Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  Brian smiled. “Your marriage wasn’t much fun, I gather?” “When we were dating, it was daffodils and chocolate ice cream sodas, the Boston Symphony, Jimmy’s Harborside, weekends of passion in Hyannis. We read Emerson and Thoreau and discussed them, listened to Bach fugues together. But after we married, that man vanished. Jackson became a phantom. I went to sleep alone and I woke up alone. The only way I’d know he’d been there was from the pile of dirty clothes on the floor. I felt like a piece of furniture. I couldn’t figure out where I’d gone wrong. I cooked well, kept the house neat and comfortable, ironed his shirts the way he liked, polished his shoes, made love whenever he wanted. Dressed carefully, exercised at a figure salon, rinsed with Scope. It was almost as though Jackson wanted to outfit a house with wife, children, and accessories, so he could move on to his next project.”

  “What was that?”

  “I have no idea. I never saw the man.” Her appetite had departed. She poked listlessly at her roast beef.

  “I wonder if Irene would say the same thing.” Brian rested his elbow on the table and his chin on his fist.

  “Is that what your marriage was like?”

  “I never thought about it that way before, but maybe it was. Maybe that’s just how marriage is.”

  “Maybe so,” said Caroline, thinking about Hannah and her husband.

  “But maybe it doesn’t have to be.” Brian inspected her like a broker eyeing the Dow after the crash.

  Back at the cabin, Suzanne’s Toyota was in the driveway, along with Caroline’s Subaru and Diana’s Chevette.

  “Looks like a used car lot,” said Brian, sitting with his gloved hands on the wheel and the motor running, waiting to be asked in.

  Caroline considered it, because if he accepted, he might end up staying the night. But revenge against Diana didn’t seem a worthy motive for such a serious move. It wouldn’t be fair to Brian, and she found she was starting to care about his well-being. “I’d ask you in,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s a very good idea right now.”

  “I understand,” he said, taking her hand. “You need more time. And so do I probably.” Holding her face in both hands, he kissed her.

  It might work, her heart whispered as she kissed him back. If I can’t have Hannah, maybe I can be Hannah….

  More giggling cascaded down from upstairs. As Caroline gazed past her loom to the bright blue sky outside the window, she realized her ode to waking up alone was sour grapes. There was nothing to equal the pleasure of looking in the early morning light at the sleeping face of someone you cherished. She remembered her feeling of bemused wonder the first time this happened for her—with Jackson in his Back Bay apartment. She sat up and leaned on her elbow, studying his stubbly jaw, dark tousled head, and curly chest hair. Reaching out her fingertips, she touched his lips, firm and smooth. He smiled without opening his eyes and caressed her fingertips with the tip of his tongue.

  Then his pager went off. He jumped up and raced to the hospital, leaving her to change the stained sheets in a haze of purpose and well-being. She’d marry him, bear his babies, devote her life to making his home a haven of comfort, to which he could return from his missions of mercy. Arlene, who had vanished from her life a few months earlier, on a trolley without a backward glance, had been mistaken. Caroline’s mission was to facilitate Jackson’s. She’d be Miss Kitty to Jackson’s Matt Dillon.

  There’d been boyfriends before Jackson, though none with whom she’d seen in the dawn. Kevin in high school, with whom she groped in the RKO and behind the Stop ’n Shop. At nursing school she dated a Harvard man named Ned Rollins III, whom she met at a mixer. One night he took her up to his rooms in Adams House. All she wanted was to roll around with him on his sitting room carpet. But he insisted she read John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” Then they discussed how everyone was entitled to pursue his own pleasure so long as it didn’t harm other people. On subsequent nights, as snow piled up outside, he had her read Malthus, D. H. Lawrence, and Simone de Beauvoir. After several tedious weeks they finally rolled around on the carpet. And when she persuaded him to relieve her of her virginity, he attributed her enthusiasm to the framework of emancipated ideas erected by his reading list. For her part, she first understood the world population crisis that her parents had explained at the dinner table for years: a regrettable by-product of an act that yielded more pleasure than any other she’d yet discovered.

  Lying on her bed listening to Diana and Suzanne giggle, Caroline examined the new shawl on her loom. Inspired by the blue and purple

  Lake Glass shawl, which now hung on the wall above the loom, she had started a second shawl based on the view out her window of the winter sunset over Lake Glass. It featured strips of oranges, purples, and reds, which faded into each other on a tie-dyed warp. In the past she’d worked mostly with earth tones. These new colors were so bright she sometimes had to stop work sooner than usual to rest her outraged eyes.

  Maybe she’d give this new shawl to Hannah. No, wrong. She wasn’t supposed to bring Hannah presents. Hannah wouldn’t be impressed in any case. She spent her days saving people from suicide. Handicrafts would strike her as trivial.

  Love. Was she in love with Hannah, Diana asked. Probably. Marsha, Rorkie, Arlene, Rollins, Jackson, David Michael—she’d been in love with them all. With every breath, she’d sighed the name of whoever was current. Sometimes she lost track and sighed the wrong name. With each one she’d known it was always and forever. Until here she was now with an entire chorus line preserved in the wax museum of her memory. Why hadn’t these loves lasted? Hannah and her husband had been together since the Gold Rush. She pictured Hannah smiling into her husband’s eyes at the restaurant last night, poking him playfully with her elbow. But everyone had problems. But maybe not Hannah. She seemed so together. Despite her children’s deaths.

  Maybe she and Brian could make it work too. But it never had for her before. There must be something wrong with her. She began itemizing her failings. She hadn’t scrubbed the grouting between the bathroom tiles when she lived with Jackson. She wanted too much sex from David Michael. Or too little? Too much with him, too little with Rollins? Or the other way around? What was the point of all that passion and pain, all those pledges and promises, if now she couldn’t even recall what she’d promised to whom? That was how it would be soon with Diana. And no doubt with Brian if they continued. Pointless. It was all pointless. She was alone, always had been, always would be. Companionship was a mirage. The reality was this gnawing loneliness. Why pretend otherwise?

  Upstairs Suzanne and Diana shrieked with laughter. No doubt they were wrestling naked in bed, as Diana and she used to, the covers tangled and pillows heaved around the room. Caroline had woven the spread on Diana’s bed—two interlocking female symbols with happy faces. It had taken weeks. She wanted to stomp upstairs and grab it off the bed, and the Eden tapestry off the wall above the living room couch.

  Caroline wrapped her arms around her pillow and rocked side to side, thinking about the bottles of pills on her closet shelf. Jackie and Jason were almost teenagers. They wouldn’t miss her as much now as when they were toddlers….

  A feathered red head appeared outside Caroline’s window. It was attached to a long black and white body that marched up the gnarled locust trunk like an Alpine climber with a red felt hat. Halfway up the window it stopped, studied the bark, and began drumming, its head vibrating like a jackhammer. Caroline watched in amazement as wood chips flew in all directions.

  • 3 •

  While Hannah waited for a prescription for Arthur’s strep throat in the mall drugstore, she took off the rack a paperback murder mystery called Never Say Die. After reading the first several pages, she guessed the adopted son had done it, then read the ending. She was correct. She replaced the book and picked up another. She couldn’t bear to read one the whole way through because she hated suspense. Real life involved more suspense than she could handle. Would Erwin the banker rape his son again th
is week? How would Caroline engineer the attempted rejection?

  She glanced around the brightly lit store, where several ordinary-looking people in winter clothing browsed through greeting cards, magazines, and toiletries, also waiting for prescriptions. Ordinary-looking, just like the people who walked into her office. And like them, everybody in the store had geysers of untapped fury and “perversity” beneath a bland exterior. Just like in the mystery novels, any character in this place was capable of a murder, including herself. Today she felt this so vividly it was tempting to stay under the bedcovers with poor Arthur, who was huddled in a heap of misery, unable to speak or swallow with his raw throat.

  As she picked up a National Enquirer with Dolly Parton’s picture on the front and began to read an article entitled “Is Your Pet a Space Alien?” the four walls of the store seemed to cave in all at once. She felt trapped in a shrinking room, like a James Bond character. She paid the clerk behind the cash register for the Enquirer, and hurried out the door into the parking lot. Taking several deep breaths, she leaned against the brick of the storefront, fanning herself with the tabloid. Menopause was such a treat. Who would wish a body on anyone? She unhooked her Berber cape, which Maggie had brought her from North Africa, and folded it across one arm.

  As her claustrophobia receded, Hannah breathed deeply and opened the Enquirer to an article headlined “Cheerleading Pyramid Attacked by Swarm of Killer Bees.” Reading it, she reflected it was a wonder anyone lived long enough to go through menopause.

  Returning to her post near the prescription counter, Hannah ran through her clients for that afternoon. Caroline was scheduled for right after lunch. What would go on today, Hannah wondered. How Caroline tried to win over a parent figure was becoming clearer, from hearing about that nursing teacher and from observing her behavior toward Hannah. She turned herself into a servant, did nice things, admired one, agreed with one. It was most seductive. Face it, my friend: You adore being adored. If only Hannah wasn’t aware that, like all slaves, Caroline had swallowed so much resentment that it seeped out her pores. But how she’d try to get Hannah to reject her remained opaque.

  The pharmacist called her name. As she wrote a check, she decided when someone asked what her therapeutic orientation was, she ought to claim membership in the Drugstore Murder Mystery School. She conducted therapy like that game her children played on cold winter evenings on the carpet in front of the fireplace—Clue, in which they guessed from assembled evidence who’d committed the murder, where, and with what instrument.

  Driving downtown through heavy traffic to meet Simon for lunch, Hannah thought for the first time in years about Mrs. Abner, the housemother at her Sussex boarding school. Her grandmother deposited her in the neo-Gothic dormitory amid a horde of frightened adolescents, with a perfunctory hug and a “Chin up, then.” Hannah took one look at Mrs. Abner’s white head and knew they were pals. Mrs. Abner, a cameo brooch at the throat of her high-necked silk dress, was aloof, just like her grandmother. The other girls were terrified of her sharp tongue and fought over who had to sit at her table at meals, but Hannah adored her. She knew Mrs. Abner, for all her brisk efficiency, was watching over her.

  This myth wasn’t dispelled until one afternoon a couple of years later during room inspection. Hannah had brought her mother’s bark painting from Hampstead and kept it in her closet, bringing it out when she was homesick. That afternoon she forgot to put it back. It sat on her oak desk.

  Mrs. Abner looked at it, white eyebrows raised. “This is the most barbaric object I’ve ever seen.”

  “It’s not barbaric,” said Hannah. “It’s Australian.”

  Mrs. Abner’s eyebrows fluttered. “And are you Australian, young lady?”

  “Yes, I am.” She thought Mrs. Abner knew this about her, knew everything about her.

  “And how would you like to go back to Australia?”

  Hannah looked down.

  “This room is frightful,” Mrs. Abner said. “We’ve never had a colonial who knew how to keep a decent room. It must be those mud huts you’re reared in.”

  Hannah clenched the muscle in her jaw.

  “No pudding at dinner until you attain the level of personal civilization befitting a British subject. And do get rid of that ghastly object, won’t you, dear?”

  Overnight Hannah went from adoring the woman to loathing her. No months of silent agony outside Mrs. Abner’s office window for her. Deserted by her parents at an early age, she’d learned to cut people off abruptly. She began to look at “British civilization” with an eye too jaundiced for her years. Was it civilized to call other people’s paintings barbaric? Was it civilized to send children off to boarding schools run by witches? She lay on her narrow lumpy bed and reflected on what she’d observed about British civilization through her neighbors’ windows from their mossy Hampstead garden walls. The Honourable Montgomery James drank sherry every afternoon until he passed out on his Oriental carpet. Sir Freddie Munson, who yelled at her for bouncing her ball against his garage door during rounders, had a retarded daughter who took tradesmen into the back shed when they made deliveries. Lady Austin-Stanforth masturbated with an ivory candle from the ornate silver candelabra on her mahogany Sheraton dining table. Once she caught Hannah watching her. She went to Hannah’s grandmother and accused Hannah of stealing jewelry from her au pair. In Hampstead and Sussex Hannah first learned to ignore what people said about themselves, and to watch how they behaved instead.

  Mrs. Abner and Hannah’s boarding school chums knew when during a meal to use their fish knives. They knew where a china underliner went when setting a table. Hannah didn’t know these things because she refused to pay attention when her grandmother tried to teach her. They were civilized, she was barbaric. So be it. She hung her bark painting on the wall of her room. And when she sat at Mrs. Abner’s table, she blew her nose into the linen napkin. She began sneaking out to the gardener’s shed late at night to meet a boy from the kitchen named Colin, who was unconcerned with the proper placement of fish knives. Colin, fair-haired and pale-skinned, had grown up in the East End of London and had come to Sussex to study furniture making, thanks to the largesse of a trustee of the boarding school, for whom Colin’s parents worked as servants. Once Hannah and Colin worked their way up to intercourse, they’d go at it for hours on the stone floor among the rakes and hoes. Until Colin would gasp, “Bloody hell, luv, I just can’t do it anymore, can I?” He made her a beautiful walnut table clock which she kept on the desk in her dormitory room and dusted daily.

  Climbing to the second-floor restaurant Simon had selected, a Swedish smorgasbord place above the main shopping street, Hannah was gripped with a sudden fear of tumbling backwards down the steps. She steadied herself with a hand on either wall, reminding herself that it was “only” menopause. Simon was seated under a hanging spider plant sipping a tequila sunrise. Normally fastidious, he was looking unshaven and unkempt, his blond hair out of place and the vest of his three-piece suit unbuttoned. His wife, Helena, had left him for another man. Hannah studied him sympathetically as she sat down. Bossy little boy and belligerent teenager, he was unaccustomed to not having his own way. Presumably he had to get himself humbled at some point, for the good of his soul, but it was still painful to watch if he’d been your baby. She remembered his agony as a little boy when she’d wash his blanket, how he’d stand anxiously by the machine throughout the cycle sucking a thumb. Once as she passed the blanket through the wringer, he became so distressed at the pain he assumed his blanket was experiencing that he tried to rescue it—and ran his own arm through the wringer by mistake.

  When Helena left, Hannah tried to figure out how it was her own fault. She’d married a man who’d died in battle when Simon was barely a year old. She’d followed another man across the Atlantic with Simon in tow. He’d lost a brother and sister, and nearly his own life. He’d had his share of upheaval and insecurity. But who hadn’t? There was no way to protect your children from the agony of loss,
however much you might wish to.

  “So how’s it going?” she asked, glancing at the drink list. The only thing that helped when her hormones were bullying her was gin, but too much gin gave her bad dreams and anxiety attacks in the middle of the night.

  “Fine,” he said curtly, tossing his head to get the blond hair out of his eyes. He was blessed with the stiff upper lip of both British parents, poor guy. But he’d called her more often since Helena left, set up lunch dates, come to the house for dinner, bringing his laundry.

  The waiter appeared, and Hannah ordered gin on the rocks. “So what’s new? Or rather who’s new?”

  He gave a pained smile. “Nothing and nobody, Mother.” His eyes were slightly bloodshot.

  She patted his hand. “Courage, my boy. This too shall pass.” She couldn’t think how to help him. Maybe you couldn’t detach until you had the perspective only fifty years of watching love affairs, marriages, and divorces could give: that there was life beyond “lurve,” as an embittered client called it. Once during her own therapy, at a time when she was furious with Arthur for being away the night of the accident, she described to Maggie the flirtation she was conducting with Allen Sullivan, presumably to punish Arthur.

  Maggie looked at her coolly from her wing chair beside a potted bay laurel tree and replied, “I’m an old woman now, and I have more important things to think about than whether Hannah Burke is going to seduce her husband’s best friend. And so should you, my dear.”

  Simon was looking irritated. “I said I was fine.”

  Hannah nodded. She should mind her own business. “Well, Arthur’s not. He has a strep throat.”

  “What a drag. Watch out you don’t get it.”

  “I’m a war horse.” She sipped her gin, hoping to fend off the sensation that the walls were closing in again.