by Kim Wright
“Seriously,” says Becca, now truly horrified. “Even though they were old and ugly? Why would anyone want to take a picture of that?”
“I never said they were ugly,” Claire says. “And they must have been just over forty, an age that seems quite young to me now. But yes, in a way, you’re right. They certainly didn’t look like your typical porn stars, they looked just like themselves. And there was Adam, naked on the screen before me, and he was . . .” She stops and traces her lower lip thoughtfully with a fingertip, as if debating precisely what to say next.
“It must have been horrible,” Jean says softly. “Seeing your husband having sex with another woman.”
“Or was it exciting?” says Angelique. “Or exciting and horrible, a little bit of both?”
“Was he the same with her?” Valerie asks. “As he was with you?”
“No,” says Claire sharply, whirling around to look at Valerie. “Thank you, because it’s a simple thought and yet somehow I couldn’t find a way to say it. That’s exactly the issue. Adam was a different man with her. He was loud and rather violent.”
“Violent?” asks Jean. “Surely you don’t mean violent?”
“No, ‘violent’ is the wrong word,” says Claire. “Completely wrong. It’s just that on the tape he moved in a more . . . uninhibited fashion, there was something more animal or maybe you’d even say . . .”
“He was more passionate with her than he’d ever been with you,” Tess says. She’s either back to her trick of summing everyone up, putting the stories into neat little boxes before we’ve half-finished telling them, or she’s terrified to think what sort of explanation we all might collectively come up with if she doesn’t step in to supply a suitable one. So she gives us a word like “passionate,” which is nice and soft and polite and thus sounds like the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to mean.
“Passionate,” Claire says slowly. “Yes, I suppose that’s it, and she was . . .”
A pause. A long pause. Uninterrupted. No one among us has the slightest theory about what naked Edith might have looked like on that bed, not even Tess.
“She was what?” Valerie finally asks.
“She was much better than I was. Better than I ever was. Better than I am now.”
“Edith?” says Silvia, in complete disbelief. Evidently she’s met the woman at some point. “You’re telling me that Edith Morrison, the Queen of the Faculty Teas, Miss I-Won’t-Vaccinate-My-Children-Because-I-Read-Some-Report-About-Autism, the woman who’s worn the same pair of black pants for ten straight years because she claims they still have plenty of wear in them . . . You’re telling me that woman was good in bed?”
“No,” says Claire. “I’m telling you that she was spectacular. What’s that line from ‘Pinball Wizard’? At my usual table, she could beat my best. And she could—no comparison, hands down, slam dunk. Edith Morrison was a goddess of sex.”
We walk on, munching our apples, each of us likely contemplating the irony. That the plain, cautious, stalwart first wife was sexier than the thin, pretty, elegant second wife. The possibility raises a rash of questions, none of them comforting. For if the sex was so good in the first marriage, why did it fail? And exactly what did Claire mean by saying Edith was spectacular? The word implies trampolines and whips and choirs of angels—something beyond ordinary coupling, something that could reach right through the television screen and shake a woman to her core. And this time the man is literally faceless. Off the bridge, in the shadows, out of focus . . . why do we have so much trouble seeing the men in our stories? If we continue in this vein much longer, soon we won’t even be bothering to name them. But Adam—intellectual, arrogant Adam—what could he have been thinking? When he swapped Edith for Claire, did he realize that even though he may have been rising in the eyes of the world, that from a bedroom sense he was stepping down? Because I believe Claire when she says that she knew at a glance that Adam’s sexual connection with Edith was stronger than the one he had with her. That’s the sort of thing women just know.
“Did you watch the whole tape?” Steffi asks.
“Several times. It was sixteen minutes long, I remember that most specifically. Sixteen minutes for me to realize that everything I’d ever thought about my husband was wrong.” Claire sighs. “And I watched it the next day too, and the next. Every day I was supposed to feed Silvia’s cat. I became quite obsessed, I suppose. I turned up the volume, in case they were saying things I was missing. They weren’t. I studied it from every angle. I played it in slow motion. I even ran the tape in reverse, can you imagine? As it turns out, sex is one of the few things in life that looks exactly the same backwards as forwards. There’s no difference at all.”
“Did you tell him you’d watched it?” Angelique asks.
“Of course not. How could I do that? We didn’t have a VCR player so there’s no way I could have claimed to have seen it by accident. I tried to go on as if nothing had happened and the next week, there was a banquet at the high school. Adam and Edith’s middle son Graham was getting a basketball award. So we were all there. I wore a pink dress, I remember, a sleeveless Dior with a matching coat. It was the best thing I owned—a gift from my first husband, come to think of it—and probably far too extravagant for a sports banquet in a high school cafeteria. What am I saying? Of course it was completely wrong. But it was my favorite dress and I put it on like a suit of armor. Because I knew I’d see Edith, sitting there at the same table, wearing her good black pants, and she looked exactly the same as she always had, and she was friendly enough. You know, I don’t think she ever resented me at all. I never got that feeling. We ate the chicken and green beans and afterward they called the boys up, gave out the awards, and made the speeches. We clapped and took pictures and that was that. A perfectly pleasant evening with the extended family, everyone acting appropriately and keeping the attention on Graham, just as it should be. But all the time I kept staring at Edith. I couldn’t seem to stop myself, even though there certainly was no flirtation between her and Adam. No crackling sexual electricity. They were polite and all about the children, just as they had always been. But everything had changed.”
“Changed like how?” Becca asks. She’s dropped her attitude now. The question is sincere.
“I’m not sure if I can explain it,” Claire says. “All my life I’ve never been the smartest or the most talented. I was never the best at anything. Except for attracting men. That was my singular God-given gift. And I had never envied another woman before the moment that I saw that videotape. I suppose it had never occurred to me that a man might find another woman more desirable—and I know that makes me sound like a dreadful person, but why tell these stories if we aren’t going to be honest about them? What would be the point?”
“There would be no point,” says Silvia.
“We aren’t sharing these stories to entertain each other,” says Tess. She’s walking at the rear of the pack for once, because here in this apple orchard the path is clear enough and it is Jean who has somewhat improbably emerged as the morning’s leader. Jean who is walking fast, who must be almost out of earshot, chopping the air with her arms and pulling the rest of us into her pace. Tess’s statement is odd. If we aren’t telling these stories to entertain each other, why are we telling them? My head swims for a moment in a temporary vertigo. I get these attacks at times, especially when I’m driving, when I look up and around and for a minute I don’t know where I am, what road this is, or even what city. Perhaps it’s nothing more than what Claire said, the confusion that comes upon a woman in her forties. Because it’s one thing to not know where you’re going, but it’s a whole other thing to forget where you’ve just been. It’s terrifying. I could accept uncertainty about the road ahead—everyone feels that at some time or another—but this is something else. A more complete kind of disorientation.
“Tess is right,” Valerie is saying. “The stories ar
en’t meant to be a distraction, or a way to pass the time. They’re our confessions.”
“Mom,” Becca calls up to the head of the pack, “slow down. You’re leaving us.”
“What do you mean by ‘confessions’?” Steffi snaps. “I wasn’t aware I had anything to confess.”
“Then why are you walking to Canterbury?” Valerie says, in an irritatingly calm tone of voice. No inflection at all, just a series of words. She sounds like a therapist.
“The Cathedral is one of the great wonders of the world,” says Steffi, “and when I studied it in school I always promised myself that someday—”
“And that may be why you’re going to see Canterbury,” Valerie says, “but it doesn’t explain why you’ve turned it into a pilgrimage. Walking the whole trail from top to bottom, that’s a pretty grand gesture, isn’t it? We all must have some sort of reason.”
“Trains run between London and Canterbury on the hour,” I hear myself say. Who told me that? Oh yeah, the closely cropped man at the George in London. This is the second time I’ve thought of him within an hour, and an idea bobs up from the confusion in my head. Could he have been the one who took my phone? But why would he do a thing like that? I was in the pub for quite a while after I said goodbye to him, sitting with the other Broads Abroad. If he’d seen I’d left my phone on the bar, he would have just brought it over to the table. I’m being crazy paranoid now. Making up stories out of nothing. Some busboy stole my phone. There was no cosmic message behind its disappearance. Nothing more than a random crime.
“Right,” says Valerie, shaking her finger at me. “Che is exactly right. Trains do run from London to Canterbury, hour after hour, all day long. But trains are for tourists, aren’t they? And we have declared ourselves to be pilgrims.”
“Mom,” says Becca, her voice shrill. “Seriously, slow down. Are you trying to leave me right here in this field?”
Mom.
Mom . . . Shit, I’d forgotten all about her. My hand goes automatically to my backpack, straining to reach for the familiar shape. But the ashes are crammed down into their appropriate place, a side pocket. She’s fine. She’s been there all along, right where she should be, zipped up in her little bag. I look over my shoulder at Tess, who is still at the rear of the pack. She doesn’t seem to have noticed that we’re disintegrating as a group. Walking too far apart, almost shouting back and forth to each other, and there is discord, palpable discord among us for the first time since leaving London. I wait for her to play her usual professorial card, to break in with some calming tidbit about Chaucer or the growing of apples or the legend of how some particular little burg got its queer name. But Tess seems as spacey today as the rest of us, far from her usual self, and it falls to Angelique to get us back on point.
“So you never told Adam?” she asks. “He never knew you found the tape?”
Claire shakes her head. The sun is hitting her squarely in the face now, and for just a passing instant she shows her age. “What was I going to say? It wasn’t as if he’d done anything wrong. He and Edith had been married at the time they’d made the tape and if part of their deal was that they liked to film themselves and watch it back, then who was I to judge? Besides, Adam wouldn’t have liked the fact that I’d watched the tape, I’m sure of that. He was very particular about how people viewed him. He had a sort of formality that he always said came with the job. He wouldn’t have liked to hear that anyone had seen his homemade porn.”
“Not even his new wife?” Angelique asks.
“Especially not his new wife.”
“So . . .” says Angelique, surprisingly persistent, or maybe she’s just thinking that this sort of problem is more on her home turf than anyone else’s. “Did you see it as a challenge? Try to do some new stuff to surprise him in bed?”
Claire smiles. “Is that what you would have done?”
Angelique nods. “I would have stolen all of Edith’s best moves.”
“That probably explains why you’ve only been married once and I’ve had four unsuccessful runs at it. You’re a trouper, Angelique. Good for you. You hang in there, and I admire that. Because I did the exact opposite, I’m afraid. Began avoiding him in bed altogether. First one excuse and then the next, until not only was I failing to live up to the image of Edith, I wasn’t even being a good version of Claire anymore.”
“What happened to the tape?” asks Steffi.
“On the day my dear friend was at last due back from her trip,” Claire says, inclining her head toward Silvia, “I knew I had to destroy it. I couldn’t leave it in her house and I didn’t want to take it back to mine. But I didn’t think it would be right to just toss it in a Dumpster. It might have been found. You’re always hearing of people pulling things out of Dumpsters. We lived in a small college town, remember, where everyone knew everyone, and Adam had his reputation on campus to consider. Edith did too, I suppose. So I watched them one last time and I went out in Silvia’s driveway and I put the tape down on the concrete and I ran over it in my Jeep Cherokee. Several times, back and forth.”
“You really wanted to grind it away,” Steffi says, with a twist of her mouth.
“But I couldn’t,” says Claire. “The case broke and went flat but the tape itself was still intact, hanging out the sides. So I went back into Silvia’s house and got a pair of scissors and I cut it up, into a hundred pieces, none of them any bigger than a postage stamp, and I threw some of them in one trash bin and others in another and then another until pieces of that tape were scattered all over town. I just kept driving from one mall to the next, putting a handful of celluloid into every Dumpster I found. And all the time I was thinking to myself, No one must ever know this tape existed.”
“You were that determined to protect his reputation?” asks Jean. She has slowed down and looked back at us at last, but her face is flushed. That unhealthy mottled sort of flush that I’ve come to associate with her. My first impression of you was so wrong, I think, watching her blot perspiration from her forehead with the cuff of her chambray shirt. I thought you were Princess Grace, the serene royal highness of some minor kingdom, but as it turns out, I was only fooled by your hair. Once the bun comes loose, there’s nothing serene about you.
“That’s what I told myself at the time,” Claire says. “That it was all for Adam. But in retrospect, I was only trying to protect my own reputation.” She says it flatly, without embellishment. They’re so different from each other, Jean and Claire, one of them spinning a tale meant to inspire envy, the other delivering a story so honest it makes the roots of your teeth ache. Despite her sweaters and hair and jewelry and figure and obvious wealth, it hits me that this is what I really should admire about Claire. Her willingness to turn the garment of her life inside out, exposing all the frayed seams and hasty alterations. It’s her flaws that make her likable. I need to remember this.
“I was the second wife, the trophy wife,” Claire goes on. “It was my job to be the bombshell, and I’d failed miserably. Here I’d managed to get myself married to an incredibly sexy man and . . . I hadn’t even noticed. So my first step was to destroy the evidence, and my second step was to avoid Adam.”
“That marriage didn’t last long,” Silvia says quietly. “Not quite two years, was it?” She hasn’t spoken much in the last mile or two and I suspect Claire’s story has shocked her more than anyone. It’s one thing to learn that you don’t really know your husband or your lover. That’s sort of a given, really. And I think most women would admit that they don’t understand their mothers or their daughters all that well either. But it’s a real kick in the gut to consider the possibility that maybe you don’t know your best friend.
“No, that was the shortest marriage of all four of them,” Claire says. “Not two years, soup to nuts, just as Silvia says. It was easy to leave Adam. I’m good at leaving men. Can pack and unpack in an instant, remember? But the irony is, I’ve nev
er quite managed to leave Edith. The image of her on that bed still plays in my head and no matter how many times I try, I can’t destroy it. It’s like by cutting her up and spreading her over town I made her stronger. Maybe she’s one of those sci-fi characters who turn into everything after they’re dead. Who was that?”
“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” I say.
“Exactly,” says Claire. “Edith was the Obi-Wan Kenobi of sex. I struck her down and she became more powerful.”
“Did you ever see her again, after your divorce?” Steffi asks. “The real her, I mean.”
“Never,” says Claire. “Well, hold on, that’s not quite true. In fact, what am I saying? I ran into her in a bookstore not that long ago. It had been years, of course, and there was another husband since Adam, and I was with my new man, Jeremy. He’s thirty years younger, so it’s all very racy and forbidden. Started out as our pool boy, and I hope that doesn’t make it sound as if I’m stereotyping him or just using him to shock people.”
“I’m pretty sure Jeremy’s using you to shock people too,” Silvia says, running a grimy hand through her hair. Now that we’ve warmed up enough to pull off our jackets, I can see she’s wearing a shirt that’s oversize, not in that deliberately oversize, faux-jacket Chico’s-catalog sort of way, but as if it’s simply too large for her frame. It’s a man’s cast-aside oxford, the work shirt of a husband who no longer works, with the sleeves badly rolled up and the neck gaping. Silvia’s one of the three pilgrims among us who is still married—and happily, evidently. Otherwise why would she bring her husband’s shirt on vacation?