Jenny and the Jaws of Life

by Jincy Willett

  But of course it wasn’t a mistake after all, as Hannah made clear on the next dinner date, and then she dropped in at the store, chatted with Cosmo, came into my office, closed the door, said “You’re in heat, David Swallow,” and smiled like a panther, if panthers could smile. She was sexy, and extremely alarming. I said, which sounded stupid even to me, “Men don’t go into heat, do they?” and she said, “Then I guess it must be me.”

  Considering this steamy beginning, we didn’t do much for a long time. We met for lunch in a lot of Polynesian restaurants. We talked and talked about Barbara and Cosmo, how much I loved Cosmo, how “fond” she was of Barbara. Hannah did most of the talking. “We must content ourselves with fantasy, David Swallow.” We drank a lot, especially me. It was the only way I could stand all the gassing, which was Hannah’s idea. I’d reel back to the store at two or three in the afternoon, and there stood Cosmo, happily greeting old customers, who really were like friends to him—loyalty means everything to Cosmo; or handing some pretentious couple a line about how he’d never cook with a Bordeaux that wasn’t a classified growth. There he stood, trusting and content, and no alcoholic blur could mask his martyr’s halo.

  We stopped being discreet, if getting blotto three times a week in public in a small city is your idea of discreet. We started, when the four of us were together, eyeing each other over the heads of the poor saps we were married to; we met in pantries and briefly in the bedrooms abandoned by my sons, and once in the Mamoorians’ first-floor lavette; we clutched at each other like teenage rebels. Then one stormy night the three of us, minus Cosmo, who had a cold, went to see Flower Drum Song or some damn thing at the Community Players, and I dropped Barbara off and took Hannah home. And there, in her driveway, with crashing lightning, etc., we did this, and then we did that, and in no time we’d done so much that only the letter of the law remained to be broken, and then we broke it.

  Now, when you’re a kid sometimes there’s some other kid that your mother hates to have you play with, and so does his mother, because when the two of you get together you act like criminal lunatics. When you’re with this kid it’s suddenly a wonderful idea to play toreador with moving freight cars or pee all over your sister’s new dollhouse. I think Hannah and I had something like this effect on each other. She called it a “folie à deux,” but really we just drove each other nuts, and the oddest thing is, I liked her even less than before. I hated the arty things she said, I hated her great big bullying laugh, and I hated most of all the way she said “David Swallow” in this vampy voice, when she’d been calling me just “David” for fifteen years.

  But she was the best. I never even thought in terms of good, better, best until Hannah. I’m a simple guy, and sex has never been a competitive event for me, or a perfectible skill. Now, Barbara and I are great—I never realized how great until I started fooling around. I had thought that maybe variety, youth, thighs so slender there’s a space between them at the top (I always wondered what that was like) would spice it up. But for my money, there’s no place like home. You don’t bump into each other there, or say a lot of asinine things, and she smells just right, and if you’re tired or frightened, or you feel like a jackass, here is the one place you can come where the story is always good, and always ends well.

  Hannah was like this, only cubed. Suppose you’re twelve and small for your age, and it’s bedtime, and you go upstairs, and there, in your bed, is Your Mom. Who is so familiar that you can’t even see her face, plus she’s still bigger than you, and stronger, and she knows everything; and you can do, you must do, for her sake, anything you want. That’s exactly what Hannah was like. We didn’t have to pretend. We weren’t even very noisy. We were quiet as mice.

  If this sounds perverted to you, or comical, then you have my sympathy. Hannah was so good that I didn’t even feel as sorry for Cosmo as I had before, when we were just talking about it. It’s hard to pity the world’s luckiest man. As to why Hannah, of all women—pushy, phony, foolish Hannah—had this gift, it’s still a mystery to me. All I know is, it made me crazy for her. I alibied, soaped myself with Irish Spring, and never booked the same motel twice, but I was just going through the motions. The future of my marriage and hers and of my friendship with Cosmo was just as real to me and as important as a six A.M. wake-up call is to a happy drunk at midnight.

  So, three months of delirium. Then I ran home one morning because I’d forgotten to dress for a semiannual wine and cheese deal we throw for VIPs, and there sat Barbara in the middle of the living room rug, hugging her knees and crying. Barbara never cries. I almost threw up. She jumped up and wouldn’t look at me; she was embarrassed and furious. I followed her around the house calling, “What’s the matter, honey?” but she kept saying it was nothing, and then she said, “Get the hell out of here,” and I got the hell out of there.

  Hannah was pasty-faced when we first met that afternoon, in the Tiki Room, but her main concern seemed to be whether Barbara had told Cosmo, or was likely to tell him, and even then she didn’t seem very worried about losing or hurting him. In fact, I could swear she was enjoying the soap opera. She sat in one of those enormous wicker thrones, filling it to groaning like the Queen of Honolulu, breathing smoke and rum fumes, issuing decrees. “Barbara’s a survivor.” “Cosmo will kill me, of course, or himself.” She was majestic, embracing her fate with royal disdain (crushing the life out of it, in fact, mashing its little surprised face into her unavoidable bosom); but you could say the same thing about a sinking ship; and being what I am, I was scampering for the portholes.

  In twenty years I had never seen Barbara cry like that. I felt guilty and afraid, and not just for myself. I feared something worse than retribution. Seeing her so lost, just that one shot of her face when she looked up at me from the floor, was like that morning in San Francisco when I leaned against the savings bank to tie my shoe and the bank moved. If a building can nudge you, like some girl passing notes in civics class, then we’re all in the soup.

  So I slunk off, leaving Hannah heaving with dramatic lust, but no hurt feelings because she was so full of herself that she didn’t even notice. On the way home I had to pull over to the breakdown lane and stop the car to puke, on just two drinks. When I found Barbara in the den she was reading the paper. I said, with my coat on, swaying on my feet in front of her, that if I were any kind of man I would abide by whatever decision she made, I would leave home, if that was what she wanted, and take her every blow without raising a finger in my own defense; but that I was a spineless worm, and would stay right where I was even if she pleaded or hired lawyers or called in the SWAT team, because here was where I belonged, and I couldn’t face life without her.

  She looked at me for a long time without expression. “You may have to,” she finally said, but I didn’t pay much attention to the weirdly impersonal way she said it because she hadn’t said “you will have to,” which meant I could take a breath.

  “There’s hope, then?” I asked.

  She stared at me with what looked like scientific curiosity. “That depends on what you’re hoping for,” she said, then added, with a wide, tight-lipped smile, “you Egregious Ass.”

  So right then I knew what you’ve already figured out, that she hadn’t been crying because of Hannah, that it was something serious that had nothing to do with me, and now it was much worse because I had spilled the beans all over her. That depends on what you’re hoping for. There were shadows under her eyes and her hair looked wispy and fine, like baby hair. This is the woman I got pregnant with Davy in the upstairs bathroom of my first and only boss, Old Man Fenneman, during his annual Christmas party for the serfs, while in the parlor directly below us, the old poop eked out carols on his Hammond organ and people tried to get drunk on Cold Duck punch, and someone knocked feebly on the bathroom door. We were stone sober, too.

  Maybe she saw something in my face. Whatever, she wasn’t angry anymore. She patted the cushion beside her, and I sat down, still in my coat, and we we
re quiet for a while. She told me, with my face against her neck and her wispy hair in my eyes, that she was going into the Lying In in two days to have a lump removed from her breast. She said there was every chance it was benign. She tactfully avoided mention of her mother’s recent death from breast cancer. She apologized for having taken it so hard. She stroked my back and rocked me. “If all goes well,” she said, “I may divorce you and I may not. At the very least, I’m going to make your life a living hell. But you can see that now is not the time for that.” I said yes. “The only thing I can say now,” she said, “is that it’s the most tasteless thing you’ve ever done. Not the affair, which by the way if you ever tell me who or how I’ll kill you, but blundering into my crisis this way with your ridiculous antics.”

  Later, when we lay in bed trying to sleep, she said, “You know what it’s like? It’s like making an obscene phone call to the gas chamber. They take that poor man—Chessman? Harold Chessman—they strap him down, they’re about to drop the pellet, and ring! ring! It’s the special telephone! And some giggling kid, dialing numbers at random, wants to know if they have Prince Albert in a can.” She took my hand in the dark. “David? Your timing stinks.”

  Yeah, I said, but that’s the one thing that isn’t my fault. I’m not responsible for the sequence of things. I know, she said. I’m not blaming you for that.

  I became a different person then, the way anybody would. It was no big deal. I was up early the next morning with the runs, and all day I was shaking and crampy with fright. So was she. But it shouldn’t surprise anybody that when Davy called from college that night to ask for money and shoot the breeze, I joked with him in a normal voice and told him we were just fine and Mom says hi but she can’t come to the phone because she’s powdering her nose, and she was standing right beside me holding my hand and plopping tears on the kitchen counter.

  The point being that sure, I’m an ass, but I can do what I have to do, the same as other people. It was the worst forty-eight hours I had ever spent in my life so far, but, as Barbara said, it was only a taste, and we had to save our strength.

  The afternoon before the biopsy Hannah came to the store while Cosmo was at lunch, and found me in my office, trusting the care of our wealthiest customer to Coriander Menard, a fact she ignored. She shut the door and pressed her shoulder back against the glass; she was still enormous, but she didn’t loom large. She was at the wrong end of the telescope, along with my own feet. And I still wanted her; but that was just sex. We’re both silly people, but she is sillier than me. “Cosmo may know,” she said.

  I heard “cosmo méno,” some kind of password in a false language, like Pig Latin, and didn’t think anything of it. That’s the state I was in. She sat down across from me, crossed her big legs, and arranged her face in a mask of tragedy. “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”

  “No.” I was just wondering, idly, how she could sound so ridiculous, when her nylons, whispering at me like a prompter, still had something to say.

  “Poor David,” she said. “You look like I feel.” She made a complicated business of extracting a cigarette from her purse, lighting it, expelling smoke. “I’m going to be brutal, David. It’s over. Finis.”

  I had a terrible moment of contempt for her, and I couldn’t stand to look at her face. My eyes dropped to her tits, her unavoidable bosom, and I had an ugly thought then, and made a repulsive wish. I was ashamed right away, but my momentum in the other direction, toward blaming her for everything, was so great that I had already started to say “Barbara’s got a breast” and had to finish it.

  “A lump,” Hannah gasped, hugging herself, and now she was two hundred percent real. “Oh no. What have we done?”

  “We haven’t done anything. Well, we did something all right, but we didn’t give her cancer, which she may not even have. Probably doesn’t have,” I added, like the incantation it was. Neither Barbara nor I, in all our frightened exchanges, had once missed this cue.

  “How could you?” Hannah said. And slowly shaking her head—she really was dramatic, even when she wasn’t putting it on—she rose and walked out the door, “without a backward glance.”

  And burst in again five minutes later, with her face the color of cream of wheat and one hand clutching shut the front of her blouse, having not, as I had assumed, stalked out of the store; having instead gone to the bathroom. Without shutting the door she leaned across my desk, yanked the blouse open, scooped her right breast from its sling with a rough violence that hurt even me, and screamed, almost without sound, the way you do in nightmares, “Feel this, you son of a bitch! You murderer!”

  Isn’t this sickening? I can feel it still, fantastic, like a single dried pea under an eiderdown mattress. I closed the door, on the off chance that discretion would some day matter to either of us, and let her flail away at me, literally and otherwise, until she wore herself out. Then I uncorked a bottle of Palmer ’61 and poured us each a blast.

  That afternoon Hannah didn’t care about her image, and spoke, in a dull voice, only when she had a fresh thought. She was purified by fear. She still talked baloney, but it was sincere baloney. This was when she gave me all that stuff about God as the writer, the writer as God, the organizing intelligence behind a good story, the “pointless mess of real life.” Just this once, in how she handled the pressure, she reminded me of Barbara. She called her breast lump “a terrible idea,” rather than a “tasteless thing,” but I think they were thinking along the same mysterious lines.

  “I feel,” she said, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands, “like one of Harry Kong’s shaggy, shambling beasts.” I told her she wasn’t making sense. “Au contraire,” she said. “I’m making as much sense of this as I can. Think about it, David. First I was having good dirty fun with you, and then I accidentally killed your wife, or at least caused her unimaginable hurt, and now I’ve got comic tit disease. The worst of it is there’s no goddamn dignity in it for me, and I’m so scared.” Later she said that the worst part was “feeling so grotesque.” When the wine was gone—we knocked it back like draft beer—she said the worst of it was “suffering and dying in a clown suit.” She sobbed for a long time, in a rhythmic, hopeless way, and very quietly, as though she were alone. “It isn’t right,” she said. “It isn’t funny.”

  I took her on my lap and held her big shuddering body in my arms, which couldn’t encompass her. I was in a fair amount of pain. I felt like Atlas. “Hey, Guy, hold this a second,” and the next thing you know you’re all alone with the world in your hands. When she calmed down she was quite embarrassed, I think. As she left to tell Cosmo—about the lump, not about us—we hugged and patted each other on the back, like the two old friends we were. And that was the end of that.

  It was funny how Barbara and Hannah, who couldn’t have been more different, had this nutty idea in common, that everything that happened to them was one more piece in a big puzzle. I never knew that anybody thought that way. I sure don’t. It seemed pretty clear to me that the worst thing was that my wife and Hannah were in danger of mutilation and death. It was the only thing, really. And here they were worrying about bad taste, and how they looked. The point being that if somebody walked up and shot me point blank and I had one minute to live, I wouldn’t spend it asking why. Would you? I’d either try to kill the guy, or just scream and cry like a baby.

  So next morning I drove Barbara to the hospital for outpatient surgery, and then, because she insisted, went to the store, where Cosmo, his whole face swollen shut, told me the news about Hannah’s breast lump right in front of a customer, a well-dressed woman in her sixties, who picked up her Oloroso, placed a kind hand briefly on Cosmo’s cheek, said “You will get through this,” and left, with the two of us looking after her and staring rudely at her bust.

  When I told him about Barbara he sobbed freely and wrung his hands, which was more than I could do. I told him what I had come to expect, after considering the odds: that everything was going to be a
ll right. Of course I was scared, but I still figured it would be okay, for both of them. “Don’t say that,” he said, clutching my wrist. “Why not, for God’s sake?” “You’re really asking for it,” he said. Everybody was nuts about this thing but me.

  We settled in for a clammy, diarrhetic morning, me waiting for a call from Barbara’s surgeon, Cosmo for a call from Hannah, who was at her gynecologist’s. And I can tell you right now that nothing educational happened between this point and when we got the word. I’m no wiser now than I was then; and if you’ve ever waited for crucial news, you know what it’s like. So I could come right out and give you the biopsy result now; except why shouldn’t you suffer a little; and also, something did happen in the meantime, and even though it was beside the point, it’s too big a thing to leave out. It’s a great big stupid thing. If someone asked you, “What did you do today?” there’s no way you could leave this out.

  What happened was the phone rang. Cosmo picked it up and looked at it. I had to pry it from his fingers. It was a guy named Pillbeam, a salesman for Lamour Tropical Liqueurs; and a rear wheel had come off his car on the Industrial Park off-ramp, and he’d had to abandon it there, loaded with cases of syrupy booze. He was at a phone booth, waiting for a tow truck, and he’d used his other dime to call us. I asked him why. “Look,” he said, “do you want this stuff or not?” His voice was shaking. I said, “Not particularly,” and then he cracked up, whinnying, on the edge of hysteria, and said, “You must have excellent taste!”