Away from Home

by Rona Jaffe

  Go ahead, she wanted to whisper, kill me; but she could not bring out a word. Her eyes were wide and fixed on his, and what she meant to say she said through them and he heard her. She knew, she saw his face change as he looked at her, and he opened his hands. She put her arms around him to keep from falling to the floor, and then she held to him more desperately because he was trying to get away from her. He reached behind his waist and took hold of her wrists to pull them away from him. Then, with his hands on her wrists, he stopped, and his hands slid around her arms and up to her shoulders, and then tenderly touched her face. Neither of them said anything.

  “I haven’t seen him for a month,” she said finally. “It’s all over. I’m never going to see him again. I never even think about him.”

  “How long were you sleeping with him?”

  “Never. I never did.” She saw that he didn’t believe her; he must have heard gossip, perhaps even about the fazenda. “I … went away with him. The last time you went away. I was going to … do it, but I couldn’t. I ran away. I know that doesn’t mean anything, because if I went away with him it was obviously because I meant to go to bed with him. But I didn’t do it, and when I decided that I knew it was all over too. Maybe that means something—just something—to you?”

  “Something,” he said. “Go on.”

  “It was nothing. Lunches; we kissed. I never loved him. I thought I did for a while, but it was only because he knew what to say to me when I felt as if nobody cared for me.”

  “That I didn’t?”

  She couldn’t look at him. “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you thought I didn’t love you? Did you have to tell him?”

  “I tried to tell you.”

  “When?”

  “That … night after the party I gave for Mil Burns. On the balcony. And … afterward.”

  “God,” he said. He didn’t touch her any more; he sat on the sofa and lighted a cigarette. Helen knelt on the floor at his feet. From below, his eyes were dark and shadowed so she could not tell what he was thinking.

  “And other times too,” she said timidly. “It’s much more my fault than yours. I never could tell you really what I was afraid of, or how I felt, so how could you know?”

  “You tried to tell me,” he said. He sounded quite sober now.

  “You told me once you wouldn’t stop me if I wanted to have an affair. I didn’t want you to say that. It made me feel like the ugliest woman in the world. I wanted you to tell me you would act the way you did tonight.”

  “Didn’t you know I would?”

  “How could I know?”

  “Don’t you think I have pride?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said slowly, “I don’t think pride like that should matter between two people who love each other. Not when one person’s pride matters at the moment more than the other’s.”

  “I don’t know if you and I will ever get together,” Bert said.

  His words hurt her so much that she felt dizzy again. She imagined herself arguing and struggling with him through all this long night and only becoming farther and farther removed from him. She had never loved or needed him as much as she did at this moment when she was most in danger of losing him.

  “If you mean that,” she said, “then you might as well really kill me. I don’t want to live without you. I can’t.”

  “Would you ever have told me about Sergio Leite Braga?”

  “I don’t know. I never had to live with something that terrible before. Every minute I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?” Bert said ironically. “If you thought I wouldn’t care if you had an affair?”

  “I was afraid you’d leave me anyway. That would be the worst; you not caring but leaving me anyway out of pride or distaste or principle, or—”

  “Or absolute human agony,” he said. “Leaving you because I couldn’t look at your face any more. I know the way your face looks when you love, and afterward, and every time I looked at you I thought that someone else was seeing that private look too and then you were coming home to me with it all smoothed out. That isn’t pride, darling. That’s much more.”

  “Why is it,” she whispered, and her voice caught in her throat, “why is it that people only say beautiful true things like that to each other when they’re saying goodbye?”

  “That’s when they’re free, I guess. An exit line is easy. You can walk out and close the door. And they feel they owe it.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to ask the question; she was too afraid of the answer. She had to fight now, for him, against him, perhaps both. She had never before suspected the true depth of his pride and she felt now that she could say anything, humble herself completely, beg him, if that would change the way he felt now and make him want her again. The balance of love was so tricky; it was as if you were an aerialist walking on a taut wire above a net. The net was there to save your life, as the marriage itself was there, but what good was it to sprawl humiliated and helpless on the net of marriage because you had failed the important thing, which was to walk grandly and skillfully across the heights of love? They could live together now in sullenness and acceptance, remembering. They had the children, and she and Bert could say, It’s for the children’s sake. Or they could say that they had been married for a long time and they were used to it. Or that alimony and child support were expensive, and Bert could not afford it yet, and that adulteresses (did he still think she was?) did not deserve to live alone and free and be supported. It made everything ugly to accept and be sullen and not speak out anger, to pretend to forget and never forget, to pretend to understand and never forgive. It would be better to break off entirely—and yet, she could not bear even to think of it, she could not lose him entirely and go on.

  “Why didn’t you ask me, when you knew?” Helen asked. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  He got up then and walked away from her, looking for another bottle. He found one, opened it, and then looked at it and put it down. He walked to the wide windows and pulled the cord of the draperies, opening the room to the lights of night. The sight of any world outside this room startled Helen. She wanted him to close the drapes again and leave her here with him in their private purgatory. Even the night sky and the street with cars and people on it seemed too much to think about. She bit the edge of her finger, ripping at the skin with her teeth until she tasted blood, watching Bert and wondering what he would answer, but he did not answer anything.

  “Maybe if the same thing had happened between you and … a woman you thought you loved, I wouldn’t have said anything either,” she began, fighting for him. “I don’t know what I would have said if I thought you were. I would have been afraid. Not that you’d lie to me, but that you’d say you were glad I’d brought it out in the open so you could get rid of me. We never lied to each other before. I guess people have a right to lie to each other sometimes; they don’t want to know terrible things. We never had a confess-everything marriage. We never felt forced to give up our own private lives completely, did we? I always hated the kind of marriage where two people get to look like twins, they say yes-dear, no-dear, they never have a single individual thought. I always wanted you to feel free. But secretly I didn’t want to be free, I didn’t. I wanted you to care what I did and what I thought. I wanted you to be jealous. I wanted you to care more about me. I’m not old,” she went on breathlessly. “I’m very young. But we’ve been married so long—it’s not fair, it’s not fair to me to say that we’ve been together so long it isn’t the way it was in the beginning. Oh, Bert, I know it isn’t the way it was in the beginning, but we’re not middle-aged either. It’s not fair!”

  “Maybe you’re bored with me,” he said tiredly. “Do you want to go home?”

  “Home! Oh, God,” she said, “where’s that?”

  “He’s attractive and rich and sophis
ticated, they tell me. You could have done worse. At least I’m not insulted.”

  His cold tone cut her. She could almost believe him. She felt her throat close and she was afraid she might cry, so she waited tensely until the feeling passed away and then she said, “Don’t be sarcastic.”

  “I’m not. I’m tired and drunk and I’m beginning to get a hangover. It’s a shame to get a hangover in the middle of the night. I should at least wait until morning.”

  “I thought for a minute you were going to kill me.”

  “You would have enjoyed that, wouldn’t you? It would have been dramatic.”

  “Dramatic! Oh, please, please—stop it. Please talk to me; don’t just say things to hurt me.” But he was right. She knew suddenly he was right, and she turned her face away so he would not read the confession in her eyes. She had wanted him to do something conclusive, something to show her without any doubt that he had been touched and changed and that he needed her enough to be driven to do something totally unlike his sensible, rational self. She had been driven to do that; to go off to sleep with a man she almost did not love, only because of some terrified search for love that had made her give it a face and voice of its own. She knew now why she had thought she loved Sergio. It had nothing to do with his wooing. It had been her own form of violence. And yet, there had been a time when her feelings for Sergio had seemed all tenderness, all gentleness and gratitude, the soft, incongruous under-feathers of the hawk.

  She looked at Bert. “What’s wrong with me?” she pleaded.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t look at myself any more. The things I see get worse and worse.”

  “Such as what?”

  “My feelings toward you. Toward myself. Toward … him.”

  “I’m not sure I want to know about them.”

  “You’re right,” Helen said very softly. She felt drained. Everything was gone. “You’re right.”

  Bert poured a drink and stood looking out the window, drinking slowly. It was straight whisky but it might as well have been water or ginger ale. He drank steadily and calmly and did not look at her. “You were with Margie tonight,” he said finally.

  “Yes. That’s true.”

  “I know.”

  He didn’t say anything more for a while, and Helen waited, afraid to speak, afraid of what he might say, feeling crazily that everything would be all right, had to be all right. She knew him too well, he was the man she had lived with and loved for a third of her lifetime, and yet, they had not known each other very well after all.…

  “It’s strange,” Bert said. He sounded as if it were an effort for him to say the words. “Delusions. It was like a nightmare in which you know you’re asleep and that it’s a nightmare but you can’t wake up. And all the time you believe it, even though you know it isn’t happening. I’m glad it’s over. It is over.”

  “Everything? … Me too?” She stood up and stood there stiffly, with her arms at her sides, speaking quietly but feeling as if he were very far away from her at the end of a tunnel and could not hear her. She wanted more than anything to run to where he was and touch him, make him say that it was not over, that it had instead never really happened, but she stood there without moving and watched the walls of the room moving away from her, her husband moving away from her, the world opening put and falling away.

  “No, the other is over,” he said. “It’s finished. Tonight when I was alone I didn’t know what I was going to say to you. I knew I had to say something. All right, I thought, if this has to be the end this is it. I even divided up the children. I got Roger, you got Julie. It was all simple. It wasn’t simple at all.”

  “Oh, Bert …”

  “How can people think it’s simple? I can’t leave you. I can’t let you leave me.”

  She ran to him then and put her arms around him. “Tell me,” she cried. “Tell me, tell me!”

  “I’m too involved with you,” he said in a strange, choked voice. “Not just a marriage or our children, or time; I mean involved with you.”

  “I am too, with you,” she whispered. She had her arms tightly around his waist, her face against his shirt, and in the warm room she felt that his shirt was cold and wet. She felt that she wanted to shield him from anything that could happen to him, from all bad things, from illness, from human frailty, from her own tormented selfishness. After only an instant she felt his hand come up gently to stroke her hair. The fear, the tenseness, ebbed away, and in its place came a wonderful calmness, the lifting above pain that comes when a fever breaks. She felt she could stand there forever, guarded and guarding, leaning against him. Only a few minutes ago she had thought her affair with Sergio had been a form of violence; now she realized how distorted it was even to imagine that. It had been stupidity perhaps, or desperation, but not violence. Filled with this wonderful calm she saw herself again clearly, and everything was real. She felt as if Bert had given her something she had lost. How fragile the line was between reality and delusion! Bert had seen it tonight in himself, waiting for her, and she had seen it too, only tonight, waiting for him. She knew then what Bert and his love had given to her again. He had restored to her herself.

  CHAPTER 22

  Dressing to go out for dinner with Mort Baker, Margie Davidow remembered many things. The night was warm and humid. As she chose jewelry to go with her dress she remembered that her gold charm bracelet had been given to her by her parents for her graduation from elementary school, started for her then with the tiny gold diploma that hung from it, and then every birthday and Christmas afterward another charm was added. A tiny gold book with the Ten Commandments printed inside in letters so small you needed a magnifying glass to read them, and the Star of David on the cover, a gold heart, a tiny tennis racket with a pearl for the tennis ball, a wedding ring and an engagement ring with a diamond chip in it—these rings had been given as a bit of whimsy when she was sixteen, long before she met Neil. She put the bracelet back into her jewel case. It made her feel guilty toward her parents, who would be receiving her air-mail letter in five days, the letter she had finally made herself write last night after Helen had gone home. She felt guilty toward them, for the shock and grief they would feel, and she even felt in some obscure way a guilt for herself, for that young Margie who had received the charms for this bracelet and dreamed of a life that had turned out so differently. She knew it was not entirely her fault, but she felt as if she had betrayed her childhood.

  The triple-strand pearl necklace had been given to her by Neil’s parents for an engagement present; she certainly couldn’t wear that. It had a diamond clasp and a three-strand bracelet to go with it—she remembered how overwhelmed she had been when she first saw them. She picked up an old-fashioned pin that had belonged to her grandmother. She couldn’t bring herself to put that on either. There was an aquamarine ring Neil had bought her here in Brazil, and a plain gold bracelet he had given her for an anniversary. Her gold wristwatch had been given to her by her parents when she was graduated from high school—her father had said it wouldn’t be a graduation if you didn’t get a gold watch. There was nothing here that had not been given to her by someone else who loved her; she could not make herself wear any of it.

  You should be a wife, she remembered Neil’s saying. She had always been a wife, or a daughter, always a member of a family, always belonging to someone else. She wondered if people who had always belonged to others, or with others, looked different than people who had lived alone. Did it show? Ever since she had been alone she felt as if the front half of herself had been sliced away, replaced with glass, revealing all her feelings and vulnerability.

  She finally ended by wearing no jewelry at all. There was a bowl of fresh flowers on the living-room table and she picked a red rose from it and pinned the rose to the lapel of her dress. She tried not to think about Mort getting dressed to go out to meet her. She remembered that evening when he had lived with them and had dressed for a date. She recalled it clearly. Tonight all over
the city people were getting dressed in clean nice clothes to meet one another, as they were in New York, in towns, anywhere. Years ago she had thought this when she fussed over her clothing before it was time for Neil to ring the doorbell of her parents’ apartment. Strange … the cycle continued. She had not gone out on a date for six years, and many things had happened to her, but here she was again with the same feeling of excitement and chilliness, going through the same motions for someone else.

  She mixed a pitcher of martinis, six-to-one, the way she liked them, and drank one very fast. The first one always stung and made her cough. For a minute she always thought it might come back up. Afterward it was easier. She had another small one and then stopped and chewed a piece of peppermint gum. She waited for the lightheaded feeling, it came, and the chilliness left. She remembered that Mort Baker was funny, and he liked to talk, and that he had always liked her very much. They had all been happy together, the three of them—she, Mort, and Neil. There was no reason to be afraid. She and Mort had lived under the same roof for weeks, they had known each other for nearly three years, they had always been special to each other. Still, she wondered what she would say to him for conversation.

  She ran to answer the doorbell herself before the maid could get to it. Mort came in fast, smiling, but he did not shake hands or attempt to touch her. He had gotten a very good suntan while he was away from them and Margie supposed he had been spending part of every day on the beach. His teeth looked very white. He looked extremely neat and fresh, clean blue oxford cloth shirt with a button-down collar, open at the neck, clean tan chino pants which were not faded and perhaps brand-new.