Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  “I know. I hardly ever remember you sick. The rest of us would be flat out, and you’d be bringing us trays and reading us stories.” He clutched his glass in both hands on the table in front of him, gazing into the orange and streaky red concoction like Socrates about to quaff hemlock.

  Hannah smiled. He’d been idealizing her since Helena left. Helena was the baddie right now. Mum was the goodie. She was enjoying it, but she knew it would last only until he found another woman, at which point she’d be returned to cold storage, like a mink coat in summer.

  She watched him as he itemized her virtues. He was a member of his own generation. Hers, traumatized by the depression and by Hitler, wanted stability, comfort and security, at whatever cost to spontaneity. His, observing the aridity of most of their parents’ lives, despised all that. They followed their feelings, hence were always in bliss or despair. They didn’t understand that the boring old forms could sometimes carry you through the turmoil and deposit you on the far shores of contentment. Several times in their thirty-eight years together, Arthur had threatened to leave. Because she was bad-tempered before her periods. Because she was a flirt. Because the kids were driving him nuts. Several times she had threatened to leave. Because he was gone too much. Because she didn’t know whom he was sleeping with all those lonely nights in strange cities. Because she was tired of washing his socks, or looking at his unshaven face across the breakfast table on weekends. Each time, their tangled web of property, responsibility, shared social life, and mutual concern seemed too complicated to unravel, and they stuck it out. Until here they were, closing in on old age, more in love than even during those first besotted days in the sleigh bed overlooking the Heath. To have been through life with someone, to know all his flaws and failings and he yours, to have done every awful thing two people can do to each other, yet still to be together—it was a pleasure unsurpassed in Hannah’s experience. More subtle than those first furious fucks, it sometimes took her breath away just to look at Arthur in the lamplight as he read his Wall Street Journal, wearing his moth-eaten green Mr. Chips sweater, and to realize what they’d achieved—a lifelong love, like they touted in the National Enquirer: “High School Lovebirds Still Cooing After Ninety-four Years.”

  Back at her office, Hannah discovered Mary Beth in her ruffled blouse and Mao slippers sitting rigidly on the tweed couch, which she and Arthur had rearranged the day before so Hannah could have her lake view.

  “Are you okay?” asked Hannah, removing her cape, not wanting to hear about it if the answer was no. “I’m not sure.

  “What’s the problem?” There was something demoralizing about therapizing a therapist. If your techniques didn’t work for you, why should they for anyone else?

  “A client just asked me to go to bed with him. When I said no, he called me the worst names you’ve ever heard and marched out.”

  “What’s so terrible about that?” She reminded herself of all the times she went running to Maggie in her early years doing therapy.

  Mary Beth looked at her with surprise. “I must have been leading him on. Or maybe I didn’t handle his advances correctly.”

  “It sounds to me as though you did fine. Either he’ll be back, or he won’t. Look, I think you’re taking this too seriously, Mary Beth. All you are is a technician. You find out what patterns got set up in infancy, and then you try to point out their recurrence.”

  Mary Beth nodded impatiently, as though she knew all that. But clearly she didn’t, or she wouldn’t be so upset. Hannah recalled the constant anxiety and sense of responsibility she used to feel. Life had gotten easier once she finally realized there was a limit to her power either to help or to hurt. A therapist was, at best, a placebo. This recognition came after a client in a deep depression took a bottle of sleeping pills and climbed into his freezer. She went wailing to Maggie in her office at the university about how it was all her fault. Maggie put on her glasses, looked up from some papers on her desk, and snapped, “Where do you get off, Hannah? Whose life was it? Not yours. It was his, to do with as he had to. It’s a tragedy, but his, not yours. So stop feeling sorry for yourself.” The unexpectedness of Maggie’s responses always fascinated Hannah. Looking at her wrinkles and gray hair, you expected kindness. You usually got instead exactly what you needed.

  The receptionist buzzed. Caroline had arrived. As Mary Beth stood up and limped to the door, Hannah said kindly, “Don’t take the full weight of human misery on your shoulders all at once, Mary Beth. It’ll snap your spine.”

  Caroline did a double take as she walked into Hannah’s office. The desk and chair had switched places with the couch.

  “I’ve been looking at the parking lot for fifteen years,” Hannah explained. “I finally got sick of it.”

  “But I liked looking at the lake.” Caroline tossed her navy blue parka onto the couch.

  “It is nice,” said Hannah, glancing out the window to the vast silver expanse of frozen lake. All morning clients had been freaking out over the new arrangement. They were in such flux that she and her setting were supposed to remain static. But they’d recover, and she’d have her nice new view.

  Caroline was circling the office in her white uniform, like a Samoyed unable to lie down. “I can see it’s upset you,” said Hannah. Caroline could do without total predictability from her now. Getting her to accept this would be part of the Great Disillusionment.

  “I’d rather look at the lake.”

  “Give me a break. I like the lake too. And I’m stuck here all day.” Caroline expressing a preference rather than enduring stoically. Hannah was delighted.

  Caroline listened to herself complain with astonishment. “Well, it is your office.” Hell, she was lucky to have a sofa to sit on, and the leisure to do so. What did the view matter? Sitting on the couch, she glanced all around. Out the window opposite her was a grimy bank of plowed snow and several parked cars. “Jesus, I can see why you wanted to switch.”

  Hannah smiled. “What have you been up to?”

  “I was just having lunch with a friend at Maude’s. There was this really old lady, eighty-five or ninety, staring at herself in the rest room mirror. She looked at me and said, ‘You know, when I look in a mirror, I get scared. Sometimes I wonder what it’s all for.’”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Don’t look in mirrors, then.’”

  They laughed.

  “Is that something you think about?” asked Hannah. “What it’s all for?”

  “Sure I think about it.” A car out the window had a bumper sticker that read, “Eat More Lamb. 50,000 Coyotes Can’t Be Wrong.” Maybe this new view wouldn’t be so dreary after all. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “You’d be surprised.” She herself was amazed by the number of clients who assumed the purpose of their lives was to pay off their mortgage. “What are your conclusions?”

  “If there’s a God, He’s wacko.”

  “And we’re here because of some complicated chemical accident?” Having eaten a fruit salad at lunch with Simon, Hannah knew there was a God. It would take a genius like God to invent the strawberry.

  “Right. Because otherwise you have to see God as a sadist.” What was this, therapy or Sunday school?

  “You do?”

  “How else are you going to account for all the brutality and suffering in the world?”

  “How are you going to account for that pileated woodpecker last month?” Or this incredible lake, Hannah added privately, not wishing to rub it in. She squinted slightly from the glare off the ice.

  Caroline smiled, pleased Hannah should remember something she’d said so long ago. “I saw it again this weekend. It climbed a tree outside my window while I was lying in bed.”

  “Oh yes? So how do you account for its existence in such a dreadful world?”

  “An apparatus evolved to keep down insects.”

  Hannah smiled. “Why do we need hundreds of varieties?”

  “For the hundreds of var
ieties of insects.”

  “What I can’t figure out,” said Hannah, lighting a brown cigarette, “is why, if you hate this world so much, you don’t just shut up about it. Instead, you dwell on its horrors in such loving detail.”

  “I’m stuck here, aren’t I?”

  “No. As usual, it’s your choice.”

  “You mean suicide? I tried that once.” She crossed her legs and put clasped hands around her knee.

  “Oh yes?”

  “I was married to that doctor in Newton. Jackson. I turned on the gas oven and stuck my head in. It was so dirty I decided to clean it first. By the time I finished, the boys were awake from their naps.”

  Hannah smiled. “Is that really true? Or are you trying to amuse me again?”

  Caroline grinned. “You’ll never know, will you?”

  Hannah shrugged. “If you won’t let me do my job, don’t be surprised when it doesn’t get done.” She thought about her own failed suicide. A couple of months after the children died, she walked off across the frozen lake, leaving Arthur a good-bye note. After a couple of hours shivering beside a snow drift, when he hadn’t arrived to talk her out of it, she trudged home. Arthur was watching the news, while Simon, Joanna, and the dog staged a loud argument in the playroom. The note still sat propped against a Gordon’s gin bottle in the pine dry sink. He hadn’t seen it because he hadn’t had a drink. She handed it to him. He read it and looked at her. “I would have come after you,” he said. She shrugged, fixed martinis, and put another log on the fire.

  Caroline was indignant. Why did Hannah so consistently refuse to be entertained by her? She sighed and began talking: “I just couldn’t take it anymore. The boys were little, and Jackson was always at the hospital. I didn’t have many friends or interests. I’d quit my job at Mass General. My sole purpose in life was to help Jackson save the world.”

  “Sound familiar?”

  Caroline hesitated. “My parents, you mean?’ She remembered waiting for them to get home at night, just as she had for Jackson. Running their baths, rubbing their temples, bringing them tea. Just as she had for Jackson. She was a fucking automaton.

  “So go on. Why did you decide to kill yourself?” Shit, a hot flash was about to hit her. It licked across her body like a grass fire. She trembled with the effort of sitting still as sweat trickled down her chest. The room wavered and receded.

  “…I used to listen to call-in talk shows on WBZ for company,” Caroline was saying. Was she being polite, Hannah wondered, or did she not notice that her therapist was sitting in a puddle of sweat? Usually clients were too caught up in their own inner dramas to notice if she did a handstand on the desk. Her face must be bright red.

  “…on this particular day they were discussing office sex. I started wondering if Jackson was getting any on the side with the nurses. It happened all the time at Mass General. It was how he and I had gotten together—those late nights relieving human suffering. So I wondered if that was why he was hardly ever home. This minister phoned in to say he wanted to swing, but his wife wasn’t into it, and would it be sinful to do it on the sly. Then the program ended and the news came on. About our tanks rolling into Cambodia, and the slaughter and famine. I had a moment of clarity: There I was in this huge neo-Tudor house, surrounded by all the luxuries I spent my days buying and maintaining, worrying about my husband having affairs—while much of the world was starving and homeless. I walked over to a window that looked out on a marble bird bath. The drapes were crewelwork, handmade in India. I took the edge of a curtain in my fingers and examined all those tiny stitches and realized that some starving woman probably went blind doing them for a few cents an hour. And people came into my house and exclaimed over how beautiful they were. I knew I’d sold out. I did examine the oven, but the boys woke up from their naps.” She didn’t add that this was when she took up weaving, as a form of penance. She enrolled in a course at a crafts school, intending to weave blankets for the Salvation Army. But her teacher entered her work in a craft show without telling her, and she won second place. Everything she made someone wanted to buy. And once she left Jackson, she needed the money. She enjoyed weaving, so that even her attempt at penance turned into a sellout.

  “Did you tell Jackson how unhappy you were?” asked Hannah, feeling chilled and clammy.

  “I tried to. He told me I was too intense, and what about all the patients at the hospital with real problems.”

  “Remember the trips to the Salvation Army? Remember Jason at Christmas?” Hannah removed her jacket, hoping her shirt would dry out.

  Caroline squeezed the bridge of her nose, marveling at Hannah’s memory. She looked up. “And you think we’re not just machines that go round and round?”

  “There can be more to us than that. Are you sure it’s just the Third World that suffers and hungers?”

  They sat in silence for a long time, Caroline studying the tire tracks across the dusting of new snow in the parking lot. Randy Eliot would probably be able to identify the tire brands. She and Brian had had dinner with Randy and Connie a couple of nights ago in their house overlooking Lake Glass. Caroline decided she liked them, despite their passion to know the cost of every object under discussion.

  “There’s a school vacation next week, isn’t there?” asked Hannah, taking out her appointment book. “Are you and your sons going somewhere?”

  “I’m driving them to Newton to stay with their father for the week.”

  “Do they get along with him?” Opening the book, she looked for an empty slot for next week.

  “They idolize him. But he’s very busy and doesn’t have much time for them. They usually come home angry and disappointed.”

  “It’s sad what some parents do to distance themselves from their children.”

  Caroline examined this remark. It was true: Just because Jackson claimed he was hostage to his patients’ needs didn’t make it so. Did that go for her parents too?

  “What is Jackson’s mother like?” asked Hannah.

  “She’s a bat out of hell. Nothing he does is ever right. She adores peach ice cream, and I remember one time when we went to visit her in Springfield, Jackson bought several quarts of the stuff from this really fancy place in Boston and packed it in dry ice in a cooler. She took a spoonful of it and announced, ‘This is disgusting, Jackson. The peaches are icy.’ I wanted to dump the rest of it on her head.”

  “So can you see why he’s frightened of closeness with people, and why he stayed away from you and the boys?”

  “What?”

  “We’re all operating from scripts written for us when we were infants. Most of the time we have no idea what other people are really like. You, me, Jackson. We have to treat each other with kindness because we’re all laboring under similar disabilities.”

  Caroline studied Hannah in her shirt sleeves, pen poised over her appointment book. She was admitting to disabilities. Caroline didn’t want to know about them. How come her hair looked damp? “Mr. Right and I went to the Converse Inn Saturday night. I saw you there.”

  “Oh yes? I didn’t see you. It’s a nice place, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Was that your husband?”

  “Arthur. Yes.” She ran the fingers of one hand through her hair, fluffing it up so it would dry faster.

  “He looks nice.”

  “He is nice.”

  “I’m thinking about trying to make this thing with Brian Stone work.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Yeah. Life seems simpler with a man. He throws the spears, and I gather the roots and berries.”

  Hannah smiled.

  “Besides, my friends have started calling me Saint Celibate. I think it’s a bit much.”

  Hannah knew she shouldn’t let Caroline get away with joking her way out of this one. But the hour was over, and Hannah was drained from the hot flash. Next week she’d put up more of a struggle. “Whatever you want, Caroline.” She waved her pen hand, wondering if she actually felt as noncommittal as
she sounded. Caroline would probably have an easier row to hoe if she could be respectable. But Brian Stone was Daddy and Jackson all over again. Picking him as a partner was like picking Zsa Zsa Gabor as your marriage counselor.

  Twisting the claw off her boiled lobster, Hannah looked out the restaurant window to the ocean, which swelled and surged around weathered wooden posts the size of elephant legs.

  “The only place I like better than Lake Glass,” she told Arthur, “is right here.”

  “Oh? Why the obsession with water, I wonder?” They both wore plastic bibs with drawings of red lobsters on them.

  “Probably that’s what growing up in the Outback does to you. Like the Arabs’ fascination with flowing fountains.”

  “I remember when you arrived in Georgetown from London,” said Arthur, probing a claw with a silver nut pick. “You acted as though you’d never seen the sun. Every time it came out you raced into the backyard and just lay there. I started thinking I’d married a lizard.”

  Hannah smiled.

  As she dipped a chunk of lobster in melted lemon butter, it hit her: Wasn’t that what her clients did? Overcompensated for whatever they lacked as children? Pursued partners of the same sex as whichever parent had been least available? She began running through client histories in her head. Fathers were hardly every available. Maybe that was why so many women were heterosexual, and so many men closet homosexuals.

  “A penny for your thought,” said Arthur as he split open his lobster tail.

  “I don’t have this one together yet.” She was chewing on a tiny lobster leg, knowing it was okay to continue this train of thought in silence. After all these years, words between them had become unimportant. Each could gauge the other’s mood by the faintest twitch. And when one spoke, it was often the words the other was thinking.

  Every few years the hundreds of hours of information from clients would rearrange itself into a pattern she’d never seen before, like the shifting of a kaleidoscope. Lifeless textbook theories with which she nodded in intellectual agreement in graduate school would suddenly take on vivid new life, clothed with her clients’ experiences. This could happen at any time—during therapy, but more often while grocery shopping, or while dipping lobster in melted butter by the Maine coast. It felt like what she once observed on Lake Glass: During a spring thaw the ice broke up all at once with a thunderous crack, chunks sailing high into the sky.