Away from Home

by Rona Jaffe

  “How have you been?” he asked; and without waiting for an answer, “You look beautiful.”

  “We haven’t seen you for ages. You ought to be ashamed.”

  “I am,” he said, but he smiled when he said it and Margie thought he hadn’t been ashamed at all or even thought of them. Here today and gone tomorrow, these bachelors. “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “Yes.” If she could get one bite down, she thought, she would be lucky. And then she realized suddenly she was hungry after all.

  They drove along the curve of beach toward Ipanema and beyond, up into the hills. The sky was streaked with pink and blue and purple and gold. The water was blue and white. Mort talked constantly as he drove, as if he had been away on a long trip and was filled with news for her. She realized that while she had been worrying about what to say to him tonight she had completely forgotten him, who and what he was, and had been planning dialogue with a stranger. Now that she was with him she felt cheerful, she laughed, she felt as if she were on an entirely different level of her existence: outside of herself and much more aware of everything around her, but as if none of the things she saw and knew could give her pain; they were only more interesting.

  There was a sort of market and barbecue in a clearing at the side of the road, on top of one of the hills that overlooked the sea. Mort stopped there. “We can get hors d’oeuvres,” he said. There was only one other car parked by the barbecue stalls, and some dark, ragged children were playing and watching.

  In one stall a man broiled bits of filet mignon on a long sharp stick, on a grill there were small sausages, and in a huge barrel there were ears of corn boiling. There were exotic fruits with bright lumpy skins piled on a counter, breadfruit, mango, papaya, pineapple, bananas, and something she did not know the name of. There were watermelons split open, red and wet with juice.

  Mort bought filet mignon for both of them, broiled on the thin sharp sticks until it was juicy and rare, then rolled in the farofa that tourists called “sawdust” and seasoned with spices. They ate four sticks apiece.

  There was an Italian restaurant nearby on the hill and they drove there and sat outdoors on a terrace festooned with brightly colored lanterns and drank martinis, looking out at the last of the sunset over the sea. There were small islands in the distance, in the shimmering water. Margie wondered if anyone lived on them.

  “I’d love to have a yacht and sail to one of those islands,” she said. “I’d like to stay on it. Never have to think of another thing.”

  “A friend of mine has a yacht. I’ll take you next week. But you’ll think, all right. You think more when you’re on an island.”

  “You must have a hundred and fifty friends.”

  “A hundred and fifty-one. They’re not friends. I know them, that’s all. Sometimes I don’t see anybody for weeks. By choice.”

  The way he said it, with neither self-pity nor striving for effect, made Margie feel slightly envious of him. She felt left out, because he was so self-sufficient. “Do you ever think about certain people when you’re not with them for a long time?” she asked.

  “Some people.”

  “Us, for instance? I guess you were pretty well tired of us by the time you left.”

  “I should think it would have been the other way around.”

  “Oh, no!”

  Neither of them said anything for a while. Suddenly Margie felt nervous again. She kept her hands in her lap so she would not tear her cocktail napkin into messy little pieces. She looked into Mort’s face and tried to guess what he was thinking.

  “It’s hard to get over something like that,” he said finally. “Traumatic. You keep thinking we when you have to start thinking just me. I couldn’t believe it when I first heard about you and Neil. I guess you never know what people are really feeling. Nobody ever wants to give it away. Everybody has secrets. I was always pretty hung up on you, but I never let myself think much about it because I thought if there was one marriage that would last it was yours with Neil.”

  “Me?” she said. Her voice sounded too shrill in her own ears. She ripped her cocktail napkin in half.

  “Some men are born to be married and some are born to be bachelors. The ones who are born to be bachelors can go on all their lives having affairs and loving every minute of it. They never want things to be any other way. I was born to be a bachelor, but then I got to know you well and after a while I began to hate being alone. Sometimes there’s one woman who changes everything. Am I making any sense?”

  She nodded, staring at him. She felt too numbed from everything that had happened to her to register quite what he was trying to say.

  “Before I picked you up tonight I kept asking myself, Should I take her to dinner and make jokes for about three hours and then will that be the conventional time to propose? And how do people propose anyway? I never really thought about it. I never thought I would ask anybody to marry me.” He stopped nervously and looked at her almost unhappily. She realized that now he was waiting for her to say something, to fill in for him, to say she understood, to accept or say no, to say anything, but all she could think was He loves me, me. Why should he love me?

  “I can’t ever get married again,” she said finally.

  “I should have waited. I’m an idiot. I don’t even know how much you like me. It’s just that I’ve wanted to marry you for such a long time that I thought I’d tell you so anyway.”

  “Oh, it’s not … Neil. It’s not that I’m going to carry my grief to my grave. I’ll get over that. And I … I’ve always liked you more than anyone we … I know.” She smiled at him, feeling less numb. “I said I, did you notice? Not we.” She looked down at her hands on the table top and realized that she had torn her cocktail napkin into bits, like confetti. “I want to tell you,” she said softly.

  “You can tell me anything,” Mort said.

  She looked at him then and she realized that she could, not just because Mort Baker was the person who some people thought was eccentric and more people resented because he did exactly what he wanted to do and said exactly what he wanted to say and had life the way he wanted it to be. She knew he was the only person she could tell because he would understand, and he would know why she had to tell him. For the first time, telling someone else about her and Neil wasn’t a betrayal. She felt very close to Mort at this moment, and less tense, but still it was hard to begin to speak about it after so many years. She wondered if she would even be able to find the right words. He waited and did not say anything.

  “I guess you want to marry me because you’ve always thought of me as a wife,” she said. “No, don’t interrupt me, wait. I mean … you knew me when I was already married and you lived with us and always thought we were happy. You said so yourself. What you fell in love with wasn’t just me but a happy marriage. I can just see how it happened.” Suddenly she choked and she could not say any more because, ridiculously, she thought she was going to cry. She felt an intolerable sadness, as if everything that was sweet and gently loving was going to fade away from her, the happy ending that you cry over because it happens to someone else, never to you.

  “That’s not what you wanted to tell me.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t you think it was just our happy marriage you liked?” she whispered desperately.

  “I’ve seen a lot of happy marriages and they only bored me,” Mort said.

  “I’ll tell you about ours.” She told him then, as briefly as she could. When she started to explain about how she had at first not liked Neil to make love to her and had finally at the last become almost ill when he tried to touch her, it seemed at first as if she were talking about someone else. Had all this really happened to her? How much worse, how almost gruesome, it sounded when she told about it in this calm way. She hoped frantically that Mort would not think she was telling him as some sort of come-on; she remembered that someone had told her married women told stories of this kind when they wanted a man to go to bed with them. That
my-husband-never-gave-me-an-orgasm kind of story, from a hypocritical woman trying to be pathetic with a lecherous gleam in her eye, and off to a hotel room to help the poor wife find happiness. But he was leaning forward, listening with sympathy and great calm. Not too much sympathy, which would have frightened her, but with understanding rather than inspiration to action.

  She felt better then, telling him; she felt very close to him. She felt a pang of guilt only at how little shyness she felt at talking to him about her most intimate life; there was an excitement in telling him that made her confide on and on. “I’m never going to make that mistake again,” she said.

  He drank all of his martini, and Margie realized that what she had just said to him sounded rather like a proposition. Well, perhaps it was. She could hardly believe it herself, and yet, why not? Her fingers, ripping the bits of napkin, shook.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “I don’t either. I don’t know what to do with my life. I’ve never been so mixed up. I wish I’d never gotten married. No, I don’t wish that at all. Part of our marriage was perfect. But you don’t know what it’s like to be getting a divorce. It’s the most terrible thing in the world. It’s just terrible. I never knew …”

  “I can’t even ask you how you feel about me right now,” he said. “You don’t know how you feel about anything.”

  “No … I’ll tell you.”

  “I want to know.”

  “I feel two different ways about you. You’re an old friend and something else that’s even more special. I think I could fall in love with you very quickly. That should make me feel better, but somehow it only makes me feel worse.”

  “I know the feeling,” Mort said. “I had it about you for the past year. For different reasons, but it’s the same sensation. You don’t want to think about it.”

  “But for once in my life I want to be responsible for what I do. I never was before. Things just happened to me. I never really knew what I was doing.”

  “Would you like another drink?”

  “No. That’s the first thing. I want to know why I’m doing things.”

  The waiter was at the other end of the terrace. That was one nice thing about Brazil, Margie thought, the waiters didn’t hover. In fact, they didn’t care. She wondered what it would be like to live here with Mort instead of going home to the States. Certainly it would be different from living with Neil; it would almost be as if she were discovering Rio all over again. All the mysteries about Mort, the way he lived, the things he did when he was alone, would be things he would be sharing with her. She tried to remember what she had thought about Neil when he was a bachelor and she was thinking about marrying him. There had been a mystery there too. But it had been a mystery about men, husbands, not so much about Neil himself. Neil had seemed the virile representative of all those unknown men, Orpheus descending to rescue her and take her to the place where other people lived together and were happy. But when she thought of living with Mort she only thought about being with him alone.

  “I don’t know how to put this to you,” Mort said. “I don’t want you to think I’m asking you on just another ‘honeymoon.’ I remember how you used to talk about that. I don’t want you to think I can solve anything for you. But I love you, and maybe we can go away somewhere together. Would you do that?”

  As soon as he said it she realized she had been thinking tentatively of it herself, and yet the spoken words gave her a small shock. If she were her dream self, her brave self, she would go. And yet, what would be the good?

  “I might,” she said.

  “I have a friend who has a house on the beach at Cabo Frio. At Buzios, really, and it’s more of a shack. He’s never there during the week and I can use it. It’s very primitive—no electricity, kerosene lamps, right on the sand, and nobody around but fishermen. Buzios is the most beautiful place you ever saw.”

  “How many girls have you taken there?” Margie asked, smiling.

  “None. What did you think?” He looked angry—no, hurt.

  “I just wanted to make sure.”

  “You have it in your mind that I’m some kind of a great lover,” he said. “I’m not taking you off for a seduction or an orgy or a wild weekend and then goodbye. I want to go someplace where we can be alone for a while.”

  “I have to think,” Margie said.

  “We’d have five days completely alone at first. And after that we could stay on as long as we want to.”

  “Let me decide later. I don’t know.”

  “We ought to have dinner,” he said reluctantly. “Where do you want to eat?”

  “I don’t know that either,” Margie said. “I’ve just been proposed to and propositioned, both in one evening. I don’t think I could manage to eat dinner too.” But she smiled when she said it and she felt surprised at how happy she was. She felt restless and confused and she wanted to be alone to think things out, but she knew that tonight when she went back to the empty apartment and was alone she would not feel lonely or afraid. “I’d like to be alone. Is that all right?”

  He waved at the waiter. She thought it was typical of Mort that after four years of living in Brazil and speaking perfect Portuguese, he still didn’t hiss at the waiters as everyone else did. “Are you all right?” he said to her.

  “Yes, I’m fine. I’m happy. Isn’t that funny?”

  “Kind of,” he said. “I am too.”

  He drove her home and took her upstairs, and said good night to her at the door to her apartment, standing two feet away from her and not even attempting to shake hands. She remembered the last moments of dates she had had when she was young: the instinctive knowledge of which boys were going to sneak up to you, which ones were going to grab you in a rush, and which ones had no intention at all of doing either. She knew if she stood there for an hour talking, stretching out the last minutes of good night because she had something more to say to him, because she was reluctant to be alone at last, he would not misunderstand her delaying.

  “I always go to the beach in the morning,” he said. “It’s my project. Do you want to come?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ten o’clock. I’ll pick you up.”

  She laughed. “You’re turning into a cafegista.”

  “It’s a mood I’m going through.” He gave her a big grin and rang the bell for the elevator.

  “Where are you going now?”

  “Home to sleep.”

  Neither of them said anything more about Cabo Frio. It was not necessary for her to mention it; she thought of nothing else. Mort waved his hand at her and was gone.

  She walked into her apartment slowly, like a sleepwalker. She felt different. Yesterday she had wondered if she could ever make a life for herself; tonight she saw one ahead. She had only to accept it. No, it was not so simple. She was through with accepting things. Accepting things as if whatever people wanted you to do was your acknowledged destiny, was like keeping a present even though you would have to make enormous inconvenient changes in your life just to use it. She looked at the clock in her bedroom. It was ten-thirty. She wondered if Neil would be home so early.

  She had forgotten his new number or, rather, had deliberately prevented herself from memorizing it so she would not be able to telephone him when she became desperate. It was written on a slip of paper in the top bureau drawer, the same paper he had written it on. His handwriting gave her a sad feeling. She didn’t want to call him; pride prevented it, the pride of a kind of last-chance feeling that she had to make this decision about her life by herself. But I can’t, she thought. I never decided anything without Neil.

  The first time she dialed a wrong number, and when a woman’s voice shrieked at her in Portuguese she thought at first it was that girl of Neil’s. She sat with the receiver in her hand, terrified and embarrased, until she realized that the number the woman was shouting was not Neil’s number at all.

  “Pardon, Senhora. Wrong number,” she murmured, and the woman hung
up indignantly. Perhaps it was a warning, an omen. She hadn’t spoken to Neil for a long time. Maybe he didn’t want to hear from her, perhaps he was right in the middle of … making love … to that girl. Then he doesn’t have to answer the phone, that’s all, Margie thought in sudden indignation. She redialed Neil’s number carefully.

  She listened to the telephone ringing and imagined it sounding in his empty apartment. She had never seen that apartment. She wondered what it was like. Was he there often? Did he have a maid to keep it clean? Was that girl living there with him, or still with her family, like a nice Brazilian virgin?

  “Hello,” Neil said. He sounded breathless.

  “It’s Margie.”

  “Wait just a second, I have to close the door. I just walked in.” He put down the receiver and for a panicked moment Margie thought he was not going to come back. “Margie, how are you?” he said, sounding warm and concerned.

  “I’m all right. How are you?”

  “Fine. I was going to call you tomorrow morning.”

  “You’re busy. You can call me tomorrow.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not busy at all.”

  “Are you alone?”

  She thought he hesitated. “Yes.”

  She tried to sound casual. “No, you’re not. You’d better call me tomorrow as you planned.”

  “What is it? It’s something important, I can tell.”

  “It is!” she said suddenly. “I have to talk to you. I can’t tell you on the phone. Can you come over, just for half an hour? Please!”

  “Of course. I’ll come over now.”

  “Can you? I mean … is it all right?”

  “Of course. I’ll be right over.” He hung up without saying goodbye.

  She realized he was on his way over, might be there in five minutes—she didn’t even know really how far away his apartment was. She ran to the bathroom and peered into the mirror at her make-up. Her hand was shaking so much she could hardly put her lipstick on straight. She wouldn’t have time to wash her face and put everything on from the start. She felt grimy. It was so hot tonight. Neil might have forgotten how she looked, he might think now that she was less attractive than he remembered her, he might tell himself he was glad to be rid of her. She put on more powder and ran a comb through her hair. She should have brushed her teeth before she put fresh lipstick on; now she was getting lipstick all over the toothbrush. God!