Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  “Hannah’s my shrink, not my lover.”

  “No thanks to you. If she were queer and willing, you’d have her in the sack in a minute.”

  Caroline considered this remark, unable to deny it. “What do I have with Hannah? One hour a week that costs me thirty-five dollars. Big deal.”

  “But you think about her all the time. It’s practically the same thing.”

  Somehow Diana had turned the tables. They were supposed to be discussing her child bride. “Now you get out of my head.”

  “Can you deny it?”

  Caroline was suddenly sad and exhausted. “I need her. I need someone I can count on.”

  “And you can’t count on me?”

  “You’re off with Suzanne half the time. And when we’re together, you’re usually hating me. Like right now.”

  “You need someone who thinks you’re wonderful? Because you’re paying her to?”

  Caroline squeezed the brown center of the daisy until it fell to pieces on the butcher block table. Abrupdy the image of Hannah shrugging floated into her head. She shrugged and said, “Well, I understand that’s how you see it, Diana.”

  Diana sat with her mouth half open, unable to find anything in Caroline’s statement to refute. “You’ve become so remote since you’ve been in therapy,” she finally said. “Sometimes when we’re together it feels as though you aren’t even here. Maybe I need Suzanne because I can’t get through to you anymore.”

  Again Caroline shrugged. That’s the risk you take if you change: that the people you’ve been involved with won’t like the new you.

  “Well?” said Diana.

  “Well what?”

  “Goddam it, Caroline!” She banged her fist on the table so the dishes clattered. “That just illustrates my point.” She did an exaggerated version of Caroline’s shrug. “Would you please engage with me? At least Suzanne listens to me and takes me seriously.”

  From her months with Hannah, Caroline suspected Diana wasn’t talking to her, she was talking to her own mother. But this wasn’t something you could say to someone else. For one thing, they’d never believe you. Cloying, a taker, remote. It had very little to do with Caroline. She sat in a perplexed silence, unable to think of anything to say. Diana was looking at her expectantly. Now that Caroline knew how to fight on the playground of life, she also knew almost nothing was worth fighting about. But she didn’t know what to do instead, and there was no time to call Hannah and ask. So she stood up and walked toward the stairs.

  “Jesus Christ,” gasped Diana, “you’re just going to get up and walk away in the middle of a discussion?” A plate went sailing like a Frisbee past Caroline’s left ear and crashed into the wall. They both stared at the shards on the floor.

  Diana and Caroline lay on cushions on the hooked rug in each other’s arms, watching the fire flicker in Caroline’s darkened living room. The children were asleep, and the only sound was the snapping and crackling of the flames. They hadn’t spoken for an hour or more. Caroline could scarcely feel her own body, although vivid mental images were flashing through her brain like a returned tourist’s slide show. She was picturing the households she’d been a part of—her parents’ in Brookline, Jackson’s in Newton, David Michael’s in Somerville. In each case, a house filled with people, possessions, furnishings. Different foods had appeared on different types of plates on different styles of tables. She’d called each variation “love,” just as she’d been calling this scene with Diana love. Just as she’d been prepared to call the setup with Brian love. But what she called love wasn’t love—it was survival. Food, shelter, protection, sex, procreation. Hannah suggested love might be what was left after you discarded all that. But what was left? Nothing, as far as she could see.

  She tried erasing from her awareness the cabin, the sleeping kids, the flickering warmth of the fire, the broccoli quiche in her stomach, Diana’s slow-breathing body in its chamois shirt and Levi’s, her own similarly clad body that lay entwined with Diana’s. What was left? Something. If only the clear sharp awareness from which she’d erased everything else.

  Diana stirred in Caroline’s arms, just enough for Caroline to see her face. Her green eyes were wide open, staring into the fire. She’d arrived downstairs an hour earlier, sheepishly bearing a shamrock-shaped cake with green frosting.

  Caroline shifted her hand slightly so it lay on Diana’s full breast, which rose and fell as Diana breathed. No doubt Diana had within herself an area of empty awareness just like Caroline’s. This area in Diana was connected to its counterpart in Caroline at that very moment. They were one, more now than during lovemaking, when physical sensations and sexual fantasies stole the show. This is it, Caroline decided, this current between two patches of empty awareness that made them no longer two. Stop looking for loaves and fishes….

  Diana sat up abruptly, removing Caroline’s hand from her breast. “I can’t go around throwing things at you, Caroline.”

  Caroline sat up. “That was my fault, Diana. I’m sorry. I realized too late I didn’t want to fight, but I didn’t know what to do instead.”

  “I’m sorry too, but we may as well face it: It isn’t working anymore.”

  Caroline shut her eyes, warding off a blow.

  “We’ve got to stop being lovers. If that means one of us moving out, then that’s how it has to be.”

  “But I was feeling so close to you just now.”

  “Me too, and it scares the shit out of me. Every time we get close, one of us lashes out.”

  “But now that we know that, maybe we can stop. Let’s keep trying, Diana.”

  “We’ve tried and tried. I’m sick of trying. I want some peace. I’m too old for all this agony.” She stood up and went to the steps. “We can discuss what to do tomorrow.”

  Caroline lay back down and put her forearm over her eyes as tears seeped between her clenched eyelids. She caused her lover agony. She failed to buy St. Patrick’s Day presents. She picked fights and walked away in the middle of them. She was a horrible person.

  But Hannah saw her as kind and generous, she reminded herself. But she was going to leave Hannah soon.

  She blotted out the whole room, and Diana and Hannah with it, envisioning jungle birds until the ache in her heart subsided enough for her to go to bed.

  • 4 •

  Dressed in wool slacks and a parka, Hannah was walking along the rutted dirt road beyond her house, looking at the night sky over the melting ice on the lake. Thousands of pinpoints of light shone like the reflection of a moonbeam off a new snowfall. Hannah had been entranced with these stars ever since her move to North America. The English cloud cover was usually too thick to allow a child there to develop much interest in stars. But someone must have fostered enthusiasm in her for the broad clear night sky in Australia, because sitting looking up at stars felt familiar.

  She came to a shale beach where she’d often sat with her children, tracing the constellations to help them with scout merit badges. Reading up on the constellations, she first realized what arbitrary configurations they were. The Big Dipper was known elsewhere as the Great Bear. Shepherds in different countries, each Indian tribe, connected the same stars like numbered dots in children’s puzzles to form different pictures—and then concocted stories to explain their inventions. These stories elicited fear, delight, the whole range of emotions.

  She could think about Mona and Nigel, Colin, Maggie, her parents, her grandparents; picture their faces, recall the endearing things they used to do; dwell on the times she’d failed them; and soon feel awful. But she could connect the events in a different pattern and generate different emotions. The underlying reality was those pinpoints of light labeled Nigel, Mona, Maggie, Mummy, Gran, who’d moved into her life for a time, and then moved away. For reasons she didn’t entirely understand but had come to accept.

  In the woods a dog barked, as though it had cornered a porcupine, the sound echoing out across the lake. She only hoped it wasn’t her dog. Pulli
ng the quills out of his nose and mouth was such an ordeal.

  Observing what she’d just done, she realized she didn’t have to dwell on those people who had inspired such joy, exasperation, and anguish in her. She could instead picture a dog bristling with porcupine quills. Or the mocha walnut torte Arthur had baked for supper. When she was intent on mocha walnut torte, it was impossible to feel anything other than greed, impossible to feel the confused welter of warring emotions associated with that platoon of ghosts that marched in hobnail boots around the parade ground of her heart. And once you figured this out, you could erase the whole show, as though the night sky were a giant blackboard covered with the incomprehensible scribblings of an insane scientist. Or you could sit on this rocky lakeshore and wait for dawn, when individual stars would fade in the light from the sun.

  Hannah sat down on a log of driftwood, stretching her legs out in front of her. Her fingers automatically began searching the beach around her for small smooth stones appropriate for skipping. Noticing what she was doing, she folded her hands in her lap. Even if she found any stones, there were no children to hand them to. Dead or grown. Gone.

  Abruptly the night sky over Canada lit up with flares of eerie green. Hannah watched in astonishment as the northern lights throbbed and flickered above the White Mountains, swelling and receding time after time. A Martian light show that shot her sunrise metaphor all to hell. That was the thing that bugged her most about life: You thought you had it figured out, and then you got socked with something you hadn’t bargained on.

  Hannah studied how Caroline was sitting. She no longer perched tentatively on the edge of the tweed couch in her white uniform, a sea gull about to take flight. Nor did she sprawl helplessly, as in her early weeks. She sat squarely today, legs crossed, arms by her sides. But not as though she owned the room, as she had a few times in recent weeks. She looked calm, confident, and a little sad—like someone on the verge of finding the balancing point to her personality.

  Caroline felt Hannah’s eyes on her and wondered what she was seeing. Those sharp blue eyes, which had seemed intrusive on the first visit, still seemed penetrating, but in the kindest possible way. There was almost nothing they hadn’t seen, but very little they condemned.

  “So how are you today?” asked Hannah.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Just okay?” Hannah propped up her stocking feet on the footstool.

  “That’s pretty good, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Considering Diana doesn’t want the sexual part of our relationship anymore. Again. Considering I may have to move out of her house. Considering I have nowhere to go.” Caroline had spent the days since Diana’s pronouncement fluctuating between terror of the unknown and excitement over new possibilities. She finally landed smack in the middle, one canceling out the other, leaving her ready for whatever happened.

  Hannah’s eyes widened with surprise—that Caroline should look so well after sustaining such a body blow, so to speak. “That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? When someone feels powerless in a relationship, he or she cuts off the sex.”

  “Powerless? Diana’s one of the least powerless women I’ve ever known.” That small red-headed frame issued proclamations at a rate even medieval popes would have admired.

  “Apparendy that’s not how she sees herself.” Hannah lit a cigarette.

  “How could Diana feel powerless? It’s her house. She has Suzanne. I’m the powerless one.”

  “Not anymore you aren’t.” Hannah exhaled with a hiss. “You’re a powerful lady now. I’m sorry, but it’s written all over you.”

  Caroline smiled. Praise from Caesar was praise indeed. “But I thought Diana would like me better if I were less of a wimp.”

  “What did she say a long time ago: If you realized what a neat person you were, why would you stay with her? I think you’ve begun to realize it. She’s probably terrified you’ll move on.” Hannah glanced out the window to the lake. There was a broad patch of open water in the middle of the soggy ice.

  “So she moves on before I have a chance to?”

  “Why not? Probably she feels you’ve already moved on. You’re not the same person she fell in love with five years ago, are you?”

  Caroline shook her head no. The woman who’d seduced Diana had been homeless, jobless, disillusioned in love, in despair over the state of the world, friendless in a new place, staggering under the responsibility of two young children. Diana herself had been lovelorn and alone with a child. They’d glued each other back together like cracked teacups. “But I’m so much more fun now,” said Caroline with a smile.

  “Diana’s a nurse. Nurses tend the diseased. Sometimes they don’t know what to make of the healthy. People who don’t need them make them insecure.” Maggie used to insist, “To really help someone, you first have to recover from your own wish to be a helper.” Caroline was looking baffled.

  “So how have you been feeling through all this?” asked Hannah.

  “Not bad. I seem to have lost my taste for suffering.”

  Hannah laughed. “Congratulations.”

  “I know I can find another house. I can find other lovers. Brian Stone wanted me. So did that woman in Boston. I have a job, good friends, nice kids. I feel as though I can cope with whatever I have to.”

  “What would you look for in a new lover?”

  Caroline thought it over as she studied the aerial photo on the wall over the bookcase. She grinned and looked at Hannah. “The first thing I’d look for is a good eye-hand coordination.”

  Hannah gave a startled laugh. She usually got a couple of good laughs out of an hour with Caroline. She’d miss that when Caroline stopped coming. Most sessions in here were as humorless as a Wagnerian opera. But Caroline mostly kept her sense of humor under wraps. Just like her weaving.

  “Hey, how come you never told me you’re a weaver?” asked Hannah.

  Caroline blushed and looked down at her hands. “How do you know that?”

  “I saw your shawls in Cheever’s. They’re gorgeous.” She eyed the bare wall above the couch.

  “Thanks.”

  “But why have you never mentioned it?”

  “It never seemed relevant.”

  “Everything you do is relevant in here. Speaking of power, it’s interesting you never brought up something you’re so good at.”

  “Why is that interesting?”

  “You’ve insisted on portraying yourself as helpless and pathetic. When clearly the opposite is the reality. You’re a fraud, Caroline.”

  Caroline smiled and resumed her study of the aerial photo. All of a sudden the white dropped into the background and out popped a veiled head. “Hey, I just saw that head! It does look like the Virgin Mary.”

  Hannah turned to look at it, cigarette between her lips. “Hmmm yes, it does a bit, I’m afraid.”

  Their eyes met, and they looked at each other with mutual approval for a long time. This is it, thought Caroline, that connection between patches of empty awareness I felt with Diana on my living room floor. She was suddenly afraid. Diana felt it too, and walked out on her. Maybe Hannah was about to clobber her.

  “I thought above love this week,” said Caroline abruptly.

  “Oh yes? Are you for it or against it?” The art of silence was hard to master. Hannah remembered sitting as a small child with the family of an aboriginal playmate in their shack on the sheep station, in utter silence for an hour at a time. Eventually the children ran out to play, but the adults kept sitting, far more connected than people who insisted on discussing their connectedness.

  “That it’s not something you can really talk about.”

  Hannah smiled. “I agree.”

  “Because that interrupts your ability to experience it.”

  Hannah nodded noncommittally.

  “So I have nothing further to say on the topic.” The one additional thing she wished to say—that now that she had some clue what love was, she loved H
annah—she couldn’t. Hannah was always warning that she was looking for a way to get rejected, and she didn’t want to back her into a corner. Hannah was a professional, a plumber of the psyche. She wasn’t there to care about clients, she was there to unclog the backed-up drains of their hearts. Obviously she couldn’t get personally involved with all the people who crawled through her office. But the longing to have her affection remained. As one person to another, not as plumber to sink hole.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Hannah. Caroline’s blue eyes had gone vague and dreamy.

  “Clogged drains.”

  “What?”

  “I’m wondering how I’ll know when this is over.”

  “Probably one morning you’ll wake up and not feel like coming.” Hannah felt a stab of regret, but promptly slipped into her coat of chain mail and grabbed up her shield. Caroline had to go, and Hannah had to help her go.

  Caroline was sure this would never happen. She might not feel like being a client anymore, but she couldn’t imagine not wanting time with Hannah. But she was being unreasonable. That wasn’t the nature of their relationship. “Well, I have a feeling it’s almost over. But I can’t bear it.”

  “So how do you want to phase out?” asked Hannah. “Do you want to come every other week for a while?”

  Caroline was taken aback. She’d only begun thinking about this. She had no idea Hannah would be so eager. Probably Hannah was bored and couldn’t wait to be rid of her. Recognizing her tired old pattern of anticipating rejection, she sidestepped it. “What I’m really trying to say is that I wish I’d met you around town. Because clients have to leave, but friends don’t.”

  They sat inspecting this statement like a meteorite from a distant galaxy. Caroline hadn’t withdrawn or gone numb. She’d stepped forward.

  Caroline felt fear knot her stomach, tense her shoulders, and furrow her forehead. She’d done what she meant not to—shown Hannah her hand. And it contained only hearts, no clubs. Like all the others, Hannah would feel burdened or suffocated, get angry or flee. I know what you want and you can’t have it.