The Urban Fantasy Anthology

by Peter S. ; Peter S. Beagle; Joe R. Lansdale Beagle

  You know that look. You know a snarl when you see it, even if the wife’s too civilized to produce an actual growl.

  You ask Diane about this the following week, while you’re in her garden, admiring her tomato plants. “Why do they hate me?” you ask Diane.

  “Oh, Stella,” she says, and sighs. “You really don’t know, do you?” You shake your head, and she goes on. “They hate you because you’re young and beautiful, even though that’s not your fault. The ones who have to work hate you because you don’t, and the ones who don’t have to work, whose husbands support them, hate you because they’re afraid their husbands will leave them for younger, more beautiful women. Do you understand?”

  You don’t, not really, even though you’re now twenty-eight going on thirty-five. “Their husbands can’t leave them for me,” you tell Diane. “I’m married to Jonathan. I don’t want any of their husbands.” But even as you say it, you know that’s not the point.

  A few weeks later, you learn that the tall blonde’s husband has indeed left her, for an aerobics instructor twenty years his junior. “He showed me a picture,” Jonathan says, laughing. “She’s a big-hair bimbo. She’s not half as beautiful as you are.”

  “What does that have to do with it?” you ask him. You’re angry, and you aren’t sure why. You barely know the blonde, and it’s not as if she’s been nice to you. “His poor wife! That was a terrible thing for him to do!”

  “Of course it was,” Jonathan says soothingly.

  “Would you leave me if I wasn’t beautiful anymore?” you ask him.

  “Nonsense, Stella. You’ll always be beautiful.”

  But that’s when Jonathan’s going on thirty-eight and you’re going on thirty-five. The following year, the balance begins to shift. He’s going on thirty-nine; you’re going on forty-two. You take exquisite care of yourself, and really, you’re as beautiful as ever, but there are a few wrinkles now, and it takes hours of crunches to keep your stomach as flat as it used to be.

  Doing crunches, weeding in the garden, you have plenty of time to think. In a year, two at the most, you’ll be old enough to be Jonathan’s mother, and you’re starting to think he might not like that. And you’ve already gotten wind of catty faculty-wife gossip about how quickly you’re showing your age. The faculty wives see every wrinkle, even through artfully applied cosmetics.

  During that thirty-five to forty-two year, Diane and her husband move away, so now you have no one with whom to discuss your wrinkles or the catty faculty wives. You don’t want to talk to Jonathan about any of it. He still tells you how beautiful you are, and you still have satisfying sportfucks. You don’t want to give him any ideas about declining desirability.

  You do a lot of gardening that year: flowers—especially roses—and herbs, and some tomatoes in honor of Diane, and because Jonathan likes them. Your best times are the two-foot times in the garden and the four-foot times in the forest, and you think it’s no coincidence that both of these involve digging around in the dirt. You write long letters to Diane, on e-mail or, sometimes, when you’re saying something you don’t want Jonathan to find on the computer, on old-fashioned paper. Diane doesn’t have much time to write back, but does send the occasional e-mail note, the even rarer postcard. You read a lot, too, everything you can find: newspapers and novels and political analysis, literary criticism, true crime, ethnographic studies. You startle some of Jonathan’s colleagues by casually dropping odd bits of information about their field, about other fields, about fields they’ve never heard of: forensic geography, agricultural ethics, poststructuralist mining. You think it’s no coincidence that the obscure disciplines you’re most interested in involve digging around in the dirt.

  Some of Jonathan’s colleagues begin to comment not only on your beauty, but on your intelligence. Some of them back away a little bit. Some of the wives, although not many, become a little friendlier, and you start going out to lunch again, although not with anyone you like as much as Diane.

  The following year, the trouble starts. Jonathan’s going on forty; you’re going on forty-nine. You both work out a lot; you both eat right. But Jonathan’s hardly wrinkled at all yet, and your wrinkles are getting harder to hide. Your stomach refuses to stay completely flat no matter how many crunches you do; you’ve developed the merest hint of cottage-cheese thighs. You forego your old look, the slinky, skin-tight look, for long flowing skirts and dresses, accented with plenty of silver. You’re going for exotic, elegant, and you’re getting there just fine; heads still turn to follow you in the supermarket. But the sportfucks are less frequent, and you don’t know how much of this is normal aging and how much is lack of interest on Jonathan’s part. He doesn’t seem quite as enthusiastic as he once did. He no longer brings you herbal tea and hot water bottles during your transitions; the walks in the woods are a little shorter than they used to be, the ball-throwing sessions in the meadows more perfunctory.

  And then one of your new friends, over lunch, asks you tactfully if anything’s wrong, if you’re ill, because, well, you don’t look quite yourself. Even as you assure her that you’re fine, you know she means that you look a lot older than you did last year.

  At home, you try to discuss this with Jonathan. “We knew it would be a problem eventually,” you tell him. “I’m afraid that other people are going to notice, that someone’s going to figure it out—”

  “Stella, sweetheart, no one’s going to figure it out.” He’s annoyed, impatient. “Even if they think you’re aging unusually quickly, they won’t make the leap to Jessie. It’s not in their worldview. It wouldn’t occur to them even if you were aging a hundred years for every one of theirs. They’d just think you had some unfortunate metabolic condition, that’s all.”

  Which, in a manner of speaking, you do. You wince. It’s been five weeks since the last sportfuck. “Does it bother you that I look older?” you ask Jonathan.

  “Of course not, Stella!” But since he rolls his eyes when he says this, you’re not reassured. You can tell from his voice that he doesn’t want to be having this conversation, that he wants to be somewhere else, maybe watching TV. You recognize that tone. You’ve heard Jonathan’s colleagues use it on their wives, usually while staring at you.

  You get through the year. You increase your workout schedule, mine Cosmo for bedroom tricks to pique Jonathan’s flagging interest, consider and reject liposuction for your thighs. You wish you could have a facelift, but the recovery period’s a bit too long, and you’re not sure how it would work with your transitions. You read and read and read, and command an increasingly subtle grasp of the implications of, the interconnections between, different areas of knowledge: ecotourism, Third-World famine relief, art history, automobile design. Your lunchtime conversations become richer, your friendships with the faculty wives more genuine.

  You know that your growing wisdom is the benefit of aging, the compensation for your wrinkles and for your fading—although fading slowly, as yet—beauty.

  You also know that Jonathan didn’t marry you for wisdom.

  And now it’s the following year, the year you’re old enough to be Jonathan’s mother, although an unwed teenage one: you’re going on fifty-six while he’s going on forty-one. Your silver hair’s losing its luster, becoming merely gray. Sportfucks coincide, more or less, with major national holidays. Your thighs begin to jiggle when you walk, so you go ahead and have the liposuction, but Jonathan doesn’t seem to notice anything but the outrageous cost of the procedure.

  You redecorate the house. You take up painting, with enough success to sell some pieces in a local gallery. You start writing a book about gardening as a cure for ecotourism and agricultural abuses, and you negotiate a contract with a prestigious university press. Jonathan doesn’t pay much attention to any of this. You’re starting to think that Jonathan would only pay attention to a full-fledged Lon Chaney imitation, complete with bloody fangs, but if that was ever in your nature, it certainly isn’t now. Jonathan and Martha Ste
wart have civilized you.

  On four legs, you’re still magnificent, eliciting exclamations of wonder from other pet owners when you meet them in the woods. But Jonathan hardly ever plays ball in the meadow with you anymore; sometimes he doesn’t even take you to the forest. Your walks, once measured in hours and miles, now clock in at minutes and suburban blocks. Sometimes Jonathan doesn’t even walk you. Sometimes he just shoos you out into the backyard to do your business. He never cleans up after you, either. You have to do that yourself, scooping old poop after you’ve returned to two legs.

  A few times you yell at Jonathan about this, but he just walks away, even more annoyed than usual. You know you have to do something to remind him that he loves you, or loved you once; you know you have to do something to reinsert yourself into his field of vision. But you can’t imagine what. You’ve already tried everything you can think of.

  There are nights when you cry yourself to sleep. Once, Jonathan would have held you; now he rolls over, turning his back to you, and scoots to the farthest edge of the mattress.

  During that terrible time, the two of you go to a faculty party. There’s a new professor there, a female professor, the first one the Anthropology Department has hired in ten years. She’s in her twenties, with long black hair and perfect skin, and the men cluster around her the way they used to cluster around you.

  Jonathan’s one of them.

  Standing with the other wives, pretending to talk about new films, you watch Jonathan’s face. He’s rapt, attentive, totally focused on the lovely young woman, who’s talking about her research into ritual scarification in New Guinea. You see Jonathan’s eyes stray surreptitiously, when he thinks no one will notice, to her breasts, her thighs, her ass.

  You know Jonathan wants to fuck her. And you know it’s not her fault, any more than it was ever yours. She can’t help being young and pretty. But you hate her anyway. Over the next few days, you discover that what you hate most, hate even more than Jonathan wanting to fuck this young woman, is what your hate is doing to you: to your dreams, to your insides. The hate’s your problem, you know; it’s not Jonathan’s fault, any more than his lust for the young professor is hers. But you can’t seem to get rid of it, and you can sense it making your wrinkles deeper, shriveling you as if you’re a piece of newspaper thrown into a fire.

  You write Diane a long, anguished letter about as much of this as you can safely tell her. Of course, since she hasn’t been around for a few years, she doesn’t know how much older you look, so you simply say that you think Jonathan’s fallen out of love with you since you’re over forty now. You write the letter on paper, and send it through the mail.

  Diane writes back, and not a postcard this time: she sends five single-spaced pages. She says that Jonathan’s probably going through a midlife crisis. She agrees that his treatment of you is, in her words, “barbaric.” “Stella, you’re a beautiful, brilliant, accomplished woman. I’ve never known anyone who’s grown so much, or in such interesting ways, in such a short time. If Jonathan doesn’t appreciate that, then he’s an ass, and maybe it’s time to ask yourself if you’d be happier elsewhere. I hate to recommend divorce, but I also hate to see you suffering so much. The problem, of course, is economic: Can you support yourself if you leave? Is Jonathan likely to be reliable with alimony? At least—small comfort, I know—there are no children who need to be considered in all this. I’m assuming that you’ve already tried couples therapy. If you haven’t, you should.”

  This letter plunges you into despair. No, Jonathan isn’t likely to be reliable with alimony. Jonathan isn’t likely to agree to couples therapy, either. Some of your lunchtime friends have gone that route, and the only way they ever got their husbands into the therapist’s office was by threatening divorce on the spot. If you tried this, it would be a hollow threat. Your unfortunate metabolic condition won’t allow you to hold any kind of normal job, and your writing and painting income won’t support you, and Jonathan knows all that as well as you do. And your continued safety’s in his hands. If he exposed you—

  You shudder. In the old country, the stories ran to peasants with torches. Here, you know, laboratories and scalpels would be more likely. Neither option’s attractive.

  You go to the art museum, because the bright, high, echoing rooms have always made it easier for you to think. You wander among abstract sculpture and impressionist paintings, among still lifes and landscapes, among portraits. One of the portraits is of an old woman. She has white hair and many wrinkles; her shoulders stoop as she pours a cup of tea. The flowers on the china are the same pale, luminous blue as her eyes, which are, you realize, the same blue as your own.

  The painting takes your breath away. This old woman is beautiful. You know the painter, a nineteenth-century English duke, thought so too.

  You know Jonathan wouldn’t.

  You decide, once again, to try to talk to Jonathan. You make him his favorite meal, serve him his favorite wine, wear your most becoming outfit, gray silk with heavy silver jewelry. Your silver hair and blue eyes gleam in the candlelight, and the candlelight, you know, hides your wrinkles.

  This kind of production, at least, Jonathan still notices. When he comes into the dining room for dinner, he looks at you and raises his eyebrows. “What’s the occasion?”

  “The occasion’s that I’m worried,” you tell him. You tell him how much it hurts you when he turns away from your tears. You tell him how much you miss the sportfucks. You tell him that since you clean up his messes more than three weeks out of every month, he can damn well clean up yours when you’re on four legs. And you tell him that if he doesn’t love you anymore, doesn’t want you anymore, you’ll leave. You’ll go back home, to the village on the edge of the forest near an Alp, and try to make a life for yourself.

  “Oh, Stella,” he says. “Of course I still love you!” You can’t tell if he sounds impatient or contrite, and it terrifies you that you might not know the difference. “How could you even think of leaving me? After everything I’ve given you, everything I’ve done for you—”

  “That’s been changing,” you tell him, your throat raw. “The changes are the problem. Jonathan—”

  “I can’t believe you’d try to hurt me like this! I can’t believe—”

  “Jonathan, I’m not trying to hurt you! I’m reacting to the fact that you’re hurting me! Are you going to stop hurting me, or not?”

  He glares at you, pouting, and it strikes you that after all, he’s very young, much younger than you are. “Do you have any idea how ungrateful you’re being? Not many men would put up with a woman like you!”

  “Jonathan!”

  “I mean, do you have any idea how hard it’s been for me? All the secrecy, all the lying, having to walk the damn dog—”

  “You used to enjoy walking the damn dog.” You struggle to control your breathing, struggle not to cry. “All right, look, you’ve made yourself clear. I’ll leave. I’ll go home.”

  “You’ll do no such thing!”

  You close your eyes. “Then what do you want me to do? Stay here, knowing you hate me?”

  “I don’t hate you! You hate me! If you didn’t hate me, you wouldn’t be threatening to leave!” He gets up and throws his napkin down on the table; it lands in the gravy boat. Before leaving the room, he turns and says, “I’m sleeping in the guestroom tonight.”

  “Fine,” you tell him dully. He leaves, and you discover that you’re trembling, shaking the way a terrier would, or a poodle. Not a wolf.

  Well. He’s made himself very plain. You get up, clear away the uneaten dinner you spent all afternoon cooking, and go upstairs to your bedroom. Yours, now: not Jonathan’s anymore. You change into jeans and a sweatshirt. You think about taking a hot bath, because all your bones ache, but if you allow yourself to relax into warm water, you’ll fall apart; you’ll dissolve into tears, and there are things you have to do. Your bones aren’t aching just because your marriage has ended; they’re aching because the
transition is coming up, and you need to make plans before it starts.

  So you go into your study, turn on the computer, call up an Internet travel agency. You book a flight back home for ten days from today, when you’ll definitely be back on two feet again. You charge the ticket to your credit card. The bill will arrive here in another month, but by then you’ll be long gone. Let Jonathan pay it.

  Money. You have to think about how you’ll make money, how much money you’ll take with you—but you can’t think about it now. Booking the flight has hit you like a blow. Tomorrow, when Jonathan’s at work, you’ll call Diane and ask her advice on all of this. You’ll tell her you’re going home. She’ll probably ask you to come stay with her, but you can’t, because of the transitions. Diane, of all the people you know, might understand, but you can’t imagine summoning the energy to explain.

  It takes all the energy you have to get yourself out of the study, back into your bedroom. You cry yourself to sleep, and this time Jonathan’s not even across the mattress from you. You find yourself wondering if you should have handled the dinner conversation differently, if you should have kept yourself from yelling at him about the turds in the yard, if you should have tried to seduce him first, if—

  The ifs could go on forever. You know that. You think about going home. You wonder if you’ll still know anyone there. You realize how much you’ll miss your garden, and you start crying again.

  Tomorrow, first thing, you’ll call Diane.

  But when tomorrow comes, you can barely get out of bed. The transition has arrived early, and it’s a horrible one, the worst ever. You’re in so much pain you can hardly move. You’re in so much pain that you moan aloud, but if Jonathan hears, he doesn’t come in. During the brief pain-free intervals when you can think lucidly, you’re grateful that you booked your flight as soon as you did. And then you realize that the bedroom door is closed, and that Jessie won’t be able to open it herself. You need to get out of bed. You need to open the door.