Current Affairs

by Raskin, Barbara;

  That’s the good news.

  The bad news is that my husband has grown tired of me.

  It’s not something he wanted to have happen. It just has. His passion simply stopped, like a smoke detector that silently gives up the ghost without anyone noticing. These things happen. And, after so many years, why not? Maybe he’s gotten tired of me—the way I look, the things I cook, the words I use, the movies I choose, the sweaters I wear or the shirts I buy him.

  I don’t know. In April we took a monthlong trip to Moscow, and Eli hasn’t been the same since. He hates the smooth tyranny of our matinee-idol president and this now rigid, Republican city, which once offered him such great journalistic opportunities. His lack of interest in me started shortly after our return, and now it just hangs there between us all the time. I know my husband still loves me, that weary aphorism of late-night collegiate bull sessions; he’s just not in love with me anymore. That’s a big difference and, of course, it makes me crazy.

  Eli crosses the brick terrace and comes over to me so he can thumb up my chin, look into my eyes and see how I’m doing. Eli doesn’t like me to get upset. Since he knows how Shay affects me, he’s worried I might be in a bad mood. But because Eli likes me to be a good sport and not make any trouble, I smile back reassuringly to show him everything’s okay. That pleases him a lot. Relieved, he is now free to say a few casual words to Christopher before turning toward the pool.

  And that’s when he sees Shay.

  He takes a good long look. She is standing in waist-high water showing Amelia the Australian crawl stroke. This activity causes her breasts to sway slowly from side to side.

  “Wow,” Eli says to me in a minivoice. “How ’bout them apples?”

  Narrowing his eyes against the sun, he continues to observe the swimming lesson.

  “Isn’t it about time for a drink?” Christopher asks, eager to interrupt our hushed remarks, which he knows are about Shay.

  “White wine?” Eli asks me.

  I nod and he relays my request along with his own to Christopher, who walks off toward the house as if leaving a battlefield.

  “She’s still got quite a pair there,” Eli says dryly.

  “Had you forgotten?” Task him gently.

  This is just a friendly reminder that he’s crossing a field we both know is mined. That he loved Shay before he loved me contributes to the slow burn from which I’ve suffered for decades. It is the deepest, darkest secret of my life, next to the abortion. Those two facts comprise the dirty linen of my life.

  From the moment Shay enrolled at the University of Minnesota (at the age of sixteen and a half) she created a new persona for herself. First she told everyone she was an “accepting” Quaker. A short while later she told certain people she was a “confirmed” Marxist. Then she started sleeping around with any movement heavy who caught her fancy and wasn’t frightened away by her aggressiveness. In her sophomore year she joined the Minnesota Daily, where she learned how to write. Shay put a lot of herself into her stories, which probably helped make her a big name on campus. It’s also the basis for her totally outrageous claim that she started the New Journalism.

  SNAPSHOT

  That’s Shay and Eli at some Aquatennial hootenanny or something. They’ve just become engaged and he’s got his arm around her shoulders. I’ve always thought he was feeling her up because of the way his fingers are dangling over her right breast. They met when she was a junior and Eli came over to the Daily office to get permission to reprint one of her stories. Of course he fell in love with her. They went steady until she graduated and accepted a job with a Headstart program in Jackson, Mississippi. The night before she left, Shay returned Eli’s one-carat emerald-cut diamond engagement ring, even though she’d lost one of the two baguettes flanking the stone. She claimed it had fallen out of its setting, dropped into some rainwater and been carried away into a sewer in front of our house. Shay took this as a sign she shouldn’t marry Eli. Eli took this as hard as a man possibly could.

  As soon as Shay left town, I began to fall in love with Eli. Newly equipped with a degree in social work, I spent that summer looking for a job—which I never found—and comforting Eli about Shay’s heartless dismissal of him and her preemptive departure to Jackson.

  After a lot of talking, Eli and I became good friends. We remained just friends until one night when we drank too much and made out together on the living-room sofa. In the early hours of the morning, we drove to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and got married. Maybe Eli thought he owed that much to the Karavan family after sleeping with both their daughters.

  Anyway, his parents and my parents were all shocked. Lots of people were shocked. Even me. Although it bothered me that Eli was a hand-me-down (hand-me-up?) from my younger sister, I wanted him so badly I didn’t care. Shay, of course, was thrilled:

  “I’m so happy for you, Nat,” she trilled over the telephone from Mississippi. “I really missed Eli after we broke up and now we can all be together forever.”

  Bingo.

  SNAPSHOT

  That’s Eli and me sprawled atop a blanket beside the lake in Loring Park. He’s much thinner and lankier than he is now, hungrier-looking and also happier. We have just rented our first apartment, in a rambling old mansion facing the park and the Minneapolis Walker Art Center. It is 1968 and we are very happy. We have begun meeting some interesting people, mostly a small crowd of liberals from the Tribune and from the Humanities Department at the U. of M. We visit our respective parents on alternate Friday nights for Shabbes dinners, but on Saturdays we make spaghetti-and-Chianti suppers for our new friends. On Sunday mornings we read the newspapers near Lake of the Isles, feeling lazy and relaxed as we tan in the sun. I have never been this happy ever before in my life. I am dangerously in love with Eli and thoroughly delighted that Shay no longer lives in the Twin Cities. Eli is a very imaginative lover, a long-distance runner of a lover, and our rich sex life keeps me crazy in love.

  Christopher returns with our drinks, and shortly afterward Shay wraps Amelia in a large beach towel and carries her over to where we’re sitting.

  “This little girl is tired and hungry,” she announces happily, rubbing her cheek against Amelia’s cap of wet curls. “Hi, Eli.”

  “Hi, Shay.”

  For a brief moment it appears that Eli might reach out to caress Amelia, but then he cautiously recalls his outstretched hand. That’s when Christopher stands up, takes off his shirt and tosses it toward Shay. She catches it easily with her free hand, but then looks puzzled, as if uncertain what to do with it.

  “Put it on, Shay,” Christopher says. “Cover up.”

  “Oh.”

  Shay sets Amelia down and absently pulls on the shirt, which envelops her like a hug, trailing down her slim body to a point below her knees.

  Eli studies the bamboo trees.

  I take advantage of Shay’s momentary distraction to pick up Amelia and finish toweling her dry. Combining a little tickling with my rubbing, I make Amelia laugh until she begs me to stop. When Shay isn’t around, I am Amelia’s favorite mother substitute. This has caused me to fall completely in love with her even though the thought of myself as a doting great-aunt alarms me. I must actively dispatch images of old maids who wear tattered cardigan sweaters, drink herbal tea and make fruit cakes from scratch for the entire family every Christmas.

  “Let’s go inside,” Shay suggests demurely. “I have to give Amelia her supper.”

  “Barney’s picking Amelia up at seven-thirty,” Christopher announces. “She’s sleeping at his house tonight.”

  Shay’s sun-flushed face constricts with disappointment.

  “I don’t believe it,” she moans, stung by the irony of being separated from Amelia at such a convenient time for being together.

  “It’s his night, Shay,” Christopher says flatly. “She’s also supposed to stay with them all day tomorrow.”

  “Grandpa’s coming,” Amelia agrees, squirming off my lap.

  Ame
lia has four sets of grandparents, a cast of eight individuals, half of whom keep changing. Amelia’s maternal grandparents are divorced and living with fresh mates in neighboring New Hampshire towns, where Amelia visits them at Christmastime. Although she has never known anything but reformatted families, Amelia has clearly begun to view her ever-changing pool of custodians with some alarm now that both her parents have disappeared.

  Because she doesn’t like cast changes, Amelia focuses on trouble spots that threaten her precarious stability. Lately she’s begun questioning Shay about her quarrels with Christopher, her arguments with Barney, her refusal to attend Victoria’s birthday party and the whereabouts of several of Shay’s lovers whom Amelia liked enough to call “Unkie” but have since dropped off the radar screen.

  “I’m going to go get dressed and find Amelia some clothes,” Shay says. “The air-conditioning in the house is too cold for her.”

  Then she walks off toward the kitchen. Amelia turns to watch her grandmother’s departure until Shay has disappeared through the back doorway.

  After a while, we all go inside.

  The air-conditioning is indeed quite cold. As with other innovations in Christopher’s home, there is a basic incompatibility between the original structure and its modern improvements. Most Georgetown houses feel the same—as if the parts are out of sync with the whole.

  Actually, Christopher has left the place relatively intact, since it had already been renovated when he bought it. While the exterior looks like the Federal period in which it was built, the interior has been opened up in a manner favored by fashionable Georgetown architects. The kitchen flows into the dining room, which flows into the living room, which flows into a library, which opens onto a deck leading to the swimming pool. The only change Shay demanded was the installation of bidets in all the second-floor bathrooms.

  Bidets, for some reason, are very important to my sister.

  When (my? our? just plain?) Mother saw the house right after Shay and Christopher’s wedding, she took me aside and asked, “Why couldn’t he buy her a new place?”

  So much for style.

  SNAPSHOT

  This is my favorite picture of Marge, my mother. I wasn’t even born when it was taken, but it’s what I envision whenever I summon up her image—a Marge I never knew. She is maybe twenty years old here, which means it’s around 1937. Because she couldn’t afford to go to college, she was working as a secretary for a St. Paul law firm. Someone had suggested she enter a typing contest at the Minnesota State Fair that summer, and she’d won the first prize of twenty-five dollars by typing 101 WPM. Dad took this snapshot of her fanning out the prize money like a hand of cards. She is smiling her usual shy, introverted smile. Her dark hair is bobbed and lacquered close to her head. She is wearing a middy blouse with a sailor scarf around the drooping neckline, a long straight skirt and sensible shoes. She looks happy. I guess she’s happy because she has a boyfriend and can type so fast.

  Christopher decides to whip us up some daiquiris.

  After rummaging around for a while, he starts tossing strawberries into the blender from the center of the room, going through the motions of taking midcourt hook shots. This makes Amelia laugh hysterically. But when Christopher turns on the blender, the cover isn’t securely fastened and the scream of the machine frightens Amelia and makes her cry. It also makes a big mess on the counter that will stay right where it is until the housekeeper returns in the morning and cleans it up.

  “Let’s watch the news in the library,” Christopher says when Shay returns dressed in her shirt and jeans. “Meese made some new statement about his resignation today and I want to hear what he said.”

  So we all go into the den and watch Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw back-to-back.

  SNAPSHOT

  Christopher and Shay’s 1978 antique silver-framed wedding pictures march across the fireplace mantel. They were married in the church at St. Alban’s School, where Steven, who was Christopher’s best man, attended fourth grade. Christopher bought Shay a designer wedding gown that made her look exquisite. Besides the formal shots, there’s a group portrait of the entire wedding party, taken the next morning at dawn down at the Tidal Basin. Christopher had rented the entire fleet of tourist paddleboats so we could sail around the basin beneath the cherry blossoms, which had exploded in time for their wedding. Eli and I are in the group photo along with Shay, Christopher, Steven, Hamilton Jordan, Peter Bourne, Pat Caddell, Jerry Rafshoon and Chip Carter. I was Shay’s matron of honor, so it’s just us two women with that gang of guys. Shay has always felt more comfortable with men than with women, but since I was her matron of honor, she had to count me in.

  By the time the news is over, Amelia has fallen asleep tummy-down on the sofa; Shay and I are working on our third daiquiris. The men go outside onto the deck to start a fire in the hibachi. I watch them through the French doors.

  Christopher spends a long time trying to coax the charcoal into action with his barbecue fork. Eventually Eli, now sucking a beer bottle, has to move in and do his usual mysterious thing that I can never quite see. Then both men back away from the grill, apparently pleased with the results. Soon I smell the fire and see Christopher appear with a large platter of chicken and a big bottle of Smokey Pit barbecue sauce.

  When the doorbell rings, Shay leaps up off the sofa.

  “Oh, Nat, please can you get it?” she begs. “Please? It must be Barney and I really don’t want to talk to him right now. I’ve got to start the salad.”

  Without waiting for an answer, she rushes into the hallway.

  Barney Yellen looks like some tough from a paperback detective novel. He has a crunched-up acne-scarred face, a drawstring forehead and a once-busted nose that spread out as it healed. His eyes are dark and speedy, his mouth a narrow slash above a square jaw. He has slick dark hair turning gray. He’s runner-thin, almost scrawny, but compact. Built close to the ground. An infighter. You can’t read Barney Yellen easily. He plays his life close to his chest.

  “Hello, Barney.”

  “Hello, Natalie. Nice to see you. I’ve come to pick up Amelia.”

  “I know. Come on in. She fell asleep in the library. She spent a lot of time in the pool with Shay today.”

  “Shay’s here?”

  “Yes. She got in this afternoon.”

  Barney is wearing jeans, a graying white shirt with the sleeves rolled—not folded—up and worn-out running shoes.

  He’s his own man and his own best Mend. Unthinkingly, Shay set him up for a great single life by letting out the word in left-wing circles that he was an extraordinary cocksman. This was the equivalent of paying him sexual alimony for life. Although they’ve been divorced for fifteen years, Barney is still stuck on Shay, linked to her by a passion that lingers between them like a naughty child holding each of them by the hand.

  In the library he walks over to Amelia and stands there watching her sleep.

  Shay and Barney met in Mississippi. He was an SDS officer sent down to serve as liaison with the SNCC leadership in the Delta. Shay went for Barney in a big way. Although she, too, eventually became an SDS organizer, Shay double-dipped. Not only did she have various political experiences, she wrote about them and then peddled her articles to various alternative and mainstream publications. It was during this Mississippi period that she began to develop a fairly large and faithful following of readers around the country.

  Shay was three months pregnant when she and Barney finally got married and went off to join an overcrowded, overwrought commune in Kearneysville, West Virginia. Living among poor white trash, the communards all pledged to produce lots of “liberated” offspring to offset regressive tendencies in the Blue Ridge Mountain area. Steven was born the day after Shay’s twenty-first birthday in the kitchen of the communal farmhouse—on a former butchering table—with nine people in attendance.

  SNAPSHOT

  This one I call “Our Lady of the West Virginia Commune.” Shay went back to the earth in
a big way. She definitely played hardball with Mother Nature throughout her pregnancy and early motherhood. This is a great shot of the young family: Barney in denim coveralls, holding their infant son, and Shay, dressed in a muslin pinafore, holding a bushel basket of freshly harvested corn. For almost two years Shay nursed, cooked, canned, knitted, dyed, wove, refinished, sewed, planted, drove a pickup and played earth mother. To my knowledge, she never cooked another meal after leaving Kearneysville for California.

  Shay and Barney might have had more children if they hadn’t moved to Berkeley to join the anti-war movement. Once there, Barney attended Boalt Law School. Shay stayed in San Francisco for four years. During this period she met all the people from Ramparts magazine, the Red Family, some of the Black Panthers, a lot of independent producers, some local politicians and a few movie stars; she still stays in touch with many of them. But in 1975, Shay left Barney and moved to D.C. with Steven. She took a job at The Washington Star, where she stayed until it shut down. Then she returned to being a free-lancer.

  “Where is she?” Barney asks.

  “In the kitchen.”

  I follow him back through the house until he stops dead still in the kitchen doorway.

  What he has encountered is a view of Shay’s heart-shaped Calvinized rump rearing up and out of the refrigerator as she scavenges for vegetables in the bottom crisper.

  “You’re looking good, tiger,” he says to her backside.

  Shay whirls around.

  “Oh. Hey! Howya doin’, Barney?”

  In an unusual display of self-consciousness, Shay begins to brush off the seat of her jeans, which are unsoiled by anything other than Barney’s gaze.

  “I hear you got lucky tonight,” she says, grinning nervously. “And all day tomorrow.”

  “Yah.”

  His monosyllabic reply is a boxcar of mixed emotions.

  It’s as if it’s the early seventies again and they’ve only recently separated and are still dueling over visitation rights and wrongs. As soon as Barney finished law school, he also moved to D.C., so he could be near his son. Every time he arrived to pick up Steven for the weekend, he and Shay quarreled; now they are fencing over their child’s child. In the post-nuclear-family world, hangovers last for generations. Because Barney and Shay are still linked by lost causes and past passions, their relationship never changes or improves.