by Mary Gordon
“Next time I see you, you will be married,” said Sylvie, holding Ruth's hands. “I wish you every happiness,” she said, handing them a gift. It was a miniature of a woman, blonde and blue-eyed, in a low-cut yellow dress. “It is from my family.”
Phil had tears in his eyes as he thanked Sylvie, but Ruth could only wonder what gift Sylvie had given the other women as they parted. Were they all treasures from her family? Had Phil taken them with him when he left the women? Were they even now in his apartment, in his office, objects that she hadn't questioned, that he'd got in just this way?
“Things change, my friend, but we are constant,” Sylvie said, as she kissed Phil goodbye.
She smiled at Ruth as she looked over Phil's shoulder, and Ruth felt herself forced to return the smile in kind.
She sat in a chair across the room and watched Phil as he slept. Usually she was a sounder sleeper than anyone she slept with. She wondered whether any man had watched her as she watched Phil now; she could not imagine it.
The light that came from the streetlights made the room seem unchangeable: an object in history, a work of art. Phil's back was to her, and his posture made him boyish. The fine shoulders were the shoulders of a boy, the few dark hairs made a pattern she wanted to follow with her lips. She could not bear anymore to be merely looking, and she wondered if she lay against him if she would wake him up. She decided to take the chance; he seemed deeply asleep. She took her nightgown off because she wanted to feel the softness of her breasts against the hard curve of his back. He did not waken. She moved away, back to the chair. She wanted to be watching him again.
She understood that if he left her it would be like death and wondered when it happened how she would go on.
The Other Woman
She was lying in the spare room in the single bed at three in the morning. It was hot, and her sense of moral failure made her head go queer. She was not asleep, and yet you would have to say she was dreaming. Images behind her eyes buzzed and skipped as in a nightmare.
Two hours before, she had been lying in bed next to her husband. They were reading; sometimes her husband's hand would fondle her belly or scratch her thigh. He would read her a sentence from a book about England; she would look up from her magazine. They would read each other sentences; they would say, “You should read this.”
She was reading a story about an adulterous affair. The woman had been left by her lover (who adored her), who went back to his wife. It was the sight of his children's hands as they slept, he had said, that made his decision for him. He loved the woman; he would go back to his wife. Because of the hands of his children as they slept.
She lay back, her arms behind her head, looking at her naked breasts and the curve of her waist. What does this body mean to me? she wondered, and ran her palms along the high bones of her pelvis. How peculiar it was, she thought, looking at her husband, that her body had the power to excite him, to make him lay down his book and turn to her, cupping her buttocks in his hands, wanting her like that. Her sense of the oddness of it all made her distant from him, but she began to feel his desire soothe her; it became a dwelling she could rest inside, and she thought as she met his desire with her own familiar body, How easy it is to be faithful! For it was not his body that excited her (it had never been men's bodies that had excited her), but the idea of him, of all that he was and was to her, that made her rise to meet him, desire for desire. It was the oddness of it all, and the familiarity.
He always became invigorated after sex, with a pure, inappropriate energy. She drew the quilt around her bare shoulders and settled down in the bed. It was sleep she wanted, sleep to flow over her. But she could see the muscles of his back twitching with impatience, like a horse's flanks sucking in and out. The magazine was still on the bed, and she threw it benevolently in his direction. “Read that story,” she said. “You'll like it.” And she brought the covers over her head so that she could be in darkness. She was content. He was engaged; she had earned the delicious feeling of cool sheets around her shoulders, of roundness, of being what we so rarely feel ourselves to be— in exactly the right place, doing what it is we are meant to do at that moment. The air conditioner hummed soothingly nearby; it was possible to sleep.
She became aware of the peculiar sensation that occurs when the interface between a dream and the world is violated. In her dream she was in a car, driving; outside the dream the bed was shaking with awkward, uneven spasms. She woke in a resentful confusion.
The sight she saw was the one that to her, even in a state of full wake-fulness, was most finally disturbing. Her husband was weeping. He was a strong man, even in the obvious senses, and she depended on that. The strength of his body and its predictability were a center for her more random life.
In the years she had known him, he had been sick twice; he had wept four times. She remembered these incidents distinctly. When he wept, his weeping was torn out of his body. She could weep and be engaged in other activities; she could walk and weep or weep and pack a suitcase. But when he wept, his entire body was taken up with it, so that he needed her for physical support.
She sat up quickly and was annoyed by her breasts, bobbing so foolishly, so irrelevantly, as she moved to put her arms around him for comfort only. This now was the function of her body, and the other, earlier one, the one she was reminded of by her breasts, vexed her; it seemed peculiar that she had the same body for comfort as for excitement. It was as though she were divided in some final, harmful way.
She put her arms around him and put his head against her breast. She began to swim up past sleep and became aware that she did not know the reason for his weeping. She stroked his hair and spoke so quietly that her own voice was unfamiliar to her. But her words were coos and nonsense syllables— ancient language she had learned somewhere, in some life. For the moment, she did not want to ask him anything; she did not want to use her language for that.
She looked at his face and wiped his eyes with the sleeve of the nightgown that she had taken from under her pillow. She had never seen anyone look as he did— it was a look of such pure grief, a look of no extraneous emotions. His face looked ancient, as though it bespoke a great sorrow that had not spent itself in mourning. It was the face of a mother holding a dead child, of a wife whose husband has been drowned. One expected such a look from women, but this— this was her husband, a man, and that made it more terrible.
His sobs had stopped and he lay with his head against her in silence.
“My darling,” she said. “What is it?”
“The story,” he said.
“The story?”
She was surprised, for it was she who lived in stories and he who lived in the world.
“It was when the children were babies,” he said. His children both were in their teens now, but still his children, and her husband's love for them, she had come to understand, was the deepest thing in his life. You could not say that it was a love that could come between him and her, because his love for her was outside that center of him, the center that was his love for his children. She had borne no children, and so she had no place in that center. It was as if he and his children stood somewhere at the bottom of a well, in a spot so dark, down so far, that she could not see it. It was not like his past, his divorce, which was another kind of darkness to her, because this with his children continued into her life, into all their lives. But it was a darkness she could live with, for they were children and she was a woman. That difference, she had come to understand, made it all right.
“It was when the children were babies,” he said. “There was a woman. I never told you about her.” And he began to weep again.
The area under her breast grew cold and stony. She wondered how he could leave his head there.
“I had never loved anyone so much,” he said. “She was going to leave her family. We were going to go away. I had never loved anyone so much. I hated my wife; all that was nothing. And then I looked at the children, and I knew that
nothing on earth could make me leave them.”
“And the woman?” she said, almost sick with the effort it took her to go on holding him.
“She went back to her husband. That was the terrible part— how I failed her. I had never loved anyone so much.”
He wanted her to weep with him, to sympathize, for her flesh to warm with his sorrow; and all she could think was, Why must you tell me this? You must not tell me this. How can you expect me to comfort you for this?
Suddenly he sighed, a great sigh, the release of a burden. “It was a very long time ago,” he said, exhausted, and he wept sleepily against her. But her body was tense with effort. She was his wife, and a wife must do this, must hold her husband in sleep and keep him from his sorrow.
But the idea of hurting him came to her mind like the thought of a delicious confection. She wanted to push him away from her, to let him lie there in the dark, wanting her, in shame, in need. She wanted to say, How you have hurt me! But she held him in her arms and stroked his head until she heard his gentle breathing. Once he was asleep, she could no longer endure the touch of his skin on her skin.
She put on her nightgown and went into the other room. She did not want to open the window for fear of waking him, so she lay in the hot, dusty air, conscious of sweat beginning to form arcs under her breasts. And she thought of her husband, who had loved a woman so much that after all these years her loss was his deepest sorrow. He would never weep like that for her. Often she had imagined her husband's response to her death. And she had always seen him accepting it as a part of their lives, going on, his mourning taking a practical turn. He would think of her, perhaps, in the garden.
For she had been his wife, and their love had known no obstacles. They had met, loved, been free to marry. Their love was even, sweet, and temperate, like milk in a brown bowl on a shelf in a fragrant pantry. But, it seemed to her now, such a love might be too mild— toothless, without the edge of frustration to eat its way into his life. Like the other. And so he would never love her so much, so much as he had loved the other woman. Even when she died he would not mourn her so deeply. He could not, for their love had been born of ease and was happy. His love for the other woman had been born of sorrow, and so he would never love her so much as he had loved the other woman.
And how could he ask her for comfort? The coldness under her breast grew until her body was entirely filled with it. And through her mind, in anger, in exhaustion, beeped two sentences: He will never love me so much. How can he ask me for comfort?
She lay on top of the spread, stretching her limbs out as far away from her body as she could. Her sex was open— utterly vulnerable, she thought.
She began to fall into a sleep that was harsh, like rusted wires.
She heard the door open. Her husband came into the room, and even in the dark she could see that he was frightened; she could smell his fear in the darkness. But his fear did not move her; inside her were the cold light and the words that buzzed and skipped: He will never love me so much. How can he ask me for comfort?
“I had a terrible dream,” he said. He was sweating. She did not tell him to continue, but he lay down beside her and said, “They were in a car. The children and the other woman. The car exploded. I woke up weeping. You weren't there.”
“I was restless,” she said. “I didn't want to wake you.”
She wanted to get up and walk away from him— anywhere, outside into the air. But she stroked his hair and said in a voice that was thick with effort, “Come here. It was only a dream.”
She thought surely he would discern the strain in her voice, in her hands. And she was torn between the desire for him to know what he had done to her and the desire to keep it from him, to absorb his sorrow into herself. But since she was a woman, her body had been bred to deceit.
How easy it was for her, quite mechanically, with no connection to herself, to soothe her husband, to be a comfort to him. And he settled into her false comfort, pressing against her body for relief. She knew that he would never know what she was feeling, and knowing this, she had never loved him so little.
Billy
I wasn't home when the call came saying that Billy had died. The woman left the message with my son. Extraordinary, really, to leave such a message with a boy, a ten-year-old. “Just tell your mother Bill McGovern died. I'm his landlady. We found her number in his room, it was the only one we found there. But there's nothing that she needs to do. We buried him already. Just to let her know.” She said that Billy had become a hermit in his room. She told my son that they'd kept asking him to come downstairs, for holidays and things, but he'd always say no. “Just send me up a plate,” he'd say.
My son reported all this flatly; he is the serious one of the three, the youngest; it was unfortunate the woman got him. He would worry. Worry that someone he never heard of died with his mother's phone number in his room. He is a modern child, the son of modern, divorced parents; he would imagine Billy was my lover. And so I wanted to tell him about Billy, to relieve him, for it would be awful for a boy like him to think of a dead person as his mother's lover. But I didn't know where to begin the story. Or how to tell it once I'd started. To make a story of a life, you had to shape it, and there was no shape to Billy's life, that was the problem. I thanked my son and sent him to his room to join his brothers.
I'd known Billy all my life. His mother was my mother's best friend. I loved Veronica McGovern. She brought into my childhood books, classical records, prints of the old masters, and a hint that there was somewhere a world— which she had once inhabited and now only imagined— where people had intelligent conversations in low, untroubled voices, where no one ever worked too hard or got too tired. She flipped the switch of my imagination, lighting up those rooms that are a refuge from the anger and miscomprehension of the adult world. She saved me from the isolated fate of the bright, undervalued child. She spared me years of bitterness. But she ruined her son's life as certainly as if she'd starved him in infancy; he would probably have been much better off if she'd abandoned him at birth.
Veronica had always lied about her age; she was eleven years older than my mother, though we never knew it till her death. She'd married at eighteen and had Billy a year later; my mother had had me at thirty-one. So although Billy and I were technically in the same generation, he was twenty-two when I was born. I thought him handsome when I was growing up; some nights he didn't come home and Veronica wrung her hands and mentioned the name Roberta. It was such a serviceable name and yet the woman cast so lurid a glow. She lived in the Village; she was a dancer; when Billy was with her he didn't come home. I had no idea what Billy and Roberta did the nights that he was with her; I had no idea that it was what they did that caused Veronica's distress; I was young enough simply to see not sleeping in one's own bed as an emblem of danger.
Billy would come home after these nights at around lunchtime; my mother and I would be sitting at Veronica's kitchen table and at the sight of him we would fall silent. He shimmered with the glow of sex, though at the time I wouldn't have known to call it that. There was always a beat of silence when we saw him in the doorway, like the silence between merry-go-round tunes. Then he would say, “Hello, Mother.” Veronica would light a Herbert Tareyton cigarette and tell him to bring a chair from his room. There were only three chairs in the kitchen, a setup left over from the days when Charlie McGovern, Veronica's husband, Billy's father, who died when I was nine, was still alive.
I'd grown up on tales of Charlie McGovern's binges and disappearances, and Billy had been pointed to as an example of what can happen when a single mother spoiled a child. My father disappeared when I was two; it was handy for my mother to have so ready an example. “Spoiled.” It is a terrible word, suggesting meat gone iridescent, but in Billy's case, it has always seemed apt. My mother explained that Veronica had never said no to Billy. Life with Charlie devastated her and she wanted to keep Billy by her side. In return for his loyalty she indulged him and convinced
him that the world was too gross to value him correctly; in time, he believed it an unfit place for him to walk in as a man.
I only knew Charlie McGovern as a drunk, but in the twenties he had been a millionaire. To a child in the early fifties, the twenties were like the fall of Rome, something much too distant to think of concretely or even to believe in. Had Veronica McGovern been a flapper? Impossible to connect that sweet, wounded, muted, and above all genteel creature with the Jazz Age, but when she spoke about the early days of her marriage, it was all bathtub gin and the Black Bottom and rides in rumble seats and staying up till dawn. She mentioned that Charlie always bought her perfumed cigarettes and stockings with her name embroidered just at the top. Hearing about those stockings caused a river of electric joy to run through every nerve in my six-, seven-, eight-year-old body; it was one of those pieces of information children instantly know to be crucial, some essential clue to the incomprehensible maze of adult life, although they cannot place quite the significance of the small jewel so casually presented. I decided that at least I knew that Veronica and Charlie had once been in love, the love, perhaps, of people in the movies. But what had come of it? No two people could less suggest what my idea was of the love between men and women: Charlie so clearly embodying ruin in his bathrobe with its sash of fraying rope, Veronica devoting her physical existence to concealing any hint of sex.
She clearly thought about how she looked: her impression of well-bred decay could not have been achieved by accident. I remember my shock when I realized as a quite young child that Veronica wore no brassiere. I fell asleep once in her lap and awoke with my arms around her torso. She must have sat perfectly still all the time I slept. Pretending to be still half asleep, I ran my fingers up and down her back as if it were a clavichord. I kept playing her back, not knowing what it was I missed. When I realized what it was it came to me to pity her, for it was pitiable that she had nothing to show for her womanhood, nothing like my mother's fine, high bolster of a bosom I had always been so happily able to trust. She wore 4711 Cologne— an androgynous scent in an age when the sexes shared almost nothing. Her shoes were a generation out-of-date: round-toed and laced and made to match some prewar dream. She was personally fastidious, but when three of her bottom teeth fell out she couldn't bring herself to see a dentist, but filled in the gap with strips of wax.