This weekend Isabel was on a class trip to Washington, and Greta had gone straight from school to a friend’s house, where she would stay till Sunday. “Please be careful, sweetie,” Caroline urged in the morning, packing her off. “So they’ll want to invite you again.” After the Friday classes, to savor her solitude she lay on the floor rereading The Portrait of a Lady. It was not the same as when she had read it the first time, when she, too, stood on the brink of life, peering into its dangers and delights and temptations. Then she had brought to the book a corresponding eagerness. Now she brought a wry wisdom. And a touch of envy, also, as well as of relief, for James’s Isabel would be forever young and forever susceptible. She was luckier than that valiant Isabel, she reflected. The self-absorbed aesthete she had married was good, not evil. And at that notion, as if on cue, Ivan unlocked the front door and came striding down the hall whistling the tune from Rome, which he always whistled off key, just missing the parabolic curves of the melody. She put the book aside and lay flat on her back, viewing him upside down. He stood at her head waving a bottle of champagne in each hand.
“Are we alone at last?” he greeted her.
“We are alone. What’s that for?”
“To celebrate. I brought two. One for before and one for after. Don’t go away, I’ll put them on ice.”
When he returned she said, “Did I forget some great occasion?”
He bent over her. “Oh, you’re such a stuffy old professor, Caroline. We’re celebrating being alone. A hundred years of solitude. Would you ever have imagined…I mean, I’d sell my soul for a weekend.”
“Oh, Ivan.” She put her hands in his hair. Only a little thinner—a diminishing arithmetic progression. At this rate it would last. Maybe his father had been right about the brushing.
He was fumbling at her clothes, looking for bare skin, which, wide awake, he quickly found. “Or maybe…Oh,” he sighed, “Caroline, baby. You’re all warm.”
“Yes. I was waiting for you,” she whispered in his ear. “Just for this. Maybe what?”
“Maybe we should have them both after.”
“Oh yes…Oh yes…That’s a better idea. But, Ivan, love. Let’s go to bed. Because…the floor…is so hard.”
“You never did like hard floors, did you?”
“Ah, you think you know everything I like?”
“I think I do, mm-hm. Don’t I, now?”
“Well, sure, that’s very nice, but what if I developed…oh…new predilections?”
“I would soon discover them. You have no escape.”
She closed her eyes with a feeling of levitation, but then let go of him. “Really, let’s go to bed. Or it will be too late, and my back will hurt.”
“But how will we get there? I don’t want to move, Caroline. I’m so comfortable here.”
“That’s because you’re not lying on something hard. It’s only a little way, love. Come on, get up, I’ll help you. That’s it. Lean on me. No, I can’t carry you, though. You’re too big. And how can I walk when you do that? Save that for later. You’re too much.”
“Thank you, ma’am. That was a fine trip. A little bumpy. All right, here’s the bed, so no more of your delaying tactics. Let’s have the goods.”
“Well, if I have to go through with it, I’ll resign myself.”
“I’m afraid so. Now don’t be shy, sweetheart. I know you’re very shy about these things. This won’t take more than a little while, and it’s completely painless if you just relax.”
“For Chrissake, Ivan, I’m all relaxed already! How long are you going to keep this up?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised, baby. Now, why do you keep on laughing? I never saw a woman laugh so much at such a serious moment. How do you expect to get this done laughing like a loon? Sober up.”
After, Ivan got up and brought the champagne and glasses back to bed. He popped the cork, the cold wine steamed, and he caught it in time, expertly. They drank.
“This is good,” Caroline sighed. “It’s so hot in here. I’m burning up. And it’s only June.”
“Oh, hot flashes?”
“That’s not funny, because pretty soon it’ll be the real thing. I’m getting on.”
“You’re complaining. I’m half a century old, and do you realize that all my life I’ve been surrounded by women? That’s just what I was afraid of.”
“Well, you’ve borne your fate bravely. Like a man.”
“Thanks a lot. What I mean is, all my attachments…all my great loves have been women.”
Besides the three of them, she wondered, who else? “So be bisexual. It’s never too late. See if I care.”
He moved away and slammed his empty glass on the night table. “Why do you have to be that way? Why do you have to reduce things? I’m trying to tell you something serious.”
“I’m sorry. You’re awfully touchy, you know? I do take you seriously. This business of being flippant to avoid…I picked it up from you. You’re the original avoider.”
“Why don’t you pick up my better traits?”
“Well, maybe I have, also. All right, go on. I’m really listening. All your great loves have been women.” She poured them both more champagne. If he intended to confess anything, she wanted to be fortified.
“I mean, not things or ideas or causes,” he said morosely. “This is a certain sort of life, that’s all. Limited. Private. There are other ways to live.”
“I know. We got caught up. But you would never have been a lover of things or ideas anyway. You see through everything. That’s why I like you.”
He moved closer and laid a heavy arm across her. “You’re the only one who stayed with me. Everything else moved on.” He chuckled. “You’re a living example of perseverance. It must come from untangling all those knots.”
So it was victory by default? This time she considered her words carefully. “Isabel will be back to you in a few years.”
Ivan smiled. “And you’ve grown so discreet, too. All the Henry James. No, it will never be the same, with Isabel. And Greta—to Greta I don’t think we’re quite real. So there’s only you, Caroline.”
It was true: no one rushed to greet him at the door any more. Greta sat absorbed in her books, and Isabel was far beyond such antics.
He rested his head on her chest. “I can hear your heart.”
“What is it saying?”
“Well.” He paused. “Your heart, as we know, is topological.”
“Oh, is it?” she smiled.
“Yes. It’s saying, ‘A perfect circle is a trivial knot.’”
Her eyes flicked open. “Hey, that’s not bad. Not bad at all. You have possibilities.”
“Did you think I could have hung around this long without learning anything?”
She watched him as he lay sprawled across her. Outwardly he had not changed very much. He had never turned into the middle-aged monster she dreaded. That was partly luck. The circumstantiality of her life sent a shiver of mortality though her. Lying on her chest as if he belonged there was a person who had aroused her at a party over twenty years ago on a sunny afternoon when she was lonely and slightly drunk, and so—her life. Only one turn round, and hers was more than half passed. Had it been different weather or different wine, had he not taken her immediately into those dark recesses to show her a she-wolf…That she loved him in a way that was appalling, that things about him over which he had little control—ways of seeing and of speaking, ways of being—exerted a control over her, she accepted now as a fact of life, neither loathsome nor lovely. She could confront it with detachment, like other facts about herself. There might easily have been other facts in its place, equally intransigent, more or less dense with possibility. But there would not be. Or was it still too soon to say?
Ivan sat up and tipped the bottle over her glass; only a few drops came out. “There’s more inside,” he said. “Do you want to get really looped?”
“Sure. We’re on our own. I’ll get it this time. Let me open one.”
“Ha! Did you ever open a bottle of champagne? It’s an art. It can’t be done sloppily.”
“I’m not a slob! At the last two department parties I did it. It’s not beyond my powers.” With the French professor too, on several occasions that she recalled quite vividly, but she could not say that.
“I’m sure it’s not, but I’ll do it anyway.” He got out of bed and headed towards the kitchen.
She leaped up and followed. “Not this time, sweetheart. I want to open a bottle. Fair’s fair.” She chased him and overtook him in the living room, and they raced to the kitchen. Ivan got there first, flung the refrigerator open and seized the champagne. He laughed exultantly and waved it aloft. Caroline yanked his arm down and grabbed the neck of the bottle. Their four hands slipped and grappled on the dewy surface, tugging above their heads.
“Come on, baby, let go.”
“Never! Why don’t you?”
“If only I had a free hand,” gasped Ivan, “oh, what I would do to you.”
“I don’t need a hand. I could destroy you with a knee.”
“Your loss,” he jeered.
Then by a common impulse, at the same instant they both yielded. The bottle fell from its height to the hard tiles. Pieces of glass bounced like a starburst. Sweet-smelling foam streamed onto the kitchen floor, and blood flowed from Ivan’s ankle.
“Look what the hell you’ve done!” he shouted. “You’re so damn perverse!”
“And you’re so damn stubborn!” she shouted back. “Sit down and let me look at that. And watch your bare feet.”
“You watch your bare ass.” But he sat.
Ivan’s blood dripped into the rills and puddles of champagne that eddied out on the floor, making the two of them into an island. The blood slid in sinuous arcs that quickly dissolved and turned the liquid a pale, effervescent pink.
Caroline examined his ankle. “It’s not as bad as it looks. A little cut and a lot of blood. Have no fear, you’ll run again.”
“Look at this disgusting mess,” he muttered. “Senseless. Too bad there’s no ship.”
She dabbed at his ankle with a paper napkin and turned it toward the light. Something glinted. “Hold it, Ivan. Sit still. You have a bit of glass in there.”
“Oh, terrific. We don’t even need Greta around to have a calamity. And you used to worry when I disappeared in the park. It’s much more dangerous at home with you.”
She stroked his leg. “Stop it,” she said softly. “Will you stop being so angry? We both did it.”
“Oh, all right.” He took a deep breath. “But will you take the glass out of my leg? If it’s there. I can’t see it.”
“Your eyes,” she said, shaking her head. She bent over his ankle and picked out the sliver, not half an inch long. She held it for a moment in the palm of her hand, then lifted it and looked into his eyes. He looked back uncomprehending at first, then slowly he smiled and leaned back, waiting. It was the smile that had first undone her, that made him ingenuous, accessible. His eyes shone a brighter green.
She sliced a careful line on the tip of her index finger. Blood oozed. “This vow will seal our kinship true…”
“You are…not quite the usual article,” whispered Ivan. He put his hands on her bare shoulders. “I knew when I first saw you, in that setting, you would be…I don’t know what it is. Wild.”
She winked and rubbed her bleeding finger on Ivan’s cut ankle. “Blood of me and blood of you.”
He kissed her finger, and then her mouth. “But,” he said, “I still think I could have opened it better. I have more experience.”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Portions of this work originally appeared in somewhat different form in the Ontario Review, A Shout in the Street, and Weekend Magazine.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint:
Quote from the “Food and Fashion” section by John Ciardi. Reprinted from The New York Times. © 1978 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
Lyrics from “Some Enchanted Evening” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright © 1949 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright renewed, Williamson Music, Inc., owner of publication and allied rights throughout the Western Hemisphere and Japan. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
copyright © 1980 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4532-8753-8
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Rough Strife Page 19