by Abby Frucht
She would need to have an answer on hand. Of course, it would be better to anticipate the question, to provide him with the answer before he had to ask. She turned around and ran five blocks back into the city, to a bakery she knew would be open. But she had no money. She ran to her lover’s and banged on the door until he opened it. He was eating his dinner. It was nearly six o’clock. “I need money!” she said. “A few dollars. I can’t explain!” He grinned, and unfolded some money from his wallet and gave it to her. At the bakery, she bought a loaf of braided bread sprinkled with poppy seeds, and two small dessert tortes. She held the warm package close to her body as she ran. The sky was black, the moon was out. Her husband was cooking hamburgers when she got to him. “I bought this to surprise you,” she said to him. “I’m sorry I’m late. I thought you would like these.” She nearly believed what she said. She gave him the package. “Thanks!” said her husband. He kissed her, and together they sliced up the bread and ate.
Later, after dinner, she went into the bathroom and locked the door. Her husband was on the telephone with another graduate student, discussing a gel he had run on some turtle cells. She could tell he was excited, in that calm way he had, pausing briefly here and there as he spoke, tapping the eraser of his pencil on the spine of a textbook. She tried to match his composure. By poking the sharp point of the nail scissor beneath the flap of the envelope, she was able to open it without causing any damage. The letter was short, typed on sturdy blue paper. She was shocked that it was typed—it resembled a fragment of poetry, It read:
I’m pregnant.
I love you.
Jeanne.
Of course, she had intended to reseal the letter, with rubber cement, and to drop it in his mail slot one day when she knew he would be in class. But she couldn’t. She tore it into pieces and flushed it down the toilet along with a small amount of urine.
She told herself she did this to save him—he was in love with Jeanne, he would allow her to come back into his life and destroy it. They would have the baby, settle down. He would put his poetry aside and find a steady, paying job. He would work his way up, becoming the manager of one of those chain bookstores he despised. She had a vision of him shining his shoes before going to work, neglecting to wipe the polish from his hands before kissing the baby good-bye, leaving, on the baby’s diaper, a brown smudge that he would mistake for excrement. He would make himself late for work, changing the baby’s diaper and puzzling over the fact that it was still fresh and clean. Eventually, to coincide with the birth of a second child, he would enroll in night school, in business administration. In the bookstore, passing the shelves of new poetry books with their slender, multicolored spines, he would avert his gaze. He would hate himself.
When she saw him again, she was giddy. He interpreted the giddiness as passion. That month, she got her period earlier than usual. Her husband didn’t like to make love to her when she was bleeding, but the poet didn’t mind. Afterward, she would look at her blood on him and imagine she had done something terrible to wound him.
On campus, she found herself searching for Jeanne, for the small camel’s hair coat and the fake leather boots that looked elegant but inexpensive. At last, on the first of December, she came across her in the snack bar, holding, with both hands, a half-pint of milk, sipping it through a straw. Sitting alone at the large, round table, with her books and coat and pocketbook piled on the other chairs, Jeanne looked smaller than ever, pale and thoughtful. Her nose was red. It was cold outside, or maybe she had been crying. On her tray was the crust of a sandwich and a packet of tissues. When she stood up to go, she did not look pregnant. But she had trouble with her coat; the sleeves of her sweater bunched up when she tried to put it on, so she had to take it off again and grab the ends of the sleeves with her fingers. Then she put on her gloves, fake leather that matched her boots. But she looked so graceful! What would become of her? When she left, the room seemed suddenly to grow noisier.
Several years later, in Virginia, in the small, pleasant college town where both she and her husband are teaching, she finds herself talking with a friend, a woman whose life is remarkably similar to her own, and she surprises herself by explaining to this friend the details of her love affair with the poet, how it began, progressed, stalled, and ended finally when they both left St. Louis. What surprises her most is the disparaging tone of her own voice, her ironical assessment of the poet’s love-making abilities. He was perfect, she says. “But too perfect. As if he’d read everything in a manual, like painting by numbers, like he was reading my mind, because he always knew exactly what I needed, when to start, when to stop, what felt good, what didn’t, what felt great. After a while it all began to seem very mechanical, like he was some kind of genius robot. Do you know what I’m saying?”
But her friend does not. Fixed on her face is a puzzled expression, the beginnings of a mistrustful smile. She offers tea. They brew some and drink, staring into their cups in silence. The friend’s husband is a linguist, and the friend herself is a lecturer in the Spanish department, where she is a graduate student. The four of them work hard at what they do, too hard maybe, holed up in their separate offices, their four typewriters clacking. They joke that they live like monks, working even on Saturday nights, sharing, at two in the morning, their hot pots of coffee. In summer, when the other couple leaves town, she writes them letters, typing on the backs of the monks’ drawings, which she has stored in a trunk because the edges are torn and they are fading. Oddly, the very last one, the one from the month of December, is her favorite, a simple water-color, Jefferson Plum. The twin globes of burnished fruit hang from a fragment of twig adorned with ordinary leaves. And the background is depthless, a flat, stony gray. The sight of the fruit hanging in the center of it suggests nothing but a perishable loveliness in the face of blankness. It still makes her think of Jeanne. Whatever happened to her? And the poet, what happened to him?
When they parted, he was flourishing. He had mailed some poems to a literary magazine and they had been rejected. “Those pinheads,” he kept saying. “Those worthless pieces of junk they publish.”
Still she scans the tables of contents in the literary magazines, as well as the Books in Print Author Index, for her exlover’s name. One day, she finds the name Larry Oliver, but the book is a mathematical treatise with an impossible title. She orders it anyway, through interlibrary loan. There is no picture on the flap, which means it couldn’t be the poet’s, who wouldn’t publish a book without his picture on it. And its pages are filled with outlandish equations. When she brings it home, her husband discovers it. “What are you doing with this?” he asks. “One of my students left it in class,” she says, and she takes the book away from him abruptly as if it might betray her.
She has learned to admire, even to enjoy, her husband’s quiet, easy style of lovemaking—his patient need, his attentive gaze, his subdued adoration of her body. Clearly, he intends to please her, so she is pleased. She thinks of time-lapse photography, the gentle unfolding of a bud into flower. And he is capable, too, of surprising her. He has been asked to write a book about turtles; he has accepted the offer. “I can take a sabbatical,” he explains. “We can go somewhere. We may as well go somewhere interesting. Where would you like to go?”
“Tahiti,” she says.
He believes her. “We’ll need access to libraries,” he says. “An English-speaking country would be best. Or we could stay in the U.S. There are so many parts of this country I’d like to see. We could go to the Pacific Northwest. Or New England. You can finish writing there. We could live in London! We have to think about this!”
“Yes,” she says. She doesn’t know what to think. She thinks of sailing round the world on a houseboat, but she doesn’t know if such a thing is possible. And she imagines the two of them settling in a foreign city while continuing to live exactly as they did in Virginia—walking to the library, walking home, making do with a primitive kitchen. Maybe, she thinks, she should not take her
husband seriously. He will never follow through with such a plan. He will lose heart at the very last minute and they will have to cancel all of their arrangements. But she is patient with him, and when he returns from town with an armload of travel brochures she takes the night off to look through them, exclaiming with him over the pictures.
Several months go by and the two of them, engrossed in their work, forget to mention the sabbatical. She feels responsible for this, afraid that her husband has sensed her reluctance. He is careful with her. He buys her another calendar. But this is a wilderness calendar, filled with photographs of wildflowers, and the slick, bright images fail to interest her. In fact, just looking at them makes her miserable. She becomes distracted. She blames her distraction on the gift. Daily, she phones her friend, the Spanish instructor, and complains that she can’t concentrate. So when finally she comes upon the poet’s name, in the alumni magazine from the university they went to, she is unprepared. At first, she skims past it without recognition. Then, later, folding up the magazine to stuff it into the garbage, she pauses, reopens it, skims it again. Larry Oliver, she reads, lives in Boston with his wife, Monique, and their two children. He is a market analyst.
How many times does she read this? She sits down at the table with a cup of coffee and the magazine open before her. Monique, she repeats. The name is French. She imagines a slim, fashionable woman with feathery hair and no English. Perhaps he has learned to speak French. But the children, of course, are bilingual, if they are talking yet at all. Perhaps they are twins. She imagines two infants, swaddled in disposable diapers, each with a rosebud mouth pressed noisily to one of Monique’s perfect breasts.
“So tell me,” says her husband, as she is climbing into bed with him one night, “what you are thinking.”
He has begun, recently, to play this game with her. “What are you thinking?” he will ask. “Nothing,” she always says, because of course he only asks when he knows she is thinking of nothing, when she is sweeping the floor, or washing dishes, or fooling with the dial on the radio. She likes this game—it is playful, a private joke.
Now she looks at him, smiling. His beard needs a trimming. In the glow from the reading lamp several clumps of hair stick out in all directions. She turns off the lamp.
“I was thinking,” she says, “about taking our sabbatical in Boston.” She kisses him hard on the mouth.
Nuns in Love
On her way home from work Cynthia passes a convent surrounded by a high brick wall interspersed with locked gates. Through the parallel bars of these gates she can see the rather drab, unimpressive convent grounds and a building nestled in evergreen trees. With its flat roof and rows of plate glass windows, it resembles an office building; on the dull rainy days of this season a fluorescent glow emanates from behind the glass. Placed along some walkways are several slatted wood benches that no one ever seems to sit on, and in the flower beds are shrubs instead of flowers, miniature shrubs with flattened tops. Pigeons march throughout, staining the walks and benches with their droppings.
There are few nuns to be seen on the convent grounds, but this is to be expected—nuns are by nature reclusive. Besides, the gates are widely spaced and offer only glimpses of the goings-on behind the wall. Cynthia once heard laughter rising from the other side of it, a high peal of laughter like the shriek of a hyena, but there was no way of knowing for certain whether the laughter came from a nun. She imagines that the nuns spend most of their time indoors, performing scholarly duties or other activities of a routine nature, always thinking about God and about how much they love him. She does not know which confuses her more, the notion of God, or the notion of love, or the notion of loving God. All three seem impossible, burdens that no girl in her right mind would inflict upon herself.
This afternoon Cynthia sees two nuns coming toward her on the sidewalk. One is sitting in a wheelchair that the other is pushing, but both are young and animated, with bright rosy faces. In their eager conversation they appear not to notice her. Just as Cynthia steps off the sidewalk to avoid bumping into them, soaking her sneaker in a puddle, the nuns stop abreast of a gate to slide a laminated identification card into a metal box. The gate opens noiselessly and the nuns pass through it. Cynthia watches as they wheel down the walkway between the stunted gardens, shooing pigeons with their skirts. Tonight she tells her new friend Richard about the two nuns, embellishing them for the sake of entertainment. In her story the nun in the wheelchair wore rainbow-striped socks with toes.
“At least I think they were socks,” she ad-libs. “I couldn’t see that far up. It’s possible they were hose.”
Richard, with a look of pained humor as if the thought of a nun in panty hose embarrasses him, gazes at her over his fondue pot. Ever since she met him, just three weeks ago, he has tried to impress her with ingenious and elaborate meals; tonight there’s a platter of neat cubed beef and six ceramic bowls, each filled with a sauce of a different color. With a long-handled fork he demonstrates how the beef is speared and then allowed to cook in boiling oil.
“Don’t eat it directly out of the pot,” he warns. “Slide it off the fork, and then when it’s cooled a little use this other fork to eat it with. Otherwise you’ll burn your mouth.”
Cynthia finds the entire process captivating and affected, much like Richard himself. There is about him an air of inconsequential refinement—his rooms are clean, cream-colored, and suffused with a vacant airy quality that is like the absence of gravity, as if they might cease to exist entirely if no one was sitting in them. In truth, the contrast between her own messy life and the careful, spare arrangements of Richard’s days is a comfort to her. He is the kind of man who buys for his coffee table books intended exclusively for that purpose, and each evening while he pours the coffee Cynthia sits herself down in the living room and opens one of them. Tonight’s book is called Labyrinths. Its pages are covered with pen and ink drawings of beautiful and complex mazes which Cynthia immediately attempts to solve. She finds in her purse a green felt tip marker and begins to make her way through the mazes, abandoning each one the minute she finds herself stuck. Richard is horrified to see that she is actually drawing on the pages of his expensive book.
“What…” he says. “You’re not supposed to … Oh, well.”
Cynthia sighs. As if ignorant of Richard’s presence and of the coffee cup he is holding out to her, she continues wrecking the book with her pen. This particular maze takes place in the innards of an elaborately rendered unicorn and seems to lead from the mouth to the anus, or from the anus to the mouth, depending on where you go in. Cynthia traces a route through the coil of the unicorn’s intestines, only to find herself mired in the stomach cavity with no means of escape.
“This would be a perfectly nice book,” she says, “except for these stupid mazes. None of them go anywhere.”
Richard opens his mouth like a fish. For three weeks Cynthia has been aware of his gigantic desire to get into bed with her. He once confessed to her exactly how much time had elapsed since he had slept with a woman, and she responded with a sincere astonishment that agitated him. Thinking back, she remembers having felt for him a vague, automatic attraction, the same she might have felt for any man who was attentive to her and polite enough and not bad looking, but the feeling had no staying power. Since then, she has fallen into the habit of teasing him and has lost sight of her own intentions. Now, as he sips his coffee, she places the blunt end of her marker between her lips and begins toying with it, circling it with the tip of her tongue. She slips her shoes off and pulls her feet up underneath her. Richard leans forward in his chair and clasps and unclasps his hands.
“Cynthia,” he says finally. “May I touch you?”
“Sure,” she says.
Richard gets up, circles the coffee table, positions himself next to her, places his hands on her shoulders, and pulls her to him. He is trembling.
“Not now,” says Cynthia, focusing on him a look of sympathy and exasperation. “You
have to learn to be spontaneous. You have to learn to do things without always talking about them first.”
Richard looks stunned and dejected.
“That’s not what you said the last time,” he says. “You said not to jump right into things. You said you needed to be prepared.”
“That was last time,” says Cynthia. She continues sucking on the pen. Her mouth tastes of ink—sharp and metallic, the flavor of power. After a minute she stands, allowing the book of mazes to slide from her lap onto his. The pages fan apart like the petals of a flower and then fall together with a whisper.
On the following day, a Saturday, Cynthia sees a nun wearing striped socks under her habit. The stripes are all colors of the rainbow and the five toes of each foot are separate, allowing the straps of the nun’s thongs to fit between them. The day is fine, damp and sunny. Since everybody seems to be coming out of the woodwork, it is perhaps not surprising that the nun should be outside too, where she can easily be seen, adjacent to a set of gates, hoeing a small portion of earth vigorously. In fact Cynthia is feeling so busy and distracted by the fury of activity on the streets, by the cyclists, the Frisbees, the wash on the lines, the dog walkers, that she might not have noticed the nun if not for those socks and the way their bright horizontal stripes stood out against the square of dark fresh-turned earth. She stops abruptly when she sees them, wide-eyed, remembering at once all the rainbows she has ever seen and the feeling of cynicism and disbelief she had when she saw them, as if rainbows were a joke being played on her. On the nun’s face is a look of blissful concentration like the look of a person admiring a loved one. Her eyes are blurred, her brow smooth, her lips pursed as if for a kiss. Noticing Cynthia peering at her through the bars of the gate, she smiles. Cynthia jumps, startled, and resumes her walk with blank determination, street after street, lot after lot, along a highway overpass, down a steep embankment studded with dandelions, across the highway into one strange neighborhood after another, into the suburbs where people are washing their cars, and then out of the middle-class suburbs and into the rich ones. Two teenaged boys on a motorcycle whiz by then make a U-turn and offer her a ride.