by Nancy Thayer
After we had been together for almost five years, Cecil came to me one day and said, “My parents tell me I must get married.”
For one brief moment my heart leapt up. I thought he was proposing. But then I read his face—how exquisitely embarrassed he was, how miserable. I said nothing. At least, I would later tell myself, at least I had that to pride myself on—I had held back from my instinctive response to jump up and throw my arms around my lover, crying, “Darling!” I had sat there, frozen, watching. I had learned that much from the British.
For of course his parents had not just told Cecil that he must get married, but that he must get married to a certain woman, a second cousin. Their affiliation would join and enlarge their estates. It might as well have been feudal times.
“Well,” I said, “then I must pack and leave. Today.”
With great dignity and reserve I rose from my chair and crossed the room. All my life had led to this point, this act of dignity. At least I hoped it looked like dignity; really, it was a state of shock that made me so still.
When I looked back, I saw something I had never thought I would see: Cecil, seated, weeping into his hands, his shoulders shaking with grief. I was unbearably touched. But I knew enough not to go back, not to embrace him, not to console him. I knew he would soon rise and wipe his eyes and go on with his life. Cecil would marry. What would I do?
I went to London, numbed. I had met many interesting people through Cecil, and I was able to get a job as an assistant to the articles editor on a glossy ladies’ magazine. Again, it helped that I was beautiful. I was too voluptuously built to model—Twiggy was now the rage—but I was photographed everywhere, at parties and nightclubs and theater gatherings. Bewildered by Cecil’s desertion of me, which, when all was said and done, no matter how important his parents and class and station in life, had been cruel and callous, I began seriously to sleep around. To sleep with men not for love or romance or even pleasure, but for reasons that had to do with crasser things, with power and ambition and acquisitiveness.
Perhaps it mattered that, when I knew Cecil was going to marry someone else, I had called Will Hofnegle. I wanted to know how he was, I said, thinking that perhaps he would fly to me now, or ask me to come home to him, for a while, for consolation. But Will was married. He had two children. He was very happy, how was I? Oh, very happy, I told him. And thought: What had I expected? That he would wait for me all his life? That after fourteen years he would still be true to me, pining for me?
For it was true, fourteen years had passed.
I was older.
I was alone.
I had awakened from a dream of life.
So I lived in a frenzy of activity. I slept with several men on any given day. I had so many clothes and changed so many times I had to hire a maid to keep them hung up (Cecil had given me a considerable sum of money on our parting and, not proud, needing to survive, I had taken it). I now had “friends,” women I lunched and gossiped with, women I worked with on the ladies’ magazine, women I talked clothes with. We were all “darling” to each other, we were all “divine.” What we lacked in depth we made up for in movement: I lunched, I dined, I danced, I flirted, I shopped, I made love, I laughed about my lovers with my “friends,” I had a wonderful time. London was swinging then, and I swung.
Carnaby Street, the Beatles, X-T-C, the Rolling Stones, now and then a champagne supper on the lawn at Glyndebourne, drinking all night at the Playhouse, my picture in the society section of the best papers and occasionally in both literary reviews and cheap tabloids. Younger and younger men, richer and richer men.
Then it was 1972 and I was thirty-nine.
There Jenny’s story ended.
“Aaah!” Sara cried aloud, frustrated. She wanted to read more, to know what happened. If she had known Jenny as a living person, she probably would have disliked her—would have seen her as selfish and arrogant. But as Sara read these pages she felt as if she were looking through a kaleidoscope that flashed beautiful patterns and now and then suddenly flared away to reveal a small, clear heartbreaking gem of truth. What would happen to Jenny when she no longer could protect herself from others with her swirling colors? What kind of woman was really hidden back in the necessary dazzle?
Sara spent the afternoon at the dining room table, bent over the Jenny pages, making notes, then typing a long letter to Fanny Anderson. What a book this could be, she thought. With a little shaping, a little editing, what a successful book this could be.
Julia flew down from Boston on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth to spend Christmas with them. The two friends sat drinking champagne in the living room, waiting for Steve to come home from work. The windows framed a sky deepening into indigo; Sara did not turn on the lamps, so that they could enjoy the flickering lights of the enormous wood fire she had built and the tiny, brilliant, jewel-like lights on the Christmas tree.
“Here,” Julia said, handing Sara a small silver package. “Open this now.”
“I thought we’d wait until later to open gifts,” Sara said, surprised.
“This isn’t a Christmas gift. And it’s just for you. I think Steve might be—embarrassed about it.”
Sara opened the silver package and lifted out a tiny crescent moon that hung from a clear plastic thread that was so slender it was almost invisible. The moon was made of glass, so that as Sara held it dangling from her hand it caught all the lights from the room and spun and glittered, throwing spangles on the wall.
“It’s beautiful,” Sara said. “We’ll put it on the tree.”
“No, silly,” Julia said. “Read the note.”
Sara unfolded the paper that Julia had put at the bottom of the box. She read:
“ ‘When, however, a childless woman wants a baby she exposes herself to the light of the new moon or makes offerings to the moon and invokes its aid.’ ”
“I didn’t think you’d always be able to ‘expose yourself’ to a new moon,” Julia said, “so I thought perhaps this would do.”
“Oh, it’s beautiful, Julia, and it’s magical. How could it not be? Look at it!” Sara twirled the slender thread and the moon whirled and threw off light. “I’ll hang it above our bed!”
She leaned over and kissed Julia and hugged her. I’m lucky, she thought, I have Steve. Poor Julia.
Julia called the stretch between Christmas Eve and New Year’s “The Suicide Season” because her lover spent every minute of this time in the bosom of his family. After the first of the year, after the family festivities and the two-week family trip to the house on St. Martin, her lover came back to her with the desperate and complimentary greed of a drowning man coming up for air. But these few days were sacrosanct, the time he was a good father, a good son and son-in-law—and a good husband. The presents—diamonds, flowers, chocolates, more diamonds—that he lavished on Julia on the twenty-third of December could not make up for the two weeks of pain that followed.
“Why do you stay with him?” Sara asked Julia. It was the afternoon of Christmas Day; Steve was home reading by the fire, enjoying a day of luxurious laziness; the two women were walking at Surfside Beach. The day was surprisingly mild and gentle, the waves frothing up playfully, nipping at their ankles.
“Why do you want to get pregnant?” Julia countered, weaving away from the foam to keep her feet dry. She was wearing the silver fox coat her lover had given her and a green scarf over her wildly abundant red hair.
“My desire is reasonable,” Sara said. “Women get pregnant. Husbands and wives have babies. That’s what people do.”
“Well, men get divorced and marry the women they really love,” Julia said. “My desire is just as reasonable as yours!” She kicked a shell away from her path.
Sara studied her friend’s face—what she could see of it, for Julia was staring ahead defiantly as if looking into her future. Sara had tried, over the past three years, to talk Julia out of her affair, which seemed to Sara self-defeating and doomed. But Julia was obsessed.
“We’re obsessed, you know,” she said to Julia.
“I know,” Julia said. “Believe me, do I ever know.”
“What gets me is the waiting,” Sara said. “You wouldn’t believe how long the days take to pass. I seem to spend my life waiting—waiting to ovulate, waiting to see if I’m pregnant, waiting for my damned period to be over so I can wait to ovulate again, and the days just crawl by.”
“I know,” Julia said. “I know that, too. When Perry is with his wife, nothing I do will make time pass quickly, and I’ve tried everything.”
“How did this happen to us?” Sara asked. “We are two intelligent, capable, dynamic women. How did we get to the place in our lives where all we can do is wait?”
“I don’t know, honey. I’ve asked myself that a million times,” Julia said. “At least you’ve got your work.”
“Ha!” Sara yelled. “All I can do there is wait, too! That damned Fanny Anderson, she’s so frustrating! I would love to get to work on her book, but I can’t get in touch with her, she just won’t talk on the phone or see me or anything!”
“She sounds crazy,” Julia said.
“Oh, we’re all crazy,” Sara moaned. She ran ahead of Julia, dancing away from the jagged surge of waves. She ran back and grabbed Julia by the shoulders. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I really am going crazy. I really am obsessed. I’m turning into some kind of maniac. All the time after I’ve ovulated all I’m really doing is listening to my body for some kind of sign. Every minute I’m thinking, ‘Do my breasts sting? Am I getting cramps? Am I sick at my stomach?’ I analyze everything! At first it wasn’t so bad, but each month I don’t get pregnant I get more strung out.”
“You’ll never get pregnant that way,” Julia said, looking Sara in the eye.
Sara flung herself away from her friend. “Oh, great, thanks a lot, that’s just what I needed to hear!”
“Well, it’s true,” Julia said. “Sara, you need to relax.”
“Julia, you need to find a man who’s not married,” Sara said.
The two friends glared at each other, bristling. Then Julia grinned, “I will if you will,” she said, and they hugged each other and laughed wryly and turned around to walk back down the beach, two hopeless cases at the edge of the careless waves.
January third was a cold bright day, a day for movement. Julia had gone back to Boston and her lover, Steve had gone back to work, and Sara had decided to take charge of her life. She was going to move on. She was going to drop this elusive Jenny business and get back to work on some other books.
She dialed Fanny Anderson’s number one last time. This time she would tell the old bitch who answered to tell Fanny Anderson that she was going to drop the book completely if she continued to be put off in this way. Really, she was a professional, there was no need for her to be chasing after her in this way, if Fanny Anderson didn’t care enough about her own work to even talk to Sara about it …
“Hello?” A soft, hesitant voice came over the phone.
“Hello? Mrs. Anderson?” Sara stammered, caught off-guard, not certain now that she had dialed the right number.
“Yes. This is Mrs. Anderson.” Such a soft voice.
“Oh! Oh, well, Mrs. Anderson, this is Sara Kendall. I’m calling because—well, I hope you received your material back with my comments.” She couldn’t help herself, she had to try one last time.
“Yes. Yes, I did, thank you.”
“Well, I hope you understood from my letter how excited I am about this book. I would very much like to show what you’ve done to Donald James. And I’d like it very much if I could come see you sometime and sit down with you and discuss the book in detail. Or, if you’d prefer, you could come here. Nantucket is a beautiful place, even in the winter.”
There was a long silence.
“Mrs. Anderson?” Sara asked at last, for the silence was so complete that she could not even hear the other woman’s breath.
“I don’t believe I could come there. I don’t travel very much anymore, you see.”
“Then I’d be glad to come to you,” Sara said.
“There’s another thing,” Mrs. Anderson said, then paused. “I’m not quite sure just how to put this. But—well, you must understand. I don’t usually see the people I work with. After all, it’s really not necessary, is it? I mean, there is the telephone, there are letters, there is the mail. With Heartways House, for example, my goodness, I must have written ten or twelve novels for them now, and I haven’t met a soul there. Miss Oldham doesn’t seem to mind. I do believe that early on she asked me for lunch or drinks a few times, but I was always unable to make such arrangements, and we have continued over the years to have a very satisfactory relationship without meeting even once.”
Now Sara was quiet. “Well,” she said finally. “Well, you see, the Jenny novel is such a different kind than the ones you’ve been writing for Heartways House. Those have a formula, a pattern, and if the writer sticks with that, there’s not much an editor needs to do, except watch for inconsistencies in timing, for example, or check to be sure the hero has aquamarine eyes all the way through. But the Jenny novel is quite different. It doesn’t fall into any category, any formula. It is romantic, in a way, but the writing is different, so it wouldn’t be a romance novel. It would be—”
“Yes, yes, my dear, I do understand all that. The difference between my little romances and this novel.” This time Sara could almost hear Fanny Anderson smile.
“Then you understand how a different kind of editing needs to be done on the Jenny book. I suppose I could write you a long letter telling you my ideas, but I’ve always found that a dialogue, a give-and-take of ideas, is much more helpful for both the writer and the editor. And it saves so much time.”
“Well, as for time,” Fanny Anderson said softly, “I’m not in any particular hurry to have this little book published. I’ve had it in mind for so long.”
Sara was silent again. “Disregarding time, then,” she went on, “it still would be helpful if we could sit down together. I would love to edit this book, and to be honest, I think it would be a real feather in my cap. It might be helpful if we could discuss what exactly you want the book to be seen as, and how I could help you to make it so. It wouldn’t take long. Just an hour or two.”
“Yes,” Fanny Anderson said. “Yes, I do understand.”
Sara waited.
Silence.
“Yes, very well,” Fanny said. “Let’s do that.”
“Wonderful!” Sara said. “Shall we set a date now?”
“Oh, well, I don’t have my calendar right here next to me. Perhaps I could have your number and call you back,” Fanny Anderson said.
“I’d be glad to come tomorrow,” Sara offered.
“Yes, but I believe I’m busy tomorrow,” Fanny said. “It really would be better if I could call you back.”
Sara gave the woman her number, refraining from pointing out that she had given it to her before both on the telephone and in letters. She kept her voice courteous. She tried not to be pushy. But she was afraid, when she hung up, that she wouldn’t hear from Fanny for a long long time, if ever.
That night Sara had to admit to herself that her breasts were sore.
The next day Fanny Anderson did not call. And when Sara looked at herself sideways in the mirror, she could see the old familiar pouching of her stomach. Her breasts were very sore, and she awoke and went through the day in a state of barely controllable madness. Mad in both meanings of the word—insane and angry, so angry at fate that she wanted to hit out, to hurt back, to destroy. She drank wine with lunch, but that didn’t help. She took a long walk, even though the weather had turned very cold, but that didn’t help—except to make her so exhausted that her fury died down into a low-burning self-hatred.
When Steve came home that night, she could scarcely speak. She was not angry at him, it was not his fault that she wasn’t pregnant—he had billions and billions of healthy sp
erm—no; it was her fault. She kept away from him with the wisdom of a wounded animal, knowing that because she was wounded, she would strike out at any kind hand that tried to touch her.
After dinner, she said, “Steve? I’m going to start my period tomorrow. I can tell.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” he said. He rose from the table, came around, bent down, and hugged her. “I know how disappointed you are. I am, too. But listen, we’re both young and healthy. There’s no hurry. If it doesn’t happen this month, it’ll happen next month, or the month after that. And I love you, however you are, whatever happens. You know that, don’t you?”
He turned her face to him, so he could look into her eyes.
“You know I love you, don’t you, Sara?” he asked again, smiling.
Sara could scarcely trust herself to speak. She could see that he loved her. She knew that he loved her, that he understood as well as any man could what she was going through. That he was doing the best he could to help her.
Sara went into the bathroom and ran a tub of steaming water. She sat there, weeping in a fury. Oh, wasn’t Steve a nice husband! Oh, what an understanding husband. Oh, he said he loved her. Oh, he was such an optimist. Didn’t this touch him at all? Didn’t this touch him at all? Why wasn’t he weeping and sick with misery because once again they had missed, they were not going to have a baby? Why was he so cheerful, so calm? Didn’t he have any feelings?
There he was, the perfect husband, and here she sat in the tub, not pregnant, the imperfect wife. The flawed wife. The inferior wife. The rapidly mentally deteriorating wife.
She wanted to go break all the dishes over his perfect, understanding, optimistic, loving, helpful head.
Instead, she sat in the tub for an hour, until she had really exhausted herself and had no more tears. Then she put on her warmest nightgown and robe, and drank warm milk with two aspirin, and watched television until it was time to go to bed.