by Mary Gordon
I carry my daughter into the bathroom. My husband, her father, stands at the mirror shaving, stripped to the waist. How beautiful he is. I place my cheek on his back and embrace him. The baby plays at our feet. In the mirror I can see my arms, my hands around his waist, but not my face. I like the anonymity. I take my nightgown off and go into the shower. Every time I take a shower now, I worry about the time when water will be rationed, when I will have to wash in a sink in cold water. My mother knew a nun who, after twenty-five years in the convent, was asked what gift she would like to celebrate her silver jubilee. She asked for a hot bath. What did that mean about the twenty-five years of her life before that? All her young womanhood gone by without hot baths. I would not have stuck it out.
I step out of the shower and begin to dry myself. I see the two of them looking at me: man and child, she in his arms. She stretches out her arms to me in that exaggerated pose of desperation that can make the most well-fed child suggest that she belongs on a poster, calculated to rend the heart, urging donations for the children of a war zone or a famine-stricken country. I take her in my arms. She nose-dives for my breast. My husband holds my face in both his hands. “Don't take your diaphragm out,” he says. Just ten minutes ago, I fed my child; just last night I made love to my husband. Yet they want me again and again. My blood is warmed, then fired with well-being. Proudly, I run my hands over my own flesh, as if I had invented it.
II
The baby is predictable now. We know that she will want a nap at nine fifteen, just after we have finished breakfast. I put her in her crib and wait until I hear her even breathing. Does she dream? What can she dream of, having lived so little? Does she dream of life inside my body? Or does she dream for the whole race?
My husband is in bed waiting for me. Deep calls to deep: it must have been sex they were talking about. I want him as much as ever. Because of this, because of what I feel for him, what he feels for me, of what we do, can do, have done together in this bed, I left another husband. Broke all sorts of laws: the state's, the church's. Caused a good man pain. And yet it has turned out well. Everyone is happier than ever. I do not understand this. It makes a mockery of the moral life, which I am supposed to believe in.
All the words of love, of sex and love, the simple words; have, take, come, now, words of one syllable. Behind my eyes I see green leaves, high, branching trees, then rocks that move apart and open. Exhausted, we hold each other, able to claim love. The worst thing about casual sex is not being able to express love honestly afterward. One feels it, but knows it to be false. Not really love. Yet, is it not inevitable to love one who has proffered such a gift?
We drift into sleep, knowing the baby's nap will not last long. She cries; the day begins for real. I am taking her into the city to see an old lover.
III
Of all the men I have been with, M found me consistently, astonishingly, pleasing. We had five months together in a foreign city, London, where he was almost the only one I knew. I was married then, to my first husband, who did not praise, who thought of me as if I were colonial Africa: a vast, dark, natural resource, capable, possibly, of civilization. As it turns out, I did not want his civilization— a tendency colonialists have discovered to their sorrow.
M is, as they say, well-bred, but with him the phrase has real meaning. Only centuries of careful marriages could have produced, for example, his nose. There are no noses like it in America, which got only the riffraff for its settlers, or those who must fear beauty as a snare. His nose is thin and long, the nostrils beautifully cut, the tip pointed down slightly to the full, decisive lips. He is the blondest man I have ever been with— this, in combination with his elegant, well-cut clothes, made him a disappointment naked. Really fair men always look foolish without their clothes, as if they ought to know better.
M likes to pretend that I have been married so many times he can't keep track. In letters, he tells me he imagines me inviting the milkman, the postman, the butcher into bed to thank them for their services. I write that there are no milkmen in America, the postman is a woman, and I buy meat in the supermarket. Don't quibble, he replies, suggesting my gynecologist, my lawyer, the man who does my taxes.
It is all praise, it is all a reminder of my power, and I thrive on it, particularly as we spoke last time we saw each other openly about the pleasures of friendship without the intrusions of sex. I was newly married then, and he took no small pride in the court adviser/Dutch uncle tone he spoke in when he warned me against the dangers of infidelity. I told him he needn't worry; I had learned my lesson; I wanted to have a child. And besides, my husband made me happier than I had ever been. So then you're safe, he said, as safe as houses. I didn't like the image: I knew the kind of houses that were meant: large and wide and comfortably furnished: it made me see myself as middle-aged, a German woman with thick legs and gray bobbed hair.
It is with a high heart that I ride down on the bus on a spring morning. The countryside is looking splendid: frail greens against a tentative blue sky, the turned earth brown and ready. M's nose is not his only benefice: his manners, too, are lovely. They are courtly, and I dream of my daughter meeting him at Claridge's one day for tea, when she is twelve, perhaps, and needing flattery. I look at her in my arms, proud of what I have come up with. This rosy flesh is mine, this perfect head, this soft, round mouth. And of course, I think we make a charming picture, rightly observed, and I count on M for the proper angle.
The city pavements sparkle and the sun beams off the building glass. We get a taxi in a second— I am covered over with beneficence, the flattering varnish of good luck. But my luck changes and we are stuck in traffic for forty-five minutes. M hates lateness— he thinks it is rudeness— and I know this will get the day off to a bad start.
He is waiting for me in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. He does not look pleased to see me, but it is not his way to look pleased. He says he hates his first sight of people he loves: they always expect too much from his face and it makes him feel a failure.
I apologize nervously, excessively, for being late. He steers us silently toward the cafeteria. I am wearing the baby in a front pack sling, when I take her out and give her to M to hold, she screams. He asks me what she likes to eat. “Me,” I say, but he is not amused. “Get her some yogurt,” I say, feeling foolish.
“And you?” he asks.
“Oh, anything,” I say.
“You always say that,” he says, frowning, “and you always have something specific in mind. You've lost an earring.”
He looks at the baby. “Your mother is always losing earrings in the most extraordinary places, at the most extraordinary times.” She looks him squarely in the eye and screams. He moves off with a shudder.
Finally, the yogurt pleases the baby, and her good temper is restored. I ask M about his visit, and he is noncommittal, uninformative. I begin to fear that he has crossed the ocean to see me. He wants to talk about the past, our past; he keeps bringing up details in a way that makes me know he thinks about me often. He keeps taking my hand, squeezing it in studied, meaningful patterns of pressure, but I keep having to pull my hand away to take things from the baby, or to hold her still. Besides, I don't want to hold his hand. Not in that way. I begin to feel unsettled, and start chattering, diverting much of my foolish talk to the baby, a habit in mothers I have always loathed.
“I've got us theater tickets for tonight,” says M. “And you must tell me where you would most like to have dinner.”
I look at him with alarm. “I can't possibly go to the theater with you. I have to get home with the baby. You should have said something.”
“I thought you'd know that's what would happen. It's what we always did.”
“I never had a baby before. Or a marriage, not a real one. Surely you must know we can't go on a date.’”
“Obviously I don't know anything about you anymore. Come on, let's look at the pictures.”
I try to put my arms through the
sling, but it is a complicated arrangement if one is trying to hold the baby at the same time, and I know she will not go with M. He stands behind me, helping me to put my arms through the straps. His hand brushes my breast, but instead of moving his hand away, he cups my breast with it.
I am covered over in panic. For the first time in my life, I am shocked by a man's touch. I understand for the first time the outraged virgin, for I am offended by the impropriety of such a gesture, indicating, as it does, a radical misunderstanding of my identity. He cannot have free access to my body, not just because it is mine, but because it stands for something in the world, for some idea. My body has become symbolic. I laugh at the idea as soon as it occurs to me, and M looks hurt, but I continue to laugh at the notion of myself as icon. My actual virginity I gave up with impatience and dispatch; an encumbrance I was eager to be rid of. Now, fifteen years later, I stand blushing.
We try to look at pictures, but it is no good, the baby cries incessantly. Besides, we really do not want to be together anymore. He puts me in a taxi and tries to embrace me, but the baby is strapped to me and all he can manage is a chaste and distant kiss on the cheek. It is the first time I have disappointed him; and I feel the failure all the way home. The baby falls asleep the minute she gets on the bus; she was crying from exhaustion. I do not know what I was thinking of, making this expedition. Or I know precisely what I had been thinking of, and cannot now believe I was so foolish.
IV
It is evening. My husband and I are going to dinner at our favorite restaurant. The girl who is taking care of the baby is a girl I love. Seventeen, she is the daughter of a friend, a woman I love and admire, a woman of accomplishment whose children are accomplished and who love her. E is beautiful, a beauty which would be a bit inhuman if she under stood its power, and were it not tempered by her sweetness and her modesty. I know her well; she lived with us in the summer. I was relieved to be unable to assume a maternal role with her; I believed, and still believe, that she sees me as a slatternly older sister, good at heart but scarcely in control. She plays the flute; she gets my jokes; she speaks perfect French; she does the dishes without being asked. The baby adores her. We can leave telling her nothing but the phone number of the restaurant. She knows everything she needs to know.
It is not a good dinner. I want to tell my husband about M but cannot. It is not his business; spouses should never be able to image their fears of their beloved's being desired by another. And I may want to see M again. I am distracted, and my husband knows me well enough to know it. We are both disappointed for we do not have much time alone.
We do not linger over after-dinner drinks, but come home early to find E in the dark, crying. My husband leaves her to me; he has always said that a woman, however young, does not want to be seen in tears by a man who is not her lover. In the car, I ask her what is wrong.
“It's R,” she says, her first boyfriend, with whom I know she has broken up. “It's awful to see him every day, and not be able to talk to him.”
“Mm,” I say, looking at the dark road.
“It's just so awful. He used to be the person in the world I most wanted to see, most wanted to talk to, and now I rush out of classes so I don't have to pass him in the halls.”
“It's hard.”
“Was it like that for you? First loving someone, then running away from the sight of them?”
“Yes, it happened to me a lot.” I conjure in my mind the faces of ten men once loved.
“Do you think people can ever be friends when they fall out of love with each other?”
“I suppose so. I've never been able to do it. Some people can.”
She looks at me with anguish in the dark, cold car. “It's such a terrible waste. I can't bear it, I don't think. Do you think it's all worth it?”
“I don't think there's an alternative,” I say.
“What a relief it must be that it's all over for you.”
So this is how she sees me: finished, tame, bereft of possibilities. I kiss her good night, feeling like that German woman with thick legs. Lightly,
E runs through the beam of the headlights over the grass to her house. I wait to see that she is in the door.
Her urgent face is in my mind as I drive home, and M's face and the face of ten loved men. I realize that I am old to E, or middle-aged, and that is worse. The touch of M's hand on my breast gave me no pleasure. That has never happened to me before.
I have never thought of myself as old; rather I fear that I am so young-seeming that I lack authority in the outside world. I feel the burdens of both youth and age. I am no longer dangerous, by reason of excitement, possibility— but I cannot yet compel by fear. I feel as if the light had been drained from my hair and skin. I walk into the house, low to the ground, dun-colored, like a moorhen.
My husband is in bed when I return. I look in at the baby. Under her yellow blanket her body falls and rises with her breath. I wash my face and get into my nightgown. It is purple cotton, striped; it could belong to a nun. I think of the nightwear of women in films whose bodies glow with danger: Garbo, Dietrich, Crawford. Faye Dunaway, who has a baby and is not much older than 1.1 see my husband is not yet asleep. He takes me in his arms. I ask, “Do you ever think of me as dangerous?”
He laughs. “Let me try to guess what you've been reading. Anna KareninaZ Madame Bovaryi Vanity Fair?’
“I'm serious. I'll bet you never think of me as dangerous.”
He holds me closer. “If I thought of you as dangerous, I'd have to think of myself as unsafe.”
I pull him toward me. I can feel his heart beating against my breast. Safe, of course he must be safe with me. He and the baby. Were they unsafe, I could not live a moment without terror for myself. I know that I must live my life now knowing it is not my own. I can keep them from so little; it must be the shape of my life to keep them at least from the danger I could bring them.
In a few hours, the baby will awaken, needing to be fed again. My husband takes my nightgown off.
The Dancing Party
“I know why you're in this mood,” says the angry wife, “I just wish you'd admit it.”
They drive in darkness on the sandy road; she has no confidence that he will find the house, which they have only seen in daylight. And she half wishes he would get a wheel stuck in the sand. She would be pleased to see him foolish.
“I'm in a bad mood for one reason,” says the husband. “Because you said to me: Shape up. No one should say that to someone: Shape up.”
“I could tell by your face how you were planning to be. That way that makes the other people at a party want to cut their throats.”
“Must I sparkle to be allowed among my kind?”
“And I know why you're like that. Don't think I don't. It's because you watched the children while I swam. For once.”
“Yes, it's true, the day was shaped by your desires. But I'm not resentful. Not at all. You must believe me.”
“But I don't believe you.”
“Then where do we go?”
“We go, now, to the party. But I beg you: Please don't go in with your face like that. It's such a wonderful idea, a dancing party.”
The house is built atop the largest dune. In daylight you can see the ocean clearly from the screened-in porch. The married couple climb the dune, not looking at each other, walking far apart. When they come to the door, they see the hostess dancing with her brother.
How I love my brother, thinks the hostess. There are no men in the world like him.
The hostess's brother has just been divorced. His sister's house is where he comes, the house right on the ocean, the house she was given when her husband left her for someone else. Her brother comes here for consolation, for she has called it “my consolation prize.” And it has been a consolation, and still is, though she is now, at forty-five, successful. She can leave her store to her assistants, take a month off in the summer, and come here. She earns more money than her ex-husband, who feels, by
this alone, betrayed. She comes, each morning, to the screened-in porch and catches in the distance the blue glimpse of sea, the barest hint, out in the distance, longed for, but in reach. She'd brought her daughters here for the long, exhausting summers of the single mother. Watched their feuds, exclusions, the shore life of children on long holiday, so brimming and so cruel. But they are grown now, and remarkably, they both have jobs, working in the city. One is here, now, for the weekend only. Sunday night, tomorrow, like the other grown-ups, she will leave. The daughter will be in her car, stuck in the line of traffic, that reptilian creature that will take her in its coils. Exhausted, she will arrive in her apartment in Long Island City. She will wait till morning to return her rented car.
I will not be like my mother, thinks the daughter of the hostess. I will not live as she lives. How beautiful she is, and how I love her. But I will not live like that.
She lifts an angry shoulder at the poor young man, her partner, who does not know why. She is saying: I will not serve you or your kind. I will not be susceptible.
She sees her mother, dancing, not with her brother any longer, but with another man. She sees her mother's shoulder curving toward him. Sees her mother's head bent back. Susceptible. Will this be one more error of susceptibility? Oh, no, my mother, beautiful and still so young, do not.