we’re up in our bedroom—she spills out a box of Tampaxes on the bed and starts ripping the wrappers off all of them saying that she’s going to save them for rolling joints because they’re the sheerest, strongest paper around. Oh, I don’t know.” Max shrugs his shoulders. “Anyway, now she’s dead. I can’t believe it. She was mad in a million ways, but she always loved life. You want to smoke a joint?”

  “Okay.”

  Max always had good dope. The joints were already rolled and lined up like little soldiers inside a carved wooden box on the table beside his stereo. He spends some time looking for a compact disc and finally puts on the Verdi Requiem. We listen to the music and watch the neon sign from Zack’s Bar and Grill across the street flicker on and off like a small-time light show while we smoke our joints.

  For a long while, Max is silent. When he finally speaks again, his voice is muffled by hopelessness.

  “Do you think it’s going to be easy for me to live the rest of my life? I mean, after the turmoil of these days is over, I’ve got to go on living knowing that Sukie died so early, so freakishly, only a few years after we split. Or after I left. However you want me to say it.”

  Now Max begins to cry. He cries in a rather controlled way so that the sobs only seem to accompany his words.

  “Do you think it’s easy for me that Elizabeth moved out and left me just a few weeks before Sukie died? Or that the day after we get to Europe—the first time I was going to be alone with both my kids at the same time in five years—Sukie dies and we have to come back to this havoc here? Don’t you think my life tastes like ashes in my mouth? What makes you think I’ll ever recover from all this? Or if my kids will? They’re going crazy because Sukie died alone when we were all away. And they hadn’t even really recovered from the damn divorce yet. Do you think I like how things turned out? How things are going? What happened to our lives?”

  Then he is swamped by his own cascading cries. His groans begin to crash down upon him like ocean waves, crushing him with their weight.

  I feel his pain and anguish about all that has happened and I am submerged by a groundswell of feeling for him. A surging urge to comfort him, to wrest away his regrets, overwhelms me. I can feel an appeal forming within him and a response shaping itself, of its own volition, within me. I wonder if Sukie would want me to comfort Max.

  After several minutes his cries start to subside.

  “Don’t you think men have feelings?” he asks. “I mean, even if we don’t talk about them all the time or confide in our friends the way women do, don’t you think we feel pain?” Max is looking out the window. “Don’t you think I died a million deaths for not living with David while he was still growing up, for not being with him when he needed me? God,” he groans. “Do you really think I would have left if I could have stayed? Doesn’t twenty years in residence show good faith? Even conceding the advantages men have over women, does that mean we don’t suffer over our family disasters? Aren’t we entitled to some peace and happiness as much as women are? Is
it so wrong to want to make our lives more decent instead of more difficult? Is it so outrageous to want that? Is it wrong to want what we feel we need?”

  I am stoned. I am very stoned.

  I see my past. I see my past like a message scrolling itself across the dark blue canvas sky. At first my past appears distinct and clear, like a fresh message left by a skywriter, but gradually the letters grow larger and more translucent. The puffy white words printed in the sky inflate, dilate, and disappear, leaving only a white smear across the blue. The past prints itself on the present, but fades into oblivion even as I read it.

  This is not good.

  “But you’re fabulous,” Max smiles.

  Turning toward me, he extends his arms in an invitation to lift me out of the deep wicker chair.

  “You’re very special. And very, very beautiful. I can’t understand how we … missed each other.”

  I reach out to grasp his hands and he draws me to my feet so that we are standing face to face.

  “We’re just something that never happened,” I shrug. “We’re like a book we put on reserve and forgot to go back and read. You know, like the classics. Like Dante’s Inferno. I’m saving that for when I have terminal cancer.”

  “I don’t want to wait that long,” Max says.

  The flashing Zack’s sign splashes light across our faces.

  Now there is a very long silence. Somehow, during its duration, I begin to feel forgiven, although I am not certain by whom or for what.

  “It doesn’t necessarily have to be right now,” Max continues, prompting a response I refuse to provide. “Although I do think we might be able to comfort each other.”

  That makes me smile again. My hands feel happily defined by the gentle pressure of Max’s fingers.

  He is watching me, waiting and wanting me to confirm him, to help make some sense out of his experience.

  “Would you want to … stay here tonight?” he asks.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I say. “If I wanted anything, I might want that. But I don’t want much anymore, Max. I have no expectations anymore. I have no needs in regard to anyone else. I’ve simply stopped expecting things.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I shrug, and he laughs softly.

  “You’re stoned,” he smiles. “I think you should stay here. I think we could … comfort each other.”

  “But see? You have some expectations about the end result of our being together—that you’ll find some comfort, or that I will. And as soon as you want or expect something—comfort or love or passion or whatever—you’ve set yourself up to crash. I don’t do that anymore.”

  “I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Never mind.” I smile. “It’s too soon to look for comfort. We’re both too raw.” Then I slip my hands out of his. “Should I call a taxi or can you take me home?”

  “I’ll drive you,” he says wearily.

  We walk back to his car in silence. The stiff, haughty streetlamps bleed light into the darkness. Dupont Circle is a black hole.

  Max drives back to Sukie’s house, but as soon as he double-parks to let me out, I remember I don’t have a key and he has to let me in with the one he’s kept on his keychain for more than five years.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Well. Where have you been?”

  It’s Elaine. She is sitting in the front room without any lights on. I close and lock the front door.

  “You know. We went to look for Jeff,” I say in a matter-of-fact voice that sounds totally false. “But we couldn’t find him.”

  “Hmmmmm. So where were you if you didn’t find him?” Elaine’s voice is hot with hostility. “It’s almost three.”

  I switch on the hall light which marginally illuminates the living room. The sofa has been made up into a bed and Elaine is wearing a nightgown, but she is sitting straight up, clearly wide awake. She has not been sleeping. She is holding an empty glass that makes me wonder if she’s been waiting up for me.

  “Well, we sat in a bar next door to Jeff’s apartment,” I answer. “The bartender there knows Jeff and said he usually comes in on Saturday nights, so we just waited.”

  Not wanting to mention Max’s apartment, I have blundered into a provocative image—of an evening spent drinking in a bar—that sounds even worse. Now it sounds as if Max and I had gone out dancing on Sukie’s grave. The hurt on Elaine’s face makes me flush with shame. There is another long and wretched silence. I don’t know how to prove my innocence without acknowledging her suspicions.

  So, of course, a hot flash begins mobilizing for an attack. It moves rapidly and I can feel the flush start to fuse with the guilty blush already painting my face. For a moment I believe I might just boil over like some soup forgotten in a pot upon the stove. Miserable, I wait.

  “So what’d Max have to say for himself?” Elaine finally asks. “How’s he handling Elizabeth’s split?”

  “Badly.”

  I set my purse on the radiator beside Sukie’s basket of mail, extract my pack of cigarettes, and walk wearily into the living room to sit in the armchair facing the sofa.

  Friendship with Elaine since Nat left her has been difficult for all of us, but it’s too late in life to give up a friend just because there’s a patch of rough times. Sukie was really no easier, just more charming in her anguish and anxiety.

  “Where’s Joanne?” I ask.

  “Sleeping. Mr. Smilow called. He’ll be here tomorrow afternoon.”

  I light a cigarette. Elaine has been drinking. A lot. She is in a stubborn, intoxicated place. Her words are wrapped in cotton. Her eyes are glassy. Her lips have become lax. Everything about her has drooped. This is sad because Elaine was always our sturdy, headstrong old-fashioned headmistress, directing us in all our political endeavors. Now it is she who is in need of some leadership. If reading Sukie’s journal has had any practical value, it must have been to alert us to the many varieties of female depression, which, like Joseph’s coat, has infinite hues and colors. Perhaps Sukie’s journal was preparing me to help Elaine.

  “Why are you so angry?” I ask her in a voice full of curiosity rather than criticism.

  “Why not? Why shouldn’t I be angry is a better question.”

  “But what does it get you?” I keep my voice as gentle as I can.

  “Nothing. Which is what I’ve got anyway. Don’t give me any lectures, Diana. You’re hardly in a position.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m sure you know.”

  “Look, I am not after Max, Elaine. And I would appreciate it if you’d quit giving me the evil eye and watching every move I make. Otherwise we’ll never get through this weekend. Max just talked to me nonstop for three straight hours about what happened between him and Sukie. And I wanted to hear what he said.”

  “You and Max always had an eye for each other.”

  “Oh God.”

  “I’m not saying either of you did anything about it. But all those summers we spent together—everyone saw it. Nobody blamed either one of you. It was just one of those things. Like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward on the same movie set. There’d have to be a click, no? Or even better—Dyan Cannon—that’s who you look like, and someone like …”

  “Did Sukie think that too?” I waver before asking the question, but I want to know the public position on this issue.

  “She never said anything to me, but I assume she saw it. Everyone did.”

  “What was it you saw?”

  “Feelings. Just feelings.”

  I shrug, confident of Sukie’s confidence in me as she’d revealed it in her journal.

  “I bet Sukie never said anything about anything like that.”

  Elaine looks thoughtful. “Actually, she did talk about it once. The summer we went to Bridgehampton. She mentioned something that had passed between you and Max on the beach. She said it was natural, or maybe she said inevitable, that you’d feel … something for each ot
her. She said it was sort of like the rain. It wouldn’t hurt anybody if you didn’t stand around in it and get a chill. Or something like that. To tell you the truth, I think if you and Max were to get together now, Sukie would probably be glad. If it made your life any easier or happier, she wouldn’t mind. She’d be more interested in your happiness than his. And she would have loved it if you’d unseated Elizabeth, if you know what I mean.”

  The shadows erase the lines from Elaine’s face so once again I can see the perky, bright woman I met in 1963 at Sukie’s house—the strong young woman with whom I later collaborated on draft-resistance actions.

  “You want a drink?” Elaine asks.

  “Sure.”

  She disappears toward the kitchen and when she returns hands me a large iced-tea-sized glass, full to the brim with vodka and tonic. I eye the drink warily, but of course start chipping away at it.

  “To be honest, Diana,” Elaine says as she returns to the couch, “I’m in a total panic because now that Sukie’s gone I don’t have a friend in the same boat with me. In the same fix I’m in. This kind of misery doesn’t just love company, it can’t survive without it. The fact that I’m fifty years old and could easily live another twenty-five years just like I’m living now is too much for me to handle.”

  “But why is it so hard for you, Elaine? So many people go through it and come out the other side. Why doesn’t it let up or get any better for you?”

  “I don’t know. But everything Sukie wrote in her journal goes for me too. Only I can’t even write it down. Everything she felt, I still feel. Of course, before today I couldn’t understand why she started feeling better, how she pulled out so far ahead of me in the recovery department. But then this morning, when that guy, when Jeff, walked in, I realized she’d gotten herself a lover and that’s why she started feeling better. That’s why she lost the weight she’d gained and started her life over again. See, even though we talked to each other almost every day, I didn’t understand why she started feeling better when I didn’t. And that wasn’t fair. Maybe it even slowed me down. Oh, I know you’ll say she didn’t want to hurt me by telling me some cute young guy had the hots for her, but it was worse for me not understanding how she could quit drinking—which I still can’t do—and lose all her weight and start looking good again and start getting writing assignments again. And now I find out it was only because she was getting laid.”