Unaccompanied Women

by Jane Juska

  Why had they married? Surely not out of passion, absent even in the beginning of their marriage. The custom of the country—in this case, marriage—is a powerful one; two seemed safer than one. After the divorce Emily did not miss her first husband, but she did not know how to live without one; she felt useless to herself now that the children were gone; what good was she, she wondered; she was lonely. Roger, who began courting Emily only months after his first wife’s death, had no idea of how to live alone either; he never had. He had done what he was supposed to: He had made money, quite a bit in fact, worked hard, and been taken care of until his first wife died. Now there was no one to iron his shirts or feed him or change the sheets on the bed where he had claimed his conjugal rights whenever he was moved to do so. There was, however, an increasing number of widows, women in their sixties, like Emily, who were accustomed to doing all those things and who, like Roger, were unaccustomed to living alone. So they teamed up, you might say, in the hope of providing a small fire by which to warm themselves against the coming of the night. The fire turned to ashes before their very eyes, and custom—a man and a woman married to each other—resumed its preeminence in their lives, providing no warmth whatsoever, simply habit.

  Ten years of a marriage of that sort is a long time, and when Emily turned seventy, she decided that, Roger’s needs notwithstanding, she wanted to travel. She cooked two weeks of meals and froze them; she drew a map to the laundry in town, where Roger could take his shirts to be washed and ironed; she renewed his subscription to TV Guide and said good-bye. But before she left, she wrote Alan this note: “I plan to visit Boston the last week of this month. I will be staying at the Ritz-Carlton. If you happen to be in the area, perhaps we could have dinner. It has been a long time.”

  Alan, a resident of New York, had not planned to be in the area, but lickety-split he was, and on a gentle spring evening, in the hotel dining room, Emily reached across the table, took his hand, and said, “Unless you need to get back to New York, we might have breakfast tomorrow.” Alan looked down at his napkin, and Emily grew afraid.

  Aging brings with it illness, infirmities, collapses, debilities, plain old exhaustion. Alan, seventy-seven and a survivor of prostate cancer quieted for the time being by surgery, was even more afraid. The years spent caring for his invalid wife had been sexless, and Alan had been too worn out to look for companionship elsewhere. What the hell was he doing here, he wondered. He hadn’t made love to a woman—for that’s what being with Emily would be—in fifteen years; his prostate was whacked; the chances of performing at all were minimal. Humiliation waited just upstairs.

  Emily, for her part, had lousy knees: Going downstairs hurt like hell. Her elbows ached even at rest—What if she had to get on top?—and her lower back had acquired the habit of going out without giving notice. Like Alan, she had not made love in many years. Though her husband had had sex with her when he felt like it, those occurrences had diminished in number until finally, supplanted by Extreme Sports on ESPN2, they had ceased altogether. Dried by age and disuse, Emily doubted she could provide the necessary slippage necessary for Alan to make love within her.

  Perhaps there have never been two braver people in the world. How easy to lead troops into battle! How inconsequential to swim stormy seas, to fly into a hurricane, to climb the highest mountain! Making love at any age takes nerve—there is so much to be lost—and when the lovers are old in body, courage had better show up. Show up it did, and shored up by love it took a stand and made everything work just fine. So said Alan and Emily to each other the next morning over the breakfast tray: “Everything worked just fine.” And they decided then and there that, adulterers both, they would be together whenever they could wherever they could. They shared a past and would make a future somehow. “Somehow, we will be together.”

  And this is what they said to me as the three of us sat on the patio overlooking the acres of paradise they had bought together after the deaths of their spouses. Alan and Emily, husband and wife for four years, are very much in love.

  “My mother told me, when I was very young,” says Emily, “that the first love is the best love because it never ends.” She looks at her husband and smiles. Alan nods his head in agreement and says, “We have been very lucky, Emily and I, though I would add that our determination to stay in touch had much to do with our happy ending.”

  In their dream life, which they spend happy hours planning, they will move to a vineyard where they will drink wine and raise animals, and in the fall and perhaps in the spring they will visit their pied-à-terre in New York on East Eighty-first Street, near the Metropolitan Museum. For now they live happily in a peaceable kingdom by the sea.

  In the photograph I take of the two of them, the Pacific sparkling behind them, Emily stands tall next to Alan—she has two new knees—her brown hair streaked with white, her face alight with happiness and confidence. Alan does not look at the camera but at Emily, his first and endless love.

  On the way home I decide to call the phone company and get myself listed again. Think what we would have missed had Emily not been able to get in touch.

  CHAPTER 24

  a gentleman caller

  Most people know more as they get older:

  I give all that the cold shoulder.

  —PHILIP LARKIN, “Winter Palace”

  I WILL BE on the West Coast around the time of your birthday. May I take you out for dinner?”

  Graham has been alive to me in my imagination and, with less frequency, in my e-mail. And so, just as I was the very first time we met, I am alarmed and excited, terrified and eager, to see him. Since he has not given me enough advance notice so that I can shed fifteen pounds, I prepare for his visit by drinking in the afternoon.

  What will I wear? All that is loose and dark around my midriff. My extra pounds seem to have gathered there, making me a prime candidate for stroke or heart attack. I pray to the god of medicine to keep me upright and ambulatory until after he leaves. It is, after all, going to be my seventy-second birthday, and I have my dignity to consider.

  Will we make love? Where? Oh, on my futon, where we made love before. But will he want to or will he insist on remaining above the carnal as he did when last we met in New York? Will he turn his back and run should I advance? My dignity already in shreds, I see myself blocking my French doors, barring him from escape. I see myself hiding my only chair, thus forcing him to sit in the only other place available—on the futon next to me. My bed still looks too small for two, although with fifteen pounds less of me, it might do—or have done. Too late now.

  Here’s what I plan to do: clean until the bathroom sparkles. Seeing my medicine cabinet through new eyes—his—I will hide my blood pressure pills behind my Purely Silk Body Lotion, my calcium supplement and baby aspirin behind my Lubriderm and vitamin C chewables. Medicine cabinet stuffed to the gunnels, I will throw into a sack my Metamucil, flaxseed, and milk of magnesia, and the sack into a kitchen cupboard way back where he wouldn’t think to look. But I don’t do it. Graham is not the least interested in medicine cabinets, mine or anyone else’s. Besides, he knows exactly how old I am, plus I’m sure he knows flaxseed is good for ages ten to one hundred. So I pour myself a(nother) glass of wine.

  In the living room I think about replacing Vanity Fair with The American Scholar, Time with The Atlantic, People with The New Yorker, all magazines at hand. But I don’t do it. Graham is an intellectual but not a snob. Besides, he knows what I read; what he likes is that I read—widely and a lot, just as he does. So I leave the magazines where they are: scattered all over my cottage. I consider replacing my CD of Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert with Bach’s The Goldberg Variations. But I don’t. He might want to dance, and Bach, though sometimes a toe-tapper, doesn’t encourage partner dancing. However, I do do this: Right next to the futon, on the table, I put the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, his favorite poet and one of mine.

  Food! He’s always hungry! So I actually do this
: I put down my glass of wine and I bake cookies. I have not made cookies, not even for my granddaughter, since Graham and I, three years ago, in our picnic à deux atop Nob Hill in San Francisco, consumed little chicken legs, Brie, and a baguette, sipped champagne, and, for dessert, nibbled daintily on my homemade chocolate chip cookies. Actually, he devoured them. “Women today,” he announced, “don’t do this sort of thing.” Right, I wanted to say but didn’t, women of my generation do! So what if he and I have committed gross generalizations. Generalizations have their place, serve a purpose. They’re like a giant exhale; they clear your head of the mess all those particularities made of it.

  Tea! He drinks tea! So okay, he didn’t sip the champagne on our picnic; I did. He drank some kind of Odwalla, weird. How is it that not one man I have met during these years of adventure drinks, except for one who was an alcoholic? Graham has never touched alcohol or dope—”Never felt a need for either.” He doesn’t even drink coffee! Now, in my kitchen I have no tea. Well, I have tea: Earl Grey. What if he doesn’t like it? Cookies out of the oven, the smell of them turning my cottage into a real home, I race to the store and get green tea, English breakfast tea, incredibly expensive lemon ginger iced tea in a pretty bottle in case the weather—It is March, and you never know, the warm sun of April might show up early—Good god, should it be caffeinated or not?! I buy some of each.

  IT IS NOW two o’clock in the afternoon and I have put in a good eight-hour day. I slip into all black, pour just a little glass of wine, and listen for the phone. Listening for the phone has got to be one of the more painful demands of life. It asks for what most of us do not have: patience. Patience asks that we occupy ourselves with something useful—crewel, for instance—and think of others while we wait. It asks us to put ourselves on the back burner, stand at the end of the line, weigh ourselves once a month instead of once an hour, call sweetly to our dilatory children, keep our screams to a minimum. Waiting for the phone to ring is its own kind of torment. If we are bold—and have his number—we can call him and give him hell: “It’s four o’clock and you said you’d call at three, and goddammit, I have better things to do than sit here and wait for the fucking phone to ring!” And he says, “I love it when you talk dirty.” If we are medium bold or upper-middle shy and we have his number, we sit on our hands to keep them from tapping the telephone keys, we sit on our cell phones, anything to make it impossible for us to call, because what would we say? “Are you dead? I feared you were in an accident when you didn’t call, so this is all about you and how much I care for your safety.” No man past thirty will believe this. Our pride crumbles before the phone.

  He calls. “I’m sorry I’m late, got held up, will call you from the train when I get there.” Although it will take the train forty minutes to get here, I leap into action. I knock back a shot of Scope and head for my car, certain that I’d better get to the station early, because what if I have a flat tire on the way or my battery dies or there are no parking spaces? I would be late and, finding no one at the bottom of the escalator, he would simply turn his back and go away forever; he probably wouldn’t even wonder if I was dead. Ten minutes later I am parked at the station, near the bottom of the escalator, cell phone at the ready, unprotected by anything to read—In my haste I forgot to bring a book, what is happening to me!—and I stare miserably into the approaching evening, waiting for the phone to ring. Only thirty minutes to go. I should’ve asked my doctor for a defibrillator; my heart is hammering in triple time. Jesus, I’ll be dead before he gets here. Maybe it’s for the better.

  He’s beautiful. He bounds down the stairs as he did four years ago, way back when we met for the first time in New York. A brief hug of welcome and we are off for cookies and tea. At my cottage he sits in the chair, leaving the entire futon to me; he chooses Earl Grey and devours cookies. We talk about our reading: old Thucydides for him, new Pamuk for me. We meet somewhere in the middle with Kafka and speculate on whether or not he was serious when he ordered his papers to be burned after his death, or whether or not it matters.

  I cannot take my eyes off him—Graham, not Kafka. His oval face, green eyes, full lips, and long limber body make it hard for me to join him in a discussion of anything. It’s not that I want to leap on him, I don’t, it would spoil everything; it’s that he is so splendid to look upon. He resembles Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum: same oval face and eyes, full mouth, the hint of a receding hairline. Dress Graham up in red coat, black collar, gold braid over his shoulder, and you couldn’t tell one from the other. Graham has a regal bearing—okay, I’m exaggerating a little just to give you the idea. And of course, beneath his khakis he’s hung like a moose. No exaggeration. Memory fails me all too often, but the memory of Graham sans clothes remains as vivid as anything I have ever experienced, and will stay with me forever. Which is good, because it looks as if that’s what we are working on here: old memory, not a new experience.

  He refuses a ninth cookie, and we’re off for dinner. The wine (mine) is lovely, the food is good, the restaurant is crowded, and would that I could tell you what we talked about but I can’t. Somewhere near the end of dinner I feel a tremendous urge to flee, to get out, to go. I must have begun rattling my silverware because Graham asks, “What’s the matter?” I answer, “I don’t know, let’s go.” So we do.

  In fact I do know, but I choose not to tell him. The truth is that I have felt this panic every time I’ve been with him, here or in New York. Will he ask me to sleep with him? Will I ask him? Do I really want to? What will I say? What if he says nothing? And, far more seriously, will I ever see him again? Is this the last time? Will I have to imagine my life without him? All these unknowns eat away at whatever equanimity I have managed to conjure, and finally I get up and leave, hoping by my action to precipitate the answer to the question, What will happen next?

  In silence I drive him through the night streets of town to the station. He gives me a juicy kiss and says, “I’m free tomorrow. Shall we meet here around eleven?” I give him a juicy kiss back and say, “See you then.”

  So my question is answered. Tonight isn’t the last time. Tomorrow will bring him back along with the same questions. I’m not sure how much more of this I can stand.

  MORNING’S AT ELEVEN and all’s right with the world. He’s there and so am I, and off we go up the coast to a little town that Graham has read is home to a salvage shop nonpareil. I have never heard of this place, but the sun is bright, the sky is blue, the air is warm, and below us the wide Pacific sparkles.

  Graham is aware of my home search. He’s gotten enough e-mails from me, lord knows, and besides, he himself may be moving out of New York, which, should he actually go, will answer one question, Will I ever see him again? For, as much as I love him, I’m not spending money to get to Topeka or Ashtabula, no matter how torrid the tryst. In addition, there’s his wife. A seventy-two-year-old tryster is kind of hard to hide in a town the size of Topeka. Maybe he’ll go to London. Now, there’s something to stir up dreams.

  “Slow down,” he says, pointing to a sign. “There’s an estate sale.” Graham loves to rummage in dead people’s stuff. “Come on,” he says, “the house must be for sale. Let’s take a look.” Thirty-six-year-old men walk really fast, so I trail behind him, having long ago stopped trying to keep up with him, and ignoring the lesson implicit as I do. Inside the house—the view of the ocean is breathtaking—I demur: “It’s like walking on the dead.” “It’s fascinating,” he says, “one can reconstruct the people who lived here from what they leave behind.”

  Dutifully I follow him downstairs, where the hallway and the bedrooms are lined with books. I am beginning to like this dead person. “A Jewish doctor lived here,” Graham pronounces. He points to a bookcase that contains medical texts. He points to another that holds books about Israel. I wander over to the bookcase that holds Thoreau and Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis. Graham joins me and says, suddenly, “Look.�
� There, Saul Bellow on one side and John Updike on the other, the pink spine of my very own book shines forth: A Round-Heeled Woman. Graham and I are both silent, ruminating on the two of us somehow having been a part of this man’s life on this California coast, a dead Jewish doctor who knew both of us when he was still alive. Otherworldly, miraculous. What good company I am in: Updike, Bellow, a well-read physician, and Graham. Doesn’t get much better than that. I am humbled.

  Outside, Graham tells me about some law of physics that claims that, contrary to popular belief, “miracles” happen often, about once a month. “So this might not be quite so miraculous as you think.” But it is, and we are quiet on the drive home. “I prefer books to people, you know,” he says, interrupting the silence. “Most people bore me after an hour. You are different. We have been together a long time, haven’t we, and not a jot of boredom anywhere.” I smile in agreement, and for the first time feel myself relax. I like being with this man, and vice versa is good enough for me.

  Somewhere along the coast, not far north of San Francisco, the highway allows us to pull off, to stop the car and gaze at the sun, which is disappearing far too rapidly but beautifully into the ocean. I turn to him and say, “Graham, tell me your wife’s name.” He does. It is the loveliest name I have ever heard. I tell him that, and he says, “Yes, and she’s . . .” I finish it for him in my mind, “the loveliest girl.” I have never before seen that look on his face—he has been graced by love—and I am overcome with the sweetness of it.

  No, we will not sleep together now or ever again. And, most likely, we will never see each other again. Somewhere between despair and relief, I fill the vacancy of him with a certainty that he will not disappear entirely from my life, no matter the geography of his whereabouts or the claims of his family life. He will write to me and I will write back.