Unaccompanied Women

by Jane Juska

  Lots of readers—let’s hope they are also buyers of books—have come to hear me talk. Sometime during the evening I will say what, finally, I have become brave enough to say aloud. It is a response to the many members of the audience who say, “I borrowed this from my aunt” or “I loved your book, I loaned it to all my friends.” I do not correct the grammar with, The verb is “to lend,” past tense is “lent.” Correcting grammar is not something you do if you’re hoping for people to buy your book. What I say is, “Wait. The next time a friend asks to borrow your/my book, tell them this: ‘Buy the book. I know the author, and she needs the money.’” “But your book is doing very well!” someone exclaims, and I say once again that I still live in three hundred fifty square feet and go to the laundromat every week. They nod and promise to do better.

  Not long ago, at a reading nearby, I said this very thing. Afterward a young woman, her turn to ask for my autograph come round at last, said, “I feel terrible, just awful. I got your book from the library; I had no idea. So I want to give you this.” She handed me a check she had made out to me for the full price of the hardcover. I tucked her check back into her hand and thanked her—I wanted to put my arms around her—and suggested she give the money to her local library. She seemed happy to be asked to do that and to believe that I was not as financially desperate as I may have implied.

  I said it again in Saint Louis and got this response from a young woman: “I’m sorry, I would love to buy your book, but I can’t. I am not of your persuasion.” Huh? She explains, “I used to be of your persuasion, but I’m not anymore.” She is all dolled up in good-looking small men’s clothes: trousers well creased, shirt and tie, a camel hair jacket, and penny loafers. She looks good. She also looks moneyed enough to buy my book. She says, “Could we meet later for ice cream?” “No,” I answer, and then, “Buy my book anyway, I need the money.” She smiles and wanders off into her persuasion.

  Tonight, as the line begins to form, a little birdlike woman rushes ahead of everyone, right up to the front of the line, where I am about to sign books. She pokes her face into mine and whispers, “Are you still seeing Graham?” I nod. She sighs as one sighs just before swooning, and says, “That’s all I wanted to know. You’ve made my evening.” And skitters off. Graham, whom my readers have dubbed The Young One, has become a favorite of many of them. They demand, “Tell us about The Young One” or ask, “How could you get undressed in front of The Young One?” He will become beloved among readers for his sexual prowess, his kindness, his intelligence, and his appreciation of me. “How does it feel to be so admired?” I asked him (before he went to Italy). “Odd, very odd.”

  The person at the end of the line tonight is not a man wanting a date. Damn. A man from Walnut Creek might just think sharing his money with me is a good idea. He might even buy me a house where air-conditioning is built right in. This kind of thinking brings back the memory of Barrett, my rich lover who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, back then buy me a house. I wonder if he could now. Maybe I should have tried harder, hung in there longer. It seems a lifetime ago that the two of us strolled about London and New York enjoying each other’s company, though not in bed. All that happened during my Romantic period. Now I am in my postmodern period, form over function, façade over feeling. Forget the love stuff; I need a fucking house. So where is it? Not here, not now. Tonight’s last person is a woman who strides forward, book in hand, an enormous grin on her face. “I waited until the end because I have a story to tell you.”

  Her name is Jody. She is fifty-four years old. Over the years her husband lost all interest in making love, and for a long time he has not touched her. In all other respects he has been a commendable companion and father. Except no touching anymore, no touching of any kind. “Sometimes I reached out to touch his cheek,” she says, “but he brushed my hand away. I felt humiliated.” When Jody turned fifty, her husband asked her what she wanted for her birthday. “I want you to make love to me,” she said, and he replied, “We’re beyond that” and bought her an expensive necklace, which lies in her drawer, unworn, to this day.

  “I didn’t want to leave my husband,” she tells me. “He is a good man, we have many things in common, he is a good father to our kids, but I knew I could not live the rest of my life without physical intimacy. I needed to feel desirable. I needed the touch of a man, I needed to make love to a man. My skin burned sometimes, my throat would close up without warning, and one day I decided enough was enough. It was time to find a lover. And then I read your book. I thought I was alone, and here you came to keep me company.” She stops and her eyes sparkle. “The surprise is that my lover is quite a bit younger than I am.”

  Jody is aglow. She stands before me tall and strong, her dark red hair springing up in little curls all over her head. “This has been the most wonderful year of my life,” she says. Now, I could spend hours in Jody’s force field; I feel energized by her, happy that she is happy. I don’t even care to know why she is so happy, it is enough to catch some of her radiance. However, the bookstore is closing, and so Jody asks if she can write me and I say yes, and she strides back up the aisle, turns and says, “And I’m reading all of Trollope.” Well, Trollope helped start off this new and incredible life of mine. Hers, too, apparently.

  Weeks later an e-mail message appears on my screen. It is an invitation to go for a motorcycle ride. Jody has owned and driven bikes for years. I bet she looks fabulous in leather. So of course I say yes.

  You have never seen the streets of San Francisco until you have seen them from the back of a motorcycle. At the start I saw them with my eyes tight shut; eventually I peered over Jody’s fabulous black leather motorcycle jacket—which I clutched with all the strength left in my seventy-one-year-old fingers—and marveled at the power and the roar of this amazing machine. San Francisco is famous for its hills; we conquered every one of them, and by the end of our ride, I felt great, I felt strong, I felt tough, as in, Hey, man, don’t mess with me, I’m a Harley babe. And I hadn’t even done anything, just clung to Jody’s leather midriff. Motorcycles are sexy beasts, all that throbbing beneath the seat that rises up right into your private parts. It’s no wonder you feel more alive at the end of a ride than at the beginning.

  I fell in love with motorcycles when I was in high school. A few of the boys in my senior class of thirty-two (biggest class to graduate from our school up to that time) owned and rode motorcycles. Dick was one of them, and every so often we would skip out of afternoon study hall and hop onto his motorcycle and roar off to Goll’s Woods, where kids went to neck, except for me. I just wanted to ride on the back of Dick’s bike. Then here came my dad who ruined it all, wouldn’t you know.

  One day—and mind you, my dad had never said one word about my accompanying Dick on his bike, though of course he knew; everybody in town knew everything about everybody—he called to me to come out to the backyard. I went, and there sat Roger Nafziger in a wheelchair. Roger was a year behind me in school and had been captain of the basketball team, and now, at sixteen, there he sat and would sit “for the rest of his life,” said my dad, also Roger’s doctor. “Roger, tell Jane”—by now some of the neighbors had gathered, among them my biker buddy Dick—“tell everyone how you sustained your injuries.” Well, we knew, we knew that Roger had been in an accident with his motorcycle and had missed practically the whole year of school. It was a really awful thing that happened to Roger, but what did it have to do with us? What was my dad trying to do here? Roger said, “I lost control of my bike, crashed it, bike fell on top of me, crushed my legs, cracked my spine . . .” His voice wandered off, and he looked suddenly old and worn out and terribly sad. “I guess,” he said, “my advice would be not to ride motorcycles.” Through it all my dad never took his eyes off me. He never said another word about it, and I never rode a motorcycle again until graduate school twenty-five hundred miles away from my dad, and only when Bob, who was getting his doctorate in physics, so how could he lose control of anything, b
eeped the horn of his bike and off we went. Riding a motorcycle is a thrill, nothing else like it. So I wondered if Jody’s bike was a substitute for the thrill of the lovemaking her husband denied her. “It helps,” she said, “but only a little.”

  Jody wants to talk, so we settle ourselves on a stone wall overlooking San Francisco Bay, and marvel at the cloudless blue sky, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and the absence of any fog, perhaps in this summer month the most unusual part of the day. It is as if no time at all had passed since our bookstore visit. “So I read your book. My god, you took a lot of chances to get what you wanted. And what you wanted was the same as what I wanted: touching, with good sex, too, if it happened, but most important was feeling a man’s desire for me.” I nod. “So I went on Craigslist.”

  Craigslist is an Internet bulletin board. It began in San Francisco, now has sites in New York and other big cities. You can find everything on Craigslist: houses, cars, jobs, dates with men, dates with women, and it’s free except for realtors who want to list properties. Jody advertised thusly: “I am a 52-year-old married woman who loves architecture, motorcycles, and chess. My husband has not touched me in years. I want to stay married but I can no longer live without intimacy and sexuality. Tell me why you would want a relationship with a married woman.”

  She received more than seventy responses within a twenty-four-hour period. “I had to pull the ad. I was afraid I would be buried. And their letters, most of them, took my invitation seriously and wrote candidly about themselves. Some were married but most were single, some black, some white, men of sixty and men of twenty-six. It was a revelation. So many lonely men.” And then there was Dan.

  Dan was thirty and had just finished his Ph.D. in genetics. “Something about his response tugged at my heartstrings. He claimed to be the quintessential nerd, ignored by girls most of his life, and filled with the romantic longing most of us have abandoned by the age of twenty-one. The undercurrent of passion in his letters rocked me.”

  What the hell, she thought. So they met for coffee. Age must have improved him, because he showed no sign of the nerd; in fact, she couldn’t take her eyes off him. It didn’t mean anything would have to happen, and it didn’t, and then they met for coffee again and the hours went by and they talked and talked and, well, it got dark and Jody’s husband was traveling on business and Dan lived nearby and “How,” says Jody, “could a young and beautiful man bear the sight of my scarred, overweight body? Wouldn’t he take one look and shrink right back into his boxers?” He didn’t; he said, “You are so beautiful and you don’t even know it.” And they fell in love. “Not something I planned for,” she says. And so began “the most wonderful year of my life.”

  But she is on the edge of tears. “I was so happy, I began to exercise, lost twenty pounds, bought new clothes; I began to be proud of myself. My husband grew happier, my daughters were happy to see me when they came home from college, my friends marveled at my new self. With my husband away so often with friends or on business, Dan and I made love all the time, at his apartment, at my house, in the countryside where we traveled on my bike. Dan loved the fact that I rode a bike. I made gorgeous picnics and off we would go to the wine country, buy a pinot noir, and feast on pâté and sourdough bread and cornichons, and cookies I made myself. Afterward . . . He loved my spirit and my libido. I loved making love to him and with him. I was like a thirsty man in the desert; after all the years of not being wanted, I couldn’t get enough of his passion for me.” She is definitely crying now; she reminds me of Roger Nafziger sitting there in his wheelchair, knowing his life is over. “We ended a month ago.”

  I have not said anything for a long time but understand now that her offer of a ride through San Francisco was not just a thank-you for my book; her invitation came from a need to talk. She rushes on: “Nobody knows anything about this. I can’t talk to anyone. I’m so bottled up. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to burden you, I’m just so sad, I need someone who understands me.”

  I do. I know that there are many layers of the love between a younger man and an older woman. It’s nothing new; in fact, it is encouraged in some cultures; for instance, there was and perhaps still is the custom in Italy of placing untried boys with skilled older women, not prostitutes, often women of good reputation, who instruct them in the art of love, the manners of lovemaking. We talk briefly about famous couples in which the woman was older than the man: Anne Hathaway, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Susan Sarandon, and let us not forget Demi Moore. Jody looks at me, her tears stanched, and reminds me that seven years are all that separate these famous people, with the exception of Demi. “Not twenty!” she says, and I think but do not say, And not forty, the age difference between Graham and me. Jody tells me how the age difference worked to Dan’s advantage. She was much more skilled than he. “Part of the pleasure,” she says, “was his eagerness to learn. We practiced a lot. We laughed a lot. We even went shopping for sex toys! Neither of us had ever . . . No one had ever touched me like that, even my scars, my middle-aged belly, my toes, and a place he found at the back of my neck I never even knew was there. I felt so free. We were new together. And now . . . it’s time for him to find a woman to carry his children, to grow old with.” She is quiet and determined and in pain.

  I murmur, “I know, I know.” I would take her hand, but she still wears her motorcycle gloves; I would put my arm around her, except she’s so much taller than I and it would be awkward and, well, of course, here in San Francisco passersby would assume we were a lesbian couple, which would not trouble either of us. I feel useless, and then she says, “You are the only person I can talk to and I’ve only met you twice, but in your book you wrote about Graham”—a bit of a smile here—“and so I thought you wouldn’t make fun of me or scold me or judge me. I thought you would understand how you can love someone and let them go. God, I’m not sure if I feel sixty or sixteen.” Although the sun is rapidly going down behind the Golden Gate Bridge, she puts her sunglasses over her eyes. “I’d forgotten how shitty sixteen can feel.” She takes off her gloves and blows her nose. “He wants children,” she says, “and I can’t give them to him. All I can give him is the freedom to find someone who can. So here we are, you and me, and there he is . . .” She points down toward the marina.

  “Letting go is hard,” I say.

  “And I haven’t yet. But I will, I have to. Hop on.”

  Our ride back to the lot where I’ve left my car is subdued. The motorcycle purrs rather than roars, and I am hoping the ride eases Jody’s pain. Because I can’t help, I can only hope that my open ear and closed mouth helped a little. At the parking lot, she gives me a hug and I give her one back. “Wait!” she says. “We’ve gotta have a picture!” She hands her camera to a passerby and we stand before her Harley, she in all her leather beauty, I in my red shirt and New York Public Library baseball cap, tough women for tough times.

  I feel pretty shitty myself, for I have not let go. I have not been as brave, as generous, as Jody. I have clung to whatever shred of himself Graham is willing to toss my way. I have berated him for his long silences between e-mails, I have written and sent midnight dui’s that embarrass me in the morning, I have cried over his inaccessability when I’m in New York for fun and he’s in Chicago on business. I have even hoped for bad luck to befall him in Italy. “The time Dan and I spent together,” Jody had said, “was a year out of time. It was a year of growth for him and happiness for me. Now he will make the life he needs and wants, a life with children in it.” Graham has made the life he wants. I should let him live it.

  Next day, on my computer the photograph of the two of us arrives. There we stand, arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning as if we were happy, the Harley gleaming behind us. Biker Babes Forever. That’s us. Good thing my dad’s not around. He’d kill me.

  CHAPTER 21

  how reading can change your life

  A reader’s faith in literature is the truest form of assisted living.

  —THO
MAS MALLON in his review of

  JULIAN BARNES’S The Lemon Table

  IN CASE YOU were wondering, when we came back from Europe in 1955, we were still virgins, except for Pat, who came back pregnant—though she didn’t know it until some weeks after she’d got home. She had an abortion, a bad one, an illegal one, a dangerous one, almost died, was disowned by her father and ignored by her mother for the rest of her life. Eventually she married a nice man, had two kids, and spent holidays with her in-laws.

  Next to Pat, I came the closest of anyone in our little group to Becoming a Woman. As travelers in foreign countries, each of us had a job: translating the dollar into local currencies, reading the map, finding a place to sleep—“Haben sie Zimmer für sechs Personen?” Now that we were abroad—on the Continent, ta-da—we convinced ourselves that we were becoming more sophisticated with each passing day, and so we felt free to be risque, to unleash the natural sexiness in ourselves, at least in words if not in deed. With that in mind, I was given the job to discover, learn to speak, and teach to others, in the language of the country in which we found ourselves, the phrase “sexual intercourse.” Germany was tough, and provided us with our least favorite word for “sexual intercouse”: “Geschlechtsverkehr.” “Rapporti sessuali,” the language of lovers in Italy, was our favorite. We made a kind of Gregorian chant out of it: “Rapporti sessuali sit in perpetuum,” which we sang up and down the streets of Florence and Rome, forgetting that our new language belonged to everybody who happened by and who smiled, mostly, at those American girls. We had such fun. Though one day, in Rome, as we sat in a café sipping red wine so cheap that our teeth were already dark brown—oh, yes, we were smoking Gauloises, too—we looked at each other and admitted that not one of us had been pinched.