by Jane Juska
And Warren said, “I’m sorry if I have caused you pain.”
Dear reader, allow me to pause in this narrative to wonder about Susan and this Warren fellow. The day after Susan confessed her “inappropriate” feelings, she and Warren discussed, in her words, her “strange affliction, I rueful, he commiserating. We agreed lovemaking had probably been an unwise decision.” Why, Susan, do you consider your passion inappropriate? Why do you call it a “strange affliction”? Of course, you would worry about his heart valve, but after all, Warren is a doctor and undoubtedly aware of the dangers lurking within. And surely, the two of you could discuss all this and then the two of you could . . . Do you think, Susan, you are too old to feel such passion? You’re not. Do you think that your passion was greater than Warren’s? Now, that’s possible; it always is. And maybe you called it an “affliction,” that is, something beyond your control, in order to avoid your own judgment, your own responsibility for your feelings. And finally, perhaps you wanted to spare Warren, to make this “strange affliction” your problem, to take the blame, to assume the guilt, to exonerate Warren from all of the above. How womanly of you! Oh, how things stay the same!
And now, Warren, if I may be so bold, who do you think you are to commiserate with poor dear Susan for her “inappropriate” feelings? Why should she feel rueful, apologetic? For what? I am hoping you convinced her that her feelings, intense as they were, did not repulse you, that they were natural; and I hope you said something like, “Well, I started the whole thing.” Because, of course, you did. What did you think would happen if she said yes to your “Would you like me to hold you?” Being sorry if you caused her pain is fine and dandy, but it doesn’t get you out of anything. How often have we women heard that? It’s supposed to make everything all right again, it’s so you can slip out of our lives with only the tiniest regret, gone by the time you hit the freeway. If you’d thought about it, Warren, you’d have known this is how it would be from the minute you stepped off that airplane. But no, a little cuddling, a little conversation about the old high school gang, free room and board for you, and a lot of screwing up a woman who’s been waiting for you forever and well, gosh, “I’m sorry if I caused you pain.” Good but not good enough. Is it possible your whole heart is steel? Okay, I presume too much.
But hold on: Here comes Helen. Yes, Warren, you mentioned Helen early on, didn’t you, a woman you sometimes traveled with, “just a friend,” you assured Susan. And Susan, well, god, at seventy-eight she’s as dumb as we all were at sixteen and seem to remain. Okay, we think, so there’s this Helen person and we certainly cannot demand exclusivity at our age! In fact, we can’t demand anything, all we can do is take what we can get and be grateful. Warren, of course, gets both Susan and Helen to diddle with as he pleases, casting crumbs to the besotted as he does. He takes Helen to France; he takes Susan on a cruise, and in between is relieved that Susan refuses cunnilingus, because, she says, it would be unfair since only she would receive the pleasure. Oh, please. Susan is content now, she says, to enjoy whatever intimacies Warren chooses to provide her. She is grateful that the various medications necessary to a healthy life at age seventy-eight do, mercifully, dull the libido—a bit.
But wait! Who would ever think Time magazine would rise to the occasion and become the hero of the day? And lo, there cometh upon the plain of darkness enlightenment, and its name was Testosterone. Susan sends the issue on sexuality to Warren. A coupla shots and Warren is up and running. Warren’s back and Susan’s got him! And so has Helen, apparently, for the two of them are off to Paris. Helen has found out about Susan, has accused Warren of betraying her but, says Susan, “I guess she’s like me and accepts whatever.” And Warren? He must be one happy guy.
So I’m not sorry to have missed my fiftieth high school reunion back there in Ohio. It happened the week after 9/11, so I flew to New York instead of to Toledo. I heard that my classmates had a very nice time. And everybody who got married is still married and hardly anyone has died, so lord knows what pain awaited me there. New York was safer.
CHAPTER 23
staying in touch
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”
—HOLDEN CAULFIELD in The Catcher in the Rye
MY PHONE RINGS a lot these days, even though I am supposed to be unlisted. “Hah!” one caller chortles. “You thought you could hide! I went to the library! Gotcha!” Not long ago my phone rang at five-thirty in the morning. I stumbled to answer it, and a deep, slow southern voice said, “Hey, Jane”—the kind of voice, only deeper, that said, “Hey, Boo” in To Kill a Mockingbird—“I just wanted to hear your sleepy-time voice.” I hung up. The phone rang at seven-thirty. “Hey, Jane, just want to apologize for waking you. Loved your book, and if you’re ever in—” Clunk. There are nice phone calls, too, from John in Mississippi, a lawyer who read the book at the insistence of his wife, and who wants to thank me for “showing them the way.” I do not know what I wrote that would show them the way, but if they found one, maybe they can write a book and show the rest of us. Len, who lives in the Bronx, phones every other week, “just to see how things are going, make sure you’re all right.” Len tells me about his job that bores him and his Japanese girlfriend who doesn’t, about his mother and her dementia that frightens him, about his dream of hiking the Appalachian Trail. He is a nice man. Then, too, there is a man named Phil who loves New York, “just like you,” and who wants “to walk the length of Manhattan” on me. I’m not sure how he planned to do that, because I hung up fairly quickly. A man in Quebec calls every so often, in that seductive French—okay, French Canadian—accent, to tell me that he has read the book many times and . . . Oh my, this man is very needy. After forty years of work in the government, he moved back to Quebec and bought his childhood home, and now he lives alone, except when he goes to the library—I hasten to end the call without being rude.
Who do men talk to?! Sometimes, during these calls, I want to reach out and touch them, hold them, and tell them—What? That everything will be all right? Because the certainty grows—as I listen to men from every state in the union and beyond—that nobody holds them, that nobody listens to them, and that, probably as a result, or maybe because of their own silence, they don’t talk to anyone—not about boring jobs or spending time in the library when kids get there from school just to be near some kind of life or . . . I have been told by men that when they get together, they talk about golf and skiing and sometimes politics and sports and their jobs and moving and buying houses or fixing them up—Sheetrock and shingling seem big in the conversation of men—so I wonder, do they ever talk about sadness or joy? I know, feelings. Who was it who gave feelings a bad name? Who was it who said to men, Feelings are not on the docket, they are off-topic, they are outsourced—to women? So now here are these men saying to me, “My sister died six months ago and I lived with her and now I was wondering if you and I could go for a cup of coffee” and “New Mexico is beautiful this time of year, I would love to show you this part of the country, my wife died in June” and “Are you still taking applications?” Maybe I’m a mom to these men. Maybe I’m someone to unburden themselves to and then, if they’re lucky, set up a sleepover with. The whole oedipal thing resolved in a single phone call. Whatever you call it—loneliness, despair, alienation—whether its explanation is Freudian or neurohormonal or god, my telephone trembles with it.
One day a woman calls. Her voice is low, with the hint of a Southern accent. She introduces herself this way: “I’ve never done this before and I don’t want to bother you, but my husband and I so loved your book I just had to tell you right away.” This is nice to hear. She continues: “We are coming to your city to celebrate our anniversary and would love to take you to dinner.” I don’t want to do this. Who are these people? But wait: She sounds nice, she sounds interesting, she
sounds as if she will pay for my dinner. What’s to keep me home? I go.
Her name is Emily and her husband’s name is Alan. They have been married for four years. Emily at eighty is truly lovely to look at. She is tall, slim, with no pouch of a tummy I can distinguish—She wears her sweater tucked in! and a belt!—and her eyes are big and brown, cataract surgery having rid her of the necessity of wearing glasses. Her hair is brown, streaked here and there with white. She is an elegant woman. Alan has my favorite look: Slim in khakis and a button-down shirt bedizened by a rep tie and covered by a V-necked sweater, he is New England softened by Lands’ End. His hair is white and thick, and his smile is of very high wattage. He is eighty-two.
At the end of a very fine dinner with fine conversation, Alan invites me to visit them in Oregon. “We mustn’t let this evening be our last.” I agree, and some months later I go. During the course of my visit they tell me the stories of their lives. The lives of Alan and Emily are the stuff of dreams, of fairy tales, of nightmares and miracles.
In a photograph of the two of them, taken in 1943 on Emily’s porch swing in Saint Louis, Emily is lying in Alan’s arms, her dark hair falling back onto his shoulder, his head bent to her face, which smiles happily and confidently into the camera. The photograph doesn’t show Alan’s face, only his hair, a bright blond cap that would stand him in good stead when he went off to Harvard. They promised to be true to each other.
Alas, Harvard was very far away, and Emily met a boy who lived nearby, a boy who was tall and dark and handsome in a Heathcliff sort of way. Emily’s mother warned her. “He is a wild boy,” she said, “and dangerous, too.” But Emily was captivated by that very wildness, and one night, in the midst of winter sleet, she ran away with her wild boy to a land of sun and water, where fruit trees dropped oranges into their laps, and where, for the first time, Emily gave herself to a boy she swore to love forever.
On the far East Coast, Alan grew to handsomeness, and on a weekend in New York City, in the bar at the Biltmore, where at nineteen Alan could drink legally, a very beautiful woman, clearly older than Alan, perhaps even as old as thirty, smoothed herself onto the bar stool next to him. For a brief moment Alan feared she was a lady of the evening, and while Alan’s father was rich, Alan himself was not, and was at the moment without the means to avail himself of such a woman.
“My husband is an officer stationed in France,” said the woman, “and on occasion I come here for company and the chance to dress in the lovely clothes he bought me before the war.” Alan looked at the satin of her gown and the satin of her shoulders and the dark sheen of her hair and determined to be good company. Two manhattans later she said, “Come with me; I live nearby.”
The woman, without her gown, was satin from top to toe, although Alan in his youthful eagerness took no time to notice. Afterward, he was ashamed. The woman shushed him: “Do not despair; time is on our side.” Sure enough, only minutes later, her mouth and hands in all the right places, Alan made love to this wonderful creature. And again. And all night long.
Far away, in the land of sun and water, the wild boy grew angry with Emily. “You told me you were a virgin! Why didn’t you bleed?!” Emily curled herself into a very small ball of misery and soon after hurried home. The wild boy, having decided that a demi-virgin was better than no virgin at all, followed her, and on Emily’s mother and father’s porch the police met him. Emily never saw him again.
In New York City, in the early morning light, the woman kissed Alan. “You are a lovely man,” she said. Despite several trips to New York and more than a little time in the bar at the Biltmore, Alan never saw the woman again.
And so ended the fairy tale of their young lives. It didn’t come out right, did it? If it had, Alan would have returned to Emily, they would have married and lived happily ever after. But they didn’t, and so real life took over.
Like ordinary people Alan and Emily did the ordinary things. They got married, though not to each other, and had children, who—if children have a purpose at all now that the world has enough people in it—serve to notify parents that life is not a fairy tale. The children grew and some of them prospered, some of them didn’t. The marriages of Alan and Emily did not prosper, yet somehow, even though they were on opposite sides of the country, they felt the presence of each other. They wrote each other polite notes at Christmas and on birthdays, always correct, never romantic, just notices to each other that they had not forgotten and would not forget, just to stay in touch.
On a few occasions in the wintertime, at Alan’s invitation, Emily and her first husband flew to Vermont, where Alan and his wife had a cabin. Emily’s husband knew of the long friendship between his wife and Alan; he knew nothing of their early love for each other. For her part Emily believed herself to be grown up, responsible, capable of friendship without a rekindling of feelings from so many years before. One stormy winter evening, the four of them warming themselves before the fire, a thought, completely unbidden, came to Emily: Oh, why don’t they leave us, why don’t they go and leave Alan and me alone? She knew then she shouldn’t have come. Watching Alan in the firelight, skiing with him down the powdery trail, standing next to him in the kitchen or on the porch or in the hall or in the driveway, anywhere at all, her heart leapt and she fell in love all over again. For his part Alan couldn’t take his eyes off Emily, who seemed to have grown lovelier over the years. The time they spent in each other’s company was not enough, not enough at all, and his heart ached with wanting her. But what could they do? There were children on both sides who needed them. Losing a child—and both Alan and Emily did—retards, and sometimes destroys, the lives of the parents. It is the most unfair and most catastrophic event in an unfair and catastrophic universe, and for a long time Alan and Emily, along with their spouses, removed themselves from life. Only their remaining children gave them reason to resume living.
And then one fall Saturday, Emily, on her way with her husband to France, stopped in New York, and there, in the Egyptian room at the Metropolitan Museum, she came upon Alan and his new and second wife, Laura. The four of them exchanged introductions and a few pleasantries, then Laura and Emily’s husband wandered off to view the pyramid, and Alan and Emily were, for a few minutes, alone. In an instant the world grew both larger and smaller; colors were brighter, sounds clearer, and all the people disappeared; there were no people at all, just the two of them standing there close to each other. Suddenly Emily leaned over and whispered, “Somehow, someday, I think we will be together.” How bold! Emily hardly dared look at Alan, but when she did, he was smiling. And then they parted.
When Emily was fifty and those children who hadn’t died early had grown, she divorced her husband, a philanderer and, worse, boring. Early in the marriage, in addition to other women he had taken up the cello, one of Emily’s favorite instruments until he began to play it, though once she got used to the screech and scratch of it she became fond of the time he spent with it. She was a cello widow and quite content to be so.
Alan’s second wife was a termagant, and why he married her no one could understand, Alan being the gentle soul that he was. Wife number two made a good deal of money in her career in finance high above Wall Street, where being a termagant seemed appropriate. But there came a time when Alan had had enough and decided to divorce her. He went to Vermont, to his ski house, to think things over.
Emily, enjoying the freedom afforded her by her own divorce, flew to Boston to visit an old friend. From the city she called Alan in Vermont just to say hello. “Come ski with me,” he said, but Emily, unaware of Alan’s plans for divorce, declined his invitation, knowing that the two of them alone would spell trouble for his family life. She tried to explain, but her voice, filled with tears, trembled so that Alan determined to stop thinking about divorce and make plans to do it; and then a terrible thing happened. In New York City, Alan’s wife was robbed and beaten; she sustained severe and irremediable brain damage; she would be an invalid for the rest of her li
fe. Divorce was out of the question.
Emily married again, not Alan but a man named Roger, who at first seemed fond of Emily but who in fact loved the acres on which she lived. Christmas cards and an occasional valentine continued their trips between Alan and Emily; their messages remained polite and informative, never hopeful of what might yet be, but never despairing of what could not.
Unlike Alan’s marriage, filled completely with caring for his wife, Emily’s marriage was typical of many. Emily and Roger were polite to each other; she cooked the right food for him; she saw to it that he had a clean shirt to wear every day. She invented a sort of social life for the two of them, though Roger had little interest in the riches of their local museum or in the books Emily adored or—well, he did go to the movies every so often, railing against subtitles, accusing Emily of undermining him when he found himself, against his will, watching a foreign film. Roger watched a lot of television and spent hours channel surfing, after his workday at the bank. Where Emily’s first husband had sawed at the cello in the studio across the meadow from Emily’s house, Roger watched ESPN. Roger was the first of their acquaintances to get a dish, which he positioned atop the studio, thus blocking the view of the Pacific—but providing him access to new favorites, such as professional wrestling, monster truck rallies, and porn whenever he felt that having sex with his wife was too much trouble. At times the two of them went out to dinner and were that couple you have seen many times in restaurants—middle-aged and silent, staring at their food—two people whose interest in each other has died long ago, perhaps as soon as it began, a husband and wife who have simply run out of things to say.