by Marge Piercy
Conway lived in an area of galleries and coffee shops, and he liked having friends who lived with more risk than he did. He liked intellectual friendships with gay men, but then he liked to know men who were successful with women, too. He enjoyed teaching, especially bright young girls who needed encouragement in science. He gave much time to student activities and clubs, was a well-liked chaperon at dances. But in summer, it was good to escape the city before the close fabric of his life sagged. In a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, he would walk barefoot along the lake shore whistling, proud his legs were still trim and firm. He relished the contemplative silence of fishing and he enjoyed talking through the sunny afternoons with Laura.
Laura had short dark brown hair and wistful grey eyes, colors of autumn he thought matched her sadness. All the years of childbearing, hostessing for her domineering husband, cooking and raising boys had left her still graceful, although a little thick in the hips. He felt guilty noticing, but he could not help being observant.
She was married to a balding opportunist, one of those types with one foot in the university, one in the business world and an eye on Washington—something boring to do with economics. Derek had been born with a machete in his mouth. Conway disliked being with the two of them together. Derek would pace around Laura examining her from the contemptuous corner of his eye. “Wear the blue silk with the belt and remember two doubles of dirty martinis for him before dinner and damn it, allow time for that and don’t start rushing people to the table when they’re chatting.”
Most likely she’d married the first man to show her attention. That coarse transformation that turned his shy minnow girls into man-hungry pikes. He saw her coming toward him cradling a basket against her, and the sensuous dignity of her walk made him swallow.
So they sat in the sun and shade of the arbor while she quilted. At Buttonwood, some of the mothers were in a quilting group. “I was thinking, Conway. You never speak of your wife. Is it that fresh, still?”
He looked slapped. Finally he said, “If I don’t speak of her, it’s because I feel more honest keeping quiet.”
She waited, bowed to her fine stitches.
“We were happy when we were first married. She was lovely but fearful, out of a broken home raised by her father only, deserted by a mother who drank. But somehow I failed her. I wasn’t ambitious enough, perhaps. Somehow I became that father and she had to betray me as her mother did. Or so I see it now. She left and came back, she left and came back. The third time she returned, she thought she was with child. I was sure it wasn’t mine. But it was cancer instead. They operated three times, chemo, radiation. It took two and a half years for her to die.” He looked at her hands a long time. Then he said in a parched quiet voice, “It was all expensive.”
She felt battered. It seemed to her he was bleeding from the mouth. She put her hands on his shoulders firmly, instinctively. “How terrible—”
He bit his lip. “It’s old. It’s worn out. That’s the fault of talking about it, don’t you see? It doesn’t matter any longer. Only …” He pulled her onto his lap, quilt and all, and kissed her.
She lay in his arms quite shocked, surprised by the softness of his mouth, the smoothness of his cheek, the taste and smell not of cigarettes but of the peach he had eaten earlier. She lay in his arms and unthinkingly, as if she were biting into a slice of cake she had been offered, she kissed him back, felt his lips on her neck, timid nibbling like a horse nuzzling. She rubbed her mouth against the smoothness of his cheek.
A car passed on the gravel road. She came to and pulled from him. “I must start supper,” she stuttered and ran for the house. She was stung with shock as if she had been slapped all over her body.
That evening she couldn’t give herself time to think about it with Derek home for most of the weekend. Then in bed she couldn’t sleep for remembering, pondering what had happened. Does he love me? Has he wanted to do that for a long time? Did I accidentally encourage him? Was it pure impulse? Could he conceivably have thought that’s what I meant when I touched his shoulder to comfort him? It was so strange for Derek to lie there sleeping bedside her not knowing anything at all, not knowing another man had embraced her. He would be furious. She longed to wake him, to confide the afternoon. But an explosion would result if she did.
No, she must be very careful not to hurt Conway’s feelings and not to alert Derek. She must set Conway at ease so that they could go on chatting. She went over the strange afternoon trying to find signs and premonitions. Lying beside Derek, stark awake in the first dull light, she rounded out a nice speech about impulse and maturity and friendship and the truth of moments.
In spite of lack of sleep, Laura felt exalted in the morning. She made a breakfast of an omelet with herbs from her little garden, grating Parmesan into it and frying bacon crisp. She wished she had oranges to squeeze for fresh juice. Derek brought a sheaf of papers to the table, but he complimented her on the eggs. “You seem in a good mood this morning.”
“I was thinking of baking a blueberry pie. They’re fresh this time of year. I bet the farmer’s market has some in town.”
“I’m cutting back on sweets, remember?” He looked up from his papers, frowning, his broad forehead crinkled. Once again she thought how handsome he was, still, a large broad-shouldered man with a strong chin and direct commanding gaze from his eyes the dark blue of lapis lazuli.
“Of course. Sorry! I wasn’t thinking. Maybe I’ll bake cookies to send to the boys.”
“Don’t. Ethan needs to lose some weight, not pack it on. You might think about a diet yourself … Keep us company.”
She could not stay away from the window facing Conway’s cottage. She felt astonished when she saw him looking as he always did, padding along the shore barefoot, turning over his compost pile, bringing in a couple of logs for his fireplace. She went over her speech, adding and subtracting and standing aside to admire. She changed into a sundress and washed, then brushed her hair thoroughly, as she always meant to but always forgot.
In midafternoon, he came out to the arbor. She paused, suddenly unwilling. Derek was on his cell, arguing with someone. She felt a little guilty. Would Derek think her unfaithful, to have kissed another man? It had been so … accidental. She recalled her period of jealousy four years previously when she had suspected him of an affair with a graduate assistant. Finally she had accused him and he had laughed at her. “Do you imagine I’d throw away my university career for some fling with a student? Don’t be absurd.” She would have preferred he answer that he loved her too much, but Derek was pragmatic to the core—a trait that she generally appreciated. It had enabled him to give her security and comfort and their sons attendance at excellent schools, tutoring, sports equipment, the latest gadgets they desired.
She was being ridiculous. She walked down to the arbor, feeling her face heat. He laid aside his book as if reluctantly and began telling her about it, a tome on some new theory of learning. In detail, he set out its argument. She sat staring at him, wondering if yesterday had been some kind of delusion on her part. She could not stay there. She excused herself and hurried to the safety of the cottage.
It had meant nothing to him. She flung herself from room to room. A bachelor for the last six years, did she imagine he had known no women? He had meant the kiss as an invitation that, when she fled, he had taken as a refusal and considered the matter closed. How dare he offer her that kind of invitation. Or even worse, perhaps he had kissed her to turn the conversation from his dead unfaithful wife. Or been merely curious. The kiss had satisfied that curiosity. He had not liked her response. He had instantly regretted.
When she saw him in the arbor the next afternoon reading calmly and drinking something from a tall glass, she turned from the window and flung herself on the bed. That weekend she kept away, replied to his distant greetings with brief nods, glanced his way only when she was sure he could not see her. She broke a wine glass and, while slicing tomatoes, cut a gash in her thumb.
She kept making speeches at him that left her unsatisfied, humiliated.
Monday after Derek had returned to Boston University for a meeting and still she did not return to the arbor, she saw him walking toward the cottage. She felt a pulse of triumph and then panic. What had she done? Now he was rapping on the screen door. Slowly she walked through thick air to let him in.
She pretended to be busy about the kitchen while they spoke in short sentences of broken rhythm. He cleared his throat twice. Suddenly fed up, she learned against the refrigerator and glared at him. “Why did you come up here? To talk about that damned book?”
“Laura? I had to talk about something. You looked at me so coldly. You seemed angry.”
“Why would I be angry?” She said, already calmer.
“Laura, what do you want of me?”
“It didn’t mean anything to you.”
“What could it mean? Of course it did. You’re a lovely woman …”
Leaning on the cold slick refrigerator door, she looked at him with a chilly clarity. She saw a soft-bellied creature she had turned on its back. She saw that she could do anything with him. If she insisted, he would make love to her, he would carry her off to his neat Mondrian bachelor apartment.
“Oh, Conway, I am sorry. Do go home. We’ve both been very silly. I’ll see you tomorrow in the arbor.” She shooed him out.
Derek returned Thursday evening, instructing her about a couple he had invited for the weekend. His meeting had gone well and he would be enjoying a sizable grant to do research on certain consumer trends among retiring baby boomers. At breakfast he said, “What’s up, or I should say, down with old Gates? I thought he was going to fall over his own feet when I met him on the road.” He rubbed his not yet shaven chin, not really interested but his attention briefly caught as he waited for his coffee to cool.
She met his eyes, saying flatly, “Oh, he kissed me in the arbor last week.”
“What? Why on earth?” One eyebrow raised.
“He was telling me about his dead wife. I suppose he feels guilty or embarrassed.”
“Poor old loser.” Derek shook his head. Then he gave a dry pitying chuckle and tasted his coffee. “Don’t be too hard on the old bastard. Must be tough, all that young pussy year after year and nothing doing, not a paw on them or you’re done for.”
He drank his coffee and took his rod and reel to the boat tied up at the dock. She stood at the window, frozen. He did not care. He couldn’t manage even a flash of jealousy. He did not care. She twisted her tee-shirt in her hands, let it drop. But I love him, she moaned, I love him! And he has grown indifferent to me. I’m just a convenience. Maybe he thinks of turning me in on a new improved model.
Again she retreated to the bed, pushing her face into the pillow. She wanted to cry but no tears came. Oh, how she wanted to be nineteen again, twenty-one, twenty-three when he had loved her, when they had melted in each other’s arms. Why couldn’t she have that again? Why couldn’t she?
She turned onto her back after a while and closed her eyes tight. His room under the eaves where he had to be careful not to bump his head, the first place, the first bed where they had been together. When she entered, to the right was a red chair. Red, the color of tomato soup, and the bed was to the left …
Fog
Barbs was sitting at the dining room table of their little house in Portland just finishing up a tutoring session with a boy who could not comprehend algebra. He was failing the class and his mother had been referred to Barbs. Before retiring the previous June, she had taught math for almost forty years. She was patiently explaining that x and y were not always the same numbers (how dense was he?) when Didi came in.
She heard the door open and then smelled the Ombre Rose perfume Didi wore morning or night. Barbs had stopped growing roses, she was so sick of the scent. She had given Didi three other perfumes, but Didi kept saying that this was her signature scent. Barbs had given up.
When the boy finally escaped, Barbs got to her feet, stretching. “How come you’re home? The shop doesn’t close for three hours.”
“Oh, sweetheart …” For a moment Didi looked blank. It always scared Barbs when her partner got that vacant look on her face. It had been happening oftener lately. Much oftener.
“What happened?”
Didi stood a moment looking at her purse as if it held the answer.
“Do you not feel well?”
“Angela doesn’t want me to work there anymore.” Didi collapsed in an overstuffed chair as if deflated. She began combing her hair. She still kept it blond and curly. She tossed her head with that gesture that used to make Barbs want to kiss her.
“Why?”
Didi shrugged. She put on a beseeching smile. “I’m tired. Could you make me a nice cold martini?”
“It’s only two o’clock. Why did she fire you?” Barbs took off her glasses and cleaned them on her tee-shirt before putting them into their case and the case into the pocket of her slacks.
“How do I know? Stop picking on me.” Didi got up and escaped to the kitchen. Barbs could hear her rummaging in the refrigerator. “Didn’t you have lunch?” She called.
“I think so …”
“Don’t you remember if you ate lunch?”
Didi didn’t answer. Barbs had a pretty good idea why Angela might have fired Didi. Lately she’d become increasingly forgetful. She’d come into a room and stand there wondering why. She lost her phone, her keys, even her partial denture with some regularity, leaving it on an end table, on the couch, once in an old ashtray left over from when friends smoked. She had fallen twice in the last week, tripping over shoes she had left on the floor, tripping over their dog Simeon, who fled yelping.
Barbs went out on the back deck and called the shop. Angela answered. Barbs came straight to the point and Angela explained. “She keeps making mistakes with money. She’s looking straight at an American Express card and she dials Visa. She can’t keep bills or coins straight. I’m losing money on her. I’m sorry, but I just can’t carry her any longer … Don’t you think perhaps she should see a specialist?”
“You think I haven’t tried to get her to one?”
Barbs sat in an Adirondack chair on their deck staring out at the lawn and the phlox in bloom, white and pink and magenta, the picnic table, the bird house, all the artifacts and plants they had put into their yard together after they bought this little house. Simeon came wagging to put his head in her lap. He was a mix of black lab and probably boxer, a good-sized dog with black fur and a rectangular head and floppy lighter ears from some ancestor. The yard was full of the warm weather accoutrements of Didi and her years together. They had been a couple for eleven years, longer than her relationship with Andie the tennis pro had lasted. For two years after that affair had gone bust, she endured casual pickups and friends’ attempts at matchmaking until she was sick of trying.
Then she met Didi who was volunteering for the same candidate she was working to elect. Barbs had been out since college, but Didi was straight and married—but not very. Her son and daughter were grown and raising their own children. She had caught her husband cheating on her twice and was deeply discouraged. She knew he was seeing someone. She began confiding in Barbs.
Didi had been cute, even at fifty-nine—a womanly figure, a flirtatious little giggle, a way of tossing her head and looking out from under her lashes. She had been a buyer for a department store chain before breeding and she still had a sense of style, although very feminine and rather flowery. When Barbs thought of that time, she saw Didi in her summer dresses, always beautifully tanned, always put together. But sad. She wanted to protect this woman who had been sorely used and was being cast aside. Even her occasional ditziness was charming. She was so different from the women Barbs had been involved with, someone who needed taking care of, someone she could make a home with. Didi was three years older than Barbs, while her tennis pro had been eleven years younger. An older woman was less likely to leave her. She was keen to
be partnered for life. Didi needed her, and she was ready to be the steady foundation under her.
Seducing her had taken patience but then Didi had exploded into orgasm, something she had rarely experienced with her husband. She instantly proclaimed herself a lesbian and moved in with Barbs. Her husband had not contested the divorce; he seemed on the whole rather relieved to offload his wife. Her daughter Cordelia and husband Nick accepted them quickly, but the brother, Spencer, four years older, sulked. Resented. Always wanted Didi to visit without Barbs, which was no problem for Barbs, who found him a bore and darkly conservative.
Didi and Barbs. Barbs and Didi. They were a couple in their Portland neighborhood, in the lesbian community, in local and citywide organizations. They agitated for gay marriage. They supported liberal candidates. They worked to clean up their neighborhood and get stop signs and street lights where needed. They hiked in the great park across the river and once took a white rafting trip, but Didi fell in the river and was miserable. They had had a good life … until recently. And mostly. She had been disappointed, she admitted to herself only reluctantly, by Didi’s silliness, her love of dreadful romance novels that were mostly heterosexual, her unwillingness to learn even elementary Spanish when they went to Mexico or French when they took a vacation in Paris. She still said gauche things that made Barbs wince. She filled their house with gewgaws, a brass Eiffel tower, pillows with doggies on them, a whole collection of china shepherdesses and sheep that filled a corner cabinet. Barbs’s taste ran to the stark and simple. Her favorite artist was Brancusi. A love of mathematics, she felt, led her to the core of design. Barbs and Didi were a compromise from the first year. But the important thing, she had always felt, was that they were a couple, they were committed, neither of them would run off or give up on the other. They were in it for life. Nobody was perfect, but they managed okay. Loneliness was much worse. She was too old to go searching for impossible perfection.