Mrs. Kimble

by Jennifer Haigh

  “How did you know?” she whispered. Her mind raced. He’d seen her in her bathing suit, the day he sprayed the oleanders. The day she fell asleep in the bathtub and woke up with the door wide open.

  “Does it matter?” said Kimble.

  She let her mouth open under his. Her hands climbed his back; through his shirt she felt his ribs. He was right: it didn’t matter at all.

  He led her down the hall to his bedroom. Quickly he shed his shirt and pants. He pushed her back on the bed and removed her skirt and stockings. For a year she’d wondered how it would be, undressing for a man again. She held her breath, waiting for him to unbutton her blouse.

  He didn’t. He made love to her bottom half; occasionally he caressed her breasts through her blouse. He treated them both equally, though one thrilled at his touch and the other felt nothing at all. His body was long and thin, his skin perfectly cool.

  It was over quickly.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  He disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind him; in a moment she heard the shower running. She lay alone in the bed, half dressed, her silicone breast still held in place by her bra, wetness pooling on the sheet beneath her. A fly buzzed near her ear; he’d left a window open. It’s done, she thought. She had made love to a man; it was still possible. In her terror she’d been unable to move; but somehow—she felt the sheet—she had pleased him.

  Reuben Goldfarb was her father’s rabbi. Joan had met him only twice, at each of her parents’ funerals. He was a genial man, bright-eyed and quick to laugh; but in Joan’s mind his bearded face was the face of death.

  “Joan,” he said, pressing her hand. “Wonderful to see you. How long are you in town?”

  “Actually, I live here now.” Mentally she ticked off the holidays—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, eight months of Sabbaths. Eight months’ worth of failures to appear at Beth Israel.

  The rabbi’s eyebrows shot up. “How wonderful.” His eyes darted from her to Kimble.

  “Rabbi,” said Joan. “This is Ken Kimble. My fiancé.” The word sounded strange on her tongue. He’d proposed suddenly; they’d been engaged for two days.

  Goldfarb extended his hand. “Congratulations. I had no idea.” He gestured to a low sofa across the room. “You want to talk about a marriage service, am I right? Please. Sit down.”

  They sat. Goldfarb nodded toward Kimble. “I take it from your name that you are not Jewish.”

  “Oh, no,” said Joan. “Ken’s mother was Jewish.” As she said it she felt herself beaming; she couldn’t help it. She’d discovered this bit of information by accident; her uncle Floyd had mentioned it one night when they’d gone to his house for dinner. Why did you tell Floyd and not me? she’d asked Ken afterward. I didn’t think it would matter, he’d replied. A few weeks later he proposed.

  “My parents weren’t religious,” said Kimble. “So I don’t know the first thing about being Jewish.”

  “Even so.” Goldfarb shifted in his chair. “Under Jewish law the child of a Jewish mother is himself Jewish, regardless of the father’s ancestry or the religion practiced in the home.”

  Joan exhaled. It would be all right. Goldfarb would marry them; they could have the ceremony in her backyard. She hadn’t been to temple in years; for three Yom Kippurs she had failed to fast; yet she wanted to stand under the chuppah beside her new husband, the familiar prayers raining down on them both. It was a thing she’d always known in her heart: if she were ever to marry, it would be to a Jewish man. If Ken were Christian, she might have said yes anyway. (Maybe. Probably. Of course she would have, but without the same conviction.)

  “I take it you were raised a Christian?” said Goldfarb.

  “No.” Kimble glanced at Joan. “I wasn’t raised anything. That makes it simpler, doesn’t it?”

  Goldfarb considered this. “Simpler because celebrating your marriage in a Jewish ceremony would not conflict with any religious beliefs of your own?”

  Kimble nodded.

  “Simpler, yes,” said Goldfarb. “Certainly it makes things simpler.”

  1972

  Joan Kimble was bleeding.

  She’d felt it coming all morning but told herself it was something else. Years ago she’d waited for her period with the same mixture of anxiety and hope, but for different reasons. At Radcliffe, only one infamous girl had a diaphragm; the rest relied naively on the calendar, resorting to hot baths and vinegar douches when they were late. Joan was never late; she’d always been lucky. Now she wondered whether it was luck at all, or simple biological failure; whether her body had ever mastered that most basic of female chores, the production of an egg.

  She dressed and went downstairs to call Ken’s office. “Is my husband there?” she asked the secretary.

  “He’s out showing a house right now. Shall I have him call you?”

  “That’s okay,” said Joan. “It’s nothing important.”

  She padded into the kitchen for more of Rosa’s Cuban coffee, the marble floors cool under her feet. Ken had hired Rosa soon after the wedding to cook and maintain the house; it was simply too big, he insisted, for Joan to do everything herself. He was adamant about keeping the place, though Joan would have been just as happy a few miles inland, in a little bungalow with fruit trees out back. Without the expense of maintaining the house, Ken wouldn’t have to work at all; they could live on the income from her father’s investments. Joan imagined them spending every day together, swimming and reading and sleeping in the sun.

  “It wouldn’t be right,” Ken said each time she proposed the idea. “I’ve got to earn my keep.”

  Her analyst had helped her understand that his male pride wouldn’t allow it; that if he was sometimes preoccupied with business the way her father had been, it was only because he wanted to prove himself to her. Already he’d achieved enormous success—in four years he’d doubled the agency’s profits—but even that wasn’t enough for him. Since Floyd’s death Ken had branched into commercial development; his newest project was a beachfront hotel. He talked constantly about casinos and shopping malls, a proposed golf resort in Boca Raton. Joan could barely keep up.

  AT NOON he came home for lunch. They ate at the glass-topped table Joan had bought for the patio.

  “I hope it isn’t too rare,” she said as Rosa brought out salads and steaks. “Tell Rosa if you want her to cook it some more.” They ate meat all the time now; Ken’s vegetarianism had gone the way of his long hair and Mexican blouse. Joan was privately horrified at the way he preferred his beef, cooked to a leathery gray—a taste he must have acquired growing up in the Midwest. She found herself thinking often of the Midwest, a place she had never been. She blamed the Midwest for Ken’s atrocious table manners, his Spartan work ethic, his reluctance to talk about his feelings, all the parts of her husband she would never understand.

  “Looks fine,” Ken said. “A little heavy for lunch, though. I missed my run this morning.” He’d recently taken up jogging; he was concerned about his weight. Joan couldn’t understand it. For as long as she’d known him, he’d been as lean as a greyhound.

  He dug into his Cobb salad. A piece of avocado shot across the table.

  “How did your meeting go?” she asked. Lately he’d been showing an oceanfront villa in West Palm. At just under a million, it was a tough sell, but he enjoyed the challenge.

  “Great,” he said. “The husband is dragging his feet, but the wife is ready to sign.” It was always the same story: Ken did his best selling to wives.

  Joan cut into her steak. The meat was bright red inside, barely warm—just the way she liked it. She tried to listen as he described an apartment he’d listed, a tenth-floor oceanfront condo in Delray Beach. It reminded her of dinners with her father, who complained about taxes and zoning laws while her mother nodded patiently and Joan and Ben kicked each other under the table. Lately she’d been lonely for her brother, hundreds of miles away. They had barely spoken since her wedding.

&
nbsp; Ken reached into his mouth, fished out a piece of gristle and lay it on his plate. “What’s on your agenda for this afternoon?”

  “Dr. Sugarman.” Joan made a face. “My six-month checkup.”

  Ken said nothing. They never spoke of her breast cancer; after two years of marriage, he still hadn’t seen the scar on her chest.

  “I suppose I should tell you,” said Joan. “I got my period this morning. Six days late. I was sure this was it.” Her gynecologist had told her to expect it, given her age: her cycles would become gradually less regular until they stopped altogether. She’d never repeated this to Ken.

  She was dying for a child. For two years it had crept up on her, like a thief trying all the doors and windows, looking for a way in. She found herself noticing children at the beach, the shopping plaza, the playground across from the hair salon. She’d become fascinated with Rosa’s granddaughter, a chubby four-year-old named Marisol who watched her with enormous eyes and hid behind Rosa’s skirt when Joan spoke to her. Sometimes, through the kitchen door, she heard Marisol laugh, a bright arc of sound that bubbled through the air like water from a fountain. Alone in the big house all day, she could think of nothing else. Recently she’d had a birthday card from her cousin Ruth in Scarsdale, pregnant with her third child. Ruth was forty-two, the same age as Joan. It was another reason to hope.

  “Maybe next month,” said Ken. He pushed his steak away and sat back in his chair.

  “Maybe,” said Joan. He always froze up when she talked about the intimate functions of her body. She supposed women didn’t do this in the Midwest.

  “Aren’t you going to eat your steak?” she asked.

  They both looked down at his plate, the barely touched meat lying in a pool of blood.

  SUGARMAN’S HAIR had begun to gray. He sat on a low stool, examining Joan’s left breast—more roughly than necessary, she thought. Or maybe she’d become hypersensitive. She wasn’t used to being touched.

  “Ouch,” she said.

  “Premenstrual tenderness?”

  “No.” She shifted on the examining table; the paper cover crinkled beneath her. “I got my period this morning. I’m not happy about it.”

  Sugarman looked at her quizzically. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m trying to get pregnant.” You idiot, she nearly added.

  His eyes widened. “Pregnant?”

  “For God’s sake,” Joan snapped. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not that old.” Her eyes went to Sugarman’s desk. His boys in baseball uniforms, teenagers now. A new photo of the blond wife, this time holding a baby.

  “I didn’t mean that.” Sugarman’s eyes sought hers. “I wasn’t even thinking about your age. But you’ve had breast cancer. No matter what your age, pregnancy would pose some risks.”

  “Risks of what?” Her pulse was loud in her ears.

  “There haven’t been any controlled studies,” he said. “But when a woman is pregnant, her estrogen levels go through the roof. If there are any abnormal cells in your remaining breast, all that estrogen is going to make them grow.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s a chance your cancer could recur.”

  Joan stared him. There were fine lines at the corners of his eyes; finally he’d begun to age. But he is a young man, she thought. He will live a long life.

  “No,” said Joan. “That’s crazy. I haven’t had cancer in four years.”

  “Three years.”

  “Three and a half.” Pressure behind her eyes, a threat of tears. “Four in December.”

  “Four in December,” Sugarman said gently. “Look, I’m not trying to scare you. I probably should have mentioned this earlier. But at your age—” He broke off. “It didn’t occur to me that you were considering it.”

  Joan drove home into the blinding sun. Storm clouds behind her: it was the last week of the hurricane season. She hadn’t thought of her cancer in a long time. At some point in the past few years—she couldn’t say when—she’d stopped grabbing her left breast, obsessively feeling for lumps. She felt, if not quite whole, then healthy and content. She had a husband, a home, a life she’d never imagined.

  She pulled into the driveway. The garage door was open, Ken’s Eldorado parked inside—he must have come home early, to squeeze in a jog before the storm. He met her at the door, dressed in running shorts.

  “How’d it go at the doctor’s?” he asked.

  “Make love to me,” she said.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance. He looked over her shoulder, at the threatening sky.

  “I want to squeeze in a run before the storm hits,” he said. “How about a rain check?”

  They made love every Sunday. First they went out to dinner.

  Mulligan’s was the best steak house in Boca Raton; that Sunday the parking lot was packed with cars. As always Joan had reserved a table for five o’clock. She had no interest in the early bird special; her concern was more urgent. Ken needed two hours to digest after dinner, and by nine o’clock he’d be asleep for the night. If sex were to happen, it had to occur before eight.

  They parked in front and went inside, expecting the usual crowd of elderly couples; instead the place was filled with men. They stood four deep in the entranceway, waiting for tables. Their dark wool suits and sober ties looked out of place in the winter sunshine, relics of a colder climate.

  The hostess showed the Kimbles to their usual table, a wide booth in the corner of the dining room. Joan scanned the menu, though she knew it by heart. They came to Mulligan’s every Sunday; the other local restaurants specialized in seafood, which Ken refused to eat. If it were up to him, they’d have every meal at home, Rosa’s meat loaf seven days a week.

  An unfamiliar waitress approached with glasses of ice water. She was young and heavily made up, sleek in a strapless dress. As Joan knew he would, Ken smiled warmly.

  “Busy tonight,” he said.

  “You got that right.” She set down the glasses. “There’s a conference in town.”

  Ken ordered for both of them, T-bones and baked potatoes; his eyes darted briefly to the girl’s cleavage. The waitress shimmied away, the dress tight across her behind.

  “What an odd crowd,” said Joan.

  He shrugged. “Lot of bad suits.”

  She glanced around the room. The tables were filled with men in dark jackets: a few gray ones, lots of browns, one forest green. Her eyes stopped on a fat man in a bow tie.

  “That man is looking at you,” she said.

  Ken looked up. His mouth tightened. “A client, maybe.”

  “Do you recognize him?”

  “Why should I?” he snapped. “I can’t keep them all straight.” He stood up abruptly, nearly upsetting his water glass.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, heading toward the washroom.

  Joan waited. The young waitress swept past, carrying a platter of steaks. Once the aroma would have made her hungry, but no longer; she was sick to death of steak. She glanced at her watch. Ken had been gone nearly ten minutes.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” said a deep voice. It was the fat man, now approaching the table. “The gentleman who was sitting here. I could swear I know him from somewhere.” He spoke slowly, a Southern drawl.

  “He’s my husband,” said Joan.

  “Then you would know.” The man smiled. “Did he by chance study at Bethany Biblical Seminary? Class of forty-eight? He’s a dead ringer for my old roommate.”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Joan.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Very sure. My husband and I are Jewish.”

  The man colored. “Sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “It’s okay,” said Joan. “You didn’t.”

  “Beg pardon.” The man’s face was very red. He turned and lumbered back to his table.

  A moment later Ken reappeared. He looked very pale.

  “Are you all right?” said Joan.

  “I think I’m coming dow
n with something.” He did not sit.

  “Oh, sweetheart.” He had a delicate stomach; everything made him queasy. “How about some ginger ale?”

  “I think we’d better go home.”

  Joan slid out of the booth; Ken reached into his wallet and laid a five on the table. “For the girl,” he said. Joan was about to point out that she’d only brought them water, but stopped herself. He was stingy with their usual waitress, who was stout and fiftyish. Only young, pretty waitresses got generous tips.

  He hurried out the back door, Joan close behind him. He reached the car first, backed out of the parking space before she could close the passenger door.

  “Sorry about this,” he said. “I feel lousy.”

  “Poor baby,” said Joan. She clutched her door handle as they peeled away from the curb. Only then did she notice the sign out front:

  MULLIGAN’S WELCOMES THE SOUTHEAST BIBLE CONFERENCE.

  KEN WENT immediately to bed. Later, when Joan slid in next to him, he lay flat on his back, snoring softly. She curled up beside him and pressed her chest against his shoulder. Since her marriage she’d wore the silicone breast constantly, even at night.

  “Hi,” she whispered.

  His eyes snapped open. “Hi.” It still amazed her, how alert he was the moment he opened his eyes. No grogginess. His body operated at only two settings, awake and asleep; there was nothing in between.

  “I’m glad you’re awake,” said Joan.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Sorry.” She reached under his pajama jacket and ran her hand across his chest. Absently he patted her thigh.

  “I have an early meeting tomorrow,” he said. “I set the alarm for five.”

  “Five?” she repeated. He jogged most mornings before work; his discipline astounded her. She’d tried to adopt his schedule but found it impossible; she went to bed when he did, then lay awake for hours watching him sleep. “Why don’t you stay up for a while?” he often asked. “You can always sleep in.” But Joan would not. If she gave in to her nocturnal nature, they’d never make love again. She would never get pregnant.